Scorpion Deception (2 page)

“No, walking away,” he said aloud to himself.

But nothing prepared him for Baidoa. There was fighting around the city, which was held by Al-Shabaab of the Mirifle tribe, and he had to bribe his way through two front lines, African Union troops and Al-Shabaab's, to get into the city. The school was a one-story concrete building on a dirt street in the hilly Isha district, which, like most of the buildings in this part of the city, was shot full of holes, the concrete crumbling like moldy cheese.

Around the building were more than a dozen bodies, women, children, a barefoot soldier, bloated and discolored in the sun. The stench was indescribable. It looked like one of the women had been raped before she was killed, her
direh
pulled up around her neck, a dried bloodstain between her naked legs splayed wide. Scorpion took a moment and pulled the
direh
down to cover her.

Inside the school the smell was even worse. Boys from ages three to about ten or eleven lay on the concrete floor in a large room, some stirring, most still. They were pitifully thin, covered with fecal matter, some in pools of diarrhea and urine. Others were clearly dead. The walls were scarred by bullets and political slogans spray-painted in Arabic that read: “Death to the African Union!”

A boy in shorts and bare feet, about ten, came up to him, holding an empty plastic bowl.

“Ma'a,”
the boy said. Water.

“I'll bring some,” Scorpion replied in Arabic. “What's your name?”

“Ghedi,” the boy said, reaching out to touch the white man's hand as if to make sure he was real. Several of the other boys started to stir. One crawled toward Scorpion, who went to a hallway that led to a crude kitchen and to the sink. In it, a small lizard the size of his hand, with a flat multispiked tail, scuttled away as he approached. He turned the tap but nothing came out. He felt a tug on his sleeve. The boy, Ghedi, looked up at him.

“Where are the girls?” Scorpion asked.

The boy pointed to a doorway. Scorpion went through the doorway to another room, lit by a ray of sunlight through a hole in the ceiling. It was filled with girls in bright blue
direhs
, some stretched out and covered in filth, others sitting on the floor. School uniforms, Scorpion thought as they began to crowd around him like chicks around a mother hen.

“Follow me,” he told them, leading them through the boys' room and outside. Once there, he grabbed two handfuls of plastic water jugs from the truck.

“You mustn't overfeed starving children. Especially at first,” Sandrine had cautioned him on his first day in the camp in the triage area. “Their metabolic system is broken. Too much protein will damage the liver even more, possibly irreparably. Just a moderate amount of water, preferably with electrolytes, and depending on the size of the child, a single Plumpy'nut bar.
Pas plus
.” No more. “Just to hold them till we can take care of them.”

He spent the next few hours feeding them and using some of the precious water in the plastic jugs to clean them up as best he could and get them settled on a blanket under a plastic tarp awning tied to four poles he rigged up at the corners of the Toyota truck bed. Out of the twenty-four orphan children, who were supposed to have been trapped in the school, only sixteen were still alive. The boy, Ghedi, helped him organize them, and one of the older girls, a pretty little thing with a shy smile named Nadifa, helped him clean up the girls.

The hell of it was he had almost pulled it off. Just another forty kilometers or so to the crossroads at Bilis Qooqaan and then a straight run on paved road of maybe ninety klicks to the Kenyan border. Except for the lousy luck of the roadblock and that idiot, Dowler, Scorpion thought as he looked into the madness-filled eyes of Sheikh Khalaf.

K
halaf pulled Dowler up by his hair to a kneeling position, the
belawa
gleaming in the sun. He tossed the knife at Scorpion's feet.

“
Yallah
. You do it. Cut his head off,” Khalaf said.

“I'm sure there's someone who would pay a lot of money for the Eenglizi,” Scorpion said, meaning Dowler. “Let me try.”

“Look at his face. The cigarette marks. The Western media, al Jazeera, would say bad things about us.” Khalaf made a hand gesture like tossing something away that in Somalia means no. “He has to die.”

“Then do it yourself,” Scorpion growled, thinking, Go to hell, you insane son of a bitch.

“No, you do it,” Khalaf said, looking at him strangely. “Unless you want to join him.” The two militiamen shifted their stance, weapons trained on Scorpion. “I take the children. Two of the boys are old enough to be soldiers. The rest . . .” He shrugged. “As for the girls, no reason for them to still be virgins before they die.”

He's lying, Scorpion decided. He's not going to leave me alive as a witness, or the children, having noted one of the militiamen smiling behind his face scarf. This was just some sadistic game Khalaf was playing.

Scorpion picked the
belawa
off the ground and put it to Dowler's throat. He looked at the two militiamen. Which one was slower? The smaller one was working his
qat
, his cheek bulging like a chipmunk. He's thinking about something else, Scorpion thought, already moving.

