Target Acquisition

At the center of the combat perched Abu Hafiza, al Qaeda torture master, cell leader and consultant strategist behind the Madrid, Spain, bombings. Hafiza waited, entrenched and surrounded by a hard-core bodyguard unit willing to die for jihad and the liberation of the Shiite people.

For obvious political reasons the U.S. had opted for a surgical strike rather than the use of massive force. Going into the snake pit to get Abu Hafiza was a suicide mission.

At the request of Brigadier General Kubrick, relayed through Brognola, Phoenix Force had deployed to Iraq.

American forces were arrayed around the landing strip, guns orientated outward, enforcing the security perimeter as the Blackhawk helicopters settled into position. Immediately a colonel, the division executive officer, moved forward into the brunt of the rotor wash to greet the arrivals.

The cargo door on the Blackhawk slid open under the spinning blades and five figures emerged from the helicopter transport. Dressed in black fatigues with faces covered by balaclava hoods, the men moved easily under a burden of upgraded body armor and unorthodox weaponry, the colonel noted.

The first man to reach the American officer stuck out his hand and shook with a hard, dry clench. When he spoke, a British accent was evident.

“You here to get us up to speed?” David McCarter asked.

The colonel nodded. “Have your men follow me,” he said.

With the rest of Phoenix Force following, McCarter fell into step with the colonel. “Has the situation changed at all?” he asked.

“Just as we left,” the colonel replied. “The Iraqi National Army moved into Sadr City to quell violent demonstrations. They ran into heavy resistance and our reinforcement brigade was called in. We rolled forward and discovered Abu Hafiza has prepped this slum the way Hezbollah did southern Lebanon for the Israelis back in 2007. It’s just a mess. But we’ve beaten them back to their final redoubt.” The colonel indicated a Stryker vehicle with its ramp down. “But it’s a hell of a redoubt,” he added as they climbed into the APC. “We can either bring in the bunker busters or throw away hundreds of men in a frontal assault. Neither of which is going to look too goddamn good on twenty-four-hour cable news feed.”

“Or you can call us,” T. J. Hawkins noted dryly.

“Yes.” The colonel nodded. “Whoever the hell ‘you’ happen to be.”

“We do like our little mysteries,” Calvin James acknowledged from behind his balaclava.

“You somehow manage to pull the rabbit out of this hat and I’ll call you mommy if that’s what you want.”

“That won’t be necessary,” McCarter assured the man as the Stryker ramp buttoned up and they rolled deeper into the city. “Just don’t call us late for dinner.”

THE BLAST from a helicopter missile had knocked a hole in the street. The explosion ripped up the asphalt and punched a hole in the ground deep enough to reveal the sewer line. Workers had managed to clear enough rubble out of the crater to keep the sewage stream flowing, but there had not been enough security or money for complete repairs. A line of rubble like a gravel-covered hillside led up out of the sewer to the street.

While the rest of Phoenix Force crouched in the shadows, Calvin James eased his way up the uncertain slope to reconnoiter the area. He crawled carefully, using his elbows and knees with his weapon cradled in the crook of his arms. As tense as the situation was, there was a large part of him that was grateful to escape the stinking claustrophobia of the pit. Just blocks over, combined Iraqi and American forces hammered the Shiite positions to provide cover and distraction for the inserting special operators.

James eased his way to the lip of the blast crater and carefully raised his head over the edge. The Sadr City neighborhood appeared deserted at the late hour. Tenement buildings rose up above street level shops, the structures book-ending right up against each other. Rusted iron fire escapes adorned the fronts of the old buildings. Brightly colored laundry hung from windows and clotheslines. The roofs were a forest of old-fashioned wire antennae. The street was lined with battered old cars, some of them up on concrete blocks and obviously unusable. Across the street feral dogs rooted through an overflowing garbage bin.

Carefully, James extended his weapon and scanned the neighborhood street through his scope. He detected no movement, saw no faces in windows and doorways, no figures silhouetted on the fire escapes and rooftops. He looked down to the end of the street and saw nothing stirring, then turned and checked the other direction with the same result.

Satisfied, he looked down. He gave a short low whistle and instantly McCarter appeared at the foot of the rubble incline.

