Hunt the Viper Page 13

  Once he returned he would sit with Captain Sutter and demand—yes, demand—that he be sent back to the Middle East.

  Right now, he so badly needed to clear his head, order his priorities, plan for the future. What was his future? Who would he spend it with?

  These questions lingered as he entered the arrival lounge and saw a man in civilian clothes holding up a sign with his covert name—Al Swearengen, after his favorite character in the TV show Deadwood.

  “Yeah, I’m Swearengen. Who are you?”

  “Ensign Wallace. Captain Sutter sent me.”

  “Good.”

  He checked his phone just to make sure the man with the sign was who he said he was. There were two encrypted text messages from Sutter’s deputy, Corporal Jackie Calderon, telling him to call or report to HQ upon landing. He did.

  A short drive later, he rolled into the ST-6 compound wishing he had time to take a shower and change. He was directed to a secure conference room on the second floor of Team Command. The first person to greet him as he entered was Jim Anders from the CIA Special Activities Division—a muscular, clean-cut man two or three years younger than Crocker. He looked like a middle manager of a finance company except for the dark circles under his eyes from focused intensity.

  His presence meant something was going on.

  Anders and Crocker had worked numerous difficult missions together—from Yemen, to Syria, to Somalia—and shared a deep respect for each other.

  He squeezed Crocker’s hand and slapped him on the shoulder. “When I heard you were in Vegas, I worried you’d won big at the crap tables and wouldn’t come back.”

  “I’m not that type of gambler.”

  “Yeah. You get your thrills elsewhere. Welcome back.”

  Familiar faces were already seated at the table, sipping water and coffee. All of them a blur as he set his duffel and backpack in the corner, grabbed a bottle of water off the credenza, and took a seat.

  “Crocker’s here. Let’s get down to it,” Captain Sutter started, then cleared his throat.

  Crocker almost didn’t recognize Davis with his blond hair neatly trimmed and wearing a clean uniform. Crocker was dressed head to toe in his usual black. His hair curled over his ears and he hadn’t shaved in a week.

  All attention turned to Anders and Lt. Colonel Smithson at the head of the table. She stood a few inches taller than him at six-four. Dark hair, attractive with wide shoulders. Looked like she could handle herself in a fight.

  “You ready, Crocker?” she asked.

  Ready for what? A mission? Fuck yeah, he wanted to say back. Instead, he answered, “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Listen carefully, because what we’re looking at here is a quick multiple strike.”

  He liked the sound of it already.

  “We’re calling this MK Doubletap,” Anders said. “The object is to cut off the supply of NATO weapons left behind after the war against Qaddafi that are currently going to ISIS. We’re talking large stocks of RPGs, MANPADS, Stinger missiles, grenades, .50 cal and AK rounds, et cetera.”

  “Left behind or seized?”

  “Both.”

  “Large stashes of them, mostly in A-plus condition, that are now in the hands of radical Islamic militias.”

  Who was the brains behind that? he asked himself. From everything he’d seen and heard, the overthrow of Qaddafi had been a fiasco.

  “Crocker, you know Libya,” Anders said, “so I’m sure you’re jacked to be going back.”

  “One of my favorite places.” He was being sarcastic. Four years ago he and his teammates had been in Tripoli searching for chemical and nuclear weapons developed by Qaddafi that Iranian officials were trying to get their hands on. During that time his wife and one of her colleagues from State Department Security were kidnapped by radical Islamic militiamen. His wife’s male coworker was tortured and killed in front of her, which threw her into an emotional tailspin that Crocker believed killed their marriage.

  So, yeah, he knew Libya. But, no, he wasn’t real thrilled to be going back.

  “You and your men will fly to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, stationed in the Mediterranean,” Anders continued. “From there you’ll launch a night raid on a compound in al-Marj, an hour outside Benghazi. Lt. Colonel Smithson here will give you the specifics.”

  She nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “When?” Crocker asked.

