Brothers In Arms

by Marcus Wynne

  “Zero, Bravo-Four, we’ve been fired on . . .” came from one speaker.

  “Zero, Alpha-Two, man down, we need medical and extraction . . .” came from another.

  Hans looked from speaker to speaker in confusion. “What the fuck is happening? What the fuck is happening?”

  Mike Callan bulled him aside and grabbed the microphone from his limp grip. “Charley-One, Charley-Two, this is Charley-Actual, abort, abort, abort, get the hell out of there now . . .”

  A tense voice replied, “Actual, this is Charley-Two. We have the package and all our people. We need immediate medical attention and evacuation, we have critical injured on board . . .”

  Callan slammed his fist into the table, jarring the monitors and speakers. “Two, this is Actual, move to designated rally point, medical is standing by.” He turned to Hans and said, “Can the medic onsite deal with trauma?”

  Hans stared, frozen, at the camera monitors. The wireless video in his cars transmitted scenes of carnage from the street.

  “My people,” he said. “My people.”

  DOMINANCE RAIN HEADQUARTERS, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA

  Alone in his office, Ray Dalton hunched over his desk, the handset of his secure telephone held to his bowed head. All his attention was on the voice, tinny with encryption, that came over the line.

  Mike Callan’s voice was thick. “I lost four of your shooters, Ray. And Dale Miller is critical . . . he’s got a forty-five slug lodged in his head. The doc is working on him, but there’s not much we can do till we get him to a hospital . . . they’re doing the best they can. Hans has eight dead, and three wounded. They were all picked up. The Athens police and Greek Intelligence are all over this. His gunfighters were armed, and the rest of the team had surveillance equipment . . . it’s a huge flap.”

  “Bin Faisal?”

  “The secondary safe house. We can’t move him or the team. The whole country is on a terrorist alert and the Greeks are in a full uproar.”

  Ray rubbed his eyes again and again. “The Greek prime minister has been on the phone to the president. The US ambassador has been on the carpet all day. Hans’s operators were sterile, but the wounded . . . we’ll have to straighten that out.” He forced himself up out of his defeated posture, straightened his back, and rested against the cushioned contours of his executive chair. “If we can’t get bin Faisal out right now, we’ll bring the mountain to Mohammed. I’ll send an interrogation team in.”

  “Charley Payne’s started to tune him up.”

  “Tell him to leave it alone. I’ll have a crew out of Frankfurt Station in six hours or less, and a backup crew from the States by tomorrow. Maybe by then we’ll figure a way to get them all out.”

  “There’s no talking to Payne. He and Dale were close. And he is the only one here that’s up to speed on bin Faisal’s priors.”

  “Do what you can to keep him off. I want him fresh for the interrogators.”

  “I’ll try. The whole crew is strung tight . . . they need to be left be for now.”

  “No time for that,” Ray said. “They need their acts together for exfiltration.”

  “Hans’s people are on their own till you come up with something. I’ll take what’s left of his command and control out with me. I’ve got a line on a military transport we can rig up with support equipment for Dale. What about Payne? Do you want me to send him home with your people?”

  “He’s still your employee.”

  “I’ll take care of it, then. Jesus, Ray . . . I’m sorry for all this.”

  Ray pursed his lips and nodded. “We didn’t know that November Seventeenth had us in their sights. And we didn’t know bin Faisal was connected to them. Now we know. We owe November Seventeenth payback. We’ll add this to accounts receivable. My boys will be back to visit in the very near future.”

  “I want in on that play,” Callan said.

  “Take care of business first, Mike.”

  “All right. Out here.”

  Ray set the handset down into its cradle, then interlocked his fingers and rested his elbows on his desk. In front of him was a battered leather organizer, open to the day’s page, with scribbled notations and Dale Miller’s name circled in red. He touched a finger to Dale’s name, then flipped the page over and began to write.

