The man obeyed and Ous nodded at Bolan. “This one speaks English.”
Ous kept the intruder covered while Bolan cut the boy free, then gave the twelve-year-old a hand up. “Esfandyar, I am a friend of your father’s.”
The young man rubbed his wrists. “I am very pleased to meet you, sir.”
“My son,” Ous said, “your mother is in the kitchen. I wish you to take her upstairs. Go to the roof, where you shall knock and say ‘Rambo’ lest your sister shoot you.”
“Yes, Father.” Esfandyar looked around at the carnage. “And you?”
The old warrior’s eyes bored into the surviving intruder. “Our friend and I wish to speak with this man.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ustad Ghulz was a very unhappy man. The United States Marines had come to Omar Ous’s house, rescued his family and removed the dead. Ghulz had been taken from the parlor, bound hand and foot and thrown into the cellar until the Marines had left. He now sat tied to a chair beneath the glare of the cellar’s single bare bulb. Ghulz was a fountain of useless information. He had been a hired thug most of his life. He had worked for the opium lords as a gunman and leg-breaker. When the Taliban had taken over, he had adopted the black turban and shot people and broken legs for the Taliban drug lords with fanatic zeal. When the Taliban had been driven out of the north, he had taken off his turban and shot people and broken legs for the new drug lords. Ustad Ghulz was a man who had found his niche.
Now he found himself tied to a chair in the cellar of Omar Ous, the Lion of Kunduz.
Ghulz shook like a leaf.
“Powerful men” whom he couldn’t readily identify had hired Ustad and half a dozen like-minded souls. These powerful men claimed to have the Lion of Kunduz on a leash. Another half dozen men who remained veiled joined them. Other than that, they were foreign and scared him. Ghulz had no idea who they were.
“Did they act like soldiers?” Bolan tried.
“Yes!” Ghulz leaped at the question like a lifeline. “Very much like soldiers!”
“They spoke Arabic?”
“Yes! I was asked if I spoke it before I was hired! It was the tongue in which they gave us orders! But among themselves they spoke some foreign tongue!”
Ous drew the sinuously curving Pesh Kabz he had found on his pillow just twenty-four hours earlier. Ghulz flinched as Ous pointed the blade at him. “Do you know what this is, dog?”
Ghulz leaned back in his chair and gazed at Ous as if expecting a lethal trick question. “A…dagger?” he ventured.
Ous rolled his eyes and replaced the blade in his sash. Ghulz had no idea what the weapon represented. Bolan continued on the “good Cop” line. “So the strangers left some hours after the house and Mr. Ous’s family were secured?”
“Yes!”
“And you were to wait?”
“Yes! I was to receive a phone call, that the American was dead.”
Ghulz flinched as Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “And?”
“After that we were to finish off…” Ghulz’s voice trailed off in terror beneath Ous’s unforgiving glare.
“So we gather,” Bolan said. “You weren’t supposed to contact anyone?”
“Only…if something went wrong.”
Bolan had Ghulz’s cell. He considered the timetable and what the contact number in Ghulz’s phone might be worth. He took out his own phone and connected to Ghulz’s while Ous watched with interest. Bolan downloaded everything in the phone’s memory, but there wasn’t much. The security software in Bolan’s special-issue phone detected no viruses or subroutines. In fact, the entire memory of the phone issued to Ghulz was the single number he was to call in an emergency. The phone had never made or received a call, text, email or image. If it had, the data had been wiped clean by a professional. “If you called, what was the code word?”
Ghulz swallowed. “I was to ask, is the lion free?”
“And then?” Bolan probed.
“And then I would receive instructions.”
It wasn’t subtle, but Ghulz was obviously a cutout. “In Arabic?”
“Yes.”
Bolan dialed the Farm. He owned one of the most powerful cell phones on Earth. Kurtzman and his cyberteam had designed it from the ground up, and nine times out of ten it was bouncing its signal through National Security Agency satellites.
“Bear, I need a trace on a call. I’m going to make a call to the enemy. I’ve linked my phone with the suspect’s.”
“That could take a minute,” Kurtzman replied. “Keep them talking if you can.”
