Master Sergeant Bridgestone and Sergeant Ross were haggling in Farsi with the street merchant over some bags of rice and flour. Both had acquired impeccable accents and their weather beaten, sun-browned, sandstorm- cracked skin left little doubt to any Arab that they were from the desert. As Bridgestone relentlessly kept dismissing the quality of the man’s goods in an attempt to lower the price, Ross kept his eye on the door of the small building across the way. The haggling stopped when he saw her enter the front door. Bridgestone, as “reluctantly” as he could play it, handed over a few coins and took possession of the bags. They were off in a second and headed toward the building. Ross was prepared to jimmy the front door with the bar he had under his traditional robe, but to his surprise, the door was open. They both ascended the squeaky stairs, taking in the smell of evening meals being prepared and the occasional voice or cry of a child reverberating off the walls of the hallway. With only a look between them, they pulled their Sig Sauers out and Ross crouched low as Bridgestone went in high through the door of the apartment in the back.
They caught her in the bathroom. She quickly scrambled, not to cover up out of any sense of privacy or humility, but to reach for a gun she had resting on the edge of the bathtub. Bridgestone got there first and pulled her wrist up hard, forcing her to rise. Ross covered her mouth to muffle any screams. They carried her off to the bed and placed her over the side, her head to the floor and her body bent at the waist. From that position, she would have to fall to the floor before she could do anything else. Ross replaced his hand with a gag made from a torn sheet that Bridge handed him. They tied her arms behind her back. She struggled but to no avail against men who were three times her weight.
Ross put his foot on the back of her neck. In Farsi he said, “Where is your boyfriend? Where is Jamal holding the ambassador?”
She struggled but didn’t speak. He stepped on her finger and applied pressure until he heard her catch her breath.
“Salinda, please. You will not be able to endure what we are prepared to do to you if you don’t tell us where that dog of a man of yours is holding the ambassador.”
Both Ross and Bridgestone were under operational orders to play the role of disaffected Muslim moderates looking to ward off confrontation with the U.S. If Salinda did survive this “interrogation,” she would only be able to report to her cell members that some other Arabs roughed her up. Of course, that would be right before her terrorist friends killed her for suspicion of betraying them anyway.
Ross tried to convey this dead-end logic to her. “Salinda, you are now tarnished. Even if you don’t tell us anything, none of your people will believe that you didn’t tell us something, especially when they see how horribly disfigured we are going to make your face. They will kill you as an insect, without thinking. After all, you are only a woman.”
In fact, Ross was thinking exactly the opposite. This woman was tougher than most men, but he and Bridgestone were prepared to kill her. She was deemed an enemy combatant by the NCA. And when the National Command Authority speaks, non-coms like them are paid to listen. Neither of them had any identification on them, and no one would be able to make a connection between them and the USA. They were totally on their own. If caught, they could at best be declared mercenaries. They were truly ghosts.
Bridgestone forced Salinda’s head right so she could see her right hand as Ross placed his foot over her ear so she couldn’t look away. He then produced a pair of pliers and grabbed her middle fingernail with it. He gave it a tug as he tried to convince her to talk.
“We can do this twenty times if you stay conscious, Salinda. Then we can wait and start snipping off bits of each finger for a few hours. Oh, and look, here’s some adrenaline.” He produced a syringe. “A shot of this and even the pain of having your genitals removed with a hacksaw wouldn’t knock you out.”
She made her first human sound, muffled as it was through the now saliva-soaked gag.
“By Allah’s will, you are going to talk. You are going to talk, now or later. You are going to talk, all in one piece, or in pieces. But, Salinda, you will talk.”
Her middle finger nail pulled back and tore off with ease. She stiffened and gurgled through the sheet.
“This could take a long time, Fasol,” Bridgestone said to Ross.
At 19:00 hours, the chopper’s radio squawked. “Target Alpha located. GPS downloading. Mission is a go. Repeat. Go.”
The twenty men scrambled into the helicopters as the big hoses that kept the turbines going from the support truck on the apron were disengaged. Within 30 seconds of the alert message,
“Delta force en route, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs informed the President.
“Good. May God protect them and any innocents on the ground.”
“Very charitable of you, sir.”
Mitchell watched a map in the Situation Room as a triangle blip denoted the progress of the two foxtrot copters as they invaded the sovereignty of Egypt.
“Notify the Egyptian ambassador. Tell him we are invading his airspace. Note time and date and then sequester him till this op is over.” The President repeated those words the way his National Security Advisor had suggested 10 minutes earlier after the Egyptian ambassador was seated in the Roosevelt room supposedly awaiting an audience with the President.
“Yes, sir.” Charles Pickering said, picking up his phone to carry out the President’s orders. He didn’t like it; the Egyptian ambassador was an official guest of this country. Stopping him from contacting his homeland was a grievous act of non-diplomacy. Still, for the safety and security of the mission underway, there could not be a chance of leaks on the Egyptian side. In fact, at the end of the day, however it came out, the Egyptians would be glad they were not responsible for any mission compromises. They then could register formal complaints at the U.N. and save face with the Arab street.
Bridgestone and Ross had made a bad decision. They should have left Salinda dead or dying in her room, along with just enough evidence to point anyone in the direction of the desert. But as hard-assed as they were, she was still a woman, albeit one who had plotted against the United States and seduced one of our Diplomatic Security officers over to the other side. So now, here they were, driving an old Datsun with her in the back seat covered in a sheet, unconscious and stinking from the vomiting caused by the intense pain of losing her right pinky. They cauterized her hand and she was alive. They even took the pinky with them in a Styrofoam cup with ice from the fridge. It was a small percentage play, but if their hare-brained scheme worked, she could be in Kuwait City in two hours and there they might be able to reattach it. The fingernails would probably grow back.
They were heading towards the safe house with her; first to check and make sure she was telling the truth and, more importantly, to “light it up” for the laser range finders on the Cobra Attack helicopters. Bridgestone rationalized his decision not to terminate her by reasoning that having her alive would prove valuable if somehow she managed to lie through all the pain they had inflicted on her and lead them down an erroneous path. Time would tell.
On board the copter, real-time satellite images were coming out of its printer. The squad commanders on each chopper had identical printouts and were working a Telestrator, the same kind of device used on NFL football broadcasts to draw diagrams over the footage of the game. The difference was that they were drawing attack plans over satellite imagery of the 300-yard square patch of Egypt where, according to Bridgestone and Ross’ fresh intel, the ambassador was being held. The two inbound forces were talking over an encrypted satellite link while simultaneously, eight thousand miles away, in a secure room at the Pentagon, other combat controllers and commanders were doing play-by-play and color.
The target area was the abandoned Maghra oil refinery on the northwest edge of the desert. Many of its buildings and pipes were sandblasted down to flat smooth surfaces through years of neglect, leaving it to face the brunt of sandstorms and drifts. Satellite infrared reconnaissance had identified warm bodies out at 100 meters from the main complex. These were perimeter guards ready to alert the terrorists about any threat. Surely, they had radios or cell phones. There were a few heat-generating spots in the main complex warding off the cold desert night.
