by Bentley, Don
Earlier, I’d turned with Sayid’s kick, and while the blow had rung my bell, I hadn’t lost consciousness for long. Instead, I’d slipped into more of a hazy twilight, aware enough to feel my clothes being torn from my body and then the gritty sandpaper feel of concrete rasping against my skin as someone dragged me from one room to another.
When I’d finally come to my senses, I’d thought for an instant that the blinding white light signaled my arrival in the afterlife. But then my nervous system started providing a running tally of my numerous injuries, putting that idea to rest. Even if my earthly performance had landed me a bit shy of heaven’s pearly gates, I thought the devil would do better than to welcome new souls with a piss-soaked slab of concrete. Syria might be hell on earth, but for better or worse, I was still in the land of the living.
For now, anyway.
A low moan and the rustle of cloth against stone drew my attention to the left. Shaw, barely conscious, lay beside me. The man-made suns in front of us directed the full brunt of their power on his hapless form.
What I saw made me suck in my breath.
I wasn’t the only one who’d caught a beating. Shaw’s face, already marred where the savages had cut away his ear, was nearly unrecognizable. His eyes were swollen shut, his face a mass of puffy tissue, giving him a sumo wrestler’s chubby features. His lips were split in multiple places, and the jagged remains of teeth protruded from his mouth like a vampire’s canines.
I could hear him breathe, but the sound was far from comforting. The air he struggled to draw past his ruined mouth gurgled in his chest, which made me think that his lung had collapsed or that he was drowning in his own blood.
Or both.
Either way, Shaw didn’t have long. As I looked away from the CIA paramilitary officer’s crumpled form, I realized that this prediction probably applied to both of us.
Now that my eyes could focus, the signs of what was about to happen were unmistakable. The blinding array of stage lights, the black jihadi flag hanging across the back wall, the orange jumpsuits we both now wore, even the thin, blood-soaked rug stretched across the concrete, all added up to only one conclusion—Shaw and I were about to play starring roles in a jihadi snuff film.
My heart thundered as I groped for something, anything, that could turn this situation to my advantage.
The beacon.
Freeing my hands was out of the question, but perhaps there was a way to trigger the transmitter with my weight. Even if it didn’t work, seeing a zip-tied man dry humping the concrete might just make the jihadis reconsider their decision to kill us. After all, if I was already batshit crazy, why go to the trouble of putting me out of my misery?
I rolled onto my stomach, clenching my teeth against the pain, and that’s when I realized my goose was cooked. I could feel the cold from the concrete leaching into my nether regions for one simple reason—my underwear had been removed.
Maybe these splinter cell jihadis who’d survived the destruction of ISIS were even smarter than I gave them credit for. Or maybe they had an underwear fetish. I didn’t know. Either way, the result was the same. Until I triggered the beacon, the cavalry wasn’t coming, and I no longer had the beacon.
Frodo was one hell of a persuader, but without proof that I was alive and had Shaw, I had no illusions about how this story would end. Two days before a Presidential election, an administration that had been willing to let an American captured on their watch face ritual execution rather than risk offending the Russians was not suddenly going to grow a pair.
Shaw and I were going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it.
The sobering thought brought with it memories of the last time I’d faced death. Then, Frodo had been by my side, one arm gone, a leg mangled, and nearly delirious with pain.
Like most in my chosen profession, I didn’t dwell on death, but it was never far from my thoughts. I’d been to too many funerals, seen the folded flag handed to too many grieving spouses, to think I was invincible. Scores of men who were better operators than I’d ever be now slept within Arlington National Cemetery’s eternal embrace. I didn’t live a charmed life, but I had imagined that, when death finally came for me, I’d be facing it with Frodo at my side.
For the briefest of moments, I thought of Laila. How seeing her across the room still made my heart skip. How her skin smelled like lilacs. The snorting noise she made when she laughed, and the way her nose wrinkled and her green eyes flashed when she was angry. She deserved better than this.
Better than me.
She deserved someone to grow old with. Someone to rock her babies to sleep at night. Someone to coach their Little League teams. She needed someone safe—maybe a high school teacher or an engineer or a lawyer.
Someone who wasn’t me.
I wasn’t safe, normal, or even completely whole. I wasn’t the man she’d grow old with, and I’d never hold her hand tightly in mine as she brought our children into the world. No, I’d never be or do any of those things, but I was still a Ranger. Even now, in my darkest hour, I was bound by something bigger than myself.
The Ranger Creed.
Recognizing that I volunteered as a Ranger . . .
Shifting my weight, I got my leg under me and strained against the floor until I’d managed to leverage myself into a sitting position.
. . . fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession . . .
Lightning bolts of agony ripped through my torso as I struggled to my knees, bringing tears to my eyes. The pain went way beyond that of broken bones to something deeper—internal injuries, possibly a ruptured spleen.
. . . I will always endeavor to uphold the prestige, honor, and high esprit de corps of my Ranger Regiment.
I was going to die. Maybe not today, but someday the grim reaper would come for me, just like he came for everyone else. But I was not like everyone else. I was an Airborne Ranger. I had a legacy to uphold. Airborne Rangers don’t die easy, and if today was my last day on this earth, I hoped only that the Almighty would grant me the leeway to demonstrate this distinction to as many jihadis as possible before my time was up.
