Rogue Strike Read online

  The men on the street entered their vehicles. Roach hammered the SATCOM with his fist.

  “Mustang, this is Cobra, how copy?” he said as the terrorists drove away.

  He switched off the designator and sat back against the wall. He kicked the SATCOM across the floor and looked at Jake.

  “We’ll call for extraction once it’s dark.”

  TWO

  THE CAMERAMAN USUALLY covered soccer matches for the Al-Arabiya television network, but the equipment today was the same, the best that money could buy. He could capture a million people in the frame or zoom in on a single face. Ultra-high-definition sensors rendered flawless images of whatever he’d selected. The control booth would occasionally tell him to take an artistic shot, and on a clear night he would zoom in on the moon and fill viewers’ screens with images of craters, ridges, and shadows that most people never knew existed. It was an awesome piece of technology.

  From high atop one of the hotels, he panned right to catch the buses, cars, and pedestrians that were clogging the highway from Mina. They were latecomers making their way back to the Masjid al-Haram, the enormous outdoor mosque in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It was the last day of the Hajj, and they were obligated to enter the mosque and complete the final tawaf, seven laps around the black building in the center known as the Kaaba. Only then would Allah erase their sins and their pilgrimage be complete.

  Covering the Hajj was easy work for the cameraman, except for the heat, which could run to 130 or 140 degrees Fahrenheit on the roof. He downed another bottle of water and zoomed in on the profile of a single pilgrim, prostrate before the Kaaba with his hands pressed up against its stone side. Tears of joy streamed down the man’s face as the song of the muezzin appeared to be directed only to him. It was one of the cameraman’s favorite shots. He focused on the individual for several seconds.

  The tearful man raised his head and the cameraman began to zoom out. He widened the frame until it included the dozen or so people closest to the pilgrim, symbolizing the man’s family. He kept widening the picture until perhaps a hundred people were in the shot, representing the pilgrim’s community. The cameraman kept zooming out until viewers could see the tawaf, rotating counterclockwise like a great galaxy of Islam. The final shot encompassed the entire Grand Mosque with the Kaaba drawing the viewer’s eyes to the center. It was breathtaking. The booth usually held it for twenty or thirty seconds before cutting to a different angle. The cameraman lifted his eyes from his viewfinder and looked out over the scene, savoring the moment.

  There was an explosion in the crowd, followed by a cloud of smoke rising into the air near the Kaaba. The crying man was gone, vaporized along with at least a thousand people around him.

  Oh, no, thought the cameraman. Some madman snuck in a bomb. Is nowhere sacred?

  There was a second explosion and more smoke on the other side of the Kaaba. And then he heard the sound, the whoosh of two objects flying rapidly through the air, followed by the noise of the explosions.

  Delayed by the speed of sound, he realized. Not a madman on the ground, but a madman in the air . . .

  The cameraman instinctively spun the camera toward the action. Its powerful lens picked up faint trails of smoke. He followed them into the sky and zoomed in until he spotted a dot in the distance. He zoomed as fast and as far as he could until the dot took form, the form of an aircraft turning away. The image was grainy on the hot and hazy summer day, but the cameraman had no doubts about what it was. The distinctive, bat-winged aircraft was possessed by only one nation on earth, and millions of people had just seen it attack the holiest site in all of Islam.

  THREE

  WHAT THE HELL does ‘negative contact’ mean? Did the UCAV crash?” Jake said.

  Roach just scowled. He’d been wondering the same thing and the CIA mission control element wasn’t responding.

  “I’m going to check the east side of the building,” Jake said, more out of frustration than anything else. He took his rifle.

  It was early afternoon, the Yemeni equivalent of a siesta, when much of the male population was out on the street. Despite the heat, most were dressed in baggy trousers, blousy shirts, and camel hair coats, often with loose turbans wrapped around their heads. Many carried a curved dagger, known locally as a jambiya, tucked in their waists. Once a fearsome weapon, the jambiya had become largely ceremonial over the last few decades. For serious work, nearly everyone had a Kalashnikov in his hand, on his shoulder, or leaning against a nearby wall.

  Most of the idlers were chewing a locally grown stimulant called qat and visiting with their neighbors, but there were others, groups of men with long beards and unblinking eyes. They were al-Qaeda soldiers, and the locals usually gave them a wide berth.

  But something was different today. The qat chewers were agitated. Jake raised his binoculars. A quarter mile away, a group of men were walking down the street, shouting and waving weapons around. Someone fired into the air.

  “Curt, check this out,” Jake said across the hallway. He didn’t bother whispering.

  Roach had heard the gunfire.

  “Sounds like a Middle Eastern wedding,” he said as he walked over. The two men stood back from the window to stay in the shadows.

  “They don’t look very happy.”

  “Sounds like my wedding,” Roach said. “Let’s stick with the plan and exfil after dark.”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t like it. When was the last time you saw the locals walking arm in arm with al-Qaeda?”

  Roach watched the action on the street for a few minutes before he walked to the other room and tried the SATCOM again.

