Chasing the Lion, page 12
Once the pigs cleared away, we veered away from the power line easement and crossed the creek, stepping on large stones across the ten-meter-wide run. After another fifty meters, we were staring over a cliff at our target. It was fifty meters below our position, the only real access being from the front. Van Dreeves retrieved a rope from his rucksack and looped it around a thick tree trunk twice, cinching two half hitches tightly against the base. He fed the rope over the lip of the overhang while Hobart and I secured our rappelling seats.
We took a minute to outline our plan, study the compound, and send a quick communication to McCool, who had recovered to our airfield thirty miles north. She was standing by with blades turning. Once again, our time on the objective was going to be restricted. We had not alerted Naicho, the Japanese equivalent of the CIA, and there was good reason for this. During the Iran nuclear deal negotiations, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had wisely paraded Parizad, the Lion of Tabas, through all the meetings. He had become central to the negotiations and accordingly was well received in the West as a champion boxer, soldier, and diplomat. The future of Iran. Accordingly, he had many friends throughout the intelligence communities around the world, including Japan, one of the largest would-be benefactors of the economic expansion in Iran. Given the level of graft and corruption involved, there was no shortage of intelligence operatives ready to sell information to the Iranians and who might give up an American or two.
We studied the compound’s entry points, which were guarded with cameras, lasers, and sensors. The twenty-foot-high fence was wired with electronic motion sensors, given away by the white plastic snaking through the ivy-covered chain links.
“Would have been better to just fast rope into the compound à la the bin Laden raid,” Van Dreeves said, joining Hobart and me.
I ignored his comment and said, “Randy, we discussed neutralizing the sensors. Can we jam them?”
“I see a junction box and wires coming into it, so it’s hardwired, not wireless. This was the intel we didn’t have. There were two options. Brute force through a soft point or call Cools for backup and fast rope into the courtyard, as Van Dreeves had just suggested.”
While fast roping was a preferable solution, I didn’t think we had the time to redo everything, and the weather was shit. If an attack on the United States was imminent and Parizad was in the compound, which was unclear, then we had to act immediately.
“The fence is only ten meters from the cliff, if that. Can we reposition the rope on that branch and swing over the fence by pushing off the rock wall?”
“We can try anything, boss,” Van Dreeves said.
“That should work. Let’s try it,” I said.
Van Dreeves untied the rope, shimmied up the tree, and secured it on a thick branch hanging over the expanse between the fence and the cliff. Since it was my idea, I threaded the rope through my snap hook and rappelled down the face so that I was about ten feet above the top of the wall, which I could now see had thin spikes at the top. The rope wasn’t positioned all the way beyond the top of the fence, so it wouldn’t naturally swing me to the other side. A suitable outcome would result from a combination of athleticism and timing, neither of which were what they once had been when I was a hard-charging captain.
I held on to the rope above my head while I opened my snap link and removed the rope from its loop. My right foot found a tiny crevice to support my weight as I balanced between the rope and the ledge. I needed to swing with enough momentum to clear the deadly finials atop the fence while also not allowing the rope to land with any force against the fence, triggering the sensors.
I gripped the rope and pushed away with my legs like a swimmer making a turn in the pool. When my momentum reached the nadir of the rope’s arc, I released and flew across the fence into the backyard, executing a parachute fall by keeping my feet and knees together and rolling like a gymnast, popping up and lifting my rifle against any guards who might be pouring into the area.
None appeared.
“I’m in,” I whispered. “Watch out for the spikes on top of the fence.”
“Roger. Hobart coming.”
Soon, Hobart landed like a ninja next to me, rolled, and popped up to one knee, scanning.
“Coming in,” Van Dreeves said.
Above us, the sound of cloth ripping broke the silence. Van Dreeves let out an oomph as he landed and rolled. He came to one knee next to Hobart, then rolled on his back and swatted at his leg, as if killing a stinging bee.
