part0006

The black site had been an open secret from the day it opened, nearly eighteen months ago. In any city, in any country of the world, neither the CIA nor any other intelligence agency could covertly operate such a facility without locals finding out about the true purpose of what was going on behind the walls of the one-story warehouse.

Even if it were not for the police officers, the assets, and the network of Mauritanian contacts, the neighbors had enough evidence in plain sight to draw the correct conclusions. White men, and sometimes women, arriving at odd hours of the day and night, in mostly unmarked, bulletproof vehicles, and always armed to the teeth. Nothing was stored at the warehouse, but there was always a significant security presence, cameras, and concertina wire crowning the tall, cinderblock walls. It didn’t take a genius to determine that it was a black site where the CIA conducted extrajudicial detention and interrogation of individuals suspected of acts of terrorism against the United States of America.

The black site had been attacked early Monday morning, around 03:15. According to eyewitnesses, a group of about twenty heavily armed fighters belonging to a local extremist group had easily overpowered the police officers and security guards, who had surrendered with barely a fight. A certain amount of resistance had come from four alleged CIA operatives or private military contractors who had been in the warehouse at the time. Two of them had been killed on the spot. Their bodies had been paraded for the jihadist cameras a few hours later. They were yet to be identified. The other two operatives had vanished without a trace along with two high-value detainees, who had been brought to the black site for interrogation.

The group had set fire to or destroyed most of the complex, so no on-site investigation was possible. Still, that didn’t stop Justin Hall—the master spy of the Europe Clandestine Section, or ECS, of the Canadian Intelligence Service, or CIS—from wanting to take a closer look at the warehouse. He had been assigned to find the truth behind the attack and the ensuing disappearance of the detainees and the CIA operatives, and bring them home. There were concerns that the attack was an inside job, so the agency was taking no chances. Justin was working with one of the best CIA field operatives, the nearly legendary Scot Thor.

Thor had run the preliminary analyses that were standard in such situations. Assisted by a few trusted men within the Mauritanian Intelligence Agency, Thor had obtained testimony from the eyewitnesses, the police personnel, and the security guards stationed to defend the black site. These were not the tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear reports initially submitted to the CIA station chief. Two men who Thor trusted had interviewed the sources personally, individually, and discreetly. A common, troubling theme had begun to emerge: The attack had been planned well in advance. Many people seemed to have had knowledge of it. Many people, but not the CIA.

Justin mopped his broad forehead with a fold of his black-and-white headdress. He couldn’t change his skin color, and he had a true Mediterranean complexion—dark olive skin, big black eyes, and a large, thick nose—inherited from his Italian mother. But he could alter his appearance. Like most locals, he was dressed in a blue-and-white boubou , the long cotton robe that flowed down to his ankles, with large pockets sewed on both sides. Underneath the robe, he wore a white sarouel , loose-fitting pants, and had a turban wrapped around his head. The garb allowed him to blend in, at least from a distance.

Justin was in the company of Ahmedou, one of the few men they trusted inside the Mauritanian Intelligence Agency. Ahmedou was sitting in the driver’s seat of their battered Toyota pickup truck. In the backseat, Thor was playing with a large metal lighter, striking it every two or three seconds. Like Justin, he was wearing local clothes. Scot was tall and thin, with close-cropped black hair and dark brown eyes. A three-day beard covered his angular face, which had high cheekbones and a square jaw.

It was early morning, but the temperature had climbed to twenty-seven degrees Celsius. The truck had no air conditioning, and they kept the cracked windows up to keep the flies and the dirt outside. Still, Justin felt as if a layer of dust had coated his face. He drew a deep breath, but the muggy air didn’t fill his lungs. He rolled down the window just a crack, but a whiff of a rotten stench assaulted his nostrils. He hastened to roll up the glass and shook his head.

He said, “Well, gents, we’re not going to figure it out by sitting here. We’ve got to go in.”

“Tell me, again, what do you expect to find there?” Ahmedou asked in his soft voice with a distinct African accent. “I’ve been there twice. There’s nothing there. Nothing useful, that is.”

Justin shrugged. “I know that. But I didn’t come all the way here not to set foot inside.”

Ahmedou said, “No one missed anything. The whole place was destroyed by the time we came. There was nothing to miss…”

“Look, no one is accusing you or your agency of any wrongdoing.” Justin shifted in his seat. “But we’re running our own investigation. That’s a fact. Now, let’s get in and find some more facts.”

Ahmedou shrugged. “A waste of time, I say. You’ll find flies and rotten flesh, but no facts.”

Justin returned the shrug and stepped outside the Toyota.

A street vendor had set up a fruit stand about fifty meters from the destroyed warehouse’s entrance. A few steps away, a couple of young men were standing idle, smoking, and fumbling with their phones. One of them seemed to point the phone at Justin and his team. Is he taking pictures of us? He turned to Ahmedou. “Can you sort out what’s going on there?” he asked and pointed discreetly at the young men.

