SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox (13 page)

Crocker told Akil, now at the wheel of the Ford, to slow down and maintain a speed of thirty-five.

Assad’s guys were pissed off, so they’d shot up some flares, which took away the SEALs’ cover. Now, to make things worse, attack helicopters were up in the air patrolling—at least one SA 342 Gazelle and a couple of Russian-manufactured Mil Mi-24s.

“So much for what Katie said about there being no helicopters at the air base,” Crocker commented.

“Who’s Katie?” Akil asked.

“Katie, the analyst at Ankara Station. The Asian chick.”

“She cute?”

“Just keep your eyes on where you’re going.”

One of the 24s bore down on them. Before its .50 cal guns opened up, Akil hung a sharp right on a little dirt path with homes strung along it. In the process he nearly flipped the truck.

“Easy, cowboy!”

“I’m trying to keep us from getting lit up.”

Crocker turned to see whether the Sprinter was still behind them. Couldn’t see it through the swirling dust.

“Slow down!”

He heard the .50 cal on the helo open fire.

“Breaker. Breaker, Deadwood here. You okay?”

A few tense seconds passed before Davis answered. “We’re in the high grass about sixty feet to your right.”

Another pass from the helo and more fire. The Sprinter found a parallel road.

“You clear, Breaker? Report. Report!”

“All good. Over.”

Based on the light issuing from their windows, the modest homes they whipped past were occupied. A sniper in one of the houses fired a shot that whizzed past Hassan’s shoulder and ripped into the dash.

Crocker picked up the 416 and returned fire. He was so focused on the windows of the houses, searching for other snipers, that he forgot the Mi-24, which had veered off in search of other targets.

“Pedal to the metal,” Crocker shouted.

“Make up your friggin’ mind,” Akil growled back.

“Stay on this road,” Hassan shouted. “It will take us straight into Idlib.”

They entered through streets piled with trash and rubble. It seemed unlikely that people still lived here, but lights shone from some of the damaged structures and they heard the occasional crack of small-arms fire in the distance.

Crocker stuck his head out the window and saw the Sprinter. “Nice work, Manny,” Crocker said into his head mic. “See the bird? You good?”

Mancini, who was driving the Sprinter, responded, “Yeah, Deadwood, high and tight. The bird has flown west. What’s the thinking at this point? You looking for real estate?”

“You see something you like, you let me know. I got cash.”

“I like the collapsed-roof thing with the jihadist graffiti sprayed all over it.”

A very pregnant dog wandered in front of the truck and stopped. Akil had to honk repeatedly to get it to move.

“You guys trying to wake the dead?” Mancini asked through the earbuds.

“No, we’re trying to get your mother to move,” Akil responded.

“Up yours with a rhino horn, douchebag.”

“The good news is that we have the sarin, and aside from a couple of cuts and bruises, everyone’s intact,” Crocker reported.

“I question, boss, whether Romeo is completely intact,” Davis said.

“More together than
you’ll
ever be, surfer dude pothead,” Akil shot back.

“Focus, guys,” Crocker said. “We’re still in Syria. Looks like we’ve lost our escort and probably have little chance of finding him. We’ve also got about an hour before the sun starts to rise.”

“Rising sun means Syrian helicopters, and helos mean rockets,” Mancini said.

“Thanks, grasshopper.”

“So what’s the thinking, boss man?”

Crocker turned to a shell-shocked Hassan in the front seat and asked him a series of questions about the streets ahead. Then he got back on his headset and said, “Hassan knows a completely bombed-out, deserted part of the city where we can hide till nightfall.”

“Sounds like our kind of joint,” said Akil.

“No electricity, no toilets, no running water,” Mancini responded. “The Idlib Hilton. Lead the way.”

T
hat was
almost too easy
,
Crocker thought as they entered what once must have been an upscale part of town, now completely destroyed. The Syrian air force had leveled everything. They traveled a half-dozen blocks beside a little park with shattered, dying eucalyptus trees without seeing one light or any evidence of life besides an occasional rodent. There were signs of phosphorus bomb damage on practically every building.

