by Tom Clancy
At this point, yes, they could lob a grenade and finish the guy, but Moore was already an arm’s length away from the insurgent. He rolled onto his side and strained his neck to peer upward until there it was, the guy’s rifle barrel hanging above the windowsill, within reach. Moore grabbed the rifle by the upper hand guard and used it to haul himself onto his knees, just as the guy, screaming in shock, let go of the weapon and reached for his holstered pistol.
By the time he freed his weapon, Moore had thrown down the AK and leveled his Makarov. Three rounds sent the thug crashing onto the floor. Moore had used his own pistol because one of the oldest of old-school combat rules said that only as a last resort should you put your life in the hands of an enemy’s weapon.
The Apache was already leaving, called off by Ozzy.
Only the fading whomp of rotors broke across the Mana Valley. Finally, a dog barked, and then someone hollered in the distance. English.
Moore jogged back across the street and down to the end of the alley, where he met up with Ozzy and Bob-O. The stench of gunpowder was everywhere, and Moore found himself shaking with adrenaline as he crouched down.
“Nice job, Puke,” said Bob-O.
“Yeah,” breathed Moore. “Took one alive up on the roof. I get to interrogate him.”
“We killed four more, but the rest fell back into the mountains,” said Ozzy, cupping one hand over his ear to listen to the reports from his men. “We lost them.”
“I want to talk to Old Man Shah, let him lie to my face about this,” snapped Moore, referring to the chief of the village.
“Me, too,” said Ozzy, showing his teeth.
Moore drifted over to Rana, who was still sitting in the alley, knees pulled in to his chest. “Hey. You okay?”
“No.”
“It’s over now.” Moore proffered his hand, and the young man took it.
While Ozzy’s team policed the bodies of the Taliban who’d been killed (and fetched the prisoner Moore had bound up on the roof), Moore, Ozzy, Bob-O, and Rana reached the mud-brick fort. The rectangular buildings were surrounded by brick walls rising about two meters and a large wooden gate before which now stood a half-dozen guards. Ozzy told one of the guards that the chief of the Shawal tribes needed to speak with them immediately. The guard went back to the house, while Moore and the others waited.
Chief Habib Shah and one of his most trusted clerics, Aiman Salahuddin, stormed out of the gate. Shah was an imposing man of six-foot-five or so, with a large black turban and a beard that seemed more like a bundle of black wires than hair. His green eyes flashed in Ozzy’s light. The cleric was much older, perhaps seventy, with an ivory-white beard, hunched back, and barely five feet tall. He kept shaking his head at Moore and the others, as though he could will them away.
“Let me do the talking,” Moore told Ozzy.
“Yeah, because I’m about to tell him off.”
“Hello, Chief,” said Moore.
“What are you doing here?” the chief demanded.
Moore tried to temper his anger. He tried, all right. And failed. “Before we were attacked by the Taliban, we came in peace, looking for these two men.” Moore shoved the pictures into the chief’s hand.
The man gave the photos a perfunctory glance and shrugged. “I’ve never seen them before. If anyone in this village is helping the Taliban, he will suffer my wrath.”
Ozzy snorted. “Chief, did you know the Taliban were here?”
“Of course not. How many times have I told you this, Captain?”
“I think this might be the fourth. You keep telling me you don’t help terrorists, and we keep finding them here. I just can’t understand that. Do they accidentally drop down out of the sky?” Ozzy had clearly damned to hell the “art and science” of negotiation.
“Chief, we’d like to continue our search with your help,” said Moore. “Just a few men.”
“I’m sorry, but my men are very busy protecting this village.”
“Let’s go,” said Ozzy, turning away and marching off with Bob-O behind him.
The cleric stepped up to Moore and spoke in English: “Go home with your friends.”
“You’re helping the wrong people,” Rana suddenly blurted out.
Moore glared at the young man and put a finger to his lips.
