Back Blast

39

Soft noises of the street leaked into the basement room from the outside as the city woke and began going about its day, but Court Gentry lay still in his tiny closet spider hole. His open eyes flitted about the darkness and his hand rested on his Smith and Wesson pistol on the floor by his side.

There was no great mystery as to why Court could not fall asleep this morning. The pain on the right side of his midsection and the worry and frustration about his confrontation with Hanley and the implications of the in extremis gunfight at the Easy Market all beat down on his psyche like a timpani drum, and the analytical side of his brain couldn’t shut itself down before it evaluated and rehashed everything that had happened over and over till the point of utter confusion and mental overload.

After a massive bout of second-guessing, he was finally able to convince himself he had done a reasonable job eliminating the compromise from the gunfight. He’d done the obvious thing, anyway: he dumped his vehicle before returning to his safe house. He hated to do it; he needed a car, but the Ford Escort was compromised, and that made it useless to him. Even though he knew it had not been picked up on a camera at the market itself, after the shoot-out he was certain the police would begin looking at area traffic cam footage. In no time they would identify a gray Escort driving out of the area, and the time stamp on the video would match the distance from the crime scene and then the cops would draw the obvious conclusion that the driver of the Escort had been involved.

He didn’t dare drive the car back to his storage unit to hide it, because he knew anyone monitoring traffic camera feeds could simply follow the Escort’s route from where it was first seen all the way to the neighborhood around the storage facility. This would compromise the location, just as the car itself had been compromised. Instead, Court had driven the Ford to the east, obeying the speed limit and stopping at the necessary red lights, and then he parked the car in a dark lot on the edge of Howard University. He struggled to climb a rickety fence and then he dropped down on the other side. Once here, he was able to move out of the streetlights through residential backyards for a block.

When he stepped back out onto the street he wore a different cap, no raincoat, and a brown oversize thermal shirt; his backpack was under his clothing and hanging on the front of his body, giving him the look of an overweight man.

Twenty minutes later he sat on a bus alongside immigrant restaurant or factory workers either beginning or ending their workdays, and just before dawn he walked back up Arthur Mayberry’s driveway with his keys in one hand and his backpack in the other. As he headed to his basement apartment, he glanced up into the windows of the two-story brick home and nodded a greeting to the elderly African American, who stood there watching from the second floor.

Arthur just eyed him suspiciously. He did not return the greeting.

As soon as he entered his place Court reset his defensive measures and then he went straight to the closet behind the door, lay down on his blanket, and rested his head on his go bag. His sticky bandages needed changing but he wasn’t in the mood to play Florence Nightingale on himself this morning. He told himself when he woke up he’d clean up his wound, but it could wait a few hours more.

He thought he’d fall right to sleep, but that had been nothing more than wishful thinking. Instead his conscious and his subconscious mind both fought for his attention, making him unable to relax. With practiced discipline he pushed the action of the Easy Market out of his mind. This was replaced by places and faces and acronyms and operations that drifted to the forefront of his thoughts.

He tried to connect dots, to make the puzzle pieces fit into something that took shape. Hanley and Travers and Babbitt and AAP and Trieste. Carmichael and Ohlhauser and Golf Sierra.

He teetered somewhere between lucid thought and ethereal stupor for two hours, but by nine a.m. a light doze gave way to real sleep. Still, he did not find true rest. The pressures of his dire predicament filtered into his dream state. He thought of Delta Force snipers, of convenience store shooters, and of omniscient traffic cameras that followed his every move, but more than anything, he thought about an operation that had not entered his mind, either while awake or asleep, in a very, very long time.

The commercial building on Norfolk, Virginia’s Kincaid Avenue could not have looked more innocuous from the outside. A one-story red brick structure, it sprawled low and nondescript like an old factory, a few blocks from the airport and directly across the street from a small liquor distillery and a wooden pallet manufacturer. A Mexican fast-food restaurant was in walking distance, as well as a strip mall that offered both payday loans and Asian “foot” massages.

The sign in front of the red brick building read TDI Industrial Suppliers, which meant nothing to anyone, not even to someone in the industrial supply field, but buildings need a sign out front to look legit, so this place had one.

