Sons of Valor Page 16

  “Yes, sir. We’ll have something to you by tonight.”

  The Vice President fixed his steely eyed gaze on Whitney. “Nice work, Watts, and don’t let these knuckle-draggers convince you otherwise.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, folding, then unfolding her arms across her chest.

  He nodded at Chunk, then excused himself and headed for the elevator door, where he waited—presumably to give Bowman a moment to wrap up.

  The Tier One CO looked at Chunk. “No bullshit, Chunk. Are you good with the timetable?”

  “Absolutely, sir. Let me gather my team, and we’ll start planning with Watts and Yi right away.”

  “Assuming we get the green light—which I guarantee we will—I don’t have to tell you how flawless the first operation needs to be,” Bowman said. “If the convoy attack was only a warm-up, God only knows how many American lives are at risk when they choose their next target. We’re playing catch-up, Commander, and that’s my least favorite game.”

  “Understood, sir,” Chunk replied. “That’s why I’d like to lead the mission myself.”

  Bowman nodded. “The SCIF is yours. You have three hours to put a plan on my desk. I want you ready for wheels up by tonight. If there’s a trail to follow, it’s gonna get cold fast.”

  When Bowman had left to join the Vice President at the elevator, and the rest of the room began to clear, Chunk crossed to Whitney’s side of the star shaped table. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks,” she said and blew out an unsteady exhale. “But you could have warned me Bowman was calling the friggin’ Vice President of the United States for the brief.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said, holding up his hands. “I swear, Heels. I had no idea.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “If you say so.” Then, shaking her head, she added, “What a crazy AF day.”

  “Better get used to it, because that’s gonna be your new normal at the Tier One.”

  “Wonderful.”

  He nodded toward the satellite slide with the red dot. “You made a good start. I’ll meet you back here in an hour to finalize all the details. In the meantime, I need to give my guys a heads-up. If you have a roommate or a significant other, you should probably do the same.”

  He wasn’t surprised when her mouth fell open.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Chunk grinned. “Remember? You go where we go, sister. Pack for a ten-day deployment. Oh, and why don’t you bring Yi from your shop? I can see that you two work well together.”

  He turned and headed for the steel door of the SCIF, feeling her wide eyes on his back.

  “Might want to have Saw or Morales help you pack your tactical gear,” he said over his shoulder. “My plan is to park you guys in the Tactical Operations Center in J-bad, but I still need you kinetic in case we need to move.” He stopped, hand on the door handle, and shot her his best Texas smile. “Shit changes fast in this world. Time to buckle up, because here we go.”

  CHAPTER 16

  al qadar warehouse and drone hangar

  mingora, pakistan

  0240 local time

  The “cyber shack,” as Qasim had dubbed it, was about as out of place inside the dilapidated warehouse as a strip club in Taliban country. It was the only room inside the building with air conditioning, actual chairs, and proper lighting. It was also the only place where he felt comfortable enough to relax and let his guard down. Despite the camaraderie Hamza’s men had expressed after the successful drone strike, he still didn’t feel he meshed with the rest of al Qadar. He didn’t have the foggiest idea what any of them actually did, other than carry around assault rifles. The lone exception was the hacker sitting in the chair next to him, typing away at a computer with two monitors.

  With Hamza pressing him to make quick progress, Qasim had spent every waking hour with al Qadar’s hacker in residence—a kid everyone called Fun Time. When first introduced, the black hat had described himself as the “badass Uyghur from East Turkestan.” East Turkestan, Qasim had since learned, was what ethnic Uyghur dissidents called China’s Xinjiang Province. Through vague and dubious means, Fun Time had fled China and ended up in Pakistan. He was fluent in Mandarin and the Uyghur dialect, but also could speak passable English and middling Arabic. Despite only having just met the guy three days ago, Qasim knew the kid’s entire life story. Five years ago his father and uncle had been rounded up in one of the government’s mass incarceration sweeps and were now living in detention camps run by the Chinese government.

