by Dalton Fury
Raynor did not take his eyes off the big sliding front door. He understood what was happening in the room behind him, and he allowed himself no moral high ground because he wasn’t witnessing it himself.
This was the ticking-time-bomb scenario. Untold numbers of his former military colleagues might die without the information in the head of the man whose pathetic grunts, screams, and sobs drifted through the thin paneling of the room behind him.
Torture was an awful, dreadful, sickening device — a device that often did not give good results.
But in this case, Raynor understood with cold clarity, it was worth a shot.
Just then the sentry’s radio crackled to life. A man gave a call sign in Arabic. Kolt could not understand it, but he was familiar with the cadence of the radio call of a security detail checking in.
A second man reported in, but then there was a break. A hesitation, then a questioning from the man who spoke first. A further questioning call to report in.
Shit. Time’s up.
Kolt stood, considered going back into the office to alert Kopelman.
The door opened suddenly in the hallway behind. Bob stood there, his face placid, though a thick sheen of sweat hung on his forehead.
Raynor looked to him hopefully.
A nod from the big spy. “Got it. Tried it. It works. We’re in.”
Kolt breathed a sigh of relief. He stepped into the room quickly, told Bob that the surviving security detail had been alerted. Kopelman all but ran to the desk to sit back down at the computer.
Kolt looked at the prisoner. Other than a bloody hand, there was no color whatsoever anywhere else on Buchwald’s skin. His face, his arms, the portion of his chest exposed above the sweat-soaked and blood-splattered white short-sleeved shirt, all of his skin was ashen.
He had not passed out from the pain. He had not been so lucky. His eyes were tight from the agony of what had once been his left hand. Kolt looked at it. It was loose and hanging in his lap, covered with the rich blood. Kolt counted only four fingers. The palm bled profusely, and the skin had reddened and swelled, almost like a miniature catcher’s mitt.
Bob wasn’t thinking about his prisoner. He had moved on. “Okay, the entire hard drive is being dumped to our man’s servers over the border. It will take a couple of minutes, tops. Why don’t you untie Buchwald, we’ll take him with us, just to see if that keeps the sentries from shooting if they see us. I doubt he’s that precious to them anymore, but it’s worth a try.”
Kolt nodded, knelt in front of Buchwald, and began untying his bare ankles.
Bob stood, came from around the desk, and hefted his AK from it. “I’ll check the front door. Hurry!”
“Got it.”
Buchwald moaned in agony, cradling his hand in his lap while Kolt untied his ankles as quickly as possible. While he did so Kolt said, “You picked the wrong friends, which means you picked the wrong enemies. Can’t say I feel sorry for you, but I bet that hurts like a — ”
Kolt first heard the crack in the window behind him. Instinctively his neck tucked down into his shoulder. He did not immediately recognize the crack as a steel-jacketed bullet fired from a suppressed sniper rifle, but when the bullet whizzed right past his ear with the sound of a wasp moving at warp speed and hit Helmut Buchwald high on the head, an inch above the hairline, he knew what it was faster than most men.
Buchwald’s scalp exploded with a hollow thunk, a large piece of his skull slammed into the wall behind the desk, and blood sprayed behind it and speckled the paneled wall in crimson.
Just then, Bob stepped back into the room from the doorway on Raynor’s right. He saw the dead man half strapped in the chair, the top of his head cracked wide open. He shouted, “What the hell did you — ”
“Get down!” screamed Kolt.
Bob did not understand what was going on, but he followed Raynor to the floor of the office. As he did wood splintered above him where a round pulverized the doorjamb.
“Sniper!” shouted Bob.
“No shit!” shouted Raynor. Bob stayed low, below the line of sight of the hills in the distance through the window.
Suddenly the walkie-talkie crackled to life as a man barked orders.
Raynor did not understand, but Bob translated for him. “It’s the shooter! He’s calling in reinforcements. There will be guys on us in seconds.” And then he asked, “Is the data transfer complete?”
