Chapter Thirteen

DELUCA WAS ON HIS BUNK, READING REPORTS, when a runner said a man named Goliath was at the gate, refusing to speak to anybody but Mr. David.

“Who’s Goliath?” Hoolie asked from where he sat cross-legged on the plank floor, brushing Smoky for fleas.

“Sadreddin’s bodyguard,” DeLuca said. “Used to be an Olympic wrestler. Heavyweight.”

“Goliath Bakub?” Hoolie said. “The Goliath?”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Only since high school,” Vasquez said. “You ever heard of the Persian Pretzel Hold? He invented it.”

“This is going to be bullshit,” Sykes said.

“Hey, cabrone—why are you so down on me, man?” Vasquez said. “I’m not shitting you. He had this hold, man, only one guy ever got out of it and beat him. Guy named Kelsey, in the World Games, down in Brazil. You can call him and ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“Oh yeah?” Dan said. “So how did he beat him?”

“I asked him that once,” Vasquez said. “Ol’ Goliath, man, he got Kelsey in his Pretzel Hold, and I said to Kelsey, ‘How’d you escape that hold, man?’ And Kelsey said, ‘There I was, in the Persian Pretzel Hold, and I thought I was doomed, but then I opened my eyes and I saw that right in front of me, two inches from my face, was a pair of testicles, so I figured, what did I have to lose? So I bit ’em. Man, you’d be surprised at what you can do when you bite yourself in the balls, man.’”

Hoolie had a belly laugh at Dan’s expense for about three seconds, and then Dan launched himself through the air, landing on Vasquez in midchuckle. The dog cowered behind the water cooler barking while Vasquez and Sykes wrestled. Mack rolled her eyes and went back to reading a six-month-old edition of Vogue.

DeLuca was happy to see his team members getting along so well.

Goliath was waiting outside the gate, leaning against the side of a black Cadillac. When DeLuca reached him, he took a map from his briefcase and spread it out on the trunk of his car. The map gave a topographical view of a mountain rising sharply out of the western desert, and at the foot of it, the town of Sinjar, about 160 kilometers west of Mosul, near the border with Syria.

“Sinjar Jebel,” Goliath said, pointing to the forty-five-hundred-foot mountain peak in the upper left corner of the map. He moved his massive finger to the town. “Sinjar. Is Yezidi place. He is here.” He pointed to an area on the map, making a small circle. “This valley. Ibrahim, yes. His father, sometimes mostly. His men, yes.”

DeLuca studied the map for a moment. The road was narrow, with high country to either side. An armored column would be sitting ducks, assuming they could even navigate the switchbacks. The road led to a high valley, following contours that grew closer and closer together, and then the road disappeared into what the map symbol indicated was a tunnel, the sort of choke point that was easily defended and nearly impossible to pass. DeLuca knew there were bunker buster bombs that could be used to open tunnels and clear out caves, even tactical nukes suitable for the task, but if the tunnel went in deep enough, not even tacticals could solve the problem. The area Goliath had indicated was beyond the tunnel, surrounded by mountains on all sides.

“Can I keep this?” he asked. Goliath nodded. DeLuca told Goliath he’d be in touch.

“I will go with you,” Goliath said.

“Thanks for the offer, but that may not be necessary . . .”

“I will go with you,” Goliath repeated, leaning over DeLuca until he blotted out the sun. “Imam Sadreddin insists. I will go.”

“That will be fine, then,” DeLuca said. “Happy to have you along.”

Goliath got in his car and drove off.

“Maybe we can find you a Humvee to snack on along the way,” DeLuca added.

DeLuca called for a meeting with General LeDoux the next day, after forwarding the general a one-page synopsis of the situation and the Air Force’s most current aerials of the region. Phillip was accompanied by Captain Martin, as well as by a senior master sergeant named Johnson who told DeLuca his friends called him Preacher. LeDoux had said only that Johnson would probably be able to help them, and DeLuca took his old friend at his word, without knowing exactly what or who Johnson was attached to. They met in a room in the building adjacent to the TOC, where Scott, who’d joined them for the briefing, was able to plug in his laptop and connect it to a digital projector to make a PowerPoint presentation.

