by Ted Bell
“So, Captain, a black hearse, not a white ambulance, yes?”
“Y-yes…black…heavily armored.”
“With weapons, you said. What will I be up against?”
“Fifty-caliber machine guns up front and…sorry, I can’t seem to get enough…some kind of Gatling gun mounted at the rear…but…no concern of yours.”
“No? Why?”
“This road north. It only lasts for…another hundred miles or so. Then…the…desert…and then the mountains.”
“How will he proceed?”
“Horses…the only way up those narrow mountain trails. You need horses, camels, mules, Commander Hawke. Warhorses…and fighters. Seasoned desert fighters. Taliban war parties everywhere, returning since the army’s 2008 offensive.”
“Where is he heading?”
“Northwest of here. The provinces. Somewhere in the mountains near the village of Chitral. He has a…a command post there. Never been able to find it. There are endless mountains…hundreds of caves and tunnels…all look alike.”
The medic put a hand on Hawke’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, I have to put an end to this. It doesn’t look good, but perhaps…you never know. But the captain needs his strength.”
“I understand completely. I’d like to ask him just one more question. Is that all right?”
“Yes, one more.”
Hawke bent even closer to the man, putting his lips near what was left of his left ear.
“Have you ever heard of a place called Wazizabad, Captain?”
“Y-yes…of course…a mythical name for one of the highest mountains…but I don’t think you can…ascend… .”
Hawke knew better than to ask why not. He thanked the medic and let him get back to work.
“Commander,” he heard the man whisper as he started to climb out of the ambulance.
“Yes, Captain?”
“Find…Lieutenant Amir, my second-in-command…in that ambulance…if he’s still alive, he can help you. He knows those mountains. He can put together a small army of hard militia veterans . . . men who have fought the Taliban for many years. God go with you, brother.”
Hawke, having spoken to Lieutenant Amir, sprinted to the waiting helo, ducking his head as he climbed in and quickly settling into his vacant seat next to the pilot. He buckled himself in, put on his headset, and positioned his lip mike.
“Ever hear of someplace called ‘Wazizabad’?” Hawke asked the young American flyer.
“No, sir.”
“I have,” Stoke said, leaning forward and squeezing Hawke’s shoulder. “In fact, I’ve got a map of the place, boss.”
THE EXPEDITION INTO THE NORTHERN provinces took Hawke and his new and very essential accomplice, Abdul Dakkon, three full days to organize and provision. Abdul’s answer to every difficult logistical question was “Absolutely, sir!” or “Already done, sir!” Still, Hawke felt the pressure. He had his eye on his watch the entire time, knowing every moment lost meant the missing nuclear weapon might be lost to him forever.
He was also assisted in the time-compressed logistics of the operation by Lieutenant Amir, a small, handsome chap, a veteran, a much-decorated soldier who’d been wounded in the barricade attack, but who seemed impervious to pain. Hawke, in fact, had left him for dead in the Pak ambulance. Many of the men under his command had died in the barrage at the barricade and Amir was eager to seek retribution against the Taliban militants, to help Hawke mount an expedition into the provinces and run them to ground.
After many sat-phone consultations about the impending mission with C back in London, most of them at great length, Hawke’s team had chosen the northernmost Pakistani Army outpost, Wanabah, an ancient enclosure of mud and stone, heavily guarded against the frequent Taliban attacks, to ready themselves for the impending journey on horseback. The outpost sat at the very edge of the desert they would have to cross before heading through the valley and up into some of the highest mountains on earth.
C’s initial inclination, after consulting with the British Army forces in neighboring Afghanistan, and his CIA and Pentagon counterparts in Washington, had been to call in B-52s and drone air-strikes out of the secret Shamsi AFB to take out the objective. He thought it far too dangerous for Hawke and his small band of fighters to venture alone into a Taliban-infested area where thousands had died. “Pound that mountain into powder and come home safe, Alex,” Sir David Trulove had said.
