20 June 2004, 0312 hours. It had to be close to a hundred degrees when Charlie Becker, retired Army Ranger and current spy, rolled out of the blacked-out Humvee. He hit the ground like he’d been body-slammed. He was lucky not to have separated his shoulder.
Screw it. What was pain? Just weakness leaving the body.
Charlie scuttled crablike off the highway into the ditch and rolled over the closest dune-rolled so he wouldn’t leave any telltale infidel boot tracks-into the soft sand of the rough scrub-brush desert.
Weapons check. He patted himself down in the spectacles, testicles, watch, and wallet mode. Pistol, knives, four M4 mags, four Sig mags. Flexicuffs, marking pen, duct tape, digital camera. Everything was where it had to be. He made sure the mag in his M4 carbine hadn’t been jarred loose by the impact, took the suppressor out of the padded pouch on his tactical vest, and twisted it over the flash-hider.
Comms check. He ran his hand from the mike mounted even with his lower lip to make sure the connection on the back of his left ear-cup hadn’t shaken loose. Then he flipped the night vision goggles down, rolled onto his back (ensuring, as he did, that a healthy portion of Iraq’s fine-grit sand slipped down the back of his shirt), and watched as the three APCs and eight Humvees disappeared down Route Irish, fading into the moonless night on their way to Forward Operating Base Falcon.
Now it begins. Charlie flipped the NVGs up and just lay there. Except he wasn’t just lying there. He was a human antenna dish, a sponge sucking up every external sensation he could absorb. Ears keened, jaw dropped, he listened.
A dog barked somewhere off to Charlie’s north. Through the amplified stereo hearing protectors he heard the convoy engines grinding. Other than that: quiet.
Not good. Logic dictated there should be crickets chirping in the sunflower field bordered by thorny scrub and mangy palm trees on whose edge he was lying. But there was no hint of them. Which told Charlie the critters were still nervous about his arrival. Which meant he had a few more minutes to go before he could think about moving.
To his right, the barest wisp of hot breeze caused the dry trees to rustle like cellophane. He brought his left arm up and focused on his watch. The muted display told him he’d left the Humvee two minutes, forty-five forty-six forty-seven seconds ago.
How time flies when you’re having fun.
I am getting too old for this crap, thought Charlie. I’m fifty-two. I have a remarried ex-wife, an Irish girlfriend, a son at West Point, a beautiful daughter newly wed to a Ranger captain, and in six months I’m going to be a grandfather. Maybe they’ll name the kid after me. Hell, it’s fricking Father’s Day. I should be home, practicing how to dandle Charlie Junior on my knee.
The fistful of sand down his sweaty back began to itch.
Probably ticks in it, Charlie thought.
Or fleas.
Or baby camel spiders.
Last deployment he’d e-mailed his girlfriend Irish Beth a picture captioned “Charlie and the Uninvited Guest.” Jose’d tossed a dead camel spider into his hide as a joke and caught Charlie’s holy shit, dude reaction on the Nikon Coolpix. Some joke. Adult camel spiders were a foot and a half end to end, and their bites burned like acid.
For an instant he saw Beth’s face. Then he thought about her breasts. About how good it felt caressing the shamrock tattoo on her fine, dancer s butt.
He blinked behind his clear, prescription Oakleys. Put Beth out of his mind. Wiped her image clean away. Charlie Becker was in his thirty-fourth year of warfare and he understood. You can think about Beth, or you can do your job. But you can’t do both.
Charlie reached into his left cargo pocket, extracted the do-rag, made a hood, pulled the Palm Treo PDA out of his vest, rolled onto his side, punched in his code, and hit the display button so he could receive streaming video from the remotely piloted Predator vehicle loitering overhead.
He squinted at the screen. There he was-a flashing triangle on the side of Highway 8. Three other triangles blinked at two-hundred-yard intervals to his south. Jose was closest. Then Fred. Then Tuzz Man. Charlie cracked a brief smile. Four triangles in the Triangle of Death. Who says Allah doesn’t have a sense of humor?
He shut the screen down, stowed the rag, closed his eyes so he’d get his night vision back faster, and lay there, listening to the night sounds and totting up the positive and negative aspects of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare. Predators were perfect examples of good news/bad news to operators like Charlie. This one was controlled from eleven time zones away-Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas to be precise. Launched from Kuwait ten hours ago, it would circle until he’d completed the mission. An eye in the sky watching his back.
