Five Years Earlier
Dale rolled to his side and squashed a pillow over his head, doing what he could to blot out the clattering growl of the big brown armored vehicles. Ungainly and top-heavy, buried under combat gear, they were headed out on evening patrol, trundling like a herd of elephants through Camp Ramadi, a secret forward operating base sixty miles west of Baghdad.
The late-afternoon temperature bounced off ninety-six. Done inflicting its damage for the day, the sun widened and squatted on the brown hills, partially blotted out by the dust rising from the vehicles.
Dale looked at his watch and sighed. He’d slept for a total of two hours. His olive T-shirt stained with sweat, he stood and watched the patrol leave, happy to see the sun making its exit. This sunset was special—supposed to be his last one in Iraq. It couldn’t have come soon enough.
He breathed the stale air and fanned himself with a three-month-old magazine. The hooch was air-conditioned but subject to frequent power outages, for whatever reason. He’d never gotten the temperature below eighty during the day when he was supposed to sleep. The Army, which officially maintained the FOB, seemed to lack the electrical prowess to keep things running in the walled-off corner where Dale lived, the collective barracks of the men and women called OGAs.
OGA, Other Government Agency in American defense speak, the amorphous nomenclature for Americans on the payroll of a federal agency other than the military. It was mostly CIA, sprinkled with FBI, DEA, and defense contractors who came to town now and then, usually to join interrogations of new detainees. They wore no insignia and they went by nicknames. Dale’s was Gramps.
His little slice of OGA land was at the northwesternmost corner, which put it extremely close to the staging area for the massive Army patrol trucks called MRAPs, a hopeful acronym for Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected. Their hulking diesels rattled on through most of the day as they came and went. When they weren’t running, they were being pulled apart by overworked, hearing-impaired maintenance chiefs who shouted at one another.
Dale didn’t mind too much that he’d missed out on the sleep. He was expecting to catch a helo to Camp Victory for a final chop of his orders, and then on to Baghdad Airport for a flight home. He’d sleep then. The helo was supposed to come for him after chow and the cargo plane was supposed to leave “the sandbox” around midnight.
He only wished it could have been under better circumstances.
Working in a special task force under the administrative command of Ed Rance, deputy Baghdad chief of station, Dale’s SAD paramilitary team had been tasked to root out the command structure of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The big prize was their commander, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; but they’d have settled for any battlefield commander, working their way up the line.
The op was called Broadsword. Its AOR, Area of Responsibility, was northern and western Iraq, unofficially extending into Syria. This fractured landmass was rife with ethnic Kurds who’d been pushing for an independent Kurdistan for a century, pissing off the Iraqis, Turks, Syrians, and Iranians along the way.
The Kurds were the good guys in America’s fight against ISIL. For their part, the Kurds saw the ISIL expansionists as the latest obstacle to a sovereign Kurdistan. Rance’s simplified way to run Broadsword was to brutalize whomever the Kurds told him to. To the Kurds, American sanction for knocking off ISIL was a beautiful thing.
Following the guidance of Kurd commanders, Rance had given his SAD team orders to go hard, snatching suspected ISIL sympathizers indiscriminately for violent interrogations, usually at the hands of rebel Kurds to keep it legal. If a few detainees happened to die in custody, well, that was the price of war.
Dale thought the whole thing misguided at best, criminal at worst. They’d snatched and interrogated hundreds. But their success rate for finding actual leads on ISIL commanders was depressingly low. More and more, he felt like the leader of a Kurdish-driven death squad.
As lead sniper, he was almost always on overwatch, a couple hundred yards off, covering the team as they cleared houses and rounded up suspects. Most of the time he didn’t need to shoot. Every now and then, he did. ISIL was big on throwing themselves at adversaries with suicide tactics, wearing S-vests or simply hugging bombs to their chests. Dale had killed dozens of would-be martyrs in his efforts to protect his team.
At thirty-nine, the Gramps moniker fit. Most of his compatriots were in their early thirties, ex–Special Forces. But in their line of work, five years’ age difference was a lifetime.
Given his age and mission, the team tended to look to him for leadership. They seemed to like his quiet opinion on matters tactical, strategic, and ethical. There were many beer-soaked philosophical discussions after mission debriefs. Dale had made no secret of his discomfort with Rance’s tactics.
