I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist
Chuck Xing put the brown liquor bottle back into a small map case of his other personal effects and led Cloud outside and down into a hidden opening in the hillside. After fewer than thirty steps, they walked through another door that Xing secured behind them.
Inside the space was an electronic showcase of breathtaking Chinese might and ingenuity.
The situation inside the below-ground bunker was rather pleasant. The computers and high-tech communication gear needed to be chilled to a consistent low temperature to function at their best, and the long hours the Chinese pilots spent in their combat chairs meant the rest and food areas were first-class, since no one was permitted to leave during the duty shift.
Cloud looked over the shoulders of the drone drivers and watched the crisp video displays showing high-resolution, full-color imagery of the ground. China’s CH-4 Rainbow unmanned aerial vehicle is a powerful armed drone on the order of the American military’s fierce MQ-9 Reaper drone, whose physical design and mission profile the Rainbow was designed to mimic. The Rainbow was new to China’s inventory. Its secret deployment to Iraq was its first combat mission.
The UAV’s electronic nervous system was attuned to pick up electronic emissions from American and coalition flights of any kind, manned or unmanned. There was a real chance that an American drone or AWACS airborne surveillance platform would see and possibly act against a strange drone found in Ramadi’s dark skies, and that wouldn’t do for the Chinese.
The Rainbow was stealthy, throwing back the radar return of an eagle, and it was nearly invisible to the eye due to light-bending optical camouflage technology the Chinese had perfected while America’s DARPA still played with it in labs.
If the Rainbow detected the slightest whiff of American or other opposition presence, it would dive to ground-following level—not just tree-top, but house-top level. It was that good—and withdraw until another day. Spies paid to be common workers on the American bases housing Reaper drones and other coalition aircraft provided a short analog early warning.
If an American drone taxied toward a runway, the Chinese would know about it within minutes and the Rainbow could safely scoot away before it risked detection.
The Rainbow idled over Ramadi at an altitude of about six thousand feet. Its powerful unblinking video eyes were focused on a house and courtyard in the middle of the city. It was the house that Pakistani intelligence had identified as the location of Susan Xing, General Xing’s daughter and Commander Xing’s sister.
Over Cloud’s right shoulder, Commander Xing watched the displays intently for signs of life.
“The imagery is really quite good,” Cloud said.
“Yes. We liberated the sensor design from its American oppressor, a vendor who supplies the same technology to General Atomics.”
General Atomics manufactures the American MQ-9 Reaper combat drone.
“You people really must learn to change your passwords more often.”
Cloud laughed—but he memorized every switch, button and move the pilots made in case he needed that information later.
It was easy to be mesmerized by the high-quality displays. The UAV could stream video, audio and data in real time, if desired, but in stealth mode, the Rainbow transmitted its coded signal up to a Chinese communications satellite in a scrambled, high-speed burst at random intervals of three to eight seconds. Then the data was relayed back down to the command bunker buried in the sand at the fish farm.
There always was the possibility that something bad could happen in between bursts, either to the drone or to its surveillance targets, because the burst transmission method left gaps in the continuous view that could be exploited by an attacker.
In self-directed stealth mode, the Rainbow sent its human operators in the bunker a constant stream of buffered video, but it was like watching an American TV broadcast with a seven-second delay. The UAV could also passively detect targeting radar, and if it did so, the data stream would automatically go to real time for defensive purposes.
“Hey Chuck,” Cloud said. Commander Xing turned toward him. “Did you know that back in the 1980s, those first IBM PC desktop computers were not considered fully Microsoft compatible unless they could run Flight Simulator?”
Xing laughed. “In 1980 I was five. How old are you, dude?”
Cloud just smiled and turned back to the Rainbow video surveillance.
“Are we going to watch the pretty pictures all day, or are we going to do something? Where are all the resources your father told me to expect?”
“The pretty pictures serve two purposes,” Xing said. “First, I’m looking for extra or unknown enemy soldiers in and around the house. There do not appear to be any”—he pointed to a secondary screen showing the form of a single individual soldier atop a neighboring structure—“except this overwatch position. The defenders are probably all inside with my sister. Related to that, these geniuses are rotating shifts exactly every six hours, just like clockwork, coming and going in untidy gaggles, always along the same route.
