Before Knuckles could answer there was a chorus of calls claiming their cars were full or they were already moving. He finally broke in. “Okay. Fine. What about the Rabbit? What do you want to do with him, turn him loose?”
“No. Bring him along. I don’t know what the page is about, but we might be able to pick up where we left off. No sense burning the team by letting him go.”
Knuckles acknowledged the call, then gave directions where to find him. He was only a couple of blocks away. I cranked up the car and pulled into traffic. I rounded the corner and spotted him a block away. He was standing two streets up holding a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless Veteran. Will work for someone who understands what’s important.” I pulled over, allowing him to climb in.
“Funny sign. Unfunny stench. Maybe you should take the Metro.”
“Ha ha.” Knuckles was silent for a minute, which told me he was pissed. I was unsure whether it was the exercise or the page, but he didn’t waste any time leaving me wondering.
“What the fuck was that call back there about tagging the target? Dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard. There was no reason to do that. It’s not like we were in a Jack Bauer scenario.”
“I know, but these exercises never have a guy carrying a nuke. We never get pressure to get it done at all costs. I decided to make it a Jack Bauer scenario — see how the team reacts. We don’t want that to happen on a real-world without doing it once in practice.”
“Yeah, sure. There’s a reason Jack Bauer’s on TV. It doesn’t happen real-world. You pull that shit on a live mission and we’re spending the rest of our lives in a shithole foreign jail.”
“Ease up. It’s better to be prepared.”
Knuckles switched the subject, telling me he was good. “What’s the story? We’ve never had a culmination exercise called off. We’re due to deploy in five days and we haven’t even worked the kinks out of the new kit.”
“I don’t have a clue. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Knuckles began rubbing off his filth with a packet of wet wipes from his pocket. “This had better be good, because we aren’t ready to deploy.”
It was good.
We crossed the key bridge, leaving Washington, D.C., and entering Virginia. Minutes later, we pulled into a parking garage under a nondescript office building near Clarendon. The small plaque on the single door leading into the building read “Blaisdell Consulting,” making it sound like we were some sort of think tank or government contractors. It was a great cover, because consulting firms are all over D.C., and no one can figure out what the hell they do.
The entire thing was a facade. Outside of the initial foyer, manned by little old ladies who would take your number and ask you to return at a later date, the building was dedicated to one thing — finding and killing terrorists. It was a block long and four stories tall, incorporating everything from an indoor twenty-five-meter firing range to an isolation facility that could house twenty-four men. The unit inside had no official designation and no official affiliation with the U.S. government — only a top-secret crypt that would never see the light of day. Because we had to call it something, it was known simply as the Taskforce.
We badged in from the underground garage and moved straight to the primary conference facility on the second floor. Paneled in dark wood, it was dominated by a large oval table with small speakers in front of every chair and a large plasma screen on the far wall. The lighting was muted. It would have looked like the conference room in any law firm except for one difference: Instead of being surrounded by bookcases full of law texts, the walls held souvenirs from past operations. Kaffiyehs, flags, framed letters in Arabic, and various weapons hung around the conference table. I had had the pleasure of hanging about a third of them.
I never really understood why so much money had been spent on the room, since we were so classified we wouldn’t be giving briefings to congressmen or anyone else. If it had been done for our sakes, they could have left it bare concrete. We wouldn’t have cared. In fact, speaking for myself, I would have liked it better. I was told it was to encourage us to start thinking like corporate types. Get us into the cover and away from the knuckle-dragging killer-commando past we all had.
The rest of the team had beaten us back. When we entered, they all looked at Knuckles and me as if we had gleaned some secret knowledge on the drive over. Before anyone could ask, I threw it right back at them. “Well, someone know what’s going on? Anyone say anything about Johnny’s team? Something happen in Jordan?”
Bull spoke up. “Nobody’s talking. Duty officer said to wait here. The boss will be down in about five minutes.”
Our lead intel analyst entered the room, moving straight to the computer system in the rear without saying a word. Ethan and I were pretty good friends, so I figured I wouldn’t have to wait for the commander.
“Ethan, what’s up?”
“Change of mission. You’re headed to Tbilisi.” He turned his back and began loading stuff onto the computer, which annoyed me.
“Tbilisi? What the fuck for?”
Speaking over his shoulder, Ethan said, “Pike, I don’t have time right now. The boss is on the way down. All I can say is that you won’t be coming to my house for dinner tonight.”
6
Before I could ask anything else, the element leader for Omega Operations, Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, entered the room. His appearance really caused the team to perk up.
He walked over to Knuckles and me. “Glad you guys could get back in so quick.”
“Well, we’re here. What’s the story? Something happen to the team in Jordan?”
“Nothing bad’s happened to the team,” Blaine said, “but something bad is about to happen with the mission. Your target is headed to Tbilisi, Georgia.”
Knuckles frowned. “Why’s that a big deal? This will be, what, his third trip? Didn’t we already analyze that and decide to focus on Jordan, where he lives?”
Mustafa Abu Azzam was a confirmed leader of a terrorist cell affiliated with Al Qaeda. Living in Jordan, but born and raised in Oman, he was hell-bent on doing irreparable harm to the United States. Had he been focused on other targets, such as the country of Jordan itself, the Taskforce would have quietly passed its intelligence into the system, letting the Jordanians handle it. As it was, he lived and worked in Jordan as a reputable citizen, leading a double life that allowed him to plan attacks in relative safety. We had worked for close to a year to put a face to the name the Taskforce had been tracking. A year of hard, slow, boring — but necessary — work. Nobody wanted to kill an innocent man. My team had flip-flopped with Johnny’s over and over again, trying to get a handle on this guy, and we were very close. Our next deployment had a good shot at finishing him. Starting with just a name, then with cell phone numbers, building into e-mail addresses and Internet traffic, finally into addresses outside the virtual world, we had pinpointed the man called Azzam. Johnny’s team had taken the first confirmed photographs, and was simultaneously building a pattern of life for an operation while we prepared to deploy for the final takedown.
Before I could ask anything else, Colonel Kurt Hale entered the room, followed by a scrum of analysts. A large man with jet-black hair, my wife says he would be handsome if his nose weren’t bent at an angle, like it had been flattened and sprung back out of whack. I always laugh at that, because I’m the one who flattened it. Don’t get the wrong idea. It was during routine combatives training. I could show you a scar on my elbow where I had to have surgery because of something he did. I would never say a cross word to the man otherwise, because he’s the finest commander this country currently has. Of course, I’m biased.
Kurt shook my hand and apologized for interrupting the team’s training. I shrugged it off. “Thanks for throwing in the trailer. It caused a little high adventure.”
Kurt grinned and said, “You guys need a wrinkle every once in a while. A few more days and you’d have figured out what he was doing.”
“We didn’t wait. We took him down. Would have had both targets if you hadn’t paged.”
“You took him down? He just entered the exercise today. Where is he?”
“In the parking garage.”
