Buried in Black Page 3

  There was little to no risk of a technical blink occurring that would allow the target to vanish. Billions of dollars’ worth of American technology pointed at a two-bit shithead in a shithole location to ensure he was the right guy and staying under watchful eyes. This wide-reaching system surveillance captured personal details, pattern of life, communication linked associates, and stored media. A comprehensive electronic snare locked the target to Drake, call sign Birddog, the digital assassin who’d stalked his prey for nearly a month in the region.

  Drake’s direction-finding and ranging Amberjack antennae also ensured the proximate lockdown. Once all the electronics and intelligence gave undisputable validation, then it would be old-school, roll up the sleeves, hardware meets flesh time. Of course, the latter was outside of his current mandate but well inside of Drake Woolf’s comfort zone and the professional expectations of his uncle Robert.

  As Murphy’s Law would have it, the signal on Drake’s feed stuttered for a moment. “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Drake refreshed his setting with the last few hours’ worth of technical signal bearings, pummeling frequencies to recapture the trace. The cell phone data indicated the target was spoofing a device MAC address to hide traceability. “You tricky little shit,” he whispered with a self-assured smirk as the IMSI phone ping responded to his Harris Hailstorm stingray cell-site simulator and surveillance intercept tool. He reconnected.

  Check, check, checkmate…motherfucker. Not sneaky enough. Drake gave the screen a middle finger. Nearing prep work completion, he keyed and pasted the code script for a payload hack to the phone that would remotely extract calls, contacts, and anything else from the target’s phone to a cloud database.

  Almost go-time.

  His secondary tasking was to digitally capture bank transfer routing numbers that would also be swept up by the program written to search the target’s device remotely. But personally, Drake needed a certain photo recognition from the crow, as he and his crew called terrorists. He’d handle that personally, and against orders. Drake knew the likelihood of a positive identification of the photo would be a million to one shot. Although, considering Drake’s unofficial body count of those he’d shown the picture to, it was more like a million to upward of sixty when totaling all the up-close and personal terminations in the past decade. None of those men recognized the photo he presented at their time of final interrogation. And so he continued on his quest.

  “Birddog to Halo Actual,” Drake whispered. “Do you copy? Over.”

  “Halo Actual to Birddog. Good copy. Ready to come home? Over.”

  “Target handhold is locked. Just sent verification package to the mother ship. I’m clear to go say hello for final confirmation,” Drake whispered. The tan skin-colored ear device and its four-millimeter boom microphone captured the fidelity and catapulted the communication up to the secure satellite relay.

  “That’s a negative, Birddog. You are red. Confirm. You are not green to shake hands. Stick to your script as fragged. You just help us develop the picture and confirm the BBC. Time to bug out. Do you copy? Over,” the Operational Detachment Delta G Squadron commander, Blake Touhey, directed from the Beirut safe house over forty kilometers away.

  Blake muted the mike and leaned to his right. “Man from Orange is on target. Chief, call our flyer. Temp hold payload on objective until he’s outta there.”

  “Roger that. Not cleared hot on our end. I’ll let ’em know,” the chief validated.

  “If they ask, tell ’em pre-strike HVI assurances are potentially compromised. We just need a minute to get him off the roof and headed for pickup,” said the commander with a grin. He had referred to Orange as Drake Woolf’s unit—the Intelligence Support Activity, known as Orange, Centra Spike, Grey Fox, and a host of other terms to mask the true identity of one of the most secretive military elements in existence.

  “Move the boys in for extraction. This crazy Activity bastard got closer to this crow in a week than we did in a year of deployments. Let’s get ’em out before he does something stupid.”

  The channel to Birddog opened again. “Negative, Halo,” Drake responded after the long pause, catching the commander off guard. Woolf continued, “I need to confirm. Getting a conflicting signal. Don’t have near certainty anymore. Going dark and heading into the house for positive ID. Out.”