“Second, we’ve been mapping ingress and egress routes to and away from the house, and watching to see what local structures they are using for safe houses. We found only one other, which seems to be their local headquarters. Our egress coordinates are being downloaded into the computers and reformatted for our handheld GPS devices. So yes, the answer to your question is we are indeed going to do something. Once you have reviewed the maps, you can tell us what that is.”
Cloud smiled. “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”
“Who is that?” Xing asked. “Sun Tzu? Confucius?”
“No,” Cloud said. “Desmond Tutu.”
A light electronic tone emanated from Cloud’s wrist, an alternating bee-beeBeep, bee-beeBeep. It cycled three times, paused, and repeated. He frowned for just a moment, imperceptible in the dim bunker light.
The tone was a meaningful signal he hadn’t expected to get yet.
Cloud raised his left arm and showed a black Suunto Core watch to Xing. “I forgot to shut off the alarm.”
He pressed the rubber-clad button on the top right of the dial and the tones went back to sleep.
So, it’s a go, Cloud thought. About damned time, Poppy.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s take a closer look at those maps.”
The assault teams crept through the darkened city wearing the U.S. military-issue ATN/PVS7 monocular night-vision system. They’d been left behind by the truckload for use by the refashioned Iraqi army, but along with weapons, vehicles and ammunition, the goggles had been abandoned in place when ISIS forces advanced on Ramadi.
The city now was considered officially liberated from ISIS proper—indeed, the entire region, of late—but all that did was allow many left-behind ISIS soldiers to melt back into the populace and hide in plain sight.
Though the Iraqis had a clear numerical advantage and the best training and equipment American taxpayers could buy, they had occasionally still bolted from the battlefield in multitudes if under attack, often stripping off their uniforms and folding back into the population as civilians in the same way the old Iraqi army had when previously overrun by U.S. military forces.
It was an easy matter for the spies paid by the Chinese to just pick up, literally from the ground, a few dozen weapons and night vision goggles without resorting to bribes. The spies kept the bribe money nonetheless.
Cloud led one team along the alleyway behind the houses across the street from the objective. Commander Xing led his team behind the objective itself. The plan was timed such that both teams would storm the house before the shift change, before the fresh ISIS fighters arrived and while the tired ones were careless and listless.
The last shift change had occurred at ten the previous night: They would hit the building at 0200 Zulu, before the six-hour changeover expected at 0400 and near the end of that shift when the soldiers would be fatigued. A careful recon had put eyes on the single drowsy overwatch soldier.
These people, Cloud thought, are not professionals. The soldier was silently knifed while he dozed. Sweet dreams.
Cloud carefully peeked around the corner of the building directly across from the house where Susan Xing was a prisoner. He had an unobstructed view across the unfenced yard to the front door. There were only two windows facing the street on each of two floors. It was very likely that Susan was on the second floor.
Cloud pulled off his night vision and extracted another thermal optical device from a pouch strapped to his combat vest. This was a highly modified military version of the FLIR One III, an imager attachment to Cloud’s iPhone with high resolution and enough cooled sensing power to tell him where the warm bodies were behind the walls. Combined with now real-time thermal imaging from the Rainbow UAV circling above, the teams would know how many people were in the building and where they were located. Then they got lucky.
The airborne thermal imaging from the Rainbow drone displayed six men sitting or mostly lying around on the first floor. There was no movement, and they all were probably sleeping, because there was no hot spot corresponding to, say, a lamp, a television or video player. There were two heat signatures on the second floor. One was motionless in a chair in front of a door, and the other was lying in a bed.
“Hello, Susan Xing,” Cloud whispered to himself. Then he turned up the magnification and took a longer, closer look at the door guard. The man’s head kept dropping slowly forward and then snapping back, and it looked a lot like the bored soldier was dozing alone in the dark hallway.
They were attacking in less than three minutes, but that door guard had to be put down: First, to safeguard Susan Xing, but second, before the man finished his nap and rose to full awareness. Cloud pointed at the imager and whispered in his Chinese team leader’s ear. The man nodded and used his throat mic to radio instructions to the sniper on the roof of their building where the ISIS overwatch used to be.
