“Say it.”
“To leave and find another headquarters.”
“I think it shall not come to that.”
Al-Bari did not plan to share the secret of his ties to Brigadier Jadoon. He recognized Faisal’s concern, and while it was appreciated, he believed it was misplaced.
However, if the Pakistani army was engaged in sweeps throughout the province, seeking criminals or rebels, it could interrupt al-Bari’s channels of communication with his agents in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. He would have to be more circumspect than ever, until things were normalized once more.
“Thank you for the warning, Faisal. It was good of you to come so far, with our best interest foremost in your heart. Our victory is possible because of stalwart comrades such as you.”
Faisal bowed deeply, his turban grazing the rug on which he knelt. “I live only to serve in Allah’s cause,” he said.
“And you shall be rewarded, in this life or in the next.”
“As-Salamu Alaykum,” Faisal said.
“Alaykum As-Salaam,” al-Bari replied.
Faisal retreated, vanishing through the hanging curtain where a guard would meet him and escort him from the cave. Al-Bari turned to one of his remaining sentries, saying, “Fetch Ra’id Ibn Rashad.”
The guard obeyed at once. The better part of ten minutes elapsed before Rashad appeared, his face puffy with sleep above his beard and marked with worry lines.
“You called?” he said.
“We’ve had a visitor. Karim Faisal,” al-Bari told him. “It appears there has been unrest within the province. Soldiers killed. The men responsible are still at large.”
“How many soldiers?” asked Rashad.
“Twenty, according to Faisal.”
“So many, all at once?”
“It is unusual, I know,” al-Bari said.
“And what is the significance for us?”
“Unknown. We may trust Brigadier Jadoon as far as his self-interest grants us power over him, but we must always be on guard against betrayal. If he feels he can eliminate us with impunity, then he becomes a danger.”
“He can be eliminated,” Rashad said. “If other soldiers have been slain, let those who killed them take the blame for one more death.”
“Not yet. If it is necessary, Arzou Majabein can deal with him. For now, I prefer to have Jadoon serving us.”
“If he does.”
“He obeyed our instructions concerning the strike in Islamabad. Jadoon thinks he is working off his debt, but, whether he realizes it or not, each collaboration binds him to al Qaeda more tightly. He is foolish, if he thinks he can escape us.”
“Fools exist,” Rashad observed. “Some act against their own best interest, especially when frightened.”
“I will deal with Brigadier Jadoon,” al-Bari said. “Your task is to discover who has chosen this time to begin attacking soldiers in the province. If they prove to be loyal Shiites, counsel them. If they are infidels—or, most particularly, if they seek to harm al Qaeda—they must be stopped.”
“Destroyed,” Rashad amended.
“But in such a way that we do not reveal ourselves,” al-Bari said. “Ideally, we should give them to the army, let the troops avenge their comrades—and be certain that Jadoon acknowledges his debt for our assistance.”
“As you say.”
“I’m going back to sleep, now,” al-Bari said. “It’s too early in the morning to be mapping out campaigns.”
Without a hint of envy, Rashad said, “Sleep well. I will arrange for all our comrades to be on alert throughout the province. It should not be long before we know the men responsible for the disturbance.”
“And remember,” al-Bari said, “we must not be tied to their elimination. Nothing should be said or done to make the faithful question our collegiality.”
9
U.S. Department of Justice; Washington, D.C.
Hal Brognola’s days when he’d been a “brick agent” for the FBI, pounding pavement and building cases that sent felons off to prison for hard time, were long gone. but that was all right. Every man had his place in this war, and his was no longer out in the field.
These days he was needed in Washington, where he was currently fielding terse reports from Pakistan that marked the progress of his long-time friend—a man who, officially, no longer existed.
The reports Brognola had received so far were hardly reassuring. Twenty soldiers killed initially, then twenty-six more—all in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province by “persons unknown.” A full-scale hunt was in progress. Meanwhile yet another suicide bombing had rocked Islamabad.
