by Dalton Fury
“Shit,” Kolt muttered. He was going to need more than three thermal signatures across four hundred yards of fog to get a rescue mission approved for this compound.
He resigned himself to sleep. Tomorrow he’d have to do better. He could not take his eyes off that damn hillside.
* * *
But the second full day began as a virtual replay of the first. The fog hung in the air well past sunup, and then the village and the compound came alive with activity, but there was no sign of the operators of Eagle 01.
Men came and went. Women peered from the windows of their homes or traveled with male family members while completely ensconced in burkas. The villagers moved about the buildings of the village, and along the banks of the river, shepherds tended their flocks on meadows to the south of Kolt’s hide, and small children gathered tinder for firewood throughout the forest.
There was activity on the narrow logging road. Mule carts with supplies passed slowly; some stopped in the villages, while others continued all the way up the steep path to the compound.
Kolt could not see down into the area Grauer’s analysts had dubbed the Playground, the large courtyard building on the southern side of Zar’s fortress, but he noticed activity on the roads around it, so he assumed it was full of children, coming and going, just like in the Predator images.
These kids were unknowing and unwilling impediments to the military and intelligence forces of the United States of America just blowing the hell out of this fellow Zar and all his houseguests.
Kolt did not want to waste the day lying there in vain hoping that T.J. and his men would just appear, so he used the time to carefully plot the movements and rotations of the guards around the compound, and to pick out every static sentry in sight. He wrote it all down on a small notepad. All this would be crucial for a successful mission if a Delta hit was ordered up, but there would be no hit if Kolt didn’t get some real intelligence sometime soon.
Nevertheless, he busied himself with this work. He timed all the movements and even mapped out the potential fields of fire from the guard tower at the front gate, the men on the roof of the main building, and the forces manning the bridge.
The fog came in thick and heavy in the afternoon, just as it had the day before. Raynor was on his thermal scope before 6 p.m., pissed and frustrated, because this meant another day without identifying Eagle 01. In the hillside village ghostly beings appeared as if from thin air as they stepped out from behind buildings, the hovels warmed by fires shone as lighter gray than the colder dark gray facades around them, and the compound’s sentries continued their patrols, although now they appeared as ethereal beings floating through the air on the other side of the valley.
This was useless. Kolt put his head down on his patoo and cursed. Wished he had a shot of whiskey to warm his bones and calm his frustrations.
The first prisoner appeared again at 10:30 p.m., just like the previous evening. Again, he was escorted by an armed guard. This time, one by one, four men were led out into the cold, into the darkness, into the thick mist, delivered to the latrine, and left alone for five minutes or so to take care of their business.
Kolt was more convinced than the night before that these were the missing Delta men. The last man in the group even moved like T.J. No, he could not be certain, but he had an incredible sensation that he was looking directly at his old friend as he shuffled, hands together, across the compound to the latrine, and then back again.
Raynor switched off the thermal sight for the evening and dropped his forehead to his mat. He saw this entire mission falling apart because of this fucking fog. He’d do his four days here, he would obtain no video recording of the men’s faces, nothing would be seen, no actionable intelligence would be derived, and then he’d be pulled out. There would be handshakes and backslaps and the clucking hens in the intelligence community would say, “Well hell, of course we did all we could, we even had a guy from a PMC go to the site and spend four days there and he didn’t see a cotton-picking thing, so what else can we do?”
This was the sort of thing that had driven Raynor crazy back when he was in Delta. Missed opportunities. Failure.
It was also the sort of thing that had caused him to push forward that morning in Waziristan, getting his men killed in the process and creating this disaster.
Kolt tried to sleep, but cold, worry, and frustration kept him up through most of the night.
* * *
The flaw in the compound’s security setup revealed itself to Kolt Raynor on the morning of his third and final full day, right after the mist swirled up and out of the valley with the arrival of the sun’s rays.
Zar spent much effort protecting himself, but Raynor identified the Afridi warlord’s Achilles’ heel.
It seemed like Zar’s biggest worry was Hellfire missiles from Predator drones, and there was but one way for Zar to counter that — place himself as close as possible to large numbers of civilians. This he had accomplished with the compound on top of the village, but Zar had gone one better with the construction of the Playground. He packed kids up against his fort like sardines, put them on display during the day, and then tucked them into their beds at night, still well within the blast radius of any missile hitting the main building of the compound or the hurja where al Qaeda and the Taliban sought shelter when they were in the valley.
That was his anti — air-to-ground ordnance plan, and, Raynor conceded, it was pretty damned foolproof.
Zar’s next biggest concern would be the threat of American commandos being choppered directly into his compound. But Raynor had searched in vain for anything that would preclude Delta from assaulting, fast-roping out of Black Hawks inside the compound walls, directly in front of the main building and the hurja. Yes, there were men with light weapons inside, but Kolt had seen nothing in the past forty-eight hours that would rule out a rescue attempt by helicopter, should he be able to identify the American prisoner.
