Total Empire, page 6
Van Dreeves’s words were not intended to anger Sly, but I felt him tense up at the cold analysis delivered by one of our best warriors.
“Roger that. Don’t miss,” I said. “Josh, let us know when your team is in position to kill the enemy behind the ridge. Once you’re there, Joe and Randy will take their shots.”
Hobart and Van Dreeves repositioned behind their weapons, took a minute to get the clicks and mils right while Josh Wright and his five men backed off our hide position and circled around the ridge to get behind the snipers without being detected.
“Got to tell you, boss, I’m freaking out right now,” Sly whispered.
“Me, too, Sly. Me, too.”
The twenty-minute wait felt like hours. Sweat trickled down my back as I thought of Zoey, Brad, and Reagan playing together at Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, at summer camps on the coast in Wilmington or the Outer Banks. Zoey had babysat both of my children dozens of times, and after her mother, Sly’s wife, died, my wife, Melissa, had become a surrogate mother to Zoey.
“Ready,” Wright whispered over the radio.
“Go,” I said to Hobart and Van Dreeves. Two ratcheting whispers sang into the valley. Watching through my IVAS, I saw one enemy sniper drop on top of his weapon, and the second was crawling toward a small rucksack. Van Dreeves put a bullet in his head.
“Moving to you,” I said to Wright and his team.
“No change in status,” Wright replied.
It took us nearly thirty minutes to join Wright, and fortunately, there had been no communications between the now-dead snipers and the force they were protecting. Though the scene we came upon had changed dramatically.
The large man with the red sash and saber slapped Zoey, who was dressed in tactical clothing, cargo pants, polypro shirt, outer tactical vest, and combat boots. The only item paying homage to local customs was her hijab, which the man had snatched from her head and shook it in her face.
“American spy!” he shouted in her face.
His accent was European, but it was difficult to tell from which country fifty meters away.
“Plan?” I asked Wright.
“Randy and Joe kill the two at either end. That leaves the guy with Zoey and one staring at the group of women.”
“Who’s got the red sash?” I asked.
“I do,” Sly said.
“And I’ve got the guard with the group,” Wright said.
“Execute,” I said.
The silenced weapons made sufficient ratcheting noises to echo through the narrow valley, and as Sly was preparing to pull his trigger, Red Sash snatched Zoey and began backing up, holding a knife to her throat.
“Zoey!” Sly shouted, lowering his weapon.
They were backing toward a cave mouth, just one of many here in the Shah-i-Kot.
“Any shot?” I asked my men.
“No shot,” they said back in unison.
“Let’s move,” I said.
We picked our way quickly through the rocks with Wright and his team ensuring the Taliban fighters were dead and securing the women and children, huddling amid muffled cries for help. Hobart, Van Dreeves, and I ran toward the cave, dodging random gunfire, which meant Red Sash had either let go of Zoey or the knife, or both.
Our first steps into the cave were met with heavy gunfire, and I wondered if there was a backup force in here. The IVAS gave me a view of Zoey lying on the rocky floor and Red Sash behind a machine gun, using Zoey’s body as firing support.
There was literally no shot at Red Sash, who was surprisingly agile. His machine gun either jammed or ran out of ammunition as the echoes ringing loudly through the cavern faded. We dove headlong into the cave mouth and raced toward Zoey, who was whispering, “Help me.”
I chased the giant through the winding tunnel until I didn’t see him anymore. As I turned, a baseball bat hit my chest, though it was a 9 mm piece of lead caught by my body armor. Stumbling back, I lifted my pistol and fired blindly to suppress any further shots. I had gotten lucky once and wasn’t counting on a second time.
The man mumbled something unintelligible and fled deeper into the tunnel as I tackled him. A knife swiped in front of my eyes, the turbulence washing over my cheeks. I had my knife out and was flailing when I heard shots fired at the front of the cave. The man’s fist caught me on my chin and rocked me backed into the wall. I stumbled as he adroitly fled through an open hatch that led to the ground above. He started pumping pistol shots randomly into the opening, denying my pursuit.
