by Ben Coes
“You’re not going to change your mind?” asked Singh calmly.
“No, Indra, I’m not. There are eight hours left. Let’s give America the time it needs.”
“You know I support you, no matter what,” said Singh. “I would never voice my doubts to anyone but you. When my wife said that to me, I yelled at her. I will need to buy her flowers for the names I called her. I’ll think of ways to redirect the anger of our citizens. In a few hours, we’ll make an announcement about our progress in Baltistan, something to quell the unrest.”
“I’ll call Jessica Tanzer. It’s time for a report from the Americans anyway.”
“Rajiv,” said Singh. “If America has failed…”
“If America has failed, we will proceed with the original plan.”
49
BRISBANE GRAMMAR SCHOOL
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Youssef pulled the semi into the parking lot at the Brisbane Grammar School, rolling the eighteen-wheeler to the darkest spot in the empty lot. It was ten o’clock at night, eighteen hours after he hijacked the truck north of Cairns. He shut off the lights, then the engine.
The truck’s driver lay crumpled in a bloody mess in front of the passenger seat. While being caught with the dead body in the truck would likely put him in an Australian jail for the rest of his life, Youssef thought the risk of being seen removing the body was even greater, so he left it there. In the humid Queensland air, the corpse had started to smell. Youssef’s solution to that was to open the windows and breathe through his mouth.
In the darkness, he climbed down out of the cab of the truck, then walked across the deserted playing fields. He could smell the fresh-cut grass. For a brief moment, the smell intoxicated him.
Youssef had grown up in Damascus, but when his parents died he and his younger brother, Ahmed, were sent by their grandfather to an all-boys boarding school in Scotland called Hampden Public. Hampden Public was one step above reform school. Most of its students were from somewhere in the United Kingdom, and had been kicked out of better private schools. For a brief moment, the smell of the grass reminded Youssef of Hampden Public, of its big, open fields and brick buildings. He thought of Ahmed. The smell of the grass brought back a wave of bittersweet emotion.
As he walked across the dark grass, Youssef recalled his last day at Hampden, only a month after he’d first arrived. It was the day a Scottish boy named Simon had pushed Ahmed down a flight of stairs, breaking both of his arms, as well as his nose.
“Did you do anything to him?” Youssef had asked, standing over the infirmary bed, horrified, crying as he looked at his badly injured younger brother. “Did you say anything to provoke this?”
“No,” said Ahmed. “Nothing, Youssef. I swear. I don’t even know this person.”
“Did he apologize?”
“No. He laughed. They all laughed.”
At dinner that evening, Youssef had gone directly to the silverware cabinet. After picking up a butter knife, he’d walked through the dining hall, searching for the boy who’d pushed Ahmed down the stairs. When he saw Simon, a tall senior, sitting at a table with his friends, Youssef had approached the table. He hid the dull butter knife behind his back.
Everyone at the table had ignored him as he stood there, waiting to speak.
“Excuse me,” Youssef had finally said to Simon, interrupting his conversation. “Are you the one who pushed my brother down the stairs?”
Youssef recalled the surprised look on the large boy’s face, followed by the toothy smile, the food in his mouth visible as he looked at Youssef.
“What about it, Mohammed?” he’d answered in a thick Cockney accent, to the amusement of his friends. “Yeah, I might have. He shouldn’t a been getting in my way.”
Without saying anything, Youssef had raised the butter knife in his right hand, then swung it down as hard as he could. It ripped through Simon’s blue blazer, through the button-down shirt, then plunged four inches deep into Simon’s neck. Youssef remembered how the blood had spurted out like a garden hose. Ten minutes later, despite the best efforts of a variety of teachers and kitchen staff, Simon lay dead on the dining hall floor. He had never heard someone scream as loud as Simon had that day.
The next few months were a blurry haze of policemen, detention centers, lawyers, mental hospitals, psychologists, foster homes, jail cells, until he and Ahmed ultimately ended up in an orphanage outside of Cairo. But he would do it all over again. The moment he swung that knife blade was the moment he became a man.
