The Panther

by Nelson DeMille

  “No. We’re thinking the way we think, but Altair thinks differently.”

  Kate saw that the taser session had ended and she came over to us. “Any progress?”

  “No. He’s hanging tough.”

  “That’s enough taser.”

  I agreed and said, “This guy doesn’t want to rat out his chief and go to hell. Right? He wants to take the express elevator to Paradise.”

  Brenner nodded and said, “It’s not a choice between living and dying. It’s a choice of what kind of death he’s looking for.”

  “Correct. So we have to help him become a martyr.”

  Kate asked, “How?”

  “I don’t know. But Hakim does.”

  The gentleman in question came over to us and asked, “What do you want to do?”

  I said to Hakim, “It seems to me, Colonel, that Altair does not want to die a traitor and a coward. Right?”

  Hakim, who was probably both, had to think about that, but then he nodded and said, “This may be true.”

  “So? How do we make a deal with Altair that lets him tell us what we want to know, but also lets him into Paradise?”

  Again, Hakim had to think about that, and he replied, “That is difficult.” He informed us, “You are the reason for his stubbornness.” He explained, unnecessarily, “You are… infidels. He cannot betray his chief to you, or he will go to hell.”

  “Right. We get that.” In fact, Altair should have mentioned that himself between tasers to his nuts. He would have saved himself a lot of pain, and saved us a lot of time. Not to mention saving all of us some discomfort. Well, the PSO guys didn’t care—they did this stuff on their coffee breaks. Maybe, though, the pain was part of the process on the road to salvation.

  Hakim interrupted my thoughts and said to me and Brenner, “There is also an issue of the money. Altair rejects it, but he will want this for his family.” He explained, “It is a thing which worries the martyrs for Islam. Their families. So, Altair will give me his family name and I will promise that his family receives the money—in exchange, of course, for the information you need.”

  Hakim thought a lot about money, but he might be on to something.

  “Okay,” I said, “so how do we make all this work?”

  Colonel Hakim replied thoughtfully, “First, we must offer Altair two kinds of death. The one will be a bullet in the head, right here, and he will die a defeated man, a prisoner, and not a martyr who has died in jihad and who would ascend directly to Paradise. And also there is no promise of money to his family.”

  Got it.

  Hakim continued, “The other death, to die in jihad, a martyr to his faith, that is more difficult to arrange.”

  Maybe I should challenge Altair to a knife fight, but the old guy could get lucky and I’d be the one heading for Paradise.

  Zamo, who was standing near the vehicles and who had spent some time in Islam, said, “Let the old guy go into the camp.”

  Yeah?

  Hakim thought that might be a good idea and said, “Yes, he can be with the dead martyrs, his jihadists. He will pray among them, and find peace.”

  Great. But first he has to do the open sesame thing with the cave.

  Hakim continued, “When I spoke to him earlier, he believed two things—that God spared him for a purpose, but also that he had not achieved martyrdom as his jihadists had.”

  Right. A little survivor’s guilt. We can help him with that.

  Brenner said to Hakim, “Speak to him. But don’t forget what we need from him.”

  Hakim said he certainly understood, and he reminded us, “Do not forget what I need from you.”

  How could we forget?

  So Brenner, Kate, and I joined Zamo near the Land Cruiser to get out of Altair’s sight.

  Hakim’s goons sat the old man up, gave him some water, and Hakim began talking to him.

  About ten minutes later, Hakim came over to us and said, “Altair has told me that he believes Bulus ibn al-Darwish was in this camp, and that he died here.”

  That was not what I wanted to hear.

  Hakim continued, “But he has also told me that because he believes his chief is dead, he can now reveal the place where al-Darwish once lived.”

  That’s more like it. I think we all understood that Altair was bullshitting himself, but sometimes you gotta do that to save your soul, like me eating hamburgers on Good Friday and calling them veggie burgers. I mean, you can’t bullshit God, but you can bullshit yourself.

  We walked back to the edge of the basin and there was Altair, stumbling down the slope toward the Al Qaeda camp, going home.