  “Mustang, this is Cobra. Come in, Mustang . . . Mustang, Mustang, this is Cobra. How copy?”

  Jake stared through the binoculars. The mob was maybe seventy-five men now. There was more gunfire.

  Roach came back scowling. “Comms are still down. This is starting to feel like a Ted Graves Special.”

  “What’s a Ted Graves Special?” Jake asked, although he already had a pretty good idea.

  “Just an expression . . .”

  “Well, something is bringing the two groups together,” Jake said. “Maybe a common enemy?”

  “If it’s the Saudis, they’ll soften up the target with airstrikes before any ground offensive. We don’t want to be in the tallest building around if we’re looking at Saudi airstrikes. They aren’t known for precision bombing.”

  Jake packed up the rest of their gear while Roach used a cell phone to text their driver. The gunfire on the street grew closer. Individual voices could be heard among the din. Chants of “Death to America” and “Allah is the greatest” echoed through the streets.

  Gunshots rang out just below the windows and the two Americans prepared to defend the stairs. Roach thumbed his rifle’s selector switch. Jake closed his eyes and listened. The shouting and the gunfire shifted around the building and began to move away. A car drove past on the boulevard.

  “Our ride should have been here by now,” Jake said. He wiped the sweat from his brow.

  The plan was for their driver to stay inside the city limits to avoid any issues at the checkpoints.

  Curt’s watch started vibrating again.

  “Motion detector . . .” he said.

  “Maybe it’s our driver.”

  Roach grimaced. “Maybe.”

  He slung his satchel over his back and put the rifle to his shoulder. He descended the stairs silently, his head and rifle moving as one, methodically clearing the open space as a series of arcs. Jake followed behind, covering the opposing doorways and hallways, until the two men reached the second floor. A diesel truck passed by in low gear. Roach shook his wrist in the air to signal that the watch was still vibrating. Whoever had entered the lobby was still there.

  Roach descended the next step, his rifle moving left. The arc was clea
r. He continued down several more stairs, scrutinizing everything, with Jake right behind him. An old Bongo truck backfired at the intersection, but their trained minds filtered it out.

  They continued down the steps with the muzzles of their rifles probing the air for trouble. Sunlight streamed in through the doorway to the street, flooding the ground floor with light. They were five stairs from the bottom when Jake saw a shadow move against the back wall.

  He reached down and squeezed Roach’s shoulder. The two Americans began to back up the stairs, but the man in the lobby was walking toward the doorway. He had a thick beard and a well-used Kalashnikov at his side.

  He spotted the two men on the stairs.

  Roach instantly realized what had transpired. The man was part of the street mob. He was using the abandoned building as a toilet, a common practice in the war-ravaged city. Roach lowered his rifle and continued down the last few steps to the lobby floor.

  The man spoke to Roach and he responded, but the Yemeni dialect of Arabic was nearly impossible for a foreigner to master.

  The man went for his gun.

  FOUR

  IN A LUSH, mountainous region of eastern Mexico, a group of men in their twenties ran up a steep dirt trail. Each had thought himself a specimen of fitness before he’d arrived six weeks earlier, but despite the shade provided by the thick forest canopy, the summer heat and thin mountain air had humbled them all. In the first week, groans and the sound of vomiting were common as they jogged up the mountainside in long pants and hiking boots, but their times had declined steadily for the daily ten-kilometer run. Now, they leapt over fallen trees and dodged boulders underfoot. The only sounds were of steady breathing and boots pounding out a brutal pace.

  As usual, the one known as Señor Paraíso was the last man in the line, but he was far from the slowest runner. It was his leadership style. He would run alongside those who were struggling, speaking words of encouragement. In their runs and in their training, he pushed his men to accomplish what they’d never thought possible. At the finish line, only the slowest man’s time went onto the board. In case anyone missed the implication, the message was written in Spanish and English over the entrance to the dining facility.

  The success of each of us depends on the success of all of us.

  After the morning run, the men spent the first half of the day refining their Spanish and English skills. The speaking of other languages was strictly forbidden, for it could betray their true identities once their mission had begun.

  There were no buildings in the compound and classes were held in underground rooms. The men found it cooler, but more importantly, the federal police aircraft and the American satellites couldn’t find it at all. A regional drug cartel had given Señor Paraíso’s sponsor use of the camp. The three-month lease and assorted other arrangements had been provided in exchange for the one thing the drug producers valued above all else: cash.

  Afternoons were divided between mission planning, cultural instruction, and weapons training. All were important, but it was the weapons training that the men most enjoyed. Russian RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades were fired with dummy warheads until the men had become proficient with the deadly weapon. Inert 81mm mortar rounds were launched until the team developed a feel for the effects of the heat and wind on their trajectories. Underground laboratories, normally used to process drugs, became workrooms where common chemicals were made into high explosives. Finally, marksmanship training, done with the ubiquitous and reliable Kalashnikov AK-47, was done with suppressors—for despite the size and seclusion of the facility, the time for the world to note their skills was not yet upon them.