  ATHENS, GREECE, DOMINANCE RAIN

  SECONDARY SAFE HOUSE

  Charley sat, his chair backed into the only corner of the room that wasn’t occupied with medical equipment, and watched the doctor and a male physician’s assistant hovering over the pale, still body of Dale Miller. Multiple IVs ran into Dale’s hand, his chest was bare and streaked with blood and Betadine around the wadded bandaging that surrounded his upper torso, and his head was swathed in more bandages.

  “What else can you do?” Charley asked.

  “That’s it,” the doctor said, an athletic man with the freshly scrubbed face of a teenager. “All we can do is stabilize him right now. The round’s not in deep, but I don’t want to touch it without a neurosurgeon. He’s in a coma, and we need him in a hospital right now.”

  Charley shifted in his seat, nodded, and said, “The plane we’ll be going out on, they’ve got an operating theater set up in it. It’s military, good equipment. They’re bringing a neurosurgeon in.”

  “We need to image the damage . . .” the doctor began.

  “We can only do what we can do,” Charley said.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “That’s right.”

  “Why don’t you get something to eat or drink?” Charley said. “We can watch him. We need you fresh.”

  The doctor wiped at his face. He had a thin sheen of perspiration across his smooth brow. “That’s a good idea.”

  He left the room. The physician’s assistant took Dale’s pulse, checked the rate against his wristwatch. “He’s got a strong heart,” he said.

  “That’s a true thing you said there, Doc,” Charley said. “You need a break? I can watch him.”

  “I’ve got to take a leak.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.”

  The PA hurried from the room, quietly shutting the door behind him. Charley picked up his chair and moved it right beside the bed where Dale lay.

  “Oh man, what a mess you are, bro,” Charley said. “Those forty-fives will fuck you up, now, won’t they?”

  He watched the rise and fall of Dale’s chest, the slow pulse at his neck.

  “You’re going to be all right, though. Just hang in a little longer, we’ve got help on the way. You’re going to have a hell of a headache for a while, but you’ve lived through worse. I’ll take care of our business, don’t you worry about that. Me and our good friend Mr. Ahmad bin Faisal, we’re going to take care of business. No Sad Holidays on your watch, bro. I promise you that.”

  He looked up as the door opened and the PA came back in.

  “Everything all right?” the PA asked.

  “Never better,” Charley said. “You got things here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ve got a few things to tend to.”

  Charley got up and left the room. He paused by the open door of the bedroom beside the one that had been converted to a makeshift aid station. This room had been converted to a morgue. Still forms, swathed in plastic, were neatly stacked beside each other. Charley wondered at the thinking that planned ahead to put body bags in a safe house. But whoever it was had planned right.

  In the front room, the remaining members of DOMINANCE RAIN sat in flimsy chairs or slumped on the floor. No one spoke to each other; most of the men stared into space or toyed aimlessly with their personal weapons. One man looked up when Charley came in, nodded to him, then looked back down at the floor beneath his feet. Charley stood there for a moment, then slowly edged his way through the room, careful not to jostle or bump anyone. He went to the last bedroom, where one man sat outside the closed door in a wooden chair with a loose leg that squeaked when he shifted his weight.

  “I
s he awake?” Charley said.

  “He was,” the guard said.

  “I think it’s my turn in the barrel.”

  “Knock yourself out.” The guard pushed his chair back so Charley could get to the door. Quietly and slowly, Charley opened the door and slipped through into a darkened room with no windows. The room was close and small, empty except for two chairs facing each other in the center of the scuffed wooden floor. Ahmad bin Faisal, his head hidden by a black hood, his hands cuffed behind him, was seated in one chair, secured by swaths of duct tape around his chest and legs. Charley stood for a moment and watched the man in the chair, saw how his hooded head tilted at the slight sound of the door opening and closing. Then he went to the empty chair and sat down.

  Charley studied the man, looking for the signs in his body that would lead him to what was happening in his brain. The Arab was silent. Tremors came and went in the big muscles of his thighs and shoulders. He was deathly afraid, as was to be expected. He was soft meat in the hands of predators he couldn’t see, predators who padded quietly around him, waiting. Charley figured he had three or four hours before the interrogation team arrived and took his prize away, leaving him with no closure to the day’s events.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  He had to figure out how to proceed.

