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  Prologue

  Near Raqqah, Syria—March 2014

  Hamam was startled awake by the explosions, but he quickly gathered his wits and joined the swarm of men seeking out the relative safety of the hardened bunkers situated along the perimeter of the former-prison-turned-military-base. One of the first lessons learned in war was that if you heard the explosion, you were obviously well outside the kill zone. But enemy bomb strikes, like lightning flashes, were seldom singular events and no two ever struck in exactly the same spot, so Hamam and the others moved with some urgency. The first few bombs might not have hit the base, but the next one very well could.

  The airstrikes, which had almost become routine, no longer frightened him. The explosions, the deep gut-churning overpressure waves, the nitrate stink and the odor of burning metal, dust, and flesh—the shock and awe—were now simply facts of his daily existence.

  At sixteen years of age, Hamam could barely remember when war—jihad, the holy struggle—had not been part of his life. Even before he was old enough to hold a rifle, he had dreamed of joining his father, a senior commander in Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad—known to the wider world as Al Qaeda in Iraq—in the fight against the Western invaders and the Persian puppet regime they had installed. He saw little of his father during those years, which not only swelled the almost-mythical adoration Hamam felt for the man, but also the young man’s idealized view of the jihad itself.

  Then, two years ago, after the Assad government’s persecution of its own citizens reached the boiling point, Hamam’s father had returned to his homeland to help lead Al Qaeda fighters in the struggle to liberate Syria. Fourteen-year-old Hamam had gone out to fight at his father’s side.

  * * *

  But Hamam’s father and the other leaders of their faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, had turned against the Caliphate—ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. They balked at ISIS’s broader goal of total war against Western oppressors in a great apocalyptic battle, heralding the Day of Judgment. The al-Nusra front preferred instead the more “realistic” and “attainable” goal of simply defeating the already beleaguered Assad regime and establishing a small regional Islamic state in Syria.

  Their lack of faith disgusted Hamam. The jihad was no mere political or ideological squabble. It was the very definition of Islam—submission to God. And it was the will of God that all men worship him as the Prophet instructed, or be put to the sword. There could be no half measures, no compromises. Turning aside from the struggle was worse than cowardice; it was apostasy.

  His father was no mythic hero after all, but a tired old man who had already lost his personal jihad. Hamam had shown no such weakness when making the decision to leave his father’s side and continue the fight under the banner of the Caliphate, even though it meant that the next time they saw one another, it would be in battle as enemies.

  The next bomb did not fall within the complex, nor did any of the others, but the pounding continued for nearly half an hour, with intermittent lulls lasting several minutes. Hamam had no idea what the actual target of the bombardment was, whether the attacking force was striking some other target, or simply acting on faulty intelligence. After a good fifteen minutes of relative quiet, the all clear was sounded, and Hamam and the others went back to their sleeping mats in the common room.

  None of them suspected that bombs were not the only thing falling from the sky.

  * * *

  Hamam was still hovering on the edge of sleep when he heard the thump of another distant explosion. The noise was faint, barely louder than a door slamming across the courtyard, but he held his breath for a moment, straining to hear more.

  Please God, he prayed, not more bombs.

  With each passing second of quiet, he dared to believe that he had imagined the sound and that it would be safe to close his eyes again, but then he heard the unmistakable—and unmistakably loud—report of a Kalashnikov rifle, and knew that he would not be getting any more sleep tonight.

  “We are being attacked,” someone shouted.

  Hamam scrambled to his feet and grabbed his rifle off the floor, gripping it as fiercely as the fear that now gripped him. This would not be his first firefight, but it was the first time he could remember that the fight had come on so suddenly, in the middle of the night.

  Who was attacking? Why?

  He could not think of a single reason. The base was of minimal strategic importance. The eight Westerners they had been keeping as hostages were gone, moved to a new location the previous night. But good reason or not, they were being attacked.

  Hamam suddenly felt a chill that had nothing at all to do with the night air. He had not felt this way in a long time.

  He was afraid.

  He rocked back and forth on his feet, trying to will himself into motion. There were more shots—long bursts of fully automatic fire—and shouts . . . screams.

  Move!

  He was aware of his brothers moving in the darkness, fumbling to ready themselves for battle, probably just as terrified as he. One of the fighters ran toward the exit, but before he reached it there was a flash of movement in the doorway. Two muted reports sounded and the young fighter pitched forward. Hamam tried to raise his rifle, desperate to shoot at the figures pouring through the door, but then something slammed into his chest, staggering him. He collapsed backward, hitting the floor hard.

  He struggled to rise, to shoulder his weapon and return fire at the intruders swarming into the common room, but his body refused to cooperate. Then, he saw nothing at all.

  ONE

  Ramadi, Iraq—July 2016

  Something about the tone of the shout caused Delta Force Master Sergeant Clay “Stitch” Vickery to look up from the screen of his Toughbook computer. War zones were by nature chaotic, filled with lots of shouting and shooting and other sounds that could turn a person into a nervous wreck if they didn’t learn how to filter out the noise. It was an essential survival skill that could only be learned with experience, and Stitch had plenty of that, which was why he cocked his head to the side for a better listen.

