Sacrifice

by Will Jordan

  Drake didn’t pause to wonder what had become of the original owners as he drew his Sig Sauer P226 automatic from its holster, pulling back the slide far enough to see the gleaming brass round in the chamber.

  He was all business now. All extraneous thoughts and doubts had vanished. All that mattered was what happened in the next sixty seconds.

  Jamming on the brakes at the last moment, Crawford brought them screeching to a halt in front of the main gate.

  Drake was out and hurrying towards it before the vehicle had even come to a halt. The weapon was held tight in his hands as he sprinted for the wall just to the right of the gate, leaning out far enough to survey the ground beyond.

  The gardens surrounding the house had probably once been as impressive and well maintained as the building itself – all expertly manicured lawns, sculpted shrubs and spotless flower beds. But such things required maintenance and attention, and clearly this place had received little over the last decade or so.

  The once vibrant lawn was reduced to bare earth and a few stubborn patches of coarse brown grass. Weeds grew through cracks in the driveway, while the skeletal remains of a row of trees stood against one wall.

  There were no cars in the driveway. No sign of any activity, in fact. The windows on the main building were covered by wooden shutters, blocking any view of what was happening inside.

  Drake heard movement at his side, and glanced over as Keegan and Crawford backed up beside him, weapons out and ready. Neither man displayed fear or hesitation. They both looked focused, resolute, prepared.

  The gates were secured by a heavy padlock for which they had no key; however, the solution came in the form of a pair of bolt cutters wielded by one of the agents from the second Humvee. A single hard yank was enough to cut through the steel bolt.

  As soon as the shackle fell away, Drake was moving again, with Crawford and Keegan close behind. Pushing his way through the rusty gates, he advanced across the courtyard to the front door while the agents behind spread out to take up flanking positions. These men were armed with MP5 sub-machine guns, ready to lay down heavy suppressing fire if it was called for. Two more circled around to the rear of the building in case the occupants tried to make a break for it.

  Drake’s radio earpiece crackled. The whole team were wearing the discreet devices. ‘Back entrance, all clear. No movement.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Crawford replied. ‘Stand by.’

  Whatever key was required for the front door, they had been unable to locate it before leaving Bagram and there wasn’t time to pick the lock. However, Crawford had a simpler, if rather inelegant, answer to this problem.

  He looked at Drake, receiving a nod confirming he was ready. ‘Breaching.’

  Raising the Benelli M3 shotgun he’d brought specifically for breaching doors, he took aim at the lock and fired a single shot. The boom of the weapon discharge was followed an instant later by the crunch of splintering wood as the lock was blasted apart by the solid metal slug.

  A single hard kick from Crawford was enough to send the smoking remains of the door flying inwards.

  Drake went in first, his weapon up and sweeping the gloomy interior of the dwelling. Keegan was right behind him, with Crawford bringing up the rear. Drake heard the distinctive click as he worked the shotgun’s pump action, feeding another round into the breech, though he paid it little attention as his eyes swept the darkness before him.

  The cavernous room stretching before them must have been an impressive reception area back in the day. Roughly L-shaped, it occupied two floors, with a staircase off to the left leading to the house’s upper storey, and an alcove to the right that Drake guessed had once been either a sitting or dining area. There was no furniture now to support either theory.

  Indeed, there appeared to be no furniture anywhere – no couches, tables, chairs or cabinets – nor were there fixtures or fittings of any kind. Even the light switches were nothing but rough holes in the plasterboard walls with multicoloured electrical wires trailing out.

  No sound or movement greeted them. The house was as quiet as a grave.

  Reaching out, Crawford switched on the flashlight mounted beneath the barrel of his shotgun, allowing the beam to pan slowly from left to right. Bare brick and plasterboard walls reflected back at them. The air reeked of burned cordite from the breaching round, though beneath it Drake detected an undertone of dust and age.

  There was nothing to suggest that anyone lived here, or had even visited this place recently.

