by Dalton Fury
T.J. still had no idea where they were going. He could not imagine them piling into trucks and driving into Afghanistan, but he could less imagine any other destination. He said, “You really think we all can just waltz over the border and right up to a coalition base?”
Al-Amriki led T.J. out the back door of the warehouse, into the predawn glow of the morning. The Delta officer’s eyes were on his captor as he was waiting for an answer. When none came, he turned his head, followed al-Amriki’s gaze into the walled parking lot at the back of the warehouse.
His mouth opened in shock.
Daoud said, “We’re not going over the border. And we definitely are not going to waltz.”
T.J. could not believe his eyes. In front of him, two American-flagged Black Hawk helicopters stood in the dawn’s early light. Their crews were inside, the auxiliary power was on in both birds, and the men, the markings, and the cabin lights all looked authentic to the American Delta operator. Above them canvas tarps attached to high poles provided concealment from the air.
“How the hell —?” He did not finish the sentence. Horror coursed through Timble’s veins. This operation was showing itself to be more and more sophisticated by the minute.
T.J. walked forward slowly, his empty rifle hanging from his neck and swaying in front of him. He had perfected the art of getting intelligence from his enemy by asking short, simple, to-the-point questions while maintaining both an air of nonchalance and an attitude of impressed awe at the actions of the enemy. For the past three years his captors and would-be killers had found it hard to ignore his innocent queries.
But right now his awe was real.
Daoud spoke proudly. “We had these trucked up from Karachi. They came on a cargo ship from Saudi Arabia. Given to us by our brothers who have infiltrated the Royal Saudi Army. This truly is a worldwide operation you are going to take part in, Captain Timble. I can’t expect you to feel pride, but just know you are very important.”
“Great,” T.J. muttered softly. Behind him his men filed out of the door, and they too stopped and stared in surprise.
“They were hidden in freight containers, unpacked, and reassembled here in Peshawar. They have been flight-tested by their crews, all Pakistani army, but allied with us.”
“You said we aren’t going over the border. Where are we going?”
“No. We are going to make a short flight through the Khyber Pass. Five kilometers from the border is a CIA secret prison. I believe the term you and your colleagues use is a black site. We will go there, and we will liberate some friends of mine.”
T.J. knew nothing of a CIA prison in Khyber. He had no idea if Daoud was even telling him the truth.
Al-Amriki continued: “You and I will go in the lead helicopter, and your men will follow us in the rear helicopter. Remember, if you try anything, anything at all, I only have to make a call to the other Black Hawk and your men will be thrown out the door, down to the rocks.”
Timble bit the inside of his lip. Even in his unfit, unhealthy, and thoroughly weakened state he could snap this bastard’s neck. But it wouldn’t change a damned thing other than getting himself and his men killed. The operation around them looked well organized and 100 percent ready to go. Josh could only go along for the ride now, and hope like hell he and his men could find a way to prevent it from being carried out.
Daoud al-Amriki lifted his rifle high into the air, then motioned toward the helicopters. “My brothers! Allahu Akbar! It is time!”
* * *
Hammond and his team arrived at the Sandcastle just after six thirty in the morning. They were stopped by the Khyber Rifle guards at the old fort’s main gate, but a call to Dick Nelson by the alert local forces cleared their way forward. Then they drove up the steep gravel road in the dawn’s illumination, pulled through the open gate to the inner compound, and stopped in front of the squat stone building at the center of the huge dirt courtyard.
Dick Nelson met Jeff Hammond with a handshake. “What kind of a dumb-ass sneaks into the Alamo right before the Mexicans attack?”
Hammond smiled ruefully, raised his hand, then turned back around to retrieve his weapon and ammunition from the van. His three men were already out and sliding into their chest harnesses, strapping loaded magazines onto their bodies. “I go where they send me, Dick, same as you. Any chance they are going to pull us out in time?”
Nelson shook his head. “Doesn’t look good.”
