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Buried in Black Page 4
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From Woolf’s first discreet foray into the home weeks ago he had noticed this potential inconvenience for either future entry or escape and had returned to replace the bolts with smaller stripped screws with enough bite to hold the security framing in place. A dab of bronzer on the metal had given enough appearance of aging to camouflage the change.
Missions took days if not weeks or months depending on the complexity. It paid off with groundwork.
Drake gave a few tugs and the bar gave way as the militia men entered the home. Apart from these small preparations and backup plans, his ass was now flying in the wind. He had to leave, but he remained steadfast.
Damned camera.
In the darkness of the room, he was still unseen, but the militia heard his movement in the back amidst the panicked cries upstairs.
From behind the door, guttural coughs of generators caused a pit in Drake Woolf’s stomach. The man from Orange was a neurological blockade away from re-entering the heat of the Lebanese night. The lights were flickering back to life.
I need to get that camera.
Drake turned around and calculated his odds and the time—and the fact that he no longer had a weapon.
“Trust your gut. Screw your tight head,” the sensory perception of Alex Woolf’s imaginary voice said to his now warrior son. “Leave the camera, Drake. It’s untraceable. Move, boy!”
Chapter 2
Drake turned from the militia men and kicked the door out to the alleyway, the remaining surveillance device be damned. He lied to himself that it was no big deal leaving it behind and mentally fought the compulsion to turn around every step of his escape. He couldn’t disappoint Dad. Not again, anyway.
Woolf willed himself out of his head and accelerated to a full sprint to avoid any trailing pursuers. It was a process he had to consciously overcome on a daily basis to survive and succeed.
He took a quick right down a narrow passageway between the hyper-congested multistory cement block shelters in the overcrowded camp. His fear was not for any Lebanese army threats but rather for the numerous joint committees of Palestinian factions living within the impoverished and overcrowded coastal city. His extraction team would be just outside the walls, but other unexpected militia security forces would be a high risk to his escape and evasion plan.
As he emerged from the tight passage, he spotted a small group of Palestinian militants who he knew would not hesitate to gun down a stranger in this tension-filled shantytown at this time of night or any other, for that matter.
Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs.
Shit.
Woolf checked his locally purchased knockoff Timex watch even though he knew exactly how little time he had.
The extraction team would come through Darb el Sim between two main checkpoints but not within the camp itself. Drake still had to make it through Fadlo Wakim and Hay el Sohoun, the camp’s adjacent areas.
To Woolf, it didn’t look good for an on-time ETA for pickup; to seasoned military planners, he was screwed.
Beirut safe house, Lebanon
“Wait a bit longer. He’ll be there,” Blake assuaged his pickup crew. “Asset had to do a double check. I don’t think he engaged and no hostile contact reported. Should be clean coming in. Are you compromised?” The Delta Advance Force Operations commanding officer swiveled his bottom on the rickety kitchen chair and muted the headpiece again. He pointed to the BBMAT advanced tactical terminal screen and swatted at Taco for attention. “What does the Pred see on Birddog’s position? Anyone approaching? I wanna give the knob-turner all the time we can.” He waited for a response while Taco squinted. “I know some guys who worked with him in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m sure he’ll get there. He’s good. Real good. I wish he would’ve stayed put. Shoulda known.”
Taco gave a no-shit look sideward. “I know. He’s pulled this shit before. We used to call him SOT-A Drake. He was one of the Task Force Sword SIGINT guys doing AQ and Taliban commo intercepts. They flew him in special for Operation Mountain Thrust when I was in Afghanistan.”
“I thought he was a shooter. Eighteen-Echo, no?” Blake referred to an abbreviated Special Forces military occupation specialty of communications expert. “Wouldn’t have had unit, rank, or name tape with the teams he was running with.”