He slashed sideways, whipping the
belawa
with his wrist, slashing Khalaf's throat from ear to ear, and without stopping, in a single motion, threw the
belawa
at the bigger militiaman, the knife embedding deep into his belly. The instant the
belawa
left his hand, Scorpion dived sideways, pulling at his jeans leg and ripping the Glock from the ankle holster.

The smaller militiaman swung the AK-47 around, but only got two rounds off, missing Scorpion, who fired from the ground, hitting him in the forehead. Scorpion started toward the bigger militiaman, who had pulled the
belawa
out of his body and was trying to stem the gush of blood with one hand while bringing his AK-47 into firing position with the other. Scorpion shot him in the throat and grabbed the gun.

Then he grabbed Dowler's arm and pulled him up.

“Run, dammit,” he growled, scooping up his backpack as he yanked Dowler toward the truck, running hard.

Sixty meters.

Dowler stumbled as he tried to keep up. Scorpion spotted about a dozen Al-Shabaab militiamen not far from the truck. They were looking around to see where the shooting had come from.

Fifty meters.

One of the militiamen spotted the two white men running toward the truck and pointed, shouting to the others.

Forty meters.

Dowler was panting heavily, almost falling then catching himself and staggering after Scorpion. Two then three of the militiamen near the road brought their AK-47s into firing position.

Thirty meters.

“I can't make it,” Dowler panted.

“Fine. I'll leave you behind,” Scorpion snapped, swinging his AK-47 into shooting position as he ran.

Twenty meters.

Bullets ripped into the sand around them. Scorpion dropped to his knee and fired a burst at the three militiamen, taking them down one-two-three and sending two others scrambling for cover. Pulling at Dowler's shirt, he ran on toward the Toyota, where one of the older boys peeked over the side of the truck bed, then seeing the running white men, ducked back down.

Ten meters.

A militiaman came around the front of the truck. At a dead run, Scorpion fired a burst from the AK, first missing him, then hitting him in the chest. He flung the cab door open and climbed in, bullets tearing into the metal side of the truck. As he turned the ignition, Dowler, panting heavily, pulled himself into the passenger seat, moving the boy, Ghedi, aside. Dowler pulled the child onto his lap as the truck skidded onto the road.

Scorpion shifted, gunning the accelerator hard as it could go, the noise of the engine drowned by a hail of bullets pinging around the truck or riddling the metal sides, one of them smashing a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield. The speedometer crept up till it hit 135 kilometers per hour; as fast as it would go. The truck rocked and bounced on the uneven road, and he could hear the high-pitched screams of the children as they ping-ponged around in the truck bed.

“Tahrir kala!”
Scorpion shouted to them over his shoulder. Hang on! To Dowler: “Are you hit?”

Dowler looked down at his body as if it belonged to someone else. Behind them in the truck side mirrors, racing after them on the road and paralleling them across the dusty savannah, were half a dozen trucks filled with militiamen, all shooting in their direction.

“I'm all right. Who are you?” he said.

“American,” Scorpion said, handing him the AK-47. “Ever use one of these?”

Dowler shook his head.

“Stick it out the window. Hold tight; it kicks. Aim a short burst at one of the trucks. For Chrissakes, try not to shoot one of the kids.”

“I'll be lucky I don't shoot myself,” Dowler said, staring at the weapon as if it were something from science fiction.

“Doesn't matter. It's just to let them know we're armed,” Scorpion said, flooring the accelerator as if he could push it through the metal floor, while reaching back with one hand to the compartment behind his seat. Dowler fired a burst from the AK, the rifle rocking up so high from the recoil he nearly put a bullet through the roof. A spray of bullets from a truck racing nearly abreast of them spattered through the cab, one of them barely missing Scorpion's head. From the back of the truck, he heard a child scream.

Christ! One of them's been hit, he thought, pulling the FAD assault rifle from the compartment.

“Hold the wheel! Tight!” he shouted to Dowler as he racked the pump action to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher.

“Good Lord!” Dowler exclaimed. “Where'd you get that?”

“Peru,” he said, leaning across Dowler to sight the weapon on the truck as they bounced on the uneven road. The other truck was nearly up to them and less than twenty meters away, militiamen blazing at them on full automatic. He aimed at the driver, squeezed the trigger and ducked back. The other truck exploded in a blast of fire, the hot wind of it knocking them sideways.

