The young man’s face was still bleached of color, except for the bruises and tears to his flesh, evidence of his treatment while in captivity. “Oui, er, yes, I understand. I am Lieutenant Jon-Pierre Duval, at your service.” He saluted, still looking unsteady on his feet.
Sam slapped him on the upper arm, making him stagger. “Well, Jon, it looks like it’s your lucky day.”
The pilot’s eyes were on Alex. The wound on his forehead bubbled for a second or two, and then began to knit closed like a red zipper. Jon-Pierre’s eyes rolled back, and he fell into Sam’s arms.
Alex looked at the big HAWC and shrugged. “Well, you hit him, he’s yours.”
Sam groaned and threw the pilot over his shoulder.
The group assembled again at midnight. They’d rested and then had a quick meal of dried beef. Jon-Pierre even looked refreshed, but his eyes were still haunted and his pallor was that of mortuary wax. From mission go-time, there would be no sleep or even rest until they made their way to a rendezvous point twenty miles out in the western desert.
They had pooled their information. Alex stared at Casey Franks, whose shawl had traces of blood all over it. He gave her a hard look, but she simply shrugged and pointed at his own thawb. Alex looked down and grunted; it was now more like a butcher’s apron. He ripped it from himself — the time for hiding was over.
They had decided on entering a building two doors down that bordered an alley. They would find an accessible door or window and break in, making their way to the roof, and then scaling across to their target building. If things went bad, there’d be no cavalry, so the backup plan was to make it to the Tigris and steal a boat. Luckily the dam was upstream, but the smaller river blockages could be worked around.
“What can I do?” Jon-Pierre asked.
“Just stay alive, sucker,” Casey said, checking her weapons. She looked up at him, her hands still running over her gun tech. “And stay out of the way. If things go well, we all go home whistling. If they don’t, you might just wish you were back lashed to that fucking post.”
“That’s not needed.” Adira glared at Casey, who scar-sneered back. Adira turned to the pilot. “You just keep up, say nothing, do nothing, other than what you’re told to do. Understand?”
Jon-Pierre nodded. Adira and her men had on night dark combat fatigues and faces streaked with blackout paint. Alex and the HAWCs were back in their adaptive camouflage suits, that were now as dark as their surroundings. Sam extended the armored hood up and over his face, and began to check and then calibrate the eye lenses’ thermal to night-vision technology.
Each person had fitted silencers to their weapons, and Alex checked his watch one last time. “Time.”
They moved out; all would use the path that Alex and Adira had taken earlier that day — it was the shortest route, and time mattered now.
At the late hour, the streets were near empty. Major roadblocks would be manned and stolen radar equipment would also be watching the skies, but down in the dirt, there was nothing except the odd lonesome dog or fleeing roach.
Casey continually swapped between thermal and night-vision lenses, and Sam sent pulses down the long streets as he checked his motion scanners. Both teams used the sprint and cover approach — each pair sprinting forward to the next place of concealment only when clear, then the next pair would do the same. Each moved fast, silent, and near invisibly within the night-shadows.
Alex was first into the side alley two buildings down from their target. He came to a locked steel grate. Sam appeared beside him, braced and readied himself to launch a mechanical assisted kick to the framework. Alex held up a hand.
“Opens outward,” he whispered. “You’ll wake up half of Mosul.” He reached forward and took the handle, bracing his other hand against the metal frame, and began to pull. After a few seconds, there came a popping sound and then the screech of complaining steel, before the metal locking plate flicked out of the frame and clattered to the ground.
Alex turned and winked at Sam. “Brought my own key.”
Eli looked at Moshe and pointed at the fallen grate, raising his eyebrows. Adira nudged him. “Must have been rusted. Focus, gentlemen.”
Alex entered; inside it was tomb-dark and they switched to night vision. Jon-Pierre placed a hand on the shoulder of Moshe and stumbled after them.
Alex went first up a set of decrepit steps, sensing the sleeping bodies behind each door. On a landing there was a threadbare cat, watching the huge human beings with indifferent eyes, as if it had seen the same thing a thousand times before.
The door to the roof opened with a squeal of rusted hinges, and Alex held up a hand to the group. He went out a few paces and crouched. There was no one on the roof, or any movement close by. He called them out.
Each Special Forces soldier stayed low and took a position up at the small rampart at the building’s edge. They used sensors and scopes to scan the other rooftops, looking for snipers. In the distance they could see a few anti gun batteries, but there was no one manning them. They would only fly into action if their radar picked up an approaching solid object. Alex doubted they’d be focused on their own rooftops even if they were awake.
He motioned with a flat hand toward the target building, and they moved quickly, but carefully — the ancient rooftops were scoured by years of harsh weather. One wrong footfall and they could end up in someone’s bedroom.
Alex leaped across the first divide between the buildings, then the second, and then ran over to their target building. This one had a new roof, and looked to have been recently reinforced. He called Adira over and pointed to some marks on the concrete.
“What do you think? Looks like the skids of a chopper, wide, possibly a SeaCobra.”
She bobbed her head from side to side. “Close; but I think it is more likely to be a Toufan. They’re direct copies of your SeaCobra but are developed by the Iranian Aviation Industries.”
“Iran? What are they doing here?”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense. They want the world to believe that, like the rest of us, they are fighting the Hezar-Jihadi. But they will covertly back anyone who makes life difficult for the west.” She looked around. “We need to be cautious. The Toufan helicopters are used primarily by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, or Sepāh.” She turned to Alex. “You know them as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
“Great.” Alex exhaled, and called the team in close. “Heads up; we might have IRG on the ground.”
“Here? I thought those guys were really only active inside Iran, and just used more as financial muscle outside their borders,” Sam said.
Adira shook her head. “You underestimate them, Sam Reid. The Sepāh now have over a hundred twenty thousand military personnel in all type of forces — land, sea and air. They also control the paramilitary Basij militia, which has another ninety thousand active personnel. And you’re right, they do use their financial muscle, because they have a lot of it — they are now a multibillion-dollar business empire.”
Alex knew she was right. During his own research he’d found that the Iranian IRG were like a state within a state, and had a finger in everything. These days they were already a more dominant force then even the Shia clerical system.
“Damned nightmare,” he said. “Iran and Hezar-Jihadi cuddling up. But it would sure answer a lot of questions about how these militia jihadis get their funding, intelligence, and advanced weaponry.” Alex grunted. “Hammerson is going to be real interested in this.” He looked around, seeking his egress, but there was no visible door or skylight. “Franks, those guys from the chopper must have got in somewhere, find me where. Sam, take some readings. Let’s see if there’s more heavy particle trace below us.”