Hunt the Wolf (4 page)

Then a moment of silence, punctuated by a woman’s scream from the apartment house.

Crocker whispered urgently into his headset:
“Now!”

They rose up as one and deployed as planned. Davis and Mancini approached the front. Ritchie ran left along the side street. Crocker and Akil crossed to cover the right of the building and the back.

The three-story apartment looked like a layer cake that had collapsed on one side—the left front. The charred wreckage of the van was barely visible past what had been the roof. The right side, particularly the rear of the structure, was more or less intact. Which meant survivors. Stunned, no doubt.

Crocker heard someone screaming in Arabic as he crossed the street. Dust and smoke rolling out in thick waves.

He motioned to Akil to circle around back, while he stopped at a side door that had shifted so that the top leaned forward. One kick from his boot smashed it in.

Angry flames shot out. He jumped back.

That’s when he heard a peal of automatic-weapon fire from his right, reverberating off the wall.

Akil’s voice in his earbud: “Shooter back of Z Central. Second floor.”

The firing immediately picked up. Lead splattered and ricocheted off the concrete walls.

“Manny, Def, what have you got?”

“Rubble, dust, and smoke. Can’t see shit.”

“Manny, you cover. Def, help Romeo in back.”

“Roger,” Ritchie replied.

Crocker pried the side door open and, using a plastic garbage can lid to shield himself from the flames, entered. Immediately felt the heat.

The first-floor store appeared to sell cleaning supplies—mops, brooms, floor polishers, wax. A brilliant orange-blue against the opposite wall was spreading, consuming god knows what. More flames to his immediate left.

He hung a sharp right and was crossing to the stairway in the corner when something exploded and knocked him off his feet.

Fuck.

As he got his boots under him, thick black smoke twisted around his head, crawled down his throat. Smelled like burning rubber. Worse.

Hearing footsteps, he got into a crouch and readied his weapon.

A shadow fell across the second-floor landing, then disappeared. Crocker was about to squeeze the trigger when he spotted a pair of skinny bare legs emerging from the gray smoke and saw that they belonged to a boy in underpants carrying a red plastic truck.

Seeing the American soldier, the little boy froze halfway down and looked back at two women in dark brown burkas. Faces obscured in shadows and cloth. Was one of them the boy’s mother? The taller of the two cradled something wrapped in a blanket.

Crocker, assuming it was a baby, held a finger to his lips and waved them down. Whispered: “Come on. Come on.”

All three descended quickly and passed Crocker without uttering a word.

Then the whoosh of a rocket and an explosion out back.

Crocker, into his microphone: “What the fuck was that?”

“RPG fired from the back window. A panic shot. Landed near the tracks.”

He turned back to catch a glimpse of the taller woman in the doorway. Caught the corner of her left eye in the shadows. Onyx black, defiant. Crocker didn’t have time to consider what it meant. AK-47 ready, he hurried up the concrete steps two at a time.

The second floor was completely dark. Desk and chairs overturned. A blackboard swaying from one hook. Papers scattered everywhere.

Sweat rolled down his legs into his boots. Footsteps moved frantically overhead.

They know they’re trapped.

He had a choice. Retreat outside and wait for the smoke and flames to force the terrorists out, or push forward.

But how long would it be before Pakistani security forces showed up? Fifteen minutes? Twenty at the most? This op was considered so sensitive that the Pakistanis hadn’t been informed ahead of time. Which meant that he and his men had to vanish before they arrived.

As Crocker considered, the third-floor door opened and a man quickly descended three steps holding an AK-47 like his. Heavyset, hairy legs. A big stomach that protruded from the bottom of a white T-shirt.

Crocker didn’t stick around to glimpse his face. Instead, he crouched behind the stairs and waited. Remembering to breathe deeply; heart bouncing in his chest.

When he saw two sets of bare legs near the bottom, he sprung out and, squeezing off a long salvo, cut down both men just below their knees.

Screams of agony. Both of them firing wildly as their femurs gave way and they stumbled down the last five steps. One with a long beard landed on his face. Orange-red blood sprayed out and splattered the wall.

As per team SOP, Crocker finished them both off with bullets directed at their heads.

Akil radioed to say he was ready to toss a couple of fragmentation grenades through the back window. Two explosions lifted Crocker off his feet, like riding a bucking bronco.

What remained was mainly mop-up after that. Crocker called Mancini and Ritchie.

“Get in here fast! Help me search the place and ID the victims.”

“Did we get AZ?”

“I think so.”

