“Maybe not. But I think I know where to start looking for both.”
“And where’s that?”
“On the other side of a big metal door on the fourth floor.”
“What’s behind it?”
“Morlocks.”
SOMEWHERE NEAR RISHIKESH, INDIA
APRIL 12
The training was over. They were as ready as they were ever going to be, Khan thought. It was possible to overtrain. Too much rote practice dulled the reflexes, stripped a unit of its edge. The men on the assault team were all experienced. They knew how to fight. The training had been important to forge the group into a team. For the first time since joining the Hand of the Prophet, Khan felt that he was a part of that team. Jadoon’s acceptance had opened the door. Khan had walked through it, building a rapport with the others through daily practice in unarmed combat. They were all good at hand-to-hand, but Khan was a cut above. He was exceptional.
The team sat together in the back of the truck, an ancient American-surplus “deuce and a half,” as it jounced over the Indian back roads that led from Chandigarh to Rishikesh. The men sat on wooden boxes. More boxes were piled up against the wall of the cab and strapped in place with nylon webbing. The driver was a local with HeM sympathies who knew these roads as well as he knew the faces of his wives and children. He had introduced himself as Ali.
They had been traveling for two days. Khan was road-weary and his clothes were stained by dust that he could no longer be bothered to brush away.
At an unmarked junction, Ali turned off the macadam onto a rutted service road. He maneuvered the big truck skillfully as the road snaked up and over a series of steep hills. After nearly half an hour of nausea-inducing switchbacks, Ali pulled the truck onto a broad flat area looking out over a valley. He parked behind a boulder that was approximately the same size as the truck. This was a remote part of India. It was rough country with rocky and infertile soil. The vegetation was mostly scrub, with only a few windblown trees for shade.
Khan and Mashwanis retrieved a camouflage net patterned in gray and brown tiger stripes from one of the boxes and stretched it across the top of the truck. For what they had come to do, it was important to remain unseen and undisturbed, especially as the other boxes held Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and plastic explosives. These would be hard to explain away. Khan was acutely conscious of being part of a very small team operating in the heart of an enemy nation of one billion people. Their truck was like a raft floating on a hostile sea a three-day sail from the nearest shore.
Like the others, Khan was carrying false papers, an Indian ID card that identified him as Baahir Daoud. It might stand up to cursory scrutiny by a local cop looking for a bribe, but that was about it. India, like Pakistan and America, had secret prisons where enemy combatants could be disappeared. Conditions in these prisons were rumored to be inhuman, and the jailers did not shy away from torture as a tool of interrogation. None of the team would let themselves be taken alive.
When the netting was secure, Khan took a moment to survey the tactical situation. They were on the lip of a valley with sides steep enough that it might have qualified as a gorge. The valley floor was some seventy-five meters below where a double set of train tracks paralleled a dry streambed. At the far end of the valley, the train tracks and streambed diverged, with the tracks leading into a tunnel that cut through a mountain. The tunnel was the reason that they were there. He glanced at his watch. Eleven forty-five a.m. They had three hours.
Working quickly, they unloaded the truck. Ahmedani opened the boxes with a crowbar and Jadoon supervised the distribution of the equipment. Khan slipped a heavy bulletproof vest on over his shoulders and cinched it tight. He strapped a tactical holster holding an Indian copy of a Browning 9mm to his thigh and checked that the combat knife in his boot would draw smoothly and easily. Although the sun was strong, he wrapped a pair of low-end night-vision goggles around his neck. It would be dark in the tunnel. Ahmedani handed Khan a Kalashnikov. Khan popped the magazine off and reinserted it after checking the load.
Mashwanis had armed himself with an imposing-looking Dragunov sniper rifle that he leaned against the truck so that he could help Khan and Ahmedani finish unpacking the boxes. They had nearly finished when they heard something that made them freeze. The tinkling of a bell; a man-made sound coming from just around the curve in the road. They were not alone.
