by Dalton Fury
It was locked from the inside with a large lever lock. He released the lock, opened the door, and checked to make sure the lock would reengage when the door shut again. He left it cracked open.
Breathing a sigh of relief for thinking to check it, he returned to the barn, stepped over the dead Talib, and raised the AK.
Just then a radio chirped on the sentry’s belt.
Kolt Raynor sighted in on his target and then closed his eyes to retain his night vision. He fired a single round into the neck of the unconscious terrorist. The gunshot hammered the still darkness with an earsplitting crack and a flash of fire. In a single motion Raynor dropped the rifle at the side of the man with the knife wound to his throat, turned, and made for the open gate.
The compound was alive with barking dogs and braying donkeys and shouting men by the time the rifle’s report echoed back from the valley walls.
TWENTY-NINE
The village came alive as well as Raynor sprinted blindly down narrow streets, turning left and then left again and then right, leaping over a mud-brick water trough and ducking low under an awning of irregular-sized wooden beams that jutted out into his path. The black night began to sparkle all around him as oil lamps and torches twinkled to life in doorways and burlap-covered window openings.
The way was steep, and though his escape had no specific direction, he knew that the fastest way out of the village was to descend the hill. He hurtled downward, flew down a flight of stone steps in three loping bounds, nearly tumbling as his arms windmilled through the air to keep just enough balance to avoid face planting into a wall at the bottom of the stairs.
He moved as fast as he could for thirty seconds, was a good hundred yards from the compound wall when dark figures waving flashlights turned into his path ahead. He slowed to a fast walk before they shone on him, then turned his back to the light and pivoted down a dirt path to the left, and the light moved on. His clothes and his demeanor fit in with the village, so there was no reason for anyone seeing his back at distance to suspect him of having anything to do with the single rifle shot up inside the compound.
He began running again as he neared the river, and now he heard men’s shouts and broadcasts from walkie-talkies in all directions. The entire village was awake, angry dogs barked and howled, and as he passed a small hovel, a pair of young kids shot out into the alley in front of him. A woman came out behind, her face uncovered. She grabbed the children, then looked up at Kolt Raynor, not more than five feet in front of her. Their eyes met. It was extremely dark in the alley, but still Kolt saw her eyes widen in fear.
With a scolding shout at her kids she lifted them into the air and turned away, disappeared back into the dark doorway.
Damn it! thought Kolt as he moved on down the hill, turning to the right to continue his descent. It would take only one witness to foil this hasty plan of his, and he’d just been spotted. He hoped the woman would not be certain of what she’d seen in the dark, or else would be too scared that her husband would find out she’d shown her uncovered face to a male who was not in the family.
That could get a woman beaten or killed in this part of the world, and Raynor prayed the woman’s fear of the Taliban’s strict enforcement of Sharia law to subjugate women outweighed her fear of white-skinned interlopers.
He came out of a cluster of low mud buildings and found himself at the road running along the river’s edge. Most of the activity was well above and behind him now, but he could see a group of armed men on the bridge to his right. He didn’t know if they were Zar’s militia, Taliban, or even al Qaeda, but he knew he had zero friends in this valley, so he turned in the opposite direction.
After fifty feet he heard an engine start up directly in front of him, maybe fifty yards ahead along the river’s edge. The hillside on his left was a sheer wall of rock fifteen feet high, so he stepped into the frigid water and ducked into the marsh grass growing there.
The shock of cold to his body, the additional stress on his already pounding heart, were nearly too much to bear.
The engine belonged to a tractor, which rolled closer up the road. Raynor tucked himself down in the water to his neck, and though the grasses tickled his nose, he remained perfectly still. As the tractor passed he realized it pulled a long cart with a mounted Russian Kord 12.7 mm machine gun. Four men on the back of the cart stood alongside it. Two held powerful flashlights that illuminated the way ahead.
The tractor passed Raynor and continued on toward the bridge.
