Without Fear

by Col. David Hunt

  Nothing.

  Removing his backpack, Gorman rolled onto his back, controlling his breathing while trying to assess his situation—which his operative mind quickly boiled down to a single word.

  Fucked.

  He was alone in the middle of this damn poppy field, surrounded by a team of well-trained snipers just waiting to smoke him the moment he lifted his head above the layer of flowers fluttering in the breeze.

  So, yes … very fucked.

  And that was just the beginning of his problems. His team was CIA operating in Pakistan—as in they weren’t supposed to be here. They didn’t exist, and that meant no one would claim them or come looking for them. Unlike during his military years, there would not be a rescue. There would be no helos coming for him. There was nobody to call for help. The instant he’d chosen to transition from Army Intelligence and Combat Support to become an operator in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, he knew the day would come when he would have to rescue himself, and that meant—

  Gorman cringed as two more reports cracked from unseen shooters, the rounds slamming the ground to his right.

  They’re trying to flush me out.

  He was about to back away but then realized that was precisely what the bastards would expect him to do: to retreat, go back the same way he’d come. And since they had a pretty damn good idea where he had gone down, they would very likely try to cut him off at—

  Three more shots, all just behind his feet, and each originating from a different source. A fourth shot nicked the heel of his boot.

  Gorman scrambled forward while trying very hard not to think of multiple snipers with night vision scopes scanning the surface of the field.

  Crawling through a dozen feet of swinging plants and loose soil, he ran right into Ken Hollis, another one of Finkle’s go-to guys. The bullet had pierced his right temple and pretty much blown out the back of his head.

  Damn.

  Dragging the backpack, Gorman crept away from him and found the next member of the team, and the next, while more reports resonated in the night, though aimed downfield, toward his expected retreat route. And that told him that they could not see him in the poppy crop as he moved about.

  Probably because of the wind.

  It took him another minute to locate Finkle and Shaw, and the brutal reality struck him as hard as those sniper bullets pounding the ground around him.

  Everyone is dead.

  Everyone but me.

  As he lay there staring at the lifeless eyes of a boss who’d been nothing short of an asshole to him for the past year—and whose arrogance had gotten his team killed—Gorman’s tradecraft training gave him an idea.

  It was obvious by now that the shooters suspected he had survived, and they were trying to force him to the surface. So why not give them what they wanted?

  He crawled around for another minute, pulling the bodies closer together while inspecting each one, finally settling on Finkle.

  * * *

  “Are you sure we didn’t get him already?” Pasha asked. “I saw him go down after your follow-up shot.”

  “I didn’t hit him. He’s still in there,” Osama replied, regretting missing that follow-up shot, scanning the surface of the field with the binoculars, wishing that Allah would kill the damn breeze for just a minute. The constant swaying masked the movements the lone survivor would make when attempting to get away from—

  “There!” Pasha hissed.

  Bin Laden brought the PSO-1 over to the right, spotting the top of a man’s head, and he immediately shot thrice in the time it took Pasha and everyone else to shoot once.

  Multiple rounds found their marks and the figure vanished, but not before his head exploded.

  “Move in,” bin Laden said, while continuing scanning the area.

  * * *

  Gorman let go of Finkle’s body and jumped back when several rounds tore apart what remained of Finkle’s skull. He had held him up by the shoulders for just five seconds before blood, bones, and tissue went everywhere, spraying Gorman’s face and chest as the headless body slapped the ground.

  He wiped his face with a sleeve, fighting the nausea rising in his throat, taking a few deep breaths.

  Jesus, he thought, staring at the carnage while feeling compelled to mumble something apologetic.

  Sorry, boss.

  Slowly and with effort, he dragged Finkle’s remains over to the other four souls before lying sideways and opening the backpack. He produced a dozen M112 demolition charges—military grade C-4 blocks each roughly 2 inches by 1.5 inches and 11 inches long, weighing 1.25 pounds. He also grabbed a gray roll of PETN, a type of detonation cord made of flexible plastic tubing filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate.

