by Gordon Kent
“Meeting’s going down in an hour.”
“We’re doing our best, guy! The plane’s coming in to pick us up in two hours.”
“And the Chinese?”
“If they’re hostile, we’ll deal with them as hostiles. What kind of weapons have you got?”
“A big revolver and an AK.”
“How many of them can you see?”
“I can’t see anybody; it’s fucking dark! But I know where six or seven are.”
“Can we climb the ridge?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Tricky in the dark.”
“Where are the snipers?”
“One’s below me. The other is off in the town.”
“Where?”
“Fuck, I don’t know! He headed off west of the market.”
“So he’s west.”
“Yeah. It makes sense. The town rises to the west. Some of those roofs may give a line of sight to the square.”
“Or he’s covering the ridge. Okay, road is east and sniper’s west. Locals still quiet?”
“It gives new meaning to ‘dead town.’”
“No sign of Shreed.”
“Zip.”
“Okay, Mike, turn your phone from ‘ring’ to ‘vibrate.’ You got that option?”
“Christ, I’ll look. Yeah, it could be a bear having it ring at the wrong moment. Okay, menu, options, ring. Yup. Good to go.”
“This may change, but I’m going after the sniper to the west and Alan’s going toward the square. When you hear us, take the sniper in the mosque.”
“In cold blood?” He heard Harry’s silence. “I’m a cop, Harry; I’m not used to killing that way!”
“Got a better idea?”
Dukas was silent.
“Stay close to the phone, Mike.”
Dukas didn’t want to let him go. “Those your headlights on the road?”
“No way.”
“Somebody coming.”
“Him?”
“Slowing at the turn. Stopped. Coming up. Now I can’t see him.”
“Hang on, Mike. We’re coming.”
“Yeah.”
To himself, he said, But I’m here.
38
Jolcut, Pakistan 2326 GMT Monday (0326L Tuesday).
Chen rubbed his hand over his head for the second time in as many minutes, being careful not to disturb his headset. A radioman huddled over his box in a corner of the ruined mosque, his face twisted in frustration.
“Nothing, sir. Number four just won’t come up.”
Chen clenched his hands at his sides to avoid rubbing them together. The wait had been long and cold. The moment of decision was close, but in the final communications check, one of his snipers had failed to report. Top Hook was capable of anything, as far as Chen was concerned, but he had assumed that with crippled legs Shreed would be unable to climb the ridge. Now Chen was chilled by a doubt—was Top Hook in fact already among them? If so, did he already guess Chen’s intentions?
I’m being a fool, he thought. Top Hook was a cripple and couldn’t climb the ridge. The missing sniper had fallen or damaged his headset. This was not the time to lose his nerve.
Chen put his hand against the cold metal in his right ear. “Two, report.”
“Ready.”
“Number Two, Four has failed to report.”
“And?” The sergeant was a peasant with a chip on his shoulder. Chen wanted his advice but did not want to have to ask for it.
“I want him found.”
“Who do you want me to send? We don’t have a reserve—as you requested.”
Chen was too keyed up to worry about the eternal war of precedence between the soldiers and the spies.
“Send whomever you think best. Just do it.”
The sergeant’s voice snapped out in his southern dialect. “Seven and Eleven!” They were the roving patrol at the base of the slope. “Work your way up the west slope and find Four. He’s someplace in the west end of the market.”
“Affirmative.”
Chen couldn’t see the valley and the highway below, but he kept peering into the darkness at the end of the short street that led to the bottom of the hill. He wished that he still smoked, and then remembered that he had ordered the soldiers not to smoke. He glanced at his wristwatch, then had to raise it to his eyes again. Four minutes until the meeting time.
He had expected Top Hook to arrive early, but here, only four minutes remained, and then the real worry would start. What if Top Hook didn’t come? That was worse than the idea that he might be loose in the dark at the top of the ridge. He couldn’t have spotted the cars, could he? Chen had had the cars hidden, two in the market, one far off down the valley.
