State of Honour (32 page)

The SEAL operators arrived in unmarked helicopters just over fifteen minutes later. They were dressed in civilian clothes: jeans and windbreakers. Sixteen men whose ages ranged from about thirty to forty, with regular haircuts and facial hair in order to disguise the fact that they were military personnel.

As a medic attended to Lester the others checked the area methodically. One forced open the Ford’s trunk and hauled out the bodies of the two American pilots whom Proctor had murdered. Tom grabbed Lester’s hand just as the medic gave him a shot of morphine. He watched his friend blink erratically.

“You give people hope, Tom. You remember me saying that?” he said, his voice tremulous.

“I do, old friend,” Tom replied.

“And that’s a gift. Don’t ever change.”

As Lester was lifted onto a stretcher and carried to one of the helicopters’ cabins, Tom’s mind was reeling. But then he swore under his breath, “The major!”

Leaving her at the roadside had been a mistake, that and not interrogating her fully. He told himself that he’d been anxious to get back to the airfield, to be the one to save the secretary. At the very least, he should’ve brought her along, sucked up his contempt and thought straight. But if she was still there, he might be able to convince her to redeem herself.

And me in the process, he thought.

He watched the guy he took for the SEALs’ leader, a tall, sinewy man with three-day-old stubble, as he walked towards him.

“Dude, did you get hit by a truck or what?” he asked.

Tom said that it’d been a rough few days. The SEAL said he was a platoon chief and that his name was Nathan. He told Tom that his men were part of SEAL Team 7, with worldwide deployment duties, but it looked as if their shitty flight across the English Channel had been a waste of time.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Nathan shook his head and spat on the ground.

“Listen to me,” Tom said. “There’s a chance we can find out where Lyric is being taken. The exact location.”

Nathan thought for a moment. “My orders were to take Lyric to England.”

“So think outta the box.”

Nathan stared hard at Tom. “Over my pay grade, dude.”

Frustrated, Tom called Birch once more. He asked him if he could follow the lead. Birch was reluctant, but said he’d make some calls.

After pacing around and doing his best to persuade Nathan that the delay was necessary, a matter of life and death in fact, Tom got a call from Birch. He told Tom that he should do what he could, but that a Navy commander was going to call the SEAL platoon chief and that it was their shout.

“And, Tom,” he said. “This isn’t official, but I think you should know. The head of the ISI, Brigadier Hasni, has been assassinated in Islamabad.”

“Hasni! Who killed him?”

“That’s classified.”

“It could be important, sir. I might be able to spook the major with that kind of info.”

Birch hesitated. “It’s still one step up from a rumour, but the word is it was the Saudis.”

That makes no sense, Tom thought, disconnecting.

Five minutes later, after Nathan had gotten the go-ahead from his commander, he and Tom, together with four operatives, flew in a red helicopter to the narrow road where Major Durrani had been left with a round in her foot. After the helicopter had landed in an adjacent field, Tom and Nathan exited first and ran across the grass to a two-metre-high bank, speckled with wild flowers, which abutted the verge on the other side. Tom had spotted Major Durrani still lying on her back about ten seconds before landing.

Major Durrani’s face was covered in a sheen of sweat. Despite the morphine that Tom Dupree had given to her just over an hour before, she was struggling to remain conscious. She’d felt ants start to crawl over her legs already and crows had perched on a nearby branch of an overhanging oak tree, squawking portentously. She guessed the helicopter contained French Special Forces and thought seriously about taking the razor blade she had concealed under her hair and ending it before they reached her.

But she had an extended family – impoverished farmers who lived in Punjab Province – who relied on her. She’d excelled at the charity-run school she’d attended from the age of eight, and had won a scholarship to Gurjat University. Ever since she’d joined the civil service, five years before being recruited by the ISI, she’d sent money home. Her father was ill. A rare form of colon cancer. He needed specialist treatment, which accounted for more than half her monthly salary. Picturing her mother cooling his emaciated face with a damp cloth, she decided to think of a story to tell the French.

