Drone Strike: A Joe Matthews Thriller Read online

  Drone Strike is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by David Austin

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-578-78913-2

  This publication, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any way without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgements

  I want to start out by thanking my family for their never-ending encouragement. Writing is a time-consuming endeavor and they have never waned in their support for my desire to create these novels.

  I also want to share my appreciation for Max and Claire Sutton, the two people who go over my manuscripts with a fine-toothed comb to correct my typos and ensure I’m not butchering the English language too badly. I’ve learned more about creative writing and grammar over the course of working with you on these two novels than I ever could in any classroom.

  And last, but certainly not least, I want to thank all the readers out there. Your encouragement and interaction drive me forward. Without you, these characters and stories would be trapped in a document on my computer, never to see the light of day.

  CHAPTER 1

  The muted sounds of gunfire, men yelling orders, and the severely wounded screaming in agony penetrated the consciousness of the man hanging upside down in the front passenger seat of the Toyota Hi-Lux pickup truck. A destroyed vehicle burned like an inferno no more than twenty meters away, causing a pleasant warmth to wash over the exposed skin of his head and arms as if he were sitting on a beach.

  But even in his semi-conscious state, he knew that didn’t make any sense. And as much as he would like to take the time to figure it out, something stirring deep within his psyche told him that was not an option. No, something wasn’t right, and the fact that he couldn’t put his finger on it unsettled him. Whatever it was, he had the sinking feeling he was supposed to be doing something about it. But that sure as hell wasn’t going to happen while he sat there contemplating his situation.

  “Come on! Wake the fuck up and get your shit together!” He wondered if the sound of his voice was in his head or if he had actually said the words out loud? At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that he followed his own advice and got off his ass.

  As he willed himself awake, the world outside the truck’s cab grew louder as his hearing began returning to normal. The intensity of the automatic weapons fire and the explosions of hand grenades and RPGs grew as if someone had turned the volume all the way up on the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.

  Desperate to get a handle on what was going on, he forced his eyes to open. At first, he couldn’t see much of anything, his vision obscured by a cloud of dust, sand, and smoke floating through the interior of the cabin. A gentle breeze wafting through the truck’s shattered windows cleared the haze and he was confused more than ever by what he saw. He closed his eyes and vigorously shook his head back and forth to try to clear his vision. It didn’t do any good. When he reopened them, the scene unfolding around him seemed more bizarre than ever.

  What the hell? he thought, as a pair of scuffed combat boots raced past his head. They passed so close that he could have reached out and touched them. Why am I upside down? Glancing around the interior of the overturned vehicle, he felt utterly alone…until he heard someone behind him calling his name.

  “Dammit, Joe!” the voice yelled. “Wake up! We’ve gotta get out of here!”

  He tried to turn around to see who was there, but the seatbelt digging into his lap and left shoulder was doing its job and held him securely in place. Straining against the taut fabric, he was able to turn his head just enough to see a man’s face staring back at him. The sight instantly cleared the fog and the reality of their predicament crystallized in his mind.

  Under the cover of darkness, Joe Matthews and his team of paramilitary operations officers had driven a pair of Toyota Hi-Lux pickup trucks a hundred and fifty kilometers across the Jordanian desert. They had entered Syria’s southern province of al-Suweida on a track that was little more than a goat path running through an uninhabited and unguarded stretch of the border.

  His five-man team was in the middle of a sixty-day rotation on the CIA’s Protective Resource Group, a unit whose primary mission was to protect Agency officers in high-risk locations around the world. Based out of the embassy in Amman, Jordan, tonight’s mission involved supporting a case officer named Greg Jacobs on a cross-border operation into Syria. They were there to conduct a clandestine meeting with an asset who claimed to have information on the Syrian government’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

  Since the civil war began in 2011, the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had accused Syria’s president of using sarin and chlorine gas against his own citizens and the rebels fighting to overthrow his regime. As a result, UN and OPCW inspectors had mounted an operation in 2013 to locate and destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal. The effort was deemed a success at the time, but evidence emerged in the ensuing years that the regime had used the poison gas once again.

  Renewed use of the banned weapons meant Syria had either re-started their production program or possessed stockpiles that had not been discovered during previous inspections. Russia, arguably Syria’s most powerful ally in the conflict, had used its vote on the UN Security Council nearly a dozen times to veto resolutions that would have renewed investigations into the use of the illegal weapons.

  The CIA was hoping tonight’s mission would be a redemption of sorts after their mistaken analysis of Saddam Hussein’s WMD capability. The invasion of Iraq and the mismanagement of the war’s aftermath were behind much of the turmoil currently taking place throughout the Middle East.

