Arctic Storm Rising Read online

  Trailing smoke, a rocket-propelled grenade skimmed just over the downed Super Hercules and arrowed on to impact a couple of hundred yards beyond the HH-60W. It went off in an orange flash and a fountain of sand. The sight dragged Flynn out of his daze. Somebody out there on the other flank had an RPG launcher. And if they scored a hit on this last intact helicopter, he and the other Americans still alive at the crash site were royally screwed. Their enemies weren’t going to sit on their asses and wait while the Air Force flew another search-and-rescue helicopter all the way from Egypt.

  His hearing was coming back a bit, just enough to let him pick up the harsh, staccato rattle of automatic-weapons fire coming from the other side of the downed cargo aircraft. Some friendlies over there must have survived the suicide bomber’s detonation.

  On this side, the surviving white-robed attackers were also starting to stir, recovering from their own daze. Another few seconds and they’d be back in action.

  Flynn scowled. The longer this fight went on, the worse it was going to get. It was time to end this—at least here. Rolling over, he tugged a ball-shaped M67 fragmentation grenade from one of his equipment pouches. Quickly, he flicked its safety clip away with his left thumb, twisted the pull ring, and yanked it out to release the pin. One swift glance over his shoulder showed him his target. Without hesitating, he reared back and lobbed the grenade high into the air, rolling back onto his stomach with the same fluid motion.

  “Frag out!” he screamed, hoping like hell that Dykstra and Kasper could hear him through their own blast-deafened eardrums.

  As soon as the grenade left his hand, its safety lever flipped open and fell away. The grenade itself soared on through a smooth arc until it thudded down high up on the dune, several yards above and beyond the little knot of prone tribesmen. Then gravity took over and it rolled downhill, right into their midst.

  Flynn buried his face in the sand again.

  Craaack! The grenade exploded, sending lethal, razor-edged fragments sleeting through a fifty-foot radius.

  Flynn looked up. Through a small puff of dirty gray smoke drifting downwind, he saw the results. Three of the five remaining attackers were motionless—ripped into blood-soaked corpses by dozens of pieces of steel. Two staggered upright. Scarlet streaks down their faces and shredded robes showed that they hadn’t escaped the blast unscathed, but they still clutched AK-47s in their hands.

  He grabbed his M4 again. “‘Iisqat al’aslihat alkhasat bik! Drop your weapons!” he shouted.

  Instead, they whirled toward him, apparently still determined to carry on this fight.

  “Assholes,” Flynn muttered. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed off six more rounds. Hit multiple times, the two white-robed men crumpled to the sand and lay still. They were either dead or dying, he decided. Painfully, he scrambled back to his feet.

  The sound of gunfire from the other side of the C-130 seemed to be trailing away—fading from a near-continuous crackle of shots to isolated pop-pop-pops. With his carbine up and ready to fire, he moved warily off in that direction.

  Greasy black smoke from the burning Mi-17 made it difficult to see much. Bodies, some in white robes, others in camouflage uniforms, were scattered in all directions. He spotted White’s gray-haired, skeletal form lying huddled near the shrapnel-torn tail section of the wrecked Super Hercules. Whether the man was dead or simply unconscious wasn’t clear, and Flynn wasn’t inclined to go check . . . not just yet.

  At least one of the former Special Forces contractors was still alive, though seriously wounded and pretty clearly in shock. He was trying to apply a combat tourniquet to his own mangled right thigh . . . but his blood-soaked hands were shaking too badly.

  “Hang on, trooper,” Flynn murmured, kneeling beside him. He set his M4A1 down. “I’ve got this.” Quickly, he slipped the tourniquet band through the buckle, pulled it tight, and wrapped it around the man’s leg. Then he carefully twisted the tourniquet rod, further tightening everything down until the blood pulsing out through gashed flesh slowed and then stopped.

  “Thanks, man,” the wounded man said weakly. “Thought I was fucked.” But then his eyes widened as he saw something looming over Flynn’s shoulder.

