Tier One (Tier One Series Book 1) Read online

  “As far as hitting HVTs, well, permission is not an issue,” Smith said. “That’s where this little shithole comes in.”

  He zoomed out on the imagery until Kemper could see the town of Al Mukalla—the fifth largest city in Yemen, with a population of three hundred thousand. Kemper studied the roads and topography around the city in relation to the compound. The compound was located twenty or thirty miles southwest of the city, within a few clicks of the N4 coastal road. It was built at the base of a modest-size mountain, with the terrain spreading out flat in every direction into empty desert. While twenty-five miles was meaningless in the Western world, traveling that distance in Yemen was a haul.

  Kemper pointed to the mountain. Even without knowing what the mission was, his mind had shifted to operational planning. “Nice high ground for an approach,” he said.

  “I was thinking the same thing, but it’s rough terrain, so you’d need to INFIL ahead of time to position.”

  “HALO INFIL at night. North of here and then a tough hump over,” Kemper said, tapping a ridgeline. “But you’d be the night,” he added, meaning the approach would have stealth.

  “Surface of the moon behind you,” Smith said, nodding. “Rest of the force from the water.”

  “Yeah,” Kemper agreed. “Night HALO with RIBs to hit the beach in the dark and coordinate with the northern team. Two teams of twelve.” He watched Smith’s face for a sign that would give away the target.

  Smith stayed quiet, still not ready to drop his drawers.

  Kemper shrugged it off. “Command comms?”

  Please don’t say satellite relay. He’d been fucked by shitty satellite comms more than once.

  “Airborne command and control relaying to the TOC in Djibouti. Real time, for all intents and purposes. This shithole is definitely not a place you want to lose comms.”

  Kemper was impressed. The higher authority was apparently in wish-granting mode, which meant this op had been blessed by the White House. He could barely stand it anymore, so he pressed. “How many guys per team?”

  Smith leaned back in his chair and stared at him. After a few seconds, he finally broke. “You’ll want everyone for this one, Senior.”

  After two decades in the teams, very little surprised Kemper—and that surprised him. “Both squadrons?”

  “You’ll need ’em. Pull this off and Tier One will go down in history as the guys who ended the war against Al Qaeda.”

  Smith leaned forward and began clicking the touch pad on the computer. Kemper watched as Top Secret files popped open on the screen—page after page, image after image, HVT after HVT. Most of the head shots were familiar—ghosts and murderers from the hundreds of operations and briefs he’d participated in during the past fifteen years. His pulse quickened, and he felt that old familiar surge of adrenaline.

  “You’re telling me that all the bad guys in these pictures are going to be at this compound at the same time?”

  Smith grinned.

  “And we know when?”

  “We’re positive. We have inside guys—sources and operators—embedded in all of the parent organizations confirming this. We’re talking about an AQ fucking convention—leadership from all the worst cells. We think this is an attempt to unify the myriad of splintered factions together.”

  “But why?” Kemper asked. “These guys have always hunted in small packs, and that was actually what made them hard to fight. They must know that.”

  “Two words: Islamic State,” Smith said. “The nut jobs in Syria and western Iraq are spreading through the region like a cancer, as you know. Bad for the good guys, but it turns out bad for Al Qaeda as well. With ISIS getting all the press, both recruitment and funding are drying up for the AQ affiliates. Business as usual is becoming unsustainable for them. We think this is a summit to pull the factions together and plan something dramatic that gets them back on the front pages.” Smith rose and paced for a moment, his excitement almost palpable. “Guys like you and me—guys who have spent years of our lives, lost our friends, sacrificed our marriages, and spilled our blood hunting these assholes—are finally going to get our day in the sun.”

  “I don’t know, it sounds . . .” Kemper stopped himself. The opportunity seemed almost too perfect, but that feeling was natural when you didn’t have all the information. Smith had shared only a small fraction of the intelligence that had been aggregated. This was how the game worked.