Hammond figured as much. “How do you want us deployed?”
“Your team, me, and three of my guys will man the parapets rimming the roof of the stockade, this building behind me in the center of the compound. The rest of my team is set up with Stingers in the four corner towers. The Khyber Rifles are dispersed equally among the towers as well.”
Hammond nodded. He had more military experience than Nelson, but Nelson was in charge, and Hammond could see no better plan.
“And the prisoners?”
“The prisoners are directly below us, two flights belowground. I have five Khyber Rifles down there, too.”
“Got it. The bad guys could come at any time, so we’d better hop to it.”
“Roger that.”
* * *
T.J. sat handcuffed to the bench in the cabin of the Black Hawk. The doors were open and the cold morning air blew across his face. Even crammed together with fifteen other men, it felt free and liberating to be on this ride, after so long in confinement.
He looked down at the earth not more than one hundred feet past his right boot. Below him farmland and dry marshes shot by in the low light of the morning. He could tell they were flying to the northwest by the position of the morning sun, but he did not know exactly where they were headed.
Josh Timble made a decision, turned to David the American, and leaned into his ear to be heard. “Amriki?”
“Yes?”
“Your plan isn’t going to work!”
The American al Qaeda operative put a radio headset over T.J.’s ears, then put one on himself. He flipped a switch on the communications console in the back of the chopper, then sat back down next to the American operator.
“Really? That’s unfortunate. I guess we will all go home and forget about it. But before I do that, can you please tell me why?”
“Look. If the U.S. was going to send someone to this black site you mentioned, it wouldn’t be Rangers. Rangers don’t cross the border on a mission like this. Wouldn’t happen. And the U.S. personnel at this place are going to know that. They’ll shoot down these two birds before we get within a half mile of the front door.”
“Rangers don’t cross the border, you say?”
“No.”
“You crossed the border.”
Timble didn’t want to reveal any information to an al Qaeda operative, but at this point, talking this asshole out of his suicide mission was the best thing he could do for his men and for the Americans at this alleged black site.
“I’m not a Ranger. I was, but I haven’t been in a long time. That intel you have on me is old. Almost ten years old, as a matter of fact.”
Al-Amriki seemed momentarily confused. He’d been wearing a bit of a smart-ass smirk below his thick goggles, but it slipped away while he thought.
“So, you are saying, you and your men are CIA?”
Timble wasn’t going to reveal anything else. “We are not Rangers. These uniforms aren’t going to fool the Americans at the target location.”
Al-Amriki thought about it for a long moment. Timble hoped he was considering ordering that the choppers be turned around.
Instead, he just shrugged, leaned back against the cool metal of the helicopter’s wall. “The uniforms do not have to fool the men at the Sandcastle. They just have to fool the rest of the world. I am confident they will do just that.”
T.J. did not understand. “But how are you going to get into the site?”
“The men who are going to get us into the black site are already at the black site.”
“Locals?”
“Part of the guard force.”
“Why would they let you in?”
“Because they know that their martyrdom will be rewarded in paradise.”
Josh Timble looked into the eyes of the American traitor. He knew the man was telling the truth, and he understood now. “You’ve infiltrated jihadists into the black site?”
“They were already at the black site before they became jihadists. We have taught them the way of the Koran, and we have convinced them that their help will free their people from the poisoning influence of the infidel.”
David the American smiled. He was so proud of himself. So smug. T.J. wanted to throw him out of the helicopter, but his handcuffs made this fantasy impossible.
Instead, he just looked back outside at the early dawn while brown hills undulated below him.
* * *
Kolt stood in the cold morning, rubbed his arms for warmth, did his best to avoid touching the deep wound to his right forearm. He’d placed his rifle on the ground so he could rub with both hands, and he stomped his feet. Even though he was standing and moving, he was careful to conceal himself from the road junction by the copper-hued boulders around him that glowed in the morning sun. He’d walked the motorbike down in a shallow gully behind him so that its metal did not glint from the rays and give away his position.
