by Scott McEwen
“I’m sure that Master Chief Shannon would be glad of your approval,” Lerher remarked, jerking his head toward the door in abrupt dismissal.
The analyst paled and exited the room, leaving his counterparts with their eyes lowered.
Feeling mollified, Metcalf allowed his gaze to fall charitably upon the rest. “So far, so good, ladies and gentlemen. Our man dodged a bullet tonight. Now, let’s hope that cloud layer lifts soon so we can see what hell’s going on down there. Any news from meteorology, Agent Lerher?”
Lerher shrugged. “It’s not good, I’m afraid. We’re hoping the ceiling will be high enough tomorrow for a predator to drop down and sneak a peek now and then, but it’s going to be touch and go.” He addressed his staff. “That’s all for tonight, people. Try and get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. Donaldson, I want you on duty in Operations with the Air Force people all night. If anything develops, anything at all, you wake my ass up. Understood?”
“Understood,” replied a blonde woman who wore her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail.
The room cleared, leaving Lerher alone with Captain Metcalf.
“I’m sorry about the idiot,” Lerher said. He didn’t personally care about his analysts making stupid remarks. They were assets to him, nothing more, and their personal feelings were beneath his consideration. They were expected, however, to know when to keep their mouths shut, an expectation the analyst in question obviously hadn’t understood, so he would be rotated stateside on the next available flight.
“It’s a cultural symptom,” Metcalf remarked, satisfied to leave it at that. “Does NSA have anything to report?”
Lerher shook his head. “Nazari made a call to his wife about an hour ago, the usual tripe . . . nothing new . . . no changes to the itinerary that we can detect. He should be right where he’s supposed to be at eleven thirty a.m.”
“Good,” Metcalf said. “With some luck, this hit will go exactly by the numbers from here on out.”
15
IRAN,
Sistan-Baluchistan Province,
twenty-five miles north of the Afghan border
Gil came gliding in over the rock quarry he had selected from above, knowing it would offer him minimal concealment while stripping his jump gear. Pulling hard on the toggles to spill the air from his canopy, he landed firmly with both feet together and turned to quickly collapse the chute. He hit the release catch on his kit bag and stripped his harness along with the SVD, shedding his helmet, mask, and insulated jumpsuit inside of a minute. Geared up and ready to move ninety seconds later, he balled the jump gear up in the chute and slung it over his shoulder, moving swiftly across the quarry to the base of the embankment, where he found a culvert with a concrete drainage pipe running parallel to the grade. He stuffed the chute into the pipe and used the SVD to shove it deep inside where no one would likely ever find it. With the changing climate, there had been no significant rain in this region for years, forcing many local inhabitants to migrate northward toward the border with Turkmenistan.
He slipped a pair of Russian army night-vision goggles over his head and surveyed the immediate area, noting the illuminated skyline a mile to the north where he had sailed over a small town only minutes before. The land was barren and relatively flat for as far as the eye could see, leaving him with the unnerving sensation of being stranded on Mars. The Afghan border and any relative safety lay no less than twenty-five miles to the south over deserted, desolate terrain, where his extraction team would already be awaiting his call in the event he declared an emergency. He realized the low-lying stratus clouds overhead would preclude any satellite or drone surveillance for the foreseeable future, but that didn’t necessarily bother him. It wasn’t as though he could call for a predator strike inside of Iran in any event. He was on his own in the belly of the beast.
He slipped the goggles off and let them hang from the D-ring on his combat harness. Prolonged use of NVGs reduced natural night vision and limited depth perception. He switched on the radio. Somewhere far above the cloud layer, cloaked in the latest stealth technology, a loitering communications drone would pick up his transmission and relay it to the command center in Kabul via satellite.
Depressing the button, he spoke quietly into the transmitter. “Typhoon main. Typhoon main. This is Typhoon actual. Radio check. Over.”