  Colonel Hakim told us, “He will die here. And that is good.”

  Very good.

  “Or, perhaps, God will again spare him, and we may hear from him someday.”

  “I hope not.” But a deal is a deal, and on that subject, I asked Colonel Hakim, “Where is The Panther’s hideout?”

  Hakim looked off at the distant hills beyond the basin and pointed. “There.”

  “Can you be a bit more specific?”

  He got specific and asked, “Do you see that peak? The one that resembles the sail of a ship?”

  Were we getting directions to Noah’s Ark?

  It was hard to see much in the moonlight, but I thought I saw what Hakim was pointing to. Zamo, however, had his nightscope on it and he said, “I see it. It’s about three klicks, across some rough terrain.”

  Kate and Brenner were also looking at it through the lower-powered daylight scopes on their rifles, and they said they could see it clearly in the moonlight. Great.

  Colonel Hakim informed us, “Altair says there is a trail which begins on the far side of the camp. If you can locate that trail, it will take you to the other side of that mountain where the trail will ascend to the cave of Bulus ibn al-Darwish.”

  Piece of cake. Or a sack of bullshit. I asked Hakim, “Are you sure Altair was telling you the truth?”

  “One can never be sure. However, he swore this to me, and I believe he was truthful.” Hakim nodded to himself and said, “Altair understood that the thing I was giving to him needed to be repaid.”

  This place is starting to make sense.

  Brenner said to Hakim, “I assume you are not coming with us.”

  The colonel replied, “I see no reason for that, and I have duties elsewhere.”

  Right. Like a swim in the pool at the Bilqis Hotel. I didn’t want Hakim and his goons with us anyway, and neither did anyone else. We could handle this ourselves unless The Panther had a platoon of jihadists with him. I asked Hakim, “Would you guess that al-Darwish is alone?”

  Hakim replied, “Al-Darwish is dead, according to Altair. But if he is not, then he is in that cave, and he is alone, or perhaps he has one or two trusted jihadists with him. But no more.” He motioned toward the camp, indicating that there weren’t many jihadists left for The Panther to invite to his hole.

  Well, the only thing left to talk about was money, and I said to Hakim, “Whether or not we find The Panther if we find his cave, you will be rewarded as we discussed.”

  “Three million dollars.”

  And a small mango up your ass. “Correct.”

  Brenner confirmed that, and said to Colonel Hakim, “We will arrange to meet in Sana’a, perhaps at the American Embassy, or in your office. The appropriate people will be there from my government to arrange for your reward.”

  I lifted my foot, because the bullshit was up to my ankles.

  But maybe Brenner would try to get something for Hakim, and I guess that was okay. As with Altair, you do a little bullshit and a little chocolate ice cream. Point is, we weren’t out of here yet, and Hakim could be the problem or the solution.

  Hakim said to Brenner, “If you should capture al-Darwish—or find him dead—and you find yourself without means to transport him to Sana’a, I am at the Bilqis Hotel.”

  Of course you are. And the hotel is not charging a PSO colonel a rial for the room
. Life is good if you’re a policeman in a police state. It occurred to me that I had the right job, but in the wrong country.

  Brenner said, “Thank you, Colonel. I’ll let you know.”

  Actually, if we found The Panther, the only thing we’d have to transport was his pinky finger, and the rest of him could rot in these hills.

  I hate long good-byes, so I said, “Good-bye.”

  But Kate, a compassionate lady, asked Colonel Hakim, “Did you tell Altair that his family would be taken care of?”

  “Ah, yes, I did that. So we will need to discuss that as well.”

  I didn’t think Uncle Sam was going to pay a terrorist’s family a hundred grand, but they might pay Hakim something and Hakim could take care of that. Good-bye.

  But Hakim had more to tell us, and he said, “The family name of Altair—it is al-Darwish.”

  I hardly knew what to say, so I said, “See you later.”

  Colonel Hakim and Mr. Brenner exchanged salutes, and the PSO guys got back in the Humvee I bought for them.

