Tier One Wild (17 page)

On his second night in the village, al-Amriki assembled all of his handpicked operatives in the largest room in the clinic. They sat on cots or stood along the walls illuminated by candlelight, the few small windows in the structure covered with canvas. In the village around them, sentries were told to keep a watchful eye over the new students.

David Doyle, aka Daoud al-Amriki, addressed his operatives while standing at the front wall. “Men. You are brave to join this mission. You have been promised that you will meet danger and death along the way, and still you have agreed to come with us. But danger and death will lead you to paradise, where you will be rewarded for your proud sacrifice.

“Paradise, my brothers, is in your future. Now your training begins. Our target is the West, so as soon as this meeting is concluded, we will begin living as Westerners. We will shave our beards, we will dress in Western clothing, eat Western food, tell Western jokes. We will each be given a new identity and documents to support this new identity. We will have e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other things so that our legends will stand up to all but the most directed scrutiny.”

It was clear by the reactions in the room, even under the dim lighting, that the order to shave their beards and act like infidels was an unpleasant surprise.

“Blaspheme?” asked one man, a twenty-five-year-old muscular Pakistani with a long angular nose.

“Regrettably, yes. But we will be forgiven our transgressions in paradise, I swear it.”

“What is our mission?” asked a twenty-two-year-old UK citizen with Saudi heritage.

Doyle did not want to tell them any more, but he knew these men were devout soldiers of Allah, and they were clearly pained by news of this transformation that they were about to undertake. He could not jeopardize their devotion to his mission, so he decided to give them a taste of the operation to come.

“I will not tell you everything yet. You will not learn the full scope of the operation until you prove that you are capable of contributing to its success. But I will tell you that our destination and our target is the United States, and our goal is a body blow to the West. We will kill thousands, we will disrupt their ability to make business and to make war, and we will bring them to their knees. Inshallah, we will tear down the American government and see that it is replaced by a government that weakens all of their so-called democratic institutions.”

“How?” someone asked.

Al-Amriki smiled. “We will do this by becoming wolves in sheep’s clothing, and then entering the center of the flock.”

The operatives smiled in the flickering candlelight, their hearts strengthened by their new leader’s words.

“Now … my brothers … my wolves. Go change into your sheep’s clothing. Read the papers you will be handed that show you your new identities. Learn every last bit of it. Memorize it. Turn into the person you will pretend to be.

“Each and every one of you speaks English. Use your English, beginning now.” Daoud al-Amriki, David Wade Doyle, switched effortlessly into his mother tongue to finish. “I want only English spoken between the fourteen of us.

“Soon Miguel and I will interview you, one at a time. You will have adopted the legend you have been handed, and I want to believe this legend. When you pass this test you will be given more information, and then you will be tested on this. There will be much work in the coming days, but remember, every day we are here will be another day closer to our jihad.”

Al-Amriki was pleased with the reactions on the men’s faces. These were all educated young men, many had themselves led al Qaeda operations. These were not mindless gunmen who would do as they were told, running into the enemy’s cannon fire if ordered to do so. These were not fools in a Waziristan market, ready to pick up an AK and charge an Abrams tank because some
malik
with a smooth tongue spouted off a few verses of the Koran. No, each and every one of these twelve men had served and served well for years; they had fought on the front lines and they had penetrated deep into enemy territory. There was not a man here who had risked less than David Doyle himself to prove his fidelity to the cause.

Four of them were Pakistanis who’d grown up with the language and had gone to school in the United Kingdom, two more were Turks who learned English to study in the UK. Two were Iraqis who’d learned the language and then served in and around American troops for years as translators. And three of the men, just like Doyle’s assistant commander Miguel, had studied in universities in the United States and spoke fair to good English. These three men were from Oman, Yemen, and Morocco.

