Special Forces: The Operator

by Cindy Dees

  Nothing could be right between them again. He’d made a science experiment out of her, and she could never trust him again when he said he cared for her.

  She opened the email, startled to see that it came from CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. She read the note quickly—it was from the Middle East Desk. They’d received her request for any further information available on a classified training facility in the heart of Iran.

  A satellite had been rerouted to pass over the region in question as part of another, higher-priority mission, and the photo intel folks had taken the opportunity to take more pictures.

  She scanned down through the attached images quickly. The only new thing she saw was that the camouflage nettings had been replaced over the mock-up of the plaza, and the shooter training range was no longer visible from the sky.

  She almost didn’t bother scanning all the way to the end of the lengthy series of still images captured from the surveillance satellite.

  But she did scroll to the end, and she did read the final paragraph the analyst attached to the end of the email.

  We do have an asset inside the facility in question. If you would like me to forward you a redacted version of the asset’s reports from inside the training building, that could be arranged.

  She lurched in her seat. The CIA had somebody who could tell her what was inside that giant warehouse?

  She hurried across the ops center to a properly secured computer and fired off a response email requesting the unredacted reports from inside the training facility at the Middle East Desk’s earliest convenience, in particular, any images obtained from inside the training building, to be sent to this secured computer. She didn’t have the authority to call it a national security matter, but she invoked Major Torsten’s authority and called it a national security matter, anyway.

  She hit Send and went back to her desk to wait.

  It took about a half hour, but a communications specialist called out across the operations center, “McQueen! You’ve got a classified email!”

  Yes.

  Impatiently, she signed the receipt log, waited for the email to be decrypted, and then sat down at the classified message station to open the email.

  The written note was brief.

  Here are the images you requested. Quality is dubious, but these are all we have. No detailed analysis has been performed on these images as they were determined to be of no immediate intelligence value.

  She peered at the poorly lit images of a cavernous space, struggling to make out features. Slowly lights and doors and large structures came into focus. She grabbed a pad of legal paper and began to sketch a rough layout of the interior of the facility as she deciphered the various images and figured out at what angles the photographs had been taken.

  It appeared that the photographer had frequently shot pictures from down by his or her hip, maybe concealing the camera, most likely a cell phone, in his or her hand.

  Getting a feel for the layout of the building was a laborious process, but slowly, she began to understand what she was looking at in the pictures. And as she did so, her blood ran colder and colder.

  This was it. The missing piece of the puzzle they’d all been looking for ever since she spotted Mahmoud Akhtar here in Sydney.

  “McQueen, other people need to use that workstation,” a communications specialist snapped behind her.

  “Sorry,” she replied absently. “These images are classified and I can’t take them over to my workstation. Feel free to use my computer if you need it—”

  “What I need is for you to get out of my chair.”

  She laid down her pencil and swiveled in her chair, not bothering to stand. “You’ll have to take it up with my boss. I guarantee what I’m working on right now will be more important than anything you can even imagine doing today.”

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” the comm guy exclaimed. “You’re just some low-level grunt—”

  She did stand up then. She was a full six inches shorter than the communications man, but she stared at him so coldly, and with such a promise of violence against him if he didn’t get out of her face, that he actually took a step back from her.

  She was sick and tired of these self-important yahoos not taking her seriously. The next one who crossed her was going to get broken into a whole bunch of tiny, painful pieces.

  Apparently, this particular yahoo had at least a minimal self-preservation instinct, for he stomped off toward Gunnar Torsten’s office, muttering obscenities under his breath.

  It took about sixty seconds for Gunnar Torsten to come out of his office and stride over to the computer station. The comm guy looked smug behind her boss.

  “What have you got, Rebel?” Torsten asked her.

  “The CIA obtained photographic images of the interior of the training facility Mahmoud used to prep his team for the Olympics.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Torsten exclaimed under his breath. “What have you found?”

  “The images are terrible and it’s taking me a while to figure out what I’m looking at. And then that guy came over and tried to kick me off this computer.”

  Torsten whirled around and snarled, “Lieutenant McQueen will have full and undisturbed access to this computer for as long as she needs it, today. If anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with me. Is that understood?”

  “But—” the communications guy started.

  “She’s working on a matter of national security. Rebel, let me know if this guy gives you any more hassles. I’ll be happy to take him out back to the woodshed.”

  The comm guy spluttered a bit more but moved away from her.

  Torsten ground out low, “Anything you need, Rebel. Anything at all. Just get me the layout those bastards used to train for their mission over here.”

  “I could use Gia’s help. I’m trying to build a 3-D representation of the training area, but it’s hard with a pad of paper and a pencil. I could use her expertise with designing a computerized model.”

  “Done. I’ll get her over here if I have to take her security detail myself,” Torsten replied.

