Born of War Read online

  Force Recon wasn’t sure, however, that Special Operations was needed. The special operators were trained to be lone wolves as well, but Special Operations got one thing that Force Recon didn’t get. It had the money. The Secretary of Defense wanted a Special Operations type of force. If the Marines didn’t have a designated Special Operations force it missed out on the Special Operations funds.

  And Special Operations got another thing that Force Recon didn’t get. It had been given a name. The battalions would be called Marine Raiders. The Raiders were given the funding for Heckler & Koch German-engineered automatic weapons, suppressors, satellite radios, and combat-driven iPads. All of the high-speed units like the SEALS and Delta received the same type of funding. If the Marines wanted part of the Special Operations dollars they had to have Special Operations units. And they had one advantage over the SEALS. Like the Marine Corps, what was different was that a Marine unit had everything in support whether it was airpower, or artillery, or logistics. They didn’t have to outsource anything. They were self-contained. And they could move, and move quickly.

  But Gunny was a special contract at the training center. He came only when needed. He was, however, invited to use the farm whenever he liked. The ammunition and ranges were unlimited. Neave had seen him shoot.

  This time he had brought a friend.

  “I have all this shit to do before that Chicago SWAT team gets in tonight.” Neave preferred the military visitors. The farm had the creature comforts for the city boys. The woods had several villages of prefab cabins, all two to a room, which had been brought in by a convoy of flatbed trailers. Each cabin was simple but well equipped. The walls were made of unpainted plywood sheets, each room had two bunks with sheets and blankets, pillows, a closet-sized bathroom with a prefab shower, and even a mini-refrigerator. There was no time for a television, as the days were intended to be long, from dark to dark, and the nights very short. Still, for most of the visitors, it was a luxury to have something softer than dirt, and something dryer than a space under a pine tree. The Rangers and Marines were embarrassed to use them.

  “Take a minute.” The trainer was persistent.

  Neave hesitated. He did, however, have ultimate faith in his friend. They had spent too many tours, on too many missions, for Neave not to know when it was something important.

  “We will take my truck,” Neave said. He wasn’t going to eat dust in the Ranger or, even worse, follow it as it kicked up a trail of red and orange smoke.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  They drove more than a mile across the farm to a valley on the far back end. It was meant to be remote. The entire farm was encircled with two rows of fences, the first a simple multistrand barbed-wire fence with NO TRESPASSING signs. The second had the more serious WARNING IMMINENT DANGER sign that was meant to stop even the most casual deer hunter making the wrong turn or being too curious. DEADLY FORCE USED.

  The road went through a small forest of planted pine trees, now grown to a height that shut out virtually all of the light below. On the other side of the forest, the road descended into a shallow valley. Large mounds of dirt formed a wall with a road cut into the side of the formation. Just short of the top of the mound, a parking strip had been laid down and surfaced with gravel. The roofs of the trucks remained below the crest. Another pickup truck, white with a red-orange coating formed by the dust, was parked there. Neave pulled in behind it.

  “Good, no shooting.” There was no sound of gunfire. The trainer closed the door to the truck and the two crossed to a wooden stairway that topped the berm. The man-made ridge of dirt served as an insulator for wayward rounds. A platform with a long-planked wood table ran the stretch of the lookout. It had a framed tin roof that took the operators out of the sunlight. Sandbags were stacked on the range side so that it would take the oddest of ricochets to hurt an observer. On the other side and below, a mud village complete with walls and roofless huts stretched for fifty yards to both the right and left.

  “Hey, boss.” Another trainer looked up from a portable computer.

  “He wanted me to see this.” Neave was impatient.

  “Yeah, this is pretty good. He is setting up right now for another run.”

  “How many does this make?”

  “This will be the third.”

  “And?”

  “Each one is faster.”

  Neave watched two figures enter the village from the left. One followed the other. He looked at his watch as he saw the lead shooter lock and load his weapon.

  The two moved in a methodical snake-like path with the leader cutting around the corner. Neave could see the T-20s lined up behind the different locations.

  “You change them each time.”

  “Yeah, none the same.”

  The shooter moved, stopped, and shot. The target dropped. He had an instinct.

  “Damn, is this Doc Holliday?” the trainer spat. His cheek was swollen with a pinch of snuff.

  Neave didn’t say anything. He glanced at his watch again. Another shot was fired. Another target popped backwards.

  “What type of shots?”

  “All head. Center of mass.” The trainer on the computer looked at the sensors.

  Another pop and another target dropped.

  “He put two through the walls.”

  The shooter worked his way across the village, moving and shooting.

  “How about a reload?” Neave asked as he glanced up to the range.

  “Yeah, we did that on the last round.”

  One round had added a few extra targets so that the shooter had to load another magazine. It was an additional test of concentration and aim.

  On this round, like the first run, it took Parker only twelve rounds out of fifteen. He had finished working his way through the entire village.

  “He passed two innocents.” The trainer looked at the T-20 targets as the computer reset the plastic jihadist warriors. Two dummy targets had been set up as innocent women.