“We’ve been looking at the Sinjar Jebel range for a long time,” Scottie said. “Basically for as long as the no-fly zone was being enforced, and Sinjar is well within the zone. In 1997, we had an antiaircraft battery light up their radars here and here, and in 1999 we had one here,” he indicated, using his finger to tap the wall where the image was being projected, “but that’s it, and nothing in the valley the imam has indicated for us. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything—this part of Iraq has been a hideout for political and religious dissidents since the Medes, basically. Sinjar itself was originally a Roman fortress.”

“Three thousand feet?” Johnson asked. He spoke with a heavy southern accent; perhaps that was why he was called Preacher, for his evangelical intonations.

“About that,” Scott said. “The area indicated, the Zinab valley, is as inaccessible as any you’re going to find in Iraq. The roads are basically goat trails, and there are caves everywhere. The tunnel the road into Zinab uses probably started as a natural cave that got excavated. It’s a half-mile long and goes straight through the mountain. Any tank or Bradley that got disabled inside would jam up the works, but as best we can tell, they’re not going to get that far anyway because it just doesn’t look wide enough. Foot access is pretty much the road, too. Tenth Mountain could probably rope in over the ridges, but not easily or quickly, and they probably couldn’t take much with them.”

“Choppers?” Johnson asked.

“Not good,” LeDoux said. “Lieutenant?”

“The general’s right,” Scott said. “We don’t think we’ve failed to get triple-A flashes because they’re not there. This picture here,” he said, moving the PowerPoint ahead a slide, “is of an energy signature typical of the newest SAMs, which we know Saddam was buying after he kicked the inspectors out, when he pretty much knew we were coming. We took out a couple dozen in Baghdad, so we can confirm the signatures. In Zinab, we’ve got energy signatures here, here, here, and here. And they’re pretty tucked away, probably in caves, which is going to make it really difficult to knock them down. And the topography forms a kind of natural bowl, so any helicopters trying to fly in will come in below the SAMs. It would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Iraqi triple-A is about as incompetent as it gets, but even they could cause us problems with these conditions. Plus the winds. It’s not somewhere where I’d want to fly a helicopter.”

“There are others kinds of air support we could throw in,” LeDoux said, “but we’re trying to contain rather than disperse, right, David?”

“If there’s biologicals there, yeah, containment—good idea,” DeLuca said. “My main problem is, I need Ibrahim, or Al-Tariq if he’s there, alive. There’s something going on, and they know what it is.”

“We’ve been having a really close look in the last twenty-four hours,” Scott continued, moving to the next slide, “and here’s what we’ve found. This building here, the white square there, was originally a monastery built during the Crusades and dedicated to Saint George, but it was more of a fortress than a monastery. A French knight named Robert de Boissy held out for sixty days there against Saladin, who eventually starved him out and chopped his head off. Anyway, the walls are six feet thick, which makes it impossible for us to jam any electronics inside. And we have reason to believe they’ve got significant electronics, because they’re running generators 24/7. UAV intel suggests somewhere between eight and twelve people. And these,” he said, zooming in, “are munitions casings. Whoever’s in there is armed to the fucking teeth. Pardon my French, General.”

“I speak French, too,” LeDoux said, turning to Preacher Johnson. “I’m thinking HAHO or HALO. What’s your opinion?”

“I’d have to check with meteorology, but off the top of my head I think HAHO is out. My boys are the best but nobody can fly square chutes into mountain terrain at night where there’s wind like what I imagine we’re going to find here. Especially if it’s too windy for choppers. HAHO could scatter people half the way to Turkey. I think we’re looking at a HALO jump.” He turned to DeLuca. “You okay with that?”

DeLuca had to pause a moment. HALO stood for High Altitude Low Opening, a method of insertion for parachute troops that involved jumping out of an airplane from six miles up, dropping at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour and waiting until the last moment to open your chute, as low as two thousand feet. It was a way to quickly insert men into an area undetected, as opposed to the alternative, a High Altitude High Opening jump, where jumpers opened their chutes as high as thirty thousand feet and then steered them like kites, riding the winds and following a navigator while traveling as far as a hundred miles across the landscape below. Veteran paratroopers called HALO jumps the ultimate thrill ride.

“Sounds good,” he said. “When?”

“Dad . . .” Scott said, but DeLuca silenced him with a glance. Not even Phillip knew about his fear of flying. It was a nonstarter. You did what you had to. This was too important, and since he was the only one who’d seen Ibrahim Al-Tariq in person, he had to go.

“It’ll take us twenty-four to pick the LZ and get our shit together and check the weather reports,” Johnson said, “but we’ve got no moon for the next two days. I like my missions like I like my humor—the darker the better. You’ve jumped HALO before?”