“Nope, Ranger-tabbed SOT-A,” Taco corrected. “One of the few. Trust me, he’s a shooter.” The description he referenced pertained to another abbreviated role where SOT-A was the shortened name of Special Operations Team-Alpha, a downrange signals intelligence/electronic warfare element of the Army’s Special Forces. A lesser-known capability to many outside of special operations, SOT-As are crypto linguists who detect, monitor, and exploit threat communications via intercepted communications and direction locating for the SFODA Forward Operating Base. But they also kill. A geek squad with guns.
Taco leaned back in his chair, nursing battlefield memories. “Team literally called him ‘SOT-A Drake.’ Badass linguist, too. Arab and a bunch of dialects. Big-ass geek. A-team kicked him out of Fallujah. Dude canoed a tango.” Taco made a pistol with his finger. “Bam, thpbt,” he said, with a tongue raspberry as both hands created a visual of a head splitting in half.
“RUMINT. That’s why I thought he was Group. They kicked him off because he’d disappear at night and go into Iraqi homes interrogating dudes they didn’t have a target package on or a green light to engage. Wasn’t his call sign, but some guys on that team called him Werewolf.”
“Cuz he was tearin’ shit up at night? Like on a full moon.” Taco laughed while leaning forward and checking the UAV feed again.
“No, Werewolf for Where’s Woolf? They thought he was AWOL but he was out hunting in the darkness. From what I heard, the team he was supporting was forward but just sitting around all night with hurry up and waits, and he’d just disappear. They didn’t have much oversight, so they just let him do his thing for a bit. He’d say he was scrounging for signals at night. But then they needed to cover their ass when he became like folklore legend and shit and he started freaking out locals who said there was some djinn demon coming into their homes, sometimes killing people, sometimes asking them questions. They asked the FOB team to help hunt this ghost down, and the whole time, the ODA knew it was Drake.”
“That’s weird.”
“Did you pull the view up, yet?” The major leaned over for a look.
“Just about. I was waiting for it to pop back up while we shoot the shit. The target space still isn’t back into view.” Taco shifted to another laptop. “Let me have them re-route a hair and take a look-see. Coordinates?”
“Let me confirm. Hold one,” replied Blake.
Taco restarted the conversation. “Yeah. SOT-A Drake.” Taco nodded. “Quiet guy. Killed what he stalked on the airwaves. I also heard that during OEF and OIF, he was on a JIEDDO team doing Attack the Network Counter-IED shit, too. Took out a cell linked to the Haqqani network like the first week. Found all their money and froze or rerouted it for SOCOM. That’s how he got the Birddog call sign—sniffing out and pointing to the prize. NSA’s Central Security Service military guys used to go into SOT-A Drake’s hooch to get trained on the down low when they were the guys who were supposed to be giving the training. SOT-A Drake punched a guy on the teams when they called him ‘Support.’”
“Seriously? That’s gotta be more bullshit. I knew he had more TIC than most on the teams,” he said, referring to Drake’s time in combat.
“That’s just what I heard….” Taco turned to the commander with a knowing look. “I do know he teamed with Delta before us when he went to Orange. Dude had invitations from two SMUs,” he emphasized, given the few operators who received invitations to go through Special Mission Unit assessment.
Taco continued, “He was one of the dudes who trained the Mohawks in Iraq. Sniff out the bad guys’ phones on the front end doing combat intel—then poof. Goes from Tactical
Technical Tradecraft to Direct Action. Taught the Mohawks the same. Grim reaper carrying a laptop and an M4. Hey, we got any more of that jerky?”
* * * *
Drake Woolf was trapped between the streets but yet undiscovered in a narrow alleyway. He pressed his back against the wall and extended his legs out to the opposite building. Keeping his feet pressed to the parallel surface, he pushed with his hands and wiggled with his back and shoulders to ascend. After each move, Drake stepped up and pressed back with force to secure his position while shimmying up the wall as quickly as possible. Within minutes he reached the top.
Now what? Woolf remained elevated but had nothing to grab at the top. The roof to his shoulder line had hammered tin sheets sloping down and bent over the building facade. There were no hand- or footholds to support his weight. If it were raining, Drake couldn’t have been any more wet than he was between the perspiration from heat, physical effort, and sheer dread of his precarious situation.
