Terminal Impact Page 20

  The men at the table, each a regional chieftain who supported the efforts of Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah and al-Qaeda Iraq, drank coffee and chai as they waited for the last two guests to arrive, now embarrassingly tardy.

  Abu Omar looked at his watch, then at Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “I cannot imagine what has delayed them.”

  Zarqawi said nothing but began eating. The others at the table followed suit.

  One of Omar’s men came in the room a few minutes later and whispered in the old graybeard’s ear.

  “Juba and Hasan just passed our eastern checkpoint, coming from Haditha,” Abu Omar told Zarqawi.

  The boss of al-Qaeda Iraq gave Omar a nod.

  Twenty minutes later, Dzhamal Umarov and Khasan Shishani hurried into the dining room, bowing and apologizing.

  “We were delayed in Haditha this evening because of something marvelous!” Juba said in French, reaching inside a satchel and withdrawing a copy of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment’s top secret operation plan. He took the document to Zarqawi, who stopped eating and began thumbing through the pages.

  His eyes lit up as he read the words TOP SECRET on the cover.

  Each of the pages was printed from photographs of the original operation plan shot by a cell-phone camera. Although rough and crude, tilted at one angle and another, the pages all read well enough for al-Qaeda Iraq to make some quick plans of their own.

  Zarqawi smiled at Juba. “Top secret?”

  “Yes, brother, top secret,” Davet replied. “A most wonderful piece of luck.”

  “From your spy in Baghdad?” Zarqawi asked.

  “A devoted agent,” Juba answered, “dedicated life and limb to the Jihad.”

  “God is great!” Zarqawi smiled.

  “Yes, brother,” Umarov said, “God is great!”

  —

  Sweat oozed into the corners of Jack Valentine’s eyes, burning them as he crouched in the blackness of a storm culvert, near a spot along the Euphrates called Alaleya, squinting into the hot Iraqi night. He blinked, reacting to the sting, and with his knuckle, wiped clear the trickles, smearing the black-over-brown camouflage tiger stripes surrounding his eyes and lined down his cheeks.

  The four-foot-diameter water chute, where Jack hid, ran beneath a desolate stretch of Highway 19, the hard-top main roadway on the east side of the Euphrates River that ran from Hit through Haqlaniyah north to Barwana and Haditha. He and his seven painted devils had hunted without success since they left the rocky hillock where they had eaten their supper. Now they searched the farmlands and road area as they moved along the river, eyes open for likely suspects to bring home alive for interrogation.

  As they came nearer to the river and its fertile valley, with farms scattered one after another, up and down both sides of its length, they anticipated that their luck might change. More people, more potential. Likewise, more risk. Especially if they triggered the local dog population to start barking.

  If dogs began barking, they would have to head back east, out into the desert, and wait for them to go quiet. Then move north to another area, where the neighborhood alert system had not sent the bad guys back in their holes.

  They worked toward the night’s objective and morning extraction point, the train tracks and bridge over the Euphrates, southeast of Haqlaniyah, and west of where the railway crossed ASR Phoenix on the east side of the river. Jack hoped to present something more to Black Bart Roberts than empty hands and ghost stories, at the very least a few worthwhile skulls. But so far the patrol offered no prospects, and he badly wanted a live prisoner singing about the latest enemy happenings in the hoods around Haditha and those areas south, along the river where al-Qaeda and its allies seemed forever fruitful.

  Peering from the dark hole with his night-vision optics, Jack focused on the slow-moving, ghostlike figures of his men drifting across the open ground, on the east side of the road, ahead of him. One after another, they moved swiftly and silently.

  The two teams of MARSOC operators that slipped across the open terrain ahead of the gunny, cloaked by the moonless night, had broken into their two-man teams, working in parallel, as they had planned, searching for bombers and gunmen as they zigzagged northward.

  With his last man now passing a point marked by three plate-sized flat rocks piled together by the first four-man team out, making a small, discreet pyramid, indicating the distance he had traveled from the culvert during his initial five-minute interval, Jack Valentine pressed the stem of his fat, black wristwatch, lighting the green luminance of its face, showing him the time. He estimated that he had three full hours of good darkness left before the moon would rise. A risen moon always caused the fish to stop biting and al-Qaeda gunmen to go into hiding. “Plenty of time to get set before that happens,” he thought.

