Locked On

by Tom Clancy

  After the third empty room they came back into the hallway, and Mohammed al Darkur cut down two men trying to enter the front doorway. After that he dropped to his kneepads, keeping his gun trained on the door where men from the barracks would enter.

  “Keep going! I’ll keep them back!”

  Chavez turned and led the way, with Ryan and Caruso right on his heels.

  They made a turn, Ding shot at a gunman retreating up a staircase on his left, then knelt to reload his gun. There was another stone staircase on the right, heading down into a basement enshrouded in darkness.

  Outside, large RPG explosions were mixing with small-arms fire.

  Domingo turned back to the others, now shouting over the sound of al Darkur’s cracking rifle. “We don’t have any time! I’ll check upstairs, you guys go down! Meet back here, but watch out for blue-on-blue fire!”

  With that Chavez hustled up the stairs and out of view. Caruso took a tentative lead down into the basement, shining his light ahead of him. He’d gotten no more than halfway down the uneven stone steps when a rifle up ahead boomed, and the steps and walls sparked around him as copper-jacketed ammo struck and bounced.

  Caruso backpedaled up the stairs but crashed into Ryan. Both men fell and tumbled forward, sliding down the stairs on their gear packs before coming to rest in the dark hallway.

  The gunman ahead continued firing. Ryan found himself on top of Caruso, pinning his cousin down, so he rose to his knees, aimed perfunctorily on the flashes ahead, and dumped twenty rounds from his weapon at the threat.

  Then, through the ringing in his ears, he heard the clinking of his own hot brass bouncing against the stone before it came to rest all around him. Then he heard a heavier metal thud as a rifle fell to the floor ahead. He shined his light and saw a Taliban slumped against the wall at a turn in the basement hall.

  “You okay, Dom?”

  “Get off of me.”

  “Sorry.” Ryan climbed off and stood up. Dom stood up, as well, and then covered ahead while Jack reloaded his P-90.

  “Let’s move.”

  They made it to the corner and then looked around. Up ahead was a single room at the end of the hall. Inside it was dark, but not for long.

  AK fire from two rifles rang out, sending showers of sparks all the way up the hall toward the two Americans as the bullets pinged off the stone wall.

  Dom and Jack tucked their heads back.

  “I’m thinking that looks like it could be the jail.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Ryan.

  Apparently there were only two jailers, but they had good cover at the far end of the hallway. Plus they held a second advantage: Jack and Dom had no idea what was on the other side of the doorway. For all they knew, if they fired up the baked-brick hallway and into the room, their rounds might bounce around inside and hit the man they had come to save.

  “Should we go get Chavez and come back?” asked Ryan.

  “No time. We’ve got to get in there.”

  Together they thought for a moment. Suddenly Jack said, “I’ve got an idea. I take a nine-banger, I throw it short, just outside the doorway. As soon as the first bang goes off, we run.”

  “Into the nine-banger?” Caruso asked incredulously.

  “Fuck, yes! We shield our eyes. They’ll have to pull their heads in the room while it’s going off. When we get halfway up the hall you roll a flash-bang through the doorway, and that should stun them until we get in. We’ll have to time it right, but that should keep them occupied.”

  Dom nodded. “I don’t have anything better. But leave your rifle. Pistols only. We’ll move better, and we don’t want to hit Sam coming through the door.”

  The two young men slipped out of their rifle slings, and then pulled grenades from their chest pouches. Ryan drew his pistol and pulled the pin on his grenade.

  Dom moved next to him at the edge of the corner. He patted his cousin on the shoulder and said, “No retreat. We start moving on their position, we can’t stop and turn back around. The only chance is to keep going.”

  “Got it,” Jack said, and he slung the grenade around the dark corner with a side-arm toss.

  After just a couple of echoing metal-on-stone clanks, the first explosion and flash rocked the hall and the men at the far end of it. Dom moved ahead of Jack, sprinted into the forty-foot-long line of fire of the enemies’ guns, and he rolled his flash-bang far into the room like a bowling ball, right through the flashes and smoke of Jack’s nine-banger.

