High Assault

Behind the men, Colonel Ayub took an unconscious step backward as Najafi donned a cotton surgical mask and a pair of clear plastic safety glasses. He came up hard against the cold metal wall of the TOC. He could feel the vibration of the plane through the wall as it climbed toward a thirty-thousand-foot ceiling. The Hezbollah agents were inscrutable observers behind their masks, their weapons still reeking of cordite from their recent use.

“Despite that…unpleasantness,” Najafi continued, “I was so sorry to hear about the loss of your family, Michael. These are unfortunate times. The Koran tells us to turn to Allah and the words of the Prophet in times of trouble.” Najafi stopped, regarded the battered Lebanese secured to the chair in front of him. “But you don’t follow the teachings of the Koran, do you, Michael? You worship this Jesus Christ, like some American lapdog.”

“You murdered my family!” Suleiman screamed. “Killer! You disgusting animal!”

The bruised man pushed up against his restraints, disfigured face twisted into rage. His eyes, almost swollen shut, blazed with hate and anger until they were bright points of light. Bloody spittle flew from split lips over broken teeth, and the veins of his neck stood out in sharp relief, like rivers.

Najafi ignored the outburst. He calmly walked over to his attaché case where it sat on the table and undid the gold relief clasps. The springs were tight and the snap of their release was clearly audible despite Michael Suleiman’s inarticulate screaming. Suleiman’s snarls turned to choking gags behind Najafi and, up against the wall, Colonel Ayub closed his eyes.

Najafi reached into his expensive leather attaché case. The Bosch eighteen-volt high-torque impact wrench was a cordless power drill. Michael Suleiman fell silent as Najafi turned around with the 9.5-inch device in his hands. The power tool was blue with the trigger and brand name printed in a brilliant red. The flat battery pack was secured to the bottom of the drill’s pistol grip like a magazine in a handgun. The drill bit was itself five inches long, grooved like a rifle barrel and colored a dull graphite-gray that seemed to absorb light.

Grinning, Najafi depressed the trigger. The 2.4 Ah batteries surged power at 1,900 RPM, generating 350 foot pounds of torque as specially designed cooling rods absorbed the heat generated by use.

“What could you possibly want from me?” Suleiman begged. “What could I possibly know?”

Najafi released the trigger and watched the drill spin down. His sneer was spread across his face as he called over his shoulder to the visibly pale Ayub. “Why do they always think it’s about information?”

Chuckling to himself, Najafi turned back toward the helpless Suleiman. “Michael, I already know everything I need to know. There are no secrets in Beirut I do not already possess.”

Najafi stepped forward and touched the hard metal of the drill against Suleiman’s left leg. The power tool rested on his vastus medialis, the teardrop-shaped muscle of the quadriceps located next to the kneecap. His gloved finger rested lightly on the red trigger of the cordless drill.

“Then why?” Suleiman asked, his voice a moan. “Just kill me. You murdered my family. I’ve suffered enough.”

“I say when you’ve suffered enough!” Najafi suddenly screamed. His face was a grossly animated mask of anger.

The drill screamed as the leader of Ansar-al-Mahdi pulled the trigger and pushed downward. The powerful industrial drill bit easily into Michael Suleiman’s flesh, burning through skin and tearing into muscle fiber as if they were paper. Scarlet blood splashed as the prisoner screamed, streaking Najafi’s pale blue apron and marking his safety glasses with beads of crimson.

Najafi wore a maniacal grin as he pulled the drill free then plunged it down into Suleiman’s leg again four more times in rapid succession. Colonel Ayub felt his gorge rising as he tried to look away, but the tortured man’s screams drew his eyes despite himself. Blood spilled into the seat of the dentist’s chair and puddled on the floor of the TOC.

Suddenly a satellite phone positioned on the table below the POV cam monitors came to life. Najafi straightened, lips pursed as he let the spinning drill power down. Michael Suleiman’s head sagged on his neck.

“Always with the interruptions,” Najafi snarled. “Always whenever I’m really starting to make progress on a project I am interrupted.”

The phone beeped loudly again.

Najafi sighed, almost theatrically. He turned around and walked toward the table. He stopped, looking down at the heavy power tool he still held in his hands. He turned back toward the helpless and bleeding Suleiman.

