The basic technique for fighting wildfires was fairly similar around the world: dig a trench around the existing fire to let it burn itself out while keeping it from spreading.
Gorman went after them in a deep crouch, aiming for the rear of the group. An older man roughly his height and sporting a long white beard tried to keep up with the rest of the younger farmers marching toward the southern edge of the fire to start excavating an isolation canal.
Confirming his target, Gorman scrambled closer, running up to the old man from behind, speedily but quietly closing the gap in under a minute.
Predatory eyes narrowed as he prepared to strike, checking his surroundings, making sure there were no other villagers coming up behind him or on either flank.
Waiting another thirty seconds for the rest of the group to get farther ahead, Gorman remained within striking distance, using the old man’s noisy steps to mask his own.
Eyes flicked up ahead again, verifying a final time that the old man had achieved the desired separation from the rest of the herd. Gorman’s movements were now almost on autopilot, honed to near perfection by years of training, closing the final gap.
He struck with the edge of his right hand the base of the neck, where the vagus nerve system ran from the cerebellum to the rest of the body. The shock triggered a vasovagal episode, and the old man fainted immediately.
Gorman caught him in midair, setting him down gently—and quietly—on the soil.
He now worked quickly, kicking off his own boots and slipping the stranger’s baggy pants and long tunic over his tactical gear. He wiped off his face before donning the man’s black pakol and leather sandals.
The transformation complete, Gorman grabbed the shovel and left him there to wake up in an hour or so with the headache of a lifetime.
He reached Darband Road in another two minutes. This time he just walked out, blending perfectly with the locals approaching the field from all directions on foot, in cars and trucks, on bicycles and mopeds, and even in carts towed by cows. Three showed up in small tractors driven straight onto the field, lowering their front loaders as they approached the edge of the blaze to carve wide isolation channels.
Gorman surveyed the horde without staring at anyone, his practiced eyes brushing dozens of faces in the semidarkness, searching for any gaze not focused on the inferno. But he saw no one interested in anything but putting out the fire threatening the area’s livelihood.
Finkle’s plan called for the team to reach the RAV4s, where they would shed their tactical gear for civilian clothes before driving back to Islamabad and storing the vehicles in a private parking garage a dozen blocks from the embassy.
But something made Gorman pause and turn around, his eyes staring at the two- and three-story mud structures along the northern edge of the field. The pulsating flames washed their facades in orange light, along with the two white-paneled vans parked in front.
As people rushed past him shouting, screaming, and even crying, Gorman couldn’t help but wonder … What if Finkle’s intelligence had actually been correct, just poorly acted upon?
And what if Shaw had indeed caught a glimpse of the elusive bin Laden?
As Gorman stared at the figures on those distant rooftops, his operative mind began to consider an alternate plan.
6
Thumb Drive
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
Hunter Stark stood guard while his team slept on cots scattered around the nose of their C-21A military transport parked in a hangar near the south end of the runway. Fully fueled, it was always ready to leave at a moment’s notice should their civilian employer decide to deploy them to another exotic destination.
The military variant of the Learjet 35A was a light jet designed to carry up to six passengers, the pilot and copilot, plus a couple hundred pounds of luggage. Or, in Stark’s case, five contractors plus several hundred pounds of violence, since one of the contractors—Danny Martin—doubled up as the resident pilot. A former naval aviator, the man could fly anything from jets and prop planes to helicopters.
The two armored Chevy Tahoes parked by the tail of the jet were supposed to be black, but like everything else in this damn country, a thick coat of fine clay soil covered the CIA-sourced SUVs.
The colonel paced the interior of the structure slowly, methodically, a Heckler & Koch MP5A1 submachine gun in his hands, safety off, shooting finger resting on the trigger casing. On paper, he and his team were supposed to be safe behind walls of concrete and the millions of miles of barbed wire surrounding KAF, which resembled a midsize city in a third world country. But the colonel had been in the business long enough to know that, in Afghanistan, any feeling of safety was an illusion. Everything around here was a potential threat. Everything was hostile. Beyond those static barriers projected a land populated by a society that had a medieval way of inflicting terror on anyone stupid enough to invade it. And the long list included legends from Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane to the British Empire, the Sikh Empire, and the once mighty Soviet Union.
And now us, he thought.
Of course, none of those ancient conquerors had to worry about IEDs or the three million mines left behind by the retreating Soviet Army in 1989.
Sighing, he checked his black Casio G-Shock watch before realizing the time and murmuring, “Damn.”
He turned the alarm feature back on before hastily walking to a small cooler next to the jet’s folding steps. He grabbed a cold bottle of water, reached inside a Velcro-secured pocket on the side of his pants, and snagged a quart-size Ziploc bag filled with four different kinds of pills.
The colonel had long since come to terms with the reality that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. There had been a time, years ago—back when he was young and stupid—when he had stopped taking the meds, which cost him his marriage and almost his career.
Stark swallowed his daily dose almost twelve hours too late, chasing it with a gulp of water before stowing away the bag.