  From a snack-sized plastic Ziploc bag, Drake retrieved a small square of paper and placed it on his tongue. The microdose of lysergic acid diethylamide, a lesser fix of the recreational LSD hallucinogen, would heighten his senses and make him more productive for the hour. It was cool though, because the military gave it to him just as they used to give him performance-enhancing amphetamine “go pills” like Dexedrine. Oddly, he would have been discharged if they knew of his legit medical needs.

  Birddog pinched the acoustic device out from his ear cavity and dropped it into a streamlined, discreet, zippered pocket within the seams of his customized button-down shirt.

  Can’t stop me if you’re not here.

  Now it’s time to get some.

  “Shit! He’s going in. I knew he’d go in. Dammit.” Blake was half frustrated and half tickled. “Birddog, do you copy? That is negative. You are not to engage.”

  Blake leaned back with a suppressed grin, “Fuck. Mister Sandman’s going into that house. If it goes south, we’re screwed.”

  “We were going to kill the crow anyway, your guy just didn’t know it,” quipped the large Native American Delta warrant officer nicknamed Taco.

  “Pssht,” he scoffed. “The video game boys were going to get the kill. I could give two shits about what Birddog does. At this point, we’re observers—and a ride.” Blake didn’t hide his frustration. “Fucking drone strike in a refugee camp. We’re so outta the game. Only the Pentagon could think this stupid shit up as an op worthy of green-lighting. Blame locals or some bullshit cover-up scheme.” His face contorted in distaste of the plan as if Taco had farted. “Wait until someone puts the missile fragments up on social media.” The commander kicked the chair next to him. “Birddog knew what was going to happen even if no one told him. All these joint task force ops are finishing with a push-button video kill. But not today.”

  * * * *

  Drake pulled the black-and-white cotton keffiyeh scarf down to his dusty brow and draped fabric around his face to cover his nose and mouth. With a few taps on the Arabic character laptop keypads the hum of electrical generators immediately fell silent. Remaining lights in the surrounding hundred meters extinguished their glow in and out of the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Anyone awake would consider it a usual power failure. The reality, of course, was a remote power disruption device in the bag of tricks tradecraft from Drake’s playbook.

  Woolf inserted the USB port “brain killer” and waited for the loaded code scripts to destroy the digital content of the laptop’s hard drive. Upon closing the tattered computer screen, he secured a small, sticky explosive charge on its underbelly and set the timed charge for thirty minutes. Drake slowly emerged from the hidden tarp and filled his lungs with the fresh albeit scorching hot Lebanese night air. First, he would give his fatigued eyes ample time to adjust. Then he would climb down from the rooftop. And then it was snuff the bad guy time. His favorite part. He whipped the antennae as far as he could onto another rooftop.

  With eyes growing more attuned to the darkness and his senses getting a chemical tweak for high performance, Drake dashed across the narrow street. He hoped the lubricant he had put on the door hinges of the home earlier in the week had sufficiently quieted the wicked squeak. He took painstaking efforts to ensure an op would go down as planned. Even if it took days.

  A dog barked in the distance. The LSD gave him an edge that could nearly hear the guttural canine growl from blocks away.

  The sentry stationed at the door would be gone for another forty-minutes and the rest of his surroundings were silen
t. Three a.m. wasn’t a busy time in the encampment. If a roach would have farted, he could have heard it.

  Birddog inserted a shallow hook and lifter pick into the imported European door lock of the home. He manipulated the pins while using the centering fulcrum. Just like flossing teeth.

  Success.

  “What are you doing?” the voice from behind Drake asked in Lebanese.

  Drake felt something hard pressed on his back. Not good. Woolf didn’t turn. “You left your post,” he scolded in the same tongue. “There was a noise coming from the house.” Drake bent the lock picks into his palm, the steel long enough to jut from his clenched fingers.

  “What noise? Who are you?”

  “My mom called me Warren,” he replied switching to Palestinian Arabic then spun catching a rifle barrel with his left and sending the lock pick fist into the man’s throat. Like a tight rubber band, Drake’s arm snapped back and then straight into the throat again while guiding the rifle out and away.

