“He assured the president that your government would do everything in its power to support his government.”
“So he lied,” the American said.
“Of course he lied. A week later, your drones were hitting our communication installations and knocking out the power grids. We were unable to use our aircraft and then your Anvil Team appeared.”
“Our mission was to cut the head off the snake and get out without anyone ever knowing we were there. We were to make it look like the rebels killed him. Those were our orders. I knew they didn’t come from Barnes, because the whole operation was way too elegant. The colonel is a hammer, and whoever was in charge knew exactly how much force to use and exactly who to talk to.”
“The war was never just about Libya, or Gaddhafi,” Ahmed said patiently. “The man who met with the president wanted to disrupt the whole region.”
“Do you remember his name?”
The café hummed with the frivolous conversations of the other patrons, recounting the day-to-day minutiae of their lives. The world’s ability to ignore what was right in their faces was amazing. The Mideast was in turmoil but right now, in that café, no one cared. There was a storm building on the horizon and he felt like he was the only one who could see it.
Ahmed appraised Mason as he patiently finished his cigarette, and finally said, “I will get you into Libya; as for the man you seek, you need to look much higher if you wish to find him.”
CHAPTER 13
The Gulfstream G650 thundered toward Afghanistan at 620 miles per hour, and as the engines hummed through the night air, Renee Hart turned her attention back to the computer in front of her.
She wanted to find Decklin so badly that she was willing to overlook the fact that Deputy Director Thompson was using her to save his own ass. It was his fault that there was some psycho running around with a suitcase full of nerve gas, but what troubled her most was how General Swift fit into the scheme of things.
Thompson had promised to get her the access she needed and advised that Swift would be told to leave her alone, but something wasn’t right. She wasn’t used to keeping things from her boss, and the fact that she was being asked to do so raised certain red flags. Somehow, her boss was right in the middle of Barnes and the Anvil Program, and Renee was still trying to figure out how far the program reached.
The thumb drive repeated some of what the deputy director had already told her but went into more detail on Anvil’s original mandate of working off the grid to find, fix, and finish terror cells wherever they presented themselves. The major problem was the fact that everything about the program was totally illegal, but no one seemed to care as long as they were getting results.
In the beginning, the newly minted unit was designed by the CIA, but someone jockeyed hard to pull it under the DoD. Once Barnes took command, he began cutting all communications with his bosses at the Pentagon and opened a secret channel with the CIA to get ahold of their drone program.
The CIA didn’t have the red tape that the DoD had, and with the right clearance from the upper echelon, Barnes could prosecute any target he wanted.
The colonel fascinated Renee, and she pored through the pages looking for any information she could get her hands on.
He came from a blue-collar family in Montana. Growing up poor, he had spent more time working on his father’s ranch than studying, and his grades were a reflection of his priorities. However, his SAT scores were off the chart.
He attended Montana State on a full scholarship and had graduated from the College of Engineering with honors, but then, inexplicably, he enlisted in the army.
Somewhere along the way, someone realized that Corporal Barnes had a great deal of potential and submitted him for Officer Candidate School, and after twenty-four months in the army, he was minted an infantry lieutenant. He decided to join the Green Berets as soon as he made captain, and was given command of an A-Team just as the war in Afghanistan was kicking off. In another stroke of luck, he was one of the first Americans on the ground.
Captain Barnes was attached to the CIA’s Jawbreaker team, and his exploits on the ground were legendary.
He had managed to stay in theater, in one capacity or another, from 2001 until the present. He never went home and never took a break. He was working almost entirely for the CIA, running missions in Iraq, when he came to General Swift’s attention.
Barnes, now a major, was seen as the bearer of the sacred torch of democracy, and General Swift expected him to illuminate the dark path to victory. No one had time to notice the subtle but furious narcissism that was growing within him.
The man was magnetic and dangerous. General Petraeus called him a “warmonger,” and Barnes wore the title like a badge of honor. He had nothing but disdain for the generals who sought to garner Iraqi affection. For him, the way to victory was through total war, and while his methods were barbaric, they were effective.
He was running Task Force 120 when he was given command of the Anvil Program.
Iraq was turning into a bloodbath and the men running the war kept throwing more bodies into the grinder. The victory they had held up a few months before had turned to ash in their hands, and the old president had needed a “win” to sell to the American public.
With no yardstick to measure success, they used a body count to prop up the faltering conflict. Barnes’s team provided more bodies than most of the coalition forces combined. JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) rolled the classified figures into their weekly briefs in an attempt to right the foundering ship. It was all about results, and the old president had laid it out: “Leave Barnes alone.” The golden child was safe to sink deeper into the darkness, and no one was watching over those men he pulled down with him.
Then, according to the document, something odd happened. Sometime during his last days of office, the previous president suddenly ordered the DoD to pull the plug on the program. The sudden shift in policy intrigued Renee, especially when she read that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had lost his job over a confrontation stemming from the decision.
Had the president realized that they were losing control of the Anvil Program, or was it something else? Either way, the decision to cut the program had a profound effect on the balance of power in Washington, and Renee wondered if this decision had pushed Barnes over the edge.
Renee scrolled through the documents, pausing to study the last picture taken of Colonel Barnes. He was standing next to a building, its sandy exterior scorched with the black scars of expended munitions. She recognized the building as the house where they had shot it out with Saddam Hussein’s two sons.
The picture captured Colonel Barnes in all his glory. He stood with a wry smile in front of the smoldering building, his body armor stained black with blood and dirt, his rough beard and close-cropped blond hair framing a cold and brooding gaze. Renee enlarged the picture and stared at his eyes. There was a powerful savagery in them, like a grass fire fed by a harsh wind.
She breezed through the remaining documents, looking for anything that she could use. Most of the files were incomplete, and it seemed that whoever had saved the documents had done so while they were being deleted. It wasn’t much to go on, and she still couldn’t get a firm grasp on the overall picture.
She was about to close the computer when she noticed an offhand memo from Barnes to Swift entitled “Objective Massey” that grabbed her attention. Renee remembered that the Third Ranger Battalion had conducted the raid along the Syria-Iraq border and stumbled across huge amounts of intel linking Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya to terror cells in Iraq. The documents reinforced the growing idea that Iraq and Afghanistan were just the first steps in a much wider war.