SEAL Team Bravo: Black Ops IV (12 page)

“Bravo Blue, loud and clear,” she replied.

He smiled in deference to her ethnic disguise. She had the call sign ‘blue’. It seemed appropriate.

“Are you set to go?” Boswell asked him, looming up out of the darkness. Nolan had packed his night vision goggles away, and it seemed odd talking to the Lieutenant who was almost invisible.

“Sure. We’ll lead off, Lt. If we see any problems, I’ll call you. We have the directions, and I have my GPS stowed under my shirt, so I’ll keep an eye on it. The plan is to head toward the vicinity of the bin Laden compound and look for a local. Someone Mariko can talk to.”

Boswell nodded. “Good luck on that, Chief. They’re not too comfy about talking to women in burqas. I guess they think the husband is likely to slit their throats, so I guess you’ll have to persuade them otherwise.”

“We’ll manage. I think Captain Noguchi has a line on strong persuasion. Twisting their balls off. Ouch!”

She’d kicked him, and in the dark he hadn’t seen it coming. But Boswell saw it and gave him an odd look.
 

“That could work,” he grinned. “We’ll be all around you, so if there’s any hostile interference, we’ll deal with it. Good luck.”

They walked into the darkness, threading their way through the lonely streets and alleyways. There were only faint lights showing from some of the houses they walked past, mainly security lights. The road was partly beaten earth, with short strips of tarmac where the owners of adjacent houses wanted something more than mud to enter and exit their driveways. The houses were as mixed as the road surface; some wealthy looking homes in their own manicured grounds, complete with pools reflecting in the moonlight, and opposite, a row of semi-derelict shanties. The one aspect of the landscape both rich and poor shared was the stench. Human excrement from blocked drains, or maybe there weren’t any drains in parts of the town. Not this part, anyway. They walked on in silence, and then Nolan dragged her swiftly into a doorway.

“What is it?”

“Quiet. Footsteps, coming this way.”

A middle-aged man walked toward them and passed by, his steps staggering slightly. Clearly, he paid little heed to the Muslim prohibition on alcohol.
 

“Can we…”

“Wait!”

They drew further into the dark doorway, and a cop came into view. It was tempting. A policeman would likely know about the compound and have an idea of who occupied it these days. Yet taking him would be a risk. If he failed to check in, the alarm bells could start to ring. Nolan decided to wait, and they let the cop pass by. There were no further footsteps, and they walked out onto the road, rounded the corner, and continued walking toward the town center; straight into the arms of the two more cops. Two Pakistani policemen were staring down at a body in the road. The body was that of yet another Pakistani cop. He lay in a pool of his own blood, which had apparently streamed from his neck. The Pakis whirled as they heard the footsteps, and one of them; a fat man with his uniform stretched over his paunch confronted them. His hand was held up for them to stop, and he shouted something at them. Mariko whispered in his earpiece.

“They want to know what we’re doing here.”

Nolan stopped next to her and waited. He understood Arabic, but his Pashto was limited to a few words, and he couldn’t even make out whether they were speaking Pashto or Urdu, or whatever.

Who gives a shit? The next few moments are going to be tricky whatever was said.

The guy barked questions at Nolan. Mariko whispered a translation, the mic invisible to them inside her burqa. The man shouted at Nolan, standing only inches from his face while his comrade stared at them, scowling and suspicious. He lit a cigarette and stood back watching and waiting.

“That dead cop in the street, he’s one of their pals. They’re pretty angry.”

“Uh huh.” He was acting the mute and couldn’t speak.

“He wants to know what we’re doing out here at this time of night. I think he suspects we may have killed him.”

“Uh huh.”

He heard her reply to the fat cop.

“I told him you’re a mute, so nod your head and smile.”

Nolan obeyed, but it only made the cop sneer even more. He was an older man, maybe fifty or so, with a fat belly and a stack of chins that wobbled as he shouted.

“He’s telling you that your mother was a poxed whore from the slums of Islamabad. He wants to see your ID card.”

That’s your mistake, buddy. You’re not playing hardball cop with some dumb-ass goatherd who’s just come down from the hills.

“Nolan, you have to give him something, or pretend you’re looking for it. He’s getting suspicious.”

The other cop looked on with interest. Then he turned away, unzipped his fly, and pissed against the wall of a house. When he’d emptied his bladder, he leaned against the wall, still watching. Nolan made a note. He looked meaner than the fat guy. He’d be fast to react when trouble started. The first cop still hadn’t stopped his tirade. He was building up to apoplexy, shouting, and spittle beginning to drool down his chin. A light came on in a nearby house, a window opened, and someone looked out. The cop who’d been pissing shouted at them, and the window was shut with a bang.

“He says you’re under arrest. I’ll try to persuade him to let us go.”

She pleaded with him, begging, cajoling, as only a Muslim woman in a burqa can. The cop was unimpressed, and he called for his buddy to help him. Mariko continued to murmur a translation, and he gathered it wasn’t working. They were about to arrest the two suspects. The thin cop walked toward him, and Nolan’s hand slid inside his long shirt, reaching for his Sig. The fat cop shouting at Mariko hadn’t noticed, but the thin cop saw the movement and leapt forward, shouting threats.

“He says you have a gun,” she whispered urgently.

“Yeah, that’s the first sensible word that’s come out of either of their mouths tonight. I’m taking them both, so be ready with your peashooter. But remember, we need someone to question, so we have to keep one of them alive.”