  “When will she give you specifics or when will the mission launch?”

  “When do we launch?”

  “You and your men should report here at 2200 geared up and ready to deploy,” Sutter answered.

  “The first phase of the mission will launch the night after tomorrow, depending on weather, and logistics,” Anders interjected.

  “The object is to destroy the compound, and the weapons stash?”

  “No, we can do that with air assets,” Smithson objected.

  “Then what do you need us to do?”

  “We want you to grab ISIS’s chief arms procurer first. Goes by the name Abu Omar. Real name, Nasir Abu al-Asiri. We believe he was born in Iraq, but usually travels with a Pakistani passport.”

  Davis slipped several surveillance photos of Abu Omar in front of him. Showed a middle-aged businessman, slightly overweight and balding with a close-cropped beard, getting into an SUV and in the company of other men.

  “He’s key to their operation. We want him,” Anders declared.

  “Alive, I assume.”

  “Yes, that’s important. We need him in our custody so we can break him down and roll up his network, which extends from the dark net to suppliers all over the globe.”

  “The dark net?” Crocker asked. “They’re involved in that, too?”

  “Of course. The hidden underbelly of the Internet is designed for organizations like ISIS, other terrorists, criminals, perverts, hackers, and credit-card scammers to cloak themselves in obscurity and exchange services and buy illegal arms. Only accessible using special software and with encrypted passwords. Clandestine networks like Onionland.”

  “Never heard of Onionland,” Crocker said.

  “Not important,” Sutter replied. “Let’s focus on the mission.”

  “We want Abu Omar in our possession. He’s critical.”

  “Got it.”

  “Method of infil?” Crocker asked.

  “Helicopter.…Blackhawks, most likely.”

  “Method of exfil?”

  “Same.”

  “I’m assuming the compound is guarded,” Crocker said, thinking ahead to the challenges.

  “Affirmative. Heavily. Lt. Colonel Smithson has the full surveillance package.”

  The half-bird Smithson looked up and nodded.

  “You and your men ready?” Sutter asked.

  Crocker nodded. “Always.”

  “Good answer.”

  “You said there’s a second part of the operation,” said Crocker, planning the six hours until departure in his head. “What’s that?”

  Anders cleared his throat. “We’ve got our eye on a couple of transport ships sailing west from Libya that we believe are headed to Turkey. We’re pretty sure they’re carrying weapons bound for ISIS. So you should expect to do an intercept or two, as well.”

  “When?”

  “When, what?”

  “Will the intercepts take place before or after the attack on the compound?”

  “After.”

  “We going in military or black?”

  “Third option; zero footprint.” That meant nothing that could ID them as American mil.

  “Third option” was CIA SAD’s motto. When diplomacy fails and military is not an option. There seemed to have been a ton of that since 9/11. Whether in or out of uniform, it was all the same to Crocker. Eliminate the bad guys, rescue the hostages, rid the world of those who threaten our freedoms and way of life.

  Afterward, he sat in Sutter’s office going over personnel, when Anders slipped in and shut the door behind him. “The
compound is owned and operated by a militia group called Ansar al-Sharia. Expect them to be nasty and heavily armed. By the way, they’re the bastards who attacked the Embassy compound and CIA Annex in September 2012, killing Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans. So don’t be nice.”

  “We won’t be,” answered Crocker.

  The Doctors Without Borders (DWB) team had stopped in a refugee camp in the Turkish border town of Suruç to lend help for the day before crossing into Syria. “A trial run,” their coordinator, Per Mikkelsen, called it, “to practice teamwork before we arrive in Aleppo.”

  The vast, hastily erected tent city spread across flat barren land and housed nearly fifty thousand refugees who had escaped recent fighting between Islamic militants, Kurdish forces, and other militia groups in Kobani. Infants, children, and men and women of all ages, minus young men between fifteen and thirty-five. Most of the latter were either militants of some kind, or had been killed in the fighting.

