Without Fear

by Col. David Hunt

  The first rounds of the AK-47s hit high, over their heads, peppering the compound’s wall, bathing them in reddish dust and debris.

  Just as Stark and Larson dropped to the ground, Ryan’s .50-caliber round parted the air like a whip from a distance of five hundred yards, tearing up the lead insurgent’s chest. The bullet’s momentum, the product of its 1,500-grain mass traveling at nearly 2,600 feet per second, flipped the man upside down, the AK-47 whirling in the air. The follow-up shot came precisely three seconds later, one second for Ryan to manually eject the spent round and chamber another one from the five-round magazine feeding the TAC-50, and two seconds to aim and fire. The full metal jacket round slammed the second rebel in the head, nearly decapitating him.

  Stark stood slowly, looked in the direction of his guardian angel, and touched the tip of his shooting finger against his right temple.

  Larson said, “Oswald and Whitman were pussies, Romeo. Drinks are on me.”

  “Anytime, Chief.”

  Martin and Hagen ran back to the courtyard but Stark waved them down while Larson knelt by the dead Tallies, noticing another of their captives soiling his trousers and crying.

  It took the CIA almost fifteen minutes to arrive in three black Jeep Wranglers. Six men and a woman got out, all wearing jeans and T-shirts and hauling bags. The team lead, who looked like he still sucked on his mama’s tit and who went by “Jones,” nodded at Stark.

  The colonel just pointed at the captives and showed the CIA man five fingers before rubbing the thumb of his right hand against his middle and index fingers.

  As his team disappeared inside the building, Jones looked at the zip-tied techs, then back at Stark, and said, “They smell like piss and shit.”

  “Shit happens,” Stark replied, walking away.

  “Dammit,” said the CIA man, before turning to one of his guys. “Find me some water, would ya? No way I’m smelling that crap all the way to KAF.”

  “Let’s go, Chief,” the colonel said, letting the spooks do what spooks do while his team fulfilled the last part of the contract by providing security for the site until Agency personnel left the area. Then Jones would call in an airstrike to blow the place off the map.

  But just as Stark reached the edge of the clearing, by the waist-high brush, Larson’s sat phone began to vibrate. The chief picked it up, listened for thirty seconds, and turned to Stark, his face suddenly gone ashen, as if he had just seen a ghost.

  “Chief?”

  “Sir, that was my guy at KAF Central Command. Apparently the Royal Canadian Air Force has launched a retaliatory strike on this place.”

  “That was the plan all along, Chief.”

  “No, sir, as in right now. Fighters are five minutes out.”

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s what he just heard, sir, and his intel is always right. A couple of IEDs killed some Canadian soldiers during an ambush an hour ago, wounded ten, and the hags even took three of the poor bastards alive—one of them a woman. Since Kandahar is under the command of Major General Thomas Lévesque, who happens to be French Canadian, well … there it is.”

  Stark had been around the block enough times to know that when it comes to a place like KAF, controlled by NATO but swarming with personnel from a half dozen nationalities, plus their intelligence services, the left hand sometimes didn’t talk to the right hand. So, as a precaution, he always tried like hell to have someone on the inside at Central Command to warn him when hell was about to break loose anywhere near his team.

  “Midnight!” Stark shouted into his mike. “Fucking midnight!”

  Martin and Hagen scrambled up the hill, SEAL style, with ridiculous nimbleness. Larson, almost ten years their senior, tried to race after them but lost them in the dark forest, while Stark, the oldest of the group, did his best to keep up while changing frequencies. “Jones! Get the hell out of there!”

  “Colonel?”

  “Fighter strike … in five!” he screamed, as he nearly lost his footing, rushing through the slanted woods behind Larson while getting swatted by the branches as the chief’s large bulk swept through the brush, crushing and parting vegetation like a mad gorilla. “Get your people out of there! Now!”

  Without waiting for a response, as his lungs and legs burned from the uphill sprint, Stark switched back to the team’s secure channel.

  “Ryan! Where … the … hell … are … you?”

  “Almost at the ledge, Colonel! Danny and Mickey are up here too.”

