by Tom Clancy
And as Benton headed for his white Lexus SUV he told himself he’d likely have a lot of free time after November 6. Not just because the election would be over, but because his man would lose, which meant his government-sector prospects in D.C. would be zilch, and his private-sector opportunities around here would be tinged by his failure to retain the Oval Office for his boss.
No self-respecting campaign manager throws in the towel publicly with three weeks until election day, and Thayer had five radio spots and nine television interviews planned for Monday, when he would confidently declare just the opposite of what he knew to be true, but the forty-three-year-old walking alone in the parking lot was no idiot. Short of Jack Ryan being caught with his pants around his ankles outside a day care, the writing was on the wall, and the election was over.
Still, he considered himself a good soldier, and there were the media appearances in the morning that he needed to prepare for, so he was off to work.
As he climbed into his Lexus, he noticed a small manila envelope tucked under his windshield wiper. He leaned out, grabbed the package, and sat back in the car. Thinking that someone who belonged to the club must have left this for him—the grounds were fenced and guarded, after all—he tore into the bag without a thought.
Inside there was no note, no indication of who had left the package. But what he did find was a small thumb drive.
If he had been anywhere else, at the mall, in his driveway, returning to his car from his office at campaign headquarters, Benton Thayer would have taken an unknown and unsolicited package like this and tossed it in the street.
But this was different. He decided to give it a look when he got to work.
Two hours later, Thayer had switched into khakis, an open-collared dress shirt, a wrinkle-free navy blue blazer, and loafers, no socks, and he sat at his desk in his office. The thumb drive had been forgotten for a bit, but he held it now, turned it back and forth, looking for any clue as to who had passed it. After another moment’s hesitation, he sat up and began to connect the drive to his laptop, but he stopped himself, hesitating again. He worried about the mysterious drive containing a virus that could either damage his machine or somehow steal the data from it.
Seconds later, Thayer stepped into the large open loft that served as the “war room” of the Washington campaign office. Around him, dozens of men and women manned computers, phones, printers, and fax machines. A buzz of activity fueled by a long row of coffee urns on cloth-covered tables against the wall to his left. There, at the closest table, a college-aged girl was filling her eco-friendly travel mug with hot coffee.
Thayer didn’t know the girl; he didn’t bother to learn the names of more than the top five percent of his staff. “You,” he said with a point of his finger.
The young lady jolted when she realized he was talking to her. Coffee splashed out of her mug. “Yes, sir?” she replied nervously.
“You have a laptop?”
She nodded. “At my desk.”
“Get it. Bring it in here.” He disappeared back into his office, and the college girl scurried to do as she was told. The third of the room that was in earshot of the exchange stopped working and stared, watched the woman grab her Mac and rush back toward Thayer’s office as if they were regarding a condemned criminal on the way to the gallows.
Benton Thayer did not ask the girl her name or what she did. Instead he instructed her to put the thumb drive into her MacBook Pro and open the folder. She did this with slightly quivering fingers that were still sticky with spilled sugary coffee. As the single folder opened, revealing several files, Thayer told her to wait outside.
The young lady was all too happy to oblige.
Satisfied now that his own machine would not be damaged by a corrupt thumb drive, Benton Thayer began going through the files that had been surreptitiously delivered to him.
There was no explanation, no electronic version of a cover sheet. But the file was titled “John Clark.” Thayer knew a couple of guys named John Clark, it was a common name, but when he opened the file and saw a series of photos, he realized he did not know this man.
Then he began clicking through pages and pages of data on the man. A dossier of sorts. A personal history. U.S. Navy. SEAL team. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group. Thayer had no idea what that was, but it sounded shady as hell to him.
Then CIA. Special Activities Division.
Targeted killings. Sanctioned denied operations.
Thayer shrugged. Okay, this guy is a spook, and a spooky spook, but why should I care?
Then specific operations were laid out. He thumbed through them quickly. He could tell these were not CIA documents, but they seemed to contain detailed information about Clark’s Agency career.
It was a complicated mess of information. Information that might be interesting to someone. Human Rights Watch? Amnesty International? But Benton Thayer? He was growing bored looking through it. He carried on an internal dialogue with the mysterious person who delivered him this thumb drive. Jesus. Like I give a shit. Get to the point.
Then he stopped. Huh? Is this the point?
Photos with Clark and a younger John Patrick Ryan. Details of their relationship, spanning a quarter-century.
So the guy is old, and he’s ex-CIA. Ryan is old and ex-CIA. They knew each other? That’s all you’ve got, mystery man?
And then, after a rundown of John Clark’s years in Rainbow, a single document that seemed to be out of place. An allegation of a murder Clark committed in Germany, thirty years ago.
Why isn’t this in its place in the timeline? Thayer read it carefully. From all the information present, he got the impression that this intel was coming from a source outside of the United States.
He flipped to the next page.
A document detailing a presidential pardon given in secret to Clark for assassinations carried out at CIA.