  Using the SOG knife strapped to his right leg, Gorman worked quickly, connecting the C-4 with foot-long lengths of PETN and shoving them beneath the bodies. He made his way around the bodies before connecting the standing end of the PETN cord to one of the dozen remote control detonators in the bag, all slaved to a classified app on his smartphone.

  Pausing, he closed his eyes, hearing the distant rustling of approaching men. As expected, the snipers thought they had killed him and were sending a recon team to check. With luck, it would be the snipers themselves.

  Grabbing the backpack, Gorman gave his team a brief but heavy sigh. Assholes or not, they were CIA officers killed in the line of duty. And as such, the best way to honor them was by not leaving a single shred of evidence of them ever being here—nothing for al Qaeda to parade around.

  He crawled on all fours away from them and from the incoming sounds, checking the compass on the top of the SOG knife’s handle to move southwest for one minute, before once more rummaging through the backpack.

  He connected a foot of PETN to a single M112 block and a second remote control detonator, set to go off ninety seconds after the main explosion. He buried the block of C-4 in the tilled and moist soil, like a mine, leaving just the detonator exposed.

  Using the compass to navigate in a horseshoe pattern around his dead team, Gorman moved in twenty-degree increments. It took all of three minutes to bury seven more of the delayed single charges while keeping a respectful distance from the sounds of men still advancing toward his last sighting.

  As expected, the incoming threat proceeded with caution, slowly, methodically, but getting nowhere near the location of his team before he was through setting up the timed mines.

  Gorman turned southwest once more, clambering through the field like a reptile, ignoring his burning shoulders and thighs while putting two thousand feet between him and the explosives, then once more pausing.

  He wiped the perspiration off his face while catching his breath. Now came the tricky part. If he were to assume that the snipers were still scanning the field, they would be doing so with their scopes, which provided a fairly narrow field of view. And if he could also assume that they would be limiting their scan to the area immediately around the last sighting, to alert the team on the ground, then it was fairly reasonable to think that he could chance a quick look to check their location.

  But to mitigate the risk, Gorman smeared dirt and fallen lavender-colored petals on his head and forehead, while also shoving the ends of fallen stems between his neck and the top of the Kevlar vest to break up the shape of his head.

  Very slowly, he got on his knees and rose just enough for his eyes to break the fluttering layer of poppy flowers.

  Slowly and quite methodically, he scanned the surface in a slow circular motion, pausing every twenty or so degrees, like a submarine skipper with a periscope.

  There.

  He spotted their shadows waist deep in the poppy, coming from the northern edge of the field. There were seven of them, dark and loose tunics swirling in the breeze, heads rounded off with pakols, hands clutching the unmistakable shapes of AK-47s and their forty-round curved magazines. And that meant they were probably not the snipers, which further meant the area ahead of the incoming rebe
ls was being scanned quite carefully.

  Feeling damn glad he had taken the precaution to camouflage his head and keep it attached to his neck, Gorman tracked the shadows as they approached the kill zone. But he decided not to keep his body still. Rather, he swayed his head back and forth to the rhythm of the flowers around him, hopefully making it more difficult for a sniper to pick him out.

  The moment the shadows got close enough, Gorman lay face down in the field and opened the app on his phone. The image of a red button materialized on the screen. Starting the digital timer on the watch hugging his left wrist, while opening his mouth, he tapped the red button three times.

  * * *

  Osama had followed the team using the red star night vision binoculars, which amplified the available light and channeled it to the center of his field of view, turning darkness into palettes of green. Pasha and the other snipers did the same, but using their night vision scopes, ready to strike if a survivor tried to make a run for it.