  Bronco Starr and Jaws had made the initial departures, always-impatient Corporal Cortez first and, after five minutes, Jaws came across. Cochise Quinlan then followed the first pair. Jack had teamed with Cochise since they both shot the same zero.

  On this mission, in addition to his support gun, Jaws took along an M82A3 SASR, Special Applications Scoped Rifle: a .50 caliber sniper rifle fed by a ten-round box magazine, designed and built by big-bore-gun guru Ronnie Barrett at his shop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Because of the two-thousand-meter distance that the SASR could fire its 660-grain bullets, and the tremendous power that it carried from muzzle to impact, Jack’s snipers had come to call the big gun’s round, Whispering Death. The Hajis never heard it coming before it took one of them out with devastating force. All an enemy would ever see was the red spray of blood in the air and the scattered remains where his suddenly dead cohort had previously stood.

  With its wide variety of .50 caliber ammunition, ranging from incendiary rounds to Raufoss penetrators and depleted-uranium-tipped projectiles, the Barrett .50 could shoot through walls, cars, buses, engine blocks, and buildings. Qaeda could run, but they couldn’t hide. And like Jaws liked to say, “If they run, they just die tired.”

  As he watched Corporal Gomez disappear into a dip that provided the first team a slight defilade for concealment, Jack eased himself out of the big storm pipe and gave one last look up and down Highway 19 above him.

  Just as Gunny Valentine put his head up to look down the roadway toward Hit, he heard the sounds of fast-moving engines and noticed the silhouettes of two vans stirring a cloud of dust as they raced toward him with their lights turned off. Quickly, he put the night-vision scope to his eye to get a better look, and immediately knew these Hajis were an IED or sabotage team, most likely moderately armed but carrying a sizeable cache of explosives.

  Bronco Starr heard the sound of the two vans’ engines, then spotted the vehicles. He had just taken his place next to Jaws, when he drew bead on them through his scope. Cortez gripped his sniper rifle with his right hand, finger next to the trigger, and wrapped his left arm under his grip, taking aim, loaded and ready. Jaws hurried to off-load his backpack and unstrap the SASR.

  Since Sergeant Quinlan lay in the open, easily seen by the Hajis if he moved, when he heard the two vans approaching, he stopped crawling and lay flat on his stomach, his rifle tucked by his face. Calmly, the sniper slipped out of his backpack, tucked it at his side, and unrolled a camouflage cover that he kept stashed for occasions like this. He had made it like his Ghillie suit, decorated in frayed-out brown-and-tan-burlap strips. Quickly, he got into firing position with his rifle aimed toward the oncoming traffic, and covered up.

  When Cochise Quinlan slipped beneath the sheet, he virtually disappeared. Even if someone looked right at him from the roadway with an infrared scope or other night optic, he would remain invisible, as long as he didn’t move.

  Carefully, Cochise snuggled into his rifle and took aim at the roadway above the culvert where Gunny Valentine had frozen in place, and waited for the two unlighted, speeding vehicles to come within ra
nge.

  “They slowing down?” Bronco whispered to Alex Gomez as he focused his night-vision spotting scope on the lead van.

  Jaws said nothing but sighted through the illuminated optics of the Schmidt and Bender scope mounted on the rail atop his .50 caliber rifle, trying to settle the crosshairs on the driver of the first vehicle. As he twisted the telescopic sight’s zoom ring back from twelve to six power, giving him a wider and steadier field of view, the two vans slowed, then stopped.

  The corporal from South Central LA took his eye from the gunsight and looked at his partner, whose mouth had dropped open in reaction to what he saw, and under his breath said, “Oh shit.”

  “Oh shit!” Jack Valentine shouted in his mind as he heard the two vans halt directly above his head. When he heard four doors slam almost simultaneously, and the sound of heavy footsteps crunch toward him on the road, he drew his Lippard 1911A2, .45 caliber, Close Quarters Battle Pistol. With it held next to his face, a 950-feet-per-second plus-performance hardball round locked in the chamber and the hammer cocked to the rear, the gunny hoped that he would not have to use it.

