by David Poyer
“Sounds like you’ve said everything you could, trying to wrap this up more gracefully,” Tony Provanzano had said, patting Andres’s shoulder avuncularly. “Some boar hogs we just can’t perfume, no matter how hard we try. You gave SKFROG every chance. And you definitely are not going back in country. You’re burned too on this, so we’re gonna have to find something else for you to do. Maybe Latin America, we can use some fresh ideas there. Okay?”
So he hadn’t gone back in. Just come as close as he could.
Which was here, in this windswept desert, with the occasional tumbleweed bouncing across it on a mindless pilgrimage, pursued by the sigh of the wind, the harsh hiss of sand abrading everything that had form. Eroding it all, like Time itself.
He wished he’d asked the guy more about his vision. Made him explain. Describe it. Oberg had sounded so certain. He probably was mad, like Langley seemed to think. Unsound. But maybe he’d just seen deeper, glimpsed something only saints and mystics usually had access to.
He shook his head. No. Like the old Gary Larson Far Side psychiatrist-office cartoon, the SEAL chief was Just Plain Nuts. That was the simplest explanation. And likeliest to be true.
The conex was so crammed with equipment he had to slide sideways to get in. He shook hands with three unsmiling women in Army desert-pattern battle dress. One white, one black, and one Asian. The OIC introduced herself as Major Zein. She was the Asian-looking one, or maybe Filipina, with deeply lined features, short black hair, and a fierce squint. As if she were frowning into the sandstorm building outside.
The wind gusted, shaking the thin steel walls. A pair of scissors hung from a string, clacking against an equipment rack as the container vibrated. The women didn’t react. Zein led him toward the consoles that lined the back wall. It was a little roomier back here, at least for three. With him added, though, it was tight.
“What are we looking at?” he asked.
Zein planted herself in front of the screen, and he leaned over her shoulder. Below, slowly, unscrolled a tormented land. Deep valleys furrowed it. Pits swallowed shadow. Here and there patches of snow glowed on corrugated mountains. A glacier twisted down, a moraine of rubble at its head showing where it had retreated over the past few years. She said, “This is from the MQ-3E Black Eagle high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft system. More capable than the old Predator. Sharper sensors. Solar powered, for longer range and indefinite linger. Your tasking pulled us off a mission for the Army. We were watching nuclear weapons sites in northern Iran.”
Andres nodded, fighting a twist of nausea. Zein pointed to a copilot’s chair set just behind hers. The two sergeants were in the other seats, to her right and left. “Understand you’re here to identify our target. Any questions?”
“Uh, yeah. We know this group has Swiss-sourced drone detection. How are we going to get past that?”
“It won’t pick us up.” She swept a hand over a bank of readouts, and Andres recognized a spectrum analyzer. “We’re IR masked, quiet electric motors, and we don’t use GPS or radar. Inertial navigation, backed up by lookdown terrain analysis.”
“But it’s transmitting video. They won’t pick that up?”
“No. It’s a scrambled uplink, microburst, direct to nanosatellites overhead. We also use delta frame video. All that gets transmitted is the changes from the previous image, which cuts maybe ninety-five percent of the bandwidth you’d need for raw video. You could monitor from fifty feet below it and you still wouldn’t pick up a thing.”
She reflected for a moment, then added, “There’s a very slight chance they could detect our radio commands, which go down via the same sat channel. But they’d have to have some pretty sophisticated analysts to figure out what that signal was.”
He nodded, and Zein settled headphones over her ears and handed him a pair. “You’ll hear the video going out, and a series of tone clues that keep us informed as to motor cooling, battery status and drawdown rate, and so on. When it’s time to deploy weapons, you’ll hear tones from that too as the missile initializes. Then a separate tracking tone, which tells us it’s live. When that cuts off, the mission’s complete.”
He fitted the headphones, which were still warm from whoever had just taken them off. The scrambled video, or at least he guessed that was what it was, sounded like a high-pitched warble.
