Tier One Wild (14 page)

Josh asked, “Did you learn from the experience?”

“I did.”

“Good,” said TJ. And just like that, the matter was put to rest. “So, tell me about Tripoli.”

Kolt hesitated. Started to speak but stopped himself. Then with a nervous smile he said, “You know how it is, man. I can’t go into much of that.”

Timble nodded. “You were there, and now you’re home. Is that about it?”

Kolt shook his head. “I was
somewhere,
and now I’m home.” He saw that Timble hated being on the outside. “I’m sorry. You know there is nothing I’d rather do than go through every last bit of the hot wash with you. But I can’t.”

“I know you can’t. Shit. It’s tough being in RDI. It’s like kissing your sister.”

“Your sister is hot,” Kolt said, an attempt to lighten the mood. It worked for a couple of seconds.

“You know what I mean. I hate being on the outside. All I know about New Delhi I got from some of the gossip around the building. I know Stitch lost a finger and I know you got some frag in your ass. I know most of the Unit thinks you are a fucking hero for what you guys managed to pull off, and I know that a couple of the guys, guys who didn’t like you in the first place, think you fucked up again and got that Dutch lady killed.”

Kolt just grunted. The speed and the quality of the gossip around the compound never ceased to amaze him.

TJ continued, “I also know that pretty much everyone in the building, myself included, thinks you are the luckiest son of a bitch in history for getting two SECDEF-level hits just weeks after returning to service.”

Raynor smiled at this. It gave him a little pleasure to think of some of the other Unit guys stewing in their juices about him getting the primo role in a couple of Delta’s biggest ops of the last year.

Kolt chuckled now. “What do you mean, ‘on the outside’? You sound pretty well dialed in.”

“I wish. You know there are few secrets that haven’t made their way down the Spine. But it’s not the same as being operational.”

“You’ll be operational again,” Kolt said.

“I’m working on it.”

“You still look like you need to gain some weight.”

“Yeah, that’s what they tell me. Been working out, running, eating like a pig. It will happen.” He took a big, dramatic bite of pepperoni pizza.

“I know it will, brother. Keep it up. You look better every time I see you.”

“Thanks.” Then he got around to the reason he came over tonight. “Did Webber tell you about al-Amriki?”

“Yeah, he did. And we got the target brief from intel this afternoon. David Wade Doyle. How does it feel to know his true identity after all this time?”

“It’s a step in the right direction, I guess. But we should have blown this guy’s ass up with a Hellfire months ago. This personality is not getting the attention he deserves. We need to go after Doyle until he’s roadkill.”

“Preaching to the choir, man. No telling what he’s up to now.”

TJ seemed to think it over a moment. “Something big. I can feel it. He will pull out all the stops after his failure in Pakistan. He’s going to throw a Hail Mary.”

“You may be right. Hopefully the CIA will get a spike on him and send us out to take him down.” Kolt smiled. “Maybe you’ll be back with us by then. Who knows? You might get a second dance with that asshole.”

TJ nodded, and then they ate in silence for another minute.

Finally, Raynor looked down at his watch. “Shit. I’ve got to run. Meeting the boys at the range for some low-light shooting at 2200. You want to come along, get some trigger time?”

TJ stood up. “I’d love to, but I’ve got an appointment with a vendor first thing in the morning.”

“Nice,” said Raynor. He did not mean to sound patronizing, but he couldn’t help it. He followed with, “Are we getting some new cool shit?”

“Hopefully. With any luck I’ll be back in the squadron before it’s issued.” As he headed for the door he said, “And Kolt?”

“Yeah?”

“Might be time to think about getting an apartment.”

“And leave all this behind? Are you kidding?”

TJ just shook his head and walked out to his truck.

ELEVEN

Mykonos, Greece, had been chosen by Aref Saleh and Daoud al-Amriki as the location for the test of the Igla-S surface-to-air missile. Aref Saleh traveled to Greece often to meet with contacts there, and he had transported rifle and machine gun ammo into Greece from Libya on two earlier occasions without trouble. But he wanted to keep his access and his contacts here intact, even after the sale to the AQAP operatives, so he developed a plan that would get himself and his clients into and then out of the country without compromising his established means.

