SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox (12 page)

“Sophisticated mofos,” Akil said.

“That’s Idlib,” Hassan said, pointing toward the left to the lights ahead.

“Already?”

Crocker quickly checked his watch: 0148 hours.

“How much farther to the air base?” he asked.

“Another ten, fifteen minutes tops.”

If they could secure the sarin within an hour, or even two, it would give them ample time to return to Turkey before dawn. The problem was that they had no detailed map of the air base, which consisted largely of a runway and underground bunkers, and no definitive intel on the deployment, number, and disposition of Syrian Army troops and pro-Assad forces. Without the above, it was hard to even conceive of a plan until they got there.

“Breaker, Deadwood here,” he said into his head mike. “We’re approaching the road to the air base.”

“Copy.”

A huge explosion lit up the sky in front of them and shook the ground.

“What was that?” Hassan asked.

“A big bomb or rocket,” Crocker responded.

“Could be one of those Chinese FN-6s, right?” Akil asked.

“Maybe.”

The jeep in front of them pulled over to the shoulder and braked to a stop. Captain Zeid walked back and leaned in the driver’s-side window. As Crocker got out, he caught a whiff of rotting animal in the grass behind him.

“That’s no-man’s-land ahead,” Zeid said. “Dangerous territory. Assad and ISIS fight there. It’s as far as we go.”

Crocker wanted to grab him by the neck and call him a coward, but restrained himself. They might need his and Babas’s help getting back.

“Where’s the cutoff?” he asked, hearing something stir in the brush behind them.

“The cutoff for the road to Abu al-Duhur?” Zeid responded. “You will see it; maybe three hundred meters ahead.”

“What happens then?” Crocker asked, peering past Zeid to the high grass and brush behind him. Something was in there. He sensed it.

“We wait for you over there.” Zeid pointed to the burned-out remains of a petrol station fifty feet ahead and on the left.

Seeing something move in the grass, Crocker held a finger to his mouth, removed the SIG Sauer P226 stuffed in a back band of his pants, and flashed a series of hand signals to Akil. Moving simultaneously, the two men slid down a gravel embankment and circled through the low scrub brush and grass in a crouch, Crocker from the rear of the pickup, Akil from the front. The smell of putrefying animals was so thick it stuck in Crocker’s throat. On his right something moved, and he jumped and grabbed a kicking, struggling person. After pinning his ankles, he brought his right hand up to the boy’s throat. Caught him in half scream, yanked him up to his knees, and quickly swept him for explosives or weapons. The kid wasn’t armed, but he had a black stocking pulled over his face.

“What the fuck’s he doing?” Crocker asked.

The kid grunted something.

Akil held an older man, who wasn’t bothering to resist and wasn’t armed either.

The two of them wore filthy clothes and sneakers. The older man had a pair of surgeon’s shears and two different types of pliers hanging from a belt around his waist. Both carried black sacks that hung behind their backs.

Crocker and Akil dragged them over to the trucks, where Zeid leaned lighting a cigarette.

“Scavengers,” he said with disgust. “If ISIS finds them, they cut off their balls.”

Akil reached into the sack the trembling old man was carrying and retrieved a handful of teeth with gold fillings, earrings, pins, and rings.

Zeid booted the old man in the ass so he fell forward. Then he held a pistol to his head. The man whimpered as he pointed into the bushes and offered an explanation in Arabic.

Crocker pushed in front of Zeid and said, “Leave him alone. What did he say?”

“Assad’s troops stopped a truck of refugees,” Akil translated. “Raped the girls and women in front of the men, then shot them. Every last one.”

Zeid aimed a kick to the older man’s stomach, then said, “These pigs loot the bodies.”

Crocker shoved him back this time. “Leave him alone! How old’s the boy?”

“
Sitta
,”
the boy grunted. He was only six years old.

“Claims he’s the old man’s grandson. They’re all that’s left of an extended family of twelve, originally from Aleppo. The men joined the resistance. When the pro-Assad gangs found out, they tortured and raped the women. Some of them drowned themselves in the river. Others were killed and beheaded. The boy had his eyes gouged out.”

Crocker removed the black stocking from the kid’s head and held his chin up. Indeed, his eyeballs were gone and the sockets covered with scar tissue. He
reached into his pocket, found a twenty-dollar bill, and pressed it into the old man’s hand.

