by Mel Odom
Syrian troop placement was heavy. Winning through intimidation, Remington called the effort, with his signature smirk of disapproval. Remington always said real warriors won wars by handing down a decisive victory that left no room for argument—not by saber rattling and trafficking in threats. Goose knew that for Remington, anything other than confrontation and aggressive action was NJ—no joy.
Goose didn’t feel that way. If intimidation kept everybody from shooting, he was all for it. Putting on a good show could save lives. Remington may have had his reasons to prefer action. An officer’s career advanced through victories, while an enlisted man simply wanted to do a good job and remain alive. Goose hoped the Syrians were willing to stick to intimidation for the foreseeable future.
The Syrian military boasted an assortment of Jeeps, Land Rovers, T-62 and T-72 main battle tanks, BMP-2 and BMP-3 armored infantry fighting vehicles, and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. Farther back among the hills, Goose had seen self-propelled artillery and air defense units, as well as multiple rocket launchers. Satellite reconnaissance had confirmed all those weapons, as well as giving reliable estimates of troop numbers.
During the last week, the numbers had doubled. So the changes weren’t all just spit and polish. Goose was getting a bad feeling about the future.
The Turks and the U.N. forces had their own array of weapons. The border area was crawling with Humvees, M-1 Abrams main battle tanks, and Bradley M-2 and M-3 APCs. Artillery and air defense units were bolstered by MLRs and Apache helicopter gunships. If that wasn’t enough to handle the army arrayed against them, heavy-duty help was close by. The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit—Special Operations Capable, or MEU(SOC), was on standby, poised for action on their three-ship amphibious ready group, anchored by the USS Wasp. The ARG sat on a 180-day float out in the Mediterranean Sea, ready to lend air and Marine support to the land-based forces at a moment’s notice.
The Syrians knew that, and not just because of secret intelligence operations. The Wasp’s presence had been broadcast all over CNN and FOX News networks since the Rangers had moved in-country. The bad guys knew what they were up against—though not, Goose hoped, the specifics of all the goodies they had in their bag of tricks.
“Maybe they are waiting on something,” Remington said.
Cal Remington wasn’t one to drop hints and not pay off on them. “You got something, Cap?” Goose said.
“I don’t know yet, Sergeant. But I may have a way to get something. I’ve got a maybe-mission for you, purely hide-and-seek with a chance at some action. If you’d rather bake in the sun and watch the Syrian army corps sleep, I can use one of the staff sergeants for this little exercise.”
Smiling despite the tension, Goose scanned the Syrian line again. Lots of snoring soldiers. Even with the changes in the front line, many Syrian troops were stretched out in the shadows under vehicles or under small tents. In this climate, a nap in the shade made a whole lot of sense. Goose felt it was a pity he and his men couldn’t join them.
“I’m interested in a maybe-mission, Cap. Especially if it gets me off this plateau and out of the sun. It’ll give me a chance to stretch my legs and clear my head.”
“Not worried about leaving the troops there, Sergeant? As I recall, you’re usually the last one to leave the field when we’re in a hot zone.”
“You’ve got sat-relays overlooking the play out here, sir,” Goose said. “You’ve got a clearer view of what’s shaping up than I do. I figure you must need me. I know you don’t like me being away from the front line any more than I do.”
“That I don’t, Sergeant.” Remington’s banter was light. “I may have eyes and ears in space, but I’ll take your gut over technology any day. Anyway, you’ll be back in place soon enough. I’m looking at a short hop that will give you the chance to show your stuff. Maybe if you get away from that standoff for a little while you’ll get a different read on it when you get back.”
“Yes, sir.” Goose peered along the mountainous area and at the tarmac road that crossed the border. The Syrians and the Turks had checkpoints for vehicles as well as pedestrians. So far there had been nothing to see today. “Who do I need, and when do I go?”
“Take a squad. Yourself and ten. Two vehicles. And you’re leaving now.”