  “He was born for this shit.” The monitor spat over his shoulder as he mumbled the words.

  Neave looked at his watch. A new record had just been set at the farm. This guy was dangerous. Neave knew what he was talking about. He was one of the few who could shoot like this. The smell of burnt rounds filled the air.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A white man walked quickly along the side street of the city of Sana’a. He stopped to inhale his cigarette, at the same time leaning against the wall of the old building as he tried to regain his breath. The old men in the side street stared at the Yankee dressed in his brown laced-up shoes and khaki-colored suit. He wore an open-collared, silk, white shirt. He looked out of place and he didn’t care. Everyone in the city knew when he had arrived and why he was there. He was safer in Sana’a than in Detroit.

  This damn, bloody altitude.

  The capital of Yemen had two unique features. The first was that the nearly two million people who lived in the maze of fortress-like buildings, all connected by an endless run of alleys, tolerated living in a city nearly a mile higher than Denver. And the city was founded before Christ. The old men said that the son of Noah came to this desert spot over twenty-five centuries ago. The men of Sana’a moved like ants on an active anthill stirred by some imaginary stick. Few women were to be seen.

  The visitor pushed up his glasses on his nose as he inhaled the cigarette again. He had been smoking since his twelfth birthday and on that particular date finished off a pack of Camels he had stolen from his father. The habit had lasted for three decades. He had a weasel’s smile and brown hair that went over his ears, combed to a high part. He spoke his words too fast, in a frantic pace, which caused people to doubt his sincerity even further. The man tilted his head slightly as he spoke, which only caused one to notice how he squinted his eyes.

  The eyes were particularly a problem as he wore glasses that had a changing tint from sunlight to dark.

  But he had always delivered what he promised.

&
nbsp; The café was just inside the gate to the old city. The ancient clay walls of the city gave a brown look to the stacked, tall blocks but the people had whitewashed the frames of the window. All of the buildings were flat topped like some big, brown stack of Legos made out of clay.

  He put his hand on the wall of the old Bab al-Yemen gate to steady himself. The altitude had taken its toll. The journey had not helped. He flew into Salalah in nearby Oman, rented a Land Rover, and drove across the desert border to leave a less obvious trail. He pulled his hand away from the wall, looked at the chocolate coating of dust on his palm, and pulled out a white silk cloth to rub the dirt off.

  The men who walked by gave him looks and then quickly turned away.

  Bertok Genret was there because he loved his Canadian Golden Maple Leafs. The gold coins each contained an ounce of pure gold and he enjoyed just holding one of the coins. His one locked room in his Swiss villa had a false front of a door that led to a vault. He didn’t keep everything in this one vault. He knew that it was important to spread the load, but the one room no bigger than a closet held canvas bags of his precious leafs.

  “No one reads the words on a leaf,” he often said.

  He meant that no one cared how he acquired his gold.

  Genret walked to the café and took a seat at a table well to the back. It wasn’t just the villagers walking in the tight alleyways that he was concerned about. Sana’a and even its smallest alleyways were under near constant watch from the sky above.

  “Qahwa.” He had grown fond of the dark coffee served in Sana’a. The old waiter wiped the table with a brown rag that looked like it only added to the dust and grime of the surface.

  “One?”

  “Yeah.” He spoke the word sarcastically as he sat alone at the table.

  The old man understood the sarcasm and walked away. He returned with a chipped cup, making no offer of milk or sugar.

  Genret lit up another B & H Gold.

  Got to get out of this hellhole. He looked down at the dwindling pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

  “Mr. Genret.”

  The man standing in front of him wore robes more in keeping with others in the café.

  “Al-salamu alaykum.” Genret did not stand. He liked being rude.

  “Wa alaykum s-salam.” The man stood over the Brit as he continued to smoke his cigarette and put the coffee cup to his lips.

  “Sit down, Musa.”

  “Someone else wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Genret had dealt exclusively with Musa now for nearly a decade. He noticed movement in the entranceway to the café. A small man with a round bearded face dressed in white robes and an odd-looking leather jacket walked in. Only the top of his beard just below the nose was visible. His face was mostly covered by a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh. The silk headdress was often worn in Sana’a but rarely was it wrapped so tightly across the face. It was as if the winds of a storm had kicked up the dust and the man was using it for what it had been intended. It was, however, so tightly wrapped that it looked odd. He stood out among the hundreds of others with the same keffiyeh. He had two large bodyguards, AK-47s held tightly at their sides, trailing behind.

  The jacket was unusual, in contrast to the white robes common to the city, but not overly exceptional. Even though a desert town, it was at nearly eight thousand feet, keeping the temperature constant. Often, Sana’a would be cool. And at night it could be bitterly cold.

  “So, you are our famous Mr. Genret.” The man pulled the wrapping from his face as he spoke to reveal the angle where his beard followed the outline of his jaw. His combed-over hair, along with the beard, gave the impression of a large brown ball with hair glued to both the bottom and the top. Unlike Genret, he had a muscular frame. It was not clear to Genret whether the man spent his life in tents or on the top floor of the Ritz. Although in Sana’a he was certainly not staying at the Ritz.

