Chapter 1382
Self-Destruction Ritual
Chapter 1382 Self-Destruction Ritual
After finishing his call with Milos, Song Heping sat in the dark, looking at the hands of his luminous watch on the table.
The second hand moves erratically, each second like a heartbeat, steadily and irresistibly moving towards some unknown ending.
After sitting there for a brief three minutes, he decided to go to the briefing room to see the whole operation.
Although he had a premonition that something bad was bound to happen.
5:25.
It was 5:25 a.m. Baghdad time, which was 9:25 p.m. Washington time.
In the circular lobby of the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, the lights were dimmed to a soft amber hue.
Twelve senior military and civilian officials sat in front of a curved control console, each with multiple screens in front of them.
The central screen displays a split view of the Mosul base command post, a video window from Duke, and a drone view overlooking Badi.
In Duke's video footage, his back was ramrod straight, and his voice was steady and clear: "Target confirmed inside the building. Outer perimeter cordon complete. Delta Force has reached its final standby point. Intrusion scheduled to begin at 6:00 AM sharp, with contact within two minutes of intrusion."
In a small screen next to the video window, a three-star general nodded, his voice coming through a secure line with a slight electronic filter: "Execution approved. God bless those lads."
Duke cut off the video link.
In the briefing room at the Mosul base, he took a deep breath and picked up the microphone.
"All units, operation commences. Repeat, operation commences. The time is now 5:30. Each team shall proceed according to the schedule."
Two kilometers outside of Badi town, there is a dried-up riverbed.
Six modified M1152A1 Hummers sat with their engines off in the shadows of the riverbed, their hoods covered with desert camouflage netting.
Twenty-four Delta Force members completed their final equipment check: each was equipped with an HK416D rifle with a SOCOM suppressor, an AN/PVS-31 binocular night vision device, an IBA bulletproof vest with ESAPI bulletproof inserts, six M84 stun grenades, and two breaching C4 packs.
Each person's helmet is equipped with an IR light that emits a faint red light in the night vision goggles for close-range friend-or-foe identification at night.
Captain Marcus raised his left wrist and glanced at his watch.
5:31.
He raised his right fist, then quickly spread his five fingers—spreading them forward.
Like two streams of black water, the team members silently seeped into the labyrinthine ruins of Badi Town.
Instead of walking on the streets, they moved through the ruins of houses, using every shadow and every crumbling wall as cover.
Night vision goggles render the world in varying shades of green, while thermal imaging reveals signs of life.
A stray cat darted out of the rubble, leaving a fleeting orange trail in the infrared field of vision; several rats rummaged for food in the garbage; in the distance, a faint warm light shone from a half-collapsed house—perhaps the residents had already gotten up early.
But there was no heat signature from armed personnel, no sentries, and no heat signature from vehicle engines.
The whole town resembled an abandoned graveyard.
This went too smoothly.
A faint alarm sounded in Marcus's mind.
Having worked in the war zone for twenty years, he understood one thing: things going too smoothly often means you've already fallen into a trap.
But he suppressed his doubts and continued to proceed according to the established route.
An order is an order, and a plan is a plan. Delta's motto is "Success is the son of preparation." They prepared for three months, so success was expected.
Team A arrived at their designated position on the north side, fifty meters from the west wall of the target building. A brick wall, half-collapsed by artillery fire, provided perfect cover.
The team members crouched down, pointed their guns at the building, and rested their fingers on the trigger guards, awaiting the final instructions.
Team B arrived at the southern location almost simultaneously, hiding behind the ruins of an abandoned shop.
The drone's live feed showed that two green triangular markers had been placed on the north and south sides of the red square.
"Team A, take your positions."
"Team B, take your positions."
Duke's voice came through the headset: "Execute according to the schedule. Prepare for the demolition."
Marcus made a gesture.
Two demolition workers stepped forward and installed linear cutting cables on the concrete wall.
The goal wasn't to blow up the entire wall, but to cut a circular hole in the wall with a diameter of 80 centimeters, large enough for a single person to pass through quickly.
The amount of explosives was precisely calculated, and the sound was controlled to be below 90 decibels, making it almost indistinguishable in the morning wind.
"Prepare for demolition. Three, two, one—"
The low, muffled sound was like someone slamming an iron gate shut in the distance.
Concrete fragments splattered inwards, creating a near-perfect circular notch in the wall with clean edges.
Almost at the same millisecond, a nearly identical muffled sound came from the south.
Team B simultaneously breaches the wall.
Marcus was the first to squeeze through the hole in the wall, rifle at his shoulder, night vision goggles scanning the courtyard quickly. The courtyard was empty, with only a few clumps of dead weeds and a rusty gasoline drum.
He gestured: Advance, alternate cover.
The team members filed in, moving in pairs back to back, their guns pointed in all possible directions of threat.
Windows, doorways, roof edges, courtyard corners.
The beam of a tactical flashlight flashes briefly, primarily to confirm details in the shadows; most of the time, they rely on night vision goggles and spatial memory developed through long-term training.
