He who fights with monsters might take care lest
he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for
long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher
Poppy Benedict had been in the Central Intelligence Agency since college. It had been twenty-seven years since his last kegger at Southern New Hampshire University, where he’d played a little intramural lacrosse but mostly just studied, drank, and didn’t date much.
His undergrad degree was in data analytics and his Master’s in operations and project management, so when—through a howling hangover one Sunday—he saw a subtly worded ad in The New York Times for employment opportunities with the CIA, that little cartoon light bulb went on over his head.
He’d never known another employer. If he could describe his work to someone with the requisite security clearance, he wouldn’t know what to say. He was no James Bond, but he finally had achieved his career goal of being an operator—a spy. These days, the well-muscled kids who graduated from their training at The Farm were no longer its only poster boys.
Poppy’s work as an operator had more to do with running computer programs than running from enemies in Moscow or Beijing or Tehran. He had grown in the CIA from an entry-level analyst poring over electronic intel, or high-altitude surveillance imagery with a large magnifying glass, to managing that section, then directing the entire department and its transition to high-resolution satellites and, later, adding remotely piloted aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles—RPAs and UAVs, or drones. With no field experience nor aspirations to have any, Poppy’s professional interest drifted to the agency’s electronic and support side.
He was paid well at the deputy director level, but he was a free agent, a swing man, a jack of all trades though a master of them as well. He lent his expertise and management skills to many understaffed offices on a project basis, and he was a hot commodity. Even within the CIA, his true mission and activity was need-to-know. If an org chart was printed out, Paul “Poppy” Benedict would be listed as just another random mission manager under the Science and Technology Directorate.
He was much more.
Army General John Glenn McCandless stood at the front of the room holding a waxed paper coffee cup and surveying the space now filled beyond a fire marshal’s nightmare with milling people. Of course, it would be a rare fire marshal who got this far into the unremarkable glass building in Crystal City, the nickname for the Arlington hive of leased federal government office towers across from the Pentagon’s south parking lot and beyond I-395.
The conference room was designed for occupancy by fifty-five or fewer people, according to the mandatory government sign in the hallway with its hand-drawn-in-red-Sharpie arrows pointing the direction to fire exits. That didn’t include the square feet consumed by the long but narrow conference table dotted with speakerphones and the conga line of chairs snaking around it, nor the gallery of additional chairs lining the walls for the deputies and seconds. Today there were seventy-two people in the room, and it was getting stuffy fast.
At the refreshment table in a front corner of the room, General McCandless drained the last cold drops of black coffee from the vending machine cup and turned to his ever-present aide-de-camp, Army Major Tommy Crosby.
“You ever miss Germany, Tommy?”
McCandless had been the three-star lieutenant general commanding all of U.S. Army-Europe, at Wiesbaden, Germany. Crosby had been his aide there, too. When McCandless was tapped to lead the secret military-CIA hybrid task force and given his fourth star, he brought Crosby along with him knowing it would be the best possible pathway to accelerate promotion for the man.
“Yessir, I do, from time to time.”
The general was a lifelong bachelor—few occupations were as hard on relationships as a military career—and he had come to refer to Crosby in private conversations as “my kid,” though the major was thirty-five and had been in the Army for twelve years. The last five had been with McCandless. He’d made major fast, and McCandless intended to see him continue promoting early.
“We always had fun in the fall,” Crosby said with a subtle smile. “Fasching. Oktoberfest.”
Crosby was single, but always seemed to have a spectacular date when he wanted one for a beer carnival or volksfest on local Army kasernes and out in town.
“I liked it, too. Maybe we’ll get back there one day,” McCandless said.
He loosened his black uniform tie and handed the empty coffee cup to the junior officer. “Let’s get started.”
Crosby spun smartly and tossed the cup into a nearby government-gray trash can lined with a clear plastic garbage bag: Nothing but net. He turned back to get the room’s attention and introduce his boss, but General McCandless already stood at his podium. The room fell silent by the time the general ritually cleared his throat.
