Clear by Fire (30 page)

“Gen— General Nantz . . . He’s working with the CIA,” he stuttered as Mason lifted his boot off the man’s windpipe. “He planned it all.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Bagram, he’s in Bagram.”

Mason looked down at the defeated general with disgust. Finally, he headed out the door, his mind already focused on the task ahead.

Outside, Mr. David looked flustered as Mason closed the door behind him.

“I need a plane to Bagram, ready to go in an hour,” he said simply.

“I’ll get on that,” he replied, regaining his composure.

•  •  •

Mason left the hangar and walked toward the row of white-painted modular houses. He had gotten his second wind and was bolstered by the new information, but he needed to check in with Renee before leaving.

The “mods” were basically trailers set up to house five separate rooms. Each one was made of aluminum with a corrugated steel roof and windows cut into the side. The housing area was the military’s version of a trailer park, but it was a huge improvement over the tents he’d used during the invasion of 2001.

He walked up the metal staircase and pulled the door open. A long, dimly lit hallway lay before him, which smelled of Pine-Sol and Windex. The smell was universal to the military and spoke volumes about the soldiers’ discipline. His boots squeaked on the spotless linoleum floor as he walked down the hall. Most of the doors were open, which meant that those rooms were unoccupied, and he continued walking until he came to a room with a closed door.

He stopped, collecting himself, and after taking a breath, he knocked.

After a few seconds, Renee pulled the door open and stuck her head through the crack. “Yeah?”

“I was in the . . . I mean, I stopped by to see how things were going,” Mason stammered.

“I’m fine,” she said as she closed the door.

Mason stood in the hall for a second, not sure what to do. He
started to turn and leave, not because she didn’t want to talk to him, but because he was suddenly nervous.

“Get your shit together,” he told himself as he knocked on the door again.

“What do you want?” Renee asked as she pulled the door open, but refused to move out of the doorway.

She’d just gotten out of the shower, and her hair was still damp and full of the distinctively feminine bouquet of her shampoo. Mason’s eyes danced over the form-fitting T-shirt she was wearing and continued down to the short Ranger panties that barely covered her shapely legs.

“Can I help you?” Renee asked defiantly as he tore his gaze away from her body.

It had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman and he found himself feeling intimidated.

“I, uhhh . . .”

“Yeah, you said that already, and I told you that I was fine.”

She moved to close the door and Mason’s hand shot out to check its movement.

“You need to cut me some slack. I’m trying to help you.”

Renee let go of the door and crossed her arms beneath her breasts as she stepped back. The shower shoes on her feet were still wet, and they squeaked against the tile floor as she moved.

“Why do you think I need your help, because I’m a woman? Is that what this is all about? You don’t think I can handle this shit?”

“No.” Mason was getting pissed at her little attitude and heard his voice going up. “It has nothing to do with that.”

“Then what?”

“Renee, you don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Act this way. We were there together, remember? And guess what, this thing isn’t over yet. So I suggest you get your shit together, because there is no way I’m going to let you jeopardize my life or Zeus’s life.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she turned away from Mason and retreated into the room. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Renee turned to him suddenly, and before he knew it she had grabbed him up in an embrace. He could feel her sobbing against his chest.

Mason was confused. One minute she was mad and the next she was crying. He had no idea what to do, so he reached down and patted her on the head.

“It was all my fault. I let all of this happen,” Renee sobbed.

“It’s not your fault. This is what Barnes does.”

“I— I couldn’t stop it . . . I had to watch them die . . . ,” she stuttered through the tears.

“Renee, there was nothing you could do. You have to know that.”

Mason knew that his words didn’t matter. They were hollow attempts to assuage a wound that only time could heal, but he felt obligated to say something.

“I killed them,” she whispered again before looking up at him.

Mason generally distrusted women, mainly because every woman who was supposed to love him had quit, but somehow Renee was different. He’d known her for only a few days, but he felt he could trust her.

“Look, get some sleep, and in the morning, when you’re rested, it’s up to you to decide if you want to finish this.”

