Soar

by John Weisman

  “Pull over. Stop.”

  The driver steered onto the narrow shoulder. Sam reached across the Uighur’s body and turned the running lights off. “There’s something ahead—a truck’s sitting in the middle of the highway,” he said by way of explanation.

  Shoazim squinted into the darkness. “A truck? Where?” he asked.

  Sam pointed. “Maybe a couple of kilometers down the road.”

  The driver flicked his cigarette into the darkness. “This is most unusual,” he said. “It is not my fault.” “I know it isn’t,” Sam said.

  He reached up and turned off the Toyota’s interior light switch. Then he opened his door and clambered down onto the sandy shoulder. “I’m going to take a look,” he said.

  Kaz opened the rear door. “I’ll keep you company.”

  “Sure.” Sam trudged ahead, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark, Kaz’s footsteps scrunching the loose sand a few steps behind his right shoulder.

  “Think we have a problem?” Kaz whispered when they were out of earshot.

  It was Kaz’s first overseas assignment, and Sam could sense the kid’s apprehension. That was to be expected. Kaz was one of the Agency’s new generation of post-9/11 hires: an IT guy, whose degrees included a B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in computer science from Duke. He wasn’t the case-officer type but a techno-wonk. He’d been talked into this little jaunt because he understood precisely how the sensors worked, and—more important—exactly how they’d have to be inserted to do their job.

  “Don’t know,” Sam said, trying to sound reassuring. “But I want to see what’s going on.”

  The two of them walked another hundred yards or so in silence. When Sam felt the grade increase, he slowed down and put the monocular up to his eye. It was a cheap, first-generation Russian device that Sam had bought in Turkey. But cheap or no, it was still amazing how bright things were through the lens. After another twenty yards, Sam dropped to his knees and silent-signaled Kaz to do the same. “I don’t want us silhouetted against the crest of the hill.”

  Then he stopped. Dead in the water. Sam closed his left eye and refocused the night-vision scope. It had only two-power magnification. But that was quite sufficient for Sam to be able to make out the truck, its hood raised, straddling the two-lane highway at about a forty-five-degree angle, effectively blocking the road. Half a dozen uniformed figures, some of them carrying weapons, stood shuffling in the chill night air around the huge vehicle while one man, perched precariously on the front bumper, shone a flashlight on the engine with one hand and tinkered with the other.

  Kaz’s hand touched Sam’s shoulder. “Can I have a look?”

  Wordlessly, Sam passed Kaz the monocular. The tech peered through it for some seconds, then handed it back. “Army.”

  “Yup, PLA,” Sam confirmed. “They’re in uniform—I could make out their hats clearly. Could you see any markings on the truck? I couldn’t.”

  “Negatory.” Kaz shook his head.

  The two of them backed off the crown of the rise. There was nothing wrong. At least nothing Sam could put his finger on. But the situation still made him uneasy. “I don’t like it.”

  Kaz shrugged. “So what do you want to do?” Sam was already heading toward the Toyota. “Let’s talk it over.”

  The X-Man was leaning up against the open front door when they got back. He pointed at Sam’s night-vision monocular. “Who are they?”

  Sam said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

  The four of them ambled past the Toyota’s rear bumper and turned west, into the desert. Their footfalls scrunching the sand, they walked about fifty yards. Sam hunkered down and drew a diagram in the sand with his index finger. “It looks like a PLA truck broke down.”

  Kaz said, “Or, it could be a roadblock.”

  “I disagree.” Sam wagged his head. “They don’t look like they’re set up to make a traffic stop. I think they broke down and they’re waiting for help.” He saw the disappointment on Kaz’s face. “Okay, Kaz has a point. Could also be they’re some kind of security unit checking road traffic.”

  Kaz said, “Hell, Sam, this is the only north-south connector in three hundred miles.”

  “So, what if it is a roadblock?” Dick Campbell asked.

  “It means we’ll probably be shaken down,” Kaz said. “Remember the traffic stop in Dabancheng?”

  “Traffic stop? It was more like highway robbery,” X-Man said. “They shook us down for two hundred bucks.”

  “And three hours, while they went through every single piece of our equipment,” Sam said.

