“Roger that, Echo One. We’ll call off the airstrike on that mountainside.”
“Yeah, Six Zulu. That would be appreciated.”
He turned to Kira, who was staring at one of the insurgents who was still alive, though not for long. Blood spurted from his mouth as he exhaled. The right side of his face was badly scarred from old burns, as was his neck and exposed upper chest.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
She didn’t reply. She knelt in front of him, looking a bit spellbound, mouth wide open. Her gloved right hand reached for a large gold ring dangling from the end of a leather strap on the man’s neck.
Stark blinked and narrowed his eyes at the ring, which looked awfully like the one in the image that Harwich had—
“This,” she told the insurgent, grabbing the ring and tearing it off his neck, “belonged to my father.” She waved the ring in his face before aiming the AK-9 at his forehead. “You understand, you piece of shit? This is my father’s! My father’s!”
The wounded rebel stared at her, before mumbling, “Shuravi. Shuravi.”
“That’s right. I’m that Shuravi’s daughter, and I hope you rot in hell, you son of a—”
A single shot rang out from the far side of the ledge.
Stark dropped to the ground on instinct, rolling away just as a tall man hauling a sniper rifle crawled down from a stone pine. He recognized the weapon’s wooden skeleton stock. It was a Russian SVD Dragunov.
From a distance of just forty feet, Stark stared at the insurgent, bringing his MP5A1 around, but then he momentarily froze, not believing his eyes.
He recognized the beard, the prominent nose, the full lips and high brows, the tall and thin frame—all matching the physical description etched in the mind of every American soldier deployed to Afghanistan.
That’s … impossible!
Stark blinked, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him. But it was definitely the elusive terrorist mastermind, the architect of 9/11—the world’s most wanted fugitive.
And as he watched him take off into the forest, the Dragunov in his hands, Stark lined him up, firing three shots aimed at the middle of his back.
Osama bin Laden shifted with unexpected agility, almost reading his mind. The 9mm rounds sparked off a boulder, missing him altogether.
Dammit!
Stark started to go after him, then he spotted Kira’s figure sprawled on the ground a few feet from the dying rebel. He glared at the vanishing figure of bin Laden, then back at Kira. The bastard had shot her with the powerful sniper rifle.
He shifted his gaze between the blood pooling under her and the terrorist’s silhouette as he disappeared in the woods. If he went after bin Laden, Kira could bleed out in under a minute.
Making his decision, and hoping he didn’t live to regret it, he jumped over the dying rebel with blood foaming in his mouth and reached her side, turning her over.
“I forgot … to duck,” she whispered, eyelids fluttering, lips quivering. The round, a powerful 7.62 × 54mm, had enough energy to breach her battle dress just above her left breast.
“Hang in there, baby,” he whispered, unzipping the armored fabric from her neck down to the side of her midriff, exposing her right breast and the intricate compass rose tattoo surrounding it—now smeared in blood.
The slug had punched her just above the polyethylene plate, which was shaped like a brassiere, following the contour of her breast while protecting her heart. Still, the Kevlar and titanium woven fibers had stripped enough energy from the 181-grain bullet to keep it from shattering her shoulder and even severing the arm. But in the process of absorbing the impact, the battle dress had spread the energy across her upper torso, shocking multiple webs of nerves. To Kira, it felt as if someone had kicked her in the ribs.
Upon closer inspection, he saw that the slug had managed to lodge itself under her clavicle bone, so the first order of business was stanching the hemorrhage before she went into shock.
Reaching for QuikClot gauze from his survival pack, Stark pressed it against the wound.
Kira cringed and muttered something in Russian, her chest heaving, hands clutching his arms, wide-eyed stare on him, lips quivering as she took the pain.
“Easy there,” he said, unwrapping a fentanyl lollipop. “Suck on this.”
Kira complied, rolling it in her mouth. The chemical had an immediate effect, relaxing her. She breathed deeply, releasing his arms, allowing Stark to work the wound.
He packed more QuikClot gauze into the bullet hole, letting the hemostatic agent in the fabric stem the blood flow, before using the remainder of the roll to wrap the shoulder.
He checked her vitals, and they seemed strong enough. But she seemed out of it, a mix of the shock and the strong opiate.
Satisfied, he partially zipped the battle dress back up and over the dressing to secure it in place before speaking into the MBITR.
“Six Six Zulu, Sierra Echo One. I need a winch for one wounded.”
“Roger Echo One. Three helos are already on the way.”
Stark glanced at his GPS before looking in the direction where bin Laden had escaped, and said, “On second thought, Sierra Echo One is requesting an airstrike east of the following coordinates.” He provided them and added, “Drop everything you’ve got. Elvis is up there.”
“Say again, Echo One.”
“Elvis. Confirmed sighting,” he said. “Bastard shot Kira. Torch the hillside.”
“Roger that.”
Slinging his MP5A1 behind his back, he picked Kira up, cradling her like a baby.
She leaned her head into his chest, and as Stark doubled back to get away from the incoming strike and to find his team, he noticed the leather strap clutched in her right hand.
And the gold class ring dangling from it.
