by Sean McFate
Thank you, Ogun, I thought.
I felt the explosion before I heard it. The concussive wave lifted the technical off its wheels with a deafening boom. It lifted me, too, and I slammed into our fifty-caliber’s deflective guard, the only thing that saved me from being catapulted a hundred meters into the desert.
Pain in my head. Ears. Side. The vehicle moved beneath me and I slunk down the turret hatch, falling headfirst into the cabin. Warm blood streamed over my face, in my eyes, through my hair. A hand was shaking my shoulder. The ringing in my ears drowned out all noise.
“Are you all right? Are you all right?”
We were slowing down now, but I wasn’t all right. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to vomit. Battle focus.
“Enemy down,” I heard Boon say over the radio. He seemed a million miles away, but I knew that was the ringing in my head. My driver smiled. The blast must have wiped out the ISIS lead vehicle and buried the other one in the wadi’s walls like that World War I trench in Verdun, France. An artillery shell hit near the trench, and the concussion buried the men alive. All that remained were the top inches of their rifles, in a line, a fitting fuck-you to a terrible war.
“Sitrep?” I gasped over the radio.
“We are free and clear,” Boon said.
“Charlie Mike,” I said. Continue mission.
“Wildman?” I said. “You still there?”
“Roger dodger!” He was now singing some Beatles song. “I am the Walrus.”
“We lost our gunner. Boon, anyone injured?”
“Negative, lead vehicle,” Boon said.
Marhaz was grimacing, one hand on her belly and the other on the Humvee’s roof as the vehicle lurched side to side with the riverbed. Farhan reached behind and put a hand on her thigh, trying to reassure her.
“Boon, slow down,” I said. “And get us out of this wadi.”
I had a phone call to make. Probably the most important call of my life.
Chapter 40
“They’ve gone Elvis,” Murphy said, spitting a wad of tobacco juice into the wadi. “They’ve flat-out disappeared.”
Campbell sat on the hood of his Viper, fuming. He thought the Reaper had destroyed the mercs, but all his men found were the carcasses of the ISIS technicals, no Humvees. They must have disappeared down this dry riverbed, meaning they were either very lucky or very smart. He didn’t care for either, but he was leaning toward smart.
“Who is this guy anyway? He’s not like any arms dealer I’ve chased before,” Bunker said, flinging a stone into the wadi.
“This mission is officially a soup sandwich,” Black Jack said.
Campbell agreed, but couldn’t admit it in front of his men. Sinjar was a debacle, and now this. Inexcusable, especially since Mr. Winters had handpicked him for this important mission because Jase Campbell was a man who got shit done. That was the reputation he had built over fifteen years in the service, and he wasn’t about to forfeit it now.
“Sure as shit means the Agency will be on us now,” Black Jack said, as the wreckage of the second drone smoked in the distance.
“Those CIA weenies couldn’t find their own asses if both hands were holding their cheeks,” Murphy laughed. “Took ’em a decade to find Osama bin Laden.”
Campbell didn’t answer. The anaconda tattoo on his neck was pulsing. After a while, his silence began to unnerve his men, but Campbell wasn’t budging. Only he knew the true extent of this mission. This wasn’t just another manhunt. It was personal. It was Apollo cleaning up one of its own, before anyone else found out. An operative gone rogue, deceiving two other Tier One operatives into his delusion. They were all traitors now, as far as Campbell was concerned, and deserved their fate.
“Bring them in alive,” Winters had told him. “I need to debrief them. I don’t know what they’ve been doing out there, son, and ignorance is dangerous to us all.”
Campbell had heard the rumors floating around the Ranch, AO’s five-thousand-acre training base in Texas. He didn’t believe them. Hell, no one believed them. That a Tier One team leader went rogue, abandoning his mission in Ukraine, then sacrificed his team to cover his escape. And that he had done unspeakable things to the dead. We’re professional soldiers, Campbell thought, we don’t do that. It’s not the warrior’s way.
