The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  Usman had nothing to say.

  Paracha stepped closer. “Are our hands clean, Lieutenant?” he asked. He shook his head. “We’ll never be clean.”

  THREE

  The fires in the city became visible about ten miles from the airport, the night sky glowing unevenly beneath a low cloud deck. The situation was just as bad as the CIA thought it would be, and just as good as Haaris had hoped. Revolutions were not born on sunny days.

  He was dressed now in long loose trousers, over which he wore a filthy long shirt and a kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, concealing his false beard and showing only the bridge of his nose and a hint of his eyes.

  Virtually no traffic moved on the broad highway that had been built to service the new airport. But there had been intense fighting this evening: the shot-up, burned-out remains of several cars and pickup trucks littered the ditches in a quarter-mile stretch, and several bodies lay where they had fallen along the side of the road.

  Haaris sat in the front seat next to Lieutenant Jura, a Beretta pistol holstered on his chest and a Kalashnikov propped up between his knees.

  They came around a long sweeping bend to a half-dozen pickup trucks blocking both sides of the highway; at least twenty armed men dressed much the same as Haaris stood either in front of the trucks or in defensive positions behind the vehicles or in the ditches. Several of them were armed with American-made LAWs rockets, meant to take out tanks.

  Although he had remained silent since leaving the airport, Jura now said, “I’ll do the talking,” and he slowed, coming to a stop a couple of meters from two men who stood ahead of the others.

  One of them came forward, a Kalashnikov assault rifle hanging casually from his right shoulder. He was tall and muscular, his face mostly hidden behind his scarf, his eyes behind aviator sunglasses.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “There is to be another demonstration in front of army headquarters. We have been ordered to attend.”

  “Ordered by whom?”

  “That is none of your business, brother. Your job is to attend to those fools who are trying to leave the city. Not freedom fighters ready for holy work this night.”

  The man shifted his weapon to a firing position, though he did not exactly point it at Jura. He leaned down and looked in at Haaris. “And who the hell are you?”

  Haaris pulled out his Beretta pistol. “I have been in Paris, and I’m bringing good news to the revolution. We have our funding. Stand aside and let us pass.”

  “If you shoot me, you won’t get five meters,” the second man, with an AK47, said, but he didn’t seem so certain.

  “But then you would be dead, so whatever happened to us would be of no concern. Call your unit commander.”

  “I am in charge here.”

  Haaris pulled the hammer back, and with his left hand moved the end of the kaffiyeh from his face. “If you should make it to Paradise, remember me.” He started to pull the trigger.

  The man suddenly stepped back and waved them through. “Go with God,” he said.

  “And you, my brother,” Haaris said.

  They had to maneuver their way slowly past several pickup trucks, the armed warriors watching, until on the other side, the road clear, Jura sped up.

  “Anyone aiming anything at us?” Haaris asked, decocking his pistol and holstering it.

  Jura checked the rearview mirror. “Not yet.” He glanced at Haaris. “The general said that you had balls. But you could have gotten us shot back there. Most of those guys were stoned. Opium. They chew balls of that shit all the time.”

  Haaris shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” Since his parents had been killed in a rock slide—he’d been there when their mangled bodies had been dug out—and since his abuse at public school, he had been mostly indifferent to his personal comfort or well-being. He didn’t know if he actually cared whether or not he survived to live another day, and he wasn’t sure if this was a gift or a curse. But like a man who could feel no pain because of a medical condition, Haaris couldn’t feel fear.

  Just as well, he thought. But this night was important, and no matter what happened he had to present himself as invincible. Which made him smile.

  * * *

  The entrance to the sprawling Inter-Service Intelligence compound in Islamabad was next to a hospital, the gate guarded only by a plainclothes officer armed with a pistol. No sign identified the place, which looked more like the campus of a university—a number of mostly low slung modern buildings separated by well-tended lawns and fountains were grouped around the eight-story main headquarters building, on the top floor of which was the director general’s office.

  This area of the city was all but deserted now, most of the trouble centered around the Army Headquarters Building ten kilometers away in Rawalpindi.

  The guard recognized Lieutenant Jura and waved him through. On the other side of the gate completely out of sight from the main road, they were stopped by a half-dozen heavily armed soldiers and four bomb-sniffing dogs. They were made to get out of the car so that they could be searched with security wands of the same type that at one time had been used at airports and then thoroughly patted down.

  Haaris’s and Jura’s pistols were taken, as was the Kalashnikov from inside the car, before they were allowed to proceed.

  “They knew we were coming but they’re jumpy because this place will probably get hit sometime tonight,” Jura said.

  “Maybe not,” Haaris said, and the lieutenant gave him a sharp look.

  “Pardon me, sir, your bravado got us past the roadblock, but the Taliban setting fire to the city might not be so easily convinced.”

  They were admitted to the parking ramp beneath the headquarters building after submitting to another, even more thorough search.

  “Remember what happens tonight, Lieutenant,” Haaris said, getting out of the car in front of the elevator. “Pakistan’s future is at stake.”

  “Yes, sir. I know. We all know it.”