Hawke had patiently explained that there was no hard target yet, only endless mountain ranges. Any one of those mountains might be the command-and-control bunker of Abu al-Rashad, headquarters of the Lion of the Punjab. There would simply be no way to confirm his exact position, his actual presence, or that of the stolen nuclear device, without a boots-on-the-ground incursion and reconnoiter.
Hawke also pointed out that these mountains were home to many non-Taliban Pakistani villages, farmers, and goatherds. Their deaths at the hands of U.S. bombers, he said, would be morally and politically indefensible in the highly charged geopolitical climate of this region and this war.
C extracted a promise from Hawke that as soon as he had this confirmation, and the precise GPS coordinates of the enemy stronghold, he would call in strikes and let the U.S. Air Force do its job. Hawke had no choice but to agree. It was, after all, an order. Hawke’s philosophy: always do exactly what you think is necessary and apologize later.
While satellite communications, ammunition, food stores, and water were being assembled for loading onto the camels and pack mules, crash courses were under way. Harry Brock was drilling the militia in the use of the U.S. M4 assault rifle on a makeshift shooting range while both Amir and the newly bearded Abdul Dakkon spent every minute of free time giving horseback riding instruction to the team.
Sahira, it turned out, was an equestrienne, a horsewoman all her life. She had no trouble controlling these fearsome horses, horses descended from the beasts Genghis Khan had ridden out of Mongolia. But camels, she soon learned, required other skills. Simply putting up with nasty, smelly, farting brutes being the least of it.
Lieutenant Amir, who had shed his army uniform for mufti and had asked to be called by his nickname, Patoo, worked with Sahira until she was comfortable with the camels. Or, at least, claimed she was comfortable. She didn’t believe any human being could ever be comfortable with camels, and vice versa.
She wasn’t one for complaining, Patoo noticed, and it made him somewhat less anxious about having such a beautiful young woman venture deep into enemy territory. He’d spoken to Hawke privately. Hawke understood his concern, but he said her presence would be critical should they find the stolen nuclear device.
Patoo conceded the point, but he looked Hawke straight in the eye and told the Englishman in no uncertain terms that, if she went along, under absolutely no circumstances should they allow the Taliban fighters to take this woman alive.
“You understand what that might mean, Commander Hawke?” Patoo said. “In extreme circumstances? Your obligation?”
Hawke looked at him for a very long time before replying, a searing image of Anastasia being loaded aboard the doomed airship flashing through his mind.
“Lieutenant, there are very few men alive who understand what you mean better than I.”
Hawke was all too well aware that, in extremis, he himself would have to kill Sahira before letting her be taken captive. Patoo was right. This woman’s unspeakably cruel death at the hands of these animals would be unthinkable. War. He’d given up this hell and tried to end his own life because of the overwhelming pain. Now, he was back in its grip and the heavy consequences were weighing upon him to the point where he had to just shove it all aside and concentrate on the job to be done. The job of the simple warrior.
Stokely Jones had already given their little expeditionary force a name: the Rat Patrol. Some bloody American TV show in the 1960s, he’d told Alex. Chaps in Jeeps with machine guns, three Yanks and one Brit, roaring around in the desert wreaking havoc on Field Marshal
Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Brock had picked the moniker up, and now everyone was using it.
Stokely Jones had never sat a horse in his whole damn life, and he obviously wasn’t very happy about the idea either, Hawke noticed with a grin. The idea of Stoke finally encountering a foe who was bigger and stronger than he was made Stoke nuts.
“Look at him, eyeballing me like that,” Stoke said to Patoo, who was holding the reins of a huge black Arabian, snorting, bucking, and pawing the sand. “Horse doesn’t like me and I ain’t too crazy about him, either. You think I could kick this horse’s ass in a fair fight, Patoo?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that,” Stoke said, sticking his boot in the stirrup. “I pity this poor sonofabitch if he pisses me off.”
“You see those hazy mountains in the distance beyond the desert, Mr. Jones?” Patoo said. “Many thousands of meters high. Freezing wind and icy ledges sometimes only one meter wide. You wish to walk up there, brother?”