“Ready. The feed goes live in thirty seconds.”
Again one of the disembodied voices from the other side of the light, but this time, the words made perfect sense.
There was an art to sawing off a man’s head, a method for ensuring that he didn’t struggle as the serrated knife bit into his throat. After all, too much struggling tended to ruin the video. Unlike Hollywood-produced gore fests, this film could have no second takes.
As such, jihadi executioners had learned to ply their prey with a subtle bit of psychology to ensure their victims’ docility. They did this by subjecting captives to mock executions. In this form of mental conditioning, victims were forced to endure repeated dry runs in which they were trussed up, dragged in front of a camera, and told they were going to die. Here, they fought and were beaten senseless, only to have the masked jihadi abort the execution at the last second.
This sequence was repeated sometimes dozens of times before the executioners actually carried out the gruesome acts. By this time, the psychologically battered victims had grown numb to the process. When the moment finally came, they rarely struggled, thinking it was just another rehearsal. Or perhaps, by then, the victims just wanted the madness to end, even if that end came in the form of cold steel biting into their necks.
In either case, the results were the same. The black-clad executioner decapitated a docile prisoner while the brutality was captured in high definition and later distributed to the legions of jihadi websites and chat forums.
But not this time.
Sayid and his friends were on a schedule. A schedule I’d disrupted with my untimely arrival, but a schedule all the same. They’d promised to livestream Shaw’s execution on social media, which meant that, even now, violence-lusting jihadi
s were calling for blood. If my new hosts delayed, they’d lose face with millions of potential recruits. They didn’t have time to engage in the usual array of mock executions.
This restriction put my captors in a bit of a quandary—how did they ensure a meek prisoner so that the beheading could be filmed in all its glory while still making their timeline?
By beating the victim senseless, of course.
It wasn’t the optimal solution, since an unconscious hostage didn’t convey the same amount of soul-numbing terror when the knife’s serrated edge begin to saw through his flesh, but it would do the job in a pinch.
“Prepare him.”
The casual command sent a chill down my spine. I tried to muster something that approached the righteous fury that had allowed me to rise to my knees, but all I could manage was a sense of terror as a figure from my nightmares walked in front of the lights.
Sayid.
And he was coming straight for me.
FIFTY-SIX
AL ASAD AIR BASE, IRAQ
Major Vinnie “Boxer” McGrath shoved the throttles of his F-22 Raptor forward, sending the fighter’s twin Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines into afterburner. The combined seventy thousand pounds of thrust compressed Boxer into his g-force-absorbing seat as the aircraft screamed down the runway. At less than half the distance required for a conventional plane, the Raptor’s nose tilted up. A second later, the aircraft’s wheels left earth in favor of the sky. With a flip of a toggle, Boxer adjusted the variable-thrust nozzles attached to the engines, and the stealth fighter’s angle of attack changed from steep to nearly vertical.
Growing up, Vinnie had been desperate to be an astronaut. He’d spent many a night as he drifted off to sleep wondering what it might feel like to be strapped to the tip of a solid rocket booster. After becoming a Raptor driver, Vinnie wondered no longer. He lived his boyhood dream every time he firewalled the jet engines, turning his fighter into one of the fastest air-breathing projectiles ever created.
But as the runway of Al Asad Air Base in Iraq fell away beneath him, Vinnie reminded himself that this was no boyhood flight of fancy. Today, for the first time since he’d first strapped himself into a Raptor’s cockpit twelve years ago, Vinnie was going to stretch his jet to its breaking point and beyond.
This thought brought with it equal parts apprehension and excitement. Vinnie pushed the emotions aside, dividing his attention between his heads-up display and the multipurpose screens that formed the heart of his aircraft’s glass cockpit. Passing through first thirty, then forty, and then fifty thousand feet, Vinnie put the jet into a slight bank, turning into a circular holding pattern as he performed his flight-lead tasks and waited for his wingmen to arrive. Communications frequencies, navigation points, and weapons presets had all successfully transferred from the data cartridge he’d hurriedly loaded during the unusually quick premission brief. But in truth, none of these mundane checklist items occupied Vinnie’s thoughts.
Instead, Vinnie’s attention was almost exclusively captured by a single unassuming line on his moving map display. A line that represented the edge of Syrian airspace, or more specifically, the section of airspace claimed by Assad’s air force and their backers, the Russians.
“Boxer, this is Ringmaster. Flight is a go. I say again: Flight is a go.”
The transmission originated from a Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS early-warning aircraft orbiting squarely in Iraqi airspace. It came to Vinnie’s ears via an encrypted radio, and he didn’t reply.
At least not with his radio.
Instead, Vinnie touched a toggle on his side-mounted control stick. His touch sent a one-word acknowledgment, in an encoded stream of laser light, to an array dish mounted on the AWACS’s dorsal.
For this mission, stealth was paramount. The Raptor was the world’s first fifth-generation fighter. It had been designed specifically to slink into enemy-controlled airspace undetected and then wreak havoc on an unsuspecting air force. But all of the fighter’s radar-absorbing properties would be for naught if something as inconspicuous as a radio transmission gave away the jet’s presence.