The cleric narrowed his eyes at Rana. “Young man, it’s you who are very much mistaken.”
It took another two hours for Ozzy’s Special Forces team to comb through the village and surrounding farmhouses, ever wary of another attack.
In the meantime, Moore questioned the man they had captured. “I’ll say it again, what’s your name?”
“Kill me.”
“What’s your name? Where are you from? Have you seen these guys?” He shoved the pictures into the man’s face.
“Kill me.”
And it went on like that, over and over, until Moore got so frustrated that he gave up before he said something he shouldn’t have. Moore’s CIA colleagues would take over the questioning anyway. Might take a week or more to crack this guy.
When Ozzy’s team finally returned to the helicopter, Moore debriefed them before they took off.
“This farmhouse right here,” Moore said, pointing to the home on a satellite photograph. “It’s pretty far back. Anyone get it?”
“We did,” said Bob-O. “Old farmer with one eye there. Couple of sons. Not happy to see us. They didn’t fit the description of your guys.”
“So there it is,” said Ozzy.
Moore shook his head. “My guys are here. They’re probably watching us right now.”
“And what’re we going to do about it?” asked Ozzy, throwing up his hands. “We’re between a rock and, well, another rock. And some mountains. And some pissed-off tribesmen. And some dead Taliban. Better tell your boys back home to ship these folks some Walmart gift cards for their trouble.”
The surprise visit wasn’t a total loss. Moore’s bosses had been unsure which way the chief’s loyalty was swinging these days, and now they knew. To believe that not a single person in this part of Shawal had seen Moore’s targets was ridiculous. They’d seen them, talked to them, perhaps trained and eaten with them. Moore had experienced this time and again, and for now there was nothing else he could do but leave behind the photographs and ask for the chief’s assistance.
“Was the mission a failure?” asked Rana.
“Not a failure,” answered Moore. “We’ve just been delayed by some unforeseen weather.”
“Weather?”
Moore snorted. “Yeah. A big shit storm of silence.”
Rana shook his head. “I don’t know why they choose to help the Taliban.”
“You should know that. They get more from the Taliban than anyone else,” Moore told the young man. “They’re opportunists. They have to be. Look where they live.”
“You think we’ll ever catch those guys?”
“We will. It just takes time. And that’s my problem, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps Wazir will have some news about your missing friend.”
Moore sighed deeply in frustration. “That’d work. Either way, I’ll be out of here by tomorrow night, and I just wish I could have some vengeance for what they did to the colonel and his family. If those guys just walk away, that’ll never stop burning me.” They climbed aboard the chopper and within ten minutes were in the air.
Before they even landed in Kabul, Moore saw that he’d received a phone call from Slater.
The Mexican guy in the photograph, Tito Llamas, a lieutenant in the Juárez Cartel, had turned up in a car trunk with a bullet in his head. Likewise, Khodai’s associates who’d been photographed with Llamas had all been murdered. The only guys in that picture who hadn’t turned up dead thus far were the Taliban. Moore needed to get back to Islamabad ASAP. He wanted to talk to the local police about Llamas and see if there were any other leads he could gather. He thought he might buy himself a little more time by “accidentally” missing his
flight back home.
He didn’t reach the city until morning, and he told Rana to go home and get some sleep. He went to the police station, met with the detectives there, and positively identified Tito Llamas’s body. The cartel member had been carrying falsified documentation, including a fake passport, and Moore was able to share with the local police what data the Agency had on the cartel member. Needless to say, those detectives were grateful.
A surprise e-mail from the old man Wazir was very welcome — that was until Moore read its contents.
The two other Taliban in the photograph that Wazir had mentioned were unimportant and were actually Punjabi Taliban, named for their roots in southern Punjab. They were distinguishable because they did not speak Pashto and traditionally had ties with groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed. The Punjabi Taliban now operated out of North Waziristan and fought alongside Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
But that history lesson wasn’t the important part of the e-mail. Wazir had found the men, but both had been murdered. He said the Taliban had discovered their security leak and had killed everyone associated with it …except Moore, of course, and he was no doubt at the top of their hit list.