  “My father no terrorist,” Fun Time had exclaimed emphatically when telling the story. “I’s the motherfuckin’ terrorist, bitches.”

  Despite his over-the-top personality, Fun Time was unquestionably the best hacker Qasim had ever crossed paths with. His tool kit of exploits and cheats was unlike anything Qasim had seen. At first, he wondered if Fun Time had worked for China’s government cyber programs, but on reflection the kid seemed too raw and rough around the edges for that.

  “Gazaaaa,” Fun Time said with a fist pump to the air.

  He did that a lot.

  Qasim turned to look at him. “Something good?”

  Without taking his eyes off the monitor, the hacker answered, “Ya, something really good, man. We in RTS Diego Garcia.”

  “Are you serious? You got in?” Qasim said, his eyes going wide. “How?”

  Fun Time didn’t answer him, just started bobbing his head to the beat of whatever he was listening to on his chunky headphones.

  Qasim was about to slide his chair closer to watch what he was doing, when shouting outside usurped his attention. He popped out of his chair and walked to the door that led to the main floor of the warehouse. The door had a rectangular inset window, but Fun Time had taped brown paper over it. Qasim hesitated a moment. It technically wasn’t any of his business what was going on out there, but this was the first conflict he’d witnessed since he’d agreed to work for Hamza.

  He opened the door.

  What he saw next made his heart skip a beat. A man knelt beside the tarp-covered Pterodactyl, begging for his life while Hamza pointed a pistol at his forehead.

  “Search him,” Hamza ordered.

  Hamza’s bodyguard and another al Qadar fighter forcibly stripped the man naked, searching for hidden transceivers and destroying his clothes and shoes in the process. When they finished, the man’s belongings were tossed into a steel barrel and set on fire.

  “Two men from Pakistani Intelligence came to your store. What did you tell them?” Hamza asked, his voice cold and clipped.

  “Nothing, I swear,” the man said, naked and trembling. “I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

  “The ISI cannot be trusted. They work very closely with the Americans. You never know if an agent is a true believer or a traitor.”

  “I told them nothing. I swear! I followed all the protocols you taught me.”

  “How can I believe you, Mohamed, when you tried to hide the meeting from me? Even worse, once you suspected you’d been caught in your lie, you decided to come directly here, potentially compromising this location.”

  “I’m sorry, I was afraid, but I am loyal. I swear. Have mercy, please,” he begged.

  “There is no place for lies and incompetence in my organization,” Hamza said, his voice hard, but at the same time he holstered his pistol.

  “Thank you, oh, thank you. Allah truly rewards the merciful,” the man said. But Hamza’s sunken-cheeked bodyguard had stepped into position behind him. “Wait? What is this?”

  Hamza folded his arms across his chest and nodded.

  With practiced efficiency, the bodyguard grabbed the condemned man by the hair and sliced open his throat. The cut was so deep that, at first, Qasim thought he’d decapitated the man. Bright-red blood sprayed from the wound, pouring down the man’s chest and abdomen and pooling on the concrete floor. He made no sound, just clutched at his ruined neck as he fell into the puddle. Only then did Hamza look away, his gaze settling on Qasim.

  Qasim locked eyes with the terrorist, and in that instant, his perception of Hamza fractured. “Is this the price of failure?” a voice asked, and only once it was too late, did he realize it was his.

  “No. This is the price of deceit, the price of cowardice . . . the price of willful incompetence,” Hamza said without a trace of malice or ire. “Do you think I should have let him go?”

  Qasim didn’t answer.

  “What would you have done in my stead?”

  “I don’t know, but I would not have murdered him, that’s for certain.”

  Hamza nodded, his expression cynical. “How magnanimous of you. Thankfully, you’re not in charge, or we’d all be dead or strapped to a board with water being poured down our throats. This is not a game, Qasim. It’s a war. Of all people, you should understand this by now. The Americans murdered your sister. They murdered your father . . . just as they murdered mine.” The terrorist then shifted from English to Pashto and asked the assembled fighters how many of them had lost a parent or family member to war. Every fighter present raised a hand. “You see, Qasim, we are all sons of war, come together for a single, unified purpose. And through that purpose we become a family. Mohamed was tested and he failed. His weakness jeopardized all of our safety, and I refuse to let anyone hurt my family.”

