by Ted Halstead
And for the sake of those girls, Martins thought, I hope I’m making the right call.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Kandahar, Afghanistan
Khaled Tanha had just finished a walk up and down a totally silent school hallway and entered the principal’s office, where Fereshtah was sitting and doing her best to avoid looking at him. The look of contempt on her face was apparently harder to control.
He ignored it and sat down, thinking about how pleasant it would be to wipe that expression off her face permanently. They were over halfway to the deadline, and Khaled’s orders were to keep it no matter what.
Besides, he was sure the Americans would get here before then.
What was that?
Khaled was sure he had seen something move in the hallway out of the corner of his eye.
Hadn’t he?
Or was he getting tired and starting to see things?
Only one way to find out.
But when he got to the door and looked down the hallway, there was nothing. He walked back to the end of the hall, and even put one foot on the first step of the stairs. The loud creak that greeted his effort made Khaled shake his head.
No, there was no way someone could have walked up those stairs without making noise, and plenty of it.
But he was sure he had seen something.
There was only one thing to do. Stand in the doorway of the principal’s office, and see if the motion happened again.
Minutes dragged past, and Khaled was almost ready to convince himself that he’d been imagining things.
Then, an insect came flying right past him! Khaled didn’t get a good look at it, but maybe a bee?
Or maybe something sent to spy on them by the cursed Americans.
It was flying straight down the hallway. Khaled started to run after it and grinned. He was sure he’d be able to catch it.
Just as was about to reach out and grab it, whatever it was flew up out of his reach.
Khaled snarled a curse and ran even faster. The thing was flying up the stairs! Khaled knew that if it made it past the floorboards, he’d never be able to catch it. Abandoning all caution, he raced up the steps.
He made it to the third one.
The step cracked in half, sending his right leg plunging through to impact painfully on the floor below. Khaled fell forward, spreading his arms in an attempt to distribute his weight well enough that his entire body didn’t follow his leg.
It worked. Slowly, Khaled was able to extract his right leg from the broken step and made his way off the stairs.
He looked down the hallway and saw Fereshtah’s head duck back into her office.
Well, Khaled thought, she was right to hope something had happened to me.
He moved the injured leg experimentally. It hurt, but he didn’t think he’d broken a bone.
Next, he took a few steps down the hallway. Yes, nothing serious. He wouldn’t be running again soon, but at this stage, he thought, that shouldn’t matter.
Khaled pressed the group text number asking each of the men on his team for a status update. All three reported promptly by return text that there was no activity to report.
Khaled did the same thing with the teams at the other schools and received the same reply. Nothing happening.
Though he thought about asking his men if they’d seen any flying insects, Khaled stopped himself. If they had seen anything they’d considered suspicious, they would have said so.
At this point, asking them about tiny drones the Americans had sent to spy on them would only make his men wonder whether they should continue taking his orders.
The truth was, Khaled was starting to wonder himself. Couldn’t it have just been a flying insect?
Khaled shook his head. No. He hadn’t stayed alive this long by doubting his instincts. The Americans were out there, and they were up to something.
Well, he and his men were waiting for them.
Khaled resolved that nothing was going to take his attention off that entrance door.
Kandahar, Afghanistan
Captain Mike Lombardy scrolled through the series of images that had been collected by the micro drones, while Commander Dave Martins joined him in looking for any hint that the Taliban were about to take any action other than continuing to watch.
One after the other, the two men in the courtyard looked at their phones and punched in a number. Other than that, nothing happened.
“Sir, I think we’re ready to move forward,” Lombardy said.
Martins nodded and pointed at the images on the screen. “You mentioned that you were feeding power to the micro drones in the courtyard just now to get those images without running down their batteries. Don’t you need to bring back and recharge the power drone before you send it on this next mission?”
Lombardy shook his head. “The drone’s power level is still high enough.” He tapped a few keys on the nearest laptop, and a digital gauge appeared reading “87%.”
“That should be plenty. Besides, it’s a tiny window,” Lombardy added.
Martins shrugged and gestured for Lombardy to proceed.
Special forces teams spent a lot of time thinking about good ways to enter a structure without making noise. Solid glass windows that were designed to admit light but never to be opened, like the one on the school’s upper level, were a particular problem.
Smashing in the window was out. Cutting the glass was quieter, but still made some noise.
The power drone’s laser offered a better option. Melting the glass.
This approach had one drawback. It left a residue of molten glass.
However, DARPA scientists had come up with an aerosol compound at a very low temperature in a handheld container, double-walled to protect the soldier’s hand from the cold. Spray from the container rendered the residue safe in seconds.
For this mission, though, that wouldn’t be necessary.
Lombardy maneuvered the power drone into position and tried to remember to breathe.
It was one thing to do this as a practice exercise, where each time it had worked perfectly. It was another to do it when the entire mission depended on glass of unknown thickness and composition melting completely before the drone’s power supply gave out.