Damn, thought Kolt. That big gun had not shown up on the Predator’s images. A couple of those weapons hidden in the woods and caves around the village and then moved into position by a tractor or even a team of donkeys would spell disaster for any helicopters diving into the valley on a rescue mission.
T.J. was right. Hitting Zar’s compound from the air or over land would be impossible without devastating losses to the attacking force.
Raynor remained neck deep in the water. The current pulled him away from the bridge and the village, and he felt his feet, ankle deep in rocky mud, slipping out of their sandals. He fought it for a moment, grabbed the reeds around him to combat the flow of cold water pushing against him, but soon enough he allowed himself to be taken away by the current.
He knew there was no way he could make it back upstream to his crossing point, and he sure as hell was not walking across that bridge to get back to his hide site on the other side of the valley.
The river was the quickest way out of here, so he allowed it to carry him away. As he floated into deeper water in the faster-moving center channel, he pulled his heavy sweater over his head and let it go. He felt the numbness already in his fingers and toes. Soon his joints would be deadened by the icy river, then his appendages. Shortly thereafter enough body heat would leave his torso that he would run the risk of hypothermia.
But to Raynor, that was a problem for fifteen minutes from now. Getting out of the area and preserving this operation was paramount. Everything else would have to work itself out afterward.
For the first time tonight he hoped like hell that Pam Archer was somewhere above him.
* * *
When Racer stepped into the cold water, he disappeared from the thermal monitor in the Ops Center.
“Switching to infrared,” Pam Archer said calmly into her microphone. Her words were broadcast in the OC shortly before the image on the main monitor flipped. Through the fog it was difficult to see the man in the water. He disappeared for several seconds at a time. Occasionally he passed under trees or large boulders sticking out from the cliff walls, and she lost him altogether.
“He’s going to freeze in that river.” Archer said this into her microphone as well, and those in the OC knew she might be right.
Grauer rubbed his hand through his hair. He’d done it so often in the past day that he was certain he’d ripped out hair by the roots.
And he had Kolt fucking Raynor to thank for that.
“Okay … how cold is that water?” he asked the room.
“Can’t be over forty-five degrees.”
“Hypothermia in how much time?”
“Fifteen mikes … twenty tops,” came an answer from an analyst who sounded like he was guessing.
“I need hard-and-fast answers, damn it! And figure out where he will wash up. And get me Bob Kopelman on the phone.”
A hand with a satellite phone in it appeared in front of his face. “I’ve got him, sir.”
* * *
Kolt lay on the rocky riverbank, shivering uncontrollably. Every inch of his body was cold and wet, the sun would not be up for hours, and there was no way in hell he was going to give his position away with a fire, even if he’d had the means to start one. His pakol hat had come off while he was running through the village, and his Makarov pistol had washed out of his pocket while he was drifting down the river. The thermal was gone, he’d left his knife near the dead al Qaeda operative, and, looking down at his numb feet, he realized he was barefoot
.
The GPS! Raynor felt in his pockets in a panic. No. He flipped onto his stomach and reached all around him, picking up stones in the dark, then tossing them away when he realized they weren’t what he was looking for.
The GPS with its camera was gone and, with it, his proof of life.
Kolt rolled back onto his back and stared into the mist.
He’d floated for no more than ten minutes but he suspected he’d covered roughly three-quarters of a mile. He sat up slowly, then climbed to his feet, wrapped his arms around his shivering body, and looked around. He did his best to get his bearings. He could only use the fact that the river flowed to the northeast to plot his location. He was northeast of Shataparai, on the wrong side of the river from his hide, and he had neither the energy nor the gear to get himself across the water, find his way back up several hundred feet of alpine hillside, and get back to his hide.
He decided the only way to stay alive, to keep his body’s core temperature high enough to ward off hypothermia, was to begin jogging along the river, and to move away from the compound, away from his equipment, away from his mission. He thought that if he could only find a village or a road or a horse or a donkey, he’d have a chance to make his way toward Peshawar.
After that, he did not know.