That was the good news. The bad was that anybody with the right clearances could sit in Tampa or Langley and watch Charlie trying to shake the shit out of his shirt. Which meant that even as he lay here, some supergrade desk jockey holding a
Starbucks grande and munching an organic cranberry bran muffin back at CIA headquarters was right now second-guessing his every fricking move, just waiting to summon the lawyers.
Still, there were techno-advantages that Charlie, a veteran of Jurassic-era warfare, had lacked in such antediluvian venues as Desert One, Grenada, Honduras, Panama, and Somalia. The Treo, for example. The Treo was linked to a secure satellite network. It gave Charlie the capability to look at real-time video. That’s how he knew that tonight’s target, Tariq Zubaydi, a local with probable ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq, was at home and tucked into bed. He’d watched as Tariq’s guests left the house shortly after 2300 hours. Saw the lights go out just after midnight. Bingo.
0344 hours. The four men linked up in a clump of papyrus by a yardwide canal smelling of brackish water and human waste. The staff sergeant trail boss of the convoy out of which they’d bailed assumed they were Special Forces working a direct action mission. That’s because they’d shown up at Camp Liberty with their own sterile Humvee, asked for the convoy’s honcho by name, and knew the convoy number, code name, its route to Mahmudiyah, and contingency plan call sign. Not to mention the fact that they wore Army-issue uniforms with subdued infrared-readable American flags. The plate carriers holding their ceramic body armor and spare mags bore Velcro’d name tags but no other designators. The whole picture, the sergeant would testify later, read Special Forces on a black op. In neon.
But Charlie and his companions weren’t Soldiers. They were civilians. Charlie was a GS-14. Jose and Fred, retired Ranger sergeants, and Tuzzy, a former Marine gunny, were 13s. Their business cards, name tags, photo IDs, and e-mail addresses (all under aliases) identified them as employees of the Army Research Laboratory, whose on-paper headquarters was three floors of offices and the bug-proof conference rooms called SCIFs in an anonymous four-story building on Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia.
In point of fact, they were all CIA, and those three floors were where Ground Branch, the so-called action group of CIAs grotesquely named SAD-Special Activity Division-was headquartered. The National Clandestine Service’s pooh-bahs at Langley had “relocated”-their term-Ground Branch to one of CIAs satellite offices, because they claimed it would maintain better operational security. Charlie, a lanky former master sergeant who had been in Ground Branch since his retirement after twenty-five-plus years with the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2001, knew better. It’s CIA’s fricking caste system. NCS ostracized Ground Branch because they consider themselves royalty and don’t want to have to eat in the same caféteria as a bunch of gun-toting knuckle-draggers.
The prime witness supporting Charlie’s theory was as close as Nicola’s pod. Nicola Rogers was Deputy Branch Chief/ Insurgency/Baghdad and Charlie’s GS-15 boss. To Charlie, she represented everything wrong with CIA. She’d been in-country for 92 of her 120-day deployment without setting foot beyond the Green Zone, except to be driven to Camp Victory to shop, eat pizza, or do karaoke night.
A tall, lithe, thirty-six-year-old chemically blonde women’s studies graduate of Vassar, Nicola was a Southeast Asia economic analyst on loan to the clandestine service. She’d volunteered for Baghdad because she was on the cusp of promotion to Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) rank, and there was a rumor currently caroming through Langley’s corridors that CIA’s GS-15 promotables needed an Iraq tour to demonstrate they were team players.
Charlie often wondered whose team Nicola was on. It certainly wasn’t his. He guessed she was filling out her resume so once she got her SIS she could resign and become a civilian contractor, pulling in a third of a mil-plus for doing the same job she was now doing for $110,256.
Moreover, like the vast majority of the 378 officer-bureaucrats assigned to Baghdad Station or CIAs bases in Mosul, Arbll, Basra, and Kirkuk, Nicola spent almost zero time gathering intelligence. She frittered away most of the day staring at her screen reading and answering senseless memos from Langley; playing computer games; downloading music, podcasts, and TV shows from iTunes; or composing whiny e-mails to her fiancé, a Yale Law grad in CIAs Office of Legal Counsel. Two or three times a week she’d allow Charlie admittance to her hallowed “secure office pod,” look at him like he was a dirty Kleenex, and lecture about how warfare increased global warming and victimized women.