“How the hell do I know?” shouted Kolt from his position flat on the floor. Bob just pointed at the laptop and Kolt crept across the floor on his belly. He grabbed the power cable and pulled it off toward the floor. Then rolled on his back behind the desk and caught the computer before it hit the ground.
The sniper on the hillside must have seen the movement, because just then the banker’s lamp on the desk exploded into pulverized bits of metal and glass.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” Again, Bob stated the obvious.
Raynor ignored the debris raining down on top of him. He looked at the computer. “Yeah, ‘Transfer Complete and Received.’”
Bob scooted on his big belly to the hallway, shifted to a low crouch, and hurried to the landing, then stood and ran down the ramp. He pulled his radio from his salwar kameez and called Jamal. Raynor was close on his heels. Already he held the AK out in front of him, and he scanned for targets below as he ran down the ramp.
“Jamal, where are you?” Bob asked in Pashto.
Jamal’s voice came back over the radio’s speaker. “I am in front of the factory. Something is wrong. Two guards entered the gate. They are moving toward the factory with their guns — ”
Just then the small door to the right of the main loading bay opened. Kolt knew the two men who’d been guarding the front gate would be the first threats he’d encounter, and he spun toward the sound, the movement, and the light of the opening door. The two men stood in the light with their weapons on their shoulders and peered into the dark, and Raynor shot them both dead. Both rounds passed just over Kopelman’s head on their way to their targets.
“Damn it!” Bob shouted. He was on the factory floor now. Kolt was still above. “Watch your fire!”
Kolt ran down to the floor, passed Kopelman, pulled the two dead men inside the building, and then shut and locked the door. He popped the al Qaeda radio off his belt and tossed it to the floor. He knew they’d be out in public in seconds, and he did not want their transmissions coming from his belt.
Jamal’s voice came through Bob’s walkie-talkie again and echoed in the large room. “Mister Bob. A pickup truck just pulled up out front. Four men, coming toward you. I think these are Taliban!”
Raynor and Kopelman turned and ran for the back door.
THIRTY-EIGHT
A minute later Bob and Kolt were exactly where they did not want to be: moving quickly and purposefully, but not running, through the thick gun bazaar arcade of Darra Adam Khel, trying like hell to get away from the men back at the factory and to somehow link up with Jamal. The Hilux was their way out of town, but Jamal was parked on the other side of the factory. Bob had received one more transmission from his Afghan agent, announcing that two more pickup trucks had arrived and entered the factory gate, but then Bob was forced to turn off the radio and slip it back inside his shirt. He could hardly move through the heavy pedestrian traffic while taking radio calls of that nature.
So he and Kolt moved blindly to the west, sometimes heading a block to the north, other times back down to the south, but generally in a westward direction. They did not speak to one another — they were not once more than five feet away from a passerby or a shopkeeper or a rickshaw driver hawking for a fare. Their weapons hung from their backs, but they drew no special attention on these mean streets of the frontier town.
They’d covered a couple hundred yards without incident, but a pickup truck appeared ahead of them, blocking off the alley of wooden shop stalls. In the bed of the truck two turbaned men stood, their rifles propped on their hips, star
ing intently out over the crowd of foot traffic and bicycles — scanning faces, clothes, mannerisms of the hundred or so moving men in front of them.
It occurred to Kolt that the sniper must have described them to the enemy chasing them. He wished he’d thought to purchase a new pakol or a shawl or anything that would alter his appearance in any way, but he’d been so intent on just getting the hell away from the factory that the thought of stopping to browse a clothing kiosk had not occurred to him.
Kopelman slowed upon seeing the men thirty yards in front of him. He began to turn into a stall as if to peruse the rifles on sale there, but before his big body disappeared from the view of the two Taliban in the truck, one of them pointed and shouted at him. Bob pretended not to hear. He continued into the little open-front shop, and the two men leaped from the truck and ran forward through the thick afternoon crowd.