  Qasim heard Fun Time curse inside the cyber shack. He looked over his shoulder as the hacker jumped out of his chair and darted toward him.

  “We have big problem!” he cried, beckoning Hamza with a wave.

  “Tell me,” Hamza said, striding over.

  “Soldi
ers in the mountains. The Americans are approaching the cave. I see them on the camera,” the hacker said.

  Qasim’s knees started to quake. Will Hamza be furious and blame me for the Americans tracing the signal? Is it my turn to have my throat slit? No, he can’t kill me. Fun Time can’t configure the drone-satellite data link without me . . .

  “What you want me do?” Fun Time asked.

  “We knew this was a possibility,” Hamza said. “Quite frankly, it took the Americans longer than I thought it would. Did you sever the data link to the camera?”

  Fun Time shook his head. “Signal is encrypted and running through a hundred blinds. Impossible to trace.”

  “Nothing is impossible. Sever the connection,” Hamza said. “And I will warn our Taliban partners that the Americans are launching an assault. If we’re lucky, our brothers in arms will usurp the Americans’ full attention and hopefully kill some Navy SEALs and Army Rangers in the process.”

  The hacker nodded and ran back into the cyber shack, while Hamza shifted his gaze to Qasim.

  “How is the work coming along?” he asked. “Have you made progress penetrating the American satellite communications network?”

  “We just breached RTS Diego Garcia,” Qasim said. “That is the first step.”

  “We need to accelerate the timetable,” Hamza said through a heavy exhale. “They’re hunting us now, and the Americans are very good at hunting. It won’t be long before they shift their spotlight from the Hindu Kush to Mingora. Tell Fun Time to work quickly and keep me posted.”

  “Okay.”

  Hamza walked several paces before he stopped and turned back. “And Qasim?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t blame you for the Americans detecting the line-of-sight transmissions from the remote pilot team. It was an inherent risk of the operation.”

  “Okay,” Qasim said, heart still pounding.

  Hamza smiled. “I’m not a monster, Qasim. Reason, not emotion, guides my decisions. I would hope you that you recognize that by now.”

  “I do,” Qasim said unconvincingly.

  “Okay,” the terrorist said, his gaze flicking to Qasim’s quivering knees. “Now go finish the work so that we may, inshallah, get the drone airborne again before the Americans find us.”

  CHAPTER 17

  operation jackal

  hindu kush mountain range

  twenty-five miles northwest of jalalabad, afghanistan

  0335 local time

  Chunk scanned the mountainside terrain through his NVGs. The rugged beauty was hard to appreciate in the monochrome night vision, but he’d watched more than his fair share of sunrises in the Kush over the years. When the sun crested the ridgeline and lit up the white rocky peaks above and the lush green valley below, it was a sight to behold . . . but the only way he and his team would be here at dawn was if they were dead.

  And that wasn’t going to happen.

  The op was straightforward—hike in, hit the target cave, and exfil by helicopter without alerting the sizable Taliban contingent hanging out at the compound in the valley below. The hope was Chunk and his team would find a small contingent of Taliban fighters in the cave, dispatch them with minimal resistance, confiscate all mobile phones and laptop computers, and exfil with a crow or two for questioning. With the help of their spooky friends at Ft. Meade, Watts and Yi had narrowed down the transmission site to a specific location on the southeast face of this mountain. Unfortunately, the spooks on the ground had not been successful at harvesting any confirming intelligence from their local Taliban-connected assets.

  For those keeping score: SIGINT one point, HUMINT zero.