Nothing to worry about yet, he told himself.
“One? This is Seven.” The voice was a whisper even with the amplification of the headset.
“Go ahead, Seven.”
“We’ve found a backpack on the west slope. Civilian. We’re investigating.”
A new voice entered the net. “One, this is Five. A car has just turned off the highway toward the village. It is a white four-door sedan. Lights are on.”
“How many passengers?”
“Only the driver.”
“All soldiers, prepare to execute Sword.”
“All soldiers, or all soldiers except Seven and Eleven?” The sergeant’s tone was abrasive.
“Seven and Eleven to continue their search.”
Chen breathed in deeply, then exhaled slowly to calm himself. Everything was all right. Top Hook was coming: of course, a lone man in a car would be the crippled American; the missing sniper was no longer important. Top Hook was coming up the hill. Alone, as Chen had hoped. Once he stopped his car and got out, the rest would be easy. Of course, little things like the sniper’s failure to respond could go wrong. But the biggest obstacle was passed. Top Hook was coming.
Still, Chen worried about the backpack. Could Top Hook have protectors?
Headlights rose like a small white dawn over the brow of the hill, and their light filled the square and cast long shadows from the chunks of rubble.
Jolcut, Pakistan 2357 GMT Monday (0357L Tuesday).
No one had come close to the house where she waited. The dead man’s radio had crackled three times, each burst of tinny gibberish raising her adrenaline. She thought about moving but couldn’t see how she could find a better position—from where she was, she could see in all directions for at least a few meters.
Anna lay on the cold tile of the roof and did isometric exercises to keep warm. The duffel coat under her black robe was thick enough, but her hands and feet were cold. Her breath came out in silent little clouds.
It had taken her half an hour to find the sniper’s scope, nestled in a tiny leather case in a corner of the roof. The soldier had been fitting it when she had killed him. She had wasted time looking for a heavy scope like those on Efremov’s hunting rifles, but the scope she ultimately found was scarcely five inches long, with a soft, rubbery covering. Fitting it to the rifle took more time and froze her fingers again; clearly, the Chinese hadn’t mastered the idea of the quick-release. And she worried that it might not be centered.
The feel of the gun was alien to her, its cheekpiece too high and the magazine exactly where she wanted to place her off hand. She practiced pointing it at doorways and shadows in the marketplace and at the two men she had spotted there. It provided a little light amplification but was barely creditable with a full moon. On a darker night, it would have been useless. Even with the bright moonlight, she worried that she would lose things if people started moving.
She began to look at things over the iron sights. She really didn’t trust the scope. She would only get one or two shots.
And it had begun to dawn on her that if she took them, she would die.
A rock, tumbling down the ridge behind her, snapped her back. She moved across the roof, keeping away from the dead soldier. The corpse disturbed her, awakened fears best left un
examined. She raised her head slowly over the edge of the roof wall and looked back along the alley. She heard the soft bleat of a goat.
No one in her home village left a goat out at night. The sound had come from the byre behind the house, the byre with the refuse heap. She stared at the stark shadows thrown by the moon, unable to decide if she had seen a movement. She was seized by an urge to scramble across the roof and check the other side. They could be moving all around her, the dropped rock a deliberate ploy. Then she heard a car’s engine roar in the square behind her, and the headlight beams splashed over her for a moment and on the roof across the street.
A man’s head and shoulders appeared so slowly at the back of the alley that at first she didn’t fully register the motion, but the man twitched at the brief illumination above his head and a meaningless criss-cross of shadow suddenly resolved into a man. Her rifle was just where she had left it, on the other side of the roof, its bipod already set, its barrel aligned with the center of the square. She reached into the back of her jeans and pulled her pistol out, turning the weapon’s receiver to avoid catching the silencer.
The man was moving, bent well forward, along the alley toward her. A second man was emerging in the shadow thrown by the first, one hand on his partner’s back. She froze as the second man raised his head and scanned the rooftops. They didn’t have night-vision goggles. But they did have submachine guns.
