by Dalton Fury
Soon the American climbed up onto the vinyl seat next to Jamal. Jamal wanted Mister Racer to remain hidden in back, but the valley here was steep on both sides and anyone approaching would have to do it from straight ahead, so he was less worried about being surprised by strangers.
Jamal asked, “Are you feeling better?”
In broken Pashto the American said, “Yes. Thank you. And thank you for coming to get me.”
Jamal shrugged. “I came because Mister Bob asked me to. This was not the plan. I was going to pick you up tomorrow where I left you.”
“I know. I am sorry.”
Jamal just repeated himself. “I came because Mister Bob asked me to.”
Racer said, “I understand the danger you are in, friend. If you are caught—”
“Caught? I would not have to be caught. I only have to be suspected of helping you and my life will be over. If the Taliban suspect me for one second you will find me hanging in the square by my hands, and my head will be hanging by a rope between my knees.”
That image lingered in the dusty air while they made their way over a dry hillock low in a valley. Finally Raynor asked, “So why do you do it? Is Bob a good salesman?”
Jamal took a moment with the question; apparently he did not recognize it as a joke at first. When he did, he laughed.
“No, no.” He thought before speaking. “I have been living at Kacha Garay camp outside of Peshawar. But Mister Bob has helped me, and now I help him. God willing, someday the Taliban will be gone, and I will be a truck driver.”
“That is your dream?”
“Yes. Not the truck you saw the other day. That is for thieves and men who travel off the highway. Inshallah, I will someday own a proper truck. A semi truck. I will move back home to Kabul and deliver goods all over my country.”
“Do you want a family?”
Jamal shook his head. “I am too old to take a wife.”
“How old are you?”
“I do not know.” Racer had met many Afghans who were not certain of their age. “But I must be thirty.”
“That’s not too old.”
“This is not America. It is very different in my culture. Here I am an old man.”
Racer did not speak again. After a moment he patted Jamal on his sweat-soaked back, then climbed back into the cart behind the tractor.
* * *
Jamal and Kolt entered the plains of Kohat just after noon. They traveled almost due north along narrow farm tracts running alongside fields of winter wheat and grasses and fallow farmland. Mud-walled compounds and simple houses dotted the hilly landscape, and trees and brush alongside the roads helped conceal them from great distance.
They skirted far to the east of Sara Garhi, a city legendary for an epic battle in 1897 when twenty-one Sikhs under British rule fought to the last against ten thousand Pashtun attackers, killing hundreds before being wiped out.
Things had been going well, but Jamal made his first mistake by leaving the low mountains and heading instead farther to the east; he had been searching for a smoother trail, but he’d followed a promising spur that took him all the way out onto a ridge that ran above the flatlands to the east. Off in the far distance, a mile away or more, was the Hyatabad–FATA road, and as soon as Jamal realized he could be seen by anyone with binoculars at the Frontier Corps outpost that would inevitably be located there, he knew he’d screwed up. He felt completely exposed for a quarter mile, then took his first opportunity to leave the mule trail by following a dry stream bed back due west.
Mister Racer was in the back and unaware of the danger. Jamal did not want to tell him, because he worried the American would be mad at him.
* * *
Five minutes of bone-jarring travel on the stream bed was about all Kolt could take. He heard the iron bolts in the wooden cart bed cracking the oaken beams, and he was concerned that the cart at least, and perhaps even the big tractor itself, would fall to pieces if they continued on this terrain. Jamal seemed to be taking the rocks and boulders much faster now than earlier, and Kolt sensed a problem from the driving technique of the young man. He rolled up to his knees to ask Jamal why they had left the dirt track, but as soon as he did this, the tractor lurched to a stop. Racer flew forward into Jamal’s back before righting himself and looking up the stream bed.
Four men stood in dappled shadows under a massive cherry tree twenty-five yards ahead.
Black turbans were piled high on their heads. Folded-stock Kalashnikovs swung from slings around their necks.