Bolan held Ghulz’s phone to his face, then nodded at Ous. “If he says a single syllable you find suspicious, cut his throat.”
Ous drew the dagger and placed the blade just below Ghulz’s Adam’s apple. “Should he be so foolish, I will cut off his head, and send it to my Christian cousins in Tajikistan, whereupon they shall toss it to their dogs. When they have finished savaging it, the eyes of Ustad Ghulz shall be filled with pig’s blood and sewn shut, his mouth stuffed with the pig’s genitals and sealed. Then shall his head be wrapped in the pig’s offal and encased in its carcass to be buried without a marker, and, clad in such raiment, shall Ustad Ghulz go to explain his sins to He who made him.” Lightning stopped just short of flashing from Ous’s eyes and smiting Ghulz where he sat. “This I swear.”
Ghulz looked like he might throw up.
Bolan pressed Send. The phone rang three times and the line clicked on.
Ghulz spoke a sentence in Arabic. Bolan raised an eyebrow at Ous and the warrior shrugged. A voice spoke back. Ous mouthed words in translation. “Ustad Ghulz has failed.”
Ghulz whimpered something back. “He tells his co-conspirator that the United States Marines came.”
The voice on the phone spoke again.
Ous’s eyes flew wide as he translated. “Ustad Ghulz is a liar. A lion and an eagle came.”
The symbolism was pretty heavy-handed.
The line clicked dead.
“What’d you get, Bear?”
Kurtzman grunted unhappily. “Not enough time.”
Bolan clicked off Ghulz’s phone. “Bear, I got a feeling that the moment I turned on Ghulz’s phone and pressed Send, I got GPSed.
“Striker! Get out of there!”
“Hold that thought.” Bolan dialed another number.
Keller answered on the first ring. “Yo!”
“How soon can you and the Marines get back here?”
“Half an hour, why? Did you get anything out of Ghulz?”
“Not much, but I think we’re about to get something courtesy of Ghulz.”
“You’re going to get hit?”
Something the size of a 155 mm howitzer round hit the house. Ghulz screamed as dust sifted down from the floor above. The second impact blew the cellar door inward, and heat and smoke roared down the stairs in a wave. Ous slashed Ghulz’s bonds and ran to the other end of the cellar.
“Come!” He overturned two barrels to reveal a hatch. He pulled it open and dropped down. Between the Soviet invasion and the war on terror, Afghanistan had become a veritable termite’s nest of tunnels.
Bolan shoved the shrieking Ghulz into the dark as the power cut out. The world plunged into darkness that relit Halloween orange and hell red as the third shell impacted. Bolan tossed Ghulz’s phone back behind him as he dropped down and gave the cowering Ghulz a shove to motivate him onward. The soldier pulled out his tactical light. The tunnel was just big enough to move at an uncomfortable crouch. Ghulz crawled, sobbing, on hands and knees. Ous scrambled ahead. Heat seared the back of Bolan’s neck, and a second later the tunnel hatch filled with rubble as the floor of the house above failed. Bolan’s internal compass told him they were heading northwest in a line that was taking them to Ous’s stable. His sense of direction bore out as the tunnel dead-ended with a hatch leading above.
Ghulz whimpered and Ous cuffed him to silence. Bolan and Ous crouched and listened for long moments. The shelling had stopped. Ou
s’s tone was dangerously conversational. “Do you know? I was not aware of an artillery emplacement in the hills above my home.”
“It wasn’t artillery.” The explosion pulse and Bolan’s sense of smell told him what happened. “They’re using thermobaric weapons.”
Ous gave Bolan a look.
“Fuel-air explosive,” Bolan explained. “I smelled the stench of the fuel over the burnt high explosive. I’d bet they’re hitting us with Russian-made Shmel or Shmel-M shoulder-fired recoilless grenade launchers.”
“Truly you are a fountain of knowledge. What else does this mean?”
“It means three hundred meters is the effective range and seventeen is the maximum. They’re aiming at a large house and they’re up in the hills firing down, so it’s plunging fire. I’m guessing if they have training and want hits they’re at five hundred meters or less.”
“What else?”
“We need bigger guns.” Bolan glanced meaningfully at his silenced submachine gun.