Scorpion fought the wheel to regain control. Grabbing Dowler's hand and slamming it back on the steering wheel, he heaved up as he pumped the grenade launcher and leaned out the driver's window, facing back. Bullets smashed around him, one of them shattering the side mirror. He fired the grenade at the windshield of the truck closest behind them, only twenty or so meters away, and watched it explode as his own truck swerved, nearly toppling him out. He fired an automatic burst at another truck farther back as it turned off the road to avoid the flames of the exploding truck in front of it.

Pulling himself back into the cab, Scorpion grabbed the wheel from Dowler, who just stared at him.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he asked.

Scorpion glanced at the remaining side mirror. There was only one truck still behind them on the road and it was at least a couple of hundred meters back. For the moment they were keeping their distance, possibly communicating to others to block the road somewhere up ahead.

He checked the fuel gauge. Less than a quarter of a tank left. He tapped it to make sure it was working. It was a miracle the fuel tank hadn't been hit, he thought. They still had at least a hundred kilometers to the Kenyan border, maybe more. They hadn't hit the intersection to the main road at Bilis Qooqaan yet. He tried to calculate fuel. At the speed he was going, figure ten, twelve miles per gallon. It was going to be close. Too close.

The boy, Ghedi, looked wide-eyed at him. Scorpion, thinking he trusted the kid more than Dowler, touched his shoulder and handed him the FAD.

“Ara ko'daisa,”
he told the boy. Hold this. Dowler was staring at him too.

“I suppose I should thank you for saving my life,” he said.

Even if they made the border, whatever he had come to Africa for, whatever he might have fantasized about with Sandrine, was over, Scorpion thought. CNN, al Jazeera, and the rest of the media would be over this like flies on garbage. He couldn't let them put him on television or even know he existed. As soon as he got the children to Dadaab, he'd have to disappear. He wouldn't even be able to say goodbye. He'd never see her again.

“Shut up,” he told Dowler.

But he was wrong. Something that was happening at that very moment in a leafy neighborhood in a city on another continent was about to change everything, including his decision never to do another mission.

CHAPTER TWO

Bern,

Switzerland

T
he girl was the key. That and the timing. They would have at most nine minutes. Realistically, Scale thought, closer to seven, before the Kantonspolizei arrived in force and they'd be trapped. Even if his roadblocks and the explosives worked perfectly.

It had taken him weeks to study the target and come up with a plan that the Gardener would approve. The problem was, the place was a fortress. He knew going in that he would lose some, perhaps all, of the team. “The real question,
baradar,
” brother, the Gardener had asked, “is not whether it can be done, but whether
you
can do it?” The Gardener looked at him then with those brown almost coal black eyes that for many were the last thing they ever saw, and even Scale felt a chill.

It was the Gardener himself who had given him his code name. Named for the saw-scaled viper, the most venomous snake in the Middle East. He liked it. He was a small man, thin, with little physical presence except for his oversize hands that looked like they belonged to a much larger man. Hands he had worked his entire life to strengthen, endlessly squeezing
lastik
balls till they could crush like a vise. A child that other children avoided or made fun of. He couldn't remember a single friend, not one true
dust
, from his childhood. But now his name made others fear him, even members of his own team, he thought, returning to the problem.

The American embassy in Bern was located at Sulgeneckstrasse 19, a tree-lined street in the Monbijou district. It was a white six-story structure on extensive grounds behind a high wrought-iron fence, with concrete driveway barriers to prevent a car-bomb attack. Outside the embassy, a Swiss security policeman with a SIG assault rifle stood guard twenty-four hours a day. The only way in was on foot past him. At the front gate, you had to pass a U.S. guard shack where visitors were asked to empty their pockets and were X-ray screened before being allowed to stand in line outside the building. No baggage, backpacks, purses, or packages of any kind were allowed.

Once past the guard shack, you went down a covered walkway to the building, where you had to go through two additional security checkpoints under the eye of a high-tech security post behind bulletproof glass. Surveillance cameras covered every possible approach as well as all interior areas and hallways. Security was provided 24/7 by armed United States Marines, six of them on duty at any given time.

Even assuming you could get past all that, eliminate the Marines and get in, you'd still have only seven minutes before the Kantonspolizei arrived in force, leaving no way out.

The girl's name was Liyan. She had to be attractive, Scale insisted. She had to hold their attention for at least two or three seconds. And they couldn't suspect her, so she had to wear Western clothes and look sexy. A twenty-two-year-old college student, she was trim, dark-eyed, and modern enough not to wear a
hejab
. Her family were Syrian Kurds from Aleppo, and Scale had false-flagged her by convincing her he was from the GSD, the Syrian internal security service. They had arrested her brother during the Arab Spring revolt, and he threatened that unless she cooperated, her brother would be shot.

