THREE
The engine of the massive American-made International MaxxPro armored fighting vehicle growled like a lion eyeing its next kill as it rolled through the darkened streets of the port city of Aden. Traffic was light but consistent at ten p.m.; a curfew was in place, though many ignored it. The civil war here in Yemen had been raging for six years, but Aden was rebel-run now and currently spared from much of the fighting, and many locals took advantage of this uncommon calm to leave their homes.
The moon was out, but the hills to the north blocked some of its glow, so when the big armored truck flipped off its headlights just before turning south onto Saidi Street, it was all but invisible.
In the back of the vehicle, just behind the driver, the leader of the force of nine drummed gloved fingers over the upper receiver of his M4 rifle. The weapon lay across his knees, its suppressor just inches from the small gunport in the armored vehicle, which he could open if he needed to fire into the street. Looking out the thick starboard-side window, just above the gunport, he watched as his MaxxPro turned onto Mualla Street. There were apartments up and down the road, and many of the residents were out and about, as evidenced by the large amount of foot traffic on the sidewalk visible to him.
Other locals sat in chairs in front of little shops, or stood on apartment balconies.
A voice came over the team leader’s headset. “Mercury for Hades.”
Still looking out the window, the man with the rifle in his lap depressed the push-to-talk button on his interteam radio and spoke English in a midwestern accent through his headset. “Go for Hades.”
From the front seat Mercury said, “Shitload of folks out tonight. Intel said it would be quiet by now.”
The operator next to Hades, his second-in-command, didn’t transmit over the radio, but as he looked through the window on his right, he spoke in a southern drawl. “We good, boss?”
Before he could answer, a voice crackled over both men’s radio headsets. “Mercury to Hades. Target in sight. No security visible at the front gate.”
The team leader nodded in resolution, then answered his second-in-command. “We’re good.” He clicked his radio. “Execute.”
The vehicle pulled to a halt seconds later, twenty yards from the entrance of a gated office complex next door to the public works building. The property consisted of a pair of identical three-story structures, surrounded by a high privacy fence and a sliding steel gate.
Eight men piled out of the big MaxxPro, leaving only Mercury behind the wheel.
Hades brought his rifle’s optic to his eye and crossed the street, third in a line of four operators. They flagged their barrels across a pair of older locals walking by dressed in ankle-length robes, quickly evaluating them as potential enemies. Then, after discounting the threat the pair posed, the Americans moved their focus to a group of four younger civilians standing next to a sedan with an open hood, smoking cigarettes while watching the heavily armed men who had just emerged from the heavily armored vehicle.
The young men did not move a muscle—they weren’t idiots—and soon the Americans had passed them by, heading south along the street towards the office complex.
While they were still ten yards from the front gate, one of the four men who had taken a position around the MaxxPro spoke over the net. “Thor for Hades. I got a cluster of military-aged males eyeing us from an alley entrance, west side, two blocks south of your poz. How copy?”
Hades kept his trigger finger straight across the receiver of his rifle, one-handing his gun while clicking his radio with the other. “Solid copy. If they brandish, you light ’em up.”
“Roger that.”
The four-man assault element stopped in front of the gate. Three men covered as the fourth, the breacher, began setting a small charge on the lock. He’d just finished arming the device when gunfire boomed on the street.
The Americans dropped to their kneepads and identified muzzle flashes two blocks south of their position.
Americans at the MaxxPro began returning fire; incoming and outgoing bullets raced in both directions, ricocheting off concrete walls. Civilians dropped and huddled behind cover; others ran around blindly, frantic for refuge.
Others died where they stood, spinning down to the asphalt.
Hades squeezed off short bursts into the general area of where he’d seen the flashes. In the low light he saw bodies running, falling onto one another, diving into shops and alleyways, desperate to get away from the wall of gunfire generated by eight rifles operated by well-trained shooters.
Hades’s M4 ran dry, and he ducked behind a small panel van near the gate to reload. As he triggered the bolt catch release with a click impossible to hear through all the shooting, he tapped his mic with his other hand. “Mars!” he called, giving the call sign of the man who had placed the charge on the lock. “Go secondary! Go secondary!”
Without hesitation the breach man rushed back to the gate. With the charge still attached to the lock next to him, he yanked off his backpack and pulled it open. From it he retrieved a smaller pack weighing almost twenty pounds, and this he also opened. Inside he turned a dial on the apparatus housed there, pressed a button, then hefted the pack and the device it held, flinging it over the gate and into the tiny forecourt of the office complex.
Mars turned, lifted his rifle, and began shooting down the street with one hand while triggering his push-to-talk button with the other. “Thirty seconds!”
Hades chimed in immediately from his position behind the van just a few yards away. “Exfil!”
The gunfire picked up as the men at the gate all began bounding back across the street to the armored vehicle, firing towards the alleyway as they went. Hades dropped someone looking over a balcony railing up the street; he hadn’t seen a weapon but shot the man out of an abundance of caution.
Mercury shouted next to him, “Frag out!” as he threw a baseball-sized grenade. It bounced and skittered along the sidewalk, knocking into food stalls and small folding tables set up on the pavement, and then it detonated next to a man attempting to shelter under a parked panel truck.