  So, here we were. Alone at last.

  They say the journey is the destination, but it is not. The journey is the journey; the destination is the end. And we were near the end of this journey—and so was Bulus ibn al-Darwish.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  We took what we needed from the Land Cruiser and began hoofing it.

  The direct route to the head of the trail, if the trail existed, was through the Al Qaeda camp, but the camp was a hellish landscape of bomb craters, smoking earth, and dead bodies, not to mention unexploded munitions. So we began our way around the rim of the flat basin with the sloping hills to our right and the smoking camp to our left.

  Every hundred yards or so, Zamo would look through his nightscope, checking out the terrain around us. He also looked down into the camp and told us, “I see the old man. He’s wandering around.”

  Just as Zamo said that, there was a loud explosion and we all hit the ground.

  Zamo said, “The old guy set something off.”

  Well, I hope he’s on his way to a better place than this.

  We continued on and the terrain was a challenge, with ridges of loose shale-like rock that gave way under our feet.

  It took us half an hour to circumvent the Al Qaeda camp, and we were now approaching the far side of the camp where the trail was supposed to begin, according to Altair, who could not be re-questioned about that.

  We stopped and took a break. Zamo passed his rifle around so we could look through the nightscope and do what he called “terrain appreciation and orientation.”

  I looked through the scope, which lit up the night with a weird green glow, like I was wearing tinted glasses. I’d trained on a similar nightscope, so my eye and brain adjusted to the monochromatic image, and I was able to fully appreciate that this whole place was a wasteland, deader than the moon. Not even a goat. Also no sign of Noah’s Ark.

  I looked across the smoking basin at the place where we’d started, and I could see our white Land Cruiser still there, which was a good sign that our deal with the devil was intact.

  I passed the rifle to Kate, who focused on the sail-shaped peak and said, “Maybe another two kilometers.”

  We moved on, looking for the trail that we would have to intersect as we continued around the rim of the basin, but the ground was so rock-strewn that a foot trail wouldn’t be noticeable. Also, the thought occurred to me, and probably to everyone, that Altair had pulled a fast one on Colonel Hakim, or Hakim himself had pulled one on us so he could get out of here and go someplace nicer and safer. Did I promise him the money for services already rendered? Or for results?

  The A-team separated and doubled back, looking for the trail, but we kept one another in sight as we closely examined the rocky ground in the dim moonlight.

  I realized that this trail, if it existed, would not be well trodden. I mean, I doubted if The Panther invited a hundred jihadists up to his cave every night to play bridge and have a cigar, and I doubted, too, if The Panther made the trip down to the camp very often. So we weren’t looking for an actual trail but more of a starting point into the hills.

  It was Kate, with her obsessive attention to untidy floors, who spotted something, and she said in a quiet, enemy-territory voice, “Look here.”

  We went over to where she was standing and she pointed the muzzle of her M4 at something that would not be noticeable or remarkable in most places, but which here, on the moon, showed evidence of human presence; it was, in fact, a plastic bottle cap.

  Kate picked it up and passed it around like a found diamond, and we all agreed that it was fairly new, and that the litterbug, whoever he was, had left us a trail marker.

  So with our backs to the Al Qaeda camp, we had our starting point for the route that would take us where we needed to go.

  We moved away from the basin and toward the hills to our front.

  Kate, who’d kept the bottle cap as a souvenir, was looking for more, like Hansel and Gretel looking for shiny pebbles in the moonlight.

  We also looked for the plastic water bottle that had been attached to the cap, but that seemed to be it for litter.

  We had no second point to connect to the bottle cap, but as we moved on, the route became more clear because the terrain started to narrow between two ridgelines, like the narrow end of a funnel.

  The ground rose more steeply and the loose rock was making noise as it slid beneath our feet, and noise was not what we wanted, so we slowed up.

  As we came around a bend in the rising trail, it suddenly ended, and in front of us was a huge pile of rock, blocking the way.

