Authors: Dale Brown
“We are happy to do something against the drugs,” added Lacu. “These are all honest policemen. Their reputations are solid. People say we do not do anything—but what can they do when the people above them are corrupt?”
“I understand,” said Nuri.
“Where will be our target?”
“There are several possible targets,” said Nuri, making it up as he went. “Four or five homes where they move around between. We’ll figure out which one it is, then you and your people will help surround it.”
“If I saw the plans, I could help.”
Nuri fended him off with assurances that the NATO team—he didn’t use the word Whiplash, of course—had everything under control. The Moldovans were only needed to secure the perimeter, and then take the prisoners. The deputy minister suggested that he should be with the team that made the arrests. Nuri agreed, an easy if empty promise.
The deputy minister began introducing Nuri, showing off not just the men but the equipment they carried. They had an assortment of AK–47 models that would have done a museum proud, along with more pistol types than men. They even had a dozen Russian F1 hand grenades that had to be at least forty years old.
“Good weapon,” said the policeman in charge of them. “Thirty meters, killing radius. Thirty meters. These fuses—four seconds.”
He mimed throwing it.
“Four seconds,” said the policeman. “One . . . two . . . three . . . ka-boom!”
Nuri, willing to do anything to kill time, repeated the ritual himself.
“How far can you run in four seconds?” he asked when he was done.
“Very far, with grenade about to go off.”
Nuri couldn’t argue with that.
A sudden commotion outside announced the arrival of an armored car. Nuri went out with the others to inspect it. He looked at it in great detail, admiring the gun at the top and taking a turn sitting in the driver’s seat.
“A handsome weapon, eh?” said Lacu as he climbed out.
“Very handsome,” said Nuri.
“We will use it on you if this turns out to be a wild goose chase,” added the deputy minister.
Nuri smiled. He thought Lacu was joking, but couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.
Northeastern Moldova
A
t exactly ten minutes after eleven Danny Freah turned off the highway about five miles from the Ukrainian border, pulling down a dirt road to a field he had scouted earlier that afternoon. He got out of the car and checked his watch, then walked up the road about two hundred meters. A broad field lay to his left. Owned by a family who lived on the other side of town some seven kilometers away, the farm had lain fallow for several years.
At eleven-fifteen the sky began filling with clouds. The moon played peekaboo with them for a few minutes, then completely disappeared.
At eleven-twenty a small red light flashed twice from the middle of the cloud bank.
Danny raised his arm and flashed his wrist light in response. A voice crackled over the ear set he was wearing.
“Whiplash Transport to Ground. Please confirm your identity.”
“This is Whiplash One. How do you read me?”
“Whiplash One acknowledged. Strong coms.”
“Bring it in,” said Danny.
The clouds began to descend. Only when they were within a few feet of the ground did it become obvious they weren’t clouds but an array of airships, camouflaged by a combination of LEDs and vapor generators, which poured mist from faceted baffles and outriggers. The baffles were arranged to reduce their radar signal during flight, when the mist wasn’t being used, making them harder to pick up from a distance.
The first dirigible glided down to a landing thirty meters from Danny. Two more touched down directly behind it.
The cargo compartment was a combination of angles and curves; the leading edge looked somewhat similar to the lip of the SR–71 Blackbird, though this aircraft was as slow as that one was fast. The lip dropped down and a four-wheel-drive pickup lurched out, moving silently on an all-electric motor.
“Hey, Colonel,” yelled Boston, leaning out of the driver’s window. “Want to drag?”
“Only if I’m in one of the Rattlesnakes.”
“Maybe you can hang from the skids,” said Boston. “No room for you inside.”
He wasn’t kidding—the fuselage of the remote controlled helicopter was no bigger than Danny’s desk at his old command. Two of them, with winglet and rotors folded up, were in the back of the pickup.
He watched as Boston parked the truck and checked the rest of the team. The six pickup trucks they’d brought looked like oversized four-door civilian Chrysler Rams. And in fact they had started life as Ram 1500s.
