The Panther

by Nelson DeMille

  I dove on top of him, and he collapsed to the ground, but then he tried to lizard-crawl out the door. I gave him a roundhouse punch in the face, then another that broke his nose, and he was down for the count.

  I stood, yanked his AK-47 away from him, and smacked the butt against his head to see if he noticed.

  I heard something outside the hut, and I flattened my back to the left side of the door and held my M4 by the pistol grip.

  It got quiet outside, and I waited, knowing that my team was covering me from the top of the gorge.

  “John?”

  “I’m here. Abdul is on the ground.”

  My teammates came into the hut, stepping over the other guy.

  There wasn’t much to say except that the guy on the ground was probably Al Qaeda and not an innocent civilian, and that he had been sleeping on the job.

  We pulled the guy away from the doorway and sat him up in a corner.

  Zamo frisked him while Brenner held a red-filtered flashlight on him. The guy had a 9mm Browning automatic and a sat-phone on him. He also had a cracked nose and a split lip, and his face was bloody. Before Brenner shut off the light, Kate took it and shined it closer to the guy’s face. She’s really good with faces, even when they’ve had a nose and lip job, and she said, “Nabeel.”

  Indeed it was. That called for a drink. Zamo opened a bottle of water and splashed it in Nabeel’s face, then poured some between his lips as he slapped him around.

  Nabeel coughed up some water, then half opened his eyes.

  We didn’t have a lot of time to get to the point, so I drew my jambiyah and put the blade to his throat, noticing the bandage on the left side of his neck, like he’d cut himself shaving, or maybe someone else had tried to get his attention with a knife. I said to him, “You owe me for that bagel.”

  He focused on me and there was real terror in his eyes, which made me feel bad, like I was the terrorist.

  I said to him, “Here’s the deal, Nabeel. You have your choice of living or dying, and by dying I mean I’m going to open up your throat like a ripe melon. Understand?”

  He nodded his head without moving his neck.

  I asked him, “Where is al-Darwish?”

  He knew that was coming, and he said, “Please not to kill me and I say where is he.”

  “No, asshole, I say where is he. You say where he is. Where is he?”

  “He… he is in… maghara…”

  Brenner said, “Cave.”

  “Where is this cave?”

  “Here. Close.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I tell you… not far. You go… go to where sun go—”

  “West?”

  “Yes. West. You see where to go. Up.”

  Brenner took over in Arabic, then said to us, “He says there are two people with al-Darwish. A sentry who he says sits on a rock, and a person inside the cave with al-Darwish.”

  Hopefully the sentry didn’t have a nightscope, though he probably did, but maybe he, too, was asleep on the job. If not, we had to put him to sleep.

  I said to Brenner, “Do you believe him about only two guys?”

  Brenner replied, “We’re about to find out.”

  Brenner asked Nabeel a few more questions in Arabic and English, and Nabeel claimed he’d never actually been to the cave, but he did confirm that the entrance to the cave was on the hill with the distinctive ship’s sail peak. So that jibed with what Altair had said, making it a little less likely to be bullshit.

  I was surprised that Altair and Nabeel gave up the boss, and I was getting the feeling that those who knew Bulus ibn al-Darwish did not love him. Just like back in the States.

  Zamo asked, “Is this guy supposed to make a sit-rep?”

  Brenner asked in Arabic, then told us, “He says yes, and he’s happy to make that call now to al-Numair.”

  We all agreed that it was better if The Panther didn’t hear from Nabeel that all was well, because there was a chance that Nabeel would give the code word for “I have a gun to my head.” No news from the sentry sometimes just means the sentry is asleep.

  Nabeel, trying to firm up his life-or-death deal, also offered to help us find the way to his boss’s hideout, but it’s never a good idea to take the enemy with you on a stealth mission.

  Anyway, if we had time, we could have happily tormented Nabeel with the news about his buddies getting vaporized at the Sheik Musa meeting. Not to mention his camp being turned into a toxic waste dump. I would also have liked to take those photos of the Belgians, which I had with me, and shove them, one by one, down Nabeel’s throat. But bottom line on Nabeel al-Samad was that he’d come to the end of his usefulness.