She heard a rustling sound behind her, knowing it came from the movement of humans rather than rodents. Bracing herself, she turned her head and saw two men atop the bank. She recognized one of them instantly. It was Tom Dupree. Part of her felt relieved; the other part desperate.

Tom knelt beside the major’s head. He noticed that her eyes were turning a muted yellow, her skin pallid. Nathan stood above them, scanning the country road for any sign of a vehicle or pedestrian. The other four SEALs had stayed behind the hedge, so as not to draw too much attention.

“Where in Yemen?” he asked.

She made a dismissive
hiss
between her teeth. “Only Proctor knows that.”

“Brigadier Hasni is dead. Murdered by the Saudis. Betrayed.”

She looked strangely uninterested. She winced and wiped the sweat from her cheeks.

“So the old tyrant is dead. I never did like him. As for the Saudis, you’ve been courting them for years, even though you know they produce more jihadists than anywhere else.”

Nathan tapped Tom on the shoulder and pointed a calloused finger down the road. An ancient Renault was heading towards them. A few seconds later, it slowed to a stop as it reached parallel, exhaust fumes spewing over the rusted paintwork. A man in blue overalls poked his large head out of the wound-down window, his jowly face a mass of spider veins.

“Ce qui se passe ici?”
What’s happening here?

Staying put, Tom said,
“
Si vous voulez frapper le bar ce soir, continuer à avancer.
”
If you want to hit the bar tonight, keep moving.

“Mademoiselle?”
he said, staring at the major.

She made a pushing movement with her hand. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Reluctantly and swearing under his breath, he drove off.

“Whatever you gotta say, say it quick,” Nathan said.

“Tell me where they’re taking her in Yemen and I will vouch for you. Otherwise it’ll be life in a cage, or worse,” Tom said.

He saw her mind working, her eyelids blinking. Then she grinned.

“No, Tom. You’ll get me a presidential pardon and you’ll do it now. That and safe passage for my family to the US.”

The helicopters had landed back in England on a disused runway illuminated by an infrared strobe at RAF Alconbury in Cambridgeshire, a non-flying facility under the control of the 423rd Air Base Group of the US Air Force in Europe. Lester was stretchered off and taken to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery. Tom had received stitches to his forehead and been told that the wound would heal with time, although, if he didn’t want a Frankenstein-like scar in the interim, he might want to opt for plastic surgery.

He sat in a small office now, surrounded by dull-grey file cabinets and framed photos of a young US Air Force officer’s family. He figured it was the end of the line. Birch was going to call him on a secure satphone that lay on the chipped wooden desk in front of him. He was convinced the head of the DS would order him to report back to DC, despite the fact that Major Durrani had pinpointed a location. Whether it was where the secretary had been taken, or a lie to buy her time, was something that would become clear soon enough. But she’d gotten her presidential pardon, although it was conditional upon her being accurate. She’d also agreed to undergo a polygraph, and be subjected to weeks of non-violent questioning about everything she knew. As a result, there was a general consensus that she was telling the truth. But whichever way he looked at it, Tom believed he’d failed personally in his mission. He figured the chances of the secretary being rescued were now close to zero.

When the phone rang, he left it a full ten seconds before answering it.

“You got friends in high places, Tom?” Birch asked.

“Not that I know, sir,” Tom said, wondering vaguely if his father had something to do with what Birch was going to say.

“You’ll accompany the SEALs to Yemen. But strictly as an observer. The platoon chief is in command. You so much as question his judgment, and he’s got orders to cut you loose. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t think that your illegal attempts to go it alone have endeared you to anyone. They haven’t. But given what you told me about her physical appearance, you’re deemed the only person capable of a positive ID. I suppose I should say good luck. But I’ll be honest with you, I was dead against it.”

Tom found it difficult to believe that the US authorities were letting him go along. But what Birch had said was true. If she was still alive, the White House sure as hell couldn’t afford the embarrassment of rescuing the wrong woman, and only he and Lester had seen the result of Proctor’s brutal handiwork. He guessed that that paranoia had been exacerbated by what he had told Birch about Major Durrani’s disguise. Anything was possible now, including another monumental screw-up of the facial-recognition variety.