Resuming his patrol, he briefly shook his head at the thought of Kate, his beautiful ex-wife, who didn’t want anything to do with him now and who had long ago divorced him and married some attorney in New York.
Kate had been the U.S. Navy doctor who treated Stark after an ill-fated mission with the Special Forces in Kuwait City in 1990. An Exocet missile hit his team while it was approaching a beach to remove obstacles ahead of the invasion force. A dozen operators—and close friends—had been killed instantly because some trigger-happy dumb-ass in some French missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf mistook Stark’s Mark V Special Operations Craft for an Iraqi vessel. It was an unfortunate mistake made among a complex coalition of forces from thirty-five nations.
The whole episode went undetected for hours, as very few in the coalition were aware of Stark’s black ops mission, leaving its sole survivor treading water with a mangled left leg until an Italian helicopter spotted him at dawn and fished him out.
Stark raised his brows and frowned at the irony of life. He would have never met Kate had it not been for that tragic wartime accident that nearly ended his military career. He had married her a year later in Virginia Beach, only to get divorced a short time later because of his extreme mood swings—because of the nightmares from that terrible night, compounded by a decade of giving and receiving violence. Last he’d heard via a mutual friend, Kate was still married, with a couple of kids.
He clenched his jaw.
Losing her and losing the life he could have had was the heavy price he had paid for arrogantly thinking that he could handle what no one ever has been able to handle without mental consequences: killing another human being.
Young and very damn stupid.
Now he simply took the meds while feeling damn lucky that the side effects were negligible enough to keep him and his contractor team in business.
He stared at the G-Shock again, annoyed at himself for forgetting to turn the alarm back on after the raid. The
pills had to be taken religiously every twenty-four hours—no exceptions.
The access door built into the large hangar doors had a small window, and Stark peeked through it. The ramp beyond the glass was relatively quiet for KAF, just night crews driving fueling trucks around at this predawn hour, prepping planes, mostly A-10 Warthogs, F-16 Eagles, and a mix of Black Hawk, Apache, Cobra, and Chinook helicopters under the dim grayish glow of floodlights. And it was all backdropped by the jagged Sulaimans dominating the northwestern horizon, the distant peaks trying to stab a yellowish moon.
Stark stared at the peaceful sight, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, his thoughts drifted to a similar moon rising above his hometown of Scituate, on the southern shore of Massachusetts. His father was a Korean War vet and retired army doctor and his mother a chief operating officer for a nearby four hundred–bed hospital. They had three boys, Stark being the youngest by several years. His older brothers followed in their father’s footsteps and were deployed to Vietnam. Neither came back. Stark lost them before their twenty-second birthdays, while he was still in high school. That had marked the start of what was later diagnosed within the PTSD family of mental illnesses: suffering massive survivor’s guilt. So he had joined the army after college, even though, with his degree from Penn State, he could have gone straight into officer training. But Stark had carried too much guilt, plus he had listened to his father, who said the best officers were enlisted men first. However, it didn’t take long for the army brass to recognize his talent, and within a year he became a first lieutenant with the Army Special Forces.
And the rest is history, he thought, still staring at the tarmac as images of his many deployments flashed in his mind. Before he could stop himself, the horror returned. Visions of charred bodies, of flesh torn by bullets and shrapnel, momentarily filled his consciousness, bringing him back to Panama, Colombia, Bosnia, and Iraq. But it wasn’t the dead bad guys that tore into his soul. Those he could handle even without the meds. It was the voices of his buddies, of his teammates, of his fellow soldiers bleeding out in his arms, that continued to haunt him. He had unleashed horror on his enemy but his enemy had paid back in kind, taking away so many men he loved as brothers. And mixed with those visions was the horror of that night near the shores of Kuwait City, when his team perished from 160 pounds of high-explosive death inside the warhead of that Exocet—
“Colonel?”
Stark blinked as Ryan Hunt pulled him out of the flashback. In an instant, the visions were replaced by tarmac and planes under a sky stained orange by the looming sun rising over the eastern rim rock.
“Yeah?” he said, without turning around. Checking his watch, he realized that he had been standing here frozen for over three hours.
Damn, he thought, silently hoping for the damn meds to kick in.
“Everyone’s good to go, sir.”
“Let’s do it,” he replied, angry at the realization that he had been standing there like a zombie while his team woke up and got ready.
Following Ryan to the same Tahoes they had used just the day before to return from their botched mission, Stark got in the front passenger seat of the first SUV, with Larson at the wheel.
“You okay, boss?” asked his go-to, electronics, and pick-up-the-sides-of-buildings guy. “We were worried about—”
“Did you get the pictures, Chief?”
Larson nodded and handed Stark a thumb drive.
“Good,” he said, pocketing the device. “Now shut the fuck up and drive.”
“Roger that,” Larson said, turning the ignition and accelerating out of the hangar.
Five minutes later, and flanked by his contractor team all dressed in fresh tactical gear, the colonel stared at the caskets draped with American flags being loaded up to a C-17 carrier.
