Hunt the Viper Read online

  Crocker wasn’t buying any of that. Angry dogs bit back.

  He noticed Davis’s blond head near the Frenchman, and, raising his voice, asked, “What’s the latest from the TOC?”

  Davis looked at his watch. “ETA, four and a half minutes.”

  “Then we should be able to see it soon.”

  CT kept surveying the sky with the Steiner M50rc binoculars. “You ever play ball?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “Me? No, I started running and lifting weights in high school. Before that I was a motocross fanatic and gangbanger.”

  CT shook his head. “You…a gangbanger?”

  “Member of the bad-ass Flat Rats. Since reformed.”

  Davis pointed into the northeast sky and shouted, “There!”

  “All right. Let’s hump.”

  He and CT snapped open some Chem lights to mark the field. Slowly the HH-60M Black Hawk came into view, until they could make out the Red Cross symbol on the nose. It maneuvered into position and landed, kicking up clouds of dust.

  With the engine idling, the crew chief and flight medic stepped out. The former had his long hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “What have you got?” the flight medic asked in perfect English. He was young and Middle Eastern, maybe Turkish or Lebanese, with a shaved head.

  Crocker gave him the medical rundown, and the Frenchmen were quickly loaded aboard.

  “That it?” the crew chief shouted.

  “No. Wait.” He turned to CT and asked, “Where the fuck is Manny?”

  Davis answered, “He doesn’t want to go.”

  “He’s going! Get him. Get him, now!”

  Like he did most nights, ISIS commander Abu Samir al-Sufi, a.k.a. the Viper, was being driven from one town in northeastern Syria to another. The forty-four-year-old with the thick black-and-silver beard traveled lightly—an AK-47 at his feet, an armored vest across his chest, and a backpack stuffed with a change of clothes, a prayer rug, worn copies of the Quran and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the twelve cell phones he used to communicate with his lieutenants.

  As he sat upright in the passenger seat of the extended cab Toyota pickup, he spoke to one of them, named Abdul Salam, through the encrypted program Signal.

  Salam reported as he did every night on all ISIS activity west of Mosul. “Sheikh,” he said in Arabic, “if God is willing we will achieve victory tonight. God is great.”

  “Yes, Salam,” the Silent Sheikh responded. “If God is willing. I felt his spirit today in the children of the town of Tal Afar. They were reciting a favorite verse from the book, Salam.”

  “Tell me, Sheikh. What verse was that? I wish to know it.”

  “‘Wealth and children are but adornments of worldly life. But the enduring good deeds are better to your Lord for reward and better for one’s hope.’”

  “Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah.”

  “I will recite that tonight before I sleep.”

  The pickup drove with its headlights off through the dark streets of Raqqa, near the banks of the Euphrates River. Behind it followed a captured Iraqi Army Humvee with the Islamic State slogan “Repent or Die” sprayed across the sides with black paint.

  For the last two years, al-Sufi had waged war against the new Iraqi army, Shiite militia groups, Assad’s Syrian army and air force, Hezbollah, special units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force, and more recently special operations units of the U.S. military. He’d seen the Islamic State give birth in central Iraq and spread through Iraq into Syria. He’d seen their ranks grow from a few hundred to tens of thousands. And he’d celebrated one victory after another.

  Recent air strikes by the Russians, British, Americans, and French had reversed that trend. Some Islamic State leaders had been killed and injured. Hundreds of their fighters had died. Hundreds of others had abandoned the cause and slipped into Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan.

  In the past, the Viper and his men had moved from Mosul all the way west past the city of Aleppo with ease and had attacked towns in between with impunity, ridding them of Shiite, Jewish, and Christian infidels, raping and subjugating their women, and establishing strict Sharia rule.

  Air strikes had forced him to alter their strategy and restrict their movements. They had also emboldened Kurdish militia groups like the YPGs and even the YJA-STAR (also known as the Free Women’s Units).