And virtually every time Charlie suggested something imaginative he could do out beyond the wire, she’d launch chaff. Nicola’s First (and only) Law of Intelligence Physics went:
Operations = Risks = Problems
Zero ops therefore equaled zero problems. That philosophy was why Charlie was fond of saying that what CIA needed most these days was a 500-psi enema, starting with the director of central intelligence and ending with Nicola and all like her.
What kept Charlie going was that despite BGAlbatross, which was the CIA-style digraph code name by which he referred to Nicola, he’d had a number of successes. In fact, over the past couple of months Charlie and his seven-man Archangel paramilitary team had made a sizable dent in AQI, intel shorthand for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq terror organization of pro-Saddam Sunni insurgents, fanatic Islamist beheaders, and common dirtbag criminals.
In April he’d disrupted a Sunni network bringing foreign AQI fighters from Syria, killing six and capturing three. In May he’d ID’d an AQI mole working in the Green Zone, captured him, and flipped him. Made him a penetration agent-who led Team Archangel to a safe house where they killed five of AQI’s top-tier support cell personnel. And over the past three weeks he’d intercepted and waxed four of Zarqawi’s couriers. Even better, he’d seized their laptops, pen drives, and cell phones intact.
It’s amazing, Charlie thought, how much information bad guys keep that they shouldn’t.
Tonight he’d score again. Happy Father’s Day. Six days ago, a Sunni calling himself Tariq Zubaydi the grocer had shown up in the Green Zone bearing a DVD.
Tariq, who hadn’t bathed in a while and smelled strongly of garlic, told the Blackwater gunsel working the security desk that the disc had been brought to his store by a stranger who’d told him, “There are those who know you speak English, and you will cooperate and take this to the Americans in the Green Zone or you will disappear.”
It took two hours until Tariq was finally passed down the food chain to Nicola.
BGAlbatross locked Tariq in an interrogation room and slipped the DVD onto her laptop-a stupid thing to do Charlie thought, given the fact it could have been virus-rich-started to screen it, got physically ill after about thirty seconds, and summoned Charlie. “You watch. You like this kind of stuff.”
The Iraqi had delivered an AQI snuff video. A thirteen-minute compilation of the beheadings of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian national killed on April 14, and Nick Berg, an American murdered on May 11. But there was new material, too: the bloody execution of Hussein Ali Alyan, a Shia Lebanese national, killed June 12, only forty-eight hours earlier. It hadn’t even made Al Jazeera yet.
Nicola insisted on grilling Tariq herself. Charlie was relegated to watching from behind two-way glass. She got nowhere of course, because (a) she didn’t know a fricking thing about interrogation, and (b) she was noticeably turned off by Tariq’s BO.
Charlie, who’d graduated not only the Army’s interrogation school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, but also the FBI’s advanced interrogation techniques and criminal profiling courses at Quantico, Virginia, fumed and made detailed notes. He also did a quick wash of Tariq Zubaydi’s name through Baghdad Station’s insurgent database and came up dry. But dry meant nothing. Baghdad Station’s files were notoriously incomplete and-more to the point-Tariq was good.
Charlie focused. The Iraqi’d obviously had tradecraft training. He was careful about his body language. And when Nicola pressed him, he did what any good operator would do when challenged: He deflected, redirected, flattered. His grocery was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was so dangerous to come here. He admired the Americans.
BGAlbatross’s head bobbed up and down like one of those rear-window doggy dolls. Charlie watched Tariq read her like the proverbial book. And when her doe eyes finally told Tariq I feel your pain, Tariq set the hook. He explained his only son was a cripple-he’d lost his leg in a bombing-and his wife had cancer.
Tears welling, he asked for three thousand dollars and ten cartons of French cigarettes so he could send his family to safety in Amman. He’d use the cigarettes to bribe the border guards.
Nicola rummaged for a Kleenex.
Charlie: Oh, fuck me.
And so, ignoring her dagger looks, Charlie stepped into the interrogation room and took over. He told Tariq in the passable Arabic he’d learned at language school in Monterey and polished during a fourteen-month tour training Special Forces in Qatar, “Read my lips, habibi, no name, no money.”