Captain Cal Remington stood behind the four-man unit that handled the communications relays for his present operation. Nervous energy filled him, pushing him to act. Instead, he waited and watched the eight computer screens spread in front of his team. Waiting was not his forte and never had been.
The computers in the cinder-block building that had been revamped into a command HQ five klicks behind the border made the chill air-conditioning necessary. Gasoline-powered generators supplied the juice to run both the computers and the air-conditioning. Thick bundles of cables snaked across the chipped stone floor. An assortment of bullet holes scarred the walls, offering mute testimony to how many times firefights had taken place in this building. The building had once been part of a small village, a place where farmers and artisans had met to swap goods and talk, but it was mostly rubble now. Only three of the small cinder-block buildings remained intact.
The satellite feeds came in beautifully, panning down over the Turkish-Syrian border. The signals actually came from two different satellites, but Cray computers relayed those signals into the systems so they could be handled independently at each of the four workstations manned by Remington’s tech support unit.
OCS hadn’t revealed all the secret machinations of its cybernetic systems, and Remington was amazed at the computer surveillance program’s abilities. Still, he knew how to use the intel the programs provided. Even though the information they gave him would have been a commander’s dream just a few years ago, he needed more. Three shifts of four operators kept twenty-four-hour surveillance on the border over different overlapping fields.
After three days of close scrutiny, Remington was of the opinion that there wasn’t much they hadn’t seen, photographed, cataloged, and archived along C Company’s section of border country. The tech teams had accumulated gigabytes of information and pumped it out to army databases in Diyarbakir, where the general command incountry was situated, to the ARG headed by the USS Wasp out in the Med, and to the Pentagon. None of the information gathered so far offered any indication of what was behind the increased terrorist attacks within Turkey. Something was up. Watching just wasn’t enough; Remington wanted—needed—to know what the enemy was thinking.
“Captain Remington, sir.”
Turning, Remington studied the man in civilian clothes who stood between two Ranger escorts. The man was tall, over six feet, but Remington stood two inches taller. The Ranger captain was also broader through the shoulders than the new guy, and at thirty-eight, probably a handful of years younger.
“Sir,” the corporal said, throwing a sharp salute while standing at attention, “this is Central Intelligence Agency Section Chief Alexander Cody.”
The CIA agent didn’t look happy about the announcement. He seemed to be fit, and his mouth looked habitually stern. He had short-cropped dark hair going gray at the temples. His light-colored slacks, white dress shirt, and tie showed a layer of dust, as did the tan jacket slung over one arm. Beneath a painful looking wind- and sunburn, his skin was pale. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes.
“Come in, Agent Cody,” Remington said. “Corporal, Private, you’re dismissed.”
The corporal saluted again, spun smartly, and departed with the private in tow.
“Not exactly the kind of introduction I usually get in my line of work.” Cody crossed the room and held out his hand. “Or one that I would want.”
Remington shook the offered hand. Cody had a firm grip and a callused palm. “In the regular army, we stand on formality, Agent Cody. Except for sometimes on the front lines, where a salute is considered to be a sniper magnet by our more experienced troops.”
“I can understand their caution. I start to feel exposed w
hen I get the full treatment. You can call me Alex,” Cody offered.
“Fine. You can address me as Captain, or Captain Remington.”
If Cody took any insult, he didn’t show it. “Very well, Captain. You’ve been briefed on our situation?”
“Only that you’ve had an agent go missing, and that we’re supposed to help you get him back. If possible.”
Cody reached into his shirt pocket and produced a miniature CD in a plastic case. “I’ve got an image of the agent here.”
Remington took the disc and handed it to Lewis, one of the young techs. “Get this up for me.”
“Yes, sir.” Lewis took the disc, pushed it home into a CD-ROM reader, and tapped the keyboard.
