Tier One Wild (18 page)

Cindy Bird was one of a dozen women brought together to assess for a new compartmented subunit within Delta. Not to become female operators but rather to simply help out when a woman’s touch was needed. The program had been Colonel Webber’s idea. As a young captain in Delta, he had written a classified thesis on the benefits of women in the covert world. His paper argued that a woman can get away with murder compared to a man, and even though his proposal followed closely on the heels of 9/11, few in the National Security Council at the time were willing to break one of the unwritten rules of warfare—no women in combat. Ironically, one of Webber’s visionary superiors in Delta back then, Mike Leland Bird, thought the idea was brilliant.

After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a sea change in attitude occurred at the highest levels. Colonel Webber dusted off his paper and it quickly hit the President’s nightstand. Green-lighted by POTUS, Webber sent out his recruiters to find the best females available to assess in a pilot program. After thirty days of whirlwind assessment, which took the candidates from San Diego, to Chicago, to Dallas, to Denver, and ultimately to Washington, D.C., to test their mettle, only Bird made it as far as the commander’s board. Cindy “Hawk” Bird was a test case. The odds were stacked against her in an elite all-male organization. She was put in training cell on a probationary basis.

Webber told her the job was hers to lose.

Cindy “Hawk” bird was officially welcomed into the Unit in 2011. She finished her six-month training as Raynor was laid up in Walter Reed healing from his secret mission in Pakistan.

Now, with a year in Delta Force, she was the only female in the training cell.

*   *   *

During the long flight to Cairo, Raynor and his AFO cell spent time going over their cover credentials for the operation to come. They would need to know their legends like the backs of their hands, so they took turns quizzing each other throughout the flight.

Kolt and Cindy were Frank and Carrie Tomlinson, a well-to-do Canadian couple on their honeymoon in Egypt, their sights set on seeing the Great Pyramid. They had brought clothes that looked like something a Western couple might pick out to wear to the Middle East, and they had wedding rings and guidebooks, and they’d even brought along cell phones loaded with names and numbers for contacts back in Canada.

Digger and Slapshot held passports and documentation backing up their legends as Mike Terry and Dean Kirkland, two freelance journalists in town looking to chronicle daily life in the city after the departure of Hosni Mubarak the year before. The new government was a complete mess and riots in the streets were commonplace, so it was no great stretch to imagine the pair as intrepid freelancers looking for a story.

The audiovisual equipment “Mike and Dean” would be lugging through the city in support of Curtis’s operation would look like perfectly natural accessories for reporters, and they both carried business cards inscribed with real, if hastily created, Web pages that showed photography and bylined articles by both men. Their backstop was shallow, but as long as they weren’t rolled up by the wrong people and stayed in their circle under questioning, they would be fine.

The Gulfstream landed in Cairo just before 0500 hours, and then pulled to a painted box on the tarmac. A pair of black Range Rovers rolled up alongside the plane. The CIA flight crew lowered the stairs and Kolt, Slapshot, and Cindy deplaned, each carrying two big rucksacks of gear. Digger wheeled a large black Pelican hard case behind him.

Myron Curtis and four other men piled out of the two vehicles. Curtis marched quickly up to the AFO cell and then, with a look of surprise on his face, he just said, “Racer.”

He did not seem overly pleased.

“Curtis,” replied Kolt in a flat greeting.

It was clear the thirty-five-year-old African-American had not expected the same group of operators who’d worked with him in Libya a week earlier to be the ones assigned to his operation in Egypt. He just shook his head slowly. “I’d always heard Delta was a small outfit, but I had no idea there were only three of you motherfuckers.” Curtis must have seen Cindy, but he did not put together that she was part of the team.

Raynor smiled a fake smile. “I guess you just got lucky twice. You’ve met Digger.”

“Not formally.” Curtis shook Digger’s hand perfunctorily, clearly annoyed that he would be working with this particular outfit on this mission.

“And the big guy is Slapshot.”

The two men nodded at one another, but Curtis was already reaching his hand out to Cindy now. His face lightened.

“And this is Hawk,” said Raynor.

“You are … you are in Delta?”

Cindy nodded, pushing windblown hair out of her eyes with one hand while accepting Curtis’s hand with the other.