Through the IVAS, it was clear that his leg was cut and bleeding. Hobart opened Van Dreeves’s rucksack and retrieved the medical kit he carried for the team. He cut Van Dreeves’s pant leg with a pair of surgical scissors. Opening an alcohol wipe, Hobart cleansed the wound then wrapped it tightly using gauze and tape.
“You’ll live, Ranger,” Hobart said.
The look on Van Dreeves’s face concerned me. The cut seemed minor, something I had seen him shrug off a hundred times. He’d been shot and stabbed and appeared less concerned than he did now.
“Good?” I asked.
“I’m good,” he said.
He reached into his rucksack, removed the cell phone jammer, adjusted the frequencies he wanted to block, and switched on the handheld device. We moved to an outbuilding that looked like a small pagoda. Perhaps the CIA interrogators and torture chamber operators had come out here to pray after experimenting on humans.
“Back patio entrance looks best,” Van Dreeves said. He winced as he spoke.
We moved in a tightly packed triangle. I still relished the adrenaline rush of conducting operations. The breeze in my face, the uncertain outcome, the unpredictability of it all. The heavy weight of my responsibility to my team outweighed any childish exuberance that attempted to creep into my thoughts. At the moment, I had a nagging concern about Van Dreeves’s minor leg cut. Infections could happen, but he seemed to be powering on, as usual. A thought scratched at the back of my mind, remembering what our CIA had once done at these facilities: made the deadliest poisons in the world and tested them on unwitting societal ne’er-do-wells.
Approaching the back patio, we veered toward the back wall of the compound and raced up a set of steps that led to the top floor. Van Dreeves pushed open a sliding glass door that was unlocked. So far, so good.
We entered a small bedroom, which was vacant. The room smelled musty and unused, which made me wonder why the door had been unlocked. I heard a distant whirring noise. When things were too easy, there was a good chance you were in trouble. It was a truism that I had seen proven too many times on missions. There was always a balance between pursuing good fortune by not letting self-doubt get in the way of success and blindly stepping into a well-laid trap by believing you were a genius planner and executor.
It wasn’t that everything had been easy. The bad weather. The improvised entry. The spiked fence. Van Dreeves’s cut. But overall, it shouldn’t have been this easy to gain entry to a former CIA compound owned by the Iranian Quds Force, who were conducting clandestine human experimentation labs.
Were we standing in a snare about to be closed?
“The basement,” I said.
Van Dreeves led, I followed, and Hobart watched our backs as the three of us moved in unison into a dark hallway. The house seemed empty, with no signs of recent life, though there were also no cobwebs or indicators of prolonged disuse.
The landing overlooked a gathering area fronted by a large fireplace, Western influences on the inside of a decidedly Eastern exterior. We swiftly and silently moved down the stairs and through the large room, finding the door to the basement, which was open.
A light shuffling noise came from a room adjacent to our position in the hallway. It must have been the kitchen, based upon the diagram we had reviewed. Hobart’s pistol coughed twice, followed by a thud on the floor. Another sound preceded a booming gunshot as we filed down the stairs.
“I’m hit,” Hobart said.
With Hobart, that could mean he was missing a limb or had a flesh wound. As I was turning to check on him, Van Dreeves’s pistol fired twice, and bullets pocked the wall next to my head. Two dark forms were fleeing through the only exit we knew of in the basement.
“Status?” I asked Hobart, keeping my pistol gripped in both hands, held low until I had a decent target.
“Okay,” he said. There was something in his clenched-teeth response that told me his wound was on the serious side of his considerable pain spectrum. As we moved, the faint whirring sound oscillated, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. It was the same sound we had heard in Heidelberg and the Iranian cave.
Van Dreeves pursued to the left as I spun to the right and shot a man lifting a weapon toward me. He dropped, and I pushed into the room opposite Van Dreeves. Stepping over the dead man, I cleared to the far wall, found a door, and said, “Door.”
Hobart was struggling behind me, but he was there.
“Roger,” he said.