  All too quickly, the gunny realized the four insurgents who had gotten out of the vans had no clue about his team’s presence. The al-Qaeda quartet laughed and played grab ass as they chattered at each other in Arabic and began dragging what sounded like heavy metal containers from the back of the vehicles.

  “No shit,” Jack whispered on his intercom to Cotton Martin. “A storm culvert’s a good place to pack full of high explosives. In two shakes, they’ll be in here with me.”

  “Sit tight and cover up,” Cotton came back. “We’re set up. You just say when.”

  “Roger that,” Jack whispered.

  Locked in place with his back to the roadway, crouched just inside the culvert, but hearing these four turds shooting the breeze with such nonchalance, laughing and talking as they worked, the gunny leaned his head back and tilted his eyes upward to try to catch a glimpse of the men and get an idea of what they were doing.

  Just as he looked upward, one of the Haji bombers stepped to the edge of the road, straddling the storm culvert, and began pissing, directly above Gunny Valentine.

  “Is he taking a leak on the gunny?” Bronco whispered on the intercom, and muffled his laugh in his sleeve.

  “Better be pissed off than pissed on, and right now, I think Gunny’s both.” Cotton Martin laughed and moved his night-vision spotting scope to an al-Qaeda insurgent carrying a large satchel that the staff sergeant guessed was odds-on stuffed tight with explosive detonators and probably C4 bricks to set off the main charges in the fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

  “Jaws, you got the guy with the big sack?” the staff sergeant asked on the covered net intercom.

  “Roger,” Jaws said. “Crosshairs on him. Say when.”

  “Fire,” Cotton replied.

  With urine and mud splattering in his face, Jack Valentine squeezed off his first shot straight up, sending his high-velocity .45 caliber round directly into the pissing man’s crotch. With the shot, a second Qaeda leaped into the ditch, and before he could blink, the gunny blew him off his feet.

  As he killed the second man, Gunny Valentine rolled into the culvert for cover.

  At the sound of the two rapid shots, Jaws squeezed the trigger of the Barrett and sent 660 grains of screaming death straight into the explosive-stuffed bag and the man who had his arms wrapped around it, trying to run.

  As the .50 caliber round from Alex Gomez’s rifle blew apart the man with the satchel, it set off a chain reaction of deafening explosions.

  Orange flames boiled into black clouds of smoke as the gasoline in the two vans ignited and lighted the darkness for a hundred yards surrounding the wreckage. The echoing thunder from the explosions and the fire that now leaped fifty feet into the night sky drew attention from every farmhouse window within miles on both sides of the river.

  With metal debris and vehicle parts tumbling from above and bouncing across the ground, Gunny Valentine held tight inside the shelter of the culvert. Then, with the last loud clank of truck parts hitting the ground, Jack grabbed his rifle and dashed straight down the shallow wash where his men had crawled, and nearly fell over Cochise Quinlan as he ran past him.

  Seeing his shooting partner hotfooting it away from the remnants of the two burning vans, Sergeant Quinlan shouldered his pack, snatched his camouflage net in one hand and his rifle in the other, and followed the gunny.

  “What now, boss?” Cotton said with a smile, as the gunny flopped on the ground next to him and looked back at the gasoline-fed flames that boiled high in the night sky.

  “Score four.” Jack grinned, blowing out a deep breath. “That son of a bitch pissed right over my head! You see that shit?”

  “Looked like you put a hardball straight up his tailpipe for it.” Bronco laughed.

  “First time I ever seen a guy get his head blown off shot up the ass,” Jaws said as he tied his Barrett back on his pack. “Might be a good idea if we put a move on this motherfucker, though. That weenie roast on the road will draw a crowd sure as shit.”

  “Hopefully, it will take them a while to figure out what happened, and we can be long gone,” the gunny answered, then looked into the darkness where they needed to travel. “Maybe by then we can get regrouped on up north. Maybe find us a prisoner to snatch. Totally fucked up this area.”

  “Strange way to start a hunt,” Cotton said, “but on the plus side, we did light up four.”