The small hole in the center of the window began to grow, and Lombardy relaxed a bit.
He had to be careful to adjust the laser’s focus to hit the remaining glass, and had found that an outward spiral from the center gave the best results. Lombardy needed to be sure the laser hit only the glass and not the probably flammable materials beyond.
Yes! There was still a bit of glass remaining around the frame, but there was more than enough space to admit the drone that was going to help them finish this mission.
“Ready to proceed with the taser drone, sir,” Lombardy said.
“Excellent,” Martins replied. Then he leaned towards the laptop display and squinted.
“Isn’t that smoke?” Martins asked.
Lombardy paled as he realized Martins was right.
“Sir, some of the molten glass must have dropped on the floor and come into contact with something flammable. I don’t think there’s anything we can do except finish this mission as quickly as possible,” Lombardy said.
Then he immediately added, “That’s not true, sir. Please ask our Afghan Army liaison to get firefighting equipment here ASAP.”
Martins nodded, pleased. He’d already planned to do just that, but it was good to see his prospective replacement had thought of it too.
Lombardy maneuvered the power drone to the school’s roof to save time. They could pick it up later.
Next, he sent the taser drone on its way.
Originally the taser drone had been designed solely to incapacitate its victims. Special forces troops ordinarily wanted to take the enemy captive if possible to question them. A remote-controlled taser was perfect for that purpose.
For this mission, though, Lombardy had adjusted the voltag
e that would be used on the target to the maximum possible. There were two limitations.
The first was that exceeding the design voltage too far risked damaging the drone itself.
The second was that using too much power on the first two targets risked too little being left to disable the third.
Lombardy believed the result of his adjustments would be, at a minimum, ensuring all tased men would be incapacitated long enough for the team to scale the wall and secure the school.
The increased charge could also very well kill its target, depending on where the electricity happened to be applied, and the target’s physical condition.
Usually this would have been a problem since dead men couldn’t provide actionable intelligence. In this case, though, the priority was making sure nobody could trigger the bomb.
Now Lombardy would see whether his calculations and adjustments were correct. He had carried them out on the taser drones being used by the other two teams as well, so this would determine mission success or failure.
As he passed the taser drone through the window, Lombardy winced. The fire had spread, and even with the drone’s night vision capability activated, he could barely see the stairs leading down to the main level through the smoke.
Could the Taliban fighter, probably the leader, inside the school smell the smoke?
Lombardy tapped a key on a nearby laptop keyboard, which activated the micro drone at the end of the downstairs hallway. The image that shortly filled the laptop’s screen showed the man who had chased one of the micro drones earlier standing at the other end of the hallway.
Thankfully, his attention appeared to be completely focused on the school entrance.
Well, that made sense, Lombardy thought. That’s the way the micro drone he’d chased came in before.
“Please tell Jack to get ready to overload the power to the guard booth,” Lombardy said.
Martins nodded and spoke quietly into his radio to the team’s electrical specialist, Sergeant Jack Collins. Like everyone else in the unit, Jack had more than one role. He was also the team’s explosives expert.
Then Martins moved his hand towards the switch that would activate the equipment shutting down cell phone and radio transmissions for a three-block radius. He would hit it the moment he saw on the screen that the first taser target was down, and the security booth overload accomplished.
Lombardy maneuvered the taser drone down the stairs and lined up his first shot.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Kandahar, Afghanistan
Khaled Tanha frowned. What was that smell?
Was it smoke?
Khaled first looked out the open entrance door into the courtyard, where he saw both of his men on watch as they should be. He nodded to the one a few meters away next to the sedan’s open trunk.
No smoke out here.
Khaled went back in and looked down the hallway towards the stairs.
At first, his mind wasn’t sure how to process what he saw. A metal shape was floating towards him, with nearly silent propellers on both sides. Though small, it was much larger than the insect-looking thing he had chased before.
This was definitely an American drone!
It only took Khaled a few seconds to complete those thoughts and pull out his pistol.
But it was a few seconds too long.
Khaled found himself down on the floor, his pistol out of reach beside him.
The pain was agonizing.
Khaled struggled to move, but couldn’t. He was completely paralyzed.
Out of the corner of his eye, Khaled saw Fereshtah’s head poke out of her office.
Then he heard her move closer.
Khaled tried as hard as he could to move his hand, which was inches away from his pistol.
Nothing.
Khaled felt his heart beating faster in his chest as he could just barely see Fereshtah’s hand close around the pistol.
He still couldn’t see her face. But he could hear her breathing.
Then, Fereshtah walked around him, so that now Khaled could see her face. She had no expression Khaled could decipher, but her eyes looked…as though she were lost in a dream.
Slowly, she said, “God has placed this weapon in my hand. I will send you to his judgment now.”
