Warning Order (15 page)

Warchild's eyes flashed with alarm. “How is that possible?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Well, you need to find out.” Warchild panted.

“Dude, how am I going to do that?”

“You're a smart guy. I'm sure you can figure it out.”

“This mission was totally fucked,” Parker said, voicing aloud what he'd been thinking on the way over. “We lost Sanchez and Starks, and the new guy, the SEAL—”

“Bonds—his name was Bonds,” Warchild groaned, forcing out five more reps before racking the weight and jumping to his feet.

“It's fucking combat. Don't tell me you're losing your nerve already.”

“You know that's not it. I just don't like putting my ass on the line without knowing what's going on.”

Warchild remained hard as nails. “No one asked you to join the Anvil Program; you volunteered, remember?”

“Yeah, but with Barnes dead—”

“You believe that shit? You really think that Kane took the boss down?” Warchild asked, taking a menacing step closer to Parker.

“Shit man, I don't know.”

“All you got to do is what I tell you. You see what happened to Boland when he stepped out of bounds. Is that what you want?”

“Boland deserved better.”

“Boland was a piece of shit who got sloppy. The only reason he was out there was because he was trying to fix his own fuckup.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guys like him—and fucking Mason—they think they're so smart. Always running around acting like James Bond and shit. Let me tell you something about Boland. All that dude had to do was take a box from point A to B, and he got jacked by a bunch of ragheads riding around in Toyota pickups.”

Parker knew his team leader hated both Boland and Mason, and he was beginning to see how personal this operation was to him.

“You're a sled dog, and your job is to pull the sled. Me, I'm a team leader. My job is to know what's going on. Do yourself a favor and get that through your head before you end up like Mason.”

Parker was starting to get fed up with the hard-guy act.

“You know they cleared him, right?”

“Who, Mason? Please, that dude is a terrorist and a traitor. If he and that bitch Renee knew you were with the program, they wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet in your skull.”

Parker was confused. “It's not like that.”

“Believe me when I tell you it's exactly like that.”

T
he blood covering the passenger side of the Ford F-250 glistened in the early morning sunshine. Al Qatar's first thought was to have his men clean it, but after a few moments of staring at the garish vehicle, he thought it looked better this way.

Moving to the tailgate, he took a seat. Before him, a plume of thick, black smoke rose above Rabia.

Jabar, al Qatar's most trusted lieutenant, had selected a handful of his best men and overran the border crossing easily. The Iraqi police who hadn't run had set up strongpoints within the government buildings, but Jabar had burned them out, and now the city was bathed in smoke.

“Emir,” Jabar said, drawing the jihadist's attention to the man kneeling before him.

Al Qatar looked scornfully at the wretched captain. The man's neat uniform was covered in the blood that had poured out of his broken nose, and both of his eyes were already beginning to swell.

“I thought we had reached an agreement,” al Qatar said, blowing a cloud of smoke into his eyes.

“Emir, I only did what I was ordered,” the man babbled, garnering a savage kick from one of al Qatar's men.

“And who ordered you to resist me?”

“General Husam, Emir.”

“And where is he now?”

“Tal Afar.”

“That is a shame, and you should have known better. Trust is what separates us from the beasts of the world. Did you know that, Captain?”

“Yes, Emir.”

“Look over there and tell me what you see,” he commanded, pointing to the edge of the city, where his men were hanging the survivors from the power lines that led to the train station.

“You are hanging my men, Emir.”

“That's right, and all of that could have been avoided if you had just kept your word. It really is a shame.”

While his men finished gathering up the border guard's equipment, vehicles, and weapons, another group was boring holes in the massive fuel tanks situated near the tracks. One of the fighters had a small video camera, and he was documenting everything in hopes of dissuading any further resistance.

Al Qatar was most annoyed that instead of heading to Mosul, he now had to go out of his way to deal with General Husam. He had a very tight timetable, and the detour could prove costly.

