Prime (6 page)

FOUR

Washington, D.C.

Domenick Boucher waited patiently for the President’s daily national
security briefing to conclude. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
he’d been the first to speak, providing the Commander-in-Chief with a succinct
snapshot of how the world had changed during the previous twenty-four hours. He
had then listened attentively as other members of the National Security Council
had done the same, but all the while his thoughts never strayed far from the
one piece of information he had withheld; he clenched it in his mind, like a
hand grenade with the safety pin removed. It was an apt simile. He was about to
drop this particular grenade on Tom Duncan’s desk, and the odds were good that
neither of them would be able to escape the shitstorm of political shrapnel
that would follow.

When the President finally dismissed the
meeting, Boucher stood with the rest of the attendees but didn’t join the exit
queue. President Duncan settled into the executive chair behind the Resolute
Desk and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Something
on your mind, Dom?”

Boucher pursed his lips. “Mr. President…”

“It’s just us, Dom.
Spit
it out.”

Easier said than done
.
Boucher wasn’t just the DCIA; he was also
Tom Duncan’s friend, and that made this so much harder. He took a single sheet
of paper from his leather portfolio and placed it in on the desktop. Duncan
ignored it, maintaining eye contact with Boucher, compelling him to speak.

“Last night, a Delta team running CT
operations in Ramadi captured two couriers working with the al-Awda
resistance—”

“Refresh my memory.”

“Al-Awda is Arabic for ‘The Return,’ as in
the return of Saddam Hussein. It’s a small group, made up of Ba’ath party
members and Saddam loyalists. They’ve mostly been marginalized since Operation
Red Dawn, but information recovered last night suggests that they are still
active. We think they might have set up shop at a remote site east of Samarra…”
Boucher
paused
a beat then dropped the grenade. “It
looks like the place is an undocumented Iraqi bio-weapons laboratory.”

Duncan processed this for a moment then
leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk to either side of the unread brief.
“Undocumented? Christ, Dom,
are
you telling me that
we’ve finally found the smoking gun?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way.”

In October 2002, after several months of
evident non-compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein’s government with UN
weapons inspectors, the United States Congress voted to authorize military
action against Iraq. Four months later, the US Secretary of State, speaking
before the United Nations Security Council, presented evidence of an ongoing Iraqi
effort to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), with the intent of using
them against Western nations. Shortly thereafter, the war began. Almost two
hundred thousand soldiers from the United States and three other countries,
swept across the border, and in just twenty-one days of fighting, toppled the
Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

But no WMDs were found.

As the triumphant victory turned into a
prolonged occupation and a brutal campaign against insurgent guerillas—news
pundits began calling it a ‘quagmire’—the rationale for the war came under
intense scrutiny. What had, in the days leading up to the invasion, seemed like
a ‘slamdunk’—damning evidence of an impending strike against American interests
utilizing a deadly combination of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons—now
seemed like a fallacious pretext for a war of imperialism.

It would later be revealed that much of the
so-called evidence had been fraudulent, supplied by Saddam Hussein’s political
rivals, who had—successfully it seemed—tricked the nations of the West into
toppling the hated dictator from power. While many would subsequently argue
that Saddam’s overthrow was justified, even absent the threat of illegal
weapons programs, the perception that America had been deceived into starting
the war haunted the former President to the end of his first and only term in
office, and his decision not to run for a second term paved the way for the
election of dark horse candidate Thomas Duncan.

Duncan, a former combat veteran, was
intimately familiar with the very real cost of war, in both treasure and blood.
His policy from day one in office was that there would be no hand wringing or
recriminations over the miscalculations of the former administration, but he
did intend to give the American people exactly what he had promised in the
campaign—a government that was accountable for every dollar and every drop of
American blood spent in the war effort.

Although there was no easy solution to the
Iraq problem, Duncan was aggressively pushing his advisors for an exit strategy
that would ensure long-term security and stability in the region. It was a
politically popular position, and the war hawks in Congress, still stinging
from the WMD fiasco, were keeping their heads down.

The discovery of a ‘smoking gun’—a secret bio-weapon
production facility leftover from Saddam Hussein’s regime—would change all of
that. A single shred of evidence, even circumstantial evidence, might be used
to justify the war in the court of public opinion. Although doubts would
linger, the uncertainty would undermine the President’s position. The hawks
would demand a more aggressive approach to foreign policy, with pre-emptive
military action as a tool of statecraft, and more American soldiers would pay
the price with their lives.

