Scott McEwen, Thomas Koloniar
Target America
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of Tyrone Snowden (Ty) Woods and Glen Anthony Doherty. Former Navy SEALs killed in Benghazi, Libya, on September 12, 2012. In the proud and storied tradition of the Navy SEALs they took the fight to an overwhelming number of the enemy in order to save dozens of American lives.
They did not have to go, they went anyway.
We will not forget your heroic acts, gentlemen, nor will we let others.
Bravo Zulu!
— Scott McEwen
EPIGRAPH
The only think necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
PROLOGUE
It was mid-June, and it was hot. Naeem Wardak could not remember ever having been so hot, nor could he remember ever having been more miserable. He was a prisoner of war in the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, where he had been held since his capture in the Waigal Valley of Afghanistan the previous fall. He had been charged as a war criminal for the rape of an American female POW, and since his capture at the hands of SEAL Team VI, he’d been interrogated dozens of times by the CIA, grilled extensively on his knowledge of Taliban activities in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Not being nearly as tough as he’d believed himself to be, Naeem had broken early in the softening-up process, unable to bear the strain of sleep deprivation and constant dehydration. Giving up hope of ever being found worthy in the eyes of Allah, he told the CIA men all they wanted to know, pathetically grateful for every hour of sleep he was permitted in exchange for the truth, for every cold bottle of orange soda, every meager meal. Toward the end, even the smallest of mercies had made him weep like a child in gratitude. Only after the interrogations ceased for good did his shame at last begin to catch up to him. Ultimately, he lost the will even to pray for forgiveness, certain that Allah had turned his back on him. And why shouldn’t he turn his back? Naeem had failed in every aspect of the jihad.
With the blistering sun at its apex, he sat on his haunches, sagging back against the chain-link fence of his six-by-six outdoor “recreation” pen, watching the Chechen prisoner lie on his back in the rec pen across from his. The Chechen was a young Caucasian man from the Caucasus Mountains, where he’d been raised a Salafi Muslim to join the RSMB (Riyad us-Saliheyn Martyrs’ Brigade) at the age of twenty. The Salafi movement was virtually one and the same as the Wahhabi movement, of which Naeem was a member, and under either name, it was a highly puritanical belief system that proponed violent jihad against anyone outside of Islam.
Neither prisoner much liked or trusted the other, but they were both bored beyond belief, and since both happened to speak the North Mesopotamian Arabic dialect, they often passed the outdoor rec hours with meaningless small talk.
Alik Zakayev, the Chechen, turned his head with a smirk at Naeem. “Eh, have you heard the news?”
Naeem scratched at his thick black beard. “What news?” he replied sullenly.
“That American lawyer secured my release.”
Naeem wished he could kick the Chechen in the face, knowing that he himself would undoubtedly rot in American captivity unless he found the courage to take matters into his own hands. “And how did he do that?”
“There’s no proof I had anything to do with those bombings in Boston,” Zakayev said. “The pig Russians falsely accused me and turned me over to the CIA because of my ties to the RSMB.” He turned his head away again, draping an arm over his eyes to shield them from the sun and slipping his other hand into his orange trousers to scratch his crotch. “The Russians are pigs. I’m lucky the Americans have softer laws.”
Naeem eyed him balefully. “When do you leave?”
Zakayev took a moment to smell his fingers, and then scratched at his belly. “The lawyer said four or five days.”
“Where will you go?”
“Wherever they take me… probably back to Chechnya.”
Naeem’s misery seemed to have no limit. Every time a prisoner was released, it was like another wall was thrown up around him. “And what will you do then? Return to the coal mines?”
“Never to the fucking mines.” Zakayev sat up against the fence, pulling his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “But it’s true, I’m a dead man in Chechnya. I will have to leave there as soon as I arrive, or the pig Russians will have me done in.”
“Then where will you go?”
Zakayev darkened, his blue eyes narrowing. “Why do you want to know these things, eh? So you can whisper them to your CIA friends?”
Naeem knew that Zakayev and the other prisoners distrusted him for having broken so easily, but he no longer possessed the energy even to feel ashamed. Instead, he shifted his gaze far beyond Zakayev’s pen to stare out over the sterile expanse of the base. It was now or never. Somewhere out there was a world beyond this living hell, a world he might get to see again if his courage held. He slipped a small, jagged piece of steel from the waistband of his trousers. It wasn’t much larger than a half-dollar coin, but it was big enough for the job he had in mind. He’d found it in the corner of his rec pen three days before, after an earthmover had been used to demolish a nearby guard shack earlier that same day. The broken piece of metal had popped off a steel truss and dropped into the rec area unnoticed.
He had since taken time to file the jagged point to a needle-like sharpness against the floor of his cell during the night. Now he sat thumbing the point in silence while Zakayev watched. The nearest Marine sentry stood some fifty feet away in the shade of an outbuilding, with his carbine slung.
“What are you going to do with that?” the Chechen asked, not yet grasping that Naeem was looking to take his own life.
Naeem ignored him, putting the point against the side of his neck and drawing a deep breath.
“Do it!” Zakayev hissed, his eyes dancing as he glanced furtively at the Marine. “He’s not watching!”
Naeem pressed the point deep into the flesh over his carotid artery and jerked it across. A bright red spurt of blood arced from his neck, followed by another and another.
“Yes!” Zakayev hissed triumphantly, slapping his leg. “Yes!”
Naeem stood up and began to run in place, the blood spurting with more force.
The Marine glanced their way, but at first he didn’t react to what he thought was just an exercising prisoner. A few moments later, he realized there was blood spurting from the prisoner’s neck and shouted for a corpsman as he sprinted toward the rec pen.
Naeem grew dizzy and collapsed to the floor of the pen. His head thudded on the concrete, and he lay staring up at the bright sun, feeling it burning his retinas until all the world was blackness.
1
Alik Zakayev’s palms would not stop sweating no matter how often he wiped them on his jeans. Being belowground again was putting him on edge. It reminded him of the Taldinsky coal mine in Siberia, where he had barely survived a cave-in ten years earlier, spending four days buried alive with six other men before rescue workers finally dug them out, all of them raving, half out of their minds with delirium and dehydration. He still had nightmares about it.
The smuggling tunnel he was in ran one hundred feet beneath the US-Mexico border between New Mexico and Chihuahua State. It was over three thousand feet long, six feet high, and five feet wide, complete with a concrete floor, incandescent lighting, ventilation ducts, and a drainage system to pump out any gathering groundwater. Of the fifty-five migrant workers pressed into service by the deadly Castañeda cartel to work belowground for weeks on end, eleven of them had died during the five-month construction, and the rest were murdered upon completion to ensure its secrecy. The passage had been in service for almost fifteen months now, and so far more than one million pounds of marijuana had been smuggled through it into the United States.