  Smith sat back down and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Look, dude, I wouldn’t be here with you if I didn’t believe this, and my boss sure as hell wouldn’t have sent me. We’re not chasing unicorns. This opportunity is the real deal—the op that could change it all.”

  Kemper shifted in his chair and felt a twinge in his back. The biggest operation in Naval Special Warfare history and he would be on the bench. All the years he’d logged since 9/11, grinding it out in the field to get to this moment, all wasted. Jack Kemper would be watching his brothers end Al Qaeda from a TV in the TOC.

  “You okay, Senior?” Smith asked. “I thought you’d be doing backflips over this shit.”

  Kemper nodded slowly. Smith was right. This wasn’t about him. This wasn’t about glory or personal retribution. Terrorism was the plague of the twenty-first century. Jihad was the disease. Whatever the sacrifice, he had sworn to make it. Whatever the contribution, he had sworn to give it. On September 11, 2001, he had made a promise to protect the lives of innocents, not just in America but everywhere Al Qaeda tried to sow death and misery. He had never reneged on that promise. He wasn’t about to now.

  He met the gaze of the man whose name he’d never truly know.

  “Tell me everything you can,” he said. “We have work to do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Gulfstream G550

  Southeast Bound over Central Europe

  April 2, 0130 GMT

  Kelso Jarvis finished reading the Yemen operation debrief for the third time—an events summary drafted by him, addressed to his boss, for a mission that hadn’t happened yet. In the world of Special Operations, he suspected he was the only person masochistic enough to spend time writing post-op debriefs for future events, but he found the exercise extremely insightful. Just as world-class athletes visualize performing the movements and mechanics of their sport before each competition, Jarvis visualized every mission parameter, start to finish, before the actors were set in motion:

  Terrain maps, satellite coverage, drone flight and strike plans, INFIL procedures, team movements, firing solutions, kill-order criteria, target response, target evasion, counterinsurgency probabilities, first-level backup plans, second-level backup plans, abort criteria, and EXFIL procedures . . .

  So many moving parts.

  So many contingencies.

  Normal people did not possess the mental horsepower to do his job, but Jarvis had never considered himself “normal.” From a very young age, he’d recognized that he perceived the world differently than other people. Not just the way numbers and letters had colors associated with them, making them easier to remember and combine into strings, but also in the way he comprehended life’s complexities. Times and dates occupied spatial positions. Geopolitical events stacked themselves into pyramidal hierarchies. Options and variables for complex problems automatically organized themselves into ladder diagrams with logic gates in his mind. He no longer included the color-coded graphical representations of his thought processes in his reports; it was far too frustrating and time consuming to explain such things to other people. He often lamented the fact that synesthesia was so rare, because life was too fascinating a journey to travel alone. But he was alone, and had been for a very long time. In fact, in fifty years he had only crossed paths with one other synesthete. And while she shared some of his traits—they both perceived the letter A and numeral 9 as red, for example—he had quickly assessed her gifts as inferior to his own and lost interest.

  He simply could not imagine perception without sensory cross-c
onnection.

  Without intuition.

  Without affect.

  Early in his military career, Jarvis had learned the danger of sharing his intuitions with his subordinates, his peers, and even his superiors. His perceptions and intuitions had a tendency to rattle people. Military operations determined life and death, not just for American soldiers and foreign combatants, but also for noncombatants and civilians. Mortality is not math, Jarvis, his first CO had lectured. You need to learn to trust your gut. Outwardly, he had laughed and thanked the man for such sound advice, but inside, he’d found the suggestion repugnant. When someone says, “Go with your gut,” what they’re really saying is that they prefer to obey the rudimentary reflexes of their vestigial limbic brain rather than utilize their highly evolved mammalian cerebral cortex. In other words, “Me think like lizard. It much more easy.”

