Tier One Wild (28 page)

As one of the Iranians paid for the over-the-counter medicine and then took it upstairs, the rest of the group entered the restaurant Le Clovis and were seated at a large table within view of the lobby. When their colleague returned, the five enjoyed a long, late, and relaxed dinner in the restaurant. And then, around midnight, the five men headed up to their rooms, shaking hands with each other. On the way through the lobby to the elevator, one of their party had spoken English to the bellman, telling him they would be leaving in the morning and arranging for someone to come collect their bags at eight-thirty.

Then the men climbed into elevators and went up.

The case officer’s job had been to watch the men and make certain they did not leave the hotel. Once he had convinced himself they were in for the night, he left the Sofitel and returned to his car, where he lowered the seat and fell soundly to sleep.

He slept through the few comings and goings in the parking lot, and he slept as hotel security escorted a disgruntled gambler back to his vehicle. It was the kind of sloppy CIA fieldcraft that Kolt had lost sleep over.

And he slept through one more event of interest. Five men, each with a suitcase and a carry-on, entered the covered lot from the hotel’s stairwell at two a.m. They climbed into a black Mahindro Scorpio SUV, and rolled slowly and quietly out of the hotel grounds.

TWENTY-FOUR

At 0230 hours Racer was back with his team at their safe house on Gamel Abd El Nasir. Digger and Slapshot had already taken the dinghy to the water’s edge, just a few blocks to the west of their location. They had secreted it in some high reeds and anchored it in knee-deep water. From here it would be a journey of twenty minutes at low power to reach the property of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd., a mile north of their position on the same shore.

Now the two sergeants were checking their kit to make sure they had everything for the hit. They wore dark brown local garb, and they sat at the table in the tiny kitchen looking over satellite images of the property along with color photographs taken during their close-target recces of the past few days.

Raynor was in the back room with Hawk, sitting on a bunk next to her with his laptop in his lap. They were using FalconView and recon photos to help them find the best point downriver where she could gain access to the water’s edge in the van and still remain away from concentrations of civilians or police. They finally found a spot, nearly a half mile from the target location, just before a slow turn in the river that might have exposed them to anyone on the Ring Road Bridge.

After picking out a couple of alternate access points to the river, Kolt got up from the bunk and checked his MP7 PDW rifle.

“Racer?” Hawk said.

“Yeah?”

“You are going to encounter a significant amount of security in that complex.”

“Ya think?” He said it playfully, but his mind was 100 percent on mission.

“You could use another gun in this.”

He stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. “Out of the question, Hawk. You are not an operator. Uh, I mean, listen, this isn’t about your abilities. I know you can handle yourself, I’m not questioning that. I—”

“Well, sir, I’m glad you corrected yourself. I am not an operator. But just because I don’t have a dick doesn’t mean my gun on target wouldn’t be a good thing if it goes loud.”

“Sorry, Hawk. Not going to happen. You’re an important contingency on this one. If we go to plan B, I need to know you are there to help us out.”

She nodded. “Right, boss,” she said, but she was thinking she could help the men out better if she was in there with them when the shit hit the fan.

“We leave in five.” Raynor hefted his chest rig of magazines and his soft armor and headed out the door.

“Shit,” Cindy Bird said to the empty room.

*   *   *

As much as he hated to admit that Racer was right, Curtis knew moving to another safe house before the hit on the target took place was a good call. He wished he had thought of it first. He knew he would not get it all sanitized before H-Hour, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted to get his ass, and the asses of his men, out of the location before all of Maadi was rocked with emergency sirens and engulfed in flashing lights.

To that end he had everyone working on getting as much packed up as possible. Murphy and Wychowski stacked duffel bags and backpacks at the top of the staircase. Denton had backed the panel truck up in the gated parking lot next to the Range Rover and he and Buckley were finishing up loading all the guns and ammo into crates in their room.

Curtis made a final call on the sat phone before disconnecting it from the roof antenna and putting it in one of the many padded Pelican cases lying around. He then took a moment to check his watch. Racer and his team would be hitting objective Rhine in half an hour. He needed to pick up the pace if they were going to be rolling before then.

