SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox (24 page)

Mid-deck below, near the pool, he saw three armed terrorists in black, with black beards, dragging a hostage. It was unclear whether the captive was alive or dead until one of the terrorists slapped him hard and the man moaned and waved his hand as though he were drunk, or coming out of a stupor.

Crocker placed his palm on his head, indicating that he wanted the other two SEALs to cover him, then sprung.

Scott was disoriented, but still alive. His head felt swollen and hot, and every muscle in his body was seized with terror. He knew what was about to happen as the terrorists positioned him against the Goofy fountain and stepped back.

What have I done to you?
he wanted to ask them, but there was no point now. Instead, he said out loud, “Please, God, watch over my wife and sons.” He closed his eyes as the terrorists lifted their AK-47s and waited for the bullets to enter his head and body, hoping it would end quickly and he wouldn’t feel much pain.

His body flinched as he heard the shots, which sounded more like spitting than pops. Curiously, he didn’t feel anything pierce his skin. Even so, his knees gave way and he started to sink.

Halfway to the deck he was stopped by strong hands that pulled him close and covered his mouth. He heard a voice whisper in English, “Sir, are you a passenger?”

Scott nodded and looked up. He wasn’t sure whether he was seeing a demon or a rescuer. It was a heavily armed man all in black, peering at him through elaborate goggles. No eyes, no smile, a serious expression.

“I’m an American,” the man whispered. “We’re liberating the ship. Hide in there.” He pointed toward the shadow behind the Goofy fountain. “Don’t move or make a sound until we come back.”

It all happened in the blink of an eye. When the man turned and left, Scott saw the three terrorists’ legs bent and torsos twisted, bleeding out on the deck. He reached down and pulled a weapon out of one of the dead men’s hands. Holding it, he was about to fire it into the inert body when he remembered his rescuer’s words and stopped.

His whole frame shaking with relief and fury, he knelt behind the fountain, took a deep breath, and said to himself,
I’m still alive.

The air hung thick and still in Lower Deck D, because the ventilation system wasn’t working. Condensation clung to the metal surfaces and walls. Wondering what had happened to the crew, Mancini carefully led the way into the ship’s dark bowels, past the massive electric turbines, when he saw a dim light from a metal catwalk above and to his left, and held up his fist: “Freeze!” The three SEALs responded, lifted their weapons to their shoulders, and knelt. Everything was in shades of green—walls, turbines, electric switches, catwalk, even the dim light. He signaled to Revis and Diego to climb up and determine what it was, while he and JD waited. The two SEALs hurried up the slick metal ladder as Mancini glanced at the laminated chart in his hands, trying to determine the direction to the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) system, which appeared to be farther aft, past the sixth turbine and on a platform of its own.

He was squirming on his belly to massive Turbine No. 3 when he heard the echoes of suppressed fire—subtle, yet unmistakable. Two quick bursts, three, four, five, then silence. Then the loud sound of metal pounding metal that echoed through the cavernous space, then more silence. Then a loud explosion, then more suppressed fire and silence again.

“What the hell was that?” JD whispered.

Mancini shook his head and whispered into his head mic, “Delta 3, Delta 4, report.”

No answer.

“Delta 3, Delta 4, do you read me? Over.”

Nothing.

“Delta 3, Delta 4?”

Praying that the comms weren’t working, he made a quick calculation. Since the HVAC wasn’t functioning, the danger of released sarin quickly spreading throughout the ship had lessened considerably. He handed JD the laminated chart and indicated that he should continue searching for the HVAC while he went back to check on Revis and Diego. JD nodded.

Mancini grabbed hold of the wet metal rail and hoisted his big body up two rungs at a time like an ape. Reaching the catwalk, he hurried along it in a crouch, and stopped when he heard something splatter. A warm, wet liquid hit his neck.

Blood!

Above him he saw an arm and leg hanging over the partial deck, then heard a squeak behind him. Turning, he saw a terrorist aiming an AK at him and pulling the trigger. He hit the metal grid, felt bullets ricocheting around him. Two rounds hit the ceramic discs of the Dragon Skin that covered his back under his black nylon suit.

He flipped over, located the man through his NVGs, and squeezed off a round from his suppressed and specially modified M7A1, hitting him in the face and hands.

The terrorist tried to hang on to the ladder and pull himself up, but Mancini fired a quick round that caused him to twist, fall, and hit the lower deck.

