Tier One Wild (32 page)

He thought some more before saying, “I will get in contact with leadership and arrange our transportation for today. Gather everyone in the meeting hall, I want to speak with them.”

Miguel nodded, and started to turn away, but he stopped. Looking at his leader, he asked, “What about brother Harry? We were going to allow him more time to prepare for the mission.”

Doyle looked at the floor. With a bit of sadness he said, “I am afraid time has run out for brother Harry.” The man’s name was Hussein, he was a twenty-two-year-old Iraqi, and, Doyle and Miguel surmised after a week of training, a severe concussion he received in battle in Mosul in 2008 had left him with an impairment in his memory.

Harry could not remember the different types of aircraft, he could not remember the colors of the airlines, and he could not remember specifics of his legend.

But there was always a chance he would remember this place, the faces he saw here, and the hints inevitably passed on about the tactics, targets, and timing of their mission ahead.

So Doyle decided he would have to kill him.

“Would you like me to do it?” Miguel asked.

“No. I will do it myself.” David stood and hefted a Kalashnikov rifle from the table, and he headed out the door.

*   *   *

Eleven cell members were called into the meeting hall in the barracks, and they sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder in the small room. A space at the end of the back row indicated that one man was missing from the cell, but no one commented on this.

Miguel entered and faced the men, then told them David would be along shortly to make an announcement. No one spoke while they waited for David to appear.

The cell all wore American ball caps and blue jeans and tennis shoes. Were it not for their stone-cold serious faces one might take them for a group of exchange students in a student union in any college in America.

The report of a Kalashnikov firing a single round tore through the air. It was a common sound here in the camp, but some of the men cocked their heads in surprise, as all of the cell members save for two were here in the room together. Yes, it could have been one of the guards, but the firing of a single shot was odd.

A minute after the crack of the AK, David entered the darkened room from the sun outside. He was dressed in local garb, and his men could see the shine from sweat on his forehead.

He spoke English, as he had done for the past nine days of training. “There has been an event in Egypt that threatens our security. For this reason we will begin leaving immediately. We will travel to the east, at first we will be together, but we will separate along the way. We will divide into three groups. Some of us will travel to Dubai, some to Doha, and some to Muscat. From these three locations we will then fly to Mexico City, but that is not our ultimate destination.

“Our destination, my brothers, is the heart of America. We will make our way through Mexico, and cross over the border into the United States on a route that has already been established by our brothers there. Once in the heart of America, we will break into cells, with each traveling in a different direction. One cell will head to the West Coast, one will go to the East Coast, and a third will operate in the interior of the nation.

“Each of these cells will have in their possession twenty surface-to-air missiles.”

“Miguel will lead the cell to the west. Thomas will lead the cell into the interior. And I will lead the group to the east. At a predetermined time we will all fire at a departing aircraft. Three large passenger planes, each packed with over two hundred people, will fall burning from the sky.”

“After this we will all relocate, and then engage targets of opportunity. I suspect we might each have one more chance to fire on an airplane before the Americans do what they did after the Planes Operation of September 11, 2001. They will shut down all air travel in their skies.”

One of the men, a Pakistani who had lived in Wales, asked, “What will we do when the airplanes stop flying?”

“We will go underground while America turns itself inside out searching for us. None of the cells will have any idea of the location of the other cells. Not even I will know where the others are. If one team is captured they will not be able to compromise the mission.

“You all have training on how to live in the United States under deep cover. Even if the subcells need to split into two-man or even individual units, you will keep going.

“America will lose more than six aircraft. It will lose billions upon billions of dollars a day, money it must borrow from China or the Saudis. America will be frantic to put its planes in the air again. And when it can’t find us because we have blended in perfectly with its society, it will be
forced
to fly again. But when aircraft venture again into the skies, we will be there, we will come out of the shadows, and we will shoot them down.”