Responding to Jadoon’s hand signals, the entire team went to ground, looking for whatever cover they could find. The truck itself was largely shielded from casual observation by the boulder and netting, but the vegetation here was sparse and the risk of detection was high.
Khan was sheltered behind a large rock and further screened by a clump of high grass. He had pulled the Kalashnikov from his shoulder on the way down to the ground, and he thumbed the safety off as he trained the weapon at the bend in the road. The others, he was confident, were doing the same.
The bell chimed again, closer this time.
Khan’s grip tightened on the trigger. He sighted down the barrel, lining up with the likely kill zone.
With a pathetic bleat, a brown goat wearing a bell on a rope around its neck stepped into Khan’s narrow field of view. He was so surprised that he almost pulled the trigger.
One by one, more goats rounded the corner, stopping here and there to pull at the dry grass by the side of the road. A moment later, the goatherd came into view. The boy could not have been more than ten. He wore loose cotton pants and a T-shirt. His hair was tied up in a Sikh-style turban secured with a dirty white cloth, and he carried a stick across his shoulders that seemed to be more of a toy than a tool. Swinging the stick off his shoulders, the boy used it to poke and prod some of the slower goats down the trail.
Khan kept his sights fixed on the goatherd, hoping that the boy would not turn in their direction.
Khan’s rifle was aimed at center mass, or what there was of it on a boy nearly as thin as the stick he carried. His palms felt cold and clammy, and there was an almost unbearable tension in his back and shoulders.
He prayed silently to Allah. Please don’t let the boy turn around. Don’t let him see us. Spare his life.
Jihad was struggle and Khan had accepted that he would have to kill if he was to fulfill his mission. He had no compunctions about killing armed men, soldiers who took on their roles willingly. This was part of jihad, and he had made his peace with it. Killing women. Killing children. That was something different. He had never killed a child and he had no desire to start now.
Unbidden, a vision of dead children from the wedding party in Afghanistan floated across his vision. Was this different? He was just a boy, but he was a danger to them. He could summon help.
The goatherd bent down and picked up a small stone. He threw it at one of his charges that had started to wander off the road. Chastened, the goat rejoined the herd. They were moving, but slowly. Agonizingly slowly.
The boy started to whistle a tuneless song that nevertheless had an air of carefree joy about it. Khan knew at that moment that he could not pull the trigger. The tension in his shoulders eased, and he slipped his finger onto the outside of the trigger guard. He could not kill this child. But the others on the team would not share his reservations. If the boy spotted them, he was as good as dead. It would not matter whether Khan squeezed his trigger or not.
One goat broke off from the herd and rambled toward the spot where Ahmedani was sheltered behind a rock that looked to Khan much too small to conceal his ample girth.
Don’t follow the goat, Khan pleaded silently.
The boy glanced quickly at the wayward animal, clearly bored by his formal responsibilities. He did nothing to indicate that he had seen Ahmedani pressed flat against the earth behind the boulder with his Kalashnikov trained at the goatherd’s head.
Don’t follow. Don’t.
The goat seemed to lock eyes with Ah
medani. It cocked its head to one side as if curious about why a man would be lying on the ground just there.
Don’t.
The boy threw a stone.
The goat retreated slowly back to the group, the bell around his neck clanking disconsolately.
The goatherd turned his back on the HeM jihadis and led his small flock down the road. Moments later, he had rounded the next curve and was lost from sight. The sound of the bells grew fainter and then disappeared altogether.
The boy would live.
Now it was time to kill.
• • •
There was one last box in the back of the truck. It was square and approximately a meter in length along each dimension. Khan helped Ahmedani wrestle it out onto the ground. The box was steel, painted dark green, and covered with numbers and cryptic symbols. The most unusual thing about the box, however, was the lock, a sophisticated-looking LED keypad rather than a combination or key lock. It was heavy. Ahmedani grunted with effort as they manhandled it out of the truck, and Khan felt his back muscles strain from the unexpected weight.
They loaded the now-empty wooden boxes that had held weapons, armor, and tools back into the truck. Mashwanis prepared a sniper’s nest that gave him a clear field of fire in the direction of the railroad tracks.