“Would you hold this for me?” he asked. “Thank you.”

The drill screamed into life and Najafi carelessly pushed the impact wrench down into the Lebanese political leader’s thigh until it bit into the bone of his femur. The man screamed as it cored into his bone marrow.

The phone rang and without bothering to remove his blood-drenched glove, Najafi snatched it up. “Yes, what is it?” he snapped.

Colonel Ayub, standing only a few short yards away, could hear clearly both sides of the conversation and he recognized the voice on the other end of the connection immediately. It was a voice he feared.

“Is that how you talk to a man in my position, General?” the voice asked.

Najafi’s manner and tone instantly changed. “Of course not, Your Eminence,” he said. “How may I serve you?”

Behind them Michael Suleiman moaned in agony, the noise very loud in the confined space of the mobile TOC. Najafi scowled fiercely and pointed a finger at the Hezbollah team leader. With a slash of his hand he indicated the bound and helpless Suleiman. Instantly the terrorist stepped forward and threw a right cross down onto the prisoner. The knuckles of the man’s hand connected with the sharp prominence of Michael Suleiman’s jaw, and the Lebanese political leader’s head went limp on his neck.

“There has been a change in certain global geopolitical realities that displease the Revolutionary Council,” the voice on the phone said.

“What happened?”

“The Americans in their arrogance have formally labeled our Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics command as terrorist organizations. The world press is running with the story now.”

“The Americans’ insolence knows no bounds!” Najafi snarled. “How quickly they forget the humiliation of their embassy hostages on the world stage before that cowboy Reagan came to power.”

“The council agrees,” the voice replied. “This arrogance will not be ignored. Our own parliament is already constructing a resolution labeling the CIA and U.S. Army as the terrorist organizations they are—but that is only our public face.”

“You have something else in mind?”

“We want you to return to Tehran immediately. Your Ansar-al-Mahdi is to be given a new tasking. We’ll leave the Lebanese situation to VEVAK officers for now,” the voice said, referring to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence.

“As you command,” Najafi said. “I will turn the plane around now.”

“Good.” The line went dead.

Najafi put the satellite phone down on the table and slowly turned to regard the bound Michael Suleiman. The Lebanese prisoner was only semiconscious, eyes dull and blood pouring from his torture wounds.

“Terrorist organizations,” Najafi scoffed, shaking his head with irritation. “You heard that?” he asked Ayub, who nodded. “Those cowboys will soon learn to regret their arrogant presumption.”

Najafi walked over to Suleiman and yanked the cordless drill from the man’s leg. Suleiman screamed. The drill whined to life, spinning at its fearsome 1,900 RPM. Suleiman’s eyes sprang wide in terror and he threw his head back against the chair.

Najafi lifted the drill in an almost offhand manner and plunged it into his captive’s left eye. Michael Suleiman jerked like a man in an electric chair, coming up out of his seat against his restraints, then sagging back down limply and falling irrevocably still.

Najafi yanked the drill free. Behind him Colonel Ayub bent double and vomited on his own shoes as the Hezbollah commandos snickered behind their masks. The Ansar-al-Mahdi commander regarded his subordinate with a look of cool distain until he had finished purging.

“Something you ate?”

“Yes, General,” Ayub said, wiping his mouth.

“Good.” Najafi shoved the gore-drenched power tool into the colonel’s shaking hands. “Clean that so that my briefcase is not stained.” He turned toward his Hezbollah surrogates and pointed at the corpse. “Take this piece of shit down to the cargo bay. I’m going to the cockpit. We’re on our way back to Tehran. When we’re over north Beirut I’ll signal the load master and you dump the body out so it can be found.”

“Yes, General,” the team leader replied.

Najafi turned back toward Colonel Ayub in his vomit-splattered dress shoes. “When you have finished with your valet duties, come up to the cockpit,” he told the man. He paused at the door of the TOC after removing his bloody apron. “We are going to figure out how exactly to show these Americans exactly what terror really is.”

Colonel Ayub nodded and Najafi went out the door. The politically connected military officer felt the eyes of the Hezbollah gunmen on him. He forced himself to stand straight. He looked at the bloody and mutilated body of Michael Suleiman and he forced his features into a mask of indifference despite the taste of his own vomit on his tongue.