“All clear. Come have a look,” James whispered.

McCarter nodded once in reply and re-slung his M-4 carbine before scrambling quickly up the rubble. He slid into place next to Hawkins and carefully scanned the street, as well.

“There,” he said. “That building.” He indicated a burned-out six-story apartment complex with a thrust of his sharp chin. “That’s the building. That’ll give us the entry point into the compound.”

“Sounds good,” McCarter agreed. “We’ll run this exactly like we did our insertion in the Basra operation a while ago.”

“Only without the sewer crawl.”

“Which is nice.”

Eighteen months before the building had been assaulted by an Iraqi National Army unit with American Special Forces advisers after intelligence had revealed it served as an armory and bomb-making factory for the local Shiite militias.

“I haven’t noticed any sentries yet,” James said. His gaze remained suctioned to the sniper scope as he scanned the building.

“They’re there,” McCarter said. “That’s the back door to the militia complex.”

“Heads up,” James suddenly hissed.

Instantly, McCarter attempted to identify the threat. Up the street a Toyota pickup turned onto the avenue and began cruising toward their position. The back of the vehicle held a squad of gunmen and there were three men in the vehicle cab.

McCarter and James froze, nestling themselves in among the broken masonry of the bomb crater. Advancing slowly, the vehicle cruised up the street. Moving carefully, McCarter eased his head down below the lip of the crater and transferred his carbine into a more accessible position.

Beside him James seemed to evaporate, blending into the background as the pickup inched its way down the street. The former Navy SEAL commando watched the enemy patrol with eyes narrowed, his finger held lightly on the trigger of his weapon.

The vehicle rolled closer and now both Phoenix Force members could hear the murmur of voices in casual conversation. James watched as a pockmarked Iraqi in the back took a final drag of his cigarette and then flicked it away.

The still smoking butt arced up and landed next to the prone Phoenix Force sniper with a small shower of sparks that stung his exposed face. The cigarette bounced and rolled down the incline to come to rest against McCarter’s leg.

A gunman in the back of the vehicle said something and the others laughed as the pickup cruised past the two hidden men headed toward the fighting. Playing a hunch, James risked moving to scan the burned-out building across the street with his scope. His gamble paid off as a man armed with a SVD Soviet-era Dragunov sniper rifle appeared briefly in a third-story window to acknowledge the patrol rolling past his position.

James grinned. The pickup reached the end of the street and disappeared around a corner. “Got you, asshole,” he whispered. “I got a security element on the third floor,” he told McCarter.

“Does he interfere with movement?” McCarter scooped loose dirt over the burning cigarette, extinguishing it.

“He’s back in the shadow now. I might have a shot with IR,” Hawkins explained. “But he’s definitely doing overwatch on this street.”

“He the only one?”

“Only one I saw,” James said. “But he could have a spotter or radio guy sitting next to him who’ll sound the alarm if I put the sniper down.”

“What’s our other option?”

“I guess send the team across and hope he doesn’t notice until we can be sure of how many we’re dealing with.”

“The clock is ticking,” McCarter pointed out.

“Then I say let me take him.”

“Encizo and I will cross the street and try to secure the ground floor before the rest of you come over.”

“It’s your call,” James said simply. He clicked over the amplifier apparatus on his night scope and scanned the windows. A red silhouette appeared in the gloom of the third-story window. “I got him. No other figures present themselves from this angle.”

“That’ll have to do,” McCarter said.

James held down on his target as McCarter called Encizo up and the two men slowly climbed into position. Encizo had left his Hawk MM-1 behind with Hawkins and held his silenced H&K MP-7 at the ready. McCarter slid his M-4/M-203 around to hang from his back and had pulled his own sound-suppressed weapon, the Browning Hi-Power, from its holster.

James settled snugly into his position as Phoenix Force gathered around him. His finger took up the slack on the curve of his trigger and he settled the fiber-optic crosshairs on the silhouette in the window.

The Mk 11 sniper rifle discharged smoothly, the muzzle lifting slightly with the recoil and pushing back into the hollow of James’s shoulder. The report was muted in the hot desert air and the subsonic round cut across the space and tore through the open window.