Stokely got on the damn horse.
An hour later, as the air cooled dramatically and the setting sun shot red arrows of light streaking through the haze, Stokely and Harry Brock were racing each other across the sands, up and down the windblown dunes, shouting curses and laughing at each other, galloping hell-bent for leather around and around the army compound. Hawke looked up from the weapon he was cleaning and caught a glimpse of them through an opened window. He smiled. The team was coming together. And when a team makes a commitment to act as one, the sky’s the limit.
Tonight the thirty grizzled Pak militia fighters who would accompany them were preparing a great feast around the bonfire in the center of the compound. Hawke was much reassured by the look of these battle-tested men. They’d been fighting the Taliban through the long, tough years, the house-to-house combat for control of strategic towns and villages.
Patoo and his militia were veterans of those cruel battles. He had told Hawke over dinner the first night, “Sir, every street battle in those days was like getting into a fistfight in a phone booth.”
At dawn the little army led by Alex Hawke would mount up, ride out through the massive wooden doors of the army outpost, and begin their journey across the trackless desert toward the mountains waiting on the horizon.
“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we ride,” Hawke said softly to himself, smiling at the quaint old English homily before going back to work on his weapon, scrubbing the works of his M4 assault rifle with a toothbrush.
AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT, ANOTHER Englishman, fifty miles or so to the north of Hawke’s position, was completing his ride. He and his camel herder had journeyed down from the mountains, his own horse slipping and sliding on the icy ledges where a single misstep might mean a death plunge of thousands of feet.
This particular mountain had, long before the existence of the written word, been known as Wazizabad.
Smith had made the journey down from the mountain many times, however, in far worse conditions, and so he was not overly concerned with death; or rather, not concerned with his own death, to be precise. The imminent death of others was a red fever in his brain; it was the only thing he lived for. He rode on.
Smith, ever the sensualist, enjoyed the occasional feel of level earth beneath him, the warmer temperatures of the lower altitudes, and the brilliant rays of the dying sun striking his cheeks. He rode toward the desert, through passes often so narrow he could barely scrape through. During the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838, the British had marched an army of twenty-one thousand men through this same pass to retrieve “British honor” in Afghanistan.
He felt countless prying eyes pressing down upon him from the creases and crevasses, the deep folds in the earth and mountains, eyes judging his potential, weighing his possible net worth.
He drew comfort from the fact that certainly no one would mistake him for a wealthy Englishman. No, if anything he resembled a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia, riding tall in the saddle, swaddled head to toe in flowing white robes and blankets. Atop his head he wore a red-and-white-checkered scarf, wound round in a kind of turban.
His visit to the summit had been a brief one. A type of summit, really, with al-Rashad and one of his senior officers. He had traveled to the highest reaches of the Hindu Kush to see for himself that all was in readiness for what would be his ultimate strike. The time had come for him to drive a final, fatal stake into the very heart of the British Monarchy. And he had to see with his own eyes the men, the matériel, the final plans, and meet the man upon whose shoulders would rest the responsibility of ensuring that this time failure was not an option.
Six months earlier he had paid his old comrade the Lion of Punjab the princely sum of five million dollars. Money taken “off the books” from a secret slush fund he had access to at the Bank of England. Gold bullion had been placed in the vault of a small family bank in Basel, Switzerland. For that he had acquired the services of a certain Colonel Zazi, the second-most-powerful warlord in al-Rashad’s universe, and his dedicated team of thirty young commandos whom he had been training here in the mountains for six long months. Zazi and his men were to be the backbone of his next operation. He had seen enough to satisfy himself that it was a backbone made of steel.
He looked back at the camel carrying his supplies in saddlebags cinched round his girth and smiled. Though he was a man of a certain age, his still youthful face was alight with a fire that might terrify the unsuspecting. The fire inside burned brightly and its fuel was pure evil. He was a man nearing the resolution of a destiny predetermined long ago. He knew his time was short; the fuse that was his life of vengeance was burning rapidly, and he spurred his steed onward.