Mancini wiped the terrorist’s blood off the goggle lenses with the sleeve of his suit, took two quick breaths to clear his nostrils, and squinted into the vast space behind him and to his right and left. Then, facing the way the young SEALs had gone, he saw the flash of an IR strobe, invisible to the naked eye but easy to make out through NVGs. He signaled back with his.

Revis emerged from the darkness like a black ghost and whispered, “We took out two enemies. You okay?”

“Yeah. Where’s Diego?”

“The terrorists were guarding a mechanical room. We took them out and found about a dozen crew members inside.”

“Diego’s with them now?”

“Affirmative.”

“Show me. Maybe one of the crew can lead us to the HVAC.”

“We spoke to the chief engineer. He knows where they set up the sarin but says that’s not the only problem.”

“What is?”

“They’ve set explosives throughout the ship.”

Davis and Team Beta encountered that problem as soon as they entered the interior of Deck 4 and had to climb past a pile of propane tanks. Connected to them were strips of plastic explosive wired to a detonator and a digital timer. The massive explosion and fire they would cause if detonated would block access to the Deck 4 lifeboats. All passengers and crew on Deck 4 and below would be trapped and likely die of smoke inhalation if the sarin didn’t get them first.

Fortunately, he had Nash with him, who was the breacher and explosives expert with ST-10. Davis held a red MagLite cell flashlight as Nash removed his NVGs and carefully disabled the detonators and timer. Then they moved down the hallway to the Security Office, pushed open the unlocked door, and dispatched the three terrorists dozing in the dark in front of a bank of blank surveillance monitors.

As one enemy fell to the floor, Davis noticed that the beard he was wearing was ripped partially from his face.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked out loud.

He knew that the plan called for his team to join Delta and clear the lower decks, but there were likely more propane tanks connected to other timing devices on the upper ones that Crocker and Team Alpha might have missed as they hurried to the bridge. So Davis decided to change the plan and clear Decks 5 through 11, first.

It proved to be a critical decision.

Crocker was the first man on Team Alpha to enter the hallway that led to the bridge. Approaching the secure door, he saw a dark trail on the carpeted floor and more dark smudges on the walls. He touched a smear with his operator gloves and held it up to his nose. It was blood.

He tried to push in the door with his shoulder, but it was either locked or bolted shut. A breaching charge would eliminate the element of surprise and give the terrorists time to hit the button that could release the sarin.

He checked his watch as he considered alternatives: 0538, ten minutes before sunrise.

He leaned close to Akil and whispered. “Attach some det cord to the frame and doorknob. Don’t set it off until you hear me and Storm come busting through the forward windows.”

“Copy.”

“Wait for us. You should hear us and their response.”

“Fuck, yeah.”

He directed Storm, a tall former Sooners tight end, to follow him up to the comms deck. There, with the wind whipping their faces and the sun starting to spread a dim ribbon of light across the horizon, he used his SOG knife to cut through the twelve-foot length of nylon rope he wore attached to his belt, handed half to Storm, and asked in a whisper, “You ever rappel down a building?”

“I’ve rappelled down a mountain, sir.”

“Good. Follow me.”

He saw that two panes of glass on the port side forward had already been blasted out. On the safety rail above them he secured both lines with the double figure-eight fisherman’s knot he’d learned while scaling Devil’s Rock in northern Ontario, then pointed to Storm and down to the bridge.

Storm nodded back.

Weapons resting on their right hips pointed forward, left hands grasping the line, they hopped the rail and started down with their boots against the metal face. Crocker pushed out, eased his grip on the rope so he could lower four more feet, and swung forward through the broken window boots first. As he did, a shard of glass in the frame ripped through his nylon suit and cut into his leg along the outside of his calf. He ignored the pain and flash of heat spreading through his body as in a split second he located targets and a place to land.

Through the NVGs he spotted a man gaffer-taped to a chair and a stunned-looking terrorist standing behind him. He directed fire from his 416 into the terrorist’s chest, hit the floor, skidded, landed on his butt, and spun up.

The nerves in his right leg screamed. He ignored them. Located another enemy to his right and directed a burst of fire into his groin. The man screamed and fell back, and almost simultaneously the secure door blasted into the cabin, filling the space with smoke and sucking out the oxygen.

In the midst of hellish confusion and screams in Arabic and English, he gasped for air and looked for targets, who were now harder to distinguish from the crew members because of the smoke, not yet aware that the blast had ripped the 416 out of his hands, and only partially aware of Storm grappling with someone to his left.