The main entrance on the first floor is made of wooden panels, which look old and mottled, but Marcus noticed as he approached that the door frame was made of steel channel steel and the door lock was a German-made ABUS heavy-duty padlock.
This is unreasonable!
Rural houses would not use this level of security lock.
"Break the door."
A team member stepped forward and quickly installed a C4 flask at the door lock.
Two groups of people stood close to the wall by the door.
boom--
With an explosion, the door sprang open, the hinges emitting a piercing metallic scraping sound.
"Enter!"
The team members rushed into the building and cleaned each room in pairs, following the procedures they had rehearsed countless times.
The living room was empty, with only a few tattered woven rugs and a low table with a missing leg. In the kitchen, the old-fashioned gas stove was cold, and the cupboard contained only three dirty plates and a cracked cup.
The storage room was piled with yellowed newspapers and empty cardboard boxes, and the dust was so thick that you could leave fingerprints on them.
Everything is normal. So normal it's unsettling.
"First floor cleared. No threat."
"Staircase inspection complete. Structural safety guaranteed."
The stairs are made of concrete, and the handrails are made of rusted iron pipes.
Marcus led the charge, taking two steps at a time, his gun always pointed at the second-floor corridor.
At the end of the stairs is a short corridor leading to doors in three rooms.
"Room One, clear it out."
The first room was clearly a bedroom, containing only a metal-framed bed and an empty wardrobe; there were no blankets or quilts on the mattress.
"Room Two, clear it out."
The second room resembled a study, but the bookshelves were empty, and there wasn't even a piece of paper on the table.
The third door was tightly closed.
Marcus pressed himself against the wall by the door and pulled a spyglass from his leg pocket. It was a flexible fiber optic tube with a miniature lens at the end.
He slowly peered the spyglass through the gap at the bottom of the door.
There was only one wooden chair in the room, and a person was sitting on the chair with their back to the door.
The room had no other furniture, no windows, only a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, emitting a dim yellow light.
The walls were bare cement, but on the wall directly opposite the door, there was a symbol drawn in charcoal—a circle with an inverted triangle inside, and a dot in the center of the triangle.
Marcus retracted the peephole and made a few simple gestures.
Target confirmed: solitary, seated with back to the camera, room is empty; prepare to storm in.
Two team members took their positions on either side of the door, while a third team member stood in front of the door holding a shotgun.
Marcus stepped back to the other side of the corridor, took a deep breath, and felt his lungs fill with the smell of dust and stale air.
He pressed the call button and reported in a low voice, "Prepare to storm the target room."
In the briefing room, everyone held their breath.
"implement!"
The shotgunner quickly aimed at the door hinge and fired.
bang——
bang——
At close range, the large projectile shattered the door hinges. The wooden door swung open with a thud.
The team members rushed into the room, all pointing their guns at the person in the chair.
"Don't move! Hands above your head!"
The person in the chair slowly turned around.
Fadil al-Hamid, 67 years old, former teacher in Mosul.
He wore a heavy, dark gray wool robe, his hair was sparse and gray, and his face was deeply lined with wrinkles, but his eyes were exceptionally clear and bright, like two polished obsidian stones in the dim light.
He didn't raise his hand, showed no panic, and even slightly raised the corners of his mouth, revealing an enigmatic smile.
"You are here."
He spoke in Arabic, his voice calm and gentle, as if welcoming a long-lost guest, his gaze fixed on the wall clock.
"I've been waiting for you. You're four minutes later than expected. Did you run into trouble on the way?"
In the briefing room, the simultaneous interpreter's voice came through the loudspeaker, carrying a slight tremor that the interpreter himself was unaware of.
Everyone heard that.
Duke frowned.
The team members' expressions froze instantly upon entering the room.
Something is wrong!
He knew the special forces were coming!
This was a covert operation...
Marcus maintained his firing stance, but the alarm bells in his mind had amplified to the point of almost drowning out everything else.
So calm.
He has participated in 43 hostage rescues and high-value target captures, and has witnessed a variety of reactions from targets, including screaming in terror, resisting in a fit of rage, breaking down and crying, playing dumb, and even defecating and urinating.
But I've never seen such a calm acceptance, as if this early morning raid was nothing more than a scheduled visit.
Where is Maisul?
Marcus asked, his voice clearly transmitted back to command via the helmet microphone.
The old man smiled, revealing his sparse but white teeth.
“He went where he was meant to be. You’ll never find him, just as you’ll never find the whole truth. You Americans are always like that, thinking you’ve seen the whole picture when you’ve only seen the part you want to see.”
"What truth?"
Marcus pressed on, while cautiously scanning the room out of the corner of his eye. Empty, utterly empty.
There was no furniture, no personal belongings, and even the dust was distributed in an unnaturally even manner.
The room has been cleaned, meticulously cleaned.
"The truth about Project Sower."
