by Dalton Fury
But the dark man with the dark eyes and the trim beard did not answer. Instead, the light-skinned longhair spoke. Again, in English. “You are the officer. I understand you are called T.J.?”
The man spoke with no foreign accent whatsoever. He sounded exactly like an American.
T.J. slowly stammered his response. “That’s right. Who are you?”
The bearded man did not answer the question; instead, he said, “There has been an incident in Darra. You are no longer safe here, so I will be taking charge of you.”
T.J. looked around the room for Zar Afridi, but he had remained outside. Zar was in control of the captives, and a Pashtun host took responsibility for his guests. T.J. looked at the English speaker and said, “Zar and his militia might have something to say about that.”
“Yes. Pashtunwali can be an annoyance when it is used to protect someone other than oneself.” He waved a hand in the air. “But there is a way around that. I have personally assured Zar that you and your men will not be harmed. I will ensure your safety during our sojourn. Afterward, I have promised him, I will return you all to his care.”
“Our sojourn?”
“We are taking a trip, and we leave immediately. To avoid the prying eyes of coalition drones, a covered truck will be backed up to the door here, and your men will climb into the back. You will ride in the backseat with me and one of my men. Your helicopter pilot friend will travel in another vehicle. If you or your men make any attempt to escape, the pilot will be shot. Do I make myself clear?”
T.J. just nodded. He slowly looked to his three men, and said, “Do what he says.”
T.J. imagined his face showed the same level of shock as the others’. There was no question now. This guy was an American. He’d always known there were Americans who belonged to al Qaeda. But he imagined them living in Karachi or Cairo or Berlin or London, working the Internet or drinking tea and smoking hookahs, not actually operating in the field. This fellow countryman seemed to be a full-fledged operative.
Seconds later a truck backed all the way to the cell door, and armed gunmen opened the canvas back of the covered vehicle. They used their rifle barrels to motion the shackled Americans inside.
Once they were chained in the truck, a group of five children, following orders from several armed men, piled into the vehicle. Two more stood on the small running boards and held on to the outside. These were the human shields. T.J. knew that if any drones were watching now they would not strike these vehicles.
T.J. and his men left the relative safety of Zar Afridi’s compound in the custody of al Qaeda.
* * *
Ten minutes later T.J. bounced and bumped in the backseat, jostled with the uneven surface of the broken logging trail. The truck had wasted no time in getting out of Zar’s compound and then leaving Shataparai. They’d backed into a small cave in the mountainside, where they’d left the children behind. The truck now crossed the bridge, and T.J. sensed that they were heading northeast along the geographical contours of the floor of the Tirah Valley. His cuffs scratched his ankles and wrists as he bucked in the rear seat, a dark-skinned gunman on his right and the mysterious American on his left.
In the front seat were an armed driver and an armed passenger. They were Pashtun, probably not al Qaeda, but the American spoke to them in Arabic, and they followed his orders.
“Who are you?” T.J. asked in English.
“I am Daoud al-Amriki.”
“David the American,” Timble translated. “That’s a little vague. Who were you?”
“A long time ago, before I converted and took this name, I was someone else. That no longer matters to me, nor should it to you.”
“You are al Qaeda.” It was a statement, not a question. He was here with the Arabs; who else could he be?
Daoud shrugged. “You Americans like to simplify the struggle against the West. To give your enemy a name, like a country you can hate or a city you can attack. I belong, with all of God’s followers, to the resistance against you. If you want to call it al Qaeda because you are unable to grasp that we are everything, we are everyone, and we are everywhere … then so be it.”
T.J. shrugged. “Al Qaeda, and a pompous ass.” Then he said, “You are a traitor.”
“To the country of my birth? Certainly. But not to my religion.”
“What’s the plan?” asked T.J. now. The vehicle slowed, negotiating a low stream bed. The undercarriage of the truck scraped loudly on a rock, and Daoud shouted at the driver before turning back to T.J.