  Al-Sufi didn’t like that. Now he and his men had to hunker down in urban areas under their control, where they were harder to find by Coalition drones and pilots. In cities like Raqqa, their headquarters, they’d built tunnels, trenches, and fortified bunkers. The infidels to his mind were cowards. He defied them to come down from the sky and fight, man to man.

  Mayor Araz Sabri, at the head of a long wooden table in a large rectangular room in Qabusiye town hall, lifted a pewter cup filled with red wine and uttered five words in English: “Friends…welcome…freedom…United States!”

  Crocker, seated to his right, smiled and returned the toast. “Thank you, Mayor. We’re honored to be your guests.”

  Translating his remarks was a bookish young man at the mayor’s elbow named Dilshad. He claimed to have learned English during the two years he’d spent studying agronomy at the University of Georgia. The language spoken in this part of Kurdistan was Sorani, a dialect of Kurdish and derivative of Farsi.

  Mayor Sabri, a robust, red-cheeked man of eighty with a bushy gray mustache and a fringe of gray hair, was a hero of the war against Iraq in the early ’70s—a war that eventually caused Saddam Hussein to grant a level of autonomy to Iraqi Kurdistan. Now a federal region within Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government boasted its own president, prime minister, and parliament.

  It was Colonel Rastan who had suggested that Black Cell remain in Qabusiye for the night because of heavy fighting in the vicinity of Highway 47 at Mosul. Besides the probability that passage to their base in Erbil would be blocked, Crocker and his men were exhausted and hungry. So Crocker decided to accept Mayor Sabri’s invitation.

  He was happy he did when townswomen brought out trays of grilled lamb and vegetables, couscous and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and set them on the table. The smells alone were overwhelming, and the lamb was deliciously spiced and cooked to perfection.

  Seated at the table were a dozen of the mayor’s friends and aides and the five SEALs. Communication was restricted to nods, smiles, and grunts of approval, except for the discussion between Mayor Sabri and Crocker, translated by Dilshad.

  It wasn’t a conversation really, more like an oral history of Kurdistan and its people delivered with passion. Crocker, in his state of exhaustion, managed to retain some facts. There were approximately thirty-five million Kurds—“the world’s largest ethnic group without a state”—and five to six million of them lived in Iraqi Kurdistan. The majority of the others resided in the Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian parts of Kurdistan.

  Kurdistan’s predecessor—the ancient Kingdom of Corduene—had been invaded by the Persians and Romans. Subsequently, Kurdistan had been ruled by the Ottomans, British, and French. Though largely Sunni Muslim, the Kurds embraced a wide range of religious beliefs, including some from Shiite Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Yazidism, and Yarsanism. Crocker had never heard of the last one.

  He also learned that the Sorani word for “great” is mezin.

  Abu Samir al-Sufi sat in a tiny, candlelit room in a mosque in Raqqa reciting verses from the Quran. He knew many of them by heart, memorized during his four years spent in the Camp Bucca U.S. military detention center outside of Umm Qasr, Iraq.

  “‘I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.’”

  These weren’t the words of a prophet, recorded dozens of years after his death by crucifixion and preserved in the Bible. They were the actual words of God revealed to the Messenger Mohammad and recorded in the Quran.

  He was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Yes?”

  “Sheikh, it is m
e, Yasir Selah.” Selah was his aide-de-camp—a painfully thin man with a perpetually serious face and a bum right leg, caused by a Shiite car bomb attack on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad years ago.

  “Come in, my son.”

  Selah briefed the sheikh about the downed French helicopter, the rescue of the Frenchmen by a small unit of U.S. forces, and the retreat of the U.S. forces into the town of Qabusiye.

  “The Americans are still there? In Qabusiye?” al-Sufi asked, stroking the silver tip of his beard.

  “Yes, Sheikh. This is so.”

  Al-Sufi rose and paced the cold concrete floor from side to side. He recalled another passage from the Quran. “If thou comest on them in war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are left behind, so they may remember.”