“A hundred times,” DeLuca lied. “You?”

“Sergeant Johnson is a TL with Task Force 21,” LeDoux said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of them. They have a lot of skill sets, but they also play old time hockey. This is too strong for MPs or Fourth Cav. You’ll be in good hands. Co-NCOICs, of course. You want somebody from your team?”

“One guy, I think,” DeLuca said. His son looked concerned. “Don’t worry about it,” DeLuca said. “Any idiot can fall out of an airplane.”

“Preacher Johnson is the best,” LeDoux confided to DeLuca when the master sergeant had departed. “He was jumping round chutes into typhoons over North Vietnam when you and I were hanging out at the mall. He could still carry you over a mountain on his shoulders if you break your leg.”

“Vietnam?” DeLuca said. “How old is he?”

“We think he’s in his late fifties,” LeDoux said. “Somebody deleted his birthday from all of his records. Probably him. And nobody has the balls to ask him. He doesn’t want to be forced to retire.”

“You’re a general,” DeLuca said. “Why don’t you ask him how old he is?”

“I may be a general, but I’m not crazy.”

DeLuca had indeed heard of TF-21, a task force so named because it supposedly comprised the top twenty-one Special Forces operatives chosen from Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALS, Green Berets, Air Force PJs—they were the best at what they did, everybody said, though no one knew exactly what they did. They’d been on the ground in Iraq for weeks before the war, dressed as Iraqis, marking GPS positions, collecting DNA, and gathering evidence before it was destroyed, and they’d been on the ground tagging targets with lasers to help guide the JDAMS, cruise missiles, and smart bombs as they fell. It had been TF-21 intelligence that had led to the decision to bomb the palace where Saddam and his sons were thought to have been hiding, two days before the planned opening of the air campaign. They had no base, never stayed in one place for very long, and generally kept to the sidelines, staying clear of publicity and embedded reporters. DeLuca was looking forward to meeting them.

He tried to convince himself that he was also looking forward to jumping out of an airplane from six miles up, but he wasn’t having much luck.

Reicken was angry when he found out he’d been excluded from planning the mission. It was the second time in as many weeks—he’d been angry the first time when he learned DeLuca had gone to Iran without telling him. He hit the ceiling a third time when DeLuca told him he’d chosen Dan Sykes to go with him on the jump. He explained, as patiently as he could, that it wasn’t a mission for Mack, and that between Dan and Hoolie, Vasquez had two weeks of jump school, whereas Dan had been a member of a jump club in California since he was sixteen.

Dan had arranged for a training jump with a helicopter pilot he knew. Practicing a HALO jump wasn’t possible after Reicken decided commissioning a C-130 for the job would have been a bit extravagant. Instead, they were to take a Blackhawk up to twelve thousand feet and jump from there. Sami walked him to the chopper, where Dan and the jumpmaster he’d booked were waiting for the pilot and the flight engineer to finish their preflight protocols.

“So how you doing with this jump stuff?” Sami said.

“I’m doing,” DeLuca said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” Sami said. “Me, I gave this shit up a long time ago. Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane, right? I mean, I did my training but that was enough, you know?”

“Do you have a point?” DeLuca asked. “Or are you just trying to get on my last nerve?”

“Dave,” Sami said. “Scott told me you don’t like to fly.”

DeLuca stopped in his tracks.

“He shouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s a minor discomfort.”

“He said on a rough flight when he was younger, you started barking like a dog,” Sami said.

“One little yip doesn’t mean you’re barking like a dog,” DeLuca replied, walking more quickly now. “People yip. So what?”

“When’s the last time you jumped, then?” Sami asked.

“I had to stay current when I was an instructor at Devin,” DeLuca said.

“I looked at your records,” Sami said. “You had three training jumps, and before each one, you reported in sick. I don’t think you’ve jumped since Benning.”

“Look—I don’t want to talk about it,” DeLuca told his friend. “If you want to do something useful . . . go check the parachutes or something.”

The jumpmaster, a Sergeant Green, gave DeLuca and Dan a brief rundown of all the things they’d have to remember.