The reply was almost immediate: “Roger, actual. This is main. We read you Lima Charlie. Over.” Lima Charlie indicated they were reading him loud and clear.
“Roger, main. I am on the ground and proceeding to the target area approximately two clicks southeast of my position. My authentication is Whiskey Tango. Do you have traffic for me at this time? Over.”
“Roger, actual. Be advised we do not have a visual on you at this time. Over.”
“Roger, main.” Gil checked his watch. It was nearly 02:00 hours. “My next transmission will be at 04:00 hours. Over.”
“Roger, actual. Over.”
“This is Typhoon actual. Out.”
Gil switched off the radio and began to climb the quarry embankment. A pair of headlights appeared at the quarry entrance to the south and turned toward his position. He slid back into the ditch to take cover, believing he must have been spotted during his descent. He shouldered the rifle and sighted on the vehicle as it closed rapidly from a hundred yards away.
He was depressing the heavy trigger as the vehicle pulled up fifty feet abreast of his position and stopped. Seeing that it was neither a military nor police vehicle, he paused. The doors of the white Honda Civic opened, and loud hip-hop music spilled out into the night. He quickly slipped the NVGs over his head, counting six teenagers—three male, three female—and slipped them off again. The kids spoke loudly over the music as they climbed out, lighting up their cigarettes. Two of the girls sat on the hood between the blazing headlights, huddled together against the chill, giggling the way teenage girls do.
In and of themselves, these teens were not a threat—Gil could kill all six of them with his Ka-Bar before they ever knew what hit them—but there was no way to scale the embankment of the quarry and slip off into the night without the risk of being seen, so he was stuck where he was for the immediate future. Any delay, however minor, posed a potential threat to his schedule. He had two thousand meters to cover before he walked into the target area, and there was still work to be done preparing his hide for the hit. As yet, there was still time to spare, but the night was young, and there was never any telling how many delays you might encounter. Combat was a fluid, ever-changing dynamic, and Gil never took a single minute for granted behind enemy lines.
Over the next couple of minutes it became obvious the teens were smoking marijuana, and except for the fact that they were speaking Farsi, they were like any other group of teenagers partying in the dark, laughing and joking with one another, the girls squealing over God knew what. Tonight, however, these innocent young men and women had driven straight into the middle of a war, a war in which no prisoners could be taken.
Gil decided to give them all the time he could before attempting to scale the embankment unseen. If they were unlucky enough to spot him during his climb, he would have to turn back and deal with them . . . quickly and without gunfire.
After fifteen minutes of trying to think his way clear, Gil saw one of the males walking toward his position. The kid was talking back over his shoulder and unzipping his fly as he came. Gil drew the Ka-Bar fighting knife from the sheath strapped to his leg, adrenaline surging as he realized with great trepidation that he was going to have to kill them all. He could already hear the girls screaming for their lives as he ran them down, cutting their throats. His mind raced to develop a better solution, but there wasn’t one. There could be no witnesses.
He remained motionless in the dark, flat against the bottom of the ditch, his face blackened, body camouflaged in the seven-colored multicam pattern. He did not breathe, he did not even blink. He would come off the ground like a striking anaconda, rammi
ng the blade up through the bottom of the jaw to penetrate the brain, killing the kid instantly and lowering him gently to the ground where he would lay in wait for the others who would undoubtedly grow curious about their missing friend. An American commando lying in ambush would be last thing any one of them would expect to find.
The teenager stopped at the edge of the ditch and began to urinate directly onto Gil’s boonie hat and shoulders, still talking loudly with his head partially turned, utterly oblivious to the fact that a trained killer lay but a few inches from his feet in the dark. He finished taking his leak and turned away as he zipped himself up.
