Frontier Fury

by Don Pendleton

  “I think the brigadier might benefit from certain reassurances,” al-Bari said. “You will inform him, if he harbors any doubts, that we had no part in the slaying of his men. We have no quarrel with the Pakistani people or their government, only with infidels whose heresy pollutes the Islamic republic.”

  “It shall be done, sir.”

  “And tell him, also, that if he requires assistance in pursuing those who slew his soldiers, he may call on us at any time. We have resources that may not be readily available to politicians or to men in uniform.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Al-Bari did not have to add that if Jadoon requested help from agents of al Qaeda, he would thus increase his debt of service. It was a masterstroke, designed at once to seal a pact of friendship and to turn the screws, commanding strict obedience from one who might, someday, discover that he could not serve two masters simultaneously.

  “Make haste,” al-Bari said, “before our friend does something rash, even irreparable.”

  Majabein bowed his way out of the cave and jogged past the guards to his car. A long drive lay before him, back to Peshawar, and there would be no time for rest along the way. Failing in this assignment would erase whatever praise he had received for other work, and might cost Majabein his life.

  He gunned the old car’s engine, aimed it down the mountain and was off.

  “WE SHOULD CONSIDER leaving this place,” Ra’id Ibn Rashad said.

  “I have considered it,” al-Bari told his friend and colleague. “First, we need another place to go.”

  “The world is full of caves,” Rashad answered.

  Was there a hint of bitterness behind his words?

  “You wish to be a public figure once again?” al-Bari asked. “To have reporters on your doorstep?”

  “No, Akram. I never had your talent as a speaker, and besides, the war of words was lost in 1948. Armed struggle is the only answer for our people and our faith. I understand the need for sacrifice, but I won’t lie and say that I enjoy living in burrows, with the lizards and scorpions.”

  “You still miss Ara and Fareiba,” al-Bari said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Rashad’s wife and daughter had been killed by agents of Mossad, six years before, during a bungled effort to assassinate Rashad himself. Only al-Bari knew how much his friend had grieved—and how he had avenged himself by sending Semtex-laden martyrs into Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa for the next twelve months, claiming a hundred lives for each of those he’d lost.

  But it would never be enough.

  “They wait for you in Paradise,” al-Bari said.

  “Perhaps they wait in vain,” Rashad answered.

  Al-Bari’s frown demanded explanation. With a weary sigh, Rashad said, “I am dedicated to our struggle. This, you know. It has consumed my family and will consume my life, someday. As for the rest…Akram, sometimes I doubt that I am worthy of a place in Paradise with Ara and Fareiba, with the others we have lost.”

  “Allah rewards his faithful soldiers,” al-Bari said.

  “He also reads our hearts,” Rashad answered. “In reading mine, he may discover that my hatred of the enemy has left no room for love of him.”

  “Do not profane your lips with heresy.”

  “I speak only the truth, old friend. But never fear that I will leave your side. Where else would I be welcome, after all?”

  Uneasy with the new direction of their conversation, al-Bari changed the subject. “We must tighten our security precautions,” he observed. “More guards, to start with. And if Arzou Majabein remains unsatisfied after his meeting with the brigadier, then we can move.”

  “As you think best,” Rashad replied.

  “You need more rest,” al-Bari told him.

  “All I do is rest, and think. I would not mind some action, for a change.”

  Al-Bari smiled at that. “We’re not foot soldiers anymore, my friend. That part of life has passed us by. We’re generals, now.”

  “Meaning, we have the will to fight, but not the strength.” Rashad’s face wore a rueful smile.

  “Faith is our strength,” al-Bari said. “And hatred of the enemies who would destroy that faith.”

  “You’re right, of course, Akram.”

  “I will instruct Fahim to reinforce the guard. Perhaps two dozen men, rotating shifts?”

  Rashad nodded. “Beyond that, we’ll be overcrowded, like an anthill. Don’t forget additional supplies.”