  There was a lot riding on this op for everyone involved. Fair or not, it would set the tone for the new Tier One. Succeed tonight, and it would instill faith and confidence among the JSOC brass, the power brokers on the National Security Council, VP Jarvis, and President Warner that the Tier One was back and more capable than ever. Fail, and a stigma could follow Bowman, Chunk, and Watts for the rest of their respective careers. They’d put their collective necks on the line pursuing Watts’s Chinese black-market drone theory, and they needed providence to have their back.

  He shook the distracting thoughts from his head and checked his watch.

  Still on time, on target . . .

  For this op, Riker had lobbied for whisky codenames for all the checkpoints, which was a big step up from wines and cartoon characters. The target cave, Dewar’s, was located on the eastern face of the mountain. The primary exfil—a ledge outcropping a half mile north of Dewar’s at elevation—was Maker’s Mark. And predictably, the emergency secondary exfil down mountain was Johnny Walker. Assuming all went well, they would be home at Redneck Riviera for breakfast—Saw’s pick because his favorite country-music star had created the line of whiskey—aka the base in Jalalabad, where Captain Bowman, Watts, and Yi were manning the TOC.

  First Platoon was split into two fire teams, Chunk leading four men and Spence leading three. The hike in had been uneventful so far, but Chunk knew that could change any minute. The Taliban had an extensive scout network, which included goatherds and teenage boys who could move as silently and swiftly up and down the slopes as mountain goats. All it took was crossing paths with, or getting spotted by, the wrong kind of mountain man, and the peak would suddenly be teeming with Taliban fighters.

  “Jackal, this is Mother,” came Yi’s voice over the secure channel. “We might have a problem.”

  And there it is, Chunk thought with a sigh.

  “Jackal One,” Chunk replied, scanning over his rifle with renewed concentration as they crossed a narrow pass bisecting two large rock formations. The geometry created a perfect kill zone if the enemy set up a crossfire, and he hoped this call wasn’t her reporting any new thermals nearby.

  “Jackal, we have movement in the valley. Two trucks have left the Taliban compound. One that left about three minutes ago, moving north out of Mano Gai. And now we have a second truck—this one a transport with over a dozen thermals in back—looping just south of Aranas. Thermal imagery indicates they are heavily armed. Hard to say for sure, but looks like they might have RPGs and crew-served weapons, in addition to assault rifles.”

  “You think they’ve been alerted to our presence?” he asked.

  “That’s our concern,” she said. “We didn’t report the first truck, but that second really got our attention. They’re heavily armed and—hold on . . . it looks like they’re turning to head up the mountain.”

  Chunk cleared the gap between the two rock towers, then moved left, back into cover. Spence came up beside him and took a knee, scanning over his SOPMOD M4. In a moment he would lead his half of the team right, to offset Chunk’s squad so they could cover one another during the approach. As a former enlisted SEAL sniper, Spence had the mental geometry that made him perfect in his leadership role in the squadron.

  “How long do you estimate it will take on those switchbacks for the trucks to get to our position, Mother?” Spence asked.

  “From satellite imagery, the roads look pretty shitty and they don’t appear to go all the way up. They’re gonna have to hike the last thousand feet over rough terrain,” Yi said.

  In the background, Chunk heard Whitney say, “I’d estimate two hours, maybe a little less.”

  “These guys are friggin’ mountain goats,” Spence said. “Let’s call it an hour and a half.”

  “Jackal is ten minutes from target. It shouldn’t be a problem,” Bowman said in the background, his voice transmitting over Yi’s mike, which apparently she had on vox. “They will be long gone by the time these assholes arrive on target.”

  Chunk gritted his teeth. Maybe, maybe not—this new wrinkle definitely impacted the tactical picture. Taliban reinforcements coming up the mountain meant two things. One, his team had just lost the ability to descend to their emergency exfil checkpoint. Second, and perhaps more significant, he’d just lost his most important tactical advantage—the element of surprise. Now, almost certainly, any Taliban sheltering in the cave knew the Americans were coming. What if they turned the tables and ambushed Chunk’s team? Also, the primary exfil checkpoint was a ledge on the west side of the range. If the reinforcements were carrying RPGs, the helos would be vulnerable during the pickup.