The looped razor wire rimming the high steel fence of TDI might have tipped off nosy neighbors that there was something inside worth protecting, but no one in a million years would imagine this to be the headquarters, op center, and team room of one of CIA’s most utilized and proficient antiterror task forces.

Heavy snow had fallen all morning and traffic on Kincaid was all but nonexistent, but that changed when a black Yukon appeared out of the white and stopped at the guard shack in front of TDI. After a show of IDs the vehicle continued up the stubby driveway and parked next to the sign, and three men climbed out onto crunchy snow. They stepped up to the front door of the facility, stood under a metal awning, and waited a moment while shaking off their wool coats. Soon the door buzzed and one of the men pushed it open.

In the lobby their credentials were checked by a pair of security officers wearing plain gray uniforms. Once they were vetted they walked down a hall, passing empty offices and double doors leading to a warehouse full of Conex shipping containers, until they arrived at an elevator with a key card access lock. One of the men tapped his key on the reader and the doors opened.

The car took them down, past B1 where a team of analysts and communications specialists worked, and past B2, which was divided into a large storage area and a larger underground firing range with six shooting lanes.

They stopped at B3, and the door opened to a short, bright hallway. Two more security officers stood there waiting, as they had been alerted by the cameras that picked the men up when they were still out front in the driveway. The officers wore M4 carbines on their chests and Beretta pistols on their hips, but they were affable guys who recognized one of the three visitors and treated him as if he were a visiting head of state.

“Good morning, Mr. Hanley,” the guard who looked over the IDs said.

“Morning.” Matt Hanley did not introduce the two men with him or address the guards by name. Instead he handed over his badge and submitted to a wanding from the other guard. Seconds later all three visitors passed through a door. On the other side was a small room with a camera looking down on it, and yet another door, this one with a state-of-the art electromechanical locking system.

Hanley and the two others waited silently while the door behind them clicked shut.

On the other side of the electromechanically locked door, half a dozen men were spread around a comfortable team room the size of a tennis court. A projection screen TV took up a portion of one wall; a soft and worn sectional sofa was pulled apart and scattered around in front of it. Aluminum picnic tables with built-in benches were arrayed by a kitchen area, and high shelves of tactical gear and luggage jutted out from the wall to the left of the door. A row of three wooden workbenches covered with guns, tools, and cleaning supplies spanned half the length of the back wall.

The smell of gun oil, sweat, and spicy taco sauce filled the team room.

Unlike all the security personnel in the gray uniforms outside this room, the six men here were decked out in a haphazard mishmash of civilian clothing. Two wore flip-flops and shorts, two others workout gear, and two more jeans and sweatshirts. One of the men in flip-flops was shirtless with a wet towel wrapped comically around his head in a manner reminiscent of Carmen Miranda.

On an aluminum table near the steel door that led to the anteroom, a bank of tiny camera monitors gave the men a view to the outside world, but the closest man to the monitors wasn’t paying attention to the screens right now. Instead, Keith Morgan sat at the table and looked into a small mirror on a stand, doing his best to adjust a contact lens. Next to him a bean burrito sat untouched on a wax paper wrapper.

Though he faced a wall he spoke loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. “It’s that grit and shit from Mogadishu. It’s not the contact lens, the contact is fine. I think my fucking eye is jacked.” He groaned as he took out the contact and looked closely at his bloodshot eye in the mirror. “I don’t need this bullshit, I’m supposed to go see Springsteen tomorrow night at RFK.”

Behind him on a piece of the sectional sofa that had been dragged away from the TV area, Paul Lynch sat with a canvas backpack in his lap and a thick sewing needle in his hand. He was working to repair a torn strap on the pack. None of the men in the room had been paying much attention to Morgan’s play-by-play about how his eye was bothering him, but Lynch heard the last part. Without looking up he said, “If you’ve got a combat injury you can get Zack to put you in for a Distinguished Intelligence Cross. You can pin that shit on your shirt for the concert and pick yourself up some cougar tail.” He chuckled to himself as he finished a stitch. “Cougars love wounded dudes.”

In front of the TV, Dino Redus held his Xbox controller on his lap. He worked the buttons and levers frantically while he stared at the big screen in front of him. Despite his frenzy, his Medal of Honor match wasn’t going his way, so he turned his attention to the conversation behind him and laughed at Lynch’s comment. “Five, if Zack gives you a medal for getting sand in your eye, I should get a damn ticker tape parade for that time I got shot in Islamabad.”