High above the desert sands, white stars burned holes in the black sky. He rode on, urging his camel driver to keep up.
He had an appointment in Samarra and he was running a tad late.
In the distance, barely visible on an unmarked paved strip of desert, he could now make out a black, otherworldly silhouette. It was sleek and ominous in the starlight, a machine from another planet. Two orange ovals were aglow at the rear of the beast, heat from the two Rolls-Royce BR710 engines. As he drew closer, the shape-shifter resolved itself into the now quite unmistakable outline of a Gulfstream V.
Jet black paint, gleaming under starlight. No markings. Blacked-out windows. Air Incognito, he liked to call his airplane. If you listened very closely you could hear the low shhhh of its two powerful engines, even at this distance.
He was feeling very close to the end of his life’s journey now, and the hour of true vengeance drew nigh.
The door lowered out of the fuselage as he steered his horse down the black macadam strip to the waiting aircraft. Two men in black jumpsuits, armed against possible attack, descended the steps and took up protective positions on either side of the staircase, swiveling their weapons through ninety degrees in either direction. The G-V was a juicy target, and now was the time for extreme vigilance.
Smith dismounted and turned the stallion’s reins over to his camel driver. Then he turned toward the opened door of the aircraft where two more men waited, hovering just inside. Smith beckoned them.
“See to my luggage, please, gentlemen.”
This done, Smith pulled a leather pouch from inside his blankets and produced a thick wad of Pakistani rupees. His camel driver accepted this generous consideration, mounted his animal, and was gone into the desert vastness in a blink.
The Englishman quickly climbed aboard, the two armed men right behind him. Smith settled into his accustomed leather recliner on the starboard side of the aircraft and nodded to the pretty attendant who strapped him in.
“May I bring you something?”
“A pillow and a blanket perhaps. I am tired,” he said. “I will sleep now.”
“Ready for takeoff, sir?”
“Oh. You have no idea how ready I am, darling.”
Minutes later, the twin engines at the tail roared and the sleek black airpl
ane surged ahead at full power, pressing the Englishman deeply into his seat, and suddenly lifted off into the nighttime sky. After a steep climb, it banked hard left.
It was headed west.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, THE ENGLISHMAN made a satellite telephone call to Sheik al-Rashad. “Hello, my brother,” Smith said. “I just wanted you to know that I arrived safely.”
“Brother, are you calling on a secure line?”
Smith laughed. “Yes, I certainly am. It is perhaps the most secure line in the entire world.”
“Good. How may I be of further service to you?”
“It is I who wishes to be of service. I am calling you with a warning. First, is your Islamabad luggage still in your possession?”
“It is. I am expecting a courier in the next few days. He will then smuggle it directly into the belly of the Great Satan, as we discussed. The weapon will be detonated in the center of the designated American metropolis to maximum effect. And I anticipate it will come as something of a shock to the laughable nation of infidels who have grown so complacent, so pitifully weak.”
Smith laughed. “A wake-up call so to speak.”
“Yes, brother. But tell me. You mentioned a warning.”
“Yes. I am calling to warn you about the man who forced your hasty departure from the hospital at Islamabad. As of this moment he is crossing the northern desert with a small army of heavily armed fighters, headed for the mountains mounted on horseback. Perhaps thirty or so. He is coming after you.”
“Does he know where I am?”
“I’m afraid that he does.”
“Precisely?”
“Yes.”
“Then I must hurry and prepare a welcoming committee for this troublesome pest. We will ensure that he receives a very warm reception at Wazizabad.”
“Brother, listen carefully to me. Do not take this man lightly. His name is Alex Hawke. MI6. He is one of the most effective and most lethal counterterrorists in the Western world. The Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, all have confronted him, and all have regretted it. I would go so far as to say he is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. Many have underestimated him over the years, and all paid dearly, most of them with their lives.”