Al-Amriki and Miguel had developed a curriculum for their time here in the Wadi Bana camp. Each of the twelve operatives-in-training would have to pass a course to prove that they could blend into American society. In addition to the changes to their hair, clothing had been purchased online from various sources by support personnel of this mission. University T-shirts, blue jeans, American-style tennis shoes, and baseball caps would be worn at all times inside the buildings, though outdoors they would wear local dress to hide their mission from the drones.

Each one of the operatives would live and breathe his legend here in the camp. This tiny speck of flatland at the edge of the wadi in southern Yemen would become, at first light tomorrow morning, a virtual college town.

Daoud al-Amriki had failed before, for reasons he still did not understand.

But he had thought of everything this time.

He would not fail again.

FOURTEEN

The flight from Fort Bragg to Cairo took all night. The CIA Gulfstream raced over the north Atlantic, landed to refuel at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and then climbed back into the dark skies to continue on toward Egypt.

Other than a couple hours of shut-eye, for the duration of the trip the AFO cell led by Major Kolt Raynor worked in the dim cabin of the Gulfstream. The team pored over laptops loaded with FalconView, a DOD mapping software that gave them a bird’s-eye view of the AO, much like a higher-resolution Google Maps, though, unlike Google Maps, it also provided them with powerful mapping and analytical tools that helped them “see” the area before going there in person. They created their own maps of choke points and bottlenecks near the important locations, like the safe house and target areas relayed to JSOC by the CIA personnel already on the ground in Cairo.

They also studied the material given to them before departure by the intel folks at Bragg. This electronic folder contained schematics of the safe houses in and around Cairo, as well as the logistical assets available to them—cars, vans, boats, motorcycles—and the stores of equipment such as guns, ammo, food, water, and batteries cached at each location. Kolt and his three subordinates looked over the size and layout of each safe house and noted where they would park cars and stow their own gear. They even discussed escape routes and rally points in the case of an assault on their hide.

Kolt and Slapshot were very much accustomed to this work; both men had taken part in numerous AFO cells in their careers in a wide variety of locations. Digger was new to this sort of operation, other than the previous week’s lightning-fast, in-and-out op in Tripoli, but he did have an impressive résumé of combat and counterterror ops under his belt, many of which had been extremely dicey.

Hawk had done one brief stint of AFO cell duty herself the previous year in Libya. She had been involved with Operation Red Baron—covert work with the CIA to locate Gaddafi in Tripoli. She had been on the ground in his hometown of Sirte at a joint safe house when the deposed leader made a run for it. She tried to go along to the ambush site with CIA assets in order to ID Gaddafi, but the agency men there with her would not allow it, as adding a female to that chaos seemed like an incredibly bad idea. It was not because she couldn’t handle what she would see, it was, instead, because the lack of law and order likely would have affected the rebels, keeping them from acting like gentlemen during the flurry of celebration after Muammar’s capture and killing.

Kolt had learned this and more about Hawk first thing that morning, when he dropped in on the shrink’s office at the compound and asked for a look at Sergeant Bird’s file. As the officer in charge of the AFO cell, it was well within his purview to dig into every detail of the men—or in this case woman—he would be taking with him on the upcoming operation.

He’d learned, in his hour or so thumbing through her records, that Cindy Bird was the only girl in the family, with five brothers. Dad, an Army man, had coached her brothers in Little League sports, football, basketball, and baseball. Cindy had two soft hands and could dribble the basketball with either hand at an early age. Football was out, so she stood on the sidelines throughout high school in a short skirt atop sleek fast-running legs, pom-poms, and an often-fake smile as she tried to motivate the Friday night crowd.

But as a kid, baseball had been her favorite sport. She played for her dad, on the field right next to her brothers at times, and could throw the ball from deep center to home plate without hitting the cutoff. The boys always stole the glory spots in the infield, so she took to the outfield, with an uncanny ability to detect how far and where the ball was going as soon as it came off the bat. She circled the grass in her spikes like a bird of prey, and rarely did she let a ball drop.