So much so that the onetime Eagle Scout and Naval officer decided to write a letter to the Agency’s inspector general. Word of it leaked to the team. Now, two weeks later, he was being sent home early, supposedly because the Agency wanted him back at Langley for a stint on the analytical side.
He’d gotten the hook.
But he didn’t care. It meant he could finally get away from Rance, perhaps press his claim of unjust tactics with the IG directly. Even if it meant the end of his CIA career, he wasn’t sure it mattered. He’d done his bit. He’d said what needed saying.
Still, he worried about the blowback on his wife, Meth. She was something of a rising star at Langley. It wouldn’t help her to be known as the wife of a rat.
But that was for another time. For now all he had to do was get home.
Just as the sun was setting, he muscled his big black bag onto his back and looked around his hooch. The plywood walls, the thin mattress, the knocked-together bookshelves had been home for almost eight months. His final act was to pluck a snapshot of himself, Meth, and Grace off the wall. He folded it into his wallet. Like hauling down the post flag.
The guys gave him something of a send-off in the chow hall. A lot of jokes about his age, inferring he was headed to a retirement community in Langley. They brought out a case of Ensure, mixed it with rum, toasted him with it—old-man eggnog they called it. They gifted him a wrapped package of Depends undergarments.
Beneath, there was sadness. Dale had been a rare voice of maturity, the guy with the judgment behind the scope. While others had qualms about their role in Broadsword, he’d been the one to say something. And for that, he was going home.
After dinner, he caught a ride in a Humvee over to the dirt airfield, where he sat with a couple of buck sergeants, waiting for his ride. Before long a black-and-gray MH-60 Blackhawk circled the pad, flared, and landed amid an ear-shattering hurricane of dust.
Dale had been expecting a regular Army UH-60 Blackhawk. The helo that landed was the armed-up variant used by the Army’s Special Ops Aviation Regiment (SOAR), a real mission bird. Bristling with guns, it had a long refueling boom and a knobby nose for terrain-following radar. A crewman stepped out of the cargo door and helped down a man with foppish red-blond hair and baggy civilian clothes. Ed Rance.
Dale’s instinct was to turn away, avoid eye contact, simply hide as Rance headed off into camp. But before he could evade, the deputy Baghdad chief of station walked directly up to him, offered a hand.
“I see I caught you,” Rance said, shouting over the screech of the chopper’s turbines, the wind blowing his hair around. He smiled, pumped Dale’s hand.
A hunchbacked Humvee pulled up and squealed to a halt. It belonged to the Army lieutenant colonel who commanded the FOB. A young corporal hopped out with a flashlight. He swept it over Rance’s and Dale’s faces.
“Which one of you is Mr. Jones?”
“Me,” said Rance, flashing a laminated credential around his neck.
“The colonel’s waiting, sir. Come with me.”
Rance looked at Dale, who was leaning against a squat auxiliary power unit the size of a lawn mower. He hadn’t budged.
“Come on,” said Rance. “I need you to come with me. This one is very hot.”
Dale continued slouching. Over the whine of the helo’s turbines, he said, “Sorry, Mr. Jones. I’m on the next flight out. I think you know that.”
Rance tapped the breast pocket of his safari jacket. “New orders. You’ve got one more op.”
About five hours later, Dale was in that same SOAR MH-60 flying through the dark. He was wearing his lightweight black combat fatigues, body armor, and combat vest.
Protruding from the vest were four pouches of twenty-round magazines for his Mk 12 SPR sniper rifle along with four mags for the Glock on his hip. He wore a black webbed helmet with NVGs tipped up and a boom mic over his mouth. His face was marked up with camo paint. The rifle lay across his knees.
He could see stars through the open cargo door. Dale’s crew was headed north, to a little village called Jurn, just south of Mosul, a hundred eighty miles north of Ramadi. To either side and across from him were the other five members of his SAD crew, the same guys who’d given him a farewell only a few hours before. The door kickers were similarly clad but more heavily decked in flash-bang grenades, glow sticks, modified M-4s.
