Black Site df-1

by Dalton Fury

  Bob punched the man in the face with his beefy right hand, sending the shopkeeper’s head snapping back and his body falling into the crowd behind him. The pistol fell to the ground.

  Another man in the crowd fired a weapon, but Bob did not know if the round had been intended for him or not. The men in the road grew in number by the second. Bob looked around for a gun, then back toward Raynor.

  Kolt stepped clear of the wreckage of the shop. In his right hand he held a counterfeit Mossberg 590 shotgun. He racked a shell into the chamber and fired high in the air, pumped the weapon again, and lowered it at the crowd, sweeping the barrel in a wide, wild 180-degree arc. He pushed through the mob. No one else fired again and Raynor managed to fight through, though many men shouted at him now. Bob stayed right on Kolt’s heels and they ran up the street, turned a quick left and then a quick left again, finding themselves on a long row of stone stairs bordered on both sides by more shops from the arcade of gun vendors. As they descended the stairs in a run Kolt grabbed a fresh AK-47 from a shop stall and a fully loaded magazine from another, and then tossed the Mossberg pump shotgun to big Bob Kopelman.

  “You’re hurt, Racer!” Bob was exhausted. His chest wheezed and he gasped the words as he saw Kolt’s bloody arm.

  Kolt ignored the comment. “We need to find a place where we can call Jam — ”

  A vendor from the last kiosk appeared on the road with a machete in his hand. He started chasing Raynor and Kopelman, ready to kill to retrieve his stolen magazine, and he gave up the chase only when Kolt clicked the mag onto his Kalashnikov and chambered a round. Kolt turned and stitched a three-round burst at the feet of the pursuing man, and the man stopped and ran in the other direction, ending his pursuit.

  Raynor turned back around and kept running, now just behind Bob.

  Gunfire above and behind them caused them to pick up the pace even more. At first Kolt thought the noise might be just guns fired in anger or some other dustup in the area, but after the third burst he saw the stairs below him and to his right crack and tear up with the impact of rifle rounds. Bob turned around and fired the shotgun up at an armed man at the top of the steps. He looked like a shopkeeper but he was clearly trying to kill both of the fleeing Americans. The blast of 12-gauge pellets from twenty-five yards caught the shopkeeper in the midsection and he disappeared over the hill above the steps.

  They made it farther down the stairs. In front of them ran the wide road that passed through the center of town. On this street they’d last seen Jamal and his truck, a few hundred yards back to the east, and Kolt hoped to see the old yellow Hilux when he turned the corner, although at this point Kolt couldn’t blame the kid if he’d gunned the Toyota’s engine and hauled ass halfway to Karachi.

  As they ran for the main street they began taking more fire from behind. Bob was only ten yards from the intersection, but Kolt slowed his sprint, stopped, spun, and dropped to his knees. Another pickup truck full of Taliban was fifty yards behind and coming down the hill toward them. Raynor dumped the remainder of the AK’s magazine at the truck and it jacked hard to the right, hit a motorized rickshaw, and went up on two wheels. The truck flipped, landed on its roof, and slid off the road, over the descending steps, and into a storefront factory that fabricated rifle ammunition.

  An explosion rocked the arcade. Hot metal shards and red flames shot out in all directions, and black smoke mushroomed into the blue afternoon sky. Raynor flattened himself to the ground to avoid the shrapnel. He had no time to alert Kopelman behind him, only hoped the old guy would make it around the corner of the building at the intersection before shrapnel perforated his heavy frame.

  Kolt looked back, did not see the sixty-year-old, hoped like hell he’d not run into trouble on the main street. Kolt clambered back to his knees, saw even more blood all over the right side of his shirt now from where he’d slashed his arm in the fall through the kiosk roof. He ignored it — the arm worked and the bleeding hadn’t slowed him yet. His adrenaline warded off the exhaustion he’d otherwise suffer from the exertion of the past ten minutes, though it would not protect him from uncontrolled blood loss.

