CHAPTER 50

Tirana, Albania

September

THE WAITING WAS BRUTAL. Not only were Reece and Freddy under the stress of the mission and the breakdown of the original plan, but they had to effectively stand by while an innocent child endured unspeakable abuse. The men’s thoughts wandered to their own children, both living and deceased. Reece knew that Freddy would be thinking of his son Sam; you couldn’t switch off being a father, no matter how hard you trained.

At 9: 00 p. m., Reece took his place behind the rifle. Dusk had turned to darkness, but the clear visual through the thermal optic turned night almost to day. The security men outside the building glowed bright white through the scope, the warm concrete standing out against the cool ground beside it. Reece turned on the illuminated MIL-DOT “Police” reticle of the S& B rifle scope, the glowing red crosshairs giving him better contrast against the grayscale thermal image.

Despite a population of 3, 500 residents, the grounds surrounding the apartment buildings were all but deserted: no children playing, no old men smoking, no women walking to or from the nearby shopping areas. The locals knew that something was going on. They didn’t need to be told. This was home. They could sense it. The only signs of life came from televisions flickering in windows and the sounds of conversations echoing down the hallway outside their door. Thirty-five minutes into Reece’s shift, the perimeter guards’ behavior changed; the boss was coming out. Four men emerged from the building’s side entrance and walked to the SUV, opening the doors. Now that darkness had fallen, the men were brandishing their weapons openly. Six at the truck, six on the perimeter.

Reece moved the rifle’s selector back to FIRE and steadied the toe of the buttstock against the beanbag-like rear rest on the table. Two more armed men emerged from the building and stopped halfway to the vehicle, facing outward. Reece took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and prepared himself for a precise shot. The security detail lead emerged next, with the shorter and heavier Nawaz trailing behind him. Reece took another breath and exhaled as he began to track the white-hot moving target with his crosshairs. The leader waved his hand toward the two men standing in front of them. They began to walk back in his direction. Reece had mere seconds before the target would be surrounded by security men.

He continued to track the target, holding the crosshairs on the front of Amin Nawaz’s chest as he increased pressure on the trigger. Even suppressed, the shot was loud inside the confines of the room, especially after the men had worked in near silence for hours. The 175-grain Open-Tip Match bullet passed across the open courtyard in a quarter of a second before slamming into Nawaz’s right arm. The bullet shattered the humerus on its way into his thoracic cavity, where it center-punched a rib, sending shards of bone into his lung like shrapnel. The bullet continued its slightly downward path as it shredded its way through both lungs and exited on the off side of his body, spraying blood, bone, and even bits of his ample body hair across the graveled ground.

His security men heard the sickening thwock of the bullet’s impact an instant before the supersonic crack of the bullet’s travel reached their ears. Nawaz lunged forward and down, crashing into his chief bodyguard. The security detail quickly became disoriented in the darkness, unsure how to react; they’d obviously spent their time intimidating civilians instead of rehearsing immediate action drills.

Amin Nawaz lay facedown, gasping unsuccessfully for breath as his lungs filled with blood. The two men closest to him finally reacted and began dragging his limp body toward the idling Opel. Reece and Freddy could hear the men yelling at one another as the rest of the team raced to surround their fallen leader.

“Hedgehog down. I say again, Hedgehog down, over, ” Freddy reported over the radio in a calm, even tone.

“Roger that, Hedgehog down, ” a distant command voice responded.

“SPARTAN, this is RENEGADE TWO-TWO, over, ” an animated voice joined in.

“I’ve got you, RENEGADE, preparing to move. ”

“Roger that, I’m ten mikes out. ”

“Good copy. ”

Within ten seconds of Freddy’s radio call to Langley, the entire city of Tirana went dark. Agency hackers had breached a firewall for the Albanian power corporation known as KESH a week earlier and, with the target down, they signaled the servers to discontinue distribution of electricity to that sector of the nation’s power grid. The hydroelectric plants continued to make power; the distribution points simply stopped relaying it. With Institut now thrown into absolute blackness, save for what came from the quarter moon, the terrorists’ panic level increased exponentially.