Brognola racked his brain for possible connections between Bolan’s mission and the latter event, but he came up empty. Akram Ben Abd al-Bari might have ordered the bombing, but such things required at least minimal planning. The link just wasn’t there.
Brognola wasn’t even sure of Bolan’s link to the most recent army skirmishes, although they sounded like his style. Hit fast, hit hard, leave no one standing when the smoke cleared. Brognola surmised that the first engagement, coming so soon after Bolan’s insertion, was probably coincidental.
As for the second…
Shit happened in the field, as Brognola knew well enough from personal experience. And while Bolan had long ago drawn a personal line that he refused to cross—vowing that he would never kill police, no matter how corrupt or brutal they might be—soldiers did not share that protection.
Hoping there’d be recent news, Brognola placed another call to Stony Man, Kurtzman’s direct line. The man picked up on the third ring, with a simple “Yes?”
“Any new word?” Brognola asked without preamble.
“Not since midnight our time,” Kurtzman said. “You know we’ll keep you updated.”
“Sure. I just hoped there might be…something.”
“Maybe no news really is good news,” Kurtzman suggested.
“Right. Keep me post.” He disconnected the call.
A few minutes later, Brognola’s private line buzzed. He lunged for the receiver, almost fumbling it before he got it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” a distant voice informed him.
Jack Grimaldi, Bolan’s wings.
“Any word?” the pilot asked him.
“Nothing specific, yet,” Brognola said. The line was scrambled, but he always played it safe. “We’ve had two contacts in the field, but nothing traceable. Nothing specific to the job.”
He pictured Grimaldi digesting that, not liking it, then heard him say, “Okay. You’ve got my number there?”
“Got it.”
“Okay,” the pilot said before the link was severed.
Back to waiting.
Brognola decided he should focus on some other work. He had a presidential briefing scheduled for the day after the next, and a routine audit of his office—the benign, public division of it—by the General Accounting Office.
Meeting with the Man, and with the GAO.
But none of it really mattered, as Brognola pushed the paper piles away from him and longed for one of the cigars he’d given up on doctor’s orders.
Waiting for the goddamned telephone to ring.
Jalalabad; Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan
THE CALL to Brognola in Washington had been a waste of time, like everything else Grimaldi had done since Bolan leaped out of his plane over Pakistan.
How long ago had it been? Twenty hours and thirty-nine minutes.
It felt like twenty years.
Grimaldi was accustomed to delivering the Executioner on-target and retrieving him on time, but some missions were worse than others. Most were hit-and-git, with fixed parameters of time and place. Bolan would land at A and be picked up at B in X hours.
It could be nerve-racking, hell yes, but there were limits to the stress.
Not this time.
Grimaldi, as the delivery boy, had not been briefed on any details of the mission beyond
where he had to go, and when he had to get there. As for retrieval of his package—Bolan, hopefully alive and in one piece—the time and place was “flexible.”
Meaning, nobody had a clue concerning where, when, or if Bolan would exit Pakistan.
Grimaldi flagged the waiter for another coffee—his third, so far—and riffled through his bankroll of Afghanis.
His coffee arrived and Grimaldi paid the waiter before sipping it.
The Stony Man pilot believed in waging the good fight, and he and Bolan had waged more than a few.
They’d logged a couple million miles together, hitting jungles, deserts, urban battlegrounds that rivaled any Third World war zone, and he always clung to the certainty that Bolan would succeed. That he’d survive.
Each time, that faith was tested, but it hadn’t failed.
Not yet.
The café’s aging television had been running news for fifteen minutes, but Grimaldi couldn’t translate any of the commentary or the Persian text that crawled across the screen like tracks on an electrocardiogram.
Right now, the camera’s focus was a pair of burned-out armored vehicles. It looked as if they had been driven down into a desert gully, then torched with some kind of chemical charge. White phosphorous, perhaps, or thermite. Soldiers were picking over the remains, while firefighters stood back and left them to it.
Always something.
