by Dalton Fury
In ten seconds he was standing on the tires, looking over the wall into the dark courtyard.
As near as he could tell it was empty. He looked through his small thermal monocular back toward the Playground’s main structure and saw no warm bodies in the windows, which he took as a good sign.
He dropped into the courtyard, immediately saw that a long colonnaded hall, with a tiled floor and an open wall to the Playground, stretched away from him on his right. He checked it with his monocular. No signs of life. He moved along the wall to his left, low in a crouch, and approached the common wall with Zar’s compound.
A door opened on his right, twenty-five yards away. Kolt dropped flat on his face and looked toward the movement. Torchlight in the hallway behind silhouetted a lone figure, a man with a rifle. He stood in the doorway, looked around at the dark open courtyard for twenty seconds, and then reshut the door. Raynor saw no hint of tension or concern in the man’s movements, supposed he was just a guard in the building who patrolled lazily during the night.
After waiting a minute to make sure the man would not return, Raynor climbed back up to his crouch and continued on.
He made it to the wall of Zar’s fortress thirty seconds later. He heard dogs barking in the distance, but they were too far away to have alerted to his scent.
Scaling this twelve-foot wall would not be a problem for Raynor. Sandstone blocks had been inlaid into the wall, and these blocks were used to hold buckets to collect rain. Kolt stepped up on one and hoisted himself to the top of the wall.
As silently as possible, Raynor dropped down into the darkened compound, with the hurja just fifty feet off his left shoulder.
* * *
“Holy shit, Racer is inside Gopher!” an analyst behind Grauer said, but Pete was watching the monitor, and he could see for himself. There was little definition to the monitor’s image other than the warmth of Racer’s body and some slight residual heat retained in the wall he’d just dropped from. Pam pulled back on the range, and several more heat signatures appeared, inhabitants of the fortress. The closest ones were on the far side of the hurja’s roof, thirty yards away from Racer, but they would not be able to see the infiltrator through the thick vapor hanging in the air.
Racer’s image turned away from the hurja, but it continued hugging the wall as it moved east toward the southeast corner of the compound.
Grauer stared at the screen, the footage from Pam Archer’s Baby Boy displayed in front of him. “Obviously he is going to try and go around the entire property, behind the corral, cross over to the north side before he comes to the main entrance gate, and then try and get eyes on the prisoners in the northwest corner.”
Pam Archer’s disembodied voice filled the conference room. “Pete, do you want me to stay on station?”
Grauer hesitated, said finally, “Negative. You are going to draw too much interest on radar if you hang out here much longer. Why don’t you pull back across the border and return to the Tirah Valley in an hour? Just try to make it look … random.”
“Understood. I’ll wander back across the border into Khost and then swing back to Gopher in sixty mikes.”
Grauer and his analysts watched the angle of the image change, the UAV leaving the airspace, and moments later Archer flipped off her thermal camera.
The president of Radiance Security and Surveillance Systems was angry. His man was dangerously off mission, and he jeopardized everything with his actions. Still, there was nothing he could do about it now from here in Jalalabad except root him on.
Pete spoke softly. “Good luck, son.”
TWENTY-SIX
Things had been going smoothly for Raynor, and he appreciated it, but he knew it would not last. As he turned at the southeast corner of the compound’s wall and began heading north, he took a moment to look through the thermal optic he carried in his right hand. A white image appeared in the darkness through its lens, directly ahead. It was a sentry, he was in the way of Kolt’s progress to the latrine, and he wasn’t moving. The man leaned against the wall, twenty-five yards ahead of the American. He guarded a wooden door in the wall that must have led to the alleyway that ran along the east wall of the compound. Kolt had not been able to see the door or the sentry from his vantage point, as the door was shielded by the roofs of village buildings on the hillside, and the sentry was shielded by the wall. He suspected this door was for the comings and goings of the women of the fortress. Kopelman told him women were generally not allowed to use the main gate, but if they were clothed in their burka or at least a chador, and accompanied by a man, they could leave through the women’s door to go to the village market.
Shit. He’d been on the lookout for static guards while surveilling from across the river, but he’d missed this guy. Now some asshole stood directly in his path, and it didn’t look like he was going anywhere soon.
Kolt tucked himself tight against the wall, secreted the majority of his body in some brown weeds that grew in thin tufts there, and looked down at his watch.
0220 Zulu. 10:20 p.m.
Shit. The nightly toilet procession would begin soon, and he was 150 yards away from where he needed to be and pinned into a corner.
* * *
At ten thirty Raynor used his thermal monocular to try to get a look into the distance where the latrine stood near the northern wall, but his view was blocked by the large corral and barn and a low rise.
His options were few, and they were bleak, but it was time he made a decision. Unless the guard wandered off right this minute, Kolt wasn’t going to be able to sneak past him. He could try to go around him, but that would entail walking through the center of the compound toward the latrine, and even in his disguise, even with the darkness, and even with the fog, Raynor would need an incredible amount of luck, and he wasn’t prepared to trust his fate to the stars to that degree.