Reasonable enough, since the Gardener's contacts within the GSD had confirmed that the brother was already dead.

Another lie was that she had been told her only job was to get the explosives—C-4 pressed flat and shaped to the curves of her body inside her undergarments—into the building. No ball bearings, no shrapnel, nothing added that would set off the metal detectors. She had been told to take it off in a restroom for them to use inside the embassy. In fact, she would not survive the attack, and if by some chance they were able to identify her body later, Scale thought, the blame would fall on the Syrians or the Kurds.

Now, coming from the blue parking zone on Rainmattstrasse, he took one final look at the embassy and gate that had been his obsession for weeks. He scanned the roof and sides of the building, spotting at least a dozen video cameras, knowing there were probably more that he couldn't see. His every move was being recorded that very second on videos that would later be scrutinized pixel by pixel for every last detail. His people were waiting in the SUV around the corner. The other two vehicles, a van truck and an old bus, were in position. Both were packed with C-4 and ammonium nitrate fertilizer and gasoline. They would act as roadblocks, one near Kapellenstrasse, the other at the Schwarztorstrasse intersection to slow the Kantonspolizei and isolate the embassy from either approach. The rest depended on timing and the girl, Liyan.

Seven minutes from now,
inshallah
, God willing, either he would have done it or he would be dead, he thought as he crossed the street, touching his false moustache, latex nose prosthesis and sunglasses, and pressing the button on his chronometer watch to start the countdown.

He smiled and nodded pleasantly at the Swiss policeman who barely glanced at him. As soon as he was behind the man, he pulled out his Beretta 92FS with the sound suppressor and killed him with a single shot to the back of the head. A half-dozen steps took him to the guard shack, where the Marine security guard had just turned from his computer screen. Scale slipped his hand with the gun under the bulletproof glass panel and shot him in the face. As he headed on the walkway toward the building, he could hear someone from the non–U.S. citizen queue scream and the sounds of his team coming up fast behind him. Then his cell phone vibrated.

Scale dived to the ground. The detonator was on a two-second delay, and as he hit the pavement, the front of the building exploded outward with unbelievable force, bits of debris and glass and human flesh flying past like shrapnel. His ears ringing, the air thick with dust and the smell of explosive, burning meat, and charred metal, he got to his feet. Turning around, he saw his team getting off the ground, their ski masks on, HK G36K assault rifles ready to go.

He pulled on his ski mask and checked his watch. Six minutes and twenty-eight seconds remaining.

“Come on!” he shouted in English—the only language they were to use till it was over—and ran at the gaping opening ripped in the side of the building where the door and checkpoint had been.

They went through the opening. The lobby was a shambles. It was filled with debris and blood and body parts, the security post utterly destroyed. There were two bodies by the far door, including a Marine guard struggling to move. A bloody foot in a high-heeled shoe lying on its side on the floor was all that was left of the girl, Liyan. Scale went over and shot the Marine in the head, then motioned to the others. They had six floors to cover and needed to move quickly. Before he left, Scale pulled a small IED from his jacket pocket and planted it next to the opening, where anyone coming would have to enter.

They headed for the stairs. Two for each floor. Scale motioned to Hadi, recognizing him by his blue ski mask. The two of them went down and out back to the second metal detector post. The door burst open and a Marine with an M4 carbine came out running. His eyes widened, but before he could react, Hadi fired a burst that cut him down. Scale went over and put a bullet in his head to make sure. Grabbing the M4 from the dead Marine, he racked the charging handle and switched to full automatic, safety off. Four Marines down, he counted; one at the guard shack, two at the security post, and now this one. That left two.

Coming into the main reception area, they spotted four civilians—three men and an older woman—who had been running for the door. He and Hadi fired simultaneously; two long automatic bursts that took down all of them. They could hear sounds of firing from the higher floors as the team went from office to office, killing everyone they found.

He motioned to Hadi to work his way down the hallway, glancing up at a security camera, secure behind the ski mask.
“Kir tu kunet,”
he cursed the camera under his breath, kicking the bodies. The woman was still breathing. He shot her again and started up the stairs, checking his watch.

Five minutes left.

There was a firefight on the third floor. The remaining Marines, he thought. He ignored the shooting and continued to the fourth floor, going door to door. There was no one in the first two offices, but in the third he found five people: three men standing, their hands raised, a young woman crouched behind a couch, and another woman hiding behind a desk. First he killed the men, then the woman behind the couch. The woman behind the desk made a run for it and he shot her in the back, and as she lay writhing on the floor, put another burst into her.

In the next office, he found an attractive blond woman feeding pages into a shredder. She froze the second he came in.