“Opening,” I said. I pulled the heavy wooden door, which opened into a long hallway with doors evenly spaced on either side like a prison. Like Heidelberg.
A man at the far end of the hallway was holding something in front of him, like a crossbow. Before I could fire, I felt a pinprick against my thigh. My pistol bucked in my hands as the target dove behind a wall at the end of the corridor. I turned toward Hobart, who was limping, and pulled him with me to the protection of the near wall perpendicular with the hallway.
Hobart’s leg was bleeding. The wound appeared to be on the outer part of his right leg, away from the critical femoral artery. Still, it looked like a serious wound from a large-caliber bullet.
There was a dart protruding from my pant leg. I reached down and tugged at the feathers, but it felt like the tip was barbed as it ripped my muscle. Nonetheless, I grimaced as I removed the device and stuffed it in my pocket. The pain was searing, almost blinding. I clenched my teeth and stifled a scream. Taking a quick peek around the corner, I saw no one, but heard moans coming from the cells. Low groans and some mumbling.
“Status?” I said.
“Coming your way,” Van Dreeves whispered.
Momentarily, he was kneeling beside me and getting to work on patching Hobart’s wound.
“You’re bleeding, sir,” Van Dreeves said.
“I know. Crossbow got me,” I said.
“Crossbow? What the fuck?”
He took a minute to clean and wrap Hobart’s leg. Our time on target inside the compound was at seven minutes. We had eight minutes to conduct sensitive site exploitation and retrieve any evidence. Naturally, I was motivated to see what other indicators of Parizad’s interrogation of Melissa might be on hand, but primarily, our focus was stopping Iran’s much-rumored attack on our homeland.
The sounds in the cells became more pronounced as my hearing seemed to intensify. Fingernails were scratching at the walls. Chains were scraping against the concrete floor. Fans were whirring loudly, their metal blades brushing the manifold.
“Ready?” Van Dreeves asked.
I nodded, but my eyes followed a light in the ceiling moving along the hallway. I stood and began to walk slowly until Van Dreeves pulled me back as machine-gun fire echoed in the small space, sounding like a hammer on a metal trash can lid.
“Sir?”
My eyes continued to fix on the small bead of white light like a laser pointer, moving along the ceiling, beckoning. For a moment, I was oblivious to the danger posed by the bullets ricocheting along the walls.
“Let’s move,” Hobart said.
“Boss has lost more blood than we’d thought,” Van Dreeves said.
“No,” I managed. “We have to open the cells.”
“That’s the last thing we need. A bunch of zombies coming after us. There’s a computer room on the other side. That’s our target.”
“Requested ETA,” McCool said. She was listening over our secure high-frequency radio communications platform, Alphmega. Her voice was tight, packed with concern.
It was my job to call McCool for pickup, but I couldn’t manage to formulate the words. My mind was drifting from its normally tight focus on executing the mission. Insects were scratching inside the walls. Hobart ratcheted his rifle, chambering a round. Van Dreeves muttered loudly, “Sir!”
Time spun away from me. My mind swirled as if I were moving through molasses. I felt Van Dreeves lift me onto his shoulders, and we began moving slowly toward the stairwell, but my eyes followed behind him. Hobart fired his silenced long gun, which sounded like a small firecracker with every shot. I was watching the floor, and the white beam of light kept appearing and pulling my eyes toward the ceiling. Van Dreeves’s rucksack bored into my abdomen. Metal scraped against fabric. Loud swooshes rattled my eardrums until I couldn’t hear anything at all. The floor began to spin. Hands waved in front of my face. I landed on the floor. Bright lights washed over me. Someone was dragging me. Fragments of time came and went like a strobe light. One second I was there, another I wasn’t.
Hot prop wash blew over me. My nostrils filled with the smell of aviation gas. I had no control over my limbs. I felt another pinprick, this time into my shoulder.
Clusterfuck was the last word I heard before passing out.
