One step at a time. Nine bodies behind him, all men, all in their twenties, too young to have any useful information, probably, and Gitmo had enough useless people sitting inside the wire. Thirty years or older-then maybe he would have been better advised to spare their lives and have an intel guy talk to them. But they’d all been too young, and they were all now dead.
Back to work.
Nothing more to be seen here. But there was still a faint glow ahead. Maybe another candle. His eyes looked down every few feet, looking for some stones that might have generated some noise, and noise was his most dangerous enemy at the moment. Noise woke people up, especially in a place like this. Echoes. That was why he had soft soles on his boots. The next turn went to the left, and it looked sharper. Time to slow down again. A sharp turn meant a sentry spot. Slowly, slowly. Four meters. Twelve feet or so. Slowly, gently. Like creeping into his baby’s bedroom to look at her lying in her crib. But he worried about a grown man around the corner, holding a rifle, and fitfully asleep. He still had his pistol out, held in both hands, the soda can-like suppressor screwed on the front end. Eleven rounds left in the magazine. He stopped and turned. Both of the other Rangers were still there, eyes locked on him. Not scared but tense and focused as hell. Tait and Young, two sergeants from Delta Company, Second Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. Real serious pros, as he was, both looking to make the Army a career.
Eyes on the job. It was hard, sometimes, to keep focus. Another couple of feet to the corner. It was a sharp corner. Driscoll eased up to it… and stuck his head around the corner. There was somebody nearby. An Afghan, or some sort of gomer, sitting on a… chair? No, a rock, it appeared. This one was older than he’d expected. Maybe thirty. The guy was just sitting, not quite asleep, but not awake, either. Sort of in between, and definitely not paying attention. The man had a weapon, an AK-74, maybe four feet away from his hands, leaning against a rock. Close, but not close enough to reach in a real emergency, which the guy was about to have on his hands.
Driscoll approached quietly, moving his legs in an exaggerated way, getting close, and-
He clubbed the guy’s head on the right side. Maybe enough to kill, but probably not. Driscoll reached into his field-jacket pockets and pulled out a set of plastic flex-cuffs. This one was probably old enough for the spooks to talk to, would probably end up at Gitmo. He’d let Tait and Young wrap him up for transport. He caught Tait’s attention, pointed to the unconscious form, and made a twirling motion with his index finger: Wrap him up. Tait nodded in return.
Another turn ahead, five more meters away, to the right, and the glow was flickering.
Six more feet, then right.
Driscoll didn’t lose focus now. Slow, careful steps, weapon held in tight.
The next chamber, which measured roughly ten meters by ten meters, turned out to be the end. He was, what, maybe seventy meters inside the cave. Deep enough. This cave probably had been set up for one of the important ones. Maybe the important one? He’d know in three more minutes. He didn’t often allow himself that sort of thought. But that was the underlying reason for this mission. Maybe, maybe, maybe. That was why Driscoll was a special ops Ranger. Forward, slowly. His hand went up behind him.
It was so dark now that his PVS-17 night-vision goggles were displaying as much receiver noise as proper image now, like little bits of popcorn in his field of view, popping and flitting around. He eased to the edge of the turn and very carefully looked around the corner. Somebody there, lying down. There was an AK-47 close by, complete with a preloaded plastic magazine, within easy reach. The guy appeared to be asleep, but in that respect they were good soldiers. They didn’t sleep all the way, like civilians did, but hovered just below full wakefulness. And he wanted this one alive. Okay, fine, he’d killed a handful of people so far this night, just in the last ten minutes, but this one they wanted alive… if possible…
All right. Driscoll switched his pistol to his right hand, and with his left pulled a flashbang off his chest web gear. Tait and Young saw this and froze in place. The cave was about to change. Driscoll held up one finger. Tait gave his senior sergeant a thumbs-up. Time to rock and roll. Gomer was about to get his wake-up call. Tait looked around. One small candle that lit up the chamber nicely. Driscoll took a step or two back, flipped off his NV, and pulled the pin on the grenade. He let the safety spoon fly free, let it cook for a beat, then he tossed it, counting, a thousand one, a thousand two, a thousand three…
It sounded like the end of the world. The ten grams of magnesium powder bloomed like the noonday sun, but even brighter than that. And the noise. The noise did sound and feel like the end of the world, a crashing BANG that ended whatever sleep the gomer was enjoying. Then Driscoll went in. He was not stunned by the explosion. He’d expected it, and so his ears had adjusted to the noise and he’d closed his eyes to attenuate the magnitude of the flash. The gomer had enjoyed no such protection. His ears had been assaulted, and that adversely affected his balance. He didn’t even reach for his nearby weapon-but Driscoll had leaped inward to bat it away, and a moment later he had his pistol right in the gomer’s face. He had no chance to resist at all, but that was Driscoll’s intention.