  He left the empty rifle in the street and ducked into a nearby stall. There he found one young shopkeeper cowering in the shadows. Kolt just pushed by him and grabbed the only rifle he could find, a long and heavy Lee Enfield bolt-action replica. He hefted it off the wall, turned to the boy, and in Pashto he shouted, “Where are bullets?” The kid pointed to a shelf: leather pouches full of cartridges were stacked three deep. Raynor grabbed one and slung the carry strap over his neck, took the time to load the unfamiliar weapon with five rounds, all the while looking out into the street for more enemy. Blood dripped off his arm as if from a leaky faucet. It drained down his hand and between his fingers, even wetting the cartridges and the breech of the big rifle.

  Also in the kiosk, hanging from a nail on a support beam, was a Makarov pistol in a leather holster built into a long bandolier. Kolt slung this over his head as well, turned back to the kid to ask where the bullets were for this gun, but caught only a quick glimpse of the boy running away.

  He did not take the time to hunt for the handgun ammunition; instead, he ran back out onto the stairs, shouldered up to the corner of the building at the intersection, and looked around it.

  Bob was there, in the street, lying on his side. His shotgun was ten feet from his outstretched hand. It looked as if he’d slipped in a puddle there in the dust.

  But it was not a puddle of water, it was blood. Bob’s blood. He’d been shot through the chest. Kolt had not heard the round, did not know from which direction it had come.

  “No!” Raynor shouted, and he ran toward the older man, darted out into the street to grab him and pull him to safety. Immediately the road tore apart in front of him — bullets stitched up the road, and bits of stone and dirt and dust flew into the air between his run and his fallen partner. Raynor spun around and dove back out of the street, back behind the baked-mud building at the corner of the intersection.

  On his chest in the alleyway now he crawled back around. Bob was still there, crumpled on his side of the street. He was moving still. His big body twitched and his chest wheezed.

  “Bob! Don’t move! I’m coming to get you. Just sit tight and I’ll — ”

  Kopelman looked up at Raynor. He did not speak, just blew out one more long breath as his life left his body.

  Bob stilled, and his eyes locked open in death, his irises rolled back. Fifteen feet from Raynor.

  Kolt stood up. He felt weak and tired suddenly. Slowly he turned away, left Bob’s body behind, and began walking back up the hill.

  * * *

  A minute later he’d found a tiny space between two kiosks in the arcade. He pushed through, came out onto another busy alleyway, hid his bloody arm as much as possible from the crowds of agitated locals. He carried his rifle under his arm, business end down. A couple of people looked at him in surprise, noticing the dirt and blood and sweat, but Kolt assumed that the situation had been so chaotic, they could not all know that he had been part of the gunfight. He could just as easily have been an innocent victim of all the shooting or of the explosion to the east. Kolt felt his body tiring quickly. He didn’t think he could run again even if his life depended on it, so he just strolled along with the foot traffic, made his way back down to the main road, started to turn to the left because he knew Bob’s body would be in the street fifty yards to his right, and he did not want to see it or the crowd that inevitably would have formed around it.

  But turning left he saw something just as disheartening.

  Jamal’s yellow Hilux was there, surrounded by a half-dozen Taliban. Jamal was standing outside it, arms high, the muzzle of a Kalashnikov to the back of his head.

  No.

  Kolt retreated back into the alleyway. He checked behind him — there were a few people walking around, but he didn’t see any Taliban.

  He looked back around the corner once again. He knew that
if he could do anything for the young Afghan who’d saved his life, it would be right now, right this second, before Jamal was led away from the Hilux, taken away in a truck or pushed off for interrogation by more black-turbaned assholes.

  Now or never, Raynor said to himself. He raised the heavy rifle, hoped like hell it was accurate at fifty yards, and lined it up on the man with the gun at Jamal’s head. Jamal stood right by the open door to his truck. Kolt hoped he could remove the immediate threat to him. Then, if the kid had any sense, he would dive into his Hilux and take off.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but Jamal’s chances would be zero if the Taliban hustled him away from the scene.

  Kolt Raynor fired the Lee Enfield. He did not look to see if his round hit the man covering Jamal. Instead, he racked the bolt of the heavy gun and quickly sighted on the next closest man. Fired again. Racked the bolt again and fired on a third target. He expected, at any moment, to be machine-gunned from behind. But he didn’t give a shit. The intel had been sent to the CIA. Bob was dead.