  He could feel Crawford’s eyes on him. Suspicious, dubious. The tentative faith he had shown slowly evaporating.

  ‘Clear,’ he heard the man mutter. ‘Unit Two. Anything round back?’

  ‘Negative, sir.’

  ‘Check the other rooms,’ Drake said, advancing deeper into the house, unwilling to concede defeat yet. ‘Move.’

  Only later would he realise he had been both wrong and right at the same time.

  Chapter 24

  Alone in the conference room that served as their base of operations, Frost sat hunched over her laptop, chin resting on her hands as she surveyed the report from the program she had dispatched to covertly probe Horizon’s firewall. So far the results were not encouraging.

  With her headphones plugged in, she was oblivious to the world around her – all her attention was focused on the screen. She was just reaching for her cup of coffee when the door burst open and a young man rushed in, startling her and causing hot black liquid to spill across the table.

  ‘Goddamn it!’ she snapped, levelling an angry glare at the man who she vaguely recognised as Gibson, one of the intelligence analysts on Crawford’s staff. ‘Doesn’t anyone in this fucking place know how to knock?’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he panted, his face flushed as if he had run up several flights of stairs. ‘But we have a problem.’

  Frost was busy trying to extract a couple of sodden sheets of paper from the black slick in front of her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mitchell’s captors are broadcasting again. It’s going out live across the Internet right now.’

  Abandoning her efforts, Frost turned to look at him. ‘Show me.’

  With Gibson providing the appropriate Web address, it took mere seconds for her to navigate to the video stream in question and bring it up on her laptop.

  Displayed in grainy low resolution was Mitchell, still bound and gagged on a chair in the centre of the shot. Beside him stood Kourash Anwari, dressed in the same frayed, cobbled-together combat uniform he had worn in the previous video.

  He was clearly in the middle of some tirade or other.

  ‘… the fate you saw fit to condemn this country to when you abandoned it twenty years ago.’ His voice was a throaty rasp as he spoke. ‘Millions of Afghans fought and died here, soaked the ground red with their blood, and when the war was over you turned your back on their sacrifice. You found it convenient to forget us. Well, today we will remind you of your sins.’

  ‘This is going out live?’ Frost asked, wanting to be sure.

  Gibson nodded, transfixed by what he was seeing. He had seen other videos like this and knew all too well their gory climax, yet he couldn’t look away.

  Frost had other ideas. She had been waiting for just such an opportunity. The first hostage tape had been a recording, emailed to them from an anonymous address. Impossible to trace.

  Not so this time.

  Ignoring the hostage video, she selected a program called RootHack1.1 and double-clicked on it. After copying over the URL of the video, she clicked a button marked Trace.

  ‘… we gave you a chance to negotiate with us, to deal as honourable men,’ Anwari went on, his voice echoing through the room. ‘Instead you choose to do nothing, to ignore us as if we mean nothing. You insult us. Well, you will pay the price for this insult. The time for negotiation is over. If you do not meet our demands within half an hour, this man’s life will end and his blood will be on your hands …’

&nb
sp; Gibson glanced at Frost’s laptop and frowned at the unfamiliar program, curious at what she was doing. ‘What is that?’

  ‘A little tool myself and a few others put together in our spare time,’ she said as the powerful hacking software went to work. ‘I call it a heat seeker. It’ll identify the ISP these guys are using, then slip a nasty little Trojan into their servers that’ll commandeer their routing protocols and use them to trace the data stream back to its source.’

  ‘Is that even legal?’ Gibson asked. He was staring intently at the screen, trying to make sense of the complex diagnostic tool.

  She looked up at him with a mixture of sympathy and amusement. ‘Half the things we do every day are illegal. I wouldn’t worry too much about this.’

  He frowned, not sure what to say to that. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Assuming they aren’t using hard-core encryption, shouldn’t take more than a few …’ She turned her attention back to the program and frowned when its search abruptly ceased. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What? Did it fail?’

