Ma’rib
Yemen
From the moment they came into Ma’rib, the American agent code-named Scorpion knew they were in trouble. There were tribesmen—Abidah, judging by the way they tied their shaal turbans and wore their curved jambiya knives—armed with AK-47s all along the main road. Men from AQAP—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—had intermarried with women of the Abidah and the two groups were now allied. The double was playing them, Scorpion thought. They were driving into a trap.
His driver, Jabir, felt it too.
“Fe Ma’rib kul agila wa kalabahu yahmeelu kalashnikov,” Jabir muttered. In Ma’rib every man and his dog carries a Kalashnikov.
Once, Ma’rib had been a tourist town where visitors came to see the ancient ruins in the sands. Thousands of years ago it had been the fabled city from which Balqis, Queen of Sheba, set forth with gold and frankincense to visit King Solomon. But now the only foreigners were oilmen, come to pay baksheesh to al Qaeda, Scorpion thought as they turned into the narrow streets off the main road under the wary eyes of tribesmen on the rooftops. He hadn’t liked the mission when Peterman first told him about it, and he liked it even less now.
Scorpion had met Hollis Peterman in the back room of a restaurant on Hadda Street in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. The restaurant was easy to spot, with its outer door painted blue to ward off the evil eye. Nearby, a dozen or so Yemeni men squatted in a patch of sidewalk shade chewing qat, the amphetamine-like green leaves that were the Yemeni national habit. Heading inside, Scorpion spotted one of the Yemenis wearing Oakley sunglasses under a shaal and tapping on an iPhone. The idiot should take out an ad, he thought, checking the walls and ceiling for cameras through the smoke from the shisha hubble-bubbles as he made his way to the back of the restaurant.
As soon as he entered the room, he began looking for bugs using a handheld electronic sweep unit. When he was sure it was clean, he sat down and waited while Peterman continued to text, as if to underscore to Scorpion how important he was. They were all like that at the CIA now, he thought. Supergeeks who thought they were smarter than anyone else.
When Peterman finally finished, he clapped his hands. A naadil padded in on bare feet, and Peterman told him in English to bring them saltah, a Yemeni stew, before turning to Scorpion.
“How was your flight?” he asked, putting on a professional smile. Peterman was a big man, fair-haired and solid-looking, but starting to go to fat.
It had been a while since Scorpion had been called upon to deal with the basic field ops level of the CIA. He didn’t have the patience for what CIA old hands liked to call the “usual kiss-kiss before you screw the poor bastard in the ass.”
“What’s on Rabinowich’s mind?” he bluntly asked Peterman.
Dave Rabinowich was a world-class musician, mathematician, and hands-down the best intelligence analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. He was one of only two people in the entire U.S. intelligence community who could have gotten Scorpion to come to Yemen on such short notice.
The naadil knocked and came in with bowls of saltah and glasses of nabidh date juice. Neither man spoke until the naadil left and Scorpion had checked outside the door to make sure no one was listening.
“This isn’t Rabinowich’s deal,” Peterman said, shoveling in the stew with a scoop of malooga bread. “Try the saltah. It’s pretty good here.”
“Are you insane?!” Scorpion snapped, getting up and heading for the door. “The only reason I’m here is Rabinowich—and he’s not part of it? And tell that idiot outside pretending he’s one of the qat crowd not to follow me or I’ll send him back with his Oakleys shoved so far down his throat he’ll be shitting glass for a week. Enjoy your meal.”
“Wait!” Peterman gasped. “We need your help.”
“Is this one of Harris’s deals? Tell Harris to go f— Never mind, I don’t care what you tell him,” Scorpion said. Bob Harris was deputy director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, and he and Scorpion had had their run-ins. The last time, in Saint Petersburg, had been the worst. Now, Scorpion wanted no part of Harris’s operations.
As he opened the door to leave, Peterman said, “We have a double who says he can deliver Qasim bin Jameel.”
Scorpion hesitated. Bin Jameel was not only the leader of AQAP in Yemen, but at the moment the operational head of al Qaeda worldwide.
“No good,” he said, closing the door, coming over and taking his seat again. “You need someone local.”
“We had someone local. McElroy. One of our best. He’d been in-country three years.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know,” Peterman said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“He’s gone. Missing.”
“Missing, or you just haven’t found the body?” Scorpion asked.
Peterman’s face reddened. He didn’t answer. The two men looked at each other. From outside, Scorpion heard the loudspeaker call of the muezzin for the midday Dhuhr prayer. Don’t do it, something told him. There’s something wrong here.
“We can’t use local,” Peterman muttered.
Worse and worse, Scorpion thought. It meant the local CIA station might have been compromised. No wonder Rabinowich had sent him a message that included the emergency code: Biloxi. To some of the better brains in the CIA, Yemen was a bigger threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan, and it sounded like Alex Station—CIA-speak for the task force assigned to al Qaeda—was falling apart. He watched Peterman take a sip of nabidh juice. One of the CIA’s agents was missing—possibly being tortured at that second, Scorpion thought—and if someone didn’t fix it, they’d lose a dozen more. If he was any judge, this guy Peterman was in way over his head.