  Crap. He desperately grabbed for his weapon and whirled around, already knowing it was probably too late. One of the tribesmen had emerged from the thick black curtain of smoke, with a rictus grin like the Angel of Death plastered across his face, and an AKM pointed straight at Flynn’s head. The Libyan’s finger was already tightening on the trigger.

  Crack.

  The tribeman’s chest exploded, torn apart by a 5.56mm round fired at close range. He fell in a boneless heap and bled out across the sand.

  Zalewski appeared out of the smoke, still holding the short-barreled carbine he’d fired one-handed. The big PJ’s left arm, apparently broken, hung limp at his side. Flecks of dried blood were spattered across his camouflage and body armor. Grimly, he prodded the Libyan he’d shot with the toe of his boot. “Pretty sure that was the last of ’em,” he said softly.

  Flynn breathed out. “Sure hope so, Zee.” Slowly, he got back up. “And . . . thanks.”

  Zalewski looked away from the dead tribesman and toward him. Lines of pain and exhaustion were drawn across his broad face. “What are your orders, sir?” he asked. “That we’re bugging out, I hope.” He nodded at the burning helicopter. “Because if there are more of these bastards out there, that smoke’s going to draw ’em like flies to rotting meat.”

  The big man’s warning agreed with Flynn’s own somber assessment. They might have destroyed this first band of attackers, but there was no telling how many more enemy fighters were lurking at the nearby oasis—waiting to see the results of their carefully planned ambush. And with so many dead and wounded of their own, the smart move for Wizard One-One’s survivors and what little was left of the black ops team was to abandon this crash site . . . and fast.

  Thirty minutes later, Nick Flynn sat with his legs dangling outside the open door of the heavily loaded HH-60W helicopter. Rotors beating hard, the CSAR bird lifted slowly off the ground, fighting for altitude as it flew east into the darkening sky. Bone-tired, he held on tight to the doorframe, craning his head to scan the desert rippling past below them—watching closely for any sign of another enemy ambush. Behind him, injured men were crammed into every available space inside the Jolly Green II’s cabin. There hadn’t been room or payload capacity to bring away any of their dead.

  Between them, the black ops team and Wizard One-One’s crew had lost more than half their strength. Bill Wade would probably lose his leg. Mike Camarillo was dead, gunned down by the terrorists just outside the wrecked C-130. Zalewski’s arm was fractured, snapped when he’d been tossed around inside the downed turboprop’s crumpled fuselage by the suicide bomb blast. Most of the ex–Special Forces veterans working for White had been killed, some by the bomb, the rest during the ensuing close-quarters gun battle—but they’d gone down hard, taking most of the attacking tribesmen on that flank with them.

  White himself was still alive, though he’d been shot in the chest. Apparently, the AK round had missed his heart, assuming he actually had one. Right now, the intelligence officer was propped up against the rear bulkhead, swathed in bandages, but conscious and glaring at Flynn.

  “Fast movers at ten o’clock high,” Dykstra reported over the intercom.

  Flynn looked up and spotted twin contrails arrowing westward across the sky, coming their way.

  “Wizard One-One, this is Hammer Three-Five,” a crisp voice called over the radio from one of the two U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles vectored to this location. “Can you confirm the target is clear?”

  “Wizard One-One confirms the target is clear, Hammer Three-Five,” Kate Kasper replied. “Anyone still breathing down there is a bad guy.”

  “Copy that,” the Strike Eagle pilot acknowledged. “Target locked.” And then. “GBU Thirty-eights away.”

  Flynn blinked, not sure i
f he’d actually seen several small specks falling off the distant F-15s or not. GBU-38s were five-hundred-pound gravity bombs converted to precision-guided munitions by bolting on control surfaces and combined inertial guidance–GPS systems. Once released at high altitude, they were capable of steering themselves to targets up to fifteen nautical miles away.

  He leaned farther out the door, staring to the west and silently counting seconds. It should be any moment now—

  “Impact,” the Strike Eagle pilot reported.