127
Angels
SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
Akhtar stared at the starry heaven as his mind grew dizzy, cloudy. He had seen the woman dressed in black take the gold ring and scream words he did not understand … except for one: father.
She had waved the ring while shouting the word over and over.
Father! Father!
Or did he imagine that? Was his mind simply losing focus as he bled out alone on that hillside?
But a moment later, after the infidels left him to die of his wounds on this sacred mountain, as his vision blurred and it became impossible to breathe, Mullah Akhtar Baqer thought he heard a choir of angels humming in the night, welcoming him to paradise.
However, it was just the distant sound of jet engines on full afterburners echoing across the Sulaimans.
128
FLIR
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
“What the hell is that?” Vaccaro asked, staring at a sequence of UAV thermal images from the bottom of the gorge adjacent to the northern face of the mountain and about two thousand feet below the rear exit of the cave.
“That is what I wanted to show you,” Maryam said, working the keyboard in the CIA war room. The operator assigned by Duggan had been called away to NATO headquarters to assist the small army of specialists tracking all of the information streaming from the dozen UAVs circling the many battles in progress. In addition to the firefight at the top of the mountain, where Wright’s platoon was still engaged in a fight of their own, the main force deployed down the mountain was encountering heavy opposition. In all, there were close to a thousand soldiers, plus air support, duking it out with as many insurgents across almost fifty square miles of mountain—at least based on the reports reaching Lévesque’s staff, which included Duggan and Harwich.
Vaccaro flexed her shoulder while leaning over Maryam, noticing that it hurt a tad less than it had thirty minutes ago—and so did her forehead—meaning the Tylenol-Codeine was working its magic. The pain was still there, but it was now manageable. And best of all, she had done it without resorting to stronger meds that, although far better at tackling the
pain, would have impaired her ability to think.
“What do you think that is?” Maryam added, pointing at a sequence of images captured before that particular UAV was rerouted to the main battle down the mountain.
Unlike night vision devices, which amplified the available light to produce greenish images, thermal cameras, referred to as forward looking infrared, created pictures from heat, not visible light. But an FLIR lens detected more than just heat. It captured and showed minute differences in heat—as little as 0.01° Fahrenheit—displaying it in the shades of gray painted on the screen.
“I think that’s people, eh?” offered Corporal Darcy in his raspy voice.
“Possibly,” Vaccaro said. “But what are they doing down there?”
“Hard to tell,” Maryam said, advancing the images depicting what could be—maybe with a little imagination—the figures of rebels, colored light gray, moving across the bottom of the ravine.
“Well, given the proximity to the exit of that cave, it merits a closer look,” said Vaccaro.
“Aye,” Maryam said. “The problem is that we captured these by accident while circling over the cave’s exit, so the camera’s lenses were not optimized for the bottom of the abyss two thousand feet down.”
“Looks like they stopped walking right there, eh?” offered Darcy.
“Tell me why you’re here again, Corporal?” Vaccaro asked, glancing over at the tall Canadian.
“My cheeky friend is here to make sure I don’t steal any bloody secrets of state, right mate?” Maryam said, without turning around, trying to zoom in on the last image.
Darcy nodded. “Something like that.”
“How did you even find these shots in the first place?” asked Vaccaro.
Maryam shrugged and looked at Darcy.
“She hates my guts, Captain,” Darcy explained. “So she’d rather spend hours scrubbing these images than—”
“Bloody hell!” Maryam said, zooming in enough to delineate something resembling a structure shaped like a cross, though the image was just too grainy. “What is that?”
“Could be anything,” Darcy said. “A cabin of sorts.”
“A cabin shaped like that? And in the middle of a dry riverbed? Really, mate?” Maryam said. “That’s why I don’t fancy you.”
“But what else could it—”
“We shouldn’t be guessing,” Vaccaro said. “Not when there’s so much at stake. What we need is another high asset pass over that spot with the FLIR cameras optimized for that depth. Then we’ll know for sure.”
“Good luck with that, Captain,” Darcy observed. “In case you haven’t noticed, there is a major battle in progress twenty miles away that requires all of our assets.”
“See what I mean?” Maryam said, looking over her right shoulder at Vaccaro. “A bloody bore.”
“How old are these images?” Vaccaro asked, massaging her shoulder.
“Three hours.”
“Damn,” Vaccaro said. “Let’s go find Harwich and Duggan.”
“You are free to do as you wish, Captain, eh? But Miss Gadai is confined to this room or the ICU.”
“He really is an asshole,” Vaccaro said to Maryam, who just shrugged again.
“Just following orders from General—”
“Are you seeing what we’re seeing, Corporal?” asked Vaccaro. “There is a nuke on the loose and these here are images that show a group of people—probably Tangos—less than a mile from that fucking cave. What part of that doesn’t just scream ‘Oh, shit’ to you, eh?”
“Captain, I—”
“I’ll be right back,” Vaccaro said, and stomped out of the room.
129
Night Moves
SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
He ran as fast as his legs would go while he held Kira in his arms, rushing through the switchbacks to get away from the kill zone, concerned with just how intense those strafing runs would be, given his reported sighting of Osama bin Laden.
