The two ambulatory men helped Clark back down the hill to the cabin, and by then Jack had called Mary Pat Foley directly to let her know that a wounded but alive Abu Musa al-Matari could be picked up at a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the only charge to the U.S. government for this item would be transport for five to the D.C. area.
A pair of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the FBI’s Tactical Aviation Unit landed behind the cabin forty minutes later. On board were medics prepared to keep al-Matari alive, and to make John Clark a little more comfortable, as the injury to his ribs was making it more painful to breathe by the minute.
The first aircraft took off as soon as it was loaded, but the second wasn’t going anywhere for a while. It had deposited a dozen members of the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team. They spent the entire evening and part of the next morning combing the area with their night-observation devices for other terrorists, but all they found were seven dead bodies and three vehicles, two of which had several rolls of carpet over some cases in the back. They found weapons and ammunition, but when the HRT men pulled out the carpets from the vehicles, they were astonished to find four Igla-7 surface-to-air missiles, each one easily capable of taking down a jumbo jet.
72
Captain Carrie Ann Davenport had been back in theater for a full month, but she still had the garden party in College Park on her mind. The dead and the wounded. The man she’d killed using the pistol that her father had given her, insisting that she carry it on her body at all times, because the President of the United States, Jack Ryan, had said that it was the right of every member of the armed services.
Her dad had been right about her carrying the gun, and she’d never hear the end of it, but she wouldn’t complain about his reminding her that he told her so.
Something else had happened the day of the attack. The good-looking guy working on his master’s in history had asked her out for coffee that night. They’d both been rattled by the events and they both felt like they needed someone who’d been there to talk to.
Since that night they’d e-mailed each other almost daily, and they’d even Skyped once, which was an ordeal for her because she was at a forward operating base in southern Turkey, on the Syrian border, and it was hard to look her best.
Matt didn’t seem to care, he joked that for some reason her loose-fitting desert aircrew battle dress uniform turned him on, and she’d laughed harder at that than she’d laughed at anything in weeks.
As she sat for the briefing for tonight’s mission she had Matt on her mind, but only at first. When the major began explaining what was going on this evening, she instantly focused fully on the job at hand.
New intelligence had come out that had pinpointed the physical location of the Islamic State’s public relations division, the Global Islamic Media Front. The GIMF was responsible for nearly one hundred percent of all the high-end propaganda coming out of the Islamic State into the U.S. these days, it had its own television stations, radio stations, websites, and social media arm. This meant it was responsible for the remote-radicalized fighters springing up around the world, disaffected young men and women who pledged allegiance to the head of ISIS, then went out and committed atrocities. Since the attack in College Park over a month earlier, al-Matari’s attacks in America had diminished greatly, although sporadic attacks continued in America and in Europe. Many suggested the continuing terrorism was all done by copycats, but the United States had said nothing about the capture or killing of the terrorist leader.
Still, shutting down the GIMF, destroying its equipment and infrastructure, would be key in reducing the draw of the organization worldwide. And killing its members would erase the technical know-how that had led to the success of the global outreach of the Islamic State.
Involved in the strike into the heart of ISIS-occupied Syria tonight would be four U.S. Navy F/A-18c Hornets flown off the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean, six Army A-10 Thunderbolts flown out of southern Turkey, as well as an unspecified number of special mission units on the ground near the town of Ratla, just south of Raqqa. These ground forces would be watching Highway 4, the main artery out of Raqqa, because they had intelligence on the make and model of the Islamic State GIMF leadership’s vehicles, a remarkably specific piece of intel.
Carrie Ann couldn’t help wondering if all this plum intelligence indicated America had the bastard Abu Musa al-Matari in hand, and he was singing like a bird.
Just the possibility of this made her happy.
The special operations units would be extracted by helos from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, but two Pyro AH-64E gunships from Carrie Ann’s regiment would support tonight’s attack by flying support for any medevac flights in case one of the aircraft was shot down.
Her job would be dangerous, of course, but she thought it unlikely she and Troy would see any more action than flying a wheel formation with another Apache over the Syrian desert and watching the fireworks from thirty miles away.
It was a shame, Carrie Ann thought.
She was in the mood to kill some of those sons of bitches tonight.
At twenty-two hundred hours, Captain Davenport made one last check to her harness, tightening herself down in the front cockpit, and she scanned the three screens and 240 separate control buttons there. She and Chief Warrant Officer Troy Oakley behind her had spent the last forty-five minutes preflighting, and now they had their aircraft ready and their clearance for takeoff.
Oakley spoke into his intercom. “You ready, Captain?” Oakley was twenty-one years older than Davenport, but she was still his superior officer.
“Let’s do it, Oak.”
They taxied out to the short runway, and Oakley eased up the collective with his left hand. As the Apache rolled forward he pressed down gently on his left pedal, countering the torque of the blades above him by increasing the power to the tail rotor.
As he pulled the collective up, adding power to the main rotor blades, his left foot pushed down farther on the pedal. When he touched the cyclic between his knees forward, the blades changed angle above, and the big attack helicopter began rolling forward faster down the runway. Now he used both pedals to keep the nose of the aircraft steady as it picked up speed.
In the cockpit’s front seat, Carrie Ann watched with her hands on her knees. She had all the controls to fly Pyro 1–1 that her backseater did; in fact she did a fair amount of flying. Similarly, Oakley had the power to launch missiles and rockets, and fire the cannon from the backseat.
She almost never let Oakley fire, however, and if they did luck into any targets on this mission, tonight would be no different. Carrie Ann loved Oakley like an older brother, she’d do anything in the world for the man, but she fired the weapons in Pyro 1–1.
With the collective at full power and the speed at forty-five knots, Oakley pulled back slightly on the cyclic, and the eight-ton Apache lifted into the air. Just behind it, Pyro 1–2 lifted off seconds later.
They stayed low, left the FOB in an eastwardly heading to fool any ISIS spies nearby with a cell phone and a mission to report helicopter flights into Syria, and then, ten minutes later, they began climbing as they turned to the south for their standoff station thirty miles northeast of Raqqa.
Ninety minutes after takeoff, Davenport and Oakley flew over empty desert in complete darkness, with Pyro 1–2 and Freight Train 1–1, a Chinook CH-47D, both doing the same things at different altitudes. Carrie Ann caught glimpses of the other aircraft through her FLIR monitor from time to time, but mostly her eyes were on the southwest, where a fireworks show of attacking and defending was taking place.