Instantly, the monitor on the left scrolled. Thumbnails of images spread out in a simple information tree. All of the images were of a young, dark-complexioned man who looked Middle Eastern. He might have been Turkish, Kurdish, or Syrian; in fact, he could have been from any of a dozen countries in the area. He looked all of twenty years old.
“He’s one of ours?” Remington asked.
“Yeah.” Cody gazed at the young man’s photo. “An American, Captain. Not a recruit or paid informer.”
“What kind of assignment has he been on?”
Cody hesitated. “You don’t have clearance.”
Remington mastered the wave of anger that flooded through him. “I just detailed a squad of men to handle the intercept your agency asked for, Cody. If my men are going to be in danger, then you’d better clear me.”
Cody pursed his lips and removed his sunglasses. “Icarus is a covert operative we’ve managed to get into one of the PKK cell groups.”
The PKK, Remington knew from his own briefings regarding the border patrol assignment, was the Kurdistan Worker’s Party. Organized in 1974 by Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK planned to establish an independent Kurdish state from land within Turkey, Iraq, or Iran. Over the years, the organization had turned to terrorism aimed at destabilizing the Turkish government. Often the PKK terrorists killed as many Kurds as they did Turks.
“Infiltrating a single terrorist cell doesn’t seem like a good investment of manpower,” Remington stated. “The cells are kept small and independent, with relatively no interaction among other cells or the parent organization. The intelligence you’d get would be infinitesimal at best.”
“Icarus penetrated the cell assigned to assassinate Chaim Rosenzweig,” Cody said. “Thanks to Icarus, the members of that team were … dissuaded from that action.”
“How dissuaded?”
“Five of the eight men assigned to the assassination are dead,” Cody said. “The other three escaped our sweeps. They have apparently taken Icarus with them.”
Remington nodded. He hadn’t heard about an assassination team being intercepted, but he wasn’t surprised that Rosenzweig was a target. The Israeli botanist whose synthetic fertilizer had turned his country into a veritable Eden almost overnight was reviled by most of the Arab nations, although Israel’s neighbors had made their peace with Israel. In the end they’d had no choice, but peace at the end of a gun barrel was still peace.
Rosenzweig had been given the Nobel prize in chemistry for his efforts, and he’d been handed a death sentence by terrorist organizations scattered around the Middle East, who now faced a concerted Israeli effort to put them out of business.
That shift in prosperity in the Middle East, especially since it also affected the global balance of trade and power, had triggered a Russian surprise attack that had caught Israel and the world off guard fourteen months ago. When he’d heard of the attack, Remington had figured Israel’s existence would be measured in minutes.
Instead, the Russian air force had suffered a massive systems failure. Their attacking force had self-destructed, its crumpled remains raining down from the sky in flaming chunks. Military experts and analysts agreed that the Russian air force had grown lax and that the fleetwide systems failures were caused by poorly maintained, obsolete equipment. Remington wanted to be sure that such a disaster never occurred to his forces on his watch.
“If this assassination attempt is off the books,” Remington asked, “why is your covert agent still with the PKK cell?”
Cody stared at the young man’s face on the computer screen. “We haven’t been successful in exfiltrating Icarus.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be exfiltrated.”
“We don’t feel that’s the case.”
Don’t feel, Remington knew, wasn’t a definite answer. “How long has Icarus been under?”
“A year and a half. He penetrated the PKK almost seven months ago. We were about to pull the plug on the op at that point but he managed to get inside the cell.” Cody paused. “Captain, there is no question about this man’s loyalty. That’s why I’m here talking to you today. He’s a good man in a bad situation. He gave us the assassination team when they were ready to strike, and he endangered himself by doing so.”
“He could be dead already.”
Concern creased Cody’s face for just a moment then flickered out of existence. “I refuse to believe that.”
“You’ve asked for help,” Remington pointed out. “I’m risking the lives of my men. Sell me on what you believe.”
The CIA agent nodded at the computer terminals. “I can log your computers in to the link we’ve set up for your team.”