Back at the Ranch, they had joked about a rogue merc going “Kurtz,” like Brando in Apocalypse Now. He had laughed then, thinking how fun it would be to be Willard, going off to kill the madman.
But Jase Campbell wasn’t laughing now. That was a former American army officer, not just a mercenary, and that level of disloyalty was inexcusable. There was nothing more disgraceful than a U.S. soldier who turned savage. It was like wiping your ass with the American flag and everything it stood for. And Jase Campbell didn’t have any tolerance for that kind of shit. I guess that’s what you get, he thought, when you take the flag out of military ops.
Chapter 41
Lewis stared at her mapboard of the Middle East in a back corner of the intel shop’s “SCIF,” or secure office. She had carved out this small nook despite the fact that she was a contractor, the lowest of the low in the intel world. The cubicles around her buzzed with keystrokes, as analysts worked the classified databases shared among the sixteen different agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.
Computers are mindless. Human logic is more powerful than computational speed.
She held a minority opinion on this. The range fans of all the possible places the freighter could be right now blanketed the ocean from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf. Her division chief said the U.S. and allies had locked down every port from the straits of Bab el Mandeb to Hormuz, but everyone knew this wasn’t enough. Not even close. A clever captain could drop off small cargo almost anywhere, or rendezvous with another ship at sea.
I need to think like a sailor, Lewis thought. She picked up her legal pad and walked down several rows of cubicles until she found Chief Petty Officer Rick Hernandez, the lone enlisted man in the SCIF. She learned in the army to trust the common sense of NCOs, something often lost among senior officers.
“Ricky, have a minute?”
“Sure, Lewis. What’s up?”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Not yet. I’m charting all the new islands off Yemen’s coast in case they’re hiding there.”
“New islands?”
“Yeah, from volcanoes. I’m looking at recent satellite imagery and comparing it to pictures taken a few years ago. There’s quite a few around Zubair Archipelago.”
“I need your help,” she said. “I’m an army girl, and need to think like a sailor. These guys are at sea for weeks on end. What do they do day to day?”
“It’s pretty monotonous,” Ricky said. “Daily chores, TV, chores, card games, chores, sleep, Internet, and more chores.”
“Wouldn’t the smuggler captain turn off the ship’s Internet, like the AIS?”
“Of course, but sailors are clever, especially the bored ones.”
“How would they access the Internet?”
“Using a satellite phone like Thuraya or Inmarsat. They’re cheap these days and easy to smuggle aboard.”
“Wouldn’t our SIGINT guys catch them if they tried to make a call or text?”
“Not necessarily. It’s a small signal in a big ocean full of millions of signals.”
She bounced her pen off her chin.
“Did you read the CIA’s INTSUM from Gwadar?” he asked. INTSUMs are intelligence summaries. “They just came in.”
“No, not yet.”
“Four freighters matching our description left Gwadar yesterday,” he said. “A fifth was also spotted, according to a source, but not registered as leaving the port.”
“Interesting. What was its name?”
“HUMINT sources say Dona Iluire. We’re looking for it, but it vanished. Its name has probably changed, and the shipping lanes are full of group-three freighters with aft pilothouses. We’re trying to verify e
very single freighter, but there are too many. I’ll forward the reporting to you.”
“Thanks, Ricky.”
She made her way back to her computer, and logged on with her CAC card and password. Like all intel analysts, she had two computers: one for classified material and the other for everything else. Analysts rarely had their unclassified terminals on, but she knew better. The intelligence community fetishized secrets, ignoring open sources like the Internet to their peril.
She Googled Dona Iluire. Then she created a fake Twitter account and searched for all tweets that mentioned Dona Iluire. Nothing much.
“Lewis!” Colonel Brooks bellowed across the room, walking over to her. “Have you checked the reporting from DIA yet?” Translation: he wanted to know if she had scrolled through the endless intel reports from her parent organization, the Defense Intelligence Agency, in Washington, DC.
“Working on it,” she lied. It would be a dead end, but he wouldn’t believe her. If DIA had anything, they would have already flagged it.