“God, through his servant Omar, Provides.”
Ous reached into a crèche in the side of the tunnel and pulled out a crate, from which he withdrew an SVU-AS sniper rifle. He handed it to Bolan and took out a second weapon for himself along with two bandoliers of magazines for the both of them.
Bolan inspected the weapon. It was distinctly odd as sniper weapons went. It was basically the old Russian Dragunov back-flipped into a bullpup configuration, and it had the charming and somewhat mind-boggling ability for a .30-caliber sniper rifle to fire on full-auto. In the glare of the tactical light between Bolan’s teeth it was clear the rifle was both well used and lovingly oiled and preserved. “You got any grenades?”
“I have two. How many would please you?”
“One’ll do just fine,” Bolan said.
Ous handed him a Russian RGO fragmentation grenade.
“Thanks.”
Ous put his shoulder against the hatch above him and shoved hard. Dirt, dung and straw cascaded down. The spooked horses nickered and shifted in their stalls at the new intrusion. Ous jumped up into the stable and pulled Ghulz up by his hair. Bolan heaved himself up and moved to the wall facing the house. He peered out a knothole at the burning pile of rubble.
“It’s gone.”
“So I gather.” Ous slapped Ghulz to the ground. “Stay still, and I shall not kill you immediately.”
Bolan glanced around through the gloom. The smell directed him to the tarp-covered pile of something in the corner. He had a reasonable suspicion it was Ous’s mother-in-law, the servants and Ous’s hounds. Ous glanced to where Bolan was looking, snuffed the air and then looked once more upon Ghulz. “I restrain myself.”
Ghulz cringed.
Bolan watched the house burn. The phone signal would tell the enemy that he and Ous were buried in the rubble. Regardless, the enemy didn’t seem to know about the tunnel.
“How shall we proceed?” Ous asked.
“They’re waiting to see if anything moves. If nothing does, they’re most likely going to extract, though there’s a chance they may come down here and run a quick recon on the rubble before they do.”
Ous squinted out a crack between the boards of the stable wall. “Can you ride a horse?”
“Yeah.”
“I suggest a quick ride through the orchard and then beneath the aqueduct. I know the terrain. We can flank them within thirty minutes.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. The stable was a house of straw and a very big bad wolf could huff, puff and thermobarically blow the structure and person and beast within it away the moment they were divulged. They could spread to give the gunners up-range too many targets. It would most likely force an extraction on their part, but the Marine choppers were inbound. It would only—
“Ghulz!” Bolan roared.
Ustad Ghulz ran screaming from the stable.
The gate hadn’t been barred. Ous raised his rifle to shoot the coward. Bolan seized Ous by the shoulder, spun him around and shoved him toward the hatch.
“Forget him! Down!” Bolan heard the rush of the rocket. Ous vaulted back down into the tunnel, and the Executioner followed a second later, slamming the hatch shut. The world blew up as the fuel-air weapon hit the stable. It stopped short of collapsing the tunnel. Bolan waited a moment as dust and dirt filtered down on him, then threw open the blackened and warped trapdoor. He found himself in a crater. Rather than burning like the house, the stable had been scattered to the four winds. The horses had been blown into chunks of smoldering meat and a smoking human leg a dozen yards away implied Ghulz had met a similar fate. The blast wave had gone on to denude the trees in the orchard of every single leaf and fruit.
Ous popped his head up and scowled around his premises. “The men left behind at the house were considered expendable.”
“Yeah.”
“The men on the hillside were left to watch, with the option of attacking us or killing their own men if my assassination attempt upon you failed.”
“Yeah.”
Ous gave Bolan a pained look. “I see, but then why did they not attack the Marines when they were at my home?”
“Because there were three helicopter loads of them and it would have accomplished nothing.”
“I see. They were left to deal with NCIS agents, malingerers, or perhaps even you and me.”
“Right.”
“The men on the hill are considered expendable, as well?”
“Yeah—” Bolan frowned “—but I haven’t made up my mind whether they know it or not.”
Ous stroked his beard. “Our enemy plays a deep game. How shall we proceed?”
Bolan knew his next suggestion would most likely be in vain. “We could wait for backup?”