That’s when Driscoll saw it was the wrong target. He had a beard, but he was in his early thirties, not anywhere near his forties. Wrong gomer was his immediate thought, followed by Shit. The face was the embodiment of confusion and shock. He was shaking his head, trying to get his brain initialized, but young and tough as he was, he wasn’t fast enough for the necessities of the moment.
Near the back wall of the chamber Driscoll saw movement, a shadow hunched over, sliding along the rock wall. Not moving toward them but somewhere else. Driscoll holstered his pistol, turned to Tait, then pointed at the gomer on the ground-Cuff ’em-then flipped on his NV and dropped the M4’s sights over the moving shadow. Another bearded gomer. His finger tightened on the trigger, but he held off, now curious. Ten feet behind the man, still leaning against the wall where he’d left it, was an AK-47. Clearly he’d heard the flashbang and knew the shit was coming down, so was he making a break for it? Driscoll wondered. Still tracking him with the M4’s sights, Driscoll led him, looking for an exit… There: a five-foot-wide alcove in the rock wall. He scanned back and now saw the gomer had a grenade in his right hand. It was a 40-millimeter version of an RPG-7; locals were fond of converting the round into hand-thrown versions.
Not so fast, bud, Driscoll thought, and laid the M4’s sights across the man’s ear. Even as he was doing this the man cocked his arm back, underhand, to toss the grenade. Driscoll’s 5.56-millimeter slug entered just above the man’s ear and just behind his eye. His head snapped sideways, and he crumpled, but not before the grenade was flying, bouncing toward the alcove.
“Grenade!” Driscoll shouted and dropped flat.
Crump!
Driscoll looked up and around. “Head count!”
“Okay,” Tait replied, followed in quick succession by Young and the others.
The grenade had bounced off the wall and rolled to a stop before the alcove, leaving behind a beach ball-sized crater in the dirt.
Driscoll took off his PVS-17s and took out his flashlight. This he turned on and played it about. This was the command segment of the cave. Lots of bookshelves, even a rug on the floor of the cave. Most Afghans they’d met were only semiliterate, but there were books and magazines in evidence, some of the latter in English, in fact. One sparsely filled shelf with nicely bound leather-sided books. One in particular… green leather, gold-inlaid. Driscoll flipped it open. An illuminated manuscript, printed-not printed by a machine but by the hand of some long-dead scribe in multicolored ink. This book was old, really old. In Arabic, so it appeared, written by hand and illuminated with gold leaf. This had to be a copy of the Holy Koran, and there was no telling its age or relative value. But it had value. Driscoll took it. Some spook would want to look at it. Back at Kabul they had a couple of Saudis, senior military officers who wer
e backing up the Special Operations people and the Army spooks.
“Okay, Peterson, we’re clear. Code it up and call it in,” Driscoll radioed to his communications specialist. “Target secure. Nine tangos down for the count, two prisoners taken alive. Zero friendly casualties.”
“But nothing under the Christmas tree, Santa,” Sergeant Young said quietly. “Damn, this one felt pretty good coming in. Had the right vibe, I thought.” One more dry hole for the Special Operations troops. They’d drilled too many of those already, but that was the nature of Special Operations.
