“Okay,” Houston answered after a moment’s thought. “And we care about this because . . .”
“Because the boy is the legal heir to the Saudi kingdom. Because the young prince is the only hope we have of establishing a pro-democratic, pro-West, pro-American government in the kingdom. Because if we don’t save him, King Abdullah wins. It’s pretty much that simple. We’ve got to get this kid out and protect him or King Abdullah retains power—a completely hostile leader sitting on the throne of one of the most powerful and important nations on the earth.”
The soldiers were silent for a moment.
“Because if you don’t help him, King Abdullah is going to kill him,” Azadeh said, breaking the silence. Her voice was quiet but her eyes were firm.
All the soldiers turned to look at her.
“Yeah, there’s that, too,” Bono said. “We’ve got a chance to do a good thing. Nothing wrong with that.”
“But listen to me on this,” Sam cut in quickly. “This is important. Saving the prince is not our primary mission. It’s critical you understand that he’s a collateral objective. Frankly, the main reason we care about him is that we’re using him as bait. If we can save him, cool, but that’s not the reason we’re here. We’re here to track down King Abdullah.”
“Why in the world would he be stupid enough to leave his kingdom?” Houston asked. “Why would he come to this forsaken place? And how do you even know he’s here?”
“A little birdie told us.”
Houston nodded, knowing Sam was talking about a micro-drone.
“Turns out the little birdie was right.” Sam slapped a high-resolution satellite photograph on the floor that showed two military transports, the Arabic script and sword of the Saudi flag upon their tails. “We got these pictures sometime yesterday. King Abdullah is here to kill the prince.”
“Why wouldn’t Abdullah just send an assassination squad?”
Sam shrugged. “Seems Abdullah’s a hands-on kind of guy, you know, a leader who likes to take care of some of the dirty work himself.”
“Okay, boss, so what’s the plan? How are we going to pop him off?”
Sam shook his head. “We’re not going to kill him. Let me say that again: We’re not here to kill him. We’re going to capture him and take him back to the States, where he’s going to stand trial for crimes against humanity, genocide, unlawful warfare, fratricide, offending U.N. officers, breaking pollution standards, stealing bubble gum out of gumball machines—there isn’t a crime on the books for which this guy won’t be charged. And he’s not going to spend his life in some cushy federal prison hanging out with convicted senators and Wall Street executives. No, this guy is going to hang, and hang quickly. It’s the only way we have of avoiding an overwhelming push toward a war of retaliation.” Sam stopped and stared around the circle of his men. Looks of confusion had crept onto several of their faces.
“Here’s the deal,” he concluded, slipping the final piece of the puzzle into place. “Even as we speak here, there’s a constitutional battle being fought for the very soul of our country. If that goes well, and it had better, then Secretary Marino—”
“Brucius Marino!” Slapper exclaimed. “I thought he was dead.”
“Quite the contrary. He’s the one who authorized this mission.”
“They said he killed himself after the impeachment.”
“Afraid that’s demonstrably untrue. All sorts of rumors going on out there right now. And if he is able to claim the presidency—”
Dallas Houston raised his hand. “Nyet, nyet, nyet. Fuentes is the president . . .”
“Not if Brucius Marino is alive.”
“He’s been impeached already.”
“That remains to be seen. It isn’t clear that the proceedings against him were even legal. In many respects, they were very clearly not.”
Sam quickly told the soldiers of the move to gather the three remaining members of the Supreme Court. After he finished speaking, they sat in stunned silence for a long moment, the helicopter bouncing all around them.
“Holy cattle,” Houston finally said.
“You got it, baby. Very holy cattle. Do you see now what we’re doing here? Do you really understand? If Secretary Marino is sworn in as president, there’s going to be overwhelming pressure to retaliate for the nuclear and EMP attacks. He doesn’t want to have to do that. But justice must be served. The only way to do that is to capture King Abdullah and take him back to the States.
“Knowing what you know now, is there any spot of doubt inside your minds how critical this mission is? Can you see that right now the world is hanging by a thread? We do our job, and we’ve got a bit of hope here. Fail, and I don’t know.”
The group was silent.
“We can do it,” Houston said.
Sam knelt beside the map in front of them. “And this is how.”
* * *
His instructions took less than five minutes. When he was finished, the soldiers stared at him.
“That’s it?” Dallas Houston wondered.
Sam shot a look at Bono. “It’s the best we could come up with, given our limited resources and time.”
Houston shook his head.
Bono shrugged with nonchalant confidence. “It’ll work,” he assured his men.
“And you say that because . . . ?”
“Well, for one thing, it’ll catch them off guard.”
Houston almost laughed. “That it will, Lieutenant. I mean, it’s so absurd, how could you even think of such a plan!”
Bono kept his face serious. “Yeah, okay, it’s . . . uhhhh . . . less direct than what we usually do. But if everyone does their job, things will be okay.”
“Dude, I wouldn’t describe this as a work of Einstein,” Houston shot back. “I mean, I’ve seen some pretty screwed-up plans before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this.”
“You don’t think it’ll work.”
