Tier One Wild (21 page)

“How the hell do you know that?”

Now Curtis shouted back at Raynor. “They have an eight-thousand-square-foot warehouse two klicks away that is protected with walls, cams, and guns! Why the fuck would they stick the SA-24s in an unoccupied building in a residential neighborhood?”

It was obvious to Raynor that Curtis did not like having his assumptions questioned. It was SOP in Delta that, if an assaulter or sniper thought the officer’s assumptions were shit, he sure better speak up about it. Myron Curtis obviously didn’t have thick skin. He was in charge. It was everyone else’s job to shut the hell up and take orders.

Kolt said, “Okay, Curtis. I understand. You pushed a deployment order through because you thought ordering up some JSOC operators would give you your own little squad of dumb asses who would come over and follow your orders without question. Am I right?”

Curtis glared at Raynor, and softly he said, “And then, in a cruel twist of fate, I get you.”

*   *   *

The meeting broke up a moment later, and Kolt’s team began filing back to the two rooms in the back of the safe house reserved for them. But Kolt lagged behind in the meeting room to talk to Curtis. He wanted to toss the guy out the second-floor window, but he fought the urge, and decided to try and right this ship before it completely capsized.

“Curtis, there is too much at stake here for you and me to get into a pissing match. It’s not about your authority or my authority. It’s about getting those damn missiles off the market.”

“Don’t patronize me, Racer. There is nobody who wants that more than me.”

“I believe you. But you aren’t going to get it done like this. Look, I’ve got no problem with cutting out a level or two of the bullshit layers of bureaucracy in order to complete my mission, and it looks to me you roll the same way.”

The younger man just nodded.

“But you are walking on a razor’s edge with this op. Your security is shit, you aren’t sharing crucial intel with Langley, and it looks to me like you had us come over here to hang around until we somehow get the go-ahead to hit the warehouse. It doesn’t work like that, Curtis. We have to get some real indicators, some actionable intel that says there are munitions at objective Rhine, before the JSOC commanding general will even consider us going in there.”

Curtis said, “I know that. I know we can’t get into Rhine without proof that the Libyans have munitions. But I’ll get the proof, and when I do, I need you and your team ready to hit it. You need to concentrate on knowing that property like the back of your hand.”

Kolt sighed. “If we get the hit, we’ll execute the hit. But we aren’t hitting shit without authority from my boss at Bragg. In the meantime, let us help you. We’re not just shooters. We probably have more experience tailing targets than your guys.”

“These Libyans are good. I saw what happened in Tripoli with Saleh’s men there, I can’t let an overzealous operator—”

“‘Overzealous’? That’s a big word, Curtis. You learn that in case officer school?”

Curtis paused a long time. Finally he said, “I know all about you, Major Kolt Raynor. I know what happened in Pakistan in ’09.”

Raynor’s jaw tightened. He leaned closer to Curtis and spoke slowly now. “You don’t know shit, and you need to think very carefully about the next fucking word that comes out of your mouth.”

Curtis nodded with a cruel smile. “I had friends at Langley look into you. You are a piece of work, Raynor. You have a track record of leaving body bags wherever you go. I just might need a gunslinger or two on this mission, if it comes down to it, so I’m not going to send you home. But for now you are a loose cannon and a danger to this op. You want to conduct surveillance on Chalice? Fine, go ahead. That will keep you out of my hair. Me and my team will find intel linking Saleh or the munitions to Maadi Land and Sea, and then I’ll send you—correction—
JSOC
will send you in to blow some shit up and to kill some sons of bitches. You might want to focus on getting ready for that.”

Raynor turned and left the room without another word.

*   *   *

When Kolt returned to the room he was sharing with Cindy, he sat down on his bunk to pull off his boots.

She faced him, sitting on her own little bunk and firing up her secure laptop. “What’s the deal with you two guys?”

“No deal. We met a couple weeks ago.”

“And something bad happened?”

“Only to the bad guys. I guess Curtis doesn’t see it that way.”

“Am I going to have to be the referee between you two?” she asked jokingly.

