Retribution

RAF Lakenheath Air Base, north of London

James Scott could barely hear what the crew chief was saying over the roar of the Pave Hawk helicopter’s turbine engine, but he could tell from the chief’s motion, pointing out the open door, what was being said.

“There’s the village and the pond is just there.” The chief was yelling the words. Scott leaned forward in the canvas seat. The harness tugged at his waist as he looked out over the snow-covered landscape. Property lines were marked in odd-shaped rectangles and squares of tree lines that surrounded the village. The air should have been chilling, but the jet engine warmed the blast coming through the open door. The helicopter tilted hard to the right, pulling Scott back into the seat, as he looked down directly to the ground below.

A blue pickup truck with a snow shovel on the front end was directly below the helicopter, pushing snow along streaks in front of a thick, rectangular bunker that was a part of a network of buildings. Each of the buildings were linked by a black-striped taxiway in a chain. The helicopter tilted again, sharply to the right, pushing Scott’s shoulder into the tubular frame of the seat.

“I’ve read about the pond,” Scott yelled back to the airman. “It’s the reason the Roman Legion was here.”

Lakenheath’s Pond existed thousands of years before the first Roman soldier set foot on the island, but the freshwater supported the establishment of the first garrison. Scott saw in his mind the encampment of the Legion in the clearing next to the pond, a perfect quadrangle, holding more than twenty thousand Romans. In the center of the encampment was the praetorian’s, or general’s, tent, the lines of the streets and tenting perfectly straight, like the geometry of the Coliseum. The small tent city was surrounded by a rampart, more than a dozen feet high, followed by a ditch twelve feet wide and twelve feet deep. The Roman measurements were exact. They had built the perfect killing machine.

But it was here in the center, the praetorian’s tent, that Caesar stayed during his visit to the frontier.

Here, in Lakenheath. Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar had been a success because he became an emperor after being a great field general. The empire lasted a thousand years not because of emperors like Nero and Claudius, but because of the Legion. The Legion, under command of men like Agricola, refused defeat. An engine of warfare, the machine took forty years to march through this island, but eventually it crushed the tribes of Britain as it did with all of its enemies.

Almost every day, Scott found that some lesson from Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came to mind, often in a relevant way. He’d studied Gibbon at Eton and Oxford.

Scott glanced down at his Submariner Rolex. He twisted it the several hours to mark the time in western Pakistan.

Parker is well over the Mediterranean by now.

The Pave Hawk helicopter’s skids settled to the ground as Scott uncoupled his belt and stepped out on the tarmac.

“Thank you!”

The crew chief saluted his passenger.

Scott turned to see the concrete bunker with a pair of F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets sitting inside. RAF Lakenheath’s row of hangars paralleled both sides of the runway.

The modern engine of warfare. Scott looked across the airfield to see the U.S. Air Force’s front line of strike fighters.

Lakenheath was the home of the Americans’ 48th Operations Group. On the other end of the row of hangars, one stood out. A massive, high-winged cargo aircraft stood parked in front of the last hangar on the far end of the runway. The T-tail stood well above the roof of the nearby hangar. Clouds of hot mist floated up from the ramp, which was extended below the towering tail of the aircraft. Scott noticed the shapes of several figures near the nose of the aircraft. Armed guards with M-16 rifles surrounded the C-17.

“Will it take off in this?” Scott pointed to the sky through the windshield as he spoke to the driver of the Air Force truck waiting to pick him up. The snowstorm had shifted into a driving, blinding wall of white.

“Sir, those guys roll in zero visibility. They had us drive the runway in the last fog bank. I could barely keep this on the asphalt.” The driver was talkative. “As soon as we called in that we were clear of the strip, all you could hear was the spin of their engines. You never even saw it.” The airman first class stared directly ahead as she drove across the airfield. Her knuckles were a blanched white as she squeezed the steering wheel.

Scott needed a C-17 crew like that.

“Are we going directly to the WOC?”

“Yes, sir.”

The operation center controlled everything on the field.

The pickup truck’s driver had the heater on high. The snowflakes hit the warm glass and turned instantly into drops of water. Despite the approach of midday, the temperature seemed to be dropping quickly. The new snow stuck to the already plowed taxiways. The driver drove the truck like an ambulance, flying across the airfield with a red flashing light on her cab’s roof, stopping only briefly as she crossed the main runway.

The truck stopped in front of a low, one-story block structure with a dark metal roof that was covered largely in white with drifts of snow. The building was missing any windows. A sign directly in front said WING OPERATIONS CENTER.

Scott ran into the building. He didn’t even bother to take the time to thank the driver.

