Scorched Earth

by George Galdorisi

  “Mr. President, we got eyes-on with a Global Hawk about two hours ago. General Underwood’s convoy was ambushed in what appears to have been a well-orchestrated attack. All of the vehicles in the convoy are still there and are either damaged or destroyed. There were ten personnel in the convoy counting General Underwood and his aide. The Global Hawk picked up what we think are six bodies surrounding the vehicles.”

  “But we can’t see inside the Humvees, right?”

  “Right, Mr. President. We have two channels working to try to do just that—”

  “How … how will we do that?” the president interrupted.

  “We have operatives working with the Free Syrian Army. The closest ones are in—” Harward paused to look down at his secure iPad, “—Deir ez-Zor. It’s about one hundred and thirty kilometers—eighty miles—north-northwest of al-Bukamal. Our people there don’t have air assets, so they’re driving toward al-Bukamal, but it’s rough terrain and slow going.”

  “The other channel we have is with the Iraqi Army,” Harward continued. “The CENTCOM commander is working with the Iraqi military to try to get some of our 75th Rangers aboard Iraqi helicopters and get to the site ASAP—”

  “Iraqi helicopters?” the president interrupted again. “Don’t we have any American helicopters there?”

  “We do, but they’re attack helicopters, with very little space for troops. We need bigger birds that can haul more men out to the site.”

  “All right, I get it. But you said, ‘working with’ the Iraqi military. Are there any issues? With all the damn blood and treasure we’ve poured into that country and the way we’re still propping them up now, they’d better treat this like a five-alarm fire and give us everything they’ve got. Do I need to call the Iraqi president?”

  “No sir. I made it clear to General George that if he needed our help he’d get it. The Iraqi military has a pretty good inventory of American, French, and Russian helicopters. It’s just a question of picking ones that can make the two hundred-plus mile round trip carrying the Rangers and all their gear.”

  “I want to know immediately when those helos are en route.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Anything else you need to tell me about this mess?”

  “There is one more thing. We won’t know this for certain until we have eyes at the site; the Global Hawk can only pick up so much detail. But we think there’s an ISIS flag planted in the ground at the ambush site.”

  The normally controlled president lost it. “Damn it!” Midkiff shouted, “Find Bob Underwood. I don’t care how we do it, just do it!”

  * * *

  “Roger … Aaron?” Chase Williams said as his intelligence director and the intel director’s networks assistant appeared in his doorway. Op-Center’s director was reading a report and sipping his Sumatra dark roast coffee from his Navy mess-decks mug. Williams put the report aside and motioned the two men to sit down.

  Now in his third year as the leader of Op-Center, Williams had helped his president deal with crises across the globe, as well as at home. He was recruited—hard—by Op-Center’s former director, Paul Hood, when the president decided to reestablish the organization.

  Williams brought just the right qualities to the job. A retired Navy four-star, he was a former combatant commander for both Pacific Command and Central Command. He had proven his mettle in uniform, and now, as director of the National Crisis Management Center—as Op-Center was officially known—Williams enjoyed the president’s complete trust and confidence. He had saved American lives at home and abroad and used his international and domestic Op-Center assets as precision instruments.

  Roger McCord began, “Boss, you’ve read our reports and have likely seen the network news feeds, so you know the convoy carrying the special presidential envoy was attacked. You also know there are at least six KIA and the CENTCOM commander is trying to get eyes-on the ground to see if General Underwood is there.”

  “Bob Underwood’s a good man,” Williams said. “He did a phenomenal job at CENTCOM under tough circumstances—much tougher than I ever faced. What else we got?”

  McCord, a former Marine who previously commanded the Intelligence Battalion at the Marine Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, had been one of Williams’s first hires when he took over Op-Center. With a PhD from Princeton, magna cum laude in international affairs, McCord was a former infantry Marine who transferred to Marine Corps intelligence when he was wounded in Ramadi. He was in many ways Williams’s alter ego. Williams trusted him without question, but what he liked best about McCord was that his intelligence director never guessed and always gave it to him straight.

  “Aaron has mined ISIS’s social media and also hacked into the transmissions bouncing off some of the cell phone towers near their compound in Mosul. I’ll let him tell you more, but from what we can figure, it looks like ISIS has General Underwood and has taken him well away from the ambush site.”

  Williams had suspected as much, but hearing it from McCord caused him to sag in his chair. “Aaron?” he asked.

  Aaron Bleich’s official title was Intelligence Directorate, Networks Assistant. But that title so understated his role in the organization that Williams kept asking McCord to change it. Widely regarded as the intelligence director’s MVP, Bleich had been recruited through a gaming company front at the annual Comic-Con International convention in San Diego, California. “Chief hacker” sounded like a too-judgmental title, but that was the long-and-short of what Bleich did so well.

