Gnash (33 page)

“After that, they conducted a hasty field interrogation and the courier broke fairly quickly.  He was just the computer programmer who designed the website and sent out the directive to carry out attacks, so he didn’t know the various plots.  But what he did tell us, we weren’t prepared for.  The real power in the region is a group known as the Brotherhood of Niyyat.  Niyyat means ‘intention’ in Farsi and according to the courier, this Brotherhood is thousands of years old and there are five men who are in charge of the group, called Masters, just as the boy claimed.  When the interrogator asked him if the group was affiliated with Al-Qaeda, the courier laughed at him.  Through this guy, we learned that Al-Qaeda was created as some type of front for the Brotherhood, a way to spread their message without ever revealing the true organization’s motives or intentions.  The front was so good though, that it actually ended up creating an entire network of linked organizations and operatives itself.”

“How do we know this courier wasn’t lying?” General Thompson asked.

“We’ve developed certain field-expedient techniques that combine drugs, pain and rewards in order to get information quickly.  A carrot or stick approach, if you will.”

“Hardly legal in any sense,” said the Homeland Security Secretary, who was a former police officer and the Director of the FBI before being appointed to his current position.

“Grow the fuck up Rob.  We’re playing by big boy rules right now.  We’re walking such a narrow tightrope that if we slip up, this nation may collapse.  If I have to torture some no-account fucking terrorist piece of shit in the middle of nowhere, then by God, I’ll do it,” Chip said louder than he meant to. 

He composed himself and continued, “Sir, we’ve got these fuckers.  This is the ancient organization that the Greeks and the Brits couldn’t find and were scared to death of.  This is the actual head of Al-Qaeda, not the public mouthpiece that we took out when we killed bin Laden.  These are the guys that planned and directed the attacks against the world’s leadership, including the assassination of President Gosebeck.  This group is responsible for unleashing the zombie plague.  Hell, you could even say that they’re ultimately responsible for firing that nuke since Gutmont would have still have been the Prime Minister if they hadn’t ordered the killings at the G-8 Summit.  Now is the time to rid the world of this menace once and for all.”

Over the intercom, the chief pilot interrupted the meeting.  “Mr. President, we are preparing for our final decent into Denver.  We’re about eight minutes out.  Please ensure you are secured for landing.”

The president looked at each man around the table and said, “Gentlemen, this is the best lead we’ve been given.  Our intelligence points to this organization as the orchestrators of this attack and possibly as agitators throughout written history.

“Chip, I want this organization taken out.  I don’t want a cruise missile blasting the complex.  We’ve let too many terrorists escape over the years because we thought we got them with a missile.  I want men on the ground.  I want proof that it’s destroyed.  And I want it to happen as soon as possible.” 

“Yes sir.  We’ll send our team in right away.”

SECOND INTERLUDE

17 May, 0420 hrs local

Karakoram Mountain Range

Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

“Kestrel, this is Skyscraper.  In position.”

“Roger Skyscraper.  Is Reaper on station?”

A brief burst of static from the earpiece evolved into, “…ger, Reaper is on station, loaded for bear.”

“Reaper, there’s interference on the line.  Fix it before we go hot,” Kestrel muttered into his headset.

His team had studied the 3D map of the cave complex that the nano drone drew the when they piloted it inside for an entire day.  The imperative from the Director to hit this complex as today didn’t allow for his SOG team’s normal prep before missions. 

Before he joined the Company, he’d been an Active Duty operator.  His DEVGRU team spent almost five weeks in isolation preparing for Neptune Spear in Abbottabad
[23]
.  They conducted planning sessions, map exercises, sand table rehearsals, developed infil and exfil plans, rehearsed clearing the house’s mock-up in the shoot house and practiced CQB
[24]
.  It was non-stop training for that one fateful night.   

