by Dalton Fury
Raynor nodded, picturing the scene.
“The compound was full of Zar’s men, no surprise there, but there were a couple of foreign guys. Westernized assholes. Turks, he thinks. Jamal thought the water might be for them, but there was too much of it. After his third trip to Shataparai he was contacted on his cell phone, ordered to go to a pharmacy in Peshawar, pick up a package, and deliver it to the compound. He sneaked a peek as he was bringing it out. It was antibiotics. Western stuff. Not something that would normally be used around here, or even known about around here.”
“That’s it?”
“No. One of the guards is kind of a dolt, apparently. Five weeks ago the guy was making conversation while Jamal was hand pumping water into their tank. The guy said there were some Westerners in the compound, they were prisoners, and the Taliban and al Qaeda were fighting over them. Zar protected them from both factions, but was trying to rid himself of the burden of the prisoners. He followed Pashtunwali, but he didn’t want to get in the middle of a fight between those two goon squads.
“The next day, Jamal went to the U.S. embassy.”
“So neither you nor any Western intelligence agency has ever worked with Jamal before that?”
Kopelman did not answer directly. Instead, he said, “I’ve been working with Pashtuns since I was a zit-faced punk passing them Stingers in the eighties to knock down Russian Hinds. I know the Pashtuns. I’ve looked in this kid’s eyes. He’s telling the truth. He’s a loyal agent.”
“Why would he work with us?”
Kopelman just looked off into the empty space toward the rear of the aircraft’s cabin. “He’s got his reasons. Good ones.” A pause. “Jamal is as solid a source as I’ve ever had. I’d stake my life on it.”
Or mine, at least, thought Kolt.
Just then the loadmaster leaned into the conversation. “We’re ready to go.”
Kopelman stood, shook Raynor’s gloved hand again. “See you in Pesh.”
“Expect it,” replied Kolt with a tone that conveyed both the intensity brought on with his game face and his continued annoyance that Bob had been less than forthright about some of the details of this operation.
Kopelman’s large body turned away. Behind it Raynor saw Grauer leaning inside the side door of the aircraft.
He had to shout over the three spinning Pratt & Whitney turbofans. “Good luck, Racer!”
Kolt just nodded to his former commanding officer. Said, “I’ll get it done.”
“I know you will.” Grauer turned away. The loadmaster shut and sealed the hatch, and then put on his headset to communicate with the cockpit crew.
Kolt Raynor suddenly felt extremely alone.
* * *
He rehearsed his actions in the air over and over inside the plane. Old habits learned years earlier in a Delta recce troop were hard to break, and this time he was his own jumpmaster. He stood up on the shiny cold metal flooring and recited the jump commands. His black assault boots grabbed the floor like glue. Underneath the flight suit and the black Patagonia long underwear, Kolt was drenched from head to toe: a combination of nerves, altitude, prebreathing on the oxygen console, and the double layer of clothing he knew he would need at twenty-five thousand feet over the Pakistani badlands.
He spoke aloud, but he alone could hear his words. “Fly flat and stable, keep legs slightly bent, don’t backslide, check altimeter, check left, front, and right, clear my immediate airspace, check altimeter, wave off fellow jumpers, arch back, pull rip cord, brace for severe jolt, and pray for good canopy.”
Kolt thought about what he’d just said. “Wave off fellow jumpers?” Kolt looked toward the loadmaster, who was busy stowing seats and snapping into his safety line. He wore an Army olive green flight suit and green Nomex gloves similar to Kolt’s. But he also wore a large gray helmet with a full plastic face piece to protect his eyes. Kolt was pleased he hadn’t heard him say that. The engine roar all but drowned out his entire voice.
Kolt lost himself in his thoughts. His memory bounced back several years to his last high-altitude jump. The skies over Iraq treated him well back then. He prayed for the same this time around, even though, this time, he would be jumping alone. He much preferred the feeling of heading into harm’s way head-on knowing he had a team of professionals heading in with him.
Soon the loadmaster shook Kolt’s shoulder and signaled it was time to go. He unhooked Kolt’s green air hose from the oxygen console and hooked him to the bailout bottle on his left hip. Kolt stood and moved aft as a set of stairs lowered into the slipstream below the tail of the 727. He turned around, facing the front of the plane, and gave a brief thumbs-up to the loadmaster, before slowly backing down the stairs until he could no longer see the man or the cabin. He stood by at the bottom of the stairs, enveloped in the incredible noise of the wind blast. He held tight on the rail, kept his eyes fixed through his goggles on the caution lights next to him.
Red. Red. Red.
Green.
Kolt pushed backward, kept his head up, dropped a few feet until his legs hit the slipstream, which slammed them back and up, turning his body horizontal. The wind smashed into his face and chest, the cold blast against his oxygen mask and goggles biting through the seams like fat needles puncturing his skin.
He fell facedown toward the black badlands below him.
Even in the hottest of summer months, the temperature at this altitude can send icicles through a jumper’s veins. This visit was in early November. At his current altitude he was floating in twenty-degree weather.