  Frost shook her head, already reaching for her cellphone. ‘Far from it. I think we’ve just found them.’

  Chapter 25

  ‘Well, thanks for that, Drake,’ Crawford said, leaning against the west wall of the building’s wide reception area while he gulped down some bottled water. ‘Thanks for taking us on a wild goose chase across Kabul, and burning a safe house before we’d even put it to use. We owe you one.’

  Drake said nothing as he sat at the foot of the staircase, his earlier rush of excitement and confidence long since vanished.

  Crawford was right. Their mission here had been a waste of time. There was no sign of Mitchell, no sign of Kourash or anyone else for that matter. The lower floor of the building was essentially empty, there was no basement, and upstairs they had found only stacks of plasterboard sheeting, timber, nails and screws. Building materials that would likely never be used.

  He had been wrong. At that moment he didn’t understand how or why, but clearly he had misinterpreted whatever message Mitchell had tried to impart. He thought he had seen the truth, but wondered now if he had seen only what he wanted to see.

  There are none so blind as those who think they can see, his father had once said, putting his own unique spin on that well-known phrase. Drake had never given it much thought until now.

  ‘Maybe Mitchell was talking about some other house or building,’ Keegan ventured without much optimism. ‘Jesus, you’d think if he wanted to tell us where he was, he could have been less goddamn cryptic.’

  Behind him, one of the agents from the second Humvee was disabling the silent alarm that had been tripped when they made entry. Drake absently noted the keypad combination as he punched it in.

  917214.

  For some reason numbers always seemed to stick in his mind. It had been a useful skill for memorising phone numbers.

  He thought once more about the message Mitchell had managed to impart, turning it over in his mind as if it were a puzzle to be examined from different angles.

  HOUSE FOUR.

  At the time he had assumed the brevity of his message was simply due to the circumstances he was sending it in. Time had been short, and to have attempted anything longer might have aroused suspicion amongst his captors.

  But perhaps there was another intention behind it. What was he not seeing?

  Before he could ponder it further, his phone started buzzing in his pocket. It was Frost.

  ‘Yeah, Keira?’ he began wearily.

  ‘We’re in trouble. Anwari is broadcasting another hostage tape. He’s giving us thirty minutes to meet his demands or he’ll execute Mitchell.’

  ‘What?’ Instantly Drake’s heartbeat stepped up a gear. ‘His deadline is three days away.’

  ‘Search me. Maybe the fucker’s getting impatient,’ she replied. ‘But we’ve managed to trace the broadcast to a small town called Jarmatoy, just south of Kabul. As near as we can figure, he’s being held in an old cement plant on the edge of town.’

  He couldn’t believe it. He felt like a drowning man who has just been thrown a lifeline. ‘Good work, Keira.’ He had never meant it more than at that moment. ‘I’m putting you on speaker.’

  He looked up at Crawford. ‘Kourash is in a town called Jarmatoy. How far is that?’

  To his credit, Crawford wasted no time questioning how they had come by this information. ‘About thirty klicks south of here.’

  ‘We need to be there now.’ Drake was already on his feet

  ‘I suggest you don’t hang around,’ Frost said. ‘You’ve got twenty-eight minutes.’

  They had to cover 38 kilometres in 28 minutes, in unpredictable traffic and road conditions. This was going to be tight.

  ‘We’re on it,’ he assured her as he hurried out through the front door towards the two Humvees that had now been brought into the weed-strewn courtyard. ‘Do we have any surveillance on the target area?’

  ‘We’re working on it.’

  Operations like this were normally planned out hours, days or even weeks in advance. They might have air assets, real-time satellite coverage, ground reinforcements and almost any weapons under the sun at their disposal. In this case they could call upon half a dozen operatives, a small cache of arms and perhaps the element of surprise.

  The only problem with surprise was that it didn’t last long.

  ‘Okay, do what you can. We’re en route now.’

  Crawford had already clambered into the driver’s seat, and fired up the engine as Drake approached.

