Authors: Brad Taylor
Brett muttered, “Always about the black man,” and turned to the roof access. Jennifer passed him the key and gave him directions.
We waited for eight minutes, watching car after car arrive at the target building. When he returned, he had Jennifer’s
abaya
and
niqab
.
She walked a short distance to put it on, pulling me out of earshot of the other men. “You know you screwed up here tonight. I was okay.”
She affixed the veil until all I saw were her gray eyes. She winked.
“The after-action review is going to be murder. But I’m glad you came. No matter what they say tomorrow, I’m not sure I would have gotten the drop on both of those guys. I probably would have ended up calling you—trying to use a cell phone in the middle of a gunfight. You made the right decision for the wrong reasons.”
They shouldn’t have, because I was the man with all the experience, but her comments meant a great deal. I winked back and said, “I’m just glad you’re okay. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
T
he Ghost scraped down the alley
in a dented and rusted rental he’d picked up in Sanaa, seeing the minaret for the grand mosque, but unable to find the entrance in the maze of side streets.
One of the oldest cities on earth, and once the capital of Yemen, Zabid had declined to a state of abject poverty, with the entire town reminding him of the refugee camps back home. Full of crumbling buildings constructed of homemade brick and mortar, all jammed together with little forethought to any overarching plan.
The drive west had been rapid on the arid desert road, with only two stops at checkpoints manned by hard men armed with AKs. He had no idea whether they were government, opposition, or simply bandits, but they let him pass. He had given himself an extra hour just for such difficulties and was pleased he had met so few. It gave him enough time to conduct a reconnaissance on the Al-Asha’ir Mosque, the location where he was told to meet the AQAP contact.
Squeezing through a gap that might or might not have been meant for vehicles, he saw the entrance to the mosque to his front. He killed the engine and waited, surveying the area. Nothing suspicious stood out. A man swatting a donkey pulling a cart, a couple of kids playing in the dirt, a lone woman clad in black carrying a bucket of water. The usual ebb and flow expected from such a town.
The mosque showed no activity. Eventually, a boy of eighteen or nineteen walked up the steps. Dressed in Western clothes consisting
of jeans and a T-shirt, he held a newspaper in his right hand.
The signal.
The Ghost gave him a few minutes, then followed. He found the boy in the large entrance hall, now deserted. The teennager saw him approach and waited, nervously shuffling from one foot to the other. The Ghost gave him the verbal bona fides and saw the boy visibly relax.
He said, “Khalid sends his regards and wishes to help in any way he can.”
“Good. I haven’t much time and am in need of his expertise. I require enough explosives to fit inside two shoeboxes, and I need it packaged in such a manner that I can place them in baggage for aircraft. Like the printer-cartridge bombs he made.”
“Carry-on baggage?”
“No. I’ll check the luggage holding the material.”
The boy nodded, considering, then said, “It can be done fairly easily. That is not much explosive. When do you need them? How soon are you flying?”
“I wish to leave tomorrow, but I am at your mercy.”
“It can be done.” The boy passed him a cell phone. “I’ll call you on this to tell you where to meet. It will be tonight.”
“One more thing: I require the explosives to be initiated wirelessly. Can you construct such detonators so that they will not draw attention?”
“You mean WiFi through the Internet, or by radio signal?”
“Internet. I will need at least five.”
“Easy. I can make them look like simple Western garage-door opener parts.”
“You? You will make the explosives and detonators? I thought Khalid was the expert.”
The boy smiled. “He is, but he has been teaching others. He was almost killed last year with Anwar al-Awlaki and knows he will eventually be found. I am your contact and will build your request. Don’t
worry. Your detonators are simple, and you only require camouflage for the explosives, no complicated barometric timing devices or other things.”
“Fine. Build them as fast as you can. I’ll be awaiting your call. I want to drive back to Sanaa tonight.”