“You heard the commander!” he snapped. “Get the body downstairs and wait for your orders.”

But the Hezbollah team was already in motion and they simply ignored the bureaucrat.

CHAPTER THREE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia—Present Day

Barbara Price pushed hard against the pedals of the elliptical machine, her honey-blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and her body shiny with sweat. A beautiful woman with a model’s looks, she tried to maintain a high level of fitness though her workaholic nature had kept her at the Shenandoah Valley covert operations site almost continuously over the recent months. The War on Terror had left the clandestine Stony Man personnel—both Phoenix Force and Able Team—like paramilitary firefighters, rushing from one global hot spot to the next with little downtime between assignments.

The former NSA mission controller didn’t see an end in sight, either.

The cardio trainer machine beeped at her and the readout display informed her that her forty-five-minute workout was almost over. She refocused her attention and began to swing her legs even faster. She was off her normal pace and fought hard to regain the distance before her time ran out.

Her body was fluid in motion. She was trim and muscular, with an assertive but feminine sexuality that caused men’s heads to turn when she passed. She took pride in her appearance, but her dedication to fitness was no longer about cosmetic sensibilities. When she was fit, her endurance improved, and when she went days without sleep while exercising a grueling schedule of life-and-death multitaskings, her improved stamina made her a better leader and support system for the men in her command.

Suddenly the cell phone resting on her elliptical machine’s console began to ring. Frowning at the interruption, she picked it up and looked to see who was calling the encrypted device before she answered.

“Barb, I need to see you in the War Room of the main house,” Hal Brognola announced.

“I thought you were supposed to be in D.C. today,” Price replied. “Briefing the Man on our last op in Kenya.”

“I was,” the big Fed said. “Now I’m in a chopper about thirty seconds from the Farm.”

“What have you got?”

There was a pause, and when Brognola spoke again Barbara Price could easily hear the grim note of satisfaction in his voice. “We’ve finally got a breakthrough on Stage One.”

Instantly the Stony Man mission controller stopped running, the machine slowing beneath her. “Really?” she said, her own voice eager. “We have a lead?”

“One for sure and one likely,” Brognola answered. “I’ll tell you more when I touch down.”

“Understood. I’ll see you in ten,” Price said, and clicked off.

She stepped off the exercise machine and grabbed up a handy towel to mop her forehead and blot the sweat on her arms. She threw it around her neck and then clicked over to the walkie-talkie function on her cell phone. Her thumb pressed the push-to-talk button and she spoke into the phone.

“Bear, you on?”

There was a pause and then Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s gruff voice growled out a response. “Go ahead, Barb. What’s up?” The brilliant technician served as leader of the Farm’s cyber team and was Barbara Price’s right-hand man.

“Meet me in the War Room,” Price told him. “Hal’s coming in now and he has something for us.”

“Something big?”

When she spoke Price could hear the same satisfied tone in her own voice as she had just identified in Hal Brognola’s. It made the corners of her mouth tug upward in an involuntary grin.

“Hal says we just broke something on our Stage One project.”

Kurtzman made no attempt to keep his enthusiasm in check. “Hot damn!” he barked into the phone, making Price wince. “It’s about time we caught a break on that one.”

“Copy that, Bear,” Price agreed. “Is Carmen or Akira near you?” she asked, referring to two members of Kurtzman’s team. Carmen Delahunt was an ex-FBI agent recruited into the Stony Man program by Hal Brognola, and Akira Tokaido was a network systems interfacing genius and all around cybercowboy who had conducted digital wizardry for Price many times in the past.

“Carmen’s right here,” Kurtzman replied.

“Good. Have her alert Able Team and Phoenix Force,” Price said. “I want the teams on standby and ready to go the minute we get the rundown from Hal.”

“Copy that.”

“All right, I’m out. See you in the War Room.” The mission controller cut communications and hurried out of the workout center.

The well-oiled machinery of Stony Man had begun ticking with precision timing and practiced competence. Soon men would be out on the sharp end and the blood of killers would begin to spill.