In his scope James saw the figure’s head jerk like a boxer taking an inside uppercut. There was an instant of red smear in his sight as blood splashed, then the enemy sniper spun in a half circle and fell over.

“Go,” James said.

McCarter was instantly up and sprinting. Behind him Encizo scrambled over the edge of the hole and raced after him. Both men crossed the street in a dead run, weapons up and ready as James began shifting his weapon back and forth in tight vectors to cover the building front.

McCarter crossed the open street and spun to throw his back into the wall beside the front door of the building. Half a second later Encizo repeated the motion, his MP-7 pointed down the street.

McCarter checked once before proceeding through the gaping doorway. He charged into the room, turning left and trying to move along the wall. Encizo came in and peeled right, coming to one knee and checking the room with his muzzle leading the way. Both men scanned the darkened chamber through their low-light goggles.

The front doors to the building had been blown out during the Iraqi raid and the room saturated with grenades and automatic-weapons fire. The two Phoenix warriors found themselves in a small lobby with a cracked and collapsed desk, a line of busted and dented mailboxes, a pitted and pocked elevator and two fire-scarred doorways. One of the interior doors had been blown off its hinges, revealing a staircase leading upward. The second sagged in place, as perforated as a cheese grater.

McCarter carefully moved forward and checked both doorways before turning and giving Encizo the thumbs-up signal. The combat swimmer turned and went to the doorway so that James could see him. He lifted a finger and spoke into his throat mike.

“Come across,” he said. “We’ll clear upward.”

“Acknowledged,” James replied.

Encizo turned back into the room just as he heard footsteps on the staircase. Booted feet pounded the wooden steps as someone jogged downward making no effort to conceal his movement. Encizo blinked and McCarter disappeared, moving smoothly to rematerialize next to the stairway access, back to the wall and sound-suppressed Browning pistol up.

Wearing a headscarf and American Army chocolate-chip-pattern camouflage uniform, a Shiite militia member with an AKM came out of the stairway and strolled casually into the room. On one knee Encizo centered his machine pistol on the irregular.

Oblivious to the shadows in the room, the man started walking across the floor toward the street. McCarter straightened his arm out. The Browning was a bulky silhouette in his hand, the cylinder of the suppressor a blunt oval in the gloom.

There was a whispered thwat-thwat and the front of the Iraqi’s forehead came away in jigsaw chunks. The man dropped straight down to his knees, then tumbled forward onto his face with a wet sound.

Encizo kept the muzzle of his machine pistol trained on the doorway in case the man wasn’t alone, but there was no sign of motion from the staircase as McCarter shifted his aim and cleared the second door.

Behind Encizo, Hawkins entered the room and peeled off to the left to take cover, followed closely by Manning and then Calvin James. Each member of the unit looked down at the dead Iraqi, his spilling blood clearly visible.

“We take the stairs,” McCarter said in a low voice. “There’s no way to clear a building this size with our manpower so it’s hey-diddle-diddle, right-up-the-middle till we reach the roof, then over and in. Stay with silenced weapons for as long as we can.”

The ex-SAS trooper swept up his Browning Hi-Power and advanced through the doorway as the rest of Phoenix Force fell into line behind him in an impromptu entry file. Hawkins took up the final position with his silenced Mk 11, replacing Gary Manning as rear security.

Weapons up, Phoenix Force continued infiltrating Baghdad.

RAFAEL ENCIZO opened his hand.

Greasy hair slid through his loosened fingers as he plucked the blade of his Cold Steel Tanto from the Iraqi militia member’s neck. Blood gushed down the front of the man’s chest in a hot, slick rush, and the gunman gurgled wetly in his throat.

Standing beside Encizo Calvin James snatched the man’s rifle up as it started to fall. The eyepieces of the two commandos’ night optics shone a dull, nonreflective green as they watched the man fall to his knees. Encizo lifted his foot and used the thick tread of his combat boot to push the dying Iraqi over.

The final Shiite soldier on the building roof struck the tarpaper and gravel as the last beats of his pounding heart pushed a gallon of blood out across the ground. As James set the scoped SVD sniper rifle down, Encizo knelt and cleaned his blade off on the man’s jeans before sliding it home in its belt sheath.