After in-flight refueling from a C-130, the helo dropped air and stuck close to the hills. In the clear night’s quarter moon, Dale could see silvery earth sliding by as they banked side to side in preemptive defense. Must be getting close, he thought. The one good thing was that the night air whipping through the cabin offered relief from the heat. Pretty much everything else about it sucked.
Rance had arrived at the base with the kind of pregnant arrogance that signaled something very good for his career was about to happen. He’d briefed the team in a rush, deferring often to the Special Forces Army colonel who would offer air support.
According to Rance, a teenage Yazidi girl had stumbled exhausted and bleeding into Mosul yesterday. She’d told some Kurds she’d escaped from the home of an old bearded man who’d repeatedly raped her along with other hostages. One of them, the teenager said, was a brown-haired American girl who went by the name Kayla.
Kayla Mueller was an American aid worker who had gone missing in Iraq some months earlier. For a while, it seemed every unit in Iraq had been on a mission to find her. Rumors had been rampant that she was in captivity with the ISIL thugs, but real intel had been hard to come by and the search had gradually waned. To have a Yazidi girl come and say she’d been in a house with her hours before, calling her by name, seemed too good to be true.
But the girl’s story did sync with corroborating SIGINT data. Supposedly Kayla Mueller was being held by the main ISIL financier, Abu Sayyaf. He was known to have owned a home in Mosul. Confirmation bias aside, this one was just too good to pass up. They needed to send in a team to check it out ASAP.
This type of op was usually for DEVGRU special operators: regular military, not CIA. But as the colonel had explained, it was all happening too fast. The tip had just come in and the information was highly perishable. The girl had said that her captors moved between houses frequently.
DEVGRU was already on task in Western Iraq near the Syrian border. Rance’s Broadsword team was the next best thing. The SAD team would raid the suspected house and see if they could rescue Kayla and snatch Sayyaf. If it all turned out for naught, no harm, no foul. It was worth the risk.
A mile from the serpentine Tigris, the town was tiny, more like an outpost on the desert frontier. There were about five buildings, one of which was supposedly the house. The plan was to drop the team, execute the snatch, then swoop in to pick everyone up. Normally they’d have to line up Apaches for air support, but there weren’t any on such short notice.
They decided to go ahead anyway. Drone footage had shown the place was dead quiet. Speed and surprise trumped deliberation.
They dropped Dale first, a half mile from the target, flying in low behind a hill to stay stealthy. He was to provide overwatch from the top of the rocky ridge, about two hundred yards’ elevation. The thick nylon hawser flopped out and Dale fast-roped down, hitting the dirt and taking cover.
When the helo was gone and all seemed quiet, he removed his clear ski goggles and flipped down his night vision. He trotted up the hill. The dirt was firm, vegetation scraggly.
He found a spot with a good view, a nice little clearing between a boulder and a shrub. He set up the SPR’s tripod and pulled his long-distance IR spotting scope from his vest. He took a good look at the house. All seemed quiet.
“Gramps has eyes on target,” he said into the mic. A series of clicks came in response.
Five minutes later he heard the whop-whop of the rotors from across the little valley. The MH-60 had come in low and fast from the opposite direction. It flared steeply over the suspected house, its gas-turbine engines screaming for power. The rope dropped. The team slid.
All hell broke loose.
Right next to the dark house, a pair of obscured truck-mounted DShK “dushka” heavy machine guns opened up through camo netting, belching six-foot flames, firing right into Dale’s team point-blank. The flare of RPGs tore straight into the hovering bird, which was now yanking back wildly, twisting in a mad effort to get out.
Two RPGs missed and flew harmlessly into the night. A couple others struck home. The Blackhawk took direct hits in the main fuselage, just aft the cargo door, and the tail rotor. At that low altitude, the bird spun two and a half times, flames licking from its engine nacelles, the turbines making an unearthly sound. It struck dirt and exploded.
Horrified, Dale watched the scene unfold from his hide. The crash formed a white-hot plume in his IR scope. The sound of the disaster hit him a second or two later. He heard the boom echo off the ridge, once, twice. Enemy soldiers were already picking over the remains of his team, shooting the wounded. All five of them now lay dead on the ground.
The whole thing had been a setup.
He constrained his breathing, ready to start picking them off. At the same time, he called out his position on the net, asking for extraction, reporting what he’d seen. After the one-second sat delay, the CP at Ramadi answered back that ISR, the drone hovering somewhere far above, had eyes on troops coming up the hill behind Dale fast. He needed to get out of there. Now.
