Sunrise: Wrath & Righteousness: Episode Ten (6 page)

Slapper shook his head. “I dunno, boss. Looks like you pulled her from the cover of some fashion magazine. Abdullah’s used to beautiful women. I don’t think he’ll be impressed.” He kept his eyes on Azadeh but still spoke as if she weren’t there. “And she looks soft as mud to me. I say she wets her pants the first shot that gets fired.”

Sam leaned toward the younger soldier. “She’s got a spine as thick as yours, Slapper. Don’t underestimate her because she’s pretty. She’s seen things and been through things you could only dream about.”

“Yeah, like running up against her limit on the old man’s credit card?”

Sam’s eyes turned hard. “She’s one of us.
I trust her
. You’re going to have to trust her too. All of us are going to have to trust each other or this thing is going to blow up in our faces.” He nodded toward Azadeh but kept his words directed to the man. “You’re going to have to trust me that I know what I’m doing with this, OK.”

The soldier was silent.

Sam leaned toward him, his bulky shoulders creating a wide shadow against the aircraft’s bulkhead. “Any further question on this topic?”

“No sir.”

“Didn’t think so, Slapper.”

The soldier turned and smiled vaguely toward Azadeh. “Welcome to the team. If you screw it up, they’re going to kill you, but hey, that ain’t no big deal. Don’t go and worry your pretty little head about all that. Just be cool, little darlin’, and let’s get this over with.”

Azadeh only stared back at him.

There it was again.
Be cool
.

Bono moved toward the center of the group. “OK, this is what we know,” he started. “We’ve got a resource somewhere here on the mountain. For lack of a better name, we’ll call him” he shot a look at Azadeh, his eyes illuminated by the red lights overhead, “tell you what, we’ll call him Omar, since that happens to be his name. He’s in contact with the Saudi prince. In fact, he’s the young boy’s protector. Over the past couple days, he’s been moving him across the mountains, positioning the prince closer to the Afghan border where it will be a little easier for us to get to him.”

“Who is this guy?” one of the soldiers asked, his face hidden in the dim light of the bouncing helicopter.

“Omar?”

“No, the kid. Who is he and why is it worth my life to save him?”

Sam leaned forward to take the question. “He’s the son of the crown prince of the House of Saud.”

The soldier shook his head. “The crown prince is dead. His brother got him. From what our intel pukes told us, Abdullah pretty much took care of everyone in the family who had the guts to stand in his way.”

The soldier was a thirty-year-old enlisted man who was one of the best noncommissioned officers the Cherokees had ever produced. He had a bachelor’s degree in physiology; a master’s degree in international relations; spoke four languages, including Arabic and Urdu, the predominate language of the region they were flying over right now (predominate in the sense that more people spoke it than most of the other forty different dialects and languages the Pashtun rebels, government soldiers and nomadic herdsman of the mountains spoke), yet he was willing to work in the grime and filth of one of the most hostile locations on the earth, all for something like forty-five thousand dollars per year. Some things men did for love of country or adventure, not for cash. His name was Dallas Houston (his father having been drunk when he filled out the birth certificate and his mother having been thrilled with his choice of names), and the soldier was like his namesakes; big, powerful, hot and sweaty. In general, the kind of guy you wanted with you in a dirty fight.

Sam lowered his eyes, his mind flashing back. His father had been close friends with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In fact, his father had sent a rescue mission to save the young boy after the crown prince had hidden him in the village in the mountains of Iran.

His heart raced at the memory but he focused his eyes on Houston. “You got it right,” he answered. “Abdullah popped everyone in his immediate family; brothers, their wives, their children. But the crown prince wasn’t stupid. He got his youngest son out before Abdullah could kill him. Took him to the remote mountains of Iran. But Abdullah soon found the location of the village where his older brother had hidden his son and sent an assassination squad to kill him.” He pointed toward Azadeh. “She was there. She saw it all. Her father was killed by the Iranian soldiers. It was Omar, one of her father’s closest friends, who got the boy out of the village before he could be killed. He’s been hiding him ever since, though we lost track of him up until a couple days ago. That’s when Omar sent us word that he couldn’t protect the boy any longer. He needed the U.S. to come and get him.”