I shuffled back to the front, where Wright, Van Dreeves, and Hobart were assembled with their troops. Van Dreeves was finishing a patch job on Zoey’s left shoulder and cheek.
“Gonna be all right, baby,” Sly was whispering to his daughter. “Gonna be all right.”
“Counterattack force,” Wright said. “Killed them. Called for extraction. Zoey’s lost some blood.”
Sly and I lifted Zoey when we heard the whipping blades of the Apache gunships that were escorting the Chinook helicopter. Rockets screamed from the Apache’s pods, the Chinook landed, the women and children boarded. Sly and I had Zoey’s arms around our shoulders as we flanked her and helped her limp to the back ramp before my operators funneled into the aircraft.
The loadmaster snapped the ramp shut, and like that, we were airborne.
Sitting next to Zoey, I looked at her eyes, weak and vacant, and wondered if we could keep her with us. A deep gash angled beneath her left eye, oozing blood.
Sly was staring at his daughter, tears streaming down his face, mouth contorted, whispering, “Hang in there, baby. Hang in there, baby. Hang in there, baby.”
An Afghan woman got up from her seat and stumbled forward toward us. My defenses went up, but the woman knelt in front of Zoey and rested her head on Zoey’s leg. Another woman rose and joined her. Then a little girl. And another. And soon the entire contingent of women Zoey had saved that night were surrounding her in supplication, praying for all the gods to save this angel.
I looked away and stared at my men who were, in a rare moment of introspection, simply watching the women lift Zoey up with their hopes and prayers.
* * *
AND SO, I had a strong sense of déjà vu when Hobart said to me today, “Sir, Zoey is missing in Africa.”
8
IT TOOK THE RIDE back to our headquarters on Fort Bragg for me to recognize how far gone I was.
Loss can come at you incrementally and erode your faith like water on a stone, or it can hit you like a wrecking ball you don’t see coming.
Or it can be both, like a one-two punch, and I imagine in retrospect that was what happened to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t fully appreciate the impact on my decision-making. I had to move quickly if I was going to do what needed to be done as much for my own soul as for Zoey and our nation. I simply couldn’t handle another deep personal loss or another setback in our national security. We all knew soldiers who had lost half of their squads in combat and the resultant suicide rates that skyrocketed, no matter how much (or little) the country tried to help.
Standing in my spartan office in JSOC headquarters, I was staring at the map of Africa hanging on my wall when Hobart walked in.
“Got a Global Hawk over the target area,” he said. “There’s an update on her location.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
My office had a large-screen monitor where a map of the world spun when Hobart pressed a button. There was a blinking red dot maybe twenty miles from Chinguetti, which was nearly three hundred miles from the coast. The way the map was situated on the monitor, Chinguetti appeared to be just south of a major terrain feature that looked exactly like an almond-shaped eye, complete with a circular iris in the middle and a dark eyebrow above.
“Looks like the same terrain feature,” I said.
“The Eye of Africa thing. We were on the southern rim of that,” Hobart said, pointing to what basically looked like the bottom of the Eye. “It’s maybe sixteen miles across.”
“Looks man-made,” I said absently. During the Stockton mission, I hadn’t paid much attention to the broader terrain feature other than its tactical implications for my team.
Hobart shrugged. “Guess I need to read Plato again.”
“Anything relevant from the ISR?” I asked.
“Nothing yet, but we should be able to see Zoey as long as her GPS is working,” Hobart said.
“Any allies in the area?”
“The French are in Senegal,” Hobart said.
“Yeah, but I asked about allies,” I quipped.
Hobart’s upper lip twitched, the closest he ever came to smiling, but he knew we had little to smile about.
“Who else knows she’s missing?” I asked.
“No one. Duke gave her a couple of weeks, so they’re not tracking her,” he said.
Just then, Van Dreeves came barreling into the office.
“Boss, you should have shared this with us sooner. I mean, holy shit,” Van Dreeves said.