Then, she began to lift the pistol towards his head.
At that moment, Khaled could hear gunfire in the courtyard. The Americans! He felt a sudden rush of hope. They would want to take him prisoner and question him!
Khaled wanted so much to tell her so. But he couldn’t make a sound leave his mouth.
The gun pointed at his head looked so big. He had been ready to die. Khaled had even expected it.
Why did he now feel such terror?
There was an instant of intense pain, and then everything went black.
Kandahar, Afghanistan
Captain Mike Lombardy had to suppress a grin, which under these circumstances would have been hard to explain. After the millions of dollars worth of technology that had been applied to this point in the mission, their method for scaling the wall surrounding the school dated back at least three thousand years.
Ladders.
Well, Lombardy thought, it didn’t matter how old the tech was as long as it worked.
First up one of the ladders was the team sniper, who didn’t need a scope to give a quick “thumbs up” confirming that all terrorists visible were down. He stayed on the top of his ladder with his head just over the wall. The sniper kept his rifle balanced on the wall’s edge so that it protected everything but his head. Placing his eye to the rifle’s scope, he stayed focused on what mattered most.
That was the man who, for the moment, was down next to the sedan’s open trunk.
The rest of the team raced over the other ladders set up against the wall. They then dropped down to the courtyard in a procedure rehearsed in countless exercises.
Two soldiers quickly bound the man lying prone on the courtyard floor next to the gate. It was only a precaution though since they could find no pulse.
No sooner had they finished when the guard booth door opened, and a man with a rifle emerged. Cuts and scrapes on his face and a dazed expression made it clear that the electrical overload had not been pleasant to experience.
Multiple rounds hit the Taliban gunman, who spun around and fell face first. Two soldiers ran forward to make sure he was as dead as he appeared, while the rest of the team moved to the school entrance.
The man on the ground was breathing. But in spite of his best efforts, he was unable to move. They had just finished securing him when they heard what they had been dreading most, next to the bomb’s explosion.
A gunshot inside the school.
Was the remaining Taliban gunman shooting the girls?
Martins and Lombardy were first through the door, expecting to come under fire immediately. What they saw instead was…unexpected.
A woman, holding a pistol loosely in her right hand, standing over the body of a dead man.
It appeared that they now knew the whereabouts of the last Taliban gunman.
“Ma’am, we’re American soldiers. Are there any other Taliban in the building?” Martins asked.
The woman shook her head slowly. She appeared to be in shock. “No. Some outside, but you must have seen them,” she said.
“We have to get the girls out of the school. There’s a fire upstairs,” Martins said.
This news snapped the woman out of her daze. Though there was blood all around the man’s body, it didn’t appear to concern her as she went through his pockets, finally holding up a metal key.
“He locked all the girls inside the classrooms. We must hurry,” the woman said. With that, she opened the door to the nearest classroom.
The girls inside were all huddled together with their teacher in the back of the classroom.
The woman said, “You are all safe now. I have American soldiers with me. They will take you out of the school.”
Lombardy and two other soldiers, in the meantime, moved the body out of sight into a nearby office.
In minutes the school had been evacuated and checked for any hiding Taliban fighters. Then, Afghan firefighters moved in to extinguish the fire, which had not yet spread beyond the upper level.
Martins and Lombardy next joined the team’s explosives expert, Sergeant Jack Collins, who was looking down at the bomb filling the trunk of the sedan. They both immediately noticed a strong odor.
Collins nodded. “Stinks, doesn’t it? Never smelled anything like it before, and I’d remember. No good for anything you’d want to hide away because of the smell. I’m betting somebody’s military uses it, but I’ve got no idea which one.”
Martins shrugged. “We’ll let the intel guys worry about that. Can you defuse it?”
“Maybe,” Collins frowned. “But I think a better idea would be to find the nearest vacant lot as far away from all these houses as possible and drive this car there. I’ve checked, and no wires are going from the bomb anywhere outside the trunk, so it should be safe. Or at least, safer than defusing it in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”
“I thought you might want to do this elsewhere,” Lombardy said. “I’ve identified a suitable location less than a kilometer away. I’ll get our Afghan Army liaison to clear the way of traffic, and block off the location.”
Martins was impressed. Preparing for this aspect of the operation had never occurred to him.
He had made the right choice for his successor.
Martins keyed his radio and made his initial report to headquarters. From his expression, Lombardy immediately knew things hadn’t gone as well for the other teams, but waited patiently until Martins signed off. He knew he wouldn’t need to ask.
Martins looked at each of them and shook his head. “Bravo Team had the same outcome we did. All Taliban killed or captured, no civilian casualties. Alpha Team though…the bomb went off as they were going over the wall. We’re not sure yet what went wrong, but a report from one surviving soldier makes it sound like one of the Taliban was able to recover from the tasing, and set off the bomb manually.”