  Together Caruso and Ryan ran forward with their eyes turned away from the bursts of fire.

  The two jailers had tucked their heads back inside the small room to shield them from what they thought was an undertossed diversion. But by the time the last of the nine-banger’s pops finished and they readied to turn back to resume firing up the hallway, a small canister bounced into the room between them.

  They both stared at the flash-bang as it went off, pounding their brains inside their skulls and dilating their blinded eyes.

  Jack entered the room first at a run, but he’d caught enough of the effects of Dom’s flash-bang to disorient him. He ran right past the two men who’d fallen to the floor on either side of the doorway, and he crashed into the metal bars of the first cell before he was able to stop on his own.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, half blinded and all deaf, at least for the next few seconds.

  But Dominic came in behind him; Jack’s body had shielded him from much of the light and some of the sound, so the ex–FBI agent still had his wits about him.

  He shot both of the disoriented Haqqani fighters where they knelt on the floor, putting a bullet into the back of each man’s head.

  “In here!” It was Sam. His cell door was only a few feet from Ryan, but he could barely hear him.

  Ryan shined his light on the cells in the room. A Pashtun man was crouched against the wall of the first cell, a sick-looking white-skinned blond man lay on the floor of the second cell.

  Ryan now shined his light into the corner. In the last cell, Sam Driscoll sat astride a dead Haqqani fighter, the man’s twisted neck in the American’s hands.

  Caruso found the overhead light and flipped it on. He stared at Sam, as well.

  “You okay?”

  Sam looked away from the man he had just killed with his bare hands, the jailer who had planned to use him as a human shield, and he looked up at his two colleagues. “You boys playing army?”

  66

  Sam and Dom led the way back up the stairs while Jack and the Afghan carried the incapacitated Reuters reporter. It was a tough climb back to the ground floor, but once they were there, things became even more precarious. Chavez had cleared the upstairs, but now he and al Darkur were in the hallway near the stairs, firing toward the front of the building at enemy fighters positioned there.

  The Pakistani major had been hit in the left shoulder and his rifle had been damaged by another round, but he continued to fire his pistol up the hall with his right hand.

  Chavez saw that he had six people behind him now, and one was being carried. He nodded to himself and patted al Darkur on the shoulder. “Let’s find a way out of here before the enemy starts firing RPGs!”

  They headed toward the back of the building, a limping Sam Driscoll in the lead with a salvaged AK. Now Chavez brought up the rear and fired constantly to keep heads down in the rooms and hallways near the front of the house.

  The hallway came to a T and Driscoll went right, with the rest of the procession following behind. Sam came upon a large room at the back of the house, but the windows had been bricked up and there was no door.

  “No good!” he shouted. “Try the other direction!”

  Chavez led now. He was surprised that the enemy fire up this stretch of hallway had lessened noticeably. With Ryan and Caruso firing down the base of the T, Chavez and al Darkur darted across, and then ran into a long narrow kitchen. There was no exit here, but a small side door looked promising. Chavez opened the door, desp
erate to find a window or a door or even a staircase back upstairs.

  The doorway led to a dark room roughly fifteen feet across and thirty feet deep. It seemed to be some sort of repair shop, but Ding didn’t focus on the room itself; instead he shined his rifle’s light quickly along the walls, searching for any other exit. Seeing nothing, he started to turn away to try to go back and fight with the others. But he stopped when something caught his eye in the low light.

  He’d ignored the wooden tables and shelves in the room when looking for a way out, but now he focused on them, or more specifically, what was on them.

  Containers of car parts and electrical components. Batteries. Cell phones. Wires. Small drums of gunpowder. Steel pressure plates and a blue fifty-five-gallon drum full of what Ding immediately assumed was nitric acid.

  On the floor were mortar shells, partially disassembled.

  Ding realized he’d stumbled onto a bomb factory. The improvised explosive devices created here would be smuggled over the border into Afghanistan.