Peering through a thermal sniper scope, the contract Tajik rifleman aimed through the open but shrouded window and took out the door guard with a single silenced shot, no muss, no fuss. The threadbare curtain covering the open window fluttered only briefly as the bullet passed through it, as if disturbed by a breeze. This breeze had been deadly. The jihadi died in the chair without a sound.
A second command sent the two assault teams creeping into the house front and back at the same time. The teams were prepared to exert overwhelming force, but instead they entered a shooting gallery.
Theirs.
The muffled staccato of machine guns mercilessly ripping into sleeping ISIS soldiers didn’t even make it to the street, and none of the terrorists even had time to cry out. There was a moment after the shooting stopped where no sound was heard. The smoke of discharged automatic weapons was swept out an open rear window by the night breeze. It was suddenly remarkably calm.
Then Cloud went from man to man and put a .45-caliber slug from his muffled Colt .45-caliber automatic in each jihadi’s head. Whatever lingering dreams they might have been having suddenly went dark. The ISIS dead were checked for anything of intelligence value, but all the raiders came up with was a half-empty Turkish cigarette pack and some local currency.
One ISIS soldier, wearing the all-black uniform of a commander, like Chuck Xing, was found with a letter in an unsealed envelope. Cloud read the handwritten scrawl to find it was the soldier’s letter home to his family, wishing an eight-year-old daughter a happy birthday. It enclosed a few Iraqi dinars. Cloud stuffed the envelope into his pocket.
The real danger was still upstairs. The critical task was for Commander Xing to get up the stairs, wake his sister, and keep her from screaming as strange, armed men powered into her bedroom. Xing crept up the stairs with another fighter to the hallway outside of Susan’s room.
He stopped to inspect the dead guard. Nice center-mass heart shot. Xing wished all contractors were as effective.
He crossed the man’s lifeless hands in his lap and, with a single pull, he yanked a dusty curtain panel off the window and draped it over the dead sentry from head to floor.
The rescue fighter guarded the hallway and stairs as Xing entered the small bedroom. As a gloved hand clamped over his sister’s mouth, he whispered, “Susan …”
She awakened instantly and her eyes went wide with fear until Xing pulled the keffiyeh from his face.
“It’s me, honey, it’s me,” he said.
“Chuck … Chucky? Is it really you?” The tension and the fear fled from her and, sobbing, she wrapped her arms around his neck so tight she almost cut off his air.
“It is me.” He managed to croak in the darkness. He reached up and gently peeled away her embrace. “Don’t cry, honey. I brought friends—we’re here to take you home.”
His sister flung pale arms around his neck again and she hugged him, desperately and hard. Joyful tears flowed in quiet streams down her cheeks and left streaks on an unwashed face. She cradled his face in her hands.
“Chuck, do you remember all those times growing up when I swatted you with my dolls?”
“You used them on me like big clubs. Hurry up and get dressed. This bus is leaving.”
Xing’s battle buddy surveyed the street from the hall window, turned, nodded good to go, and gave an upraised thumb.
“Well,” Susan laughed in ebbing fear, “I want you to know I am really fucking sorry about that!” She grabbed a handful of her clothes and dressed as they fled.
The teams exfiltrated with Susan Xing as quietly as they had arrived. The streets were nearly deserted in these early morning hours, but the hint of dawn flirted with low-hanging clouds in reds and oranges and occasional Iraqis were encountered in the street. They all averted their eyes and hugged the building walls as they edged past, hoping to seem invisible to obviously dangerous strangers.
The challenge was managing Susan’s excited and terrified sobs and squeaks as they quick-marched through the city to their secure vehicle staging area in an abandoned garage. They would hunker down to burn off the day before setting out again that night.
In the city center, just off a town square where the Humvees awaited, the relative order of a reawakening city now featured a sprinkling of municipal offices as the government struggled to reconstitute. Cloud paused before a large, remarkably unscathed building that was the Ramadi post office.
He stopped and pulled from his pocket the ISIS officer’s birthday greetings to his daughter. The envelope was addressed and even had a stamp. He opened the flap of the envelope, moistened and sealed the adhesive, and slipped it into the mail drop.