Easier said than done. Boucher wasn’t just the DCIA; he was also Tom Duncan’s friend, and that made this so much harder. He took a single sheet of paper from his leather portfolio and placed it in on the desktop. Duncan ignored it, maintaining eye contact with Boucher, compelling him to speak.
“Last night, a Delta team running CT operations in Ramadi captured two couriers working with the al-Awda resistance—”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Al-Awda is Arabic for ‘The Return,’ as in the return of Saddam Hussein. It’s a small group, made up of Ba’ath party members and Saddam loyalists. They’ve mostly been marginalized since Operation Red Dawn, but information recovered last night suggests that they are still active. We think they might have set up shop at a remote site east of Samarra…” Boucher paused a beat then dropped the grenade. “It looks like the place is an undocumented Iraqi bio-weapons laboratory.”
Duncan processed this for a moment then leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk to either side of the unread brief. “Undocumented? Christ, Dom, are you telling me that we’ve finally found the smoking gun?”
“I’m afraid it looks that way.”
In October 2002, after several months of evident non-compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein’s government with UN weapons inspectors, the United States Congress voted to authorize military action against Iraq. Four months later, the US Secretary of State, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, presented evidence of an ongoing Iraqi effort to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), with the intent of using them against Western nations. Shortly thereafter, the war began. Almost two hundred thousand soldiers from the United States and three other countries, swept across the border, and in just twenty-one days of fighting, toppled the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.
But no WMDs were found.
As the triumphant victory turned into a prolonged occupation and a brutal campaign against insurgent guerillas — news pundits began calling it a ‘quagmire’—the rationale for the war came under intense scrutiny. What had, in the days leading up to the invasion, seemed like a ‘slamdunk’—damning evidence of an impending strike against American interests utilizing a deadly combination of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons — now seemed like a fallacious pretext for a war of imperialism.
It would later be revealed that much of the so-called evidence had been fraudulent, supplied by Saddam Hussein’s political rivals, who had — successfully it seemed — tricked the nations of the West into toppling the hated dictator from power. While many would subsequently argue that Saddam’s overthrow was justified, even absent the threat of illegal weapons programs, the perception that America had been deceived into starting the war haunted the former President to the end of his first and only term in office, and his decision not to run for a second term paved the way for the election of dark horse candidate Thomas Duncan.
Duncan, a former combat veteran, was intimately familiar with the very real cost of war, in both treasure and blood. His policy from day one in office was that there would be no hand wringing or recriminations over the miscalculations of the former administration, but he did intend to give the American people exactly what he had promised in the campaign — a government that was accountable for every dollar and every drop of American blood spent in the war effort.
Although there was no easy solution to the Iraq problem, Duncan was aggressively pushing his advisors for an exit strategy that would ensure long-term security and stability in the region. It was a politically popular position, and the war hawks in Congress, still stinging from the WMD fiasco, were keeping their heads down.
The discovery of a ‘smoking gun’—a secret bio-weapon production facility leftover from Saddam Hussein’s regime — would change all of that. A single shred of evidence, even circumstantial evidence, might be used to justify the war in the court of public opinion. Although doubts would linger, the uncertainty would undermine the President’s position. The hawks would demand a more aggressive approach to foreign policy, with pre-emptive military action as a tool of statecraft, and more American soldiers would pay the price with their lives.
Duncan shook his head. “It is what it is, Dom. I won’t lie to the American people. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the sooner we get this out in the open, the better.”
“In point of fact, we don’t actually know what it is. That’s what the D-boys are going to find out tonight.”
The President sighed, then lowered his eyes and scanned the brief. “What’s this about a cryptanalyst?”
Boucher stifled a laugh. “The code the insurgents are using triggered an internal protocol that’s been around since the days of the OSS. Sci-Tech says it’s a code that’s never been cracked, the holy grail of crypto. They begged and pleaded for me to deploy their expert with the team, and I saw no good reason to refuse. Her presence won’t put the mission at risk.”
The President did not pursue the issue. “I want to watch the game. Transfer control of this to the Situation Room. I want General Collins there, too. Those are his boys on the ground.”
Boucher frowned. Some in the media had opined that, if the President had a failing, it was that he didn’t like to relinquish control to his subordinates. The DCIA knew better; Duncan wasn’t a control freak, and he didn’t hire anyone without absolutely trusting them to get the job done.
He just misses the action.
“I’ll order the pizzas.”
FIVE
The three MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, arrayed in an echelon-right formation, cruised through the darkened sky high above the Mesopotamian flood plain, performing the very task that had earned them the unit designation of the ‘Night Stalkers.’ Huddled together with Parker and the rest of his squad in the middle aircraft, Jack Sigler peered through his night vision scope, looking over the shoulder of a Black Hawk crew chief seated behind an M240H machine gun. He could make out a distant glow — the lights of Baghdad — far to the south, but below them, there was only the flat featureless desert landscape.
Featureless, but not quite empty.
The reconnaissance drone had uncovered the desert’s secret: a low, cinderblock structure, half buried by windblown dust, just to the east of what the map called Buhayrat Shari Lake. The lake was now just a dry salt flat, two miles across and almost twenty miles long. The drone had showed them the target building, but revealed no sign of activity — no cooking fires burning, no vehicles, not even tire tracks. The facility looked abandoned, but looks could be deceiving.
After completing the initial sweep, the drone returned for refueling, but it was back in the air now, feeding real time infrared imagery to the PDA Rainer carried with him in the trailing helo. Sigler kept expecting the Cipher element leader to keep them updated, but Rainer had been uncharacteristically quiet. With the exception of Strickland’s sotto voce whispered: “Mommy, are we there yet?” comment, everyone else had remained quiet as well.
Maybe no news is good news, Sigler thought. Guess we’ll find out in about five minutes.
Four minutes and fifty seconds later, the crew chief at the gun twisted around and tapped him on the arm. The Night Stalkers crew members wore headsets that gave them access to their own radio net and internal comms, but as a matter of operational security, they didn’t have Cipher element’s frequency. The Delta team’s radios did include a separate channel so they could communicate with the Night Stalkers — who were using the unit callsign ‘Beehive’—but this close to the objective, the last thing Sigler wanted to do was mess with the radio settings. At this point in the mission, gestures and hand signals were the preferred form of communication.