To mitigate this risk, Vinnie would not break radio silence until absolutely necessary. Instead, communication between Vinnie, the AWACS controller, and his three wingmen would occur via the optical transmission system first birthed for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and then distributed to the Air Force’s other premier aircraft—the F-22 Raptor.
Within seconds of his sending his response to the AWACS mission controller, a series of two-toned beeps in Boxer’s earpiece heralded the arrival of optically transmitted text messages from the three other Raptors in his strike package. Craning his head over both shoulders, Boxer visually verified the presence of his wingmen via his helmet-mounted night-vision goggles. Once he was certain that everyone was in position, he edged the throttle up to the agreed-upon setting, configuring his jet for super cruise.
In yet another marvel for an aircraft whose capabilities often seemed more science fiction than science fact, the Pratt & Whitney engines were now powering the jet to supersonic speeds without the use of the fuel-guzzling afterburners.
But this amazing feat of engineering—much like the Raptor’s radar-evading skin, adaptive radar, and computer-assisted flight controls—was lost on Boxer. Not because he didn’t appreciate his jet’s groundbreaking capabilities, but because as of thirty seconds ago, he and his silent flight of hunters had crossed to the other side of the green line on his moving map display.
They were now in Russian-controlled airspace.
Boxer and his flight of four Raptors were going to war.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Here we go,” Chief Warrant Officer Joel Glendening said, more to give voice to the tension he felt infecting his crew than to announce a new phase in the mission.
“Let’s do it, Chief,” Colonel Fitz said, slapping Joel on the back.
Joel didn’t bother to reply or explain what was happening on the glass display located prominently between his console and his copilot’s. This time around, the Delta Force Commander was intimately aware of what the scarlet line on the moving map display represented.
After the aborted rescue attempt thirty minutes ago, everyone knew what they’d face once the helicopters crossed into Russian-controlled airspace. To a man, every aircrew member had volunteered for the second rescue attempt as soon as their JSOC liaison had provided them with the White House–endorsed plan. In fact, Joel had needed to turn aside potential crew members when he hand selected the men to accompany him on this second, and final, rescue attempt.
Judging by the press of bodies in the Black Hawk behind him, the Unit commandos had reacted in the same manner. Except unlike Joel, Colonel Fitz hadn’t even tried to restrict the number of operators who’d insisted on climbing aboard to rescue Drake and the captured CIA officer.
For a moment, Joel almost pitied the terrorists holding the two Americans hostage. Almost. But then he remembered what was at stake. Joel had been in high school during the infamous Black Hawk Down mission, but the legacy of that day still burned bright among the 160th Night Stalkers. Two American special operators were in harm’s way, and Joel and his comrades were flying to the rescue. As far as Joel was concerned, there was no better embodiment of the Regiment’s motto: Night Stalkers don’t quit.
Still, the righteousness of their mission aside, Joel had no illusions about what was waiting for his band of brothers on the other side of that thin red line. Last time, it had been warning shots.
This time, both sides would be playing for keeps.
Almost on cue, a transmission from the AWACS plane orbiting at the edge of Iraqi airspace slammed across the airwaves. Joel didn’t know the wattage that the airborne command-and-control plane was capable of transmitting, but the signal seemed almost strong enough to rattle the fillings in his teeth. He hoped it would be enough to get the Russians’ attentio
n.
Or maybe he didn’t.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Russian aircraft patrolling in sector Charlie at flight level three zero, this is American air traffic control. Two American helicopters will be transitioning across your airspace from east to west in three minutes. Do not deviate from your current heading and altitude. I say again, any changes to your current heading and altitude will be considered demonstration of hostile intent. Acknowledge. Over.”
Dmitri Androvinoch could not believe the audacity of the Americans’ radio transmission. He knew the Yankees had a reputation for stubbornness, but this turn of events almost defied belief. Less than an hour after he’d shown restraint by not turning the American helicopters violating his airspace into burning hunks of debris, the Yankees thanked him for his kindness by issuing directives as if they owned the sky.
Their arrogance was breathtaking.
Activating his targeting radar, Dmitri saw the same inconsistent return designating the stealth-equipped American helicopters as well as an early-warning AWACS plane, which he assumed was the source of the radio transmission.
Other than that, his screen was clear.
Surely the Americans didn’t think to threaten him from an unarmed radar plane?
A quick glance at his aircraft-survivability equipment showed no active radars of the type attributed to either ground- or air-based antiaircraft-missile systems.
Were the American’s bluffing?
“Outrigger Main, this is Badger Three Four,” Dmitri said after thumbing the radio-transmit button on his stick. “Are you monitoring the American transmission?”
“Affirmative, Badger Three Four. Your instructions remain the same. Do not allow the Americans to enter our airspace.”
“Badger Three Four confirms,” Dmitri said. With a push of a button, Dmitri took the aircraft’s master arm switch from safe to weapons hot. Then he yanked his Flanker into a tight spiral, aiming the aircraft’s nose toward the encroaching helicopters.