The memory raced through his mind as he walked across the football fields, toward the lights of the houses in the distance. He started crying. He’d always been there to protect Ahmed. He’d driven for eighteen hours, and every time the thought of his younger brother crept into his mind, he pushed it away. He’d treated Ahmed like a dog, he knew, but he was the only relative Youssef had. He wondered how Andreas had killed Ahmed. Youssef closed his eyes. Right now, he had to focus on getting out of Australia. He wiped the tears from his cheeks, then pushed the thought of his brother completely away.
At the far end of the fields, he climbed over a wooden fence, then went right on Toombul Road. He then took another right and walked into the parking lot of the Novena Palms Motel. He knocked on the door of unit twenty-two.
“Youssef,” said an older man with a beard and glasses, who opened the door. “Sit down. Take off your coat.”
The man inspected the wound on Youssef’s right arm, poking it with his finger, even sniffing it.
“It’s not infected yet,” he said. From the table, he took a syringe. “This is an antibiotic, just in case.” He stuck the needle into Youssef’s arm.
After the man bandaged his arm, Youssef went into the bathroom. He leaned into the tub, turned on the faucets, put on a pair of rubber gloves, then took a bottle of black hair dye and rubbed it through his hair, turning it black, then dried it. He removed the gloves, then put on a striped button-down shirt the man had brought.
“Sit down,” the man ordered.
He took photos of Youssef.
“There’s food over there,” said the man as he looked over the photos, deciding which one was best. “Crackers, fruit, and cookies. Eat while I do this.”
“Why the passport?” asked Youssef. “I thought Nebuchar had arranged for a private plane.”
“A charter,” said the man as he worked on the fake passport. “They will inspect your passport before takeoff.”
Half an hour later, a black Camry pulled into the Hawker Pacific Flight Center at Brisbane Airport. The car drove onto the tarmac and up to a shining dark blue and white Hawker 4000 jet. Youssef climbed out of the car and walked over to the Hawker’s air stairs. At the base of the stairs, a young man in a light green Australian Customs and Border Protection Service uniform was waiting. He inspected Youssef’s passport, then stamped it without asking any questions.
“Have a nice flight,” said the man.
Youssef climbed up the airstairs, nodded at the pilots in the cockpit, then sat down in one of the leather seats in the back of the jet. When the jet was airborne, Youssef opened his cell phone.
“I’m in the air,” he said, running his hand through his short, spiky hair. “Thank you for making the arrangements. See you in Beirut.”
50
BENAZIR BHUTTO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
ISLAMABAD
Deputy Inspector General Sahi, Agent Hasni, and four other Capital District policemen, as well as a pair of customs agents, reconvened in the second-floor conference room at Benazir Bhutto Airport.
“I ran the manifests,” said Hasni. “For the three hours leading up to the discovery of the bodies, there were eleven arriving flights. Eight were domestic, three were from outside Pakistan. I ran all eleven manifests, a total of one thousand nine hundred and forty-four passengers.”
“What did ISI flag?” asked Sahi.
“None of the passengers set off the ISI watch list,” said Hasni. “So I focused on
the three international flights. There was a Thai Airlines flight out of Bangkok, and two PIA flights, one out of Chicago, the other London. On those three flights, there were four hundred and eighty passengers. Three hundred and eighty-one were Pakistani. I eliminated them, as you suggested. We can always go back to the bigger list.”
“Yes, yes. Go on.”
“Of the ninety-nine foreigners, forty-two were men. I removed anyone under twenty and over fifty. This reduced the number to twenty.”
Hasni pushed a short stack of papers toward Sahi.
“And here they are, Inspector,” said Hasni.
Sahi started to flip through the small stack of papers. Each sheet was a photocopy of the individual passenger’s passport entry page, along with photo, and entry customs visa form, in which each passenger is required to list their profession, duration, and purpose of visit.
Sahi analyzed the pages, quickly separating ones he felt were improbable from individuals who looked, at least hypothetically, like they could have killed the two men. Out was a group of four men from Colorado who were climbing K2, three doctors from Canada who were traveling to Baltistan to volunteer for a month at a rural health clinic, and several others with equally disqualifying backstories.