“Work faster,” he said, walking away.
She nodded, then ignored him as she launched a Web Scraper, a proprietary software tool that could search thousands of social media accounts in milliseconds. She typed in “free,” “woman,” “ship,” and “navy,” and translated it into Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Somali, Mandarin, Greek, Tagalog, and other languages.
“What’s that?” Brooks asked. He had circled back to look over her shoulder.
“Running a lead,” she said, quickly pulling up the DIA reporting.
“Taxpayers don’t invest billions in the intelligence community for you to check Facebook,” he said, loud enough for the entire SCIF to hear. “You’re the DIA liaison officer. Liaise!”
Prick, she thought, turning back to the Web Scraper results as he went off to terrorize another cubicle. Seventy-two million hits. She began quickly scrolling, scanning a hundred hits in a minute. Several minutes later, she paused on a tweet from a sailor aboard the Eleutheria, “freedom” in Greek. Her intuition flashed. Intuition wasn’t something you learned in school or coded into a computer. If she thought about it, she could have rationalized her intuition. Smugglers like their freedom, a cocky captain might change the name from Dona Iluire to Eleutheria, and only a cocky captain would take on a cargo of nukes. But ultimately it was a hunch.
Lewis opened the sailor’s Twitter account. It was written in Tagalog, the Philippine language, which the computer translated automatically. Most of it was complaining. They had no shore leave in Pakistan, even though they were in Gwadar for a week. The only thing they took on was a dozen small crates of machinery.
She continued to scroll. The captain beat him because he refused to speak Tagalog over the radio to the U.S. Navy. Finally, he grabbed the radio and said, “The captain can eat shit.” The skipper was satisfied, not understanding the language, and so was the sailor, who took the opportunity to gloat.
She scrolled down further, finding a dusk photograph of two sailors giving each other a high five on a ship. She zoomed in. It was a small cargo ship with an aft pilothouse, and a real piece of shit, too. The time and date was yesterday.
The ship matched the Dona Iluire’s profile, but where on the planet was it? She tapped her pen on her chin, then zoomed in on the constellations above the sailors’ heads. Opening a star-watching website, she plugged in the time and date of the photo. Then she punched in the estimated longitude and latitude of the mystery freighter at that time. The website displayed the night sky, and she compared it to the photo. The sky was hazy and the picture not so sharp, but she could definitely make out consistencies of the brighter stars and faint constellations. They were not identical but close enough.
Could this be our freighter? she thought.
Chapter 42
The ISIS fighters jumped into their four technicals and tore out through the barbed wire perimeter of their temporary base. They had been tasked with watching the main highway south from Mosul a few hundred klicks north, but watching the main highway was boring, and the two vehicles jackrabbiting into the desert were easy prey. Bandits out of the Jazira, probably, come to scavenge and steal. They didn’t even call in the sighting. Killing them would take ten minutes, at most; their commanding officer, who never bothered coming this far from his headquarters, and who was Lebanese and didn’t know his way around this part of Iraq anyway, would never even know they had abandoned post.
The two vehicles disappeared suddenly, a few hundred meters in front of them. There must be a low dip in the flat desert there, the ISIS leader thought. It didn’t help that the moon had been waning for the past week, so the Jazira wasn’t as brightly lit as it had been only a few days ago.
“’Asrae,” he yelled, smacking his driver in the head for emphasis. “’Asrae.” Faster.
They lipped the low spot and saw the two vehicles, or more precisely their dust clouds, because it was dusty even in slight depressions, where sand collected. The commanding officer covered his mouth with his head scarf, but he wasn’t worried. If they were this close to the dust cloud, the bandits couldn’t be far.
They never knew what hit them, but it was small arms fire, perilously close. It cracked across the desert and then fell silent, the fire discipline a wonder. By the time the technicals rolled to a stop, the desert had fallen silent again. The survivors didn’t even have time to fire back. They were executed with single shots, even the two gunners in the back technical who tried to surrender.
