Asset Seven Read online

  Randy laughed and raised his mug.

  ‘Amen to that brother.’

  There was a moment’s quiet before Ned spoke.

  ‘Anyway. We’re going off the reservation for a little while. Team from B Squadron’s gonna take our slot here to cover. We leave tomorrow morning around ten so get cleaned up, get some food in you and get some sleep. Don’t worry about the report, I’ll throw something together and fire it back. You just enjoy the stand-down.’

  ‘Works for me, man. Where we going?’

  ‘In-country but we may have to scoot over into Apache territory for a look-see. It’s for the spooks but I know the lead guy and he’s okay. Done some shit for him before and he’s a straight shooter, one of their better guys.’

  ‘Okay. What about briefing and prep?’

  ‘Nah, you’re good man, going to do all that at the other end. All you need to do is pack tonight or tomorrow but get some warm stuff in there; we’re in the mountains for this one.’

  Randy stood and stretched, groaning as the tension released in his back.

  ‘Okay. I’m gonna get some chow and a hot shower and sleep like the dead. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Sleep well, Randy.’

  As Randy headed back to the accommodation, Ned made his way to the secure area to check that the air assets were still on track for their trip east in the morning. The Boss had cleared the support to the Agency operation and Ned had briefed the rest of the Team so in truth, there wasn’t really a whole lot more to do. As he made his way into the corridor, Ned wondered exactly what kind of task Vic Foley needed him and his guys for. In the past, Ned had worked on several Agency tasks and had experienced every level of professionalism he’d thought possible. From an aborted shit-fest of a rendition in China to a great infil Op in Yemen. He and his guys had fought their way out of ambushes, called air strikes in on pursuing paramilitaries, been extracted from hot LZs as bullets pinged off the fuselage of their chopper. They’d had some close calls over the years working with the Agency so Ned was glad that Vic Foley was running point on this.

  Ned knew that Vic had cut his teeth on some really tough operations in Afghanistan; straight out from Langley after 9/11 and embedded with the Northern Alliance in the very first engagements with the Taliban. He’d worked with Vic in later operations in that country and liked the man. He was upfront about everything and never held back, making sure that Ned and his Team were as informed as it was possible to be. Vic was no stranger to combat either; Ned had fought alongside the Agency man on two occasions where they’d been caught short on the exfil and Vic was no passenger; he held his own and then some. There were a couple of former Delta Operators who had joined the CIA over the years and Ned would usually reach out to them for a discreet heads-up on whatever Agency guy was running point with the Op that Ned and his Team would be helping out on. The word he got back from the former SOF guys was that Vic was a safe pair of hands, well respected by the soldiers and spooks alike. Unlike some Ned had encountered.

  His mind wandered back to the colossal fuck-up in China, where he and his team had only just made it out of the country by the narrowest of margins. All because the spook running the show hadn’t thought they needed to know that his Asset hadn’t been in contact as often as he should. That a sensitive collection platform had identified movements of a unit of the PLA’s Falcon Special Forces that was highly unusual. It was only when their communications were attacked that Ned and his Team began to suspect that their exfil was compromised. And being captured in Mainland China by a Special Forces unit of the Peoples’ Liberation Army was not an option for consideration.

  Shaking his head at the memory, Ned knocked on the door and waited a brief moment until it was opened by a tall, rangy individual who nodded and pulled the door wider to allow Ned to access the room. Ned muttered his thanks and made his way towards the Air desk, weaving between the makeshift benches and desks that held the computers and radio systems the Task Force used for communications. He stopped when he reached a large whiteboard and studied its contents, nodding with satisfaction when he identified his Team’s scheduled ride for the morning had been confirmed. He turned around and made his way back out of the room and headed for his own bunk. He wanted to pack and be ready to go so that he could get a good night’s sleep and be refreshed in the morning.