  Well, the moment that we would have liked to avoid had come, and it was time to say good-bye to Nabeel.

  Zamo said, “I’ll tie and gag him.”

  We all nodded and left the hut. A second later, I heard the cough of the muzzle silencer, and Zamo stepped out of the hut, bolting another round in the chamber.

  No one said anything as Zamo slung Nabeel’s AK-47 over his shoulder and we moved on.

  Kate noticed that the gorge was littered with plastic water bottles and similar evidence that a lot of people had been there, and we concluded that this was a meeting place, like an amphitheater, maybe where The Panther rallied his troops. If so, his cave couldn’t be far off.

  We climbed out of the gorge and continued on. I had point now, but Zamo was close behind me, scanning the terrain to our front, sides, and rear.

  We were about a hundred yards from the base of the high hill where the cave was supposed to be, and I felt Zamo’s hand press down on my shoulder. I dropped to one knee and glanced back to see him focusing on something up the slope of the hill.

  He passed his sniper rifle to me and pointed, like a bird dog. I followed his outstretched arm and scanned the hill. About halfway up, sitting on a rock, was a man in dark cammies with what looked like a rifle across his knees. As I focused in, the man raised the rifle and began scanning the ground below him. I caught a brief flash of his nightscope lens as it swept past us, and Zamo and I hit the ground and rolled behind a flat rock.

  As I passed the rifle back to Zamo, Kate and Brenner inched forward, and I said, “Sniper.”

  They both nodded and kept completely still.

  Zamo was now refocused on the sniper, and Brenner inched closer to him.

  Zamo said, “We can’t move without that guy seeing us.”

  Meaning, permission to fire.

  We all understand that if Zamo took that guy out, there’d be another dead sentry who was not reporting in. On the other hand, there seemed to be no way around that.

  Brenner thought a moment, then said to Zamo, “Take him out.”

  Zamo seemed pleased with the assignment.

  Zamo knew, and we all knew, that he had literally one shot at this. The sound of his shot would be muffled by the silencer, but the bullet, if it missed the target, would hit rock and even the most clueless sniper would know that he’d been shot at and missed. And by the time Zamo chambered another round and re-aimed, the enemy sniper would be behind a rock and raising the alarm. Then he’d start shooting back.

  It looked to me like the sniper was maybe five or six hundred meters up the side of the hill, still within the nine-hundred-meter effective range of Zamo’s scope and rifle. But it wasn’t an easy shot because it was a night shot, and because rising or falling terrain distorts your perception of the target’s distance.

  We all sat as still as the rocks around us while Zamo steadied his aim from a kneeling position. There wasn’t a rock around that was high enough for him to use to steady his rifle, so he was aiming freehand, and I could see he was having a problem with his injured left arm, which couldn’t hold its position long. In fact, Zamo lowered the rifle, then sighted again, then lowered it again.

  Jeez. Come on, guy. You can do it. And do it fast before that bastard starts scanning the terrain again.

  Zamo t
ook a deep breath, then actually stood, took another breath, held it, then fired.

  He dropped to one knee and chambered another round.

  Brenner was the one to ask, “Hit?”

  Zamo glanced back at him as though he couldn’t understand the question. Finally, he said, “Yeah. Hit.” Like, why bother to fire if you’re going to miss?

  Well, Zamo was feeling good about himself, and I was feeling that we were very lucky and that The Panther was not.

  I suggested, “We really need to move it before The Panther hears all this silence.”

  Everyone agreed and we dispensed with stealth and caution and double-timed it up the trail that curved around the base of the high hill with the sail on top. We kept an eye out for what could be a climbing path up the hill, and after about a hundred yards Zamo spotted a small pile of loose rock on the trail.

  We all dropped to one knee and hugged the side of the hill as Zamo scanned straight up and confirmed, “This is the way.” He also said, “I don’t see an entrance to a cave… but I see, like, overhanging flat rocks…”

  I peered through my scope at the high hill and I could see rock strata jutting out, casting moon shadows across the face of the hill. The entrance to the cave would be under one of those overhangs.