  “And you are?” Genret leaned back in his chair with his arm to his side, flicking the cigarette ash on the floor.

  “Sheikh Muhammad Al Faud.”

  Genret dropped the cigarette to the floor and sat up in the chair.

  “Faud Mohammed Khalaf?” Genret used his other name. His body tightened up like a rattler. He looked around, keeping an eye on the café’s arched opening. This man was known to be very dangerous. He could kill and, more important for Genret, Faud was a target to be killed. A Predator would not hesitate to drop one on the café, even in the center of the capital of Yemen, for this target. Genret would be a casual side player in a CNN news story the next day. It would take a week or more for his fate to make it back to his wife in Switzerland. The story would simply read that the financial mind of Al Shabaab had been killed by a Predator strike in Yemen.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Genret.” The man sat down opposite Genret and waved his hand at the waiter. “Qahwa!” he yelled over the high-pitched music that played from a box behind the bar.

  The waiter brought another cup of coffee; however, this time he acted carefully, cautiously, wiping the table with a bright white cloth. It was clear to Genret that the waiter also knew who his customer was. Again, Genret was scared.

  If the waiter knows, who else is aware of this meeting?

  The answer was that the meeting needed to be short. The only safety for both was to remain constantly moving.

  “So you know me.”

  “Head of finance for Al Shabaab.” Genret knew of Faud. He was an Arab with a price tag on his head that might have exceeded the Leafs in Genret’s secret room.

  “Yes.” The man smiled as if he had been introduced as the founder of Facebook.

  Genret offered the pack of cigarettes to his seatmate at the table.

  “The habit is deplorable,” said Faud. “It is a Yankee addiction that is far more harmful to you than the bullets of those AKs.” Faud pointed to one of his guards sitting at the table behind and looking out, constantly, towards the alleyway. “If America wants to kill, they have done it best by tobacco.”

  “You want arms?” Genret asked the obvious; however, Faud didn’t need to leave Somalia to place an order for several crates of AK-47s. “I assume that is why you have come?” Genret had never dealt with anyone from Al Shabaab at this level. He was somewhat stymied by his visitor.

  “We want something very special.” Faud paused.

  He drew with his finger a shape on the table. There were no markings. Only the movement of his hand. Genret noted that his hand was brown and tough like a piece of leather exposed constantly to the sun. The fingers were short and stubby and fat. He was a Saudi by birth.

  More difficulty, more profit. Genret pondered the idea. A truckload of Russian rocket-propelled grenades was less profitable but just as marketable. The penalty for something more deadly was rarely worth much more than what Interpol would have given him just for the RPGs. Ten years in prison was ten years whether it be for cases of RPGs or a missile. And that required his staying in the same jurisdiction long enough for Interpol to catch up to him. And then there were always the jailers. Money, especially gold ounces, helped many cross through borders.

  “Semtex-H? Is that what you want? I can get a shipload on sale.” Genret felt slightly repelled. The plastic explosive would take down the roofs of malls in Ethiopia and Nigeria, crushing the children underneath.

  “You have children?” Faud asked the question.

  “Yes, I have two.”

  “In your Geneva?”

  “Yes.”

  Genret knew that Faud and the world kept track of where the arms dealer’s ties were. But it didn’t sound like a threat. It would have been a loss to Al Shabaab for Genret to leave his trade.

  “I have two wives. One in Somalia and one here in Yemen.” Faud looked away for a moment. “One wife is from Saudi Arabia, like me, but we can never go home.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You never will.” The Saudi turned deadly serious.

  Faud leaned ov
er the table and looked directly into Genret’s eyes. Genret felt the stare through his tinted lenses.

  “It is Allah’s will. Those words mean little to you nonbelievers. You see no more than your present world. You never will.”

  There was silence.

  It was true. Genret made money as a necessity. His children would fly with their mother to New York at Christmas, but he never considered that the same flight might be carrying a laptop loaded with Semtex. The sin was that his wife and children knew him as an exporter. The wife never asked for the truth and he never provided it.

  “Mr. Genret, we want a Dong Feng 21.”

  Genret rolled back in his chair, catching the news like a baseball bat to his chest.

  “I am not sure.” He hesitated with his choice of words. He wasn’t trying to be dramatic. He had nothing else to say. A nuclear core was probably easier to obtain. The Dong Feng 21 was the only weapon in the world that would have caused Genret to roll back as he did.

  “We have a weapon identified.”

  Genret thought that every intelligence agency in the free world would pay, dearly, to hear what was said next.

  “You know what they call it?”

  “Yes.” Faud paused. “And it is well suited to our little land with such a long coastline. Don’t you think? We have too many American ships off our coast.”

  A mobile, well hidden, protected DF-21D would tip the balance of the scales in the Gulf of Aden. Shipping had to use the tight waterway as they exited the Suez Canal, but it also meant that military ships were likewise squeezed into the same narrow corridor.