“This is a personality strike, correct?” Zein said. “Against a person specifically designated on the kill list? I have to have that on the record.” She held out a clipboard and pen.
“He’s not in the disposition matrix,” Andres said. “This is special handling, as per a finding of imminent threat. No permanent record, and all video to be erased.” He extracted a folded paper from inside his jacket and handed it over.
She glanced over the order, then handed it back. As if she didn’t want to keep her fingers on it any longer than necessary. “Not a problem. We’ll just carry it as a recon, and the weapon as expended for practice. But I’ll still need a signature. If the time comes. That’s just how the Army does things, sir.”
Andres nodded. “Okay. Sure.” He wasn’t going to sign anything, of course. But he could tell her that later, after it was done.
* * *
FOUR hours later, after Guldulla had split off to lead the assault force, the Lingxiu slid down off the pony. Sweating in the oppressive, growing heat, aching in every bone, he pulled his drag pack off its rump. He patted the animal and threw the reins to one of the boys who trailed after the rebels, sometimes picking up fallen weapons to fight alongside them. Staying low, in a combat crouch, he limped uphill.
Just before the crest, he dropped to his belly and low-crawled forward, binoculars clutched to his chest, drag-bag strap in his other hand. The way he’d once carried a sniper rifle, in Ashaara, years before. On a mission to kill a man who’d thought he was directed by God … and now, ha ha, you had to grin at the irony … Jusuf crawled close behind, carrying the antidrone gear, a rifle, and a pack with water and food and grenades.
Concealed between two large flattish stones, Oberg looked down from the crest at a magnificent panorama. The valley ran southeast down from the mountains. A river glittered like windblown tinsel where rapids shattered it into bright shining scraps of silver. A road ran alongside it, though no vehicles moved there. No, not with the many IEDs his rebels had sown the length and breadth of this land … Far ahead the terrain flattened, interrupted only by low hills. To this side of them, barely visible from up here, a strangely regular reticulation of gray interlaced a flattening green.
His fists tightened on the binoculars. That green was soyabean paddies. The gray, the insectile hives of the Han. Their interlocking concrete compounds marched across the land like a great wall dividing the Uighur from the interlopers. A thinner line ran from east to west: a highway. And beyond the low hills rose the polluted haze of a city, set down on the land like the nest of an invasive species.
Like creeping bamboo, the Han would spread and spread, unless they were burned out, their roots torn up, the soil seeded with salt. Until it was made plain they were no longer welcome in this land they falsely claimed as theirs.
Jusuf flourished a radio. “Convoy on its way, Lingxiu.”
“Bu yakshi. Give me a heads-up when it passes Kilometer 304.”
They settled in for a stay. Jusuf pulled a flask of mare’s milk and a wad of dates and bread out of the pack. Teddy shared it with the big muj, chewing thoughtfully, staring up at the passing clouds. Remembering other hides, other stalkings. He’d always sought something, without ever knowing what it was. Once he’d thought he’d found it in the Teams. Then, trying to put a film together in LA.
Now, for the first time, he truly knew peace.
Peace was when the outcome was out of your hands. When you didn’t have to make choices, or worry if you made the right choice.
When really no “choosing” existed. Since everything had already been decided. From time immemorial. For the best, and all he had to
do was … go with the flow. Let it happen. Trust Allah.
You have always done My will.
He said a brief dua that the old imam had taught him. “Lord, all praise be to You, to Your might and your greatness, amin.”
You didn’t need to do much, to resign yourself. Simply accept. Submit. That was all.
The sun glittered on the rapids far below, and a bird twittered below them somewhere on the hill. The world was filled with stunning beauty. The mountains behind him, incredibly sere and distant in their granite sky-reaching. The plains below, warm and rich and fecund where they drank of the pure melted waters from the high snows.