  There was nothing else he could do for T.J. and Eagle 01.

  Kolt did not give a damn if he lived or died anymore.

  He was done.

  He manipulated the bolt a third time, and then a fourth, lining up his sights each time on a fresh gunman.

  After he fired the fifth round his smoking rifle was spent. He ejected the last empty cartridge, sending it arcing through the air ahead of a stream of gray smoke. Incoming gunfire began pocking the street and the building next to him. He paused only to look at the scene ahead.

  Five dead men in the street, more running or crawling for cover.

  The Hilux speeding off in the opposite direction.

  “Go, kid!” Kolt shouted, hoping Jamal could make it out of town, dump the car, and then find his way out of Peshawar. It would not be safe for him around here, and there wasn’t a damned thing Kolt Raynor could do to help him.

  Kolt turned back into the alley. Men scattered, hid in their shops or ran like hell into side streets. Others dived into rickshaws or pedaled their bicycles out of the way, desperate to get clear of yet another gun battle.

  Kolt dropped the empty rifle, took the leather ammo satchel off his neck, and threw it down as well. He forced himself to jog away, armed now with only an empty Makarov replica.

  A minute later he made his way out onto a small side street. A lone taxicab sat parked in the dust. A driver behind the wheel shouted into his cell phone.

  Raynor climbed into the back of the taxi. The man turned and looked at him, saw the blood, the sweat, the torn tunic.

  The Western features.

  “Get out!” he screamed in Pashto.

  Kolt pulled the empty Makarov pistol and jabbed the muzzle against the driver’s forehead, pressing it hard into the man’s black prayer cap. “Drive!” he said in Pashto, and the man spun around to his steering wheel and complied. Kolt kept the weapon in the back of the cab driver’s neck as they left Darra Adam Khel, heading back north on the Peshawar — Hayatabad road.

  THIRTY-NINE

  T.J. and his men had awakened slowly that morning, as usual, and then sat around in the dark talking once again about Racer’s visit three nights earlier. Zar and his men had been up that entire night, several times barging in on the chained Americans and standing there silently, glaring at the prisoners as if trying to decide if they really did have no idea what was going on. T.J. found out from a guard the next day that, as far as Zar and company knew, a junior AQ man and one of the local Taliban guards got into a fight with a knife and a gun, and they both lost.

  Josh and the boys decided that Kolt must have killed one of the men out of necessity, and then killed the other to stage the crime scene to cover up his presence in the fort. Kolt’s ruse had worked, and the Delta men in the tiny cell now only prayed that Raynor had made it all the way to safety.

  This morning had continued just as every other morning here at Zar’s camp. A breakfast of tea and flatbread, a daily team prayer service led by one of the staff sergeants, some mild calisthenics there on the small dirt floor in the cramped confines of their chamber, and then back to the bunks for discussion and idle conversation.

  Lunch came after noon, again, just like every other day. And then after lunch, they returned to the discussion of Racer’s visit, and then slept, dreaming of freedom.

  Everything changed in the middle of the afternoon. Men entered the cell, Zar’s men, and Zar Afridi himself followed behind them. There was a nervousness in the actions of all the visitors. Few words were spoken, the three sergeants were ordered to sit on their cots, and T.J. was ordered out of the cell.

  At gunpoint he was led out into the sunny afternoon and then ordered to dunk his long hair and bearded face in a water bucket positioned by a low stepstool. He did as he was told, then sat on the stool. Hurriedly an old man came toward him with a long straight razor.

  T.J. shot to his feet, and his arms rose in defense. Zar stepped forward, spoke to his prisoner in Pashto. “No, my friend, it is fine. We have been instructed to cut your hair and to shave you. To put you in new, clean clothes.”

  “Ordered by who?”

  “TTP,” Zar said. T.J. knew he was talking about Tehrik-i-Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban.

  If this news was supposed to put T.J. at ease, it failed miserably. He asked, “Why?”

  “I do not know.”

