Hunt the Falcon (24 page)

Akil nodded.

With the next flash, Crocker got his feet under him, cradled his weapon across his chest, ran to the lip of the roof, and jumped. He hit the Quds Force HQ roof, flexed his knees, slid on the gravel, and somersaulted over his right shoulder as lightning cracked overhead. Springing back up onto his toes, he knelt behind the base of a satellite dish on his left.

When no shouting or gunfire ensued, he continued to the back of the sand-colored cement structure. As he reached the back left corner, he heard the
phewt-phewt-phewt
of suppressed automatic fire.

Crocker spun and continued to the front corner, knelt, aimed, and fired. A stream of nine-millimeter bullets cut down an Iranian standing with his back to him. Another bent over his wounded compatriot beyond the opposite corner. Crocker squeezed the trigger and took him down, too.

Then he hurried to the wounded soldier, who was holding his chest. The man started to shout a warning that was cut off by the two bullets Crocker pumped into his head.

Seeing another flash of lightning, he entered the structure and located the door that led to a metal stairway. Akil limped up behind him holding his ankle and wearing a gas mask.

Crocker pointed to the steps. Akil slapped his arm and pointed to his ears.

Crocker had forgotten his earplugs and mask. He quickly fished them out of his pack, along with another thirty-round magazine for the Kashtan that he stuck in the back pocket of his pants. Ritchie and Mancini ran up behind him with masks in place and guns ready, pushed past, and entered the dark stairway.

Their footsteps echoed off the metal steps down to the fourth floor. At the landing Crocker squeezed past them and entered a hallway with Akil at his elbow. About fifteen yards away he saw an older man in dark pants and a white shirt who was holding a brown folder. Mancini rolled a grenade across the carpeted floor that exploded and obscured everything with thick purple smoke. They were in.

Crocker felt his way along the wall in the direction of the office in the far corner—the one that, according to the diagram, belonged to General Suleimani. Another grenade went off. Even with the mask in place, he caught a whiff of a sickening smell, then passed a kitchen of some sort where he saw a woman doubled over, puking against the wall.

A siren blasted so loud it literally stopped him in his tracks and hurt his chest. He heard what he thought was Akil's voice announcing in Farsi that there was an emergency that required everyone to evacuate the building immediately.

Someone stumbled into Crocker, who bashed him in the face with the butt of his weapon as the siren produced by a black fourteen-by-fourteen-inch device Mancini had brought continued to screech in ungodly 150-decibel short blasts.

Crocker continued toward the target office and felt his skin burning, thanks to another device Mancini had deployed—a compact NLW microwave emitter that penetrated clothing and caused water molecules to vibrate at high speed under human skin.

Crocker took a more old-fashioned approach, kicking in the door to Suleimani's office and firing at the two men hiding behind the big wooden desk. Their bodies flew back. Blood splattered against the window and the wall and started to seep into the sepia-colored carpet.

Crocker rushed forward to see whether he could identify Suleimani when something hit the back of his head. Since he wasn't wearing a helmet, he staggered for a second, then wheeled and released a stream of bullets that tore apart a bald man's neck and chest and sent the metal lamp he was holding flipping in the air and crashing to the floor.

Crocker felt a lump on the back of his head and a trickle of blood. Stepping over the writhing body, he hurried down another hallway to the front of the building. Gunshots ricocheted and echoed. He practically smashed into Ritchie, who was running the other way. Ritchie said through his mask, “The floor has been neutralized. We're grabbing shit and heading for the stairway.”

“You find Alizadeh?”

“We killed everyone we could find. It's hard as hell to see.”

“Go ahead! Don't wait for me.”

He entered the square office that faced the avenue below, saw a big photo of Ayatollah Khomeini on one wall, a large blue-and-white Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution flag on the other. On the desk sat a framed photo of a girl kneeling beside a German shepherd that looked like Brando's little brother. Behind him stood tall shelves filled with books in Farsi.

The edge of one of the stacks of shelves stood out farther than the others. He pushed on it, and it clicked into place. Looking for a button or lever, he found one under a nearby shelf. He pulled it and the stack sprung open. Inside the wall was a little dark room, at the end of which he found a circular stairway filled with smoke.

Crocker took a deep breath through the mask and climbed down one flight to another dark space. Here the stairway ended. Sweating profusely, he felt along the wall, found a door, and pushed it open a crack. A helmeted man stood with his back to it. Another uniformed man was talking excitedly. A third man out of view was saying something, too.