“Please, don't,” she said, her lips trembling. “I'll do anything you want.”

“I know,” he said, motioning her closer. “Where are the CIA offices?”

“Sixth floor,” she said, coming around the desk. She came closer. He could smell her perfume. Lilacs. She wore a white blouse and a neat gray skirt. She really was very pretty. They could hear screams and the sounds of shooting on the other floors. Then the sound of a grenade exploding on the floor below made the floor vibrate beneath them. F1 grenade, he thought. Hopefully, it took out the last two Marines.

The firing stopped. They got them, he decided.

“Which offices?”

“All of them. They have the whole floor,” she said.

“Anything else?”

She shook her head, a tear forming in the corner of her eye.

“It's going to be all right,” he said soothingly, and shot her with the M4.

He killed four more on that floor, then on the stairs ran into Hadi and Maziar, who wore the ski mask with the red stripe.

“Did we lose any?” Scale asked as they headed up.

“Three. Jalal, Mohsen, and Ashkan,” Hadi said.

“Marines.
Madar sagan
,” Maziar cursed them. Sons of bitches. “We killed them both.”

“Speak only English,” Scale hissed. He checked his watch. Less than a minute and a half left. “Take the next floor,” he told them, and sprinted to the top floor.

As he reached the landing, he heard the sound of heavy gunfire on the floor below. Hadi and Maziar, he thought. Stepping into the hallway, he was nearly killed by a pistol shot. He pulled back and dropped to the floor.

Suddenly, an incredibly loud explosion shook the building, rattling and shattering windows. It came from the direction of Kapellenstrasse. The roadblock. He was running out of time. The question was, how long would the roadblock hold them?

The shot had come from the left side of the hallway. Someone taking cover in an office, firing from the doorway, he thought, pulling the pin on a Russian F1 grenade. About four meters, he estimated, tossing the grenade and counting. It was a 3.5 second fuse, and as soon as it exploded he ran at it firing the M4.

There were two dead men in white shirts turned red with blood lying in the doorway, one with an S&W .357 pistol—the one who had been shooting. Scale went through the offices methodically, rushing through the door first, then ducking in to check. There was only return fire from one office, near the end of the hallway, and another F1 grenade took care of the men inside. He killed fourteen on that floor, the last in a corner office with a name plate on the door that read:
MICHAEL BRAND, CHIEF POLITICAL LIAISON OFFICER.
Dead giveaway for CIA, he thought. Brand was a big man. He lay on the carpeted floor, clutching his chest where he'd been shot, staring venomously at Scale.

“Who are you?” Brand asked.

By way of an answer, Scale knelt, put the Beretta to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Brand's head flopped back, blood and bits of his skull seeping into the carpet.

Scale checked his watch. Eight minutes and forty-two seconds had elapsed. They had taken too long. The Swiss polizei would be past the roadblock any second now, unless they had gone around to approach the embassy from the other side. Even as he was thinking that, the building was rocked again by another powerful explosion coming from the direction of the Schwarztorstrasse intersection, glass flying from the few remaining windows. Got you, you stupid
seyyedan
, he thought. There was still a tiny bit of time.

He heard something behind him and whirled, ready to fire. Hadi and Maziar. He motioned them close.

“Quick. The flash drives. Start with the ambassador's office on the fourth floor and work down. I'll take this floor,” he whispered, moving to the laptop on Brand's desk. Checking to make sure it was on, he plugged a flash drive into a USB port. It would automatically download every document and data file on the hard drive.

He didn't wait, but went to the next office. Stepping over the bodies of a man and a woman, he plugged in another flash drive and repeated the process, going from office to office. In the sixth office, he peeked out the window at the street and grounds below. Two polizei vans were pulling up. Men in body armor armed with SIG assault rifles began setting up a perimeter.

Time to go.

He pressed a contact number on his cell phone and sent a call. Hadi and Maziar would know what it meant, he thought as he raced down the hallway, popping into each office, pulling the flash drives and dropping them in his pocket.

He ran down the stairs, Hadi and Maziar just ahead of him. They heard the sound of polizei from outside. It was going to be close. As they reached the landing of the second floor, they heard men come into the building. Scale pulled out the cell phone, selected the contact number and pressed Send. The three of them hit the floor as the IED he had left at the opening went off, deafening them and shaking the floor.

They got up and ran down the remaining stairs, the area filled with smoke and the screams of the wounded polizei hit by the IED. The three men went out the back. The embassy grounds were green with trees and lawns and a vegetable garden. They ran through the garden toward the spiked wrought iron fence at the back of the property, knocking over the wooden stakes along the way.