The Hammer of God (13 page)

The Sheik's heart rate and nerves combined to make him shake again. This was a new breed of American, outlaws against their own laws and government, yet seemingly more protective of an American ethic, than those laws or the government.

∞§∞

When Chet entered the control room, Brooke went to high-five him, but he demurred holding up his pig-blood-stained hands. “You didn't just take up space minoring in theater at Princeton,” she said, patting his non-bloodied back.

“Yes, very good, Chet. Reminiscent of a young, raw, Brando.”

“Really?”

“No. But good enough to sell the Sheik.”

“Achmed, what can I say? You sold the whole scenario. The proof of your performance is that you had him almost ready to spill, but he got conscious of his surroundings.”

“Talk about Academy Award, Achmed, you rock!” Chet said, punching him collegially on the shoulder.

The smile on Achmed's face flattened out when Brooke added, “And now that showtime's over, Ach, please wash that smell out of your hair.” She said this laughing as she handed him a wet towel.

“Great preparation, Achmed. He would have seen through any theatrical attempt to make you look like you've been held prisoner for a while,” Fusco said, giving the thumbs up to one of the best of the new breed of Muslim F.B.I. agents.

Rubbing a towel into his caked and matted hair, Achmed said, “He's very smart, sir, like an engineer or scientist – his manner of speech and his demeanor.”

“Well, thanks to all of you, we've given him a paradigm shift that will take his preconceived defenses out of the equation.”

They looked at the monitor to see the Sheik shuddering in a fetal position on his cot.

“We'll move to stage four soon,” Dr, Fusco said.

∞§∞

The Sheik was hustled from his bed into the other room. He was forced to his knees, hogtied, and blindfolded.

“What's going on?”

“Bad news, Sheik. Your asshole buddies killed the ambassador and now we are going to show them that they took him for nothing.”

The Sheik felt the heat of the TV light on his face and started saying his prayers under his breath. Then suddenly all hell broke lose. Gunshots rang out and he was knocked to the floor. After the yelling ceased, he was stood up and the blindfold lifted as they swept him out of the room. He briefly saw one of them in the mask down with blood pouring from his head and two more crumpled in the corner by a fallen camera.

Out in the hall, a man in an FBI windbreaker grabbed him and said, “Do you want to live?” The man shook him roughly. “Do you want to live?”

“Yes… yes…” Aliz said in exhausted rasps.

“Then tell us your network. Where did you base your operation out of? Tell us, or we will shoot you right now as if you were killed by the Brotherhood.”

The Sheik spoke without thought. “Philadelphia. The Al Alaxa safe house…”

“Good, good choice Aliz. You will live. Now tell us more.”

∞§∞

Based on the information supplied by Sheik Alzir El Benhan, the FBI monitored and unraveled the Al Alaxa support network. First observing and learning the depth of its tentacles, then in one fell swoop, arresting and detaining 143 known operatives. That haul became a secondary treasure trove of other contacts that led to other networks. All this made Brooke's star shine brighter than any other agent. The little show Dr. Fusco's Psy-Ops division put on for the benefit of the Sheik garnered more funding and personnel for itself. The agents chipped in and had a phony Oscar done up and engraved with the name Chet Ballard. It stated, “Best Actor in a Crime Drama.”

∞§∞

Happy to be back in an American prison with its culturally correct food menus and proper prayer mats, Alzir's last iota of self-dignity arose from the fact that he remained true to the sacred oath they made to each other as they ran for their lives through the Hungarian forests. Alzir never betrayed his brother and never revealed the existence or location of “the key.”

The Redrock Delta team was on strip alert at Prince Sultan AFB in Saudi Arabia. 20 operators, 4 pilots, 2 crew chiefs were at “Jump Ready 1.” The support personnel, mobile air conditioning units, and food trucks would not go on the rescue mission, should the call come. But while they were on the tarmac under the boiling sun, it made the men's lives easier.

