by Marc Cameron
“Because of your ex-wife?” Garcia went out on a limb.
“Maybe so.” Quinn shrugged. “But don’t necessarily expect the same resolve when I’m at altitudes below ten thousand feet.”
“I’ll make a note of that.” She grinned.
Garcia stripped down to her black wool long johns before kneeling to crawl in the vestibule door. Exhausted or not, she hoped Quinn was watching her.
She wore the floppy Nepalese hat to bed. Using her rolled fleece jacket as a pillow, she tugged her side of the blanket tight around her shoulders as he maneuvered beside her. He piled the riding jackets over their feet but kept the blanket on his side turned down to his waist. Cuban versus Alaska blood, she thought. It made sense.
“Why did your parents pick Jericho?” she asked in the darkness.
Quinn sighed. He clicked on his headlamp and rolled up on his shoulder to stare at her. “I thought you were exhausted.”
She batted her eyelashes, hoping she didn’t look too much like a silly cow.
He snapped off the light and threw an arm across his forehead, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “My dad wanted to name me Gideon, but his sister stole the name for my cousin a month before I was born. I guess they figured Jericho was the next best name from the story ... Gideon’s trumpet and all.”
Ronnie couldn’t help but think he was in his element—hostile terrain in a hostile country.
“What’s he do now? This cousin of yours.”
“A big-shot banker in Anchorage,” he said. “Pretty wealthy, as a matter of fact.”
“Banker or secret government agent ... let me see... .”
“He’s home in a soft bed right now.” Quinn rearranged the blanket, trying to situate his body between the rocks under the tent floor.
For a long moment there was no sound but distant wind and rivers.
“You know this really sucks,” Ronnie said suddenly, not quite ready to give up Quinn’s company to sleep.
“Why’s that?” he said through a long yawn. She could just make out the outline of his chest, rising and falling in the shadows.
“Well, most couples have these sorts of sweet little conversations when they’re breathless and spent. You have to lie there and listen to me snore and pass gas all night without any of the ... you know, fringe benefits.”
Quinn yawned again, longer this time, shuddering. “Could be worse. You could have night terrors and wake up trying to kill someone.”
She scrunched up next to him, stealing the warmth of his body. Smelling the musky odor of his skin.
“Is that what you do?”
“Only when I’m extremely tired ...”
Through the darkness, she thought she saw him smile.
MONDAY
October 2
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Dawn took its time in the protected valleys of the High Pamir. The mist was gone, but the morning would linger gray and clammy-cold for hours before the sun finally peeked over the knife ridges high above. A brisk wind popped at the tent fly.
Quinn stirred under the blankets, feeling the familiar aches in his shoulders and hips from too many nights on the unforgiving ground. His hands felt like claws from gripping the Enfield’s handlebars all day. The effects of the fight with Umar left him with a stiff neck and a wrenched knee that was sure to give him problems when he got older. He thought of the Chinese proverb: When two tigers fight, one is injured beyond repair—and the other one is dead.
During the night Ronnie had rolled half on top of him. Her arm flailed across his chest, the warmth of a long leg draped over his thigh. Quinn lay still for a moment, feeling the moist, fluttering puff of her exhausted breathing against his neck.
Bootystan, he thought. Jacques, Jacques, Jacques. If you could only see me now ...
Trying not to wake her, he wriggled out of the tent, stifling a gasp as he stepped into his chilly riding pants and stiff Haix patrol boots. He munched a piece of naan from his day pack—courtesy of Umar’s wife—and swung his arms trying to warm up. In the muted light, he could just make out the outline of a path he hadn’t noticed the night before. Likely a game trail used by ibex or Marco Polo sheep, it ran at an angle to a small plateau about a two hundred feet above the camp.
“What do you see?”
Quinn jumped at Ronnie’s voice behind him. She’d poked her head out the tent door.
“I’m thinking I’d like to take a look at what’s up there. It might give me a glimpse of what’s ahead of us.”
“Take the bike.” She yawned, catlike. “I’m awake. Anyway, a girl could use a little privacy first thing in the morning.”