  The man’s throat wheezed but not loud enough to cause a disturbance. Woolf dropped the picks and gripped the rifle butt then came back with a hammering blow to the man’s head. The cracking feel confirmed sentry down. For good.

  Drake scanned the streets. All was still clear.

  He dragged the sentry into the home and left the body in a sitting room corner before moving to the modest kitchen. Drake found a half-full pitcher of water on a table, which after adjusting his scarf at a frantic pace, he brought up to his broken lips and gulped the cascading warm liquid of life. It was salty and foul-smelling but welcome, nonetheless. Drake guzzled it to the point of breathlessness. He wiped his dripping lips with his dusty shoulder sleeve only to smear water into mud.

  His adhesive covered hands were sticky with blood but he gave them no thought. He was not going to make a clean exit regardless of what happened next.

  A cleaver lay just as he had seen it on the camera feeds hours ago. To its right, a thick six-inch cutting knife. The latter was his quest.

  In addition to Woolf and his unit entering a country under commercial cover, he was most always unarmed. At least conventionally.

  Knife in hand, Drake continued up the narrow staircase.

  Ho, ho, ho.

  As the flooring beneath his feet creaked, his belly gurgled in seeming protest of the long-lost aquatic friend that had just invaded the withered cavity. It had been almost two days since he had had to piss. Add pissed-off kidneys to the list of furious bodily organs constantly pushed to limits.

  Drake pressed at his gut, hoping it would recognize the need for silence. Santa’s not liking that eggnog. Woolf was pleased with neither the sounds of his digestive tract nor the floor alarming anyone within lucid earshot.

  The first room was the children’s. That was off-limits. Personal code. Next.

  The second chamber was the host’s and his wife’s. Later. Maybe. This was a flexible code determined by operational constructs. Namely, if shit went south it was cool to smoke them. He’d feel bad, but he’d be alive.

  The third room, as the story goes, was just right and held the shady little Goldilocks—Syrian jihadi rebel leader and Iranian-sponsored moneyman Ali al-Hamad, a dude on the lam who the Israelis did not want to gain a foothold of influence within the camp. Somehow the Americans got the task. Tier one target for tier one troops. An opportunity gained was an opportunity seized.

  Woolf crept up to the sleeping man’s bedroll. He knelt down and gently put his latex liquid skinned hand over al-Hamad’s snoring mouth. Ali stirred a bit but succumbed to deep slumber and breathed through his nose until the blade passed through shirt to skin.

  Ali al-Hamad’s eyes shot open, and forced air expired from his lungs, captured in the palm of Woolf’s filthy rubberized hand.

  Drake held out his mobile device, showing a glowing image of a man in his mid-to-late forties. The picture itself was dark and somewhat distorted.

  The bright glow made the target squint and blink until he could focus on the bearded man in the image before him, maybe Caucasian or a Turk.

  Al-Hamad showed no apparent emotion at the sight of the picture save for the fear in his eyes of being awoken under duress.

  Drake flipped to a sketched image saved on the device.

  “Do you know this man? Both could be the same man. Have you ever seen him?” Drake asked in Arabic. “Think!”

  Al-Hamad struggled and closed his eyes for a moment. He moved under Drake’s hand, turning his head back and forth, signaling a denial of any knowledge of the photographic image before him.

  “Asking again. For your life,” Woolf whispered in a more than passable local accent.

  Again, his subject denied knowing and moved his shoulders in an apparent shrug. Nothing. Another dead end.

  Do it.

  Drake Woolf pushed the knife between the man’s ribs, the pericardial cavity, to the heart. Woolf’s nostrils flared in frustration of the continual dead end with the photo. He took a deep breath and bent forward. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered. “You’re no help to me.” Woolf’s face was stone as he pushed the knife deeper before pulling it out with al-Hamad’s passing life. He wiped the knife three times across the man’s nightshirt. His thumb was not on the top of the handle. Drake had developed his own style over the years.

