by Tom Clancy
“Sniper!”
Ross was dead. Shot through the back of the head. How the bullet had not penetrated all the way through and killed Mobasheri as well he had no idea.
The crackle of automatic weapons fire erupted outside at both the front and the back of the chalet. Mohammed dropped back to his hands and knees, rushed over to the computer on the desk, and retrieved the microdrive and the adapter. He stuffed it into his jacket and ran low and fast for the front door.
DOM HAD CALLED IT —shit went wrong almost immediately. After he shot Ethan Ross in the head, determining it to be the least worst option, he’d pivoted to get an angle on one of the men outside the house. Just as he lined the man up in his sights, gunfire from the other sentry tore through the trees just feet above Dom’s head. Dom shot the man with the AK dead at the front door, but the man in back with the MP5 had impressive aim, and branches all around Dom began snapping off trees. He dropped to the ground, nine-millimeter bullets came so close he felt the overpressure of them as they parted the cold air near his face.
He all but buried himself in the snow until the man stopped to change his magazine. Dom rose to his knees and fired several rounds at the man with the MP5, striking him in the stomach and knocking him into the snow. By now someone else was firing, and Dom thought it might be coming from the kitchen window. He turned and crawled through the trees for fifty feet or so, rose and aimed his rifle at the house behind him. He squeezed off three rounds without having a target in his sights in an attempt to make some noise and slow down anyone coming after him.
His gunfire was met with multiple weapons chattering back in his direction, and he hit the deck again and then crawled for cover.
MOHAMMED MOBASHERI STOOD in the doorway to the chalet. One Hezbollah man from the Lyon cell lay dead in front of him, shot multiple times in the chest. Isfahan had already leapt off the port and started to run off after the retreating sniper, but Mohammed stopped him with a shout. He didn’t want his small team to split up, there would be a lot more police crawling around here soon enough, and he knew they needed to be gone by then.
His entire operation had been derailed by the bullet to the back of Ethan Ross’s head. He had been making quick changes to his plan since the moment he stepped off the plane in Washington last week, and he’d rolled with the punches, but he’d never anticipated losing any chance to obtain the password from Ross.
All he could do at this point was to get himself back to Iran with the microdrive full of CIA intelligence, and leave it to machines to crack the encryption. He’d been told it might take months or even years to do this with brute-force computer decryption techniques, but now that the only other option was to lie dead on the floor in the house behind him, he saw no choice but to escape from Europe with the drive and begin the arduous process.
Ajiz rolled up the short driveway behind the wheel of a red Mercedes 4Matic SUV. Mohammed ordered everyone into the vehicle, and Ajiz remained at the wheel. As they pulled out of the drive of the chalet, leaving Ross’s body behind, Mohammed began programming the GPS in the car to get them out of these fucking hills and down to Genoa as fast as possible.
IT TOOK DOM a minute or two to realize it, which was understandable, considering his focus had been on not getting shot, but soon he came to the conclusion there was no one chasing him through the trees.
He stumbled back out onto a road, ran across to the other side, and then dove into a small gully. He swung the black M4 around and scanned the way from which he had just come. Through his scope, through the trees on the other side of the road, he saw a red SUV—it looked like one of those boxy Mercedes—pulling up the driveway of the chalet. He couldn’t see people at this distance, even through the scope, so he knew he wouldn’t be shooting at the vehicle. His chest heaved and vapor shot out of his mouth in cadence with his panting. He forced himself to hold his breath so he could listen for the telltale sounds of pursuit, but he heard nothing more than the hiss of snowfall and the whine of a drifting wind through the pines. In the distance the singsong sirens of emergency vehicles came and went. They sounded like they were a half-mile away or more, nowhere in this valley, and Dom thought it likely they hadn’t even made it to the site of the helicopter crash.
He took a moment to dial Adara again, keeping his eyes peeled while he did so. There was no service, he fought an urge to throw his fucking phone into the snow, but instead he just jammed it back into his jacket and he continued to scan and heave while he lay there on his chest.
He’d killed Ethan Ross, that was just now sinking in. He didn’t think he had much of a choice, and considering what Ross had in store for him at the hands of the Iranian with the broken bottle, Dom felt he’d done the bastard a favor. He’d say a bullet to the brain was more than the American NSC man deserved, but he’d realized at some point in this entire affair that Ethan Ross, though responsible for the deaths of the Yacobys, was little more than a useful idiot in the entire event.
A fool in over his head.
He didn’t feel bad about killing the American traitor, but he didn’t feel as great about it as he thought he would when he had been seeking vengeance.
Dom wondered what the Iranians would do now. He didn’t think Ross had given them the decryption key before he died. If he had it seemed unlikely they would have taken the time during their escape to break into a house just to cut up their prisoner’s genitalia. No, they were torturing him for the password. But just because they didn’t have it, brute-force decryption—plugging the encrypted drive to a computer than then throwing tens of millions of possible passwords at, was also an option. It would be time consuming, but Dom knew, with enough time and effort, Iranian intelligence could still penetrate the breach and reveal its secrets.