The opposite building had a flattened rooftop, but it was impossible to maneuver without falling roughly thirty feet down in the shadows.
Below, he heard whispers approaching his position then watched as silhouettes of a militia crew turned into the alleyway.
Woolf stretched his arms to be as flat against the façade and his body as straight across as possible. From the ground, at first glance, he ideally resembled a homemade bridge between buildings as was common in the area. And this was his intent during this ten-minute ultimate abs survival workout.
His left foot, however, was starting to slip.
With his right foot, Drake pushed as hard as he could. He pressed his clammy toes in third-hand Adidas runners against the surface. Gripping with isometric pressure, the traction gone decades ago, his ass began to drop.
Woolf could hear the grating of his left shoe sliding down. But with no leverage to his body, he had nothing left to raise his leg short of spasming abdominal muscles.
Sweat poured from his face; his right leg started to send signals of a coming muscle seizure. He prayed the cameras wouldn’t clank in the bag and that his phone wouldn’t shift from his nearly inverted pocket. He was as functional as a screen door on a sub and about as dry.
Drake fought against his body, waiting for the militia men to come closer to his position and hoping to the gods they wouldn’t look up. He contemplated his only option.
The voices drew closer. They were under his position.
Drake’s left foot completely slipped.
This is going to hurt.
* * * *
The four-man Delta team kept vigilant as they waited for their package.
“Halo Actual, this is Halo Two. Any update to ETA?”
“Negative, Two. Sit tight. I’m sure he’s just strolling your way. He may be in warrior mode but he’s still a support dork. You are still clear of hobos jumping your train.”
The operators laughed. “That’s a bit of a stretch, Halo. But thanks for the visual. Standing by.”
“Roger that, Two. And who ate the last of the jerky? Can’t find it. Over.”
“We brought it along,” the operator paused for response.
One of his crew whispered as he chewed the dehydrated meat, “Someone’s approaching, better go.”
Halo Two’s lead, Charles Upton, a man they called Upchuck or Barf, laughed. “Uh, we gotta go, someone’s coming, Halo Two out.” The operator snickered. “That was pretty funny. I thought for a second you were serious about hostile approach.”
“I am serious. Look!”
* * * *
Back in the safe house, a Predator feed showed the visual of white bogies approaching by foot and a vehicle turning in their direction. “Can we order the Nevada joystick monkeys to launch the Pred’s Hellfire?” he asked, referring to the Creech Air Force Base fliers safe back in CONUS.
“We can’t do anything unless engaged. They’re not going to let us use a Hellfire for close air support. Shit. That’s almost a White House sanction request.”
“So, we wait?”
The XO, or commanding officer, sat flipping a pen end over end. He tapped it on the table as he thought through options. “Our dudes aren’t here. None of us are except the bird. But that’s sanctioned. We got the target, so that was sanctioned to validate the crow’s position. I’m wondering if we could schwack the bogies, right?” He searched his colleague’s wide face for any sign of reassurance.
Nothing.
“See if we can get a connection to that Beechcraft King Air. It’s gotta be flying arcs above the camp. Just like back in the sandbox. OGA’s probably been airborne triangulating with SIGINT listening posts to support Birddog with signal feeds. ISR coverage would be too sparse. Maybe they even have microwave to spot their guy, right? Or maybe they have someone with like native language ears picking up and translating any shit going hot. How is it that we’re the guys cut off from the bigger mission plan? I feel like Airborne,” he jested under the futility of options.
Taco nodded and interjected an affirming grunt, “God forbid anyone direct connect them to us in case we needed them for our work.”
“Dude, what even is our work here?”
“Support.” Taco laughed as he feigned a duck from a punch.
* * * *
Drake craned his neck over a quivering shoulder. He looked down to the adversaries below.
They remained unaware of his presence and precarious situation.