Uighurs had lived here for a thousand years. Then the Han had come. Not content to live alongside the original inhabitants, they’d clamped down a heavy yoke. Closed mosques, shuttered madrassas, prohibited firearms and beards and knives and traditional dress. And when their subjects still persevered in the old ways, herded them into concentration camps for “reeducation.” Monitored them with facial recognition. Rated their “social scores” online, to reward those who conformed, and punish those who persisted in being what they’d always been. What they and their ancestors had been born to be. Free.
Killing a few hundred people … it was little enough. He had to smile, thinking of the objections the CIA agent had raised.
Jusuf rolled over to place his bearded lips next to Teddy’s ear. He murmured, in Uighur, “Tokarev is with the leader.”
Teddy nodded. “Pass a standby while we wait.”
Settling into the glasses again, he panned left, and saw them. But only the turrets. They were parked hull down behind a rise, but angled so they could charge down a dry streambed paved with the sparkling, rounded pebbles the meltwater had tumbled down from the mountains for age after age, polishing agate and jasper into ruby and emerald.
The gray-green hulls were light mountain tanks. The Chinese had made the mistake of training their Uighur auxiliaries on them. The whole squadron had deserted one night, coming over to ITIM. Not the first native troops to do so, but the first to bring armor with them.
Modern machines that today he would employ for the first time. To strike a blow that would resound all the way to Beijing.
Today they were going to take down the bloody marshal.
Chagatai had been a thorn in their side since he’d arrived in the West, fresh from the massacres in Hong Kong. He’d depopulated whole regions, cramming the Uighurs behind barbed wire, then starving them. The reports from the camps were dire. Famine. Disease. Neglect.
Okay, that was how it went down in war. But you couldn’t fight a guy like that with one hand tied behind your back, the way the Agency seemed to want. Or said that it wanted, though he figured they were really just preserving deniability.
Teddy had tried to kill Chagatai once before. Sucked him in with a fake IED factory, rigging it with hundreds of kilos of C-4, ready to blow a cave roof down on him. Instead his opponent had preempted with a lightning-fast spoiling attack, complete with poison gas, killing scores of rebels and hundreds of innocent townspeople.
But this time they had a source on the inside. Their informant, a junior member of Chagatai’s staff, had passed their target’s route and time mouth to mouth via a cutout in the bazaar.
Teddy checked his watch again. In twenty more minutes, checkpoint at Kilometer 304. The highway below, empty in both directions at the moment. The tanks would attack downhill, so any errant rounds or misses would go over the highway and into the Han compounds beyond. Which didn’t bother him at all. Actually, casualties there would be a plus.
Jusuf muttered, “Kilometer 230.”
Teddy did the multiplication. At forty miles an hour, the convoy would hit the checkpoint in a little over half an hour. He fidgeted, raking the valley again with the binoculars, then cleared his throat and spat. What was he doing way up here? He should be down, by the road. His hands tingled. He felt suddenly too warm, and it wasn’t just the hot wind off the desert, a few miles distant.
He should stay where he was. Manage the battle.
With difficulty, he accepted that truth. But he didn’t like it.
Jusuf touched his arm. “Lingxiu? Kilometer 235.”
* * *
THE too-soft seat had molded itself to Andres’s rump. It was almost like a La-Z-Boy. Obviously built for prolonged sessions in front of the screens. Beside him in the trailer, Major Zein seemed lost in another world. She palmed a trackball slowly, as if it were a shiatsu massager. The scene on the screen moved with the ball after about two seconds’ delay.
The camera panned across a terrain familiar to him from trekking across it for months. Deeply folded, shadowed valleys. Glacial moraines. The twisting, sinuous braiding of vanished rivers, lost and sunk in desert, leaving only their outlines. Rock in a million hues of brown and gray shading to black. Serpentine streams, twisting their way down rugged valleys. And now and then, a jewellike deep blue lake, blocked by the ruler-line of a dam of earth or concrete or stone.
Finally Zein murmured, “Coming up on your coordinates. We’ll drop altitude and start a close search.”
The lens zoomed back, showing the rectangular gridwork of a city at one corner. The city canted and drifted left. Hills appeared, and what looked like suburbs. More rounded hills, then a highway. Then a green scablike crust on the earth, like a malignant growth, subdivided by more gridwork.