Crosby made a knife-hand motion to his Signal Corps staff sergeant dressed in the popular new World War II-throwback “pinks and greens” uniform. The woman lowered the room lights and brought up the ceiling-mounted projector at the same time.
Outside the room, a red light reading OCCUPIED—DO NOT ENTER went on over the door and an electronic lock clicked softly.
“Okay, I presume you all have seen the early briefing deck, but here is the updated version as of one hour ago.”
McCandless pointed a ruby red laser pointer at the screen showing a map of the Middle East. In the center was Afghanistan and Iraq.
“At about 2330 last night, we received an action notification from our asset embedded with a Chinese People’s Liberation Army force conducting a hostage rescue operation in Ramadi, Iraq.”
He paused and turned toward the darkened room. The powerful beam shed by the overhead projector illuminated the general’s face with shadows and light, appropriate considering the context of this discussion.
“These are honest-to-God PLA soldiers. We think they are being led by a young Chinese Special Forces commander named Chuck Xing, a man with a lot of enterprise and impressive access to resources.” Chuck Xing’s photo was put on the screen. “This is an image from an old Stanford student ID, so it’s about twelve years old. The kidnapped woman is Susan Xing, a dual-citizenship American/Chinese person living here legally, currently also a Stanford student. Xing and his team are working freelance, because the kidnapped girl is Commander Xing’s little sister.”
The screen displayed driver’s license photos for Susan Xing and her mother.
“While changing planes in Germany en route to Poland on an exchange student trip, Susan and her mother, Catherine, a native-born American, were lured out of the Frankfurt-Main Airport security zone and snatched by ISIS assholes. ISIS is—or was—holding Susan for ransom. Catherine Xing hasn’t been seen since they were abducted. We are aware that she is dead.”
He made the statement without emotional topspin. She was a factor in the equation, nothing more. Just business.
A hand in the back was raised tentatively to ask a question. The man thought better of his timing and the hand disappeared in the gloom. Better to not interrupt.
“They may just want cash, maybe information, maybe more. That ‘more’ part is the troubling bit. There is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence from other sources suggesting they think they could have traded Susan Xing for some kind of miniature Chinese nuclear device. That’s when Operation Patient Anvil was initiated. We have waited a long time, spent a lot of money, and made many sacrifices to get our man inserted into this Chinese operation, and he has worked his angles hard, domestically and in Iraq. Now it is time to start hammering the Anvil part of the program. Next.”
The image on the screen changed to a recorded satellite video feed. The video had been shot at night from space, but it was as perfect and detailed as if the onlookers were watching it happen in the parking lot two stories below. Of course, this secure room had no windows. The telltale lack of color in the gray, black and white imagery established that this orbiting overwatch was infrared.
“This angle is on the Al-Taqaddum Air Base outside of Ramadi. It’s largely unused anymore. Watch: A white business jet takes off”—McCandless pointed his laser at the aircraft. It rose lazily at this high viewing angle and disappeared to the northwest. Digital details in an onscreen window flickered as changes in azimuth, direction, altitude, and other vectors, even ground temperature, were analyzed and displayed.
“Then an M-1078 is loaded into this aircraft.” The general circled a Hercules cargo plane with his laser pointer. “As soon as it buttons up, it rolls out and takes off. The Humvees and a third cargo truck depart together. Then, this group of men carrying weapons”—another laser point—“walk toward a C-130J Super Hercules. The Herk turns toward the runway threshold and immediately takes off.”
The scene jump-cut to another clip, also at night. A dark C-130 taxied along a roadway lined at regular intervals with infrared markers. It turned around where the markers ended and faced back toward the village of Tagab.
“About five hours later, a little less, maybe, the same Herk lands outside of a little place called Tagab, near the Pak border. We watched it the whole way across Iran and Afghanistan. AWACS directed our coalition aircraft to give the plane an uninterrupted flight path, and we had assets ready to help out if the Iranians got frisky.
“The plane flew way south and low, keeping off Iranian radars as they overflew the entire friggin’ country. We kept the coalition AWACS birds apprised and the C-130’s pilots had no idea they were being followed. It turned east just here, above Rafsanjan, and then went flat out across Afghanistan to Tagab.”
