Reaper: Drone Strike: A Sniper Novel Read online

  “Wasn’t aware we were losing,” Cartwright said.

  “Part of the problem, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s try this. You’re obviously very smart and, it seems, creative. You’ve seen plenty of plots and schemes. Give me your wildest scenario that you think could stem from what was being planned on that map.”

  Sassi paused, held back a quip, and said, “Assuming it wasn’t a child’s homework assignment, my immediate impression was that al-Ghouta has been the site of so many chemical attacks. There have been rumors that the Syrians dropped the chemicals from helicopters and airplanes, and there have been rumors that the rebels gassed the civilians to blame Assad. I don’t really care, because the net effect is the same. Civilians were gassed with sarin, a deadly nerve agent, and as I’ve made clear, everyone is culpable, regardless of army or affiliation. My point being that it is possible that someone has a stash of chemical weapons and is planning to transport them to Tripoli, load them on a ship that docks in Cyprus, and then something happens there that perhaps weaponizes the chemicals for some type of attack in Europe or the United States.”

  She held out her hands and said, “The best I can do.”

  “Pretty damn good,” Cartwright said.

  “Close?”

  “We have no idea. I’m sure there are other markings on the pictures that could help us. Maybe I can send a team in with you tomorrow morning. Patalino and Ruben are two of my best.”

  “I won’t even consider that. No,” Sassi said.

  “You’re packing right now, so don’t give me that. But, yes, that actually is an option. I’ll have a small team go in with you tomorrow to try to get in the basement. We have an asset over that area right now studying patterns of life. I’m not authorized to send troops into that area—”

  “I know you’re not, but that doesn’t stop anyone else from doing it. Russians were there today. I see Syrians all the time. It’s a shit show. The last thing we need is to add Americans to the mix.”

  “You have to return the girl—”

  “Her name is Fatima Abel.”

  “Yes. You have to return Fatima. So, we will send a small security team with you. You show them the house next door, and they’ll go in and get pictures while you’re returning Fatima to her family.”

  Sassi thought about the balance between her and Fatima’s personal safety and the second-order effects the footprint of U.S. military personnel might create. If it weren’t for Fatima, she would stay wedded to her consistent position that she does not conduct joint operations with military personnel or allow them in her sector. But she had taken Fatima from her neighborhood under the pressure of ISIS rebels looking for a place to reconstitute.

  “No uniforms,” Sassi said. “Civilian clothes. And none of that macho American cowboy bullshit. I’ll lose all creditability if I’m seen with these guys. I go in separately with Fatima and Hakim, my interpreter, and your guys come in either before or after. I’ll park my SUV four houses away and, assuming your guys can count, they enter the fourth house and they’ll have access to the tunnel I was in.”

  Cartwright nodded. “Okay. Deal.”

  “I don’t want to know your guys or meet them. I help in this fashion only. You Americans are famous for destroying something and then leaving it. I’m trying to rebuild a community here. I don’t need your cowboys coming in and shooting it up.”

  “Should be a clean operation,” Cartwright said.

  “Famous last words of every military guy with whom I’ve ever spoken.”

  Sassi stood and shouldered her small rucksack. “I’m leaving at zero four hundred hours with Fatima and maybe another family. I haven’t decided yet. I’ll be there about eight a.m., give or take. My UN vehicle has the number twenty-seven on top.”

  “I know this.”

  “Of course you do. I’m telling you so that you don’t shoot my vehicle. Or at least if you do, I’ll be able to curse you with my dying breaths.”

  “I’m feeling all sorts of love here, Ms. Cavezza.”

  “You want love? Go find a Turkish hooker. You want my help? Stay out of my way and don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’m doing more for you than I have anyone else. And it’s only because I believe fifty-one percent to forty-nine percent that you are being honest with me.”

  “Tight margin right there.”

  “That’s as wide as it gets when I’m dealing with the military.”

  “You need me, call me,” Cartwright said, handing her a card.