Maybe it was time to go home.
7 TRAVEL PLANS
Shawal Area
Afghanistan
Samad and his two lieutenants had fled the farmhouse before dawn and had made the laborious ten-kilometer hike across the border and into Afghanistan. They chose a well-beaten path and had joined a small group of five merchants so as not to draw any attention to themselves. As Samad had reminded his men, the Americans were watching from the sky, and if they took what seemed like a route with better tree cover, their vibrations might be detected by one of the many REMBASS-II unattended ground sensors that the American Army had carefully hidden along the border. That movement would subsequently trigger one of the Americans’ many Kennan “Keyhole-class” (KH) reconnaissance satellites that would begin taking pictures of them. Their images would almost instantaneously flash across screens in Langley, where analysts sat twenty-four-seven, waiting for Taliban fighters like him to make such mistakes. The response would be swift and fatal: a Predator drone piloted by an Air Force lieutenant colonel sitting in a trailer in Las Vegas would drop Hellfire missiles on his target.
Once in the valley, they found Mullah Omar Rahmani seated on a pile of blankets inside one of a dozen or more tents erected in a semicircle beneath several walnut and oak trees, and hidden from the east by patches of lemon vines. The morning prayers were over, and Rahmani was sipping tea and about to have some round sweet flatbread the Afghans called roht, along with some apricots, pistachios, and thick plain yogurt (which was a true luxury in the mountains).
Rahmani greeted them with a terse nod, then stroked his beard, which swept down toward his collarbone, terminating in a sharp point. His gaze, slightly magnified by a pair of thick wire-frame glasses, seemed permanently narrowed, which made it difficult to determine his mood. He’d pushed his white turban farther back to expose deep lines spanning his forehead and the lima-bean-shaped birthmark staining his left temple. His long linen shirt and baggy trousers hid his considerable girth, and were he to remove the camouflage-pattern jacket tightly hugging his shoulders, he might seem just a hair less intimidating. That jacket — old, tattered at the elbows — had been worn during his battles with the Russians.
Samad had to assume that Rahmani was not pleased with all the attention recently drawn to the area, although he might commend Samad for his quick thinking and ability to once more fool the Americans.
Rahmani lifted his chin toward them. “Peace be unto you, brothers, and let us thank God that we are here this morning to enjoy this food and to live another day — because the days grow more difficult for us.”
Samad and his men took seats around Rahmani and were served tea by several young men attending to him. A chill spread across Samad’s shoulders as he sipped his tea and tried to calm his breathing.
It was, admittedly, difficult every time Samad was in the man’s presence. If you crossed him, if you dared fail him, he would have you executed on the spot. This was not a rumor. Samad had watched the beheadings with his own eyes. Sometimes the heads would be hacked off. Other times they would be sawed off slowly, very slowly, while the victim screamed, then drowned in his own blood.
Rahmani took another deep breath, set down his teacup, then folded his arms across his chest, his black shirt and scarves pulling tighter across his neck. He studied them for a moment more, sending an icy pang into Samad’s gut, then cleared his throat and finally spoke again: “The Army has grown too unstable for us now. That much is clear. Khodai could have caused even more damage, and while I am grateful for the work your men did back in Islamabad, there are now many loose ends — particularly the agent our sniper spoke about at the hotel. We’re still looking for him. And now our new relationship with the Juárez Cartel in Mexico has been threatened because we were forced to kill their man. All of this means we must move more quickly.”
“I understand,” Samad said. “The CIA has recruited many operatives in the area. They pay well. It is hard for young men to resist. I have two men tracking one right now, a boy named Israr Rana. We believe he’s responsible for helping to expose the link.”
