From Filth & Mud (29 page)

Jacob wrapped his keffiyeh around his head as naturally as he would have slipped on a fitted baseball cap. Minute by minute, it was all coming back to him, and he felt himself eerily immersed in the disembodied comfort of muscle memory as if he had stepped into a dream where he was not in conscious control.
Mendes!
The haunting memory materialized momentarily then disappeared just as quickly. He willed his mind back to the present, to this mission, to Nathan. He had made his Faustian deal as he lay on the floor of the hospital lobby, and there would be a price to pay. He just hoped that it would not cost him everything.

The three-SUV motorcade left the Basrah docks just as the first hints of sunlight began to disperse the dark cloak of the Arabian night just beyond the horizon of the Gulf. The motorcade quickly sped through scores of rows of shipping containers and punched through a gap in the security fencing around the shipping facility. Their pace quickened as they hit the streets on the outskirts of Basrah. The drivers were keenly aware of the time when the local faithful would be drawn from their homes by the muezzin’s call to morning prayer, the Adhan. They bounced along the narrow streets of the suburban neighborhoods in a circuitous route that would take them around the city center. The thirty-minute ride was as nerve-racking as it was bone-jarring. The three SUVs skidded to a stop in a dead-end alleyway and a rush of adrenaline dumped into Jacob’s bloodstream. He scanned the perimeter rooftops for gun barrels. He was still unnerved as the drivers flung their doors open and John ordered everyone to dismount. John ran inside the small structure and knocked on an unmarked metal door. A man inside peered through a slide-cover.

“Filet-o-fish,” John grunted at the sentry inside and the door swung open. John led them to a second floor where a jerry-rigged communications and control center had been assembled. “We’ve got all of our operational intel in here; coms to the
Jonah
, Manama, and even stateside, all on secure lines.” John beamed with fatherly pride as he displayed the setup. “Up on the roof we’ve got eyes on our objective. We’ve been reconning that lab, or what’s left of it, for the last couple of days.” John pointed to a small briefcase that contained a large display. Pictured on the screen was a night-vision illuminated scene showing a few empty intersections and several city blocks. John took a seat in front of the briefcase and pulled out a small joystick controller.

“Watch this.” He pointed to the screen and pressed one of the buttons on his joystick. The screen’s picture switched from the greenish hue of the night-vision camera to the multi-colored scheme of a thermal view.

“I’ve got thermals and natural light view on this sucker, too.” The screen switched once again, this time to an unassisted optical view of the same set of city blocks. “Plus a few more party tricks with one awesome showstopper.” The display switched once more to a night-vision view of the same few city blocks, but this time from different angles. “I’ve got four drones up there on a 24/7 basis. I can even bring up the different cameras at the same time and look at the target in all spectrums at once.” The screen now simultaneously displayed the thermal, night-vision, and optical views. “These drones are flying up at a thousand feet right now. Best part is that they are GPS controlled and can fly on autopilot once their coordinates are uploaded. They’re programmed to be autonomous most of the time and they can be coordinated as a swarm as they are now. We’ve had these little guys up there for a few days and no one has noticed them yet.”

“What’s the showstopper?” Tim interjected.

John grinned with mischief. “I thought you bastards would never ask!” He leaned under the table and pulled out another small briefcase. He opened it to reveal a small gyrocopter drone within. He unfolded its wings and assembled it with a few snaps of clips, much like an erector set toy. He pointed to a bay that ran the length of the drone’s fuselage and pressed a quick-release latch. A small door hung open, and John grabbed a thin, rectangular package and unwrapped it, exposing a brick that resembled a block of cheese. “Each of these babies is equipped with a block of C4 that packs a big enough punch to help you out of a tight spot if need be.”

Jacob shook his head. John never failed to come up with some sadistic weaponized use for just about everything.

“We’ve got a fleet of these things that we can send up at a moment’s notice if you need some air cover. Well, you guys have some work to do. Get at it.” John slapped his friend on the shoulder and showed them the way to their observation post.

