Killing mercury, p.1
Killing Mercury, page 1
Praise for RETRIBUTION by Anderson Harp
“Tense and authentic—reading this book is like living a real-life mission.”
—Lee Child
“Want to see what the military’s really like? Harp knows his stuff. Retribution proves that the scariest story is the true story. Here’s the real intelligence operation.”
—Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The Fifth Assassin
“I seldom come across a thriller as authentic and well-written as Retribution. Anderson Harp brings his considerable military expertise to a global plot that’s exciting, timely, and believable. His characters are exceptionally well-drawn and convincing. If you like Tom Clancy’s work, you’ll love Retribution. Harp is very much his own man, however, and to say that I’m impressed is an understatement.”
—David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of The Protector
“Anderson Harp’s Retribution is a stunner: a blow to the gut and shot of adrenaline. Here is a novel written with authentic authority and bears shocking relevance to the dangers of today. It reminds me of Tom Clancy at his finest. Put this novel on your must-read list—anything by Harp is now on mine.”
—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of Bloodline.
“Retribution by Anderson Harp is an outstanding thriller with vivid characters, breakneck pacing, and suspense enough for even the most demanding reader. On top of that, Harp writes with complete authenticity and a tremendous depth of military knowledge and expertise. A fantastic read—don’t miss it!”
—Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of Impact
“Retribution by Anderson Harp is a fast-paced, suspenseful thriller loaded with vivid characters and backed by a depth of military knowledge. Top gun!”
—Kathy Reichs, #1 bestselling author of the Temperance Brennan and Tory Brennan series.
The Will Parker Thrillers by Anderson Harp
NORTHERN THUNDER
BORN OF WAR
RETRIBUTION
MISLED
Table of Contents
The Will Parker Thrillers by Anderson Harp
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Conclusion
Teaser Chapter
Killing Mercury
Anderson Harp
LYRICAL UNDERGROUND
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2020 by Anderson Harp
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First Electronic Edition: November 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0977-7 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0977-5 (ebook)
First Print Edition: November 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0981-4
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0981-3
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 1
The Outskirts of Zinjibar, Yemen
War is a prologue to revenge.
The sun’s setting caused the shadows from the torn and broken buildings to paint a jagged picture across the street. Dresden had no less damage after the B-17s and Lancasters of World War Two had leveled the city. The thousands of tons of explosives that shredded the German town overlooking the Elbe River seem to have done the same damage to the small Yemen coastal town of Zinjibar. Here it was the constant barrage of rocket propelled grenades, mortars, and Chinese-built machine guns. Empty shells of buildings, jagged walls scored with bullet holes the size of grapefruits, outlined what was left of neighborhoods. The smell of spent gunpowder, burnt wood, melted tires and death lingered.
Zinjinbar’s streets had become only winding pathways through mounds of fractured cinderblocks, shredded wood scraps, burnt out shells of cars, piles of shredded clothes, a bloody shoe tossed on the heap and the broken evidence of the death and destruction caused by a series of battles. First, the Houthi rebels had attacked, then the government, and finally, al-Qaeda had taken control of the small town. The shadows left long, sharp knife-like marks of the gloom that stretched over the remaining ruins. As the machine gun fire stopped, those remaining came out of their shelters and cleared access for their mule carts, motorcycles, white Toyota vans, and pickup trucks. A small boy missing a leg bore his light weight on a makeshift crutch as he made his way down the street and disappeared into the wreckage of a home. On the backstreets of Zinjibar, rows of mud- and clay-roofed villas, connected together in tight lines, survived the brunt of the destruction.
One sign of what the town once was still stood, oddly: a gigantic soccer complex, the Al-Wihda stadium, just outside the town center. Now, it was the shell of what once was. The ghosts of past football games only haunted its field. The structure, disfigured by the constant barrage of shelling, seemed more like an old man’s mouth of jagged teeth, with some broken, some missing.
The town of Zinjibar, within a close walk to the waters of the Gulf of Aden, had been the home of small fishing boats, made for centuries of wood, but replaced in recent decades with thin, long fiberglass skiffs powered by single outboard motors. Each was manned by a handful of men. At the end of the day, they would pull their boats on shore and walk into the town to their homes. One such place, buried deep in a neighborhood of brick, clay and cinderblock structures, stood out—at least to a particular observer on the other side of the world.