Then subcontractors for the Office of Technology had gone to work. The trucks were outfitted with dual engines—turbocharged big block gasoline engines for fast travel, and heavy-duty electric motors for quiet travel. Screens were installed on the dashboards to interface with MY-PID. The metal skin and windows were doubled and reinforced, and an exterior wall of reactive armor added. This outer skin was designed to explode rocket-propelled grenades before their charges could penetrate; it augmented a “kill first” detection system mounted beneath what looked like a cargo carrier on the truck roofs.
“All present and accounted for, Colonel,” said Boston. “Ready any time you are.”
Danny signaled to the blimps to take off. They were guided by computer; there were no human pilots aboard. A duty officer back in the Ukraine watched over them as they flew. He would step in only if necessary.
“We’re going to stage out of this old barnyard,” Danny told Boston, showing him the GPS coordinates. “It’s two klicks from the target area. We’ve got Predators watching overhead, but be careful anyway. These guys are full of surprises.”
F
lash was sitting in the car, watching the video feeds when Danny drove in. There was activity at the Black Wolves’ farm—a lot of it.
“Two trucks came in about a half hour ago. Four more guys total,” said Flash. “Two went into the building and moved things around. The other two put up some new defenses outside.”
“They expecting us?” Danny asked.
“That’s what I thought when I first saw them, but everything’s back here by the house. I think they made their exercise more specific.”
“You have the computer compare it to Kiev?”
“Figured I’d wait until they were done.”
“Right. So have they started yet?”
“No, sir.”
That was bad. The later they started, the later they could move. Keeping a strike force sitting around for several hours doing nothing was always problematic. But Danny knew he had no other choice.
“Let’s see if they’re any good,” he told Flash, pointing to the screen.
They didn’t have long to wait. Tonight there were eight Wolves involved in the exercise, six on the assault team and two inside the building, posing as targets.
The assault group moved more quickly than they had the night before. Four members moved up the road to the large building and slipped inside. The others took posts covering the approach. The infrared sensors on the Predator caught small explosions inside the building—flash-bang grenades, probably, though the thermal signatures were not big enough to see.
“Time them,” Danny told Flash.
“Yeah. On it.”
Flash tapped a set of keys that began keeping track of the elapsed time. Exactly two minutes and fifty-three seconds after he had flicked it on, a grenade flashed near the door. The two men on the outside began shooting into the woods.
Guns began firing back.
Flash zoomed to the spots where the guns were firing from. There was no one there; only weapons.
“Gotta be remote controlled,” said Danny. “Part of the exercise.”
“Yeah. But they were hidden so well we didn’t see them, not even with the ground radar.”
“They’re good. No doubt about that.”
The team came out of the building, moving at close to a dead run. Two men with them, bound and gagged—hostages.
“Only two?” said Flash.
“Two’s a lot for six guys to handle,” said Danny. “I’m surprised they’re taking any.”
Boston joined them, watching as the Wolves worked their way to the cottage and different gun emplacements opened up. Once more they got onto the skeleton helicopters and flew across the compound.
“These are the guys we’re hitting?” Boston asked Danny.
“Yeah.”
“They got a lot of gear.”
“Sure do.”
“At least they’ll be tired when we go in,” said Boston.
The Wolf team practiced their assault three more times. By the time they were done, Danny could have done it with his eyes closed.
They used live ammunition on the last trial. The bullets perforated the trees.
It was almost 3:00
A.M.
by the time they packed up. Danny waited until they had been in the house for a half hour before giving the order to saddle up.
“Our turn now,” he told Boston. “Let’s take our shot.”
Northeastern Moldova
N
uri slouched in the front pew of the small church,pretending to be sleeping. The grumbling of the policemen around him had settled into a low background hum, the sort of sound a generator makes when some of its bearings are worn. Part of him hoped they would grow so bored and disillusioned they would simply go home. Another part of him feared they would decide to lynch him.
