Sacrifice

by Will Jordan

  Keegan and McKnight were both there. Their clothes were torn and dirty, and both were nursing various cuts and bruises, though they seemed to have escaped major injury.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Keegan, with a couple of tape stitches holding together a facial laceration, flashed a defiant grin. ‘Never better, buddy.’

  McKnight was less jubilant. She had pulled up her T-shirt to expose an ugly bruise just below her ribcage, the discoloured skin cut and grazed. A female medic was busy applying a sterilised dressing.

  Drake couldn’t help feeling a sudden pang of guilt. He had left them out there in the field while he returned to the safety of Bagram, and this was the result. ‘You’re hurt.’

  ‘Very astute, Ryan,’ she remarked with a wry smile. ‘But it’s nothing. Just cuts and bruises.’

  Unconvinced, Drake glanced at the medic for confirmation.

  ‘We’ve patched her up, sir. She’ll be fine,’ the woman said.

  That at least seemed to satisfy him. ‘Can we have the room, please?’

  The conversation they were about to have wasn’t the kind he wanted to be overheard. Finishing up with the dressing, the medic packed away her gear and left the room.

  ‘What happened out there?’ Drake asked as soon as the door closed.

  ‘We had a close encounter with a sniper,’ was McKnight’s simple reply. ‘Fortunately John took him out first.’ She glanced at the older man with gratitude in her eyes. ‘Even then, Vermaak and the Horizon team pulled out. They blew the crash site before we could stop them.’

  ‘It was like fuckin’ Hiroshima, man,’ Keegan added. ‘They used enough C4 to sink a battleship. There’s nothing left.’

  Drake’s heart sank. He was relieved beyond words that his two team members had returned more or less unharmed, but there was no escaping the fact that they had just lost a major avenue of investigation.

  ‘What about the sniper? Where did he come from?’

  ‘No idea,’ Keegan admitted.

  ‘Didn’t you find anything on him?’

  The older man threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Never got the chance. Vermaak was so anxious to clear out of there, they left the body behind. Wasn’t in their job description, apparently,’ he added with a look of disgust.

  ‘We just heard from an army patrol sent in to retrieve the body,’ McKnight added. ‘There was no sign of it.’

  Drake couldn’t believe what he was hearing. First the Horizon team tried to stop them accessing the crash site altogether, then they acted as if they owned the place, and to top it all off they had destroyed a crime scene and left a dead enemy combatant unrecovered. Their actions might well have sunk the entire investigation.

  Seeing those thoughts reflected in his eyes, McKnight grabbed her rucksack, lying discarded on a nearby bed. ‘It’s not all bad news. In fact, I’d say we might just have lucked out.’

  ‘How so?’

  Reaching into the pack, she lifted out a small metal object and tossed it across the room. Instinctively Drake caught it and held it up to the light to take a closer look.

  It was metal, cylindrical in shape, and relatively heavy for its size. The outlet nozzle at one end suggested it was an engine of some kind, and the smell of propellant confirmed this theory. He had no idea what purpose it served though.

  ‘I found this at the launch site, just after Keegan took the sniper down. In fact, if that guy hadn’t attacked us, I might never have found it at all,’ McKnight explained. ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’

  ‘It’s an ejector motor,’ she said, looking like an archaeologist who had just uncovered a priceless artefact. ‘When you fire a surface-to-air missile from a shoulder launcher, a little disposable rocket like this pushes the missile clear of the tube. Once it’s a safe distance away, the missile’s own engine ignites and off it goes. The ejector motor just falls away when it’s served its purpose.’

  Taking his eyes off the rocket motor, he looked up at the woman who had recovered it. ‘Can you work out what kind of weapon this came from?’

  ‘I can tell you right now,’ she said. ‘It’s an FIM-92 Stinger.’

  Stunned silence greeted her words as the implications sank in.

  Mitchell’s chopper had been shot down by an American missile.