“Here, take this.…May God be with you.”

“Alhamdulillah
.…
Alhamdulillah.”

“Leave ’em. We can’t afford to waste any more time. Let’s go.”

T
hey lay
in tall grass within the base perimeter, all wearing night-vision goggles and holding weapons. A rocket whined overhead as Crocker calmly counted the seconds in his head. “Five, six, seven—”
KA-BLAM!

The explosion sucked the oxygen out of the air, creating a wind that pulled at the green stalks. It was followed by a second blast less than a minute later.

They were waiting for Suarez and Akil, who had run ahead to recon the approach to the tunnel. ISIS rebels approximately 1,000 feet behind them had kept up the barrage for fifteen minutes now. Their target: the big rectangular building that housed Abu al-Duhur air base headquarters and the control tower. That structure stood about a quarter mile ahead and to their left. When Crocker raised his head above the three-feet-tall grass he saw black smoke streaming from the top left of the structure.

“They hit it,” he announced.

“What happens now?” Davis whispered back.

“We wait for Suarez and Akil.”

He had no idea how many of Assad’s forces remained there or what their response was likely to be. Nor was he aware how long the ISIS rebels planned to keep firing missiles.

Would they follow up the barrage with a land assault? He hoped not, because that might interfere with Black Cell’s objective—the tunnel that held the sarin canisters, which was about 900 feet to Crocker’s three o’clock, at the opposite end of a long underground bunker, B3, that housed Assad’s aircraft and crews.

The whole setup was odd. Aside from the large main building there was nothing to indicate that there was, or had been, an air base here. Everything else, except the airstrip itself, was disguised under bunkers covered with the same grass that carpeted the pancake-flat plain.

“Deadwood, it’s Romeo,” Crocker heard through his earbuds.

“You guys stop for pizza?”

“We’re almost finished. Be there in three. Over.”

“Time’s a-wasting.”

Mancini, Davis, Crocker, and Hassan had parked the trucks in a drainage culvert fifty feet away and now lay on their stomachs with their backs against an old mud wall that rose about four feet.

Four more rockets sailed overhead and exploded before Crocker saw Akil’s Phoenix IR strobe beacon in the grass ahead. Soon both men were kneeling before them, breathing hard and drinking water from the bladders they carried strapped to the back of their waists.

Suarez removed his NVGs and used an iPad and stylus to sketch the setup in and around B3.

“The tunnel is right where Hassan told us it would be, boss,” he said pointing to the screen.

The men gathered closer.

“Let’s hope the canisters are still inside,” said Davis.

“Better be,” Akil responded.

Suarez pointed over his left shoulder. “One of the four main bunkers starts about two hundred yards over there. It’s huge. Really massive. At the end of it is like a concrete parking area with sandbags and a gate. Part of that gate has been destroyed. We couldn’t tell if it had been hit by rockets or had withstood a more coordinated attack.”

“Where’s the tunnel?” asked Crocker.

“The entrance is right there, past the bunkers. Six to eight concrete stairs that lead down to a locked door. Nothing much.”

“Think you can breach it?”

“Yeah. Easy.”

“What’s in the hangar?” Crocker asked.

“B3 also appears partially damaged,” Akil chimed in. “Maybe from a previous attack. Looks like it’s being used for storage. Trucks, parts, barrels of fuel, random shit.”

“No soldiers inside?” Crocker asked.

“A few guards. The main focus of the base seems to have shifted to bunkers 1, 2, and 4, farther north and closer to the main building.”

“Got it.”

“Access to the tunnel aside from the stairs?” asked Crocker.

“We located an air vent here,” Suarez said, pointing to a location on his sketch just south of B3. “We think we can squeeze in through there.”

“Good. What’s going on behind us?” Crocker asked, pointing to the ISIS missiles behind them.

“The jihadists appear to have gotten their hands on a BM-21 Grad missile launcher system,” Suarez reported.

“It’s a truck-based Soviet system built back in the sixties,” Mancini, the weapons expert, added. “Nothing especially high-tech, but with enough bang to do damage.”

Crocker nodded. “I can see that.”