Quinn looked down at the Breitling. “Oh-seven-fifty Afghan time,” he said. “I should be back in twenty minutes.”
“Sounds good.” She pulled her head back inside the tent. “I’ll heat up some of that goat’s head soup or whatever it was.”
The trail up the mountain was strewn with baseball-sized rocks and steep enough Quinn had to keep the bike going forward or risk sliding back down. Umar had replaced the little bike’s stock Avon tires with decent enough Chinese-made Cheng Shin knobbies suitable for the washouts and gravel roads of the western frontier. It climbed without complaint.
The trouble with the Enfield was that, being old-school, some parts were prone to break. The bolts that held on the muffler had sheared off somewhere along the way since they’d left Kashgar. Quinn knew he’d have to figure out a way to jury-rig the exhaust before it fell off or risk deafness and an avalanche from blatting engine noise.
The bikes had their flaws, but the simple beauty of the Enfield was its fixability. Every village from the southern tip of India to the Mongolian Steppe had at least one shade tree mechanic who was familiar enough with the thumper to repair it with little more than a metal file and a screwdriver. Quinn felt confident he’d be able to figure something out when he got back to camp.
At the top of the goat path he was greeted by row after endless row of jagged peaks and rivers of flowing glacier ice. The world seemed nothing but muted shades of blue and slate gray.
The trail he’d hoped to scout disappeared around yet another plateau. It was easy to see how someone could hide in such a forgotten place high on the roof of the world.
Disappointed, Quinn turned the bike, rolling it to the lip before starting the short but steep ride back to camp. His breath caught hard in his chest when he peered over the edge and he took a reflexive step back, out of sight.
Less than two hundred feet below, a pair of men in rolled Afghan Pakol hats and knee-length shalwar kameez shirts fingered through their gear. A third man Quinn recognized as the young camel herder from the day before stood behind Ronnie, pinning her arms.
Adrenaline surged through Quinn’s body as he realized he had no weapons. Each of the men had a rifle slung over his shoulder. In this part of the world, they were sure to have knives as well.
Every few seconds the camel herder craned his long neck to gaze up the trail, obviously expecting Quinn to return from that direction. He’d likely convinced his friends to travel all night in order to rob the rich tourists. The other two bandits tossed through clothing and camping gear as they searched for anything of value. It wouldn’t be long before they realized the only thing in camp worth selling was Veronica Garcia.
Quinn formed his plan as he went, relying on instinct over intellect. Jumping from the Enfield, he found a rock and bashed at the damaged muffler where it joined the straight pipe coming directly off the engine. In seconds he was able to shear the remaining screw and rip the muffler away.
Moments later he sat aboard the silent bike. A soft wind blew in his face. Looking over the edge, he shifted into third. He kept an eye on Ronnie while he slipped the Breitling from his wrist and unscrewed the crown on the lower barrel that contained the emergency location transmitter. He stopped short of pulling out the wire that would activate the satellite beacon.
Gripping the watch between his teeth, Quinn made certain t
he Enfield’s ignition switch was turned on. For his plan to work, he’d need the element of surprise and a hell of a lot of luck. The camel herder already knew he was unarmed—but he hadn’t counted on the Breitling.
Quinn pressed the clutch so he could pop it when he wanted to start the bike, and released the brake. He was rolling.
A hundred feet above the bandits, the trail leveled before making the final drop to camp. Quinn popped the clutch here. The Bullet’s 499cc engine shuddered, skidding the back wheel in the loose gray shale. Thankfully, it caught enough traction and thumped to life. Without a muffler the little bike rattled and popped like a fifty cal.
“Made like a gun,” Quinn whispered the Royal Enfield slogan through gritted teeth. And that was just how he intended to use it.
Rolling on all the power he had, he yanked back on the handlebars, praying they didn’t snap off in his hands. The bike rose to an agitated wheelie, bouncing over the rocks, rearing like an angry horse.
Two of the men dove for cover at the sound of a sudden attack. The camel herder shoved Ronnie to the side. He brought up the Kalashnikov and began to fire.