  Dick Campbell folded his arms. “Hell, so what if we lose a few hours, Sam? It’s not as if we’re on a tight schedule.”

  “You’re right,” Sam said. “It’s probably nothing. I’m being overly sensitive.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Kaz said. “Sam, you’ve turned into a real Mr. Touchy-Feely.”

  Sam smacked Kaz on the upper arm. But he wasn’t sanguine about this turn of events. He’d survived for more than a decade by trusting his instincts. And now his instincts were telling him something about the truck just … wasn’t … right.

  “So?” X-Man hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “What’s the plan?”

  “I’ll think of something. Let’s get back before Shoazim gets suspicious.”

  Sam mulled the possibilities as they walked back to the 4x4. Then he walked up to the Toyota on the passenger side. “Shoazim, back up. We’re turning around. I don’t want to drive through the Army checkpoint tonight.”

  The driver crossed his arms. “No, Mr. Sam,” he said. “We cannot.”

  Sam wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted. “Shoazim—” he began.

  The Uighur tapped the fuel gauge. “Two hundred kilometers at least to where we can get fuel if we go back,” he said. “But fourteen kilometers straight ahead in Tazhong is gasoline. Turn around is impossible.”

  “How much fuel do we have, Shoazim?”

  “Just a little.”

  Sam walked around to the driver’s window. “Let me see.”

  The Uighur twisted the ignition key and Sam checked the gauge. It showed just under a quarter of a tank—maybe three, three and a half gallons. He did the math in his head and came up about a hundred kliks short. “Okay,” Sam said, improvising, “what we’ll do is, we’ll go around.”

  Shoazim’s eyes widened. “Around? But it is the Army, Mr. Sam. They will not like it.”

  “They won’t ever know.” Sam tapped the Toyota’s roof. “Four-wheel drive,” he said. “No problem.”

  The Uighur’s expression showed he didn’t like Sam’s decision at all.

  Sam said, “Hold on.” He reached into his pocket for the Visor, turned it on, then held it toward the sky. “Let’s see what Mr. GPS says about where we are and where we can go.”

  Half a minute later, Sam shut the PDA down. “Dammit—I can pull map coordinates, but nothing topographical.” He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s just do it.”

  “Wait a sec.” Dick Campbell pulled the cell phone from his pocket and turned the power switch on. “Just in case we get stuck in the sand and have to call the office in London for a tow,” he said.

  Sam nodded in agreement. “Good idea.” He climbed into the cab, pulled the door shut, turned on the interior light, and unfolded the road map. “Okay, here’s the plan.” His finger tapped the yellow line showing the road they were on. “We’re about here. We roll forward about half a kilometer. We’re still out of sight because of the rise in the road… “ Sam’s finger strayed off the yellow line. “We go west, across the basin.”

  Sam saw the dubious look on the driver’s face. “Shoazim, there are no big dunes this far south. We’ll be just fine.”

  “We are too heavy for the desert,” the driver said. “Too much weight. Soft sand.”

  “I just tested the sand, Shoazim,” Sam bluffed. “We’ll be just fine.” Sam’s finger went back to the map and drew a half
circle. “All we have to do is give ‘em a wide berth, then swing back onto the road.”

  Kaz said, in French, “What if they see us?”

  “If they see us,” Sam answered in the same language, “we’ll deal with it.” Then he swiveled in the front seat until his eyes settled on the X-Man. “Everybody’s documents in order, Mr. Chris?”

  Chris patted the upper left side of his photographer’s vest, where he kept the group’s passports and visas in a zipped interior pocket. “Ready for inspection, Mr. Boss Man.”

  Sam grinned. But it wasn’t because he was happy. “Mr. Chris” was the private emergency signal he and X-Man had worked out in advance to indicate trouble. “Mr. Boss Man” was the confirmation. Which also meant that as they drove, X-Man’s left hand would be in his jacket pocket, wrapped around the emergency transponder sewn inside the lining. If the situation went south, he’d let Langley know they were in trouble—and more important, where they were.

  “Okay,” Sam said. He extinguished the interior light, folded the map, then took one deep breath. His lips were dry. He could feel his pulse racing. But he fought for control so no one would notice his anxiety. “Let’s roll.”

