A man’s voice called out, “Sir… wait. Wait, sir… Sir?”
Cuthbert wheeled around, sizing up a gangly man with an unkempt beard. He gazed over the man’s shoulder down the street to a second, larger uniformed man approaching. “Sure,” the agent groused, and removed the aba from his head. He flipped the silk bolts aside, whipped out a knife from the mantle; the blade flashed as he rammed it through the left hand of the man, who lunged at him. He shrieked in pain. Cuthbert stepped on the man’s foot and drove an elbow into his throat, chopping him to the ground; he writhed as blood ran out of the impaled hand.
Cuthbert ran when the uniformed man charged, lumbering in pursuit. The agent disrobed, turned on his smartphone, and pressed a coded text alerting the two laser-paint SEALs that he was on the run heading toward them.
Down the street, the agent saw a pair of armed soldiers scamper toward him. He glanced at the smartphone and, with a digital map of Jaar, slowed down to swipe it larger. Seeing an escape route, he dashed down a side street. More shots were fired, but missed him. He glanced back to one soldier stooping down to take aim and shoot a series of volleys; the other soldier, joined by the uniformed man, pulled out a pistol and fired several rounds.
As more shots strafed the ground near him, Cuthbert ran along the walls of the buildings, making a clean shot at his large frame difficult. Shells tore up the stucco wall, sandblasting his face and forehead with chunks and debris, with grains hitting him, his left eye in a spat of dust. He covered the eye, took a step, and a foot stuck out tripped him. The agent stumbled to the ground, scraping his face. Cuthbert rolled over and looked up with one eye at a US SEAL, who pointed him to stay down. The SEAL whipped around a long-barrel MK-17 SCAR assault rifle and fired a two-shot burst at the charging soldier, knocking him to the ground. He swerved the barrel around and squeezed a muzzle flash of three shots that tore into the large uniformed man, dropping him to the street.
Cuthbert looked to the end of the street and saw a third soldier run away.
“The tango has gone for help. Let’s go. Move it,” the SEAL said, pulling the CIA agent off the ground as he wiped dust out of his eyes.
They scurried down an alley, zigzagged up another street, and ran into an abandoned building. In the alcove, they saw a drug-addled squatter quivering in the fetal position. Covering his mouth from the stench, the SEAL pulled a tarp off a motorcycle, handed Cuthbert the assault rifle, and started the engine. The CIA agent climbed on and off they sped out of the building and out the center of Jaar, heading to the border, to the surveillance nest where the other SEAL had painted the target on the terrorist building. Cuthbert clicked the Satcom three times.
Inside the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Red Cell CIA analysts watched the plasma screen. The infrared night view of Jaar, where few lights glowed, showed silhouettes of green and black buildings, rows of them, passing under the drone as it flew overhead until it spotted and locked onto the laser-painted wall of the building. One analyst pointed at the screen, while another located the target on a laptop and confirmed the GPS coordinates of the target against the laser markings, saying, “Target all green. Light ’em up.”
Inside a bunker at the Djibouti drone base, the reachback operator fired the drone’s first of two Hellfire missiles from more than 500 klicks away. The comet trail shot off in front of the drone, arcing down toward the target. The analyst saw virtual crosshairs streak to the laser-paint, when the Hellfire missile locked on the building. Just before it struck, the reachback operator fired the second Hellfire in a double tap strike, Navy SEAL style.
The first Hellfire missile burrowed into the concrete wall of the old building and erupted into a fireball. A huge ascending explosion collapsed the walls and rooftop, crashing them on top of the floors below.
The second Hellfire missile’s heat-sync zeroed in on the explosion and slammed into the teetering building. The next blast broke the structure apart, pancaking the floor slabs to the ground in a cloudburst of flames and debris.
“We got ’em,” the CIA analyst said, tapping the reachback operator in a fist-bump. “The tangos are dead.”
“Roger that. They are,” the reachback operator said, watching the ensuing inferno on an infrared live-feed.
Chapter Five
“Goddamn it, Toten, you don’t know your ass from your elbow. What were you thinking taking on the Iranian Guard Corps?” Captain Davis Whittal shouted, circling Merk like a trapped prey.
Merk sat in the middle of the captain’s conference room at the Jebel Ali US Naval Base in the United Arab Emirates. He stared at the fit young captain’s waist, then watched the veins in his neck throb with each biting word.
“Merk, you were unarmed, unfocused, and had no goddamn backup. Lt. Azar is dead. Dead… so rein yourself in, sailor.…” The captain paced back and forth. “I don’t care what black program you work for. You’re still in the United States Navy. We don’t lose good men on a hunch, or gut instinct. What were you going to do when they spotted you? Huh?” He nudged Merk’s shoulder.
Numb, Merk sighed, reflecting on the loss and stared aimlessly at the floor. Captain Whittal walked away, then turned 180 and stepped back, hovering over Merk, who began to pluck hairs from his eyebrow, one by one, in an unconscious self-mutilating trance.
“The cause of death is being determined as I rip your ass apart.” Captain Whittal leaned in Merk’s face and, dropping his voice a few decibels, said, “And yet you somehow got valuable intel last night out in the strait. Shit, what am I to do with you?”
Looking up at Whittal, Merk had nothing to say; the death of Azar cast an immense shadow over him and his reputation like an ice overhang.
“Toten, why didn’t you abort when you spotted the Iranians? Why did you ignore Morgan Azar’s pleas to pull out and bolt? ONI investigators are going to need to know the whys. And they will find out when they grill you.… Tehran is foaming at the mouth to attack us in retaliation,” the captain said.
“Retaliation? For what? The puke Quds Force didn’t know we were there?”
“You’re not listening. Read my lips and let my words sink in.… You’re no longer a SEAL, lieutenant. You haven’t been for a while. You left that branch of the navy a decade ago. You had one objective last night,” Captain Whittal railed, kicking a chair across the room with such force that it crashed into a wall. “Beyond getting your teammate killed, you broadcasted to the Ayatollah that US Navy dolphins are spying on them in their water.”
Whittal kept chiding Merk, tapping his shoulder, bumping him, getting in his glum face, shouting: “You could’ve lost the Dolphin Code to the enemy, instead of the sea.”
“But I didn’t, did I? Next time, I’ll tether the laptop to my leg,” Merk said, pissed off.
“Shit, Toten, you’re conflicted.”
“Conflicted?”
“Affirmative. Like I said, ‘your ass from your elbow,’” the captain shrieked. “What were you doing last night? Were you in Six mode?… Do you miss being a trained assassin?” He stepped away and paced in front of the dolphin whisperer. “I’m asking, because when my SEALs conducted inventory of the boghammer, they didn’t find anything. Just a spent flare gun shell.”
“Hell, I wish you could ask Lieutenant Azar about the flare. He fired it.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve permanently morphed into a no gun, pussy pacifist, or… are you just a puke lifer, like your navy mustang father?”
“Leave my old man out of this. He’s dead.”