“What does it do?” he finally asked.
“Everything,” replied Hafiz. “I don’t understand even half of it, but from that big chair, the chief engineer had everything at his fingertips. Watching him work it was like seeing a conjurer doing the impossible. Despite the wonder, these are not toys for children but a real war-fighting center. Cameras and sensors everywhere, map overlays, holographic projections, and automatic weapons adjustments. Just imagine; one man holding off anything the enemy could throw at him, and doing it in air-conditioned comfort. A bomb hit up top might not even be felt down here. Giant springs beneath the floor would soak up the impact.”
“Then why is it not filled with technicians right now?”
“Well, the truth is that the chief engineer did not think about other people running his system. He must be replaced before it can be truly functioning. Islamabad is putting together a qualified team; no one man could do what he did. They will be transferred in to take final control within a week.”
Al-Masri walked around, looking, and was drawn toward the one flat screen that showed some activity and was giving off a steady beep. The flare of a campfire showed clearly, and several shadowy figures moved around it. “What is this?”
Hafiz glanced over. “Some of my security people. Just a routine patrol down in the valley by the old bridge,” he said. “Taliban. They may be good fighters, but not very disciplined. We are bringing in regular troops to take over as soon as possible, a whole platoon.”
“A lazy patrol does not inspire confidence,” said al-Masri.
“Nothing ever goes totally smooth in bringing a huge project such as this online, transitioning from construction to operational,” said Hafiz, trying to sound casual. “A lot of pieces are yet to finally be in place, including a final security protocol. When everything is up and running, it will be a wonder. The Commander will be quite safe here.”
“That is for me to determine,” said Ayman al-Masri.
Hafiz laughed. “Wait until you see the guns. Now, let’s take a break and have some tea.” He led them away and relocked the door. Inwardly, Hafiz was embarrassed that the latest patrol had been seen taking their ease down by the old bridge. The poor quality of the Taliban was reflecting on him personally, and he would not tolerate that. When they reached the dining hall, he took a minute to radio orders to move out the reserve unit immediately. The sergeant planned to kick some sense into that first group when it returned.
19
THE VALLEY
“NOW WHAT?” BETH LEDFORD whispered, staring out beyond the campsite.
“We keep going,” Swanson replied, unfolding a map he had found on the man who had been standing up. Taking a compass reading and shielding his flashlight with his hand, Kyle studied it for a moment and determined the landmarks of the old and new bridges. Bingo. Good intel. It was a detailed rendering of the sector.
“Things are changing fast, Coastie, but that always happens after the first shot is fired, and our plans have to change to meet the new circumstances. This is just the start of the game, and we have to do a lot more. Get one of the blankets.” Among the contour lines on the map was a scattering of bold blue dots, including one about ten meters from the campsite. He pointed and said, “Walk slowly directly west and see if one of those camera pipes comes up. About a dozen steps.”
She shook out a sweat-stained blanket and held it before her like a shield. After only three steps, she said, “There it is. Already coming up and pointing at the camp.” She tossed the heavy cloth, and it settled like a tent around a center pole, blinding the camera.
“OK. I think every camera in this sector is marked with the same symbol, which is good for us. I’ll take point. Follow me up this trail.”
Ledford brought her rifle to a ready position and stepped out behind him, changing magazines as she walked. She had reloaded without being told.
So far, Kyle had been satisfied with her work. Started out a little nervous but adjusted well. She had not freaked out in their ambush and was able to pull the trigger, but he anticipated that stronger opposition lay ahead, and the hardest part of the three tiers of reaction was to keep calm when someone is shooting back. She would face that test soon enough.
“We have to believe we have been compromised, but it’s too early to leave, because things don’t make sense yet. Whatever the secret may be lies up at that big bridge, so we have to move closer. Keep your head on a swivel. And don’t worry if you feel scared. You’re supposed to be scared. It helps you pay attention.”