As Reece and Freddy worked swiftly to ready their gear, they heard shots ring out. At first it was a few isolated bursts but the rest of the men caught on and soon full-auto gunfire was spraying in almost every direction. The suppressor had eliminated the rifle’s muzzle flash and had muffled the report, so it was doubtful the men outside knew from which building the shot had originated. Their reaction was to wildly pump rounds into every structure in the vicinity in what professionals referred to as a “death blossom. ”

“RENEGADE TWO-TWO, this is SPARTAN. Hot extract. I say again, hot extract, over. ”

“Roger that, SPARTAN. Eight mikes out, ” a voice responded over the sound of a screaming diesel motor in the background.

Both operators had put on their helmets with the distinctive four-eyed NODs in place. Freddy had the magazines for the 7. 62mm HK sniper rifle in his vest, so he carried the larger rifle. Reece checked the ATPIAL laser on his little MP7 submachine gun and nodded to his partner, who removed the two-by-four blocking the door and opened it, allowing Reece to creep into the deserted hallway. The sniper pair moved quickly but quietly toward the stairwell at the end of the hall, hearing animated voices from the apartments they passed. The residents of Institut were apparently unhappy with the power being shut off during their prime TV-watching time, not to mention the hail of bullets just outside their doors. They made it to the stairs and took the two flights down in seconds, pausing at the bottom to ensure that the hallway was clear. Halfway down the narrow ground-floor hallway, a beam of light washed out their night vision, and they heard a female scream. A surprised young woman dropped a flashlight and sprinted down the hall. The men raced to catch her, but she had too much of a head start.

“Polici! Polici! ” she screamed as she burst through the metal doors and out into the open area between the buildings, pointing back the way she’d come.

Reece rounded the corner just in time to see a burst of tracers cut her down, the fire shifting to the doors. He dove back inside as the bullets impacted the concrete walls and metal doors, sending shards of dust and debris across the small entryway. Back on his feet, he and Freddy made their way swiftly toward the building’s only other exit.

When they reached the side door, which was propped open with a rock the size of a soccer ball, they saw the headlights of a pickup truck racing toward their position. One of the terrorists riding in the bed of the truck had a belt-fed PKM machine gun resting over the cab and began firing toward the open doorway. Both men dropped to the ground and Freddy began firing methodically toward the PKM’s muzzle flash while Reece put a long burst into the truck’s windshield. The firing stopped, and the engine’s whine slowed to an idle. The truck’s momentum carried it forward as the pace slowed while both operators shifted their fire to the headlights.

The lull in the fire was temporary as the enemy began to zero in on the Americans’ location. Within moments, more small-arms fire impacted around the doorway.

“I’ll cover the other door, ” Reece yelled over the gunfire. “How far out is Ox? ”

“RENEGADE TWO-TWO, what’s your ETA, over? ” Freddy called over the radio.

“Under five, I say again, under five. ”

Reece heard the transmission and flashed Freddy a thumbs-up as he jogged down the hallway. Rounds still passed through both of the building’s openings, preventing either man from returning effective fire. Green tracers from a belt-fed weapon ricocheted as they impacted the walls of the hallway and 5. 45mm AK rounds hit in a less frequent but equally deadly tempo. Reece slowly worked an angle on the doorway, firing short bursts as enemy muzzle flashes worked their way into his line of sight.

“I need a window, ” Reece heard his frustrated teammate call out. Seconds later, he heard the sound of a door being kicked in and the screams of the residents inside. The window gave Freddy a better position and after he dropped two terrorists with as many shots, the firing from that side of the building abated as the survivors took cover behind the bullet-laden pickup truck.

“Moving your way, ” Reece said into his radio.

Freddy fired repeated rounds into the truck to keep the enemies’ heads down as Reece moved to exit the side door, scanning the area outside to ensure that he wasn’t going to walk into a burst of machine-gun fire. Satisfied that it was as quiet as it was going to get, he sprinted through the door and ran around to the back side of the apartment building, where he took a knee to cover Freddy’s exit. He didn’t have to say a word; instead he fired short bursts from his MP7 under the pickup, his laser dancing across the open ground. Two of the rounds caught a shooter in the shin and he fell to his side, grasping his leg. The next burst hit his face. Freddy moved past Reece and took cover behind a small car, firing toward the enemy. They leapfrogged slowly, putting distance between themselves and the terrorist gunmen.