Houston didn’t answer at first. The look on his face said it all. Finally he responded, “I don’t know, boss, I’m not saying it’s completely hopeless, I just wonder, you know . . . I just, I mean, what are we going to face, maybe a hundred of the king’s special security forces?”
Sam shrugged. “Maybe not a hundred.”
“Okay, eighty or ninety, then?”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“And these guys are not slouches. All of them are graduates of the finest training the United States could provide them, I’m sorry to say. All of them were hand-selected for their dedication and ruthlessness. I’ve worked with some of those guys, Lieutenant—all of us have. They’re good. And anything they lack in tactics they more than make up for in their lack of fear.”
Sam shrugged again. “Yeah, okay, I’m not going to argue.”
“All right, then, just to make sure I’ve got it. We’re going up against at least three teams from the Royal Security Forces, with something like twenty-five to thirty men in each team. They’ve got the advantage of defensible positions and superior firepower, not to mention the fact that, when it’s all over, we don’t have any way to evacuate the area, no way of getting out of town. There’s six of us.” He looked at Azadeh. “Well, six and one girl who, if we were going to assault some modeling agency in Paris, I think she’d be okay. But this ain’t Paris, this is Ickistan. And I’m supposed to feel good about this gig?”
Sam’s face remained calm, his eyes bright. He didn’t feel scared. “Yeah, Houston, you’re supposed to feel good about this thing. Come on, man! This is guts and glory, the kind of mission that they write songs about.”
“No one writes songs about things like this anymore.”
Sam looked dejected. “Well, they used to.”
“Not anymore, Lieutenant.”
“Still, they should.”
Houston stared back at him, then started smiling.
“And there’s one really important thing you didn’t mention that’s in our favor,”
Sam said as he slapped Bono on the shoulder. “The quality of your leadership is unmatched anywhere in the world. If anyone can get us through this, believe me, this man will.”
Houston nodded, then glanced at his watch. Outside, the night was turning pale, the last cold glimmers of the falling moon forming shadows among the mountains.
“LZ in two minutes,” one of the flight engineers announced over the chopper’s intercom.
The men stood and started unstrapping their gear from the helicopter’s metal floor. They had a very long hike ahead of them and very little time, for they had to be in position before the sunlight broke over the enormous mountain peaks almost 15,000 feet over their heads.
Three or four hours of running. Uphill. Among sheer cliffs. With seventy pounds of guns, ammo, and equipment strapped around their chests and atop their backs.
Most men couldn’t make the hike in two days.
They had a little more than three hours.
Sam braced himself for the physical battle that lay ahead. By the end of the day, all of them would be utterly exhausted, every muscle, every bone, every tendon, and every ounce of energy pulled and stretched and used and drained.
By the end of the day, they’d be either successful or dead.
He stood up and threw his pack across his shoulders. A surge of adrenaline pushed through him, sending a shiver through his veins.
But this was more than just the adrenaline. There was something else . . . something around him. Something he didn’t recognize. A feeling, foreign and powerful, warm but unfamiliar. A premonition, maybe? He swallowed and looked away, his mind tumbling, a wave of vertigo making him reach for the nearest brace.
Turning toward Bono, he felt a sudden sense of sadness sweep across him. It hit him like a black and heavy blanket, covering his entire soul.
For no reason he could explain, he felt like weeping.
For no reason he could explain, he felt like walking toward Bono and holding him in his arms.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Along the Pakistan/Afghanistan Border
Eighty-Five Kilometers East of Kandahar, Afghanistan
The village was too small to even have a name. It sat beside a swiftly flowing river, which was dark and muddy and frothing now from three days of severe rains. A collection of rock huts and wooden shanties had been built around a crumbling central market, the walls of which were covered arches, the blue and green paint faded now, the white script almost entirely unreadable. The entire wall was pockmarked with bullet holes, some from the brutal Russian military, some from the Taliban militia, some from U.S. soldiers, some from the local warlord’s henchmen, some from celebratory shots fired after a wedding party. Behind the village, the land sloped gently upward for three or four kilometers before jutting suddenly toward the blue sky at nearly impossible angles. The valley floor was too rocky to be farmed, three hundred thousand years of retreating and advancing glaciers having deposited a couple of million boulders and man-sized rocks across the gravelly ground. Because the valley was unfarmable, the foothills had been heavily terraced, every inch put to use. The lifeblood of the village, the terraces were richly earthed but dry, the villagers having no practical way of
pumping the water out of the gushing river up to the higher ground. Electricity hadn’t made it to the village yet. Neither had running water. Nor doctors or medical services. There were a few automobiles, certainly nothing made in the present century, and donkeys outnumbered trucks or cars by at least twenty-five to one. In most respects, the village hadn’t changed much over the past thousand years. Battles had been fought here. Battles were fought here now. People had lived and died here. People lived and died here now.
So much was the same.
It was remarkable.
For more than two thousand years, the Pashtun village had lived through a series of horrors known as invasions from the Aryan tribes, then the Persians, then the Mauryas, Kushans, Greeks, Arabs, and Turks. Partly because of this, but mostly because they lived in a land the modern world had forgotten and didn’t care about, the Pashtuns were the largest segmentary people on the earth, segmentary in that they stood as tribes, with no other form of government to bind them. The best description of their hierarchy was found in the old saying, “brother against brother, brothers against cousins, brothers and cousins against the world.”