The Enfield’s chassis and engine gave Quinn some protection from the gunfire, but he was thankful the guy used the regional “spray and pray” tactic with no attempt at aiming his shots.
Rocks and debris skittered down the mountain ahead of the bike. The deafening crack-crack-crack of rifle fire and motorcycle engine slammed off the cliffs and echoed through the canyons. Thirty feet out, Quinn used his teeth to tug the coiled antenna wire on the Breitling, activating the locator beacon. He tossed the watch toward the two bandits standing beside his gear and plowed the Enfield straight into the camel driver, sending him and the bike over the edge and flailing through empty space.
Quinn bailed off the bike a split second before the front wheel impacted the startled man in the chest. He grabbed Garcia by the arm.
“Run, run, run!” he yelled, dragging her over the edge.
An instant later the high clouds gave a piercing hiss and a Hellfire missile struck the men above with pinpoint accuracy. The entire mountain shook with the explosion.
On the narrow ledge below, Ronnie screamed. Her wrist slipped from Quinn’s grip and they began to slide on loose shale toward the jagged lip of rock—and oblivion.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Northern Virginia
Jacques Thibodaux paced the oblong tile floor in front of the bank of blinking flat-screen computer monitors and glowing digitized maps of China and Afghanistan. The whir of cooling fans gave the place the feeling of a giant white noise machine. Thibodaux had to keep his hands behind his back to keep from slapping the big-eared Air Force staff sergeant sitting behind a computerized instrument panel and beefed-up military version of a game controller. On the wall above hung a three-foot blue banner bearing the motto of his secret unit in ornate golden script: hic sunt dracones —“Here There Be Dragons.”
A red dot pulsed on the tightly stacked topographic lines of the map, seventeen miles across the Chinese border into the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
An emotionless female voice, like the ones that warned military pilots to “pull up, pull up” and avoid low terrain, sounded the alarm of “Impact ... impact ...” followed by a repeated set of GPS coordinates.
Staff Sergeant Guttman, the big-eared object of the Marine’s wrath, banged away furiously at the keyboard beside his game controller. His wide eyes blinked in teenage dismay at the instrument display on the panel before him.
A video game prodigy, he was one of a new generation of Air Force pilots assigned to Detachment Seven, the highly classified unit within the Fifty-third Test and Evaluation Group based at Eglin AFB. He was the primary pilot of the AX7 Damocles, a top-secret, Tier III—high-altitude, low-observable drone. Developed by Lockheed Martin’s infamous Skunk Works project office, Damocles differed from the RQ-170 Sentinel in several ways, the most notable being that it carried a payload of weapons. Like the mythical sword on a single horsehair, Damo could loiter above the enemy for nearly two days at altitudes well over sixty-five thousand feet.
The emotionless female voice continued: “Impact ... impact ...”
Thibodaux stopped to rest both hands flat on the counter, breathing down the kid’s neck. “Somebody wanna tell me what Bitchin’ Betty’s talkin’ about?”
“I swear, sir.” Guttman looked up, terrified. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t deploy anything.”
Win Palmer sat in a leather office chair along the back wall of the narrow control room, across from Staff Sergeant Guttman. The windowless trailer was more like a submarine than an Air Force control center. The national security advisor’s arms were folded across the chest of his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“What deployed?” Palmer asked. “A Tomahawk or the Hellfire?”
“The one-fourteen, sir,” Guttman chirped, his voice cracking from youth and fear. “The Hellfire.”
“Very good,” Palmer said. He leaned back, nodding as if relieved. “Damocles is normally armed with four Tomahawk missiles. We replaced one with a Hellfire to give Quinn close air support for this mission.”
“And?” Thibodaux wanted to say, What the hell does that mean? But even he knew there were limits to ways you spoke to the president’s right-hand man.
“The Breitling Mrs. Miyagi gave him,” Palmer explained. “We programed Damocles to lock on to the watch when the ELT antenna was activated. The Hellfire would then deploy on a two-second delay. With travel time from altitude, that would give Quinn between five and seven seconds before impact.”
