Hunt the Fox

Chapter Six

He stood in the shower, staring at the spaces between the green tiles and thinking how fortunate he and his family were to be citizens of the United States. Most Americans didn’t appreciate how lucky they were, nor did they understand the thin line between peace and chaos. When he got home, he’d tell the story of the refugee family to Jenny. He tried to imagine himself and his family in the same situation, fleeing their home with as many possessions as they could carry.

As he pulled on cotton pants and a T-shirt-all in his customary black-a Turkish military aide arrived to inform him that Colonel Oz requested his presence in a room on the second floor.

“Me alone, or my whole team?” Crocker asked.

The aide looked confused. “Your team, I think.”

He found Mancini, Akil, Davis, and Suarez sitting on sofas on the second floor, drinking hot tea from glasses and cracking jokes about Davis’s dyed black beard and hair.

“Don’t you think he looks like an Arab pinup boy?” Akil asked.

The dark hair made Davis’s blue eyes stand out more than usual.

“Have you seen Colonel Oz?” Crocker asked.

Mancini shook his head. “Not since we arrived. Why?”

“What about Logan?”

“Logan? Don’t think I’ve met him.”

“What do you call a Turkish baby?” Akil asked in a low voice as Crocker craned his neck looking down the hall.

“What?”

“A kebaby.”

Crocker groaned. “That sucks.”

“What do you say to a crying Turkish baby?”

“What?”

“Shish kebaby.”

Crocker shook his head and groaned again. “Even worse. You guys drive here?”

“Unfortunately. We’ve been listening to his bad jokes for the last hour,” Davis complained.

“I would have tossed him out of the vehicle.”

“We considered it.”

Mancini asked, “Boss, what’s going on? You look like you got a lot on your mind.”

“We need to get ready to deploy into Syria tonight.”

“How?” the always practical Mancini asked. “What’s the plan?”

“There is no plan, as of yet. We just have an objective and a timeline, but no approval.”

“Let’s not do what we did in southern Mexico,” Mancini commented. In that case, with the minutes ticking down to a deadline, Crocker and his men had launched a raid before they’d gotten White House approval. Fortunately, they had saved a U.S. senator’s wife in the process, otherwise Crocker might have been drummed out of the service.

“Hopefully Oz will have more intel when I find him.”

“He’s getting his head polished,” Akil joked.

“Not funny.”

“Seriously, boss, some cultural advice,” Akil offered. “Don’t get impatient. Turks don’t like that. Pride and honor are important to them.”

“Thanks.”

He hurried down to the end of the long hall. All the offices and rooms were empty, except for one in which a man with his feet on his desk was reading a report.

“Excuse me, do you know where I can find Colonel Oz?”

The Turkish soldier picked up a phone and called someone. After he hung up, he led Crocker over to the window and pointed to a low adjoining building on the left.

“Kahvalti,” he said in Turkish.

“I don’t understand.”

The Turk mimed sipping a cup of coffee. “Colonel Oz…”

The Turkish orderly led them across an empty cafeteria and entered a private dining room where Colonel Oz sat at a round table with Mr. Asani and Logan watching a TV propped in the corner. Logan looked bored and uncomfortable.

Seeing Crocker and his men, Oz stood and pointed to a buffet set up on a table along the wall and said, “Buyrun, takilin” (Help yourselves). Before the SEALs had heard the translation, they were filling plastic plates with boiled eggs, cheese, green olives, sucuk (dried sausage), and börek (thin dough filled with meat, cheese, and chopped vegetables).

“These people know how to eat,” commented Akil as he bit into a piece of börek.

“Good,” Mancini said. “Check out the baklava.”

“Isn’t baklava a Greek word?” asked Davis.

“No, Turkish. Dates back to ancient Mesopotamia.”

They found places at the table and filled cups from white pitchers of Turkish coffee and green tea. Colonel Oz’s eyes never wandered from the TV, where a buxom blonde with elaborate makeup and a tight lavender outfit was interviewing a bearded man in a white suit.

“Who’s the babe?” Crocker asked as he sat next to Logan.

“Don’t know.”

Crocker couldn’t understand what the man on TV was saying, but he noted his extreme self-importance and theatricality.

“What about the guy in the white suit?”

“His name is Harun Yahya.”

Crocker had never heard of him. “Who is he?”

“Harun Yahya? The messianic leader of an apocalyptic Islamic sex cult, and a close friend of Prime Minister Erdoğan.”

“Really?” Crocker asked in disbelief. “I never thought I’d hear the words Islamic and sex cult in the same sentence.”

“Harun Yahya is an important man in Turkey and considered one of the most influential figures in Islam. Kind of a cross between L. Ron Hubbard and Hugh Hefner.”

“Who’s she?” Davis asked from the other side of Logan, pointing to the woman in lavender.

