Midas nodded. “Understood. I’ve had a few days like that myself.”
Adara knew about what had happened, and she was used to Dom getting a little melancholy when things went wrong. Added to that was the fact Adara was now being trained as an operator, and she knew she had to give Dom some extra space and understanding.
She imagined that wasn’t going to be too much of a problem, considering the fact she had a full plate for the next several weeks.
Clark spent forty-five minutes going over his plan for six weeks of instruction with his two new trainees, and at eight o’clock sharp, Gerry Hendley came into the conference room to meet Midas. The four of them talked about the history of Hendley Associates and its special relationship with the government for a while, until Gerry excused himself and Clark officially began his training.
In order to work at The Campus, one had to understand how The Campus worked, as well as the operation of Hendley Associates, the cover company that Midas was now an employee of.
Clark spent the morning moving Midas and Adara from meeting to meeting throughout the building, first introducing them to the investing and analytical team on the Hendley “white side” as well as the analysts, computer hackers, equipment purchasers, logistics experts, et cetera, who worked on the Campus “black side.” Adara had worked here for years, but she was not on a first-name basis with everyone in the building. Some of this had to do with the fact that fully fifty percent of her work life took place on board the Gulfstream or else at a tiny office they kept at the airport fixed-base operator, formerly at Baltimore BWI Airport, but recently relocated to Reagan National, just ten minutes’ drive north of Hendley Associates in Arlington.
There were just over eighty employees working here in the building today, and Clark took Midas and Adara around to meet most all of them.
The next part of the process was as educational to Adara as it was to Midas. Clark went down the somewhat complicated list of just exactly who around the intelligence community was aware of the sub rosa intelligence work done at The Campus. From the director of national intelligence to the attorney general and, of course, the President of the United States, it was a list with some lofty names, although it remained a relatively short list. The off-the-books organization had been employed on more than a dozen special assignments in the past several years, so many people had come in contact with operators of The Campus, but Gerry Hendley and his executive staff had gone to great pains to keep the exposure small and the affiliations murky.
Midas knew this from his own experience a couple of years earlier. He had been an officer in a highly secretive military unit operating in a battle zone who was then introduced to a group of men and told he couldn’t be read in on just who, exactly, they worked for. He’d found it odd at the time, but now that he was on the other side of the coin, it was comforting to know there were just enough people around the government who ran interference for The Campus that he knew he could expect some semiofficial cover during his operations.
In the late afternoon Clark took his team down to the two-lane firing range on level B3, just below the parking garage. Over the next few hours they trained on the MP5 submachine gun, the M4 rifle, and the SIG Sauer MPX, the new sub gun the team had been testing to see if it was worthy of replacing the H&K UMP kept hidden as a close-quarters defensive weapon in the Gulfstream.
Adara actually had more time behind the SIG MPX than Midas. Delta used the H&K MP7 PDW (personal defense weapon), as their short-barreled weapon of choice, while The Campus had been testing the new SIG for the past few months.
Still, Midas and Adara shot identical groups.
Adara was never going to be the shooter Midas was, but a small, mobile unit like The Campus was in need of overlapping expertise. She had more medical training, more logistics training, and a wider understanding of worldwide aviation. She was a pilot, where Midas was not, although they both had significant boating experience.
There would be places Adara could go where Midas would stick out, and the inverse was just as true.
Clark was happy to see that Midas didn’t have any qualms about training alongside a female. He could think back to a time in his own military career where he would have found it incredibly odd, to the point of distraction, to run and gun with a woman, but that was a long time ago. Adara had become something of a daughter figure to him in the past five years, and he realized he had to keep aware of his own professionalism so he wouldn’t take it easy on her during the training program.
After working into evening at the range, they took an hour off for dinner at a local barbecue shop, then they drove to an outdoor range in Springfield for night fire training. They donned night-vision equipment and used rifles equipment with night-vision-capable holographic weapons sights, and they cleared rooms in the four-room shoot house there.
Again, Adara acquitted herself well, and Midas shot, moved, and communicated like he’d been, just months earlier, a high-ranking Delta Force officer.
That is to say, this stuff was ingrained in Midas’s DNA by now.
Adara was bone-tired when John Clark called his last cease-fire of the day, shortly after eleven p.m.
Clark said, “You both did good today. But today was the easy day. Tomorrow things get harder, and harder still the day after.”
Adara imagined this was true, and she imagined John would say the same thing every day for the next six weeks.
23
The opening play of the Islamic State’s worldwide operation to draw American soldiers en masse back into the Middle East did not begin with Sami bin Rashid and Musa al-Matari’s fighters in the United States. It began in Sicily, and it was carried out by three young Islamic State plants in the flow of war refugees from Syria.
The men had been trained in an underground ISIS camp in Raqqa, then traveled in the mass immigration out of the war zone from Syria into Turkey, then through Bulgaria and Romania, before leaving the refugee flow and slipping illegally over the border into Hungary. When they made their way into Slovenia these three men were met by other ISIS operatives, already living and working in Europe, and here they were outfitted for their operation.
A total of six operatives, including the three newcomers to Europe, crossed into Italy, then spent a full day on the highways heading south. Down at the tip of Italy’s boot in Reggio Calabria, they stole an eight-meter fishing boat with a small Zodiac launch tethered to it, and they sailed across the Strait of Messina over to Sicily.
They anchored in a quiet cove through the daylight hours, then sailed back out into the black Mediterranean in the late evening, using their mobile phones to give them precise geo-coordinates and directions to a point off the coast of Fontanarossa, a sleepy Sicilian beach community. Here the three young men from Syria climbed into the rigid-hulled inflatable Zodiac launch and began heading west toward the beach in the pitch-black night.
Naval Air Station Sigonella was a fifteen-minute drive to the west of Fontanarossa. Considered the hub of America’s U.S. Naval Air operations in the Mediterranean, Sigonella served as a main support station for America’s ongoing attacks against ISIS targets in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and other U.S. operations against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates all over North Africa. Flying time from Sigonella to Syria was roughly two and a half hours, and it was barely a quarter of that to northern ISIS positions in Libya.
Sigonella base was well protected with guns, gates, and guards, and local police were on the lookout for any disturbances in the area that might indicate a threat to U.S. personnel. But on this early morning, the waters of the Med to the east of the base were perfectly quiet other than the approaching Zodiac. The rubber boat came into the shallows without use of the motor. The three men climbed out into waist-deep water and tossed their paddles back in.