“A pleasure, Miss Hawk.”

In a professional tone she said, “It’s just Hawk, sir.”

Curtis smiled. “And it’s just Myron, Hawk.”

Raynor groaned to himself.

Curtis introduced Denton and Buckley to the team, two bearded men Kolt took immediately as CIA paramilitary operations goons from their Special Activities Division, though they looked to Kolt like they’d just come out of Central Casting. Then he presented Murphy and Wychowski, two men Kolt took for case officers. They also looked like clichés to Kolt. They were rounder and less road-hardened than their SAD counterparts, less tan, and better dressed. Next to the paramilitary guys they looked like blow-dried network weathermen.

With the introductions out of the way, everyone climbed into the two Range Rovers, and they left the grounds of the airport.

FIFTEEN

The safe house chosen by Curtis and his team for this operation was on the eastern side of Maadi on Ahmed Kamel Street, just a few kilometers from their target location. It was in a two-story office building that had an empty ground floor and a second-floor office suite rented out by the CIA and staffed to look like a small travel agency. A back door behind the counter led to additional office space, a warren of small rooms, each converted into living quarters and meeting spaces. There were five rooms in all, each with a door to a narrow hallway. A single bathroom was at one end of the hall and a well-stocked kitchen sat at the other.

As soon as Kolt climbed out of the SUV in front of the safe house, he began evaluating the security situation his team would face here. Immediately he found problems. He stood in front of the building, looked past the small, gated lot where they had parked their Land Rovers, and he saw two high-rise buildings under construction. Dozens of open and dark cement floors looked back down on their position. To a man like Raynor, each and every nook and cranny was a perfect place to position watchers with binoculars or spotting scopes or even a sniper team.

Kolt was also quick to notice the antenna farm on the roof of his safe house, a dead giveaway for trained enemy operators.

Kolt went inside, took the stairs to the travel agency, and then passed through the rear door to the safe house. Here he checked the rooms and hallways. He noticed cases of Stella beer, the local brew, stacked waist-high in a corner of the kitchen. The windows of the two rooms had a view over a back alleyway, and he saw thirty-round AK magazines and binoculars in the windowsills, and Kalashnikovs propped against the walls under them.

It was a typical CIA setup, and Kolt did not like it one bit.

He’d learned in the intel report on the flight over that by day the small travel agency in front of this clandestine dormitory kept up appearances that they booked vacations for whoever came through the door. In actuality no one did come through the door, as the travel agency was not exactly easy to find, nor was it particularly energetic in its marketing. The staff who worked in the office were a small team of well-paid and vetted Egyptian support personnel from outside of the city who were never more than a step or two away from HK MP5 submachine guns hidden under their desks.

At night when the travel agency was closed, a SAD officer covered the lower floor of the building and a second officer manned the top of the stairs, just outside the door of the travel agency. Both of these men carried HK MP7s under their jackets and HK pistols on their hips inside their waistbands. As far as Kolt was concerned, these two men would be able to ward off some limited threats to the building, but this really wasn’t a lot of firepower in the case of a real attack. Kolt figured their presence provided more of a chance for compromise than they were worth, as anyone looking through the ground-floor windows would see white Westerners inside, and that news was sure to spread across the neighborhood like wildfire.

After Raynor finished his eval of the site, Curtis called everyone together. They congregated in one of the small rooms to begin their initial briefing.

Myron Curtis took the floor, but Kolt first expressed his reservations about the safe house’s setup in his typical direct language. “Your cover for status here sucks.”

Curtis cocked his head in surprise. “We sweep for bugs daily and there is code access on the front door. We’ve got armed security day and night. That’s all we need. Look, Mr. Operator, you aren’t in Afghanistan. If we had an A-team on the roof armed to the teeth we would get noticed by the wrong crowd.”

“I get that, Curtis,” Kolt said. “But you’re missing my point. Because we
aren’t
in Afghanistan, your three antennas on the roof need to be camouflaged. Try local TV antennas; yours scream ‘American spy.’”

Kolt continued his dressing-down. “Your Alamo kits in the two windowsills are visible from the high-rises to the north, and the two gorillas pacing the stairs and halls with the lights on all night will attract more attention than we need.”