Six Arabic-looking men lay dead. Five had heavy beards.

One had tried to jump out the back window. Another two appeared to have taken their own lives. The last lay in a pool of blood by the third-floor window, bleeding from the neck.

Crocker instructed Mancini to photograph the men’s faces. He and the other three grabbed what looked important—a couple of laptops, identification papers, wallets, a cell phone, some ledgers—and out they all went.

Back in the SUV. Cranking their way over the Napier Mole Bridge just as the Pak Capital City Police were starting to close it down.

From the driver’s seat Akil said, “That was close.”

“Which one of them was Zaman?”

Crocker: “My money says it was one of those ugly dudes at the bottom of the stairs.”

Akil: “Who’s taking bets?”

Crocker craned his neck to study the digital images on Mancini’s camera. They all agreed that with the black beards, it was hard to tell.

But Crocker had a nagging feeling.

In the backseat, Davis was slicing open Ritchie’s pants to expose his wounded leg.

“What happened?”

“Ripped a nasty gash on a piece of metal.”

“You up-to-date on your tetanus?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

Nothing life-threatening. But it had to be attended to soon.

Crocker said to Akil, “Pull over for a second so I can get back there and clean it.”

He and Davis traded positions, then Crocker extracted gauze and Bacitracin from his emergency medical kit.

They were already halfway to the safe house in Karsaz, near the golf course. There they would find a surgeon waiting. Warm showers, beer, sandwiches, fresh clothes.

Crocker, from the backseat, said, “Brothers…well done.”

T
he muscles
in Crocker’s arms and legs shook as he sat on the back patio nursing a cold Corona. Nothing unusual about that. It always took his body several hours to wind down from the adrenaline rush of an op.

His friends joked that the SEAL team leader’s favorite leisure-time activity was kicking back in his rec room with a glass of red wine or a beer and watching reruns of
Everybody Loves Raymond
on TV.
I’d kind of like to do that now,
he thought. Never mind the ribbing he’d have to take from his men.

Besides, something nagged at him. Through the sliding glass door he saw a well-scrubbed officer from the U.S. embassy sorting through stuff they had recovered from the terrorist safe house.

In front of him, the morning sun had burned through much of the haze. Past a row of eucalyptus trees he saw well-dressed golfers walking together down a yellow-green fairway. Like watching a dream. Or a video feed from some faraway place.

What struck him was the deliberation with which the golfers went about lining up and measuring their shots. Kneeling, frowning, studying their scorecards, consulting with their caddies.

Crocker pegged the men as business executives. Successful enough to belong to the exclusive club. Probably with fat bank accounts, diversified stock portfolios, vacation homes.

As they walked together, he wondered what they were talking about. Interest rates? The size of their stock portfolios? The trading price of oil?

Whatever it was probably wouldn’t interest him. Crocker preferred to keep his needs to a minimum and direct his energy toward bigger challenges.

Wiping the perspiration off the neck of the Corona, he imagined his father limping up to the kitchen table of their house in Methuen, Massachusetts.

His dad had admired men who played “in the big arena,” made personal sacrifices for their country or beliefs, and didn’t give in to fear. He’d consumed biographies of George Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, Simón Bolívar, Francis Marion, Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander the Great, and men like them.

Tom Crocker understood that his destiny had been cast at that little oak table as he listened to his father talk about leaders, his gray eyes shining, his scratchy voice rising in his throat.

Now the patio door slid open and Mancini stuck his thick head out. “We need you, boss.”

Crocker cracked his neck and straightened his back. Ran his hand over the scar over his left eye that he’d gotten falling off a motorcycle as a kid. “What’s up?”

“Inventory.”

Inside, leaning on the dining room table, Officer Williams was checking off a list of the recovered items that he had written on a yellow legal pad. Crocker watched as he slipped on white cotton gloves, carefully wrapped each item in plastic, and packed it in a metal box. He saw the two battered-looking laptops, several notebooks covered in Arabic writing, a half dozen videos, including one that looked like an Arabic version of
Pulp Fiction,
one of Crocker’s favorite movies.

“I wonder what the analysts at the CIA will make of that,” he said, referring to the video.

Williams didn’t answer.

Crocker was reaching out to turn over a charred book that still lay on the table when Williams stopped him with a gloved hand. “We’d rather you didn’t touch anything.”

We? Who are we?

“Sure thing. But I doubt you’re going to find any usable fingerprints on something that’s been burned to shit.”

Williams stopped. “Is this everything?”