  Timble looked over the old man with the razor. He certainly did not appear as if he had nefarious intentions. Josh asked if he could just shave himself and cut his own hair, but no one, Zar Afridi included, was going to let him wield a straight razor.

  In ten minutes it was done. He’d had his head shaved just once in the past three years. Up in Hazara the previous summer the prisoners had been so infested with lice that their captors had had to remove all their hair. Otherwise, the men had worn long hair and beards, just like their Pashtun jailers, but only Bouncer, a Puerto Rican staff sergeant named Tony Marquez, looked much like a Pashtun.

  T.J. reentered the cell. His men just stared at his thin, bare face, and then Marquez was led out of the room.

  The barber made quick work of all the others. One of the men even caught a glimpse of the CIA helicopter pilot, Skip Knighton, as he was led from the main building to get his head shaved.

  Afterward, back in the darkness of their cell, the men of Eagle 01 tried to figure out what was going on. Were they to be released? Were they to be involved with the Chechens in the phony American Rangers uniforms? No one knew.

  In the early evening, Lieutenant Colonel Josh Timble heard a commotion in the compound outside the walls of his cell. Quickly he and Staff Sergeant Troy “Spike” Kilborn placed the two rope cots on top of one another, and Josh climbed upon them. Staff Sergeant Tony “Bouncer” Marquez, the fittest of the four men housed in the twelve-foot-square hut, hustled onto the shaky contraption and dropped down onto his hands and knees. T.J. climbed onto Marquez, pulled himself up to the vent slat at the top of the wall, and looked out into the compound, while Staff Sergeant Tim “Roscoe” Haynes held him steady from behind.

  It was foggy, and the sun’s direct light had left the valley for the day. Out of the low light and the mist, three four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup trucks with canvas-covered beds pulled to a stop on the long driveway not fifty feet from the Americans’ cell. A dozen men climbed from the vehicles. T.J. tried to identify the new arrivals to Zar’s compound from his lousy vantage point. He could tell only that they were all armed and that most wore prayer caps or bare heads. At first glance they did not look like the Pakistani Taliban he had been around the majority of his time in captivity. He noticed Zar Afridi himself come out to greet the men. The warlord walked with several of his militia by his side.

  T.J. expected to witness the long and friendly Pashtun greeting, followed by a slow walk either toward the hurja on the far side of the fortress, or at least toward Zar’s main building. But there was no greeting, only a rushed conversation while all fifteen me
n marched directly toward the Americans’ cell.

  “Down, down,” Josh instructed, and Roscoe helped him down from the vent. Spike and Bouncer scrambled to put the cots back in place.

  All four men had just made it back to their respective positions when the iron door was unlocked with a series of loud clangs and the gritty sliding of an old iron bolt, and more early-evening light shot into the room in a growing shaft that reached T.J. on his cot against the far wall.

  “Everyone up!” The first man through the door shouted it in English. Zar’s two sentries held handcuffs and leg irons. They hustled around the men who entered the cell and began restraining the four Americans.

  T.J. looked at the English speaker. He was young, early thirties tops, and he wore a long black beard and long black hair. His skin was very fair, his eyes were hazel green, and his posture was proud and erect. His two words of English were surprisingly clear for a Pashtun or an Arab. T.J. wondered if he might be a Westerner.

  Next to him stood a man T.J. recognized. He was the AQ man in the glasses who had come in with the German and the Chechen “Rangers” a few weeks back. At the time, Timble had been concentrating on the fake Americans. But now he focused on the al Qaeda operative. He was in his late thirties, had well-manicured hands and a clean bearded face.

  And he possessed the coldest black eyes Timble had ever seen.

  Spike had commented after this man’s last visit to the cell that his accent was certainly Turkish. T.J. hadn’t noticed, but Spike knew languages better than anyone else on the team.

  As Josh felt the hot metal cuffs snap on his ankles, repeating a miserable process that he’d been subjected to hundreds of times in the past thirty-six months, he suspected that the time for the mysterious operation, in which he and his men would be probably be unwilling participants, had just come.

  “Where are we going?” he asked the AQ man in Turkish. He did not know much of the language, but he wanted to assert himself by showing this al Qaeda strongman that he knew the man’s country of origin.