“It’s not sand!” Morgan shouted back as he popped his contact back in. Then he blinked a few times and looked again in the mirror. After a moment he said, “Okay, maybe it was sand. I’m good to go.” He reached for his burrito.

Sitting next to Redus on the couch, Ritchie Phelps spit tobacco juice into a plastic Gatorade bottle and adjusted the ice packs he’d strapped to both his knees with ACE bandages. Once he felt like he had them on the worst part of the swelling in his joints, he reached up and removed the towel from his head, then he shook out his freshly washed hair. “I’m the most busted-up dude on the team. If Five gets a medal and Three gets a parade, they need a marble statue of my ass right there by the bubble at Langley.”

Across the room, sitting at one of the picnic tables and typing on a laptop with a pen sticking out of his mouth, Zack Hightower shook his head in disgust and pulled out the pen. “You guys are the whiniest little bitches I’ve ever had under my command. Why can’t you all be more like Six? Just do your job and stop griping about every little fucking scratch.”

Keith Morgan was Sierra Five to Zack Hightower’s Sierra One, but this was an extremely informal unit, so he had no problem talking back to his team leader. “Zack, the only reason Six doesn’t complain about anything is because Six is fucking psycho.” He had moved on from his worries about his eye, and now he took a big bite out of his burrito. With a full mouth he said, “Ain’t that right, Six?”

Court Gentry sat at one of the workbenches on the back wall, hunched over a pistol he was buffing with an oil rag. He wore threadbare blue jeans, the sweatshirt of a college he had not attended, and a ball cap with the logo of a baseball team he knew nothing about.

Without missing a beat or looking up, Court replied, “Certifiable.”

The room transitioned back to silence, other than the Medal of Honor match, as everyone returned to their individual projects.

This was an uncharacteristically lazy morning for the men of the Goon Squad. Hightower ran a tight ship on the Golf Sierra Unit, the informal banter notwithstanding. But he was showing mercy on his team today considering everything they’d endured over the past week. All six operators of the task force, Zack Hightower included, had been in Somalia since Sunday on a particularly dangerous and austere operation. They’d completed their job yesterday morning and then climbed aboard a company Gulfstream, flew for fourteen hours, and only landed at the airport here in Norfolk at one a.m. As soon as they deplaned they loaded their gear in a van and climbed into an SUV, and then they returned along with their equipment to the team room in the TDI building. They spent a couple of hours cleaning and refitting their kit in case they had another in extremis callout, then they crashed in their bunks for a few hours.

It was after eleven a.m. now, and Hightower knew his boys would be back at work soon enough, so he let them sit around and shoot the shit this morning while he filled out his after-action report on Mogadishu.

Keith Morgan took another bite of his lunch, then his eyes flitted up to the monitors in front of him. For the first time he noticed the three men standing in the anteroom, just outside the door. “Company.”

All six men in the team room pulled firearms from holsters or grabbed subguns that they kept within reach. With the exception of Hightower everyone remained seated. Sierra One stood from the table and turned towards Morgan.

In the back Gentry one-handed an MP5 off the table, slammed a thirty-round magazine in it, and racked the cocking lever. He spun around in his seat and aimed the weapon at the door across the room.

“Who is it?” Hightower asked Morgan.

Morgan kept his eyes on the monitor for a few seconds, then he relaxed noticeably. “It’s our fearless leader.”

Hightower boomed back at him. “I’m your fearless leader.”

“Hanley, I mean. He’s got a couple of other guys with him.”

“What other guys?” asked Hightower.

“Dunno.”

“Operators?”

Morgan shook his head. “Nah. Look like a couple of brassholes from Langley.”

Hightower headed to the door, surprised that his team’s control officer was dropping in unannounced, with guests in tow.

But not too surprised. Even though Hanley didn’t spend much time here, he occasionally stopped by after a successful mission, and Mogadishu had been nothing if not textbook.

Hightower said, “Unlock it,” and he headed towards the door, but while he walked he looked over his team sitting and lying around the room. As if only noticing his motley crew for the first time, he sighed. “Straighten yourselves up. This place looks like a motherfucking soup kitchen.”