  Damn you, young guys.

  He pressed on, feeling the strain of his forty-five years—plus his old wounds, which had a way of surfacing at the worst possible moments. As he pushed himself up the uneven incline, his body protested the effort, reminding him of the shrapnel fragments still lodged in his lower back from some Colombian asshole ten years ago, plus the stab wound in his thigh from a mission in Bosnia back in the day, plus the ACLs on both knees from jumping from too many damn planes too many damn times. And there were those titanium rods and screws holding his left leg together from that misguided missile strike in the waters outside Kuwait City during a mission with the U.S. Special Forces in support of Operation Desert Shield. But his mind worked through the pain, ignoring everything, even the branches whipping him as he tailed Larson while checking his watch and seeing one minute gone by.

  Switching frequencies, he shouted, “Jones … you guys … out yet?”

  “Almost, Colonel. Hauling everything out now.”

  Hauling everything? What the—

  Taking a deep breath, Stark tried a final time to talk some sense into the stupid and inexperienced CIA operative before he got everyone killed. “Drop everything, Jones! Get out! Now!”

  And once more, he returned to his team’s frequency without waiting for a reply. In this type of asymmetric retreat, where the enemy—and any bomb, even those made in America—could be literally everywhere, you had to have a stop what you’re doing and leave right now attitude. Such a moment had arrived yet again. In his mind, Stark had already done the math on the explosive charges of your typical NATO missile, plus the ridiculous amount of Semtex he’d just seen—enough to level a few city blocks.

  But the colonel would later learn that, due to a mix-up with NATO commanders, a pair of Royal Canadian Air Force UAVs loaded with Hellfires would get there well ahead of the fighter squadron, with orders to fire as soon as they were in range.

  “Damn Canucks!” Larson cursed, as they reached their emergency rendezvous, a wide ledge some seven hundred feet above the compound, where Martin, Hagen, and Ryan were huddled by the entrance of a cave-like rock formation lining the back of this plateau.

  The master chief dropped the Browning and placed his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. “You know, Colonel,” he said, panting, “we all expect to die in this kind of war … probably any war … but you don’t expect it … to be at the hand … of your friend.”

  Stark didn’t reply, taking in lungfuls of air through his nose and exhaling through his mouth while checking his Casio. It had taken them exactly ninety seconds to get the hell out of Dodge, meaning he still had over three minutes left to seek even better shelter, and he could only hope that the CIA contingent had also—

  The blinding flash made everyone hit the ground as a vertical column of flames and smoke licked the night sky, visible for miles. The ear-piercing blast gripped the entire mountainside, shaking it like an earthquake, so hard that Stark thought his teeth would come loose.

  The shock wave propagated radially, tossing the operators across the rocky ledge, as the world seemed to catch fire around them. The energy bounced from the face of the hillside and joined the rest of the blast spreading in the opposite direction, toward the desert, colliding against the massive sand dunes east of Lashkar Gah.

  And unearthing the tip of an old Soviet bomb.

  2

  Divine Sign

  SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. FIVE MILES NORTHEAST OF LASHKAR GAH. SOUTHERN AFGHANIS
TAN.

  Mullah Akhtar Baqer traveled by night, avoiding all roads suspected to be under the surveillance of Predators or the even deadlier Reapers.

  The forty-year-old Taliban commander gave the starry sky a contemptuous stare. Most of the three thousand men under his authority thought of Allah, or the Prophet Muhammad, or simply of paradise and virgins when contemplating the heavens on such a beautiful and calm night. A waxing gibbous moon hung high and proud over South Asia, adorned by countless stars blanketing the firmament from horizon to horizon.

  But the magic or even romance of this moonlight-bathed arid wilderness, as seen from his side window, was completely lost on Akhtar, evoking only images of the unmanned aerial vehicles responsible for the deaths of so many of his brothers.

  And almost of my own, he thought, shifting uncomfortably in the rear of an old UAZ-469, the Soviet version of the American Jeep, appropriately nicknamed Kozlik, or “Goat,” a leftover relic from the war of his youth.