Seeing the sentry down, McCarter led the rest of the team out of the stairwell and onto the roof. Phoenix Force crouched next to a 60 mm mortar position beside the parapet and overlooked the cluster of buildings in the Baghdad slum. Below them, in the shadow of the militia sentry building, a large flat-roofed home stretched out behind an adobe-style wall. Armed guards walked openly or stood sentinel at doorways. In the courtyard near the front gate a Dzik-3 with Iraqi police markings stood, engine idling.

Hawkins took up a knee and began using the night scope on his Mk 11 to scan nearby buildings for additional security forces. As David McCarter took up his field radio Manning knelt behind him and began to loosen the nineteen-pound grappling gun from the Briton’s rucksack.

“Super Stud to Egghead,” McCarter said.

“That’s so very funny,” Akira Tokaido replied, voice droll.

“You have eyes on us?”

“Copy that,” Tokaido confirmed.

At the moment the Predator drone launched by Jack Grimaldi from the Coalition-controlled Iraqi airport floated at such an altitude that it was invisible to either Phoenix Force or, more importantly, to the Iraqi Special Groups HQ below. Despite that, the powerful optics in the nose of the UAV readily revealed the heat-signature silhouettes of Phoenix to Akira Tokaido in his remote cockpit as they crouched on the Baghdad rooftop.

It was a little known fact that most of the larger drone aircraft seeing action in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent Iraq, were piloted by operators at McCarren Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As soon as Kurtzman and Price had seen the remote pilot setup used by both the Air Force and the CIA they had gone to Brognola with a request for the Farm to field the same capabilities using the Stony Man cyberteam as operators.

Both Kurtzman and Carmen Delahunt had proved skilled and agile remote pilots, but it had been the good Professor Huntington Wethers who’d proved the most adept at maneuvering the UAV drones and he had consistently outflown the other two in training.

But Akira Tokaido, child prodigy of the videogame age, had taken the professor to school. The Japanese-American joystick jockey had exhibited a genius touch for the operations, and Kurtzman had put the youngest member of the team as primary drone pilot for the Farm.

Now Tokaido sat in the remote cockpit unit, or RCU, and controlled a MQ-1c Warrior from twenty-five thousand feet above Baghdad. He had four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and a sensory/optics package in the nose transplanted from the U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk, known as the Hughes Integrated Surveillance And Reconnaissance—HISAR—sensor system.

From a maximum ceiling of twenty-nine thousand feet, Tokaido could read the license plate of a speeding car. And then put a Hellfire missile in the tailpipe.

Having seen the effects of the coordinated air strikes during training with the FBI’s hostage-rescue team at a gunnery range next to the Groom Lake facility known as the Ranch, David McCarter was more than happy to have the air support.

The ex-SAS leader of Phoenix Force touched his earbud and spoke into his throat mike. “You see the wheeled APC at the front gate?” he asked.

“Copy.”

“That goes. I want a nice big fireball to draw eyes away from us while we come in the back door.”

“That should obstruct the main entrance to the property,” Tokaido allowed, voice calm. “That changes the original exit strategy Barb briefed me on.”

“Acknowledged,” McCarter responded. “But the truth on the ground has changed. Adapt, improvise, overcome.”

“Your call, Phoenix,” Tokaido confirmed. “I’ll put the knock-knock anywhere you want.”

“Good copy, that. Put one in the armored car and shut down the gate. You get a good cluster of bad guys outside in the street use Hellfires two and three at your discretion. Just save number four for my word.”

“Understood.” Tokaido paused. “You realize that if you’re inside that structure when I let numbers two and three go you’ll be extremely danger close, correct?”

“Stony Bird,” McCarter said, “you just bring the heat. We’ll stay in the kitchen.”

“Understood. I’ll drop altitude and start the show.”

“Phoenix out.” McCarter turned toward the rest of the team. “You blokes caught all that, right?” Each man nodded in turn. “Good. Hawkins, you remain in position. Clean up the courtyard and stay on lookout for Hajji snipers outside the compound.”

Hawkins reached out and folded down the bipod on his Mk 11. “I’ll reach out and touch a few people on behalf of the citizens of the United States of America.” The Texan shrugged and grinned. “It’s just a customer service I provide. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

“Just try to stay awake up here, hotshot,” McCarter said. “I’ll put the zip-line on target. The rest of you get your Flying Fox attachments ready.”