This mission, however, was literally thrown together last minute, so they’d have to do it live.  The team consisted of its normal compliment of operators and they had the MQ-1 Predator drone’s bigger, meaner brother, the MQ-9 Reaper for aerial support, but that was about it.  Kestrel wasn’t sure if that was due to the circumstances back in the States or for deniability purposes.  Maybe a little of both, he decided.  He was extremely confident in the team’s abilities, but he would have liked some more support, especially for the security element responsible to take out the squirters, which he had to carve out of his team. 

That meant the assault element was down by three shooters and the drone’s model of the complex had indicated a minimum of twenty rooms or side chambers and there was no telling how many more there were deeper into the complex.  Intel said they’d been here for thousands of years, that was a long time to dig out new rooms.  They’d seen forty-three people on the drone’s camera, of those seventeen were men.  

Yet another unknown was the children.  They hadn’t seen any children like you normally saw in these types of multi-family complexes.  Sure, they’d seen several young boys, but those were probably sex slaves like the kid they found who led them here.  Were there a bunch of children further back in the cave complex?  Were there more people, including combatants, living inside that hadn’t been present during the recon and would pose a problem later on?  Kestrel just didn’t know and it bothered him. 

The team’s infil and exfil plan was by foot to a point about five miles from the target, as the crow flies, but when they were humping up and down the mountains and through the valleys it ended up being more like eleven total miles.  All that climbing and descending carrying a sixty pound pack full of water and ammo had made his knees, quads and lower back scream in protest, but he’d been in similar situations before during Green Team
[25]
so he would get over it.

He scratched idly at his beard while he lay prone in the team’s assault position.  There was too much gray in it for his liking.  Given his age and the reconstructive surgery to both his ACL and MCL in his right knee last year, the Company would probably end up pulling him from the field within five years.  He didn’t know what he’d do in the rear and he certainly knew he wouldn’t adapt to a desk job.  Maybe he could train the next generation of SOG operators or consult for some nation state that would pay him in cigarettes and pussy.

His personal life was a disaster.  He’d been married twice, once while he was in the Navy and once right after he joined the Agency.  Both had ended badly, but he hadn’t given enough of a shit to appear in court, so each time he’d been wiped clean.  He chain smoked to ease his nerves and drank more whiskey than most would believe humanly possible.  He could barely stomach the everyday civilian population that he protected, so he tended to minimize his contact with them and on his days off he usually spent a few hours rolling on the mats with other off-duty operators and then the remainder of the day at the range burning through Uncle Sam’s ammunition. 

His second wife had called him an egomaniac and the term “asshole” was a daily occurrence.  One of the Company’s shrinks had diagnosed him with Antisocial Personality Disorder.  Great, I’m a sociopath, tell me something I don’t know Doc, he’d told the psychologist after his prognosis.  But the man had only chuckled and stamped “Cleared for Covert Operations” across his file.  Apparently, not caring about how others feel, having a propensity for violence and then being able to compartmentalize it all away is what the Company desires in their field agents.

He went through the mission checklist one more time in his head.  As second in command of the team, he had a lot of tasks to keep track of.  The mission was a clean sweep so all but the five men who lived beyond the tapestries in the final chamber would be dispatched.  It was a highly unusual order, but they were directed to leave no one alive, even the women and kids, if they found any.  Not a single witness was allowed to escape and the five prisoners would be transported to a Company cell.  They’d probably never see the light of day again, if they survived the interrogations.  He didn’t want to think about his next Agency-mandated therapy session when he’d have to unload the memories of shooting kids from wherever his brain packed things away while he was on a mission.

After they’d neutralized the enemy, they were to collect all the intel they could carry, then permanently alter the geography of this mountain.  The plan was to blow the place from the inside and then the MQ-9 would fire a couple rounds from above to finish the job.  The terrorist networks that the Brotherhood controlled would never know what happened except that the Americans had used a cruise missile to bomb the complex and no one survived.  Happened all the time here in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we’d refuse to even acknowledge that it was us who launched the missile.

Wraith reached across and tapped Kestrel twice on his calf.  That was the signal.  “Let’s get everybody up and moving,” the team’s commander told him.  “And camera’s on this time dammit.  Everybody back at the big house wants to see the show.”

