Support and Defend (39 page)

E
THAN
R
OSS HAD SPENT
the last several minutes with his eyes fixed on Mohammed. The Iranian intelligence officer sat with his phone pressed to his ear almost constantly. He was conferring with someone, it sounded like it was Arabic and not Farsi, but Ethan could not be sure.

Ross didn’t speak either language, but he had understood one thing Mohammed had said. After several loud almost angry outbursts, the Iranian said an unmistakable phrase in English.

“Track my iPhone.”

Ross and Bertoli exchanged a confused glance.

While Mohammed barked into his mobile the driver of the van looked into the rearview mirror and shouted an alarm, again Ross had no understanding of what was being said, but he pieced it together when all the Iranians swiveled their heads around and looked behind them. Ross followed suit, and he saw a silver SUV racing up from behind in the left lane.

Ross assumed it was nothing more than a crazy driver ignoring the awful conditions, but the Iranians began reaching for their weapons in their coats.

Ross ducked down in his seat, still keeping his eyes out the window, and still expecting the vehicle to pass. But to his horror the silver SUV merged quickly into the van’s lane. The right-front quarter panel of the Ford truck made contact with the left rear quarter of the van briefly, knocking it gently.

And that was all it took. The driver of the van shouted and Ross realized the man had lost control. The nose of the van angled to the left and the rear tires slid to the right. Soon everyone inside was grabbing on to something or someone, and the van began skating sideways on the two-lane road at over fifty miles an hour. Ross slammed into Bertoli as the van skidded one hundred eighty degrees; it showed no sign of slowing as it left the road and impacted a guardrail and scraped along it as it shot backward.

At the end of the guardrail the van left the road and slid slowly backward down thirty-foot-long snow-covered hill. It stopped in a drift and teetered, finally tipping over, crashing down on its side in a foot of snow.

Ross ended up on top of Gianna Bertoli and an Iranian in the back of the van. Mohammed and two Quds men were pressed together in front of them. Two more Iranians were in the second row, and in the front, the driver and the passenger were still strapped in their seats.

Quickly men clambered over one another to get out through the driver’s-side doors. One after another they rolled off the side of the van and they dropped into the snow, taking cover behind the hood and the roof.

Ross heard the back door of the van open behind him, and then he felt hands on his jacket, his belt, and even in his hair. Two men pulled him roughly out and into the snow. He screamed in pain as his hair was wrenched nearly out of the scalp.

For a brief moment Ethan lay alone on his back by the rear of the van. From his position he had a view of the road above him, and he saw two silver Ford Expeditions parked there. Several men appeared; they crouched with rifles pointed down in his direction.

Even though Ross lay on his back, he raised his hands high in the air.

Just then someone grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him around the roof of the van, removing him from the line of fire.

He looked around quickly. Gianna was sitting in the snow with her back against the van’s roof. She seemed dazed, and a black-and-blue bruise that covered her right cheek and eye socket told him she’d been injured in the crash of the van.

The Iranian men in the ski jackets were all around. The two who had pulled him around the van joined up with the others, they knelt or squatted low behind the van, and they all held black pistols in their hands. They swiveled their heads back and forth between the road above them and Mohammed, down here behind the van on his knees.

Ross looked at Mohammed now and realized the Iranian was, incredibly, still talking on his telephone.

What the fuck?

Just then he heard the squawk of a bullhorn. “Ethan Ross!

Can you hear me?”

Ross answered instinctively. “Yes!”

“Tell your men to put down their weapons!”

Ross was confused. He looked around him. My men? “They aren’t
my
men! I’m a prisoner!”

The amplified voice said, “I want to see guns in the snow, now!”

Bertoli crawled frantically over to Mohammed, grabbing at his arm and pulling the phone away from his ear. “We must surrender! My friends here in Italy will protect us! Please, don’t do anything—”

Mohammed backhanded her with enough force to knock her onto her back, and he kept talking into his phone.

From above the man with the loudspeaker said, “I need you to comply immediately or we will be forced to—”

Mohammed shouted something in Farsi, and then, with no hesitation, his six men stepped out on either side of the van and opened fire uphill at the men in the road.

Ross cowered into the fetal position and covered his ears. He closed his eyes. Hot brass ejected from the pistols and landed all around him.

Gunfire from above boomed louder than the pistols.