“OK,” Houston answered after a moment’s thought. “And we care about this because . . . ?”

“Because the boy is the legal heir to the Saudi kingdom. Because the young prince is the only hope we have of establishing a pro-democratic, pro-Western, pro-American government in the kingdom. Because if we don’t save him, Abdullah wins. It’s pretty much that simple. We’ve got to get this kid out and protect him or King Abdullah retains power; a completely hostile leader sitting on the throne of the one of the most powerful and important nations on the earth.”

The soldiers were silent for a moment.

“Because if you don’t help him, King Abdullah is going to kill him,” Azadeh broke the silence. Her voice was quiet but her eyes were firm.

All of the soldiers turned to look at her.

“Yeah, there is that too,” Bono said. “We’ve got a chance to do a good thing. Nothing wrong with that.”

“But listen to me on this,” Sam cut in quickly. “This is important. Saving the prince is
not
our primary mission. It’s critical you understand that he’s a collateral objective. Frankly, the primary reason we care about him is we’re using him as bait. If we can save him, cool, but that’s not the reason we’re here. We’re here to track down King Abdullah.”

“Why in the world would he be stupid enough to leave his kingdom?” Houston asked. “Why would he come to this forsaken place? And how do you even know he’s here?”

“A little birdie told us.”

Houston nodded, knowing Sam was talking about a micro-drone.

“Turns out the little birdie was right.” Sam slapped a high resolution satellite photograph upon the floor that showed two military transports, the Arabic script and sword of the Saudi flag upon their tails. “We got these pictures sometime yesterday. King Abdullah is here to kill the prince.”

“Why wouldn’t Abdullah just send an assassination squad to kill him?”

Sam shrugged “Seems Abdullah’s a hands-on, kind of guy, you know, a leader who likes to take care of some of the dirty work himself.”

“OK boss, so what’s the plan? How are we going to pop him off?”

Sam shook his head “We’re not going to kill him. Let me say that again; we’re not here to kill him. We’re going to capture him and take him back to the States where he’s going to stand trial for crimes against humanity, genocide, unlawful warfare, fratricide, stealing bubble gum out of gumball machines, cheating at cards, parking in a no-parking zone, offending U.N. officers, breaking pollution standards—there isn’t a crime for which this guy won’t be charged. And he’s not going to spend his life in some cushy federal prison hanging out with convicted senators and Wall Street executives. No, this guy is going to hang and hang quickly. It’s the only way we have of avoiding an overwhelming push toward a war of retaliation.” Sam stopped and looked around the circle of his men. Looks of confusion seeped into several of their faces. “Here’s the deal,” he concluded, slipping the final piece of the puzzle into place. “Even as we speak here, there’s a constitutional battle being fought for the very soul of our country. If that goes well, and it’d better, then Secretary Marino—”

“Brucius Marino?! I thought he’s dead.”

“Quite the contrary. He’s the one who authorized this mission.”

“They said he killed himself after the impeachment.”

“Afraid that’s demonstrably untrue. All sorts of rumors going on out there right now. And if he is able to claim the presidency—”

Dallas Houston raised his hand. “
Nyet
,
nyet
,
nyet
. Fuentes is the president—”

“Not if Brucius Marino is alive.”

“He’s been impeached already—”

“That remains to be seen. It isn’t clear the proceedings against him were even legal. In many respects, they were very clearly not.”

Sam quickly told the soldiers of the move to gather the three remaining members of the Supreme Court. After he finished speaking, they sat in stunned silence for a long moment, the helicopter bouncing all around them.

“Holy cattle,” Dallas Houston finally said.

“You got it, baby. Very holy cattle. Do you see now what we’re doing here? Do you really understand? If Secretary Marino is sworn in as president, there’s going to be overwhelming pressure to retaliate for the nuclear and EMP attacks. He doesn’t want to have to do that, but justice
must
be served. The only way to do that is to capture King Abdullah and take him back to the States. And we haven’t even talked about the fact that King Abdullah is committed to wiping Israel off the earth.