  So what’s the plan? If Chet and Buck were with us, we’d sit here for a week with charts and diagrams, then call Howard and ask him to call Washington for clearance. But I had a better plan—go up the hill, find the cave, kill The Panther, go down the hill.

  Brenner, however, had a few add-ons—Zamo was to stay here and cover our backs, then he, me, and Kate would go up and look for the entrance to the cave, but only one of us would go in. And who would that be? Well, whoever thought of this.

  Brenner whispered, “Watch for tripwires—flares or booby-traps.”

  Thanks for that.

  I went first, Brenner was behind me, and Kate brought up the rear as we began our ascent. The climbing path was mostly rock ledges, like a steep staircase cleared of loose stone. But now and then a piece of stone would fall and make a very loud noise, which I knew wasn’t as loud as I heard it in my head.

  I was happy with the small M4, which, as advertised, was light and compact, and I was sure it would be excellent in caves. The moonlight was bright enough to see the way, but not bright enough to see a tripwire, so I felt my way carefully, brushing my fingers around the stone ledges to feel for a wire.

  This was slow going, but the idea was to surprise The Panther, without being surprised ourselves by tripping a wire and getting blown to pieces. Or at the very least, tripping an illumination flare that would light us up like deer in the headlights, followed by a long burst of AK-47 fire.

  We had no way of knowing for sure if there were any such devices on the approach to the cave, but if I was living in a cave, I’d damn sure put something on the path to alert me to visitors.

  And there it was. I felt it with my hand—a taut metal wire about six inches above the wide ledge I was about to crawl onto.

  I turned and motioned to Brenner, who was about ten feet behind me, using the hand signal for tripwire, which if you’re interested is like pantomiming stretching a rubber band.

  Brenner nodded, and I turned back and did a crab walk carefully over the wire. You can’t cut it because it could also be set to trip if the tension is released. So you leave it, mark it, and move on. I draped the wire with my white handkerchief and kept climbing.

  Brenner got over the wire, followed by Kate, and we continued on.

  We were about halfway up the hill, which was maybe fifteen hundred feet high, and the slope was becoming less steep, and this had the effect of making it more difficult to see ahead to what was over the next strata of rock.

  Then something caught my eye to the right and I froze. It was a man about fifty feet away sitting on the same rock ledge that I was on. It took me a few seconds to realize that this was the sniper’s perch, and that the man, who was leaning back against the rock, was not moving because he was dead.

  I signaled to Brenner, who passed the signal along to Kate. They climbed to the ledge below me where they could see the dead man.

  I moved sideways to my right and got to the sitting man, whose head was tilted back as though he was moon gazing. I could see that Zamo had hit his target full in the chest, slightly right of the heart, but fatal nonetheless.

  The man’s rifle, lying to his side, had the distinctive shape of the Soviet-made Dragunov sniper rifle, which it probably was. More importantly, the rifle had a nightscope whose lens was still illuminated, and I reached out to take it.

  All of a sudden the silence was broken by a loud, piercing noise, like an alarm, which made me jump. Ringing phones always make me jump, and the phone rang again, then again. Well, it wasn’t my sat-phone, which was dead, so it was the guy’s phone and he was dead. If my Arabic was better, I’d have answered it and reported all was dead quiet here.

  The phone finally stopped ringing, and I looked at Brenner and Kate below me. Obviously the sniper had missed his situation report, as had Nabeel, and whoever was calling—maybe The Panther himself—was getting a little worried. And with good reason. We, however, also had a problem now. But there was nothing we could do about it except continue on and get rid of the problem.

  Brenner was signaling insistently that he would take the lead, and Kate was nodding in agreement and motioning me to come toward her. But I had come too far to drop back this close to the finish line, and I continued up the slope with my new sniper rifle. I got to the next ledge and used the nightscope to scan up the hill.

  Less than thirty feet in front of me was a huge overhang, a long slab of rock that formed the roof of a deep, dark shelter—a cave. I focused the nightscope and saw something move in the darkness.