“I think they’re firing Egyptian-made Sakr-45A missiles,” Suarez said. The Sakr-45A was an eleven-foot missile with a range of about twenty miles.

“Why are they so close? Don’t those babies have range?” Crocker asked.

“Because they’re idiots,” Akil answered, “who like to film what they’re doing and post it on YouTube.”

“You mean they’re filming this shit now?” Davis asked. “At night?”

“Fuck, yeah. You’d think they were having a party. Every time they fire a fucking missile twenty guys jump in the air, dance and shout
‘Allahu akbar!’
And every time they hit something, they go crazy.”

“Zero operational training.”

Akil: “They don’t think they need it. Allah is on their side.”

“Allah or not, they’re about to get their asses kicked,” Suarez added.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the Assad forces are massing a counterattack. They’re moving out armed columns here and here,” he said, pointing to the map he’d drawn. “They’re gonna outflank the rebels and cut off their escape.”

“How many?”

“Maybe two squads with tanks and armored vehicles. They might not be flying because of the low cloud cover and the missiles, but they’re still here and they look plenty strong.”

“Good work,” whispered Crocker. “We’d better move fast.”

“Agreed,” responded Suarez.

“Akil and Davis, you get in the tunnel through the vent. Suarez and I will attack B3. Manny, you back the pickup up to the entrance and get ready to load the sarin.”

“Yes.”

“What about me?” Hassan asked.

“You wait here with the other truck.”

“What about the jihadists? What if they find me?”

Crocker removed the letter he had gotten from al-Kazaz and handed it to Hassan. “Take this. The jihadists are gonna start running away when they’re attacked, and they’re not gonna run toward the base.”

“Okay.”

Crocker also handed him his SIG Sauer 226. “Take this just in case. All you have to do is unlatch the safety, here, then point and shoot.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll be fine. We’ll be back soon.”

Twenty minutes later Crocker lay on his belly to the rear of B3 waiting for Suarez to set the C4. The body of a dead Syrian Army guard lay in the grass to Crocker’s right. He had finished him with a swipe of his SOG knife against his throat. Quick, lethal work.

Several hundred yards behind him a vicious battle raged between Assad military forces and ISIS. Lots of automatic weapons fire and the occasional explosion, like the one now that lifted him six inches off the ground and lit up the low clouds so that for an instant the entire landscape turned white.

Crocker extended his forearms and eased himself down. Based on the sloppy military tactics of the jihadists, he had to believe they were losing and would soon be retreating. When that happened, Assad’s forces would return.

He pushed the button that lit up the dial of his Suunto watch. Already 0243. Things were proceeding too slowly for comfort. If they wanted to get back to the border before sunup, they had to pick up the pace.

“Manny, Deadwood here. What’s happening?”

“The StunRays are in place.” The StunRays were special handheld hardware Mancini had brought along.

“Good.”

“Rojas?” Crocker asked into his head mic.

“I need two more minutes.”

“Time’s fucking precious.”

“I know, boss,” Suarez whispered from two hundred feet inside the hangar, where he had found a pile of propane tanks near some parked vehicles. He was trying to orchestrate the biggest possible diversion.

“Breaker, can you hear me?” Crocker asked.

“Breaker? Report.”

“We’re…” His voice broke up.

“Breaker. Breaker?”

Davis’s voice came through. “I read you.”

“What’s your status?”

“We’re in, boss.”

“The tunnel?”

“Roger.”

“Excellent. Romeo with you?”

“He’s bitching like usual. Scratched his pinky.”

“The canisters there?”

“We count six of ’em.”

“Only six?”

“How many did you expect?”

“Wait. Here comes Rojas. Hold on.”

He saw Suarez hugging the opposite wall, moving as fast as possible while trying not to be seen. Through his NVGs, Crocker eyeballed the clearance in all directions, rose into a crouch, and signaled Suarez to join him on the south side of the bunker.

When Suarez arrived, his chest heaving, he readied the radio-controlled detonator in his hand.

“C4’s set. Time to blow?”

“Hold on. Let’s move alongside the bunker first. Maintain a safe distance.”

They proceeded another hundred feet and stopped. All the action behind them seemed to have shifted farther north and west, which was ideal for their escape.

Crocker, into the head mic: “Manny, report. Ready with the truck?”

“Near the gate, Deadwood. Ready. Over.”