  Ned closed the book and rubbed his eyes, feeling tiredness begin to seep in. He placed the paperback down on the floor beside his cot-bed and yawned. Turning off his light, he rolled onto his side and closed his eyes as his mind was drawn once again to the task ahead of them. Vic had told him very little over the comms other than where he and his team needed to be and what they should bring. Good enough. Ned’s guys were all seasoned operators and had been on this rotation for nearly four months now. In truth, Ned was looking forward to something a little bit different from the daily grind against the last gasp of Islamic State’s fight for survival. As sleep eluded him, he thought about how these past two years coming in and out of this country to battle the biggest threat to western civilisation had been some of the strangest times he’d experienced as a Special Forces Operator.

  He remembered the surreal moment of watching the downlink from the drone showing hundreds of fighters, artillery and tanks converging on his squadron at the Conoco plant and the Combat Support Intel guy shouting They’re speaking fucking Russian. The panic and confusion as flustered calls were made to command at JSOC, requests for air support held up until it could be determined if the approaching Russians were friend or foe. But when they’d fired their first bombardment at the plant, the line was crossed. It was one of the toughest fights Ned and his guys had been in, the line between their defensive ordnance and the enemy’s non-existent. Thousands of bombs, missiles, rockets and bullets shredded the plant and its meagre defences and Ned and his Team fought for their lives, running from cover to cover, returning fire as well as coordinating the air support and reinforcements from the Green Berets at the Mission Support Site. For over four hours they’d repelled assault after assault until eventually the enemy had withdrawn, having suffered a staggering number of casualties. When the dust cleared and reinforcements arrived, every one of Ned’s guys had been wounded in some way, although they were all relatively minor ones. Frag, kinetic shock, burns, blast injuries, temporary deafness. They’d been lucky. Later the report back from JSOC indicated that they had killed over three hundred of their attackers, a large proportion of which had been Russian mercenaries from a Private Military Company called Wagner Group. JSOC’s assessment was that Moscow had been aware that American Special Forces had been present at the Conoco plant, had even been told this by the Pentagon as the build-up to the assault began. But Moscow claimed that there were no Russians present in the battle space. That the US was mistaken. And that was all JSOC needed to hear to rain down hell on the attackers. Ned had personally listened to the translated telephone intercepts between the surviving Russians and their families back home where they recounted, in high emotion, the slaughter of their comrades by the Americans. Ned had asked why the hell Russia had let this happen. Allowed the mass slaughter of their citizens. The Colonel from the Defence Intelligence Agency had replied that the Pentagon believed Russia had used the situation to test American reactions and appetite for an engagement when they were vastly outnumbered. He explained that Wagner was little more than a front for a deployable force of the Russian military that was used for deniable operations in Syria, Ukraine, Georgia and some African nations. It still shocked Ned that a country would allow such a massacre of its own soldiers merely to test the resolve of their foe. Cold. Very fucking cold.

  Then there was the Iranians. On one hand still the world’s biggest exporter and supporter of terrorism against the west but now working against the same enemy as the US in the same battle space. Ned had never thought he would see the day where US forces and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would be sitting in Joint Operation briefs, deconflicting air moves and troo
p deployments. Each side wary and mistrustful of the other, giving only the minimal information that was needed to avoid misunderstandings. And tomorrow Ned and his guys would be starting a new operation where the Iranians were, once again, the enemy that they had always been. As his breathing slowed and his mind closed down, Ned’s last thought before sleep overtook him was that the world was at its craziest since any time that he could remember.

  5

  DANKASH REGION, NORTH-WEST IRAN

  Karim swept the area once again, his hand steady as the scope on the assault rifle magnified the land to his front. The air was cool and still, no sounds save for the distant screech of a raptor riding on the early morning thermals above him. Changing position, he turned around and conducted the same routine facing the direction he had come. He scanned the area for several minutes but saw nothing to indicate they were close. Leaning back against the rock, he laid the rifle beside him and opened up the side-pocket of the backpack, retrieving the gas canister and cooking equipment. Working with a speed born of practice, Karim soon had the water boiling and the noodles cooking in the small pot. His stomach groaned in anticipation and he chewed on some dried meat to assuage his hunger until the food was cooked. After a couple of minutes, he removed the noodles from the gas and set them to one side to cool a little.