It did not take long for Sahi to narrow the group of twenty down to three: the first was an American from Chicago who was an executive for a U.S. defense contractor called Sallyport. The second was a Chinese man from Shanghai who worked for a Chinese pharmaceutical company called Pleineir. The third was a journalist from Paris, a correspondent for Le Monde named Jean Milan.
“Get these out immediately,” said Sahi, pushing the three sheets of paper to one of his deputies. “Police, border patrol, customs, TV stations, hospitals, newspapers, hotels, military. I want these men brought in for questioning.”
* * *
Back at Capital Territory Police HQ, Sahi closed his office door. He studied the three sheets of paper. Of the three photos, it was the photo of Jean Milan that Sahi found himself going back to again and again. The man simply didn’t look French. He looked Pakistani. Sahi went to his computer and searched the CDP database, found a number, then picked up his phone.
“Oui,” said a groggy voice with a French accent. It was Pierre Toloph, Islamabad bureau chief for Le Monde. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“Mr. Toloph, this is Deputy Inspector General Sahi from Capital Police. Can you answer me a question?”
“What time is it?” asked Toloph in a thick French accent. “Do I need counsel? Jesus, it’s four thirty in the morning!”
“You don’t need a lawyer and you can go back to sleep,” said Sahi, “if you answer me one question.”
“Yes, yes, ask your question, Inspector.”
“Who is Jean Milan?”
“Jean Milan? Why do you ask this? How should I know?”
“You don’t have a correspondent working for you named Jean Milan?”
Toloph was silent for several seconds, then hung up the phone.
51
DRASS
INDIA-CONTROLLED KASHMIR
The air was cooler in the Mushkoh Valley than in Rawalpindi. They were more than twelve thousand feet above sea level now.
Through a night vision monocular, Millar studied the Pakistani supply line in the distance. Then they moved.
The air was thin and they ran at a good trail pace, seven-minute miles, one by one behind Iverheart, negotiating the boulders and cracks in the ground. They stopped on a bluff just above the supply line.
In the distance, the sound of a truck could be heard coming toward the front.
Millar stared through the monocular.
“Fuel truck,” he said as he studied the eighteen-wheeler rumbling toward them in the distance.
Dewey looked at his watch: 4:55 A.M.
They moved down from the ridge above the road as the truck approached.
“You’re shooter,” Dewey said to Iverheart. “We’ll fall in after you take out the driver from here.”
Iverheart swung the rifle from across his back to his front, then lay on the ground, unfolding the DTA SRS. He got down on his stomach, setting the rifle on the ground. He turned on the Renegade thermal sight.
On the hill, in pitch-black, Iverheart adjusted his ATN goggles. Through the goggles, the truck was illuminated in glowing shades of green. Iverheart, on his stomach now, placed his finger on the trigger of the sniper rifle, and flipped his goggles up, then looked through the Zeiss optic on top of the rifle aligning the truck’s path. He would have to hit a target moving at more than thirty miles per hour.
Dewey and Millar lay on their stomachs a few feet off the road.
The fuel truck rumbled closer, its engine louder, its headlights increasingly large as it approached, oblivious to the coming ambush.
A low crack whipped through the air as Iverheart fired from the hill. The round passed ten feet above Dewey and Millar as they waited on the cold ground. The slug hit the young driver in the skull, spraying blood across the back window of the cab. The truck jerked off the road, then slowed to a stop.
Dewey ran to the truck and opened the cab door on the driver’s side. He reached up, pulled the dead Pakistani soldier from the cab, and dragged the corpse to the side of the road, more than a hundred feet, out of sight.
Iverheart arrived, sniper rifle slung over his shoulder.
Back in the truck, Dewey and Millar brushed broken glass from the seat, then took an old rag and wiped blood and brains from the seat and windows of the truck.
“We got company,” said Iverheart from the ground next to the truck.