  After that experience, Jarvis learned the importance of wearing masks. In the beginning, it was exhausting trying to emulate the type of people who occupied all the different worlds he traversed back and forth between his personal and professional life. But over time, his skills improved, and eventually changing his persona became as automatic as a chameleon changing the color of his skin. Kelso Jarvis was not simply Kelso Jarvis. He was many different men to many different people. Jack Kemper and his fellow SEALs idolized Kelso Jarvis, the Tier One operator, who talked their talk and walked their walk, but they would not feel the same connection with Kelso Jarvis, the politician’s ass-kisser. He loved Kemper and the team, appreciated them for who they were and the strengths they brought to the party, but they didn’t carry the same burdens he carried. They didn’t interpret data, identify problems, and create solutions the same way he could. And most important, they didn’t have an understanding of the big picture.

  His computer screen saver turned on—a passive-aggressive taunt to stop zoning out and get back to work. He pushed the secure laptop away in disgust, sighed, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the plush, leather-appointed headrest. The Gulfstream’s cabin was so well insulated that despite traveling at nearly six hundred miles an hour, he did not need earplugs. This particular jet, on loan from supporters over at CENTCOM, was way too luxurious for his taste. Actually, he didn’t mind luxury per se. What he minded was the appropriation of luxury for the intercontinental transportation of government employees. It was akin to giving a garbageman the keys to a Range Rover and telling him to make his rounds. He would have been perfectly happy stretched out on a sleeping bag beside Kemper and the Tier One SEALs in the back of a C-130.

  Footsteps.

  He opened his eyes. A female attendant, with curves that even her green flight suit couldn’t hide, approached him from the galley.

  “More coffee, sir?” she said with a smile, stopping next to his seat.

  “Yes, thank you. Use this, please,” he said and handed over his stainless-steel tumbler.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Black.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He watched her go, wondering what modeling agency CENTCOM had plucked her from. Maybe the coffee service on this VIP transport was a luxury he could grant exception to. He glanced at his watch. Two hours and they would be on the ground at the joint base in the Republic of Djibouti on the horn of Africa.

  He hated Djibouti.

  Both the country and the base.

  He had nearly lost his Tier One command because of a mission out of that place. Why? Because he chose to disregard the asinine orders of a paper-pushing civilian in the TOC while he was fighting for survival on the ground in Ethiopia. That fiasco had happened more than a decade ago, but he remembered the details as if it were yesterday. Information and perception were so tightly linked in his mind that time did not erode his memories the way it seemed to for everyone else.

  Phil McDonald had been the spook’s name.

  What a jackass that guy was.

  When Jarvis was an operator, he’d often fantasized about what could be accomplished if he—rather than some pencil-neck politician—was granted both the means and authority to protect America without having to fret over political fallout. Someone important apparently had similar thoughts, because opportunities that had previously been sequestered had suddenly become available to him. According to his boss, an unofficial, unwritten mandate had been issued to speed the transition of experienced operators into civilian leadership positions bestowed with secret authority. Whether this had come down from POTUS, the JCS, or SECDEF, Jarvis did not know, but someone with serious swag believed that empowering men like him was critical to the future success of US clandestine operations. And now that he was on “the inside,” Jarvis considered it his personal obligation to purge the chain of command of people like Phil McDonald and replace them with people like Shane Smith.

  The polished mahogany door separating the passenger cabin from the aft sleeping quarters cracked open. Jarvis looked up.

  Speak of the devil.

  Smith stepped into the cabin, rubbing his eyes. Jarvis had handpicked the former Delta operator for the joint interagency counterterrorism task force he now commanded, and was in the process of mentoring him for bigger and better things. Like Jarvis, Smith was retired from active duty and worked as a civilian for the Joint Intelligence Research Group. Over the past three years, his young prodigy had become more than just a trusted subordinate—he had become a friend. At least as much of a friend as a chameleon can have. Despite the difference in age and positional authority, Jarvis trusted Smith implicitly.

  As his operations officer slipped into the seat beside him, Jarvis slipped into his operator persona. “Get some sleep?”

