Free Hunt the Wolf by Don Mann, Ralph Pezzullo Page B

No.”
    Crocker winced as he remembered long, light blond hair like hers, glimpsed in the backyard of a grand house in Mosul, Iraq. His memory took him back to the summer of 2003 and a morning when he and his team had been called in to help eliminate a “high-priority” target.
    An army intelligence unit searching for Saddam Hussein had stopped to interrogate the owner of a large, gated house in Mosul when people started shooting at them from the second floor. Air support was called in; rockets were fired. By the time Crocker and his team arrived, the battle was pretty much over.
    One of the Delta squadrons swept the house. The shredded bodies of two bearded men were found behind a bloody mattress. Army intelligence operatives believed they were Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein.
    Crocker and his men had gone downstairs to search the basement. Past a workout room filled with Nautilus-type machines and decorated with leopard-skin-patterned wallpaper, they found a torture chamber, the medieval-looking devices covered with bloodstains. There was splatter on the walls and ceiling, even dried pools on the floor. Some of it was still sticky-wet and pungent.
    Inside a desk, they discovered a collection of photos of naked, tortured women. Uday and Qusay posed with some of them, bound and gagged, in the act of being raped or sodomized. Many were young and blond, and had been burned, whipped, and cut.
    Sick fucks!
    Behind the house they found a large cage of lions busily gnawing the remains of some of these women down to the bone.
    Crocker and his men saw rib cages, blanched pelvises, skulls. Some looked fresh. Akil had pointed out a head with long blond hair lying in one corner next to a pool of water. It was the one time in the SEAL team leader’s combat experience that he’d come close to losing his lunch.
    His stomach churning, he focused on the screen again. The young girl in the picture had long, light blond hair and big breasts, which had made her a target.
    “What’s her name again?”
    “Malie Tingvoll.”
    “Anything about her background that I should know?”
    “She’s a nice girl, a good student, no record of drug use. Healthy and normal. Like I said before, I know her family.”
    At times like these Crocker hated being tied down by regulations. Part of him wanted to turn around right now, grab his men, and fly to Oslo.
    He said: “If you and the king can buy me a couple of weeks, I’ll try to find her.” Or what’s left of her, he thought.
    “Are you confident you can accomplish that in so little time?”
    “The more you can tell me about the people who grabbed her, the better chance I’ll have.”
    “Of course,” Mikael answered, placing a hand on Crocker’s shoulder. “The king will be pleased.”
    “Tell him he has to act quickly.”
    “I’ll call him in the morning on my sat-phone and start making the arrangements,” Mikael said. “I’ll also alert our security police to assemble a file with their best evidence.”
    “That’s fine,” Crocker answered. “But I can’t wait here. Tomorrow morning I’m proceeding into the mountains with my men.”
    “I understand.”
    Crocker thought it was a long shot. Unless Klausen secured the necessary authorizations immediately, Crocker would be almost impossible to reach. In the time it took him and his men to finish their climb and return to Islamabad, the girl would probably be sold into slavery, or dead, or God knows what.
    But he’d learned to never underestimate the ability of politics to trump the rules and procedures, and of kings to influence the future.
    As he got up to leave, Crocker said, “Nice to meet you, Mikael. Good luck.”
     
    A king needed a crown. Towering above the frozen valley floor was a natural one formed by dozens of mountains that grew in size and dramatic splendor as the team picked its way farther north. Like the Himalayas, the Karakoram Range had been violently thrust upward when the Indian and Eurasian tectonic