He was hobbled by the fact that his feet were bare, and the muddy, rocky riverbank was hardly ideal for a run, but he kept on. He stumbled in the darkness, but he knew he could not stop, could not rest, could not sit down for a break, for fear he would drift off and then drift away.
He looked up into the impenetrable fog, and it occurred to him that if Pam Archer was not watching over him right now, he might well not make it out of this alive.
Which meant T.J. and his men wouldn’t either.
* * *
At ten minutes past four in the morning, Pam Archer detected a heat register, fainter than normal, but unmistakably the image of a single individual moving twenty-two thousand feet below her. She zoomed on it, saw a hobbled man staggering along the riverbank. He fell at the water’s edge, splashed on his hands and knees, and then pulled himself to his feet and regained his earlier slow but steady pace.
“Pete?” she said into her mike. Grauer was still in the OC, but his head was down on the conference table. He was catching a few minutes’ rest.
“Pam?” came his surprised reply.
“I think I have him. Check the monitor.”
Pam banked the drone gently and the image-stabilization computer corrected for the buffeting of the winds at altitude.
Grauer stared at the screen. It did not take long for him to feel sure the UAV had found their asset. “Yeah. You got him!” Pete Grauer exclaimed loudly through her headset. “I’ll call Kopelman and have his man go out and pick Racer up. Let’s hope saving his ass turns out to be worth the trouble.”
* * *
Jamal Metziel yawned deeply, looked up briefly at the late-morning sun. After a call from Mister Bob, he’d raced out of his tiny shack at four thirty in the morning and run three kilometers in the dark to a nearby garage. Bob met him there and unlocked the door, and now Jamal drove his large red Euroleopard 650 tractor and towed an iron-and-wooden cart behind him. He left the yellow Hilux in Bob’s other garage west of Peshawar because the route he would have to take to pick up the American spy would take him over broken ground and dry riverbeds that even the formidable 4×4 pickup could not negotiate.
For a time he puttered along the Khyber Agency Road. This was a virtual highway, the single piece of efficient infrastructure for dozens of miles in every direction. The tractor just barely made fifteen miles per hour. The few cars and trucks running in this area at this early time zipped by him like he was standing still. Finally he exited the road and turned south onto the flatlands north of the Tirah, passing bare orange orchards and simple factories and towns and military garrisons that were buttoned up like sealed Tupperware containers, providing no security to the villagers whatsoever from the highway robbers, the Taliban, or any militia who decided to set up a roadblock to exert dominance on the area, even if for only a few minutes at a time.
But there were neither bandits nor zealots on Jamal’s path this morning. The young man with the scraggly beard and the junky tractor moved along at low speed, bumped up and down on the rutted trails, headed south like a man on his early-morning run to pick up goods in the FATA to take back to market in Peshawar or Hayatabad.
He hoped any brigands in the area would deem robbing him not worth the trouble.
But Jamal did have one possession of value, and he had secreted it below the torn vinyl seat, between rusted-out springs.
A Hughes Thuraya satellite phone.
He called Mister Bob twice in the two hours after leaving Khyber Agency Road. The burly American gave him updates on where he should go to pick up Mister Racer. Bob also begged him to go faster, but there was nothing Jamal could do about that. He had to refill his tractor’s gas tank twice from the metal jerricans in the cart, and that took time. And he was forced to go twenty minutes out of the way after taking a small mountain spur and pulling up behind a colorful bus that had thrown a wheel crossing a rock bridge. Jamal maneuvered out of the line of traffic and up to a shallow portion of the stream that he could ford in his Euroleopard.
It was straight-up noon when he used the phone for the third time, then pulled the tractor over on a hilly mule track and turned off the engine. Bob answered immediately, and said there was a Predator above him right now, and the American spy was just a hundred yards away, lying on his back under a cedar tree. Jamal jumped from his tractor and headed to a copse of cedars and found the man huddled there, awake and aware, more or less, but completely worn out. The Afghan helped him to his feet.
“Salaam aleikum.” The American’s voice was weak. He looked dehydrated and cold and gaunt.
