Without Fear
Page 28
“The intel, sir. It was … well … shit.”
“Careful,” Duggan said. “The best way to get a new assignment is to bitch about its current owner. How do you think I ended up in KAF in the first place?”
Wright knew the story. Hell, everyone at KAF had heard how Duggan had flown from 29 Palms to the Pentagon and stormed the office of the commandant of the United States Marines Corps to complain about reports of marines not being properly equipped in the field, resulting in several deaths and many more dismemberments.
Duggan had been on the next plane to KAF.
“All the same, sir. Intel was still shit.”
“Yeah,” Duggan said, removing his glasses and rubbing his face. “About that … The intel actually wasn’t all shit. It just was … not managed quite properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come,” he said. “You’ve earned the right to know.”
“Know what, sir?”
“There’s someone you need to meet, and that should also take care of your high-asset request.”
Confused, Wright followed the colonel out the back of the headquarters and into a large shipping container converted into an office of sorts. Duggan entered a code into the digital pad next to the metal door and pulled it open.
Inside was a balding man in civilian clothes. He looked in his midfifties, with an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, and was standing behind a much younger Hispanic-looking woman. Dressed in desert camouflage pants and boots plus a black FBI T-shirt, she sat by the keyboard, facing a pair of large computer screens displaying what he recognized as UAV terrain imagery.
They looked in Wright’s direction and then, without acknowledging him, returned to their work.
Duggan said, “Captain, meet my new—and largely insubordinate—intelligence staff.”
“Sir?” Wright said, confused.
“You think our intel is fucked, Captain?” Duggan said, raising his voice a decibel, which drew the attention of the bald-headed man, while the woman kept working the keyboard, her eyes on the images displayed on both screens.
“Colonel, I—”
“Here is your chance to unfuck it.”
Now the woman also looked their way.
“Sir, I didn’t mean any disrespect by—”
“I’m briefing General Lévesque in one hour,” Duggan said, checking his watch. “That’s how long you have to work with these characters and get me a plan of action for Compound Fifty-Seven.”
“Sir, what about getting a UAV over—”
“Ticktock, Captain. One hour. You’re my new military intelligence liaison with the CIA and the FBI, so figure it the fuck out.”
58
New Mission
SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
Pasha stood over his fallen comrades in the clearing, gusts of wind shrilling across the wooded plateau, trees rustling, as temperatures dropped into the forties.
Wearing a dark cashmere tunic and a woolen pakol, the Dragunov in his gloved hands, he paced the killing grounds slowly, alone, after ordering his men to the wreckage, on the outside chance that any of the helicopter crew survived the RPG strike and subsequent crash.
But Pasha really just wanted time alone to inspect the bodies, the footsteps on the ground, the trail left behind by the pilot and whoever it was that had come to her rescue.
Did the Americans send ground troops along with the helicopter?
Pasha doubted it. The footprints did not match those of American boots, except for one pair: those belonging to the pilot. The others were a mix of desert sandals and hiking boots.
He slowly shook his head while following the path that several men had taken from the west side of the clearing, approaching the pilot while she had rolled on the ground at the feet of one of his men. But someone had shot the man twice in the back and he had collapsed face-first where Pasha had found him.
His eyes narrowed in anger as they followed the track left behind by whoever it was that had decided to make his job harder.
As he started to walk over to his men standing around the smoldering wreckage, his radio beeped.
“Brother, any survivors?”
Pasha stood by the remainder of his team and said, “Doesn’t look that way.”
“And the pilot?”
“Still at large. She got help.”
“She?”
“Yeah. Female pilot. Someone interfered, killed four of ours, and rescued her.”
A pause, followed by, “Forget her.”
“What? Why? They left a trail for us to follow, and they can’t be far.”
“Because, brother, I need you to head west immediately, to a spot almost eight miles from our compound.”
“Well, the good news is that I’m at least halfway. What’s there?”
“Your new mission.”
“New mission?”
“The most important of your life.”
59
LALO
SOUTHEASTERN PAKISTAN. NEAR THE AFGHANISTAN BORDER.
The Cessna 208B Grand Caravan fitted with tundra tires came in low and fast, its single Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140 turboprop propelling it to Formula One speeds.
Prince Mani al Saud sat at the controls while Zahra Hassani finalized checks prior to her upcoming low altitude–low opening insertion.
Developed during World War II for drops over hostile enclaves, the LALO technique minimized the time airborne troopers spent vulnerable to ground fire. But there was a catch: if the main chute failed to open, the low-altitude drop—typically from around four hundred feet—prevented the trooper from deploying the reserve chute.
So Zahra just didn’t wear a reserve, confident in the way she had carefully folded her main canopy. Instead of the reserve chute, she carried the handful of components in a rucksack strapped to the front of her tactical vest, next to her suppressed UZI submachine gun.