  Pulling a map from the pocket of his cargo-pants, he traced his finger along the route he had taken to reach this location. He’d been unchallenged through the dark hours of the early morning, as he’d hoped, and had made good progress. Ahead of him, however, lay the real challenge; the high passes of the Zagros Mountains. Sub-zero temperatures, snow, ice, winds, and of course, the challenge of working at altitude. But that’s exactly why Karim had selected this route as his exfiltration. Very few people, even among the Quds Force, were capable of comfortably navigating and surviving in such terrain. Or so he’d thought. When he’d been selected to work at Camp Palang, Karim had been surprised to find the training environment so high in the mountains and even more surprised that the same mountains were used to test the students. But it had also presented him with an incredible opportunity with which to spend time in the mountains conducting a reconnaissance of his exfil route under the guise of designing the training exercises for the Palang students. After a confirmatory look at the location of his first Rendezvous point, Karim stored the map and turned his attention to the hot food.

  Spooning the noodles into his mouth, a memory came to Karim of enjoying a meal with General Shir-Del and his staff at Palang not long after Karim had arrived. He’d been praising the facility and what it would achieve when one of the captains had mentioned the security infrastructure in place. Karim had listened, rapt, as the officer waxed lyrical about the sensitive measures they used to ensure the camp and its activities were never compromised. This included a classified monitoring platform that identified all electronic transmissions in the area and a complex algorithm that would classify them as either benign, suspicious or outright malevolent in intent. Karim had not known that this capability existed and had the young captain not mentioned it, would have been caught sending his transmissions to Vic without even knowing how he’d been snared. His mouth had gone dry and his heart raced as he’d been intending firing off a quick missive that night to Vic to give him the camp’s location and function. He’d managed, during a logistics run to Tehran, to get a brief message to Vic, letting him know he had important information that he couldn’t transmit. He’d given Vic his exfil codeword and told him to standby as the next time he heard from Karim it would be to get him out. And here he was. Getting out.

  He looked back along the rocky valley he’d just ridden through, almost expecting to see a convoy of vehicles racing towards him but there was nothing to see other than a dust-devil spiralling its way across the valley floor. Karim didn’t think they would look for him in the mountains, at least not to begin with. No, they’d start with the usual: Roadblocks, checkpoints, searches of towns and villages. Aircraft conducting aerial sweeps. This thought drew his attention to the bike but he knew it was safe from view under the camouflage netting. They would already know that Karim had no family, girlfriend or friends beyond his acquaintances in the Quds Force and consequently, no one to torture or interrogate to get information from. Karim could not have done this if he had. His parents had died in a factory fire when he was young and he had no siblings, his mother suffering a complication during his birth that meant she couldn’t have any more children. There would still be torture and interrogations. But Karim had no problem with these.

  The surveillance teams would be thoroughly beaten and their team leaders executed. Those on the night shift would be tortured and interrogated to identify if they had been complicit in Karim’s escape. His neighbours would be questioned thoroughly and given a rough time but nothing too violent. The widow Aria would get a pretty hard time once they discovered Karim’s escape route through her bedroom but he’d known for some time she was feeding low-level information on her neighbours back to the bottom-feeders at VAJA so he didn’t feel too bad about this.

  As he cleaned his utensils and re-packed them, Karim thought about the information he needed to get to Vic and patted the lump of the inside pocket of his jacket. The three small flash drives were padded, waterproofed and encased in RFID shielding to protect them against all invasive possibilities. This is what he was risking his life for. Risking his own life to save those of others. Others he had never and more than likely, would never, meet. But he couldn’t let something like this happen. No human being with any sense of morality or responsibility could. But then, the Quds Force and the IRGC were not known for either of these positive traits, existing as they did to sow death and destruction to the western nations through their training and mentoring of proxy forces.