  He grimaced while touching the extensive scar tissue beneath his kameez, the long shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. Like clockwork, the muscle aches on his trunk and limbs had begun, along with mild stomach cramps. Soon the contractions would have him bent over in seizures as the pain squeezed his organs, ripping into his bones while perspiration oozed out of every pore.

  A glance at his watch confirmed what his body already knew: it had been twelve hours since he last opiated. For a moment he considered reaching for the ever-present canvas knapsack by his feet, but the rough ride through this switchback trail would not be conducive to using the Chinese pipe. He would have to wait until they reached their destination, which should be within the hour, hopefully before his symptoms worsened to the point of alarming his men.

  Sighing in anger for forgetting to medicate before leaving his compound, Akhtar took solace in toying with the gold ring hanging from his neck by a leather strap. But the breaking news that had pulled him from his nightly routine had distracted him.

  Faiz, his driver and nephew, negotiated the hairpin turns of the steep trail with expert ease, winding down the southern face of the mountain under the protective canopy of a variety of conifers.

  The mullah closed his eyes and tried to relax, taking a moment to enjoy the pine resin fragrance filling his lungs. Like the ring and the Goat, it reminded him of those glorious years when his people had defeated the Soviets.

  The Americans had been their allies back then, supporters of their cause. But five years ago those same Americans had almost incinerated him and his beloved Akaa with a Hellfire while he was riding in a convoy just like this one. Akhtar had reacted quickly, pushing Akaa out of the burning vehicle, sparing the man who had founded al Qaeda—the man who taught him everything he knew—from the flames that disfigured him.

  Akhtar shook the thought away as the distant lights of Lashkar Gah loomed over the western edge of the narrow trail, backdropped by snowcapped ridges lining the horizon’s rim as the range curved south toward Iran. Nestled between the foot of the mountains and the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab Rivers, the city was home to over two hundred thousand Afghans.

  But Akhtar’s destination on this starry night steered his three-Kozlik convoy away from the city and toward the vast desert dunes a mile east of the fertile strips of land flanking the shores of the rivers. It was there, by the edge of Afghanistan’s largest desert, that Hamid, the young goatherd sitting next to him, had been leading his flock to the edge of a water reservoir. If Akhtar were the religious man his jihadists believed him to be, the mullah would have called it a miracle that the boy had noticed the tip of a strange metal object protruding from the sand.

  But he didn’t believe any more than did the infidels—though no one would ever know it from the brutality with which he enforced Sharia law among his people. Unlike Akaa, and even his own brother, Pasha, true disciples of the Prophet Muhammad, Akhtar’s reasons for fighting this so-called holy war were quite selfish: under Sharia law, he was king. And for several glorious years, when the Taliban ruled this land, he had lived like a monarch, getting anything his heart desired—women, girls, land, and creature comforts. And total power over others.

  Until the Americans took it away.

  But it could all change tonight, he thought. The boy’s sighting had been reason enough for Akhtar to abandon his secret headquarters high above Lashkar Gah in the middle of the night. The mullah was responsible for all Taliban engagements with NATO forces in the Kandahar region, plus he was directly accountable to Osama bin Laden, his Akaa.

  It is the same location, he thought, ignoring another stomach cramp as Faiz turned the wheel, working the clutch and manual gearbox, downshifting as their descent grew steeper. The engine groaned, slowing them down while the oversize tires bit into the sharper grade.

  Akhtar grabbed the window frame for support as the Goat tilted forward, its headlights washing the rocky incline in yellow light. Half the thread of the 4 × 4’s left tires projected beyond the edge of the trail, over the gorge, while Faiz forced the right tires tight against the side of the mountain.

  Hamid looked out his side window and into the void, but if the boy was afraid, Akhtar never noticed it. Rather, the goatherd showed far more interest in devouring the naan and figs in the basket between them.

  In spite of his cramps, Akhtar couldn’t suppress a grin. Hamid reminded the mullah of himself at that age, full of grit, eyes flat and impassive, hardened by their way of life, his young skin already dark and leathery from the desert sun.