  Allah had an answer for everything.

  Al-Sufi knew that the town was vulnerable and that the infidels’ air forces were focused on liberating the oil fields around Mosul. He also knew the infidels were greedy capitalists and generally interested in areas that would yield some sort of economic advantage. Qabusiye was a modest town in the center of an agricultural area. It offered neither oil, minerals, or antiquities.

  A learned man who had studied every important military strategist from Alexander the Great to Napoléon Bonaparte, to Hannibal Barca, Erich von Manstein, and North Vietnamese Võ Nguyên Giáp, he considered 2,500-year-old Chinese general Sun Tzu’s five essentials for victory.

  He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

  He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.

  He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout its ranks.

  He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

  He will win who has the military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

  In every way, it seemed like a perfect time to strike.

  Chapter Four

  Many people die with their music still in them.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Crocker dreamt that he was sitting in the basement of a strange house. A loud party was going on upstairs, but he couldn’t join it because he was babysitting a two-year-old girl with a chubby round face and shiny black eyes. He couldn’t remember who she was. It definitely wasn’t his daughter Jenny. But he had a sense that they were related somehow.

  A niece, maybe?

  The girl in the blue patterned dress ran and giggled, challenging him to chase her. He did and she squealed as she ducked under furniture and evaded his grasp.

  As he stopped to catch his breath, someone spoke through the closed door. “Tom, you can come up to the party now.”

  He turned to the little girl and suddenly he wasn’t in the basement anymore, but in a dark room with a vaulted ceiling. Davis snored from the mattress beside him. He sat up and looked at a triangle of reflected light that fell across the red tile floor. A dog barked in the distance.

  Where am I?

  Crocker slowly remembered the lamb dinner and Sabri’s talk about an independent, unified Kurdistan and the Athenian-style direct democracy they would establish based on voluntary participation. It was a nice idea, he thought, but ideas only worked if put into action. And action in the case of a unified Kurdistan involved an enormous number of variables and contingencies. The first thing they had to do was secure their country’s borders and provide security to their citizens.

  He heard a whining in the distance like that of a girl crying. It was quickly joined by others to create an eerie chorus. As it grew louder and closer, his body tensed.

  Crocker realized what he was hearing and shouted, “Wake up! Wake up! We’re under attack!”

  A split second later explosions shook the walls and filled the little room with smoke and dust. He reached for his weapon first, then his combat vest. His body moved automatically, rousing his men, pulling on his boots and pants, pulling extra mags from his rucksack and shoving them into his pockets, fitting NVGs onto his head. At the same time, he was acutely aware of the sounds and the directions they were coming from.

  So far, all he heard was rockets. No incoming automatic weapon fire. That meant the enemy was still at a distance.

  He intuited the rest: Daesh had traced them back to the village. They’d come to extract revenge.

  The TOC at Erbil had to be alerted. A defense had to be organized. His team consisted of two gun trucks and five men. It would be impossible for them to defend this town of four or five hundred on their own.

  Dilshad burst into the room, coughing from the smoke and wearing black pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. His eyes were red and his wire-rim glasses askew.

  “The mayor…Mayor Sabri needs you!” He was gasping for breath and appeared to be in danger of hyperventilating.

  “Take a deep breath. I’m going now.”

  “We’re under attack!”

  Crocker grabbed him by the shoulders. “Calm down, Dilshad, we’ll be okay. You have a Peshmerga detail assigned here or a police force?”

  “Only…only the town…militia.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty…men and boys…with guns.”

  “Where are they, Dilshad?”

  He seemed confused by the question and tried to pull away. Rockets landed nearby and exploded.

  “Listen to me, Dilshad. Listen.…Where is the militia? Do they have a headquarters?”

  “No!”

  “A place where they gather?”

  “They have instructions to assemble in the town square, which is close. I’ll show you.”

  “Good. Let’s go!”