Once their gear was brought in from the 4Runners, Jacob took Tim up to the rooftop and ordered the rest of the team to get two hours of sleep. He and Tim lay on the rooftop and observed the laboratory and the surrounding neighborhood. They spotted several militia men loitering around the smoldering building. The men shooed away any passersby and blocked the adjacent streets to vehicle traffic. They guarded their posts until several pickup trucks appeared with several more militia men. The newly arrived men ran inside the laboratory and emerged with monitors, shelves, boxes, desks, chairs, and anything that could be removed and transported by pickup truck. The men loaded the pickups and sped away as quickly as they had arrived. The men kept this schedule throughout the day until the call to evening prayer.

Jacob keyed his earbuds, “What’s it look like to you, Tim? I’ve lost sight of the guards.”

“I’ve got eyes on the target. Four Tangos are still in the back of the building. Those two trucks that you saw pull up have been doing that pretty much on a forty-five minute rotation for the last couple of hours,” Tim reported from his new observation post located about a kilometer to the west of the rooftop.

“Any idea where they’re dropping that stuff off?”

“Looks like they are headed northeast.”

Jacob switched frequencies and radioed John. “Any idea where those trucks are headed?”

“We’ve peeled off one of our drones. It’s en route. We’ll notify you as soon as we know.” John loved having that God’s-eye-view of the battlefield. It was something that they sorely lacked when they were in Iraq previously.

Jacob’s team continued to recon the lab throughout the night. The building stood unlit in the dark, undisturbed until morning, when the militiamen returned to continue their looting, keeping the same schedule as the day before.

Jacob and his team arrived back at the operations center where they debriefed John and the other two teams.

“Okay. We go tonight and hit the lab. My team will conduct a quick recon before we close in on the lab. This will be a foot movement for a few city blocks. From what we’ve seen, we shouldn’t encounter any Tangos or civilians. Everyone shutters their homes at night, so there’s a low possibility of being spotted. Once inside the lab, we grab whatever looks important: documents, computers, lab equipment; though I’m guessing there’s not much left that the militia hasn’t rat-fucked. We are looking for anything that will lead us to those Chinese workers, the VIPs, and those crates. Understood?” Jacob searched each of the men’s eyes for confusion. Satisfied that there was none, he continued.

“My team will take point. Teams two and three will provide overwatch from the alley to the north and south. John’s team will cover the exfiltration route to the east. The objective is to be in and out of that lab in twenty minutes without being noticed. Let’s keep our heads in the game, gents. There will be absolutely no itchy trigger fingers out there. No one is to take any shots unless I give the okay directly. We aren’t here to start a war with the local militia. They probably don’t know what they have, and we don’t want to tip them off that it might actually be important because then they might offer some resistance.” The men grunted in approval and dispersed to make their preparations.

- - - - - - -

That night, the plan was executed flawlessly. Jacob’s team approached the lab under the cover of darkness. The alley near the lab was desolate except for several mangy, wild dogs scavenging for food. The dogs were undeterred by the armed quintet as they navigated their way stealthily through the littered alley. The bright lights of the city center cast a faint glow in the sky above but left the neighborhoods below in undisturbed darkness. The dirt and gravel street narrowed down from a one-lane causeway to a pedestrian path that was barely wide enough for Jacob’s team to walk two abreast. As they neared the lab from the rear, north-side entrance, the alleyway narrowed further, barely wide enough for Doug to walk normally. Jacob glanced behind him as Doug shook his head.

“Should’ve brought my KY!” he whispered as the team paused to hold their laughter.

Jacob tapped the tablet screen on his wrist and accessed the live feed from the drones circling overhead. There they were five human heat signatures and one distinctly canine tucked in behind a high garden wall and a series of abandoned buildings. There were no other human heat signatures in the area. Jacob motioned back to Doug to turn Van Damme, their sturdy Belgian Malinois, loose. Van Damme was a specially-trained reconnaissance canine that XPS had provided for the mission. In the Marine Corps, Jacob had worked along his four-legged friends while dropping into hostile landing zones under cover of night. Van Damme and dogs like him were a force multiplier for small, special operations teams, providing them with superior stealth, speed, and superhuman senses.