Renee looked like she was about to hug him, and Mason stepped backward, almost tripping over his feet. She smiled and said, “What, are you scared?”

“No, it’s just, look, I . . . ,” he stammered. “Just get some sleep, okay?”

He turned and headed for the door, leaving her standing in the middle of the room. Mason steeled himself for what was ahead as he stepped out into the hall. He was going to get the answers he needed—no matter what the cost.

C
olonel Barnes stood in front of the mirror and carefully cut his blond hair with a pair of scissors. The hair fell into a plastic bag, which he’d taped open over the sink, and he shaped his hair until it was as close cropped as he could get it.

The bathroom smelled of cleaning products and fresh soap. A ceiling fan rotated lazily above his head, blowing clumps of his shorn hair across the cool tile floor and onto his bare feet. He noticed a smear of dried blood on his forearm as he pulled a pair of latex gloves from a small box and stretched them over his hands.

The ambush had left him with a feeling of invincibility, which added fuel to his resolve. Still, he knew that his blond hair would only attract attention, now that he was out in the open, and he was going to use dye to remedy that.

He released each glove with a snap before grabbing the plastic bottle of hair dye. Staring at himself in the mirror, he shook the plastic bottle vigorously and noted with pride the rippling muscles in his chest.

This is my destiny
, he thought.

Twisting the cap of the dye bottle, he felt it snap free in his hands and then dipped the applicator into the inky liquid. He was careful not to spill it on the stark white sink as he began applying it to his hair.

He worked the dye in from front to back until his hair was dark black, then replaced the lid and tossed it into the bag. The applicator and the brush followed, and when he was done, he ripped the bag free and tied it off.

He let the dye set for the allocated time before stepping into the shower. He turned the water on without waiting for it to warm up. The excess dye swirled around the drain like black rivulets of dark blood. He thought of the men he’d lost to the Hellfire strike, which had knocked him unconscious. Fate hadn’t been finished with him then. In fact, it had another blessing in store. After they left the valley, the World Health Organization had given them seats on a transport from Pakistan to Jordan.

It was all coming together, just like he’d been told.

•  •  •

Three hours later, the team stood around the van they were taking across the border. They were waiting for the order to load up. Boz had just finished a protein bar and was taking the plastic wrapper off the Listerine he had bought in Jordan.

“Is there some ingredient in that shit that I don’t know about?” Villa asked, watching him swish the blue liquid around in his mouth for the third time that day.

Boz had already gone through one of the travel-sized bottles and had been forced to open this one before the day was even over.

“Who knows, but for the longest time I thought it was vodka or something,” Harden said. “The man should have been a dentist.”

Barnes stood by himself, waiting for Jones, who had crossed the border the day prior with Hoyt, to send in his latest update. He’d considered his options and decided he didn’t want to go north in search of another crossing. Without knowing who was in control of the checkpoint, he could be walking into a trap. When the phone finally rang, Jones didn’t do much to help his decision.

Jones advised that he had a good vantage point on the crossing
but that there wasn’t any traffic coming from the Syrian side. Hoyt assumed that someone had cut the road and that al-Qaeda was letting people in but refused to let anyone out.

Barnes hung up the phone and called Harden over to him. Explaining the situation and lack of intel, he decided that they would dismount short of the border crossing before nightfall and conduct a recon before continuing on. Harden nodded and went to brief the team.

The civil war in Syria had brought every major terrorist group in the Mideast to the war-torn country. The violence and lawlessness meant that it was unsafe for most reporters, and therefore he didn’t have to worry about his men showing up on the news.

Barnes sat in the front while Scottie drove, and if traffic stayed light they would arrive at their drop point fifteen minutes after the sun went down. He grabbed a map from the visor and checked his position on his wrist GPS. Once he found his location, he began searching for a good place to stop the van.

“Scottie, in another five kilometers I need you to pull off the road and head into the desert. Harden, you stay with the van and I’ll take Boz and Villa up for the recon. You guys go ahead and kit up.”