The two-story structure sat in a row with its neighbors and, on the back side, was connected to a small alley. Two men, dressed in black shirts and green camouflaged pants with their AK-47s on their laps, sat sleepily on overturned oil barrel halves on the flat roof behind parapets that guarded them from the street. The flat roof was an oven. It was a different color as it was floored with a “good hat” made of “nurah” or a heavier lime-based material that held the structure during the rare rains. They used a torn tent to protect them from being spotted from above; however, they were not good stewards of the ruse. Because the tent blocked what little breeze came off of the Gulf of Aden, they hid under it only in the noonday heat. Now, with the sun setting, they came out of their shelter.
One of the guards looked at his watch, a small Timex, and then moved his hands to animate the conversation he was having with his fellow guard. He pointed down at his sandals, seemingly complaining of a past injury to his foot.
The observer could not hear what was being said between the two AQAP soldiers but she saw each and every detail of the men from the unpiloted aircraft that soared more than forty-eight thousand feet above Zinjibar. The drone watched its target from well beyond the sight of those on the ground. The MQ-9 Reaper’s camera lens was like the eyes of a hawk, only better. While a hawk’s eye was eight times more powerful tha n the human eye, the Reaper’s camera could see the man’s watch and tell time from it. It even saw the flies that circled the two men as they swiped them away with their hands.
The other man had a finger missing on the hand he was using to hold the stock of his rifle. The drone’s camera even picked up the scar tissue that had built up around the old wound.
The targeted building had been under the watchful eye of the Reaper’s Operation Center at Shaw Air Force base in South Carolina for days now, and with good reason. It was thought that its occupant led a cell of one of the bloodiest groups in the world of international terrorism. AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as it was called, extended a long reach from this dusty, arid town. It had caused the slaughter at the office of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and attempted a grander attack with a failed bomb detonation in Times Square in 2010. It was AQAP that had blown a hole in the side of the USS Cole, killing several seamen asleep in their bunks. It had even prompted the killing spree carried out by an Army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas. AQAP took pride in its slaughter of the innocent. It had murdered fifty-six innocent doctors, nurses, and patients in a hospital raid in the capital Yemen city of Sana’a. Women and children in beds, healing from injuries suffered in past attacks, were torn to shreds by the assassin’s machine gun fire on the hospital wards. AQAP also had taken hold of Zinjibar, lost it, and then regained it multiple times over several battles.
* * * *
“Definitely AQAP.” The Reaper’s pilot in South Carolina focused in on the guards from the drone’s perch in the upper troposphere. The house had caught the attention of the eye in the sky by the most innocent of mistakes. A child with a basket full of bread had visited there a week earlier. She’d knocked on the door while the guards above were asleep in the midday sun. A hand had reached out, taken the loaves, and handed her some money. It was a man’s hand. The child had left with an empty basket. A Reaper had been on random patrol over the town for weeks. Later, analysts had noticed that two men were standing guard on the house’s roof under the thin cover of a tent.
And now, three small white Toyota trucks appeared in the alley behind the house. They stopped only briefly. Two armed men jumped out and entered the rear of the structure.
“Gonna call this in.” The pilot sat up in her chair as she spoke to the senior airman sitting on duty next to her. The two, assigned to the 50th Attack Squadron, sat side by side in twelve-hour shifts. The Reaper hadn’t come from Shaw—it was only controlled by the crew there. The constant communications that guided the aircraft came via satellites, but the aircraft’s home was a secret base called Camp Baledogle. “B-Dog” was in Somalia and kept the Reapers on duty by refueling within striking distance of the home of terror—Yemen. B-Dog’s airfield had been built by the Soviets during their past efforts to win over the Somali Air Force. Later abandoned, it was taken over by the Department of State’s Africa Peacekeeping Program—which, when translated, meant the U.S.’s war against al-Qaeda. This Reaper was one of four that were rotated on duty above the target. As one became low on fuel, another drone would take off from B-Dog and relieve the other. The surveillance remained constant with the stateside operators swapping out. It was this crew that brought the action.