“Impressive,” a handsome young man said, turning to the older man beside him.
Colonel Hosseini took his binos from his eyes. His men were cleaning up the mess; he had seen it before.
“We are twelve,” he said, “but the Iranian Quds are always more than their number. How many do you have, Qais Khazali?”
“Two hundred,” Khazali said. “They are already north of Tikrit. They will be here before morning.”
“Good. We’ll need them,” the colonel said. He had never met a commanding officer who traveled with his advanced scouts before. Even General Suleimani, legendary for his presence at the front, traveled with his main force. No trained military man would do more. But of course, militia leaders weren’t trained. They recruited on the strength of their reputation, and commanded respect by being brave. Khazali, he knew, had fought with Muqtada al-Sadr during the American War. He had broken away and founded the League of the Righteous because he thought al-Sadr too soft. Under his leadership, the Righteous had grown into one of the most feared Shia paramilitaries in Iraq. Now that the Americans were vanquished, the militia even had a seat in parliament.
Most men would be sitting in that seat, the colonel thought, but instead Khazali was fighting with his men in the field. No wonder he was so respected, despised, and feared.
Chapter 43
I awoke with the sun in my eyes. My watch said 1143, more than five hours since we’d left Sinjar. We’d been traveling overland through the Jazira and were making a final piss stop. The horizon was flat and brown in every direction, as if we were marooned on another planet. There might be the occasional Bedouin or Shammari, the bandit tribe of the Jazira, but otherwise no one ever came into this unforgiving desert. We were safely alone.
Boon attended to Marhaz. The hard pounding of off-road travel wasn’t good for a pregnant woman. Earlier, Boon had rigged a makeshift hammock for her in the back of the Humvee, but it could absorb only so much of the rough travel. Fortunately there was no blood, and the baby was restless, or so Marhaz thought. Boon couldn’t feel her moving, but that wasn’t unusual. Farhan looked distraught. Many men can be trained to assassinate, but most still fall apart over the birth of their child.
“Where are we?” I asked Boon.
He handed me the binoculars. “South of Baiji,” he said, and I could smell it. Baiji was an oil town.
We had traveled 120 kilometers through the desert, avoiding human settlements. The Jazira was hard-packed desert with chunks of rock, not the flowing dunes of th
e Sahara, but it was still a slow and bouncy route. Marhaz, resting in her makeshift hammock, must have been nauseous, at least. Most of us were.
Girl’s got grit, I thought.
“That’s our objective,” Boon said, pointing toward the east. Camp Speicher lay on the horizon, in all its containerized-housing-unit, Hesco-barrier, chain-link-fenced glory. The place was no “camp” but a mammoth former American military base, thirty-six square kilometers large. Now it straddled the front line between ISIS, Iraqi, and Iranian forces, plus your random bandit tribes bunkering oil from the nearby refineries. It was a deeply unsafe place, but for us, it was cover.
“Plan?” I asked Boon, thankful that he had taken charge while I caught a quick nap. A week ago, I wouldn’t have expected it, but since he’d stolen Kylah from me . . . Okay, since I’d found out he’d won Kylah’s approval, I’d begun to realize Boon had the quiet authority of a natural leader.
He spread out the laminated map on the Humvee’s hood. “Here’s Speicher,” he said, pointing to a huge square with a felt-tip marker. “According to the Kurds, ISIS holds the center, near the runways. The southeast is held by Shia militia. They’ve been fighting since July. We need to get to the northeast corner, but ISIS patrols the perimeter, except the southern border. We run into a patrol, we’re dead.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Once we’re spotted, more will come.”
Boon frowned at the map. “The south is less guarded than the north, but we’d have to cut through miles of base. No telling what’s in there. Even the Kurds don’t know for sure. Could be tens, hundreds, thousands of militants.”
“I don’t like it. No go.”
“That leaves the northeast corner,” Boon said.
“The main entrance?” Wildman said, hovering nearby. That was always his favorite tactic: frontal assault.