“Burn everything, and hang him next to the rest of the traitors,” he ordered, casually tossing the cigarette to the ground.

“Emir, please,” the man begged, but al Qatar turned to the doughy commander anxiously awaiting his instructions.

The commander's thin mustache glistened as sweat poured down his face. The neck of his desert uniform was soaked through, giving him an unhealthy appearance.

“Are we ready to go?” Al Qatar asked.

“Yes, Emir. I have just been told that your artillery will reach the city within the hour.”

“Good. Jabar, let us be on our way,” al Qatar ordered as he opened the bloodstained door and took a seat in the stolen pickup.

  •  •  •  

It took more than an hour to get his men gathered up and on the road, and by the time al Qatar could see the outskirts of Tal Afar, he was in a foul mood. The only saving grace was the black Pelican case that sat on the seat next to him. He hoped the Americans thought they had destroyed it back in Syria, but if not, he was sure they wouldn't admit it had fallen into enemy hands.

He had heard the imams preach about the “sword of Allah,” but he'd never truly believed such a thing was real until Khalid told him the capabilities of the equipment in the case. The thought of knocking out American air power filled him with a wave of joy that almost made everything else he was doing seem trivial.

Still, al Qatar knew that for him to use the weapon successfully, he had to make it impossible for the United States to ignore him.

The first boom from the stolen howitzer echoed across the desert, rattling the truck as it crested a small hill. Tal Afar appeared before him: a tranquil, gray smudge on the horizon.

A flash of light erupted as the shell erupted in a shower of golden sparks and black earth, followed a few seconds later by the guttural echo of the explosion. Small-arms fire chattered sporadically in the distance, announcing the first thrusts into the city. Ali gently pulled the truck to the side of the road in order to let the rest of the fighters join the assault.

“Keep going,” al Qatar commanded.

“Are you sure, Emir?”

“Don't worry, I'll be fine. But if I am not close, the men might run.”

Ali waited for three up-armored Humvees to pass before sliding in behind them. The fighters that Jabar had brought with him had already spray painted over the Iraqi markings that adorned the American vehicles. “You did a good job,” he said.

“I thoroughly enjoyed myself,” the Arab replied. “It is a shame we wasted so much money bribing the general, however.”

“Never fear, Jabar. He will pay for every cent he took.”

Al Qatar had met his second-in-command at a CIA-run training camp in Jordan, where a proxy army was being trained to fight against President Bashar al-Assad's government troops in Syria. The agency wanted al Qatar to lead the men across the border, since he'd already been vetted by headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but, as usual, the jihadist had plans of his own, and the day he met Jabar, he knew he had a man he could count on.

Jabar's father had been hopeful when the Americans toppled Saddam in 2003, and despite the lawlessness emanating from Baghdad, he told his son to be patient. Everything changed on a warm summer day in 2005 when a Shiite car bomb killed his family while they were on their way to the market.

There wasn't enough of his family left for a proper burial, and the rage growing within him demanded blood. Jabar joined a group of fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but was forced to flee to Syria after Task Force 145 killed the terrorist leader north of the Iraqi city of Baqubah.

In Jordan, al Qatar worked feverishly to fan the hatred smoldering inside Jabar, and by the time they crossed the border, the jihadist led his very own militia. Instead of fighting the government troops besieging Aleppo, his men quickly set upon the loose confederation of rebels hunkered inside the city, and in less than a month, al Qatar had more than five hundred hardened fighters under his command.

As they approached the front lines, al Qatar turned his attention to the light-artillery pieces Jabar had taken from the Syrian army. They were firing at concrete positions that had been set up along the road. Toyota Hiluxes with hastily mounted DShK and PKMs raced back and forth across the open plain, spraying harassing fire into small clusters of Iraqi infantry.

The radio on the dashboard crackled to life, and one of his men yelled for more RPGs near the south side of the city. “They have tanks, we need the rockets now.”

“We must pull back; there are too many,” another voice ordered.