A heartbeat later he heard a bullet zing and ricochet near his head. Then another and another.
Only one way he could go: forward. He picked up his rifle and ran for his life, leaping off the ridge.
The next three days were a blur. He’d crept in among rocks, lying like a lizard, sweating, pissing himself, just plain breathing. But his hunters were everywhere. They found him dehydrated and bleeding, suffering from lacerations and a concussion. He was delusional.
They dug him out and slapped him around. He’d told himself that when they finally came, he’d fight to the end, squeeze off a couple rounds from the Glock and take a couple with him. But when they actually pulled him free, he was hallucinating incoherently, in the late stages of heatstroke, near dead from dehydration. He couldn’t stand up.
His next memory was of a truck and a river. He’d ended up in the water—the Tigris, he’d realize later. They’d let him drink and bathe. Dale soaked it up with the animalistic sensation of life reentering his body. He’d been stripped naked and they held on to his arms and legs. But the water got him thinking again. Fight to the end. Never surrender.
He struggled to get loose and run away. They laughed at his weakness and slapped him around. He sustained a hard kick to the ribs. Not long after regaining his senses, he was bound and tossed in the back of the pickup, two men beside him with AKs.
He spent two days in a cage, a zoo animal. Men in black turbans would walk by and spit on him, shove sticks through the bars to poke him. A couple adolescents flipped his cage over for fun, rolling him in a stew of his own bodily waste.
Sometimes they’d drag the cage into the sun and let him roast alive, stark naked. Others, they’d drag him into the rock recesses of a cold cave to let him shiver. They fed him a bowl of rice once a day, every now and then a bottle of water.
On the third day, another white Toyota pickup arrived. A new black-turbaned man stepped out. He spoke English with an authoritative air; a guy behind him set up a camcorder on a tripod.
They dressed Dale in a long filthy shirt and told him to confess his crimes before the camera. He was given a paragraph to read, scrawled carefully in capital letters on a torn sheet of notepaper, like some preschooler had written it. When he refused, he was beaten. The cycle repeated. He knew from his training that it was only a matter of time before he’d break. He was shoved back into his cage, deep within the rocks, bruised and bleeding, delirious. He hadn’t broken yet.
For two days they seemed to forget about him. He lay shivering in the dark in his long shirt, accepting the rice and the water whenever he could. The interlude was just long enough that he began to recover a little, to think straight.
They came for him again. He’d torn a bit of fabric from the shirt and wadded it up, then rolled it in blood and dirt to make it hard. This time, when they opened up the cage and dragged him out, he jammed the wadded fabric into the catch of the cage’s open lock.
Video man was back. He sat at a table like a judge. It was a sweltering-hot day and Dale just stood there, blinking in the sun. They made him sit in a chair, facing the judge across the table. They told him they’d found him guilty of crimes against Islam, said it in careful English. They brought out his right hand, held it down. They sawed off his pinkie with a Ka-Bar while he watched, videotaping the whole thing as he screamed.
For two more days he lay in his cage, nursing the mutilated hand, wrapping a tourniquet on the stub with strands from the shirt. He felt hollowed out. Nothing mattered anymore. He’d either escape or die trying. He had nothing to lose.
On the third day after he’d been cut, video man came back. He’d brought a new prisoner with him in a Toyota SUV.
Leaving Dale in his cage, the terrorists put the new man through a similar ordeal. Dale could hear him screaming, refusing to read the “confession.” Dale was surprised to hear one of them speaking to the new man in Farsi, a language Dale understood since his mother had spoken it to him as a boy.
They were brutal to the new man. Asking him to confess for committing crimes against Allah. But like Dale, the man wouldn’t do it. He was beaten ruthlessly. Dale was glad they had someone else to torment. For now they’d at least forgotten about him.
Later that day, they shoved a second cage into the cave. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear the metal clanging against the rocks. He could hear the door opening and the Farsi-speaking man being shoved inside. The man was moaning, muttering incoherently.
The next day they came for the new prisoner and put him through the same routine. Afterward, he was dragged back into the cage near Dale. He was quieter this time.