  “Stay here, I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  The ISI’s Covert Action Division covered the entire third floor of the building. A hundred or more cubicles took up the center of the room. Offices, conference rooms and two data centers faced outward around the perimeter on three sides, and the fourth—the side facing toward the presidential palace—was taken up by General Hasan Rajput’s large suite of offices, along with the offices of his deputy director and staff.

  Anyone who had gotten past security inside the main gate and again either in the parking garage or through the ground-floor entrance was considered safe. No one bothered to look up as Haaris got off the elevator and made his way to the general’s office. The secretary was gone and the door to the inner office was open. Rajput, the collar of his white shirt unbuttoned, was seated at his desk listening to reports from three of his staff. When Haaris walked in he looked up. He could have been a kindly grandfather, with gray hair and soft eyes.

  “At last,” he said. “Gentlemen, please leave us.”

  The staffers glanced at Haaris as they walked out but said nothing. The last one closed the door.

  Rajput motioned for Haaris to take a seat. “Did you run into any trouble on the way in?”

  “Not much. What’s the current situation at the Aiwan? Is Barazani there?” Farid Barazani was the openly pro-Western new president of Pakistan. His election four months earlier was one of the reasons the Taliban had staged their attacks. Almost everyone in the West believed this was the signal for the dissolution of the government, which was why American nuclear strike force teams had been moved into place.

  “Yes, I spoke to him less than ten minutes ago. The fool still thinks that he can talk his way out of this.”

  “Did you tell him about me?”

  “He thinks that you’re here from the CIA to offer him backing. He’s waiting for you.”

  “Will he try to call Washington?”

  “He might, but we’ve seen to it that t
he Taliban have cut all the landlines to the Aiwan, and we control the cell phone towers within range.”

  “How about satellite communications?”

  “We have a good man in their computer section. Nothing will be leaving the Aiwan tonight.”

  “Except me,” Haaris said. “Has it been reported to the CIA’s chief of station here that I’m missing?”

  “The metro police reported an incident on their wire, one of dozens this morning.”

  “No word from Langley?”

  “No.” Rajput picked up his phone and said, “Now, if you please.”

  A minute later a young man in army uniform without insignia of rank came in.

  Haaris got to his feet and unwrapped the kaffiyeh. He stood still as the young technician secured what looked like a dog collar with a device about the size of a book of matches just below his Adam’s apple.

  “Say, ‘My name is Legion.’”

  Haaris spoke the words, but the voice coming from his mouth was nothing like his own. It was deeper, more resonant, the British accent almost completely absent.

  FOUR

  The four nuclear weapons, covered in wool blankets, were strapped to wooden cradles in the back of the Toyota SUV, the two uniformed guards sitting on top of them. They were south of Quetta, on the narrow highway to Delbandin, and Usman kept nervously looking in his rearview mirror. He could see the empty highway behind them, but he could also see the blank expressions on the faces of the two men, and he thought it was just like watching the zombie movies that were so popular.

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting radiation sickness, sitting so close?” he asked.

  Neither one of them wore name tags, and they could have been brothers, with slight builds, narrow faces, dark complexions, wide, dark eyes.

  “They don’t leak,” the one on the right said. “And if they did you’d be in the same trouble as us.”

  “You’re not nervous?”

  “Just drive, Lieutenant. I’m not nervous, as you say, just damned uncomfortable.”

  “And I have to take a piss,” the other guard said.

  “I’m not stopping out here,” Usman said.

  Ten minutes earlier they had passed through the town of Nushki, where nothing moved and very few lights shone. At this point they were fewer than thirty kilometers from the Afghan border, and Usman could feel the brooding hulk of the wild west country, once filled with friends of Pakistan who had now turned enemies. The mix of the nearness of the border and the weapons he was transporting had caused him to have waking nightmares: all he could see were hulking monsters, wave after wave of zombies, mushroom clouds, burning flesh, women and children screaming in agony. His armpits were soaked, his forehead was dripping, even his crotch was so wet it almost felt as if he had pissed himself.

  He reached over and took from the glove box the SIG-Sauer P226 German pistol his father had given him as a graduation present from the military academy and laid it on the center console.

  “There’s no one out here,” the one soldier said. “So you might as well let Saad take his piss, otherwise we’ll have to listen to him forever.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Usman said. “Any longer than that and I’ll drive away without you.”

  He slowed down, pulled off the side of the road and stopped. Immediately both soldiers got out and walked a few meters away.

  Usman had asked for a radio in case he ran into trouble, but his request had been denied by his unit commander, Captain Siyal. He’d also been made to give up his cell phone.

  “They have the capability of intercepting our radio transmissions and even our cell phone calls.”

  “What if I break down in the middle of nowhere?”

  “See that you don’t.”

  “That makes no sense, Captain,” Usman had argued.

  They were in Siyal’s office, and the captain spread his pudgy hands. “Personally I agree with you, but I too have my orders. Balochistan has been fairly quiet. Pick up your cargo, drive three hundred kilometers, hand it over and you’re done.”