Van Damme came up to Jacob, and he dosed the Malinois with the scent of the marking dye that had been used to track BioSyn’s shipping crates. Van Damme sniffed the end of the small dispensing tube and continued at a slow pace with his nose waving back and forth over the ground. He emerged from the alley and made his way slowly in the direction of the lab. Jacob watched him pause intermittently, picking up his muzzle, as if to clear his nostrils of the putrid smell of wastewater that bathed the street. Van Damme reached the lab and looked back to the team in the alleyway giving them the all-clear. Jacob toggled the drones above, and the team’s five heat signatures were the only ones in the picture. Jacob, Doug, and Odin emerged from the alleyway and walked quickly along the twelve-foot-tall garden wall, staying relatively undetectable from any peering eyes that might have been in the surrounding buildings. Tim and Tanner straddled the adjacent walls of the narrow alley and Spider-manned their way to the rooftop of the market across the street. Tim radioed that he was in place and gave the all-clear for the three to move out.

The three adopted a tight wedge formation and stalked swiftly through the alley until they reached the lab. Jacob, on point, arrived first and slapped Van Damme’s mane for a job well done. The Malinois did not reciprocate the affection; his mind was on the business at hand, and he was keen on gaining access to the interior. Jacob and Doug made their way down the side of the building to an exterior stairwell, while Van Damme kept watch on the alley. The two quickly climbed in silence, but paused just before cresting the roof.

“You’re clear,” Tim’s voice guided them from his vantage point on the market rooftop across the street

Jacob and Doug climbed onto the roof and ran to the interior access stairwell where they quietly made entry into the building. Jacob activated his tablet and keyed the prompt for Van Damme’s collar control. Van Damme responded instantly to the ultra-high-pitched signal, which instructed him to continue his search for the crates. Van Damme paced around the building until he came across a broken window and jumped through it. He switched his display to Van Damme’s collar camera, and he followed along as the canine navigated the remnants of the lab below.

Van Damme paused momentarily on the first floor, his ears listening for the faintest human sounds. Hearing none, he followed his nose up a flight of stairs to the second floor and pushed his way through a set of double-swinging doors of a makeshift infirmary. Only a couple of beds and torn mattresses remained. The canine walked toward a back room as Jacob could hear his nose working hard to find the crates. The camera panned around several times in the small back room and then came to a standstill as Van Damme sat, signaling that he had found his target.

Jacob and Doug emerged from the rooftop stairwell into the desolate interior of the building’s innards. The ambient light within was nonexistent, and they both activated the infrared illuminators on their NVGs and the integrated infrared flashlights of their weapons to navigate in the pitch black. The interior hallway immediately brightened in their night-vision, as if the power had come back to the building, but to the unaided eye, the hallway remained lost to the dark. They took a knee and listened as their earbuds augmented the ambient noise three-fold. Jacob was satisfied that they were the only two living beings in the building, though the countless souls who had died here throughout the last decade and a half were surely watching their every move.

They reached the double doors of the infirmary and scanned the room for threats. Finding none, they headed down the dual rows of empty beds toward the back room where Van Damme still sat. Doug pulled a small chew toy out of his ballistic vest and handed it to Van Damme along with a beef liver treat. Jacob concerned himself with the room. The crates were not there and had most likely been taken in the initial raid. A cursory search of the room revealed nothing but the discarded waste of chaos. He cleared some boxes from the floor and found some loose papers and a couple of notebooks embossed with the BioSyn seal. He tucked these into his daypack along with a couple of mangled thumb drives. Jacob expected that the mission would turn up very little. Experience had taught him that people living in war zones tended to be extremely efficient at scavenging through the wreckage of war.

Their mission accomplished for the night, he motioned to Doug to move out. As the two headed back through the infirmary, Jacob noticed that Van Dammehad not followed. He peered back into the roo
m
 
to find that Van Damme stood perfectly erect against the back wall. Jacob called to him, but the dog did not move. Jacob triggered the collar command, but again Van Damme remained motionless.

“He’s signaling,” Doug said as Jacob came to the same realization.