All the men were smiling now. David Doyle, Daoud al-Amriki, spoke like a preacher at the pulpit. “The second ground stop will be longer, more costly, destroying the economy completely. The American government will turn on its own people to root us out. This will violate the civil liberties for which the United States holds itself above other nations, and it will reveal to the citizenry that America is nothing but a lie. Armed but weak leaders oppressing the masses. Riots will break out, banks will fail, and institutions will burn to the ground.

“There are thirteen of us. Inshallah, we will succeed in launching all sixty of our missiles successfully, killing over ten thousand nonbelievers in dozens of fireballs across the United States. But our true success will be the fall of the American government.

“You see, my brothers, beyond all this beautiful mayhem we will create, there is my mission. It is in addition to your work, and my mission will ensure that Washington is rocked by the war waging in the skies across the nation.”

The men cheered. Some wondered about Harry, but no one asked what happened to him.

They knew, and they understood.

The cell left the base within hours, heading to the east to catch planes that would ferry them to the West.

TWENTY-EIGHT

As the first hint of dawn softened the black sky over Fort Bragg, Kolt and his team arrived at the Delta Force compound. He, Cindy, Digger, and Slapshot had all slept on the long transoceanic flight from Qatar to Atlanta. There they had linked up with a Unit rep at a nearby mall and executed a discreet doc swap, exchanging their cover IDs for their real IDs. In Delta-speak, this was called turning into pumpkins.

With the Cairo AFO gig behind them, they had been wide awake for most of the drive back to Fayetteville. After a half hour to stow their gear and do a quick e-mail check on the Unit’s secure local area network, they met up in the chow hall for some coffee and breakfast. They all grabbed a second cup before meeting with Webber in the Beckwith Room for the hot wash of the action in Cairo.

With Webber was a Unit intel officer named Joe. He brought them up to date on a few critical items. He had spoken with the CIA and had learned Myron Curtis had had surgery on his leg the day before, and he was expected to make a slow but complete recovery.

Hawk and Digger nodded at the good news. Kolt looked at the floor and sipped his coffee.

Then came the hot wash. Webber wanted details. Uncharacteristically, he wanted
every
detail. The team filled him in on each and every action of the past week while he sat quietly.

When they were finished, the colonel looked at Kolt. “You a doctor, Major Raynor?” Webber said in an obviously serious tone.

“No, sir!”

“Then can you tell me why you elected to disregard a CIA officer’s potentially fatal wounds to conduct a hasty assault?”

“Say again, sir?” Kolt heard him, but was a little stunned by the obvious accusation that his decision-making process in a crisis situation had been flawed.

“Major Raynor, that CIA officer could have died while you and your team were conducting a hit that wasn’t entirely time-sensitive. Why?”

Racer hesitated. He knew going on the offensive was a nonstarter, but becoming defensive would be equally damning. But before he could answer, someone else beat him to the punch.

Hawk said, “Sir, I think Major Raynor made the correct command decision based on the available information we had at the time.”

Colonel Webber cocked his head slightly and practically looked right through her.

“Hawk, I got it,” Kolt said, holding his hand up to signal her to shut the hell up. “Sir, for context, four CIA officers had just been killed in cold blood. Myron Curtis was treated, stabilized, and coherent when we moved on the target.”

Webber cut him off and raised his voice. “And he could have died while you were on target!”

“Yes, sir, he could have. In my assessment, at that moment, knowing that the alternative might be letting the missiles get away … Curtis was expendable.”

Webber raised his eyebrows and stared at Kolt for a few seconds before looking into the other three’s eyes to gauge their reaction.

“Slapshot? Was the CIA officer expendable?” he asked.

“Racer made the call, sir. I can’t say I disagree with his logic,” Slapshot said.

“What about you, Digger? You’re the medic.”

“Sir, I assessed him. Curtis’s vitals were within tolerance. Personally, I would have questioned Major Raynor’s ability to serve the Unit as an officer if he would have aborted the mission, considering Mr. Curtis’s condition and the nature of the opportunity at target location Rhine.”