Instinctively he reached for his SIG Sauer pistol as Akil charged in, shoved aside a terrorist standing in his way, and in one fluid movement shot him in the face. As the terrorist fell onto Crocker, Crocker saw another, taller one turn to his left, reach for something in his vest pocket, and run in the direction of the captain’s quarters. Crocker intuited what he was about to do. Without wanting to expend the half second it would take to find his weapon, he propelled himself up and lunged onto the man’s back.

Stavros Petras crashed chest first into an upholstered chair and flipped over with Crocker still holding on to his neck. The fall resulted in Crocker landing on his back on the floor, with Petras’s full weight smashing into him, and forcing the air out of Crocker’s lungs. He felt a rib snap and saw spinning stars but he refused to let go, putting Petras in a headlock and squeezing with all his strength.

He reached for his SOG knife with his left hand, aware that the terrorist was desperately clawing for something at the front of his shirt. Crocker didn’t have another hand with which to stop him. He found his knife, raised it, and thrust it into the back of the terrorist’s neck, hoping to sever his spine.

Petras’s whole body jerked three times and froze, and an instant later an explosion from Deck 11 threw both men into the air.

A
s soon
as the waiting firefighting and chemical weapons teams from the
USS Dwight D. Eisenhower
saw the explosion, they sped toward the
Disney Magic
.

Davis and his men had been defusing the explosives on Deck 10 when the propane tanks on Deck 11 went off. Luckily for most passengers and crew, charges on the other decks had already been disabled, and Mancini and Team Delta had unhooked the eight sarin canisters from the ship’s inoperative HVAC system. Also fortunate was the fact that there were no passenger cabins on Deck 11, nor were any crew or passengers present in the Deck 11 teen Vibe Club when the explosion went off. The handful of crew huddling in the Wide World of Sports Bar and Palo restaurant escaped with minor burns and bruises.

Firefighters from the
Eisenhower
found Crocker, Akil, and Storm using the ship’s fire extinguishers to battle the flames on Deck 11. All three men were only half conscious, bleeding from various cuts and bruises and suffering from smoke inhalation. They had to be overpowered and dragged away.

Crocker came to five minutes later, lying on a deck chair on Deck 4. He squinted up at the man sitting beside him and saw the sun rising over the man’s right shoulder. When he sat up abruptly to see whether the ship’s superstructure was still intact and the fire was out, all appeared normal except for wisps of light-gray smoke from the upper deck. A sharp pain in his lower chest reminded him of the terrorist landing on him, which had probably resulted in a cracked rib. The suit on his right leg was stuck to his skin and caked with blood.

“Who are you?” Crocker asked, wincing.

“Scott Russert, from Putney, England,” answered the man with red hair.

“What are you doing here, Scott?”

“You saved my life, and I don’t even know your name.”

“Crocker. You here alone?” He saw groups of passengers being escorted down to a lower deck.

“Traveling with my family.”

“They’re safe, I hope.”

“Already been rescued. Waiting for me on one of the patrol boats.”

“Shouldn’t you be with them?”

“I wanted to thank you first.”

“For what?”

“For saving my life when I was about to be shot and tossed in the pool.”

Crocker remembered the event; it seemed to have happened a month ago. “Hey,” Crocker said. “Glad I could be of service.”

Scott’s smile revealed a wide space between his front teeth. “You’re one of those bloody but unbowed blokes, aren’t you?”

“Something like that. But I can’t answer that definitively until I’ve checked on my men.”

Of the ten SEALs who had taken down the ship, Crocker had arguably suffered the most damage. Davis and the Team Beta guys on Deck 10 were treated for cuts and bruises, minor burns, and smoke inhalation. Akil had lost a tooth when he crashed through the bridge door. Storm had dislocated a vertebra in his lower back.

The medical staff on the
Eisenhower
stitched together the skin on Crocker’s calf and taped his ribs. He still wasn’t sure exactly what had gone down on the
Magic
and didn’t know the identities of the terrorists who had seized the ship. Figured he’d be briefed on all that when he got back to HQ in Virginia.

Most of the SEALs flew to Naples Naval Station in Italy and from there home to Virginia Beach. Crocker and Mancini detoured to Germany to check on Suarez. Both men needed time to process the psychological whirlwind they’d been through. In Crocker’s case, he wanted to get his head right before he returned home and faced Holly. There was always a huge emotional letdown after a mission of this magnitude, and he wanted to be ready.

