Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Deception

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just to let them know we’re armed,” Scorpion said, flooring the accelerator as if he could push it through the metal floor, while reaching back with one hand to the compartment behind his seat. Dowler fired a burst from the AK, the rifle rocking up so high from the recoil he nearly put a bullet through the roof. A spray of bullets from a truck racing nearly abreast of them spattered through the cab, one of them barely missing Scorpion’s head. From the back of the truck, he heard a child scream.

Christ! One of them’s been hit, he thought, pulling the FAD assault rifle from the compartment.

“Hold the wheel! Tight!” he shouted to Dowler as he racked the pump action to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher.

“Good Lord!” Dowler exclaimed. “Where’d you get that?”

“Peru,” he said, leaning across Dowler to sight the weapon on the truck as they bounced on the uneven road. The other truck was nearly up to them and less than twenty meters away, militiamen blazing at them on full automatic. He aimed at the driver, squeezed the trigger and ducked back. The other truck exploded in a blast of fire, the hot wind of it knocking them sideways.

Scorpion fought the wheel to regain control. Grabbing Dowler’s hand and slamming it back on the steering wheel, he heaved up as he pumped the grenade launcher and leaned out the driver’s window, facing back. Bullets smashed around him, one of them shattering the side mirror. He fired the grenade at the windshield of the truck closest behind them, only twenty or so meters away, and watched it explode as his own truck swerved, nearly toppling him out. He fired an automatic burst at another truck farther back as it turned off the road to avoid the flames of the exploding truck in front of it.

Pulling himself back into the cab, Scorpion grabbed the wheel from Dowler, who just stared at him.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he asked.

Scorpion glanced at the remaining side mirror. There was only one truck still behind them on the road and it was at least a couple of hundred meters back. For the moment they were keeping their distance, possibly communicating to others to block the road somewhere up ahead.

He checked the fuel gauge. Less than a quarter of a tank left. He tapped it to make sure it was working. It was a miracle the fuel tank hadn’t been hit, he thought. They still had at least a hundred kilometers to the Kenyan border, maybe more. They hadn’t hit the intersection to the main road at Bilis Qooqaan yet. He tried to calculate fuel. At the speed he was going, figure ten, twelve miles per gallon. It was going to be close. Too close.

The boy, Ghedi, looked wide-eyed at him. Scorpion, thinking he trusted the kid more than Dowler, touched his shoulder and handed him the FAD.

“Ara ko’daisa,” he told the boy. Hold this. Dowler was staring at him too.

“I suppose I should thank you for saving my life,” he said.

Even if they made the border, whatever he had come to Africa for, whatever he might have fantasized about with Sandrine, was over, Scorpion thought. CNN, al Jazeera, and the rest of the media would be over this like flies on garbage. He couldn’t let them put him on television or even know he existed. As soon as he got the children to Dadaab, he’d have to disappear. He wouldn’t even be able to say goodbye. He’d never see her again.

“Shut up,” he told Dowler.

But he was wrong. Something that was happening at that very moment in a leafy neighborhood in a city on another continent was about to change everything, including his decision never to do another mission.

Bern,

Switzerland

The girl was the key. That and the timing. They would have at most nine minutes. Realistically, Scale thought, closer to seven, before the Kantonspolizei arrived in force and they’d be trapped. Even if his roadblocks and the explosives worked perfectly.

It had taken him weeks to study the target and come up with a plan that the Gardener would approve. The problem was, the place was a fortress. He knew going in that he would lose some, perhaps all, of the team. “The real question, baradar, ” brother, the Gardener had asked, “is not whether it can be done, but whether you can do it?” The Gardener looked at him then with those brown almost coal black eyes that for many were the last thing they ever saw, and even Scale felt a chill.

It was the Gardener himself who had given him his code name. Named for the saw-scaled viper, the most venomous snake in the Middle East. He liked it. He was a small man, thin, with little physical presence except for his oversize hands that looked like they belonged to a much larger man. Hands he had worked his entire life to strengthen, endlessly squeezing lastik balls till they could crush like a vise. A child that other children avoided or made fun of. He couldn’t remember a single friend, not one true dust , from his childhood. But now his name made others fear him, even members of his own team, he thought, returning to the problem.

The American embassy in Bern was located at Sulgeneckstrasse 19, a tree-lined street in the Monbijou district. It was a white six-story structure on extensive grounds behind a high wrought-iron fence, with concrete driveway barriers to prevent a car-bomb attack. Outside the embassy, a Swiss security policeman with a SIG assault rifle stood guard twenty-four hours a day. The only way in was on foot past him. At the front gate, you had to pass a U.S. guard shack where visitors were asked to empty their pockets and were X-ray screened before being allowed to stand in line outside the building. No baggage, backpacks, purses, or packages of any kind were allowed.

Once past the guard shack, you went down a covered walkway to the building, where you had to go through two additional security checkpoints under the eye of a high-tech security post behind bulletproof glass. Surveillance cameras covered every possible approach as well as all interior areas and hallways. Security was provided 24/7 by armed United States Marines, six of them on duty at any given time.

Even assuming you could get past all that, eliminate the Marines and get in, you’d still have only seven minutes before the Kantonspolizei arrived in force, leaving no way out.

The girl’s name was Liyan. She had to be attractive, Scale insisted. She had to hold their attention for at least two or three seconds. And they couldn’t suspect her, so she had to wear Western clothes and look sexy. A twenty-two-year-old college student, she was trim, dark-eyed, and modern enough not to wear a hejab . Her family were Syrian Kurds from Aleppo, and Scale had false-flagged her by convincing her he was from the GSD, the Syrian internal security service. They had arrested her brother during the Arab Spring revolt, and he threatened that unless she cooperated, her brother would be shot.

Reasonable enough, since the Gardener’s contacts within the GSD had confirmed that the brother was already dead.

Another lie was that she had been told her only job was to get the explosives-C-4 pressed flat and shaped to the curves of her body inside her undergarments-into the building. No ball bearings, no shrapnel, nothing added that would set off the metal detectors. She had been told to take it off in a restroom for them to use inside the embassy. In fact, she would not survive the attack, and if by some chance they were able to identify her body later, Scale thought, the blame would fall on the Syrians or the Kurds.

Now, coming from the blue parking zone on Rainmattstrasse, he took one final look at the embassy and gate that had been his obsession for weeks. He scanned the roof and sides of the building, spotting at least a dozen video cameras, knowing there were probably more that he couldn’t see. His every move was being recorded that very second on videos that would later be scrutinized pixel by pixel for every last detail. His people were waiting in the SUV around the corner. The other two vehicles, a van truck and an old bus, were in position. Both were packed with C-4 and ammonium nitrate fertilizer and gasoline. They would act as roadblocks, one near Kapellenstrasse, the other at the Schwarztorstrasse intersection to slow the Kantonspolizei and isolate the embassy from either approach. The rest depended on timing and the girl, Liyan.