Conservative in their lifestyle and devout in their beliefs, the Pashtuns made fearsome friends and terrifying enemies.
Which did Omar stand beside right now? He didn’t know.
* * *
The village leader’s hut sat in the corner of the lowest terrace, the only structure allowed to take up such a precious piece of farming ground, perhaps the greatest tribute to his status in the village that he could ever hope to achieve. Omar stood beside the village leader. It was dim now, not quite morning light but not quite dark, the gray light having washed out the stars. The princeling hung close to Omar’s side, and the man looked down at him. The boy was larger now, stronger and more confident. Omar thought of the hidden diamond tucked under his woolen shirt. Looking at the boy, he knew two diamonds were hidden there.
“Who is he?” the village leader demanded.
“He is a child.”
“Who is he!”
“He needs your help.”
“Who seeks him? Are you his father?”
“Many forces seek him. And no, I am not.”
The leader studied Omar. “I will not let you bring evil into my village.”
“I bring no evil. I bring a child.”
“Evil comes in many faces.”
“Look at him, Aashir.”
The leader of the local tribe was young. Life was too hard to leave many old men on the mountain, and all village leaders had to be young enough to fight. He was called abbu Rehnuma, or “father leader,” and that was exactly what he was: father of his people, leader of their tribe. He studied the boy, pulling on his long beard. He hadn’t shaved—praise to Allah—not even once in his life; his face was virgin, having never touched a blade. He thought for several seconds, then turned around. “Take him away,” he commanded. “He’s not my charge.”
“Aashir, please, in the name of all that is sure and holy—”
“He is not my charge!” The young man looked suddenly nervous. “I hear much now, Allah willing, and I listen. There are foreign forces all around us. And not the devil Americans, no, not from what I hear. These are far more evil, far more dangerous . . .” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “These are the forces of a foreign king: keeper of the Holy Stone, protector of the Shrine.”
Omar felt a cold chill. “One day of rest is all I’m asking,” he begged. “One day is all I need.”
The leader scoffed. “I doubt that, my friend Omar, I doubt that a great deal. One day of hiding the boy and then what, you disappear back to the mountains from which you came? You head on down the river, boy tucked neatly under your goat-hair coat?” The man gestured adamantly toward the mountains. “If I let you stay one day, you will not leave.”
“No, no, no. One day and we will go.”
His words were met with scoffing. “Few will leave the mountain, especially at this time of year.”
The two men fell silent.
“How will you do it?” the young man asked. “If I let you stay, how will you leave me?” He looked down at the child. The boy stood beside Omar’s legs, but he didn’t hide his face. His eyes were dark and penetrating, his shoulders small but square.
Omar remained silent.
The abbu Rehnuma watched him, waiting, then raised his hand. “Not my charge. Not my charge. I have to protect my people. Look at me, look at all of us, my brother—how could we possibly protect ourselves? We are nothing. For a thousand years we’ve been nothing. For the next thousand years, Allah willing, we’ll remain nothing. That’s all we want now. Nothingness. Peace. No more foreign soldiers. We want our brothers. Sometimes our cousins. That is all.”
Omar
took a desperate step toward him. “This is not some swara, Aashir, some woman-child I have bought or was given because I was owed. This is—” he caught himself, falling suddenly silent. “This child is something else. Something important . . .” He was afraid to tell.
Aashir turned to him. “This is who, Omar? Tell me, who is this child?”
Omar cleared his throat. “We seek sanctuary, Aashir.”
The younger man’s eyes went hard and he took a sharp breath and held it as if he’d been punched in the gut. He stood there, his mouth open, his face pulled into a frown.
“A single day, that is all,” Omar told him. “A single day of sanctuary is all we ask. Then, one way or another, we’ll be gone.”
“I cannot, I cannot . . .”
“Sanctuary is one of the tenets of your society, a pillar of your faith. You can’t deny us sanctuary. Allah requires this of you. If you want Him to protect you, you have to pay the price!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Over an Unnamed Lake along the Pakistan/Afghanistan Border
Seventy-Three Kilometers East of Kandahar, Afghanistan
The enormous chopper made two full passes, its infrared and low-light sensors searching the ground below. But there was simply nothing there. Every inch of open ground jutted up to meet the rocky cliffs. The ancient pines stretched a hundred and twenty feet into the sky. It took them only a few minutes to realize there wasn’t a single patch of level dirt on which they could land.
It was starting to get light now and the chopper was getting low on fuel. And the longer they hovered around the edge of the small lake, the more likely they were to be spotted, if they hadn’t been already. Sophisticated as the combat chopper was, nothing muted the roar of its engines or whine of its powerful blades; it sent an audio signal that could be heard for miles.
“What happened to our landing zone?” Sam demanded into his intercom.
“Not here, man,” the copilot called back from the cockpit. Looking forward, Sam could see only the left side of the man’s body behind the armor plate that was wrapped around his seat.
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