Khan and Ahmedani packed explosive charges in a backpack and half walked, half slid down a scree field to the track. They followed the tracks into the tunnel. Khan slipped on his night-vision gear. It was an older model, but more than adequate for the conditions in the tunnel, which were closer to low light than to darkness.
The tunnel was maybe a kilometer long, and it cut right through the heart of the Mohand mountain range. On the far side, the microclimate was different. Just one valley over, the countryside was lusher, with tropical vegetation taking over from rock and arid scrub. Thick stands of rhododendron covered the slopes.
It took nearly twenty minutes to find what they were after. Some thirty feet up the southern slope, Khan saw a large boulder set firmly into the soil. Ahmedani used a trenching tool to dig a hole at the base of the rock. Khan placed one of the charges in the hole and set the timer for sixty seconds. The earth muffled the sound of the explosion, but it was a powerful charge and Khan had set it well. The blast knocked the stone free and sent it rolling downhill, slowly at first but gathering speed.
When it reached the bottom, the stone was moving so fast that it bounced completely over the train tracks and started up the reverse slope. Khan cursed under his breath. But the rock rolled back, this time stopping right on top of the rail line.
“Bull’s-eye,” Khan said in English.
Ahmedani looked at him quizzically.
“Nice shot,” Khan offered in Urdu by way of explanation.
The train crew would be able to move the rock eventually and repair any damage to the rails. It would take time, however. And it would make noise.
They walked back through the tunnel to rejoin their comrades. Jadoon and one of the other jihadis, a rat-faced Punjabi named Umar who had more than twenty HeM operations under his belt, had brought the heavy box down to the railbed and stashed it in the culvert that ran alongside the tracks. The last of their number, a taciturn Pashtun tribesman who called himself Amir Kror, was cutting brush to screen it from view. Amir Kror was the name of a famous eighth-century warrior poet and Khan considered this nom de guerre something of a boastful affectation. The original Amir Kror had written poetry of timeless beauty. This Amir Kror was barely literate.
Khan looked up the slope toward the truck, trying to see it from the vantage of the train engineer. If you knew what to look for, it was possible to make out the shape of the truck behind the camouflage netting, but only if you knew what to look for. Moreover, the train would be moving at least forty miles an hour and the engineer would be thinking about the approaching tunnel rather than gawking at the unremarkable scenery. He would not see the truck. Atal Mashwanis was even harder to spot. Khan had to squint and concentrate to pick out the telltale shape of the Dragunov barrel peeking shyly through the firing gap in the sniper’s nest. Atal was insurance. If he fired his weapon, it meant that something had gone wrong. But if something went wrong, they would be glad he was there.
The preparation was complete. Now they had only to wait. As always, the waiting was agony. From his time in Afghanistan, Khan knew that each soldier developed his own strategies for managing this period, the limen between peace and violence, between the quotidian world of the everyday and the insane, upside-down, bizarro world of combat. Some of the soldiers in the highly trained irregular unit he served with in Afghanistan would spend the time obsessively caring for their weapons, the tools of their chosen profession. They cleaned gun barrels that had already been scrubbed raw and smooth, and sharpened combat knives that could slit a throat as easily as they opened a letter. Others stole furtive glances at pictures of loved ones or pored over tactical maps that they had long ago committed to memory. Khan prayed.
“Subhana rabbiyal a’la wa bihamdihi,” he murmured softly as he, Jadoon, and the others crouched down low in the culvert. Glory to my God the most magnificent.
Allah, guide me. Give me wisdom and strength to serve you. Help me to see the right. Bring me victory, though I am surrounded by enemies.
The train was late. This they had anticipated. But it was hot in the sun, and soon they were all sweating profusely under the heavy gear.
Khan felt the train before he heard it, a rhythmic vibration that seemed to come from deep in the earth. A few minutes later, he heard the clacking of wheels and a single whistle blast.