A breeze swept across the dusty airfield under a cloudless sky as temperatures soared into the nineties, even at this early hour. Jets, mostly Warthogs and Hornets, took off and landed in the distance, their exhaust plumes injecting the all-too-familiar smell of burned jet fuel into the air. The acrid scent always had a strange way of reminding Stark of his life, while the caskets symbolized just how quickly it could all end.
It never really got any easier, seeing American men and women who gave it all in the service of their country. Stark had seen these caskets in countless countries while fighting long-forgotten battles, some to be forever classified. But the feeling was always the same. It didn’t matter if it was Colombia, Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the waters off the coast of Kuwait. The ultimate sacrifice always looked like this in the end, with another American flag draped over another coffin going up the ramp of another transport for its final trip home.
A single tear managed to escape the corner of his left eye, and if Stark were to be completely honest with himself, he would have conceded that it had more to do with his survivor’s guilt. It was at times like this that he would wonder which sacrifice was greater, being inside one of those coffins or walking alone on this earth shouldering the burden of those who had died under his watch—and that included Jones and the rest of his CIA team.
He watched as the former Delta, Sergeant Major Ryan Hunt, marched stoically in front of the contractor team. Although the colonel and his guys had been out of the service for quite some time, they came to attention as Ryan snapped the heels of his army boots and commanded, “Present arms!”
All brought their right hands up in the way taught to them at basic schools across the military. Once the caskets were carried by designated army personnel in front of his group and up the ramp of the C-17, Ryan said, “Order arms!”
Everyone brought their hands crisply down to their right sides.
“Ryan, get the team back to the hangar,” Stark said, walking away from the closing ramp of the large jet and toward the Tahoes. “I have to go see someone.”
“You want company, Colonel?” asked Ryan, flanked by Larson, Hagen, and Martin, who produced a watermelon lollipop and pulled off the wrapper.
“No, thanks,” he said, before turning to Larson. “But if the chief is not too busy, I could use his large frame for a quick mission.”
Feeling much better as the meds worked their magic, Stark snagged the keys from Larson and got behind the wheel of his SUV. Larson slid into the passenger seat while Ryan and the others left in the second SUV.
“So, what’s up, boss?” asked the chief, sitting sideways, a black cap worn backwards, mirror-tint sunglasses reflecting Stark in matching black tactical gear.
Slipping on a pair of Oakley sunglasses, Stark cranked the massive 6.2-liter engine and put the Tahoe in gear. “We’re paying a not-so-courteous call on a certain Canadian general.”
The command center was a thing of beauty, designed to impress visitors. It wasn’t necessarily the best arrangement to manage a war, but that was the direction NATO and the United States had drifted toward over the previous twenty years. Set up like an auditorium, with seats and desks rising from a center stage, the place was busy 24/7, always full of importance, most not justified.
Major General Thomas Lévesque, sitting in the commander’s chair at the bottom of the auditorium, was the senior NATO officer in the room and the man responsible for ordering the drone attack on Compound 45.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since “friendly fire” came raining down on that mountainside, triggering a disaster that cost not only the lives of six CIA officers but also the job of the CIA station chief, who had taken the fall for the botched op and had been among the detail carrying the caskets into the C-17 to bring his team home.
Twenty-four hours had been plenty of time for Stark to figure out exactly what had happened, who was responsible, and then to decide what to do about it.
These command centers all had extensive audiovisual installations to project all manner of pictures, slides, and videos onto massive screens, like those at Houston’s Mission Control. Large conference rooms lined the back of the auditorium, used for private staff me
etings and briefing sessions.
When Chief Larson walked in, his size alone drew attention. Add to that the fact that he was all gunned up, with all his tactical gear on, which in these headquarters was highly unusual, and even more heads swung in his direction.
Stark put his large hand on a U.S. Army sergeant confined to a wheelchair, who was sitting at the video console system near the entrance. He was former Special Forces and had lost both legs in an ambush in Baghdad. Stark had helped him, the year before, get retrained as a video specialist and redeployed.
Sergeant Jimenez likely would have succumbed to alcohol or drugs or, worse, committed suicide like so many forgotten veterans did, at the appalling rate of twenty each day. Instead, he looked up from his console, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at the man who had given him a second lease on life.
“Colonel. Glad you guys made it out.” Jimenez had been the guy who had given them the heads-up yesterday about the incoming strike.
“Thanks to you, buddy,” Larson said while standing next to Stark, who gave Jimenez the thumb drive and told him what to do.
The sergeant went to work, downloading the files into the system and handing the drive back to the colonel.
It was not that Stark did not understand and respect the rank and room that he strode into. It was just that he did not give a shit. The brass at the bottom of this room, led by the moron sitting in the commander’s chair, were responsible for what had happened the day before.
Stark thanked Jimenez and proceeded down the stairs to the center stage. Four guards—all wearing the uniform of the Canadian Army Military Police—walked up from where the general sat surrounded by advisors, reviewing a map of the region.
One of the MPs, a large blond man wearing the rank of corporal—the name Darcy stenciled over his left breast pocket—stepped in front of Stark.
“Son,” Stark said. “Please … This is beyond your pay grade.”
Without Fear Page 7