  The poppy field was quiet, peaceful, almost resembling a rippling ocean as the wind swept over it under a yellow moon surrounded by a blanket of stars. And in the middle of it, like green ghosts, his men cruised toward the last known location of the survivor he had shot a few minutes—

  The sudden intense light blinded him as the Russian binoculars amplified the white-hot ball of flames erupting where his men had been a second ago, shooting it right into his retinas. An instant later a powerful blast smashed into the building, the shock wave shoving him off his sniper’s perch, tossing him in the air, and sending him crashing somewhere in the middle of the rooftop.

  His back slapped the metal surface hard, skinning his shoulder blades and elbows as the explosion reverberated in his eardrums.

  Stunned, Osama took a deep breath while trying to get his bearings, while forcing his shocked mind to figure out what the hell had just happened—while bright spots pulsated in his field of view.

  A Hellfire?

  But … drones are not allowed in Pakistani skies.

  Rolling to his side, he blinked, trying to clear his sight, but the flash had killed his night vision. Everything was dark, save for the massive column of orange and yellow flames licking the night sky, turning the middle of the poppy field into a conflagration. The fire cast a pulsating dimness across the rooftop, where he spotted Pasha, also on his back, hands on his face.

  Osama sat up with effort, swallowing, before standing and staggering over to Pasha, who was also sitting up, his round face tight under his short beard, eyes wide in obvious surprise.

  “What the hell was that?” Pasha mumbled.

  Osama lifted his gaze at the stars while blinking, wiping the tears off his sore eyes. “Not sure,” he replied. “A drone, maybe … Or perhaps…”

  Realizing the other possibility, Osama rushed to the edge of the roof again and glared at the field. Although his night vision was shot and white spots still peppered the center of his field of view, the fire washed most of the surrounding farmland in shades of orange.

  And at its farther end, between the fire and Darband Road, which connected the agricultural region to the northwest section of Haripur, he spotted a figure running.

  * * *

  Bill Gorman dashed through the night like a gazelle that had just pissed in the lion’s den.

  He ran for his life, gulping lungfuls of cold air, his eyes fixed on the road and the assortment of villages extending beyond it, sprinkled among farms and ranches surrounded by pastures dotting the north end of Haripur.

  He ran as fast as his legs would go, ignoring everything else—the inferno behind him, the heartbeat pounding his temples, the sweat dripping into his eyes, his burning muscles, and his drying throat.

  But he did allow a quick glance at his digital watch.

  Thirty seconds left.

  He pressed on, his back tingling in anticipation of a sniper’s bullet. But he had to trust the optics of his counterattack, the logic of his tradecraft. Anyone using night vision equipment should be momentarily blinded, in shock and pain, probably rubbing their eyes while wondering what the hell had hit them.

  The blast had been more powerful than he had expected, lobbing him across the poppy field like a rag doll even at a distance of almost two thousand feet. But the soft soil and the vegetation had cushioned him, allowing him to leap to his feet and take off like an Olympic sprinter.

  Twenty seconds.

  He charged ahead, believing in his training, in the countermeasures drilled into him, both at Army Intelligence and at the Agency.

  Ten seconds.

  He thought about hitting the ground again but decided that he had already gained enough distance from those buried charges to fear any significant shock wave.

  * * *

  Osama worked quickly, reaching for his SVD and resting it back on the ledge overlooking the field. He acquired the runaway figure easily through the PSO-1, thanks to the scope’s night vision feature, which amplified the dim orange light reaching the opposite edge of the field.

  The bullet drop compensation elevation turret in the POS-1 reticle showed his target slightly smaller than the 10 marking, meaning just beyond a thousand yards. But the SVD could still make the shot, thanks to the unusually powerful 7N14 charge inside each cartridge in his magazine.

  While Pasha stood by his side, acting as his spotter with the red star binoculars, Osama settled his breathing, ignoring his throbbing back and a flaring headache. He made a slight adjustment to the BDC and positioned his mark directly on the center chevron while exhaling and—

  Multiple blasts erupted in the night like cones of fire, the flashes shooting through the reticle’s advanced optics, piercing his vision again just before another shock wave pushed him back, though not as hard as that first one.