Curtis grabbed an empty backpack off of a shelf and began stuffing it with gear.

*   *   *

While Buckley broke down the Alamo kits of rifles, mags, and binos positioned in the windows, Denton hefted four big duffels of gear and headed up the hall. He exited the travel agency and then crossed the landing to the stairs, taking them down to the darkened lobby.

At the front door he glanced out the small window, making certain the parking lot was empty except for the panel truck and the SUV, and also making sure the electronic gate was closed. After doing this, he opened the door and headed out to load the bags. A warm breeze blew trash from the construction site across the street, over the dark two-lane road, and through the openings in the fence around the parking lot. The CIA SAD officer packed the gear in the back of the panel truck and then headed back into the building to grab two more armloads of duffels.

He pressed the key code at the front door to the building and the locks popped open. As he pushed open the heavy door, his head snapped forward, and his body tumbled into the lobby to the stairs, his legs still outside the door. His body twitched for a few seconds, but soon he stilled.

Denton had been shot through the skull by a suppressed Dragunov sniper rifle from the fifth floor of the lot across the street. The bullet had exited his forehead and taken a small portion of his brain with it.

As this all happened, the electronic gate access to the small parking lot began to open silently. As soon as there was a foot of separation between the two gate doors, a black figure pushed through the rest of the way. As he did so he let the remote control for the gate fall from his hands. His Libyan associates had been given the remote by the security company who designed it, and then they had passed it on to his team.

It had served its purpose, but now the Iranian needed both of his hands to operate his weapon.

The man in black, along with four more men dressed in black behind him, sprinted across the parking lot toward the door left propped open by the dead American. Here they vaulted the body and entered the lobby. The first three men crouched at the bottom of the open staircase, their weapons trained on the landing above, and the other two men rolled Denton’s body back outside before shutting the door.

All four Iranian Quds Force operatives headed up the stairs quietly, their eyes scanning for targets in the dimness.

*   *   *

The Delta AFO cell drove west toward the site of their hidden dinghy in the shallows of the Nile River. Hawk was behind the wheel, a blue veil covering her face and hair, and an MP7 with its stock collapsed hung under her right arm.

Raynor sat in the back with Slapshot and Digger. They would darken their faces with black waterproof camo paint at the very last moment before climbing onto the boat, but for now he and the others kept their faces clean.

As they rode in silence Kolt grabbed his mobile phone from inside his duffel on the floor next to him. He announced to the van, “I’m going to double-check that Curtis and his team are out the door.”

He punched Curtis’s number, and listened to the phone make the connection.

“We’re pulling up to the dinghy,” Hawk said softly from the front seat, and the van slowed and stopped in the parking lot of a shuttered boathouse along the water.

“Come on, Curtis,” Kolt muttered softly. Slapshot and Digger were pulling the long gallabiyas off their bodies, revealing the black Nomex, black canvas, and quick-release buckles underneath.

Curtis did not answer.

Kolt looked down to his watch.

Suddenly he had a very bad feeling.

“Hawk,” Kolt barked. “You have Murphy’s cell number saved on your phone?”

“Roger, why?”

“Call him, Curtis isn’t answering.”

It rang six times before Hawk looked back at Kolt and shook her head no.

“Shit!” Kolt said as he looked out the window. He didn’t need this. But something didn’t feel right. He knew Murphy had been staring at Hawk’s ass since day one. Not answering her phone call was a hell of an indicator.

“Back to the safe house on Ahmed Kamel Street. As quick as you can get us there.”

Digger asked, “You don’t think they got hit, do you?”

Kolt shook his head, but the look on his face did not match the gesture. He tried the call again. “I don’t know. If we get there and they are fine, or they are already gone, then we can be back here in twenty minutes.”

As they neared Ahmed Kamel Street, the team saw a large number of locals out in the street for this time of night. They seemed to be looking around.

Hawk said, “Looks like something just happened in this neighborhood.”

