Black Operations- the Spec-Ops Action Pack

by Eric Meyer

  My aircraft! I still owe the bank money for this valuable machine.

  Then she realized the absurdity of that thought and concentrated on getting off the ground. Something she’d only done once before, and with her father beside her, a qualified pilot telling each move to make.

  She pulled on the control column too hard; the nose went up and then smacked down onto the strip. Her father’s words came back to her.

  Ease back on the stick. Keep every movement gentle, coax the aircraft into the air, don’t try and beat it off the ground with a big stick. That’s it, smooth, easy going. Good.

  The Otter came unstuck and rose into the air. She could see flashes on the ground. They were shooting at the fleeing aircraft to stop them escaping. Their chances of a hit were poor. The range was already lengthening, and the computation of speed, angles, and offset were too complicated for accurate shooting. Meter by meter the Otter rose into the sky, and she kept the throttle at full revs, gaining height and distance from the nightmare they were leaving behind.

  She felt exhilarated. She’d done it. After only one flying lesson, she’d managed to get the aircraft into the air. She glanced around at Bob Crawford and smiled with relief, expecting a compliment. “We made it.”

  “Yep, you did good. Where do you intend to land?”

  Land! Dear God, I haven’t given that any thought. Where do I land? How do I land? What do I do?

  She calmed her racing thoughts and told him part of the truth. “I don’t know where to land, sorry. I didn’t think of that. All I had in mind was to get away.”

  He nodded. It was a reasonable explanation. “We’ll think of something. I’m sorry about your house.”

  She grimaced. “It’s just a question of time and money.”

  But there won’t be any money. We got away from the men trying to kill us, but if I come back, they’ll still be there. And the Afghan government will seize everything I own. Will I ever come back?

  She looked down through the window, and her stomach churned. The Islamists were moving around the outside the remains of her home. They were shooting rockets into the building, one by one, and already it looked as if it had been the target of a heavy bombing raid. She felt the beginnings of a tear prick at the corner of her eye and forced herself to ignore her misery, the loss of her childhood home, her inheritance, everything.

  Akram in the right-hand seat touched her on the shoulder, and she jumped, but his face showed only concern. “I think you need to reduce the engine revolutions. The gauge is moving into the red.”

  She glanced down quickly and saw he was correct. She still had the engine at full power, straining for height, and she moved the lever back to reduce the revolutions. After a minute, the gauge began to drop, and she relaxed.

  “Thank you, Akram. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “You were busy. Listen, Ivan has an airstrip. It may be best to land there, away from this place.”

  “In Band-e Amir? I thought it was all mountainous terrain.”

  “It is, but a year ago he brought in a team of laborers, and they hacked a strip at the side of the plateau. It’s short, and not too smooth, but aircraft manage to land and take-off. This de Havilland shouldn’t have any problems.”

  She glanced back at Crawford. “What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “Do you think this Ivan the Terrible guy will be inclined to help us?”

  Akram answered for her. “He will help. I can contact him if you wish. He keeps a listening watch on the guard frequency, and we can switch to a low traffic channel and talk to him.”

  “We don’t have anything better to do,” Crawford grumbled, “Right now, we need help. Those bastards back in Panjab have us outgunned. If we’re going to beat them, we need to go in mob-handed next time. Besides, Stoner and Blum might still be alive and need help.”

  She stared at him, shocked. “You think they could be dead?”

  His answer was brutally frank. “Those Islamic sons of bitches started a war back there. Who knows? If they’re alive, they’ll need help. If they’re dead, there’ll be accounts to settle.” He looked at Akram. “Get on the radio. Let’s see if this Ivan is as terrible as his reputation.”

  While the Afghan used the radio, Lena concentrated on the controls of the aircraft. They were about to head to a remote, rough strip high in the mountains. Right now, she doubted her ability to land the Otter on the main runway at Kabul International. A patch of rubble surrounded by the harsh slopes of the mountains sounded more than a challenge, more like an invitation to suicide. She tried to remember everything from that single lesson with her father when she’d managed an assisted landing at Panjab. It would only need one tiny mistake, and they’d crash into the harsh and jagged rocks that waited to snatch their lives.

  Concentrate, Lena, dear God, I just don’t know how I can do this. I’m going to kill us all.

  * * *

  The house was nothing more than ruins, a heap of burning rubble. Smoke rose in the air, mingled with flames from the antique wooden furniture that still burned with a fierce intensity.

  Anyone caught inside the house is dead. Burned to a crisp.

  He thought of Lena’s sweet loveliness, her feisty intelligence, and cursed his inability to help her escape the conflagration.

  Unless she was inside that aircraft, and there’s no way of knowing.

  “There’s no sign of Bob and his boys,” Greg said. They’d stopped the Hilux behind a tumbledown cottage a short distance away and watched from behind a hedge. Armed men still ringed the house, and from time to time they fired volleys of shots either into the air or directly at the house. A violent and bloody celebration of the work they’d done this night. Of their magnificent achievement, destroying a woman’s home, probably killing her and her companions at the same time. Condemning local people to a future of poverty, misery, and disease. And war, of course.