“Knowing what you know now, is there any spot of doubt inside your minds how critical this mission is? Can you see that right now the world is hanging by a thread? We do our job, and we’ve got a bit of hope here. Fail, and I don’t know.”

The group was silent.

“We can do it,” Dallas Houston said.

Sam knelt beside the map in front of them. “And this how.”

*******

His instructions took less than five minutes. When he was finished, the soldiers locked eyes on him.

“That’s it?” Dallas Houston wondered.

Sam shot a look at Bono. “It’s the best we could come up with, given our limited resources and time.”

Houston shook his head.

Bono shrugged with nonchalant confidence. “It’ll work,” he assured his men.

“And you say that because . . . ?”

“Well, for one thing it’ll catch them off guard.”

Houston almost laughed. “That it will, lieutenant. I mean, it’s so absurd, how could you
even
think of such a plan?”

Bono kept his face serious. “Yeah, OK, it’s less direct than what we usually do. But if everyone does their job, things will be OK.”

“Dude, I wouldn’t describe this as a work of Einstein,” Houston shot back. “I mean, I’ve seen some pretty screwed up plans before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this.”

“You don’t think it’ll work.”

Houston didn’t answer. The look on his face said it all. “I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s completely hopeless, I just wonder you know—I just, you know, I mean, what are we going to face, maybe a hundred of the king’s special security forces?”

Sam shrugged. “Maybe not a hundred.”

“OK, eighty or ninety then?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“And these guys are not slouches. All of them are graduates of the finest training the United States could provide them, I’m sorry to say. All of them are selected for their dedication and ruthlessness. I’ve worked with some of those guys, captain, all of us have. They’re good. And anything they lack in tactics they more than make up in their lack of fear.”

Sam shrugged again. “Yeah, OK, I’m not going to argue.”

“All right then, just to make sure I’ve got it. We’re going up against at least three teams from the Royal Security Forces, with something like 25 to 30 men in each team. They’ve got the advantage of defensible positions and superior firepower, not to mention the fact that, when it’s all over, we don’t have any way to evacuate the area, no way of getting out of town. There are six of us.” He looked at Azadeh. “Well, six and one girl who if we were going to assault some modeling agency in Paris, I think she’d be OK. But this ain’t Paris, this is Ickystan. And I’m supposed to feel good about this gig?”

Sam’s face remained calm, his eyes bright. He didn’t feel scared. “Yeah, Houston, you’re supposed to feel good about this thing. Come on, man! This is guts and glory, the kind of things that they write songs about.”

“No one writes songs about things like that anymore.”

Sam looked dejected. “Well, they used to.”

“Not any more, captain.”

“Still, they should.”

Houston stared back at him, then started smiling.

“And there’s one
really
important thing you didn’t mention that’s in our favor,” Bono said as he slapped Sam on the shoulder. “The quality of your leadership is unmatched anywhere in the world. If anyone can get us through this, believe me, this man will.”

Houston nodded then glanced at his watch. Outside, the night was turning pale, the last cold glimmers of the falling moon forming shadows among the mountains.

“LZ in two minutes,” one of the flight engineers announced over the helicopter’s intercom.

The men stood and started unstrapping their gear from the helicopter’s metal floor. They had a very long hike ahead of them and very little time for they had to be in position before the sunlight broke over the enormous mountains peaks almost fifteen thousand feet over their heads.

Three or four hours of running. Uphill. Among sheer cliffs. With seventy pounds of guns, ammo and equipment strapped around their chests and on their backs.

Most men couldn’t make the hike in two days.

They had a little more than a couple of hours.

Sam braced himself for the physical battle that lay ahead.

By the end of the day, all of them would be utterly exhausted, every muscle, every bone, every tendon and ounce of energy pulled, stretched, used and drained.

By the end of the day, they’d be either dead or successful.

He stood up and threw his pack across his shoulders when a surge of adrenaline pushed through him, sending a shiver through his veins.

But this was more than just the adrenaline. There was something else . . . something around him. Something he didn’t recognize. A feeling, foreign and powerful, warm but unfamiliar. A premonition maybe? He swallowed and looked away, his mind tumbling, a sense of vertigo making him reach for the nearest brace.