  “A little, but I’ve got so much spinning around in my head it woke me up,” said Smith, shifting uncomfortably.

  “What’s on your mind, Shane?” Jarvis asked, holding the man’s eyes in a way he knew would be intimidating, but familiar from his time in Delta Force. “I didn’t drag your ass out of that shithole in Mogadishu and all the way to this task force so you could hold back. Talk to me.”

  Smith nodded and took a deep breath. “It’s the data stream. Not the data itself, but the stream that’s bothering me.”

  Jarvis pursed his lips, mostly for effect, but secretly he was intrigued to see where his Ops O was going with this thread. Maybe, just maybe, with enough tutelage, Smith might develop the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed him as Director. “What do you mean?”

  “The data seems solid, don’t get me wrong. If it weren’t, I would say so,” said Smith, tapping his armrest. “The intersecting streams support everything we’d expect to see for a high-level meeting. We have embedded assets in most of the camps, and they not only confirm that a meeting has been called, but they are now confirming movement of the principals. The movement in force and size is consistent with what I’d expect for an incursion into Yemen. Also, the movements are not coordinated. The different groups are moving in accordance with their unique SOP fingerprints. For example, Mohamed Al-Badari is traveling through Iraq, and his border team is in place as expected in Jordan, near Al Qaim, while Raheem Mufar is following his typical protocol of switching identity in Kosovo, playing that tired Eastern Bloc businessman we all know by now. The point is, all those different cells have very different signatures of communication and movement, and we are seeing those fingerprints. It makes it impossible to conclude this is a ruse promulgated by a single source.”

  “I thought you said something was bothering you, but instead of playing devil’s advocate, you just outlined all the reasons this mission should be a go. What’s your—” He stopped as the blonde flight attendant returned with his tumbler in one hand and a carafe and extra cup in the other. “Thank you,” Jarvis said as she handed him his thermos.

  “You’re welcome, sir.” To Smith she asked, “Would you like coffee, sir?”

  Smith flashed her his best cool-guy smile and said, “You came prepared.”

  “Always,” she said, unfazed by his char
m.

  “Coffee would be great, thanks. I take it black.”

  She nodded and deftly poured a stream of steaming Columbian roast into a Styrofoam cup, which she then handed to Smith.

  The chemical formula of polystyrene (C8H8)n, popped into Jarvis’s head, accompanied by a mental image of an expanded hydrocarbon chain of hexagonal phenyl groups. He watched Smith take a sip from the Styrofoam cup and resisted the urge to wrinkle his nose at the endocrine-disrupting styrene oligomers being released by the hot thermoplastic and subsequently ingested by his prodigy. These were not the type of things that Tier One operators worried about, so the topic was not something the “retired operator” Kelso Jarvis would interrupt the conversation to mention.

  “Anyway,” said Jarvis, slipping deeper into his SEAL-self to make it easier for Smith to speak freely, “you’re doing a pretty shitty job of raising red flags for me, Shane.”

  Smith chuckled and shook his head. “I know, I know.”

  “It’s the data stream, you said, that bothers you?” Jarvis prompted.

  “Yeah, but not even the individual streams,” Smith said, rubbing his temples. “It’s more the way they intersect. They come together so damn well.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Not necessarily bad,” he said, shrugging. “Just worth discussing.”

  Jarvis had considered a similar hypothesis himself and dismissed it. He was impressed that Smith had thought of it. He was also impressed at how quickly the former door-kicking Delta operator had taken to intelligence analysis. Unfortunately, Smith was still uncertain of his capabilities, and he was hesitant to challenge any of Jarvis’s ideas. Now was a good time to do something about that.

  “Okay, then let’s stop pussyfooting around and discuss it. You’re thinking it, so why don’t you just fucking say it. You think the meet is a ruse. You think we’re being set up because all the data streams show principals moving like they’re supposed to. Am I right?”