“You’ll know soon enough, Captain Joshua Timble.” Daoud al-Amriki smiled. “We know all about you.” Josh had not been a captain for nine years. “We know you are a Ranger.” He had not been a Ranger for six. Still, for three years here in captivity, neither he nor his men had revealed their real names to their captors. That this American al Qaeda operative knew his name was disquieting, even if he did not know his current rank or organization.
Josh shook it off. He needed intel. “You said something happened. A place called Darra?”
“Darra Adam Khel. South of Peshawar. A German associate working for us was tortured and killed. We have reason to believe it was done by CIA spies.”
Josh said nothing. Any inflection, any reaction, any comment, might be recognized by al-Amriki. T.J. could ill afford to give away any knowledge that he knew his fellow countrymen were searching for the German.
Al-Amriki continued: “We killed one of the spies. The other escaped. We don’t know what he knows. We don’t know who he may be in communication with. Therefore we will be forced to execute our operation at dawn tomorrow.” He shrugged. “It is no matter. We are ready.”
“Can you give me a hint about your operation?” T.J. had become an expert at getting his captors to talk. He saw in this young man’s eyes that he was proud of his plan, and Josh thought he might be able to draw him out in conversation.
It was dark now in the valley. The driver flipped on his headlights, and the beams shone on nothing but dust as the vehicle ahead bottomed out again in the road. Daoud held on to the handle above the door to the backseat. He grimaced after another crashing bounce of the truck. Then he looked back at T.J. in the darkness. “What do you know about the Vietnam War?”
Josh was taken aback. He could hardly imagine the relevance. He replied, “A lot, actually.”
“Then you will be familiar with the Tet Offensive, January 1968.”
“Of course.”
“A single act that changed the course of history.”
T.J. cocked his head, slowly. Where is he going with this? he wondered. “The Communists lost that battle.”
“Yes, but they won the war, didn’t they? General Giap and his forces could not defeat the Americans on the field of battle — that was obvious. The Americans had an advantage in numbers, in technology, in resources. So he did not try to beat them on the battlefields. He used guerrilla techniques, the slow boil of harassing operations, and the Americans found themselves fighting an amorphous foe that they could not defeat.”
T.J. just looked at al-Amriki in the dark truck cab.
“Does that sound familiar? Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again.”
T.J. started to argue, but the American traitor continued. “But Giap did not want America in his country for a hundred years. So he devised a plan to win. He used what resources he had, including irregular forces, the Vietcong, and he ordered a simultaneous attack on all the major cities of the south. Why? He knew he could not hold any of those cities for any length of time. His attack was too broad to do more than cause chaos for a few days at most. But Giap understood the American public. They were weary of war, sick of watching it on their news, watching their money go up in smoke and their young come home in body bags. Giap knew this, and he understood this one event, this Tet Offensive, would be the tipping point, the point at which the American public had finally had enough.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Tomorrow, Captain Timble, will be the tipping point in th
e Afghanistan War. Tomorrow will be our Tet.”
“You are going to attack all the major cities of Afghanistan? All three?” T.J. sniffed, unimpressed with the scheme.
Al-Amriki smiled through his beard. “Don’t take the metaphor too literally. I mean that we will, in one act, in one day, with one mission, end this war in the favor of Islam and to the shame of the infidels.”
T.J. looked away. That was ridiculous. This guy was delusional. “Then you’d better be prepared to lose a lot of men.”
“I am. In fact, that is the plan. But the men who will be lost will happily lay down their lives to throw the infidels out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
T.J. looked out the front windshield now. This guy was nuts if he thought he and a few costumed Chechens could accomplish such a feat.
“And that’s not all,” Daoud al-Amriki said proudly. “We have our eyes on another prize.”
Josh smiled a little. “You going to run for president of the United States?” His sarcasm was ignored by the younger man.
“No. But we will, by our actions tomorrow morning, set the wheels in motion for the fall of the Pakistani government. Our friends will take control of the country, and we will take control of the nuclear weapons they possess.”
“Never,” muttered Timble, but his voice betrayed a slight concern.