“So …” Thayer muttered to himself. “CIA chief Ryan orders Clark to kill people, then President Ryan papers over the crimes after the fact.”
“Holy shit!”
Thayer picked up the phone, pushed a pair of buttons. “It’s Thayer. I need to see him tonight, just as soon as he gets out of Marine One and back into the White House.”
36
Traffic on the Boya–Miran Shah road had been light throughout the day, and it turned near nonexistent at night. Some transport vehicles, Taliban on motorcycles, and a few brightly colored buses with small mirrors hanging from the sides like Christmas ornaments. But the men in the observation post saw nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. Mohammed al Darkur said that his prisoner had mentioned that ISI officers were coming into the area via aircraft, which meant they had to land at Miran Shah, and they had to travel this road to get to the camp.
But in the first thirty-six hours of the surveillance, Driscoll and the others had come up empty.
Still, al Darkur photographed each and every vehicle that passed. He had no way to be certain some high-ranking ISI officer, even General Riaz Rehan himself, would not dress himself up like a goat herder to make his way to the Haqqani training camps, so after each vehicle passed their position, al Darkur and his men reviewed the high-res images.
But so far they had seen no indication that the ISI, or even some foreign force, for that matter, was operating in the area.
Just after midnight, Driscoll was manning a night-vision camera on a tripod facing down to the road while the other three men lay on their cots in the hallway behind him. A jingle bus had passed a minute ago; the dust it kicked up still hung in the air above the Miran Shah–Boya highway.
Sam rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then looked back.
Instantly he pushed his face tighter into the eyecup of the optic. There, on the road below him, four darkened pickup trucks had pulled to a stop and men rolled out of the back of the beds. They carried rifles, their clothing was black, and they moved stealthily up the rocky hillside, directly toward the IS
I safe house.
“We’re getting hit!” shouted Driscoll. Mohammed was at his side with his radio in his hand a moment later. He used his binoculars, saw the dozen or so men down a hundred yards below them, and turned to one of his captains. “Contact the base. Tell them we need a priority exfiltration, now!” His subordinate headed for his radio, and al Darkur turned back to Driscoll.
“If we take the trucks, they will destroy us with those RPGs on the road.”
But Sam was not listening—he was thinking. “Mohammed. Why would they assault like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“They have to know we are watching the road. Why did they go to the road, the low ground, and not the high ground behind us?”
Al Darkur thought about it but only for a moment. “We are already surrounded.”
“Exactly. That’s a blocking force below us; the attack will come from—”
An explosion rocked the rear wall of the compound. It was thirty yards from where al Darkur and Driscoll stood in the hallway, but still it knocked them to the ground.
The ISI major began shouting commands into his radio and he climbed back to his feet. Sam grabbed his M4 and ran toward the stairs, took them three at a time as he rushed to meet the enemy who would be trying to breach the rear wall.
Sam hit the ground floor and kept running for the back of the building. He passed two 7th Commando men in a room on his left. They trained the lights of their weapons out a ground-floor window, blanketing the eastern portion of the compound with white light, desperate to find targets. Driscoll continued toward the exit to the rear grounds, and hoped like hell the sentries posted at the back gate were still in the fight, keeping Haqqani’s men pinned down in the surrounding brush and hills.
Chattering gunfire came from the front of the safe house as the enemy moved through the rocks up the hill toward the front entrance.
As Sam ran full speed toward the open rear door, preparing to shoot across the pitch-black grounds toward the gate, al Darkur came over the speaker of Sam’s walkie-talkie. He spoke English now. “Sam! Our rear wall sentries are not checking in. The enemy must already be inside the compound!”
Driscoll’s momentum took him through the doorway as he processed this information. He’d not made it five feet out into the night when bright flashes of light flickered from the gate twenty meters ahead, and booming Kalashnikov fire echoed off the outer walls of the house. Driscoll stumbled in the dust, turned, and retreated back to the doorway in a crouch.
The doorframe tore to splinters from the Haqqani fighters’ rounds, but Sam managed to get back inside and up the hall without taking a bullet. Al Darkur met him there; he was still shouting into his walkie-talkie. Both men leaned back around the corner and fired a few rounds out into the dark night. Neither thought he could quell the attack with a couple of bursts of an assault rifle, but they did hold out hopes of making some impression on anyone who thought they could just rush in the open back door and make their way up the hall unimpeded.
Al Darkur shouted into Sam’s ear after firing a few more bursts in the narrow hallway. “I’ve called for a helicopter from the base in Miran Shah, but the quick reaction force will not be ready for fifteen minutes.”
“Not quick enough,” said Sam as he dropped to his knees, leaned around the corner, and shot out the lights of the hall.
“It will be thirty minutes or more before they arrive.”
Driscoll released the empty magazine from the magazine well of his rifle, then replaced it with a fully charged mag from his chest rig. Incoming gunfire from all sides had picked up now, and shouts over the comms, even though Driscoll could not understand the words, gave the impression that the building itself was about to be overrun.