A couple of men chuckled, but no one really moved but Redus, who stood at crisp attention and saluted, a sarcastic gesture that Hightower returned with a middle finger and an eat-shit look.

Morgan punched a button on a desk panel and the massive locks in the door released.

Dino Redus did a decent Matt Hanley impersonation, a little bombastic and just slightly patronizing. Before the door opened he called out to the room in Hanley’s voice, “Hell of a job in Mogadishu, Golf Sierra! Welcome home!”

Morgan and Phelps both snorted out a quick laugh.

Hightower himself pulled the door open and bade the men into the lair of Golf Sierra. Hanley was first through the door; he shook Hightower’s hand and then called out to the others. “Well done in Mogadishu, Golf Sierra! Welcome back!”

“Thank you, sir,” said Hightower.

The two men with Hanley stood silently. One was in his forties with white hair, the other in his twenties, his hair black and slicked back. Both men wore heavy Burberry coats.

Hanley said, “Gentlemen, meet Jordan Mayes and David Lloyd. They’re from the office. SAD.”

The two suits raised hands to the men, and the men nodded back politely enough, but no one really tried to pretend like they gave a damn about a couple of suits.

Hanley, Hightower, and the two others stepped into the conference room, and the door closed behind them.

Keith Morgan mumbled to the others in the team room. “Son of a bitch. Hanley’s sending us back out, I can fucking feel it. I had tickets to see the Boss tomorrow night at RFK.”

“You mentioned that,” said Lynch. Then he added, “Fifty bucks says somebody ID’d another number three in al Qaeda and we’re heading back to Pakistan.”

Redus turned away from his video game and looked to Morgan now. “Hey, Five, maybe Springsteen will play a gig in Peshawar and you can catch him during our op.”

Morgan wasn’t laughing. “Paid two and a quarter for those tickets. This is bullshit!”

Ritchie Phelps said, “Whatever is brewing, it’s big enough for Hanley to come in person and bring suits along with him.”

Redus corrected him. “Hanley is a suit.”

“Yeah, now he is. He used to be SF.”

Morgan snorted. “That was twenty thousand Big Macs ago.”

The room erupted in laughter, and at the back workbench even Gentry cracked a half smile, but he didn’t look up from his gun. He worked diligently, perhaps excessively so, on his new Glock 19. He’d finished cleaning it, and now he got to work adding a large front sight loaded with a vial of radioactive tritium gas that would ensure it glowed in complete darkness, giving the user the ability to line his barrel up on a target despite poor lighting conditions.

Court’s last G19 had served him well, but he’d put seventy thousand rounds through it, and it was time to upgrade to the newest generation. He’d planned on taking his new piece upstairs to the range to test-fire it as soon as the adhesive in the screw on his sight dried, but now he figured he should wait around the team room to see what the hell Hanley had planned for the task force.

After Hightower and his visitors passed the one-hour mark in the conference with the suits, the speculation among the operators in the team room had transitioned from if they were about to get redeployed on a new op to if they would even have time to grab a burger and a beer before leaving the States again. They could imagine no other reason for the long meeting other than a mission, so amid the grumbles and bitching, the five men began packing deployment bags and double-checking weapons platforms.

A minute later the door opened and the four men reappeared. Hanley and Hightower came out first, then the other two CIA men. Gentry had already forgotten the young guy’s name, but Lynch and Phelps had been talking about Jordan Mayes for the past hour. According to what Gentry overheard, Mayes worked directly for the head of the SAD, Denny Carmichael. Court didn’t care much for office politics; hell, he’d only been to Langley once in his many years with the Agency. Most of his CIA career was spent in smelly barracks and team rooms like this, or else out in the field using a backstopped legend and pretending to be someone else.

After a wave to the six operators and Hanley’s repeated congratulations for the success of the Mog op, the visitors left.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Hightower turned around to the room to face his team. All five paramilitary operations officers stopped what they were doing and stared back at him, wondering where they were headed, and if they would even get the chance to pass by a drive-through for tacos to go on the way to the airport, since by now nobody figured they’d even have time for a sit-down burger meal.