Haha, Teabag we called it, a voice whispered from the darkness, followed by suppressed laughter.
Without turning around, McCandless said, “Yeah, that’s what we called it, too.”
More laughter. The room was cooling now and people were leaning comfortably, attentively forward in their chairs.
The general’s pointer moved to the right of the screen while the video continued to play.
“Here, three trucks run down from the hills toward the plane. They are not challenged. One takes a defensive position and the other two turn away, then back up to the plane’s tail.”
The imagery changed to another angle, nearly close-up and evidently shot not by the spy satellite, but from a drone or other atmospheric platform, because the picture slowly panned from left to right as the camera platform winged by.
“Two large shrink-wrapped pallets are man-handled onto the plane, then the trucks are driven away and blown up.” Most of the viewers in the room had seen many such surveillance videos before, or the many gun-camera posts that show up on Facebook, LiveLeak and YouTube, but the lack of sound as the trucks transformed into silent, expanding clouds of smoke, dust, and flying metal still was surreal.
The general circled the aircraft’s ramp with his laser pointer as the ramp closed, a signal to the staff sergeant to pause the video. Two dark cubes were clearly visible in the gloom.
“Each of those pallets has about fifty million American greenbacks stacked in bundles of one hundred dollar bills.” A low wolf-whistle of appreciation rose from the back row of chairs. “Yeah. That’s a nice retirement package, huh?”
The scene changed, and McCandless gestured again with the laser pointer. “Note the infrared markers along here,” he said, tracing the length of the road serving as a runway. “If that’s what we think it is, that’s about as minimum a takeoff distance as you’re gonna find. Watch the C-130.”
McCandless pointed to a whitish blip emerging from the adjacent town of Tagab. “At about the same time the plane starts its takeoff roll, this truck here comes rolling hot out of the town.”
The Army officer stopped talking and let the soundless action unfold. It was clear that the speeding truck was full of armed men, likely militia from the village. In just seconds the two white blips merged, but then in slow motion the plane rose into the air without a bobble and flew out of the frame.
On the ground, the truck burst into a hot blotch and flipped backwards, end over end, like a circus acrobat. Along the way, men on fire were ejected from the truck and spilled across the terrain, sometimes flopping and rolling around briefly as they burned hotly in the infrared, but most were already dead and motionless when they came to rest.
On the video feed, spectacular secondary explosions burned in splotchy white orbs that grew fast and faded slowly. It seemed like a Hollywood special-effects movie, making the lack of sound all the more profound.
“Scratch one truck full of militia,” McCandless said. Light applause filtered into the air. “Lights, please.” Instantly the windowless room brightened, and people blinked away the sudden change.
“We believe that second C-130 is the team that rescued Susan Xing in Ramadi.” Her smiling driver’s license photo again appeared on the projector, its color washed out from the overhead fluorescent room light. “As I said, she is the sister of the Chinese Special Forces commander who helped free her, but that’s not even the punchline.”
The photo on the screen changed to a dignified Chinese man in a PLA general officer’s uniform.
“They both are the children of General Xing Jianjun, a retired PLA three-star who, as incredible as its sounds, today operates a Chinese restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside of Detroit.” A murmur of disbelief circulated around the room. The general half-smiled in wry agreement. “Yeah, inconceivable, but true. I hear the food is good, too.” Another ripple of laughter.
“What does all this have to do with anything, you’re asking? Well, to start with, our asset embedded with the Chinese freelancers is a former Army Ranger, convicted of war crimes, who busted out of Leavenworth about seven months ago.”
Sharp intakes of breath came from the direction of several chairs. There was only one of those guys.
“He left thirty-seven years to life on the table, but here is the material thing: Those horrific crimes we accused him of? That we publicized so widely to show the world how judicious our government is, serving truth and justice and The American Way, all that crap?”
Heads nodded all around the room. The sordid ordeal had been in the news cycle hourly for months.
“We made it all up.”