  Orange flashes rippled across the desert in rapid succession as bomb after bomb plummeted down out of the sky and detonated. Huge clouds of smoke, sand, and debris billowed high into the air. When they drifted away, there were only overlapping craters where the wrecked C-130, its cargo of illicit weapons, and the burned-out black ops helicopter had once been.

  Flynn sat back with a sigh.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, Captain,” White said bitterly. “Your recklessness triggered this disaster. And I’m going to make sure you don’t just walk away from the mess you’ve created.”

  For a moment, Flynn stared back at the pale-eyed intelligence officer. Was the other man really serious? Or just desperately hunting around for someone else, anyone else, to take the fall for his own obvious failure? Then he shrugged and looked away. Let White stew in his own rage and pain. There wasn’t any point in arguing with the man right now. There’d be time enough to make sure the facts were straight when they were all debriefed. Instead, he closed his eyes and leaned back against the door, steeling himself for the long flight to an emergency extraction point deeper in the Sahara.

  But deep inside, Nick Flynn couldn’t quite shake a growing sense of unease . . . and the uncomfortable awareness that not all enemies necessarily wear different uniforms or speak different languages.

  Three

  The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

  Some Weeks Later

  Doing his best to control his nerves, Captain Nick Flynn followed the uniformed Pentagon police officer escorting him down a long basement corridor. Overhead LED lights glowed brightly, illuminating a bare concrete floor and walls painted a faded institutional green. Other than a firm, but polite “Follow me, sir” uttered right after they met at the entrance, the sergeant hadn’t said a single word to him. Nor had any of the multitudes of people hurrying onward in all directions paid him the slightest attention. More than twenty-five thousand military personnel and civilians were employed inside the enormous building. And in a place where Army, Air Force, and Marine generals and Navy admirals were a dime a dozen, a junior officer, even one with a police escort, apparently didn’t rate so much as the flicker of an eye.

  Maybe it was a trick of the poetic imagination he’d inherited from his Irish immigrant grandfather, a teller of many tales, but something about this silent procession through the bowels of the Pentagon struck him as eerie—as though he were nothing but a ghost drifting through this massive military bureaucratic machine. Jet lag brought on by an overnight flight from the Middle East only intensified this weird sense of disembodiment, as did the preemptory orders he’d received to report here today for “further debriefing on the Wath Incident.”

  Flynn honestly wasn’t sure what more there was to analyze about the tribal ambush and its aftermath. He and the other survivors had spent days with Air Force and DoD investigators. Every observation, word, and action they could recall had been relentlessly probed, questioned, and challenged in an effort to develop a clearer and more detailed picture of how the attack unfolded and how it was repelled. The precision-guided munitions used to destroy the downed C-130 and its cargo had also obliterated every scrap of physical evidence, so all that was left were differing and imperfect human memories.

  With Flynn in tow, the gray-shirted police officer turned right into a narrower hallway, one of the five concentric rings that ran around each floor of the huge building. Two Marine sergeants in camouflage battle dress uniforms stood on guard outside a door a few yards farther on.

  “This is Captain Nicholas Flynn, USAF, reporting here as ordered,” the police officer announced. “You have him?”

  The older of the two Marine noncoms nodded. “I relieve you of the responsibility, Sergeant,” he said formally. Without any further word, the policeman turned around and walked away.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Flynn thought, raising an eyebrow in surprise. He offered the two sentries a dry smile. “So I’m your ‘responsibility’ now? Is that some kind of new DoD code word for ‘prisoner’?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir,” the younger Marine sergeant replied woodenly. He held out a hand. “May I have your cell phone, please?” He nodded toward the door and its adjoining electronic card reader and ten-key pad. “That’s a secure room. Per SOP, no personal electronic devices are allowed inside.”

  Wordlessly, Flynn handed over his phone and watched the guard stash it in a lockbox. Then he stood still while the noncom patted him down, making a final check for any additional prohibited devices. He glanced at the door. The usual alphanumeric code used to identify rooms inside the Pentagon had been covered over by another sign: i-con (t).

  “Icon?” he asked.