  Davis, Rip, and CT were still gathering their gear. Akil stood at the door, armed and ready. Another series of whines grew closer.

  “Incoming!” Akil shouted.

  They hit the ground and covered their heads, except for Dilshad, who seemed mesmerized by the sound. Crocker reached up and pulled him to the floor as one of the rockets slammed into the roof and exploded. Plaster and pieces of clay tile rained down on them.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  He sprung, powered by a burst of adrenaline, pulling Dilshad with him. Outside, the cold night air was pierced with screams and cries for help. His teammates gathered around him.

  He took Dilshad by the shoulders and said, “Show us the way!” He shook him. “Dilshad, take us to the square.”

  “Yes. Yes! Over here.”

  They ran in formation, weapons ready. Some with helmets. All wearing Dragon Skin armored vests. Akil beside him, his dark eyes burning with intensity.

  “The fire’s coming from the northeast,” Akil said. “One hundred and fifty meters, I would guess. I’m gonna climb up on one of the roofs to get a better look.”

  Crocker hadn’t seen a building of more than two stories in the entire town. “Okay. You got comms?”

  “I got comms.”

  “We’ll be in the plaza.”

  “Copy.”

  “Davis, call the TOC in Erbil,” Crocker continued, checking to make sure that he had a full mag loaded in his HK416. “You know what to tell ’em. Then see if you can reach Rastan.”

  Davis’s blond hair was matted with plaster dust. “Will do.”

  He checked his watch. A few minutes after 0400.

  They entered the town square, which was surrounded by older buildings with balconies and porticos. A little fountain sat in the middle. Assembled around it were a dozen teenage boys with rifles. More men were arriving via passageways and alleys. Mayor Sabri shouted at them through a megaphone in the local dialect. A man beside him switched on an electric lantern that cast strange shadows against the ground and walls.

  Crocker turned to Dilshad and said, “No, no! Tell him to turn that off.”

  “What?”

  He pointed at the lantern. “The light! The fucking light! Off. It gives the enemy a target!”

  Dilshad shouted hysterically at the mayor. Sabri threw up his hands and grunted something at a group of town
smen, who helped him down from the lip of the fountain. He got in Crocker’s face and snorted in English, “This…is…bad…very bad!”

  “Listen.”

  Crocker pulled Dilshad and the mayor close. Townspeople gathered around them.

  “Tell the mayor…”

  Akil’s urgent voice came through the headset. “Deadwood, I’m looking at six technicals and a shitload of jihadists armed with .50 cals and rockets. I think they’re going to hit us east and north. Maybe send a truck or two to probe west.”

  “Copy. Gather as many men with guns as you can and meet me on the east side of town.”

  “Roger.”

  He interrupted Dilshad in heated conversation with Mayor Sabri. “Listen to me.…Listen. Tell the mayor we have to set up a perimeter.”

  “We need air strikes!” Dilshad exclaimed. “The mayor says, we need air strikes!”

  “Yes.”

  “Without air strikes they will kill everyone!”

  “Everyone! They kill,” Mayor Sabri repeated in broken English.

  “Listen, Dilshad, listen.…Erbil has been alerted. Airplanes are coming.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Listen. My men are going to set a perimeter.”

  “How?”

  Crocker turned to his men on his right. “Rip and CT, you’ve got south and west. Take Truck Two and set up. Akil, Davis, and I will take Truck One and cover east and north. One man on the SAW, the other organizes and directs the locals.”

  “Roger.”

  Looking at Dilshad and Mayor Sabri, he continued, “Mayor, you stay here. Direct your men as they arrive to the different sectors on the perimeter. Northeast and southwest. Does he understand?”

  “Yes,” Dilshad said, his voice and body trembling.

  “Repeat it. Tell him to nod his head if he understands.”

  The mayor nodded and slammed a forty-five-round mag into his AK-74 Kalashnikov. Crocker hoped he knew how to use it.