But so far, he’d seen not a thing to worry about.
He watched the smattering of traffic fifty yards in front of his hide. Donkeys pulled carts, the occasional jingle bus or merchant truck headed to Torkham or the border. This part of the Khyber Pass was subject to attacks by highway robbers or ambushes by Taliban looking to torch fuel trucks heading from Islamabad to Afghanistan.
But for now, for this morning anyway, Kolt had not seen a damned thing.
He shivered, then glanced back over his left shoulder at the squat fort in the distance, perhaps a mile and a half away. Its walls were the same color as the rocks around it and the hills behind, so it was nearly invisible from the valley floor, although, with its high perch, anyone in the towers of the Sandcastle could see the road below. He knew Agency men were positioned on the roof of the building at the center of the fort.
Kolt stopped stamping his feet.
A low sound, more a perceived vibration than actual noise. He looked at the two roads ahead of him for a clue as to its origin, but only a small white taxi and a pair of donkey carts were in sight. On the far side of the hill, in the town of Landi Kotal, he could hear more engine noise and honking horns, but this low tone was different.
Distinct.
The noise grew slowly, changed from a hum to a soft but steady beat. He continued scanning the vista in front of him, stopped doing so only to kneel down and grab the Kalashnikov.
The thumping grew, began to echo off the walls of the valley, and Raynor knew that sound well. He looked a little longer, toward the rising morning sun, and then he saw them.
A pair of Black Hawks, silhouetted against the orange dawn, moving low and fast.
In seconds they passed by, a hundred yards off his left, streaking directly toward the Sandcastle, and Raynor depressed the button on his walkie-talkie. As he made the call he looked back at the road, scanned the distance for any sign of a follow-on attack from the ground.
“Hammond, birds are inbound, say again, birds are inbound. Approaching from the south — ”
A new sound, also low and deep, echoed through the valley in the wake of the passing choppers. It was an explosion. At first he thought a Black Hawk had crashed, but they were still in the air.
But beyond them, at the Sandcastle, a plume of black smoke rose from the building in the center of the compound.
Then another low thump and one of the four towers turned to smoke and dust.
While Kolt Raynor watched, yet another brief flash of fire and black smoke appeared from a tower on the other side of the fort. Seconds later he heard the passing boom of this explosion as well.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
FORTY-THREE
Dick Nelson lay on his back on the roof of the stockade. He’d heard the approaching choppers and run to look out between the battlements on the roof, but a noise behind him, close, had turned his head. One of the Khyber Rifles had appeared on the roof, out of the ladder hole, and shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”
One of Nelson’s men dove toward the Pakistani, managed to all but envelop the small man in the salwar kameez just as an explosion turned them both to pink mist.
While Nelson tried to recover his senses the tower on the southeast wall of the compound blew apart, fire and rock and smoke and debris blasting into the air. Before he’d even wiped the blood from his eyes from the first blast he was pelted with debris from the second.
He made his way slowly to his feet to look over the parapet to seek the origin of the attack, when the tower on the southwest corner exploded in exactly the same fashion. He fell back onto the roof of the stockade, one of Hammond’s men fell on top of him, dead, and while he was held down by the other man’s body the other two towers exploded, shrapnel flew in all directions above him, and small rocks and burning splinters rained down on his position once more.
Just like that his rooftop citadel and his four antiaircraft positions were down. The enemy helos had not even arrived and already suicide bombers had decimated his defenses and killed most of his men.
Through a ringing in his ears he heard the thumping of the Black Hawks; they appeared overhead a few seconds later. Dick Nelson freed himself, grabbed his M-4 and rolled onto his knees, and now he saw that both birds were flying with their doors open. Men in Ranger uniforms were strapped into the sides of the open craft, and their weapons were raised, and in seconds the roof around Nelson began to pock and shatter with incoming rifle fire from above.