  “I wish we knew if they were in the aircraft that got away,” he replied, “If they weren’t, and it was one of her pilots making a fast exit, well, we need to…”

  “Need to what?”

  He didn’t answer at first. Every path was blocked until they knew, one way or the other. Knew if Lena and the men with her survived the onslaught.

  “We need to know if they survived.”

  Or we need to locate the bodies and give them a decent burial.

  They waited and watched the victorious Afghans dance around the flames of the destruction they’d caused. After an hour, the shots petered out as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The fighters milled around the outside of the house, waiting. As the flames began to die, they started to loot anything they could find undamaged. The day grew warmer, and the Islamists tired of their sport. Two men appeared to argue, one of them in the robes of an Imam. The other, without doubt the leader of the warband shouted orders. The Imam stepped into a shiny SUV, and the fighters piled into a decrepit bus. Many of them carried looted furniture. One man even struggled with a white toilet pan and cistern he’d ripped out of the bathroom. The diesel engine fired up in a cloud of dense smoke, and the old vehicle followed the SUV in the direction of Panjab.

  They gave it another fifteen minutes, just in case, but the enemy had gone. Both men walked down to the ruins of what just the day before had been a magnificent house. One of the few survivors of the unending conflict that devastated Afghanistan after the Soviets arrived. Now it was like most of the others, a pile of rubble and a building site, awaiting the construction teams to build a new dwelling; or for foliage, weeds, and grass to grow in the ruins until the rubble disappeared forever.

  They searched long and hard. Each time they turned over a large chunk of masonry or flattened door, their stomachs churned at what they may find beneath. They found nothing. Greg gave a shout, and Stoner fought his way through the ruins, still tearing aside chunks of smoking timbers and broken stonework. Blum was standing at an opening in what had clearly been the kitchen. Twisted metal that had once been modern ap
pliances, a refrigerator and a stove were twisted heaps of metal, and a faucet protruded from a meter-high section of wall.

  “It’s a basement, like a root cellar. They could have taken shelter down there from the incoming missiles. I’m going down to take a look.”

  Stoner followed him into the dark space that had once been used to store fresh food. The remains of vegetables and even sacks of rice had spilled over the floor. Nothing. No bodies.

  “I think they got away,” Greg opined, “If the hostiles had taken them prisoner, we’d have seen them herding them into that bus. They must have flown out in the aircraft.”

  “Who was flying it?” Stoner mused, “Bob doesn’t fly, neither does Seb. Malik, no way, so who does that leave, Akram? The guy used to be Taliban, so forget it. That leaves…”

  “Maybe it was Lena,” Greg said, “It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

  He shook his head. “She told me she didn’t fly. Said she’d never had a lesson, except one time when she went up with her father shortly before he died. I doubt that counts. If she was flying that plane, she’ll never get it down, unless she flies to some commercial airport like Jalalabad International or even Kabul. The traffic controllers could talk her down. That’s about her only chance.”

  “So we’re on our own. I don’t need to ask what happens next.”

  Stoner turned his gaze on Blum, and his eyes were chill. “Khan.”

  Blum grimaced. “It would be suicide, trying to take him with just the two of us. Look at that,” he waved his hand around the destroyed building, “They don’t go in for half measures.”

  “Neither do I. Let’s go get the bastard.”

  Chapter Seven

  Most of the people had dispersed when they drove back into the city. A few angry glances followed them as they entered the built-up area, but the religious fury that had engulfed the town was spent. A few sullen-looking men were standing around on street corners. They wouldn’t have known the real reason for their idle poverty. They’d blame the foreigners, infidels, Americans, United Nations, Australians, and Chinese. Their own government, the corrupt politicians in Kabul, everything except the root cause. Islam.

  They had to look for a detour. The cops had the approaches to the central mosque covered. A queue of vehicles waited to be searched. At the checkpoint, they spotted the bus. The same bus they’d seen leaving the destruction at Stori Transport. The driver was arguing with an angry looking cop. He was no ordinary policeman.

  “Mutaween,” Greg murmured, “Wherever those guys go, there’s trouble.”

  Stoner knew he was thinking of the arrest of his wife, Faria Blum, when a corrupt Mullah in the hometown of Mehtar Lam attempted to bring about her arrest and execution by stoning. The men who carried out the arrest and attempted the execution were Mutaween, religious police and peculiar to Islam. Intended to harry and punish their citizens should they fail to observe the laws of the Koran, no matter how idiotic, no matter how medieval or misinterpreted, or just made up by some half-crazed Imam or Mullah. The law was the law.

  What puzzled him was why were they hassling the bus driver.

  Aren’t these the guys who did the dirty work at Lena’s place? The normal reaction of Islamists to mass killing and destruction by their fellow fighters is joyous celebration. Cheering, clapping, shots fired into the air, the whole nine yards. So what’s going on?

  Greg swung the wheel over and drove into a narrow lane away from the roadblock. They were still two blocks from the central mosque, two blocks from Mullah Khan. His death was long overdue. Yet, he’d surrounded himself with a small army of armed guards. Men who’d fought for the Taliban, killed for Al Qaeda, Mutaween who’d promoted the stoning to death of women. Killers all. Then there was Ivan, who’d said no, and threatened them if they ignored the warning.