Thor said, “Young punks…”

“We’ll check the warehouse,” Justin told Thor. “Let’s go.”

They stepped around a couple of heaps of cinderblocks and twisted metal, which was all that was left of the entrance. According to pictures that Ahmedou had secured from a local paper and several jihadist Twitter accounts, one of the attackers’ vehicles had been disabled a few meters away. There was a large dark stain on the ground, but Justin couldn’t be sure it was connected to the vehicle that, by now, was God knows where.

Thor gestured he was covering the left side of the yard. Even though they didn’t expect squatters in the almost completely looted and destroyed complex, both Thor and Justin had drawn their guns. They both opted to use Sig Sauer P320 9mm pistols, compact and reliable. They could maintain their blend-in persona only for so long. Now that they were out on the street, Justin had started to have a nagging feeling deep in his gut that they were stepping into a trap. A trap that could be sprung at any moment.

The feeling was seldom wrong.

He found the path of least resistance through the rubble and tried to imagine the battle that had taken place. According to the eyewitnesses’ testimony, the first wave of attack had caught the black site occupants by surprise, but they had recovered quickly. A couple of rocket-propelled grenades had slowed down the attack. Those probably account for the gaps in these walls. Justin looked at three man-sized holes and stepped carefully through one of them.

The view inside the warehouse was even sadder than outside. The level of destruction exceeded the one in the yard. A couple of vehicles were burned beyond recognition, and only blackened frames remained. Everything that hadn’t been destroyed during the attack had been stripped down and ransacked by a furious mob shortly thereafter. Walls were pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel.

He shook his head, while Thor cursed viciously. “The hyenas came through and devoured everything.”

Justin nodded and looked around. It would take days and a crew of a dozen or so men to clear up everything. He doubted they’d find anything useful beneath the rubble.

“We’ve got to find our boys and bring them home,” Thor said.

He had taken a few steps toward one of the windows on the other side, overlooking the street where they had parked the Toyota truck, when a couple of gunshots erupted from outside. “Ahmedou!” Justin shouted.

He bolted toward the window as fast as the heaps of debris would allow him. When he looked through the window, Ahmedou was lying on the street, next to the fruit stand. The vendor was leaning over the fallen agent and seemed to be trying to attend to his wounds.

“Ahmedou is down,” Justin said.

Scot stood next to him. He pointed his pistol at a black sedan that was just rounding the corner. He squeezed the trigger once, but the bullet missed. Instead of the side of the vehicle, it thumped against the cinderblock wall.

“I’ll help Ahmedou.” Justin jumped through the window. “Don’t let them leave.”

“They’re as good as dead…”

“After we’ve interrogated them…”

Scot grinned. “Of course. We can’t talk to the dead.”

Justin held his pistol tight in his hand and covered all sides as he bolted toward the local agent. Terrorists were known to organize small hit-and-run attacks against a team member, in order to draw the rest of the team out into the open. Then, a larger group would unleash a torrent of bullets at the exposed and unaware teammates.

This time, it didn’t happen.

Justin reached Ahmedou without anyone firing a bullet. The Mauritanian had been shot in the right side of his lower abdomen. The fruit vendor had already placed a rag over the wound, and the rag was soaked in blood. Ahmedou’s face had turned a shade paler, and he was breathing with difficulty.

Justin leaned over him and said, “Stay with me, stay alive.”

Ahmedou seemed to return a small nod, but Justin wasn’t sure if it was an involuntary twitch. He looked at the vendor, who shook his bald head. “Don’t know what else to do…”

“Call an ambulance.”

“By the time they get here—”

“Call them! He can’t die.”

The man pulled a phone from his shirt pocket.

Justin removed the rag and looked at the deep wound. Ahmedou might die at any moment unless they stopped the blood gushing. Justin pulled a pack of combat gauze from the rucksack on his shoulders and tore open the pack with his teeth. He applied the gauze tightly onto the wound, directly over the source of the bleeding. He slowly put his hand underneath Ahmedou’s side and placed a second piece of gauze over the exit wound to stem that blood flow as well.

“Here,” he told the fruit vendor still talking on the phone. “Put your hand there and hold it.”

Justin secured the front gauze with tape, then slowly turned Ahmedou’s body, and did the same with the back gauze. The man gave no visible or audible reaction, which Justin knew wasn’t good news.

When he was almost finished, he looked to his right. Scot was running toward them. Justin frowned and shouted, “What’s happening? Where are they?”

“They won’t go far.”

“Where are they?”

“Come here.” Scot gestured with his hand.

Justin glanced at the fruit vendor. “Where’s the ambulance?”

He shrugged. “They said ten minutes.”

Justin shook his head. “He doesn’t have ten minutes.” He stepped to the side and asked Scot, “What is it?”

“It’s not where they are, but who they are. I recognized one of the men. He’s with the local security intel.”

Justin frowned and cursed under his breath. The people from the country’s security intelligence agency who were supposed to help were working against them.