  ‘Understood.’ Frost’s voice was barely audible over the rumble of the engine. ‘Oh, and Ryan?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  There was a pause. No more than a second, but long enough. ‘Be careful. Out.’

  Chapter 26

  Drake’s mind was racing as fast as the Humvee as they sped down the rough potholed road to a town he hadn’t even heard of until twenty minutes ago, trying to beat the clock and save the man who just might hold the answers he needed.

  But only if they reached him in time.

  His earlier disappointment at failing to find anything at the safe house had been pushed to one side now as he tried to focus on the task at hand.

  Air assets were scrambling from Bagram to reinforce them, but it would take more time than they had to reach the target area. For the time being at least, they were on their own.

  His thoughts turned inexorably to the motives behind his adversary’s change of plan. Why had he suddenly brought forward the time of Mitchell’s execution? Was he growing impatient, or was he afraid of something? Was he somehow aware of the progress they had been making, and moving to forestall further discoveries?

  Everything they had seen so far pointed to a plan; a series of phased, mutually supportive actions building towards a desired result.

  Had he changed his plan, or had this been his intention all along?

  ‘How long?’ he called out.

  Crawford didn’t take his eyes off the road. ‘A lot longer than if you shut the fuck up and let me drive,’ he replied tersely. He was feeling the pressure just as much as they were.

  Drake’s phone was ringing. Amidst the background noise, he felt rather than heard it. It was Frost calling with another update.

  ‘Ryan, you need to hurry,’ the young woman implored him. ‘Anwari is broadcasting again.’

  Frost could do nothing except watch and wait. She ached to be out there with her companions instead of stuck in this dusty conference room, knowing they were about to put their lives on the line. When Drake returned to Bagram, she fully intended to kick his ass for leaving her behind.

  On the video feed in front of her, Anwari was spitting venom once more, delivering his final hate-filled speech before he executed his captive.

  ‘We have given you every opportunity to negotiate, yet still you ignore us. We gave you a chance to save this man’s life, but you refused to take it.’
r />   Frost watched as he reached into his camouflage jacket and drew out a pistol. The same one he had used to shoot Mitchell in the leg.

  ‘If this is the only language you understand, then so be it.’

  ‘Hurry, Ryan,’ Frost whispered.

  ‘This is it,’ Crawford said as the Humvee roared up the side of a low hill. ‘Twenty seconds!’

  Drake tensed, readying himself, gripping the M4 carbine he had armed himself with from the vehicle’s weapons bin. A side arm might have been adequate for a house raid, but for possible urban combat like this he wanted something with greater range and firepower.

  With only seven operatives against an unknown number of hostiles, their chances of success were far from guaranteed. Still, they were all highly trained professionals, and between them they were capable of causing a lot of trouble.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, it might be enough.

  Keegan reached into his shirt, plucked out the necklace he wore for luck and kissed the crucifix dangling from the end. Superstitious to his core, he performed the same ritual before every operation.

  Maybe there was something in it – he’d never been killed yet.

  Sensing Drake’s eye on him, he turned and flashed a grin.

  ‘If you tell me this is just like old times, I’ll have to shoot you,’ Drake warned.

  The grin broadened. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, buddy.’

  ‘Ten seconds!’ Crawford called out as they crested the hill. Ahead and below stood their target.

  The cement works, another relic of the Soviet attempts to turn Afghanistan into a modern Socialist republic, was a bombed-out ruin of a place. Two of the three big concrete storage silos had been blasted open, their steel shells peeled back like orange skins, with the support gantries and walkways lying broken and twisted in giant heaps of rusted metal.

  Nearby, the main kiln stood as a sad wind-scoured shell, its machinery long dead and rusted solid. Off to the right, beyond the sole remaining silo, was the cement mill, where the coarse aggregate had once been ground down into fine powder. Various other buildings, offices and warehouses, clustered in around the cement processing facility, all long since abandoned.