Jamal walked him back to the cart behind his vehicle and guided him in, grabbed an extra patoo, wrapped it tightly around the American, and helped him sit up. His clothing was no longer wet, but still Jamal helped him take off his kameez, and replaced it with an old green sweater that was a few sizes too small for the American’s frame. He pushed a pakol hat on his head and helped him toward the front of the cart, facing backward. A plastic canteen of water was placed in his hand—Jamal assured him it was safe for him to drink—and then a flat loaf of bread appeared. The young Afghan leaped up to the tractor’s seat and refired the engine. The machine lurched forward, found a wide enough place in the trees to turn, and then began heading back to the northeast.
The tractor had been a necessity for this part of the trip—the truck would not have made it ten kilometers on these steep, rutted, and narrow spurs—but, unlike the Toyota truck, there was no good way on the tractor or in the cart behind it to hide the American for the return trip to civilization. With Mister Racer’s beard and clothing he would not look in any way suspicious to passing donkey caravans or men on foot, and this stretch was normally too disused for the Taliban to establish roadblocks. Still, Jamal would not be surprised to pass a small Taliban convoy or two heading toward the Afghani border, and then his fate would rest on the whims of the unit’s commander and whether or not he was in the mood to stop these two locals or to continue on to the war just over the mountains.
Jamal and Bob had decided that they would not press their luck and try to make it all the way to Peshawar. Mister Bob’s cover was as a logistics coordinator for an aid group called World Benefactors, so he was allowed outside of the city of Peshawar as far as a relief supply warehouse just west of the city of Jamrud. If Jamal could stay out of sight of the heavily traveled Grand Trunk Road, he just might be able to deliver his human cargo to Mister Bob’s warehouse, where the two Americans could ride together back to Peshawar in a large World Benefactors truck.
Everything hinged on the next three hours. If they were stopped by a Pakistani army patrol they would be arrested. Mister Racer might be expelled after an international incident, but a poor young
Afghan refugee caught in the perpetration of international espionage would likely just disappear.
And if they were stopped by the Taliban or al Qaeda fighters who camped in the area to organize and train locals for the jihad, there was not one shred of doubt that they would both be killed.
Mister Racer could communicate in the local language to a degree, but he would not last through three seconds of questioning. Jamal could claim his “friend” was from Nuristan, a province of Afghanistan in the Hindu Kush mountain range populated by Muslims with lighter skin, and it was not common that a Nuristani would speak Pashto. But this cover story was thin. To check this legend one would just need to ask this foreigner to drop down onto his janamaz and pray.
Racer would reveal himself as a nonbeliever, and Jamal would thereby be revealed as a conspirator with the nonbelievers, and that would be that.
THIRTY
They made the first hour of their return trip wholly without incident. The American lay swaddled in blankets in the back as it bounced and shook and shuddered behind the loud tractor. He was all but hidden below the wooden lip of the cart, and the various odds and ends Jamal had hurriedly tossed back there at 4 a.m. to give the appearance that he was a merchant or a laborer served well to conceal his stowaway. It had been Bob Kopelman’s idea that Jamal half fill the cart, so the young Afghan had tossed items from the garage where he kept the tractor. There were some hammers and nails, a shovel, a pick, blankets, water jugs, and four large jerricans full of fuel.
The items rattled and bounced, and they gave the vehicle and the driver an air of purpose.
Just after safely crossing the Khyber Agency Road, Jamal stopped in a deep valley and turned off the engine so he could refill the tractor’s gas tank from a can in the back. He also took the opportunity to make a quick call on the satellite phone. Mister Bob answered immediately, reported that he was already on the Grand Trunk Road, west of Peshawar, and heading toward the warehouse. He reported seeing many Frontier Corps convoys on the main thoroughfare through this part of Khyber Agency, which was no great surprise, but he was making good time and expected to arrive at the rendezvous point well ahead of the Euroleopard tractor negotiating the arduous terrain to the south.