“They have terrorized my wife, beaten my son, abused my daughter, killed my mother-in-law, shot my hounds, burned down my house, slaughtered my horses and now the cherry crop is ruined.” Ous’s tone was eerily conversational as he made his list. “It is said that the man who forgives shall find his place in Paradise assured. However, I find I wish to see these men’s souls in hell before I worry about my own.”
“It’s not unreasonable,” Bolan admitted.
“No.”
“You’re going up that hill?” the soldier asked.
“I am.”
“Do you want some company?”
“Few things would please me more,” Ous said.
“Let’s go.” Bolan crawled to the edge of the crater and pulled down his night-vision goggles to peer through the smoke. The problem for the bad guys was that recoilless weapons belched fire from both ends. Beyond the burning house, gray smoke rose up in the hills, marking their firing position. “I make it four hundred meters from the house.” Bolan tried to scan the area, but the fit between his night-vision goggles and the Russian telescopic sight wasn’t ideal. The good news was that he had fired a Shmel rocket once or twice himself. They weighed nearly twenty-six pounds and most of that weight was the rocket. A mobile force wouldn’t be carrying many reloads, and they’d already fired four times. The bad news was that out in the open one thermobaric detonation would be all it took to paint Bolan and Ous into swathes of shattered bones and bubbling goo across the scorched earth.
“Cover me.” Bolan rose and sprinted across the killing ground. He kept the smoke of the burning house between him and the hills. The enemy opened up, but it was almost a relief to have rifles firing at him in the distance rather than rockets. Bolan made it approximately eight shooters. Ous returned fire as the Executioner ran. A thermobaric blast had knocked Ous’s Landcruiser onto its side and Bolan skidded behind it. He slapped his rifle over the scorched left tire and roared behind him. “Go!”
Ous ran. The chattering of the enemy AKs were strobing orange blossoms in night. Bolan picked flowers. The short, SVU-AS rifle slammed into his shoulder, and a rifle in the hills fell silent. He took two more, and suddenly all the weapons fell silent as the enemy realized they were outranged. Ous reached his overturned
truck, his breath ragged.
It was another hundred yards past the house to the start of the rugged hills and rock creeping that was more the veteran’s speed. “Go.”
Ous groaned but broke cover and ran. Bolan knew every step Ous took also brought him in range of the enemy rifles, but the soldier was a trained sniper and the better sprinter. He had to get Ous into the hills first. One fool did the Executioner the favor of opening fire from too long a range, and Bolan’s bullet put into him.
Ous reached the rocks alive. The effort left him bent over double, but he waved Bolan forward. The big American kept the house between himself and the enemy as long as he could, then sprinted for the rocks. No fire reached out for him during his seconds’ long sprint across the open ground. He crouched behind an outcropping. Ous was still gasping. Bolan considered the situation. He wasn’t looking forward to climbing this hill. “They’re waiting to ambush us as we come up.”
“Yes,” Ous agreed. “However, look to your right.”
Bolan looked. To a practiced eye the land to his right formed a small alluvial fan. He smiled in the dark at the rocks that guarded its mouth. “A channel.”
“A chute,” Ous acknowledged. “When it rains, the water comes down the chute in a torrent. The chute goes nearly to the top of the hill. When the Soviets came to my village, we fighters scattered up into the hills. We would slither down the chute on our bellies at night to come down to the valley floor unseen. We shall now creep up it to come upon our enemies.”
“Lead the way.”
Ous disappeared into a crevice. Bolan slung his rifle and followed. The chute was like a narrow waterslide of stone. Aeons of rainwater had carved a serpentine course down the hillside. The sides and floor of the chute were bone-dry at the moment and made for an easy ascent. Hands and boot soles made almost no noise against the slick rock and Ous set an easy pace up the hill. They stopped at the sound of whispering voices. They were about halfway up the hill, and the rolling land gave way to “shattered castle” rock formations. It made the exact location of the enemy difficult. The problem of the valley floor repeated itself on a smaller scale. To reach the rocks they had to clear twenty-five yards of dead space. Once they reached the rocks they were going to be outnumbered and at fistfight distances. Bolan wanted an advantage.
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