  He was specific with Shoazim. “Go slowly,” he instructed the Uighur, “until we reach the dip in the road half a kilometer ahead.”

  He waited until the driver nodded in agreement.

  “Then turn west, straight into the desert.”

  “Chataq yoq,” Shoazim said. “No problem.”

  “Then go two kilometers and turn south. After two more kilometers, head east until we hit the road again.”

  The driver may have nodded obediently after listening to each sequence. But he obviously had no intention of following Sam’s directions. Because Shoazim drove straight through the dip in the road at forty kilometers an hour, crested the rise, and continued down the far side.

  He finally stopped in full sight of the truck and its occupants. “Turn now, Mr. Sam?” he said facetiously.

  Sam thought seriously about throttling the driver. “No—go straight,” he said through gritted teeth, resigned to an hour’s delay—probably more.

  Shoazim grunted, put the Toyota in gear, and moved ahead.

  They were less than fifty yards from the truck when Sam realized how badly he’d misjudged things. He and Kaz had spied half a dozen uniformed men. Now, even in the dark, he realized they weren’t wearing PLA uniforms, just PLA uniform parts.

  He’d spotted the easily identifiable Chinese Army hats and jackets through the night vision. But up close, it was obvious they didn’t fit the people wearing ‘em. Not even remotely.

  Sam glanced at the driver. Shoazim had obviously seen what Sam had seen, because there was a look of sheer panic on his face. The Uighur screamed something unidentifiable and slammed his foot on the brake pedal without taking the truck out of gear. The Toyota stalled out. Sam yelled, “Dick—”

  He hadn’t needed to say anything. The communicator had already slapped the cell phone to his ear.

  But it was too late. There was sudden motion on their flanks. A tide of armed men came out of concealed positions on either side of the road. They ran, screaming, at the 4x4.

  Their hands were already on the vehicle when Sam saw—holy Christ—that these were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans, Kazakhs.

  The first to reach the Toyota wore a red-and-white kaffiyeh wrapped around his head like a Hizballah guerrilla. He stuck the butt of his pistol through the driver’s-side window and hammered at Shoazim’s head as the Uighur screamed and tried to twist away from the blows. Sam’s peripheral vision caught a beetle-browed youngster in a striped Russian uniform undershirt coming at him. Instinctively, he raised his arms to protect his face. The kid grabbed both his wrists, yanked hard, pulled Sam straightaway through the Toyota’s open window frame, leaving a fair amount of skin behind in the process. He punched Sam in the face. He kneed him in the gut. Then he body-slammed the American roughly onto the highway and kicked him savagely.

  Sam was frozen by the sudden intensity of the violence. He regained his senses barely in time to see a heavy jackboot coming at his face. He rolled away but still took a steel-toed kick that sent a shock wave of pain up his spine. The butt of a rifle glanced off his shoulder. He tried to tuck into a fetal position and got a breath-stopping kick in the balls for it.

  There was a lot of noise—yelling, cursing, and shouting—in a language Sam didn’t understand. There was shooting: quick, deafening bursts of automatic weapons fire and the raw smell of cordite mixed with dust. He thought he heard Kaz scream and then the kid’s voice cut off, abruptly.

  Sam tried to crawl away from the barrage of boots and gun butts. But his attempts grew pitifully futile and he finally collapsed in a bloody heap, mercifully unconscious.

  3

  Room 3E880-D, the Pentagon.

  0712 Hours Local Time.

  MIKE RITZIK NEVER FELT completely comfortable in business attire. And so, the normal anxiety over where he was right now—the cozy hideaway office of the secretary of defense—was compounded by the fact that he was wearing his only dress suit: ten years old, navy-blue worsted, and very seldom worn. Oh, you didn’t have to look very hard to see the hanger marks imprinted just above the trouser knees, or get up close and personal before you caught the faint yet unmistakable cedar-tinged perfume of mothballs issuing from the jacket.