“Mr. Scott, your pass.” Another airman handed him the magnetic card. It wasn’t as if Scott hadn’t been here before. He walked down the hallway, past several airmen armed with short-barreled M4 rifles with their vest jackets. He scanned his pass and entered the vault marked SCIF. The Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility had walls nearly a foot thick, covered with copper mesh that foreclosed any eavesdropping from an outside source.

The room was no larger than an oversized cubicle crammed with computers and LCD screens covering the three walls remaining beyond the vault door entrance. A table in the center was covered with satellite photographs and pictures of bearded, turban-dressed men. Several men, also with beards, sat at the desk studying the pictures.

“Well, gentlemen, he has crossed the Rubicon.” Scott took off his coat, knocking the snowflakes from it. One of the bearded men, in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, stood up to take it.

“Do you have the pictures of the ridgeline?” asked Scott.

“Yes, sir.” The man, Captain Mark Furlong, hung the coat and handed a packet of satellite photos across the table. They were marked up with black tracings showing the major gradients and pitch of the land.

Scott pulled his chair up to the table. “The ridgeline goes from the northwest down to the southeast. The riverbed is on the south side, and intelligence tells us that the caves are in the mountains on the far side of the bed.”

“Any water in the riverbed?” A blue-eyed, black-bearded soldier asked the question from a chair that was leaned back against a filing cabinet. A wad of snuff tucked into his cheek made him look like a man with a bad toothache. He held a plastic cup, which he would occasionally spit into.

“Sergeant Frix.” Furlong mentioned the name as a way of introducing the shooter to Scott.

“It’s dry and rocky. It looks like a gravel truck dumped a pile of crap into a ravine and called it a riverbed.”

Frix nodded his head.

Scott had a sense of the team’s structure. Frix sat next to another lanky soldier with brownish-blond hair and a short brown beard. His name was Don Burgey, and he too had a cheek swollen with a pinch of snuff. Scott knew that those two, like the other team, Sergeants Vaatofu Fury and Nel Villegas, had spent years working together. In-country, they communicated with a look or, in the pitch-black darkness of a rocky outcrop of rocks, a squeeze of a shoulder or arm, a spotter and shooter, setting up kills in perfect sync.

Parker’s requested man, Kevin Moncrief, also sat at the table. Though he didn’t have a beard to match the other operators and he was at least a decade older than the most senior man, Furlong, the ex–gunnery sergeant, looked comfortable enough with the team, and they with him.

“We’ll drop in on the northwest of this mountainous finger in the other valley.” Furlong pointed to the ridge that paralleled the dead riverbed. “And we’ll move up to the front of this point. Several valleys should be visible from somewhere in here.” He continued to point as the others looked over his shoulder.

“Pull up the bird and let’s see what activity there is.” Scott directed the briefing.

Sergeant Burgey turned to a keyboard, bringing an image up on the largest of the several LCD boards. As he focused in, the sprawl of Peshawar could be seen to the southeast. Soon Peshawar disappeared as the view shifted farther to the north. A river twisted across the screen, from upper left to lower right. A scattered row of clouds to the south gave the picture a sense of depth. Burgey continued to focus in and, as he did, a twisting dirt trail could be seen at the base of the mountain range. At several points, the dirt road turned toward the mountain and then suddenly stopped.

“There’s one of the caves.”

“What’s that?” Scott stood up, crossed over, and circled an object on the ground.

Burgey focused in, and with each click the image of a man, walking alone across the rocky desert, became obvious. He left a moving shadow that was much longer than his height. The sun was setting, distorting the proportions.

“Take it all the way in.”

The spy satellite had the sensitivity of a microscope. The form of a man changed to a clearer image that showed his outline, then his manner of dress, and then the beard on his face. Even though darkness was approaching on the desert plain as he moved quickly across the rocky landscape, his rifle was slung over one shadow.

“What do you think the chances are?” Scott smiled. If he wasn’t who they hoped he would be, he certainly was a bad guy. He was heading in the wrong direction to be a good guy. Now, if he only stayed there.

“It can’t be that easy,” said Frix.

“Let me call Langley.” Scott reached for the secure phone.

“This is Scott.”

The others watched the one-sided conversation.

“Yes, indeed.”

Scott looked up at the digital clock on the wall with the several time zones.

“Yes, departure is in six hours.”

The tension in the room was thick. They had all done this before, but there was always the risk of the random bullet, the pin-sized fragment of shrapnel, or the ricochet splinter of shell casing. But the team would not go in without one or the other.

“I hope not.”

No, the mission wasn’t being canceled by weather or storm or sleet or rain.

Scott picked up the pen from the desk, grabbed a piece of paper, and wrote weather.

“Yes, got it.”

This time he wrote in big, bold, block letters: TALIO.

“Yes, Operation Talio.”

Langley had assigned the mission its official name.

Only Scott knew the word’s meaning in Latin.

Retribution.