In fifteen minutes Charlie bargained the cash down to one hundred dollars and the cigarettes to two cartons. That accomplished, he insisted on the name of the messenger who’d delivered the video.
Tariq looked past Charlie’s Saddam Hussein mustache deep into his cold blue eyes, factored in the scars on Charlie’s face and his knuckles, understood he was dealing with a pro, and coughed up the name Abu Hadidi and a physical description. Yes, it was a war name and a probably phony description. But small victories are small victories. More important, it set a quid pro quo precedent for future meetings.
Through it all, Nicola sat dumbstruck. She’d never known Charlie was the only Ground Branch operator in Baghdad fluent in Arabic, because she’d never bothered to ask him anything about himself.
Tariq’s gaze passed slowly from Charlie to Nicola and back to Charlie, and when Charlie caught the Iraqi’s subtle yet unmistakable contempt, he almost laughed out loud. The Iraqi was obviously thinking the same thought as Charlie: Had this worthless woman learned nothing in spy school?
Charlie kept everybody waiting while he collected the cash and doctored one of the cartons, affixing a Radio Frequency ID transponder (RFID) that CIA’s techno-wizards concealed within an inventory sticker. So when Tariq departed the Green Zone, Charlie, the well-worn galabia he referred to as a man-dress over his body armor, was waiting with Jose, who could pass for Egyptian, in one of Archangel’s battered Toyota pickup trucks. The RFID’s transmissions allowed him to trail Tariq’s filthy Nissan across the river, through the Sunni market on Karada Kharidge, then along a leisurely, meandering course-Charlie and Jose decided Tariq was running an SDR, or surveillance detection route-that ultimately led southwest into the Sunni Triangle of Death to the squalid city of Mahmudiyah.
But not Mahmudiyah itself. Tariq turned off Highway 8 north of the big canal, near a cluster of villas marked on Charlie’s maps as Insurgent Central. The development had been built in 1991 for Republican Guard officers and their families, and Charlie had long suspected it was a transit zone for AQI kidnap victims.
Jose gave Tariq about a klik’s lead, while Charlie surreptitiously shot video with his cell phone. One point eight kliks past a walled cluster of villas that had once housed top Baath Party officials, Tariq pulled onto a rutted dirt road, drove east over a fetid, yardwide canal, and two hundred meters later pulled up next to a two-story, stone-faced villa with a clothesline on its flat roof, the easternmost structure of a three-house compound. Between the houses, the canal, and the Baath Party villas sat tilled fields of desiccated sunflowers. From one thousand meters away, Charlie squinted through binoculars as Tariq unlocked a heavy wrought-iron grille door and disappeared.
“If I was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that’s exactly the kind of place I’d stash people,” Charlie told BGAlbatross when he got back. “I should check this guy out.”
She gave Charlie a nasty look. “You already did.” Hell, she was pissed he’d even trailed Tariq in the first place (although she downloaded his photos fast enough).
When he asked for Predator surveillance she said, “No way” and ostentatiously swiveled toward her computer screen.
Dismissed, Charlie returned to the shipping container he called home, turned up the air-conditioning, drank half a six-pack, and imagined how lovely it would be to sell Nicola Rogers to the Hells Angels. Then he pulled off his clothes, ran through the shower, crawled into his rack, and thought about Irish Beth.
Four days later, Friday, 18 June, while Charlie was working a source on lower Hilla Road, Tariq returned. The Iraqi asked for Nicola by name and demanded four thousand dollars.
Nicola paid him every penny and even apologized for Charlie’s behavior. The reason: Tariq brought two “proof of life” videos. The first showed a South Korean, thirty-three-year-old Kim Sun-il, who had been kidnapped not twenty-four hours previously. A tearful, terrified Kim begged his hooded captors not to kill him.
The second was also a gem: new video of Keith Matthew Maupin. Maupin, a Soldier from Ohio, had been captured when his convoy was ambushed by AQI two months previously. There’d been no sign of him since the week after his capture. In this video, Maupin was kneeling, an AK to his head, with three gunmen standing behind him.
When Charlie got back they screened the DVD half a dozen times, Nicola murmuring “holy shit” like a mantra.
Charlie was impressed, too, but wary. “Did you polygraph Tariq?”
“No, I did not polygraph Tariq.” Nicola was visibly annoyed by the question. “C’mon, Charlie, this is pure gold. Besides, there was no time to box him.”