Out of habit, Kolt counted out loud. His words vibrated behind his oxygen mask up to his earlobes. “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, pull!” Kolt arched his back hard, kept his left arm half bent out in front of his head to maintain balance, and reached back to his right shoulder for the silver ripcord handle. He gave it a vigorous tug, pushing out and away at 60 degrees.
Thankful for the good canopy above him that blocked his view of the stars, Kolt reached up high for his left toggle, pulled it down to head level, and arced in a 180-degree turn. He turned his head to the left to see the 727’s lights being swallowed in the distance by the dark night. The big bird would be on final approach over Jalalabad not long after Raynor’s boots touched the earth. A few seconds later he checked his small compass on his right wrist to confirm he was heading due east.
At twenty thousand feet above the tribal region of Pakistan, just east of the Afghanistan border, Kolt easily identified the lights of Peshawar in the far distance. So far so good.
Kolt’s next waypoint was the lights of the small village of Landi Kotal, off his left shoulder. He strained under a moonless night to locate two more scattered towns along the N5, the highway through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. He thought he might be a little north of his route, so he pulled on the right toggle and shifted to the right twenty degrees.
Kolt turned his left wrist over and checked his altimeter—thirteen thousand feet. Suddenly, Kolt’s left side dropped as if he was no longer being suspended from above. He felt like a puppet with only one string. Kolt struggled to right himself, but before he could manage a hold on his left riser he started spinning rapidly clockwise. A free-fall parachutist might experience a partial malfunction of his parachute once in a lifetime. But Kolt had been there before. In fact, he had experienced the same malfunction years earlier during his initial operator training. He knew he had to act quickly or risk losing consciousness due to the violent uncontrollable spinning.
A dozen of his left suspension lines had snapped. He didn’t have to check his altimeter to know he was losing altitude fast. With his right hand he reached up to where his right shoulder and chest met and grabbed the red cutaway pillow. With his left hand he reached up to his left breast and found his oval-shaped ripcord. With solid grips on both Kolt yanked the cutaway pillow in his right hand from its pouch and immediately pulled his reserve cord with his left hand.
Kolt’s main c
hute separated and floated away as Kolt felt the obvious sensation of free-falling in an upright position. In a second, his reserve silk caught air, causing his leg harness to snap him vigorously in the groin.
Feel pain. Still alive. Must be a good chute.
Kolt checked his altimeter again. He had lost four thousand feet during the escapade. He quickly toggled to his left toward his drop zone, still several miles distant. He’d never make his rendezvous with Jamal on time now.
But Kolt had no time to worry about that—he had to concentrate on his landing. He reached for his right toggle, drew it down to waist level, and executed a tight right-hand turn, heading back into the wind in the opposite direction. At one thousand feet Kolt made his final turn.
He knew he was in the mountains, which meant there was little chance of his landing on level ground. He pulled the quick-release strap holding his big rucksack to his body, allowing it to drop the length of the fifteen-foot tether. Looking down now, he could see nothing in the blackness below him, but he had to keep his body ready for the moment when the—
For the third time on this jump, a violent tug to his harness jolted his body and burned into his skin between his legs.
Raynor lurched to a sudden stop, but his feet had not yet touched the ground.
He was stuck in a tree. Instantly he began swaying with a cold valley breeze.
There was no moon, and his night vision equipment was stowed in the pack that had been hanging far below him. He had no idea how far he was from the earth, or what sort of terrain he’d find when he hit it, so he spent a couple of minutes perfectly still, intently focused on the sounds around him. Satisfied that he was alone here, he retrieved a small flashlight from a pocket on his shoulder. It had a filter which emitted a lower-intensity red light, and he switched this on.
Pausing a few more seconds, he scanned below him with his light.
He was less than five feet from the ground.
A few seconds of jerking and heaving helped him the rest of the way to the pine-covered earth. The chute was tangled but he tore it out of the tree in under a minute, all the while thanking God that his jump was over.
TWENTY
Kolt buried his olive gray silk reserve parachute, harness, altimeter, oxygen mask, boots, and a small survival shovel in the forest. He unzipped his flight suit and let it drop to his knees before he hurriedly stepped out of each leg. He pulled off the Patagonia base layer as well. He retrieved his local canvas pack from the jump bag, and quickly donned his local garb.
He opened the jump bag and pulled out a pair of old ragged leather sandals that tied around the ankle and had a single loop hole for the big toe with a one-inch-wide band behind it, closer to the instep. The soles were made of several layers of tanned camel hide, and were as authentic as the rest of his clothing, with the exception of the hidden scent-reducing long johns.
When everything he no longer needed was well hidden he sat on a bed of pine needles and covered his head with his patoo, the capelike wool blanket that is wrapped either around the front of the body or over the head like a hood. He used it as a tent to cover his work, and then fired up his GPS. It took a moment to receive the signal from the satellite, but once the GPS got a fix on his position, he realized he’d landed three miles south of his original drop zone.
Three miles would not have seemed so bad, if not for the topography illustrated on the GPS. He’d landed in a pine forest down in a small basin, and to get to his destination he would need to head sharply uphill. There was no possibility of making his rendezvous with Jamal on time, but that wasn’t the end of the world. Kopelman would have warned his agent that he could expect unavoidable delays to the pickup window.