  Bleich was the architect behind the data mining and anticipatory intelligence programs that made Op-Center hum and that put its analysis abilities on a level above—likely far above—any other intelligence collection efforts in or out of government. Bleich ensured that Op-Center had access to all the information collected by each of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. More importantly, he had carefully built the automated collation and analytical programs to make sense of the mountains of data Op-Center ingested. Big data didn’t worry the Geek Tank leader; he embraced it and put it to use. Bleich had built his Geek Tank around machines and people—and the people were the best and the brightest minds, hired away from companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and eBay.

  “It’s like this, sir,” Bleich replied. “ISIS has only dribbled out a little bit into social media, but they’ve been burning up the cell phone circuits. They definitely have General Underwood. We’re all but certain he’s out of Syria and into Iraq. Beyond that, there’s not much more we can say with any certainty.”

  “But what’s your anticipatory intelligence suggesting?” Williams prodded.

  Bleich looked toward McCord before continuing. He had overstepped his bounds with his immediate boss before and had been gently nudged back into line. McCord just nodded, so he continued.

  “Well, the special presidential envoy for countering ISIL is a prize for any terrorist organization, but perhaps more so for ISIL because his very existence suggests we intend to take the fight to them. Most of the cell phone conversations we’re picking up are carefully worded—we suspect ISIS is well aware of our monitoring capabilities—but my … umm … our analysis suggests there’s little drama in their calls. It’s more like whoever has him is just reporting in to someone at the top of their food chain.”

  “Mabad al-Dosari is still their leader,” McCord interjected.

  “You’re saying the ISIL fighters who snatched him aren’t operating independently. You think they’ve grabbed him at al-Dosari’s behest and are bringing him to their compound in Mosul?”

  “That’s right,” Bleich added. “And you know that area is no-mans-land for the Iraqi Army. They don’t even make a pretense of controlling it.”

  “Do you think what you’re picking up and what you’re analyzing will alert us once they have him there in Mosul?” Williams asked.

  “We’re pulling out all the stops to ensure it’ll do just that,” McCord interjected. “Aaron will keep us posted on a real-
time basis. You want us to send the ops folks in, boss? You thinking of sending our JSOC unit downrange?”

  “No, not yet,” Williams replied. “Give me a minute to let the president know what we know. Once I do that, we’ll get the rest of the staff together and see if there’s anything we can do to help.”

  As soon as McCord and Bleich left, Williams sat in front of his computer and composed one of his short, cryptic memos to the president. It was in the format of Williams’s own design for communications that were strictly between him and President Midkiff. The infrequent communiqués were initially labeled, “President of the United States/Op-Center Eyes Only” which Williams later abbreviated to, “POTUS/OC Eyes Only.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mosul, Iraq

  March 5, 1530 Arabia Standard Time

  Bob Underwood awoke and tried to clear the cobwebs from his head. The last thing he remembered was the men holding him down and one of them injecting something into his right shoulder. Then it all went black.

  He saw he was in some sort of hospital bed. He looked down and could see his left arm was in a cast. The pain was all but gone but he attributed that, as well as his grogginess, to pain medicine they must have injected him with before setting and casting his arm.

  Underwood tried to move but realized his hands and feet were bound by restraints. He pulled against them with all his might but he was tied tight. He was about to drift off into sleep again when the door to the room burst open and four men entered.

  * * *

  “Well, what do we know?” General John “Jack” George asked as his ops deputy finished briefing him and telling him, again, that they didn’t know where the special presidential envoy was.

  “General, our operatives with the Free Syrian Army got to the site about six hours after the ambush. They confirmed nine KIA and saw no signs of General Underwood. There were vehicle tracks leading off in a northeasterly direction. They followed the tracks up to the Iraq border but didn’t cross it.”

  “What about our Rangers that the Iraqi Army was supposed to fly in from Baghdad?”

  His ops deputy paused before responding, worried that what he was about to tell his commander would set him off. He steeled himself and then said, “Ah, General, they had cascading maintenance problems and couldn’t muster two birds to fly our Rangers in.”

  “Dammit!” George shouted.

  His ops deputy waited for more, but George remained silent. That worried his staff—a lot. They knew he was simmering. After an extended silence the man plunged ahead until he had told the CENTCOM commander everything he knew.

  “Yes, I knew all that yesterday,” George said in almost a whisper. “What I want to know is what our intelligence has turned up and what we’ve extracted from the three-letter agencies.”

  The CENTCOM commander hadn’t slept in the forty-eight hours since Underwood was kidnapped. It was on his watch and on turf for which he was responsible. But he couldn’t do anything because he didn’t know all he needed to know to take action. It was frustrating beyond words. He knew his staff was trying, but it wasn’t enough.

  George tried to bring his thirty-five years of military experience to bear to take action—any action—that would rescue Underwood. He inventoried what he had learned in the last two days. The intelligence agencies had confirmed the attack was well planned and executed with precision, and that suggested it was directed from ISIL headquarters, maybe by Mabad al-Dosari himself. The collective assessment told them Underwood was most likely in ISIL’s hands in central Mosul.