You numskull, thought Charlie, you make the fricking time. Charlie frowned. The timing-Tariq’s sudden appearance and these 24-karat videos-was almost too good to be true. Charlie knew from experience that when things appeared too good to be true, they often were too good to be true. His skepticism was wasted on Nicola, who told him he should take yes for an answer and then ordered him out so she could tell her boss what had dropped into her lap.
Charlie copied the DVD, went back to his shipping container, and spent the afternoon memorizing every tiny detail. He noted every crack and stain in the walls, every irregularity in the marble floors, even the cabriole leg of an armchair barely in the frame of the Maupin video. He froze the picture, zooming in long enough to identify a fleur-de-lis pattern on the chair’s upholstered apron.
Two and a half hours later, a beaming Nicola showed Charlie the opening screen of a PowerPoint entitled “Hostages in Iraq: A New and Important Development from Nicola Rogers.” Nicola was ecstatic: Baghdad’s chief of station had forwarded Nicola’s package to Langley as flash traffic. But that wasn’t all. She’d received an e-mail from the deputy chief of Iraq Group at headquarters saying he was putting her in for a cash bonus.
When Charlie gave her a quizzical look, she showed him all twenty-one screens. She’d composed a piece of fiction explaining how she’d developed Tariq Zubaydi as her AQI penetration agent. She’d used Charlie’s surveillance photos to illustrate the narrative. Charlie, unnamed, was described as “an American operative.”
“Well,” she said, misreacting to Charlie’s scowl, “he is my agent. I told him to bring me-and only me-every DVD they give him. He promised he would. I only paid him after he agreed.”
Charlie felt like puking. Or quitting. Going the contractor route himself. He and Beth had talked about it. She’d been in favor. It was Charlie who’d hemmed and hawed like he had a flawed gene. The same gene that kept him at the Regiment for almost twenty-six years. The same gene, when he was offered a quarter mil by one of the private intelligence outsourcers, made him turn them down and apply to CIA, where the Brahman at human resources told Charlie even with his code word clearances he was lucky to get a GS-14 salary because he didn’t have a college degree.
So here he was, still a cog in the federal machine. BGAlbatross tells lies and gets a bonus. And what does operative Charlie have to show for his scars? A master sergeant’s pension, the Silver Star, the two Purple Hearts, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Combat Jump Wings, and the four rows of ribbons in the shadow box on his living room wall is what.
And yet… and yet… when he actually accomplished something-taught a young Ranger tradecraft that might save his life someday, killed or captured a high-value target, worked a source who got him one step closer to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi- to Charlie, that mattered. Duty. Honor. Country. That mattered, too. Later, he’d tell Jose, “I’m fricking old-fashioned is why. A dinosaur, that’s me.”
So Charlie didn’t puke. Or quit. Instead, he stuck his desert-booted foot in the figurative door and browbeat Nicola until she approved Predator surveillance of bayt Tariq Zubaydi.
With Nicola’s support, there was a bird overhead by 1830 hours. Charlie watched real-time, noting the half-dozen-plus vehicles that visited Tariq’s house over an eight-hour stretch. Got a look at some of the individuals. Washed the identifiable pictures not through Baghdad Station but Langley’s Big Pond photo database and its newest VEIL (Virtual Exploitation and Information-Leveraging) software. And came up with a couple of palpable hits.
At 0320 hours he woke Nicola and made his sales pitch: Tariq’s knowledge of tradecraft, his unique access to real-time information, and his links to known bad guys all made him a viable target.
“It’s the duck rule,” Charlie insisted.
Just after 0400 hours, wilting under Charlie’s barrage, Nicola grudgingly admitted that Tariq quacked like a duck and was therefore probably more than just a grocer who spoke some English.
“That’s right-that’s why we gotta pick him up.”
“Impossible, Charlie.”
She was so fricking consistent. But this time there was way too much at stake to let her have her way.
“Nicola, don’t be obstructionist. This guy knows stuff. I saw it in the interrogation room. He knows people. I saw it in the Predator surveillance. We gotta grab him.”
“If we do, I’ll lose him as my agent. I won’t get any more videos.”
Geezus. Did she see nothing? “He’s not your agent. He’s probably Zarqawi’s agent. He’s a walk-in. An unvetted walk-in, no less. He’s probably target-assessing us for AQI.”
