Chapter 25
Central Anatolia, Turkey
The truck hit a massive pothole and John Conza’s head bashed against the sidewall. It brought intense pain. But more critically, in that moment, it brought a return to consciousness.
His eyes cracked open.
He blinked the world into focus. Conza discerned a metal floor and a corrugated wall.
There was dirt and trash. A few hand tools and a spool of insulated wire lay nearby.
An empty plastic bottle rocked back and forth with the movement of the truck.
The space was dimly lit, the only source of illumination coming from somewhere beyond his feet.
Having ended up face down, he tried to raise one shoulder to get a better look.
This brought more pain, although his limbs seemed functional.
The next thing he discerned was the flight helmet he’d been wearing on the floor beside him.
There was a giant crack on its crown. Better that than my skull, he thought.
Conza saw that half the compartment was occupied by a huge metal case.
It was the size of twin refrigerators, and wires and cables sprouted from a portal on one side.
Along the far wall he saw crates of tools and hardware.
He fought off pain and continued to twist his upper body.
When he finally got a look in the front of the cargo compartment, he saw a burly man sitting on an overturned crate.
The man was swaying with movement of the vehicle and staring at him.
In the spray of weak light, Conza discerned two men standing behind him, gripping the sidewalls to steady themselves.
One wore a beanie. The other had a spiderweb tattoo on his neck.
Behind them was a pass-through to the front cab, and Conza could make out a dashboard and the shoulder of a driver.
Outside, through the windshield, he saw nothing but darkness.
And just like that, everything began to add up. His helicopter had been shot down, and now he was inside the GAZ box truck they’d been chasing. Success and failure all in one nice, neat package.
“It is good of you to join us,” said the man on the crate. “We weren’t sure you would ever wake up.”
He was big and jowly, his face shadowed by a few days’ growth of beard.
His ruddy complexion suggested a life spent in harsh climates.
A lot of sleeping rough and eating cold meals from plastic pouches.
Or maybe he just shaves with a belt sander.
His English came with a monster Russian accent, the consonants like chewed gravel.
“You are Lieutenant John Conza, United States Navy.”
There was no denying it. It was right there on his uniform. Thankfully, operational muscle memory from his life with the Teams had prompted Conza to leave his wallet and military ID in the hotel room safe. He pressed his eyes closed, then reopened them. “Is that who I am?”
The big Russian smiled a weary smile. “Do not pretend you are…what is the word…amneziya…forgetting.”
“You’re right, I remember just fine. I remember that somebody shot down a Turkish army Black Hawk without provocation.”
“I think maybe you were preparing to provoke us.”
Conza regarded the equipment around them. “And I think you caused a diplomatic aircraft to crash.”
“What is your job in Navy, Conza?”
“I’m a weather officer. I came to Bodrum to help investigate the crash of a United States Air Force aircraft.”
“Weatherman? I doubt that very much. Maybe you are something else.”
“Okay, you got me. I’m a United States Navy SEAL.”
The big man looked at Conza’s prosthesis, which was jutting out from a torn pant leg, then back at his cohorts. They all broke out laughing.
“Okay, Mr. SEAL. But tell me this—who else might be looking for us?”
“Pretty much the entire Turkish military.”
A long sigh. “I think not. We have heard and seen nothing. We also have sources, and they tell us that things are mostly quiet. Which means you have lied a second time. In your game of baseball there are three strikes, but I give you only two.”
The big man waved his hand, and the other two closed in on Conza. Beanie pinned his shoulders to the floor. Neck Tat picked up a two-by-four.
And without another question, without any wavering, the beating commenced.
—
Turkish first responders reached the downed Black Hawk to find one crewman alive, the crew chief who had crawled clear of the wreckage.
He was in critical condition and was immediately medevaced to the nearest hospital.
It would be another hour before the sharp-eyed copilot of a second military helicopter, a Eurocopter Cougar that had carried in a team of MPs to cordon off the scene, recognized a telltale shrapnel pattern on the exhaust shroud of the downed aircraft’s starboard engine.
Only when he radioed this observation into headquarters did the Turks realize their aircraft had been shot down.
By that time, the C-41 carrying Task Force 99 was closing in on the three-vehicle convoy as it neared the Georgian border.
But they hadn’t caught up yet.
As the GAZ truck and its accompanying vehicles barreled eastward, they were traveling marginally above the speed limit.
Speed enforcement in this part of Turkey was virtually nonexistent, and the Russian commander of the unit reasoned that on the off chance they were stopped by a patrol car, any lone policeman would be overwhelmed by the firepower his twelve men could lay down.
All were experienced mercenaries with a variety of backgrounds and nationalities.
Three from Belarus, four Serbs, two Nepalese, a smattering from the various “Stans.” They were experienced shooters, one and all, and eager to get their payday—and that meant getting across the border.
Neither the Turks nor the Americans would follow them into another country—on that point, the commander was confident.
Doing so would require diplomatic negotiations with a prickly Georgian government, and with a mere two-hour crossing of the Caucasus afterward, reaching Russia would be all but guaranteed.
Cross the first border, and they would be home free.
By this time tomorrow, his men would be boarding flights to points across the globe and the GAZ would be getting pushed off a barge into the Black Sea.
They were nearly to the finish line, the only limitation being the GAZ itself—even with the accelerator hard on the floor, the big truck topped out at sixty-two miles per hour.
What none of the men in the truck knew was that hundreds of miles overhead two low earth orbit satellites in the Blackjack constellation, coordinating with MAADN, had their convoy under continuous surveillance. The system tracked the vehicles ruthlessly, a digital Ahab pursuing its whale.
For a brief interval, the two Blackjack birds lost sight of the convoy when an operator overrode the surveillance to concentrate on the downed Black Hawk. When the command was given to reacquire the moving targets, MAADN’s algorithms took over.
There were, in that moment of indecision, four hundred and six vehicles on the roads and tributaries leading to the Georgian border.
For MAADN it had been child’s play, on a supercomputer level, to discern which of them was their quarry.
To begin, it identified three sets of headlights that moved as one for nearly thirty minutes, creating a high mathematical probability that they were linked.
This was combined with the size and shape of the vehicles, and the possible routes leading from the crash of the Black Hawk.
Most damning of all: the convoy drove past three cameras.
The first was at a gas station, the second mounted on the dash of an idling semitruck.
These MAADN cracked into effortlessly, harvesting good-quality video.
The final camera was part of a surveillance network operated by Turkish intelligence—a network that had recently been hacked by the NSA.
This camera had unusually good resolution and high-speed imaging, meaning a clearer view of the vehicles’ occupants was obtained.
The force estimate was refined to be between ten and thirteen individuals.
This was forwarded immediately to a grateful Task Force 99, who were ten miles behind and closing in fast.