Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 2

Hot, jagged pieces of rock flew in all directions as the first mortar exploded. It was immediately followed by two more.

Scrambling for their gear, team members yelled out their call signs, and that they were “Up!”—ready to engage in the fight.

As they raced toward the areas they were responsible for covering, Berglund grabbed one of his junior guys, a man named Moss. Pointing at the women he yelled, “Get them to the pit!”

The pit was a subterranean interrogation facility from the days when the Iraqis had used the fort as a detention facility. It was the safest place for Ashleigh and her girlfriends.

“And bring back the belt-fed!” Berglund roared over the din, calling for the team’s lightweight medium machine gun.

The mortars continued to rain down, knocking out huge sections of wall and scoring a direct hit on the fort’s last remaining tower as Moss rushed the women toward the stairs.

At the bottom was a huge metal door that had been propped open with a large piece of stone. Moss herded the women inside, snatched up the twenty-four-pound machine gun, and grabbed as many cans of .338 Norma Magnum ammo as he could carry.

“Get to the back of the room,” he instructed. “And don’t come out until one of us comes for you.”

Knocking the stone out of the way, he bent his shoulder into the heavy door and gave it a shove. He was halfway up the stairs before it clanged shut.

Outside, on the fort’s decrepit battlements, the gun battle was on.

Berglund was firing his suppressed rifle in controlled bursts when Moss charged into the courtyard. “Hurry up with that belt-fed!” he shouted.

Moss ran to him, dropped the ammo cans, and began setting up the weapon.

“Did they get to the pit?”

He was about to respond when another mortar round came screeching in and exploded inside the courtyard. It blew out half the wall near the stairs, only feet from where he had just been.

“Did they get to the pit?” Berglund repeated, yelling above the ringing in his ears.

“They’re safe,” Moss shouted back.

Berglund pointed with the barrel of his rifle toward the southeast. “There’s at least fifty of them. Maybe more. Armed with AKs and RPGs.”

“Who the hell are they?”

“Who the fuck cares? Start putting rounds on them.”

Using the night-vision scope mounted to the top of the machine gun, Moss flipped off the safety and opened fire.

The .338 Norma Magnum round was incredibly accurate and exceedingly powerful. Its effective range was two thousand yards, but it was capable of hitting targets at over six thousand. The General Dynamics lightweight medium machine gun could burn through five hundred rounds a minute, and Moss was letting them have it.

But no sooner had he dropped one group than another popped up. And now they were coming at the fort from different directions. It was a swarm. They were everywhere.

Moss changed position six times as one of the team members rushed to the pit to retrieve the rest of their ammo.

Berglund had already called Langley over his encrypted satellite phone for help. He needed intel badly. Who are these guys? What are their numbers? And what kind of assets are in the area to come to the team’s assistance? Langley didn’t have any good answers for him.

Whoever the attackers were, they had struck as the CIA’s drone had come off station. A new UAV wouldn’t be overhead for at least twenty more minutes. Retasking a satellite would take at least thirty. Berglund didn’t have thirty minutes. He doubted he even had twenty. Pretty soon, they were going to be out of ammo. When that happened, this fight would be over.

Complicating matters was the fact that the SAD team was not even supposed to be in Iraq. This was a completely black operation. The CIA, though, wasn’t going to let its people die.

In an abandoned warehouse back across the Jordanian border sat a commercial eighteen-wheel vehicle. Hidden inside its long, white trailer were two heavily modified Hughes/MD 500 helicopters with their rotor blades folded in.

“Let’s move! Let’s move!” the CIA crew chief yelled as the birds were rolled out and hastily prepped for launch. Their fastest time ever from truck to takeoff was four and a half minutes. If they had any hope of helping Berglund’s team, they were going to need to cut that time in half.

The helicopters, CIA versions of the U.S. Army’s MH-6 Little Birds, had been pre-positioned on the Jordanian side of the border as a Plan B. Plan A was for Berglund and his men to roll into Syria via three separate vehicles, put a bag over the head of their ISIS target, and roll back out. The helicopters were only there in case something went wrong during the mission.