Ten minutes later, Tom and the operators were sitting on plastic chairs in a blacked-out chow hall, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and blue tiles. A flat-screen monitor had been rigged up behind Nathan, showing the first slide of a hastily prepared PowerPoint presentation, a laptop perched on a stool by his side. The subject-matter of the meeting wasn’t so much classified as completely off the radar to all but a few people in the US intelligence community. As a result, a section of trucked-in Redcaps had been ordered to surround the building armed with SA80 A2 assault rifles. It wasn’t exactly a secured conference room, so US Secretary of State Linda Carlyle had been given the upbeat pro-word, Phoenix, and all the operators had been asked not to use anything else. Tom had already come to the conclusion that they were the type of guys who didn’t need to be ordered around or told twice.

“I’ll do a Q&A at the end of the briefing,” Nathan said. “The most recent photographs we have of the rescue site are these.” He tapped a key on the laptop and the first satellite-generated image came up on the screen behind him. “You can gather round for the drone feeds later. Now the detail …”

The distance to western Yemen was almost three and a half thousand miles. A five-man reconnaissance and sniper SEAL team had been deployed there already. The country was ravaged by internal conflict, chiefly between the north-western Shia tribesmen and the al-Qaeda backed Sunnis in the south. At the behest of the State Department’s counterterrorism unit, the SEALs had been sent there to monitor the situation. If what Major Durrani had said was correct, the secretary was being held at a small hamlet in southwest Yemen on the Red Sea coast.

Opposite Yemen, a mere eighteen miles away across the Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, was the small African state of the Republic of Djibouti. An Islamic, US friendly country sandwiched between Eritrea and Somalia on the Horn of Africa, it had been used as a so-called black site in the Global War on Terror, housing secret prisons used by the CIA for the interrogation of jihadists. It regularly allowed US forces to strike at al-Qaeda sympathisers in Somalia and Yemen. Since the insurgencies in Mali and Algeria, the base had been deemed even more important and strategically placed.

An RAF Hercules would transport Tom and the operators to Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion outpost, which occupied an area bordering the Djibouti-Ambouli International. Lemonnier was utilized as a base for the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, the only US base on the continent. From there they’d cross to Yemen by sea. They’d meet up with the team inside Yemen, who were heading towards the rendezvous point, and the combined force of twenty-one SEALs would assault the hamlet, hoping to free the secretary in the process. The assault would be carried out on foot, with, if necessary, aerial back-up from armed Reaper drones. The Yemeni president was a friend of the US, but given the secrecy needed to secure any chance of a successful outcome, together with the possibility that innocent Yemenis might be killed in a firefight, it had been decided by the NSC that he wouldn’t be informed of the mission until after it had concluded.

Nathan wound up by saying that there’d be a quarter-moon, which mean that there’d be enough ambient light to use their night vision effectively, but also meant that they could stay relatively hidden. Tom knew he was referring to their goggles, because they all had thermal or infrared scopes, which worked perfectly in total darkness. While he worked primarily in the open during the day, the SEALs adopted feline tactics. They attacked at night, utilizing surprise and stealth. The Delta assaulters back in Pakistan had had no option but to go in the way they had, due to the occupation of the land around the fort by the Shia refugees. But the majority of Special Forces’ ops were the opposite.

As he stepped out into the overcast daylight once the briefing had ended, he saw an Air Force officer walking towards him. She was in her late thirties and wore tortoiseshell-framed eyeglasses. Her blonde hair was up in a neat bun at the nape, although her uniform was struggling to contain her Munroesque curves. After confirming his identity, she informed him that a local hospital administrator had rung to say that Lester’s condition was described as comfortable and that he had a good chance of pulling through.

Despite the secretary’s circumstances, Tom could barely conceal his relief.