“What about an SAS?” Scorpion asked. Special Activities Staff teams were the CIA’s paramilitary units specifically designed to perform deep-penetration rescues, extractions, and other high-risk operations. Scorpion’s own first CIA assignment had been in SAS, whose teams were comprised of ex-Delta, Navy SEAL, or USMC Reconnaissance types who then underwent advanced training that made even those formidable special units look like choirboys.
“We don’t have the intel,” Peterman said bleakly, meaning they couldn’t use SAS because they had no idea where McElroy was or what had happened.
Neither man spoke then. It was salvage; the worst, highest risk type of mission.
Whatever you do, don’t do it for McElroy, Scorpion told himself. Even if he was alive, whatever was left of him wouldn’t be worth saving. Plus, AQAP would be sitting there, waiting for whoever came over the fence after him. The prize was bin Jameel. It was a little like buying a lottery ticket. You didn’t expect to win, but the payoff was so big, you didn’t want to kick yourself for not taking that one-in-a-hundred-million chance.
“What was McElroy’s op?” Scorpion said finally.
“Predators,” Peterman said.
The Predator drone, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, was the Pentagon’s primary antiterrorist weapon. It could hover over a target for forty hours and fire Hellfire missiles from 25,000 to 35,000 feet high, too high to be seen or heard from the ground.
“The Hellfire is keyed to the cell phone’s GPS,” Peterman said, taking a cell phone out of his pocket and handing it to Scorpion. “Just have the guy press Send and leave it somewhere. They’ll have sixty seconds to get out.”
“And if the Predator has engine trouble or there’s a screwup somewhere?” Scorpion said, hesitating to use the word “leak.” At this point he had no way of knowing who or what was the problem. For all he knew, he was looking across the table at the problem.
“We’ll have two Predators on station; one for backup.”
“Did McElroy also have a cell for the Predator?”
Peterman reddened. The implication was obvious. It was his op and he had screwed it up. He nodded.
“Perfect,” Scorpion said.
But nothing about the RDV had gone down the way Peterman was supposed to have set it up. Jabir parked the Land Rover near the Ma’rib gun market, its canvas stalls filled with M-4s, AK-47s, and small pyramids of M67 hand grenades piled on old rugs. The safe house was a brick building a block from the market, its arched windows outlined, Yemeni style, in white. A half-dozen heavily armed tribesmen—Bani Khum, by the look of them—squatted near the building’s front door, their cheeks bulging like chipmunks with qat.
Scorpion studied the building. Next to the safe house was another brick apartment building, its roof about ten feet below the roof of the safe house. If he had to, he figured that would be the way out. He told Jabir to wait till he went in, then move the Land Rover across from the second building and keep the weapons ready and the engine running.
Ahmad al-Baiwani was waiting for Scorpion on the roof of the safe house with ginger coffee and bint al sahn honey cakes spread under a tarpaulin shade. A bearded, heavyset man, he wore an American suit jacket over a traditional futa-style skirt and trousers, and the shaal turban of a qadi of the Bani Khum. As a qadi, or tribal leader, al-Baiwani was of the second highest social class, lower only than a sayyid, a descendent of the Prophet. Scorpion himself was disguised as a qabili, or ordinary tribesman, of the Murad. Speaking in fusha standard Arabic, after the usual elaborate pleasantries, Scorpion asked about “the American,” McElroy.
Al-Baiwani said he had never seen McElroy. No one had.
“You know of the hadith of Bukhari when the Prophet of Allah, rasul sallahu alayhi wassalam,” peace be upon him, Scorpion said, “spoke of the greatest of great sins and said, ‘I warn you against giving false witness,’ and kept repeating it over and over till his companions thought he would never stop.”
“What are you accusing me of?” al-Baiwani asked, glancing at his guards to make sure they were watching.
Before Scorpion could respond, he heard the sound of car doors slamming. He got up and looked over the side of the roof. Below he saw three black SUVs that hadn’t been there before. A number of armed AQAP tribesmen got out and headed toward the building door.
“Who’s coming?” he asked, putting his hand on the Glock 9mm hidden in his robe. Al-Baiwani’s guards tensed, not sure what to do.
“Your asayid Peterman said you wanted bin Jameel.” Al-Baiwani gestured as if to say, I gave you what you asked.
The al Qaeda leader himself, along with a bunch of his men, were on their way up. Scorpion took the cell phone out of his pocket, pressed the Send key, then slipped it under his cushion. He had sixty seconds before the Hellfire hit. He grabbed al-Baiwani, jamming the Glock against his side and whispered into his ear, “Ta’ala ma’ee.” Come with me. “We have forty-five seconds to get out or we’ll be dead.”
Al-Baiwani stared horrorstruck at Scorpion, his face showing that he understood about the Predator. The CIA had used them so often in Yemen that in AQAP camps and villages, anyone found carrying a cell phone could be summarily executed.
“Yalla,” al-Baiwani said hurriedly. Let’s go. He got up and motioned for his guards to follow.