Grimaldi had never known a time when people weren’t preoccupied with killing one another, and he guessed that no such time would ever come. The question—in his mind, at least—wasn’t so much a case of who killed whom, but rather why the killing was performed.
Some predators, human and otherwise, were immune to remediation. They wouldn’t listen to negotiations, felt no empathy. They were, in fact, devoid of any feeling beyond an insatiable hunger.
Bolan was strong, smart and slick enough to handle them, provided he wasn’t overwhelmed by numbers or betrayed by one he trusted. The problem with stalking predators, simply stated, was that they never died out.
It was a predatory world out there, and those who swam against the tide, resisting it, were always outnumbered. Always outgunned.
This time, Grimaldi knew, Bolan was not only tracking al Qaeda’s elite, but he was doing it while trying to avoid God only knew how many soldiers, whose commanders might share ideologies with Bolan’s targets. Might even be guarding them, either to keep the peace at home or to support al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks abroad.
Just give me the coordinates, Grimaldi thought, and let me take the bastards out.
But it was not to be.
He drained his coffee and stepped from the café into another scorching day.
Sunshine, blue skies and death.
The perfect package, right.
“HOW MUCH FARTHER?” Bolan asked Gorshani.
“Half an hour, perhaps,” his driver said. “These are the Safed Koh, ahead of us.”
Daylight was just an hour old, already casting shadows on the rugged range of peaks that lay across their path like a natural roadblock. Bolan knew the two-lane highway would take them through those mountains and beyond, but his trek ended somewhere in their midst.
He didn’t ask which one was Mount Khakwani, didn’t care at that point. There’d be time enough to size it up once they had reached the mountain’s base and were prepared to start their climb. Until then, the Executioner used his time to watch out for patrols, coming or going.
Someone had found the burned-out APCs sooner than Bolan had hoped they would. A news broadcast from Radio Buraq Peshawar, translated by Gorshani while it played, had given sketchy details of “ruthless massacre,” with vows from persons in authority that those responsible would be tracked down and punished.
No surprise, there, but it meant their time was running short.
The net would already be cast, and if they met a search team on its way to Mount Khakwani, it would mean another critical delay at best.
Assuming they survived a third skirmish.
Bolan believed in luck to some extent, though he had always been convinced that people made much of their own through preparation, courage and commitment to whatever cause they served. If they were lazy, negligent and weak, it stood to reason that their luck would normally be bad.
But, on the other hand, no training, no amount of guts would stop a well-aimed shot from mangling flesh and bone. No soldier was invincible, whether he dressed from head to toe in Kevlar or was buttoned down inside an APC. For each defense, there was a weapon built to pierce and overcome it.
Bolan had been putting off a question that he had to ask Gorshani, but he voiced it now. “Somebody must have briefed you on coordinates for where we’re going,” he remarked. “I need to know your contact’s name before we hit the slopes.”
Gorshani shot a glance at him, surprised, then turned back toward the road. “But I was told—”
“To keep me in the dark,” Bolan said, interrupting. “I get that, and it’s no good. If you think we’ve had trouble up to now, forget about it. Once we’re on the mountain, that’s when it starts getting hairy. If it goes south on us, but we make it out alive somehow, there’ll be a need for payback on the setup. I’ll be reaching out to touch someone.”
“Goes south? Payback?” This time, Gorshani sounded nervous and confused.
“A name,” Bolan replied. “Right now.”
Finally, reluctantly, Gorshani said, “Azar Gulpari. He contacted me through…others.”
“Your controller from the Agency,” Bolan surmised.
Gorshani nodded.
“Okay. Who is Azar Gulpari?”
“As I understand it, he has been a member of al Qaeda since the group was organized. Over the years, his allegiance to bin Laden and the rest has apparently weakened, but he cannot simply leave. To leave is death, you understand?”
“Blood in, blood out,” Bolan replied.
“Sorry?”
“It’s an expression used by criminals back in the States. It means you spill blood when you join the gang, to prove yourself, and they spill yours if you try getting out.”