Every man on the team was capable of not only finishing but also winning a triathlon with 40 pounds of field equipment strapped to his frame. Every one was an expert-marksman who shoots rounds everyday. All had medic, explosive, munitions, and communications training. In short, one of these guys, by himself, was a wrecking crew of enormous proportions. Twenty of them were an unstoppable force. Yet they were helpless without knowing the location of the ambassador. The Deltas were as forward deployed as they could be without starting a small war. All except for two of them.

Master Sergeant Bridgestone and Sergeant Ross were haggling in Farsi with the street merchant over some bags of rice and flour. Both had acquired impeccable accents and their weather beaten, sun-browned, sandstorm-cracked skin left little doubt to any Arab that they were from the desert. As Bridgestone relentlessly kept dismissing the quality of the man's goods in an attempt to lower the price, Ross kept his eye on the door of the small building across the way. The haggling stopped when he saw her enter the front door. Bridgestone, as “reluctantly” as he could play it, handed over a few coins and took possession of the bags. They were off in a second and headed toward the building. Ross was prepared to jimmy the front door with the bar he had under his traditional robe, but to his surprise, the door was open. They both ascended the squeaky stairs, taking in the smell of evening meals being prepared and the occasional voice or cry of a child reverberating off the walls of the hallway. With only a look between them, they pulled their Sig Sauers out and Ross crouched low as Bridgestone went in high through the door of the apartment in the back.

They caught her in the bathroom. She quickly scrambled, not to cover up out of any sense of privacy or humility, but to reach for a gun she had resting on the edge of the bathtub. Bridgestone got there first and pulled her wrist up hard, forcing her to rise. Ross covered her mouth to muffle any screams. They carried her off to the bed and placed her over the side, her head to the floor and her body bent at the waist. From that position, she would have to fall to the floor before she could do anything else. Ross replaced his hand with a gag made from a torn sheet that Bridge handed him. They tied her arms behind her back. She struggled but to no avail against men who were three times her weight.

Ross put his foot on the back of her neck. In Farsi he said, “Where is your boyfriend? Where is Jamal holding the ambassador?”

She struggled but didn't speak. He stepped on her finger and applied pressure until he heard her catch her breath.

“Salinda, please. You will not be able to endure what we are prepared to do to you if you don't tell us where that dog of a man of yours is holding the ambassador.”

Both Ross and Bridgestone were under operational orders to play the role of disaffected Muslim moderates looking to ward off confrontation with the U.S. If Salinda did survive this “interrogation,” she would only be able to report to her cell members that some other Arabs roughed her up. Of course, that would be right before her terrorist friends killed her for suspicion of betraying them anyway.

Ross tried to convey this dead-end logic to her. “Salinda, you are now tarnished. Even if you don't tell us anything, none of your people will believe that you didn't tell us something, especially when they see how horribly disfigured we are going to make your face. They will kill you as an insect, without thinking. After all, you are only a woman.”

In fact, Ross was thinking exactly the opposite. This woman was tougher than most men, but he and Bridgestone were prepared to kill her. She was deemed an enemy combatant by the NCA. And when the National Command Authority speaks, non-coms like them are paid to listen. Neither of them had any identification on them, and no one would be able to make a connection between them and the USA. They were totally on their own. If caught, they could at best be declared mercenaries. They were truly ghosts.

Bridgestone forced Salinda's head right so she could see her right hand as Ross placed his foot over her ear so she couldn't look away. He then produced a pair of pliers and grabbed her middle fingernail with it. He gave it a tug as he tried to convince her to talk.

“We can do this twenty times if you stay conscious, Salinda. Then we can wait and start snipping off bits of each finger for a few hours. Oh, and look, here's some adrenaline.” He produced a syringe. “A shot of this and even the pain of having your genitals removed with a hacksaw wouldn't knock you out.”

She made her first human sound, muffled as it was through the now saliva-soaked gag.