Eight hours later the Ghost sat in the shade of a dilapidated café, drinking tea and staring at the phone he had been given, willing it to ring. He was startled when it did, then surprised when the voice on the other end wasn’t his contact. He wrote down the instructions provided, paying particular attention to the directions he would need to navigate the maze of the town.
C
aptain Brian Wilcox watched the men
loading the back of the old Yemeni army truck and realized he still had time to back out. To let the Yemenis handle the mission without him. To follow the orders he had been given.
An operational detachment commander from the Fifth Special Forces group, his team was on loan to the CIA with the mission of training a special counterterrorist unit of the Yemeni police. Paid for with CIA dollars, the unit was arguably the best in the country. Wilcox should be proud of what he and his team had accomplished, and he was, but he was sick of hiding on post training while the men he taught went into harm’s way. But that was the deal made with the Yemeni government. No Western face on any assault. Training only.
In his heart, he knew it was prudent. With the troubles wracking Yemen, and the accusations made that the government was nothing more than a Western puppet—especially given the devastation of U.S. drone strikes on AQAP for the past few years—it would do more harm than good for a U.S. Special Forces team to be seen on an assault, giving the terrorists a propaganda coup. In truth, he knew he should feel lucky they were still operational at all, since every other unit had completely lost focus on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and become nothing more than regime protection against the opposition and protests rocking the country.
Still, Wilcox felt the unit had reached a plateau and that the only way to increase the effectiveness of the training was to see how the men operated on a live mission. Relying on what the Yemenis said after the fact, knowing their predisposition to whitewash mistakes and glorify every little success, was not efficient. It was like teaching all the plays on the practice field, then never seeing the team play a game. Being forced to only listen to the team tell him they’d won, when about fifty percent of the time the predator feed he watched in the JOC showed a different score.
To take them to the next level, he needed to at least see a couple of operations from the ground. So, he’d decided to go on this one. Just him and his team sergeant, not the entire team. And not to lead it. To simply observe.
His team sergeant saw his reticence and said, “Sure you want to do this? We’ll be crucified if word gets out.”
“Yeah. It’s the right thing to do. Just be sure you stay out of the fight. No running to the gunfire.”
The team sergeant smiled. “Shit. You know this’ll be another dry hole. Khalid’s not stupid enough to advertise his location like their intel says he did.”
Wilcox cinched the Velcro on his body armor. “Let’s hope so. No way do I want to get in a gunfight. A dry hole will show us plenty about how they operate, and there’s enough intel indicators to say the place is bad.”
The Ghost read the Arabic phrase spray-painted on the brick wall and stopped his vehicle.
Right house.
Larger than most, with a second story, it had a courtyard out front but was still dilapidated, with the courtyard walls crumbling in places.
As soon as he entered, he knew he was in trouble. Four men with AK-47s faced him, showing no sign that they were friendly. His contact was not in sight. To their rear several chains hung from the ceiling,
and piles of soiled clothing lay about the room. What disturbed him most were the maroon stains on the walls and floor.
He said, “Is one of you Khalid al-Asiri?”
The first man spoke. “No, but Khalid sent us. It seems you might not be who you say you are, and we’re going to find out what’s true.”
“What do you mean? I was sent here by the Resistance. By a man named Majid. Surely you know this. Why do you not trust me now, after sending your contact to meet me?”
“Majid’s dead, and the Resistance says you might have killed him, after you killed our friends with a bomb. Maybe you’re an infiltrator for the far enemy.”
“What? That’s insane! They came to me. I didn’t seek them out. How could I be an infiltrator?”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
The Ghost didn’t bother to try running, knowing they would simply kill him. He raised his hands in the air. In short order, he was hanging from one of the chains, naked from the waist up. One of the men wheeled over what looked like a battery charger for a car.
Captain Wilcox felt the eyes of Lieutenant Bashir on him and said, “Wishing I’d stayed behind?”
Bashir said, “As long as you stay in back, I don’t mind.”
“Don’t worry. You’re in charge. I won’t do anything but watch.”
