The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  Taking the rifle Mac pushed his way through the bushes and got into the jeep. No alarm had been sounded yet because of the phone call or because someone had spotted him making his way across the roofs, but the silence wouldn’t last much longer. And once it did happen, the entire ISI compound would go into immediate lockdown. At that point getting out would become unlikely.

  He propped the rifle on the passenger seat so that he could get to it instantly. Someone came on the radio and barked an order. Almost instantly a one-word reply came back.

  The main access road swung around the north and south sides of the main building to the front gate, but a much narrower lane headed west off the south road down a long row of tall, slender cedars. The parade field stretched off to the right, and a row of smaller buildings that could have been barracks for the enlisted men lay to the south. Nothing moved anywhere, and only the brilliantly lit headquarters gave any indication that something out of the ordinary was going on. Pakistan was in what some of the local media were calling a “welcome crisis,” to counter the Western media’s tagline of a “velvet revolution.”

  Passing a broad paved driveway that led from the barracks to the parade ground, where troops could march up for review, he had to turn left at the end of the driveway to the back gates, less than fifty feet away.

  He pulled up at the double-chain-link fence topped with razor wire. An inner gate opened onto a no-man’s section a little longer than a troop transport truck, which was blocked by the outer gate. Vehicles coming in or out would be trapped between the two gates until a positive ID could be made.

  A uniformed sergeant came out of the guardhouse, a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder. Behind him another enlisted man stood at the open door. He had a sidearm but no rifle in hand.

  The sergeant said something as he approached, but five feet away he suddenly stopped short and reached for his rifle.

  McGarvey pulled the Beretta and shot the man center-mass twice.

  The guard in the gatehouse reacted, but McGarvey was out of the jeep and to the doorway as the man was grabbing his sidearm from its holster.

  Mac pointed the pistol directly at the guard’s head. “Open both gates.”

  The guard didn’t respond, though McGarvey was sure that he understood English by the look in his eyes.

  “Now, or I will shoot you,” Mac said.

  The guard turned to the left to reach the two green levers for the gates, but instead he slammed the palm of his hand into a large red button and immediately a klaxon broke the early morning air.

  Mac fired one shot into the side of the man’s head, and as the guard went down, McGarvey shoved his body aside and swung both green levers.

  The two gates began to open as Mac jumped into the jeep and drove forward.

  Just inside the no-man’s-land the second gate, less than half open, began to close.

  Mac accelerated, the front right fender of the jeep catching the leading edge of the gate, knocking it just far enough so that he could get through.

  Even more lights came on all over the ISI compound as McGarvey hauled the jeep around the tight corner to the left and onto the service road, and fewer than a hundred yards later turned right on what he thought was an empty Khayaban Highway.

  A car, lights on its roof, suddenly passed and then turned directly into his path, leaving him no choice but to run off the road.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  McGarvey drew the pistol as Pete jumped out of the red Mercedes and ran back to him, a look of intense relief on her face. Searchlights stabbed the air behind them and more sirens started up.

  “Are you wounded?” Pete demanded as McGarvey grabbed the Kalashnikov and struggled to get out of the jeep.

  “I banged up my leg getting out,” he said, almost collapsing.

  Pete took his arm, put it over her shoulder and helped him to the cab as Thomas jumped out. Between the two of them they got him in the backseat and Pete climbed in beside him.

  Thomas made another U-turn on the still-deserted highway and two blocks away turned onto a side road that led into the Rose and Jasmine Garden. Following even narrower roads he wound his way into the deeper woods to the east. From here they could just make out the highway.

  “We can’t stay here long,” Thomas said. “But as soon as the search widens we’ll take a chance on Club Road. I know a couple of shortcuts to get us to my place in Rawalpindi.”

  “Otto’s going to crash the ISI’s mainframe,” McGarvey said. “Soon as he does it they’re going to know for sure that I’m CIA and all hell is going to break loose.”

  “He’s already done it once, and he’s going to shut them down even longer just as the morning shift shows up,” Pete said. “It’ll play hell with their security routines.”

  “Thanks for picking me up, guys, but what the hell are you doing here, Pete? I told you to stay home.”

  “Like I would.”

  Mac was vexed, but without her he wouldn’t have gotten more than a few blocks before he’d have had to ditch the jeep and make his way on foot. “Thanks, to both you and Milt.”

  “Otto’s going to set up a SEAL Team Six extraction for us up to Jalalabad, but not until tonight. In the meantime we’re going to go to ground at Milt’s place.”

  “They’re not going to come to me until they’re sure that you managed to escape,” Thomas said. “But then they’re going to call up all of their assets.”

  “Time for you to come home,” McGarvey said.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing lately. And despite what the local media is reporting, most people are nervous about suddenly being pals with the Taliban. Everyone is sure they were responsible for the nuclear explosion outside of Quetta, and that maybe more of the bombs are still missing.”

  A jeep, its siren blaring, passed by on the highway, followed immediately by a pair of open troop-transport trucks filled with helmeted soldiers.

  “That took longer than I thought it would,” Thomas said. “No one wants to accept responsibility.”