Too fucking easy
,
Crocker thought. He had expected more resistance from the Syrians at the air base. Then remembered that Assad’s men were busy chasing ISIS jihadists.
Our timing was perfect, for once.

Hassan pointed to some wreckage ahead on the right. “Turn in there,” he instructed. “It used to be a primary school. I had a girlfriend who taught there.”

“You had a girlfriend?” Akil asked. “I thought you were into guys.” But Hassan wasn’t laughing.

The three-story modern structure looked as if it had been abandoned for months. Bombs had landed on the roof, collapsing the middle of the building so that the resulting wreckage formed a giant V.

“Welcome to paradise,” Akil announced as he emerged from the cab of the Ford, farted loudly, and stretched.

“First let’s find a place to hide the trucks,” Crocker said. “Then I want you and Suarez to do a quick recon of what’s left of the building.”

“We looking for ghosts?” Akil was in a jaunty mood.

“Ghosts, rats, busted gas lines.”

“Roger that.”

“Davis, you establish comms with Ankara Station. Let ’em know that we’ve got the sarin and we’re planning to stay here until it gets dark.”

“Awesome.”

They found a garage in back that was big enough to accommodate both trucks and made them impossible to spot from above. Several of the washrooms on the first floor still had a trickle of running water—dirty and undrinkable, but enough to rinse their faces. Crocker, Mancini, and Davis pushed the trash out of a classroom with a view of the street.

“We’ll assemble here,” Crocker announced. “Soon as Akil and Suarez get back we’ll set up a sentry schedule and the rest of you bums can catch some z’s. I’ll take the first watch.”

No vehicles had passed along the street so far, which was what they’d hoped for. Since all the structures around them lay in ruins, there seemed no reason for anyone to enter the neighborhood. The buildings had already been looted.

When Ankara Station asked the name of the street and the building number, Crocker went looking for Hassan. He found him standing in a stairway, talking on his cell phone, which he found odd.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked.

“I was trying to reach a friend,” answered Hassan.

“Probably not a good idea to use it. If the Syrians are looking for us, which I assume they are, they could be using scanners to pick up cell-phone signals.”

“I’ll power it down.”

“Do it now. Thanks.”

He thought of taking the phone away from him, but decided against it. The kid had been useful and cooperative.

Akil and Suarez’s recon of floors one, two, and three yielded nothing surprising. The classrooms and offices they had been able to reach had already been stripped of valuables—desks, computers, calculators, books, toilet fixtures, and maps. They were about to wind up their search when Suarez noticed what looked like fresh wax drippings leading toward the basement.

Cautiously and quietly, they descended and entered a dark hallway that led to storage rooms, a laundry, and an electrical room. Here, too, doors had been ripped off their hinges and everything of value taken. Akil spotted water on the floor of the last storage area ahead. Strung from one wall to the other was a line containing items of women’s laundry, including two black bras.

In the far corner, behind a large heating unit, they found mattresses, blankets, and two trembling women. One held a pair of scissors, the other a small kitchen knife.

“We’re not going to hurt you. We’re not going to touch you,” Akil repeated over and over in Arabic.

The women didn’t believe him at first. But when the one with the long dark hair and amber-colored eyes asked where he was from and he told her that he and his colleague were humanitarian workers from Canada, she started to relax.

Her name was Amira, she said, and explained that the school had been destroyed with the rest of the neighborhood five months ago. She and her friend Natalie had both been teachers at the school. Along with many others, they tried to flee the country, but because they were young unmarried women, they had been picked up by pro-Assad forces and raped.

After about three weeks of abuse, they managed to escape. Hiding during the day and traveling at night, they had returned to the school. They’d now been in the basement for a month and a half, surviving on emergency supplies the looters hadn’t managed to find.

Akil told them that he and the men he was with were leaving for Turkey after sundown. When he asked the women if they would like to travel with them, they looked at each other and nodded.

