Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

In Afghanistan, where Special Forces’ primary goal was to seek out and destroy enemy combatants, teams of ten to twenty men established outposts at far-flung locations and used these as bases from which to locate, track, and kill the enemy.

Connor sat down at a keyboard and logged on to JWICS. Civilians had the World Wide Web. The military had its own dedicated networks, and civilians were not welcome. JWICS, or the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, was reserved for top-secret or classified communications. Information available included a listing of all U.S. forces deployed around the world, down to battalion level. Connor navigated onto the page for the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan. A colonel was in charge, but it was enlisted men who drove special ops. One man in particular held sway. In this instance, he was Marine Sergeant Major Lawrence Robinson and he ran the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram Air Base, thirty miles north of Kabul.

Connor thanked the Lord for this piece of luck.

Smiling inwardly, he rolled his chair over to the red phone. A red phone for the red line, a secure, encrypted line linking intelligence agencies, military installations, and embassies around the world.

“This is Sergeant Major Robinson.”

“Frank Connor at Division. You the same Robinson helped pull Saddam out of his spider hole a few years back?”

“You the same sonofabitch sent me to find him?”

“Hello, Larry. How they hangin’?”

“Two more years till I have my thirty in, then I’m coming to work for you.”

“Any time. Just remember to tell the wife you’re selling washing machines.”

Robinson cleared his throat. There was precious little time for levity. “Why don’t you give me your verification code, just for old time’s sake.”

Connor rattled off his ten-digit alphanumeric ID. He had visited the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram on more than one occasion. Waiting for his clearance, he envisioned Robinson standing at his perch on the raised platform that overlooked the rows of desks and wall-mounted video screens and the determined young men and women hard at work. At any one time, Robinson might be monitoring a Predator mission on one screen, a field interrogation on another, and a platoon engaged in combat on a third, all while signing off on the next day’s duty roster.

“And what can I do for Division this fine day?” asked Sergeant Major Robinson.

“We have some HVIs”-high-value individuals-“in transit on the border of the northwest tribal region traveling with a team of enemy combatants. We’ve been after these guys for a long time. We’re talking some extremely nasty individuals. Do you have a team in the area available for immediate dispatch?”

“Gotcha loud and clear, Frank. I have two Marine special ops teams working out of Korengal Valley. I’ll have to speak with the ground commanders to see who’s good to go. Hold for ten.”

Connor looked at Erskine and crossed his fingers. He knew better than to mention the missile. An HVI in the company of enemy combatants was a mouthwatering target. At this point, retrieving the missile could wait. Liquidating Balfour’s team was mission one. And that included Emma Ransom.

“I have Captain Crockett at Firebase Persuader patched in. Mr. Connor, go ahead.”

Frank Connor outlined the story as he chose to present it. A group of enemy combatants, including at least one individual figuring on the Terrorist Watch List, had been spotted in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. He had 100 percent visual confirmation as well as the precise coordinates where the targets had been seen a short time earlier.

“I’ve got a pair of Chinooks on the flight line powering up,” said Robinson. “ETA to Captain Crockett is one hour.”

The TOC was situated adjacent to the flight line at Bagram, and Connor imagined that Robinson could see the crews running to the large helicopters and the long twin rotors beginning to turn.

“One question, Mr. Connor,” said the Marine captain. “Should any effort be made to capture and interrogate either the combatants or the HVI?”

“Negative. They are to be considered armed and dangerous and will resist capture. Shoot to kill, captain.”

“Hoo-yah,” said the Marine.

Connor ended the call and looked at Erskine.

No death warrant was ever worded more clearly.

It was morning, and morning was when they did memorization games. Danni pulled a white cloth off the table and said, “Go.” Jonathan had ten seconds to look at and memorize as many of the objects on the four-foot-square table as possible. The first day she’d given him thirty seconds, the second day twenty. The amount of time he was allotted to observe and commit the items to memory kept decreasing while the number of items increased. Danni had a word for this method of training. She called it “elongating,” and said it meant pushing the envelope at both ends. Jonathan, ruled by his secret mantra to do everything better than anyone else, either before or to come, called it “bullshit” and struggled to increase his scores.

Ten seconds.

Jonathan regarded the assortment of dissimilar objects, registering each in turn, assigning it a letter or a numeral. C for candle. N for notepad. 1 for cell phone, because there was always a cell phone, therefore it was a constant. (The other constants were an alligator billfold, 2; a pair of sunglasses, 3; and a pack of breath mints, 4.) He estimated that there were twenty-five items on the table. Some were large and impossible to forget-a Colt. 45 pistol, for example. But he had learned that these were put there to obscure his recollection of the smaller, more important things. It was these items he sought out first and branded into his memory: a flash drive disguised as a pen; a slip of paper with a twelve-digit phone number. (“Concentrate on the last eight digits,” Danni instructed him. “We can figure out the country later.”) A photograph of three men and a woman. (Two of the men were swarthy, with heavy mustaches, the third bald, with a birthmark on his left cheek. The woman was red-haired, with sunglasses, and, oddly, topless.) A business card with Arabic script.

There were other assorted items, ranging from a flathead screwdriver to a ring of keys. And these his mind registered in a fleeting, once-over sweep.

“Time.”

Jonathan turned his back to the table, but not before Danni threw the cloth over the items, just in case he might have eyes in the back of his head.

The exercise was not over yet. To mimic real life as much as possible, Danni made him wait ten minutes to the second before he was permitted to recite the list he’d stored away. During that time, it was their practice to discuss the main stories taken from that morning’s edition of the Jerusalem Post. “Compartmentalization,” she called it. Carving up your mind into individual, hermetically sealed sections and putting a lock and label on each.

Today’s headlines were stolen from a world at war. The Israeli navy had boarded and seized a cargo ship under foreign flag in the eastern Mediterranean, which was carrying a devil’s arsenal of Iranian weaponry destined for Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon.

“Name the ship and the country of registry,” said Danni.

Jonathan had the reply at his fingertips. “Faring Rose. Norway.”

Riots had broken out again on the Temple Mount. More than two hundred policemen had been called to quell the violence.

“What’s everyone so damned mad about?” Danni asked.

“Access to the Temple Mount by Palestinians.”

“Who’s for or against?”

“People’s Party for…” Jonathan gave up. Israeli politics had always confused him. He found it no easier to follow now that he was in the country. “Next.”