  “I ain’t complaining. We ain’t the ones lying scattered up there like roadkill,” Sergeant Quinlan said as he departed into the night, leading the way.

  —

  After Liberty Cruz had checked into her Green Zone contractor and press corps hotel efficiency apartment, one of four similar rooms assigned to her and her team by the State Department facilities officer, she headed downstairs to meet her crew in the all-ranks service club for a late dinner and a few rounds of whatever flavor beer they served. For the simple advantage of having freedom of movement and less close scrutiny, and against the wishes of the embassy security officer, she and the team had turned down the white trailers with blast-proof roofs and reinforced walls, located within the compound gates, an old Saddam Hussein palace converted to the US embassy, Baghdad.

  Construction on a new embassy facility had recently begun on the more than one hundred acres of the US compound grounds, overlooking the banks of the Tigris River. At the end of the day, the new embassy would cost taxpayers more than $600 million atop the $150 million already spent establishing the current US embassy, Baghdad. With cranes raised high in the air, the construction site made the growing structures a noticeable part of the city skyline and a hard-to-miss target. Liberty didn’t want to be sleeping close to that bomb magnet, either.

  Even dressed in military-style tan 5.11 cargo pants and matching blouse, sleeves rolled up and buttons open over a black T-shirt, and a black baseball cap with no markings, her long black hair tied in a bun and tucked under the cap, Liberty Cruz still stopped traffic. When she stepped through the zigzag entrance of the service club, hoping to not draw attention, all dozen or so late-night patrons, an all-male crowd, locked eyes on her.

  Pointless now to try keeping a low profile, the long cool woman from the FBI took off her baseball cap, shook loose her hair, so that it fell around her shoulders, and beamed a big smile at the gawking crowd of horny men.

  “Hello, boys,” she called out in her best Mae West imitation. “I’m so glad you could see me.”

  Everyone hooted and laughed, including the FBI tactical team waiting for her.

  Amidst the cheers, she sashayed across the room to where her three-man crew sat, grinning ear to ear.

  The whole place sent up more cheers and whistles as she sat down.

  Before she or her men could say another word, a pitcher of Amstel beer slid acr
oss the table in front of her, along with five clean glasses. A good-looking blond-haired man with a well-trimmed moustache had brought them.

  “Aren’t you the bold one?” she said to the stranger.

  “I never got anywhere just watching,” he said, and extended his hand to all four at the table. “Chris Gray, CIA Operations. I believe you’re the FBI team from DC I heard landed this evening?”

  “No kept secrets in Baghdad, I see,” Liberty said, shaking Gray’s hand. “Should we make introductions, or do you already know our names?”

  “I have them.” Gray smiled, finishing the round of handshakes. “Jason Kendrick and I go back a ways. He gave me a heads-up. Asked me to assist on the down low, anywhere you needed. Keep a back door open and all.”

  Liberty smiled. “And where do you and Jason go back?”

  Gray put his forearm on the table so that they could see his Marine Corps tattoo.

  “It’s like a Mafia family.” Gray smiled back.

  “Oh, don’t I know. Once a Marine, always a Marine,” Liberty said, and nodded at her team, the three of them Marines, too.

  “Yes, I know,” Gray said, and began pouring beer. “Semper Fi, brothers. You too, sister. Even though you’re like an illegitimate stepchild to us Marines.”

  Liberty smirked at him and drew grins from her crew.

  A tired and disgruntled waiter came to the table, impatiently tapping his notepad to take the orders.

  “What’s good?” Liberty asked him.

  “Nothing here, but it’s all safe to eat. You won’t get sick from it,” he said in a strong Brooklyn accent. “Probably the shepherd’s pie’s your best bet. If you like Irish. I pretty much live on it and Mulligan stew.”

  The four new people all raised their eyebrows, fully expecting to hear an Iraqi accent to go with the waiter’s dark hair, complexion, and need for a shave.

  “You’re American?” Liberty asked.

  The waiter nodded. “I run the place. Name’s Kelly. That’s my twin brother Henry behind the bar, and my younger brother Jim does the cooking out back. We got a subcontract from Kellogg, Brown and Root. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”