When Dale was relatively sure no one could hear, he called out to the new man. “Hey—who are you?” he said in Farsi, his voice dry and cracking.
The man didn’t answer for several minutes. Dale asked again.
Finally, the man responded, surprisingly, in British-accented English. “You speak Farsi like an American,” he said between labored breaths.
Dale could hardly believe it. That little bit of an English accent felt hopeful somehow. “British? SAS? Pilot? How’d you get here?”
“I didn’t answer their questions,” the man said. He let out a sick, jarring laugh that turned into a groan. “Why should I answer yours?”
Dale cradled his wounded hand against his breast. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Something to do before we die.”
The man on the other side of the rock laughed in his grotesque way. Then he fell silent. Dale heard him sobbing. He tried to get him to speak again, but he wouldn’t.
That night, Dale went to work on one of the bars of his cage. It was rusty. He thought that if he could pry loose a piece of rust that was strong enough, he might be able to wedge it into the lock where he’d already lodged his balled-up fabric. He hoped it would be just enough to free the hasp.
He spent the entire night trying to get a piece loose. Just before dawn, he had something he thought might work. But it was still too dark to try to do anything.
The next day video man was back. Dale heard them come for the Farsi-speaking Englishman. Overhearing bits of the Farsi exchange, Dale guessed they were putting him through the mock trial sentencing.
Now that there was daylight poking through the rocks, Dale went to work with his sliver of rust. After several attempts, he got it to work. The metal poked the fabric and slid the catch just enough for him to be able to open the cage.
This is it, he thought. Die trying.
He slid from the cage and crawled across the dirt, his long ragged shirt trailing behind him. As he neared the cave edge, he was blinded by daylight. He paused to let his eyes adjust.
Video man was off to the right, making a speech in front of the camera. Four black-clad men stood around the table, looking into the camera behind him. Rifles leaned against a banner on the table that said something in Arabic.
For the first time, Dale got a look at his cave mate. He was bearded, dark skinned, Middle Eastern. He was clothed in the same kind of long shirt that Dale wore. A man stood behind him with an AK pointed at his back, just as they’d done to Dale.
Hidden by boulders, Dale lay prostrate, watching the proceedings, wondering what to do. The answer came before his eyes in the form of sandals. A man apparently sent to check on him rounded the corner, ducking into the cave. He had an AK slung around his back. As he ducked to make it between the two boulders that marked the entrance, he almost tripped over Dale.
No decision to be made. Dale grabbed the man by the turban and yanked him to the ground, throwing him into a choke hold. They struggled, but Dale had the angle. He squeezed as hard as he could, then heard the man’s thorax break, jamming his fist in the man’s mouth to keep him quiet. The terrorist kicked and struggled. Eventually, he stopped. Dale continued squeezing until he saw the final twitch.
As soon as the other man was still, Dale robbed him of his sandals, pulled the AK free from his lifeless body, checked the curved magazine. Full.
If he exited the cave, he’d be in full view of the handful of terrorists who were out there conducting their kangaroo court. But he didn’t care. He was going to kill every last one of them. He cared more about killing than surviving.
Die trying.
Dale took the filthy black turban off the dead man’s head and tied it around his own, obscuring most of his face. It smelled of sweat and garlic.
He crawled out of the cave, sticking to one side to remain unseen as long as possible. In what he assumed would be the last moment of his life, he lay still, taking in the scene.
His fellow captive was leaning forward, head on the table. Two black-turbaned men held him in place. A third carried a serrated carving knife in one hand, a machete in the other. They were going to cut the prisoner’s head off on camera.
Dale saw the knife touch the man’s neck as the speaker’s voice rose in some kind of speech. The captive screamed crazily.
Dale rose to his knee in a classic infantry position. He chose the knife-wielding head cutter as his first target, blasting the man with a three-round burst to the shoulder blades. He shot the man holding the prisoner to the left, catching him in the head. Four other ISIL terrorists reached instantly for their rifles, which were leaning against the table as props for the video production.
Dale whipped a ragged volley across the lot, felling two instantly. Others crawled, wounded, trying to get to cover. Dale walked right up and blew their heads off point-blank, screaming as he pulled the trigger. Their heads exploded like smashed watermelons.