  This explained why the Haqqani fighters hadn’t fired a rocket toward Chavez and his team here in the back of the house. If anything in this room detonated, the entire compound would be obliterated, the Haqqani men included.

  “Mohammed?” Ding shouted, and al Darkur peered into the room.

  Immediately he nodded. “Bombs.”

  “I know what they are. Can we use them?”

  Mohammed nodded with a crooked smile. “I know something about bombs.”

  Ryan and Caruso were both down to their last magazine. They fired individual rounds from the top of the T down to the base. They knew they’d taken out a lot of the Haqqani members with rifle fire, but there seemed to be an unlimited supply of armed assholes remaining.

  One of the Puma helicopters was flying in circles behind the compound. This Jack could tell from occasional automatic fire from his six-o’clock high, coming from outside the building. He could not actually hear the helo—with the gunfire in the narrow hallways his ears were trashed, so nothing less than small-arms fire up close or heavy machine guns at distance registered.

  Chavez appeared just behind the two men, sliding a fresh magazine around and into their chest rigs. While he did this he shouted, “There is a bomb factory in the back!”

  “Oh, shit,” said Ryan, realizing that he and his mates were, essentially, exchanging fire while sitting on top of a powder keg.

  “Al Darkur is wiring an IED to blow the back wall. If he gets it right it should make us a hole in the back of the building. When it’s time to go, just turn and run up the hallway. I’ll cover your egress!”

  Jack didn’t ask what would happen if Mohammed did not get it “right.”

  Ding next said, “Do not head out back until you toss your LZ beacons. The door gunner in the Puma has been rocking his MG for the past ten minutes. Don’t count on him to spot the IR strobe on your back. He’ll turn you into ground beef. Use your LZ marker as a second way to alert them that friendlies are coming out.”

  The two young men nodded.

  “Sam and the Afghan will drag the wounded man, you guys just keep up the covering fire for them until the chopper lands and they get on board.”

  “Got it!” Dom said, and Ryan nodded.

  Both Ryan and Caruso kept up the controlled fire, just enough to let the enemy know that, if they ventured up the hall toward the T, then they were going to pay a heavy price. They still took some fire, but it came from AKs that were just held around the corner and sprayed by their handlers, and the rounds banged along the walls, floors, and ceiling.

  Twice al Darkur and Chavez passed behind them as they took IED material out of the bomb factory on Jack and Dom’s right and carried it to the other end of the hallway on their left.

  Within a minute, Chavez was back behind them. He screamed into their ears, “Get down!”

  Both men dove to the stone floor of the hallway and covered their heads. Within a few seconds, an incredible boom from behind them pounded up the hallway with a concussive force that made Jack think the building would fall on top of them. Cracked mortar, stone, and dust did fall from the ceiling, raining down on all the men in the hallway.

  Caruso was first to his feet. He ran up the hallway with Ryan close behind, passing the wounded Reuters man being dragged by his shoulders by Driscoll and the Afghani prisoner.

  Jack caught up to him as they entered the room with the bricked-over windows. Their weapon lights were useless with the dust in the air. They just continued on toward the far wall until, finally, they could see open sky. Immediately Dominic threw the flashing landing-zone signal into the rear of the compound. The beacon would, in theory, alert the gunmen in the circling choppers that friendlies were in that area so they should not fire.

  As Dominic stepped into the rear courtyard he worried he would take a blast from the door gun of the chopper, but fortunately the Zarrar commandos had good fire discipline. The American crouched behind a small stack of truck tires and covered the north side of the compound, while his cousin went prone beside a large pile of rubble left by al Darkur’s bomb blast, covering the south side.

  One of the SSG choppers had used its 20-millimeter cannon to take out the poles holding up the electric wires in the back of the property, so the helo landed near Major al Darkur, the prisoners, and the American operatives. Within seconds everyone was aboard and the helo lifted back into the air and immediately began racing for safety.

  Inside the helicopter, all seven men who’d made it on board lay on the metal decking, arms and legs atop one another. Jack Ryan found himself near the bottom of the pile, but he was too exhausted to move, even to push the thick leg of the Afghani politician off his face.