  “Soon as they find the jeep they’ll figure I’m on foot and they’ll send helicopters to look for me,” McGarvey said.

  “And this’ll be one of the first places they’ll look,” Thomas said, slamming the car in gear.

  Headlights off, he followed a footpath that snaked through the woods, the lower branches of the trees scraping against the sides of the car. They came out behind a group of buildings, among them a maintenance shed. A campground was off to the left. A driveway around front led up to Club Road just above a cloverleaf that connected it with Murree Road. Both were major highways during rush hour, which would begin in less than an hour.

  Back to the west two helicopters were rising from the ISI compound as Thomas turned south onto the broad road, passing around the cloverleaf, and then speeding up.

  “Did anyone spot you this morning?” McGarvey asked.

  “A couple of truck drivers, but no one saw us when we picked you up, I made sure of it,” Thomas said.

  McGarvey looked out the rear window as one of the helicopters dipped low over the campground and set up what looked like a search pattern. For now they had a little breathing room. But it wouldn’t be long before the search expanded.

  “How far to your place?” he asked.

  “About ten K from here,” Thomas said. A blinding light from above swept over them. “Down,” he shouted.

  McGarvey grabbed Pete’s arm and dragged her with him to the floor, the pain in his hip like a lightning bolt to his system.

  Thomas slowed down, stuck his head out the window and waved.

  The Aérospatiale Alouette III helicopter swung to the driver’s side of the car, and flying sideways about twenty feet up, kept pace. Someone said something in Punjabi over a loud hailer.

  “They want to know who I am,” Thomas said. “Gohir,” he shouted in Punjabi. “But police call me the Fox.”

  The crewman said something else.

  “They’ve ordered me to pull
over and stop,” Thomas said. “They mean to search us.”

  “Do it,” Mac said. “But be ready to get us out of here.”

  “Right.”

  McGarvey switched the Kalashnikov’s fire-selecter lever to full automatic. “Stay down,” he told Pete as he rose and began firing directly at the cockpit canopy.

  The pilot swung hard to the left, exposing the tail section and fuel tanks.

  Mac let the rounds walk aft, hitting the crewman perched in the open doorway, who’d managed to get off a few rounds of returning fire, and punching holes in the fuselage, finally hitting the fuel tank and turbine.

  The chopper spun farther left, its nose dipping when a fireball rose out of the engine and a split instant later a bang shattered the early morning air and the machine disintegrated as it hit the ground.

  Thomas accelerated away.

  “Is everybody okay?” McGarvey asked.

  “Jesus,” Pete said. “I’m fine.”

  “Milt?” McGarvey asked, checking the magazine. It was empty.

  “As long as they didn’t get a chance to use their radio, we should be okay. But take off the uniform shirt or at least get rid of the epaulets, and Pete, cover your hair. We’re coming up on a residential and business section and there’s bound to be people up and about.”

  Mac pulled off the sweat-stained shirt, noticing some blood on his chest, and removed the epaulets, name tag and unit patches from the sleeves.

  Without a word Pete wiped the blood away with her scarf before she covered her hair.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” McGarvey said, putting the shirt back on.

  * * *

  The eastern sky was just beginning to lighten as they drove through a rat warren of narrow streets, many of the vendors in the small shops and sidewalk kiosks opening up already. Pedestrian traffic here in the northern section of Rawalpindi was heavy, as was vehicular traffic on the main roads, all of it picking up with a vengeance that wouldn’t let up until well after dark.

  Down one lane paved with cobblestones they stopped at a tall metal gate. Thomas passed back his keys to Pete. “Open it for me, please,” he said softly. “This is home.”

  Pete jumped out, went around to the gate and undid the heavy padlock. She swung the gate in, and Thomas drove through, parking in the narrow space in front of a three-story hovel. Laundry hung drying outside the open windows on the second and third floors. Several bags of garbage were piled in a corner.

  Pete closed and locked the door.

  “Be it ever so humble,” Thomas said, and he slumped forward.

  McGarvey managed to grab his shoulder and pull him back before he hit the horn. Blood had poured down his side and covered the seat.

  Pete immediately returned, and between them, they managed to get the barely conscious Thomas out of the cab and to the front door of the house.

  “Wafa,” Thomas said softly.

  The door was unlocked, and half carrying, half dragging Thomas into what had been a spotlessly clean front room, they stopped short. This room and what they could see of the living room through a beaded archway had been ransacked. A woman, her dress hiked up to her waist, her underwear torn away, lay dead. Her throat had been slit, blood pooling like a halo around her head.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Haaris could not remember the last time he had slept, and though he was weary, at this moment he wasn’t sleepy. In fact, his mind felt as sharp as it ever had; the feeling was surreal, almost as if he were on a crack high.

  Today was the day it would begin. All of his planning over the past five years was coming to fruition. His name and his high position within the CIA, and even more deliciously, his close relationship with the president of the United States, would strike a blow against the West that would be worse than a thousand 9/11’s. The very foundations of American prestige around the world would be diminished, as would those of her closest allies, the British—all the bastards at Eton who had used him so hard and who now were in positions of power in Whitehall.