“I’m going first,” Manning said. “You hit the mark with the grappling gun but we’ll use me to test the weight.”

“Negative, I’m point,” James said. “The plan calls for me to slide first.”

Manning shook his head. “That was before we got burned. Those assholes down there know we’re coming. We’ll only get the one line. I should go first.” He stopped and grinned. “Besides, Doc, if you fall, who’ll patch you up?”

McCarter lifted a hand. “He’s right, Cal. We’ll send Gary down first.”

The ex-SWAT sniper took up his SPAS-15. “Doesn’t seem right, a Canadian going before a SEAL, but I’ll make an exception this time.” He reached out a fist and he and the grinning Manning touched knuckles.

“Get set,” McCarter warned.

CHAPTER FIVE

McCarter lifted the launcher of the T-PLS pneumatic tactical line-throwing system to his shoulder. The device sported 120 feet of 7 mm Kevlar line and launched the spear grapnel with enough force to penetrate concrete. Despite himself McCarter paused for a moment to savor the situation.

He felt adrenaline pump through his system like a bullet train on greased wheels. He knew that he was not only among the most competent warriors on the face of the earth, but also he was their leader. He could sense them around him now, reacting not with fear but with the eagerness of dedicated professionals.

They had the brutal acumen of men about to face impossible odds and achieve success. McCarter smiled to himself in cold satisfaction as he recalled the motto of the SAS—Who Dares Wins.

As his men, other than Hawkins, slid on their protective masks, McCarter’s finger took up the slack in the grappling gun.

There was a harsh tunk sound as the weapon discharged, followed by the metallic whizzing of the line playing out. The sound of the impact six stories below was drowned out by the sound of Akira Tokaido’s Hellfire taking out the Dzik-3 APC. A ball of fire and oily black smoke rose up like an erupting volcano. The blazing hulk leaped into the air and dropped back down with a heavy metal crunch that cracked the cobblestone court.

“Now we’re on,” Encizo declared, and Phoenix sprang into action.

THE MEN SLOWLY CHEWED their food as they watched the body hanging from chains set into the wall. The imam had dared to speak out against the random violence that claimed the lives of Baghdad’s women and children, preaching in front of the prayer mats in the mosque that the Koran did not direct the slaughter of Muslim innocents in the name of Allah.

On his way to the market an Iraqi police car had stopped and two officers had thrown a sack over the imam’s head and pushed him into the vehicle. When his hood had been ripped off, the cleric found himself chained to the wall and in the hands of the very extremists he had railed against.

Then he saw two men, one in the uniform of the Baghdad police, calmly eating. The two men continued eating as other men caught his tongue in a pair of pliers and cut it off with a bayonet. They had continued eating as the torturers had taken a ball-peen hammer to first his fingers and then his toes. Then, when his naked body was slick with his own blood, they had driven the slender shaft of an ice pick into his guts, perforating the large intestine and allowing his own fecal matter to flood into his system, causing sepsis.

From outside of the building the militia of the faithful held the Iraqi National Army bootlickers and their American allies at bay. The troops around the man now were those returning from the line to grab a meal and resupply. Despite their exhaustion and wounds the Shiite extremists remained upbeat—happy with their performance.

Then a vengeful god rained fire from the sky.

Abu Hafiza jumped out of his chair at the sound of the explosion. Around him his men scrambled to respond and he looked across the table to the Iraqi police officer Saheed el-Jaga.

“It’s them!” he hissed, stunned.

“Ridiculous. They never could have gotten close. It must be an air strike. I told you to leave the city,” Saheed el-Jaga snapped back.

Abu Hafiza thought about Ziad Jarrah sitting in Dubai like a spider at the center of his web. He thought of telling the crown prince how he had failed, how the Americans had driven him from the Shia stronghold in Baghdad.

“No,” the Shiite terrorist said simply. “I’m safer here.”

“I’m not!”

Then they heard the gunfire burning out around them and they knew it was more than an air strike. They knew then that against all odds the unknown commandos had made it into the Shiite slum, had come for them. They both realized that whoever these clandestine operators were they would never give up.

Instantly they rose up and ran to rally their men.