High above their heads, the man from Orange had the three core tenets of close-quarters battle in his favor: stealthy surprise to gain an upper hand, speed against his enemy’s immediate recovery, and an ability to inflict violence of action to further destabilize the men below. That was if he didn’t screw up.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation would make for a powerful weapon. At roughly twenty-five feet off the ground it would take only a second coming in at nearly twenty miles per hour to twist into a reasonable attack position with minimum damage to himself and maximum to the goon below. Fuck it. He thought. If an Olympic high diver or gymnast could do it in half the distance, he could at least get off a half-gainer with a twist and stick a landing on top of an unsuspecting goon.
And so he let go.
But even as he contorted his body while plummeting to the ground, he wished he had a better option. Woolf positioned his buttocks and hips, raising his knees just shy of a cannonball to ensure his legs were available to stabilize after the fall.
As he hoped, he landed just off-center of the middle man’s head and hammered down on his foe’s neck as it bent forward, breaking the bone and rupturing the spinal cord. Drake twisted to the left as the man crumpled under his legs, cushioning the impact and buttressing downward momentum.
Crouched to a tripod, Drake snapped his leg outward, catching the next man’s knee and driving it at a ninety-degree angle inward. As Woolf extended the kick, he could feel the break of bone and joint and hear the distinct snap as the lower leg flopped upward in a limp swing.
The militia man let out a cry and collapsed with hands covering his face then grasped down to hold the broken leg.
Two down—for the moment.
Drake flipped to the right, back over the dead Palestinian. His feet met the ground, and rolling momentum helped elevate him to a combat stance. His opponent, too, was preparing for battle starting with a trigger pull as he raised the weapon in Drake’s general direction.
The muzzle flash was blinding for both men in the alley’s darkness.
Drake leapt to the nearby wall and immediately pushed off with his right leg to carom into the assailant.
In the darkness, Drake miscalculated slightly, but both men still collided and hurled into the adjacent wall.
The militant’s grip on the discharging weapon softened upon impact.
Drake regained balance and threw multiple devastat
ing body hook punches into his foe’s side until he heard the dull clank of the weapon hitting the ground.
The man grasped Drake’s shoulder, to which he hammered his arm down and whipped out a balled fist, striking the militia man’s face. Drake brought his arms back parallel, seized the man with fists full of clothing, and flung him against the opposite wall. He then yanked him back again into the other wall. When the dull thud of the man’s head smacking the concrete sounded, Drake took a step back and watched the body drop like a stone.
All men were down. But the wounded man wouldn’t quiet.
Killing a surrendered wounded man was a war crime, but an act of mercy was more acceptable. In this case, the injured man was a liability and technically still a combatant and Drake didn’t have a humanity supply of morphine. Time was fleeting and if Drake didn’t move out, he’d be a dead man, too His only recourse was to disengage the brain from the body. He did so with multiple swift kicks. The act would change most men forever, but Drake just added it to his tab.
Now he needed his own act of mercy to get to the exfil point. He was already on borrowed time and had to make contact. The plan came to him, and he began to search the bodies for mobile phones. Each had one.
Drake picked up a weapon and began firing down both ends of the alleyway, raising the fire upward and shouting in what little Hebrew he knew, “He’s on the roofs!”
Woolf rewrapped his headscarf and headed out in the direction of the corridor the militia men had entered.
Chapter 3
John “Skidmark” Turdington chuckled from his position within the Beechcraft King Air. Not an Agency man, but rather, a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, he was monitoring the airplane’s SUMERIAN code-named geolocation system with another virtual base-tower transceiver to vacuum up the camp’s data emitting from routers, computers, phones, and other devices within range.
The men’s recurring mission over the past week was to re-map from the aircraft the ever-changing digital footprint of Ain al-Hilweh, while still keeping an eye—or ear—to their boy on the ground. “Hey, Waldo, someone on the ground just called Papa John’s Pizza in DC. I didn’t even know they delivered out here.” He half-laughed, assuming someone in Lebanon must have a family member franchising back in the States. Pizza businesses were great for laundering money, so the call was highly plausible given the characters they monitored at just over twenty thousand feet.