Al Ghaydah Airport
Al Mahrah Governorate, Yemen
Al Ghaydah was a decidedly nondescript city. Exceedingly average for Yemen, and yet there was a mystical beauty about the place. It was set on the southeastern coast in close proximity to the border with Oman. A large wadi, or dry streambed that filled with water during the rainy season, ran through the northern area of the city, dividing the small provincial capital into two sections. Both housed a population consisting of some of the poorest people in the world.
It was a bleak outcrop in an otherwise open and featureless desert. Dirt and sand extended as far north as the eye could see, unbroken by even a whisper of vegetation. The only sign of civilization was the town itself, and even that was a stretch compared to the more modern cities in the western part of the country. South of the wadi were hundreds of buildings clustered together, mostly brown and white in color. The majority were single- or two-story sandstone structures, with the occasional larger building jutting up from the desert floor and into the sky to create the modest beginnings of a city skyline.
To the north of the wadi was a small village with a few dozen homes,a grocer, two mosques, and a single gas station where residents stopped to fill up their cars withbenzenebefore driving nearly 150 miles northeast to the Oman border, or before setting out north into the great desert wilderness. At the opposite end of the city, far to the south, a small military camp had popped up just outside the regional airport.
It was ironic that the people of this city lived in a coastal paradise with the stunning backdrop of the Arabian Sea that would have topped the list of attractions for many tourists from around the world. But it was the minority of the population that made it otherwise. Al Qaeda terrorists hid among the people and used the lawlessness of war-torn Yemen as a safe haven to train and plot attacks both inside and outside the country. It was this small group of extremists who brought the glaring fixture of a military encampment to the otherwise picturesque shores.
Sergeant First Class Nathan Wilde leaned against a Hesco barrier, casually stroking his beard and staring off to the east. The sun reflected off the Gulf of Aden as it slowly declined toward the western horizon at the end of the enormous Arabian Peninsula. It was a beautiful sight. There was simply no other word to describe the majestic display of nature taking place.
As he gazed at the picture being painted live before him, Wilde contemplated the history of this land. Its roots were ancient. If he’d had the opportunity to speak with the locals about such topics, he had no doubt they would regale him with stories of their ancestors generations past. They would point him toward prehistoric paths that wound their way down to the shoreline to meet up with caves that were used by the local inhabitants thousands of years ago. A small measure of fieldwork would likely uncover artifacts that any modern museum would be proud to count as part of their collection.
Places in the world like Yemen were untouched gold mines of historical significance. Large swaths of the Western world were industrialized,the secrets of their past built over or otherwise lost for all time. In areas such as this, those remnants of history remained untouched for untold generations. A few weeks of anthropological studies and interviews, followed by a few months of excavations, would certainly uncover secrets of the Hadhramaut desert thought lost forever.
But as much as he would have enjoyed delving into the history of his surroundings, that wasn’t why Wilde was here. He was the Special Forces Intelligence Sergeant on an Operational Detachment Alpha, or an “ODA” as it was generally abbreviated. Far from the daydream of archaeological fieldwork he had been conjuring in his head, he was currently assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group, in which he had served for nearly a decade. And during that time, the U.S. Army Special Forces, more commonly known as “Green Berets,” had been at the forefront of the Global War on Terrorism. While this had in fact given Wilde plenty of opportunity to travel to exotic and historic locations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, it did not provide many occasions to satisfy his scientific curiosity. And this trip was no exception.
A war was raging in Yemen. The Iranian-backed Shia Houthis ousted the Sunni government in 2014, and there had been open conflict ever since. A coalition of Sunni Arab nations had rallied to back the besieged government forces, led by Saudi Arabia, which had the most to lose by the shift in power. They shared a long border with Yemen and Iran was their biggest geopolitical foe. The coalition was assisted by the United Kingdom and the United States, and Wilde and his team had been tasked to work with the Saudi military, training and advising the Yemeni military forces. Since U.S. foreign policy waxed and waned depending on the political climate back home, their task was to enable the Yemeni military’s defeat of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, as opposed to fighting the Houthi rebels.
The same was true of the British military, and a contingent of thecountry’s premier forces known as the Special Air Service, or SAS, had joined them several months earlier. The British troops had fewer restrictions and operated with considerably more freedom. While the American team could travel outside the wire to advise, assist, and accompany the Yemeni forces alongside the Saudis, the British could go practically wherever they wanted unilaterally without dragging along indigenous forces. It was an arrangement that they all used to their favor in the best way possible, despite the occasional grumblings from the American side.
Fighting AQAP and countering smuggling was the mission that brought the ODA over five hundred miles from the capital of Sana’a and into the hinterlands of the country. It had been five very long months, and they were looking forward to wrapping up their tour of duty in the next several weeks. But the trip had not been a total loss. While not as exciting or kinetic as other trips the team had been on in recent years, it had certainly been interesting. Wilde had made friends with many of the Saudi officers, he’d had the opportunity to gain deeper proficiency in Arabic, and he’d had time to continue his college coursework, albeit over a very slow internet connection.