The security team expended magazine after magazine, lighting up the street to the south and firing a few bursts to the north, not at targets but simply as a means to suppress any potential fire from that direction.
A two-door hatchback turned onto the road three blocks away, and Thor sprayed it with copper-jacketed lead from his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. The driver of the hatchback slammed on his brakes, then threw his little vehicle into reverse, but before he made it more than a few meters back up the side street, the gas tank ignited and the rear of the car burst into raging flames.
Thor stopped firing to let Hades and the others pass in front of him on the way back inside the armored vehicle, and as soon as the four men of the assault element scrambled back into the MaxxPro, the four-member security squad outside the truck broke contact with the targets to the south and climbed in, as well.
The last hatch was shut twenty-six seconds after the breacher initiated the timer on the explosive, and Hades was still counting off the seconds in his head when he shouted over the mic, “Drive! Drive!”
The truck lurched forward.
Next to Hades, his second-in-command spoke up again in his southern drawl. “We’re gonna catch it!”
Hades slammed his hands over his hearing protection. “No shit!”
When the thirty-second mark hit, the noise of the detonation was unreal, even inside the armored car and even with ear pro worn by the entire team. The shock wave of the blast enveloped the vehicle; debris pelted the armor and the thick Plexiglas ports. A man inside the cab of the vehicle flew into Hades, who was then slammed hard against the inner starboard-side wall.
But the big American truck continued racing to the south, out of the kill zone.
“Everybody good?” Hades shouted into his mic. It took a few seconds for a reply, and it came in the form of Hades’s men counting off, some shouting their response under the effects of the concussion and the adrenaline of the attack and its aftermath.
They were all okay, and soon the back slapping, fist bumping, and high-fiving erupted in the confined space, but while this was going on, Hades looked out onto the street as the dust cleared and saw the bodies of civilians lying on the sidewalk. Many of them had been killed right where they had sheltered to stay out of the gunfire that preceded the explosion.
The bomb had been composed of ten M112 demolition blocks: C-4 plastic explosives wired together for simultaneous detonation. It had created a colossal blast, designed to kill those in the office complex, but it did not discriminate. No one inside the blast radius who was not housed in an armored vehicle stood a chance.
Civilians lay dead and maimed wherever he looked.
Also killed, Hades was pretty sure, were three high-ranking members of Al-Islah, a Yemeni political party, who had been meeting inside the office complex at the time of the blast.
The Al-Islah men were the targets. All these other victims, just collateral.
The collateral didn’t bother Hades and his team—at all. They’d achieved their objective tonight. And achieving their objective meant a satisfied client and, almost assuredly, more work.
While all nine had been former members of elite American military units, they didn’t serve the U.S. flag any longer. Hades and his men instead worked for an Israeli-owned company registered in Singapore, with a contract to provide direct-action combat arms to their client.
Their targets tonight were, as far as Hades and his team were concerned, terrorists.
And their client was the United Arab Emirates.
These were mercenaries, conducting targeted killings on behalf of the monarchy of the UAE, just one of the dozen or so factions involved in the Yemeni conflict.
Americans assassinating foreigners in a foreign land for a foreign power.
Yemen was a strange war.
Hades’s raiding party was just two klicks out from the airfield when a call came in to his sat phone. The noise of the vehicle meant he only felt the unit’s vibration; he couldn’t even hear the ring. He pulled the device out of a pouch on his belt, then checked the number. While his team looked on, he removed his ear protection and his radio headset, then put the phone to his ear.
“Yeah?”
The men around him stared, wondering why he’d be taking a phone call when they were still in the process of extracting from a target location.
“Yes, sir,” he said, and then they knew. Hades was talking to his contact in the Signals Intelligence Agency, the Emirates spy organization. The man, code named Tarik, was Hades’s boss.
And when Tarik called, Hades answered.
The American said, “Repeat your last, I didn’t make that out.” The rest of the small force leaned closer, trying to discern some information from this end of the call.
Finally, Hades said, “Sorry, sir, it sounded like you said ‘Caracas’?” A pause. “Caracas . . . like Venezuela?”
The rest of the raiding party within earshot looked to one another in confusion.
Hades nodded. “Roger that, sir. Caracas it is.” He ended the call and slipped the device back into its pouch. Once he had his headset back on, he said, “That eighty-minute flight to Abu Dhabi we were gonna take has turned into a sixteen-hour flight to South America. We’ll stop in Lisbon for fuel, but otherwise, it’s gonna be nine smelly motherfuckers in a Learjet staring at one another for the next day.”
Mars said what everyone else was thinking. “Why the hell would the Emirates want us in Venezuela?”
Hades said, “Ours is not to reason why.” After a pause he said, “I haven’t got a clue. I was told we’d be given instructions en route.”
One of the men, call sign Ares, said, “Bet we’re gonna go kill some shithead.”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty safe bet,” Hades replied.
The fat, squat armored vehicle rumbled on through the night, delivering the American killers for hire to the flight that would take them to their next mission.