There was a ladder from their roof down to the roof of the next building. As al-Baiwani put his foot on it, Scorpion shoved him, leaping down at the same time. Al-Baiwani cried out in pain. The two of them landed on the lower roof just as bin Jameel’s al Qaeda men swarmed out onto the other roof. Someone shouted, and the al Qaeda men began shooting at al-Baiwani’s Bani Khum guards, who fired back. Scorpion prodded a limping al-Baiwani ahead of him as they scrambled down the interior stairs of the building while the shooting went on outside. They could hear children shouting and women screaming.
A little boy, who couldn’t have been more than three, stood on a landing, staring at Scorpion and al-Baiwani as they ran down the stairs. A woman, presumably the boy’s mother, came out of the apartment and stared at them in terror. When the two fleeing men reached the boy, Scorpion scooped him up and handed him to the mother, yelling at her to lock the door and lay on the floor.
Reaching the ground floor, Scorpion checked his watch. The Hellfire would hit any second. He yanked at al-Baiwani, pulling him down to the floor, where they put their arms over their heads.
They waited, every nerve screaming.
Nothing happened.
Scorpion checked his watch again. The Hellfire should have hit. He waited another fifteen seconds, counting every second. There was no Hellfire. From above, he heard men clattering down the stairs. That son of a bitch Peterman, he thought. It would take a miracle to get out of Ma’rib alive now.
Cautiously, Scorpion peered out from the front doorway, looking for Jabir. The Land Rover was parked across the street, not far from the three black SUVs. Jabir was there, scanning the buildings, an M-4 with a mounted M203 grenade launcher in his hands.
Time to go. Scorpion nudged al-Baiwani, then sprinted across the street to the Land Rover.
An Abidah tribesman from one of the SUVs spotted them and started to aim his AK-47. Scorpion shot him in the neck with the Glock. A moment later, a half-dozen Abidah tribesmen heading toward the safe house turned to fire at Scorpion and al-Baiwani, and Jabir opened up with his M-4 on full automatic. Two of the Abidah went down. Just before Scorpion reached the Land Rover, Jabir was shot in the face and collapsed to the dusty street. Scorpion grabbed the M-4 from his lifeless hands, whirled and cut down two more of the Abidah. The remaining tribesmen turned and fled to the safe house.
Al-Baiwani started to get into the Land Rover when Scorpion grabbed him and instead pulled him toward the front SUV. There was an Abidah driver still in it, and Scorpion fired the M-4 as he ran, bullets spiderwebbing the windshield. Shots from the other SUVs and the buildings kicked up on the street around his feet.
Scorpion fired through the SUV window at the driver, killing him. Taking an Abidah shaal from a dead tribesman, he tossed it to al-Baiwani, who was climbing into the SUV’s passenger seat. Scorpion grabbed the dead driver’s shaal for himself, letting the driver’s body tumble into the street, then climbed in. They drove off in a hail of bullets coming from the other SUVs and the roof of the safe house.
“Use this,” Scorpion said, handing the M-4 to al-Baiwani as he swerved around a man with a donkey. Looking in the rearview mirror, he saw that the other two SUVs, filled with Abidah tribesmen, were in pursuit.
“What should I do?” al-Baiwani asked.
“Shoot through the rear window!” Scorpion shouted, making a sudden turn around a corner, then careened down the street toward the main road. Al-Baiwani fired on automatic, shattering the rear window.
The first SUV made the turn and sped after them as Scorpion, tires squealing, pulled around another corner and slammed on the brakes. He jumped out, rummaged for a moment in the backseat, then grabbed the M-4 from al-Baiwani and readied the M203 launcher and loaded a grenade as the first SUV came swerving around the corner. He aimed the laser at the SUV’s windshield and fired, ducking behind his SUV and pulling al-Baiwani down beside him as the grenade exploded, the hot air ripping past them.
The blast killed everyone inside the other SUV. What was left of the chassis continued rolling till it bumped against a cart by the side of the road. Scorpion reloaded the launcher with another grenade and peeked around the corner of the building. The second SUV was no longer following them. It was stopped in the middle of the street, guns bristling.
He motioned al-Baiwani back to the SUV and got back in himself. Tucking the M-4 beside him, he headed toward the main road. On the outskirts of the city they saw a roadblock ahead. It was manned by AQAP fighters, their guns aimed at them as they approached.
“What do we do?” al-Baiwani asked.
“We’re Abidah, remember?” Scorpion said, touching his shaal and slowing as they approached the roadblock.
Scorpion and, after a moment, al-Baiwani raised their fists and shouted, “Alahu akbar!” The AQAP fighters shouted back, “Alahu akbar!” several firing their guns in the air for effect as one of them waved them through.
They drove carefully through the gap in the roadblock, Scorpion waiting until he was at least a hundred meters away before he gunned the SUV. The roadblock receded in the rearview mirror, then the last mud-brick buildings gave way to desert. Al-Baiwani looked at Scorpion but didn’t say anything.
Ten kilometers on, Scorpion pulled to the side of the road and stopped. They were in a sandy desert plain, the road an empty blacktop for as far as they could see in either direction.
“Why are we stopping?” al-Baiwani asked.
Scorpion pulled out the Glock. “Where’s McElroy, the American?” he said, pointing the gun at al-Baiwani’s groin.