  The captain’s use of the word cargo bore no relationship in Usman’s mind to the things in the back of the SUV. The fact that Pakistan had more than one hundred of the weapons had given him a certain pride, a nationalistic fervor—until now. These things right here were not an abstraction. They were real. They were meant for only one purpose—to kill a lot of people.

  He looked over his shoulder in time to see both soldiers lighting cigarettes. He couldn’t believe it. His nerves were jumping all over the place now, and the nearly absolute darkness of the night was pressing in.

  Grabbing his pistol, he started to get out of the SUV, but for whatever reason he took the key from the ignition and put it in his pocket.

  “What the hell are you men doing?” he shouted, walking around to the rear of the Toyota.

  “A change of plans, Lieutenant,” one of them said, and he turned around, a pistol in his hand.

  Usman reared back, and at the same time the solider to his left fired one shot that went wide.

  Someone else from the darkness off the side of the road opened fire with a Kalashnikov, the rattle distinctive. The rounds slammed into the side of the SUV.

  Usman ducked low as he raced across the road in the opposite direction and into the desert, the soft footing making it almost impossible for him to move fast.

  Another burst of fire came from the highway, but then someone shouted something, and Usman continued running, as one of the soldiers answered.

  “It doesn’t matter, let the bastard go. We don’t need him now.”

  Only then did Usman remember the pistol in his belt. He stopped and turned around as he drew it and fired four shots in rapid succession at the side of the SUV, about twenty meters away.

  Someone cried out, and Usman took several steps back toward the highway, when another burst of Kalashnikov fire bracketed him, one round slamming into his left side, knocking him backward but not off his feet.

  “Let him go!” an unfamiliar voice commanded.

  “He’s got the fucking key,” one of the soldiers shouted.

  “What?”

  “The key to the ignition!”

  Usman staggered to the left as the shooters opened fire, this time off to the right. He hunched over again, and holding the wound to his side with his left hand ran as fast as he could into the desert, the soft sand catching his feet, wanting to trip him up, make him fall. His only consolation was that the sons of bitches coming after him would have the same problem. And one of them had cried out. With any luck he had hit the bastard hard.

  The sand suddenly dropped away and he pitched forward onto his face and tumbled five meters into a depression. When he ended up on his stomach he rolled over onto his back and looked up to the crest of the sand dune. He was at the bottom of a bowl, with no easy way out.

  He had managed to hold on to his pistol so when they came for him he would take them out. Maybe all of them.

  Someone shouted something to the left, over the top of the dune, and immediately someone else to the right shouted back, and then others picked up the cry. Maybe a half dozen or more men, some of them speaking with a variation of the Gilgit tribal accent, one Baloch, another Brahui and two Pashtuns—the soldiers from Quetta—without a doubt all of them Taliban.

  This had been trap from the beginning. Which meant that Captain Siyal or whoever had given the original orders was a traitor, as were the two guards from the air base, and possibly even the group captain.

  But why put things like these into the hands of terrorists? All of a sudden he had at least one part of it: if the government fell American SEALS accompanying Nuclear Energy Support Teams would swoop down and disable as many of the weapons as they could. The highly trained NEST people, most of them nuclear scientists and engineers, were ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice to anywhere in the world. So it came down to losing the weapons either to the Americans or to the Taliban

  It would be a perfec
t opportunity for India to launch a preemptive strike, which would very possibly embroil the entire region in an unwinnable war.

  Usman laid his head back for just a moment.

  The weapons were too heavy simply to pick up and carry away. They would need the SUV.

  He sat up, took the car key from his pocket and making sure that no one had crested the dune and was watching him, tossed it as far as he could.

  They might eventually find it, though maybe not until dawn, but by then when he hadn’t shown up at Delbandin the alarm might already have been sounded. Unless, of course, he’d never been expected to get that far in the first place. It never occurred to him that they might hot-wire the ignition.

  He got to his feet, just a little dizzy now but not in any serious pain, and started for the wall on the opposite side of the depression down which he had fallen.

  “I’ve got the bastard,” one of the soldiers cried from the crest.

  Usman turned and fired in that direction, and kept firing until his pistol went dry, the slide locked in the open position.

  He felt the Kalashnikov rounds striking his body before he heard the noise of the shots, and he fell back, dead as he hit the sand.

  FIVE

  The attacks across the city and down in Rawalpindi, where the Army General Headquarters was located, had increased just during the time Haaris had been inside with General Rajput. Small-arms fire and the occasional explosion rattled in almost every direction around Diplomatic Row in the Green Section. But there were no sirens.

  Haaris had changed back into his blazer, white shirt and khakis, and he got off the elevator in the parking garage carrying a bright blue nylon shoulder bag, sealed with a U.S. State Department diplomatic tag. Word had finally come that the CIA knew that a man matching Haaris’s description had been kidnapped by the Taliban on the way from the airport. Traffic between Langley and the ISI had suddenly become heavy.

  He tossed the bag in the backseat of the Fiat and got in with it.

  Lieutenant Jura turned around. “It might not be such a good idea for you to be seen dressed like that tonight.”