Amira said that her friend thought she might be pregnant and needed medical attention.

“We’ll get that for you in Turkey,” offered Akil.

The opening chords of the darkly beautiful “’Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk played on Crocker’s iPod. There was something hauntingly sad about the way the angular chords built to the melody. Crocker had read somewhere that the jazz genius had composed it when he was eighteen years old.

It might have been written for this moment—the broken, abandoned school, his men snoring gently behind him, the light from the sun slanting through the wreckage. Kids had played here. The rooms were once filled with laughter and young, eager faces. It bothered him that one man—one tyrant and his supporters—had been allowed to wreak so much damage. How did the world allow this?

Birds chirped, unaware of the human madness around them. A breeze rattled aluminum roofing that had once covered the entrance to the playground.

Where are the children now?
he wondered, aware of an engine chugging in the distance. As it slowly drew closer, Crocker shouldered his HK416 and decided to take a look.

Standing at the far end of the third floor where the roof was still more or less intact, he peered out the shattered windows and saw an old Corolla sedan approaching tentatively, stopping every ten feet as though the people in it were looking for a specific address. Nothing about it appeared alarming, but still he kept it fixed in the crosshairs of the EOTech 553 gunsight.

As the Corolla drew within thirty feet of the school, a curious thing happened. Hassan emerged from the building and waved it down. Crocker watched as the Corolla stopped and Hassan ran to the back door, opened it, and helped a very pregnant young woman out. They embraced. Then a young man emerged from the driver’s side and kissed them both.

What the hell is this? A family reunion?

Crocker watched as the driver hurried to the back of the car, popped open the trunk, and handed the pregnant woman a suitcase. Then he returned to the Corolla, waved to Hassan and the woman, and started to back the car down the street.

Who’s she?
Crocker asked himself.
Is she the person Hassan was talking to on the phone?

His thinking was interrupted by the whoosh of an approaching RPG. The Corolla was twenty feet from where it had left her when it hit the car from behind and exploded, destroying the car and throwing Hassan and the pregnant woman to the ground.

The pregnant woman screamed repeatedly in Arabic. The men downstairs stirred and reached for their weapons. Crocker flew down the concrete steps two at a time, his 416 ready.

What the hell is going on?

He found Hassan and the pregnant woman lying on the pavement, hugging each other and trembling. He helped her up first. She was bleeding from a cut to her forehead and was blubbering hysterically, pointing at the burning car and saying,
“K…K…
Khoya…”

Hassan pointed to a piece of shrapnel embedded in his arm. “Look. Oh God!”

“Get inside!” Crocker shouted. To the woman: “Lean on me. Hurry.”

She struggled to walk. “
Khoya! Khoya!
My…brother!”

“Come.”

“My brother! My brother!”

He had to pick her up in his arms. With his free left hand he reached out to stop Hassan, who was stumbling toward the burning car in a half crouch. He was holding his ears and appeared disoriented.

“Hassan, get back inside the fucking school! Turn around!”

Hassan pointed toward the car and mumbled something. Then a peal of automatic gunfire came from beyond the car and ricocheted off the pavement around them. Crocker ran the woman to the schoolhouse. He passed Mancini wearing running shorts and cradling an M7A1.

“Incoming. Down the street! Past the burning car!”

“Who are they?”

“Unclear! Get Hassan. Bring him in. He’s fucked up.”

Mancini grabbed Hassan under one arm and scooped up the suitcase with the other. Hassan struggled, seemingly determined to rescue the man in the burning car even though he was surely burnt to a crisp by now.

Akil ran out to help wrestle a very resistant Hassan inside. Crocker left Suarez to watch him and the pregnant woman, then returned with Davis to try to deal with the attack from the end of the block.

“Who the hell are they?” asked Davis, slamming a mag into his automatic rifle.

“Unclear.”

“How many?”

“Unclear again.”

What they didn’t need was a big commotion, which could bring Assad army reinforcements and air support. They were completely vulnerable and didn’t even know their way out.