Webber could see he was losing the argument. The team was sticking together. He didn’t like it, especially the part about Curtis being expendable, but he understood. A lot of good men had been lost over the years because commanders had to make tough life-and-death decisions in an instant.

“Okay, before we move on, let me be perfectly clear here. No American is expendable. The Almighty has no problem making those decisions for all of us. Why don’t we leave that up to him?”

“Yes, sir.” All four said this in unison.

Webber gave Raynor a few more seconds of stink-eye, then he turned to the Unit intelligence officer.

“Joe, fill us in.”

The senior intel officer explained that U.S. satellites were tracking two barges heading north on the Nile, both within a day’s travel of Ras El Bar, at the mouth of the river. The alert squadron from ST6 had arrived offshore in the Med, ready to get the go-ahead to take one or perhaps both vessels down so they could get the SAMs back.

Kolt was relieved to hear this. He would’ve liked to have been there, with a remote detonator in his hand, crouched at a safe distance, while pressing a big red button that would make the SA-24s go up in a mushroom cloud.

In a perfect world,
Kolt thought.

Oh, well, some lucky ST6 commander was going to get that pleasure, and Raynor knew better than to begrudge him for that. It would be a dangerous mission, and Kolt had a unique understanding of all the worries and stresses that would be on that commander’s mind.

Even hits that went off without a hitch were no picnic. He wished them all the luck they could make.

Kolt thought about something else he’d learned from Curtis. “There was an earlier shipment of missiles that went through Cairo. Do we know the location of that?”

Webber stepped in and shook his head. “The ship made port a week ago. We lost the cargo.”

“Why the hell didn’t we blow it out of the water?”

“Politics. It was a Finnish-flagged boat, so POTUS wanted to be certain of its final destination before allowing it to be taken down. It docked in Aden before the Pentagon got the info to the White House and the White House sent back the go-ahead.”

“Damn!” Raynor shook his head in disbelief. “Curtis said there were fifty SAMs on board.”

The colonel said, “That was his estimation. We do not know for sure, but we do think a number of SAMs are in play. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would be the obvious recipient of these weapons, due to the location they were sent to. The intel community agrees that they may have them to target government-forces helicopters that approach their operational bases and hideouts in the country. Nobody is assuming that these SA-24s will be used against U.S. or Western commercial aviation.”

Kolt had packed his right jaw with chew and turned his Styrofoam coffee cup into a makeshift spittoon by now. He took a long spit and blew out a long sigh. “So … CIA says there’s nothing for us to worry about.”

Webber put his hands up in surrender. “Just passing on the message. Of course there is a hell of a lot to worry about. Langley is just basing their assessment on AQAP’s focus during the past couple of years. They have been fighting a civil war, not an international war.”

“But … boss. They didn’t have fifty damn SAMs until a week ago. Who’s to say their mission might not have changed?”

“Agree totally, Major.”

Kolt did not need to say that AQAP was the organization David Doyle belonged to. “Does TJ know about this?”

“He knows.”

“Is JSOC planning to get these SAMs back?”

Webber said, “The President knows how important this is and he is a little pissed. He told the Secretary of Defense to move quicker on any new intelligence.”

“So, the gloves are off?”

“Kolt, if the gloves didn’t come off after 9/11, they aren’t off now. Not in this political climate. But the JSOC commanding general says we have been given a good deal of latitude in course-of-action development to get the missiles out of the hands of the terrorists.”

Raynor’s frustration bubbled over. “Not exactly a catchy battle cry, Colonel.”

Webber shrugged. “It is what it is. The SEALs got the call last time, but keep your kit bags packed because the CG says we have the next one. If the intel folks can find those SAMs in the next forty-eight hours,” he said, “then it’s likely you will get yourself another hit.”

“It’s not necessarily about our squadron getting the hit, sir. It’s about knocking those SAMs out.”

Webber nodded. “It’s about both, Kolt. I know you want to be there when it happens. Nothing wrong with that. It’s why we do what we do and don’t leave it to someone else.”