“You’re sure he’s in there?” the Ranger captain asked.
Cody tapped more keys. The feed changed to a thermal image view. The station wagon registered as purple, and the road and the desert became a sheet of pale yellow. The human body temperature of 98.6 degrees was lower than the ground temperature, making the four figures actually register cooler than the land around them. The four people inside the car became outlined in dark yellow and orange. “We’ve had a lock on this car since it left Ankara this morning,”
Cody said. Ankara was Turkey’s capital city. “We’ve tracked Icarus since the group left Jerusalem.”
“The assassins got close,” Remington observed.
“Yes. Icarus has been closely watched.”
“They suspected him?”
“The group watched each other. Since we decided to take them down in Jerusalem, we created an opening for Icarus to feed us information. However, we couldn’t get a message back to him.”
“What message?”
“We wanted him out,” Cody said. “Icarus has reached an untenable position. If those other men don’t suspect him now, they will soon. Or whoever they’re going to meet in Syria will.”
“When your teams swept the other members of the cell, seems Icarus should have jumped ship.”
“Unless he thought he was about to get more information we needed. We would have gone after Icarus ourselves, Captain Remington, but given the state of alert in Turkey and Syria, the decision was made that it would be more feasible and prudent to have your men handle the exfiltration.”
Remington silently agreed. While the United States Army’s peacekeeping effort was welcomed in-country, CIA agents weren’t. Especially since they didn’t operate with Turkey’s permission in many cases.
Cody tapped the keys, changing the view back to normal.
The perspective also pulled back, revealing movement high in the hills overlooking the road. Cody tapped the keys again, narrowing the focus to the eleven Rangers huddled in two groups on either side of the narrow road. Another keystroke put the group’s geographic location in longitude and latitude under them.
“These are your men?” the CIA section chief asked.
Though he recognized the Ranger camo fatigues, Remington checked the location of Goose’s group. The figures matched. Goose had brought his unit into position after a fifteen-minute hop from the front lines. They now sat seven klicks north-northeast of the border face-off.
“Yes,” he replied, moving back to Cody’s screen.
“They’re good?”
“They’re Rangers,” Remington answered. “They’re my Rangers. They’re the best.”
“Well,” Cody replied noncommittally, “in three or four minutes, we’re going to find out.”
The pale blue station wagon continued bouncing across the broken terrain, closing on the Rangers’ positions.
2
Turkey
37 Klicks Southeast of Sanliurfa
Local Time 0621 Hours
Goose hunkered down behind the rocks on the west side of the road he’d decided had probably served as a pass through the mountains back in the days of the Silk Road. These days it was so little used Goose figured the only reason it wasn’t grown over was that nothing would grow in the sand and bleak rock.
A half mile away, a dust cloud closed on their position.
Moving slowly, letting his dust-covered camo do the job it was designed to do, Goose lifted his M-4A1 and peered through the scope. He checked to make sure the digital camera mounted underneath the assault rifle had a clear field of view.
The digital cam hooked into the modular computer/sat-com feed on his load-bearing frame, spreading the extra weight across his shoulders. After two years of training with the rig for special urban warfare operations, Goose didn’t even notice the extra weight on the rifle.
In most instances, the M-4A1 carbine was a better weapon than the M-16A2 Goose had been given when he entered the Army sixteen years ago. He’d been a rawboned twenty-one-year-old fresh from the backwoods country of Waycross, Georgia. Both assault rifles fired the 5.56mm round, but the M-4A1’s barrel was fourteen and a half inches long, nearly six inches shorter than the M-16A2. Along with the collapsible butt stock, the M-4A1 offered quicker reaction speed as well as the ability to use the weapon in more compact places.
Goose lay prone on the hot ground. Before taking up his position, he’d scraped away the top layer of sand and rocks, exposing the cooler earth below. It made lying down on the scorching desert surface more bearable. Only a minute or two of being exposed to the dry heat had turned the layer he’d exposed the same color as the land around him.
He adjusted the telescopic sights, bringing the image of the pale blue Subaru station wagon into proper magnification. The image sharpened. He kept both eyes open, the way he had been trained to do, mentally switching between both fields of vision. His father, a woodsman who had hunted all over the Okefenokee Swamp and had pulled a tour of duty as a Marine in Korea, had first taught him the technique. Drill sergeants and sniper specialists had refined the skill during training.
Dried mud covered the station wagon’s windshield except for the arches carved out by the wipers. Streaks of dried mud stained the car’s body. Tie-downs held two spare tires and two five-gallon jerry cans on the roof.
Goose played the scope over the vehicle’s windshield. The driver and the man sitting in the shotgun seat looked Middle Eastern. Evidently the vehicle’s air-conditioning wasn’t working because they were both drenched with perspiration that left damp stains in the armpits of their shirts.
“Base,” Goose said, speaking into the pencil mike at the left corner of his mouth.
“Go, Phoenix Leader,” Remington called back. “Base reads you five by five.”
“You got vid?”
“We see what you see, Leader.”
“Can you confirm your package?” Goose asked, sweeping the M-4A1’s sights from the driver to the passenger.
Remington hesitated an instant. “Neither of those men. They are confirmed hostiles. Repeat, we have positive ID of hostile nature. Don’t take any chances with these people.”
Shifting the rifle slightly and refocusing the scope, Goose ran the sights over the two men in the backseat. He knew the agent immediately because the man’s face was battered