It could go either way.
He remembered a somewhat similar operation in Africa, when he’d been working with a local government against guerrillas who had taken to a particularly nasty form of piracy—the guerrillas would hijack buses on a deserted route, holding the passengers for ransom. To prove they meant business, they would kill the person they figured was the poorest, and send body parts to the local army barracks.
Grisly as it was, it was just business to them, and part of their costs included protection from sudden army or police raids. Every time the government threatened action against them, the cost of that protection went up—and so did the ransom amount, and eventually the number of kidnappings.
The CIA began working with the government when the daughter of a prominent Episcopalian bishop was among those kidnapped. An eavesdropping program quickly revealed that the local army general was getting kickbacks—something Nuri guessed the first day he’d been briefed on the assignment.
Still, the government insisted that the local army unit be notified when Nuri arranged a raid by SEALs to rescue the hostages. He had spent several uncomfortable hours in the African commander’s home, basically under house arrest, while the raid went forward.
In the end he got out alive by suggesting that the general could make more money on the CIA payroll than by working with the guerrillas. The general proved to be very handy with numbers, and they soon cut a deal. For all Nuri knew, he was still collecting a paycheck.
He nearly jumped to his feet as his sat phone rang.
“This is Nuri,” he said.
“We’re in place,” Danny told him. “Give us ten more minutes, then come along and secure a perimeter. Sign into the Whiplash circuit when you’re ready.”
“Thank God,” said Nuri, shutting off the phone.
Northeastern Moldova
T
he key to the operation was a device that looked a little like a lawn mower, assuming the motor was replaced by a large fan mounted horizontally and covered with black plastic grills. A pair of the devices was used to create a resonating magnetic force that matched the field surrounding the farm. Placed side by side, they created a corridor approximately six meters wide for the Whiplash team to slip through without being detected.
Once past the perimeter, they moved stealthily through the woods. While there were video cameras hidden in the trees, MY-PID had calculated a safe albeit twisted path to the fields beyond. The pattern looked like a series of drunken vees. The team had to snake through the thickest foliage single file on their bellies before finally reaching a dried out stream bed where it was easier to move.
All in all it took more than a half hour to clear the wooded area. At that point the team split into two groups. One, led by Boston, began circling to the east to cover the front half of the house and property. The second, led by Danny, continued in from the south. Danny’s group would do the actual assault.
The Predator with ground-penetrating radar provided a good view of the interior layout of the house. There were three floors above ground level, not counting the crawl-space attic. The top floor was divided into two large rooms with chairs; both appeared to be empty. The second floor looked something like a dormitory area, with small rooms boxed off on either side of a long hallway. There were staircases on each end. A total of four common bathrooms with four showers apiece were located between the rooms. All but two of the twelve people inside were sleeping in the dorm rooms, one to a room.
The other two people were in what looked like a small control room at the back of the house, directly above the basement door the Black Wolves had used to get in and out of the building. They were sitting next to each other at a pair of desks arranged in an el shape against the walls. There were no windows in the room, and the door was closed.
The basement, which appeared unoccupied, was divided into a small classroom where the debriefing had been held the night before, a workout room, and what appeared to be an armory. Besides the outside door, a single staircase ran down from above at the exact center of the building. There were no windows.
Even more important than giving Danny the location of the Wolves, the synthetic radar painted the mechanical layout of the house, showing him where the air-conditioning vents were. Most ran in the interior walls. One set, however, came through the attic where the air handlers were located.
That was the starting point for the assault on the house. After freezing a pair of motion detectors on the southwest corner of the house with blasts of liquid oxygen from a small tank—the sensors worked by detecting heat—the assault team moved next to the building. A former Delta trooper nicknamed Tiny and a Marine the team called Bean pulled special booties over their shoes and donned climbing gloves. Cautiously, they began moving up the clapboard siding. The gloves contained tiny, razor-sharp points that dug into the wood; they were surrounded by a supersticky rubberized material that made the gloves worn by NFL wide receivers look like ice packs. The booties, which were strapped tight around their shoes, were made of the same material. The two men were essentially human flies, scrambling upward.