Managing his breathing as best he could, especially given the altitude, Stark felt his strength slowly evaporating—felt his years of hard living lifting their ugly head. The accumulation of lactic acid in his muscles tired them at a faster rate than they would have a decade ago, even with his disciplined exercise routine.
But he persisted, working through the pain, running up the arduous terrain before turning at the hairpin to face yet another steep and rocky hill. And that was precisely the problem he faced: the terrain only got them vertically away from the kill zone, not horizontally away, meaning they could still get hit by the—
He heard the jet, an F-16 Falcon, its single engine screaming in full afterburners as it shot over his head while releasing its load of eight CBU-87 cluster bombs.
Christ Almighty!
He watched the cylindrical objects spinning in the night sky, sighing in relief as they rushed past them in their parabolic flight toward the same hill he had occupied a minute ago.
The canisters continued spinning as they dropped into the side of the mountain and then broke open, releasing their individual loads of 202 bomblets.
The clouds of submunitions spread across the sky like a plague, momentarily covering the stars, falling precisely to the east of the GPS coordinates he had provided.
That’s a good stick, he thought, pausing to seek cover behind a boulder at the next switchback, and kneeling against the rock while holding Kira even tighter under his bulk.
“Leave me … Janki mishka,” she mumbled beneath him, obviously aware of what was happening. “Find the bomb. I’m only … slowing you—”
The blasts shook the entire mountainside, the ground trembling as the sky lit up in pulsating shades of red and orange, sparkling debris shooting across his temporary hideout, pounding the other side of the boulder.
He gazed into her wet stare, kissed her on the forehead, and mumbled, “Never.”
Getting up, he rushed up the next incline, inhaling through his nostrils and exhaling through his mouth, the smell of cordite mixed with charred wood as the entire hillside east of them burned, the smoke boiling through the forest. Hopefully someone at KAF was keeping an accurate log of where those bomblets were released, since an average of 7 percent of the submunitions would not explode on impact, creating an unwanted minefield.
Another Falcon whooshed above them, engine roaring. Fortunately, it held on to its munitions for a few more seconds, releasing them just beyond the drop of the first Falcon, in overlapping fashion, meaning farther from Kira and him.
But unlike the first F-16, this one hauled four Mark 84 general-purpose bombs, each housing over 940 pounds of Tritonal high explosive, a mixture of 80 percent TNT and 20 percent aluminum powder—the aluminum was used to increase the heat output and overall punch of the plain TNT by 18 percent.
And that all meant that Stark and Kira were just too damn close.
He sought cover just before the multiple blasts shook their world.
Each bomb was capable of forming craters fifty feet wide and thirty-six feet deep, and they set the air on fire, triggering temporary whiteouts in his night vision monocular as lethal fragmentation shot off to a radius of eight hundred yards.
More debris blasted past them, cooking the woods, the heat nearly unbearable.
But Stark understood NATO’s logic. The first jet took care of the surface while the second went after the tunnels.
“Please … Hunter,” she said. “You must—”
“Never,” he repeated, as molten shrapnel landed all around them
He shielded her with his own body as the thundering shock wave passed over them, ripping branches and dislodging rocks, turning everything into lethal missiles.
In the middle of this madness, he found her catlike eyes gazing up at him, and she mumbled, “Spasiba.”
“Anytime,” he replied, as he heard two more jets in the distance, their engines also on afterburners.
Holding her tight, he scrambled toward the next switchback.
130
Enclaves
SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
“I want fire on those boulders now!” Wright shouted at Gaudet, pointing toward the insurgents huddled behind each of three rock formations closest to him, some one hundred feet away, sporadically firing their AK-47s. The rest of the force was too far left or right to matter and was already engaged with the other squads.
The hillside to their left was in flames as multiple sorties shelled the woods, igniting the sky in more explosions than he could count.
That wasn’t his fight, though for a moment he could almost imagine his grandfather in the snowy Ardennes as German artillery shelled the woods.
Focus!
Gaudet grabbed three sets of marines armed with either M249s or the larger M240s, and within another thirty seconds multiple volleys of mixed-caliber slugs enshrouded the enclaves in crushed rock and dust.
“Stay here!” Wright shouted.
“Sir?”
“Just keep those guns on them! I’ll be right back!”
“You want me to pop some smoke, sir?”
“Hell no! Don’t feel like catching one in the ass!”
Smoke was a two-sided sword. It could hide you from the enemy but also from your own guys, who could also confuse you with the enemy.
“Eyes on me, Gunny!”
He left the protection of his tree without waiting for a reply, running around the leftmost enclave while the rebels behind it remained pinned down.
There was a risk with this approach, as slugs ricocheting off the rocks could get him, which is why he came alone. But he had no choice. He had to make a move. The Taliban had engaged them for far too long, almost as if they had an ulterior motive, stretching the moment instead of vanishing as they always did when facing a superior force.
And what about the picks and shovels? What the hell are they burying?
He scrambled in a zigzag pattern, remaining low, closing the gap in seconds, the UMP45’s polymer stock pressed against his shoulder, right hand clutching the pistol grip, shooting finger on the trigger and left hand on the vertical foregrip beneath the muzzle.
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