by Dalton Fury
He hadn’t heard a helicopter, hadn’t heard English-speaking voices. The women outside began pounding the bread flour. The start of a normal day.
No, he did not believe these three Rangers had just walked in the front gate without anyone noticing.
Still, he could see the light hair and skin on the three men, he recognized the Wiley X sunglasses, the Casio watches—the guns and gear all looked general issue.
They wore Colt M4 rifles across their chests.
His emotions overrode his logic. “Holy shit, guys. Where the hell did you come from?”
One of the men smiled and nodded. Gave the thumbs-up sign.
Spike sat on the cot next to T.J.’s. “Thank God!” he shouted.
The other two men just stared dumbfounded at their three rescuers.
But T.J. spoke quickly. The military officer in him was taking over from the captive he had been. “There is a hurja on the opposite side of the compound, that’s where the tangos are billeted. Probably a dozen-plus, all armed, there will be more in the main build—”
He stopped talking as more men stepped into the doorway, blocking the light from outside.
Two long-haired Pashtun gunmen, Taliban perhaps, an al Qaeda man in a trim beard and eyeglasses, and an older European-looking man with gray hair and a dusty white suit. They all entered the room behind the Rangers. The floor of the cell was flooded with men now; the four Delta captives just sat shackled to their rope cots and stared up at the bizarre scene in front of them.
T.J. muttered, “What the hell is going on?”
One of the Rangers removed his helmet and scratched his head while turning back to the men behind him. He wore a standard military haircut, well kept and tapered. Light brown hair stood no more than a half inch on the top of his head.
The al Qaeda man stepped farther into the room, out of the doorway, and addressed the man in the suit in English. “Good. Very good.” He then turned to the Rangers, spoke to one of them in Arabic. The man took his M4 rifle from around his neck and held it out for T.J. to take.
Josh just stared at the man. No one held a weapon up in any threatening manner. He was being asked to take hold of a rifle?
Bouncer said, “Don’t touch it. It’s a trick.”
Roscoe disagreed. “Take it, boss. Shoot these sons of bitches.”
One of the Taliban produced a key and unlocked T.J.’s restraints. He stepped away and Josh Timble stood, reached out, and took the gun from the Ranger’s hands.
Everyone in the room stared intently at him.
Josh immediately dropped the magazine, looked into it, and found it empty. He pulled the charging handle back and found the weapon itself empty.
He looked up at the men. They continued to stare at him like he was a monkey in a cage.
“What the fuck?” asked Spike.
Timble racked the charging handle again while he looked at the men. A third time. He looked down at the weapon for a moment, rotated it in the bad light, then held it back up to the crowd in front of him.
“It’s a fake.” He tossed it roughly to the al Qaeda man in the wire glasses, who struggled to catch the empty gun. Then T.J. reached out to the Ranger, put his hand on the man’s chest rig, ran his hands across the stitching of the plate carrier on his armor, and looked back up to the men in his cell. “Phony. All this gear is counterfeit.”
The al Qaeda man deflated somewhat. The suited man seemed to grow defensive. He began moving forward to speak, but the al Qaeda man stayed him with a raised hand. Instead, he spoke in English to Timble. “Why do you say this?”
T.J. did not answer. Instead, he looked at Roscoe. “You still remember your Russian?”
“Sure, boss.”
He pointed to the oldest-looking man in a Ranger uniform, a cold-eyed blond of about thirty-five, who stood five feet in front of him. “Tell this motherfucker that I just called him the son of a Chechen whore.”
Roscoe translated, and immediately the “Ranger” leaped at T.J., knocked him down on the cot, and reared back to smash his fist into the face of the weakened American. The al Qaeda man shouted in Arabic, the Ranger’s raised fist froze above his intended target, and he climbed back up slowly. His face remained red with fury.
Josh sat up on the bed, shook his head at all the men in front of him. “Don’t know what your plan is, but unless you’re heading to a costume party in Mullah Omar’s cave, you’re going to get your dumb asses killed.” He laughed cruelly. “You didn’t fool me, and you won’t fool anyone else.” The faces of some of the visitors to the cell, obviously the ones who spoke English, contorted with fresh anger. All the men filed out and the door slammed behind them. In seconds the sound of the chain and the padlock, and then retreating footsteps and arguing.
Raised voices.
T.J. tuned into the voices, and for an instant he was certain he heard English with a German accent.
He had stopped smiling the instant the men turned away from him. His smile had been as fake as the faux Americans and their equipment.
“How did you know, boss?”
“Educated guess. AQ has used light-skinned Chechens or Nuristanis before. These guys didn’t look like any of the Nuristanis I’ve come in contact with. Not all Chechens speak Russian, but I figured if they were Chechen, the oldest guy would know enough to get the gist.”
He looked to his men now, still sitting on their cots, their eyes still wide in shock at all they had just seen. “Damn it, boys. That shit was fake, but it was close enough to get them through any security checkpoint I’ve run across in Afghanistan.”
They all understood the ramifications, and these men’s mood sank as they imagined what horror would befall their unsuspecting comrades over the border.