  We approached the rock pile and it was obvious that this was a recent slide, caused either by God telling us to go back, or by twenty-four thousand pounds of high explosives shaking the earth like an erupting volcano.

  Zamo volunteered his rock-climbing skills, and Brenner held his rifle as Zamo picked his way up the broken rock with his Colt .45 automatic in his hand.

  There was no doubt that The Panther, if he was in his cave when those bombs hit, had heard and felt the airstrike, and I imagined that he knew he’d lost a base camp and everyone in it. His unanswered sat-phone call to the camp would confirm that.

  I had no idea what this psycho was thinking or feeling when his cave started shaking around him, but I hoped he realized that his world had gotten much smaller. That, and the lack of news from the goat herder’s hut, told him he was alone, with a problem. Maybe Perth Amboy wasn’t so bad after all.

  Zamo called down in a loud whisper, “Clear.”

  Brenner slung Zamo’s rifle across his back and we all picked our way up the rockslide.

  At the top we could see the continuation of the trail and the sail-shaped peak off to our right.

  Zamo took his rifle and scanned the terrain, saying, “Nothing moving… no scope looking back at me… There’s like a deep gorge ahead that cuts through the trail… about six hundred meters… I see a stone hut…” He focused in and said, “Nothing moving around the hut…”

  Brenner took the rifle and looked through the scope, saying to us, “It could be a sentry hut—between the base camp and the cave…”

  “Could be,” which meant we were on the right track.

  Brenner said, “We can go around it.”

  I suggested, “Let’s see if anyone is home.”

  We scrambled down the rock pile as quietly as possible and continued along the route.

  There was nothing moving in this dead zone except us, and the night was silent, except for the crunch of brittle rock beneath our feet. The high terrain around us made me start to imagine that there were people looking down on us, and I was expecting the silence to be shattered any second by blasts of submachine-gun fire. Whose idea was this?

  We were spread apart as we walked, but I moved closer to Kate and gave her an encouraging pat on the back, then continued on.

  Zamo was on point now and he raised his arm, indicating halt. We stop
ped and everyone got down on one knee, rifles at the ready.

  Brenner moved up to Zamo and they took turns looking through the nightscope.

  Brenner motioned me and Kate forward, and we moved in a crouch to where he and Zamo were kneeling.

  About fifty meters in front of us was the gorge we’d seen, and sitting in the gorge was the stone hut.

  Brenner whispered, “I’ll check it out.”

  Well, if you insist, go ahead. But I remembered whose idea this was so I grabbed Brenner’s arm and made it clear that I was going. Kate wanted to come along, but that wasn’t happening. I whispered, “Cover me.”

  I moved forward quickly in a crouch and got to the edge of the gorge, keeping my eyes on the stone hut. I flattened out on the ground and looked through my four-power scope to the right where the gorge descended between two hills. The moon was higher in the southern sky, and it cast good light on this south-facing slope. Nothing seemed to be moving uphill, and to my left was the hut at the bottom of the gorge.

  I focused my scope on the hut. Like most of these huts it had no windows, only a narrow, doorless entrance. There was a crude ladder going up to the flat roof, and from here I could see that there was no one on the roof, so if this was a sentry post, the sentry was inside, which didn’t make much sense in terms of vigilance.

  I made my way on my butt down into the gorge, dividing my attention between the hut and everything else.

  At the bottom, I crouched between two rocks and looked at the hut. There is the cautious approach, favored by most, and the let’s-do-this-fast approach, favored by me. I sprang out of my crouch and charged across the rocky ground directly for the door of the hut.

  I really didn’t expect to find anyone inside, so when I tripped over a body lying on the dirt floor, I was as surprised as the guy I tripped over.

  It was pitch dark inside the hut, except for a little light coming through the door, and I saw the guy getting to his feet at the same time I did. He’d just been rudely awakened, so he wasn’t at the top of his game, but he instinctively kicked out and caught me in the gut. I grabbed his bare foot, twisted it, and he fell to the floor, then scrambled toward the door, grabbing what looked like his rifle on the way.