Duncan shook his head. “It is what it is,
Dom. I won’t lie to the American people. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and
the sooner we get this out in the open, the better.”

“In point of fact, we don’t actually know
what
it
is. That’s what the D-boys are
going to find out tonight.”

The President sighed, then lowered his eyes
and scanned the brief. “What’s this about a cryptanalyst?”

Boucher stifled a laugh. “The code the
insurgents are using triggered an internal protocol that’s been around since
the days of the OSS. Sci-Tech says it’s a code that’s never been cracked, the
holy grail of crypto. They begged and pleaded for me to deploy their expert
with the team, and I saw no good reason to refuse. Her presence won’t put the
mission at risk.”

The President did not pursue the issue. “I
want to watch the game. Transfer control of this to the Situation Room. I want General
Collins there, too. Those are his boys on the ground.”

Boucher frowned. Some in the media had opined
that, if the President had a failing, it was that he didn’t like to relinquish
control to his subordinates. The DCIA knew better; Duncan wasn’t a control
freak, and he didn’t hire anyone without absolutely trusting them to get the
job done.

He
just misses the action
.

“I’ll order the pizzas.”

FIVE

Iraq

The three MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters from the 160
^th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment, arrayed in an echelon-right formation,
cruised through the darkened sky high above the Mesopotamian flood plain,
performing the very task that had earned them the unit designation of the ‘Night
Stalkers.’ Huddled together with Parker and the rest of his squad in the middle
aircraft, Jack Sigler peered through his night vision scope, looking over the
shoulder of a Black Hawk crew chief seated behind an M240H machine gun. He
could make out a distant glow—the
lights of Baghdad—far to
the south, but below them, there was
only the flat featureless desert
landscape.

Featureless, but not quite
empty.

The reconnaissance drone had uncovered the
desert’s secret: a low, cinderblock structure, half buried by windblown dust,
just to the east of what the map called Buhayrat Shari Lake. The lake was now
just a dry salt flat, two miles across and almost twenty miles long. The drone
had showed them the target building, but revealed no sign of activity—no
cooking fires burning, no vehicles, not even tire tracks. The facility looked
abandoned, but looks could be deceiving.

After completing the initial sweep, the drone
returned for refueling, but it was back in the air now, feeding real time
infrared imagery to the PDA Rainer carried with him in the trailing helo.
Sigler kept expecting the Cipher element leader to keep them updated, but
Rainer had been uncharacteristically quiet. With the exception of Strickland’s
sotto voce
whispered: “Mommy, are we
there yet?” comment, everyone else had remained quiet as well.

Maybe
no news is good news
, Sigler
thought.
Guess we’ll find out in about
five minutes
.

Four minutes and fifty seconds later, the
crew chief at the gun twisted around and tapped him on the arm. The Night
Stalkers crew members wore headsets that gave them access to their own radio
net and internal comms, but as a matter of operational security, they didn’t
have Cipher element’s frequency. The Delta team’s radios did include a separate
channel so they could communicate with the Night Stalkers—who were using the
unit callsign ‘Beehive’—but this close to the objective, the last thing Sigler
wanted to do was mess with the radio settings. At this point in the mission, gestures
and hand signals were the preferred form of communication.

Sigler passed the tap on to the rest of the
squad, and almost in unison, they gave their equipment a final pre-combat
inspection.

Rainer’s voice squelched in his earpiece.
“Eagle-Eye, this Cipher Six.
Let me know when you’re in
position.
Over.”

A few hundred yards ahead, the lead Black Hawk
executed a tricky near-vertical descent, flaring into a hover just a few feet
above the arid terrain. Though he couldn’t see them, Sigler knew that the six Eagle-Eye
snipers were piling out of their ride and establishing a defensive over-watch
position a kilometer away from the target.

The helicopters were quiet, but the desert
was a big empty place and sound carried. Even at this distance, the insurgents
in the building were probably sitting up and taking note. The Black Hawks were
always at their most vulnerable during touchdown, when they were close to
potential hostiles and unable to execute any kind of evasive maneuvers. It
would be the job of the snipers to deal with any opposition during the
interminably long half-minute or so required for other two Night Stalker birds
to debark their passengers.