13
I AWOKE ON A stretcher in the back of the same C-17 aircraft that had carried us to Japan, though I had no idea where we were other than somewhere in the air. The turbulence rocked the airplane. A fire extinguisher sprung loose from its hold and landed with a loud clang on the metal floor.
When I opened my eyes, McCool was standing over me, her hand on my arm, fear in her eyes, her voice rushed and low.
“Sir, can you hear me?” she asked.
I managed to nod.
“Hobart? Van Dreeves?” I muttered.
She looked away, a tear in her eye.
“Tell me,” I growled.
“Hobart is going to be okay. Randy’s hit bad. Jackson, too.”
“How bad?”
“We had to leave them in Japan. Randy wasn’t okay to fly. Two shots to the abdomen. Lots of bleeding. Jackson…” Her voice trailed off.
“Van Dreeves … carried me,” I muttered.
“Yes. Randy got you to the helicopter. We took heavy fire. We unloaded two cans of ammo into that place.”
“The others?” I asked.
McCool looked away and started talking, but I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. Her voice was much louder than normal. I listened, but all I could think about was that Van Dreeves had saved my life. He openly risked his own life to get me to the helicopter because I’d became a liability during the mission.
The jet engines whined with piercing authority. Medicinal smells of alcohol and antiseptic permeated the air. The normally dim lights in the C-17 cut through my eyelids like razors. Every inconsistency in the medical litter poked into my body like needles. When I swallowed, I tasted copper.
“Sir?” McCool said. She had been talking to me. “Did you hear me?”
“Come again?” I croaked.
“On exfil, Admiral Rountree sent us a report that five Iranian Akula-class submarines left the Persian Gulf a week ago,” she said.
I struggled with the information. The Akula submarines were Russian stealth technology first sold to India and then, we suspected, to Iran after Iranian coffers were flush with the $50 billion from the Iran nuclear agreement. Not being a politician, I had no opinion on that deal or its reversal. There were consequences either way for military personnel and our nation. My job was to assess the threat and prepare to handle it.
“Akula?” I said.
“Right. More than we thought they had.”
I tried to sit up but couldn’t elevate. McCool put her hand on my chest and nudged me back down. I was able to catch a glimpse of two men in suits standing at the foot of the litter.
I tried to lift my hand to motion McCool closer to me but couldn’t move my arm. It wasn’t that it was heavy; rather, it felt like someone had tied my arms down. My injuries must have been worse than I’d thought given that I was secured so tightly to this stretcher. I motioned with my chin for McCool to lean over me, which she did. The smell of sweat and hydraulic fluid blasted my nostrils as she placed her face near mine.
“Who are they?” I whispered, my voice hoarse and dry, the coppery taste still present.
She looked toward the two men and then leaned into my ear.
“CIA,” she said.
She slipped something into the side of my combat boot as the two men abruptly nudged her away and stood on either side of my litter like guards. I was too exhausted to tell them that McCool was one of mine, I was on a friendly airplane, and I didn’t need security. Whatever poison the dart might have carried, I felt better today than I did during the first moments after being struck. My main concern, as usual, was the status of Hobart, Van Dreeves, and Jackson, but apparently, my condition was worse than I’d anticipated, because they weren’t letting me up.
To emphasize the point, a third unfamiliar man pulled a surgical mask over his mouth and nose, leaned over me, and shined a light in my eyes. He had the youthful appearance of an actor with his disheveled brown hair and three-day beard. He continued inspecting me with latex-glove-covered hands, squeezing my leg around where I’d extracted the dart. His face zoomed in and out as he pushed on the wound. The pain rocketed through my body, causing me to flinch and release a slow hiss through my teeth. The rushing air through my mouth caused the roots of my teeth to ache. Every nerve in my body was exposed.
Not responding to my wince, the doctor shoved a needle in my arm and pumped something into my body. Then he turned to the two CIA men, nodded, and walked away. The CIA men looked at me and then at their watches. McCool was nowhere to be seen.