  But it got worse. ISIL had consolidated its power in Mosul after the American-led coalition had finally pushed them out of Raqqa, Syria. While the United States had overhead assets that could focus on Mosul, the city of over a million was so densely packed these high-tech eyes in the sky could tell them little. And ISIL’s control of the city was so complete that it could move its headquarters at will. His staff’s collective assessment was that if they tried to mount a combat search and rescue op with what little intelligence they had, they’d be setting up another “Blackhawk Down” scenario.

  After digesting all the bad news, George, trying to find some way, any way possible, to rescue the hostage, asked, “I get it, but what about the Iraqi government, can’t they help? Without us, they’d have collapsed by now. Surely they can do something to help find him.”

  The ops deputy could tell George was just venting now. He knew the Iraqi government had yielded control of central Mosul to ISIL years ago, and American-backed attempts to retake the city had been futile. It was no-man’s-land.

  “Their intel isn’t any better than ours, General. The best we could hope for is that they’d stand aside if we mounted a CSAR effort, but until we know where General Underwood is, we can’t even begin the process.”

  “I know—I know. And I know our intel directorate is in overdrive trying to help. Tell my aide to set up a call with the director of national intelligence. I need to know everything he knows.”

  * * *

  “Mr. President, turn on CNN now!”

  Harward never burst into the Oval like this. The president’s antenna went up; he could see the alarm in his national security advisor’s eyes.

  Midkiff reached for the remote and turned on the flat screen television hanging on the right side of the Oval Office. He toggled until he found CNN. The American network was broadcasting a direct feed from Al Jazeera.

  Both men moved close to the screen. There, to their horror, they saw ISIL leader Mabad al-Dosari standing behind the kneeling Underwood. The American was attired in an orange jumpsuit with his head bowed. Al-Dosari was reading a long diatribe against the West, and Al Jazeera was broadcasting the English translation in a feed across the bottom of the screen:

  I am back, Midkiff. I am back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State, and because of your insistence on continuing your bombings in Mosul, despite our serious warnings. You, Midkiff, have but to gain from your actions but another dead American citizen. So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people. We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave us alone.

  I take great pleasure in slitting the throat of this man, your so-called special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. You insult us many times over. You refuse to use our proper name, the Islamic State. Burn that name in your brain, Midkiff. And you dare to call for a global coalition to fight us! No coalition can defeat the caliphate we now have established here.

  We roam freely anywhere we want to go and soon we will be on your shores and we will slay you, Midkiff. You send this man and a few soldiers here to do what—to be sacrificial lambs because you are too much the coward to come here yourself? He is paying the price for your cowardice and your stupidity. I hope his family spits on you, Midkiff. You have made his wife a widow and his children fatherless—

  Suddenly, al-Dosari stopped talking, yanked Underwood’s head up by his hair, pulled a large knife from his belt, and held it under Underwood’s neck. The ISIS leader paused a moment while his fighters behind him cheered and shot their weapons in the air. Then in one motion, al-Dosari ripped the knife into the American’s throat. Blood gushed as al-Dosari held Underwood’s head under his armpit, and the camera zoomed in as he bore down and carved until the American’s head was completely severed from his neck.

  The president and his national security advisor gaped in horror. Harward turned away, too sickened to look any longer, but the president just stood mesmerized.

  “You bastards!” Midkiff exclaimed at the horrific image on the screen. “Bob!” he shouted. “They can’t be doing this, look!”

  Harward turned around to look at the screen. The video zoomed in on the ISIS fighters as they kicked Underwood’s head around in an improvised soccer game. Harward turned away again and retched on the carpet of the Oval
Office.

  The president remained transfixed on the television for a small eternity as the ISIS fighters continued their gruesome game. Then abruptly, the screen went black.

  The president turned to his national security advisor, who was trying to clean himself up, and ordered, “Get Defense and the Joint Chiefs chairman over here immediately.”

  * * *

  Six hours later, at CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, General George had still not left his office. He had watched the same video the president and his national security advisor had seen. He had then ordered his executive assistant to tell his principal department heads to remain at the headquarters until further notice.

  The call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had come as he had anticipated it would. But the chairman had not asked the question George expected to be asked: what forces were on station in his AOR—the CENTCOM area of responsibility—the question usually asked so higher headquarters could evaluate options. Instead, he was told to prepare to strike ISIL in Mosul in the next forty-eight hours with the full force of everything he could bring to bear. All the chairman wanted to know was how soon George could make that attack happen.

  Calls had gone out to his Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Special Operations component commanders. Those commanders and their staffs, in turn, fed what they had back to the CENTCOM staff. Now it was evening, and his senior staff was assembled in his conference room.

  “General, we’ve received inputs from all our component commanders,” his ops deputy began. “We’ve sent you briefing memos over the last few hours with the details, so I’ll just surf the wave tops in this brief.”

  “Good, quicker is better. I’m overdue with an answer to the chairman,” George replied.

  “Yes, sir. The Theodore Roosevelt strike group was in the southern Arabian Gulf just east of Qatar when this crisis broke. Fifth Fleet started them moving north as soon as we called. They’ll be in the northern Gulf in,” he paused to look down at his tablet, “about eight to ten hours.”