“Assault element, we’re moving.  Cams on,” Kestrel whispered into his mike and groaned internally as he turned on his helmet camera.  All the bigwigs back in D.C., shit!
Denver
, he corrected himself, wanted to see the action, but very few people were willing to be the cameraman.  “Skyscraper, you’re a go.  Nothing in, nothing out.”

“Roger, Skyscraper acknowledges,” the leader of the three-man overwatch and sniper element replied.

“Coach, the game has started,” Wraith broadcast to his superiors monitoring from thousands of miles away in the interim capital of Denver, Colorado.

The eleven men moved silently towards the mouth of the cave complex.  They’d each conducted similar insertions hundreds of times over their careers with the military and the various other three-letter organizations that ultimately fed them into the CIA’s Special Activities Division.  As they trotted across the open ground in a half crouch, each man was in the zone, totally locked on to the objective.

There had been studies conducted over the years about the operators’ physical reactions to combat.  The normally stressed-out, hypertension-prone, non-conforming individual that made up the teams entered into an almost Zen-like state of calm.  Their breathing became slower, their pupils dilated, even their heart rate dropped and evened out.  The operators’ bodies became perfectly efficient machines which fed on adrenaline during a mission.  The Company’s shrink had told Kestrel that was yet another reason why his personal life was so fucked up: he was literally addicted to adrenaline and craved the rush that it gave him.  In normal, everyday life, hardcore adrenaline spikes were hard to come by, so he created all this drama around himself that was simply too much for the women who’d passed in and out of his life.

Kestrel rotated the switch for the thermal sights on his PNVGs
[26]
and instantly everything change from the normal green night vision to varying degrees of reds, whites, yellows and blue.  Each of his teammates wore a large square of thermal IR tape on their helmet, back, front and on each arm in order to avoid fratricide.  The man just slightly in front of him was a blazing white heat source except for the dark blue, almost black of the tape, which he’d apparently gotten artistic with since the dark blue spot was in the shape of a fist giving him the finger. 

Further ahead, he saw two men raise their suppressed carbines and fire several times into the mouth of the cave.  An intense burst of heat registered from the end of their weapons with each trigger squeeze.  By the time he arrived, the puddles of blood from the three exterior guards were already cooling in his thermals.  He imagined all the politicians in
Denver
creaming in their pants at the sight of the dead terrorists.  They’d get their fill tonight and more since he’d be sure to get a close up of any children he was forced to shoot.  U.S. foreign policy carried out, up close and to the extreme.

He scanned the area.  Nothing appeared to be different or out of place from when they’d sent in the drone two days ago.  The team’s demo expert moved up to the disguised entrance and switched his PNVGs from thermal to night vision while others took up positions on either side of the door.  He ran his hand around the seam in the rock until he felt the hidden latch that they’d seen the guards trigger on the video feed from the drone.  The stone door opened outward on well-oiled and well-concealed hinges and four men immediately entered the tunnel, and began firing at targets who were asleep on the couches in the entryway. 

Kestrel breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t have to blow the hatch so they still had the element of surprise on their side.  He stepped through the entryway and saw six KIAs, women mostly, sprawled across lavish cushions.  None of them had even woken up.  Systematically, the team worked its way down the long hallway, entering each room while others pulled security.  Everyone was earning their paychecks this night but they wouldn’t allow themselves think of the price until they were done.

***

Kestrel and Wraith reached the end of the complex that they’d seen from the drone’s video.  They knew from their interrogation the other day that behind the tapestry hanging on the wall were the sleeping chambers and meeting rooms of the men in charge of the Brotherhood.  Capturing these men was the final objective.  If they didn’t get them, then everyone who’d died here tonight would have been for nothing.

It was clear that the courier had only been in the meeting room, so he was useless for other information about what further tunnels and rooms were beyond that.  Once they were satisfied that there was only one passageway behind the large tapestry, Wraith signaled for the men to stack up.