  As he packed his gear away, Karim recalled with fondness some of those very operations he had been involved in when he had been a committed servant of his regime. Training members of Hamas in complex bomb-making that would elude the Israeli detection systems. Emplacing limpet mines on American and British oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz. Kidnapping British sailors and Royal Marines from their own vessel and scoring a tremendous propaganda coup for Tehran for which he had been publicly honoured. But that had been when he was the sharp end of the spear for the regime. When he’d been ruthlessly committed to his country’s physically hostile foreign policy. And, of course, that had all been before Vic.

  Karim had been living and working in Beirut for several months, recruiting and training talented Hezbollah fighters for better things. He’d exercised his usual tradecraft, leaving a sensitive footprint that didn’t expose his true identity or nature of his activities. Or so he’d thought. He’d been enjoying a quiet lunch one day in a café off Rue Hamra when a man dropped into the seat beside him, removed his sunglasses and gave him a big grin. Karim immediately knew the man was American; his looks, clothing and confidence giving him away. Karim had returned the grin, put his fork down and raised his eyebrows to indicate his puzzlement. Vic had gone straight for the jugular. He’d leaned forward and with a slight inclination of his head, indicated the locations of two vehicles of athletic-looking Lebanese men staring in their direction. He’d addressed Karim by his real name and informed the Quds Force operator that he knew exactly what he was doing. Karim had started to rise up from his seat when Vic placed a gentle hand on his arm and asked him to take a minute. Karim had smiled and said something about Vic being confused and that he did not recognise the name Vic was saying but sat back down regardless, his pride eager to accept the challenge of dealing with the American. Vic thanked him and spoke for a couple of minutes during which Karim realised that he was either going to work with the American or die fighting in a back street of Beirut. The Lebanese in the cars were Vic’s Plan B: Plan A was that Karim recognised an opportunity when he saw it and was smart enough to grasp the time-limited offer. If he wasn’t smart enough then Vic had clearly misjudged his man. For the first time in his
life, Karim heard the word rendition applied to his own circumstances and could feel a box closing around him as any options he’d considered for escape were suddenly closed. And then Vic had slid over a small file.

  A couple of pages of a photocopied intelligence report from many years before. Karim had given the American an indulgent grin and read the Farsi-language documents. It had only taken a minute but after that minute, his whole life was changed. He’d suspected, of course, that it could be a ruse; a doctored file used to bait him and snare him, but Karim recognised immediately the wording and phraseology of his own country’s intelligence agency. It was genuine. He’d looked up at the American across the table from him and met the calm brown eyes and slid the file back to Vic before addressing him in English.

  ‘Rendition will not be necessary.’

  His professional relationship with the CIA officer had developed fast and he found himself both liking and respecting the American. After providing information that stopped a Hezbollah assassination attempt, he and Vic shared a celebratory meal where, in a moment of levity, Karim had asked what his CIA codename was. Vic had grinned almost sheepishly and admitted that it was probably the most banal codename ever. He explained that their initial meeting had taken place on the seventh of July and that as he’d had to push out a report almost immediately after the meeting, he’d designated his lucky number, seven, which was also the day and month, as the first thing to come to mind and hopefully as a good omen for the future. And just like that, Asset Seven was created. Karim had feigned indignation at not having a more exotic codename and both men had enjoyed the humorous exchange.

  Karim shook his head at the memory and concentrated on the task at hand. He strapped the backpack onto the motorcycle then pulled the camouflage netting away, rolled it up and stuffed it into the top of a pannier. Placing the assault rifle into its sheath on the side of the bike, he gave a final look back along the valley, donned his goggles and pulled away in a small cloud of dust towards the high mountain passes in the distance.