He could sneak close to the sentry at the door, pull out his four-inch blade, and kill the man without a sound.
Right. Then what? Continue on with his mission, a mission that would keep him here in the compound at least another half hour, and then somehow cover up the fact that a guard had been slaughtered so he could get out of the compound and back to his hide site with no one being the wiser?
No. The wet alternative wasn’t going to work here.
That left one thing. Calling it off. Backing out, making his way back over the wall into the Playground, hopping one more wall, and then getting back into the hills, crossing back over the river, and climbing back up “home.” Four hours of grueling effort, absolute risk, all for zero gain.
Raynor hated failure. He took it personally. As he squatted there in the grass, dropping to his belly now as a patrol wielding lazy flashlights headed up the center road, past the big house and toward the hurja, Kolt decided he had no choice but to exfiltrate. He’d already missed the beginning of the latrine march; there would be no sense waiting till it was over and then heading to the row of buildings and knocking on doors looking for prisoners.
No, this night was a blown opportunity. All because of this jackass at the little side door. Kolt looked at him through his thermal optic one last time before heading back in the other direction.
The man moved. He pushed off the wall and began walking toward the patrol, twenty yards in front of him.
The guard called out in Pashto: “Wait.” He kept walking. The flashlights stopped on the road. He continued, clearing the way forward for Raynor. Kolt followed the sentry with his eyes as he stepped up and began a conversation with the three patrolling guards. Kolt had no idea what they were talking about or how long this little get-together would last, but in an instant he decided to go for it. He quickly pulled off his sandals and held one in each hand, dropping the thermal sight into the pocket of his salwar. With a last glance toward the lights in the fog, their beams pointed toward the earth as the men stood and talked, Kolt Raynor rose out of the brush like a runner on the starting block. And in bare feet he ran forward into the d
arkness, his shoulder never more than a couple of feet off the baked mud wall on his right.
He neared the small door in the wall and kept running, did not look left or right, his entire body tense in fearful anticipation of the shout of a man or the crack of a Kalashnikov. He passed the door and within just a couple of seconds he was behind the long stone barn. The perimeter wall and the barn wall created an alley not six feet wide, with open gates in the barn that gave access to a row of closed stalls inside. Raynor kept running, a little slower now because he could not see his hand in front of his face here in the alley, as the barn shielded all of the ambient light from the sky.
Just a few minutes later he had crossed the main road, fifty yards from the entrance gate. He’d taken the time to account for all the sentries there, to make sure no one was positioned with a good view inside the compound. He crossed the road at a normal pace, his sandals back on his feet and his patoo back on his head. In the wet, hazy distance he was just one of the boys heading between two points at this time of night. No reason for anyone to stress about a single unarmed man walking here.
Raynor made it into the copse of woods behind the latrine. The fog was thick like strings of milky cobwebs between the pines. He lifted his thermal monocle to his eye several times as he neared his destination.
It was ten forty-five—he was fifteen minutes past the start of the bathroom trips. He only hoped one of the prisoners was constipated; otherwise he’d missed the entire thing.
Just then he saw movement through the thermal lens. From around the front of the latrine, a man moved forward, away from the outhouse, his hands fastened in front of him, the armed guard behind him.
Kolt moved forward quickly and quietly, opened his eyes wide to take in all the light he could.
But it was too dark to make out the man in the shackles.
Just then the prisoner turned back to the sentry to say something, and the sentry’s flashlight swept across his face.
Raynor knew him instantly.
It was Spike. Staff Sergeant Troy Kilborn, from Lincoln, Nebraska.
One of T.J.’s teammates.
He looked like he’d lost thirty pounds, but there was no doubt Kolt had found a missing man from Eagle 01.
Yes! I’ve done it, Raynor said to himself.
But the moment of euphoria evaporated quickly.
Just what had he done? He’d gotten “eyes on,” yes. But that wouldn’t do anyone a lot of good if he didn’t find out where the team was held, if he didn’t ensure they were all together. And he wouldn’t do anyone a damned bit of good if he didn’t make it back out of here.
He closed on the back of the latrine, put his hand out, touched the rough stone wall, knelt down, and checked around the side toward the main house with the thermal monocle. In the distance, fifty yards away or more, three armed men stood at the front of the two-story building. He saw signatures of two more on this side of the roof.
They would not be able to see him here, so he knelt by the side of the latrine. Kept his monocle pointed toward the west, where the next prisoner would come.
Unless that was it for the night.
In seconds he saw a single white blob. In a few more moments it separated into two, as the men in the distance neared. Quickly Kolt moved around to the front of the latrine, pushed open the wooden door, and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind him.
It smelled like shit. Two black plastic buckets sat in a trough dug in the dirt. A three-legged wooden stool in the corner held a lit oil lantern that gave out more shadow than light. Kolt pushed himself tight into the space behind the door, across the eight-foot-square room from the lantern.