At the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein, they were escorted by a male orderly who explained that during a typical day the military hospital served 1,178 meals, administered 1,598 doses of medication, handled 2.3 births, and accommodated twenty-three new patients and nine new acute emergencies. The number of incoming acute cases was more than many civilian hospitals admitted in the space of two months.

“What’s the pace like currently?” Crocker asked.

“With combat winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s about a fourth of that,” the orderly answered.

“Good.”

In the ICU on the third floor they found Suarez flirting with a cute blond nurse with a cross tattooed above her right breast. He was covered with thick white bandages from his neck to his waist.

“Glad to see you with a smile on your face again,” Crocker said.

“They’re taking good care of me.”

“I can see that.”

“Heard you guys kicked ass without me,” Suarez said.

“We missed you,” Crocker said. “Everything happened so fast. It’s still a blur.”

“He didn’t do shit, like usual,” Mancini joked.

“Yeah, right. While this guy was jerking off in the engine room, I was killing terrorists.”

“Man, I wish I was there,” said Suarez.

“Hey,” Crocker said, “I meant to ask you, you remember anything from the night you were shot?”

Suarez’s expression turned serious. “Not much. I was standing near the cab of the van, talking to Hassan.”

“Hassan?”

“Yeah, Hassan.”

“What was he saying?”

“Some stuff about his girlfriend. I don’t remember anything after that.”

“He disappeared with the sarin,” Crocker said. “Nobody’s seen him since.”

“I heard. Yeah. Strange dude.”

“Real odd.”

They were resting in their room in the hospital’s visitor center, getting ready to go into town for dinner, when the phone rang. It was Jim Anders.

“Crocker, you alone?” Anders asked.

“No. Mancini’s with me. Why?”

“How do you guys feel about detouring to Paris?” Anders asked.

“For what purpose?” If this was for a confab of some sort, he’d pass.

“I’ll explain when you get here. It’s pretty basic. Won’t take more than a day or two.”

“It’s ops-related, right?” asked Crocker.

“Yes. You’ll understand why I called you specifically when you get here.”

“Okay.” It would give him more time to prepare to face Holly.

“I’ll have a Gulfstream waiting for you at the airport in an hour,” said Anders. “Once you land in Paris, take a cab directly to the InterContinental, on the Right Bank near the Opera House.”

“We have time to grab dinner before we leave?”

“As long as you get here before midnight. You’ll be traveling undercover, so use your alias passports.”

“Got it.”

Four hours later he and Mancini were zipping down the Beaux Arts–era boulevards of Paris with the taxi’s windows open, both lost in thought. They registered at the InterContinental under their aliases and met Anders in his suite on the ninth floor.

“Glad you’re here,” he said, ushering them in. Janice was there, too, looking sharp in a dark-blue blouse, along with two officers whom Anders introduced as FBI Special Agents Leslie Farrell and John Wilkens from Overseas Operations.

Anders was all business, showing them to seats around a coffee table in the living room. “We’re here to wrap this up,” he said, sleeves rolled up.

“What, exactly?” Crocker asked, helping himself to one of the bottles of Perrier on a table in the corner.

“The operation that began in Istanbul,” Anders answered.

“I thought that was over.”

“Remember Mr. Talab?”

“Sure. I thought he was still in Syria.”

“Farrell and Wilkens have been searching for him. And guess where they found him.”

“Here?” Mancini asked.

“Good guess,” Wilkens said, handing Crocker a black-and-white surveillance photo taken through the back window of a passing Mercedes. “We took these as he was coming out of the Syrian embassy.” It showed someone who looked like Talab seated in back, with a short beard and wearing sunglasses.

“You sure this is Talab?” Crocker asked.

Wilkens handed him a stack of eight more surveillance photos of the same man standing and talking to several men and getting into the car. It was Talab.

The gears in Crocker’s head started grinding, trying to figure out what was going on. “Why are we going after Talab?” he asked. “I thought he was our friend.”

“We thought so, too,” Janice said. “But it turns out he’s the guy who set the whole thing in motion.”

Crocker had been suspicious of the Syrian from the start. “Wait. He’s been acting as a kind of double agent?”

“More than that,” Janice muttered.

Anders leaned forward and said, “We now believe Talab has been working for President Assad of Syria all along, first as a double agent, fingering people like Jared, and then as the mastermind of the entire sarin-slash-hijacking operation.”

Crocker remembered the light resistance they had encountered while stealing the sarin from the Syrian base, and how it had surprised him.