“Don’t worry, Captain,” said al-Amriki. “You and your men will be safe as long as you do what you’re told.”
Josh started to question him some more, but he stopped himself. He needed time to think, to plan. If this operation was something on the scale that Daoud al-Amriki claimed, then he’d need to reevaluate the situation. He sat silently, rocked with the vehicle as it moved through the darkness, a sick ache of dread growing in his stomach along with the nausea caused by the motion.
FORTY
The hands on Kolt’s wristwatch displayed 1900 Zulu, midnight local time. He sat at the kitchen table in Bob Kopelman’s apartment. His torn, bloody, and filthy clothing lay strewn on the linoleum floor around him. Bandages and antiseptics and ointments and scissors and tape sat on the table in front of him.
Along with a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey he’d found on a shelf in the living room.
He hadn’t touched the booze, yet, but he’d stared at the bottle and it had stared back at him while he’d cleaned and dressed the long and deep gouge in his forearm. He’d even stood up on his tired and sore legs, walked doubled over like a hunchback to take the strain off his stiff lower back, just to go to the cupboard to get a teacup with which to drink the whiskey.
The teacup sat next to the bottle untouched.
For now.
Kolt sighed. A long, painful exhalation. He’d pulled the landline telephone into the kitchen and placed it in front of him, had to stretch the cord to its limit for it to reach.
The phone rested in his lap, but he had not yet brought himself to make the call that he knew he’d have to make.
Raynor knew he was acting foolishly now. There was no way to be sure Bob had not had anything on his body that might lead al Qaeda or the Taliban right here to this address. At any moment the garage door downstairs could come crashing down, and the black turbans could come up the stairs. Raynor had found a loaded Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum revolver in Bob’s desk drawer, and this now rested on the table next to the Kentucky bourbon and the teacup. The five hollow-point Magnum cartridges in the handgun’s cylinder could knock down the first couple of men that charged through the door. But that would not do much more than delay the inevitable. Kolt hoped that if the bad guys did come through that door, he’d remember to reserve the fifth round in the revolver for himself, to save himself from being taken alive.
Yes, this was stupid, sitting here tired and spent and hurt and unsure about what to do next, but he’d needed a place to hide and to treat the wound on his forearm and to get out of his bloody clothing and to regroup. He did not know Peshawar, only this apartment, Bob’s place. So, for better or worse, he’d come back here.
But he could not stay. With another glance at the bottle and another successful turn away from it, he picked up the phone and dialed the number.
Bob’s home phone was clean: Radiance had provided Kopelman with a cable hookup running through his computer that routed calls through an untraceable line that could not be monitored from the outside.
The international connection took forty seconds. During this time Kolt closed his eyes, tried to concentrate and think of something to say. When the connection was made, there was no hesitation from the other side.
“Christ, Bob! Thank God! Talk to me! I’ve been ringing the Thuraya off the hook trying to — ”
“It’s Racer.”
Pete Grauer paused. When he spoke again there was even more concern in his voice. “What the hell is going on?”
“Bob’s dead, Pete.” Kolt almost whispered it.
“Damn it!” Grauer shouted, his rage aimed squarely at Kolt Raynor. “Damn it! Son of a bitch!”
Kolt closed his eyes. Spoke over the curses. “We infiltrated the German’s factory, almost made it out, but AQ and Taliban gunners nailed the shit out of us right there in Darra Adam Khel. Bob and I wasted a dozen of them, easy … but there were a dozen more.”
“Fuck!” Grauer shouted. Then he paused a moment. His voice changed. “I told him not to go with you.”
“I know. He insisted. I should have stopped him from — ”
“I’ve known Bob Kopelman twenty years.”
“Sorry, sir,” was all Kolt could say. Bob’s death was not his fault, and he knew it. But merely because he’d survived and the old spy had not, he would never forgive himself.
“What about the contact? Jamal?”
“I’m not sure. I think he might have gotten out of there. I … I really don’t know.”
“Damn it, Kolt!”