“An AQI agent?” Nicola’s eyes narrowed. “But I told Langley…”
“Let me bring him in-you can box him. Then he’s vetted. Then we flip him. Double him back against AQI, like I did Faiz.”
She looked at him blankly.
“The mole. Remember?”
Nicola’s eyes lost focus. She squirmed, her body language telling Charlie she was nervous her lies would be discovered. So he switched gears. “Y’know, I’m convinced Kim and Maupin are in Tariq’s neighborhood.”
BGAlbatross crossed her arms. “Headquarters says AQI warehouses hostages in Fallujah, not Baghdad.”
“HQ could be wrong.” Charlie played off her quizzical look. “Fallujah? It’s complicated and risky. Think about the logistics. Moving Kim north with all our coalition roadblocks and thousands of troops, secreting him, making the video, and then getting it back to Tariq? And all in less than twenty-four hours?”
She pursed her lips. “You have a point… I guess.”
He paused. “C’mon, let me bring Tariq in.”
He saw she was weakening.
“For chrissakes, Nicola, if we can pinpoint just one hostage.”
“But the consequences, Charlie.”
“Nicola, think about the consequences of not doing this.”
“Not doing?”
“An old sergeant major used to tell me, ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’”
When her expression told Charlie she had no idea what he was talking about, he spelled it out. “Our main thing is hostages, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What if bringing Tariq in resulted in retrieving a hostage? Or some solid information about where a hostage-hostages- are being kept?”
Nicola calculated the odds. Then: “You can go. But I’m writing a memo to the file that this is being done against my better judgment because I believe your operation to snatch my valuable agent-which is how headquarters thinks of Tariq- is too risky. After all, Charlie, your operation could compromise him.”
20 June 004, 0410 hours. It took Charlie less than fifteen seconds to pick the lock on Tariq’s wrought-iron security gate. He eased it open and, with Fred’s infrared flashlight focused on the vintage lock of the front door, he picked that, too. Charlie’s op plan was basic. They’d made a silent approach. Charlie mounted an infrared flasher, visible from a thousand yards away, above the front door. Now they’d make entry stealthily, suppress any resistance, restrain Tariq, then follow up with a thorough SSE-a sensitive site exploitation-to discover any goodies Tariq might have lying around. Like his cell phones, his laptop, his PC hard drive, or any notes, phone messages, memos, or photographs.
Charlie would signal Harlan and Paul, who were in an Archangel truck two kliks north. They’d ID the house by its infrared flasher. Charlie’s team would bundle Tariq into the truck, pile in themselves, and haul butt to Baghdad in plenty of time for a Father’s Day breakfast of Egg McMuffin at the Camp Victory Mickey D’s. It was textbook. Classic.
0411. Charlie eased the inner door open. The beam of Fred’s IR flashlight swept the entry. He saw no trip wires or other booby traps. His left index finger pressed the switch of the IR SureFire attached to his M4 and painted the low-ceilinged foyer left-right, right-left, his eyes leading the muzzle.
All clear. He, Jose, and Fred started forward. Tuzz would remain outside, making sure they weren’t interrupted.
0412. The three men soundlessly cleared the sparsely furnished living room, then moved into the dining area.
That’s where the hair on the back of Charlie’s neck stood up. Something’s wrong.
He couldn’t put a face on it, but his instincts were screaming oougah-oougah, dive, dive, dive.
Screw ‘em. Back to work. Kitchen: clear. Jose’s upturned thumb told them that the small laundry room was okay, too.
The ground floor was safe.
0413. Charlie started upstairs. For someone packing sixty pounds of gear he moved with the nimbleness of a ballet dancer. He was climbing the marble stair treads one at a time when he stopped abruptly.
Realized what was wrong.
Realized he’d been an idiot. “Shit.”
He backed down the stairs, headed for the kitchen.
Jose: “What’s up, boss?”
“This, dude.” Charlie’s gloved left index finger swept the small kitchen table. Even through the NVGs, the trail of dust was clear.
“And this.” He went to the fridge. Opened it. It was empty. Pulled the curtains aside and looked under the sink.
Nothing. No knives, forks, or spoons in the drawers under the counter. No dishes in the cupboards. No food in the pantry. No laundry in the washroom. No signs of life.
