by Scott McEwen
Gil held Ramesh in his sights as he walked eastward toward the decoy building. Forty yards up the slope, he stopped and knocked at a door on the north side of the lane. The door opened and Aasif Kohistani stepped out, pulling his winter coat closed as he led Ramesh at a brisk pace back toward Sandra’s quarters.
Kohistani and Ramesh went into the building. They were inside for perhaps five minutes before coming back out. Ramesh turned west and stepped inside where the sentries were playing cards. Kohistani went east back to his house. As Gil shimmied carefully back from the edge of the roof, he wondered if the Hezbi cleric could feel the shadow of death moving with him up the lane.
The God of War is a fickle son of a bitch, Mr. Kohistani.
49
AFGHANISTAN,
Kabul, Central Command
General Couture stood staring at the screen with his arms crossed over his chest, watching intently as Gil shimmied slowly back from the edge of the roof. Captain Metcalf was beside him. The unexpected sighting of Aasif Kohistani minutes before had caused a stir in the room, leaving everyone convinced that Sandra Brux was definitely being held inside the building marked by the strobe.
Couture leaned closer to Metcalf. “If you have someone you can call in to assist your man,” he muttered, “now would be the time to do that.”
Metcalf looked at him in confusion. The president had just ordered them to stand down.
“You’re telling me you don’t have anyone you can call?” the general asked.
Metcalf scratched his head. “Well, the truth is, General, we’ve already sent for them . . . and the MPs can’t seem to find them.”
Couture gave a curt nod, glancing at the screen. “What about back in Langley . . . inside of SOG?”
“General, what about the president’s—?”
“Look, Glen. I’d like to kick Shannon’s ass for pulling this fucking stunt, but Sandra’s in that goddamn building. So if you’ve got some kind of SOG voodoo you can work here, nobody in this room is going to say anything.”
The Navy captain drew a breath, pausing before making his reply. “General, if I may speak frankly . . . ?”
Couture made a “come on” gesture with his hand.
“Master Chief Shannon doesn’t think he’s a ninja, sir. He knows he’s not infiltrating that village and stealing Sandra away from those people without help. It’s my guess that whatever voodoo he’s going to need has already been laid on.”
“Which, I presume, is why the MPs can’t find Steelyard and Crosswhite.”
“I don’t know, sir, but whatever those two lunatics are up to . . . you can bet they’re not hiding under the bed someplace waiting for the all-clear.”
“Fine,” Couture said. “Then neither are we.” He snapped his fingers to get the attention of his communications officer. “Lieutenant, get Colonel Morrow on the horn.”
“Yes, sir.”
Metcalf and Couture stared at the screen as Gil made his way north along the river.
“Where the hell is he going now?” Couture wondered aloud.
Metcalf sucked his teeth. “I believe he may have it in his head to kill Kohistani.”
“Just grab the girl and go,” Couture quietly urged. “She’s right there, for Christ’s sake!”
“We can’t see everything that he sees, sir. He may be seeing something we can’t.”
Couture gave him a glance. “You’re worse than my wife, Captain. Let me watch the damn game, will ya?”
Metcalf chuckled. “Yes, sir.”
“Cynthia, widen the angle a bit, please.”
Gil began to shrink as the shot pulled back, revealing a section of the village about as long and wide as a soccer field.
“Shit, who the hell are those guys?” Couture pointed to the top of the screen. “Cynthia, tighten it up.”
The shot zoomed directly in on half a dozen armed men marching along the river toward the village from the north. They were all heavily armed with RPGs and belt-fed Russian PK light machine guns. Only one of them marched with his weapon at the ready, but they were on a direct collision course with Gil.
“Those are mountain fighters,” Metcalf said, rubbing the back of his neck where he was beginning to tense up. “They’re coming down from the Hindu Kush to answer Kohistani’s call for jihad. Probably marched all night to get there.”