Saleh, al-Amriki, and Miguel did not travel to Greece directly. Instead they flew to Turkey under false Egyptian passports, and then they used former JSO assets who worked in the human smuggling trade to take them by boat from the Turkish coast, first to the Greek island of Ikaria.

And then, on the second night, they traveled by speedboat to Mykonos.

Before leaving Cairo they shipped one completely disassembled Igla-S system secreted in several large crates of motorcycle and scooter parts directly to a freight forwarder in Mykonos. It was decided that, if the three men were captured trying to sneak into Greece, they would be expelled with little fanfare, as North Africans attempting to get into Europe is far from a unique event. But three men with Egyptian passports caught attempting to get into the EU while transporting shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles would ensure than none of them would ever see beyond the walls of a Greek prison, so the weapon traveled separately.

Once in Mykonos, Saleh sent an agent of his living there to pick up the crates from the forwarder at the airport. Saleh was prepared to sacrifice one of his agents in Greece on this operation, but not himself.

His agent returned to the parking lot of a restaurant a mile from Saleh’s safe house. Saleh, al-Amriki, and Miguel were not there waiting for him. They were, instead, watching the parking lot and the two-lane coastal road that led to it from their rented house in the hills above.

The agent was alone, he had not been followed, and he had the crates with him. After letting the man sit and wait for an hour, Saleh drove down to the parking lot, took the boxes with the Igla-S, and returned with them to the safe house.

Committing such a bold criminal act as the shooting down of an aircraft meant the three men would have to arrange for a hasty escape after the fact, and Saleh, al-Amriki, and Miguel had worked this out well in advance of their test of the weapon system. They had their getaway ready in the form of a Uniesse Marine forty-two-foot open powerboat. It was owned by the Turkish smugglers and had made the Aegean crossing many times in the past. Saleh and his men had anchored it in a rocky cove just minutes from the airport.

The three men decided to engage their target in daylight. This would, as long as they remained out of sight, lessen the chance that witnesses would report an ascending plume of fire from a missile shortly before the plane went down. There was no chance whatsoever that this SAM attack would go undiscovered; the wreckage would give many telltale clues that the passenger plane had been shot down. But Amriki, Miguel, and Saleh wanted to delay this inevitability as long as possible.

At least long enough for them to get out of Mykonos.

A day of scouting by Amriki and Miguel led them to a small hillock shielded on three sides by sheer rocky cliffs. The site afforded them a view of the airport to the north, as well as quick access to a road that led to the beaches to the south.

It was a perfect spot to ambush a plane as it passed by, low and slow, after taking off from Mykonos.

The three men spent the night in the safe house, and then breakfasted on the veranda facing Paradise Beach. Every few minutes an aircraft would take off and fly overhead, and then bank over the bay before disappearing into the bright sky.

At noon Saleh went to the boat, and the two AQAP men returned to the hillock in a two-door Fiat. They took the Igla from the trunk, and they prepared themselves for the test-fire.

When they were ready and comfortable that no one was close by on the hillside, they chose a departing Airbus A319 as their victim. There was neither political nor strategic justification in the choice; the Airbus was merely a target of opportunity. As it turned out, it was a Lufthansa medium-haul flight that flew a Mykonos-to-Athens route five days a week. It was not a particularly large aircraft, but it would do for their test.

The plane could have been carrying 124 passengers, but it was a Wednesday, the slowest day of the week for the route, so only 84 passengers and 6 crew members were on board as it rolled down Runway 16, gaining takeoff speed in the hot Greek summer sun.

Two minutes later it passed by the launch site, and al-Amriki leveled the weapon at the departing jet, holding it high with the grip stock and his shoulder. The white aircraft was his initial aiming point, but he refined it to the blue and gold tail, putting the glass aiming reticule between the two engines on the departing plane.

He heard the hum indicating that the warhead had found its heat source in the sky.

“
Allahu Akhbar,
” Daoud al-Amriki said, and he pressed the trigger.

