CHAPTER 1
RÉGION DU LAC
REPUBLIC OF CHAD
It was a snatch-and-grab job.
No good guys believed to be in the target area. Lots of bad ones, though.
Plenty.
Havoc Team was on the ground near the shores of Lake Chad, right at the crossroads of north and central Africa. Once upon a time, it was a beautiful place to live. A lovely desert, lush forests, and a sparkling blue lake. Probably be nice again one of these days. Not so much right now.
Real damn short history lesson: ISIS and al-Qaeda are the most dangerous active terrorist groups in the world. The US and its allies have done a pretty good job spanking them, but the thing with fanatics is that they view every loss as a rallying cry. Special Forces have scored some serious wins that with other enemies might have had a demoralizing effect.
During one raid by US Special Operations forces in Syria in 2019, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest rather than allow himself to be taken. Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, the successor to al-Baghdadi, was killed in a US raid in Idlib province in Syria in 2022. And Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, was taken out by a drone attack in Afghanistan in 2022.
But with people like these, every death saw the birth of a new martyr. Martyrs are excellent recruiting tools. Western military is often a step behind the learning curve in thinking these strikes will take the heart out of the fighters. I mean, sure, they’re useful strategic hits, but they don’t stop the war.
Nothing so far seems able to do that. The war is the war, and it will always rage. Here and there. Under different flags, fueled by different kinds of hate. Rationalized by the ideology du jour. Guys like me aren’t fighting for the big win. We’re either fighting holding actions in whatever shape they take, or we’re looking for small wins, taking what we can. Making whatever difference we can.
And, as jihadist groups in the Middle East are weakened through attrition, splinter groups tend to pop up anywhere the organizers view as fertile ground. In Africa, amidst the rampant poverty in certain nations, and with culture wars and ethnic genocide, the pickings are ripe. These extremists have established serious footholds in Somalia, the western Sahel region, the Lake Chad basin, northern Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula. In Chad, there’s a group that thinks ISIS has taken losses because they weren’t extreme enough. Yeah, sit with that one for a moment.
What makes them even scarier is that they have focused less on suicide bombings and more on acquiring technology that gives their small group a fighting chance against the superpowers. Since late 2022, there have been dozens of hits against US and UN drones and surveillance helicopters. Not just teenagers with RPGs, but weirdly sophisticated strikes that suggest someone with deep knowledge of combat software.
And that’s where Havoc Team joins the party.
We were hunting a man named Marco Russo, an Italian national who worked as a freelance military systems software engineer for Italy, Germany, and France. He’s one of those computer super nerds who probably thinks in code. Software and hardware genius. For the first eleven years of his career, he was considered a safe bet by any nation’s vetting teams. Squeaky-clean life except for some parking tickets near the better museums in Rome and Florence; no politics at all, and no red flags like deep debt or known addictions.
Then one day Russo went missing. His wallet, passport, keys, and shoes were found on the Grand Duchess Charlotte Bridge in Luxembourg City. No note, no known reason for suicide, and no trace of him was ever found. Missing, presumed drowned.
Now here’s the scary part: When forensic computer whiz kids tore apart his emails and text messages and computers, they discovered hints of what he was working on. Not full details, but enough to suggest that he was edging toward several variations of new software packages that could turn the randomness of LAW rockets and RPGs into very precise and nearly unshakeable laser-guided missiles.
That was when drones and choppers started falling out of the sky.
Around that time, rumors began whispering down the lane through various communities tied to ISIS. The rumors hinted that Russo was alive, well, and working on something even more dangerous for an extreme splinter group.
A lot of covert ops teams were out hunting for him. Everybody wanted his scalp, but rumors or not, Russo seemed to be unfindable.
Then we caught a break.
Ali Hissein, a local Muslim working as a ground man for a central African Islamic counterterrorism group, took photos of everyone going in and coming out of an ISIS camp by Lake Chad. It was a place that used to be a school. Hissein’s computer team ran every surveillance photo they took through facial recognition software and pinged Russo. Very much alive and well and laughing it up with two men known to be leaders of a Boko Haram group overseeing the ISIS recruits.
Russo, being an Italian national, was hands-off for American Special Forces. Lots of red tape, some political challenges with the new government in Italy, and outstanding warnings from the government of Chad against any incursion by the US of A.
Which is why Mr. Hissein reached out through his group’s network of contacts, and a phone rang on the desk of my boss, Mr. Church. We at Rogue Team International don’t fly anyone’s flag. We’re autonomous, although we will occasionally do jobs over or under the table for the UN and other allies who ask nicely. Hissein was a trusted friend, and Church took his intel very seriously.
Thirty-seven hours later, Havoc Team was in Chad.
Hunting.
Copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Maberry