The RPA pilot keyed her microphone to the operations center. The officer in charge passed the call up the line to the White House operations center, through the CIA and Pentagon; in a matter of minutes, the video from the Reaper’s eye had reached the higher-ups.
“Pilot, what’s the armament on this bird?”
She had placed the communication on speaker. She didn’t recognize the voice. Her sensor operator glanced at her, her stare showing the tension in the room.
“I’m sorry, sir.” She hesitated to answer the question.
“This is the Chief of Staff of the White House.”
“Oh, sorry, two GBU-thirty-eights” The Reaper continued to circle above the target with a five-hundred-pound bomb under each of its wings. The craft was an improvement over its younger brother, the Predator, with the ability to reach higher into the heavens—nearly fifty-thousand feet—and carry more payload. Each GBU-38 contained five hundred pounds of explosives that could be guided into a car window. The terrorists might still be able to hit so-called soft targets—the children at malls or theaters—but they had to live with the constant fear that every small glimmer they spotted on a clear, sunny day could obliterate them and their families in an instant.
“What’s your rank and name?” asked the man who had identified himself as the chief of staff.
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant Isbell here.” Her voice sounded too young to be manning a machine that could cause the death of a covey of terrorists with the pull of a trigger. She had the slight tinge of her southern Arkansas upbringing in her voice. Shaw was a long way from Helena on the bank of the Mississippi River.
“Tom, do we have recognition on the two?” the chief of staff asked someone in the room with him.
“Just confirmed from Hawaii. The second one is Jamal.”
The drone pilot in the ground cockpit had a small poster in her cubicle showing photographs and names of the principals above her in the chain of command. “Tom” was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Lt. Isbell felt her heart beating as she realized the Reaper’s eye had caught something that had pushed this matter to the top of the pile. She had been trained from her first day at the Air Force Academy for what was next likely to happen.
“Okay, let me get the boss.”
* * * *
Jamal had not seen his wife and young child for more than a month. He kept his family in this most protected safehouse available, not allowing anyone to visit, come or go. It had been stocked with everything the occupants needed until the next move would be made. This visit wasn’t meant to happen; however, Jamal’s child had been ill for several days with a high fever and constant diarrhea. The heat had caused her mother to use up nearly all the water. Jamal feared the worst. Cholera had taken the lives of other children by the hundreds. He felt the child’s forehead. She was hot and dry. Her lips were parched. The diarrhea had stopped only when the little body had nothing more to give. Her eyes continued to stare out into space. Jamal had seen it before. Only medicine could save the girl’s life.
He would not let their only child die. They had tried to have a baby for years. The men were jealous of his wife’s beauty, but she was frail. Jamal had married her when she was only fourteen. She came from Sana’a, was a good mother and obeyed all of the teachings of Mohammad.
“We’ll get her some antibiotics.” He promised the mother. “And more water. Clean water.”
She provided a slight smile that didn’t remove the worried look from her eyes. Jamal used one of his cell phones to call the nurse who had helped the wounded after the battle that had retaken Zinjibar. He tried never to use the cell. Messengers only. But urgency forced him to take the risk.
He hoped the call, so brief, would escape the eyes and ears of the Americans. Swift destruction of the chip after the call should stop the trace.
The cell rang, and rang. He pressed it to his ear, waiting for an answer.
“She needs to drink.” He called another number. Again, it rang and rang. “Do you have some clean water?”
“Yes.” The mother held up a plastic bottle of water. “This is it. But she won’t swallow.”
Now Jamal knew that his daughter needed both antibiotics and an IV. Barely three, she continued to stare into space with a blank look, as if her father was not there.
“I’ll get help.” He redialed the number. Spending this time on the phone was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew that the Americans followed every conversation and used their powerful systems of surveillance to home in on targets.
“Yes?” The nurse’s voice finally answered.
“Lala is very ill.”
“Cholera?” The nurse’s voice did not seem surprised that another young child was desperately ill. It was framed as a question that needed no answer.
“Do you have something that can save her?”
“Yes.”
“Bless Allah, I’ll be there shortly.”
“Is her skin dry? Hot?”