“You’ve got it now. We’ll talk on the airplane.”
“What’s that?” Hobart asked.
“The external drive Zoey gave the boss,” Van Dreeves said.
Hobart snapped his head toward me. “When?” he asked.
“When I got back from the Pentagon. Two days ago.”
“Neither of you said anything,” he said. Hobart swiveled his head from me to his lifelong friend, Van Dreeves.
“I’m saying it now,” I said.
Even though they were displeased with me, I wasn’t worried about our bond. Not too long ago, I had dragged Van Dreeves from a cell where Iranian Quds Force commander Dariush Parizad had placed him directly before a bomb had destroyed the remote building as part of a chemical weapons plot against the United States. Both Van Dreeves and Hobart had saved my ass too many times to count, and now it seemed I’d had the opportunity to return the favor. Even Hobart, rarely not in control of himself, had needed evacuation after a near miss from the deadly chemical weapons.
“Roger that, but this external drive has some wild shit on it from his recce missions there. Lots on China nukes, the Dakhla Accords, blackmail, the Eye of Africa, and crazy geometric drawings, like Galileo kind of stuff. And completely, seemingly unrelated, there are several pictures of bags of gold coins with several dig sites in the desert looking for the gold.”
I felt the presidential burner phone buzz in my cargo pocket. Instead of engaging in conversation, I grabbed my gear and began walking out the door.
“Grab your shit. Sally and the team are loaded. We need to move now before our airplane gets canceled.”
“Boss—”
“I said, ‘Move.’ Let’s go.”
Once we were on the airplane, it taxied quickly and was airborne as we huddled in the command pod.
“When I talked to Zoey the night Sly died, she thought he might have been killed for a reason. He had information that he had gathered from his previous trips to Dakhla and gave it to Zoey in case the mission went bad for him or all of us,” I said. I owed them an explanation and was just now able to process everything without emotion clouding my judgment. I had read Sly’s summary, which included communications intercepts from the Dakhla Accords discussions that vaguely referenced Chinese nuclear weapons.
Van Dreeves, McCool, and Hobart remained silent as I talked. They were seated in their respective positions around the small, rectangular drop-down table.
“Boss, WTF,” Van Dreeves said. “You’ve been on our asses. We all want the same thing.”
“Randy, I know you like to talk, and I always let you, but I’ll give you your turn in a minute. First, this has nothing to do with trust. I trusted you, Randy, to print out everything from Zoey last week and then to review the external drive she gave me.”
I looked each of them in the eyes. They understood.
“Second, Zoey may be missing, or she may be operating on her own, expecting us to follow. I truly don’t know and would tell you if I did.”
“Wait, what?” Hobart interrupted.
“I said exactly what I meant, Joe.”
He stared at me hard, face flush, eyes shooting ninja stars.
“Third, I moved fast because the president tried to call me, which most likely means she got my message. I gave her some of this information because it implicates senior members of the military and her cabinet.”
All three of them looked down and shook their heads. They didn’t like politicians or direct political influence on our missions, but there was no other way to proceed.
“Last, when I saw Zoey, she said to me, ‘It’s all about the geometry.’ In Sly’s files were drawings of the Eye of Africa, with graphs and lines reaching into the atmosphere. Either it’s an Indiana Jones kind of thing, where the sun shines through a diamond and opens a vault, or it’s some type of strategic weapon. I need to know what kind of calculations he’s got going on in those files.”
I stopped talking. Locked eyes with each of them. Returned their hard stares. Tough love.
Van Dreeves nodded.
“I’d add a fifth. Gold.”
“Gold?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s got reams of notes about gold finds in the Eye of Africa. Supports our debrief with Stockton. Little sacks of gold stacked in a dark tunnel,” Van Dreeves said.
He clicked on the track pad of his MacBook, and the pod’s monitor jumped to life at the opposite end of the table. He pointed at a series of photographs of brown leather bags cut open with oddly shaped coins spilling out. He clicked again, and a menu of information appeared.