“In that case, Gunny, I’m paying a lot of attention.”
Darkness closed around them again as they left the campsite on the well-traveled trail that ran along the west bank of the river. A treeline started at the top of the ridge. Below, Beth could hear the forceful rumble of water working around smooth boulders, uprooted trees, and the debris caught around the submerged eastern end of the old span. She wasn’t really scared, and reminded herself that the Coast Guard preached that you have to go out, but nobody ever said a damn thing about having to come back. Same thing, different place.
The radio Swanson had taken from the patrol leader squawked. Somebody angry, speaking fast Arabic. He caught the drift, that the dead man was being chewed out for not making a scheduled radio check. Swanson turned down the volume but listened carefully. A relief patrol was being sent out. He did not try to reply. The call puzzled him, for it sounded like the headquarters dude was unaware that they were around. Perhaps they had not been badly compromised after all.
THE BRIDGE
SPIKES OF NOISE ECHOED through the corridors, and Sergeant Hafiz had to find a quiet place before trying raise the second patrol by radio. He pushed open a steel door painted light green and stepped inside a low bunker where an Iranian SPG-9 antitank gun squatted on its automatic mount. The room smelled of oil. Hafiz pushed a control switch on the wall, and the cover of the firing slit hummed open, allowing direct line-of-sight radio transmission into the valley. Beyond the hearing of the al Qaeda inspectors, he now unloaded his pent-up frustration into his radio. The patrol had not checked in, and he had even seen them on the control room monitor, loafing and asleep at the old bridge. There was still no response. Hafiz closed the firing lid and stormed out of the gun pit, his face dark with anger.
The barracks was up one flight of steel steps, which he took two at a time, then marched quickly past some startled workers until he was in the troops’ sleeping area. “Everybody get up!” he shouted, grabbing the closest man and pulling him hard from the bunk. Taliban fighters understood force a lot better than words, and all of them scrambled to their feet, barefoot, bearded, and dazed. Partially eaten food was scattered by the bunks, along with dirty clothes and empty plastic water bottles. Dirty, worthless scum. “Get ready to move in ten minutes! Your patrol leader will come get you and take you out the valley. Your friends went to sleep on sentry duty and are out of radio contact! Inexcusable! You go to sleep out there and I will crucify you and let the birds have your worthless bodies.” He spun around and stalked away in a fury, out of patience with these people.
He went back the same way he had come up, down the steel circular staircases and once again into the gun bunker, closing the outer door and opening the firing slit. He put his face up to the cool outside air and sucked in a lungful, exhaled, then took another deep breath. Hafiz had retreated to the solitude of the pit to regain his composure and reassemble his outward image of total confidence and competence. Everything on the inspection tour was going well so far, except for that outside security detail. Ayman al-Masri had not seemed disturbed by the condition of the chief engineer in the infirmary, but Hafiz had seen displeasure momentarily cross his face when he had also noticed the idle patrol. That lapse was damaging and required a tough response, but Hafiz still needed those morons for guard duty until the regular troops could arrive.
All he could do at present was to continue the tour and let the mighty bridge fortress sell itself, without him havi
ng to say much at all. Answer any questions that he could immediately. Admit no weakness. The message was to be All is well here; it is safe.
THE VALLEY
SWANSON STOPPED, REACHED DOWN,and brushed the dirt beside the trail until he found a patch of smooth ground right where the map indicated. “Another blanket,” he whispered over his shoulder, and Ledford unfurled another cloth. “These are little paths that have been tramped down by maintenance workers who serviced the cameras,” he said. “The map shows a whole network of them coming off the trail at various points. Go up about twenty meters, find it, and cover it.”