Beards hung to their breasts.
These were Taliban, and Raynor knew it.
Jamal let out a slight high-pitched gurgle from his throat that Raynor could hear even over the rumbling engine.
Kolt did not see a vehicle, but assumed these guys wouldn’t be this far out in the boonies on foot. There would be horses, donkeys, or a four-wheel-drive pickup somewhere close. Perhaps more Taliban as well. These men weren’t set up for ambush—perhaps they’d just been resting and drinking tea—but they’d obviously heard the tractor from a distance and had moved away from their camp to come investigate.
Kolt thought quickly. Options? Vehicle or not, he and Jamal weren’t going to outrun these guys or their rifles on a damned tractor, and Raynor did not even possess a sidearm to fight them with. The Makarov was back at the bottom of the river, and his knife, impotent as it would have been against four men with assault rifles, had been left as a prop back in Zar’s compound.
Options? What options?
“Keep going, Jamal. Maybe they will let us pass.”
Jamal reached down to shift the Euroleopard back into gear. His hand shook, and that, combined with the perspiration on his palm, with the terror coursing through his body, caused him to stall the vehicle. Quickly he reached down to restart it, but Raynor patted him on the back.
“It’s okay, friend. Just relax.”
The four Taliban hefted their weapons and approached the tractor. Jamal sat in the seat and Raynor knelt in the cart behind, facing the men with the rifles.
* * *
“As salaam aleikum,” said the driver of the tractor. Twenty-eight-year-old Abdul Salaam did not reply; instead, he held his rifle up, snapped his fingers, and motioned for his three men to spread out around the tractor and do the same.
Abdul and his three cousins were in hiding here in the hills west of Hayatabad. They had been part of a larger unit that had killed a French aid worker and his six Pakistani army bodyguards nearly a month ago up in Chitral, and the group had broken apart to avoid capture. Abdul Salaam and the other three had been heading slowly south. Their plan was to make it to Parachinar, where they would join a donkey caravan that would head west all the way to a crossing point through the mountains into Afghanistan, where, God willing, they would fight and kill more infidels.
Abdul Salaam did not know who these men were on the big red tractor. They could be locals. They could be smugglers.
They could be spies.
Abdul Salaam would find out.
“Wa alekeum a salaam,” he said finally. “Where are you going, friends?”
While he waited for the driver to respond, he checked to make sure his cousins had their weapons’ safeties off, and they surrounded the vehicle in an arc that did not endanger one another with gunfire from their own weapons should the need arise to kill these men. Yes, good. These three would be good fighters over the border. They would kill many infidels. Many Americans.
He looked back at the driver of the tractor. The man was afraid. He had not spoken.
“I asked you where you were going?”
“To Peshawar.”
Abdul Salaam suspected instantly that the man was lying. “In this riverbed? There are roads to Peshawar. Where are you from?”
The driver in the light blue salwar kameez looked down to his hands. Abdul Salaam checked them—they were empty. The Taliban leader took a step forward and his cousins followed suit. They closed to within fifteen feet of th
e front grille of the big tractor.
“I am sorry, sir,” said the man. He sounded like an Afghan. Perhaps from Kabul. “We have been delivering goods, and are returning to Peshawar. We wanted to avoid the Frontier Corps on the main roads.”
Smugglers. Abdul Salaam nodded slowly. Hardly unusual out here. “What goods did you deliver, and to where?”
“Hashish. From Kabul to Mingora.”
“You and your friend?”
“Yes. Yes, that is correct.”
“What is your name?”
“Jamal.”
“And your father’s?”
“I am from Kabul. My father’s name was Muhammad Metziel.”
“Jamal, the Koran does not allow for the consumption of narcotics. ‘Make not your own hands contribute to your destruction,’ it clearly says. Are you not a follower?”
The Afghan said, “Yes, brother, I am a follower. I do not use the drugs. I am only trying to make a living.”