Caruso also knew enough about intelligence and counterintelligence to know that the CIA would have to operate under the assumption that all the data on the drive had been compromised. This would result in operations stopping cold, profitable ties with agents being severed, facilities closed and moved, and case officers recalled. It would be a disaster even if the breach were never actually fully exploited by the opposition.
The red SUV backed out of the chalet, and sped off in the opposite direction.
Dom stood and climbed out of his one-piece motorcycle suit. It was restricting his movement, and he knew he was going to have to run. The bike was somewhere back in the valley, a quarter of a mile in the opposite direction. Wearing only a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, he hefted his gun and sprinted back across the street. He was outnumbered by at least five to one, but he saw no alternative, he had to go after the drive.
As he ran, he heard the voice of Arik Yacoby in his head.
“C’mon, D. Soldier on.”
51
DOMINIC MADE IT TO the chalet over a minute after the Iranians left, but he kept running. He considered looking for a landline phone inside, but he knew if he didn’t find one the Mercedes would be long gone in the time it took him to check. The sprinted first through the yards of the other winter chalets on the winding street, and then on the snow-covered paved road. He knew it would be impossible to catch up with the fleeing vehicle, but lacking an intelligent plan, action seemed like his only recourse.
On the other side of the first bend in the road, just a hundred yards or so beyond the chalet where Ethan Ross’s body now lay, he saw the thick trees gave way to a wide-open windswept hill alongside the road. He was able to look out here over the valley, and he thought it possible he might get a sat phone signal here as well. Just as he reached for the phone tucked into his waistband, the earpiece in his ear chirped. He took the call by touching it.
“Adara?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’ve been calling you for a half-hour! Where are you?”
“In Italy. In some mountains. That’s about all I know.”
“Well I’m en route, so if you can be more precise, call me back. In the meantime, I can conference you in with the deputy chief of CIA station Milan. He�
��s been working the phones dealing with your situation for twenty or thirty minutes, but he needs to talk to you.”
Dominic was winded from running and talking at the same time, but he kept running and said, “Put him through.”
There was a full minute of nothing on the line, Dom caught another look over the valley and noticed the road ahead wound back and forth in a series of tight switchbacks to maximize the number of little vacation chalets the developers here could cram on the hillside. Dom left the road, ran between a pair of wooden cabins on his left, then started tearing down a forested hill, hoping he could make up some time with the Mercedes.
Suddenly a booming and annoyed-sounding voice came into his ear. “Who’s this?”
“Deputy Director, I’m an FBI special agent involved in the Intelink-TS counterintelligence case in Geneva. Are you aware of the situation?”
“Yes. I spoke with the woman who patched me through to you. I know what you are, I am asking for your name.”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you that.”
“Why the hell not?”
Dom kept running, he stumbled over a bicycle hidden in the snow in the backyard of a chalet, but in seconds he was up and running again, speaking between pants as he reached the next paved piece of the switchback road and continued across it. “Look, my name is Jones. Will that work?”
“No, it won’t. FBI doesn’t mask their identity, so that tells me you aren’t from the Bureau. Before we go any further, I need to know who you work for.”
“If you need to know who I work for, then we won’t be going any further.”
There was a pause. Dom covered twenty yards before the man spoke again. “You’re one of those, huh?”
“I’m the only guy who knows what the hell is going on over here, so that might be good for something.”
The DCOS took a moment, but finally he said, “Okay. I understand you are in pursuit of Ross and an unknown group of actors.”
Dom shook his head while he ran. “Ross is dead. Iranian intelligence officers have his data, I don’t know if they have the decryption key they need to get into it, but I’m sure they have the drive itself. They are in a Red Mercedes SUV heading south.”
“Shit. What’s your location?”
“I’m about a half to three-quarters of a mile south of where the helo went down. That was a couple miles south of the SS26 highway. Does that help you?”
“Yes, I know where the local emergency crews are responding to the crash. I’ve got some help on the way to you.”
“Agency help?”
“Negative. I’m in Milan and I have no armed assets close. I’m sending you U.S. Army help. It turns out a group from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat team is in your AO right now. They are based in Vicenza, but a rifle platoon is doing some alpine training in the foothills south of the SS26. I was able to get routed right through their CO, and he ordered them to load into trucks and head in your direction. I’ll call them back and tell them about the Mercedes coming down the road.
Dom slowed, then started walking. He couldn’t believe his luck. “A platoon of infantry! Are you kidding? That’s perfect.”
“Well, not exactly perfect. There is one problem.”
“What’s the problem?” As far as he was concerned, they could wrap this up in minutes.
The deputy COS began explaining the situation, and before he finished talking, Dom had broken into a frantic sprint once again. He continued down the hill as fast as he could.
TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD FIRST LIEUTENANT D. J. Dower slammed his radio back in its cradle in the cab of the truck and ordered his driver to make a hard left at the next intersection. The whiteout conditions that they’d experienced earlier in the day had improved greatly, but he could still barely see the turn off that led up the hill toward the neighborhood of luxury chalets to the south.
Dower still wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on, but he did know that whatever it was, it was “real world” and not part of their training.