Immediately the rocket fired out of the launch tube, then its internal propellant ignited, and with a roar it arced into the sky. Doyle had fired RPGs several times and even a captured American antitank weapon in Afghanistan once, but he had never fired a shoulder-launched SAM. The rocket was nearly the length of the launcher itself, but as it rose it turned into a tiny pinprick in the sky ahead of a line of wispy gray smoke. The missile seemed to streak high above the flight path of the aircraft for a second, but then it angled sharply back down.

Impact between the missile and the tail of the Airbus took place just six seconds after Daoud al-Amriki pressed the launch trigger.

The Lufthansa flight was no more than three thousand feet in the air, passing over Agrari Beach on the southern side of the island. The pilot had just begun a gentle bank to the west when his craft was hit from behind by the missile. With its fuel tanks more than half full for the flight to Athens, and with the low altitude and the full power of the engines, the Airbus A319 did not stand a chance.

A fluff of brown and white smoke behind the Lufthansa flight was visible from the ground. The two men on the hillock just stood and watched. The sound of the explosion, a sharp crack and a low boom, made its way to them several seconds later. By then the Airbus had changed its flight path; it banked hard to the west, its climbing nose went level with the earth and then tipped down.

Ninety-six seconds later the burning jet crashed nose-down into the crystalline sea four miles southwest of the island of Delos.

There were no survivors.

*   *   *

Miguel and al-Amriki drove calmly but purposefully to a secluded spot near Paradise Beach, where they climbed aboard a dinghy with Aref Saleh at the motor. The three men raced to their speedboat, which was anchored a quarter mile offshore. No one paid any attention to them; the holidaygoers at the beach watched the smoke in the distance and discussed what had happened three thousand feet above their heads just minutes earlier. Most had seen the plane go down, many had watched its portside wing erupt into a fireball, and a few had even seen the initial explosion of the port engine.

But none could definitively say they’d seen a fast-moving missile rise from the hills behind them and hit the plane.

The forty-two-foot powerboat with the three men on board raced due east in order to put as many miles as possible between the men and their crime, but by afternoon it had adopted a southerly route and slowed somewhat so as not to draw attention.

They arrived at Fourni Island around midnight. They were close to Turkey, but still in Greece, so they anchored in a tiny natural harbor to wait out the rest of the morning and the light of day. Fourni had been a haven for pirates for centuries due to its high cliffs and this made it easy for the men to avoid detection.

That evening, after darkness returned, they finished their escape, heading east into Turkish waters.

They docked in Didim, a Turkish seaside resort, just before one in the morning on the second day after the destruction of the Lufthansa flight. Within minutes of climbing off the boat they were in a minivan, heading for the interior of the country, and at eleven o’clock the next morning they were on separate flights, Saleh to Cairo, and al-Amriki and Miguel to Sana’a.

Daoud al-Amriki’s people in Dubai executed the first wire transfer into Saleh’s account before the end of business two days later, and by the end of the week the Libyans were readying their logistics means to move the weapons from Libya to Egypt, and then on to Dubai.

All parties were extremely satisfied with the arrangements.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor was called into Colonel Webber’s office by his secretary on the public address system. Kolt had been spending his time since returning to the compound from overseas reading the daily intel summaries of potential threat locations and personalities and reviewing hot washes from past operations conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan that took place after he had been declared persona non grata and tossed from Delta. He’d also put the finishing touches on the award recommendations he was submitting for Stitch, Digger, and Slapshot for the New Delhi hijacking op. None of the boys needed another valor award, nor did they even want one, but Webber had suggested it and Kolt knew they deserved it.

While Kolt sat on his ass in the office, the sergeants worked on their commando skills. Running the O-courses, busting plates on the flat range, tweaking their HK416s’ zero, and generally putting in the solid day’s work expected of a Tier One operator at home station.

“Kolt,” Webber said as soon as the major entered his office. “It has been confirmed that the Lufthansa jet that went down in the Aegean Sea the other day was shot down by a MANPAD.”

Kolt breathed out a frustrated sigh. He knew it. The Jakarta SAM in the spring, and now this.