Unless things get ugly.
Bashir was a good man and a good commander, but Wilcox knew he wouldn’t follow the Yemeni’s orders if they became engaged in a serious firefight. Something Bashir knew as well. The unit was about as good as any force he had trained, with every man hand-selected from the counterterrorist police force, but they were still junior varsity. Still at the level where they could do something stupid in a firefight, and if it came down to it, Wilcox and his team sergeant would take over the operation, their lives superseding the orders to stay hidden.
Wilcox felt the truck jerk to a halt and peeked out the corner of the tarp covering the bed while the men quietly deployed. He saw them fan out in a security perimeter while the breacher placed a charge on the front door.
Swift and silent. Pretty good.
He was patting himself on the back when a wrenching scream punctured the air. Coming from inside the house. Then all hell broke loose.
T
oo late
, the Ghost realized there was no convincing the men of his innocence. They weren’t looking for the truth. They were looking for a confession, and he feared soon they would get it. His body was racked in pain, his skin slick with sweat. He barely had the strength to raise his head, and they had just started.
One of the men applied the battery charger to his naked chest again, and his frame locked up in a rictus of agony, a screeching wail torn from his throat filling the air. As quickly as it came, the pain left.
“Tell us what you did. Who you are. My friend is losing patience and wants to start working below the waist.”
The Ghost looked at the man with his eyes barely open, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth where the electricity had caused him to bite his tongue.
Allah, deliver me from this pit. Help me on my path.
The torturer said, “Your choice. So you know, when we tire of the electricity, we begin with the real pain. With knives.”
He bent down and began yanking on a pant leg, giving the Ghost a clear view of the front door so far, far away. Freedom he would never see again. He was staring at the portal, transfixed at the thought of escape, when it shredded inward in a blinding flash.
The shockwave from the detonation flattened the torturer to his front and disoriented the others. Before they had even comprehended there had been an explosion, multiple men entered the room, firing wildly.
The man on the floor bear-crawled down a hallway while the other three began firing back. Caught in the middle, the Ghost simply hung like a rack of meat, praying he wouldn’t be hit.
He saw two men in uniform go down, but more poured through the doorway, while still others fired through the windows. The three torturers continued to shoot, until one by one they were silenced. After about a minute, all that he heard was the stomping of feet and the shouting of commands. Eventually, one of the men focused on him.
When questioned, he lied, saying he was a Saudi Arabian citizen who had been kidnapped. He stated it must have been for ransom. One of the police cut him free from the chains. As he was gathering his clothes he saw them bring in the primary torturer. Alive.
He knows the truth.
The Ghost couldn’t allow the man to be taken for questioning, especially if it was questioning like he had just endured. The man would give him up in a heartbeat.
Only half-feigning rage, he screamed and raced across the room, picking up the broken iron hinge of the door as he went. Using it like a dull axe, he feverishly hammered the torturer in the skull, getting in three solid blows before he was pulled off and thrown to the floor, with all gun barrels now trained on him.
He screeched that the man had tortured him, then began to wail as if he was traumatized. A heated argument began about his fate. As he had hoped, some of the men sympathized with his actions. The commander looked at him with pity and ended the discussion. He was left alone, but the barrels all remained on him constantly now. He stared at his torturer, trying to catch a rise and fall of the man’s chest. He saw none. He watched the commander leave the room to the outside. He knew his mission was done, but was feeling some comfort in his ability to escape to fight another day.
He collected his
dishdasha
and felt the weight of the traitorous cell phone his contact had given him, along with his Saudi passport. He gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had left the Jordanian passport in the car. Having two passports of two different men would have
been hard to explain. He then remembered where he had gotten the phone and felt a stab of fear. There was no telling who or what that cell had contacted, and eventually these men would take the phone from him and scan it. At the very least he needed to delete the call history. He pulled the phone out as surreptitiously as possible. And saw he had two missed calls and a text message.