The lights of an approaching troop carrier flickered less than a quarter mile behind them.
Dewey took the wheel. Millar climbed into the passenger seat and moved to the middle. Iverheart climbed into the cab next to Millar. Dewey hit the gas and the large truck began to move. He steered it back to the supply road.
The truck gathered speed and was soon moving quickly down the supply road toward the war front. Dewey steered a straight path east for more than five miles. The sound of mortar fire grew louder as they closed in on the front. The pace of the bombing seemed to uptick as dawn neared.
When the sky was dark, the lights of the truck illuminated little more than the road in front of them. But the fires revealed an altogether different scene; a violent, chaotic beauty, composed of red and orange, framed by the ridgelines of the Ladakh Range, far in the distance behind the Indian front.
Dewey kept moving toward the front, down the supply road. They passed several departing Pakistani Army vehicles—empty troop carriers, flatbeds, a few fuel trucks.
“Dewey, it’s Van,” came the voice in Dewey’s COMM bud. “UAV says you want to break right as soon as you can now.”
Dewey moved his night vision goggles down over his eyes. He reached in front of the steering wheel and shut the headlights off. He turned right and eased the tanker truck off the dirt supply road. He kept the gas pedal floored, moving at the same pace, in darkness, across flat terrain, avoiding the occasional bush or boulder. They drove for several miles, parallel to the battle front at their left.
“You’re approaching the reservoir beneath the village,” said Bradstreet over the COMM. “You’re good on foot from there.”
Dewey downshifted, then eased the truck to a gradual stop. They climbed out of the truck. To the left was a large pond with a small shack at its edge. Dewey surveyed the hill above with the monocular. In the distance, the sharp incline of a mountain base sprang vertically skyward. Several hundred yards up was a village.
“Why hasn’t India razed it yet?” asked Dewey, tapping the bud in his ear.
“They think it’s abandoned,” said Bradstreet. “They don’t want to destroy the town if they don’t have to. Remember, this is Indian soil.”
Dewey glanced at his watch: 5:25 A.M.
* * *
The sky was stunning; the stars looked as if you could reach up and touch them. To the east,
the horizon was turning gray as dawn approached. The light illuminated the mountain village; white cement and mortar flashing like an aerie above the fray of the battle.
Millar led a fast-paced run toward Drass. As advertised, he was in excellent shape, and it showed. The twenty-four-year-old kept them running, even in the thin, high elevation air, at a grueling six-minute pace. Dewey brought up the rear, behind Millar and Iverheart. The air burned his lungs. The steady pounding of mortar cannons filled the air. They stopped to catch their breaths at the base of the mountain, a few hundred yards below where Bolin and his commanders were overseeing the battle. Despite the temperatures, now in the forties, they were all sweating profusely.
Dewey adjusted the settings at the side of his ATN PS15-4s. The village of Drass sprouted in low, square buildings up the side of the mountain. The village was dark. A terrace jutted out from the hill above them. He saw movement on the terrace.
“Ten o’clock,” said Iverheart.
“I see it,” said Dewey. “You guys see the building?”
“Yeah, I got it,” said Millar.
“We’re counting fifteen to eighteen people,” said Bradstreet. “No one below the building but there is a guard posted at the front door.”
“I’ll torch one of the buildings below the terrace,” said Dewey, pointing. He looked at Iverheart. “You come with me. We’ll assault from the terrace. Alex, when you hear the bomb, move in hard from the front.”
Dewey reached into his back pocket and removed a photograph. He flipped on a low light on the underside of his MP7, and aimed it at a black-and-white head shot of a Pakistani man, longish hair, dark, slightly overweight, a mustache.
“That’s Bolin,” said Dewey. “Whatever you do, don’t kill him.”
They moved up the hill, through a quarter mile of walnut trees and flat grazing plots carved onto steppes. They split up beneath the terrace. Dewey and Iverheart moved to the side of the house and hid beneath the eastern precipice of the terrace. Millar went around the other side of the house and crouched at the corner of the building, just out of sight from a soldier guarding the front door.