  “And we must plan a new campaign abroad,” al-Bari said. “America, I think, but not the Eastern Seaboard. A target that exemplifies the decadence and the hypocrisy of the Crusaders.”

  “Why not Hollywood?” Rashad inquired. “It’s owned and run by Zionists, corrupting all the world.”

  “Or possibly Las Vegas,” al-Bari said, “where the Christians flock to throw their cash away.”

  “More Zionists,” Rashad observed. “They built and own the great casinos. Half their money goes to Israel, and the rest to whores.”

  “To whores and politicians,” al-Bari said.

  “What’s the difference?” Rashad asked.

  Al-Bari smiled at that, regretting that he had forgotten how to laugh. His faith, his war, had cost him mirth, on top of all the rest that he had lost.

  “Perhaps none,” he acknowledged. “Allah hates them all.”

  “His will be done,” Rashad said.

  10

  Gorshani drove his SUV off-road, along a dry creek bed, which, Bolan guessed, would fill with rushing water during flash-flood season. That was weeks away, however, and his mission on the mountain should be finished, one way or the other, before dawn the following day.

  When they’d driven a half mile or so into the gully, and its steep, unstable walls of dirt were four feet taller than the SUV, Gorshani stopped, switched off the engine and declared, “We hide it here.”

  Ahead of them, Bolan observed the gully clogged with Russian thistle, known in the United States as tumbleweeds. Nodding, he pulled his gear out of the vehicle, set it aside and donned his gloves, then helped Gorshani camouflage the dusty SUV. The clumps of thorny, dried-out vegetation would mask it from an aerial perspective, and from casual inspection at ground level.

  Doing the job properly took twenty minutes. It left Bolan sweating, but he knew that he’d be cool again once they had reached a higher elevation. Mount Khakwani towered over them, roughly eleven thousand feet in height, but seeming taller from their mole’s-eye view.

  Somewhere close to the summit, Bolan hoped to find Akram Ben Abd al-Bari and a handful of his closest aides. The more, the merrier, in fact—up to a point.

  As they divided up the climbing gear, Bolan wondered whether his guide would make it to the top—or wherever al-Bari might be waiting for them. Gorshani had proved he could fight and kill, in the crunch, but aiming and pulling a trigger required no great strength of endurance. It was the difference between a fifty-yard dash and a marathon.

  Bolan’s early Special Forces training had included mountaineering, and he’d kept himself in fighting form since then. Still, based on what Gorshani had told him so far, he understood most of their climb would rank as tough hiking, rather than scaling vertical cliffs or scrabbling over glaciers.

  The ropes, carabiners and pitons were gear they might need, but which, with any luck, would not be used. However it might pan out, the extra weight was worth it, for the peace of mind that it provided.

  Their first step toward the mountain—their final destination—was evacuation of the gully where they had concealed Gorshani’s SUV. They walked back almost to where they had left the highway, then climbed up the crumbling bank to ground level. From there, they jogged the final hundred feet to reach the base of Mount Khakwani.

  Up close and personal, Bolan saw there was no shortage of trails. He scanned the mountainside, saw one that seemed to go the farthest up without visible interruption, and confirmed the choice with Gorshani. A nod from his guide, and they started to c
limb.

  The slope began at thirty-odd degrees and steepened after that, lighting a fire in Bolan’s thigh and calf muscles, testing his stamina before he’d covered forty yards. His gear seemed to gain weight with every stride, and while Gorshani carried less, Bolan could hear his labored breathing up ahead.

  Beyond the physical exertion, Bolan had to deal with the fact that they were completely exposed to any trackers on the ground or sentries posted higher on the mountain. Like a pair of insects crawling up a kitchen wall, they could be swatted down at any time. Bolan’s fatigues gave him some cover, but the desert camo pattern didn’t blend as well with shale and granite, as with sand and gravel. Still, he guessed that he was no worse off than his companion, clad in a brown jacket and a pair of denim jeans.