Rahmani nodded. “Some of us argue that patience will triumph. The Americans cannot and will not remain here forever, and when they leave, we will continue to train here, and we will bring Allah’s will to the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan. But I do not agree with sitting down and waiting for the storm to pass. The problem must be dealt with at its source. I’ve been working for the past five years on a project that will soon come to fruition. The infrastructure is in place. All I need now are the warriors to execute this plan.”
“We would be honored.”
“Samad, you will lead them. You will bring the jihad back to the United States — and you must use the contacts you’ve made with the Mexicans to do that. Do you understand?”
Although he nodded, Samad grew tense because he knew asking any favors of the Mexicans might both insult and incense them. Yet if he could somehow garner their support, his mission stood a far greater chance of success.
But how?
He would have to resort to hudaibiya—lying — as the Qur’an exhorted him to do when dealing with infidels.
“I must caution you and all of your men, Samad,” Rahmani went on. “Nearly one hundred of our fighters have already dedicated their lives to this plan. Some of them have already given their lives. There is much at stake here, and the consequences for failure are great, very great indeed.”
Samad could already feel the blade on his neck. “We all understand.”
Rahmani’s voice lifted as he quoted from the Qur’an: “Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him we shall bestow a vast reward.”
“Paradise awaits us,” Samad added with a vigorous nod. “And yet if we die and are martyred, only to be resurrected and martyred again, we will do it. This is why we love death.”
Rahmani narrowed his eyes even more. “This is why …Now, then, let’s eat, and I will discuss all of the details. The complexity and audacity of this mission will impress you, I’m sure. Within a few days, you will be on the road. And when the time comes, you will bring a message from Allah, the likes of which the Americans have never seen.”
“We won’t fail you,” said Samad.
Rahmani nodded slowly. “Do not fail Allah.”
Samad lowered his head. “We are his servants.”
Gandhara International Airport
Islamabad, Pakistan
Moore was en route to San Diego to meet with his new joint task force, and he was dreading the more than seventeen hours of travel time it would take to get there. As he sat at the gate, waiting for the first flight of his journey, he kept a wary eye on the travelers around him, mostly businesspeople, international journalists (he assumed), and a few families with small children, o
ne of them decidedly British. Occasionally, he consulted his tablet computer, where all of his data was secured behind a double-encrypted password. Any attempt to access his computer without his thumbprint would summarily wipe the hard drive. He’d just pulled up some of the Agency’s most recent declassified reports on cartel activity along the border (he’d read the classified ones in a more private location). He was most interested in finding intel on Middle Eastern or Arabic links to that activity, but for the most part, the cases he reviewed were limited to warfare between rival cartels, most notably the Sinaloa and the Juárez cartels.
Mass graves had been turning up more frequently — some containing dozens of bodies. Beheadings and bodies hung from bridges were pointing to a rise in gruesome attacks by gangs of sicarios led by former Mexican Airborne Special Forces troopers. Government officials argued that the cartel wars illustrated the success of government policies, which were causing the drug traffickers to turn against one another. However, Moore had already concluded that the cartels had become so powerful that, in effect, they literally controlled some parts of the country and the violence was simply evidence of their gang law. Moore read one report written by a journalist who’d spent more than a year documenting cartel activity. In some of the more rural towns in the southeast portions of the country, the cartel was the only group the citizens could rely on to provide them with jobs and protection. This journalist published a half-dozen articles before he was shot seventeen times while waiting outside a shopping mall for his mother. Obviously the cartels did not like what he had to say.
Another report made a comparison between small towns in Mexico and those in Afghanistan. Moore had seen the Taliban engage in the same tactics and behavior as the cartels did. Both the Taliban and the drug cartels became much more trusted than the government and certainly more trusted than the foreign invaders. Both the Taliban and the cartels understood the power that drug trafficking brought them, and they used that power to enlist the aid of innocent civilians who were simply not supported or were even ignored by their government. For Moore, it was difficult to remain apolitical when you saw firsthand a government that was more corrupt than its enemies you were tasked with killing.