  The round-bearded Turkish man named Özgün who ran the camp explained that several million Syrians had been displaced since the civil war broke out in March 2011. More than two hundred thousand civilians had been killed. Turkey’s thirty camps housed more than three hundred thousand refugees. Another two million lived on the streets and in shantytowns.

  As he spoke, humanitarian workers came up to him with an assortment of urgent requests—an argument had broken out between two families in Sector 103, supplies of bottled water were running low, three unregistered men snuck into camp last night, et cetera.

  The need for food, doctors, and medical supplies was enormous, Özgün explained. “We feed and clothe them today, but nobody knows what will happen to these people in the future. They’re trapped in no-man’s-land. One refugee said to me the other day, ‘We are dying here, just like we were in Syria, but slower.’”

  Per, a hospital administrator from Denmark, divided the nine nurses, doctors, and public service workers into three teams and dispatched them to different sectors of the vast camp. Özgün assigned each an interpreter, jeep, and driver.

  Séverine sat in the back, a black scarf tied over her head, struggling with familiar feelings of displacement, sadness, and futility. The irony was that the more you tried in places like this, the more you realized your efforts were just a drop in the huge bucket of needs to be filled.

  Maybe that’s why the burnout rate in DWB was so high, and why every time Séverine volunteered she ended up working with new people, most of whom were on their first assignment, or had been with DWB for less than two years.

  Her thirty-eight months of service made her a veteran, but she didn’t feel that way, remembering her friends Axelle and Christine in Paris as though they were from another galaxy, and wondering what they would make of the camp and its residents. The strange thing about it was that as primitively functional as the camp was, wherever she was in the company of refugees she felt a kind of hope.

  She sensed it in the eyes of the children as they chased a ball made of rags tied together, or made circles in the red dirt. She saw it in the tired eyes of the women who lugged buckets of water and went about their chores.

  Before Séverine and her colleague Nabhas—a young medical student from the UK—met their first patient, they could hear his desperate screams coming from the white medical tent. A Syrian nurse explained to their female interpreter that the man was twenty-two and named Hamza. Had just arrived in the clinic, carried by four young men in a dark thermal blanket.

  Séverine instructed the young men to place their friend on the assessment table so she and Nabhas could attempt to make a diagnosis.

  The young man’s agonized screams and thrashing didn’t stop.

  “Did he suffer a head injury?” Séverine asked his friends through the interpreter.

  “No.”

  “Is he intoxicated?”

  “No.”

  “Does he have a history of mental problems or seizures?”

  They didn’t know.

  Nabhas said, “This has to be a surgical problem like a kidney stone or a perforation of the stomach. Let’s sedate him and cut him open.”

  “Not yet,” Séverine pronounced, noting some symptoms in common with the boy she’d seen dying on the road near Aix. Particularly the discoloration around his mouth and eyes.

  When she used her gloved finger to clear the young man’s airway, she realized that he was trying to swallow his tongue and hold his breath at the same time. As a result, his oxygen levels were falling, producing pain in his head and the muscles throughout his body.

  “But why is he doing it?” Nabhas asked. “And how do we get him to stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Through the interpreter, Séverine instructed his friends to hold Hamza’s limbs. When they did, he just became more agitated. One of his kicks hit Séverine in the chest, causing her to fall back and lose her balance.

  Nabhas said, “We need a strong sedative, like diazepam, or he’ll choke to death.”

  “There’s some in the truck.”

  “I’ll go quickly. Wait here.”

  Nabhas ran off, and one of Hamza’s friends explained through the interpreter that Hamza had just been informed his sister had been killed in an air strike in Syria. He was so stricken with grief that he was trying to kill himself.

  Séverine applied jaw-thrust pressure to keep Hamza’s airway open until Nabhas returned with the diazepam, which quickly took effect.