“Everybody off the roof!” he screamed to anyone still alive. He ran to the wooden ladder that led down into the stockade, and he pushed two of his men in front of him. He turned to open fire on the closest Black Hawk, but found it turning away after its strafing run. He then swung his rifle around to the other helicopter, but before he could even line up his weapon’s sights on his target he was shot by an automatic rifle. The first couple of rounds clanged off his body armor, but rounds three and four tore through his throat. His body jerked and dropped back off the side of the roof, cartwheeled once before hitting the hard earth of the courtyard.
* * *
Raynor gunned the Suzuki out of the gulley, going airborne before crashing down hard on the dirt bike’s forgiving suspension. His AK hung from his back, his extra rifle mags were strapped tight to his chest, and though he wanted to get to the black site as fast as possible, he came off the throttle a bit so that he would not lose control on the gravel hillside.
In twenty seconds he was on the Torkham Road, jacking the bike back to the west, gunning the engine now for all he could pull from it. He knew there could still be a ground attack from Taliban forces, but the men at the Sandcastle did not have the luxury of allowing Kolt to hang back to deal with the second wave of threats. They were deep in the shit right now.
For the first kilometer of his race toward the battle on the hillside in front of him he really did not have any plan other than to drive right to the black site and engage whatever targets he could find. But during his ride he had time to think and refine his plan, and just before he arrived at the long gravel road up toward the fort he left the highway and turned in the opposite direction, to the south. He shot up another hillside, tried to get the bike to take him as high as possible before he leaped off it and continued on foot. The helos thumped behind him, the soft crackle of small-arms fire carried to him, but still he trudged up the steep incline, finally tucking behind a large boulder and turning toward the fort on the opposite wall of the valley. This would be a challenging distance for accurate fire from a Kalashnikov, five hundred yards easily. But he thought he could dump rounds into the Black Hawks, maybe get lucky and dam
age one of the birds or take out one of the pilots. He even hoped they would see his muzzle flashes and attack him, over here, giving Hammond and the others time to regroup and reposition.
Kolt wondered if T.J. and his men would be on board one of the choppers he fired at. He hoped not, but nevertheless, he knew what he had to do.
But by the time he got high enough on the hill, turned back around, and lined his weapon up on the Sandcastle, the Black Hawks had landed in the courtyard on the other side of the wall.
“Shit!” Kolt screamed into the cold morning. “Shit!”
He began sliding back down the rocky hillside, skidding and stumbling down toward his dirt bike.
* * *
Pam Archer’s arrival over the Khyber Pass had been delayed by the CIA. They had their own Reaper drones taking off at Jalalabad to head into the area, so she had to wait to get clearance to use the runway. At the last minute the two Reapers were ordered back to the hangar, some change ordered to their munitions load from on high, so the Radiance drone flight was approved, and Baby Girl launched into the morning Afghanistan sky and quickly streaked over the border into Pakistan.
Grauer wished he could send something more potent than an unmanned aerial vehicle toward the target, but at this point, that was all he had at his disposal. He had learned all about the Sandcastle during his call with Racer a few hours earlier. Then, just forty-five minutes ago, he’d got a call from Langley, and Langley had laid it all out to him. The black site, the impending hit, etc., etc. He pretended like this was all news to him, but they didn’t seem to care what he already knew or how. They had bigger fish to fry now. They were worried. No, they were scared shitless, and they solicited Pete Grauer’s help.
Grauer had to suspend disbelief. He found it incredible that this secret interrogation facility had been operating just five klicks from the border for years. He figured the few up on the seventh floor, the top brass who had been read in on the Sandcastle project, must have protected that information like the Holy Grail. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link of the Sandcastle had been, apparently, the leader of the Khyber Rifles who gave up the goods to al Qaeda and then split with a fat cash withdrawal from the Quetta slush fund.