“I thought maybe the Agency or the State Department could look for him. Help him out. Jamal risked everything for us. He’s compromised and the Taliban will be hunting — ”
“Negative,” Grauer said firmly.
Kolt knew it had been ridiculous to even suggest that there would be official help from the U.S. government for a foreign national agent of a private company working in the black in Pakistan. “Right.”
Pete Grauer was furious. No doubt he was devastated as well. But he remained focused on the mission. “I received the data from Buchwald’s laptop, sent it on to the Agency. Their man in Peshawar, the one who was planning to meet with Kopelman — he’s calling me frantically trying to get in touch with Bob. There was something on that laptop, apparently, that’s scared the shit out of Langley.”
“I’ll talk to him if you want me to.”
Grauer paused. Kolt knew he wasn’t Grauer’s first choice as a liaison between his organization and the CIA. Still, he was the only one here. Finally, the former Ranger colonel said, “Don’t guess there is any other option.”
“Where and when?”
“Just tell me where you are and I’ll let them know. They’ll pick you up and deliver you there.”
“I’m at Bob’s place.”
“His apartment?”
“Affirmative.”
“Kolt, how do you know it hasn’t been compromised?”
“I don’t.” Kolt looked at the door to the garage. Expected it to explode in splinters ahead of a dozen black turbans.
“What is wrong with you?” A slight hesitation. “You’re not drinking, are you?”
Kolt looked at the bottle of Jim Beam. As he did so he sat up straighter in the chair. “Of course not. I’m operational.”
“Bullshit, Racer.”
“Not a drop, sir.” Kolt stood, turned from the bottle, and walked the phone back into the apartment’s spartan living room.
Grauer either believed him or else just let it go. “Are you wounded?”
Now Kolt glanced at his arm. “Not bad.”
“All right. I’ll tell the Agency where to pick you up. Watch for
them, and don’t shoot any white guys that come through the door.”
“Roger that.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, Pete. I’m sorry about Bob. I did my best to — ”
Grauer hung up the phone.
* * *
Raynor spent the time waiting for the CIA car by staring out the apartment’s second-story window at the city of Peshawar. It was one in the morning, and even in the moonlight he found the town to be grimy and filthy. The foreign smells sickened him. And though he was exhausted, he found himself unable to rest or even to relax here, hidden in the sloppy urban sprawl of the big city, the majority of whose inhabitants would, if given half a chance, happily rip someone with his background and origin limb from limb.
A small Mazda minivan pulled up in front of the warehouse. Raynor fingered the Smith & Wesson in his hand — pulled the hammer back with his thumb.
Two men stepped out. As they passed in front of the headlights of their vehicle he could tell they were Westerners, and likely Americans. He could tell from their features, their eyes, the way they wore the local clothing, even in their confident and wide strides as they approached the garage door. He wondered if he fit in around here any better than these guys. No. He was sure of it. In the mountains he had been invisible when he’d wanted to be, but here, in the city, he was not invisible. He did not melt into the texture of his surroundings. No … Here he was Kolt Raynor … American.
Infidel.
He lowered the hammer back on the pistol and went to the kitchen to open the garage door.
“Racer?” one said. No friendly handshake or bonhomie between fellow countrymen abroad.
Kolt nodded.
“Let’s go,” said the other. Raynor followed them out to the van, climbed in behind them, and found a third man behind the wheel.
The drive was short, and no words were spoken. Soon they pulled into a dark garage. It reminded Kolt of Bob’s house here in the city, but he had no clue where they were. The vehicle’s door slid open and Kolt was ushered out. An open stone staircase went up a single flight and he took it. The other men did not follow. He entered a second-story room that was dimly lit by lamps covered with fabric shades. There was no furniture, and the floor was bare except for several small mats and rugs lying around. A glass door to a balcony was centered on the far wall, and on either side of it was a window that was closed and shuttered. A porcelain tea service sat in the middle of the dim room, and a man sat in the corner. In front of him a Nalgene water bottle rested on the cement floor.