The old man's gaze seemed to pierce through the walls, across dozens of kilometers, and look directly at everyone in the briefing room of the Mosul base.
"About those who sow death on other people's land and claim to be sowing freedom. About those who create hell with laboratories and formulas and call it scientific progress."
In the briefing room, Lamont strode to the communications console, pressed the call button, and raised his voice a notch higher than usual, but still managed to stay composed: "He's stalling for time! Subdue him immediately! Now!"
But Marcus hesitated.
A hesitation of 0.3 seconds.
Twenty years of battlefield experience screamed in his mind—no, none of it is right.
The emptiness of the room, the old man's tranquility, those words, that symbol on the wall.
This is a trap!
There's definitely an explosive device!
But he didn't know where the fuse was.
The old man lowered his head and began to chant softly in Arabic.
It wasn't a verse from the Quran, nor a common prayer, but a rhyming text with strange syllables and bizarre intonation, like some ancient, almost lost dialect incantation.
What is he reciting?
In a briefing room dozens of kilometers away, Duke, who had heard the old man chanting sutras, turned to Lamont beside him.
He also realized something was wrong.
The next second, the old man looked up and his eyes met Marcus's helmet camera.
Then, smiling, he spoke clearly and slowly in Arabic to the camera, as if reading a final verdict:
"Witness it. Witness how the seeds you have sown will grow into thorns that will devour you."
Then he made a gesture—crossing his hands in front of his chest, left hand on top, right hand on the bottom, fingers bent at a specific angle, thumbs crossed.
"Stop him!"
For the first time, Lamont's voice showed a noticeable fluctuation.
Two Delta Force players rushed forward.
But it's too late.
The old man's body did not swell or undergo any dramatic changes.
He simply pressed a black button held in his left hand.
The button was always hidden in the folds of his robe.
The explosion did not start with the elderly man.
Instead, it came from deep within the building's basement.
First came a low, guttural groan, like the deepest part of the earth, then the entire floor bulged and cracked, and orange flames shot out from the fissures.
The shockwave was not horizontal, but vertically upward, like an invisible giant hammer that smashed the entire building's structure from bottom to top.
The concrete floor slabs shattered like cookies, the brick walls exploded outwards, and the entire roof was ripped off, thrown into the air, and then disintegrated in mid-air.
Flames and thick smoke instantly engulfed everything.
In the briefing room, all the screens simultaneously turned into a blinding white blur, then flickered a few times before turning into dense static.
The audio channel was filled with the deafening roar of an explosion, followed by the sound of building materials collapsing and shattering, the shrill whistling of twisting metal, a brief, suffocating silence, and finally the hissing of static electricity in the background.
The drone footage resumed after three seconds.
From above, the entire two-story building has disappeared, replaced by a large pit 15 meters in diameter and 3 meters deep, with twisted steel bars, broken concrete blocks and burning wood piled up around its edges.
Thermal imaging showed more than a dozen heat sources in the ruins, but most of them were no longer moving, with only three or four heat sources at the edge slowly and laboriously crawling.
Duke stood still, motionless.
His hand was still on the radio, his fingers in the position of pressing the call button.
His face was expressionless.
But something deep inside his eyes went out, like a light that had been turned off.
He slowly, extremely slowly, raised his hand, pressed the communication button, and his voice was unusually calm, eerily calm: "Medical team, deploy immediately. All standby units, prioritize rescuing survivors, control the scene, and block all access routes. Execute immediately."
Then he released the call button, turned around, and glanced at everyone in the briefing room.
His gaze lingered on Song Heping's face for half a second, his eyes revealing a bottomless emptiness.
Then he looked away and looked at Lamont.
Lemont stood by the wall, his face extremely grim.
“Clean up the scene,” Duke continued. “Take a headcount for casualties, recover all…recoverable bodies. Set up a temporary morgue. Notify Washington. And…”
He paused, a pause that lasted only two seconds but felt like an hour.
“I need to confirm the identity of the deceased. I need to know if the person below is indeed Fadil al-Hamid.”
Song Heping understood the weight of those words.
If the deceased was Hamid himself, then this was a tragic act of suicidal resistance.
But what if the deceased wasn't Hamid?
What if this is just a stand-in, a decoy, an actor who puts his life on the line?
That means the entire operation was manipulated from beginning to end.
This means that someone meticulously designed this trap, using the lives of several Delta Force members to convey a message and complete a ritual.
He turned and left the briefing room, no longer looking at the ruins on the screen.
The corridor was already filled with the sounds of running, shouting, and radio calls.
He returned to his room, closed the door, locked it, drew the curtains, and sat down in the darkness again.
Outside the window, the sound of helicopter rotors grew louder and louder as they approached.
The medical rescue team is taking off, its red navigation lights flashing in the pre-dawn darkness.
The base's alarm system began playing a loop of alert escalation notifications, and a mechanical female voice echoed through the corridors.
Everything was so surreal.
Asking for a monthly ticket!
(End of this chapter)