SIXTEEN
Pamela Archer stood on the tarmac, just a few hundred yards away from the runway at Jalalabad Airport. The U.S. Air Force controlled the airport and runway, but Pamela’s employer, Radiance Security and Surveillance Systems, had its Afghanistan base here, adjacent to the U.S. military installation. There was also access, via this tarmac and taxiway, to the runway itself, and here Pam stood among a large group of Radiance employees.
She was the only female.
All eyes were on the Radiance 727 landing in the hazy morning. It touched down, applied its reverse thrust, and kicked up a swirling cloud of dust behind it. Soon it turned onto the taxiway and began slowly heading in their direction.
While she awaited the arrival of the aircraft Pam Archer looked off to her left, toward her Predator drones. Her two babies sat sleek and still on the tarmac in front of their hangar. Pam allowed herself a little smile. Before joining Radiance Security and coming out here to Afghanistan she’d served twelve years in the Air Force, and many of those years were spent flying drones from Creech AFB in Nevada. But in the Air Force she and her birds were rarely in the same hemisphere, much less so close that she could walk over and touch them.
And these days sometimes she did touch them. She couldn’t help it. They were beautiful, and they were hers. Well, they were hardly hers in any legal sense, but she was in charge here, and she liked that. This wasn’t the Air Force. She called the majority of the shots when it came to the UAVs; she had her own team of systems officers and mechanics, but still she was the only drone pilot here at Radiance Afghanistan.
So, to her, anyway, they were hers.
She’d even given them pet names. “Baby Girl” and “Baby Boy.” Baby Boy had an additional nub that protruded from its belly, hence the distinction between the two.
But this was not the day to be sentimental, she told herself as she stood in the mass of beefy men while the stairs rolled up to the side of the 727 and the cabin door opened. An operation that had been in the planning and development stages for the better part of two months was about to be put into action, and although she was an integral part of the operation, although she had worked sixteen-hour days preparing for it, although she was determined to play her role and do it well …
she did not like it at all.
Men began filing out of the 727. She recognized many of them. They were Radiance paramilitary operators, and each man seemed to be carrying his own weight in gear. The first guy was an ex-SEAL who’d hit on her tirelessly all summer long in the base cafeteria. The second man was an ex–Army Special Forces medic; the third was also a former Green Beret, a quiet man from upstate New York whose bunk was decorated with artwork created by his young children. A couple of ex-Rangers followed, young guys who’d done well for themselves earning the larger pay of a PMC, a paramilitary company, compared to what they would have been making if they were still in the Army. A former marine followed these Rangers out onto the stairs.
All these men had been based here at the Radiance compound in Jalalabad, but they had flown off to Wyoming a month ago, all to help prepare the last man off the aircraft. A large contingent of Afghani nationals had flown off with them, but they were not on today’s plane. Radiance had allowed the men a week of sightseeing and shopping in Denver before they would return on the same aircraft. Peter Grauer had arranged this not out of the goodness of his heart, though the eight sore and tired Afghans would certainly enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience. No, for the purposes of operational security Grauer had decided he didn’t want the Afghans popping out of the same plane as Raynor here at Jalalabad, and shuffling around the same base from where the op into Pakistan would take place in just a few hours.
Pam kept her eyes on the cabin door of the jet, waiting to catch her first glimpse of the man she knew only as Racer. When he appeared she knew immediately, even though she had never seen a photo of the man. He stood there at the top of the stairs for a moment, looked around at the base, sucked in the jet fuel–infused air that must have brought back memories of his troubled past.
She’d been told beforehand that after a few initial rough patches, he’d aced his training in Wyoming, and he’d done it at the expense of his Afghan opposition. She smiled wryly with the mental image of eight dark, bearded men hobbling through the food court of a Denver shopping mall with bruises and lacerations, after spending three weeks playing the role of the Taliban force pitted against the man in front of her.
Racer was filthy. Someone had mentioned that morning that he had refused to shower, refused to eat American-style food in the time between the end of his first training evolution and the beginning of the operation. He wanted to stay dirty; he wanted his insides as well as his outsides to fit into the Pakistan border region where he would be operating. They’d said he’d spoken very little English, only communicated through his Pashto instructor, the woman in the veil who followed him out of the aircraft now, and down the stairs.
Pam Archer regarded the man as he stepped up to the crowd of men around her, the operational leadership of Radiance Security and Surveillance Systems. He shook hands and nodded with them, said a couple of soft words to Pete Grauer, her boss and the president of the company, and then he stepped up to her. She shook his hand; the skin of his palm was coarse and cracked and his fingernails were blackened. She was introduced to Racer by Grauer as the flight director of the Predator drones, and Racer thanked her in advance for her support of him.
It was surreal to be face-to-face with the man she had thought about so much in the past three years. To see him as she thought of him, as a human being. Not a code name. Not a number. Not an infrared signature on a television monitor five thousand miles away.
He seemed even more human, more flesh-and-blood, more fragile, than she had envisioned. He was smaller than most of the Radiance security guards around. More slightly built as well. It occurred to her that she could walk right now to the front guard post and grab the first man she saw, and he would be more the image of the commando that she had in her head than the man who stood in front of her.