  It was at the end of a particularly long and hot day that one of the men turned his ankle and cursed in his native tongue. He was a star student, with language and weapon skills among the best in the group, yet a chill spread throughout the camp. Señor Paraíso dealt sharply with transgressors, and the man had been warned twice before.

  The man limped over to Paraíso and said in Spanish, “Señor, please forgive my temper. Know that I will always do what is best for the mission.”

  Paraíso loved his men, but there was no room for mistakes. As quick as lightning and as loud as thunder, he drew his pistol and fired a single shot into the man’s face.

  “That is what is best for the mission.”

  FIVE

  ROACH LUNGED FORWARD and smashed the muzzle of his rifle into the man’s sternum. He cried out in pain and fell backward onto the ground. When he looked up, Roach’s weapon was still pointed at his chest.

  A man who’d been out on the street heard the scream and looked inside. He saw Roach holding his friend at gunpoint and raised his own rifle, but Jake dropped him with three shots to the chest. A third man, six-foot-five and at least two hundred fifty pounds, stepped into the entryway, blocking it entirely. He held his rifle at his waist and began to rake the lobby on full auto. Jake put three rounds into his torso and two more into his head before the giant fell backward onto the street.

  The man lying on the floor lunged for Roach’s rifle but the former marine special-operations sergeant anchored him with two 5.45mm bullets in his heart.

  Roach motioned Jake toward the door. They moved along opposite walls, weapons up, looking through the doorway to clear as much of the exterior as they could from the relative safety of the interior. Roach signaled that he would go through first and clear right, and that Jake should follow and clear left.

  Roach stepped through the doorway with Jake barely a second behind. A man with an AK-47 was hidden across the street behind the hood of a burned-out car. He fired wildly, stitching a line of bullet holes over Jake’s head and up the side of the building. Roach skipped half a dozen rounds under the old car and dropped the shooter.

  The two Americans scanned the boulevard with their weapons up. The man behind the car was out of commission, but their ride was nowhere to be seen and they’d just made a hell of a lot of noise, even for Zinjibar. They folded the wire stocks on their stubby rifles, tucked them under their jackets, and hustled around the street corner.

  Roach dialed their driver. “No answer.”

  They took a circuitous route to their alternate extraction point, watching carefully for any surveillance they might have picked up. The driver wasn’t there either.

  “First Drifter-72 disappears, then the SATCOM goes down, now this,” Jake said. “It feels like this op just got rolled up.”

  Three teenage boys with guns rode by on a motor scooter, eyeing the two Americans as they passed.

  “We need to boost some wheels and get out of here,” said Roach. “Let’s try the old taxi lot.”

  Roach gripped his Glock 19 pistol in his pocket while Jake held his rifle under his jacket. The two men spoke to each other in Arabic and gestured with their free hands as they walked down the sidewalk carrying their satchels and trying their hardest to look utterly unremarkable. Both had deep tans and had dyed their hair black. They would never pass for Yemenis, but the disguises gave them some breathing room, and they needed every inch of it. Several times, they crossed the street to avoid contact with the locals.

  “There’s the lot,” Roach said.

  Most of the taxis had been abandoned because few people in Zinjibar had anywhere to go and even fewer could afford a taxi. Roach took a multitool from his belt and started one of the old vans. Jake tossed their satchels in back and jumped in the passenger seat with his rifle across his lap.

  The streets were empty as they drove through town. Jake tuned the AM radio until he picked up an Arabic-language station in Aden, forty miles away. The broadcaster spoke of an American airstrike, but that was not uncommon in Yemen. CIA and the U.S. military had made it the epicenter of U.S. drone strikes over the last five years.

  Roach turned north over the broken pavement, toward the dirt road they’d taken into the city that morning. The radio announcer mention
ed thousands of civilian casualties. As with any military action, the death of noncombatants was a tragic by-product of the drone campaign, but one that was often exaggerated or fabricated by the enemy to generate ill will toward America.

  But thousands?

  Not even the harshest critic of the drone program had suggested civilian deaths in the thousands.

  Jake and Roach glanced at each other.

  “Did he say where?” Jake asked. There was static on the airwaves and Roach’s Arabic was better than his.

  Roach shook his head slowly.

  A minute later the announcer solved the mystery.

  Thousands dead at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The distinctive shape of an American B-2 bomber was filmed turning away.

  Roach coasted to a stop in the middle of the road. The two CIA officers felt as if they’d had the wind knocked out of them.

  Jake stared at the radio. “Drifter-72?”

  The math worked. There had been enough time for the drone to fly from Zinjibar to Mecca. Two missiles had struck the mosque, one on either side of the Kaaba. To an amateur observer, Drifter-72 would have looked like a B-2, and the big bomber had the capability to launch missiles, not the kind that were used in the strike, but that didn’t matter. It was a U.S. aircraft and the court of world opinion had already rendered its verdict.

  Roach shook his head again. “I uploaded the right coordinates.”

  “This is what you meant by a ‘Ted Graves Special,’ isn’t it?” Jake asked.

  “First Drifter-72 disappears, then we lose the SATCOM, then our exfil goes dark. I’m a big believer in Murphy’s Law, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”