Tier One Wild (36 page)

Farmer said, “I guess you aren’t just a dumb ROTC grad, sir. That’s what I think it is.”

“So this village is not just a little collection of houses. It’s a fortress.”

“A clandestine fortress,” Farmer said. “I spent all day looking over the images we have of the vil, the vehicles coming and going, the tracks in the dirt around there, things like that. And I have found things.”

“What things?”

“Motorcycle tracks down to the wadi, although I don’t see any bikes in the village. They have a burn pile for their trash that looks like it’s working about four times harder than one would expect for the trash accumulated by dirt-poor civilians in the quantity that we would expect to find living in a settlement of this size.”

“You’re pretty slick.”

“Thank you, sir, but I’m not slick enough. I’m sure there’s something I’ve left out. I wish I could get more overflights of this area from the north, maybe just to see if more of the structures there have false roofs.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it with this intel that you’ve pulled off of the images we have.” Kolt was damn impressed, but nearly certain this fake village wasn’t actionable enough for JSOC to commit to it. He knew how hard it was to get boots on the ground in Yemen. He asked, “Anything else? Anything at all?”

Farmer nodded, then brought a new image up on the monitor. It was a further enhanced shot of the two men under the covered walkway.

Kolt looked at it for a long moment. “Is that guy on the right wearing … No. No way.”

Ken Farmer just looked at Raynor. “It’s two males. One in garb traditionally worn in the area.”

Kolt blinked hard and leaned forward. “And the other guy has on blue jeans and a baseball cap.”

“And what look like tennis shoes,” Farmer added. “I don’t think this is a CIA base, though, just from the location.”

“No way. We’d know.” Kolt did not look away from the monitor to say, “I’ll be damned.”

*   *   *

The four TerraStar trucks full of Igla-S surface-to-air missiles pulled off the highway and into their first overnight destination just after eight p.m. Ahead of their arrival four of the vehicles driven by the Zetas gunmen had rolled up the long gravel drive and then parked, and the dozen or so men inside the vehicles had fanned out to guard the area.

David Doyle had been traveling in the third vehicle in the TerraStar convoy and as he climbed out to stretch his tight muscles he looked around at the location. Under a moonlit sky he could see the Sierra Madre Occidental all around him and, in his immediate vicinity, a cluster of large vacant buildings built on a rocky expanse of ground next to a mountainside.

As Doyle took in the view here in the dark, Henrico appeared next to him. “This is a vacant silver mine. We have used it many times in the past when we have convoys passing through this part of Coahuila. There is only access from one road, and I can put my men on the hills to see the highway from a great distance. There is some risk from helicopters, of course, but we will put men on higher ground to watch out for them.”

Henrico continued, “We have twelve men on guard duty around the mine. I am in contact with them. If there is any trouble, we will be ready.”

Doyle left the Mexican by his truck and walked back to the rear TerraStar. Here, Miguel stood with Charles, Nick, and George.

David said, “I want two of our men awake all night. Everyone stays armed, even while sleeping.”

Miguel said, “Very well, David. I will organize this.”

Doyle then walked away from the group, made his way up a pile of black rock discarded during the mining process, and took out a mobile phone and battery set that he’d bought at a gas station that afternoon. He put the battery in the phone, then activated it with the prepaid card he’d purchased along with the phone.

It took a minute for the device to power up, but as soon as it did, David dialed a number that he’d committed to memory months ago.

The call was to the United States, and it took a moment to make the connection, but soon enough Doyle heard the ringing signal.

“Hello?” The voice was tentative.

“Hello,” David said, his own voice lighter and more relaxed. “I wanted to let you know we will be in town soon. Not more than four days’ time. Perhaps a little sooner.”

“Good.”

“Are you ready for our visit?”

A pause. “All is in place. We are ready. We are excited.”

“Then I can’t wait to get there.” Doyle looked down to his watch. Only twenty seconds had passed since the man on the other end had answered. “Good-bye,” he said. And he quickly ended the call. Then David took the battery out of the back of the phone, and smashed the device with his bootheel.