“You mean to tell me”—Thibodaux’s face burned red—“you just shot a Hellfire missile at Jericho?”
Guttman shook his head. He forced a sick smile. The kid was actually wearing multicolored braces on his teeth. “No, sir, at least not unless he told us to. The Breitling Emergency pings at two hundred and forty-three megahertz for your basic military frequency. Mr. Palmer’s shop tweaked it to talk to Damo and Damo only. When your friend pulled the pin, the watch sent up a signal that went out like a giant cone. Damocles just had to lob one in the basket of that cone, so to speak. The Hellfire followed the signal down to the watch with less than one meter of error.”
“Yeah, well,” the big Cajun harrumphed, exhausted at being trapped stateside while Jericho was in danger, again. “Does Damo have a camera?”
“Multiple,” Guttman said, puffing up his chest like a proud father. “Conventional and infrared—all mounted on a Gorgon Stare Pod—”
“Excellent,” Thibodaux said. “Then get her zoomed in and let’s make sure he’s okay.”
Guttman shot a terrified look at Palmer.
“Can’t do that, Jacques.” The national security advisor frowned. “The AX7 is a stealth platform, but it does leave some signature. With the Hellfire deployment, they’ll be searching for us as it is. If we bring the drone lower to look through the cloud layer the Chinese will shoot her out of the sky. The Red Army has an air defense battery just outside of Kashgar. Too close.”
Thibodaux rubbed his jaw. “You once said you wouldn’t drop us in the grease without fair warning. Looks to me like Jericho is fryin’ out there and you don’t give a shit.”
Palmer shook his head slowly. If he was offended, he didn’t show it. “Quinn was fully briefed, Jacques. He knew how to deploy the weapon and how far away he had to be. He’s alive now or he isn’t. I’m betting he had an escape plan before he pulled the wire.”
“We should at least look.” Thibodaux rolled his shoulders, trying in vain not to let his temper get the best of him.
“No one wants to more than I do,” Palmer said.
“I’ll bet I do.” The Marine stared hard.
“Easy to say, Jacques, when you only have your friend to consider ...” Palmer studied him a long moment before nodding slowly, opening both hands. “But okay. You’re in charge now. You say the word and Sergeant Guttman will bring Damocles out of near or
bit to check on our friend Quinn. Don’t worry about the little dustup with China, Pakistan, and the rest of the world over our previously top-secret invisible armed UAV.” The national security advisor turned to Guttman. “This man says the word and you bring her down.”
“Sir ...” Guttman stammered, looking like he might have already wet his pants.
“Just do it, son.”
Thibodaux stood completely still, glaring at the ashen staff sergeant.
“Shit!” he finally spat, throwing up his hands. “Just forget it.”
Across the room, Palmer released a pent-up breath. Guttman slouched in his seat, looking as if he might weep.
“There are damn few people in the world we can trust now, Jacques,” Palmer said. “The last thing we need is for what we’re doing to end up on WikiLeaks. We’ve got to believe Jericho knows what he’s doing... . Give him a chance.”
“I know.” Thibodaux nodded. His neck burned with a mix of worry over Quinn and pity for men like Palmer who had so many layers of convoluted junk to consider. He preferred the heat of battle when it was kill or be killed. The political side of matters fatigued him. He turned to leave. Camille was in the hospital on bed rest and he hated to leave her alone too long.
“Jacques,” Palmer called.
He stopped at the coded, metal door.
“Sir?”
“For the record, I wouldn’t have made that offer if that had been another Marine out there.”
Thibodaux grinned. “Shows how much you know, sir. I adopted Chair Force into the Corps about an hour after I met him.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Jericho clenched every muscle in his body. The veins on the side of his neck swelled as he strained with his left arm to hold on to Ronnie where she dangled five thousand feet above the hungry rocks below. He lay on his stomach, the crook of his right elbow clutching a nubbin of stone where they’d landed on the ledge roughly the size of a kitchen counter an instant before the Hellfire strike. The camel herder had fallen to his death and the two bandits left topside had been reduced to fine bits of ash.