Gil watched him go, the scent of the kid’s urine lingering heavily in his nostrils. It was not entirely new to him. He had carried the bodily wastes of men on his uniform before, mixed with their blood and viscera. Killing a man hand-to-hand was a very personal thing, comparable with the most intimate of acts, comparable even with making love to a woman. As your enemy struggled impotently beneath your weight, you could feel his body writhing against your own in a desperate bid to save itself, his hot breath in your face as you penetrated him with your knife. As he died, he would shit himself, piss, and bleed all over you. This was war at its most fundamental level, and Gil was glad the boy had been so dangerously unaware of his environment. This lack of awareness alone had saved not only his life but the lives of his friends as well.
After another forty-five minutes of screwing around, the kids piled back into the car and sped out of the quarry trailing a cloud of dust, leaving Gil free to scramble up the embankment and make his way across the desert landscape. He skirted a dry lake bed, part of the sprawling Hamun Lake system, once a thriving commercial zone for many water-based businesses and activities, and now nothing but a wasteland, dotted with dilapidated buildings and boats left high and dry, appearing entirely alien in this increasingly arid wilderness.
A few hundred yards from the quarry, he realized that he was being dogged by a bony canine looking to mooch a meal. He hissed at the unfortunate wretch and tossed a stone, sending it skittering off into the night. Taking advantage of the brief stop, he donned the NVGs long enough for a quick 360-degree scan of the terrain, and then double-checked the GPS to be sure of his orientation. He found the road that Al-Nazari and his party would be driving the following morning and traveled parallel to it at 50 yards. He covered 1,800 meters before stopping again to survey the terrain through the NVGs.
He was looking for an ancient one-lane stone bridge over a dry creek bed cutting the road from east to west. Two hundred yards south of that bridge, he would find an even more ancient stone ruin, the perfect place for a sniper’s nest. Three more clicks south of the ruin along the same road was a fenced-in group of rundown military buildings whose original purpose had been to house a garrison of Iranian border guards. According to intelligence reports, the buildings were now being used to house Al-Nazari’s bomb-making activities. Satellite surveillance indicated that three or four different sentries provided round-the-clock security for the facility, driving government vehicles and wearing Iranian police uniforms.
These sentries were of no concern to Gil. He would bypass the facility the following night during his egress, moving south toward the Afghan border under cover of darkness to link up with his extraction team another thirty clicks beyond, far out into the wasteland where no one would hear the rotors of the Night Stalker helos as they flew in snake and nape across the Afghan border.
He spotted the bridge a hundred yards ahead and moved out. The sound of a helicopter to the southwest caused him a few minutes of concern, but the rotors faded and he was back on the move. The helo was likely flying a drug interdiction mission north of Zahedan. The capital city of Sistan-Baluchistan Province was only some twenty miles from the Afghan border. It stood as the preeminent staging area for international heroin smuggling. From Zahedan, the Afghan heroin made its way to Tehran. From Tehran into Turkey, and from there to the rest of the world. The smuggling didn’t stop at drugs, either. Everything was smuggled from weapons to illegal Afghani immigrants. Iran had pretty much lost its war on drugs by the early twenty-first century, and its police forces were now so corrupt as to make even the Mexican police look like Boy Scouts.
Gil covered the distance to the ruin in good time, donning the NVGs and scanning carefully as he approached. This region was lightly scattered with different ancient ruins from the pre-Islamic period, some of them having once stood as temples or monuments to the god Zoroaster. He made sure the ruin was deserted and then went to stand looking at it from the road. Yes, even at a distance, the fallen stone walls appeared the perfect haven for a sniper.
That was why he crossed to the opposite side of the road, where he began to dig in with a Russian entrenching tool.
16
AFGHANISTAN,
Jalalabad Air Base
Agent Ray Chou was in the hangar talking with Steelyard and Lt. Commander Perez about the possibility of Sandra Brux being held in the village of Waigal. The Night Stalker crews were there, too, having arrived the hour before to begin prepping their aircraft for a possible rescue mission.
Captain Crosswhite pulled up in a Humvee and got out, stalking up to the three men with an almost casual salute to Commander Perez, whom he normally didn’t care for. “So, are we on or what?” he wanted to know.