One day her dad told her she was more of a “Hawk” than just any “Bird” after she robbed a dangerous hitter of a walk-off home run, and the nickname stuck.

Living with five brothers, three of whom wrestled in a youth program and another who studied tae kwon do, as well as an Army father, she learned how to handle herself at a young age. She rolled around the backyard or living room with the men in the house as they tried to practice submission moves on her or each other constantly after school.

Her dad had introduced all the kids to handguns at an early age to protect them and ensure they understood how to use the two home-defense pistols stored in the house. Cindy was a natural shooter, something her dad said likely explained how she was able to track those fly balls so easily. She outshot her brothers, which was all it took for them to elect to ride bikes or play a game of pickup football on the weekends as opposed to going to the range with their dad and sister.

Despite her cheerleading days and a stint on the freshman homecoming court, Cindy Bird wasn’t much into dressing up. She was the type of girl who would wear an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt every day if she could. She was always topped with a ball cap over a ponytail, and most of the boys in town were more interested in the looser girls in cleavage tees and tanks and high cutoff jeans, so she garnered little attention.

In 2003, in the middle of her senior year of high school, her father died in Iraq. The Army told her mother that he went quickly, but word around the unofficial wives’ channel was he suffered badly until he bled out during a heated firefight in Fallujah.

Her dad’s death changed everything in the life of Cindy Bird.

Cindy went on to college, studying to become an environmental engineer. She struggled through all four years, demotivated by the loss of her father and the nagging emptiness inside her. Her mother remarried quickly, which bothered Cindy. She tried to make the best of it for her mom’s sake and sucked it up and, despite this hardship, she managed to graduate with a respectable B average.

Somehow the career path she had chosen no longer seemed desirable to her. She had taken her dad’s death very hard, and recalled the camaraderie and passion he had experienced in the Army. Her older brothers had told her their dad had been in some Special Forces unit, but she could not picture her gentle father as the “snake-eater” type. Still, it did strike her as odd that she rarely saw him in uniform and he always seemed to sport long hair and a thick mustache most of the year. She also realized she did not see him much after 9/11, but she was too busy with her girlfriends, high school gossip, and memory-making, and not all that bummed that Dad wasn’t around to quiz her on her whereabouts when she came in late on Saturday nights.

Cindy had no idea that her father, Michael Leland Bird, had been the only Delta Force squadron commander ever lost in battle. His code name was “MLB”—a play on his actual initials, but more tied to his love for baseball. His men called him “Major League Ballplayer.”

In 2008, shortly after graduating from college, Cindy enlisted in the Army. The recruiters tried to talk her into going straight to Officer Candidate School, since she had a four-year degree. But she remembered her father had been enlisted before he became an officer—a “Mustang,” they called it—and he had always said his time in the trenches as a soldier made him a better officer and leader.

Cindy Bird became a “74D,” a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) specialist, and she was stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, though she spent a full year deployed to Iraq.

In early 2010, Sergeant Cindy Bird received a phone call at battalion headquarters from a man claiming to be a recruiter for a special unit. She hadn’t ever heard of such a thing. He asked her if she had received the recruiting letter in the mail earlier in the week. She had, but had only read through it quickly and discarded it as junk mail. The recruiter was very professional and took a few minutes to recite Cindy’s qualifications back to her, almost as if he were checking to see if it was the correct Cindy Bird. Born in northern Virginia, lived for nine years in Fayetteville, North Carolina, attended North Carolina State, five brothers, etc. The recruiter never mentioned her father. It seemed a little odd to Cindy that the recruiter’s last comment was, “We’d be honored if you assessed for our organization.”

Cindy received PCS (permanent change of station) orders to Fort Bragg and reassignment to the 43rd Personnel Support Battalion. She had done well so far as a 74D, taking her job very seriously. But it was starting to bore her, so the phone call from the mysterious recruiter intrigued her. Besides, she had seen pretty much everything Fort Riley, Kansas, had to offer.