Her hair tied in a ponytail, her features darkened with camouflage cream, wearing black tactical cargo pants made of a cotton/nylon/Teflon ripstop fabric and a matching long-sleeve shirt and boots, Zahra felt ready for business.
She flexed her gloved hands before checking the rest of her gear, including her suppressed .22-caliber Ruger, secured to her waistband, and spare magazines for both weapons. She rested her right palm on the rubber handle of her Israeli-made Dustar seven-inch fixed-blade tactical knife, her thumb feeling the Velcro strap that kept it in its sheath.
Satisfied that her gear was in order and secured, she sat in the copilot’s seat as the desert rushed ridiculously close to the belly of the single-engine plane flying into Afghanistan twenty miles south of Chaman. The route would keep them 120 miles south of Kandahar, away from the fighting.
The nature of this mission meant that Zahra flew alone with the prince tonight, having left the rest of the crew with the Citation X at the Karachi airport.
Towering dunes, some two hundred feet high, rose above them as Mani wedged the Cessna through these canyons sculpted by the constantly shifting sand. The scene beyond the large Plexiglas windshield resembled some sort of video game as he steered the Cessna through these surreal and fluctuating channels.
The meandering and quite dangerous path took them in a fairly steady northwesterly heading, their low altitude and the seemingly endless pyramids of sand—barchans, as they were called—making their entrance into the NATO war theater invisible to radar. And their distance from Kandahar also made the likelihood of overhead UAVs quite unlikely.
But the catch was that they could not really see the horizon or even the very distant Sulaiman Mountains, due to the soaring dunes, which forced them to rely on the GPS to navigate through this rat maze to their destination.
She stared at Mani’s profile—a fine nose, a strong chin, and a full head of very burnished hair under a Bose headset—as he maneuvered them across one of the most desolate and ravaged places on earth. Yet it looked peaceful, even dreamlike, as infinite silica crystals reflected the moonlight in
a shimmering gleam hovering just a foot or two over the surface.
“You know, it’s actually beautiful,” she said into the microphone built into her helmet. It was connected to a Wouxun KG-UV6D transceiver just powerful enough to stay in communication with Mani, who wore a matching set connected to his Bose headgear. All other radios were off, per his agreement with bin Laden for complete silence, to minimize electronic detection.
“Yeah,” he replied, eyes front as he turned the yoke and worked the rudder pedals to bank the Grand Caravan to the right, negotiating another turn in this powdery labyrinth. “That’s Afghanistan for you. One moment charming and the next deadly … like you.”
She hugged herself tightly without realizing it, her eyes on this man who’d had such a physical and emotional impact on her life.
You will always be safe with me.
She blinked the thought away and asked, “How much longer?”
Risking a glance at the GPS, he said, “Fifteen minutes. All set?”
“All good here.”
“Say hi to Pasha for me,” he said.
“Ha-ha,” she replied, recalling the fiery nephew of bin Laden, with whom she had collaborated on the occasions when Mani met with the sheikh over the years. Pasha was head of the sheik’s security, just as she protected the Saudi prince, meaning they had had to work together to coordinate their bosses’ safety, though not without a degree of friction. Pasha was a firm believer in Sharia law.
They continued zigzagging, constantly banking to avoid the next sand dune, before continuing northwest, always northwest, the drop point looming closer as the Sulaimans slowly rose before them.
Mani maintained his altitude relative to the ground, even as sand turned to rocky terrain slanting heavenward, climbing steadily as the land rose.
“Two minutes,” he said, without taking his eyes off the windscreen. “Got your GPS coordinates?”
“Yep.”
“Remember,” he said, “we’re deep in no-man’s-land. The GPS maps around here aren’t that accurate. They’re more like … guidelines.”
“Got it,” she said, standing, placing a hand on his shoulders, and squeezing gently. “I’ll be right back.”
“You know where to find me,” he responded, turning diagonally toward the mountain range when the terrain became steeper. He kept his right wingtip thirty feet off the rocky southern face while approaching the coordinates provided by bin Laden.
She headed for the cabin and slid the side door open. In preparation for this jump, realizing they would be alone, Mani had had the door spring-loaded, so it would close after she released it.
The foot of the mountains and the desert projected below the rectangular opening. Somewhere off to her left she could barely make out the distant glow of Lashkar Gah by the foot of the Sulaimans.
Part of the plan was to jump off this side of the plane and into the gorge, giving herself maximum altitude without Mani having to increase his separation from the incline.
“Time!” he shouted.
Zahra kicked her legs and jumped while holding the rip cord, which she pulled the instant she cleared the tail.
The canopy blossomed with a sudden pop above her. The winds carried her slightly farther west than planned, but she still approached the ground less than a half mile from her desired touchdown.
She tugged the handles of her rectangular chute, guiding it to a relatively flat patch of terrain, landing with a short run the moment her boots touched the ground thirty seconds later.
“Made it,” she spoke into her mike.
“Enjoy the hike.”
“Enjoy the flight. See you.”
“Not if I see you first.”