Hightower said, “Sierra Six. Front and center.” Court Gentry stood and stepped forward. “Conference room,” Hightower ordered, then he surprised the rest of the team when he said, “You other four lucky fuckers have seventy-two hours R&R.”

Morgan pumped his fist in the air. “Hell, yes! The Boss is a go!”

Hightower opened the door to the conference room and held it for Gentry, but he continued addressing everyone. “Don’t forget, Monday at oh six hundred we’re rolling in convoy down to the shoot houses in Moyock to run some CQB force-on-force evolutions.”

Gentry looked around the team room at the other men. Confused. “Just me, Zack?”

“Yep. Don’t you feel special?”

“My lucky day,” he mumbled, and he entered the conference room.

Hightower followed him in with a whistle. “Kid, you’ve been hanging around these degenerates too long. Slowly but surely you’re getting a fuckin’ mouth on you.”

“Sorry, boss.”

Inside the conference room, Hightower and Gentry sat down at the table. Sierra One immediately got down to business. “Something different this time. A solo op. Real James Bond shit. Free tuxedo included. You up for it?”

Court nodded slowly.

Hightower glanced down to a small notebook in front of him. “Just kidding about the tuxedo. Local civilian attire will do.” He coughed as he checked his notes. “Anyway, the Agency has liaison intel saying some Israeli deep penetration agent has worked his way into a cell of al Qaeda in Iraq. The cell is on a gun run in the Balkans, getting AKs and such from Serbian gangsters. They are meeting in a safe house in Trieste, just over the Italian border from Croatia.

“Unfortunately for this Mossad deep-pen agent, he’s been compromised, and he doesn’t have a clue. A group of Pakistan al Qaeda are meeting them in Italy, and shit’s about to get nasty.”

Court said, “We know the Israeli agent is compromised, but the Mossad doesn’t know?”

“Affirmative. Like I said, another partner nation gave us the heads-up. We can’t tell the Israelis, apparently, because we don’t want to tip them off that we have a liaison relationship with this other nation.”

Court asked, “Who is the other nation?”

Hightower made a face at Gentry. “If we were supposed to know that, Hanley would have told us.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, this entire thing in Italy is a setup to get this agent away from his area of operations, so he can be liquidated without it causing a rift between the two AQ divisions. The plan is for one of the Pak AQ operatives on the trip to smoke him in Italy, then blame it on the Serbs.”

Court said, “And I need to stop that from happening.”

“You are so much smarter than you look. Anyway, you’ll be driven to Dulles within the hour. From there you’ll fly commercial to Milan. In Milan you will take a train to Trieste.”

Court wrote nothing down.

“You will ID the Iraqi guys when they arrive at the port, identify the Israeli asset among them, and follow them to their safe house. As soon as it’s prudent get him out of there. Tell him he is compromised and take him to the train station. After that, he is the Israelis’ problem. Remember, he must not know you are American. He speaks Hebrew and Arabic only, and you speak neither, so things shouldn’t get too chatty between you two.”

“Guess not.”

Court still wondered why CIA didn’t just pick up the phone and call Israel and tell them to rescue their own dumb agent. Seemed to him like the CIA could have just not revealed where they got their intel. But that was strategy, and that was above Court’s pay grade.

As usual, Court just figured the graybeards knew what they were doing.

Hightower asked, “Any questions?”

“Just the obvious. Why me? Why solo?”

“Hanley’s orders, but it looked to me it was Jordan Mayes’s order, which means it was Denny Carmichael’s idea. My guess is we’re afraid Mossad will find out we are in the area if we roll in with the whole task force. I imagine the Israelis will have support personnel monitoring their agent while he’s out of the Middle East. Hanley thinks you can get in and out low profile, stay fast and light if you don’t have the high drag of moving with the Goon Squad.”

Court just nodded. It wasn’t how they normally operated, but whatever.

“Got it.”

Hightower said, “No kit but what you’ll pick up in Trieste at a dead drop cache left by local Agency assets. They’ll leave you a suppressed pistol and the image of the Israeli asset you’ve got to recover. Remember, this is simple if you make it simple. Your job is to go save some asshole who can’t know who you work for. If anyone gets in your way, you are cleared hot to schwack them. We want you back in seventy-two hours, max.”

Court nodded with earnest. “Roger that, One. I’ll make it happen.”