“Roger that, boss.” They had bought the van from a smuggler who had built compartments into the seats that were virtually impossible to find. Villa and Boz moved off the bench seat and depressed the hidden lever that opened one of the compartments. The two men began pulling kit bags out of the hiding spot and laying them on the floor.

“I got your kit, sir.” Boz handed the colonel’s kit bag to Harden, who stood up and switched seats with him.

Barnes squeezed his large frame into the back of the van and slipped into his plate carrier. Instead of the HKs they were going to use AK-47s that had been modified to take a suppressor. He didn’t want to leave NATO brass around the objective—not that it mattered. The 7.62 magazines that they were carrying were bigger and
heavier due to the size of the round, and Barnes had made sure that everyone had a rig that would carry the magazines.

The colonel checked his optic to make sure it was working. He had never liked the EOTech, so he used an Aimpoint M68, which did the same job but had a dot instead of a reticle. They had modified the rifles because unlike the M4s, the Russian rifles didn’t have rails to mount hardware. Boz had solved the problem by welding a small rail forward of the bolt, which allowed the team to mount optics onto the rifles.

The van came to a halt at the predetermined spot and the team conducted a quick radio check. From his position on the other side of the border, Jones was monitoring the same channel while Hoyt used thermals to scan the area.

“Anvil 6 is stepping off time now. How copy?” Barnes asked as he led the team away from the road.

It was common for Muslims to stop on the side of the road to pray, so the van wouldn’t draw any attention. What would draw attention was three armed men running across the desert, so they made sure to push far enough out of sight that they wouldn’t be detected by any passing motorists.

“Yes, sir, I read you. Our position is about one kilometer northeast of the checkpoint. We couldn’t get any closer without being compromised, and there has been no traffic from this end for the last two hours.”

“Roger that.”

Barnes used the GPS to navigate away from the target before swinging wide and coming in from the south. He could see the road in the distance as it snaked east of him. According to the map the road would open up into a Y, and there would be a metal guard tower on a hill next to the intersection.

The terrain was flat and the sandy ground had been packed hard, making it easy to walk. Barnes could see low-lying shrubs and tufts of grass through his NODs as his feet gently scuffed the ground. He
wasn’t even breathing hard when he saw the guard tower rising over a low set of hills.

As they quietly slipped across the border, Barnes realized that he could have easily driven across without anyone seeing anything. However, in the back of his mind he knew that a plume of dust coming out of the desert might have drawn attention. The terrain was beginning to rise beneath their feet as they moved into the hills, and when they were five hundred meters out he called a halt.

“Be advised, we are five hundred meters from the objective.”

“Check, boss,” Harden replied.

“You must be in the low ground, sir—we can’t see you from here.”

“Roger that, we’re moving out.”

Barnes pivoted and touched Boz on the shoulder before he moved off in the darkness. He kept to the low side of the hill for as long as he could before he began working his way up at an angle. They made their approach carefully and avoided silhouetting themselves on the crest of the hill. The moon was beginning to peek out over the horizon, and they were close enough to the target to hear voices and smell the guard’s cheap tobacco.

“Sir, we have you now. We aren’t observing any movement.”

Barnes keyed his mike but didn’t say anything. In Vietnam, long-range reconnaissance teams referred to this as “breaking squelch.” The technique allowed them to communicate nonverbally when talking could compromise them.

He pointed at Boz and motioned for him to set up on the hilltop. Boz nodded and began low-crawling toward the crest of the high ground. Once he reached a good vantage point, he keyed the radio, signaling that he was set. Barnes and Villa moved silently from their position and approached the target.

The colonel crawled as close as he could to the edge of the hill, and since no one had bothered to cut the grass he had plenty of concealment to work with. He was able to move all the way to the edge
without any effort. He took a moment to relax as he looked around. Five feet below him was a metal shack made out of corrugated tin. He could see light filtering out of the west side of the shack, and he assumed there was a window over there.