  Iraq’s deterioration in the wake of Saddam’s fall, along with the civil war that erup
ted in Syria when the regime refused to capitulate during the Arab Spring, forced a collision of secular Syrians, homegrown Islamic extremists, and foreign jihadis. The chaos that spread across the region led to the rise of the cult-like organization called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

  Led by a black-clad fanatic named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s goal was to establish a caliphate across the Middle East and return the region to a rule of Islamic law reminiscent of the fourteenth century. And it nearly succeeded. ISIS captured and held large swaths of land and declared the city of Raqqa, Syria, as its de facto capital. Eventually, Iraqi military units and a loose coalition of militias in Syria backed by the United States and a few other Western countries had managed to defeat ISIS and retake the captured land from the militants. In the ensuing chaos, the remnants of the Islamic State scattered, escaping to Libya and other lawless regions in turmoil across north Africa.

  Even though Joe and the members of his team understood the rationale for tonight’s mission, it did little to ease their concerns about a covert penetration deep into Syrian territory. The government in Damascus was battling the remnants of ISIS and rebel forces attempting to break the president’s ironclad grip on the country. Meanwhile, Turkey was conducting cross-border strikes against U.S. backed Kurdish forces and a variety of antigovernment rebel militias. Iran, with the help of Hezbollah, their proxy based in Lebanon, was assisting Syrian military units while simultaneously building up resources and capabilities on Israel’s northern border. Throw in the Russians, who were supporting the regime in Damascus while advancing their own agenda with Turkey and Iran, and an argument could be made that Syria was perhaps one of the most unpredictable and complex battlefields in the history of warfare.

  Operating under these conditions, it would not be difficult at all to get yourself killed, or worse, captured, by the absurd number of opposing groups fighting in such close proximity to one another.

  CHAPTER 2

  Their insertion had gone off without a hitch, and that should have been the first indicator that Murphy’s Law – if something could go wrong, it would – was going to come into play sooner rather than later. A flat tire or vehicle breakdown, a loss of comms with the drone circling overhead, or running into a random patrol were all well within the realm of possibility when old Mr. Murphy was involved.

  As they entered the town of Salkhad, the team drove a predetermined route through the city, looking for any indication they were being followed or monitored by hostile surveillance. With businesses shuttered for the evening, and most everyone asleep at this late hour, there were few people on the streets. Anyone attempting to follow the Americans would have stuck out like a sore thumb. When Joe was confident they were clean, he gave the command and the two-vehicle motorcade headed to the designated meeting site atop the highest point in the city.

  Built into the crater of an extinct volcano during the Ayyubid dynasty in the thirteenth century, the Salkhad Citadel protected Damascus from the threat of a Crusader attack from Jerusalem. The fortification was the prominent centerpiece of Salkhad, and over the years the town had gradually expanded outward around it. The fort had been under military control for decades but the government had only recently relinquished its authority over the site and allowed it to be open to the public, serving as an attraction of sorts – not that there were many tourists visiting Syria’s historic sites these days.

  Two entrances, one from the north and the other from the south accessed a perimeter road that encircled the site. Joe had chosen the south entrance and the team made their way to the parking lot midway up the volcano’s escarpment. Backing their trucks into a dark space between a set of long rectangular ruins, the small CIA team melted into the shadows.

  Joe Matthews, the team’s leader and former member of the Army’s Special Missions Unit, better known as Delta, or the Unit, was in the right front seat of the lead truck. His best friend, and former Navy SEAL Chris Ryan was in his usual position behind the wheel, and Greg Jacobs, the case officer from Amman station, was in the back seat.

  Mike McCredy drove the second Toyota. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, he had joined the CIA after an unsuccessful tryout as a linebacker with the Buffalo Bills. John Roberts, the team’s communication specialist, sat up front next to McCredy to monitor the radios, and Kevin Chang, a defensive tactics instructor and accomplished skier and snowboarder from Vermont, rounded out the team.

  Joe hit the push-to-talk button on his MBITR multiband radio. “Warrior One Seven, this is Spartan, over.”

  Warrior One Seven was the call sign of the man piloting the MQ-9 Reaper supporting tonight’s mission. Medically retired from the Air Force after losing his right leg while ejecting from a doomed F-15, Travis Mullin found that flying UAVs for the CIA gave him the same sense of service to his country, albeit without the exhilaration of going full afterburners in the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter.

  “Good evening, Spartan. Comm link is good and I’m reading you five by five.”