Remington excused Lewis from the chair and Cody sat. The CIA chief’s fingers clacked against the keyboard in rapid syncopation. The monitor screen scrolled and scrolled again.
“What am I looking at?” Remington asked.
“I’m downloading a satellite feed. We have a lock on the vehicle Icarus is being transported in.”
The screen image changed, revealing a ten-year-old Subaru Legacy. Battered and pale blue, the vehicle stood out in sharp relief against the yellow sand. A billowing amber dust cloud trailed behind the Subaru.
Remington watched the station wagon jerk and bounce across the rough terrain. The road was ancient, a whisper-thin memory that probably was constructed for carts and foot traffic, or military Jeeps.
“You’re sure he’s in there?” the Ranger captain asked.
Cody tapped more keys. The feed changed to a thermal image view. The station wagon registered as purple, and the road and the desert became a sheet of pale yellow. The human body temperature of 98.6 degrees was lower than the ground temperature, making the four figures actually register cooler than the land around them. The four people inside the car became outlined in dark yellow and orange. “We’ve had a lock on this car since it left Ankara this morning,”
Cody said. Ankara was Turkey’s capital city. “We’ve tracked Icarus since the group left Jerusalem.”
“The assassins got close,” Remington observed.
“Yes. Icarus has been closely watched.”
“They suspected him?”
“The group watched each other. Since we decided to take them down in Jerusalem, we created an opening for Icarus to feed us information. However, we couldn’t get a message back to him.”
“What message?”
“We wanted him out,” Cody said. “Icarus has reached an untenable position. If those other men don’t suspect him now, they will soon. Or whoever they’re going to meet in Syria will.”
“When your teams swept the other members of the cell, seems Icarus should have jumped ship.”
“Unless he thought he was about to get more information we needed. We would have gone after Icarus ourselves, Captain Remington, but given the state of alert in Turkey and Syria, the decision was made that it would be more feasible and prudent to have your men handle the exfiltration.”
Remington silently agreed. While the United States Army’s peacekeeping effort was welcomed in-country, CIA agents weren’t. Especially since they didn’t operate with Turkey’s permission in many cases.
Cody tapped the keys, changing the view back to normal.
The perspective also pulled back,
revealing movement high in the hills overlooking the road. Cody tapped the keys again, narrowing the focus to the eleven Rangers huddled in two groups on either side of the narrow road. Another keystroke put the group’s geographic location in longitude and latitude under them.
“These are your men?” the CIA section chief asked.
Though he recognized the Ranger camo fatigues, Remington checked the location of Goose’s group. The figures matched. Goose had brought his unit into position after a fifteen-minute hop from the front lines. They now sat seven klicks north-northeast of the border face-off.
“Yes,” he replied, moving back to Cody’s screen.
“They’re good?”
“They’re Rangers,” Remington answered. “They’re my Rangers. They’re the best.”
“Well,” Cody replied noncommittally, “in three or four minutes, we’re going to find out.”
The pale blue station wagon continued bouncing across the broken terrain, closing on the Rangers’ positions.
2
Turkey
37 Klicks Southeast of Sanliurfa
Local Time 0621 Hours
Goose hunkered down behind the rocks on the west side of the road he’d decided had probably served as a pass through the mountains back in the days of the Silk Road. These days it was so little used Goose figured the only reason it wasn’t grown over was that nothing would grow in the sand and bleak rock.
A half mile away, a dust cloud closed on their position.
Moving slowly, letting his dust-covered camo do the job it was designed to do, Goose lifted his M-4A1 and peered through the scope. He checked to make sure the digital camera mounted underneath the assault rifle had a clear field of view.
The digital cam hooked into the modular computer/sat-com feed on his load-bearing frame, spreading the extra weight across his shoulders. After two years of training with the rig for special urban warfare operations, Goose didn’t even notice the extra weight on the rifle.