  A figure suddenly emerged from under the overhang, carrying an AK-47, and I took aim with the sniper rifle. As I pulled the trigger, I realized the figure was wearing a balto. My shot hit her where I’d aimed, right through the heart, and her arms flew up, sending her rifle into the air as she fell backwards and hit the ground.

  The bastard who was still inside the cave had fixed my position, and before I could take cover I saw the muzzle flash a half second before I heard the hollow popping sound of an AK-47 on full automatic. A tracer round clipped my hip and another round hit my Kevlar and knocked me backward off the ledge to the ledge below, and I lost the sniper rifle. It took me a few seconds to catch my breath, and when I looked up I could see green tracer rounds streaking down the slope right above where I was lying.

  Kate and Brenner were returning fire, but they were probably low on ammunition from the shootout at the Crow Fortress and they weren’t on full blast. The firing from the cave stopped, and Kate and Brenner ceased fire. It suddenly became quiet.

  I was lying flat on my back on the rock, and I couldn’t see Brenner or Kate, but I’d be able to see anyone who appeared on the ledge above me, and I had my M4 on full automatic across my chest, ready to fire at anything that moved.

  Only one AK had been firing and I assumed that was The Panther. The other person that Nabeel had mentioned must have been the woman. I don’t know who she was—girlfriend or wife—but like all women around here, she was expendable, and al-Darwish had used her to draw my fire. Nice guy. And now The Panther was wondering if I was dead or alive. The name of this game is patience, deception, and surprise, and I was good at two out of three.

  The minutes ticked by, and I was concerned that al-Asshole was flanking around to our sides, or worse, he could be hightailing it up the hill, heading for someplace far away. But if Zamo was in a good spot, he should be able to see that kind of movement and take care of it. Still, The Panther had the immediate advantage of the higher ground.

  When you get hit, you don’t always feel it at first, and I didn’t, but now I could feel the pain where the bullet grazed my left hip, and the throbbing in my chest where the Kevlar had absorbed the second hit. I also felt some warm blood
, but it wasn’t gushing. Still, the hip would start to stiffen up when the initial shock wore off and the body said, “You got hit, stupid.”

  Another minute passed, and I was starting to think that maybe Brenner or Kate had been hit, but I couldn’t think about that now. And I couldn’t lie here all night waiting for The Panther to make a move—or a full retreat. So I took a deep breath, sat up quickly, and fired a long, sweeping spray of rounds up the slope. Bullets ricocheted from the rock as I dropped down, slapped another magazine into the M4, rolled down the slope, got up, and repeated the recon by fire.

  But no one returned the fire and it got quiet again. I reached for another magazine in my bush vest and discovered that I was out of ammunition. Shit.

  I drew my Colt .45 automatic and lay very still. I couldn’t figure out what this asshole was up to, but he’d gone from panic-fire to very cagey silence. Or he was in the next province by now.

  I yelled out, “Bulus! Asshole! Shithead!”

  He didn’t respond to his name, so I moved as far as I could along the ledge, still on my back, which was the only way to see what was above me without raising my head. I yelled out again, “Asshole! I’m talkin’ to you, Bulus. You speak English?”

  No response.

  Okay, time to do it. I yelled, “Cover fire!” and I charged up the slope as Kate and Brenner, off to my right, opened up with their M4s. I zigzagged across the flat ledges toward the mouth of the wide cave in front of me, popping off a few rounds from the Colt. Brenner and Kate were firing full, long bursts of suppressing fire into and around the cave, and the bullets were ricocheting around me, but I wasn’t drawing any return fire, so the bastard was either gone, ducking, or dead.

  I got to the overhanging ledge, jumped over the dead woman, then shoulder-rolled into the mouth of the cave. I lay still on my side and peered into the darkness.

  I realized I was lying on a very funky blanket. Some moonlight was penetrating the space under the ledge, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see that the carpeted floor was strewn with what I guessed was camping equipment. So this stinking shithole was the lair of The Panther, the mastermind of the Cole bombing, the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, and the target of the greatest power on earth. I mean, I expected something like this, but now that I was here, it was hard to believe that this crap hole was where Bulus ibn al-Darwish, al-Numair, The Panther, lived and plotted and ruled from.