Curtis shrugged. “What you see is what you get, Racer. We’ve had NOC personnel, nonofficial cover operators, working out of this location since before the revolution with no issues.”

Kolt did not like it, but this safe house was a pretty average CIA setup, considering Egypt was an ally of the U.S. If they had been somewhere where the locals were considered hostile to the United States, they might be less obvious. He understood he couldn’t just order up whatever type of coverage on the safe house that he wanted, much as he would like to. Kolt was a guest, not the MFIC.

Raynor very much preferred to be the motherfucker in charge.

And, by the looks of it, so did Myron Curtis.

Kolt and his team then pulled up chairs around a small desk with a laptop on it, and Curtis sat at the desk, his stool turned around to face the others. Murphy and Wychowski stood in back by the door, and the two SAD men wandered off to their room to crash after a full night of guard duty.

“All right, people,” Curtis began. “I’ve brought you here to Cairo because we suspect a location here of being a transit hub for a portion of Libya’s missing SAMs. We have tracked former officers of the Haiat amn al Jamahiriya, that’s the Jamahiriya Security Organization, to one particular address, and I think it is possible they are using this location to store and repackage the munitions before sending them on to their clients.”

Hawk took a few notes, Digger and Slapshot just sat in their chairs with their arms crossed.

“We know the ex-Libyan security officers have caches across Libya and Egypt where they are storing as many as seven hundred SA-24 systems, all with viable missiles. With the possible exception of a missing nuke, these loose MANPADs on the world’s stage represent the worst imaginable proliferation issue the United States could possibly face.”

Curtis pulled up a digital image on his laptop. It was a head shot, apparently taken for official Libyan credentials, of a middle-aged dark-haired man with thick jowls and a heavy brow. “This is Aref Saleh, Gaddafi’s former JSO director here in Cairo. We believe he is at the center of the smuggling operation. In fact, we are referring to the enterprise now as the Aref Saleh Organization.”

Kolt leaned forward to get a closer look. In the briefs he’d received on the Libyan MANPAD situation, there were only mentions of involvement by ex–Gaddafi intelligence operatives. That Curtis had a name and a face meant to Kolt that either this intel was brand-new or Myron Curtis had not bothered to forward it back to Langley for distribution.

Curtis pulled a new image up on his laptop now. Kolt and his Advance Force Operations cell all stood up from their chairs and leaned in. They found themselves looking at a satellite photo of a leafy neighborhood spotted with tall buildings. Raynor recognized from a few reference points that the neighborhood represented on the screen was their current location here in Maadi.

“This is us,” Curtis said, tapping on a building with the tip of his pen. “Now, moving over here to the west, along the eastern bank of the Nile, you see these buildings here.” He scrolled the satellite image over and zoomed in on a long, low building separated from a square, taller structure, both surrounded by a parking lot. By zooming in again Curtis revealed a fence around the complex, protecting the two buildings on three sides from the large Kornish al Nile and two smaller residential streets. On the fourth side of the building was the Nile River itself. “This complex here is the warehouse and offices of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd. We are calling the warehouse here at the northern part of the property location Rhine, and the three-story office building here at the south location Stone. According to intel reports, Maadi Land and Sea is run by ex-members of the Jamahiriya Security Organization. Saleh’s men. We think it is very possible the missing SA-24s brokered by Saleh are brought via boat up the Nile or truck from the west from those hidden caches in Libya and Egypt, stored in the warehouse at Maadi Land and Sea, before then flying out of Cairo or, when moved in larger quantities, traveling overland to seaports.”

Hawk asked, “Why don’t you just let the Egyptian police know? Have them roll up the Libyans.”

“Reasonable question. Number one, we don’t know how good our intel is. It’s from a reliable source, but it’s nowhere near one hundred percent. Number two, if this
is
Saleh’s shipping point to his customers, there’s a good bet they are paying off local officials to look the other way. We can’t risk compromising our operation by just sending up a flare to the Egyptians. If Saleh and his boys scatter, we’ll just have to start all over. Our best bet is to find out who is involved, confirm the existence of the SAMs here in Cairo, and shut this transfer point down.”