  It took another twenty minutes of nap-of-the-earth flying before the lights in the cabin of the helo came on and the pilot announced, through Mohammed al Darkur and his intercom-linked headphones, that they were out of danger. The men sat up, water bottles were passed around, and al Darkur’s shoulder was attended to by the loadmaster of the aircraft, while one of the Zarrar commandos started an IV into the arm of the Australian Reuters correspondent.

  The normally dry and stoic Sam Driscoll hugged each member of his extraction team, then he rolled into the corner and fell asleep with a water bottle tucked to his chest.

  Chavez leaned over into Jack’s ear to yell over the engine noise, “Looks like you had a pretty close shave back there.”

  Jack followed Ding’s eyes to the canvas magazine rack on his chest. A jagged hole was torn through one of the pouches. He pulled out a metal and plastic P-90 mag, and found a bullet hole all the way through it. Fingering his way into the hole in his chest rig he fished out a twisted and sharp 7.62 round that had slammed into his ceramic breastplate.

  In all the action, Jack had no idea he’d taken a hit right to the chest.

  “Fuck me,” he said as he held the bullet up and looked at it.

  Chavez just laughed and squeezed the younger man’s arm. “Not your time, ’mano.”

  “I guess not,” Jack said, and he wanted to call his mom and dad, and he wanted to call Melanie. But he had to put both those communications on hold, because he suddenly felt the nausea return.

  67

  Riaz Rehan had men on the inside of each and every major institution in his nation. One of these institutions was the Pakistani nuclear ordnance industry. He, through his own network of cutouts, was in contact with nuclear scientists, engineers, and weapons manufacturers. Through them he learned that in Wah Cantonment, near Islamabad, was the storage location of many of his nation’s nuclear devices. Several air delivery bombs, essentially U.S. Mark 84 conventional bomb cases packed with five-to-twenty-kiloton-yield nuclear devices, were kept at the Kamra Air Weapon Complex inside the massive Pakistan Ordnance Factories there at Wah. The nuclear bombs were disassembled, but kept at something known as “screwdriver ready” status. This meant they could be assembled for deployment in hours if and when the head of state called for
them to be made ready.

  And, Rehan had learned from one of his high-ranking associates in the Ministry of Defense the previous morning, the President of Pakistan had made the call.

  So the first portion of Operation Saker had already succeeded. In order to ensure that the weapons were assembled and deployed to their battle stations, General Rehan needed to bring his nation to the brink of war. That done, he monitored his contacts in the government and nuclear weapons branches of the military, and waited like a coiled snake in the grass to make his next move.

  The Pakistanis had long boasted that their nuclear weapons were protected by a three-tier national command authority security procedure. This was true, but ultimately it did not mean much. All one needed was the knowledge of the weakest link in the security of the device after its assembly, and some way to exploit this weakest link.

  The general’s agents at Pakistan Ordnance Factories told him that around nine p.m. two twenty-kiloton bombs would leave the Kamra Air Weapon Complex by truck, and then they would be delivered to a special train in nearby Taxila. At first Rehan considered attacking the truck convoy. A truck is easier to disable than a train, after all. But there were too many variables for which Rehan could not control so close to the large military presence there in Wah and Taxila.

  So he began looking at the rail route. The bombs would be delivered by a heavily guarded freight train to the air force base at Sargodha, some two hundred miles of rail travel away.

  A simple glance at a map was all it took to pinpoint the weakest link on the route. Just five kilometers south of the town of Phularwan, on a flat stretch of farmland bisected by the railroad, a cluster of abandoned mills and grain warehouses sat alongside wheat fields that ran right up to the tracks. Here a force could hide, ready to attack a train approaching from the north. Once they had achieved their objective the force could then load itself and the two ten-foot-long, one-ton bombs onto trucks, and access the modern M2 Highway, the Lahore–Islamabad road, where they could go north or south and disappear into either massive metropolis inside of ninety minutes.