“You’ll be flying the latest MT-1X ram air chutes, double-layered squares with 375 square feet of rip-stop desert camo nylon, with an open nose that inflates to present a profile something like the wing of an airplane. Without any brakes, you’ll be flying forward at approximately thirty miles an hour. That means if you get a ground wind of thirty miles an hour, if you don’t land into the wind, you’ll hit the ground at sixty. We got very little wind today and there’s a windsock next to the LZ for us to watch, and I’ll guide you in, but be aware of that. On the mission, you won’t have a windsock, so listen to the nav. He’ll give you the vector. Release your chute immediately upon landing, unless you want to be dragged across the desert. You control your flight with your toggles. Toggle left to turn left, toggle right to turn right, both at once to brake your forward speed. Half-toggle, quarter-toggle, half-brake, full—we’ll have a chance to practice these things a bit. This is important—when you’re landing, you want to slow down as much as possible. Flare too late and you hit hard and break a leg. Flare too soon and you stall your chute, and you’re just as dead if you frap from a hundred feet as from ten thousand. You pull your chute by grabbing your D-ring, which is located here on your right chest strap, grab it and then throw a jab with your right hand. You should feel a tug. If you don’t, it might mean your chute’s trapped in the vacuum that forms directly above your back in free fall, so just bring an arm in and roll a bit to free it. If it malfunctions, which with these chutes happens once every two hundred jumps or so, or if you get a partial, pull your cutaway before deploying your reserve. You do not want to have your reserve chute get tangled with your main. Before you pull your main, wave your arms to signal anybody above you that you’re deploying and check over your shoulder and below—we don’t want people free falling through each other’s chutes. Worst-case scenario and you’re in a death spiral on your main with one side tangled, you’ll have knives to cut your lines, but you only have about twenty or thirty seconds. I’ll be on radio telling you what to do every step of the way, and I want you to listen to me but think for yourselves, too.

“Now, during free fall, you will become a human missile. Terminal velocity is going to be 125 miles per hour. If you find yourself in an uncontrolled tumble, simply spread out your arms and legs and arch your back as much as possible and you’ll come out of it. You will feel a sense of euphoria, like you’re floating on air, because you are floating on air. You may subconsciously wish to prolong this experience—you must maintain awareness. Guys have frapped, believe it or not, because they simply forget to open their chutes. I knew a photographer once whose job it was to take pictures of tourists on their first jumps, and he’d jumped twenty-five times in one day, and on his twenty-sixth and last jump of the day, he exited the plane and grabbed his camera but forgot to put on his parachute. Keep that sort of thing to a minimum. Maintain awareness. If you should drop below a thousand feet, it’s too late—it would take superhuman strength to brake your chute before you hit the ground . . .”

Sergeant Green continued. DeLuca was pretty sure complacency and euphoria weren’t going to be a problem, but he listened intently all the same.

Dan looked like a kid in a candy store, shifting his weight from side to side with his hands clasped behind his back as he took instructions. DeLuca saw Sami eyeballing the helicopter, chatting with the flight engineer and the pilot, then crouching low to examine the parachutes where they lay on the tarmac. Sami turned each one over, feeling inside them briefly, then returned to the flight engineer to ask him something. DeLuca saw a concerned expression on his friend’s face as he approached, asking to speak in private with Sergeant Green. Sergeant Green followed him to the parachutes and examined them a second time. He spoke to Sami, who then went to where DeLuca and Dan were standing.

“Let’s get some coffee, okay?” Sami said.

“What’s up?” Dan said, grabbing Sami by the arm. “We’re delayed?”

“There’s not going to be time for a practice jump,” Sami said.

“Because?” DeLuca asked. He knew Sami would give it to him straight.

“Because the chutes have been tampered with,” Sami said. “Somebody cut the lines. Reserves, too. The sergeant says they’re going to have to repack all the chutes before anybody can fly again. The FE gave me a description of the guy who delivered them, so I’m going to look into that. You arranged this through Reicken’s office?” he asked of Dan, who nodded. “Who did you talk to?”

“His secretary,” Dan said. “Washington.”

“So nobody else knew you were going to pull a training jump?”

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “I don’t think so. I mean, the flight crew knew, but . . .”

DeLuca came quickly to the same conclusion Sami had.

“Whoever it is is getting his information from Reicken’s office,” Sami said. “That’s where the leak is. You wanna call off the mission?”

DeLuca considered what the truck driver who’d dropped off his load at Moushabeck Shipping Ltd. in Beirut had told them. Something deadly had been shipped. There was no telling, yet, where it might have ended up, but there was a high degree of probability that it was in the United States already.

“No,” he said. “But let’s make sure we double-check the parachutes we use on the mission.”