Steelyard shrugged. “We don’t know yet. That’s what we’re discussing.”
Crosswhite glanced around. “Where are your SEALs?”
“In the back breaking into their cruise boxes. Where’s your gear?”
Crosswhite thumbed over his shoulder at the Humvee. “I packed light. Your people can hook me up with whatever else I need, right?”
Steelyard nodded. “Why don’t you head back there?” Crosswhite walked off and the chief turned back to Perez. “Like I was telling you, Commander. I think it’s better if this operation stays at the noncom level on the DEVGRU side. If word reaches the Head Shed about what we’re up to, they’ll yank the plug on us. I’ve assembled enough noncoms to pull this operation off, good men who aren’t afraid of the consequences.”
Perez was in a quandary because he was very much afraid of the consequences. At first, he’d been all for the idea of going in after Sandra Brux without orders, enjoying the heroic feel of the rhetoric around the hangar, but now that there was actionable intelligence to work with, he was getting cold feet.
Steelyard had expected this from Perez, knowing him for the rear echelon–type motherfucker that he was. So he had selected six seasoned noncoms and two enlisted men that he trusted implicitly for the rescue operation, knowing that Perez didn’t possess enough spine to stand up to that many chevrons. Dan Crosswhite had already volunteered to lead the op, giving them the only officer they would need. What Steelyard was hoping for now was for Perez to go back to the Head Shed and keep his fat trap shut.
He took the cigar from his mouth. “Look, you know how solid these men are, Commander. If the mission goes bad, nobody’s going to mention that you knew anything about it. There’s no reason for you to risk being around here now.”
Chou was watching Perez very carefully, knowing the man had the power to shut it all down with one call, and he could see that Perez was about to make that very decision. “Listen,” he said casually, cutting Perez off before he could open his mouth. “It’s not like you could have done anything to prevent SOAR showing up here with all those fucking helicopters. And it’s not like you could have prevented the men from viewing the rape video.”
Perez stared at him, understanding the implication of Chou’s words. Perez had not only failed to prevent the men from watching the video, he had watched it with them, knowing very well that it was classified material. What Chou was saying, just as plain as day, was that if Perez backed out now, and the rest of them wound up with their tits in the wringer, Perez was going to wind up under the proverbial bus for not going to the Head Shed the second he realized classified information had been leaked to the rank and f
ile.
Chou was a civilian with NCIS, and was therefore in no way subordinate to Perez. He didn’t care if the guy liked him or not, and he sure as shit wasn’t afraid of him. The potential consequences of the risks he had taken went far beyond any heat that Perez could bring.
Steelyard cleared his throat. “And we’re going to need a man on the inside back at the Head Shed,” he added, realizing they had Perez by the nuts. “Someone to run interference if anybody starts asking questions.”
Perez knew he was had, and he was kicking himself for having gotten chummy with enlisted personnel, having certainly known better. There was nothing to do now but try and make sure the op was a success and hope they all became legend.
He looked at Steelyard, trying to appear more enthusiastic than he felt. “So what do you want to call the op, Chief?”
“Operation Bank Heist.” Steelyard grinned and stuck the Cohiba back into his mouth, putting out his hand. “If it’s any consolation, Commander, we probably couldn’t pull this off without you.”
Perez knew there was no probably about it, and that Steelyard and Chou had set him up for the op from the very beginning, knowing that an unauthorized mission of any real scale would need a man on the inside back at the Head Shed to run interference and keep the op from being discovered by the higher-ups. That was why Chou had invited him to view the video in the first place. Perez felt too stupid to speak, so he nodded and shook Chou’s hand and left the hangar.
Steelyard and Chou smiled at each other.
“Warms my heart to see him stepping up to the plate like that,” Steelyard said.
Chou chuckled. “Well, Chief, all we can do now is hope he doesn’t suddenly grow himself a spine.”
17
IRAN,