Gil froze when the mountain men closed to within seventy-five yards, going immediately to ground with the Remington extending out in front of him.
“Shoot!” Couture muttered. “Shoot!”
Breathe, Metcalf thought to himself. Breathe.
A few seconds later, the fighter marching with his PK at the ready, jerked as if he’d been stung by a wasp. Less than a second later, the man beside him dropped dead to the earth.
With the sudden realization that they were taking fire, the other four gunners raced to unsling their machine guns. The next man in line dropped dead, and then another. There were three left alive. The first fighter hit was down on his knee, hammering at the receiver of his machine gun with the heel of his fist.
“Shannon shot his weapon in the receiver,” Metcalf said.
By the time Metcalf had completed his remark, the man with the disabled weapon was the only one left alive. He flung the broken machine gun aside and jumped up to run but didn’t travel a full step before his head exploded and he went down.
“My god!” someone said. “How long did that take?”
“I’d say just over ten seconds,” Couture remarked, turning to Metcalf. “This is what you missed not being able to watch the Iran mission.”
Metcalf nodded, lips puckered, deeply concerned for his man on the ground. Couture was a good general, highly educated, a solid tactician. As a major general, he had even been shot in the face with an RPG, surviving a terrible wound to go on and earn himself another couple of stars . . . but he had never killed anyone. As a combat veteran with seven Cold War kills under his belt, Metcalf had a great deal of appreciation for what he was seeing on the screen, but he still did not consider it a spectator sport. He sneaked a look at the chronograph on his watch. Gil Shannon had killed six heavily armed men in nine seconds with a bolt-action rifle at a distance of seventy-five yards, and judging from the lack of HIK activity within the village, he had done so without allowing his enemy to get off a single shot.
“General, I’ve got Colonel Morrow on the line.” Colonel Mack Morrow was with the Air Force 24th Special Tactics Squadron, another Special Mission Unit under the auspices of the CIA’s Special Operations Group/Joint Special Operations Command.
Couture went to the back of the room and took the phone. “Mack, sorry to wake you. Listen, I want a pair of Black Hawks loaded and ready on the tarmac for an emergency extraction, ASAP. I may or may not end up needing them, but if I do, it’s going to be soon. They’ll be going into the Panjshir, Mack, so keep this as low-profile as possible. You’d better ready a pair of Cobras as well.”
He returned to the front of the room, where Captain Metcalf stood watching him.
“All set, General?”
“Yeah,” Couture said. “I’ve got it set up so you and I both will be in the unemployment line by the end of the week.”
“You have to admit, General, Fell Swoop was a death sentence for Sandra.”
Couture grunted. “Well, for what it’s worth, I did try talking the president into going with DEVGRU . . . not real hard, but I did try.”
50
AFGHANISTAN,
Panjshir Valley, Bazarak
Gil was up and moving the second the last gunman was down, sprinting the seventy-five yards to where they lay. One of them was still breathing, choking blood with an exit wound the size of a coconut in the right side of his back. Gil knifed him. Ditching the Dragunov for good, he gathered up all six of the RPGs the gunners had been carrying and trotted back toward the village with them. He didn’t have an immediate use for six rockets, but he didn’t want them lying around for the enemy to pick up an
d fire at him on his way out of Dodge. His intended EZ was three full clicks to the north, and he didn’t need any extra hurdles to jump along the way.
He stashed the RPGs behind the rusted bed of a pickup someone had leaned against the back wall of a lone outbuilding, then made his way toward the rear of Kohistani’s house. A roving sentry was coming down the hill, crossing through a beam of light that shined from the back window of a house farther up the lane. The man held up his hand to wave. Gil waved back and stopped, waiting for him to approach, feeling almost as though he could walk among these people with impunity now. The sentry drew within ten feet, and Gil shot him through the eye with the .45. He dragged the body into a gap between Kohistani’s house and the one next door, then slipped beneath an awning to peek in through Kohistani’s window. A candle burned on a table beside a bed where the cleric lay sleeping, an open Koran on his chest.