Ledford shook out the blanket. Now that she had done it once, her confidence had soared, and when the camera stalk came rising out of the ground, there was no surprise. It wasn’t some mighty alien erupting from the flood-scarred mud. Just a dumb machine. She flipped the cloth over the lens. Through her night goggles, she also now could recognize the slightly flattened area around the device where service crews had been working, pulling weeds, clearing obstructions, and keeping the magic eye functioning. Then she saw a longer strip of discolored earth, running straight as an arrow. She dug her fingers into the muck, pried away a few rocks, and touched plastic. Some things are so basic. Beth returned to Swanson on the main trail. “Done,” she said. “The cameras are hardwired by landlines running through PVC pipes. We can just disable them with our knives.”
“We don’t have time to do them all, Coastie. It’s enough for now that we know where the cameras are so we can dodge. We’ve got bits and pieces of information, but we still don’t know what’s behind it all. I want to get to that bridge. We only have about an hour of darkness left, and weather’s moving in.”
“I can’t figure it out, Gunny. Why all this security to protect a danged bridge?” she asked as he got up. Above them, the sky had filled with troubled clouds, knotting and shifting, blotting out the stars and entirely hiding the moon.
“Nothing out here makes much sense, Coastie. It’s a quacks-like-a-duck thing. There is a reason, but we just haven’t found it yet. My opinion, worst case, since this is Pakistan, they might have stuck a nuke in there. Let’s go. Stay quiet.”
A single raindrop touched Beth’s hand, and a quick wind swirled through the valley to drop the temperature a few degrees. It was followed by a powerful peal of thunder, and lightning sparkled in jagged sharpness overhead, rendering the nightmare landscape even more misshapen. Then the hard rain slashed down, and the first drops changed to torrents. She hunched up her shoulders and moved on.
The mission had never been considered to be a long-duration job, and they had packed no rain gear other than the special blankets in the survival kits, which they would not use as raincoats. Their uniforms were formulated to retain body head and not encumber movement, and the goggles still worked, although they had to wipe them. Rain would have gotten into their exposed eyes just as easily, so wearing the NVGs continued the advantage of being able to see in the dark.
Kyle already felt the dirt beginning to mud up beneath his boots, because the area had been so drenched by the recent floods that it still had not deep-dried, and the water saturated the land and rushed down toward the river. On the plus side, the deluge added concealment and deflected noise. The storm and lightning would help protect them from the nosy cameras and motion detectors, so he considered it an even trade.
Kyle heard them coming. The members of the third Taliban patrol were bitching and complaining loudly over the sound of the falling rain about how that dog of a Pakistani sergeant had forced them out of the dry and comfortable barracks and into the foul weather, and now their clothes were weighed down by water, sticking to their skin, and they were growing colder with each step. They cursed the first patrol that had gotten carelessly ambushed, and the second for failing to do its job and making it necessary to be relieved early. There was nothing tactical about their approach; they were just rambling down the trail with a mob mentality, disinterested, angry, ignoring their leader, and wanting to get to the fallen bridge where they could put up some shelter. Each man had an AK-47 over a shoulder or slung across his chest.
Swanson, with the NVGs, had a couple of seconds to react when he saw the smeared images approach, because they could not yet see him. He went to one knee and softly said to Beth, “Contact, front. Five targets, twenty meters. I take One, you got Two, just like we drilled at Quantico.” She locked into a firing position, ready to shoot over Swanson’s head.
The Taliban came hurrying forward in a ragged line, their eyes on the trail, bodies bent against the slamming rainstorm. Kyle fired when the first man was only twenty feet away, but the target’s forward momentum kept him moving even after he had absorbed a bullet in the chest. As he fell, Beth Ledford’s CAR-15 spat a silenced round into the center mass of the second man. Swanson, a moment later, downed a third one.
The fourth man in line realized something was happening and began to crouch. Ledford’s round smashed into his face and spewed bits of bone and brain onto the fighter behind him.
Because of the melee in front of him, the final fighter had a chance to react and was about to jump from the trail when Swanson shot him; the bullet penetrated under the right arm, and the round bored through the chest cavity, tearing up vital organs as it went. He died as he hit the mud.