“By Allah's will, you are going to talk. You are going to talk, now or later. You are going to talk, all in one piece, or in pieces. But, Salinda, you will talk.”

Her middle finger nail pulled back and tore off with ease. She stiffened and gurgled through the sheet.

“This could take a long time, Fasol,” Bridgestone said to Ross.

∞§∞

At 19:00 hours, the chopper's radio squawked. “Target Alpha located. GPS downloading. Mission is a go. Repeat. Go.”

The twenty men scrambled into the helicopters as the big hoses that kept the turbines going from the support truck on the apron were disengaged. Within 30 seconds of the alert message,
Foxtrot Alpha
and
Foxtrot Bravo
, the mission code name identifiers for the teams of MH60s and AH64-D Apache Longbows, were wheels up and out.

“Delta force en route, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs informed the President.

“Good. May God protect them and any innocents on the ground.”

“Very charitable of you, sir.”

Mitchell watched a map in the Situation Room as a triangle blip denoted the progress of the two foxtrot copters as they invaded the sovereignty of Egypt.

“Notify the Egyptian ambassador. Tell him we are invading his airspace. Note time and date and then sequester him till this op is over.” The President repeated those words the way his National Security Advisor had suggested 10 minutes earlier after the Egyptian ambassador was seated in the Roosevelt room supposedly awaiting an audience with the President.

“Yes, sir.” Charles Pickering said, picking up his phone to carry out the President's orders. He didn't like it; the Egyptian ambassador was an official guest of this country. Stopping him from contacting his homeland was a grievous act of non-diplomacy. Still, for the safety and security of the mission underway, there could not be a chance of leaks on the Egyptian side. In fact, at the end of the day, however it came out, the Egyptians would be glad they were not responsible for any mission compromises. They then could register formal complaints at the U.N. and save face with the Arab street.

∞§∞

Bridgestone and Ross had made a bad decision. They should have left Salinda dead or dying in her room, along with just enough evidence to point anyone in the direction of the desert. But as hard-assed as they were, she was still a woman, albeit one who had plotted against the United States and seduced one of our Diplomatic Security officers over to the other side. So now, here they were, driving an old Datsun with her in the back seat covered in a sheet, unconscious and stinking from the vomiting caused by the intense pain of losing her right pinky. They cauterized her hand and she was alive. They even took the pinky with them in a Styrofoam cup with ice from the fridge. It was a small percentage play, but if their hare-brained scheme worked, she could be in Kuwait City in two hours and there they might be able to reattach it. The fingernails would probably grow back.

They were heading towards the safe house with her; first to check and make sure she was telling the truth and, more importantly, to “light it up” for the laser range finders on the Cobra Attack helicopters. Bridgestone rationalized his decision not to terminate her by reasoning that having her alive would prove valuable if somehow she managed to lie through all the pain they had inflicted on her and lead them down an erroneous path. Time would tell.

On board the copter, real-time satellite images were coming out of its printer. The squad commanders on each chopper had identical printouts and were working a Telestrator, the same kind of device used on NFL football broadcasts to draw diagrams over the footage of the game. The difference was that they were drawing attack plans over satellite imagery of the 300-yard square patch of Egypt where, according to Bridgestone and Ross' fresh intel, the ambassador was being held. The two inbound forces were talking over an encrypted satellite link while simultaneously, eight thousand miles away, in a secure room at the Pentagon, other combat controllers and commanders were doing play-by-play and color.

The target area was the abandoned Maghra oil refinery on the northwest edge of the desert. Many of its buildings and pipes were sandblasted down to flat smooth surfaces through years of neglect, leaving it to face the brunt of sandstorms and drifts. Satellite infrared reconnaissance had identified warm bodies out at 100 meters from the main complex. These were perimeter guards ready to alert the terrorists about any threat. Surely, they had radios or cell phones. There were a few heat-generating spots in the main complex warding off the cold desert night.
Foxtrot Alpha's
FLIR spotted a vehicle moving towards the complex about three miles off. They made note of it. If it became a factor, they would kill it with a Hellfire missile that the armament officer had assigned to the target by laying the cursor over it and locking it into his targeting computer. Unless the vehicle went underground or found cover, which was doubtful in this terrain, the Forward-Looking Infrared Radar and computer would keep track of it and warn him if it closed to within 500 meters, the effective range of any shoulder-fired missile at the low altitude they were flying.