“Soybean fields,” Zein murmured. She turned her head and flipped pages in a red-bound binder, then went back to observing.
Andres was finding it a little hard to breathe. He got up and let himself out of the trailer. The wind was still blowing. He looked around the compound, and saw nothing he needed. He checked for cameras, then realized: with the blowing dust, no lens would last long out here.
He unzipped and pissed in the lee of the trailer, facing away from the wind. Fighting a looseness in his bowels. The feeling that he really shouldn’t be part of this.
But he was. He had his orders.
When he let himself back in and pulled the dust curtain closed behind him, Zein was discussing a terrain feature with one of the enlisted women. Cross-referencing it with a geo overlay that the computer superimposed over the video feed in a ghostly pentimento, like a shadow beneath reality. As she trackballed back and forth in minute increments the underprinting shifted, following the camera. A readout in the upper corner of the screen scrolled upward, registering the percentage of match.
“Ninety-eight percent.” Zein half turned her head, probably to make sure he was back. “That’s about as high as this system registers. We’re in your target area.”
“Oh. Can you see him?” Andres asked her.
Her right shoulder jerked, a tic or mannerism he hadn’t noted before. She said, “Commencing close search. This could take a little while. Any pointers?”
“He likes a high overwatch position when he can get it.” Andres looked around the interior of the van. There, a case of bottled water. He pointed. “You mind—?”
The major kept her eyes on the screen. “Help yourself.”
No one said anything for a while. All three screens were lit now, with a sergeant at each of the others. Zein, in the center, trackballed from crest to crest, zooming in to examine each elevation while the enlisted flanking her studied theirs, tilting their heads and frowning. A small white square skittered here and there across the screen, nervous, flitting, dwelling only for an instant before skipping elsewhere. Nothing they did on their panels seemed to be driving the white square. Some kind of AI routine, trying to pick up whatever it had been programmed to detect.
Even as he noticed it, it hesitated, as if considering. Then darted to the side and halted, hovering over an otherwise indistinguishable dot on a sharp ridgeline.
One of the sergeants said, “Looks like a leadership element. Elevation to the north, above Road G3013.”
“Let the agent see,” Zein ordered.
The sergeant got up and swiveled the chair so Andres coul
d sit in front of her screen. Its slick faux leather upholstery was warm. He cleared his throat and hitched forward, studying the display.
The view zoomed down, down, until he was looking at several figures prone amid a wilderness of slanted flattish rocks. The rocks were gray. The figures, which seemed to be wearing shaggy gray coats, blended so perfectly he had to look very closely to make them out.
“Could any of those be him?” Zein asked him.
Andres studied the image, noting details. Four—no, five, six figures. Maybe more to the rear. Packs, to the side. Definitely some kind of long thin weapon-shapes. Horses, held farther back, downhill, their backs slightly curved from above, like humped brown slugs. “Can’t tell,” he finally muttered. “Could we zoom in closer?”
“Sure, but we’ll lose resolution.” Zein demonstrated with a slow roll of the trackball. The images grew larger but blurrier, until they were just random pixelations of gray and yellow and black.
He nodded. Said, “Okay, I get it,” and she pulled the camera back out. Until they seemed to hover just about where she’d originally placed them. He gnawed his lip, studying the figures again. “Could be anyone,” he concluded. “How far up are we?”
“Angels five,” Zein said. “Five thousand feet. Any lower and they’ll hear us.”
“Hey, look at this,” said the other sergeant, the blonde. Zein nodded and the view lifted, panned, steadied again.
Four squarish dull green shapes were spaced out in a line at the bottom of the valley.
“Armor,” the sergeant said. “Consistent with ZTQ light tank. 105-millimeter gun with laser-guided antitank missiles, kinetic penetrators, HEAT. Autoloading, IR fire-control system, crew of five.”
“Chinese?” Andres said. Then thought, Damn, that was a stupid question.