The nickname “Bean” had been shortened from Stringbean, and it was an apt description of the Marine’s body. A quarter inch shy of six feet, he weighed 140—or at least claimed to; Boston joked that if he stood sideways he would fit through a sewer grate with no problem.
Tiny, on the other hand, looked like an artist’s conception of a typical Delta Force trooper, with a well-developed upper body that featured muscles coming out of his muscles. But the image was blown once he stood next to someone—Tiny really
was
tiny, and very much so, standing five-three and a half. How he managed to get into Delta, which Danny had always thought had a strict height requirement, was anyone’s guess.
The two men climbed directly to the roof, pausing to remove the gloves and booties. Bean then grabbed Tiny’s legs and lowered him from the peak, holding him as Tiny inspected the fasteners on the attic vent.
“Star driver,” whispered Tiny.
Bean pulled him back onto the roof. Tiny reached into his pant leg pocket and removed a small cordless driver, then found the star-shaped bit in the handle compartment. Bean once more grabbed his legs, and Tiny went back over to undo the vent.
The screws came out easily enough, but the vent wouldn’t pull away from the wood. The slow settling of the house over the years had pushed the roof joists apart slightly, levering the vent into the fascia. Tiny had to return to the roof for a standard screwdriver.
In the meantime, two of the people who had been sleeping on the second floor got up. Worried that the sound of prying the vent off might alert them, Danny ordered Tiny and Bean to stop and wait.
“It looks like a guard change,” Danny told them. “We’ll just wait it out.”
The two men inside took their time getting dressed; ten minutes passed before the first one went downstairs. When the next one finally went down five minutes later, Danny told Tiny to take a shot at getting the grill off while the men were on the first floor.
Tiny leaned back over the side. He levered the screwdriver in but found he had to use two hands to get the grill to budge. Suddenly it gave way. Tiny grabbed for it, but it fell to the ground with a loud
clang
.
Everyone froze.
Danny turned to Flash, who was looking at the radar feed on his laptop. He had the first floor.
“Nothing,” said Flash. “Looks like they’re talking. Maybe hard to hear from there.”
MY-PID, watching the feeds along with Flash, warned that someone was moving on the second floor.
“Freeze,” Danny told the men on the roof.
The man got up and looked out the window. He stared for a few minutes, then went back to bed. It was impossible to tell if he had heard anything or was merely restless.
“As quiet as you can,” said Danny. “Let’s move ahead.”
Bean lowered Tiny to the opening. He slipped in, slithering around the frame as he felt his way to the floor.
“I’m inside,” he whispered. “We need the gas.”
Bean handed down a clamp and a metal pole, which Tiny attached to the top of the frame. The pole had a small pulley at its end. Tiny set a stranded metal line through the pulley, attached a small weight, then let it fall to the ground. Sugar brought up a pair of large gas canisters and attached them to the line. Tiny quickly pulled them upward, while Sugar kept pressure on a lightweight line attached to the bottom of the tanks to keep them from swinging into the building.
Tiny had just hauled the tanks into the attic when the two guards who’d been relieved earlier finally left the room on the first floor. But instead of going to their rooms, they went up to the third floor.
“Right below you,” whispered Danny.
He watched on the screen as they sat on the couch. One of them took something from a nearby table—a remote control. They were watching TV.
Tiny was supposed to drill a hole into the metal ductwork to insert a hose for the gas. But even muffled, he worried that the sound would be enough to alert the men below. He crawled next to it, waiting to see if the men might fall off to sleep or leave the room. After a few minutes he realized that he might be able to loosen some of the screws on a nearby seam. He took out a pocketknife and went to work.