Kolt could tell he hadn’t yet been made. Bob’s large frame surely was the distinguishing characteristic that made the men anxious to check him out. Kolt stepped into a stand right across from Bob that sold decorative medieval weapons — broadswords and maces and battle-axes. He waved a hand to shoo away the teenage shop boy who approached him, and turned back in time to see the two gunmen converge on Kopelman just twenty feet away across the cobblestone alleyway. They looked like Pakistani Taliban, and they were no doubt in communication with the AQ guards in the hills who had sniped at him back at the factory.
“You are looking for a fine weapon, sir?” the shop boy asked in Pashto. Kolt shook his head, kept watch on the growing confrontation in the stall across the way. “Take a look at this beautiful morning star, made by hand with resined walnut and cast iron.” Kolt said nothing, just shook his head again and waved an angry hand at the boy.
Bob was speaking to the two Taliban. Raynor could not hear the words, but he could not imagine the gunmen just walking away without taking this man away for the sniper to identify. The boy said something else, words that Kolt could not decipher without concentrating on, and all his concentration was on the other little shop across the alleyway.
One of the Taliban spoke into a walkie-talkie, the same model the al Qaeda men were using back at the factory. Seconds later the horn of a truck began honking up the alley to Raynor’s left — he pictured another pickup truck full of trouble making its way slowly through the tight foot traffic of the arcade.
The boy said something else in Kolt’s ear. The little salesman was starting to piss Raynor off.
Both Taliban put their hands on Bob Kopelman’s shoulders. He protested, in Pashto, of course, but they began leading him out of the little stall.
Kolt gritted his teeth. Tension and adrenaline and the frantic urgency of the moment, the desperate need to make a decision, to find a way out of this situation that was going downhill fast, threatened to overtax Raynor’s well-trained brain.
He had to do something. And he had to do something now.
His decision made, his face hardened.
In a blur of perfect execution Kolt unslung the AK-47 from his back, spinning the muzzle-down weapon up in front of him. The shop boy threw his arms up and stepped back quickly, knocking his ass against a wooden table full of decorative swords. The barrel of the Kalashnikov rose, spun, and Raynor’s finger dropped to the trigger. He fired two quick rounds into both of the Taliban holding Bob Kopelman, and both men spun around in the middle of the dusty alleyway and dropped dead on their backs amid the crowd.
The pedestrians all around began shouting, running, panicking, knocking over bikes and tables and a metal stove with several teapots on its burners, pushing one another down as they tried to flee the gunfire that had killed men right in front of them. As they leaped, ran, shoved, tumbled, and crawled, many of these men hefted their own weapons from their shoulders or drew them from their belts.
Raynor ran to Bob, grabbed him by the left arm, and spun him around in the opposite direction, and the two men began running through the crowd, away from the honking horn of the pickup approaching from behind and toward the parked truck at the intersection ahead. The one man in the cab, the driver, quickly climbed out with his AK, stepped forward, and propped his rifle on the hood of his truck.
A three-round burst from Raynor’s rifle knocked him backward into a crowd of men running by on the sidewalk.
“Get in the truck!” shouted Kopelman. Raynor saw the vehicle had left-sided steering, so he vaulted the hood, landed by the driver’s-side door, and dove behind the wheel. The truck faced up a steep alleyway. Kopelman opened the passenger-side door and lunged inside, reached back and closed the door behind him.
Kolt looked down and saw that the keys were not in the ignition.
A burst of automatic fire came from the crowd back up the alley where the other pickup was pushing its way through the scrambling pedestrians.
“Fuck!” shouted Raynor. He did not have time to get back out of the truck and rifle through the dead man’s pockets for the key. Instead, he popped the truck’s clutch into neutral, stuck his left foot out the open door, and pushed backward on the ground with all the strength in his leg and back. The small pickup rolled backward down the alleyway, slowly at first, but quickly picking up speed. Some men scrambled out of the way; others, clearly not understanding what was happening and only trying to help, desperately grabbed on to the door and sides of the vehicle to try to arrest its uncontrolled backward decent.