  ‘How sure are you?’ Drake asked. He doubted she would have made such a claim if there was any doubt in her mind, but he had to know.

  ‘I’ve seen these things a dozen times before, and I’ve studied their technical drawings more times than I can count,’ she assured him. ‘I know what to look for, and I’d bet my life that it came from a Stinger. I’ll need to check on the serial numbers to work out what batch it’s from, but there’s no doubt in my mind.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Keegan said, frowning. ‘Where the hell would these assholes have got their hands on a Stinger?’

  Frost looked at the older man in exasperation. ‘From us. Don’t you get it? We sent hundreds of these things here twenty years ago.’

  It was an open secret nowadays that the Agency had channelled billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment to the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion. At first it was Russian-made weapons bought from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and even corrupt Red Army logistics officers in Afghanistan itself. But as the war escalated, the assistance became more and more overt.

  Soon state-of-the-art anti-aircraft missiles like the Stinger were flooding the country, and shooting down Russian gunships and fighter-bombers with deadly efficiency. Much as in Vietnam twenty years earlier, the weapons of one superpower were being used by proxy to fight a war against the other.

  ‘The Agency supplied weapons like these to the Afghan rebels back in the eighties. When the war ended, we tried to buy them back.’ Drake glanced at McKnight with a raised eyebrow. ‘It seems we missed a few.’

  The Mujahideen, though united against a common enemy in the Soviets, had never been a coherent group. Ethnic and tribal feuding had been rife even during the invasion, and when they no longer had a common cause to fight for, those simmering tensions erupted in full-scale civil war.

  With the country descending into anarchy, the weapons supplied by the CIA were scattered amongst the various warring tribes, changing hands so quickly they soon became impossible to track down. The West had created a monster, and could do nothing but watch as it consumed the very country it was supposed to liberate.

  Keegan was quick to see the implications. ‘Christ, if news like this got out—’

  ‘It would be a public-relations disaster,’ McKnight finished for him. ‘American troops shot down by American-made weapons. The media would be all over it.’

  ‘I say let them,’ Frost decided, disgusted by what she’d heard. ‘The assholes who gave them the weapons deserve to be punished.’

  ‘You’re missing the bigger picture,’ McKnight cut in. ‘ISAF, NATO, and especially the White House want to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Bush doesn’t want to go down in history as the guy who led us into a second Vietnam. But if news got out that the insurgents had surface-to-air missiles, any chance of leaving Afghanistan goes up in smoke.’

  Drake let out a breath, his mind racing. ‘No wonder the army were so keen to write this off as an RPG strike.’

  ‘It might explain why Horizon were so uncooperative out at the crash site,’ McKnight added. ‘Maybe they were under orders to keep this thing quiet.’

  Drake said nothing for several moments as he worked through everything he’d just heard. A whole lot of possibilities had just opened up in front of them, none of which were good. What the hell had they stumbled into here?

  And in all of it, there was one question that kept nagging at him. What did Kourash really want with Mitchell?

  Somehow he was the key to all this. Whatever secrets the man held had been worth shooting down a chopper for. Drake didn’t understand how or why yet,
but he intended to find out.

  ‘All right, we need to get moving on this,’ he decided. He looked up at McKnight. ‘Sam, did you tell anyone else about this?’

  She shook her head. ‘No one. And I don’t think they saw me pick it up.’

  ‘Good.’ He tossed the device back to her. ‘Find out everything you can on the Stinger. I want to know where and when it was built, where it was shipped, and how the hell it ended up here.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she promised. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m going to have a word with our friends at Horizon.’

  Chapter 12

  Once again Drake was forced to borrow McKnight’s Ford Explorer. Horizon weren’t based at Bagram as he’d expected, but instead operated from their own independent compound on the outskirts of Kabul. The message was clear – they needed no one for protection.