*   *   *

The discovery of the shipping container in the clandestine militant stronghold in al Qaeda territory sent a shock wave through the U.S. intelligence communities. Numerous satellites were diverted and more overhead flights of the area became an instant priority, and within thirty minutes of a directive being sent out to Langley assets in the area, an unarmed Predator drone’s cameras were snapping tens of thousands of digital frames of the tiny settlement along Wadi Bana.

The video and still images were fed to Langley, and there, imagery analysts went to work.

They found women and children in the village, but they also found canvas-covered breezeways between freestanding homes, gun emplacements on the roofs of six of the buildings, armed men with binoculars on the hillside who, no doubt, served as lookouts for the village, and the telltale sparkle of spent rifle and pistol ammo in the dirt. Most telling, though, was that all the historical pulls of sat images couldn’t find a single evening in the last two weeks when the occupants had slept on the roof. Prior to that, for the past seven months, there wasn’t a night they hadn’t slept on the roof. Something, for some reason, had forced a change in an age-old local custom.

This was no innocent settlement in the hills.

Just three hours and twenty minutes after Kenny Farmer pointed out the curiosities in the tiny village in Yemen to Kolt Raynor, Langley and JSOC had determined the village to be a clandestine training camp of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Kolt thought that determination should have taken only about twenty minutes.

This information went straight to the Secretary of Defense, along with the CIA’s admission that, without a well-placed HUMINT or human intelligence asset in the village, they could not know what was going on there without boots on the ground, kicking in doors and searching the homes, barns, corrals, and adjacent area.

They did not need to remind SECDEF that approximately fifty SA-24 Grinch man-deployable air-defense systems had disappeared in that area, and the President of the United States had demanded that the weapons be found before they could fall into the wrong hands.

*   *   *

The order to send the Delta alert squadron to Yemen came at 1700 hours. ST6 was still deployed in the Mediterranean after their operation to take down the SAMs purchased by Quds Force operatives, so they were much closer than Gangster and his men at Fort Bragg, but ST6 was also close to getting a high-probability hit themselves of a suspected cache of SA-24s and other munitions in Libya, near Sirte. There was plenty of work for everyone.

Gangster and his team were wheels-up at nearby Pope Field at 1930. They would be flying to Eritrea in advance of the mission into Yemen, although they would work on the details of the hit throughout the flight, just in case their timeline got pushed up and they had to do an in-extremis hit.

All this activity meant little to Kolt Raynor, other than the fact that he and his mates would have a little more room around the compound the next day. He planned on heading in early in the morning and sticking around, so he could be there to listen in to the radio chatter between the guys on target and the JOC.

Raynor knew he had been center stage almost constantly for most of the past month, but right now he felt incredibly left out. It was an operational imperative to rotate fresh guys into the fight, because killing is not an innate character trait. It can be in one’s blood—in fact, after 9/11, most Americans would have argued it was in theirs—but it’s not passed down from one generation to the next. Some are into it more than others, but after a while, after ten years of killing, even in the mind of a Delta operator, a switch flips. Everyone has limits.

Everyone needs a break.

He had been off the net for three years, but like Webber implied at Relook, the rules had changed. It didn’t take him long to see it in his former teammates. One of his former assaulters even argued that guys with eight rotations to the box either sat the next one out or succumbed to extensive testing for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Raynor was moved by the humble admission that even America’s most highly trained killers were not immune to the psychological impact of war. The Unit psych was arguably the busiest and most important member of the command.

Other than the chaplain.

Kolt knew the rules, and he understood he had to stand down for a while. He resolved himself to getting his entire squadron in the best shape, mentally and physically, that he could, before they returned to bat in three months.

THIRTY-ONE

By ten o’clock at the abandoned silver mine in Coahuila, Mexico, most of the al Qaeda operatives and the Zetas gunmen had formed into small groups, either sleeping in, on, or by their vehicles, or on sleeping mats inside the derelict buildings of the mine. A few flashlights scanned the distance and the occasional scratch of a walkie-talkie transmission or the scuff of a boot traveled quickly around the natural bowl next to the mountain that made up the mining site.