Kolt did not like the inference. He was pissed about Curtis, pissed about the potential for this operation to fail, and he did not like being teased by the pilot program girl from training. He was in charge here, and she was getting a bit too relaxed with their banter. “No, Hawk. You will not.”

To her credit, Cindy immediately realized she’d gone too far teasing about a serious situation. “Sorry, boss. I was out of line.”

“Not a problem. Stay focused on the mission, Carrie.”

“Yes, sir. I mean … right, Frank.”

*   *   *

The Delta personnel spent the next day doing more recce of Rhine and Stone and setting up the laser mics in the apartment across the street from Chalice. Much of their surveillance work was tedious and much of it was repetitive, but Kolt knew that they would need much more intel on the locations. One had a tendency to make dangerous assumptions with a single look at a target. It would take multiple recons to understand the daily patterns inside the walls of Maadi Land and Sea.

So Digger and Slapshot sailed by in a felucca for a second time at midmorning and a third time in late afternoon. Raynor and Hawk did their honeymoon routine again. They hired an English-speaking tour guide to take them around the neighborhoods of Cairo so they could take pictures with their high-end camera equipment. At their direction he drove them over the Ring Road Bridge spanning the Nile, and then south on the Cairo-Aswan road. Here, in a wide spot of greenery along the river, they stopped and ate a picnic lunch while their guide ate his lunch back at the car. Kolt took his camera, attached a 400mm lens, and took more than one hundred pictures of the target location across a hundred yards of blue water.

As they added to their target folder, the target was beginning to look more and more difficult to take down. Armed men, motion lights, fences, open ground to cover.

The AFO cell recognized that the hit, if it came, was going to be a real bitch.

EIGHTEEN

In the late afternoon two flights arrived at Cairo International Airport within minutes of one another: an Egypt Air flight from Beirut and an Olympic Air flight from Athens. From among the hundreds of passengers disembarking from the two aircraft, seven men converged just past customs control. They ranged in age from thirty-three to forty-four, they all wore fine tailored suits, and their luggage was minimal. They all climbed into a single minibus at curbside pickup. From there they were driven through traffic-clogged streets to the Hotel Sofitel Cairo Maadi Towers and Casino.

The seven men took keys to four suites, all on the ninth floor. From their balconies they had views of the pyramids in the distance, but they instead pulled the draperies closed in their rooms and slipped
NE PAS DÉRANGER
cards in their key locks.

They took no calls and held no meetings that evening.

They were not businessmen; they were Quds Force, Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.

They were spies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

One of the seven was the deputy director of the organization, and the other six men were his security force. Each and every one of them had military special operations experience. They had worked missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and Syria, and they had come to Egypt, for want of a better explanation, so their boss could do some shopping.

The leader of their group was here to meet with Aref Saleh, formerly of the employ of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, to purchase weapons, but for now they would wait here in their hotel until given further instructions by the shadowy arms merchant.

The Russian-made Igla-S missiles that he had for sale were worth the inconvenience.

Iran had shoulder-fire SAMs galore. Igla-S’s as well as others. But the Iranians weren’t looking to increase their own armaments stores. Instead, they were gift-shopping. The SAMs they would acquire here in Egypt could be traced back to Libya, not Iran, so they created real plausible deniability.

The mandate of Quds Force was, in part, to build underground Islamic organizations throughout the world.

They were here to secure the purchase of twenty Igla-S systems to deliver them to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Lebanese themselves could have arranged this, but the Iranians were working as cutouts as well as benefactors to Hezbollah, so they were here instead of the Lebanese.

*   *   *

In the al Qaeda base disguised as a village near Wadi Bana in southern Yemen, a soft knock at a wooden door echoed in a baked brick room. David Doyle, clean-shaven and with his brown hair cut short and spiked, stood looking out a tiny bare window, his back to the door. A simple aluminum table sat in the middle of the room, and around it were three chairs.

Miguel sat at one of the chairs with a notepad and a pen in front of him. At the sound of the knock he called out in excellent English, “Come in.”

David Doyle joined his second-in-command at the table now.