In the Datsun, Ross grabbed the laser and pulled himself halfway outside the passenger window. Using it like a pen, he laser-lit the roof of the Datsun drawing a rough triangle symbol. It only took 30 seconds for the armaments officer to register the symbol as the friendly sign used by his squad members.

“Captain, I've got Ross and Bridgestone. Traveling towards target one in a vehicle two-and-a-half miles out.”

“Good. We'll extract them with us.”

∞§∞

At 1000 meters out
Foxtrot Bravo
launched a drone that was mounted on hard points between the struts. It glided down 100 feet from the copter; its silent drive engine then kicked in and it sped ahead of the copter. On board the copter, Specialist First Class Neumann flew the drone from a joystick and monitor display. When he got to within 200 yards of the refinery, he engaged the EMP switch. Immediately, all radio, cellular, and any other electromagnetic radiation was blocked from an area about the size of a 300-yard umbrella directly below the silently hovering drone. It was the same kind of electro-magnetic pulse type jamming device that was used when senators or VIPs visited war zones where improvised explosive devices could be remotely detonated by cellular or radio control. The Presidential detail also carried this type of device to stop would be assassins from getting real-time telemetry or data on the President's exact whereabouts. Now the group holding the ambassador in the refinery was blind and their forward scouts were unable to signal them.

The Apache Longbows went down to the deck and switched on NOE. Utilizing the Nap of the Earth, terrain-hugging software, the pilots became passengers as the computer-guided copter cruised over sand dunes and gullies at 90 knots at 25 feet. Using infrared, the co-pilot turned on his “see and shoot” helmet array. A M230 Chain Gunon a gimbaled mount under the nose of the helicopter now copied every move of his head. The heads-up display on his visor was in infrared mode. He just lined up his reticule by moving his head and trained the gun in on whatever he had in his sights. A red button to the right of the center of his collective control was the trigger. If he held the button down, he could fire 300 rounds per minute. Tapping the button released a 50-round fusillade of flesh/metal tearing 30 mm slugs, which he now did five times as he walked the fire in on the four life forms revealed on his ever-changing horizon. All of the bullets en route created a temporary curtain of white hot lines trailing towards the target.

To the doomed lookouts at the forward post, there was only the sudden percussion of 250 heavy white-hot bullets slamming into and shredding them and everything around them. They never heard or saw the black copters approach.

On the co-pilots HUD, all he now saw were cooling pieces of bodies and glowing hot holes where the bullets either lay embedded cooling in the night air or starting small fires where they met something material. What a few seconds earlier were four distinct heat signatures, was now a mess of green dots and clumps.

“Target neutralized,” crackling over the pilots headset, was the only epitaph the dead men, who they were now zooming over, would ever get.
Foxtrot Alpha
flared up at 100-feet and held off at 50-yards, its co-pilot picking off random targets in the compound, while
Foxtrot Bravo
went in for a strut jump. Hovering four feet from the ground as the men piled out 50 yards from the main building 20 seconds later,
Foxtrot Bravo
was 12 feet off the roof as five repel lines sprang out from each side. A door gunner training his counterbalanced 7.62 mm mini-gun down onto the roof to clip anybody trying to stop the deployment.

∞§∞

“Eight kills, 35 seconds into breach, and no sign of counterattack,” the Captain manning the console reported to the room in the Pentagon. He was watching an array of monitors that showed him every feed of video and GPS data. He had seen the action of the gunners much the same as they had through their HUDs.