  “Are you on station?”

  “Doing lazy circles twenty-thousand feet above you as we speak,” the pilot replied.

  “Roger, that. See anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Not unless you consider a team of Agency operators hunkered down on a Syrian hilltop a little unusual.”

  With the Reaper orbiting above using its electro-optical, infra-red cameras to keep an eye out for trouble, Joe had his men dismount. After a quick check of the area, they assumed defensive positions around their vehicles.

  The team had only been in place for ten minutes or so when the drone pilot’s voice came through their earpieces. “I’ve got a single vehicle heading your way. It’s about a kilometer from the north gate.”

  Joe acknowledged the call and ensured each member of the team had heard it as well. “Heads up, boys. It’s showtime.” Then, he leaned in next to the case officer, and asked, “How reliable is this asset, Greg?”

  “Tariq? He’s about as good as we’ve got in Syria. His reporting has been spot-on since the beginning of the war.”

  Colonel Tariq Kabbani was an officer in the Internal Security Division of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate, or GID. The unit’s primary role was to monitor and suppress dissent and antigovernment activities inside Syria’s borders. Countering the various militias involved in the civil war and the presence of the Islamic State had kept his department of the Syrian intelligence apparatus busy for the better part of a decade.

  Jacobs continued. “He isn’t a hard-liner like so many in the Syrian government. Tariq’s a patriot, but he’s also a realist. He cares about his country and its people, but that same loyalty doesn’t necessarily extend to Assad or his family. And he despises ISIS for what their bastardized version of Islam did to his religion and his country.” The case officer paused to take a sip from a bottle of water. “Tariq did his part for the cause, putting plenty of the black-clad fighters in the ground personally, but he was just as disgusted by his government’s response to the rebels fighting the regime. Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own citizens was the seminal event that drove Tariq to come work for us. At this point, he wants Assad and his henchmen out of power as much as he wants ISIS out of his country.”

  Joe thought about what he would do if the roles were reversed, if he were in Kabbani’s position. “The Syrian people have been dealt a pretty shitty hand. I can see how having to choose between ISIS and Assad would drive someone like Tariq to look for help from outside his own country.”

  The Mercedes sedan that entered the citadel’s grounds was not the type of vehicle a casual observer would expect a high-ranking officer in the Syrian security forces to be driving. It was nearly as old as the men awaiting its arrival and had open holes in the bodywork where rust was winning the battle of attrition. But the car’s age, along with the wear and tear on display, helped it blend in and didn’t draw unwanted attention to the driver.

  Kabbani followed the road
around the western perimeter of the grounds, the mound of the volcano and the ruins of the citadel looming high above on his left. He continued along the access road, passing the southern entrance, then made a hard left onto a switchback that took him up to the parking area. Finding a spot in the shadow of the citadel, he brought the car to a stop and turned off the engine.

  Before getting out, he pulled a burner cellphone from his pocket and thumbed in a text message. The phone vibrated a few seconds later, and he was relieved to see the appropriate response appear on the screen. The people he was here to meet had arrived and the area was secure. He exited the vehicle and, following the text message’s instructions, walked toward a gap in the ruins.

  The sudden appearance of two men emerging from the darkness startled Kabbani at first, but he relaxed when he saw one of them was Greg Jacobs. He didn’t know the second man, who was tall and muscular with a chest rig and spare magazines partially concealed under a light-weight jacket. Must be security, he thought.

  Jacobs embraced his asset, then put a hand on Kabbani’s shoulder and guided him back into the shadows. “It’s good to see you again, my friend. How’s your family? Are they well?”

  “They’re fine. Thank you for asking. The conditions in Damascus are relatively normal, which is more than I can say for the rest of the country.”

  With the pleasantries out of the way, it was time to get down to business, so Joe headed back to his truck to give the men some privacy. He was reaching through the open window for the can of Red Bull in the center console’s cup holder when he heard the drone pilot’s voice come back over the net.

  “Heads up, Spartan. You’ve got four vehicles approaching the north entrance. I can’t tell if they’re military, police, or one of the local militias, but the trucks at both ends of the convoy appear to be technicals.” Mr. Murphy had just made his first appearance of the night.

  “Son of a bitch.” Joe cursed under his breath. He drew his pistol and stormed past the case officer, delivering a forearm shiver that pinned Kabbani against the ancient stone wall of the ruins. Startled by the unprovoked hostility, the Syrian recoiled and his hands instinctively came up to protect his head. Pressing the Glock 19’s muzzle into his temple Joe snarled, “What have you done, Tariq?”