  He landed on his butt, stunned, the SVD still in his hands, while Pasha, who had been standing, took a harder hit and rolled past him, landing on his side a dozen feet from him.

  Mustering strength, and while Pasha groaned behind him, Osama stood and staggered to the edge of the rooftop, his aching eyes staring at the multiple fires spreading across the field, becoming a single blaze kindled by the breeze. It created a wall of fire and smoke that shielded the runaway figure from him and his other snipers, who also stood by the edge of their rooftops staring at the inferno.

  Closing his eyes, he breathed in and out, trying to quench his growing anger at the infidel who had managed to outsmart—

  The cell phone in his pocket vibrated twice, signaling a new message.

  He frowned. Only a handful on this earth knew the number, and they all knew to use it only in an emergency, as one of his generals had done that afternoon when getting word of the incoming termination team.

  Reaching into his pocket, he stared at it a moment. The message was a photo of a Russian pilot’s ring. And below it read:

  FOUND WHAT WE LOOKED FOR THAT NIGHT.

  NEED ASSISTANCE TO ASSESS ITS CONDITION.

  Osama stared at it, then at Pasha, who was standing, dusting off his tunic and pants, then back at the message.

  Could it be?

  “I will find him, Akaa,” his nephew hissed while walking up to him and glaring at the furnace below, the Remington in his right hand. “I will find him and peel off his skin on YouTube.”

  Osama continued staring at the message while his mind grasped its profound significance, the reality of having control of a weapon with the power to destroy hundreds of World Trade Centers—an entire city full of infidels.

  He closed his eyes, recalling that night in the mountains north of Lashkar Gah. He had been fighting with the mujahideen after leaving his family in Riyadh, where he had been born to billionaire Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Osama had studied economics at King Abdulaziz University in Riyadh before joining the Afghan resistance in 1979 to fight against the Soviet occupation.

  That night in 1988, as the decadelong war drew to an end, than
ks in part to the military aid provided by the same Americans who had tried to kill him tonight, his team had spent many nights searching for the missing bomb. His old CIA trainer, the Ba’i, thought the weapon important enough to risk leaving the protection of the mountains to find it.

  But we never did.

  “Akaa? Is everything all right?”

  Osama turned to his nephew, dropping his gaze to the muscular warrior’s waistband, which holstered the same Makarov pistol from that night.

  “I will find him, Akaa,” Pasha hissed again. “And I will—”

  “Not you,” he replied. “You have a new mission.”

  “A new … Wait, what are you talking about? That bastard just—”

  “And we will find him, Pasha,” Osama said, placing a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “But not you.”

  Before Pasha could reply, Osama showed him the message from Akhtar.

  5

  Alternate Plan

  HARIPUR. FIFTEEN MILES NORTHEAST OF ISLAMABAD. PAKISTAN.

  Gorman reached the edge of the poppy field, covered in mud and perspiration. Panting, he took a knee, hiding in the foliage, peering up and down Darband Road while he caught his breath. The two-way paved street leading into town smelled of cow manure and was nearly deserted.

  Not for long.

  Villagers from surrounding farms raced toward the field, and he could hear the distant alarms of the Haripur’s municipal fire brigades. Poppy was essential to the local economy, so much effort would be devoted to cleaning up the mess he had made. Soon this place would be jam-packed with villagers, and if he had learned one thing after operating in the region, it was that al Qaeda had eyes and ears everywhere. He would not last a minute in the open while wearing his black tactical gear, smeared in soil and blood.

  Unfortunately, Finkle’s exit strategy had not been ideal—to which Gorman had also objected, to no avail. The Toyota RAV4s they had used to drive up from Islamabad were parked a kilometer away, hidden behind a cluster of trees, fully fueled and ready for their getaway.

  But he had to get to them first, and that meant a change of clothes.

  Gorman’s answer came a minute later, when a group of farmers ran up the road, hauling picks and shovels. He watched them go inside the field a couple hundred feet from where he knelt.