It would be tough, and it would be bloody, but an assault on the compound would, in Kolt Raynor’s estimation, be doable.
Just below this on Zar’s threat matrix would be fears of a ground attack. The logging trail that led into Shataparai was guarded by men with guns in fortified positions. They would have radios and they would be in contact with Zar’s militiamen all over the valley. If invaders appeared, even kilometers away, there could be more security in Shataparai itself in moments, meaning the steep village pathways toward the compound would be one fatal funnel after another ready to repel a ground attack from the road. The stone-and-concrete walls of Zar’s lair were twelve feet high, and the main gate was steel with a guard tower alongside it — any ground assault would be met with a wall of lead outside the walls of the compound.
Yeah, Zar was ready for the Frontier Corps or the militia of a rival Pashtun strongman charging straight up the middle toward his fort.
Clearly the warlord who ruled over this area had a lot of enemies, and a lot of fears, but one thing he did not seem to guard himself against very well was the potential for a lone man infiltrating his compound under cover of darkness.
The Playground, this newish construction pressing up against the southern wall of the compound, was the key. In his attempt to make his home and guesthouse safe from missiles, Zar had unwittingly damaged another aspect of his security. The hillside south of the Playground was steep and thick with alpine trees, but it was free of other structures and not patrolled by anyone Raynor had seen through his binoculars during the day, or through his thermal scope during the night. Certainly no large force would be able to scramble alongside the sheer valley wall undetected. But one man, one man possessing enough skill and daring, could make his way right up to the Playground, over the wall of its large courtyard, and then sneak right up to the wall of Zar’s fortress.
But what about the patrolling sentries inside the stronghold? Kolt had spent thirty-six hours, on and off, monitoring and recording and mapping their movements, and he had come to a conclusi
on: the answer lay in the time frame — one minute, thirty-seven seconds.
One minute and thirty-seven seconds was the minimum amount of time between patrolling perimeter guards passing a particular point inside the compound at any time of the day or night. Sometimes it took them longer, but they were never less than one minute, thirty-seven seconds apart.
Any potential interloper into the fortress would need to get over the wall after one guard passed, and then find a hide or move out of the path of the next man, all within a minute and a half.
It would not be easy. Shit, it would be the most challenging thing Raynor had ever attempted. But he felt he could do it. With the dark of night, with the thick evening fog, with his training and his gear … yes. He could get in there and get eyes on T.J. and the boys.
And he knew he had little choice.
Jamal would return for him the following day, and Kolt had no illusions that the fog that had fallen the past two nights would not be back this evening.
Damn it, Kolt. Are you really going to do this?
He lay there and thought about it throughout the day, but by midafternoon he knew what his decision would be.
It was obvious.
He was going into the compound.
Grauer would be pissed, but only if he failed.
And he would not fail.
The Playground was the way in, but figuring out how to infiltrate from the southern wall would be tough. He could get across the river, he could skirt the village, he could come to the Playground from the wooded hillside to the south, but he did not know if the kids and their supervision would be in the courtyard or not. If not, if it was just a big empty dirt patch, he’d be in good shape.
But if it was full of sentries or dogs or even kids, he’d be in serious trouble.
In the late afternoon women shrouded in their burkas appeared on his side of the river. There were two dozen in total, moving in small groups of two or three up the fallow stepped fields closer to his position. Kolt was not worried about being seen. Even from the highest of the terraced fields, there was still a hilly tree line and then a sheer limestone cliff between his position and the women. They strolled all the way to this tree line, and they began to gather armloads of small sticks and branches, kindling for their fires.
In his intelligence briefing with Kopelman back at Radiance’s Operations Center, Bob had told him that if he saw women working in the fields or gathering wood, then it was a good bet that there was not a strong Taliban presence in the area, because the Taliban did not allow women to work outside of the house, even to gather fuel for their fires.
A good bet. Yeah, that sounded so much better to Raynor in a conference room on the other side of the border. The women before him now indicated something might be the case, but was he ready to risk his life on it?
Kopelman had also warned him that the women would know how to shoot Kalashnikovs, and many would be better shots than the men. He didn’t see weapons hanging off the outside of the burkas, but even without weapons the women of this village would be a danger.
The two dozen women filled their arms, their backs, and, in some cases, their heads with kindling and firewood, and they returned over the bridge and back to their village. The cooking fires began burning as the mist fell in late afternoon. Kolt caught the scent of gently wafting wood smoke through the moisture long after the village disappeared from view.
He ate a little of his rations and sipped water, preparing himself and waiting until nightfall. His stomach turned with nervous energy and concern, but despite his fears, he was determined, and Kolt Raynor was a man who acted on his resolve. He knew he’d be heading for the compound as soon as the village went to sleep.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Pete, are you seeing this?” It was Pam Archer calling into the Operations Center. Her disembodied voice was louder than the murmured conversations between the analysts and senior staff in the room. Her aircraft had just arrived on station over the Tirah Valley, here for her nightly checkup on Racer. It was just after 9:30 p.m. and she’d zoomed her thermal camera in on his hide, but there was no man-sized heat signature to be found. An empty black void showed on the monitor against the wall.