Gil slipped in through the back door and crept around the corner into Kohistani’s room, taking a seat on the chair beside the bed. He pressed his finger into the candle to snuff out the flame and sat looking at Sandra’s tormentor in infrared. He set the Koran aside on a table and placed a gentle hand on the cleric’s shoulder.
Kohistani came instantly awake, sitting up in the dark.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in Pashto. Without night vision, Gil would have appeared very much like the Grim Reaper sitting there beside him in the heavy mountain cloak. He reached for the matches to relight the candle. “You’re supposed to knock before you come in here.”
Gil didn’t understand a word. He realized the cleric spoke decent English, but he couldn’t risk him calling for help, and there wasn’t much to be said anyhow. He produced a garrote from a pouch on his harness and gripped the wooden toggles in his fists. A garrote wasn’t exactly a combat weapon, but it was a weapon of stealth. A weapon of assassination. And Gil believed that Kohistani had earned himself the right to be assassinated.
Kohistani struck the match, and with catlike speed, Gil looped the strand of piano wire around his throat, giving it a stiff jerk to choke off all air and blood flow to the brain instantly. Kohistani grabbed for the wire, and the match went out. He clawed desperately but it was no use. The wire was slicing through his flesh like a cheese cutter. Gil knelt with a knee on the edge of the bed, applying steady pressure but stopping shy of killing him.
As the cleric slowly died in agonizing, strangled silence, Gil whispered into his ear: “Sandra’s husband sent me here to kill you. I want you to know that before you die.”
In the violent throes of death, Kohistani thrashed wildly about, his legs kicking with fury beneath the heavy wool blankets. Gil gave the toggles a vicious jerk in opposite directions, and the piano wire sliced clean through to the spine. The cleric’s bowels let go, and the room filled with the acrid stench of raw shit.
Gil let go and Kohistani flopped over, falling half out of the bed with blood gushing from his severed neck. This was the most intimate kill of his career, and even as he was slipping from the house like a wraith in the night, he was aware that something within him had just shifted. His heart filled with a violent hatred unlike any he had ever known, and he suddenly found himself wanting to destroy the entire village and everyone in it. He thought of the RPGs and went to retrieve them.
He pulled the bed of the truck away from the wall and began to remove the individual rockets from their launchers, checking them over to make sure they were serviceable. He would only need one launcher. The rockets he could carry over his shoulder in a sling he would fashion from the cloak. He would leave this place a smoking effigy of the village it once had been. No one could stop him when he was on the attack—he knew that now, felt it in his veins. These backward jackasses weren’t soldiers. They were clumsy imposters stumbling their way through a modern war, the full scope of which they couldn’t even begin to conceive. How could they possibly touch him if he decided they were going to die? He was death from within, walking among them without so much as an if you please, come to kill them in midstride as punishment for their sins against humanity.
Was this what war really was? Was this sudden and violent urge to kill indiscriminately the same as what his father had experienced all those years ago in Vietnam, north of the DMZ, where life had blurred into one long and bloody nightmare of death and destruction? Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out! Was this the frame of mind that had enabled an otherwise kind and gentle man to become a mindless butcher of women and children?
If so, Gil understood it now, understood it on a level more visceral than he had ever thought possible, and it was the most powerful feeling he had ever known—bloodlust! He shrugged out of the cloak and was about to use the Ka-Bar to cut it up the back when he thought of Marie, his wife. Suddenly, there she was before him, lying in their bed sleeping, the faint smile still on her face after making love. His eyes flooded with tears and his mind began to clear. The hatred dissipated, leaving the faint residue of shame in its place as the mission slid back into focus.
“Jesus,” he muttered to himself, shoving the rockets back behind the truck bed and getting to his feet. There was plenty of killing yet to be done before this mission concluded.