Within five seconds Ross felt a blow to his head. He opened his eyes and saw that an Iranian had fallen on top of him. He was dead where he fell, his black clad leg and ski boot lying atop of Ross.

A man on the far side of the toppled van dropped to his knees and his pistol tumbled free. He clutched at his throat and Ethan watched as a geyser of blood spurted through his fingers. He let out a garbled cry, and then another spray of blood exploded out the back of his head. He flopped onto his back in the snow as the men next to him kept firing.

D
ARREN
A
LBRIGHT POSITIONED HIMSELF
at the rear axle of one of the Expeditions, keeping the vehicle between himself and the Iranians shooting. He had his SIG pistol in his hand, but the five HRT men were laying down withering fire on the armed men below.

After thirty seconds of incessant shooting, there was a break in the gunfire. Albright saw that one of the HRT men had been hit, but he’d been dragged back to cover by another agent, and he appeared to be only lightly wounded. The others expertly moved wide on both sides of the road. Albright knew they would try to hit the men below from the flanks simultaneously. He covered their movement with his pistol, ready to lay down fire on anything that appeared from behind the toppled van.

Albright was the first to hear the noise. He cocked his head and looked up to the sky as the faint but unmistakable thumping of a helicopter’s rotors filled the air. In this weather the helo was a surreal sound, and within seconds every last member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team followed Albright’s gaze into the sky. The snowfall was heavy and constant, it seemed as if the clouds were no more than twenty feet above the ground.

Albright brought his radio to his mouth. “That helo does
not
belong to us. Who the fuck is flying in this—”

A blue-and-white helicopter appeared out of the gray soup just over the highway, less than a hundred yards away. It skimmed twenty feet off the road surface and as it closed on the two SUVs, and it pivoted ninety degrees, revealing an open sliding side door. Figures were visible moving inside. Like something from a nightmare, Albright saw flashes come from the helo’s interior, and he heard the quick staccato sounds of automatic gunfire.

The first SUV on the road shook on its chases as copperjacketed lead tore through its aluminum skin.

An FBI agent near Albright swung his weapon up toward the new threat, but he immediately spasmed and fell, blood erupting from his legs and lower torso and splattering across the snow-streaked highway.

Albright dove for the deck and shouted into his mike.

“Engage that fucking helo!”

A
CELL OF SIX
H
EZBOLLAH
operators from Lyon, France, sat strapped inside the Eurocopter EC145 that streaked sideways over the snowswept Italian highway. Five men were in the back, firing down on the Americans on the road with their mish mash of automatic weapons, while one man sat in the copilot’s seat and held his CZ nine-millimeter pistol to the head of the pilot.

His name was Ajiz, he was leader of this cell and the oldest at twenty-four, and he had been in near-constant communication with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer running this operation for most of the past twenty-four hours.

From the moment Mohammed Mobasheri arrived in Geneva and saw the welcome reception of ITP members, he decided he might need to snatch Ross out of the hands of the ITP to satisfy his mission parameters. To do this, he began planning on a way to effect the abduction. He was well aware the weather would be turning bad, the winter storm was all over the news because it was coming so late in the season, but he didn’t think he could take Ross overland all the way to the Mediterranean, a five-hour drive.

Mohammed knew he needed a helicopter and a pilot, and with the approaching storm he decided he would need the best pilot available to travel in the miserable winter conditions. He did some Google research the previous afternoon and found a private helicopter rescue organization that operated in the area. Their helos were responsible for plucking injured climbers off of Mont Blanc, as well as other mountains in the Graian Alps, so he decided they would be best suited to the horrible conditions coming. He ordered the Lyon cell of Hezbollah men to hijack a helicopter and a pilot from the service and to have it meet him on the road outside of Geneva.

More research showed Mobasheri that he could mask the flight of the helicopter on radar if it flew low through the alps, so he made the decision to move the transfer of Ross from the van to the helicopter to somewhere in the Aosta Valley, the nearest suitable location.

The six Hezbollah operatives had arrived at the hanger of Mont Blanc Copter Services at ten o’clock that morning. Flight operations had been cancelled due to the snowstorm, but the staff lived on the mountain, so they showed up to work for paperwork and routine maintenance. There was no security on the property, just a secretary at a desk, three maintenance men, two pilots, and a receptionist.