The eleven vehicles—four operated by al Qaeda and seven operated by the Zetas—were spread out over the several hundred yards of property. It had been decided that, on the off chance an aircraft flew overhead, stray trucks and cars parked around the facility in a haphazard fashion seemed less likely to be noticed than a big collection that looked suspiciously like a convoy bedding down for the night.

Doyle lay in the passenger seat of the green truck, his tennis shoes up on the dashboard. He struggled to find sleep. Two Iraqi brothers snored in the truck with him. Tim and Andrew would be backup for guard duty in a few hours, so David let them sleep.

He heard a shout in the distance, one of the sentries on the hillside to the south of the mine, and he hoped the noise would not be followed by other men yelling and shouting.

But it was, and David Doyle lifted his head off the headrest of the seat, then quickly rolled down the window next to him.

He reached for the walkie-talkie. He did not know which one of the eleven vehicles in the mining site Henrico was sleeping in, so he did not take time to look for him. Instead he just transmitted. “What’s wrong?”

Henrico’s voice came back over the radio seconds later. “Helicopter. State police. It is small, and not heading directly for us. Make sure all lights are off. Everything will be fine.”

Doyle instructed his men to stay in their positions and to keep their lights off, and he heard Henrico shout orders on the radio to his men.

A minute later the flashing lights of a helicopter appeared over a ridge to the south. It was high in the sky, heading north, but Doyle imagined a police helicopter might well have the means to see through the darkness and the distance and find these odd cars and trucks parked in an abandoned mine.

But the chopper kept going. The lights were visible for three minutes or so, and then they disappeared behind some peaks to the northeast.

Doyle checked again with the leader of the Zetas security detail. “Do you think they saw us?”

Henrico replied, “I don’t know. It is possible that they reported vehicles here at the mine. My spotters in the hills report no more aircraft in the area.”

“Should we leave?”

“No. If we get back on the road we will be more exposed. We will stay right where we are, but I will double the guard force.”

Doyle put the radio back on the dashboard and worried. He had known from the beginning he would be in constant danger of exposure here in Mexico, but there had been no alternative.

He closed his eyes to sleep, trusting in Allah to see him and his men through the night.

*   *   *

Doyle finally fell asleep with the volume on his walkie-talkie turned low, but not all the way down. Just after four a.m. he awoke to excited calls in Spanish from one of Henrico’s men. He reached over and turned up the volume to try to get a feeling of what was going on.

Doyle then heard the low thumping sound of a helicopter echo off the hillside, identified it for what it was, and leapt straight up in the passenger seat of the truck. He lifted the walkie-talkie, but before he could depress the push-to-talk button, Henrico transmitted in English.

“David! Navy helicopters in attack formation!”

Henrico had screamed the order, and now Doyle shouted at his men. “Move away from the trucks!” His order was not to protect his men, it was to protect his missiles. If his men created some distance between themselves and the vehicles, then maybe the SAMs would be spared if the choppers opened fire on the men.

In the moonlight he saw a pair of helicopters appear over the ridge in the east. He did not recognize their make immediately, but within seconds he could see the pill-shaped fuselage, and he identified them as German-made Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm BO105s. He’d seen these in Iraq, flying for various militaries. The BO105 could be equipped with either rocket pods or machine guns. They were not heavily armored, but they were small, light, and nimble.

And there was no question as to whether or not they were just passing by. Their outboard lights were off and their noses were pointed directly at the silver mine.

Doyle called Henrico on the walkie-talkie. “Don’t do anything stupid. They don’t know who we are. Tell your men to hide their guns.”

But the Mexican had other plans. “No. There will be trucks of Marines here behind the helicopters. If we stand here and do nothing, then we just wait for capture. We attack now. Only by getting rid of the choppers will we have time to escape before the troops get here.”