“By profiting from the suffering of others? The Koran says, ‘Anyone who believes in Allah and the Last Day should not hurt his neighbor.’”
“I…” The man in the seat of the tractor said nothing else. He was shaking now.
Abdul Salaam enjoyed making men shake in fear. Not just infidels. Anyone who defied the law of the Koran.
He turned his attention to the man in the back of the cart. “Do you speak, friend?” This man looked different. He was lighter in complexion and older, and, unlike his friend, he appeared calm.
The one called Jamal said, “He is my associate from Nuristan. He does not speak Pashto.”
“I see,” said Abdul Salaam.
* * *
Kolt Raynor desperately tried to picture a map of the FATA in his head. With all the other concerns and calculations going on up there in his brain, the geography was difficult to get his mind around. Still, he didn’t think Jamal’s story added up. They were traveling west when he made it as if they were going east, Mingora was way too far south to travel from by tractor, and while Kolt could manageably pass for a lighter-skinned Muslim, a non-Pashto-speaking Afghan from Nuristan Province would not be of much use as a drug smuggler down here in the Pashtun tribal FATA.
Yep, Raynor thought, these assholes are about to call bullshit on twitchy Jamal’s story, which means one thing, and one thing only.
Raynor may have been the first here in the stream bed to figure it out, but he knew it wouldn’t take the others long to catch up.
This polite conversation was just about over, and a fight was just about to start.
Raynor’s right hand slid down to the bed of the cart, where his fingertips began walking along the oaken floor, searching for anything within reach that could be used as a weapon.
* * *
Abdul Salaam did not believe the frightened Afghan’s story. Moreover, these men might have money, food, or other goods that he and his cousins could use. They’d long spent the French aid worker’s cash. He would search them, he would relieve them of their belongings, and he would either kill them or send them on their way. The decision would be made by Allah, meaning that if the men showed they were good Muslims, if they could pray and recite the Koran to Abdul Salaam’s satisfaction, then he would let them leave on their tractor with the clothing on their backs. If not, he and his cousins would shoot them here and now.
“Get off your tractor. Both of you.” He turned to Dagar: “Check the cart for weapons,” and then to Jandol: “Get them down from there.”
Abdul Salaam covered the strangers with his AK. He took just a moment to unfold his stock to bring it to his shoulder, looking down for a split second to do so. When he looked back up he was surprised to see the Nuristani in the back of the cart standing up straight, quickly, and something appeared in his right arm. It was not a rifle, but it was long. He swung it like an ax at Jandol, who had stepped to the left of the cart. Abdul Salaam recognized it as a shovel just as it slammed into his older cousin’s face. A clang of heavy steel against hard forehead echoed through the low creek bed, Jandol’s head snapped rearward, and his body dropped limp onto the white stones.
Abdul Salaam’s eyes widened in shock and his finger began to pull the trigger of his automatic weapon. As the first round cracked out from his AK’s barrel, he saw the Nuristani sling a long instrument directly at him with his other hand. It cartwheeled through the air, directly at him. Abdul Salaam ducked as he fired, rounds shredded limbs and leaves from the trees above and behind the tractor, and he landed hard on the stones of the stream bed as an iron hammer whirled by, narrowly missing his head.
In panic Abdul held the AK’s trigger down hard and saw sparks on the grille of the red tractor. The recoil of his weapon pulled his fire up high and to the right, and the Afghan in the blue kameez seemed to be propelled backward through the air and into the cart behind him.
* * *
Kolt Raynor dropped the shovel and grabbed Jamal by the collar of his shirt, yanked him off the seat of the tractor and out of the way of the gunfire with all his might, almost pulling the young man out of his sandals. Together they fell back in the cart and rolled all the way off the back of it, falling hard together onto the stony surface of the stream bed. Jamal would be safe back here for the next five seconds, so Raynor launched himself up and off Jamal and shot low to the right of the tractor, knowing he would find a gunman there. The lone Talib on this side of the cart had his weapon high over his head and was firing down over the side wall of the wooden cart. He was shocked to see the man appear at ground level to his left, and he swung his weapon at this fast-moving threat.