  Bin Faisal was no field man. They’d established that early on. He’d never been through the terrorist training camps; few of the upper hierarchy had. They preferred to let their money and organizational expertise insulate them from that rough and dirty business. So he would have minimal, if any, experience in resisting interrogation. Why would he? Men like bin Faisal never dreamed of being caught, much less interrogated. Pain would buy a certain amount of information, but the threat of pain and violence was a better tool against a man like bin Faisal. An operator, a seasoned field hand, would have thought out in advance several layers of information, true and false, to slowly give up to the interrogator at each step of the process. Someone like bin Faisal would try to hold out everything, not knowing any better, and when he went, he would go all at once, giving everything up. If the interrogator played his hand right.

  So he had to capitalize on the man’s fear, and his imagination of what might happen.

  “You don’t know much about this end of the business, do you?” Charley said, in a soft conversational tone. “You’re not the type to get your hands dirty. That’s what you pay others for. I know your type, you see. There’s someone like you in every organization. You’re the guy who signs the checks and gives the orders, but you stay nice and clean in your office or your fancy hotel room. It’s the man out on the sharp end of the stick that gets bloody. But you sure got your hands dirty today. That was good work, setting us up like that.”

  Charley slid his chair closer, so that he sat knee to knee across from bin Faisal. The Arab’s chest rose and fell as though he were running a race.

  “What is your name?” Charley said.

  The Arab’s voice was high. It quavered as he said, “What do you want with me? Who are you? Is it money?”

  Bin Faisal was going to put up a fight.

  Charley let a hint of menace into his voice. “Don’t think me a fool. You know what we want, you know who we are, and you know it has nothing to do with money. You want us to think that. You want to be seen as just another Arab businessman from Syria. A good try, but foolish. Don’t you think so?”

  He slapped the Arab sharply, boxing his ear, raising dust from the dark hood.

  “Can you hear me clearly now?” Charley said. He kept his tone level. “I want you to think before you speak. I am not a fool. I am not willing to suffer your foolishness. You are an intelligent man. You realize what has happened. There is no escape for you. Your comrades aren’t coming to kick these doors down and rescue you. Maybe they will try something dramatic to demand your release. But any such attempt is a long time away. So that’s useless thinking for you. Do you hear me?”

  The hooded man’s shoulders were slumped, his head bowed forward and canted to one side, the hood beginning to darken in spots with either sweat or tears.

  “Yes,” the Arab said. “I hear you.”

  “That’s good,” Charley said. “What is your name?”

  The Arab twisted uncomfortably in the chair. His linen trousers, dirtied and torn in the struggle to get him into the van, were bunched tightly beneath the duct tape that held him in place. The hood rose and fell over the open O of his mouth, where he struggled to get a full breath of air.

  “My name is . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Ahmad bin Faisal . . .”

  Charley nodded. He pulled a small tape recorder out of his shirt pocket, looked to be sure that a tape was in place, then switched it on.

  “What is your position with the Al-Bashir terrorist organization?”

  The mind sends clear signals to the body, which in turn sends a clear signal in the language of posture and muscular tension to the trained eye. Charley saw resistance begin in the stiffening of bin Faisal’s shoulders, the turning in and tensing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .” bin Faisal began.

  Charley reached out and took the hooded head between both his hands. Bin Faisal twisted, turning against his duct-tape bonds, trying to pull free from Charley’s iron grip. Charley held bin Faisal’s head steady as though in a vise, then let his thumbs slip over the Arab’s eyes, fluttering beneath the hood, to where the nostrils meet the upper lip. Then he dug his thumbs hard into the nerve plexus there. The Arab arched backward, stretching the duct tape to near-popping, thrashing his head from side to side, crying out in pain. Charley let go his grip, sat back in the chair, and watched submission return to the Arab’s body. The terrorist organizer shifted his whole body away from Charley, his shoulders slumped, and his head drooped.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” Charley said, the conversational tone once again in his voice. “And it leaves no mark. It’s very crude when you consider the many ways we have to make you talk. You don’t have the experience or the training to fight me on this, Ahmad. You’re not a man of the street.”