  Sassi took the card, nodded, and walked outside, brushed past Schmidt, and bounced down the steps. When she returned to her room, Fatima was under a blanket, sleeping on a cot next to Sassi’s bed, clutching Aamina tightly to her chest as she sucked her thumb.

  Sassi didn’t want to imagine what dreams might be coursing through Fatima’s mind, so she focused on Cartwright.

  Decent guy, she thought. But time would tell. It always did. She had an uneasy feeling about tomorrow and knew that she needed rest if she was to be on her A game. She brushed her teeth, stripped, wiped all the appropriate areas with a wet cloth and soap, pulled on fresh cargo pants, polypro T-shirt, and socks. She placed her boots at the bottom of the bed and hung her outer tactical vest and pistol on the metal bed frame next to her head, crawled into bed, rehearsed in her mind reaching for the pistol—one, reach; two, grab; three, aim; four, shoot—and began the process of shutting down her mind.

  Something Cartwright had said had made her uneasy. She couldn’t remember it. The words floated in the outer reaches of her memory like a soaring hawk.

  Should be a clean operation.

  And peace would also fall upon the Middle East by the morning.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jasar Tankian

  Jasar Tankian unhappily stood on a ridge that on the map looked like a bony finger reaching into the Beqaa Valley. The moon hung brightly above the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in the east, reminding him that the long night of combat was still at hand. In the last six hours, one of his drones had been shot down and a sniper had nearly killed him. He’d had better nights.

  Despite his lack of sleep, he ensured the Mercedes-Benz trucks were properly parked in the motor pool at the far end of the compound and then instructed his drone operations team to scout for any following enemy forces. Three fixed-wing drones flew below him in a synchronous pattern in the wide canyon, the northernmost section of the Great Rift Valley, a series of volcanic peaks and fissures running from Lebanon through the Red Sea all the way to Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro and Olduvai Gorge.

  These Russian Sobirat drones had twelve-foot wingspans, could fly at altitudes up to two miles, and could reach distances two hundred miles away. Sobirat was the Russian term for “gather,” and the reconnaissance drone was a complementing aircraft to the new Russian Hunter S-70 Okhotnik attack drone.

  Hunter-gather.

  The Sobirat drones were like synchronized swimmers in the air, dipping and diving all in concert with one another. Tankian nodded at his engineer, who cut the radio feed, and the drones continued apace to their target across the valley, swooping like graceful eagles eyeing a kill. A small bald man named Rafik Khoury was standing next to him with the remote operating viewer, commonly called a ROVER.

  Khoury was Tankian’s longtime business partner. Originally from Beirut, Khoury had been alongside Tankian for every major transaction and had partnered with him fourteen years ago. Khoury knew about Tankian’s isolation and skepticism, while Tankian knew about Khoury’s womanizing and alcohol binges. Khoury was the operations officer to Tankian’s chief executive role.

  Tankian lowered the night-vision goggles and said, “Okay, collect them when they return. Let me know if there are any problems. I want to see the results broken down by aircraft for the entire length of the flight. Don’t hide flaws. Last night was a disaster. We should have killed whoever that was in the mountains shooting at us.”

  He spoke with a thick Arabic accent. Lebanese by birth, he was raise
d by a father who ran the largest bank in Lebanon before radical Islam had destroyed the financial center of the Middle East. His mother had been a businesswoman as well, running a commercial real estate enterprise in Beirut that was once the envy of most Mediterranean nations and was now nothing but a hollowed core of steel and jagged glass rising from the streets like zombies awaiting the call to action.

  During Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982, the Israelis had killed his parents with an errant air strike. He had been wounded by a burning white-phosphorous marking munition. The bomb had exploded outside their summer home, which was situated on the western plateau overlooking the Beqaa Valley. A favorite terrorist hideout, Beqaa became the target of the Israeli air strikes, which everyone in Lebanon also believed were directed by the new American president, Ronald Reagan. A year later, terrorists had bombed the United States Marine barracks, and the entire country began circling the drain.