  He was as good as his word. In about fifteen minutes, Gia hustled into the operations center and rushed over to Rebel. “What’s up?”

  “I need your eyeballs to help decipher these images. And I need you to build a 3-D images of what we see.”

  With Rebel working on the actual images and Gia working on her laptop computer, the two of them slowly constructed a recreation of the contents of the warehouse. It took most of the afternoon, but they finally sat back, nodding grimly at each other.

  “I think that’s got it,” Rebel declared.

  “I concur. Want me to call the Medusas together?”

  “I think we’d better.”

  “Are you gonna call Avi?” Gia asked slyly.

  Rebel huffed. “Fine. I’ll call him. But I’m telling you, nothing’s going on between us. As in nothing.”

  “Methinks she doth protest too much,” Gia sang.

  She told her teammate succinctly what she could do with that sentiment.

  Laughing, Gia headed for Torsten’s office to start calling in the team. Reluctantly, Rebel pulled out her cell phone and dialed a familiar, painful number.

  “Rebel? Is that you? Thank God. I was beginning to despair of you ever speaking to me again. You have to let me explain—”

  She cut him off. “This is a work phone call, Major Bronson.”

  He fell silent.

  The silence stretched out for an uncomfortably long time.

  His voice rough, strained, infinitely pained, he finally said, “What’s going on, Lieutenant McQueen?”

  “I need you over here as soon as possible.”

  “That’s going to be difficult. I’m scheduled to work until 2:00 a.m. tonight.”
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  She winced. If she continued refusing to let him explain himself, then he obviously didn’t want to see her. Matching his formality, she said, “We’ve had a breakthrough that may help us determine what target Mahmoud and his team are planning to hit.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  The line went dead in her ear.

  That was it, then. She’d officially killed any chance at a reconciliation between them.

  It was over. She should be relieved. Right? Why then, did it feel like she’d just extracted her heart from her own chest with a spoon?

  * * *

  Avi paused outside the conference room door and took a deep breath. He could do this. He could look at Rebel, sit beside her, have a professional conversation with her, without giving away how wrecked he was by her rejection.

  Initially, he’d thought it was just a simple misunderstanding between them. The sort of thing they could talk out in an adult conversation. But as the days had dragged on with her refusing to even speak with him, let alone see him in person, it had dawned on him that something larger was afoot.

  Not only was she mad at him for setting a personal goal of making her happy and achieving it, but she was soul-deep angry that he’d challenged her worldview and, ultimately, proven it false. Maybe that was what she couldn’t forgive him for.

  Thing was, he couldn’t be sorry for showing her that there was more to life than work. That happiness was an essential and wonderful part of being alive. She might never forgive him for it, but at least he had the bitter satisfaction of knowing he’d made her life immeasurably better.

  Too bad that knowledge wouldn’t keep him warm at night, or laugh with him, or grow old with him.

  “In or out?” someone said behind Avi, startling him into realizing he’d been standing there with his hand on the doorknob for a stupidly long time.

  Swearing, he opened the door and walked into the conference room. The impact of seeing Rebel again was a punch in the gut. Delicate violet circles under her eyes suggested she wasn’t sleeping any better than he was, and she appeared to have lost some weight. There was a hollowness to her cheeks he didn’t remember from before.

  What kind of a monster did it make him that he’d given her happiness, and now she had to live with awareness of its absence. God. Had he actually ruined her life? He needed to make it right. There had to be a way to fix the damage he’d done.

  “Thanks for coming, Avi,” Gunnar Torsten said grimly.

  “What’s up? Rebel said there’s been a breakthrough.”

  “She found it, so I’ll let her tell you about it.”

  He gathered the rest of the Medusas had already been filled in, for they all looked expectantly at him and not at Rebel.

  Clenching his jaw, he reluctantly lifted his gaze to her at the end of the conference table beside Torsten. For just an instant, she met his gaze. Her expression was quietly ravaged as she stared back at him.

  Then she turned away from him and flashed a very dark, fuzzy photograph up on the wall-mounted large screen behind her. She said emotionlessly, “I’m going to flash through the actual images very quickly, because it took me and Gia hours to decipher what we were actually looking at. But I wanted to give you an idea of where our diagrams came from.”

  He nodded and watched as several dozen equally dark and meaningless photographs of the interior of some building flashed past.

  She spoke again. “I was notified by my government that a series of photographic images had come in from the interior of the training facility Mahmoud Akhtar and his team have been using for the past eight months or so.”

  Avi lurched in his chair. That was huge! His gaze flashed back to the screen and the blurry image on it. That was Mahmoud’s training setup? He asked urgently, “What did the two of you figure out from analyzing those images?”

  Rebel pressed a button on a remote control and a computer-generated, 3-D image of a series of boxes placed around a large space popped up on the screen. “This is a crude rendering, of course, but we’re fairly certain the dimensions are accurate. Inside the warehouse-style facility is a large, open training area similar to what we—or you Israelis—would use to mock up a mission and practice it before actually executing it.”