Crocker reached into the side pocket of his backpack, grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, counted five seconds, then opened the door, rolled it forward, and quickly closed the door. The explosion shook the walls and hurt his head.

Readying the Kashtan, he plowed through the doorway into the smoke-filled, red-misted room, where men were moaning and screaming for help. He saw one figure on the floor holding his mangled leg. A chunk of plaster from the ceiling fell on Crocker, and he slipped and fell, hitting his chin and ripping off the mask.

Part of the ceiling crashed onto a metal table, and someone opened fire. Gas burning his eyes, Crocker rolled left past the legs of a chair and under the table. Bullets ricocheted throughout the room. Seeing a man's booted foot, he grabbed hold of it and pulled.

The man hit the floor, and Crocker scrambled clear of the table with his Chinese handgun ready, smoke and dust obscuring his view. He could see enough to tell this was a conference room, with a rectangular table in the middle, charts and maps, and speckles of fresh blood on the walls.

He fired two bullets in the head of the man he'd pulled down. On the floor he saw two other bodies. None of the dead men looked familiar.

Hearing people shouting in the hall, he dusted debris off his head and exited the room. Approximately twenty feet away he saw the backs of two soldiers who were running behind a shorter man of the same approximate shape as Alizadeh. He tore after them, steadied the TU-90, and fired. One of the soldiers spun and slid into the wall, leaving a wide ribbon of red. The other returned fire with an automatic weapon.

Crocker dove into an open doorway, waited several seconds, then poked his head out. The second soldier and the man who was with him turned right at the end of the hallway and out of sight. He'd lost the Kashtan somewhere, so he took the automatic weapon dropped by the soldier against the wall. It was an Iranian variant of a M5, called an MPT-9 Tondar—short, with a pistol grip and long curved magazine that Crocker hoped was mostly full. He ran to the end of the hall and hung a right.

He wanted Alizadeh so bad he could almost taste it. But this hallway turned out to be empty, except for discarded papers and shoes. He realized he was headed toward the back of the building. Two-thirds of the way, he saw gray smoke drifting out a doorway, then spotted a trail of fresh blood leading to a stairway.

The angry voices of men shouting in Farsi echoed from below. Out of breath and eyes watering, he hurried down. When he reached the landing and turned left, he saw another flight of steps, and past them Alizadeh and a soldier resting in the corner next to the door to floor two. Alizadeh's foot was bleeding. The soldier was bent over him. Looking up and seeing Crocker, he reached for the weapon slung across his chest.

Crocker launched himself, firing the MPT-9 at the same time. Bullets tore into the soldier's torso, but still he managed to squeeze off a few shots. One struck Crocker in the right forearm, causing him to land awkwardly on the second step from the second-floor landing, twist his right ankle, and crash into the soldier, whose body helped break his fall.

As he struggled to get his bearings, he felt something slice into the skin on his right shoulder. His eyes coming into focus, he saw the triumphant look on Alizadeh's face, eyes glowing with hatred and the shining silver Swiss military watch on his wrist—the same one he'd seen in the underground prison in Barinas.

“Crocker?” the Iranian spat out as he pulled the knife out of Crocker's shoulder and got ready to thrust the blood-covered blade into his heart.

“Yeah. Fuck you,” Crocker hissed, twisting his body to the right and pounding Alizadeh in the neck with his left elbow. He spun back and smacked the stunned Iranian in the arm hard enough to dislodge the knife, which hit the metal door with a clang.

Crocker heard men shouting from below. Their footsteps grew closer.

Alizadeh groaned and reached for the knife with short hairy fingers. Crocker grabbed the thick black-and-silver hair at the back of his head and, despite the intense pain in his forearm, smashed the Iranian's face into the wall, shattering his nose and sending blood spraying against the wall and door.

The footsteps came closer. Crocker wanted to see his rival's bloody face one last time. He spun him around, trapped Alizadeh's head between his knees, and growled, “This is for all the other people you've hurt, you son of a bitch!” Then he pulled Alizadeh's head forward and twisted it sharply until his spine cracked and the hatred drained out of his eyes.

On impulse, he took Alizadeh's watch and stuffed it in his pocket as the soldiers drew closer. He saw the tips of their boots on the landing below, and for a second he thought his time was up.

But then a stubborn burst of energy lifted him to his feet and helped him limp out the door to the second floor. His body moved on automatic to the back corner office, where he kicked out the window glass, jumped down onto the hood of a parked car, and rolled off.