Digger added, “They all heard something, but they don’t know where it went down.”

“Park in the mouth to the back alleyway,” Kolt said. “We don’t need any spectators as we approach, and I don’t want any snipers in the high-rise construction to take a potshot at us.”

With that Hawk killed the van’s headlights and, a few seconds later, turned into the alley that led behind the safe house building. At Raynor’s direction, they parked two blocks from the back door of the property. Kolt said, “Foxtrot from here. Back entrance. Quiet and careful. No one knows we’re coming.”

The rest of the team nodded as one.

Kolt and Cindy began heading up one side of the alley, Digger and Slapshot across from them.

The back door to the building was secure, and all the lights were off downstairs. Kolt knelt down and took a quick look through the window next to the rear door, and he saw a body on the staircase.
Shit.
Quickly he slipped across the window to the other side, and motioned for Slapshot to unlock and open the door.

Slapshot pulled a pair of keys out and reached across the glass to the lock.

Seconds later the back door opened and Kolt moved into the downstairs lobby, his rifle high, his back moving sideways along the rear wall to the west. Digger moved in right behind him and followed the wall to the east, keeping himself out of view up the staircase ahead of him. Slapshot and Hawk moved in behind them—Slapshot following Kolt all the way around on the left and Hawk going in Digger’s direction.

There was blood all over the floor in front of the front door. Kolt and Slapshot noticed this, but they kept moving.

Once they cleared the downstairs rooms, they moved upstairs in silence and near-complete darkness. The little light that filtered in from the lobby’s windows revealed that the man on the stairs was Buckley, one of the SAD officers. Digger knelt to check his pulse, but in seconds he looked up at Raynor and shook his head. The stairs were covered in blood around Buckley’s body, but Kolt and the others did not take time to look for his wounds before continuing cautiously up the staircase.

They found the door to the travel agency wide open, and the lights off. They slipped into the office silently, moving low, their weapons trained on the open door to the safe house in back. As they went behind the counter, they found Murphy. There was no point in Digger checking for a pulse. The man’s eyes were wide open in death.

Their tactical train entered the hallway of the safe house and they cleared the kitchen, finding it empty, but bullet holes and blood smears told of a recent fight here. In the first bedroom they found Wychowski facedown in a pool of blood.

Digger checked his pulse, but he was dead.

The rest of the rooms were empty, just the way they had looked the day before when Raynor and his men had vacated them.

The team formed at the bathroom at the end of the hall. Kolt reached forward with one hand and pulled the latch.

As he opened the door, he felt the resistance of something pushing against it. He flashed the flashlight on his rifle’s barrel quickly, illuminating the room before him, and he saw a scene of utter carnage.

A man head-to-toe in black was facedown next to the toilet; blood had spurted from an artery across the walls and mirror of the small bathroom.

And Myron Curtis was sitting on the floor next to the dead Iranian. His back was against the wall under the towel rack by the shower. The rack had been bent almost in half and the towel was wrapped tightly around Curtis’s upper leg.

It was soaked in blood.

Curtis’s eyes had been closed when Kolt flashed the light, and Kolt thought the CIA man had bled out. He called Digger forward, and the medic entered the bathroom and knelt over Curtis. The young Delta operator started to reach to check for a pulse but the CIA man lifted a pistol up weakly from under the bloody towel.

Digger pulled it out of the man’s hands as he called out, “Boss?”

Kolt shut himself and Digger in the bathroom with Curtis and flipped on the lights. He checked the thigh wound along with Digger by carefully removing the towel. Instantly dark blood pumped from the hole in Curtis’s pants. The thick string tourniquet Curtis had applied wasn’t getting it done.

“That does
not
look good,” Curtis announced in a tired and hoarse whisper.

Instantly the medic pulled a tourniquet out of his chest rig and wrapped it above the wound, cinching it tight, almost into Curtis’s crotch.

“Ahhh!” Myron Curtis groaned as Digger cut off the field-expedient tourniquet Curtis had applied. Then he recovered and looked at Kolt. “Everybody else?” he asked.