He had plans for Daniel Petrovich, or whoever he currently claimed to be. Berg would make sure he didn't live for very long. If possible, he'd be there to kill Resja himself. He had no idea how Petrovich had become Marko Resja, and he didn't really care. It had something to do with Black Flag, but that wasn't his problem. He had searched the CIA's files on Sanderson, and found not a single mention of the General's secret program. He'd let the FBI decipher Black Flag, while he focused on Petrovich. Under the right circumstances, he might learn more about the clandestine program than Keller or the FBI combined. He was pretty sure the right circumstances would involve the purchase of a climbing axe from the REI store in Bailey's Crossing, Virginia.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Darryl Jackson hung up the phone and contemplated his situation. He didn't like it, but he owed Karl Berg more than a weekend favor. He owed Berg his life. Four years earlier, Jackson and a small crew of Brown River paramilitary contractors found themselves fighting for their lives in a small wadi outside of Sorubi, Afghanistan, when Berg reached down from the sky to save him.
While conducting a site reconnaissance along highway A1, on behalf of the newly arrived U.S. Central Command forces, his convoy of two Land Rovers stumbled into a platoon sized group of Taliban militants, who had just broken camp to move further south toward the safety of the Taliban controlled mountains near Khowst. Within minutes, Jackson had lost both vehicles and half of his eight man contingent. With his satellite phone destroyed in one of the mangled SUVs, Jackson was on his own until someone at Brown River's operations center back in Kabul declared them missing.
Jackson's team retreated to the cover of a dried up river bed and set up a perimeter to hold the Taliban at bay. Jackson's highly trained team had already inflicted serious casualties on the Taliban force, and he hoped that the Taliban leadership in the group would decide against suffering further unnecessary losses. Minutes later, a suicide attack on his position scrapped any hopes that the enraged hornet's nest of Muslim extremists would abandon their quarry.
The attack broke through his perimeter, killing one more member of his team, but the wave of militants suffered enough casualties to cause a temporary withdrawal to the cover of Jackson's disabled Land Rovers. He counted at least twenty Taliban in the vicinity of the trucks, who had now started an organized volley of rocket propelled grenades. A smaller group moved along Jackson's left flank. Everyone in his team was wounded at this point, and when he caught sight of the flanking movement, he knew they wouldn't last another five minutes. Then he heard a familiar buzzing sound.
He could barely lift his head high enough to scan the entire expanse of blue, as bullets snapped past his head. He heard a muffled scream and a curse, turning to see a member of his team grimace while pressing a blood soaked hand down on his thigh. In his peripheral vision, Jackson caught a glimpse of something moving in the sky. The buzzing sound returned. A Predator drone. One of his men yelled something encouraging, and pointed to the drone, but Jackson wasn't optimistic. To him, the Predator drone simply meant that their deaths would be watched live by a crew in Nevada.
Jackson wasn't completely correct about the location of the crew. The RQ-1 Predator drone circling overhead was indeed controlled by an Air Force officer at an undisclosed location in Nevada, but the video feed had the undivided attention of CIA officers in the Counter Terrorism Center at Langley, who had requisitioned the flight to assess reports of an Al Qaeda way station operating outside of Sorubi. Osama Bin Laden's location remained a mystery, though there was little doubt that he would seek refuge in the mountains near Khowst. Electronic intercepts suggested that he had not reached this destination, and the CIA was very interested in any possible points of refuge along his projected escape route.
Berg watched the attack unfold from the drone's cameras, and an argument developed within the operations center about whether to render assistance to the civilian team on the ground. The drone carried two Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, which could easily turn the tide against the militants, but several of the officers within the center wanted to save the missiles for high value targets at the suspected Al Qaeda rest stop. Berg quickly ended the argument. As Deputy Assistant of the Counter Terrorism Center, the Predator flight was under his control, and he had no intention of abandoning the men on the ground. He relayed orders to the controllers in Nevada.
Thousands of miles away, Jackson took a grazing hit to his right shoulder, which caused him to hug the ground, at a time they couldn't afford. Three guns were barely keeping the Taliban from organizing another rush of the shallow wadi. Just as Jackson said a prayer and lifted his body up to continue firing, he was hit with a concussion that snapped his head backward and slid him down the side of the river bed. A second shockwave fired through his small group, rolling Jackson onto his back. Jackson still held his rifle tight, and waited for bearded heads to appear over the river bank's edge to finish them, but nothing materialized.
He painfully scooted through the loose gravel to continue firing at the Taliban positions, but the scene in front of him had been altered by forty pounds of high explosive charge. The shattered Land Rover hulks now sat thirty feet closer to Jackson, completely engulfed in flames. To his left, the Taliban flanking movement had been obliterated by another strike, which left a charred dead zone among the low rocks.
Nothing moved. Jackson scanned the sky above, but couldn't find their savior. He swore an oath to find the man responsible for diverting the Predator drone, knowing that the defense of paramilitary contractors was a low priority on the military's list of uses for expensive Hellfire missiles. He finally met Berg two years later at Brown River's headquarters in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and they had since become inseparable.
Darryl Jackson spun his chair around and opened a file cabinet drawer. He thumbed through the red files, pulling the one with the appropriate rosters. He needed to assemble a uniquely loyal team of highly capable special operators, and have them standing by inside of D.C. within an hour, which would be a miracle during rush hour.
Their target was a rogue freelance operative that posed a significant threat to U.S. security, and Berg felt certain that this operative would arrive in the D.C. area tonight. He wanted the Brown River team to capture or kill the operative as soon as he surfaced. It was clear the Berg didn't want the team to attract any attention, and Jackson didn't even bother to ask if the mission was authorized. Berg said the rogue agent was black flagged, and that was all Jackson needed to hear. He turned back to his desk and picked up the phone to start making calls.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daniel threw his duffel bag on the floor of the hotel room and emptied the contents of two retail bags onto the foot of the bed. A dark green backpack, several pre-paid cell phones, a GPS receiver, hair dye, power bars, two knives, and three local maps — all purchased with cash — formed a pile on the thick down-feather comforter. He worked for several minutes to activate the untraceable phones and the GPS receiver, placing all of the product packaging back in the large REI bag for disposal in another location.