He took a few slow breaths in an attempt to calm himself, and he waited.
Within a minute he heard shuffling footsteps in the dirt outside. The quick flare of a flashlight’s beam as it shone through the cracks in the doorjamb and the space through the hinges.
The door opened inward, shielding Raynor, and then it shut.
In front of him the back of a chained prisoner. He did not have to look for more than one-half second. He knew.
It was T.J.
With all his other worries about making this clandestine approach to the property, Kolt hadn’t spent any time thinking about what he would do or say if he actually managed to make contact with one of the boys. Now his knees weakened in terror as he frantically planned the next few seconds. He could think of only one way to be certain that he could do this quietly. He waited until Josh took a full step closer to one of the buckets, and then Raynor took a step forward, reached in front of his friend’s body, and yanked him tight. His hand covered T.J.’s mouth as he yanked him back onto his heels.
Raynor had expected much more of a fight. Back in the old days the two men would train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for hours at a time, and the winner was never predetermined. All things being equal, the two men were almost perfectly matched physically. But the past three years had taken a shocking toll on Josh Timble. His body was thin and bony and his reaction to Kolt’s attack was slow.
Raynor wanted a quick and quiet surrender, but his friend’s instant supplication was disquieting.
For three seconds the two men were locked together in the blackness of the smelly latrine. When Raynor was confident he’d get no noise or fight in return for his sneak attack, he leaned into the other man’s ear and said, softly, “Josh … it’s me. It’s Kolt.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
No response. For a brief but horrifying moment Raynor worried that he’d misidentified T.J. and grabbed some random Paki goon taking a break to run to the john.
No, even in the dim light he could tell this was his old friend. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m going to take my hand from your mouth. Just be real quiet, cool?”
A slight nod.
Kolt moved his hand.
T.J. turned around and faced him. Kolt could barely make out his outline in the darkness. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Kolt started to speak again but T.J. said, “I thought you were dead.” Slowly he stepped forward and gave Raynor a weak hug.
Raynor felt bones again under his friend’s dirty pajamas. The shadows in the room only accentuated the deep hollows in Josh’s bearded cheeks, the rings around his recessed eyes—malnutrition had taken a toll on his buddy’s face.
“I thought the same about you, brother.”
T.J. backed up just far enough to reach out a hand. He put it right on Kolt’s face. Confirming that the person in front of him, the person he’d just embraced, was not some sort of dream-state apparition.
“How long can you talk?” Raynor asked.
T.J. shook his head. He was recovering from the shock, albeit slowly.
“Colonel. I need you to snap out of it. How much time do I have?”
“Not long. Couple of minutes.” Even in the darkness Kolt saw the whites of his eyes widened in utter amazement. “You can’t be here. They patrol the compound and—”
“I’m here to establish proof of life. We’re going to get you out.” Quickly Raynor grabbed the GPS and fired it up. Began filming with a quivering hand.
T.J. shook his head again. Then he said, “When I leave, the guard will follow me back to the room. There won’t be anyone over here except for the patrols. If you can make it to the northwest corner of the compound, there is a narrow drainage culvert behind the concrete shed. That’s our cell. Sentries don’t patrol down in the culvert. A drain runs from our floor into the culvert. It’s only about three feet long. We can talk through the drain.”
“Okay. I’ll be there as quick as I can.” The two men just stared at each other for another ten seconds. Kolt thought Josh wanted to tell him something.
“Uh … dude?”
“Yeah, brother?”
“I kinda need to take a dump.”
Raynor smiled. Good ole T.J. He turned off the video camera. “Who’s stopping you? This latrine isn’t much less private than our trailer.”
“Good point. That pla
ce was a shit hole.”
“Still is,” Raynor said, and Josh smiled.
Two minutes later a shackled T.J. left through the wooden door.
* * *
It took twenty minutes for Raynor to make it out of the outhouse and back into the little grove of trees, crawl to the wall of the compound, and scurry the eighty yards or so to the northwest corner. As promised, a three-foot-by-three-foot indentation ran the length of the western wall, a dirt drainage ditch to control runoff at the back of the compound during the rainy season. Brush and grass grew wild down here, which Raynor knew would help provide cover from above. He also knew it would hide rats, and he heard tiny footfalls of scurrying creatures all around him in the dark culvert.
He found the pipe sticking out of the mud wall just behind the single-room stone shack. The pipe seemed to be fabricated from empty Russian mortar tubes stuck together. A glow just barely shone through it. A lantern inside the room. Kolt looked inside but could make out nothing for a moment. Then the opening at the far end darkened, and he heard the soft whisper of his old friend through the pipe.
“Racer?”
“I’m here.”
A pause and the sound of shuffling. If anything the tube amplified the sounds of the room. He could hear other voices, excited, behind T.J.’s words.
“They’ll come to lock us down to our bunks in a bit. We don’t have much time.”
“Roger that.”
“I didn’t think you made it out of Waziristan.”
“I would have come after you years ago.… I just found out you guys were alive.”