“Me, too. What’s your name, Gomer?” Driscoll asked Tait’s prisoner. There was no response. The flashbang had really tumbled this bastard’s gyros. He didn’t yet understand that it could have been worse. A whole shitload worse. Then again, once the interrogators got ahold of him…
“All right, guys, let’s clean this hole out. Look for a computer and any electronic stuff. Turn it upside down and inside out. If it looks interesting, bag it. Get somebody in here to take our friend.”
There was a Chinook on short-fuse alert for this mission, and maybe he’d be aboard it in under an hour. Damn, he wanted to hit the Fort Benning NCO club for a glass of Sam Adams, but that wouldn’t be for a couple of days at best.
While the remainder of his team was setting up an overwatch perimeter outside the cave entrance, Young and Tait searched the entrance tunnel, found a few goodies, maps and such, but no obvious jackpot. That was the way with these things, though. Weenies or not, the intel guys could make a meal out of a walnut. A little scrap of paper, a handwritten Koran, a stick figure drawn in purple crayon-the intel guys could sometimes work miracles with that stuff, which was why Driscoll wasn’t taking any chances. Their target hadn’t been here, and that was a goddamned shame, but maybe the shit the gomers had left behind might lead to something else, which in turn could lead to something good. That’s the way it worked, though Driscoll didn’t dwell on that stuff much. Above his pay grade and out of his MOS-military occupational specialty. Give him and the Rangers the mission, let somebody else worry about the hows and whats and whys.
Driscoll walked to the rear of the cave, playing his flashlight around until he reached the alcove the gomer had seemed so keen to frag. It was about the size of a walk-in closet, he now saw, maybe a little bigger, with a low-hanging ceiling. He crouched down and waddled a few feet into the alcove.
“Whatcha got?” Tait said, coming up behind him.
“Sand table and a wooden ammo crate.”
A flat piece of three-fourths-inch-thick plywood, about two meters square to each side, covered in glued-on sand and papier-mâché mountains and ridges, scatterings of boxlike buildings here and there. It looked like something in one of those old-time World War Two movies, or a grade-school diorama. Pretty good job, too, not something half-assed you sometimes see with these guys. More often than not the gomers here drew a plan in the dirt, said some prayers, then went at it.
The terrain didn’t look familiar to Driscoll. Could be anywhere, but it sure as hell looked rugged enough to be around here, which didn’t narrow down the possibilities much. No landmarks, either. No buildings, no roads. Driscoll lifted the corner of the table. It was damned heavy, maybe eighty pounds, which solved one of Driscoll’s problems: no way they were going to haul that thing down the mountain. It was a goddamned brick hang glider; at this altitude the wind was a bitch, and they’d either lose the thing in a gust or it would start flapping and give them away. And breaking it up might ruin something of value.
“Okay, take some measurements and some samples, then go see if Smith is done taking shots of the gomers’ faces and photograph the hell out of this thing,” Driscoll ordered. “How many SD cards we got?”
“Six. Four gigs each. Plenty.”
“Good. Multiple shots of everything, highest resolution. Get some extra lights on it, too, and drop something beside for scale.”
“Reno’s got a tape measure.”
“Good. Use it. Plenty of angles and close-ups-the more, the better.” That was the beauty of digital cameras-take as many as you want and delete the bad ones. In this case they’d leave the deleting to the intel folks. “And check every inch for markings.”
Never could tell what was important. A lot would depend on the model’s scale, he suspected. If it was to scale they might be able to plug the measurements into a computer, do a little funky algebra or algorithms or whatever they used, and come up with a match somewhere. Who knew, maybe the papier-mâché stuff would turn out to be special or something, made only in some back-alley shop in Kandahar. Stranger shit had happened, and he wasn’t about to give the higher-ups anything to bitch about. They’d be angry enough that their quarry hadn’t been here, but that wasn’t Driscoll’s fault. Pre-mission intelligence, bad or good or otherwise, was beyond a soldier’s control. Still, the old saying in the military, “Shit runs downhill,” was as true as ever, and in this business there was always someone uphill from you, ready to give the shit ball a shove.