  The Syrian nurse explained that she had witnessed similar extreme psycho-physical reactions to the violence and killing—a middle-aged woman who experienced fainting spells following the death of her sister in Aleppo. A seven-year-old boy who couldn’t urinate for four months after witnessing his father being shot and killed by a rebel sniper.

  The nurse said, “People don’t leave these experiences behind when they flee. The traumas follow them like shadows.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

  —Bob Dylan

  Crocker sat with the rest of his Black Cell team in the operations room of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (a.k.a. The Big Stick)—a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier more than three times longer than a football field and home to eighty-six fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. They were currently located a hundred and ten miles southwest of Tripoli, Libya.

  Crocker, Mancini, Akil, CT, Rip, and Danny “Tiny” Chavez were in various states of disorientation following their fourteen-hour journey. Hours from now they would be deploying on an op against an HVT, the details of which still hadn’t been communicated to them. Careful planning and precise execution were paramount to mission success.

  So they all felt a sense of urgency as they focused on the satellite images of their target, an Ansar al-Sharia compound thirty-two miles southwest of Benghazi on the big screen in front of them. Other screens featured projections of local maps and a live feed of Lt. Colonel Barbara Smithson from ST-6 HQ.

  “First, a little background,” Smithson started. “Ansar al-Sharia translates to ‘Partisans of Islamic Law,’ and they were founded in 2011 during the Libyan Revolution. As the name suggests, their goal is to establish the rule of strict Sharia law throughout North Africa and the Middle East and remove U.S. and Western influence. As you might imagine they’re closely allied with ISIS and have helped supply them with militants and arms.”

  “Nice.”

  “Their logo is a pair of AK-47s, a clenched fist, a Quran, and a black flag.”

  “Pretty much says everything we need to know,” offered Akil.

  “Who said that?” Smithson asked.

  Akil raised his hand. “I did.”

  “Did you know that they’re based in the western Libyan cities of Benghazi, Darnah, Sirte, and Ajdabiya, and also have an active branch in Tunisia?”

  “Thanks for filling me in,” answered Akil.

  “They’re the ones who directed the Benghazi attacks in 2012 that resulted in the deaths of J. Ch
ristopher Stevens, our ambassador, and three other U.S. officials, including two former Navy SEALs.”

  “That makes me hate them even more,” Akil groaned as he looked across the table at Crocker. Both of them knew one of the men who had died defending the CIA compound in Benghazi, former Navy SEAL Ty Woods.

  “Ty was a good man, a hero,” Crocker commented. “What’s our time window here?” he asked, shifting to the current mission. The history of Ansar al-Sharia could wait until later.

  “Our source on the ground tells us that the target, Abu Omar, is there now and will be until noon tomorrow.”

  “In the compound?”

  “Correct.”

  “Where specifically?”

  “In the main house. Second-floor bedroom is where he sleeps.”

  A close-up of the house appeared on the screen. Looked like a new, modern structure with balconies, columns framing the entrance, and a red-tile roof. A house you might see in the upscale suburbs of Istanbul, Beirut, or even LA. Surrounding it were high walls topped by razor wire, and guard towers. The compound also featured several satellite dishes, parked military vehicles, technicals, and two one-story structures along the back wall.

  “Which bedroom?”

  “Unclear. According to our source there are four bedrooms on the second floor.”

  A schema of the house appeared on another screen.

  “The big one on the northwest corner belongs to the house’s owner, militia leader Ahmed Tamin al-Ghazi. The one to the left of it is occupied by one of his wives. The other two on the south side of the building are reserved for guests. We assume Abu Omar is in one of them.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “No.”

  “How good is your source?”

  “Very good. The Agency has used him before.”

  “These pictures we’re seeing are live-feed?”

  “Correct. The ones on your right are from a surveillance satellite. The left…those are from a high-altitude drone.”

  He saw two guard towers on the northwest and southeast corners of the wall surrounding the compound, and another several guards stationed in front of the main gate.