Tariq Zubaydi didn’t live here. Nobody lived here. This was a safe house.
There was no wife, no crippled kid. Of course Tariq was good; of course he’d had training. Tariq was fricking AQI. A disinformation agent, just as he’d told Nicola.
Charlie shook his head, disgusted at Nicola’s naïveté and his own obtuseness. Abu Hadidi. That was the war name the sonofabitch had coughed up. It was probably his own fricking war name. How dumb can I be?
Charlie took a good look at the living room. A faux Persian was centered in the room. Atop it sat a couch, a coffee table, and two armchairs. The two lamps were attached to timers.
He dispatched Jose and Fred upstairs. They returned ninety seconds later to confirm what Charlie already knew: The place was empty.
0417. Charlie examined the furniture. Christ, there was something familiar about the armchair. The cabriole leg. He’d seen it in the Maupin video. Even through the green-tinged monochrome of his NVGs he could make out the faded fleur-de-lis pattern. AQI videoed Keith Maupin in this house. Tomorrow he’d come back with a forensics team to search for DNA.
“We’re on to something.” They moved the couch and chairs. Rolled the rug. And discovered exactly what Charlie thought they’d discover: a two-foot-square plug of plywood inlaid into the marble floor.
Then: gunfire. Unmistakable. AKs. Simultaneously: Tuzzy’s suppressed M4 and his voice in Charlie’s ears: “Hostiles. Two groups, I count eight muzzle flashes.”
“Fred, cover with Tuzz,” Charlie said into the mike. Then Charlie pinged Paul in the truck. “Get your asses up here.”
He pulled the Treo out. The infrared picture from the Predator showed one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten hostiles coming in a flanking movement, four from the west, the rest from the south. Bad news: They’d been suckered. And capture was not a viable option here.
Charlie hit the rapid dial. The Treo flamed out-dropped signal. He ran to the doorway, rolled outside, disregarding the AK rounds impacting the stone facade above his head, and tried again. On his flanks, Tuzz and Fred were proned out, squinting through NVGs, squeezing off two-shot bursts.
It seemed an age, then the phone connected. In an even voice, Charlie said, “This is Archangel.”
“Archangel, Ops,” came the reply. It was the operations center at the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force.
Charlie spoke in shorthand. “SITREP hostiles. Running Bear.” SITREP stood for situation report and Running Bear was the code word for tonight’s contingency plan-CONPLAN in mil-speak.
“Running Bear CONPLAN,” the voice on the other end confirmed. There was a five-second pause while Archangel’s position was retrieved from the Predator s GPS display and his coordinates were punched into a computer. Then: “Fourteen minutes, Archangel.” That’s how long it would take for the pair of Apache attack choppers circling Camp Taji to reach Charlie.
“Roger that.” Charlie rolled onto his side and tapped Fred on the back. “Fourteen minutes, dude.” Then he stowed the Treo and scurried back into the living room on all fours. He pulled his combat Emerson from its sheath and shoved the blade tip between plywood and marble. Damn, it was tight. “Hoser- gimme a hand here.”
The two of them removed the plug.
Revealing a ladder.
Leading to a tunnel.
Leading who fricking knew where.
Nowhere good.
0420. Charlie focused the IR flashlight into the hole. The tunnel floor was nine, maybe ten feet below. Quickly, he started to shrug out of his gear. He’d made that mistake once-got himself wedged so tightly he’d had to cut himself loose. Almost got himself killed.
He peeled down to basics: body armor, mags, knife, pistol, flashlight, NVGs, and commo kit. Jose started to do the same. Charlie waved him off. Charlie was a master sergeant, and master sergeants led by example. “Twelve minutes until cavalry gets here, dude. You stay with Fred and Tuzz. If I need you I’ll call.”
Jose picked his M4 off the floor. “Stay safe, boss.”
“No other way.” Charlie rolled onto the ladder, tested the rungs, and when they held, eased his way down.
At the bottom, he scanned through his NVGs. Checked the compass on his watchband. The tunnel went north, and as far as he could see it was unoccupied. But the damn thing was just over a yard wide and less than four feet high.
Charlie stood five-eleven. Geezus H. My back and my fricking legs are going to kill me by the time I get through this. Charlie looked up. Jose’s bearded face peered down at him, green through the NVGs.