Al Qatar snatched the radio from its mount and ordered, “You will not pull back. Tell me where you are.”

The net went silent once the men recognized their commander's voice. Finally, someone spoke up.

“We . . . we are near the south wall,” the man mumbled.

“Take me there before they break through,” he commanded.

His knew a core group of his men were battle hardened from their time fighting the Syrian army, but the majority of the fighters at his disposal were used to slaughtering civilians. The Americans had trained the Iraqis defending the city, and some of his fighters sounded like they were on the verge of running away.

Ali punched the accelerator, while the men in the back of the Ford hammered the roof of the truck with the flats of their hands, jeering at the men cowering near the rear.

Al Qatar wished he'd brought more men from Kobani, but he'd already lost too much fighting for the city. He'd worked hard to gather fighters who'd stood toe to toe with the Americans in places such as Fallujah and Ramadi, and they had become the backbone of his ruthless shock troops. Like him, most were Sunni, and ever since Saddam had been driven from power, they had been waiting for their chance to strike back at the Shia minority.

Once American troops left Iraq in 2011, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had made the situation worse by cracking down on the Sunnis in the north, and al Qatar knew the country was ripe for regime change.

Ali stopped the truck a hundred meters short of the southern gate, and as Jabar got out of the backseat, al Qatar could see that some of the men had already begun to fall back in the face of the Iraqi armor. Jumping out of the cab, he slipped the dead captain's bulletproof vest over his head and grabbed his M4 off the seat.

In Syria, they had been forced to fight with whatever they could get their hands on, which was usually older Soviet-era weapons, but America had left behind an arsenal when it withdrew, and al Qatar was hungry to get his hands on the NATO weapons.

A few feet ahead, three of his men climbed onto an armored Humvee, its front end twisted and burned from an RPG. Dead soldiers lay facedown in the rocky soil. One of his fighters ducked into the turret and expertly charged the Browning .50 caliber mounted to the truck.

The heavy machine gun boomed as the gunner fired over the heads of the retreating fighters, causing al Qatar to plug his ears against the concussions. He ducked away from the gun, pausing to take aim at an Iraqi soldier who was trying to lead a squad of soldiers into the fray. Al Qatar lined up the iron sights on the man's back and gently pulled the trigger.

The round hit the man just below the back of his head, knocking him face-first into the ground. The soldiers who'd been following him scattered or began looking around to see who else was in charge. Given the golden opportunity, al Qatar's gunner traversed the .50 cal in their direction, cutting the massive rounds across their backs.

Off to his left, a gun crew rammed a shell into the breach of a Russian 122 mm D-30 howitzer, while one of his lieutenants formed more fighters into a chain near the back of an old Opel truck. As they began to unload more of the shells, the gunner yanked the lanyard and the howitzer roared, sending a high-explosive shell toward the city.

The retort of the huge gun sent a wave of dust billowing over the area. Like clockwork, the gunner yanked the breach open and yelled for another round.

Al Qatar, waving the dust out of his face, made a beeline for an 82 mm mortar crew, with Jabar right on his heels. The men were just getting the tube settled into the baseplate when one of them recognized their commander and slapped his teammate on the back to get his attention.

“Yes, Emir?” the man asked.

“Fire at those tanks, right now.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

The man grabbed a round off the ground and hoisted it up to the tube while his comrade stood on the baseplate. As soon as he was set, he dropped the round down the tube, and the mortar bucked, slamming the baseplate into the ground.

Without a sight, they were aiming down the tube at their target, and the first round sailed harmlessly overhead.

“Keep firing,” he commanded.

Meanwhile, he yelled at the fleeing fighters to “Turn and fight!” Most of them ignored him, deciding that the tank was a bigger threat, forcing him to raise his rifle as another knot of deserters tried to dart past.

“I said stand and fight!” he yelled before firing a burst into two of the men. The fighters saw the men hit the ground and quickly decided they would take their chances with the tank.