“You two stay here and defend,” Crocker said to Mancini and Davis, who returned fire from the front of an adjacent structure that appeared to have been a church of some sort. “Akil and I are going to try to flank them from the right.”

“What about Hassan?”

“Suarez is guarding him and trying to calm him down.”

He signaled Akil to follow him to an alley that ran behind the buildings. Much of it was blocked with rubble and garbage like broken bicycles and furniture, making it impossible for a vehicle to pass. They squeezed through, Akil in Marine Corps shorts and a white Hooters tank top, Crocker in his usual black tee and pants.

None of the men had shaved in the past several days, so they didn’t stand out. Nothing to mark them as Westerners, or trained operators. Even their weapons weren’t that unusual. HK416s with attached grenade launchers, SIG Sauer P226 handguns, SOG knives, an RPG-7 with an assortment of warheads that Crocker carried in pouches on his black combat vest.

The firing on their left was close. Sounded like mostly small-arms stuff, with the occasional boom of a grenade. Seeing a badly damaged apartment tower ahead and to the right, Crocker signaled that this was their objective. He veered right, breaking a sweat, hopped a low concrete wall, pushed past a bloodstained mattress, and entered the back stairway. The trapped, stale air tasted like bitter coffee.

He pointed upward. At four o’clock, the stairway was completely blocked by a collapsed wall, so he turned left into a hallway and then into a large apartment that had been completely burned out. Ran in a crouch to the front windows, past the burnt remains of sofas and rugs, a child’s crib, a cracked flat-screen hanging precariously from the wall. Akil followed.

Below and slightly left sat a jeep and a Toyota pickup with a nasty-looking .50 cal machine gun mounted in its bed. Several men with beards were crouched around the front of the jeep, firing automatic weapons. The jeep flew a yellow flag with the green logo of an arm raising an assault rifle and over it in Kufic script “Party of God.”

“Hezbollah,” Akil whispered.

Crocker hated those fuckers, having tangled with them before in Lebanon. He was aware that the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia had come to Assad’s aid in the south and east. At least they weren’t encountering Assad’s army. Not this time.

The pickup was in the process of turning and backing up so that the .50 cal would have a clean shot down the street at the school.

Crocker pointed to the .50 cal and raised the RPG-7 to his shoulder. Then he pointed at Akil and signaled for him to deploy downstairs. Akil nodded and hightailed it, clutching his 416 and pushing a grenade into the M320 launcher on its lower rail.

Crocker knew he’d have only one shot before he gave away their position, so he loaded in a 40mm PG-7VR rocket, aimed carefully, and fired. The round glanced off the roof of the truck and hit the guy manning the .50 cal square in the back. The following explosion had the red aura of a direct hit.

Goner!

The hajis below turned and directed their fire at his window. With bullets tearing up the concrete and brick around him, Crocker quickly reloaded with an OG-7V fragmentation charge and fired again. This round hit the back of the jeep, causing it to lift off its rear axle and flip over. The resulting shrapnel downed most of the terrorists around it like a set of bowling pins.

He wanted this over as soon as possible, so he ran down the stairway as fast as his legs could take him. Through the drifting smoke he found Akil on the street, mopping up.

Pop-pop-pop!

A shot to the head finished off one Hezbollah terrorist. Two in the chest silenced another.

“Nice shot from the window,” Akil said poking him in the chest with his elbow.

“Like picking off ducks in a pond.”

Crocker was fired up to the max, wanting to get out of Idlib as soon as possible. Back at the school, he saw Davis on the radio talking to Ankara Station, his hair matted across his forehead, his eyes bloodshot, his frustration growing.

Because the weather had cleared and Assad’s air force maintained complete control of the airspace, it was deemed impossible to rescue Black Cell and the sarin canisters by helicopter without taking a tremendous risk. A downed U.S. or NATO helo in Syrian territory wasn’t something the White House appeared willing to tolerate. Still, the military maintained that they were looking for a safe LZ while they waited for approvals.