  And like Akhtar, Hamid was also growing up while his people fought off an invasion.

  The path flattened after a while, as rocks turned to sand, as they reached the foot of the mountain and steered the Goats across the desert, past dozens of sand dunes glittering in the moonlight. This also meant leaving the protection of the conifers, but according to Hamid, they were almost there, just beyond the impressive blast radius of the latest American drone strike.

  Akhtar frowned while staring at the distant fires to the east, still burning after twenty-four hours, where one of his largest IED factories had stood nestled against the side of the mountain. According to his scouts, however, the blast had also killed a number of CIA men after a team of Special Forces—probably SEALs—had secured the compound during a night raid. He had yet to understand why NATO had ordered a strike on its own people. But whatever the reason, and as much as it pained him to have lost good men plus thousands of pounds of explosives, hundreds of IEDs, and other raw materials, the resulting shock wave would be called by men of faith a gift from Allah.

  A divine sign.

  But for Akhtar it was simply a much-needed break in this war.

  Since the beginning of this damn invasion, the Americans had had the upper hand. Using their technology, the infidels continued to find and kill his people, forcing them into tunnels.

  Like rats.

  And on top of that, they were now arming warring Shia tribes, compounding his problems. This discovery could turn the tide of the—

  “That way!” Hamid shouted, pointing to their right at the steep and narrow valley formed by two immense sand dunes just west of them. A mile past the V-shaped rift, moonlight danced over the surface of one of many irrigation reservoirs fed by the slow-flowing Arghandab.

  The almost magical sight of the towering mounds and the glittering water beyond them, however, was lost on Akhtar, who felt his heartbeat rocketing at the thought of—

  Faiz swung the Goat sharply in that direction, forcing Akhtar and the boy to hold on tight as all four tires kicked up walls of sand and the vehicle slid into the turn, going around a shallow dune, steering them toward the edge of the mounds.

  Akhtar looked behind them, making sure that the two Goats continued following them. It was quite easy to get lost driving in the desert, especially while navigating between sand dunes, and at night. But the trailing Kozliks remained glued to him, per his instructions, the drivers ignoring the spray of sand on their wi
ndshields. Before leaving his headquarters three hours ago, Akhtar had all seats, except the driver’s, removed from the trailing 4 × 4, to use as a truck to haul whatever it was that Hamid claimed to have—

  “There, Mullah!” the boy shouted with excitement. “Right there! Over … there!”

  Jumping out of the Goat the moment Faiz stopped the vehicle, Hamid scrambled across the two hundred feet of sand separating the convoy from the rift between the dunes.

  Akhtar understood why Faiz had not gotten any closer. This was the desert, and sand dunes could shift unpredictably, especially these crescent-shaped dunes called barchans. At a glance, the angle of repose of the pair of dunes seemed steeper than normal, so any foreign disturbance, such as low-frequency vibrations from approaching vehicles—even loud voices—could trigger a crushing avalanche. And if Hamid was right and the blast did indeed shift the sands enough to unearth this metallic object, then that meant that the dunes could be unstable.

  But the fear of being buried alive was quickly overwhelmed by an enthusiasm Akhtar could not control—a boost of adrenaline that somehow even subdued his muscle spasms.

  He too leaped out of the 4 × 4, and went after the boy, who seemed to float over the sand, reaching the closest barchan.

  Akhtar filled his lungs with cold desert air, catching up to Hamid as he knelt by a handful of rocks stacked about a foot high near the point of inflection of the dune.

  The men from the other two Goats pulled up behind the lead 4 × 4 and got out armed with shovels.

  “Here, Mullah,” he said, tossing the rocks out of the way. “This is where I found it.”

  Akhtar sank his knees in the sand next to Hamid, as the parting stones revealed something resembling a metallic fin painted in a light gray color, like those in the rear of large bombs. Flashlights converged on them as the group made a circle around Akhtar, who demanded complete silence. Any sound wave could trigger a deadly slump.

  Using only their hands, Akhtar and the boy shifted some of the sand out of the way, unearthing a second fin at a right angle to the first one. The two were linked along their backs by a sturdy metal ring.