Pam Archer had put the pieces of this man’s biography together, and knew that he’d been cashiered from Delta after an op that went bad three years earlier. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this man had been the leader of the Delta team that she had failed three years ago just a few hours south of where they now stood together.
Racer was ushered into an SUV with Grauer and they rolled off toward the Operations Center. Pam climbed into another truck and followed behind with a group of egghead analysts. She would be front and center in the meetings between Racer and this group, she’d do her job during the operation to follow, and she’d do her best to hold her tongue about her opinions.
But she didn’t like this op one damn bit.
She could not help but think that Racer was on a one-way suicide mission, another well-planned date with disaster, and she would be there, in the sky above, watching over it all.
* * *
Kolt Raynor said good-bye to his translator at the entrance to the Operations Center. She’d be returning almost immediately to Kabul, and for the rest of the day, English would be the language of necessity. She had helped him greatly with his Pashto; he certainly could not pass five seconds’ scrutiny posing as a local, but he would be able to understand much conversation and get his point across in most circumstances, and that would have to be good enough.
He was processed by security and issued a large red badge that he hung around his neck. The security director of the base himself warned Racer that if that badge ever came off, “even if he was in the crapper,” then Racer would immediately be considered hostile and would be treated as such.
There was zero tolerance around here for lax security.
A morning meeting would be held in the Bubble, a secure conference room in the OC that was scanned every morning for listening devices. The Radiance base was not as reliant on foreign workers as the adjacent American military base here at Jalalabad, where citizens from literally dozens of nations worked every possible job from fixing satellite equipment to ladling gravy onto mashed potatoes. Still, they were in a foreign nation, they dealt in and discussed highly classified information, and they were therefore cognizant of the need to adopt counterintelligence measures.
Pete Grauer offered Kolt a soda once they got into the conference room, but he declined. Instead, he sucked water from a CamelBak bladder that he held in his lap. There was a minute of small talk, and then Pam Archer entered the room and headed for a seat across from the men.
“You’ve got one hell of an operation here,” Kolt said to Grauer as she sat down.
“You better believe it. Our contracts cover the gambit. We’ve got reconstruction and development money, drug-interdiction money, black-fund money from the Agency. We are juggling a lot of balls over here at this base.”
“What kind of contracts are you guys working?”
“You name it. We are the biggest private security and surveillance firm in Afghanistan. We provide security, both mobile and static, for development and reconstruction projects.”
“And you have your own Predators?”
“Sort of a lease arrangement with the Air Force. But we have one of the best drone pilots running the show here in Ms. Archer.”
Pam nodded politely as she sipped coffee.
Grauer continued: “We use them primarily along the Pak border monitoring poppy farming for the Afghani government.”
“On both sides of the border?”
“Yes, but unofficially.”
“And what do the Afghans do with that information?”
Kolt caught Pam rolling her eyes behind her coffee mug. Pete just shrugged. “Not enough, unfortunately. Opium is a hell of a cash crop around here. We’re doing the legwork, and Washington is applying the political pressure, but heroin is going to come out of the mountains and plains of Af-Pak a lot longer than we’ll be around to monitor it.”
Raynor nodded. He’d heard this same lament three years earlier, the last time he was in theater.
Colonel Grauer looked at his Predator pilot. “A few months back Pam and I went to Kabul to meet with some high-ranking officials, basically to report on our progress. Ms. Archer joked that we could equ
ip the drones with defoliant-extruding devices, sort of turn them into unmanned crop dusters, and she could low-fly the poppy fields for three months and thereby cut opium production in half.”
Pam Archer looked at Grauer. “I wasn’t joking.”
Grauer said, “The Afghans looked terrified. I thought we were going to lose the entire contract.” Grauer didn’t look too happy about Pam’s plan.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Kolt remarked.
“Hell,” Grauer said, “we have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s no guarantee we’ll have any contracts around here this time next year.”
“Why’s that? White House wants to start sending troops home. I would have thought fewer U.S. forces would mean more work for you guys.”
“It should. But the Afghani government is courting the Taliban, trying to come to some sort of truce, if not an outright peace. There’s going to be a big peace jurga next spring between the government and the Afghani Taliban, and a lot of people think the leadership in Kabul will accept some Taliban terms to give them a measure of regional control. If that happens, God help them, and God help us.”
“No shit,” said Kolt. He’d heard about peace talks with the Taliban. To him it sounded like insanity. Making deals with a loose coalition of religious zealots who bombed girls’ schools and were prone to violent and protracted clashes against one another did not sound like a recipe for lasting peace.
It sounded more like madness.
More Radiance personnel entered the room. Kolt noticed that the open seat on his right was the last to be filled on his side of the conference table. He assumed that was because of his foul odor. Soon a crisp white sheet of paper was placed in front of him and he smudged it immediately with his soiled hands. It was his itinerary for the day. The first line under the heading said, “10:30 a.m. Initial Briefing—Bubble.” He looked at his watch and saw the readout flick from 10:29:59 to 10:30:00.
“Good morning,” Grauer instantly barked to the dozen men and one woman arrayed around the table. Just like during his days in the Ranger battalion, Raynor thought to himself. Colonel Grauer was on the ball.