An attack of this magnitude, at such a remote location, when no one should have known that they were there, had been considered almost impossible. But here were Berglund and his men, with only minutes left to live. The aviation team wasn’t even aware of the unauthorized visitors hiding beneath the fort in the pit.

Swinging his index finger urgently above his head, the crew chief barked for the pilots to fire up their birds. “Get ’em hot! Let’s go! Now! Now! Now!”

As four support personnel snapped, slapped, and racked the helicopters’ weapons systems into place, the noise in the warehouse was pierced by the high-pitched whine of the engines coming to life.

Moments later, loose panes of glass began falling from the warehouse windows as the vibrating rotors chopped hungrily at the air.

When the pilots flashed the thumbs-up, the crew chief gave the signal for the warehouse doors to be opened and he set the birds loose.

Lifting off the concrete floor in unison, the MD 500s hovered over to the exit and took off.

The team had beaten their all-time best record by a minute and eighteen seconds. It was a valiant effort, and might have made the difference, except for what happened next.

Three kilometers out from the fort, as the copilots in each helicopter went hot with their weapons systems, a pair of surface-to-air missiles locked onto the heat from the engines. Neither had a chance.

Berglund didn’t need Langley to tell him what had happened. He could see the explosions in the night sky for himself. Emptying the last round of his rifle mag, he set it down and transitioned to his pistol.

In his oversized Texas way, he had thought he was being cute when he had welcomed Ashleigh and her girlfriends to the “Anbar Alamo.” Whether that had been prophetic or ironic didn’t much matter at this point.

With their vehicles destroyed by mortar fire and the helicopters shot down, they had no choice but to make their stand here. Even if jets could be scrambled out of Jordan, they wouldn’t arrive until it was too late. This was going to be it.

Berglund was a warrior. And that’s how he would go out — on his feet, taking as many of the enemy with him as possible. He only had two regrets — that he hadn’t better hidden Ashleigh, and that he never got a chance to eat his steak.

Sacha Baseyev was impressed. The Americans had fought harder than he had expected. Even after running out of ammunition, they had drawn their knives and tried to fight with their hands.

Only two remained alive. Both were beyond any hope of medical treatment, though. He told the videographers to hurry up and get to work.

Walking across the rubble-strewn courtyard, he approached the coolers. Brushing off a layer of debris, he removed a flashlight and opened one of the lids. Reaching inside he found it to be full of—ice. An incredible luxury in the middle of the desert.

He then went to the next cooler, and the next, studying their contents. Bottles of pink wine? Pastries? Ice cream? As decadent as the Americans were, these provisions made no sense, even for a CIA paramilitary team.

Strewn across the ground near the last cooler were steaks. Baseyev reached down and touched one. It was still warm. He counted nine of them. Nine steaks for a six-man team.

Considering how big some of the Americans were, perhaps a few planned to consume more than one steak. But that still didn’t explain the wine he had seen. American men, particularly military men, usually drank beer or hard liquor. If they drank wine at all, it certainly wouldn’t be pink.

Something wasn’t right. The contents of the coolers looked like catering for a picnic or some sort of American beach party. Then his flashlight caught a reflection a few feet away.

Underneath more debris, he found an iPhone clad in a rhinestone case. Its password-protected screen was cracked, but the image of a woman kissing one of the CIA fighters was clearly visible. This was indeed a blessing.

Holding it up in the air, he called out to his fighters in Arabic. “There is a woman here,” he shouted. “An American woman. If you find her, you can have her!”

A cheer rose from the jihadists as a handful of them rushed into the stairwell.

In the passageway below, it took two of them to pry open the pit door. The first man to force his way in took two shots to the chest and one to the head. Another gunfight was on.

This one, though, was much shorter. Ashleigh only had two spare magazines.

When her pistol ran dry, the jihadists poured in. Her colleagues were clerical workers. They didn’t carry weapons.

It took only seconds for the unspeakable to begin.