The snipers gave the ‘all-clear’ a moment
later. Immediately, Sigler heard a change in the pitch of the turbines, and
then he felt his stomach lurch and rise into his throat as the helicopter
dropped like a runaway elevator. The downward motion stopped abruptly, and
Sigler saw the crew chief waving, giving his all-clear.

The ground looked tantalizingly close, but
Sigler knew from experience that night-vision devices screwed with depth
perception, and with forty-odd pounds of gear strapped to his body, it paid to
err on the side of caution. With his knees bent slightly to absorb the impact,
he jumped from the hovering helo. As soon as his feet made contact, he dropped
into a low shooter’s stance and began moving forward, sweeping the foreground
with the barrel of his HK416 assault rifle.

The squared-off outline of the building was
visible about fifty meters away, but it looked as desolate as the rest of the
bleak landscape.

“Last man out!” someone behind him shouted
into the radio, and then the Black Hawk’s turbines roared and the downdraft of
the helicopter’s ascent nearly blew Sigler over. When the maelstrom began to
subside about ten seconds later, he keyed his mic. “Cipher
Six
,
this is Cipher One-Six. We’re in position. No sign of rain.
Over.”

“Roger, One-Six. You know what to do.”

Sigler gestured for his team to line up
behind him, and he began advancing toward the building. He stayed in his
hunched over stance, his gaze flitting between the front of the building and
the ground directly in front of him.

“Cipher element, this is Eagle-Eye two.
Nothing on thermals.”

Sigler frowned in dismay but kept moving. The
cinderblock structure, unlike the shoddy house they had raided the previous
evening in Ramadi, was an effective enough insulator to mask heat signatures
from the thermal scopes.

The six men reached the front of the
building. Sigler lined up beside the entryway—there was no door. Three
operators were behind him, while the remaining two men posted at the corners to
watch the sides and the rear of the building.

Unit SOP called for a dynamic entry, moving
in fast, identifying and eliminating hostiles in the blink of an eye, but
Sigler hesitated. The open doorway, a dark hole in the green-gray of the
building, beckoned him. Without a door to kick down, it would be the smoothest
entry ever. What could be easier?

Too easy
.

Instead of giving the signal that would start
the countdown, Sigler eased forward and peeked around the doorpost.

Someone behind him hissed a warning. Almost
from day one in basic training, soldiers were taught to never present a
silhouette target to an enemy. If the insurgents were inside, waiting to meet
the attack that they must surely suspect was coming, then he was a dead man.

No shot came.

The green display of his night vision showed
what looked like sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets. There was no sign of
movement within.

Sigler eased back. Nothing about this felt
right.

It was decision time; he had to either go now
or abort. His instincts were screaming for him to do the latter, but he didn’t
have a shred of evidence to back up that call.

Rainer’s voice scratched in his ear. “Jack,
why are you still on the wrong side of that wall?”

Sigler ignored the question. He activated his
PAQ4 and directed the laser beam into the room, easing out once more into the
danger zone. The green light stabbed into the dark interior, illuminating the
space but revealing nothing more…

Something glinted in the laser light, right
in front of him. A thin strand of monofilament was stretched across the door
frame just above ankle level.

He keyed his mic. “All Cipher elements, this
is One-Six, I’m calling the game.
Fall back to rally one.”

“Jack?” Rainer didn’t bother with brevity
codes.

“This is a set up, Boss.”

Sigler wasn’t sure what Rainer’s reaction
would be. Another SOP was that anyone could pull the plug on a mission for any
reason—he might catch hell in the after-action review if it turned out to be
nothing but a case of jitters—but this close to the objective…

“It’s your call, Jack.”

Sigler led his squad back out, taking care to
step only in the boot prints that marked their initial approach. Rainer was
waiting at the designated rally point, two hundred meters from the building,
along with Pettit, Klein and Sasha.

Sigler got right to the point. “It’s wired.
We were expected.”

Sasha spoke up. “You don’t understand. I need
to get inside.”

“No ma’am,” Rainer said. “You don’t
understand. There’s nothing in there. This was a trap.”

“Shit,” growled Klein. “Can we at least sweep
the place for NBC residue?”

If the facility had been used as a bio-weapons
laboratory, it was conceivable, however unlikely, that trace evidence might be
found.

“Negative. We’re done here. I’m calling the
birds,” Rainer said.

Best
news I’ve heard all day
,
Sigler thought.