  Tankian’s face was scarred, his flat black eyes peering out from skin grafts that looked intentionally placed there by Hollywood horror makeup artists. His eyelids were folded tufts of skin, decreasing the range of how wide he could open his eyes. He was eternally half-lidded, a lizard caught in mid-blink. His lips were malformed, peeled back against his teeth in a perpetual sneer. When he smiled, which was infrequent, Tankian’s only tell was the slight, nearly audible crinkling of the skin on his left cheek.

  The left side of his body had been badly burned. The explosion was nearly a hundred meters away, but he had turned too slowly, and the burning phosphorous had whizzed through the air, smothering his left side like a blanket as he turned away. Rolling down the hill into a stream, all unintentional on his part, had been the only way for him to survive. While underwater, dousing the flames that seemed stuck like jelly to his skin, he had heard the muffled thuds, like mattresses dropping on a floor, along the ridge above him.

  He had crawled back up the ridge to his home where he found his childhood in smoldering ruins. The marking round had done its job. The subsequent bombing run had killed his parents and brother. To this day, he had no idea why Israeli jets had indiscriminately bombed his family and the other homes along the ridge. It was true that the Beqaa Valley was home to Hezbollah and Al Qaeda terror training camps. There, they traded tactics, techniques, and procedures in the 1980s and 1990s before Al Qaeda had become the dominant gene among the terrorist organizations. But to his knowledge, his parents were the successful businesspeople they claimed to be, and his older brother was simply a teenager who liked a girl. As a kid, Tankian liked to run along the ridge where he now stood, chased by his brother in a silly game of tag. Tankian had been fast, but his brother was quicker. They darted underneath the electric fence lines designed to keep the cattle in their pasture while also holding would-be thieves at bay.

  Tankian had been just ten years old at the time of the bombing in 1982. In an instant, his entire family was obliterated. Oddly, he didn’t harbor any resentment toward the Israelis or Americans. The one thing he had learned at the knee of his business-oriented parents was that everything was indeed about business. Money was the ultimate motivator. Ideology was for the pawns, the true believers who could be mobilized in the name of some cause that served a higher purpose—which, it turned out, was typically a monetary one for those ultimately in charge.

  Tankian knew that groups such as ISIS were, at their core, businesses. ISIS raided a village or town, controlled its assets, kidnapped dignitary children, charged ransom, and moved to the next village to repeat the process. The leaders were millionaires, the ideologues were dead or wounded. Over the last four decades, he’d observed the comings and goings of terrorist leaders through the Beqaa Valley and Beirut. They were all capitalist heathens who violated every principle of the Koran in private, while extolling its virtues in public and during information operations. The Koran meant nothing to Tankian. The only god he worshipped was currency, and on that he was even agnostic, preferring dollars and pounds but willing to accept euros and a few other types of exchange that held their value: gold, silver, and diamonds. It was rare that he bartered in anything else.

  Tankian had met both Osama and Hamza bin Laden, Zarqawi, Baghdadi, Maliki, Kuwaiti, Soleimani, and others who used the land in the Beqaa Valley as training and transshipment grounds. Unbeknownst to Tankian as a child, his parents had purchased a large portion of the valley and the ridge above, allowing them to control its ingress and egress points. Tankian had parlayed this thousand-acre asset, which included tunnels and mock villages, into a massive commercial real estate enterprise: a training ground for terrorists. His bona fides as a war orphan at the hands of the Zionists provided him the authenticity required to do business with every unsavory actor in the Middle East. They all assumed he hated America and Israel, and he did nothing to dissuade them from believing this notion. The very fact that he leased land to terrorist organizations that attacked Israel and America was good enough to make him valid in the eyes of the ever-suspicious Bin Ladens of the world.

  “Yes, sir,” Khoury said. He was a sharp businessman himself and expert engineer. He had replicated the aircraft, their engines, weapons systems, and the cameras. In the light manufacturing area next to the stables in Tankian’s compound, Khoury had assembled and tested the aircraft that were now flying over the valley. He had built twenty fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles that could fly connected to radio, satellite, or by way of GPS guidance. In addition to spying on copycat logistics competitors, Tankian intended to also spy on the terrorist training camps to potentially blackmail his clients. He could sell this information to the highest bidder, typically Max Wolff, his German benefactor, but he didn’t discount opportunities with the Americans, Israelis, Syrians, and Russians. Money was money.