Wilde heard footsteps approaching from behind and glanced over his shoulder to see a burly, muscular man with tanned skin, shaggy red hair, and a thick red beard walking up. Timothy McBride was the senior weapons sergeant on the team. If it went bang, odds were a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant could take it apart, put it back together, and put it into operation with lethal proficiency. That applied not only to firearms, but to mortars, rockets, and just about anything else that could inflict bodily harm upon another human being. And McBride was one of the best.
“You ready to work out?” McBride asked with a nod of his head, which was adorned with a blue University of Kentucky ballcap. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and black Ranger panties, small silk shortsworn by those in the special operations community. While his legs were bare, his arms were covered in a myriad of tattoos that combined to make sleeves depicting various patriotic-themed images.
“Not yet,” Wilde replied. He was still in his MultiCam Crye Precision pants and matching combat top, not in workout attire. “I need to speak to Captain Ahmed in the JOC and ask what the CT guys found on the targets they killed last night.”
The American team shared a joint operations center, or JOC, with the Saudis and the British, and that was where he was headed. Wilde had personally trained the Yemeni force on sensitive site exploitation, which required meticulously combing through an area after an operation to collect information of potential intelligence value. The locals had learned the basics, though their methods and proficiency left much to be desired. A group of Yemeni Counter-Terrorism forces had been attacked on the highway the night prior, but managed to kill all the attackers and had presumably searched the area for exploitable items. Wilde was interested in what information they may have taken off the bodies.
McBride gave him a hard stare from icy-blue eyes set under a pair of red bushy eyebrows. “You’re not quitting on me ’cause it’s leg day, are you?”
The rough-looking ginger in front of him was not only Wilde’s workout partner but also his best friend. The two had gone through the Special Forces Qualification Course together at Fort Bragg, had been assigned to the same team in 5th Group, and had been on half a dozen deployments together over the last decade. Wilde didn’t imagine that two men could be platonically closer.
He laughed. “You know I never shy away from leg day, although I still can’t keep up with those tree trunks of yours.”
Tim shrugged. “I’m from hardy stock. We grow real men in the great Commonwealth State of Kentucky.”
Wilde rolled his eyes. McBride was a proud Kentuckian who nevermissed an opportunity to promote his heritage. He was not only born and raised in the Bluegrass State as evidenced by his charming Southern drawl, but after finishing Special Forces training he was assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a mere hour from his hometown.
“Let me knock this out and then I’ll meet you in there,” Wilde said, turning to walk away. “Some of us still have to work when the sun goes down,” he added with a grin.
McBride shrugged. “Poor life choices, buddy,” he said, before turning around and heading toward the tent that housed their primitive gym equipment.
Wilde shook his head. He had made a friendly jab at his teammate, but there was some truth in it. While he had started as the communications expert on the team, Wilde had transitioned years ago to his current position, which entailed returning to Fort Bragg for a several-months-long course to be trained in intelligence collection, analysis, and targeting. He found the work rewarding and enjoyed solving mysteries and putting the pieces of the puzzle together. In his current role he was still able to kick in doors, but after they cleared an objective he had the chance to exploit the take and produce leads for follow-on targets.
Still, it came with drawbacks. When much of the team was enjoying downtime, Wilde was generally stuck with the team’s leadership poring over data, creating enemy situation templates, or SITEMPS, and constructing what McBride called his “spiderwebs,” which were really link-analysis charts that tracked targets in the region.
He glanced at his watch, figuring the Saudi teams would be back by now, and made his way over to the JOC. The camp was fairly small, and he passed by the tent that served as the chow hall, several living quarters, and tubes of PVC pipe hammered into the ground at an angle that served as urinals. He quickly reached the middle of the outpost that contained the brain center of the camp.
The JOC was a large tent, the same size as the one that housed the chow hall. Unlike the chow hall, the flap to this tent remained closed so that local workers passing through the area did not have an opportunity to gaze inside and begin to figure out what operations the multinational group was planning. The locals were vetted and searched on the way in and out, but were not necessarily trusted.
Had they been able to peer into the tent, they would have seen what Wilde did as he threw back the flap and entered the large space. The inside was filled with laptops sitting on folding tables and standing whiteboards with information written on them in both English and Arabic. Different-colored cables ran everywhere, connecting various electronic components. Papers were pinned to the walls, laminated maps were unfurled on tables with graphics drawn on them with dry erase markers, and television monitors showed live drone feeds as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, buzzed thousands of feet above the country. Since it was a joint space, the scent of cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air, clinging to the fabric to create a powerful stench of both fresh and stale odors.
The tent itself was designated a General Purpose–Medium, with a metal frame supporting the weight of the tent. There was a flap in the back that remained closed with a zip tie, the one main flap in the front being used to funnel personnel in and out. The Americans and British took one side of the tent, with the Arabs occupying the other. In the middle were several tables of shared space where meetings were held and planning conducted. Toward the back was a table that held coffee and hot water with tea bags and was maintained around the clock, as there was always at least one representative from each command present at any given time.