“This is the EXIF data. Exchangeable image file. Shows date, time, and location.”
“A little over two months ago,” I said. “A day after Sly and his team made contact when conducting recon.”
“Roger that. Might not have been a random thing,” I said.
“Location?” Hobart asked.
“Ouadane, Mauritania,” Van Dreeves said. “The Eye of Africa.” He pointed at the image on the monitor.
“Same location as Zoey and close to where our guys were killed. Looks like a moonscape,” Hobart said. “Everything keeps coming back to the Eye of Africa.”
He was right. What was it about the terrain feature that looked like a hurricane on the map that had so much activity surrounding it?
It’s all about the geometry. Zoey’s words circled in the back of my mind like a hawk searching for prey.
“So the gold is hidden in the crater. Where did it come from?” I asked.
“The coins aren’t perfectly round,” Van Dreeves said, pointing at the screen. He dragged the cursor and expanded the picture of one of the coins, which had edges that looked like a third grader had tried to draw a circle freehand. The coins had small nicks in the bevel and what only could be seen as hieroglyphics on either side.
“Egyptian?” I asked.
“All I could find is this image,” Van Dreeves said. He pulled up a picture from the internet that showed a similar-looking coin called an Egyptian stater.
“How did an Egyptian coin get to Mauritania?” Hobart asked.
“Maybe Timbuktu,” I said.
I had read about the lost treasures of Timbuktu, a major trading post along the Niger River on the southwesternmost edge of the Sahara. It was a key pivot point for merchants, travelers, explorers, safaris, and expeditions. With the Sahara to the north and tropical sub-Saharan Africa just to the south, it was like Denver in the early North America days, a stopping-off point before traversing treacherous terrain and a redoubt in which to settle after attempting and failing. Business opportunities sprouted from the intersection of needs. Water for the parched, food for the hungry, stores of both for the wanderers, and shelter from the incessant heat.
“Is there a nexus between the Dakhla thing and the gold? There’s millions of dollars of gold in that tunnel, and people looking for it,” Van Dreeves said. I looked at Hobart, whose face was drawn with worry. “And then there’s all this other stuff Sly gathered that seems to bear no relation.”
“Maybe there’s no connection,” I said. “Seems to pale in comparison to the rest of the information. Like it’s a distraction.”
“Why would Sly have this in the file, then? There are probably a million unrelated things he didn’t include. This was deliberate,” Van Dreeves said.
“He did say he had more work to do. Maybe it was understanding the connection between the two. Add in nukes, China, and blackmail, and I can see why he was struggling with pulling it all together.”
“This stuff about nukes, though, is crazier,” Van Dreeves said. “Just makes no sense.”
“I saw that,” I said, leveling with them.
They paused and looked at me.
“This is what Zoey’s doing?” Hobart asked. His voice was clipped, tight, restraining anger with me.
I nodded. “Maybe.”
“Why her?”
“The medical thing gives her cover,” I said. “But she got in front of me on this. I honestly didn’t know she was going to leave so soon.”
“So you guys were plotting without us?” Van Dreeves asked, hurt.
“No. We were having discussions.”
“Sir, you know Zoey well enough to know that she’s going to find a green light in anything you tell her!” Hobart said.
It was the most emotion I had seen from him in the three decades of operating with him. Van Dreeves looked at him with big eyes.
“I agree. I should have seen that coming,” I said.
“We’ve got to find her,” Hobart said, settling his voice.
“We will,” I replied. “Now let me call the president.”
I was focused. We needed momentum, and we were starting to achieve some.
“Before you call the president,” Van Dreeves said, “this picture is interesting.” He showed a digital image of seven people standing on the balcony of a castle overlooking the ocean. Secretary of Defense Angela Blankenship and Secretary of State Bryn McHenry were flanking Chinese general Liang and the CEOs of two of the largest Big Tech companies in the world. Behind them were French defense minister Albert Gambeau on one side, and an armed, bearded man wearing sunglasses on the other.