The rage-fueled burst drained the magazine. He picked up a fresh AK, checked its mag. Full.
He dropped to his stomach and swept for targets: no one left except for the man at the table, tied to his chair, whimpering and crying. He was bleeding at the neck from the initial cut. Looked bad. Dale got up and ran to him. The knife was still in the grasp of the dead man at their feet. He pried it loose and cut the captive’s hands and legs free.
“Here,” Dale said in Farsi, removing the turban from his own head. “You’re cut, but I don’t think it’s that bad—just a surface wound. Wrap your neck with this. You’re going to be okay.” He didn’t really think so.
The man looked at Dale with quivering red eyes. His face was streaked with blood, tears, snot. On closer inspection, Dale could see that the cut was long but shallow. Arteries hadn’t been severed, but it was messy. The guy might have a chance.
Dale pulled him to his feet. The wounded man stumbled against him, whimpering.
“We have to get out of here,” Dale continued, holding the other man’s face up, looking into his bloodred eyes. “Just focus on that. Hear me? We have to run. Now. Focus!”
Stumbling, they headed toward a copse of vegetation. The Tigris. They crouched in some reeds on the bank. Voices of villagers, the high pitch of women and children, not too far away. Dale and the other prisoner drank as much as they could. Then Dale checked the man’s wound, much cleaner now.
“Think it’s going to be okay if we can get you some stitches in the next couple hours. Just keep that bandage on tight.” Dale made a tight wrap around the man’s shoulder.
“What about your hand?” the man said to Dale, looking at the bloody stump of his finger.
The tourniquet had come loose in the water, revealing a glimpse of bare bone. Dale nodded and tore a new strip of cloth from his shirt to rewrap the wound.
After another minute, Dale said, “I say we swim.”
The man nodded.
They went out to the center of the river and floated, still as a couple of logs, moving steadily south with the slow current, only their noses and mouths above water.
When they’d made it a few miles downriver, stopping occasionally to hide in the shadows of the bank or walk in the shallows, Dale pulled the man to shore.
“Kurdish territory. Safe to walk here.”
They walked along the muddy bank until late afternoon. Toward sunset they moved to the road. Focused only on getting away, they didn’t speak.
At dusk they encountered a Kurdish patrol driving American vehicles. Dale hailed it and identified himself. Their commander spoke broken English. He was skeptical at first, but he’d been working regularly with Americans and Dale knew exactly how to talk to him.
Dale promised to call in some air support for their mission if they would let him use their radio. It was an American PRC-152, supplied by the Green Berets helping to train the unit.
Dale walked free of them, giving himself ten yards of privacy. He called up the American net. Using code, he found the tactical operations center at Ramadi and identified himself as Gramps, the Fallen Eagle. He could hear the shock of the watch officer on the other end. They would send a SAR helo to pick him up. Dale identified a nearby hill as an LZ, about a mile’s hike away.
He returned to the Kurdish platoon and gave the radio back. He told the commander that air support was on the way, but that Dale and his companion had to be moving on. The commander was grateful. He handed them a pack of beef jerky.
Dale and the man walked on, toward the hill, eating the meat.
The sound of a low-flying Blackhawk beat up against the hills, just as the sun was setting.
“That’s our ride,” Dale said.
The man hesitated. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours. “I can’t get on an American helicopter.”
“It’s not going to be a problem,” said Dale.
“Yes, it is,” the man said. “I’m not British. I’m Iranian.”
“I figured,” Dale said. “You speak Farsi like an Iranian.” He attempted a modest smile.
“You rescued your enemy.”
Dale blinked. “We’re both fighting ISIL.”
Holding the cloth to his neck, the man said, “You know how it is.”
Dale nodded. “Yeah.”
The man offered his hand. Dale shook it. They were both so weak, they nearly fell into each other. The man brought his other hand over Dale’s in a two-handed grasp, leaning, letting his bandage go loose.
“Thank you for saving my life,” he said in his British-accented English, staring into Dale’s eyes, swaying.
After a few seconds, he released Dale’s hand and turned, swaddling up again in the bandage. He started hurrying down the hill, holding the turban to his neck, moving clumsily. When he was a dozen yards away, he looked back with a final wave.
Dale returned it.
The Blackhawk crested the hill.