51
AFGHANISTAN,
Kabul, Central Command
Everyone in the operations center breathed a collective sigh when Gil slipped out the back of Kohistani’s house and headed toward the river.
“I think it’s safe to assume that Mr. Kohistani won’t be joining us for the duration,” General Couture remarked, almost casually. “Christ, this guy’s bold. To watch him move, you’d think he owned that goddamn village.”
“At the moment, he does,” Metcalf muttered, taking his chair. He had suffered a spinal injury years earlier during a parachute jump, and his lower back was killing him. “Forgive me for sitting, General. It’s the old bones . . .”
“Warrior’s bones,” Couture replied. “Put your feet up on the table if you need to.”
Metcalf shook his head. “This will do, sir. Thank you.”
They watched Gil return to the outbuilding.
“What’s he doing with the damn rockets now?” Couture wanted to know. “Jesus, this guy’s killing me! Grab the woman and go, son!”
Metcalf stared at the screen, a shadow creasing his brow. “Looks like he’s got something in mind, sir.” This was the first worrisome thing that Gil had done so far. He was wasting time now. There was nothing he could accomplish with those rockets that wouldn’t bring every Pashtun hiding in the mountains down into the village. Could that be his plan? It hardly made sense.
They watched on as he paused and seemed to reconsider his decision. In the end, he shoved the rockets back out of sight and pulled the bulky cloak back on over his multicam ACUs.
“Thought better of it,” Couture mumbled, “whatever it was . . . thank God.”
Gil trotted back down the river to the south, turning east at the end of the row of houses and sneaking back into the building near the stone corral. A couple of minutes later he came back out leading a saddled horse.
Metcalf rocked back in the chair, gaping at the screen.
“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Couture said, turning to look at Metcalf. “Is he kidding? Is he kidding me?”
“He certainly isn’t,” Metcalf replied, scratching his head. “I guess now we know his plan for extraction.”
“Shit,” Couture said, putting his hands on his hips. “I wish he’d gone with the RPGs. At least then he’d have taken some of the bastards with him.”
Gil led the horse north up the lane toward Sandra’s quarters, crossing in front of the row of houses this time, rather than behind.
“I wish we knew what the hell he can see that we can’t.” Couture griped. “Anybody in here got a cigarette?”
No one did.
“Goddamnit.”
As Gil was passing the last house on the lane, a villager came from inside and walked out to intercept him, his hands spread out
before him in a gesture of confusion.
“Must be the owner,” someone remarked.
Gil put the suppressor of the .45 right up against his forehead and started walking him backward into the house. It seemed an eternity before he finally reemerged.
“That does it!” Couture hissed. “Sergeant Becker! Go find me a pack of cigarettes. I don’t care what brand or who you have to mug to get them.”
“Yes, sir!” The Air Force sergeant jumped up and hurried from the room, obviously wanting to get back before he missed anything.
Gil was leading the horse straight across the road now toward Sandra’s quarters, bold as a shiny brass tack.
“Look at the balls on this guy.” Couture stole a glance across the room where the black Air Force lieutenant sat behind the console, piloting the UAV. “You didn’t hear that, Cynthia.”
“Hear what, sir?” she replied without looking up from her monitor.
The sergeant returned with a pack of Pall Malls.
“Throw them here, Sergeant.”
“Sir.” The sergeant pitched the smokes over the console, and the general caught them with two hands, finding a green pack of MRE matches tucked inside the cellophane.
“You’re a good man, Sergeant. I take back all of the foul and disgusting things I’ve said about you.”
“Sir!”
Moments later Couture stood puffing away, obscured in a cloud of smoke. “Christ, I’d forgotten how good these damn things are under stress. Thanks to this son of a bitch,” he said, gesturing at the screen, “I’ll probably be smoking for the rest of my life now.”
Metcalf chuckled in spite of himself. He couldn’t help it. There was too much tension in the air.