And just like that, as the turboprop continued its northwesterly heading along the mountainside, she removed her harness and gathered her chute, hiding it under some rocks before moving the rucksack from her front to her back. Releasing the Velcro straps securing her suppressed UZI to the side of her battle vest, Zahra verified that she had a round in the chamber and then placed it in single-shot mode.
She turned off the transceiver to conserve battery and maintain radio silence before inspecting the GPS display on her wrist. It marked two locations.
The first was the planned rendezvous spot, which she had to reach by dawn, an old and secret Soviet bunker currently used by Akhtar as his headquarters.
The second marked her alternate location, where she would go if her primary target became compromised: a clearing eight miles west of the bunker.
Briefly closing her eyes while inhaling the cold mountain air and listening to the Cessna’s engine fading in the darkness, Zahra began to make her way to the red spot on her GPS.
60
Heart of a Smuggler
SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
It took a fair degree of patience, instinct, and perhaps even a smidgeon of fortune to locate this most secret of passes across the Sulaimans. But it took a hell of a piloting skill, a steady hand, and more guts than on a slaughterhouse floor to actually attempt to fly through it—and at night. On top of that, the navigation maps loaded into the GPS for this desolate part of the world were only accurate to around five hundred feet.
Less than twenty minutes after dropping Zahra, Prince Mani steered the Grand Caravan into what looked like a narrow crack between the mountains. Flying into the constricted and winding gorge without hesitation, he committed himself to following the dry ravines and rock-strewn riverbeds of this nameless and uncharted pass used by Afghan fighters for a millennium.
In doing so, he knowingly violated the cardinal rule in mountain flying: never enter a box canyon unless there is enough room to turn around. The logic behind the rule was simple. If flanked by towering walls that prevented a 180-turn and the terrain ahead suddenly rose beyond the airplane’s maximum rate of climb, the pilot would be “boxed” inside the canyon with no way to avoid a crash.
The danger of being detected by NATO forces, however, more than justified flying this seemingly impossible and slender pass, which he followed slowly, bleeding speed to reduce the span of his turns as he gently tracked its contours.
But this had to be done carefully. Flying too slow was to risk entering a stall during a turn, resulting in a sudden loss of altitude, which, given his nap-of-the-earth flying, meant death. Flying too fast was to risk exceeding the width of the canyon’s winding turns, which also meant death.
But Prince Mani never did anything—even flying a box canyon at night—without giving himself at least a sporting chance of surviving. That’s where his oversize tundra tires came into play, allowing him to attempt a landing in the bottom of the gorge should everything else fail. But in order to be able to set the plane down in the event of a sudden rise in terrain, he had to manage his speed at every turn.
So, easy does it, he thought. The GPS provided him with a gross view of what lay just beyond the next bend, so he could prepare for it while also getting ready to react to errors on the same GPS map, which meant he had to trust the picture beyond the windshield more than the moving terrain maps on the Cessna’s color screens.
But this wasn’t Mani’s first rodeo, flying through regions where GPS maps were not as accurate as in the civilized world. He was a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, which he had attended by special invitation from the U.S. Department of Defense, earning a degree in finance in addition to becoming a proficient pilot. This was followed by an eight-year stint with the Royal Saudi Air Force, where his education and connections made him the ideal candidate to handle the covert physical transfer of $900 million to al Qaeda, between 1992 and 2000. And Mani had stepped up to the challenge, becoming the behind-the-scenes go-to pilot and negotiator of his government’s top secret initiative to keep the terrorist organization from committing acts of terror inside Saudi Arabia. In the process of doing so, he became one hell of a bush aviator while also discovering an affinity for the smuggling business, which came in handy after September 11.
And the rest is history, he thought, recalling how he had risen to become the region’s top smuggler, taking airplanes into spots that would make the best fighter jocks piss their pants. And he did it with the same cool hand and fingertip control with which he flew the Cessna tonight.
He continued traversing the range, becoming an indistinguishable black smudge following the bottom of a lost canyon, should a drone or satellite happen to be tasked directly over him. But Mani knew there wouldn’t be any, not with Operation Mountain Thrust raging between Kandahar and Lashkar Gah, well east of him.
And that’s why this just might work, he thought, marveling at the simplicity of bin Laden’s plan, which called for him to continue through this meandering pass to a preselected dry riverbed ten miles away. But first Mani had to get through what locals called the “needle squeeze,” a vertical rock formation near the middle of the pass, narrowing the gorge to just under fifty feet, which was two feet shorter than the Grand Caravan’s wingspan.
As he approached it, Mani banked the wings thirty-five degrees to the right while applying opposite rudder to maintain a straight flight path. He also applied a dash of power and rear pressure on the yoke to offset the loss of lift due to the steep angle of bank.
The maneuver, called “slipping,” often used to land in crosswinds, allowed him to momentarily reduce his horizontal allowance requirements to below forty-five feet, clearing the pass with room to spare.