Crocker removed the black stocking from the kid’s head and held his chin up. Indeed, his eyeballs were gone and the sockets covered with scar tissue. He reached into his pocket, found a twenty-dollar bill, and pressed it into the old man’s hand.
“Here, take this…May God be with you.”
“Alhamdulillah…Alhamdulillah.”
“Leave ’em. We can’t afford to waste any more time. Let’s go.”
Chapter Ten
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
– Muhammad Ali
They lay in tall grass within the base perimeter, all wearing night-vision goggles and holding weapons. A rocket whined overhead as Crocker calmly counted the seconds in his head. “Five, six, seven-” KA-BLAM!
The explosion sucked the oxygen out of the air, creating a wind that pulled at the green stalks. It was followed by a second blast less than a minute later.
They were waiting for Suarez and Akil, who had run ahead to recon the approach to the tunnel. ISIS rebels approximately 1,000 feet behind them had kept up the barrage for fifteen minutes now. Their target: the big rectangular building that housed Abu al-Duhur air base headquarters and the control tower. That structure stood about a quarter mile ahead and to their left. When Crocker raised his head above the three-feet-tall grass he saw black smoke streaming from the top left of the structure.
“They hit it,” he announced.
“What happens now?” Davis whispered back.
“We wait for Suarez and Akil.”
He had no idea how many of Assad’s forces remained there or what their response was likely to be. Nor was he aware how long the ISIS rebels planned to keep firing missiles.
Would they follow up the barrage with a land assault? He hoped not, because that might interfere with Black Cell’s objective-the tunnel that held the sarin canisters, which was about 900 feet to Crocker’s three o’clock, at the opposite end of a long underground bunker, B3, that housed Assad’s aircraft and crews.
The whole setup was odd. Aside from the large main building there was nothing to indicate that there was, or had been, an air base here. Everything else, except the airstrip itself, was disguised under bunkers covered with the same grass that carpeted the pancake-flat plain.
“Deadwood, it’s Romeo,” Crocker heard through his earbuds.
“You guys stop for pizza?”
“We’re almost finished. Be there in three. Over.”
“Time’s a-wasting.”
Mancini, Davis, Crocker, and Hassan had parked the trucks in a drainage culvert fifty feet away and now lay on their stomachs with their backs against an old mud wall that rose about four feet.
Four more rockets sailed overhead and exploded before Crocker saw Akil’s Phoenix IR strobe beacon in the grass ahead. Soon both men were kneeling before them, breathing hard and drinking water from the bladders they carried strapped to the back of their waists.
Suarez removed his NVGs and used an iPad and stylus to sketch the setup in and around B3.
“The tunnel is right where Hassan told us it would be, boss,” he said pointing to the screen.
The men gathered closer.
“Let’s hope the canisters are still inside,” said Davis.
“Better be,” Akil responded.
Suarez pointed over his left shoulder. “One of the four main bunkers starts about two hundred yards over there. It’s huge. Really massive. At the end of it is like a concrete parking area with sandbags and a gate. Part of that gate has been destroyed. We couldn’t tell if it had been hit by rockets or had withstood a more coordinated attack.”
“Where’s the tunnel?” asked Crocker.
“The entrance is right there, past the bunkers. Six to eight concrete stairs that lead down to a locked door. Nothing much.”
“Think you can breach it?”
“Yeah. Easy.”
“What’s in the hangar?” Crocker asked.
“B3 also appears partially damaged,” Akil chimed in. “Maybe from a previous attack. Looks like it’s being used for storage. Trucks, parts, barrels of fuel, random shit.”
“No soldiers inside?” Crocker asked.
“A few guards. The main focus of the base seems to have shifted to bunkers 1, 2, and 4, farther north and closer to the main building.”
“Got it.”
“Access to the tunnel aside from the stairs?” asked Crocker.
“We located an air vent here,” Suarez said, pointing to a location on his sketch just south of B3. “We think we can squeeze in through there.”
“Good. What’s going on behind us?” Crocker asked, pointing to the ISIS missiles behind them.
“The jihadists appear to have gotten their hands on a BM-21 Grad missile launcher system,” Suarez reported.
“It’s a truck-based Soviet system built back in the sixties,” Mancini, the weapons expert, added. “Nothing especially high-tech, but with enough bang to do damage.”
Crocker nodded. “I can see that.”
“I think they’re firing Egyptian-made Sakr-45A missiles,” Suarez said. The Sakr-45A was an eleven-foot missile with a range of about twenty miles.
“Why are they so close? Don’t those babies have range?” Crocker asked.
“Because they’re idiots,” Akil answered, “who like to film what they’re doing and post it on YouTube.”
“You mean they’re filming this shit now?” Davis asked. “At night?”
“Fuck, yeah. You’d think they were having a party. Every time they fire a fucking missile twenty guys jump in the air, dance and shout ‘Allahu akbar!’ And every time they hit something, they go crazy.”
“Zero operational training.”
Akiclass="underline" “They don’t think they need it. Allah is on their side.”
“Allah or not, they’re about to get their asses kicked,” Suarez added.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the Assad forces are massing a counterattack. They’re moving out armed columns here and here,” he said, pointing to the map he’d drawn. “They’re gonna outflank the rebels and cut off their escape.”
“How many?”
“Maybe two squads with tanks and armored vehicles. They might not be flying because of the low cloud cover and the missiles, but they’re still here and they look plenty strong.”
“Good work,” whispered Crocker. “We’d better move fast.”
“Agreed,” responded Suarez.
“Akil and Davis, you get in the tunnel through the vent. Suarez and I will attack B3. Manny, you back the pickup up to the entrance and get ready to load the sarin.”
“Yes.”
“What about me?” Hassan asked.
“You wait here with the other truck.”
“What about the jihadists? What if they find me?”
Crocker removed the letter he had gotten from al-Kazaz and handed it to Hassan. “Take this. The jihadists are gonna start running away when they’re attacked, and they’re not gonna run toward the base.”
“Okay.”
Crocker also handed him his SIG Sauer 226. “Take this just in case. All you have to do is unlatch the safety, here, then point and shoot.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll be fine. We’ll be back soon.”
Twenty minutes later Crocker lay on his belly to the rear of B3 waiting for Suarez to set the C4. The body of a dead Syrian Army guard lay in the grass to Crocker’s right. He had finished him with a swipe of his SOG knife against his throat. Quick, lethal work.
Several hundred yards behind him a vicious battle raged between Assad military forces and ISIS. Lots of automatic weapons fire and the occasional explosion, like the one now that lifted him six inches off the ground and lit up the low clouds so that for an instant the entire landscape turned white.