  He had called ahead to request a meeting with the most senior Horizon executive available, using a combination of persuasion and veiled threats to cut through the red tape. The call had concluded with a very unhappy Horizon operator assuring them that a ‘member of staff’ would be on hand to answer his questions when he arrived.

  After clearing the base’s heavily fortified security gate, Drake found himself heading south on Highway 76, the main artery that ran between Bagram and Kabul.

  He made good progress initially, but was obliged to slow down on the outskirts of the city. Most of the locals had stopped what they were doing for Asr, the Islamic prayer offered during mid-afternoon, but now they were back on the roads in force, and there was no avoiding the resultant traffic jams.

  Grossly overloaded vans and pickup trucks chugged along beside him on the main drag. Nobody gave way. The chokingly hot air was thick with dust, exhaust fumes and horn blasts.

  The situation wasn’t helped by the military checkpoints that had been set up at most major road junctions, all of them staffed by Afghan National Police (ANP). This was another new experience for Drake – the last time he’d been in Afghanistan, local law enforcement had been non-existent.

  They were a strange-looking bunch. Apart from their flat-peaked caps and dusty grey military tunics, there was almost no unity or cohesion in their gear, uniforms or weapons. Some wore body armour, while some went without. Some had webbing, while others were forced to jam extra magazines into their pockets. Two of them were armed with AKs, and another was packing an old Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol; the kind worn by US generals back in the 1960s.

  Most unusual of all was the soldier with an RPG-7 slung idly over one shoulder as if it were a golf club or a garden rake. Somehow Drake found it hard to imagine police officers back in DC armed with anti-tank rockets.

  He’d heard a lot about these guys over the years, most of it less than complimentary. Drug abuse, corruption and desertion were endemic amongst the ANP, with many of their personnel simply melting away during a firefight. Some were even in the pay of the insurgents. Taliban fighters captured at great cost were able to buy their release for as little as 100 dollars.

  It took another twenty minutes of driving, queuing and braking to negotiate a tortuous route through Kabul’s crowded streets. He was beginning to wish he had circled around the outskirts to approach his destination from the south, but by that point there was little he could do except press on.

  And finally, he saw what he was looking for – a big three-storey concrete building dominating the afternoon sky. From his position it was hard to gauge the structure’s size and dimensions, but it seemed to consist of a central building with wings stretching out on either side.

  It wasn’t a new structure; that much was certain. Its imposing grey walls were scarred and pitted by cannon fire and shrapnel impacts, the deeper shell holes showing evidence of recent repair. This building had survived the civil war and years of Taliban rule, if only through sheer strength and resilience.

  The entire compound was encircled by a concrete wall at least 12 feet high, topped with razor wire. Guard towers had been placed at intervals along the wall, and even from this distance Drake could make out the long barrels of 50-calibre machine guns trained on the road beyond.

  Drake slowed to a stop at the main gate. As far as he could tell, this was the only way in or out of the compound.

  The guard post was manned by three Horizon security men, all decked out in full combat gear and armed with M4A1s. With two of his companions keeping a wary eye on Drake, the operative in charge of the post strode towards their vehicle. He was in his early forties, black, with a noticeable shrapnel scar on his left cheek. Clearly he had seen his share of action already.

  ‘Identification, sir,’ he said, holding out a gloved hand.

  Drake duly obliged. ‘I was told I’d be met by one of your representatives,’ he explained as the checkpoint controller studied his documents. ‘They should be expecting me.’

  He was still uneasy about showing his identification to non-Agency personnel. Shepherd teams were by nature clandestine groups, and not inclined to give out any information that could compromise operational security. Nor were they required to when dealing with other Department of Defence organisations.

  They didn’t have to present passports or other official documents to get into or out of countries like Afghanistan. They had only to identify themselves to a ranking officer briefed in advance of their arrival, and they would be waved through without any mention being made. Their luggage and equipment could not be searched, nor could they be detained or interfered with. If the shit hit the fan they could even show up on the doorstep of the US embassy and be granted access, no questions asked.

