CHAPTER 1
TERLET AIRFIELD, NORTH OF ARNHEM, THE NETHERLANDS
The figure lying on the ground wasn’t shivering, but she wasn’t far off. The cold had seeped through her outer layers, chilling her as she lay motionless on a mound of dirt and damp moss. Though the rain had stopped at dawn, the sun’s warming rays hadn’t yet reached her.
Water dripped from leaves, producing a quiet, up-tempo beat tapped out on the forest floor around her. She inched her way forward through the underbrush to adjust her sightlines. Like an apparition, her body blended in with her surroundings, her ghillie suit and face camo breaking up the lines and patterns that could give her away.
Special Agent Alexandra Martel was, quite literally, hiding in plain sight.
A voice in her earbuds broke through the silence.
“All units stand by.” It was the soothing baritone voice of Chief Inspector Nils Van Dijk of the Dutch National Police Corps.
Seven minutes earlier, a midsize cargo van pulled into a secluded area off a runway at the airfield, accompanied by two dark sedans on either side. Men piled out—seven in total—and gathered around the vehicles. All of them were armed. She ranged the closest at 260 meters. Like three of the men with him, he carried a semiauto carbine slung over his shoulder in the low-ready position as if preparing to engage his shadow.
The chief inspector’s voice came through her in-ear headset again.
“Sierra One, report.”
Alex had settled into her overwatch position shortly after dawn. It was now approaching ten. Peering through her rifle scope, she came up two clicks, settling the crosshairs over center mass of the man closest to her. Then she laid the weight of her shooting hand on the stock of her rifle, chambered in .308 Winchester, and rested her finger outside the trigger guard, lightly in contact with the cold metal. The rifle was braced by a bipod in front and a sand sock below the buttstock.
“Sierra One—Special Agent Martel—do you copy?”
She keyed the push-to-talk pad clipped to the MOLLE straps of her vest with her support hand. “Targets acquired. Seven subjects in all.”
Her muscles were relaxed, allowing her skeletal frame to support her weight, averting the fatigue that could induce a tremor. She pulled the rifle butt into the pocket of her shoulder and welded her cheek to the gun, just as she had done a thousand times before, in preparation for what might happen next.
The man she sighted in was leaning against the front of the van, a cigarette nestled between two fingers. A pistol was visible in his waistband, a cell phone in his other hand. He looked gaunt and unkempt, with messy blond hair standing straight up and a week’s worth of stubble, but it was clear to Alex that he was in command. That earned Spike the honor of being designated her primary target. He looked down at his phone and answered a call. While he listened, he took a drag off his cigarette, nodded, then clicked off and shouted something to the group of men gathered nearby. She couldn’t hear the exchange but assumed it meant the rendezvous was about to go down.
Van Dijk’s voice came over the radio again. “Second target package approaching.”
Just as he had outlined to her and the team in the predawn briefing.
* * *
DUTCH NATIONAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS, THE HAGUE, 0400 HOURS
Chief Inspector Nils Van Dijk led the briefing in front of twenty officers gathered to prosecute the mission. While uncommon for a high-ranking officer to lead such an operation, this was an unusual situation, and Van Dijk a highly proficient commander. He was a senior officer with real-world tactical and military experience.
As Alex scanned the room filled with her colleagues, she noticed a man standing in the corner off to her left. He wore his wavy chestnut-brown hair a little longer than she preferred and wasn’t particularly handsome. But dressed in the somewhat clichéd unofficial uniform of paramilitaries everywhere—khaki 5.11 Stryke pants, an untucked black polo shirt, and a pair of black-and-gray Salomon mid-height tactical boots—he communicated an air of confidence that made him attractive anyway. He carried no visible sidearm, which made her suspect he was from British or American intelligence with a military special operations background. If anyone introduced him as an advisor, she reckoned, it was a done deal—spook for sure. In fact, no one introduced him at all, which only confirmed for her his intelligence-community pedigree.
Chief Inspector Van Dijk began the briefing. He advised that the arrests they were about to execute were part of a more extensive investigation. Then he continued with a formal review of the situation and mission.
“Our targets are two groups conducting their criminal enterprise on Dutch soil,” he began. “And the commodity they are exchanging is special nuclear material.”
Alex sat up in her chair. “Fissile material? As in nuclear-bomb-making material?”
“Correct,” replied the chief inspector. Someone else whistled. “Twenty kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Enough to construct several bomb cores.” He nodded toward Alex. “Interpol caught wind of the pending sale to a jihadi group called the Islamic Levant Front and notified Dutch intelligence that they were looking to transact their business here in the Netherlands.”
The room turned toward Alex. She was an FBI special agent on loan to Interpol and Interpol’s liaison to the Dutch National Police for this mission.
Copyright © 2023 by Steve Urszenyi