Gorshani nodded. “It is the same, I think. And since he cannot leave the group, Gulpari hopes to bring it down. It think it is perhaps his one hope to cleanse his conscience.”
“And he told you all this?” Bolan made no attempt to hide his skepticism.
“No. Most of it was explained to me by my controller, as you say. Gulpari told me only what I—what we—need to know in order to find al-Bari and the rest.”
“So, what was your impression of him? Was he straight with you? Did anything ring hollow?”
“I am here,” Gorshani said simply. “If I believed that he was lying, that the story was a means to take my life, I would not have been waiting when you dropped out of the sky.”
That much, at least, Bolan believed. And it was all the he would get until they took their shot at Mount Khakwani.
“Right, then,” Bolan said. “Let’s get it done.”
ARZOU MAJABEIN hated bearing bad news. Even mixed with good news, as his was, the bad reflected on its bearer. It could sometimes be a death sentence for those with no actual responsibility for what had gone awry.
Majabein’s face was stoic as he confronted the guards outside Akram Ben Abd al-Bari’s cave. He offered no objection as they frisked him, then ran metal-detecting wands over his body from turban to toes.
He had, as usual, left all his weapons in his car.
When he was cleared for passage, Majabein followed his silent escort into the familiar darkness of the cavern, listened to the crunching echo of their footsteps as they left daylight behind. Beyond the first turn in the tunnel, more guards waited. Majabein was handed off to them, his guide retreating toward his post outside.
Another frisk, no wands this time, and then he stood before his masters, with al-Bari seated in the middle of a stony dais, with Ra’id Ibn Rashad at his right hand. Majabein hoped that neither man could see him trembling
as he stepped forward, knelt and bowed his head.
“You bring word from Islamabad,” al-Bari said.
“I do, sir. And other news, besides.”
“Begin.”
“The martyr’s sacrifice was flawless. Nineteen infidels were slain outright, with twenty-three more wounded. Some of those will die, I am convinced. Also, the damage to their property is costly and significant.”
“What was the martyr’s name?” Rashad inquired.
“Sabeir Hamayun, an Afghani. Pamphlets with his photo are in circulation now. Al Jazeera plans to air the standard profile on him, probably tomorrow or the next day.”
“There were no objections from the brigadier?” al-Bari asked.
“No, sir. Bahaar Jadoon is in our debt for life. He played his part exactly as directed.”
“Very well. You mentioned other news?”
“Yes, sir.” Majabein cleared his throat and moved on to the bad. “Last night—or, I should say, early this morning—someone ambushed an army patrol to the south, at a village called Sanjrani. According to the news reports, and confirmed by our contacts inside the FIA, twenty-six soldiers were killed. Also, nine villagers. The highest-ranking officer was a colonel, Salim Laghari, who served as an aide to our own brigadier.”
Al-Bari and Rashad exchanged somber glances, before al-Bari said, “These dead soldiers you speak of, are they not the same reported to us earlier last night?”
Majabein risked a shrug. “Sir, I don’t know who spoke to you, or what was said. The skirmish I describe was fought sometime after midnight, this morning. I am aware of another ambush, still farther south, that killed twenty soldiers yesterday afternoon.”
“Two attacks, then,” Rashad said, confirming it.
“Yes, sir.”
“I take it,” al-Bari said, “that this colonel from Rawalpindi was dispatched to find the killers from the first attack?”
“It seems so, sir,” Majabein said.
“Sent by our brigadier.”
“Most likely, yes, sir.”
“Two attacks, still unexplained. The second farther north…and so, closer to us.”
“Yes, sir.”
Al-Bari did not ask if they were in danger. He had to know that every move he made and every breath he drew was fraught with risk. Al Qaeda’s top commanders had lived on borrowed time since the 9/11 attacks, and while some seemed almost forgotten in the West, Majabein knew that al-Bari and Rashad were too wily to take their survival for granted.
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