STONY MAN FARM was located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Despite housing an extensive command-and-control logistics network, an airfield and outdoor training areas, the remote clandestine site maintained a facade as a tree farm, orchard and pulp mill. Security was a fully integrated package of electronic, computer-monitored and human surveillance. The farm workers and general laborers spread around the Farm were actually highly trained soldiers from America’s elite military and law enforcement units.

In the past rotational assignments to the Farm had given members of those units access to advanced training tactics and an opportunity to engage in cross-organizational networking. As the wars in southwest Asia and the Middle East had ground on, the short-term assignments to the top secret site had started to provide physically and emotionally exhausted multitour combat veterans with a low-key break from near-constant combat operations.

Such breaks were not available for members of the Farm’s premier crews, Able Team and Phoenix Force. While the security corps, designated as blacksuits, maintained protective defensive operations, the Farm’s strike teams deployed constantly across the Western Hemisphere and the world on offensive mandates for the U.S. government.

The leaders of those teams now gathered in the basement facility under the Farm’s main house in a briefing area called the War Room. Besides Hal Brognola and Barbara Price, Aaron Kurtzman was there with the unit commander of Phoenix Force, David McCarter, and Carl Lyons, Able Team leader.

Kurtzman, confined to a wheelchair after an attack on Stony Man grounds by KGB surrogates had left him paralyzed from the waist down, sat off to one side, running the briefing media presentation components from a keyboard built into his chair.

Built like a power lifter, the barrel-chested Kurtzman still routinely did sets of the bench press with 250 pounds for nearly a dozen reps. In contrast to his heavy build the two big men seated at the massive conference table in front of him seemed built more for endurance, despite impressively muscular builds.

The fox-faced Briton, David McCarter, was a consummate pilot and driver, as well as being a former member of the British Special Air Service. He had seen combat around the world in places as diverse as Oman and Belfast before coming on board as a shooter for the Farm’s Phoenix Force. Now, years later, the brown-eyed Englishman commanded that team and had committed violence on behalf of the U.S. government in every region of the globe.

“What have you got for us?” he asked, his English accent mellow after years in United States.

“Tell me it’s something good,” Carl Lyons answered.

The blond leader of the three-man Able Team was a former LAPD homicide detective. Lyons lived up to his moniker of Ironman. There was no better pistol marksman or fitter athlete than Lyons on the Farm’s teams. He had the subtlety of a bull in a China shop, combined with the acumen of a veteran espionage agent. When Carl Lyons ran into a problem he put his head down and battered his way through it.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time for some actionable intelligence on this,” Hal Brognola said. “A long time. Several years, in fact.” The Fed’s suit was rumpled and he spoke from around the stump of an unlit cigar. He gestured toward Barbara Price, who stood unselfconsciously in her sweat-stained workout gear. “Barb?”

The Stony Man mission controller nodded once curtly, obviously eager to get into the meat of the briefing.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “let me tell you about Stage One. Quite a while ago national intelligence estimates began warning the Oval Office about an increased threat focus coming from Iran. These threat focus assessments had little to do with Iraq or with Tehran’s burgeoning nuclear program. In fact, the assessments were not Israel centered in nature.”

Intrigued, McCarter lifted an eyebrow and glanced over at Lyons, who shrugged. Behind them, Kurtzman hit a button on his keyboard and an Iranian in an army general’s uniform appeared on the monitor at the head of the table.

“The intelligence was disparate, piecemeal and often obtuse. The Oval Office asked Hal to put Bear and his cyber team on it to try to analyze what we were seeing,” Price continued.

Kurtzman powered his wheelchair forward toward the head of the table. “We had precious little to go on,” he admitted. “Everything that was Iranian intelligence, Hezbollah, Hamas or Iraqi special groups related had to be screened to see if it fit with any other irregular activities worldwide. We figured out that whatever they were up to, it had something to do with the U.S. directly and not through surrogates or proxies. Mostly we got lost in smoke and mirrors.”

“Don’t be modest, Bear,” Hal Brognola said. “You were two weeks ahead of the golden boys at INR in identification of Stage One.” The big Fed referred to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The bureau had few or no field operatives of its own, but was instead tasked with performing oversight and analysis of information gathered from other branches of the U.S. intelligence community. In both the cases of pre-9/11 threats and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the INR had offered up the only dissenting voice in the national intelligence estimates and had subsequently come to be seen as the nation’s premier brain trust on intelligence.