  Though Stitch’s Arabic wasn’t great, the phrase was a common one—roughly translated: Stop, or I’ll shoot—but it was the pitch of the Iraqi soldier’s voice that pinged Stitch’s attention. The soldier was frightened. He sounded ready to make good on the threat, which meant this was more than just some typical background chaos that Stitch could afford to ignore. He stood up, grabbed his HK416 off the tabletop, and headed up to the roof of the recently recaptured police station where the Iraqi troops he was shadowing had set up a temporary operating base from which to root out the last remaining ISIS fighters in the outlying villages.

  Ramadi had been the rope in a bitter two-year-long tug-of-war between Iraqi and ISIS forces for control of Anbar Province. Officially, the city was now once more under Iraqi control, though as victories were measured, it was a little like burning down a house to get rid of a termite infestation. Hundreds of buildings and homes
had been destroyed, along with roads, bridges, and everything else that would have made habitation possible. Not that anyone was really trying to inhabit the rubble. Most of the civilian population had fled at the start of the struggle. Many of those that had stayed had been killed during the subsequent ISIS occupation, either directly in brutal executions or as collateral damage in the non-stop fighting with Iraqi forces.

  Still, it was a win and the administration made sure it played that way on CNN. The termites were mostly gone.

  More importantly, it had been a serious blow to ISIS’s morale. Local walk-ins shared that defeated ISIS fighters who had tried to flee to nearby Mosul had been rounded up by their leaders and burned alive in the town square. The last few remaining pockets of resistance were being dealt with, and the American government wanted to ensure that the tug-of-war did not continue, which was why Stitch and his Delta sniper team were in Iraq. Unofficially and off the books. Again. Not that it made a shit’s difference to Stitch. Twice divorced—blame Army happenings, Jody next door, and of course, the long wars—he always preferred the loner, away-from-the-flag-pole-type missions anyway.

  He was, after all, a typical Delta sniper.

  As he topped the stairs, Stitch flicked his long dirty-blond locks away from his eyes, hunched his barrel chest over, and duckwalked to the low parapet at the edge of the roof. The shouting was coming from street level, about thirty meters away. That estimate wasn’t based on Stitch’s keen sense of hearing, but rather because he knew that was the distance at which the Iraqi troops had placed the concrete T-walls to establish a secure perimeter around the police station.

  Stitch raised up for a quick peek. Two seconds, no more. Just long enough to take a mental snapshot of the scene below.

  As he had surmised, the shouting was mostly coming from the Iraqi soldier manning the checkpoint entrance. The increasingly strident commands were directed at a small figure wearing a dirty white salwar kameez with a matching taqiyah prayer cap, who stood a good twenty meters farther out. Stitch guessed it was a preadolescent boy based on size and slight build, but that in itself did not make him any less of a threat. The loose pajama-like garments could easily conceal a suicide-bomb vest, and ISIS militants did not hesitate to use innocent children as IED mules, particularly the children of poor tribal villagers who had not been especially quick to embrace their rabid vision of Islam.

  Stitch felt a pang at the thought of what the soldier might have to do. If the kid didn’t back off, the man would have to make good on his threat, and then spend the rest of his life thinking about it, particularly if the boy was just there to beg for food or medical assistance for a family member.

  Another voice, high-pitched and fainter, reached Stitch’s ears. The kid, shouting back. Pleading. Stitch only understood part of it. He distinctly caught the word amriki—American. Something like, Give this to the Americans.

  Stitch peeked over the wall again, this time peering through the EOTech HOLOsite scope affixed to the top rail of his carbine. He spent only a moment looking at the boy, just long enough to see that he was holding something in his right hand; it looked like a mobile phone.

  Is that what he’s talking about? Give the phone to the Americans?

  Stitch did not let his gaze linger on the kid. He moved his red dot from side to side, sweeping the rubble beyond, up and down the street, for other potential threats. If the boy was a walking IED, there would almost certainly be a follow-on attack.

  Nothing.

  Maybe it was just a kid, turning in a phone he found in the ruins, hoping for a reward.

  A loud rifle report brought Stitch’s attention back to the stand-off. A faint cloud of settling dust marked the spot where the soldier’s warning shot had struck the ground, a good two meters to the left of where the boy had been standing a moment before. The kid was already gone, rabbiting down the street, but he had left the phone behind.

  Stitch let out his breath in a sigh, relieved at the outcome.

  Below, the soldier at the entry point started forward toward the discarded phone but an urgent shout from one of his comrades stopped him. He turned and shouted back. Stitch didn’t linger on the roof to watch the conversation unfold, but picked up and headed back downstairs, grabbing his interpreter, a young man named Amir, on the way to the exit.

  By the time he reached the gate, the discussion had grown both in size and intensity. An entire squad of Iraqi soldiers was clustered together in a gaggle around the phone.

  “They think it is a bomb,” Amir explained, unnecessarily. Stitch had figured as much.

  “Good thing for them it isn’t,” he remarked. “If it was, they’d all be dead already.”

  It almost certainly was not an IED.