Ajiz and his team took the entire staff at gunpoint into an office, where he demanded to know which of the two pilots had more experience. Neither man spoke up, but a photograph on the receptionist’s desk told Ajiz what he needed to know. Claudette, the thirty-year-old receptionist, was the daughter of the fifty-six-year-old pilot named Henri. The Hezbollah cell commander knew instantly he could use this to his advantage.

The French pilot told the young Middle Easterners that they were mad if they thought anyone could fly in such poor visibility.

The honest truth was no one in the Lyon cell wanted to fly in this weather any more than the Frenchman did, but they had their orders from Mohammed Mobasheri, and they knew failing to carry them out would mean a certain death sentence back in Lebanon for themselves and their families.

The French pilot and his daughter were pulled into the hangar and the others were lashed with tie-down chains and locked together in a supply room off the hangar with padlocks from the storage doors. They weren’t killed, because Mohammed had passed orders on to Ajiz mandating that he keep them alive. He knew the pilot would need the incentive of believing he would be left alive at the end of the operation.

Killing the others would tip him off that even his total compliance would not save him and his daughter.

Ajiz ordered the pilot to fuel and preflight the largest craft in the hanger, a blue Eurocopter EC145, then he, his daughter, and the six Hezbollah operators from Lyon rolled it out into the heavy snow on a trailer.

The pilot begged the armed men to reconsider, telling them they would all likely slam into a mountain before they accomplished whatever the hell it was they were planning. Ajiz just strapped in beside him and waved his gun while Claudette was placed in the back in the middle of the rest of the Lyon cell. Ajiz put on his headset and told the Frenchman they would be heading somewhere down in the valley, and he’d provide him more information soon.

The helicopter lifted off into the gray, the pilot used his instruments and his radar and his GPS to pick his way forward slowly between the peaks of the mountains, certain they were all going to die, but aware he’d saved his colleagues back in the hanger, and desperately trying to come up with some way to somehow save his daughter, as well.

The flight was miserable and stressful for all involved, but Ajiz was in comms with Mohammed for most of the flight, and this made things ever more difficult. The pilot flew much slower than Mohammed demanded, but Henri refused to fly faster, even with a CZ pistol jabbed in his neck.

By using a locator app from Mobasheri’s iPhone, Ajiz was able direct the pilot to the van on the road, although the iPhone signal was intermittent as the phone entered and exited tunnels.

When the helo reached an altitude of only twenty-five feet above the highway, the pilot could see both the ground and any wires along the road, and this gave him the confidence to pick up speed.

Mobasheri contacted Ajiz seconds after the van crashed down the hill, and he told the Lyon cell leader they were under attack, and he ordered the men in the helo to engage the Americans and the vehicles on the road.

Just seconds later the two silver SUVs appeared one hundred yards in front of the helicopter, Ajiz ordered the pilot to turn sideways so the men could shoot out of the side door. Henri feigned trouble with the task, but the butt of an AK-47 rifle to the side of Claudette’s head showed him that he needed to comply. As he flew perpendicular to the highway Henri heard the heavy gunfire coming out of the cabin of his aircraft. He ducked down as low as he could, and hoped his daughter would be able to do the same behind him.

A
MINUTE EARLIER,
D
OMINIC
C
ARUSO
raced through the rustic village of Villair as fast as he could do so without sliding his big bike into the side of a stone house or crashing through a wooden fence. Off his right shoulder and a thousand yards away he could hear the rolling echoes of gunfire from both M4 rifles and handguns, and he hurried to get back on the road, and then race back to get his own weapon into the fray.

When he was still several hundred yards away from the SS26 he backed off on the throttle for a moment, because he thought he heard a helicopter overhead. It seemed unlikely, impossible really, as there were high hills on both sides of the road here that disappeared into the clouds just a hundred feet or so above his head.

The sound disappeared and he all but dismissed it, but suddenly a new barrage of even more intense gunfire erupted from the site of the FBI traffic stop to the north. It seemed several more guns had entered the fight, and the only explanation Caruso had for it was that somehow the Iranians had managed to show up with reinforcements from the air.

He rolled onto the SS26, turned west toward the gunfight, opened the throttle on his BMW bike, and leaned down behind his little windscreen. He flew headlong through the snowstorm with no idea what he would encounter when he arrived at the battle.