Kolt took the man down with a tackle that would have made the defensive line coach for his high school football team proud. He slammed his right shoulder into the slight man’s solar plexus, the rifle flew into the air, and the American used his momentum to drive his body down through the Talib as they both hit the rock-strewn earth. Kolt heard ribs crack but he did not even look at his victim. Instead, he lunged for the AK-47, scooped it off the stream bed, and rolled his body three times to the left, into the space between the big right rear tire of the Euroleopard tractor and the right tire of the wooden cart. Now he was directly under the cart itself, and he searched for a target on the other side. Gunfire rattled in the stream bed and beat off the surrounding hills. Immediately he aimed at the legs of the man running past on his left. With a five-round burst Raynor dropped the Talib to his knees. He could see the bearded man’s pain- and shock-stricken face now below the cart, and he fired one round into his chest, blasting him dead on his back.
There was one threat remaining: the leader, the man who had spoken, and the first man to fire. Raynor did not know how much ammo remained in this salvaged Kalashnikov, but he had no time to drop the magazine or check for a round in the chamber. He began rolling to the left again, his body came out from under the cart on the opposite side of where he had rolled under, and he stopped only when he bumped up against the man he’d just killed.
Quickly he trained his weapon forward.
The leader of the Taliban squad was in a low crouch. He had just reloaded his weapon and was bringing it back up to his shoulder.
Kolt Raynor lay flat on his chest, snap-aimed the automatic rifle’s iron sights at his target, and pulled the trigger back hard.
A single round popped from the gun and then it ran dry. The spent cartridge ejected in a smoking arc over his right shoulder, and Kolt rose quickly to his knees.
One shot was all he’d needed. The Taliban leader lay crumpled in a heap, facefirst on top of his gun.
* * *
Raynor found the man he’d tackled still alive on the other side of the cart, but the Pashtun was out of the fight. He lay on his back and stared at the infidel above him. His breath came in short wheezes, the broken bones rattling in his chest along with the raspy breath.
Kolt quickly searched him for more weapons, found a rusty Makarov pistol, and shot the man through the forehead with it.
There was no way h
e would leave a survivor here to tell others what had happened.
He then found Jamal right where he’d left him, lying facedown in the dry creek behind the wooden cart. Instantly Kolt’s heart sank. Smears of blood on the young man’s clothing, and on the rocks around him, convinced Raynor that the agent who had come to save him had been shot in the first barrage by the Taliban leader. But Raynor quickly ran his hands all over Jamal’s body, and found him to be free of serious wounds, and also very much alive. Jamal climbed back to his feet, seemingly as frightened by all the rough and inappropriate touching by the American spy as he had been by the dozens of bullets fired in his direction.
Kolt found the source of the blood soon enough. His own knees, elbows, and forearms were cut from the rocks of the stream bed. His local clothing was tattered and torn. He felt not one iota of pain at the moment—a near overdose of adrenaline saw to that—but he knew his bruised and abraded appendages would sting and burn like hell in no time.
Considering the other possible outcomes of the event that had just transpired, he was thrilled to find himself only banged up and dripping a small amount of blood.
But there was no time to celebrate. Two of the tractor tires had been pierced by AK rounds and were now flat. Kolt knew they had to leave the vehicle behind and get out of there before others came to the sound of the gunfight. He grabbed the thin Afghan by the arm, then pulled the satellite phone from under the seat.
The phone was in pieces. It had taken a 7.62 mm round directly into its body. Raynor crammed the pieces into his pockets nonetheless.
“Is there anything on this tractor that can be led back to you or Bob?” Kolt asked it in broken Pashto, and his pronunciation and bad grammar, coupled with Jamal’s shock and ringing ears from all the gunplay, slowed the response.