Crocker found his backpack among a pile of gear in the corner. From inside he removed a handful of papers that he’d grabbed off a desk on the second floor of AZ’s safe house. He paused to study one of them—the remains of an invoice with the address burned off. He made out an unusual name.

“The name Syrena mean anything to you?”

Williams: “No, sir.”

Mancini perked up: “Serena, like the tennis player?”

“No, Syrena with a
y
.”

Past his shoulder, in the corner of the sunken living room decorated in a cool pale green, Davis and Akil sat huddled in front of a big-screen TV that was broadcasting a story on BBC World News. Their story. An excited British voice over the
whop-whop-whop
of helicopter blades: “Appears to be a terrorist-type bombing, though details are sketchy. Through the smoke we’re seeing a seriously damaged three-story building near the port. Preliminary reports from the Ministry of Interior say that a large explosive device was hidden in a van. Has all the earmarks of the Taliban extremists….”

Taliban extremists. Isn’t that rich?

Down the hall, past the steamy bathroom he’d showered in, Crocker stopped at the beige door at the end and knocked.

“Come in,” came a no-nonsense woman’s voice.

He turned the knob and saw the nurse leaning over the nightstand, placing a stopper in a vial. The thin white fabric stretched to the contour of her nicely shaped behind.

God, what I’d like to do to that.

He stopped. Pushed what he knew was a dangerous urge aside, and focused on Ritchie sitting up on the bed with his right leg stretched out.

The East Indian doctor attending him glanced up at Crocker with a mischievous look in his eyes. He seemed to relish the idea of mixing with shadowy men like them. Probably couldn’t wait to get home to tell his wife.

Crocker said: “Doc, did you tell Ritchie that the next time he shaves his legs he needs to stand still?”

The doctor cracked up. “I told. Oh…I told him that. Yes.”

Ritchie shot him the finger.

“You guys with Delta?” the nurse asked.

“You trying to insult us?” Ritchie asked back.

“Why?”

“D boys look like soldiers,” Ritchie explained. “Clean cut. Sticks up their asses. Do everything by the book. SEALs are cooler, more relaxed, until we swing into action. Then watch out.”

Her eyes shifted from Ritchie’s shaggy hair to the biceps bulging out of Crocker’s shirt. Rested on the left one, with the tattoo of a skull smoking a cigarette.

“So you’re SEALs.”

“That’s right.”

Ten years and one failed marriage earlier, he would have taken the bait. Invited her out for a couple of beers. He imagined she was the kind of woman who posted overseas in search of adventure. Tom Crocker had it running through his blood. But he was too happily married now to invite complications. Had learned to keep his life clean and compartmentalized. Love, marriage, family, sex in one box. Work, danger, mental and physical challenges in another.

The big SEAL team leader turned to Ritchie with a look that cut right through him.

“We’re going up north without you, Rich,” Crocker said. “Give your leg a chance to heal. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

“Hell, I can still outclimb you guys.”

“Not on one leg, you can’t.”

“You want to bet?”

“I’ll bring back a yeti if we find one.”

“Or one of those cute German climbers.”

“Stay out of trouble.”

“I’ll do the best I can.” Then, glancing at the doctor’s light-haired assistant, “But no guarantees.”

“If he gives you any shit, Doc, you’ve got my permission to cut his balls off.”

The shoulders under the doctor’s white coat shook hard. He covered his mouth with a little pink palm and laughed. “I’ll remember that,” he said. “Oh, my. I don’t think it will be necessary. But I’ll remember it for sure.”

That’s when Akil burst through the door looking worried. “Boss, you’d better come see this.”

Crocker stopped him in the hall and whispered, “What?”

“They recovered a little girl’s body from the apartment. She was crushed to death.”

Each of the four men wrestled with the news during the two-hour Pakistan International Airlines flight to Islamabad. It was easy to say, as Crocker had, that the girl was an unfortunate and probably unavoidable casualty of war, and one they had tried very hard to prevent.

But that didn’t stop each man from feeling regret. Mancini and Crocker both had wives and children. Davis’s wife was almost eight months pregnant with their first.

Crocker had a daughter. Plus, he was the one who had made the decision to deploy the VBIED that partially destroyed the building and probably killed the girl.

How old was she?

It didn’t matter. Nor did it help that there were a dozen or so Pakistani and Arabic-looking girls on the flight. Seeing them, he couldn’t help trying to imagine her.

What did she look like? What was her name? Was she related to Zaman? Who was her mother? Would she have made a good wife and mother?

