NIGHTSHADE: A Shadow Warriors Short Story
By
Stephen England
Copyright © 2013 by Stephen England
Cover art by Louis Vaney
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the author.
5:23 P.M. Local Time
Ciudad del Este
Paraguay
He wasn’t supposed to be here. None of them were. That wasn’t unusual—he’d spent well over ten years of his life going places he wasn’t supposed to go, doing things he wasn’t supposed to do.
The man looked to be in his thirties, tall, at least a couple inches over six feet—his height and dark, close-trimmed beard betraying the fact that he wasn’t a local, despite the street clothes. He might have been an Arab, though—there were certainly plenty of them in the Tri-Border Area, the disputed zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The AK-47 assault rifle lying by the man’s side was equally common. Ciudad del Este was a nexus for weapons traffickers of all creeds and colors.
The tall man shifted his weight against the sandbags piled on the floor of the third-floor apartment, taking his eyes off the scope of the SVD Dragunov for a moment. The Russian-made Dragunov wasn’t a state-of-the-art sniper rifle, but local color was more important.
“Need a break, Harry?” A voice asked from behind him.
He looked down at his Doxa dive watch, then back at the muscular Asian reclining easily on the dingy apartment’s bed. “Thirty minutes on the scope, Sammy. Thirty minutes off. You know the drill. We switch in five.”
Below them, street noise drifted up through the open window, noise and the smell of rotting garbage.
Two hours.
6:48 P.M. Eastern Time
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“Give me some good news, people.” For a man with a prosthetic leg, Director Bernard Kranemeyer knew how to make an entrance. He arrived in the operations center of Clandestine Service with all the subtlety of a storm front moving in, dark eyes sweeping across the workstations until his gaze fell upon a short black man. “What’s the latest from Alpha Team, Ron?”
Ron Carter plugged the USB cable into the back of his workstation and glanced up at his boss. The director of the Clandestine Service still had all the bedside manner of the Delta Force sergeant major he’d been until an Iraqi IED took off his right leg below the knee.
“Nichols checked in at sixteen hundred local time. Everything’s still go-mission.”
Kranemeyer moved to the bank of plasma screens filling one wall of the op-center. Screens filled with satellite photos, their timestamps indicating their sequence over the course of the two months of Operation NIGHTSHADE. “How long before the KH-13 closes within range?”
“An hour away,” Carter replied, referring to the CIA spy satellite. “The KEYHOLE will be in orbit over the target area for exactly ninety minutes—we’ll have full spectrum coverage, thermal imaging if necessary. That’s our window.”
A rare smile crossed the director’s face. “It’ll be good to have this over, bring the team back home.”
“It would have been so much easier to send in a Predator drone—take him out with a single Hellfire when he leaves the apartment in the morning.”
It would have been. But those weren’t their orders.
“The president, God bless his soul—isn’t about to make the same mistake twice.” Kranemeyer shot a sardonic look at his lead analyst. “Relations with Pakistan still haven’t stabilized since the bin Laden raid and the administration doesn’t need those type of problems south of the border. The whole idea is to make this look like a local job. Total deniability.”
That brought a laugh from Carter. “Think the politicos will ever get out of our way and let us do our job?”
5:57 P.M. Local Time
Ciudad del Este
Paraguay
Jean-Claude Manet, aka Ramzi bin Abdullah. Codename: HARROW. At one point the leader of al-Qaeda operations in Europe. Truth be told, the Agency didn’t know when or why the French-born Manet had converted to Islam, just that he had become radicalized after moving to Marseilles and coming under the “ministry” of a Salafist imam with connections to bin Laden.
Manet was the perfect recruit. Mid-forties, white, quintessentially French. Even with the thick beard he had grown after conversion, he didn’t fit the profile. For five years, the CIA had worked with the French to bring him down, with nothing to show for it.
If Manet’s only daughter hadn’t started sleeping with a young khafir artist from Toulouse—if Manet hadn’t then decided to kill his daughter…well, none of them would be here. He was now an SDT(Specially Designated Terrorist) and fair game as far as they were concerned.
Harry Nichols laid his binoculars aside, running a hand over his dark beard. Everything was in place.
A knock came at the apartment door and his hand stole toward the Colt 1911 holstered at his side.
“Answer it, Sammy,” he hissed, gesturing to his partner. “I’ve got your six.”
Samuel Han was already on his feet, moving from the bedroom into the living room of the apartment. His suppressed Beretta was clutched in a two-handed Weaver grip, the weapon an extension of himself.
The Asian moved with a grace born of training—he’d been a SEAL once, in a different time.
Harry watched him in the cracked mirror as Han advanced on the door, holding the gun to one side as he opened the door a crack.
“Oh, it’s you,” were the next words out of Han’s mouth as the third member of the team entered the room. Harry slipped the Colt’s safety back on and exited the bedroom.
“Salaam alaikum, Hamid,” he said with a smile, extending his hand. Blessings and peace be upon you.
A light danced in the Arab’s blue eyes as he clasped Harry’s hand in both of his. “Alaikum salaam, my brother.”
They’d worked together for so many years, dating back to their years in Iraq. It was Hamid Zakiri’s native country, albeit a country he and his family had fled in the ‘90s.
“Anyone miss me?”
“Not hardly,” was Han’s sarcastic response. “Plenty of great stuff on the TV.”
Hamid favored him with a grin “Latin soap operas may be corny, but they’re still better than anything you can buy out there on the street.”
That sobered everyone up. They were in the heart of Ciudad del Este’s red-light district and pornographic videos were for sale everywhere—many of them locally produced and ‘featuring’ children. It might have seemed a strange place to be hunting the key player of an Islamist terror network, but those were the realities of the war on terror. Nothing was as it seemed.
Harry cleared his throat. “You find anything actionable?”
“I met with SKYWALKER,” the Iraqi replied, referring to the Agency’s informant. “We talked things over in one of the downtown bars. He says the meet is going down shortly after nineteen hundred local—says bin Abdullah is already in the building, staying under wraps until after the meeting.”
“Do you believe him?”
A pause, and Hamid nodded, an expression of distaste crossing his countenance. “He’d had too much alcohol to be lying.” A practicing Muslim himself, Zakiri didn’t drink. It was the primary reason Harry had chosen him to make the rendevous.
Harry gestured to the sniper rifle. “We’ve not been able to pick up much, just an occasional visual on the wife through the window. Thermal’s useless, can’t penetrate
the thick walls. Long and short, we can’t independently confirm. Bin Abdullah could be inside. So could a couple dozen Wahhabis.”
Hamid walked over to the window. “We have muscle near the door—Libyans by the look of them. Two guys, the big one has a pump gun, but the small one’s the leader. You can tell by the way they interact. Little guy’s carrying a stainless steel Kimber.”
Amateur hour, Harry snorted. You could tell a lot about hired muscle by their hardware. If they chose their weapons based on their “cool” factor, well then—Islamists or not—they’d been watching too many Western music videos.
Time to hold the ball, make the call. Over a decade as a CIA paramilitary operations officer and making these decisions never got any easier. They’d waited two months for this night, for this opportunity. But without independent verification…they were flying blind.
“Let’s do this,” he announced finally, looking around at his team. “Sammy, get Langley on the horn. It’s time we got the final go-mission.”
There was no comment, but he could see it in their faces, his own thoughts reflected in their eyes. They had a bad feeling about this…
7:36 P.M. Eastern Time
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“What’s the deal?” As soon as Carter turned and saw the look on the face of the DCS, he knew the question had been ill-advised. He didn’t even really belong here, the analyst thought. The Intelligence Directorate cut his checks, but