  The Arab began to cry silently. His shoulders shook, and the black fabric of his hood darkened around his eyes.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Charley said. “There is nothing you can do to resist us. We have too many ways: pain, sleep deprivation, chemicals. But you don’t need to go that way. Cooperate with me now. You can avoid all that. You are an intelligent man, you prize the functioning of your brain . . . have you ever seen a man who has been tortured? They are broken in a way that can never be fixed. Think about that, Ahmad bin Faisal.”

  Charley eased his chair back and stood. He walked slowly, deliberately, weighting each foot, till he stood behind the hooded man, whose shoulders shook as they rose in an attempt at self-protection. Charley rested his hands on the Arab’s shoulders and felt how he trembled, like a guitar string pulled to the point of breaking.

  He was almost there.

  “We can protect you,” Charley said. “Your colleagues in Al-Bashir, they don’t want you to talk to us. We know that. But they are forever out of reach now. There’s only you. And us. We can make things very good for you . . . once you help us. Give me a little something now, something I can give the people I work for, something to show that you mean to help us.”

  Bin Faisal’s voice quavered. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me who your contact with November Seventeenth is. Tell me who you contacted to set up the hit.”

  The man’s lips moved soundlessly, twisting beneath the hood. Then he said, “. . . The only contact I have is a man named Christou. If I needed to make contact, I was to go there and have dinner and ask for him, tell him what I needed.”

  “Go where, Ahmad?”

  “To his restaurant, Christou’s it’s called, after him.”

  “I know this place. That’s good, Ahmad. You went there last night?”

&n
bsp; “Yes.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  A convulsive twitch ran through the man’s whole body. Charley reached down and touched his chest and felt the runaway pounding of his heart.

  “Easy, Ahmad,” Charley said. “Take a deep breath, that’s right, now hold it, then let it out slowly. That’s right. Once more. Good. Now tell me what you told Christou.”

  “I told him that I thought I was being followed. That I would pay for someone to watch my back.”

  “Did you tell him to kill the watchers?”

  “No! I didn’t,” bin Faisal said. “I had nothing to do with that. I had no idea that was going to happen.”

  Charley checked the tape in his recorder.

  “I believe you, Ahmad,” he said. “Tell me something else, now. Tell me about Sad Holiday.”

  The sudden twitch and dip of the Arab’s shoulders were eloquent.

  Charley lifted his hands as though he were a pianist at the end of a recital. He walked around the bound man and sat back in his chair facing his prisoner.

  “Careful, Ahmad,” Charley said, watching the other man’s chest rise as he prepared to speak. “Be careful here. Remember what I said.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Tell me about Sad Holiday, Ahmad. You know what I’m talking about. It’s your project. You can be proud of what you’ve done so far. But it’s over, and I want to know more about it.”

  Charley let the man be silent for a long time. Then he said, “Would you like a cigarette, Ahmad? I know that you smoke. Perhaps a cigarette would help you remember.”

  Bin Faisal remained silent.

  Charley reached out and delicately unbuttoned bin Faisal’s shirt pocket and took out his silver cigarette case and gold lighter.

  “Very nice,” he said. “When I traveled in the Middle East, I used to smoke these.”

  He took a Turkish cigarette out of the case, snapped the case closed, then tapped the cigarette lightly to settle the tobacco. He lit the cigarette in the bright blue flame of the gold lighter and took a long, appreciative draw of the smoke before he got up and loosened the hood ties around bin Faisal’s neck. He lifted the hood, keeping the Arab’s eyes and head covered, then held the cigarette for the man to suck. There were tear tracks on bin Faisal’s face; fresh moisture glistened beside his nose and on his upper lip.