  We’re in it now, he thought. Too late to second-guess the wardrobe.

  If they were observed, they would be killed, regardless of their clothing choices. Bolan’s mission had been a gamble from the moment he’d accepted it. And now he moved into the finals where the stakes were life or death.

  What else is new? he asked himself, and settled into the long haul.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL Raheem Davi stood above the burned-out hulks of two M113 armored personnel carriers, breathing in the still-strong smells of burned gasoline, electrical wiring and flesh. The bodies had been carted off before he’d gotten there, but their essence had remained behind, part of the desert atmosphere.

  It troubled Davi to think that each time he smelled something—be it a flower, a succulent steak, or a pile of feces—he was, in fact, inhaling microscopic pieces of the thing itself. Each smell on Earth had substance, and that knowledge, once acquired, had made him almost paranoid about the effluent his brain and body might absorb simply by breathing.

  Still, he had to be here, and his soldiers would have ridiculed him if he’d worn a surgical mask to the scene of the crime. Weakness was punished in the military, one way or another, even more than in the world at large.

  So he inhaled the stench of death and tried to relish it, become one with his men, who didn’t flinch as they perused the battleground.

  Davi’s assignment was simplicity itself, at least on paper. He would find the men responsible for this atrocity, as well as the annihilation of a previous patrol, and either kill them or take them back to Peshawar for judgment. That had been Colonel Salim Laghari’s assignment, but he had failed spectacularly, thereby giving Davi his one chance to shine.

  Where would the killers go from here? he asked himself.

  There first ambush of troops had occurred some eighty miles to the south of the killing ground where Davi now stood, proof positive that they were moving northward—if, in fact, the same men were responsible for both events. Davi assumed that they must be, since tracking down two different guerrilla bands within the time allotted to him clearly was impossible.

  The brigadier had given Davi just twelve hours to produce results, by any means required. Once that deadline ran out, he was at risk of being sidelined and relieved of duty, suffering disgrace that might prove fatal to his career. Success, conversely, would ensure his status as a rising star.

  “There was an extra corpse,” Davi remarked.

  “Yes, sir,” Company Havildar Major Minhas Kermani replied.

  “Twenty-seven,” Davi said. “There should be only twenty-six.”

  “You are correct, sir.”

  “So, they had a prisoner?”

  “Most likely, sir,” Kermani said.

  “What is the nearest village?” Davi asked.

  “Sanjrani, I believe, sir. It lies five miles to the south.”

  “We’ll start there,” Davi said, “and see if anyone is missing. If they are, then someone else will know why they were taken, and we work from there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Five minutes later they were rolling southward on the narrow rural highway, buttoned down inside the APCs as if expecting an attack at any moment. Which, in fact, Lieutenant Colonel Davi was.

  He planned to crack the mystery that had been handed to him, not wind up as one more name on a growing death list. He would not make the brigadier regret selecting him for this assignment, or bring shame upon his brigade.

  There was no substitute for victory.

  The APCs reached Sanjrani fifteen minutes after departing the massacre scene—or, rather, the point where the victims were left. It was apparent from the scene they’d left behind that the soldiers and their unknown passenger had been slain somewhere else, then transported to the gully where they had been found.

  Sanjrani was as good a place as any to start looking.

  At the village, Davi summoned the peasants from their homes with his APC’s PA system, and waited impatiently as they straggled into a rough crowd formation before him. His call for the headman caused another brief delay, before a thin old man stepped forward.

  “What is your name?” Davi demanded.

  “Armin Mojtaba, sir,” the old man said.

  “What happened to your face?”

  Mojtaba raised a hand to feel his nose and lips, as if the bruising and scabbed-over cut were new to him, instead of hours old.

  “A disagreement, sir. It has been settled.”

  “Ah. A disagreement over what? With whom?”

  “Sir, it was trivial.”

  “Your injuries do not appear so.”

  “It is best forgotten now, sir.”