Crocker pulled himself to his knees and took a deep breath as the gentle raindrops cooled his face. Remembering Rahman's promise, he limped around the back of the movie theater, where the green garbage truck was just pulling out. Rahman at the wheel saw him and stopped long enough for Crocker to grab hold of the ladder on the side of the hopper with his left hand. That's when the exhaustion and the loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he remembered was hitting the mess of papers and trash inside and seeing Ritchie's surprised face.

H
e was
sitting with his back against a metal shipping container, listening to Mancini explain how he had paid Rahman a thousand dollars for the old van they had driven from the garbage dump to the scrap metal yard where they were now, and how it was the sweetest thousand he had ever spent.

Someone had applied a blowout patch to Crocker's forearm, bandaged the wound near his shoulder, wrapped his ankle, and given him some painkillers. His body felt numb. The sky above his head was deep black. A steady, cool rain fell.

He watched Akil fifty feet away using gasoline and a lighter to set a pile of wooden loading pallets on fire. He was about to scream at him to stop when he heard a roar in the sky.

Thunder? No. A Blackhawk helicopter with its lights out.

Ritchie and another man helped him in the door. And as the bird lifted off, he felt his heart ease in his chest.

“We're going home,” Akil said.

Ritchie: “We did it, man. We did it.”

Mancini: “Fuck, yeah. Now what's for dinner?”

By the time the SEALs landed at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach twenty-three hours later, Crocker was running a 102-degree fever. He was transported to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where doctors cleaned the infected wound near his shoulder and shot him up with painkillers and antibiotics.

When he woke the next morning, the first things he saw, like a beautiful dream, were the faces of Holly and Jenny. He blinked and looked again to make sure he wasn't imagining them, then realized the constriction he felt from the tubes in his arms and the machines he was hooked up to was real. So were the shouts of surprise from Jenny, the kisses, the joy on their faces, and the relief in Holly's eyes.

Crocker hugged and kissed them back, and quietly thanked God. Then he wiped the tears from his eyes and said, “I want both of you to know that everything I've been through, every injury I've sustained at Alizadeh's expense, every worry I've experienced, every doubt, pain, sacrifice, and sleepless night feels worth it right now, being here with you and seeing your faces.”

Nine days later, a more somber, healthier Crocker sat in the backseat of the silver sedan, watching the sights along Wisconsin Avenue pass by. At Chevy Chase Circle, they left the District of Columbia and entered Maryland. He remembered that he had once dated a Swiss au pair who worked near here and lived in a room over a garage. She had frizzy hair and a beautiful mouth, and had dumped him for a law school student from Georgetown U.

The driver eased the car up in front of a redbrick house and stopped.

“Here we are, sir.”

Crocker climbed out, adjusted the jacket of his blue dress uniform around the bandages on his forearm, shoulder, and chest, and walked slowly to the front door, trying not to limp. An older woman with a handsome face and curly white hair answered the bell.

“Chief Crocker?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Welcome,” she said. “Please come in.”

She and a tall older man thanked Crocker profusely, then she showed him to the basement and knocked on a brown door. Half a minute later a tall boy with a mop of thick brown hair and sad brown eyes opened it.

The boy's grandmother said, “Alex, this is Chief Crocker. He's the Navy SEAL who hunted down the man who killed your parents.”

Alex nodded slightly, then lowered his eyes.

As Crocker reached into his pocket, Alex's grandmother whispered in his ear, “That's the biggest response I've seen from him in weeks. He hasn't spoken a word since the incident.”

Crocker held out the silver Swiss military watch and said, “Alex, this watch belonged to the man who took your mother's and father's lives. I brought it back from Iran with me, and I want you to have it.”

As he slipped it on the boy's wrist, the boy looked up.

“Did you get him?” Alex asked in a voice that was barely audible.

His grandmother gasped and squeezed Crocker's bad arm, reminding him once again of the raid in Ahvaz.

“What did you say?” Crocker asked, leaning closer to Alex.

“Did you get him?” Alex asked, louder this time.

“Yes. He's dead.”

Alex's lips trembled as he looked up at Crocker and said, “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” responded Crocker.

“Did you know them?” Alex asked, looking at the watch, then at his grandmother who had a hand over her mouth and was sobbing.

“You mean your parents?”

Alex nodded.

“I met your father in Afghanistan. We went running together one night. I liked him a lot.”

Alex smiled as tears spilled from his eyes.

“Alex, both your mom and your dad were brave Americans. They weren't soldiers like me, but in a way they were braver, because they were unarmed civilians who served their country overseas even though they understood the dangers.”

The boy swallowed hard and nodded. “I know.”

“Be proud of them always.”

The boy wrapped his arms around Crocker and said, “I will.”