“Don’t know her name, but she must be one of Harun Yahya’s so-called kittens. He’s into kinky sex and cocaine, and has written something called the Atlas of Creation, which espouses some weird form of creationism, that he’s sent to academics and biologists all over the world. Those who have bothered to read it dismiss it as pure BS.”

“Sounds like your kind of thing,” Crocker said to Davis. “You ever hear of it?”

Davis shook his head.

As they watched, one of several lavender-spacesuit-clad kittens did a slow pirouette and broke into song, an off-key Turkish version of “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha.

Colonel Oz applauded and started to laugh. He rose halfway to his feet as though he was about to say something when a massive explosion blew the glass out of the cafeteria window, threw him back against the wall, and lifted the others out of their seats. Glass flew everywhere. Chunks of plaster from the ceiling crashed onto the table. Eggs, tea, and coffee spilled onto the floor.

Crocker found himself on the floor gasping for breath. He brushed the dust away from his eyes and mouth, and did a lightning-fast appraisal of the damage. When he saw that the ceiling wasn’t going to cave in, he hurried over to Oz, who lay near the wall holding his chest and coughing.

“What the fuck was that?” Akil shouted through the dust and debris.

“Car bomb, probably,” Mancini responded, picking a sliver of glass out of his thigh. “The explosion originated to our left.”

Men were scrambling, moaning, and coughing. Some crawled under the table.

Crocker, his eardrums ringing, shouted, “Clear everyone to the courtyard in back!”

He heard no gunfire or sounds of a follow-up attack.

With Oz leaning on him and wheezing, he turned to him and said, “We’re going outside to get fresh air and find out what’s going on.”

Oz nodded.

Mr. Asani, who was bleeding from a cut to his forehead, took Oz by the arm and led him out while Crocker accounted for his men. Except for a few minor cuts, they were all intact.

The courtyard, which occupied the space between the military headquarters building and barracks, quickly filled with half-dressed soldiers carrying AKMs (modernized Kalashnikovs) and Spanish-made G3 7.62x51mm NATO assault rifles. MiT officials in black were barking orders into handheld radios and cell phones, and medics were ministering to the wounded. Nobody appeared to be seriously hurt.

“The bomb went off in front of Turkish police headquarters down the street,” Asani reported. “From what I hear, the whole front of the building collapsed.”

Crocker knew that meant casualties and wounded. “You wait here,” he said, turning to Mancini. “I’m going to see if I can help.”

Akil chimed in, “I’m coming with you.”

With a borrowed medical kit and two Sarsilmaz Kilinç 2000 semiautomatic 9mm pistols, he and Akil hurried left along the main street.

As he ran, the thick, stomach-turning smell of Ritchie lying on the ground hit Crocker again. His throat turned dry and he started to feel sick. Leaning on the hood of a parked truck, he felt the muscles in his abdomen convulsing and he threw up.

“Go back, boss,” Akil said. “I can handle this.”

“No, I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not. Wait here. I’ll get you some water.”

“Screw that.”

Three short blocks later they reached the Turkish police building. Pushing through the throng of onlookers and stepping around the six-foot-deep crater and smoking ruin of what was left of the truck that had carried the bomb, they confronted the pancaked façade of a modern six-story building.

“Holy shit!” Akil exclaimed.

Crocker had seen too many scenes like this.

The sickening smell of ammonium and burning plastic lingered in the air-a telltale sign of an ammonium nitrate car bomb. Half-dressed Turkish firefighters were trying to extinguish a furious blaze on the third floor. Scattered around them lay bodies, parts of bodies, the twisted remains of furniture, glass, and rubble. People trapped in the building called for help.

“What do we do now?” Akil asked.

“Follow me,” Crocker said, crossing to a passageway along the far side of the building where rescue workers in blue-and-red helmets were carrying out people on stretchers. The heat and dust were oppressively thick. Pushing forward, they climbed through the rubble to the back. All the windows there had been blown out, and although the six stories were still intact, the whole structure looked about to collapse.

Men from inside a basement floor were shouting in Turkish and waving pieces of clothing. Crocker and Akil knelt in the broken glass and lifted out a stretcher bearing a wounded man through the broken frame of a window. They handed it up to rescue workers, grabbed an empty stretcher, passed it inside, and got ready to take the next wounded individual.

After the fourth one, Crocker’s arms were aching and sweat was dripping from his brow. “There are prisoners trapped downstairs,” he heard a woman behind him say in English.

“Where?”

“Over there.” She pointed to a pancaked section of the building to their right.

He stood and acknowledged the woman in the blue Turkish EMS uniform. “Thanks.”

Stepping over a chunk of smoldering, undistinguishable flesh, he pulled at Akil’s sleeve and pointed to the little space in the collapsed concrete where a man was attempting to pull himself through. His shoulders were stuck and he grimaced in pain.

“Calm down,” Crocker told him. “We’ll get you out.”