“From the sound of it, we don’t have anything like thirty minutes. How many men do you have left?”
Al Darkur got back on the walkie-talkie to find out while Driscoll went prone at the corner of the hall, then slowly rolled out on his right shoulder, putting him low in the hallway toward the back door, with his weapon’s barrel scanning for threats. He could not see a thing in the dark, so he actuated his weapon light on the side rail of the M4. Instantly two hundred lumens of bright white light filled the hallway, illuminating two Haqqani fighters making their way silently toward Sam’s position. They were blinded by the beam, but they raised their weapons anyway.
Driscoll pulled the trigger on his M4 rifle, swept a dozen rounds of automatic fire back and forth across the two men. They died before either of them got a shot off.
More sparkles of gunfire from the dark night outside forced Sam back around the corner, where he reloaded again.
“I have six men alive,” Mohammed said.
Sam nodded as he reloaded. “All right. Any chance we can make it to the trucks in the garage on the east side?”
“We have to try, but the road will be covered with Haqqani’s men.”
“Who needs a road?”
Driscoll grabbed a fragmentation grenade from his chest harness, pulled the pin, and then flung it underhanded up the hallway like a tiny bowling ball. Mohammed al Darkur and Sam Driscoll took off toward the men fighting at the east window as the explosion tore through the doorway.
Two minutes later, a group of eight Haqqani fighters attacking from below had made it through the gate and up the drive on the southeast side of the compound. They’d left four of their number behind, one dead, felled by a shot through the stomach from a second-floor window of the enemy safe house, and three more wounded: one by gunfire and two by a hand grenade tossed down the hill by a sentry at the gate who had himself been shot dead one second later.
But now the eight survivors were within twenty meters of the garage. The door was open and it was dark inside, so the men approached quietly and slowly while their comrades fired into the building on the other sides. If they could make it into the building from the door here in the garage they could, by staying low to avoid fire from their own forces, comb through the structure and destroy any remaining forces there.
As the men came to within ten yards of the garage entrance, their leader was just able to make out two large trucks parked inside. His night vision had been all but ruined by his firing several magazines from his Kalashnikov, so as he moved forward now he had to squint to hunt for a door inside.
All eight men passed the two trucks, found the door giving them access to the building, and they went inside in a line, crouching and listening for threats.
As soon as the eight Haqqani men disappeared from the garage, Sam Driscoll, Mohammed al Darkur, two ISI officers, and four Zarrar commandos quietly climbed out from under the truck farthest from the door. A driver, al Darkur, and three others climbed in the front of the vehicle, while Sam and two others remained at the back of the garage. Once Sam heard the driver quietly release the hand brake, he and two men pushed the truck from behind with all their might. The nose of the vehicle was already oriented downhill, so once they had pushed the truck out of the garage it began to pick up speed quickly. Sam and the two men gave one more firm shove, then leapt into the back of the covered bed.
The driver did not turn over the engine, nor did he turn on the headlights. The only sound made by the dark vehicle was the crunching on the rocky driveway as it moved faster and faster down the hill. The driver had only a very faint light from the overcast sky to guide him toward the front gate, and if he missed it a few feet right or left, the truck would plow into the wall and they would then have to fire the engine, letting everyone still on the hillside or on the road below know exactly where they were.
But the driver made it through the gate, the truck rolled faster now, and the driver had to force the wheels to turn left and right by using all of his upper-body strength. It was still one hundred yards of steep wnding gravel to the road below, and the pathway twisted and turned all the way down.
They made it out of the compound itself, which was where the majority of the enemy guns had concentrated by now, but so
meone on the hillside either heard or saw the truck when it was only twenty yards outside the gate. A shout, then a series of shouts, and then finally erupting gunfire put an end to the stealthy part of Sam Driscoll’s plan. He shouted from the back of the vehicle to the driver, told him to forget about trying to stay on the gravel road, now it was all about getting away from the guns as fast as possible, no matter where the truck ended up or what condition it was in when it got there. The driver went off road, used his big heavy truck’s momentum to propel him and his passengers down through the dark.
There were Haqqani men on all sides of the hurtling object, but most of them were unable to fire without hitting their fellow militants. A few men did fire, and Sam’s position in the back of the truck was raked with 7.62 rounds. One man with him was shot through the head, another took two rounds in his left bicep and left shoulder, and Sam took a round high on his protective steel SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plate in his chest rig vest. The impact knocked him over, down to the floor, just as the huge covered truck slammed hard on a large boulder and went airborne several feet. The nearly decapitated Zarrar soldier’s body rolled with Sam in the rear of the vehicle. The truck continued, careening down the hillside, it bounced again and again, and the driver had to focus all of his faculties on keeping the truck pointed downhill so that it would not veer sideways and flip.
They were only twenty yards or so to the road when Mohammed saw more Haqqani network fighters step out of the darkness and open fire on the hurtling truck. One man held an RPG.