Grauer had not been looking. He’d been talking to a pair of analysts on the far side of the table. When Pam’s voice filled the room he immediately walked over to the monitor, his men trailing behind him.
“Where the hell is he?”
“No idea.” Pam’s voice quivered with concern. “I’ll adjust the image scale.”
With a series of flashes the monitor’s image took in more of the valley now, the cold river curling like a black snake through the center of the picture. Rocks on both sides of the valley that were large enough to keep a measure of the day’s warmth this late into the chilly evening showed up as fuzzy light gray spots. The houses in the village shone nearly all white where dying embers of the cooking fires and the body heat of the locals and animals radiated.
But there was no sign of Racer.
Archer took her Predator to the other side of the hill, a few kilometers behind Racer’s last known position, on the theory that he might have felt he was compromised and needed to escape. But she saw nothing but some large cattle, some sheep and their shepherds, and an encampment of men, probably members of Zar’s militia. She then traced the road with her camera, followed it ten or more kilometers back to the east, in the direction of Peshawar. But she found very few men or vehicles on this stretch of the dirt track, and nobody that she did find was traveling alone.
After ten minutes of searching, each moment more worrisome than the last, Pete Grauer’s square jaw rose slowly, and he spoke through clenched teeth. “Pamela. Search the river crossing a couple of klicks south of the village.”
“The crossing?” she asked.
“Affirmative. There is a spot where the river bends and it’s bisected by boulders. A fit man could cross the river there if he was careful.”
A brief pause before acknowledging her compliance. “Roger that.”
Grauer’s jaw muscles flexed as he waited for the drone to move into position nearer to the natural stone pathway that spanned the river like a rocky dotted line. The water was swift here between the rocks, but a motivated and sure-footed man could make his way from one boulder to the next and cross the river here without having to use the guarded stone bridge in at Shataparai.
Pam centered on the river, zoomed in, and enhanced resolution on her thermal camera.
Nothing. “Negative heat signature,” she said.
“All right,” replied Grauer. “Now I want you to scan all the way from this crossing point to Zar’s compound. Check the hillside, not just the riverbank.”
A long pause from Pam. “Are you saying you think he — ”
“Humor me, Pam.”
“Yes, sir.”
The camera zoomed out and then began tracking along the hillside toward the village of Shataparai. Twice Pam stopped panning and focused on heat registers. Both times they were animals in the forest. When she was just a few hundred yards from the village she continued panning but said, “Negative contact.”
“Keep going,” ordered Grauer. He had a feeling.
Nothing for a moment more. And then there it was. Just a tiny white splotch moving through the trees at this magnification. Archer centered on it and then zoomed. Then zoomed again.
Walking along the steep hillside, slowly and stealthily, not more than fifty yards from the southernmost structures of the village, was a single individual. He was well secreted in the trees, but the thermal camera picked him out easily.
“Oh, shit,” said Pam Archer into her mike, violating the normal protocol in her transmissions.
“Son of a bitch,” muttered Grauer. “Someone … please, tell me that Racer is not attempting to infiltrate Zar’s compound.”
The analyst on his left just shook his head slowly. “What the hell is he going to do?”
“What do we do?” asked Grauer. No o
ne spoke. No one knew.
Then Grauer growled, “Get me Kopelman on the secure line.”
* * *
Kolt Raynor hoped like hell that the UAV hadn’t come to check on him tonight. He hoped to get in and out of here and back to his hide, with more information than he would have been able to get from across the valley, well before daylight tomorrow. Further, he would much rather Pete Grauer did not know what he was up to until he could tell him about it, after the fact. He did not want Grauer to think he was on some crazy solo mission, because that’s not how Kolt saw this. He could call this off at any moment: if guard dogs alerted to him, if sentries changed up their patrols, if villagers remained in the alleyways this late at night. There were a dozen or more indicators that could convince him to back off for now, but he was not going to just lie on his belly across the valley from T.J. for three days and then exfiltrate the area without getting proof of life.
No, he had to try.
There was a camera on his tiny GPS unit and he’d brought this along, kept it stowed in a pocket of his salwar. He’d left his spotting scope, his night vision gear, and all the other recording devices back up in his hide. His thermal monocular would be his main piece of equipment to get him to the prisoners, but once there, he’d pull out the GPS camera to get proof of life.
Raynor made his way to the southern wall of the Playground. He was reasonably certain that the courtyard would be empty, though he was equally certain that the building adjacent to it would contain kids, families, or at least sentries. He hid himself for several minutes in the brush across from the rusty iron gate that led into the dirt courtyard. He kept his eyes and ears open and tuned to any human noises.
