SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox by Don Mann, Ralph Pezzullo Read Free Book Online Page A

can. The security team will keep a constant eye on you and Jenny. So there’s no reason to worry.”
    “I know, Tom.”
    “I love you.” He kissed her again.
    She nodded sadly and said, “I love you, too. Be safe.”
      
    The four Americans pulled their chairs into a semicircle around the TV to watch the video Mr. Talab and his assistant had left behind. Before slipping it into the VCR, Anders explained that it had been shot outside the city of Idlib by a twenty-two-year-old Syrian engineering student named Hassan.
    “When?” Crocker asked.
    “When what?”
    “When was it shot?”
    “About a week ago,” Janice answered.
    “Where’s Idlib?”
    “Northern Syria, about 120 kilometers from the Turkish border.”
    “Any more questions before we start?” Anders asked.
    “Yeah,” Akil said as he bit into an apple. “Why are you showing us this?”
    “You’re about to find out.”
    Filmed at night using an infrared filter, the video showed a half-dozen uniformed men carefully offloading five-foot-long stainless-steel canisters from a truck and carrying them down concrete steps into a tunnel. The video was grainy and jerky, and lasted about two and a half minutes.
    When it ended Crocker asked, “What did we just watch?”
    “Those were members of the Syrian National Defense Force, the Quwat al-Difa al-Watani,” answered Anders. “It was formed in 2012, following massive defections from the army and air force, and is made up of Assad loyalists. It’s a special militia filled with members of the country’s minorities—Alawites, Druzes, Armenians, and Christians—and modeled after the Basij militia in Iran.”
    “What were they carrying?”
    “We believe the canisters contain sarin gas.”
    As the former WMD officer on ST-6, Crocker knew more about sarin than he cared to. He’d searched for it in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi and in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. He knew that it remained in an odorless, tasteless liquid state below temperatures of 150ºC. In order to maximize its potential as a weapon, it was usually dispersed from a canister attached to a rocket or missile into droplets fine enough to be inhaled into the lungs. The sarin that reached the ground would eventually evaporate into vapor. Once it entered the body through the eyes or skin, it shut off the nervous system, causing involuntary muscles like the diaphragm to stop functioning. It had been discovered by Nazi scientists, who dubbed it Substance 146 and found it to be hundreds of times more deadly than cyanide. A variation of insecticides using organophosphate compounds, sarin could be made relatively easily using more than a dozen recipes. One recipe used isopropanol, known as rubbing alcohol. Another involved mixing methylphosphonyl dichloride with hydrogen or sodium fluoride.
    In 2012 the United States and other countries had tried to block sales to Syria of the chemicals used in the manufacture of sarin. By that time, however, the Assad regime had already stockpiled large amounts of them.
    A lethal dose could cause death in a minute. Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein discovered this in 1988, when he directed a sarin attack against the Kurdish village of Halabja that killed five thousand people. More recently, UN inspectors discovered that the Assad regime had used sarin against rebels occupying the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.
    Janice said, “Assad’s military has been stockpiling the stuff for years. As military bases are overrun, there’s a very good chance of it falling into the hands of rebels, particularly ISIS and those groups allied with al-Qaeda.”
    “For a number of real obvious reasons, we don’t want that to happen,” added Anders.
    “No, we don’t,” echoed Janice.
    “What are the odds?” Akil asked, finishing the apple and tossing the core in the trash.
    “Odds of what?”
    “Odds of AQ or ISIS getting their hands on the sarin.”
    “Better than even,” Anders answered. “We know they’ve tried