At four-fifteen p.m., more than an hour after the train was scheduled to reach the tunnel, the locomotive rounded the curve. It did not look like an ordinary engine. It was squat and black and practically screamed “military.” The cars it pulled were similarly distinctive. A flatbed immediately behind the locomotive held three armored personnel carriers secured by enormous nylon straps. The boxcars looked as if they had been reinforced with metal plates for added security.
Khan counted cars. Mentally, he tagged the sixth car back from the locomotive and counted an additional five cars between the target and the caboose. Dead center.
Khan did not know what or who the car carried. He knew only that this was their target. Since they had not opened the heavy box that he and Ahmedani had taken from the truck, it seemed reasonable to assume they were supposed to load it on the train. Maybe it was a bomb. No one had told that to Khan, however. It was simply an assumption.
Jadoon spoke.
“There will be men in the car,” he reminded the team. “Do not shoot them. I would prefer that you not stab them either. Nor should you allow yourselves to be shot. It’s not that I cannot replace you. I can. But we want no blood, no sign of a struggle. Even so, the men inside the car must die. We cannot take prisoners. Is this clear?”
He looked at Khan expectantly.
“Yes, Jadoon,” Khan replied. “It is clear.”
A sharp squeal of brakes came from inside the tunnel. The engineer had spotted the rockfall. Whether the train hit the boulder or not was immaterial to the objective, although an actual derailment would have presented the team with significant complications. Khan did not, however, hear anything that would have indicated a crash. It seemed that the train had stopped in time.
Jadoon led the team of jihadis into the tunnel. Through his night-vision goggles, Khan saw the cars outlined in eerie green light. It looked like a ghost train carrying freight for delivery to the devil himself.
They moved quickly and silently. Khan counted off the cars. They stopped alongside the target car, which was located at about the midpoint of the tunnel. While some of the cars seemed to have been up-armored in postproduction, this car looked like it had been purposely built as a vault on rails. The door was solid steel and set into a reinforced frame that seemed to extend as a k
ind of cage around the bed of the entire car.
A running board ran around the edge of the car, and Khan and Ahmedani climbed up and positioned themselves on either side of the door, holding on to metal handgrips that had been welded onto the frame. They both stripped off their night-vision goggles and left them dangling around their necks. Jadoon stood directly in front of the door. From memory, he typed a long series of numbers into the LED cryptolock.
“Ready,” he whispered, just loud enough for Khan and Ahmedani to hear.
Jadoon hit enter and jumped back. The door hissed open.
A burst of light from inside the car would have blinded Khan if he were still wearing his goggles. He swung around the door frame into the boxcar and did a rapid scan of the interior.
There were two soldiers inside sitting on a bench set into the back wall to the left of the door. They were wearing light combat armor and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Not regular army, then. The MP5s marked them as Indian Special Forces. Neither was as big as Ahmedani, but they both outweighed Khan by at least ten kilos. The one farther to the left had the three stripes of a havildar on his sleeve, the Indian equivalent of a sergeant. The other was a sepoy, a private.
Khan processed all of this information instinctively and immediately.
The sergeant would be more experienced, more dangerous. Khan did not hesitate. He closed the distance rapidly. To reach his target, however, he had to vault over a large steel box strapped to the floor. A tiny piece of Khan’s brain registered that the box was an exact duplicate of the one he and Ahmedani had unloaded from the truck.
The Indian was good. Before Khan could reach him, he was up off the bench swinging the MP5 high enough so he could take a shot. Khan saw him thumb the safety off with a smooth, practiced movement. It was a race and it was close, but even with the box as an additional obstacle, Khan had too much of a head start. He stepped inside the arc of the gun and grabbed the sergeant’s wrist with one hand. He pulled hard and twisted the wrist to get the Indian off balance. Khan was hoping the move would also dislodge the man’s finger from the trigger. As he pulled with his right hand, Khan shoved his left elbow up into the sergeant’s now-exposed throat. He missed crushing the windpipe, but the blow was nearly incapacitating.
Secrets of State Page 16