  On top of that Pakistan, the country that had turned its back on him when he was a child, and had so foolishly misspent its energy and resources on a stupid religious war with India, would pay dearly.

  Standing at the windows in the president’s office—the same spot from which he had watched the crowds gather in what seemed like an age ago—watching the start of the dawn, he felt for just that moment like Gandhi. The man had started out as the great pacifier, giving up nearly everything to ensure that India’s Muslims and Hindus could learn to live in peace.

  He’d been wrong, of course; and as a result Pakistan was born. And now it was the Messiah’s turn. He would reunite the two countries in fire. And when it was finished the world order would have taken a paradigm shift.

  Not bad, he thought, for a peasant without parents. He threw his head back and began to laugh, all the way from his gut. It wasn’t a good feeling, just relief that the end was at hand.

  His encrypted cell phone buzzed. It was an out-of-breath Rajput.

  “We have trouble coming our way.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Haaris said. He felt as if he were in a dreamlike state. Nothing could touch him. His will was supreme.

  “Listen to me. Parks managed to kill his interrogator and three others and escape.”

  “He won’t get far. When you find him, kill him.”

  “You don’t understand. He had help. Someone shut down the building’s surveillance system long enough for him to get out of the interview cell, before they turned it back on.”

  “The system isn’t hardened, I warned you about it before. Doesn’t change anything; he won’t get far.”

  “Our entire system crashed for precisely sixty seconds. My people tell me such a thing is impossible. Yet it happened. Worse than that they believe that a virus has been implanted in the mainframe so that such a thing can happen again. It has made us vulnerable.”

  “Go back to the factory default settings. Start all over again.”

  “You still don’t understand. It gives them access to operational details. Your operation.”

  “Nothing vital could have been included.”

  “No, but enough for the right program to unravel it with time.”

  “With time,” Haaris said, but something suddenly struck him, completely dashing his euphoria. “How exactly was the system crashed? Was it simply a power failure? And are you sure about a virus?”

  “It wasn’t a power failure. Embedded in the virus is a warning that the system will go down again later this morning, and this time it could be permanent.”

  “Backup systems?”

  “All have been infected.”

  “You have experts.”

  “To this point they have no idea where to turn,” Rajput said. “And that in itself is an extraordinary admission. This isn’t the work of some ordinary hacker. Whoever is doing this to us is a genius.”

  Traffic was building on Constitution Avenue, both vehicular as well as pedestrian. A normal workday was beginning. Functionaries out and about the business of governing 180 million–plus people through a difficult transition. Glad souls, many of them, sad souls, others.

  “Rencke,” Haaris said, almost as a half whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Otto Rencke. One of the only men in the world—maybe the only man—who could pull off something like this. He’s the CIA’s resident computer genius, and he’s a close personal friend of Kirk McGarvey’s.”

  “If that’s true, how do we stop him?” Rajput demanded.

  “You don’t, but that’s not the most important thing.”

  It was the look in the journalist’s eyes that had been bothersome. There’d been too much confidence in them, or at least a different kind of confidence. Real journalists asked questions; Parks had made challenges. Journalists were gatherers of information, storytellers. Parks had the feral posture of a killer.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It�
�s my fault. I missed it. Travis Parks is not the man’s real name.”

  “We know that.”

  “He’s Kirk McGarvey and he came here to kill me.”

  The line was dead silent for a long time. When Rajput came back he sounded determined. “At least we know who we’re really dealing with. We found the jeep he stole and almost certainly the person or persons helping him. One of our helicopters was shot down on Murree Road just south of here.”

  “What’d they report?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Call out all of your resources, priority one. Kill them on sight.”

  “We’re already on it.”

  “But, General, listen to me very carefully. Send your best people, and a lot of them, because McGarvey isn’t a man who’ll be so easy to kill.”

  “We’ll need to hold off.”

  “Absolutely not,” Haaris said, his anger rising. “We have a timetable and we will stick with it. All three packages will be delivered across the border as we planned.”

  “Too much can go wrong.”

  “We have come too far to stop now. After Quetta it was too late to quit, because sooner or later it’s bound to leak what actually happened up there.”

  “Yes, and someone like Rencke will put two and two together.”

  “But not the how or the where or the when,” Haaris said.

  “I’m not sure,” Rajput replied.

  “I am,” Haaris said. “The next step happens now.”

  “What next step happens now?” the mufti asked from the doorway.

  Haaris pocketed the phone as he turned. The Taliban spokesman, who was sharing the Aiwan with Haaris, stood in his full dress, including his head covering. He’d just come from morning prayers and his eyes were at peace.

  Haaris smiled pleasantly. “Prayers this morning were comforting.”

  The mufti chuckled. “Save me,” he said. “What next step?”

  “The transfers begin this evening.”

  “Everything has been arranged?”

  “Yes. I want you to get word to your people in Quetta.”

  “You do me an injustice, Messiah,” the mufti said. “All three packages have been waiting at the American and British trucking depots in Peshawar from the beginning.”