  Khoury held the ROVER up so Tankian could see the thermal image on the display. A Russian cargo truck was bouncing up the severe terrain, negotiating the switchbacks, and cresting the plateau. He handed the ROVER back to Khoury, who frowned and said, “What could he want?”

  “Something important if he’s driving here,” Tankian said. In the floodlights of Tankian’s compound, the Russian truck stopped, coughed, and spat black diesel from its charred smokestack poking above the cab. Captain Igor Padarski stepped out and walked toward him. The Russian had black hair, a sharp-edged nose, and beady black eyes. His olive uniform was unkempt and dirty, and he smelled of diesel fuel and onions.

  “Commander,” Padarski said in greeting.

  “Captain,” Tankian replied. “Tell me about the woman we saw on the video.” Two of Tankian’s drones had also accompanied Padarski’s tanks into al-Ghouta, part training, part operational.

  Padarski held his crewman’s helmet under his armpit as he spoke through chipped teeth to Tankian.

  “I’ll tell you about the woman, and then you tell me what intelligence you collected with these aircraft.” He nodded at the ROVER and then pointed at the sky.

  “Perhaps we can trade information,” Tankian said. The captain was his liaison with the Russian government for the last six months. Tankian had higher connections, but he preferred to deal with the individual who could spend the money.

  “She was in the village with a little girl and her interpreter.”

  “She’s coming back, no?”

  For the past six months, Padarski and his Russian tank company had been using his land for a logistics base. They were the quick-reaction force for Syria should the Israelis invade. Russia needed to protect its port in Tartus. If the Israelis stormed up the valley, the tank company could hold them off until Russian jets scrambled and evened out the playing field.

  As with everything he did, Tankian developed a personal relationship with the Russian tank commander. In addition to running resupply convoys to Syrian combat units, he sold the Russian peacekeeping units fuel, food, water, and medical supplies. Tankian’s enterprise was about forty personnel strong, which included a security team of twenty hardened fighters whose collective strength was appearing to be or
dinary mechanics or day laborers, yet they were armed with pistols, knives, and rifles.

  Listening to the tank commander talk about the UNHCR woman, ideas pinged in his brain. It was almost always a bad idea to kidnap a relief worker for a nongovernmental organization. It drew international attention and unwanted visitors. But he listened, because he was always angling for the financial upside. He had no moral issues with kidnapping anyone or housing people others had kidnapped. There was a price for everything.

  “Yes, she’s coming back. She comes back every day with more families.”

  “What has happened that makes this an emergency?” Tankian asked.

  “Some rogue elements, either ISIS or Syrian rebels, came out of the neighborhood chasing her. I think she saw something,” Padarski said.

  “What might she have seen?” This was Tankian’s real concern. He had equities in al-Ghouta that promised a larger payday.

  “I’m not sure. But she ran out of one of the houses, and next door, three men ran out at the same time, chasing her. She got in her UN vehicle and sped away with the child and her interpreter.”

  Part of the barter Tankian had with the tank company was that they would provide him information on the resettlements in the villages around Damascus in exchange for smuggled cigarettes and vodka. There was no shortage of useful goods in one of Tankian’s supply warehouses. Initially, he wasn’t sure about the financial opportunities in the resettlement operation, the UN being cash rich but stingy when it came to doling out contracts. At the very least, he saw opportunities to sell supplies and perhaps even construction services.

  Tankian Logistics Group had won a small UN contract to build or reconstruct ten homes in the village of Ghouta. The contract called for purifying the area, cleansing the chemicals Assad’s Syrian air force and army had dropped there. Tankian’s bulldozers had scraped three feet deep and hauled away the contaminated soil, which he’d dumped along the Turkish border at night.