Without moving the rest of her body, Anna pressed the automatic against her jeans and worked the slide, rubbing her thumb along the safety until she was sure it was off. The perfect coordination of the two men in the alley indicated expertise, but their caution suggested that something had alarmed them—had they found her pack? She cursed again having left it.
The two men moved forward a step at a time. The front man had his machine pistol raised slightly above horizontal. The second man’s head moved, looking everywhere. She strained her neck muscles to stay immobile, while her left hand moved slowly up her body to change her balance, because the crenellations along the edge of the roof would cover her for only a few more feet of their approach.
The goat bleated again, and the rear man of the pair twitched toward the noise. An opportunity missed: she hadn’t had her balance changed yet.
Now she had her weight on her left hand. The pair moved forward another few feet, their heads swiveling like radars. Anna no longer felt cold. Her heart was pounding so heavily she could feel it in her head. She was wet with sweat. Adrenaline warred in her veins with the need to stay still.
Every few seconds, the rear man glanced behind him. She watched him do it once, then a second time, trying to catch the rhythm. Then she brought the pistol in line with the target in one motion, as Efremov had taught her, letting her index finger point at the man in front, now only a few feet away, and she fired. The pistol spat, the flash almost swallowed by the silencer, and then she was rolling on her right shoulder and along the roof, clipping her head against the wall. She had no idea if she’d hit him. A burst of shots tore at the wall, the roar of the gun filling the village and the night.
Jolcut, Pakistan 0000 GMT (0400L).
Dukas watched the car roll to a stop well before it reached the rubble pile and the fallen pillar. The driver left the headlights on and the engine running. Dukas closed one eye to keep some of his night vision and continued to stare at the driver’s-side door. A long moment passed before it opened, and then the driver emerged as if the car was too small to hold him, wriggling a little to get clear of the seat. One hand reached up and grabbed the top of the door and hauled him erect. He had a coat over his other arm.
It was George Shreed.
“Chen?” he called.
A balding man in camos emerged from the entrance to the ruined mosque below Dukas.
“I am glad you made it. I was worried. Did you come by way of India?”
“The border was closed.” The voices seemed too loud in the darkness, as if amplified. Dukas recognized the sign and response from the Chinese Checkers plan. The bald man, then, was Shreed’s Chinese control. He came out warily, a surprising nervousness visible in his posture and his stiff walk.
Have they not met before?
“Perhaps you could turn out your lights?”
“I thought I’d take you for a little drive. The mosque looks like it’s had it.”
Chen stopped well in front of the car and off to the left, out of the main splash of the beams.
“I don’t want to hold this conversation in the public street,” Chen said.
“You’re going bald!” Shreed said from the dark behind the lights.
They have met before.
“Time has various unpleasant surprises. I would rather you turned off the lights and we talked here.”
“Afraid I’m going to run off with you?”
“Could we stop shouting across the street in English and meet in the mosque?”
The headlights went out and the engine noise stopped. For a moment, even with both eyes opened, Dukas was completely blind. Then he caught a flicker of movement—Shreed limping across the tiny square.
The bastard didn’t have any crutches. Dukas gripped the AK-47 so hard his hands hurt.
Shreed stopped a few feet from Chen and held out his hand. “Good to see you, Chen.”
Chen. Like Smith, for God’s sake.
Chen took the hand. Shreed, despite a slump caused by fatigue or pain, was half a head taller. He put the arm with the overcoat gently over Chen’s shoulders and started forward as if guiding the smaller man toward the mosque. Chen stiffened and then moved beside him.
Metal gleamed in the hand that held the coat.
Shreed has a gun under the coat.
If the Chinese officer had noticed, he gave no sign, but after a few steps he shrugged himself free of Shreed’s arm. They picked parallel ways across the rubble. They were almost to the door of the mosque when a short, loud burst of gunfire cracked through the village, echoing off the walls and the street.