“American?” the trapped man asked, his face covered with white dust and vivid red blood dripping from the top of his head.

“Canadian.”

“Toronto Maple Leafs or Montreal Canadiens?”

“The Leafs, of course.”

Together, the SEALs used their legs to pivot a chunk of concrete to the right so it continued to hold back the debris above it but opened enough space for the man to worm through.

He smiled and embraced them, even though his right foot was a mess. A relief worker with a Canadian patch on his shoulder led the man off. Weird coincidence, Crocker thought, his throat and nostrils clogged with dust and smoke.

The space they had opened allowed more prisoners to squeeze out. Crocker was helping one with an injured arm when he recognized the face of the Syrian boy he had seen earlier with his family.

“Hakim.”

“My friend! My friend! Mr. Wallace.”

He knelt in the rubble, cleaned and dressed a cut near the kid’s elbow, and asked, “Where’s the rest of your family?”

“Hospital. They go to hospital.”

“Good. What’s your last name?”

“Gannani.”

“Hakim, stay with me. You can be my assistant. Okay?”

“Yes.” The boy smiled, revealing a large space between his upper front teeth.

Crocker found Akil on his knees, still passing empty stretchers to the workers inside. Wiping the perspiration from his forehead, Crocker said, “I’m taking this kid to the hospital and will meet you back at headquarters.”

“Who’s he?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“When?”

“I’m going now.”

“I mean, when will you be back at HQ?” Akil asked.

“Soon as I’m finished.”

“Remember, we’ve got a mission.”

“I know. I’ll be no more than an hour.”

He and the boy worked their way to the front of the building, stopping to disinfect and bandage wounds and clean faces. Crocker directed Hakim into the back of a blue-and-white medical van. A young female nurse with pale blond hair leaned on his shoulder and sobbed throughout the five-minute ride uphill.

“You’re doing good work,” he said to her in English. “These people need you.”

She nodded and wiped her eyes. “Nona.”

“Wallace.”

“Polish.”

“Canadian.”

Cute girl. No more than twenty-five.

He lost her in the chaos of the hospital-a parking lot and entrance lined with stretchers; inside, stressed-out EMS workers, doctors, and nurses shouting orders in Turkish and Arabic and running to and fro.

He saw a little girl lying on her back fully conscious, with her stomach, liver, and intestines exposed. He held her hand, grabbed a doctor, and locked his eyes on her dark-brown ones as they wheeled her into surgery-heroism and tragedy all around him. Everyone pitching in to save lives.

Crocker worked his way down a green corridor, administering help where it was needed-setting one man’s broken femur, removing broken teeth and debris from a soldier’s throat, handing out bottles of water to people in shock. Hakim ran upstairs to try to locate his family.

Time flew past, with more wounded arriving by the minute. Then, as though someone had turned off a tap, the flow of incoming stopped and the entire hospital and all the people in it seemed to relax.

Crocker was leaning over a gurney applying a cold compress to a minor burn on an old man’s arm when Hakim tugged the back of his shirt. From the expression on his face, Crocker could tell that he had found his family.

“Where?” Crocker asked.

“Floor three. Room 312.”

“Good. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Ten minutes later, he climbed the steps and found a large rectangular room packed with beds and cots. Some patients rested on mats on the floor. The Syrian family stood beside a bed in the far corner by a window covered with old mustard-colored curtains. The sun through the curtains cast a golden hue over their heads and shoulders.

Mother and father greeted him with hugs and kisses. Both pointed proudly to their daughter, lying on her back with her eyes closed. An IV drip fed her right arm, and her left foot was wrapped in bandages, indicating that the doctors had treated it in time.

Crocker nodded with relief and turned to the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Gannani beside him, each clutching one of his hands and smiling and weeping at the same time.

“I’m very glad,” he said.

“Allahu akbar,” the father muttered. God is great.

“Yes, Allahu akbar,” Crocker repeated. It didn’t matter that he was Christian and the Gannanis Muslim. They were all giving thanks-whether they were referring to a divine creator, karma, or random good luck. The Gannanis had no home to go back to, no country, and little more than the clothes on their backs, but they were grateful to be together with their children and alive.

Through Hakim, the parents asked Crocker about his own family and nodded with affection and muttered blessing to Allah as he described Holly and Jenny back in Virginia.

After he had confirmed with a Turkish doctor that the girl’s foot had been saved and she was out of danger, it was time to say goodbye. Mrs. Gannani insisted on pressing a little white embroidered handkerchief into his hand as a token of thanks. They hugged and kissed him again. He wished them well and walked back to the military compound feeling fulfilled in an important way.

Maybe what Jared had said back in the Meşale Café was right. Maybe larger commercial interests really were pulling the strings. But he lived by his own code, and that included protecting humble people like the Gannanis wherever they lived in the world, even if that made him naive, or romantic, or a renegade in some people’s eyes.