  He nodded impatiently. Every Special Forces unit on Earth routinely ran mock-ups for training and for mission planning purposes.

  She continued, “As far as we can tell, the Iranians placed a series of large, wooden crates around the open space. The placement is not random—most of the boxes line up with one another one way or another. Our guess is the crates were built to specific dimensions, because they are all of differing heights and widths.”

  “Maybe they just slapped some obstacles together without worrying about the dimensions?” he suggested. He didn’t particularly believe that, but they needed to consider all the possibilities.

  Rebel shrugged. “It would be hard to stack and store boxes of so many different shapes, and it would waste lumber—which is neither plentiful nor cheap in Iran—not to reuse these simulated obstacles.”

  He nodded, satisfied that the dimensions of the crates were intentional. “Continue,” he murmured.

  Rebel said, “As you can imagine, we’ve been trying ever since we called this meeting to match any places at the Olympics or in the surrounding areas of Sydney to this topographical layout.”

  “And?” he prompted.

  “No success, yet.”

  “Can you run some sort of comparison against satellite imagery of the whole area?” he asked.

  “Easier said than done,” Rebel replied. “The first problem is that it would take sophisticated software and mainframe computer access, neither of which we have readily at our disposal, to run the kind of comparison you’re suggesting. We can ask a couple of different agencies in the US government to set up that sort of matching comparison, but it would take too long. The games will be over in less than a week.”

  His gaze snapped to hers, and hers to him as she uttered the words.

  Less than a week to sort out whatever had gone wrong between them and get their relationship back on track—or from her point of view, he supposed, less than a week left to dodge and avoid him until she could return to her regularly scheduled miserable existence.

  “The second problem with identifying what this is a mock-up of is that this could as easily be indoor as outside. We can’t rule out lobbies of large buildings, shopping malls, or Olympic venues as the targets.”

  “So we’ll physically have to walk through each building and look at the interior setups for a match,” he declared.

  Gunnar interjected, “If I were them, I’d be planning a hit where the most people will be crowded together.”

  Avi responded, “So, you’re thinking the interior of an event venue, or a nightclub. Maybe a party of some kind.” He thought about it for a few seconds. “I concur. It’s what I would do if I were them, too.” He glanced up at the diagram on the screen. “I’d go for maximum death in minimum time.”

  Rebel shook her head. “I don’t understand why they didn’t just spray that crowd at the concert with automatic weapon fire. They could have killed hundreds of people and wounded hundreds more. There were nearly three thousand people in that plaza, packed shoulder to shoulder. The carnage would have been spectacular.”

  Avi responded, “We can only assume that they have an even-larger death toll in mind for their ultimate attack.”

  A moment of grim silence around the table greeted that observation.

  “Third problem,” Rebel continued, “The heights of the crates in the warehouse may not correspond exactly to the heights of the obstacles in the actual target location. Roughly half of the boxes in the warehouse are about two meters tall—tall enough that the attack plan may include using them for cover or moving around them, but won’t include climbing over them.”


  “So they could be pillars or other vertical structures instead of just crate-shaped obstructions,” he verified.

  “Correct,” Rebel responded. “And some of the crates could be simulations of corners with hallways extending at ninety-degree angles from them.”

  Damn. That would complicate identifying the target. “Still,” he said, “we have the basic layout of some sort of structural obstacles. That should be enough to figure out what they’re planning to hit. It’s a hell of a lot more information than we had a few hours ago.”

  “One last conclusion we can draw,” Rebel added. “They most likely are planning some sort of quickly executed tactical strike, and they plan to get away alive, or else they wouldn’t bother running the mission through a detailed mock-up like this. The intel report that came with the photographs of the training facility said this setup was in place for several weeks and only dismantled about two months ago.”

  Avi breathed, “A few days before the IRAN Jahan sailed.”

  Rebel’s startled gaze met his. She hadn’t made that connection, huh? She nodded slowly. “The timing is perfect.”

  Gunnar asked, “Do you want to take this to Otto Schweimburg?”

  Avi pulled a disgusted face. “He has steadfastly refused to listen to any of my suggestions that the Iranians are up to something. I have no reason to think he’ll believe me—or you—now.”

  Gunnar grunted in agreement.

  “I think we should go out and find a matching location to the diagram and then show it to Schweimburg. If nothing else, maybe we can convince him to put extra security on the target we identify.”

  That got nods all around the table.

  Avi looked around at the Medusas. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get out there and start searching for the target.”

  Gunnar replied, “We may not have much time before the attack. We’ll have to work smart and not just randomly run around looking at floor plans. I propose that we build a list of gathering places in descending order of crowd size. We’ll start at the top and work our way down the list.”