To Tom, the payload compartment of the C-130 Hercules, or the Herky Bird, as the military had nicknamed it, looked even more basic than the Chinook he’d flown in to the Upper Kurram Valley. With its exposed-aluminium conduits, metal plate boxes and lengths of clad wiring, the cabin resembled a basement generator room. But it’d been relatively stable, even at eight thousand metres, and had decent AC. While he’d been unable to close his eyes for the duration, the operators had taken sleeping pills and had spread out on the deck close to where their gear was strapped down, and had fallen unconscious from barely after the plane’s chassis had retracted.

He wondered if he’d been wrong to try to do things by himself. Perhaps the US intelligence community would have had her safe by now if he hadn’t intervened. But if they’d had a better source of intel, he figured he’d be facing a federal indictment, or even occupying a cell at a black site, instead of flying towards the African continent with a bunch of the Navy’s finest.

Resting against the back of the red canvas seat now, he watched a brawny crew chief in a massive aviation helmet hold up two fingers to the SEAL sitting closest to him. Due to the loud whine from the engines, the arrival time was passed down the line of operators in the same fashion. Then they grasped the alloy bar either side of their thighs, so that they wouldn’t injure themselves before the mission if the plane hit the runway like a lineman taking out a wide receiver. Tom did likewise, bracing himself for the landing.

The Hercules landed heavily, as it always did, the screech and roar of the four turboprop engines in reverse thrust making it sound as if the fuselage were imploding. After the plane had taxied on the runway, they all moved to the aft cabin.

The operator next to Tom was a short guy, perhaps five-six, with wavy hair that fell over his ears, and a pale-pink scar on his jaw-line. He held a weapon that Tom didn’t recognize. It was less than a metre in length and looked like a mini-cannon, with a laser rangefinder on top. Unlike the other small-arms weapons the men had, which were camouflaged in a tan-desert pattern, the stocky weapon was jet-black.

“That heavy?” Tom asked.

“Nope.”

Tom sighed. “So what does it weigh?”

The operator looked over at Nathan, who nodded to him.

“6.35 kilos. It’s called the XM25 CDTE System. That’s Counter Defilade Target Engagement. An air burst grenade launcher. Fires 25mm shells with microchips programmed to detonate mid-air at a specific range. Over five-hundred metres if fired straight from the shoulder. Designed to take out targets hiding behind impenetrable obstacles like reinforced walls. Heckler and Koch smart tech.”

“Effective?” Tom asked.

“We call it the Punisher. Real motherfucker.”

As the cargo door swung up and the heavy rear ramp lowered to the tarmac, Tom shivered. The daytime temperature had plummeted to something like November in New York.

Camp Lemonnier was situated on the southernmost end of Djibouti airport, an outcrop of volcanic rock at the base of the Red Sea. The five-hundred-acre site was home to three thousand US military personnel and Department of Defense contractors, who occupied lines of adapted shipping containers known as Containerized Living Units, or “cans”. As they disembarked Tom saw them illuminated beneath the floodlights a hundred metres or so ahead. To the left, a military truck was parked on a nearby gravel road in front of “Thunder Dome” – the massive hangar-shaped structure used as a basketball pit – a group of five US Marines dressed in desert camouflage stood around it. The hum of generators filled the cold air, and Tom felt suddenly incongruous.

Nathan came up to his shoulder. “The rest of our gear,” he said, nodding towards the vehicle.

“What’s the up-to-date intel?”

“Nothing’s changed.”

“How long?” Tom asked.

“A helo will be flying us out in thirty minutes. We’ll be at the Y at zero two ten,” Nathan answered, referring to the point from where they’d proceed on foot to the hamlet. “There’ll be an interpreter in Yemen. Stick with him.”

“You think I’m a liability?” Tom asked, a little rattled.

“I respect what you do. But this is a military op,” Nathan said. “Nothing personal, dude.”

He walked off towards the truck, took his hands out of his cargo pockets and gestured to the Marines to unload the gear.

He’s right, Tom thought. It’d struck him that although he was the head of her protective detail, he’d been as much use as an interpreter in preventing her kidnapping in the first place. Now he’d be a bystander again, same as at the Shia fort in the Pakistan Tribal Areas. But, in truth, he was fortunate to be even that.