Stop it! This is useless. Stop!

Tom Crocker sat up in his seat and reminded himself that he was fighting a war to preserve the freedom of people to choose the kind of life they wanted to live. It was a simple equation.

Yes, there were degrees of freedom and innumerable other factors and influences. But he held tight to a basic proposition. Namely, that Islamic terrorists like Zaman wanted to impose a highly restrictive and repressive set of religious laws on people all over the world, and they were hell-bent on making it come true. He, as an agent of the United States, was fighting to preserve and extend personal freedom at home and abroad.

Crocker said a silent prayer for the girl and vowed to be even more careful in the future.

Entering the baggage claim area, the SEAL team leader spotted a tall man in a light-colored suit and recognized him immediately.

What’s he want?

It was Lou Donaldson from the CIA station—their main contact in Pakistan.

Shit…

Crocker had worked with Donaldson numerous times before, and didn’t like his superior manner and the way he talked down to people, like a disappointed father or a scolding schoolteacher.

The CIA officer sidled up to him at the first baggage turnstile.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“No Hello? Or How have you been?”

“Follow me.”

Crocker left Davis, Mancini, and Akil to deal with the gear and followed the man out of the terminal to a light-colored SUV with blacked-out windows idling beside the curb.

Despite the fact that the sun was fading and the sky had turned a vivid shade of salmon, the air was still surprisingly hot. Gods with halitosis, or something like that.

Crocker had perspired through his shirt by the time he climbed into the air-conditioned backseat. Two thick-chested men waited inside. One behind the wheel. One in back, Jim Anders, Donaldson’s chief aide and yes-man, whom Crocker had also met before. Lou slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

He said, “We’ve got a major fuckup on our hands, thanks to you.”

Crocker chose to remain silent, biting on his anger.

Donaldson craned his long neck past the headrest.

“You hear about the girl?”

“Yes, I did.” Trying to hold it back.

“Six years old. Regrettable. But there’s more.” Donaldson looked quickly at the other two, to add their displeasure to his.

“Zaman. You didn’t get him!”

“What do you mean?”

Donaldson wasn’t finished. “The guys you killed mean nothing. We’ve checked their backgrounds. Minor players. Bodyguards. But the guy we sent you in to get…according to our intel, he was there, and you let him walk.”

“You know that as a fact?”

“Yes, goddammit. AZ was in the fucking apartment!”

Crocker, his blood pressure rising, immediately flashed back to the two women in brown burkas he had let pass.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

Rage boiled in his stomach. “How can you be absolutely sure he was there?”

“You screwed up, Crocker. You failed!”

“We carried out the mission professionally, thoughtfully, to the best of our abilities. Of course, everything happened very fast. As you know, every mission involves certain—” His words sounded hollow even to himself.

Donaldson cut him off. “The Pakistanis are fucking irate! They’re pretty damn sure that we were involved.”

“Do they have evidence? Because we were careful not to leave anything behind.”

“Not yet.”

“Then that’s not my problem.”

Donaldson turned to his cohorts—Anders and the driver. “Did you hear that? Not his problem. Fuck.”

Crocker struggled to stay calm. He said, “Look, I did see two women in burkas as I was engaged in a firefight on the first floor. One was holding what I assumed to be a baby. The other was leading a four-year-old boy by the hand. I let them pass and assume they escaped the building unharmed.”

“Piss-poor decision, Crocker! Jesus Christ! I bet one of those women was AZ.” The tall CIA officer punched the back of his seat.

“In the heat of battle I wasn’t able to stop and question them.”

“It didn’t occur to you that one of them could have been Zaman?”

“Like I said, this happened in the heat of battle.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t see their faces clearly, but neither of them appeared to have a beard.”

“Maybe he shaved the fucking thing off!”

“Your intel described him as bearded.”

“This is a goddamn disaster!”

“He’s on the run. We’ll get him. I’ll make sure of that.”

“No, Crocker. You missed your chance.”

The SEAL team leader was determined to extract something positive. “What about the laptops we captured?”

“What about them?”

“You find anything on the laptops that might be useful in tracking Zaman down?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Nothing?”

Jim Anders spoke up for the first time. “Seems he liked to download images of half-naked blondes in cages.”

“Blondes?”

“Yeah, blondes.”

“Does the name Syrena mean anything to you?” Crocker asked.

“Why?”

“I saw it on something that was burned in half that looked like an official invoice.”

“How was it spelled?”

“S-y-r-e-n-a.”