  Even Davi’s men were startled when he drew his sidearm, pressed its muzzle to Mojtaba’s wrinkled forehead and drew back the hammer with his thumb.

  “Old man,” Davi said, “my brigade has lost twenty-six men. Another twenty were assassinated yesterday. I think you know what happened to them, and the matter is not trivial to me.”

  “Sir, with respect, you are mistaken.”

  “I can live with that mistake,” Davi informed him. “You cannot.”

  A solitary tear spilled down the old man’s weathered face, then he began to speak.

  THE NEW GUARDS were mostly Taliban, black-turbaned, with their beards untended. They seemed to have the proper attitude, which meant they had forgotten how to smile and likely would have died before they laughed at anything, even the downfall of America.

  It made for peace and quiet in the cave complex that Akram Ben Abd al-Bari called home. Without a noisy staff, he could devote himself entirely to the vital tasks of planning and spiritual meditation. In al-Bari’s mind, there was no concrete difference between the two.

  Jihad, as he had known and served it all his life, meant struggling or striving in the way of Allah. It involved an endless war against the heathen West and its puppet state of Israel.

  To each his own. So be it.

  At the moment, he was more concerned with fatwa than jihad. The former, generally, was an edict on Islamic law and could be issued by any Muslim scholar. In modern, practical terms, fatwa was understood to be a death sentence, issued upon an infidel or blasphemer.

  Ironically, throughout the Muslim world there was unanimous agreement that a fatwa only bound its author. Thus judicial chaos was averted, and a semblance of sanity preserved. However, when al-Bari pronounced a fatwa, he had the soldiers and resources of al Qaeda to carry out his orders.

  Al-Bari wished to kill the unknown men responsible for stirring up the hornet’s nest of military action in the province, but he could not send a squad to liquidate them if he didn’t know their names, or where they might be found.

  Rashad had hinted that the killings might have something to do with al-Bari himself, or their mountain retreat. It seemed implausible, and yet…

  When he plotted the two mass killings on a map, it did seem that the killers had to be moving north, along a route that would bring them into the Safed Koh. That did not mean they would wind up on Mount Khakwani, but if there was any possibility of it, al-Bari had to be prepared.

  He hated running from the enemy, although strategic withdrawals were a guerrilla’s stock-in-trade. He longed
to stand and fight—to test himself again, as he had in his youth—but al-Bari knew he had to consider first the broad needs of al Qaeda and those who dedicated everything they had to his jihad.

  His spies were scouring the countryside for any lead as to who’d killed the soldiers, watching the approaches to al-Bari’s lair. If he was found…

  The prospect almost made him smile. Surely, if the Crusaders knew where to find him, they would have sent cruise missiles to destroy al-Bari long ago. Long-distance killing was their specialty, followed by boasting to the media.

  But if not the Crusaders, then, who?

  Al-Bari knew that he had to also watch his friends, while taking bold steps to eradicate his enemies. Unfortunately, when he did not know the men who possibly were bent on killing him, he had to guard against all men in general.

  And women, too, although females had played no significant part in his life since the massacre of his wife and daughters. It has been said that “no man is an island,” but al-Bari considered himself a mountain.

  He was a rugged mountain—or, at least, a part of one—and that was where he felt best able to defend himself. Anyone who sought him there had to run a gauntlet of his own devising, and face death before he found al-Bari.

  In the meantime, while he waited to see if Rashad’s suggestions were prophecy or paranoia, al-Bari had a war to run. There would be fresh blood on his hands by this time the next day.

  It would be, he hoped, his ticket into Paradise.

  GORSHANI WAS starting to drag, and they weren’t even halfway to the summit yet. Bolan sympathized with his guide, guessing that Gorshani hadn’t kept himself in shape for this kind of exertion, but the Executioner couldn’t let the pace slack off.

  To help distract Gorshani from his weariness, the burning ache that made his legs feel leaden, Bolan questioned him about al Qaeda’s operations in the province and in Pakistan at large.