“You got it, boss,” Tait said.
“Frag it when you’re done. Might as well finish the job they should have done.”
Tait trotted off.
Driscoll turned his attention to the ammo box, picking it up and carrying it into the entrance tunnel. Inside was a stack of paper about three inches thick-some lined notebook paper covered in Arabic script, some random numbers and doodles-and a large two-sided foldout map. One side was labeled “Sheet Operational Navigation Chart, G-6, Defense Mapping Agency, 1982” and displayed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, while the other, held in place with masking tape, was a map of Peshawar torn from a Baedeker’s travel guide.
4
WELCOME TO AMERICAN AIRSPACE, gentlemen,” the copilot announced.
They were about to overfly Montana, home of elk, big skies, and a whole lot of decommissioned ICBM bases with empty silos.
They’d be burning fuel a lot faster down here, but the computer took notice of all that, and they had a much better reserve than what they’d had westbound over the Atlantic a few hours before-with a lot of usable fields down below to land on. The pilot turned on the heads-up display, which used low-light cameras to turn the darkness into green-and-white mono-color TV. Now it showed mountains to the west of their course track. The aircraft would automatically gain altitude to compensate, programmed as it was to maintain one thousand feet AGL-above ground level-and to do so with gentle angles, to keep his wealthy passengers happy and, he hoped, turn them into repeat customers.
The aircraft eased up to a true altitude of 6,100 feet as they passed over the lizard-back spine of the Grand Teton Range. Somewhere down there was Yellowstone National Park. In daylight he could have seen it, but it was a cloudless and moonless night.
The radar-sending systems showed they were “clear of conflict.” No other aircraft was close to their position or altitude. Mountain Home Air Force Base was a few hundred miles behind them, along with its complement of young piss-and-vinegar fighter pilots.
“Pity we can’t steer the HUD off the nose. Might even see the buffalo on the infrared sensors,” he observed. “They are making a real comeback in the West, I’ve read.”
“Along with the wolves,” the copilot responded. Nature was about balance, or so the Discovery Channel said. Not enough bison, the wolves die. Not enough wolves, the bison overproduce.
Utah’s countryside started off mountainous but gradually settled down to rolling flatness. They again maneuvered east to avoid Salt Lake City, which had an international airport and, probably, a sufficiently powerful radar to get a skin-paint.
This entire exercise would have been impossible thirty years earlier. They would have had to cross the Pinetree Line, one of the predecessors to America’s DEW-Distant Early Warning-Lines, and alert the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Well, given the current tensions between the United States and Russia, maybe the DEW and Pinetree would be recommissioned.
The ride was smoother than he’d expected. Riding in daylight, in summer, over the desert, could be bumpy indeed, what with the irregular rising thermal currents. Except for a few automobile headlights, the land below might as well have been the sea, so empty and black it was.
Thirty minutes to go. They were down to 9,000 pounds of fuel. The engines burned it a lot faster down here, just over 5,000 pounds per hour instead of the usual 3,400 or so.
“Wake the passengers up?” the copilot asked.
“Good idea.” The pilot lifted the microphone. “Attention. We expect to land in thirty minutes. Let us know if you have any special needs. Thank you,” he added. Thank you indeed for the money, and the interesting flight profile, he did not add.
The pilot and copilot both wondered who the passengers were but asked no questions. Upholding customer anonymity was part of the job, and though what they were doing was technically illegal, probably, by American law, they weren’t American citizens. They were not carrying guns, drugs, or anything else illegal. In any case, they didn’t know their passenger from Adam, and his face was wrapped in bandages anyway.
“Hundred miles, according to the computer. I hope the runway really is that long.”
“Chart says it is. Two thousand six hundred meters. We’ll know soon enough.”
Dead or Alive Page 3