Before she could answer, he snatched out his long suppressed Sig. The cops looked at him, astonished to hear the ragged man with his burqa clad wife speaking in American English. Then reality hit them. The guy was a ringer, and the two cops clawed for their pistols. But Nolan was ahead of them, a mile ahead. He double tapped the thin cop, the one who looked more dangerous. The guy went down as if pole-axed, and the ‘phut, phut’ of the 9mm rounds sounded unnaturally loud in the dark, stinking street. Nolan pulled the fat cop close to his body while he whirled around, searching for further targets. The man he was holding murmured something in his weird dialect.

“He’s pleading for his life,” Mariko interpreted.

“Yeah, I guessed it was something like that. Tell him to shut up, or I will kill him. Don’t worry; it’s only a threat. We need him.”

She spoke rapidly in Pashto while Nolan searched the man. He removed his service pistol; a Russian built Makarov automatic, and found a pair of cuffs that he used to fasten the guy’s wrists behind his back. Then he called in.

“Bravo One, this is Two. We encountered some cops. One was already down, and I had to kill another. We have one as a prisoner, and he’s with us now. We need help to tidy up here.”

He gave them his coordinates. Thirty seconds later, the Platoon materialized out of the darkness. Boswell eyed the two bodies and turned to stare at Nolan.

“This is not good, Chief. Orders were not to make any waves.”

“The only alternative was to let them shoot me. Besides, I didn’t kill the first cop. He was already dead. It’s too late to second guess it, Lt. We must get these bodies away and take this guy away for questioning.”

Boswell nodded and gave the orders. The men ran forward, picked up the two dead cops, and carried the bodies back to the insertion point. Two other Seals began to clear up the area, using their night vision goggles to search for any signs of bloodshed that would be hard to explain away. Nolan could see Boswell had placed snipers at either end of the street. They seemed pretty well covered. If any more cops turned up, there’d be more dead bodies on the streets of Abbottabad.

They began walking back to the insertion point, the cricket ground. Suddenly, he remembered the first cop they’d seen and turned to Boswell.

“There was another cop. We need to keep an eye out for him. He’s probably still around here somewhere.”

The Lieutenant nodded and gave the order, but they reached the assembly area without running into any more of the local law. The men gratefully put the bodies of the dead Pakistanis on the ground.

“How are we going to cover this up, Chief? Three cops missing. The locals won’t wear that one. Christ, what a mess!”

“We’ll handle it, Lt, take it easy. We’ll fake up something to convince them.” He looked around, but there was no sign of Lucas Grant. “Where’s Grant?”

Boswell looked a bit shifty. “He, er, I sent him to check out the compound. Jack Whitman went with him to watch his back.”

“To Bin Laden’s compound? You’re not serious! You know what the orders were.”

“Yeah, I know, but Lucas has been there before, remember, with Seal Team Six. He wanted to take a look around, see if anything had changed. It could tell us a lot.”

“Did Grant ask to go on this wild goose chase, Lt?”

“Er, yeah, he did. But it seemed like a good idea.”

“The hell it is. Get him back here before he does any damage.”

“Chief, you don’t give me orders. I’m in command here. I’d remember that if I were you, feller.”

“As I recall, the order to stay away from the compound came from Colonel Weathers. Last time I checked, a colonel trumped a lieutenant.”

Boswell stared at him for a long moment. Then he clicked on his mic.

“Bravo One to Three.”

After a long pause, Lucas Grant replied in a whisper. “This is Three, go ahead.”

“Come back in, Lucas. Abort, I say again, abort.”

“What the fuck!” he whispered back. “You’re sure about this?”

“Yes. Report back, on the double. Where’s Whitman?”

“I left him a few hundred meters back. He’s watching my six, and he’ll cover my withdrawal.”

“Whitman, this is Bravo One, do you copy?”

“Whitman here, I copy.”

“Get your ass right back here, right now. And you too, Lucas, get moving.”

There was a long silence, and it was clear Grant was anything but happy about the recall.

“Copy that. I’ll be back in five.”

The two Seals came back in together, and Boswell looked down at two bodies.
 

“We’ll have to take those bodies back with us. If they find them, it’ll blow the operation wide open. Chief, give the order to move out. You can organize a rota to carry those corpses. Captain Noguchi, keep an eye on the prisoner, and see if he has anything useful to tell us. Jesus Christ, the shit will hit the fan when those cops don’t report back.”

She smiled. “Maybe, Lieutenant, but remember, Waziristan is like the Wild West. Do you want me to rip his balls off to get him to talk?”

“You what?”

Nolan and a couple of the men who were in on the joke chuckled, but Boswell didn’t get it. He shook his head. “No, there’s no need for that, Captain. We have specialists at Bagram to take care of rigorous interrogations.”

“If you’re sure,” she smiled. “Look, Lieutenant, I wouldn’t worry too much about the cops. They go AWOL all the time in this area. Don’t forget, it’s a Taliban controlled region, so they’re always tangling with the local law and taking potshots at each other.”

“I hope you’re right. Just watch him and talk to him, that’s all.”

The exfil site was ten klicks outside of Abbottabad. 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) was due to pick them up, using two of their advanced MH-60M Black Hawk helos, specially silenced to shield the noise from anyone on the ground. Nolan brought up the rear. He’d donned his night vision goggles, and he was able to constantly sweep behind them for any signs of pursuit. Grant fell in beside him, and Nolan had to ask him the question that had nagged at him since they’d left the town.

“Why did you disobey orders and go to check out the compound, Lucas? Didn’t you hear Colonel Weathers give the order to stay away from it? If this bin Laden guy is there and thinks we’re nosing around, he’ll be off like a frightened deer.”