“Breaker and Romeo?”

“In the tunnel. Ready.”

“All right. Signal to launch!”

Suarez lowered the black button and a split second later, the bunker emitted a tremendous roar that shook the ground and sent a huge column of light, flames, and debris shooting out the back. Crocker and Suarez didn’t stick around to watch. They ran the rest of the two hundred yards in a crouch toward the opposite end—the front entrance to B3—hoping to meet Mancini soon after he entered the gate.

Mancini, meanwhile, drove the Ford pickup up to the gate and came out of the cab shouting gibberish at the two guards, who started running toward him. They readied their AK-47s and ordered him to the ground. He stepped behind the cab and pushed a button that activated the six XL-2000 StunRays he had bolted to the forward stabilizer bar of the truck.

To say the light they emitted was intense was a huge understatement. An aircraft landing light put out about one-tenth the light of only one of these little devices. The collimated beams of incoherent optical radiation temporarily blinded both Syrian guards. In fact, the light was so bright they became completely disoriented. One soldier covered his face with his arm and stumbled backward.

Mancini put them both down with suppressed blasts from his M7A1. Then he got back into the Ford, rammed through the fence, swung it around, backed in, and lowered the gate. It was like picking up furniture at Walmart.

“Vehicle in position,” he barked into his head mic. “Let’s do this! Over.”

Cradling the M7A1, he knelt beside the back gate of the truck and got ready to start loading. A Syrian guard to his left opened fire, and he responded.

“Clear?” Davis shouted from the steps to the entrance to the tunnel where he waited with Akil. Both men were drenched with sweat.

“Clear!” Mancini shouted back, now that the guard had run away. “What did you guys find?”

“We’ve got six of these babies.”

“Hand ’em over.”

Mancini set down the M7A1 and took two of the forty-pound canisters at a time, one under each arm, and started to load them into the back of the pickup. Each canister was wrapped in black plastic.

“Where’s Crocker?” Akil asked when Mancini came back for the second round of canisters.

“Dragging ass, per usual.”

Akil smiled.

They worked fast as military sirens sounded in the distance. By the time Crocker and Suarez arrived, everything was loaded.

“That it?” Crocker asked.

“Done. Where the fuck were you?” Akil responded.

Mancini pointed to a Russian S-125 Pechora missile system on a truck parked at the entrance to B3. “Looks like two more there!” he exclaimed.

“Two more what?”

“Warheads. They contain sarin.”

Crocker saw that they matched the size and shape of the canisters in the truck bed.

“I can dislodge them,” Mancini said. “Spare some civilian lives.”

“How long?”

“Give me five to seven.”

Crocker glanced at his watch and nodded. “Five. Davis, you help him.”

The rest of them guarded the pickup as the fierce battle raging in the distance moved north. As Mancini handed down the first warhead, an armored vehicle appeared from the other side of B3, speeding toward them.

“Incoming!” exclaimed Akil. “Three o’clock!”

“Keep your heads down and cover my ass!” Crocker shouted.

The .30 cal on the armored truck opened up, bullets tearing into the concrete around the pickup and ricocheting. Crocker knelt and fired one of the PG-7VR rounds from the RPG-7 he’d been carrying.

Whoosh!

The PG-7VR maintained a straight line four feet off the ground. The first 64mm round detonated against the vehicle’s reactive armor block, and the second 105mm warhead penetrated the gap created to take out the vehicle itself—just as it was designed to do.

Within seconds the truck was a ball of flaming white-hot metal.

“Bingo.”

“What next?”

“How about we get the hell out of here?”

Seven minutes after the “launch” order had been given, they loaded the last sarin warhead into the pickup and packed into the cab, shouting, “Go, professor! Take us back to Turkey!”

Mancini gunned the Ford F-250 through the gate and cut the lights. “Turkey, here we come,” he muttered.

“Piece of cake.”

They rendezvoused with the Mercedes Sprinter hidden in the concrete culvert where Hassan was waiting nervously, distributed the canisters between the two vehicles, and headed back toward the highway. Almost immediately they ran into problems. The combat between the Assad forces and the jihadists had resulted in impassable roads, which they bypassed by going off-road and driving across the flat plain—more difficult for the Sprinter than for the F-250.