  The suit still fit him well enough. That was to be expected. At the age of thirty-nine Mike Ritzik hadn’t put more than six pounds on his five-foot eight-inch frame since he’d graduated sixth in his class at West Point eighteen years before. He worked out daily: a constant but varying routine of distance running, weight-pile sessions, and the once-a-week torture of the obstacle course. He knew that sooner or later his body would betray him—lose the agility and elasticity that allowed him to trounce men half his age on the basketball court they’d built behind the razor wire of the CAG.

  CAG, which stood for Combat Applications Group, was the Army’s neutral-sounding designator for the never-acknowledged First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, otherwise known as Delta Force. Delta’s compound was buried well inside Fort Bragg, the huge, sprawling post that was home to the 82nd Airborne Division, as well as the Joint Special Forces Command, and which sat a dozen or so miles northwest of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

  But his body hadn’t betrayed him yet. And it wouldn’t—not for a while, anyway.

  Ritzik unclipped the yellow plastic ID with its bold blue V for visitor from the lapel of his suit and examined the fine print. It told him that the badge—number 120342—was the property of the United States government, and its return was guaranteed if it was dropped into any postal box. If he’d been in uniform, he wouldn’t have had to wear it. His Special Forces photo ID with its smart chip would have gotten him through the thumbprint card readers and into the building. But at nine-twenty last night, the secretary’s chief of staff had called the Old Man, who passed the word down the chain of command. SECDEF himself wanted Major Michael Anton Ritzik in Washington. Posthaste. Forthwith. Chop-chop. Zero seven hundred in SECDEF’s office. And in mufti, please.

  They’d sent a plane—a C-12—that had him on the ground at Andrews Air Force Base one hour and six minutes after departing Pope. From there it had been a twenty-six-minute ride in an anonymous black Chevy with red and blue flashing lights, driven by an anonymous driver who wore an anonymous Sig Sauer 228 in a shoulder holster under his blue blazer. The ride was followed by a six-minute walk escorted by a pair of DOD rent-a-cops that entailed jogging up one escalator, marching through four separate metal detectors, and showing his North Carolina driver’s license to three huge Marines and a prissy Air Force colonel, the secretary’s deputy military assistant.

  The colonel, relatively satisfied about Ritzik’s identity, had ushered him reverentially into SECDEF’s ceremonial office, which was (Ritzik knew this because he’d seen it once before) about the size of a soccer field. There, the four-striper r
ecounted, as if speaking from a TelePrompTer, the history of the secretary’s desk: “Made from the wood and hardware of a twin-masted British privateer bravely captured during the Revolutionary War.” He dragged a manicured finger languidly across the “Four Top” table, where, he said, SECDEF and his deputy had a twice-weekly lunch with the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, in an unctuous tone, he pointed out his personal favorites from the secretary’s Me Wall—that unvarying Washington political custom of displaying political relics, warmly inscribed photographs, editorial cartoons, and newspaper headlines relating to the VIP—for all to see.

  The photos and headlines Ritzik could understand. But it had always baffled him to see the cruel caricatures so willingly displayed by the very butts of the cartoonists’ derision. It was, he thought, kind of like walking down the street wearing a huge sign that said KICK ME! Go figure.

  From there, Ritzik was led down a short, private corridor to the holy of holies. Actually, he found the secretary’s hideaway office to be comfortable, even inviting. There were no VIP pictures or ego-boosting tributes on the walls. Instead, the cherrywood bookshelves bore framed family snapshots of the secretary’s wife, children, and grandkids. A fire crackled in the fireplace. An afghan, which bore the huge likeness of a black Labrador retriever, had been flung over the arm of a well-used leather wing chair, in front of which sat an equally well-used leather footstool.

  “Sit, Major,” the four-striped major domo instructed, pointing schoolmarmlike toward a rail-backed wooden armchair placed at an oblique angle to a small, burlwood writing desk.

  He complied. The colonel’s nose actually twitched as Ritzik passed downwind to drop into the chair, and the man’s face momentarily betrayed the fact that he’d caught a whiff of the detested eau de mothball. But he wasn’t a Pentagon staff puke military assistant for nothing. This guy was a pro. His expression quickly returned to neutral. Then he turned on his mirror-shined heel. “The secretary will be with you shortly,” he said to the hideaway office door, and left without waiting for a response.