  All of this was made possible by their official mandate, issued by the Director of National Intelligence himself. It was, in effect, a blank cheque investing them with a great deal of authority. However, their powers weren’t infinite. Shepherd teams were expected to conduct themselves diplomatically, to show respect to ranking officials, and most importantly to keep a low profile.

  Drake was braced for another round of bartering and intimidation, but to his surprise the man handed his papers back after a few moments.

  ‘Go on through, sir. Park in one of the bays off to your right,’ he said, indicating the open tarmac area beyond the security gate. ‘Someone will be there to escort you inside.’

  Drake nodded. ‘No problem.’

  The open space beyond the gate was easily 50 yards wide and twice as long, serving as a combination of marshalling area and vehicle maintenance centre. Off to the left, at least a dozen Horizon operatives were gearing up to go out on patrol, going through the countless last-minute checks that any group of soldiers went through before an op. Drake knew the feeling well.

  Five RG-33 armoured personnel carriers similar to the ones at the crash site were lined up near the main building, with a similar number parked inside a single-storey concrete structure that resembled an armoured aircraft hangar. Mechanics and armourers were busily working to make them ready for action once more, checking engines and loading up weapons.

  War, it seemed, had become big business. And business was booming.

  Mindful of his instructions, Drake turned off to the right, parked the Explorer near the perimeter wall and killed the engine.

  The hot breeze hit him the moment he stepped out, carrying with it a heady combination of smells, from both the compound and the city beyond it. Petrol fumes from the nearby drag, oil from the maintenance area, gun grease from countless weapons, the stench of rotting garbage from uncollected waste bins and ditches used as improvised landfill, not to mention the scents of cooking meat from the kebab shops that lined the streets.

  He glanced up at the rhythmic thumping of rotor blades overhead, and watched the dark form of a Black Hawk chopper swinging in a wide arc off to the north. Perhaps it was acting in support of the Horizon operation that seemed to be kicking off, or perhaps it was on some other errand entirely. One could never tell in the organised chaos that was Afghanistan.

  Unbeknow
nst to him, someone had approached while his attention was focused on the chopper; the thump of the rotors and the general hubbub in the assembly area drowning out the sound of his footsteps.

  Only when he spoke up did Drake become aware of his presence.

  ‘Well, fuck me,’ a gruff Scottish voice remarked. ‘Isn’t this a turn-up for the books?’

  Startled, Drake whirled around to face the new arrival, and felt his heart leap in shock. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  The man standing before him was tall, maybe an inch or so taller than Drake himself, and with the square-shouldered, well-made physique of a natural athlete. His dark hair, greying at the sides, was cut short and side-parted, while his tanned skin was telling evidence of a lengthy deployment out here.

  His face might have been called handsome, but there was a hardness, a severity to his expression that stopped some way short of that. His pale blue eyes were fixed on Drake. They were soldier’s eyes if ever he had seen them – sharp and eager, assessing everything and missing nothing.

  He was wearing desert military fatigues, though Drake couldn’t make out any obvious rank or unit insignia. Like his fellow Horizon operatives, he maintained a facade of anonymity.

  Only Drake knew him for who he was.

  ‘Ryan Drake,’ he said, his voice low and menacing, perfectly matching his fearsome glare. ‘Talk about a bad fucking penny.’

  Drake stood his ground, not flinching for a moment. ‘You should know, Cunningham.’

  Suddenly the scowl vanished, replaced by a beaming grin as Cunningham threw his arms around Drake and hugged him like the long-lost friend he was.

  ‘Jesus, it’s good to see you again, mate.’

  ‘You too,’ Drake said, hardly believing what he was seeing.

  Matthew (Matt) Cunningham had been a sergeant in 22nd SAS Regiment when Drake first met him nearly ten years ago. Tough, seasoned, fearless, but uncompromisingly fair and even-handed, he was the sort of NCO that any soldier would be happy to serve under.