  Woolf leaned in and with the room’s faint light watched the man’s eyes roll and the body succumb to the fate of a lingering Department of Defense Al-Qaeda network Executive death Order. Such orders permitted US special operations to work in denied spaces without hindrance of legal or bureaucratic process to target and kill members of the AQN. Al-Hamad wasn’t a card-carrying member of the terror group, but he was close enough to that charter and authorization that no one would raise a war crime eyebrow. But then again, Woolf didn’t plan on signing his name or getting caught. Neither did his taskers or the president, himself. So, the point was moot. And Al-Hamad was no longer on the list.

  Drake left his target lying lifeless save for the blood escaping to the floor. He rose devoid of emotion to his next task, retrieved the small camera from its nestled place in the bookcase stacked with magazines and newspapers, and proceeded to the host’s bedchamber while stuffing the camera into a small cloth pouch.

  Once in the bedroom of two sleeping adults, he placed the knife on the man’s bedcovers in silence. It had just enough blood on the blade and handle to serve its purpose. Woolf looked with scorn at the man and woman who knowingly gave safe haven to a man capable of creating more problems for their own region. From a large hip pocket, Drake retrieved a bundle of Lebanese pounds. The US equivalent of roughly ten thousand dollars.

  Judas. Drake, they have to die.

  Drake placed the stack of currency on a small table.

  You’ve been a little naughty too, Drake accused the man and woman to himself But I’m going to let your neighbors and the local militia deal with that.

  After Drake left the soon-to-be-framed man and wife, he stood at the bedroom doorway where the children lay within, innocent under a blanket of assumed safety and security of their parents’ watch.

  “Shit,” Drake muttered to himself. We’ll kill these kids ten years from now because of what I’m doing now. Kids like me. He stood in the darkness. Silent. Deliberating.

  Son of a bitch.

  He looked at his watch. Five minutes tops before the militia would check in. They’d done it for days.

  “Shit.” Drake stared at the door to the children. What do I do, Dad? He softly clicked his tongue.

  The vivid sound of Alex Woolf memory spoke to the soul of his son and over the voices in Drake’s head. “You know what to do. And it’s not this.”

  Drake rushed back into the host’s room, picked up the knife, covered the startled man’s mouth and stabbed him superficially just under the clavicle and waited for it. When the man fully awoke and realized wh
at had happened, he flailed his arms defensively and yelled as the burning sensation set in. Woolf gave little effort to prevent the knife from flying from his own grasp.

  And then there was the scream. He had anticipated it. Planned on it. And still, it cut deep into his own heart. After over twenty years, his mother’s scream still left him breathless. This shriek of utter terror was universal.The images Drake had tucked away for years in the deepest and darkest corners of his mind resurfaced. His mother’s sashay to the door. His father chipping ice for scotch. The men with guns. His friends laughing outside. The searing pain.

  Drake swallowed hard and moved quickly away from the bed, snatched the money, and tossed it at the wife. “Hide this. Say nothing of it. An intruder has come to your house tonight and killed your guest,” he said in Lebanese before fleeing the bedroom. He made haste before the children could see the killer in their home.

  The cameras. Damn! He was supposed to get the other fish-eye. He’d have to leave the second camera upstairs.

  Ruckus ensued above his head on the second floor. The children were awake now, calling and crying for their parents. Drake heard new noises coming from the front entryway. The militia men. Had he relocked the door? He had to have relocked it and checked again to be sure. And then checked it again. He was certain of it…he thought.

  He was late. Woolf whirled to the kitchen, where he grabbed the third camera tucked between a shelf and the thin wall. The fourth was a fish-eye within the sitting room just off the front door. He couldn’t get the second camera out of his mind and wrestled with the compulsion to retrieve it.

  Drake heard the men opening the entry.

  A pop resounded about twenty meters from the home. The laptop’s set charge was just loud enough for the men at the door to turn around and stare at flames emerging from a rooftop across the way.

  Right on time. Woolf rushed forward and seized the camera, then bolted for the back of the house. The door was barred and padlocked.