“Cease fire,” Swanson said, waiting to be sure Ledford was through pulling the trigger before he stood up. Drawing his pistol, he advanced to administer the necessary final head shots. Then he just said, “Let’s go.”
Beth was breathing heavy, her breath puffing little clouds in the chill and rain. She had felt nothing for these people she had just killed; nothing at all. This time, it was almost like a video game, for the poor visibility and their positions had shielded their faces from her view, so they didn’t even look like real people. She just took the shots. Quick and easy, like clockwork; like Swanson.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
UNDERSECRETARY WILLIAM LLOYD CURTIS was still working through the shock of having his request turned down by the ISI. Such a simple thing! The secret police apparatus of one of the world’s most paranoid nations had refused to let him borrow one of their men for a special mission of mutual benefit at a critical time. A favor, refused. He needed a drink, but not at one of the usual Washington watering holes.
Instead, his BMW M3 seemed to find its own way out of the metropolis, away from the government, as the flush of embarrassment turned to anger. Fuck ’em. Requests for favors were seldom refused in his world, and he would remember this insult. For now, he just wanted to blow off some steam. He could do that during his next appointment. Just outside of Williamsburg sat a tired building that had obviously been a working man’s tavern for many years, and a big American flag hung listlessly in the August heat. His kind of secret place, where he could revert to his old self, the rough construction boss, Big Bill Curtis, and have a conversation that he could never have in some fancy Georgetown watering hole. He parked in the broad lot, where several pickups and Jap cars sizzled in the afternoon sun.
He rolled up his sleeves two laps to display the faded tattoo of a rather pitiful-looking dragon that he had picked up one long ago evening in Singapore, then walked into the bar and straight to a stool. “Gimme a cold American draft, pal,” he told the bartender, who brought him a Budweiser in a chilled mug.
“Ya know why them Muslim fucks don’t drink?” he asked out loud, turning heads. “They don’t know shit about making real beer. How long they been sucking up air on this planet? A couple of million years, or something, and they still haven’t figured out how to make beer?”
That drew a few laughs and started the conversation. Bill Curtis joined in as he let the back part of his brain deal with the problem. The Diplomatic Security Service had told him to go screw himself. Then the paramilitary tough guys chickened out after two of their punks got popped by Kyle Swanson. Now the damned, camel-screwing ISI decided not to get involved in a job on U.S. dirt, although he was about to pull the trig
ger on a big operation of which General Gul was intimately aware. Gul was creating some distance between them because of the investigation that was sure to follow.
“Can’t depend on the muzzies,” he told his new group of friends after ordering a pitcher of beer and joining them at their table. “You understand, don’t you? They have money out the wazoo, they have the oil, but they can’t buy respect. Ever see one of those Saudi princes’ homes, where they paint the statues around the swimming pool with big red nipples or gold cocks?”
A fellow in a checkered shirt, with dirt under his nails, added, “Rodney Dangerfield had it right. Can’t get no respect.”
“They don’t deserve any,” Curtis declared, emptying another glass of Bud. Damn, it felt good to be in an out-of-the-way bar with a bunch of strangers, just to be able to bitch and moan without consequence. Everyone in there had a story about their wives, their trucks, their bosses, or politicians. His was different, and he could not share it.
“Want something done right, you got to do it yourself,” he said. It was that thought he would take back to Washington. Curtis called for another pitcher.
“You got that right,” agreed another man.
Curtis laughed. Now to business. He turned from the bar and walked toward a corner table where a man sat alone, sipping a Corona beer. He wore clean jeans and boots, a sweat-stained golf shirt, and dark aviator-style sunglasses. His brown hair was short and neat. “Buck?” he asked.
Astronaut Buck Gardener acknowledged him, and Curtis slid into the other chair at the dim corner table. “Where’s the money?” the astronaut asked.
“In the trunk of my car outside. Is the gizmo finished?”
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