  In 1995, Israeli Shin Bet agents had used a cell phone packed with fifteen grams of RDX to assassinate Palestinian bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, but mobile phones had gotten a lot smaller in the two decades since. Stitch doubted there was enough room in the little Motorola V197 flip phone to hold more than a few grams of explosives wrapped around a blasting cap. Maybe enough to give you a headache if you held it up to your head and tried to make a call, but probably not even that. No, it was just a regular mobile phone.

  The debate abruptly ceased, and in the unexpected silence that followed, Stitch could hear a trilling sound issuing from the device.

  The Iraqi soldiers just stared at it, utterly flummoxed. Stitch stared, too. The ringing continued, a long series of generic electronic chirps followed by a moment of quiet, and then more chirps, over and over again. After several cycles of this, the phone went silent, but after no more than thirty seconds, it started again.

  Stitch continued forward until he was standing right over the phone. The Iraqi soldiers backed away nervously, as if the Delta operator’s six-foot-three-inch frame was more intimidating than their earlier suspicions about the phone. Stitch ignored them. He raised his eyes and scanned the surrounding area again, looking for an enemy observation post or sniper position, then knelt down beside the phone. He could see the message displayed on the tiny LCD screen.

  UNKNOWN CALLER.

  “No shit,” he muttered.

  The message vanished and there was another short pause as the call terminated, but after just a few more seconds, the phone began ringing again.

  UNKNOWN CALLER.

  “Persistent fucker,” Stitch said as he picked up the phone with his four-fingered left hand—he’d lost the pinky digit during a high-risk but ultimately successful aircraft takedown over India years earlier—and weighed it in his palm. It felt about right, but as he slipped his thumbnail between the halves of the flip-out device, he could not help but think about Yahya Ayyash’s final phone conversation. He also recalled what the boy had said moments before dropping the phone and running away.

  Give it to the Americans.

  “Shit,” he growled, and then repeated, “shit.”

  With a flick of his thumb, he opened the phone and held it up to his ear. There was a faint crackle of static. “Hello?”

  “Yes, hello?” The voice on the other end was male, and spoke English albeit with a heavy Middle Eastern accent. The man sounded almost startled, as if he had not really expected anyone to pick up. “To whom am I speaking?”

  Stitch frowned. “You called me, buddy. You go first.”

  “You are American? CIA?”

  Stitch said nothing, hoping that his silence would prompt the caller to reveal more. One thing was certain. This wasn’t just a random phone found amid the rubble. He wished the Iraqi soldiers had taken the young delivery boy into custody, rather than frightening him off.

  The caller spoke again. “Are you authorized to negotiate?”

  Negotiate what? Stitch wondered silently. Terms of surrender? Ransom demands for the life of a hostage? Local gas prices?

  He found himself regretting the decision to answer the call.

  “That depends,” he said, “on who you are and what you want?”

  There wa
s a brief pause, and when the man spoke again, he sounded irritated. “What I want is to speak with someone who is authorized to negotiate. I will call again in three hours.”

  “At least tell me—” A beep, signaling the end of the call, cut him off.

  Stitch held the phone at arm’s length for a moment, then snapped it shut and shoved it into a pocket. “Someone authorized to negotiate,” he muttered as he headed back inside the police station. “Someone else’s problem.”

  TWO

  Washington, D.C.

  One of the advantages of being an uncontroversial political appointee in the waning hours of a lame-duck presidency, thought retired Admiral William Mason as he passed through the east exit of the Harry S. Truman Building and jaywalked across Twenty-First Street, was that nobody paid much attention to you. There were no reporters waiting to ambush him with gotcha questions, no protestors railing indignantly about some obscure foreign policy decision, no lobbyists lurking to slyly buttonhole him in order to curry favor for whatever corporation or cause had hired them. Even his obligatory Secret Service protection detail appeared completely indifferent to his presence. No one seemed to care at all about the man who was now fourth in the line of succession to the Presidency of the United States of America, and that was just fine with Secretary of State Mason.

  Like the tortoise in the fable, his relentless yet utterly unremarkable plodding pace was going to win him the race while nobody was paying attention.

  Mason came from old money, though he was not so well-off as to invite undue scrutiny. Influential, but not enough so as to attract the spotlight. His naval career had been a perfunctory success. He had checked all the blocks, made all the correct political decisions, and generally avoided controversy. He had come within a whisker of reaching the highest office in the force, but bad timing and entrenched devotion to antiquated tradition had kept him from becoming chief of the Navy. Still, even that seeming setback had worked to his advantage, allowing him to sidestep into a political career. As a reward for his sturdy leadership of the Joint Special Operations Command, he had received a presidential appointment as ambassador to Tungsten, an ultra-secret counter-terror action group. Tungsten, with Mason at the helm, had been critical in thwarting a terrorist plot to destroy the Yellow Creek nuclear reactor, and later in stopping a North Korean nuclear strike dead in its tracks. There had been a couple of close calls, incidents that nearly derailed the train of his career. Strangely, they always seemed to involve a certain pseudo-insubordinate Delta Force officer named Kolt Raynor. . . .