“You okay, boss?”
“Couldn’t be better, dude.” He gave his teammate an upturned thumb, then swiveled, squatted, and put his M4 in low ready. Gave himself a burst of IR light, saw nothing but air, and duckwalked forward.
0426. Charlie was having trouble breathing. He hadn’t gone two hundred feet, yet his lats felt as if they’d been napalmed. His fifty-two-year-old back screamed Yo, geezer, give me a fricking rocking chair and a screen porch. Yeah, well, he thought, Rangers lead the way.
Lead the way even when you knew it could get you hurt. The way he’d felt jumping at five hundred feet over Grenada. The way he’d felt in Mogadishu. The way he felt now. This is what he did.
A hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered left-west. It looked to be about a forty-five-degree turn. Charlie edged closer to the left wall so as to give himself cover. That’s where I’d set the ambush if I was them.
He halted. Brought out the do-rag and Treo, covered his face and head, and fired it up, only to confirm there was no reception down here. That was another bad-news element of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare: It is signals dependent. Block the signal, you defeat the system.
He stowed the PDA. Pressed the transmit button on the radio twice.
Immediately Jose’s voice came back at him: “Boss?”
Charlie hit the transmit switch twice again, telling Jose he was okay. At least the radios were working.
0429. He figured he was about three-quarters to the first villa west of Tariq’s safe house. Thing was, he wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there.
He was missing something here. They had to know he’d find the tunnel. Had to know he’d come after them. Had to know he wasn’t without resources. In-he checked his watch-four and a half minutes the Apaches with all their firepower would be on-site to rip these scumbags new assholes.
0431. Muscles burning, he eased into the curve, moving inch by inch, his NVGs scanning floor, walls, ceiling.
Nothing.
But something deep inside Charlie still made him bring the M4 up. His right thumb eased the safety downward. He was surprised by the loudness of the metallic click as it snapped into the fire position.
Scan and breathe. Eyes open, he kept a sight picture through the NVG-capable Aimpoint.
He moved forward soundlessly, his boots heel-toe, heel-toe on the packed earth, trigger finger indexed, touching the side of the M4’s magazine well.
He paused to control himself. Took a deep breath.
Okay. What was the main thing here?
That’s the key, Charlie thought. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
And then, as he cleared the bend, Charlie saw something thirty feet ahead that could be the main thing.
A teenage kid. Facing Charlie. Propped up against a wooden crate, kind of sitting on his hands. The kid wasn’t wearing a shirt but sported a pair of the baggy pajama bottoms that young Iraqi boys wore before they transitioned to blue jeans.
The left leg of the kid’s pj’s was cut off above the knee, revealing an ugly, raw stump.
One of the main things about this could-be main thing was that the kid wore an American helmet and stared back at Charlie through its NVGs. On the front of the helmet cover, Charlie read the name maupin.
As unfatherly as it might have been, Charlie’s first instinct was to shoot the kid preemptively. Then he thought better of it. But he kept the Aimpoint’s dot on the kid’s bare chest.
He advanced, the kid staring at him.
From ten feet away, Charlie asked in Arabic, “What’s your name, boy?”
“Rachid.”
Charlie nodded. “Where’d you get the helmet, Rachid?”
The kid’s voice was so subdued he might have been on painkillers. “From my father.”
Always ask a question to which you know the answer. Charlie gave it five seconds. “Who’s your father, Rachid?”
“My father is Tariq.”
That was when Charlie realized what the real main thing was. That the real main thing was Charlie. Charlie, who’d put one big fricking dent in AQI’s operations.
“Show me your hands, Rachid.”
Shrugging, the kid brought them out. Each adolescent hand held a single alligator clip attached to a pair of wires. The wires ran under the boy to the crate. Two short pieces of wood dowel separated the tips.
As Charlie watched, the kid squeezed the clips. The dowels tumbled in slo-mo onto the tunnel floor.
I should have shot him, Charlie thought. I should have killed him even though he’s someone’s son, because the fathers here are fricking nuts.
Rachid looked at Charlie with the same sort of blank stare Charlie had seen on khat-eaters in Somalia.
“My father says to tell you Happy Father’s Day.”
In the heartbeat between the time Rachid released the clips and the tunnel disintegrated in a violent orange fireball, Charlie thought he saw the kid smile.