Raynor shouldered his backpack, wrapped himself in his patoo, and began walking north. His eyes took in what light they could, but he struggled to see through the darkness in the thick pines, hoping like hell he’d run across a path before long.
* * *
He stopped to rest on a cold rock at 6 a.m., after three arduous hours of constant uphill trudging. There was still no light and he’d not yet broken out of the pine and fir-covered hillside, but he had covered a respectable amount of ground considering the conditions.
He’d found a disused logging trail. It was level and cleared of brush enough to be useful, and it was completely devoid of traffic. This wasn’t unexpected during the middle of the night, but he did consider himself fortunate. These rural parts of the Tribal Areas were full of locals who regarded each and every outsider with utter suspicion, and a stranger walking through this valley would attract a lot of attention. He needed to get to his meeting point with Jamal as soon as possible, but he knew from his slow progress that he would not make it to the rendezvous until several hours after sunup.
He took a long swig of water from his hidden CamelBak and began marching once again up the hill.
The first living creature Raynor encountered in the Tirah Valley was a rail-thin cow, standing alone in a clearing of freshly cut cedar trees along the side of the trail. The animal startled him with its movement in the dawn’s light, but Kolt recovered quickly, passed the field of low stumps, and then made out other cattle milling in the distant mist.
He entered fallow fields, then left these behind him by following the trail along the side of a steep gorge, and found that the gorge and the trail spilled out onto the valley floor, where a village lay shrouded in fog. He smelled cooking fires, knew the women would be up preparing the morning meal even before the first prayer of the day, and he wanted to give this village a wide berth. He left the trail, climbed the steep hill to another clearing. Here he entered an orchard of peach trees, their branches bare this late in the year. Looking back behind him he eyed the village through the vapor. He saw baked mud buildings, all single-story, with flat roofs that made them look like the mortarboards of college graduates.
He wanted to stop and rest again, but he fought the urge and turned away, moved on up the trail.
A waterfall trickled off a cliff side and fell into a stream, and Kolt followed the stream down into a valley via man-made steps that ran alongside it, because a quick peek at his GPS told him to do so. The decline did not last, however, and soon he was climbing again, leaving the trail behind as it wound back to the northwest.
His legs ached and burned as the incline increased even more now. His lower back tightened under the weight of his heavy canvas pack. His three-year-old war wound ached, the fused vertebrae protesting every step.
Soon the terrain rose so abruptly that he was forced to his hands and knees, pulling his way upward by grasping the trunks of firs and carefully setting the soles of his smooth leather sandals on rocky outcroppings before pushing himself higher.
Just off his right shoulder a long wash ran up into a saddle of the hill above him. He knew the going would be smoother there, if just barely. He began moving laterally but stopped when he heard a noise. He froze in a copse of wild mulberry trees in the fading mist, and listened hard again.
The sound repeated. He cocked his head.
A group of men chanting softly.
There. In a small flattened-out section of the wash just above him, at the limits of his eyesight in the vapor, a group of a dozen men knelt on their patoos and prayed aloud.
At their sides, next to their ersatz prayer rugs, Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers rested on the ground.
They were either local militia or Taliban—either way, he’d come within thirty seconds of wandering out into the open right in front of them.
It had been too easy so far, and the long lonely walk was lulling him into false confidence.
Come on, Kolt. This isn’t the damn Smokies. This is Indian country.
He tucked deeper into the fir trees, continued on up the forested hill, slowly and silently, and passed to the left of the armed men, leaving them behind to complete their morning prayer.
* * *
By the time the mist burned away completely he had reached a
highland plain, where he passed an opium field. The poppies were dormant this late in the season, short sticks preparing themselves for the winter cold.
Now he could see to the distant west and north. The land was green and lush, and the tall mountain peaks of the Kurram and Khyber ranges were snowcapped, sharp and beautiful in the distance back toward the Afghan border.
It reminded him of Wyoming.
For the first time he was thankful for the training he’d received in the States. He’d climbed, crawled, and walked for over seven hours, and his muscles, joints, and back ached, but his lungs had no problem with this altitude.
He was surprised to find himself feeling good as the first warm rays of the sun beamed onto his face.
But he knew this would not last.
TWENTY-ONE
Jamal Metziel turned the key back toward himself, silencing the rumbling engine of his old truck. It was daylight already, he’d arrived to the rendezvous point late, but an exact time was nigh on impossible with the terrible condition of the track that he’d been forced to drive for the past three hours. Quickly he leaped out of his Toyota Hilux pickup and lifted the hood, coated his hands with grease and grime from the air hose, and then wiped the evidence of his “truck repair” across his light blue kameez shirt. He pulled some tools from his truck bed, dropped onto his back, slid on grass and dirt under the vehicle, and waited there.
The ticking and clanking of the hot metal kept his attention for a moment, relaxed him to the dangers around him, but he knew he was not safe here.
The American would come soon, maybe any moment, and at that point the true perils would begin.
He was no fool—he knew the stakes. If he was caught helping a Westerner he would be killed.