  Fuck Ivan!

  Greg found a parking slot behind a dilapidated grocery store and turned off the engine. He looked at Stoner. “I won’t say this again, and I know you’re the experienced soldier, but we can’t fight our way through Khan’s fighters to reach him. They’ll shoot the crap out of us before we get near. I don’t care who you are and what you’ve done in the past, Stoner, it won’t be enough.”

  “I’ll go on my own,” he snapped back, “He’s going down, period.”

  “He won’t go down if they kill you first. Let’s look at this with cool heads. He has a big army of men who’ll die for the privilege of wiping his ass. They’ll kill us if we give them half a chance, and with those kinds of odds, that’s a real possibility. Where can we get more men?”

  Stoner shook his head. “I can’t stop myself thinking about that aircraft. If Lena were flying, at best she could only land on a long, flat, commercial airfield. She’s either in Jalalabad, Kabul, or…”

  “Or they crashed,” Greg finished, “So they’re out of the picture.”

  Stoner nodded. “There is that possibility, yeah.” He closed his eyes for a second, surprised by the anguish brought on by the prospect of Lena Stori’s death. A second later, he dismissed it.

  I have a job to do. I can’t leave it unfinished, not any longer. Although there’s a lot of sense in what Greg said. We need more men. We need Ivan. At least, we need his guns.

  He forced himself to concentrate on what he’d come to Panjab to finish, to kill Khan to avenge Madeleine.

  Another wave of grief rocked him, and again he pushed it to the back of his mind. First, there’d been Madeleine, murdered. Dead. Then there was Marina Tanai, the girl he and Greg had rescued from a notorious drug trafficker. Dead. And now Lena, just as he’d come to admire her, she may be dead.

  Dammit! If she was flying that aircraft, there’s no way she’d get it on the ground, even on a landing strip long enough to land the Space Shuttle.

  “We have to have men,” Greg said again, “Especially now Crawford and his buddies have disappeared. How’re we gonna play this?”

  “We need to see a man named Hamed, he runs an auto parts store. We’ll park the SUV and go see him.”

  He sobered as he thought again of Lena.

  Either she’s landed at a distant airfield, or the Otter’s a heap of twisted wreckage, after she tried and failed to land on some crappy stretch of concrete.

  He got that wrong.

  * * *

  “You want me to land on that!”

  She glanced down at the tiny landing strip. On one side, a sheer rockface, on the other, an area of broken ground, loose rocks, and a dark shadow marking the path of a dry riverbed. The landing strip was about the same length as the airfield at Panjab, although much narrower and little more than forty meters wide. The problem was, the sturdy de Havilland Otter had encountered turbulent air that swirled through the mountain. The wings dipped and rose, and the fuselage corkscrewed in the powerful currents of air.

  She twisted the control wheel to port to compensate for another violent gust. The powerful wind had almost tilted the aircraft on the tip of its right wing, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to regain straight and level flight. The strip was coming up fast, and she throttled up and pulled back to go round again.

  “What’s up? It looks okay to me,” Crawford growled, “Why can’t you land?”

  She didn’t need a reminder of her shortcomings as a pilot. After Akram made contact with Ivan, they’d given her a heading to follow, and she’d kept the aircraft on course until their destination field appeared in front of the windshield. That was when her problems started, when the vicious crosscurrents threatened to hurl the fuselage against the rocks.

  “It’s not so easy!” she hissed, “If you can do better, feel free to try.”

  “You’re the pilot, girlie, not me.”

  That was the end, the last straw. She was a wealthy businesswoman, not some cheap whore from a local bar.

  Girlie! I’ll give him girlie, the macho, arrogant pig!

  She was lined up on the field once more, flying low, too low to abort the landing. “Hold tig
ht, I won’t go round again. We’re about to land.”

  He nodded, as if she’d just stated the obvious. What else would she do when piloting an aircraft, other than land it on the nearest field? Except it was not so much a field, but more a nightmare fairground ride. She started to peruse the descent and approach checklist from the clipboard next to her seat, and tossed it to one side. It was all very well to check and double-check, altimeter, radio, auto-feather, descent speed, torque, flaps, fuel balance, and a score of other important considerations.

  Except on this occasion, there were only two factors she needed take into account. The first was to avoid clipping the rockface with the port wing. The second was to get the wheels on the ground and bring the aircraft to a stop, before she slammed into a wall of huge rocks, each one almost as big as a family car.

  She took a deep breath, throttled back all the way, and pushed the control column forward. Her eyes raced over the gauges, checking the rate of descent, altitude, and airspeed. The wind hammered at the Otter, and once more, she struggled with the column to correct the trim.

  “You may do better if you relax your hands on the column,” she heard Crawford say.

  She almost spat a sharp retort but stopped herself in time. It was good advice. She relaxed her hands, and the aircraft did fly better. The ground rushed up toward her, and she tried to work out when to pull back on the column to flare the landing. She was over the grass, and the rocks at the end were rushing toward her at an incredible speed. There was no way she’d get it down, no way. Unless…