  “Intelligence Conference,” the older sergeant explained.

  With the (t) signaling that it was only a temporary use of this particular facility, Flynn realized. Maybe even just for today’s scheduled exercise in once again plowing the same stony ground of trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong in the Libyan desert.

  The Marine swiped his ID card through the reader and rapidly punched in a code on the pad. With an audible click, the door unlocked. “Go right on inside, sir,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”

  Which was probably pretty much what the Babylonian guards had said to Daniel right before they shoved him into the lion’s den, Flynn decided warily. He took a quick look around the room as he entered. Five men were seated behind a long table. Four of them were military. The fifth was a beefy, overweight civilian in a dark suit, a collared white shirt, and a red silk tie.

  A couple of the Pentagon brass, a colonel and a major general, were from the Air Force. The other pair were Army, both of them brigadier generals. Oddly, and in Flynn’s view, ominously, no one else in the room had a name tag or an ID badge on his uniform or coat. That was totally against all regulations. What the hell was going on here? He took a closer look at the civilian at the far end of the table. Everything about the guy shouted high-ranking CIA executive. You could take the man out of Langley, but you couldn’t take the shadowy aura of Langley out of the man.

  Definitely worried now, he came to attention. “Captain Nicholas Fl—”

  “Take a seat, Captain Flynn,” the Air Force two-star said quietly, interrupting. He indicated the lone chair set in front of the table.

  Working hard to keep any expression off his face, Flynn did as he was told. His mouth felt as dry as dust. Suddenly, this setup seemed a hell of a lot more like a trial than it did a routine intelligence debrief. More than ever, he thought, this was a time to be cautious.

  As though he’d read his mind, the major general shook his head. “Relax, son. This is not an official UCMJ proceeding.”

  Which was very cold comfort, Flynn concluded. Proceedings conducted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice at least had protections for those involved, including the right to legal counsel if necessary. He leaned forward slightly in his chair. “May I ask exactly what the purpose of this meeting is then, sir?”

  The general glanced briefly at the men seated next to him before turning his attention back to Flynn. “Consider this more of an informal, interagency discussion, Captain,” he said. “Together with our colleague from the CIA here, we’re simply trying to find a mutually agreeable way to handle this unfortunate situation before it spins further out of control. And we’d appreciate your cooperation in that effort.”

  Spinning out of control? How so? Flynn wondered. From the moment they’d landed back at El Minya,
everything that had happened in Libya had been classified top secret. Under direct orders from higher up, he and all the other survivors had already signed mounds of official paperwork swearing to keep everything hush-hush.

  “Maybe you missed the news out there in the back of Bumfuckistan, Flynn, but our bid to keep this quiet has failed. Some son of a bitch somewhere leaked,” the civilian behind the table growled. “So now we’ve got members of Congress and the media screaming their heads off—demanding to know why a U.S. aircraft crashed in Libya and exactly how so many Air Force personnel and other Americans ended up dead or badly injured in a firefight with the locals.”

  “So what are you going to tell them?” Flynn asked bluntly, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he should have kept his mouth shut. His earlier resolution to be cautious had been the smart play. This was like walking blindfolded through a minefield.

  “As little as possible,” the CIA executive snapped back. His jowly face had reddened. “This was a highly sensitive, need-to-know operation, and those clowns on Capitol Hill, except for the people we can trust on the intelligence committees, do not need to know one goddamned thing. That goes double for the press.” He glowered at Flynn. “Which brings us right back to you. Because from our perspective, you’re the one who landed us all neck-deep in the shit.”

  Flynn gritted his teeth. Keep your temper in check, he warned himself. Don’t rise to the bait. “Whoever told you that got it wrong,” he said, far more calmly than he felt.

  “Your own testimony is that you fired the first shot,” the CIA officer reminded him. “Killing that first tribesman is what triggered everything else. The ensuing battle. The horrendous casualties our team and yours took. And all of the political and national security fallout we’re facing now.”

  “I killed that Teda clansman because the bastard was about to detonate a suicide bomb,” Flynn snapped.