The door opened and a dark-complexioned man with short hair and trim sideburns entered slowly. He wore baggy cargo shorts with sandals, and a sweatshirt that made him perspire in the still air.

“Good morning,” he said to the men on the other side of the table. His voice was tentative.

“Good morning,” said David Doyle. “Please, have a seat. This won’t take long.”

The man sat in an aluminum chair that scraped the brick flooring as he scooted forward. Thin beads of sweat streamed from his temples; he wiped his face with the forearm of his white sweatshirt. The garment bore the orange silhouette of the head of a longhorn steer and the word
TEXAS
above it.

“How’s it going?” asked Miguel.

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” the man asked, his accent thick but his English easily understood.

Miguel did not answer. Instead, Doyle took over the questioning. “What is your name?”

“Jaza Hussein, but everybody calls me Jerry.”

“Where are you from?”

“I’m originally from Pakistan, but now—”

“What do you do, Jerry?”

Jerry smiled, pinched the front of his UT sweatshirt. “I’m working on my master’s in public policy at UT in Austin.”

“Are you, now?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, then said, “Yep.” His second try sounded more natural, less stilted and formal.

“That’s cool, Jerry. I hear that’s a nice town.”

Jerry nodded quickly, spoke quickly. His nerves showed. “Great town. Got a little flat right off of Guadelupe Street.”

“A
what
off of Guadelupe?”

“An … an apartment?”

“
I’m
asking
you
.”

“An apartment. Yes. In my country we call them flats, but here in the States we—”

“I understand,” said Doyle.

Miguel looked down at the papers in his hand. “I had a friend who went to UT. I visited him once.”

Jerry’s eyes widened slightly, but he nodded and smiled. “Cool.”

Miguel then looked up from his papers. “I forgot, what does everyone at UT Austin call that stretch of Guadelupe there by the campus?”

Jerry’s eyes narrowed in thought. They looked off to the side slightly. Then back to his interviewers. “Yes. That is referred to as … ‘the drag.’”

Doyle said, “You don’t sound too sure about that, Jimmy.”

The interviewee smiled nervously. “Jerry. It’s Jerry. And, yes, I
am
certain. It is called the drag.”

“What was the name of the guy who shot all those people from the clock tower?”

Now there was no hesitation. Jerry was emboldened. “Whitman. A total motherfucking asshole.” He said it as if it were all part of the man’s name.

Doyle and Miguel looked the man over for a moment more. Finally Doyle said, “Well done, my friend.”

The operative across from them smiled, his chest filled with pride. But Doyle then said, “But it needs to be a lot better.”

Jerry said, “It will be, David. I promise.”

“Good.”

“Very well. Leave us, and send in the next student.”

Jerry stood with a nod and a slight bow and left the room. As he shut the door Miguel said, “Not bad for one day of study. That guy is Pakistani. Never been to the U.S. Never been to the UK.”

Doyle was a tougher instructor. He said, “He’s got the language, and he’s coming along on the facts quickly enough, but he has to get rid of the nerves. The objective isn’t to make these men into Americans, it is to make them into foreign students
in
America. I don’t give a damn if a cheeseburger makes him puke, I just want him to act comfortable when questioned.”

“It has only been one day, David. He will be fine. They will
all
be fine.”

Doyle just grunted. His entire operation depended on his operators’ ability to blend into the fabric of the United States.

There was a fresh knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Miguel.

It went on like this for the entire morning. These were just the initial interviews, the easy ones. Over the next few days Doyle and Miguel planned to put each of the men through several more, each different from and more difficult than the last. The two leaders would play the role of busybodies sitting next to the men on a bus, then they would be curious and suspicious citizens, racially profiling the men and challenging them on what they were doing near an airport.

Finally, Doyle would pose as a police officer, and he would pull the men over in their car, one at a time, and question them against their documents.

Each of the twelve operatives had memorized stacks of material relating to their legends, and Doyle would make certain they knew every last line of it. He would also make sure they could recite it back while relaxed, while exhausted, while scared, and while angry.