Beating them on a point of analytical determination had provided Aaron Kurtzman with a moment of quiet pride.

“If this has been going on for a while, then why are we just now hearing about it?” McCarter asked.

“Because we didn’t have any operational intelligence,” Price replied.

“You couldn’t find anyone for us to shoot or hit over the head?” Lyons asked.

Hal Brognola removed the unlit stogie from his mouth. “Exactly,” he said. “Bear and his team were putting together a jigsaw puzzle from half a dozen different boxes while in a dark room.”

Barbara Price spoke up. “Stage One is an umbrella term for some sort of operation directed at the United States. It includes several separate but connected operations and projects that are all being run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their black ops unit, the Ansar-al-Mahdi. We were only ever able to tie a couple of low-level couriers and agents to the project. That included this man.” She pointed to the Iranian on the monitor screen. “Colonel Muqtada Ayub of a Basij division near Tehran.”

“Basij?” McCarter frowned. “I thought they were a local militia, like a National Guard for the Revolutionary Guard.”

“Yes and no.” Price nodded. “They are an auxiliary paramilitary force. But they also serve in law enforcement, emergency management and social and religious organizing in their respective areas. They also serve as a secret police militia against the general population doing morals policing and suppressing the activities of dissident groups.”

“Nut jobs?” Lyons asked. He took pride in a direct approach many often referred to as crass. He also liked to claim it was part of his charm, though he had never met anyone who actually agreed with him about that.

“Highly motivated nut jobs,” Brognola specified. “They provided the martyr volunteers for Iran’s human-wave attacks against Saddam Hussein’s army during the Iran-Iraq war.”

“It seems Colonel Ayub is also connected by marriage to a prominent cleric on the Revolutionary Council,” Price added. “He’s the highest ranking operative we’ve been able to connect to Stage One so far.”

“He’s a big, fat intelligence node just waiting to be hacked,” Kurtzman added. “With what he can tell us, I’m sure I’ll be able to piece together this puzzle in no time.”

“Getting him would be a major coup,” Price said.

“Where is he now?” McCarter asked. “I assume somewhere we can get to him.”

“Yes,” Price answered. “Specifically we have him located in a safehouse in Hayaniya, a Shiite-militia-controlled neighborhood in northwestern Basra. Carmen will provide you momentarily with a briefing packet of operational details for you to go over with the rest of Phoenix once we’re done here.”

“That explains what David’s going to be doing,” Lyons spoke up. “How about Able?”

Price acknowledged him, then nodded to Kurtzman. The computer specialist used his thumb to strike a key, and the picture changed to a surveillance shot of a Middle Eastern man in civilian clothes. “That individual is Aras Kasim,” she said. “A known agent of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, VEVAK.”

Lyons leaned forward, reading a sign in Spanish in the picture behind the man. “Where’s he at? Caracas?”

“Yes. You can thank the very thorough Carmen Delahunt for giving you someone to knock over the head, Carl,” Price answered. “Two days ago a CIA interagency memo had Kasim meeting with Ayub in Basra. This morning a brief by DEA agents surveilling Juan Escondito showed him in a meeting with Kasim.”

“An Iranian intelligence operative meeting with a Venezuelan narco-trafficker?” Lyons grunted. “That is big. We can run with this.”

“Good. Carmen will have your operational details ready to go in a couple of minutes, as well.” Barbara Price looked down at her team leaders from the head of the conference table. “Go out and bring me these men so we can shut the Iranians down.”

Both David McCarter and Carl Lyons were grinning as they rose from their seats.

CHAPTER FOUR

Basra, Iraq

Akmed Anjali had been a major in the Iraqi police since the Americans had taken Baghdad. He had been a loyal and partisan son of the Shammar clan all of his life and a follower of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite sect since he had been a small boy. His loyalties were not divided; they were prioritized. Allah, family, national duty. He followed them in that order, and if his duties as a Shia patriarch ever conflicted with his responsibilities as police officer, then he had to remember that his land was far older than most Americans could conceive and after the Americans were gone his land and his faith would continue unabated, like the life-mother Tigris River flowing perpetually to the sea.