And D. J. Dower had never done anything “real world.” He and his platoon had been eating chow over a campfire in their bivouac after a long morning of training when he was contacted by a colonel at U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, told to leave all their gear except their small arms, load up into their three M939 five-ton trucks, and move out to the south. Ten minutes later, just after they were on the road, a second radio call came through, this by a man patched through from Vicenza. He gave no information about himself, but he asked Lieutenant Dower about the number of troops in his platoon, and then told him there was a national security situation in his AO.
Dower didn’t get it. The area he was heading for was wild snow-covered hills and fancy vacation villas. This wasn’t exactly western Pakistan.
The unidentified man on the brigade network channel told the lieutenant that he and his men would have to move as a blocking force to stop a red Mercedes SUV descending one of the hills just south of their location.
D. J. Dower coughed nervously. “Uh, be advised, we have no live ammunition.”
“I understand that. You are going to have to improvise.”
Dower looked at his first officer, behind the wheel, who just looked back at him. After a moment the lieutenant said, “Improvise with what, sir?”
“Son, you’ll have to be scary. You’ve got thirty-four armed and uniformed soldiers. That’s an imposing sight. Make the most out of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Dower said. “The occupants of the Mercedes. Are they armed?”
“Heavily. Not going to sugarcoat it, son. I’m throwing you in a shitty situation.”
A SECOND RADIO CALL from the same man two minutes later pinpointed an intersection at the bottom of a high hill. A winding road through a field led away from the intersection and up into the trees, where it snaked back and forth for several miles around entire neighborhoods of small but luxurious wood chalets.
Dower ordered the trucks to stop and to block the entire intersection, and then he gave the order over his radio for everyone to dismount.
Bravo platoon’s M4 carbines and M249 squad automatic weapons all wore BFAs, blank firing adapters. They were screwon bright red metal plugs that attached to the muzzles of their rifles so that the low-pressure blank rounds in the weapon would properly cycle.
With the BFAs in place, all thirty-four weapons could fire loud blanks that made them sound like they were lethal weapons. But with the BFAs in place, all thirty-four firearms were obviously nothing more than nonlethal props. The red plugs were visible at one hundred yards.
As they moved into position, Dower told his men their assignment was to stop a carload of armed opposition from escaping. He was certain every single one of the thirty-four men with him said some sort of a curse. Most cussed loud enough to be heard, and the rest just bitched under their breath. And the first lieutenant couldn’t say he blamed them. They were pissed at him for the order he gave, and he was pissed at the man who gave him the order.
Nevertheless, Dower and his men would do their job. They spread out in front of the trucks, and Dower had to shout to be heard. “Everybody with an M4, I want you in a cordon on the road with me. The six of you that have SAWs, I want you on overwatch on that rise behind the trucks. Out of view from the road.”
The Bravo SAW operator, a nineteen-year-old Hispanic American named Chacon, said, “Overwatch, sir?”
“Yeah. We’ll take our BFAs off so we look legit. If the bad guys start shooting at us, I want all six of you rocking full auto with the SAWs. All we’ve got is attitude and noise, so we’re going to use as much of both as we can.”
Dower knew his only chance was for the armed men heading his way to consider their situation hopeless, because if they decided to fight, Dower and his men were pretty much dead. Quickly he and his men unscrewed their BFAs from their rifles and hid them in cargo pockets. Then they waited on the frigid road, all eyes up the hill.
52
THE RED MERCEDES SUV appeared out of the
forest, two hundred yards away. It continued down the hill for several seconds, as if the driver did not see three five-ton trucks parked in the middle of the two-lane road with more than two dozen infantrymen holding weapons high in the air. But finally the driver realized his predicament, and he slid to a stop fifty yards from the roadblock.
Then he just sat there, parked in the middle of the road. Dower stood front and center in the roadblock, closest to the SUV. He felt like a matador staring down a bull.
His first officer stood just behind him. He shouted to his platoon, “That’s right, men! Guns high and pissed-off faces. Nobody’s fucks with Third Platoon!”
After twenty seconds, the Mercedes back up and turned around. It started racing up the road.
Dower said, “SAWs . . . Give them something to run from!”
All six light machine-gunners fired their weapons fully automatic. Even though blank rounds weren’t quite as loud as actual live ammo, it sounded real enough. The incredible noise bounced off the tree line, and Lieutenant Dower knew the men in the Mercedes would have thought they were taking fire from behind.
The red vehicle disappeared into the forest up the hill.
Dower’s Charlie squad leader asked, “We ain’t chasin’ it, are we?”
Dower didn’t know for sure, he hadn’t been given instructions on what to do if the armed men retreated, but he wasn’t going to let his men see any indecision. “Fuck, yeah, we are! Load up!”
DOM WAS EXHAUSTED, he’d covered well over a mile, almost all of it downhill in deep snow.
He’d fallen on his face a half-dozen times, but still he ran like hell. He knew the men on the road somewhere below him were essentially defenseless, and they would be going up against several armed and motivated killers. Dom had a loaded weapon, he just needed to bring it to the fight before it was too late.