“It’s extremely devious, really,” Anders continued. “They led us to the sarin, then made it appear that it had been stolen by ISIS terrorists who then went on to hijack the cruise ship. Their larger objective was to alert the United States and the rest of the world to the worldwide threat posed by ISIS—which was easy to do, given recent events in Iraq and Syria—and to shift U.S. and Western sympathies back to President Assad as a more reasonable alternative.”

Made sense, in a diabolical way.

“I never liked Talab,” Mancini offered.

“You think the Syrians are that clever?” Crocker asked.

“The Assads aren’t dummies, which is why they’ve survived so long.”

“So Hassan was involved, too, working for Talab and the Assad regime the whole time?” Crocker asked.

“We believe so, yes.”

It felt like a punch to the gut. He’d rescued that little bastard off the street in front of the schoolhouse in Idlib and helped deliver his son. Never for a second had he suspected that Hassan was an agent for Assad.

“You find Hassan?” Crocker asked.

“No. But we will.”

“Make sure you do.”

They’d been double-crossed to such an extent and had expended so much effort that Anders’s cool-headedness bothered him.
Hadn’t Anders been so sure that Talab was a friend? Wasn’t the Agency’s trust in him the basis of everything we had to endure inside Syria, and on the
Disney Magic
?

He wanted to kick the table in front of him, but he held back. Everyone made mistakes. They misread people and situations, and as a result put others in danger. There was no point pointing fingers or complaining now. It was time to put this hydra-headed monster to bed and move on.

Leaning forward, he asked, “Tell me, what do you want us to do?”

At 0812 the next morning Crocker was sitting behind the wheel of a red-white-and-blue American Airlines van parked in front of the Hotel de Suede on Paris’s Left Bank, not far from the Les Invalides and beyond that, the Eiffel Tower. Under the blue American Airlines overalls he wore an armored vest, the straps of which were cutting into the skin under his arms.

He and the CIA Ground Branch and former British SAS operative named Sully were acting as though they were there to ferry a flight crew to de Gaulle Airport. They were really waiting for a signal from FBI agents Farrell and Wilkens, who were standing in the alcove of a photographer’s studio across the street from the Syrian Embassy at 20 rue Vaneau. A delivery truck with Mancini at the wheel idled in an alley off the cité Vaneau, and a third vehicle waited beyond the embassy on the one-way rue Vaneau.

It was a simple snatch-and-grab. Crocker had executed dozens of them in much more dangerous locales than Paris. Farrell, Wilkens, and their team had been watching Talab for days, tracking his movements, monitoring his security, and establishing the patterns and routes he followed.

As Crocker scanned the street through the windshield, Sully leaned in the passenger window and said, “The doorman with the stick up his arse is complaining. He wants the room numbers of the crew we’re picking up.”

“Tell him you don’t know room numbers. Give him some names instead. Stonewall the bastard. Buy us another ten minutes.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Crocker and Black Cell had worked with Ground Branch often, but never with Sully, who was new to the unit. He glanced at his watch: 0815. The target was late. Looking right, he heard Sully joking in French with the uniformed head doorman.

The voice of Special Agent Wilkens blasted through his earbuds. “All units, stand by to move. The side gate is opening.”

He turned the knob on the Motorola in his pocket that controlled the volume. Two seconds later Wilkens continued: “Observe a black Mercedes 450 limo emerging. Stand by thirty seconds.”

Crocker honked twice. Hearing the go signal, Sully slid in.

“Stand by ten seconds while we ID the target,” said Wilkens through the earbuds.

“What’s going on?” asked Sully.

“Close the door,” Crocker ordered.

“All units, target IDed. Go!” Wilkens shouted.

Crocker pulled the black one-hole face mask over his head and hit the gas. A small Fiat sedan was up ahead, between him and the Mercedes limo, but he managed to weave around it. A white sedan beyond the limo did a sharp U-turn, stopped, and blocked the street. A second later a truck sped out of an alley and T-boned the Mercedes.

Bam!
Metal into metal, glass flying, sparks. Game on.

In his ear he heard Wilkens screaming, “Teams two and three engage! Go! Go! Go!” The guy sounded like he was losing it.

Crocker screeched to a stop right behind the Mercedes, grabbed the suppressed M7A1 off the floor, and jumped out. A second delivery truck spun out of the alley and blocked the gate to the Syrian embassy so no follow-up vehicle could exit.

Mancini was already out on the street, using a metal bar to smash the window beside the driver. The terrified man came out with his hands on his head. Simultaneously another man exited the passenger door with a Glock in his hand and started shooting wildly. Sully cut him down with a suppressed blast to the chest.