Shreed and Chen had separated by half a dozen feet. At the first shot, Chen dove inside the entrance to the mosque; Shreed threw himself against the wall, where, Dukas knew, the sniper in the mosque’s ruin couldn’t see him. Another man ran to the corner of an alley that entered from the north and raised his weapon to his cheek and fired. The flash dazzled Dukas’s eyes, and then he saw that Shreed was down. He lay on the littered pavement, a black shape like a shadow. And then he moved.
Shreed rolled on his back and fired, twice, loud, sharp cracks that resounded around the square. The man at the corner was flung back as if punched by a giant hand. Shreed rolled into the rubble at the base of the wall and disappeared.
The first gunfire caught Alan and Harry well up the ridgeline, moving up the tiny path by inches. The fire was above them. Both cringed. Alan reached back and handed Harry up the outcrop he had just climbed, and then there was another set of shots, a short blaat punctuated by two sharp reports.
Alan’s eyes sought Harry’s eyes in the starlight. Harry nodded. They began to scramble for the top, all caution gone. Harry made it first and rolled over the last lip, Alan well off to his left by the time he hurled himself on the flat at the top. Another burst of small-caliber fire sounded off to the right, well away from the center of the town. Harry could see the minaret and the bulky shoulder of the tower against the sky, and he put his head down and sprinted across the trash-strewn open ground to the shelter of the first houses. He stripped the automatic shotgun over his head and cocked it.
Alan was already gone: they had agreed to separate, hoping to seem a larger force than they were. Harry glanced around the corner of a house and then sprinted to the next one. Another shot crashed from his right. He flung himself across the street. No shots answered.
A Navy SEAL had told him, Once the music starts, speed is life.
The tower was off to his left, now. He was trying to get into the back of the square, but the two bursts of fire had come from this direction. Another lou
d shot came from the square. Then he caught a flicker of movement on a rooftop forty feet away, higher than the rest.
Harry rolled to his right to put a screen of low shacks between himself and the movement, his lungs gasping for more air, his heart shaking his ribs. He raced for the next corner and threw himself on his chest like a runner sliding for first. Up the alley now revealed he saw a man firing around the next corner, using a house for cover. He was firing at the roof of the building where Harry had just seen movement. Another man in a Chinese uniform lay kicking in agony behind the first. They were both in Chinese uniforms.
Harry took a long moment to aim and blew the top of his head off.
Anna heard the roar of the big shotgun from behind her assailants. It didn’t matter; they would be all around her in a moment. She rolled up into the corner of a new crenellation and aimed.
Nothing but two bodies.
She rolled back out of their line of sight and waited, her whole body shaking. No one had fired. Someone had killed the second man. The reaction was as great as if they had been alive and fired at her. But her brain was still in charge and she rode it out, waiting until her limbs were under control. It took thirty seconds.
Then she looked again.
Harry’s first thought was that the man on the roof was Dukas; it almost fit his description. But it was wrong, and a second’s observation proved it; Dukas was over there, six streets away, by the minaret. It wasn’t Alan. It was someone who had killed a Chinese soldier. Harry smiled unconsciously, like a man with a really good and unexpected birthday gift.
“Don’t shoot, Anna,” he called, and rolled out of his cover.
Alan stopped in the shadow of the first building he reached to press the Send button on his cellphone. Then he moved, racing up the opening between two houses. The stench told him it was a midden, not an alley, and he could now see that the opening ended in a wall. He leaped for the top and tumbled over, landing without grace on the other side. He had screwed up, was exposed in the open, off-balance, but no shots came. A two-story house with a high wall at the back loomed ahead of him, and again he jumped, his arms finding just enough purchase on the top to get one leg up. Broken glass bit into his gloves and raked his right knee, but he kept going, right over the wall and down the roof of the little outbuilding beyond, feeling an ooze of blood down his leg.