The pickup rolled faster now, and the would-be helpers tumbled away from it. Raynor did not even bother to put his hands on the steering wheel. It would not respond to his commands, and he knew they’d roll back twenty, thirty, fifty yards at most and then crash into a shop or a rickshaw or a truck. They might well hit or run over some pedestrians in the process, but his only objective was to get away from the shoot-out above him and get the hell out of here.
The crash came after thirty-five yards, a jarring rearward slam into the support beam for a plastic tarp awning in the front of an adobe building selling counterfeit versions of Thompson submachine guns. A second support beam was knocked over with the truck’s impact, and then the bed smashed through the facade of the building, coming to rest in a cloud of dust.
“Move! Move!” Kolt screamed at Kopelman as he threw open his own door, moved to the hood of the pickup, and immediately picked out targets up the steep alley. Two turning pickup trucks full of armed men had already sighted their weapons on the crash below them. They were preparing to fire over the dozens who had not yet cleared the street, but a long, fully automatic burst from Raynor’s AK into the windshield of the first vehicle killed the driver and caused the small truck to swerve violently to the side, sending the men in the cab tipping out into the street and tumbling down the hill.
Rather than open his own door in the direction of the enemy, Bob had crawled across the cab of the truck, and now he fell out the driver’s side onto the street. Quickly he clambered to his feet, and he shouted at Raynor to follow him around the side of the adobe building. Kolt did so, tossing his empty and smoking rifle to the street as he made the turn in a sprint.
They were on a larger street now, two lanes wide, but it was still only made of hard dirt and bits of gravel. It headed downhill. Shops and stalls lined both curbs all the way to a turn in the road thirty yards on. They passed a shop selling a homemade version of the HK MP5 9 mm submachine gun. It was far from Kolt’s first choice for a frontline battle rifle, but it was the closest weapon available. One of the small black rifles sat proudly on a stand at the entrance, with two loaded magazines nearby in case a prospective buyer wanted to step into the street to fire some test rounds at the surrounding hills. Raynor scooped up the weapon, grabbed the mags, seated one, and pulled the charging handle back, all just in time, as a half-dozen men on foot appeared around the turn in front of him and Bob. They were armed and clearly part of the force chasing them through the alleyways of the Gun Village. Kolt fired on them immediately, saw his shots hit low into the street and kick up dust. Then he pushed Bob int
o a wooden kiosk on his right. Raynor followed him into the kiosk but passed him, gained speed with his run, and threw his entire body at the plywood back wall.
With a violent jolt the impact smashed the wood and sent Raynor airborne. He’d expected to land in the dirt of another alley, but instead he found himself spinning through the air, six feet straight down, where he slammed chest-first into the corrugated metal roof of a stall facing the next alleyway over, which was farther down the hill than Kolt had anticipated. His fake MP5 skittered off the side of the roof and fell into the crowd of scrambling men below. The tin roof dented in when Raynor hit it, bending into the general shape of a man impacting from above, but it did not give enough to prevent Kolt from getting the wind knocked out of him. Slowly he rolled to his knees, gasping for any air his lungs could accept, and he looked up at the hole he’d created in the back wall of the tiny shop above.
Bob Kopelman appeared through the opening at high speed. He leaped through the air and came down right next to Kolt feetfirst, and instantly the roof of the stall collapsed, sending both Americans crashing down with it, tumbling through the debris.
Bob was the first to his feet, though he stumbled and staggered out of the dust and wreckage. Raynor was a few steps behind, still gasping for air. He felt pain in his forearm, looked down as he struggled to catch his breath, and saw he’d suffered a foot-long laceration to the inside of his forearm from a sharp corner of the sheet metal roofing.
Blood appeared in a jagged line on his arm.
From out of the foot traffic and the shop workers running in all directions, the owner of the shop the two American spies had just destroyed stepped forward. He was a thin man of fifty. He wore a long neat beard and a long white shirt. In his right hand he held a local copy of a Colt .45 model 1911 with silver etching and faux ivory handgrips. With neither a word nor any visible emotion he leveled the handgun at Bob’s chest and pulled the trigger.
Click.
The weapon did not fire.