The scene was first world versus third, trained versus untrained, disciplined versus undisciplined. Reece and Freddy moved, fired, and changed magazines with practiced discipline while the terrorists sprayed rounds wildly on full automatic. The technological advantage of the NODs and IR laser–equipped former Frogmen was almost unfair: the terrorists fired at fleeting sounds and shadows while Reece and Freddy could clearly see not only the enemy, but each other’s lasers. To the commanders and analysts stateside watching the scene from the black-and-white UAV feed, it was like watching a video game with the sound muted. IR strobes blinked on top of the helmets of the good guys while the bad guys’ muzzle flashes identified them with nearly equal clarity.

Rick “Ox” Andrews had earned his nickname as a nineteen-year-old Ranger private first class by running across the runway of the Port Salines Airport in Grenada under fire, laden like an ox with a mortar tube across his shoulders and belts of linked M-60 ammunition crisscrossing his chest. He’d fought in nearly every armed conflict since that October day in 1983 and had served as a sergeant major in the Army’s premier special operations unit before going to work for the CIA’s Ground Branch in 2004. The special operations world was a small one, and he and Reece had crossed paths more than once in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Thirty seconds out, ” Ox called over the radio as he wove the green Land Rover Defender 90 toward the firefight around parked and slower-moving cars. He flipped his NODs down as he neared the target, his path illuminated by the vehicle’s IR headlights. As soon as he did, he saw the beam from the powerful laser co-witnessed with the sights of the machine gun mounted on the Rover’s roll bar. He hit the brakes, careful not to bounce his gunner around too badly, and turned sharply. The turn put them perpendicular to the pickup with the enemy totally exposed. Ox winced as the 12. 7mm DShkM machine gun came alive above his head, its 855-grain armor-piercing incendiary bullets tearing the men, their weapons, and the truck behind them to shredded bits of flesh and metal.

Ox steered past the pickup and caught sight of the IR beams from Reece’s and Freddy’s ATPIALs two hundred meters ahead. He accelerated in their direction and saw one of their flashing IR strobes emerge from behind a compact car as he closed the distance. As he rolled to a stop, Reece opened the passenger-side door and climbed inside. He heard Freddy tumble into the truck’s bed, and the massive gunner, whom they’d nicknamed Django after the movie character, slapped the truck’s roof. Ox consulted the night vision–compatible LCD screen attached to the truck’s dash as he accelerated away from the objective, confirming over his Peltor headset that their ride was inbound.

Reece changed magazines in the passenger seat and looked through the Rover’s back window to see Strain covering the truck’s rear with his rifle. Full head count. He let Ox handle the navigation as he ran through a mental checklist and subconsciously checked over his gear with his left hand. Full mag in the gun and one more in the vest. All Reece could see were buildings lining the darkened city streets as Ox wove his way toward the extraction point, his goggled head shifting between the road ahead and the screen to his right.

“Good to see you, buddy, ” Ox said as he drove. Reece could see his trademark grin below his NODs.

“Damn good to see you, Ox! We appreciate the ride. ”

“No worries, man, somebody’s gotta keep you Navy guys out of trouble. ”

Ox steered the truck off the road and drove through a side yard between two houses at fifty mph. As they crossed the open field, a black shadow descended before them out of the heavens. The sound came next, the twin blades roaring through the night sky, the rotor wash forcing the high grass flat against the ground. Ox hit the brakes but was still moving at a faster pace than Reece had expected when he steered the Land Rover up the metal ramp of the MH-47G Chinook. It was a tight fit, too tight to open the truck’s doors, but the Defender fit into the helicopter’s cargo bay like it was made for it. Ox engaged the parking brake and shut off the engine, flashing a thumbs-up to the flight engineer. Seconds later, the pilot from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment added power and lifted off.

• • •

As the helo gained altitude and turned west toward the Adriatic Sea, Amin Nawaz’s dead body lay cooling in the backseat of the Opel, his frantic driver speeding to exit the city. Within an hour, cable news outlets were reporting that the terrorist leader had been killed in a raid by Albanian commandos and, an hour after that report, the actual commandos from Albania’s Eagle 5 arrived on the scene of the firefight in their DShKM-armed, olive-green Land Rover Defender 90s. Thanks to a tip provided to the nation’s State Intelligence Service, the Albanian SHISH recovered the terrorist leader’s abandoned body in a discarded vehicle a few kilometers outside Tirana.

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