Hunter Killer (2005)

by Robinson Patrick

  Gamoudi had decided they should trundle up into the mountains, call his father, and then wait for the dawn. Banging on the door of his father’s house in the small hours of the morning was out of the question. In a place like Asni, that would most certainly attract the attention of someone, somewhere, who might suspect who it was.

  As it happened, Jack Mitchell got there first. He slipped into the Moroccan tunic and hat he always kept in the rear of his car and inquired at the local bar where he might find Abdul Gamoudi. His house was only fifty yards away. Mitchell went to it and tapped sharply on the front door.

  The man who faced him was lean and tanned, a true Moroccan Berber of the mountains. He was in his mid-sixties and he was wearing jeans and no shirt. He confirmed readily that he was indeed the father of Jacques Gamoudi.

  Mitchell explained rapidly that he was expecting the Colonel either to arrive there within the next few hours or, somehow, to make contact. Either way, the CIA man said, Gamoudi was in the most terrible danger.

  Gamoudi’s father nodded, almost as if such a scenario were not entirely foreign to him. “Ah, Jacques,” he said slowly, in French. “Mon fou, mon fils fou.” My crazy son. “Malheureusement, vous êtes en retard.” Unfortunately you are late. Abdul Gamoudi admitted that his son had been in contact during the past hour, but that he was not coming to the house.

  “Est-ce qu’il vous téléphone encore?” Will he call you again? Jack Mitchell’s French was passable, but nothing like fluent.

  “Bien sûr, demain.” Of course, tomorrow.

  This was no time for idle chatter. Still speaking in French, Mitchell told Abdul that there was a hit squad somewhere behind him, searching for Gamoudi, determined to assassinate him. He told him that the Americans had the Gamoudi family, and their money, safe. Gamoudi was to use this cell phone, which would connect him direct to the U.S. warship where Giselle and the boys were waiting to speak to him. The Americans would get Gamoudi out of Morocco, with the help of this cell phone. Jack Mitchell struggled through the French verbs, informing the old man about the phone’s GPS, which would beam its position to the ship’s communication room.

  “Les Américains sont les amis, Abdul,” said Mitchell. With some heavy gestures he made it clear that everything would be fine, if the Colonel could reach them. He hoped his final, dark warning was understood by Mr. Gamoudi. If the French find him first they will kill him.

  Abdul Gamoudi nodded gravely. “Je comprends. Je lui donnerai le téléphone et votre message.”

  Jack Mitchell handed over the phone, and hoped to hell that old Abdul would remember everything.

  In fact the French were some way behind. They did not even learn that the Saudi Boeing had left Beirut until after 10 P.M., when the local radio station announced the death of four French agents in the Crusaders’ Castle. The two men still on duty outside the Saudi embassy heard this, and tried to contact Paris.

  That took longer than usual. From then it took four more hours to establish that the Saudi Boeing had left, probably carrying the passenger who had fled Riyadh.

  The flight control office was closed and it was not until seven o’clock on Friday morning that the French Secret Service established that the Boeing had gone to Marrakesh, almost certainly with Col. Jacques Gamoudi, a native Moroccan, onboard.

  Back in Paris, Gaston Savary was furious. He had always felt “out of the information loop” on this case, ever since the operation began, as if he were always trying to catch up. But now in his military/policeman’s mind, he knew a few things for certain: (1) His men had failed to eliminate Gamoudi in the car “accident” in Riyadh; (2) his men had not been in time to catch him at his residence in Riyadh; (3) having successfully tailed him to a little town north of Beirut, all four of his agents had got themselves killed; (4) his men had failed to detain Mrs. Gamoudi in the town square of Pau; (5) his Beirut team had somehow failed to track the Boeing without a delay of almost twelve hours; (6) the CIA wanted Colonel Gamoudi as badly as he did; and (7) Pierre St. Martin was going to have a blue fit when he found out that, right now, no one knew where the hell Gamoudi was.

  He picked up his phone and went through on the direct line to Gen. Michel Jobert at the Special Forces headquarters in Taverny. It was the middle of the night, a fact that was not even noticed by either of the two men. General Jobert needed to move from his bedroom, and his sleeping wife, into his study next door. But that was the only delay—twenty seconds. At which point Gaston Savary recounted the entire sorry tale of the failure of the French Secret Service to put this matter to rest.

  “And now, Michel,” he said, “we have this armed, highly dangerous military officer loose in the High Atlas Mountains, in an area in which he grew up, giving him every territorial advantage. And I’m supposed to catch him.”

  Savary paused, and then said, “Michel, this is no longer a Secret Service operation. The President of France wants this man eliminated, and my organization is not equipped to stage a manhunt in the mountains. This has suddenly become military. People can get killed. We need helicopters, gunships, search radar, maybe even rockets, if we are to catch him.

  “Michel, I am proposing to hand the entire operation over to the First Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment. Quite frankly, I hope you’ll agree, but anyway I am proposing to recommend to Monsieur St. Martin that the Special Forces take over from here. You do, after all, have two helicopter squadrons under your permanent command…”

  “Gaston,” said the General, “I am in agreement with you. If they want Gamoudi killed, it will have to be Special Forces. I imagine that will also mean getting rid of the body?”

  “Oh, certainly. They want Gamoudi to vanish off the face of the earth and to stay there.”

  “Well, I have no doubt that can be arranged, Gaston,” said the General. “What’s our focus point for the operation?”

  “Little village called Asni, thirty miles south of Marrakesh. It’s way up in the Atlas Mountains, and that’s where we think Gamoudi is hiding out, until we tire of trying to track him down.”

  “You know, Gaston, it’s over a thousand miles from Marseille. We’ll make the journey overland, across Spain, with a refuel before we cross to North Africa. We have three of those long AS532 Cougar Mark Ones ready to deploy instantly, they hold twenty-five commandos each, and they’re well armed—machine guns, canons and rockets. Plus tons of surveillance. I can have them in Marrakesh tomorrow morning. Do I speak to St. Martin, or do you?”

  “I will, now. I’ll tell him you’re on the case. And I’ll send detailed briefing papers via e-mail in ten.”

  “Okay, Gaston. Let’s go and silence this troublesome little bastard once and for all.”

  SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1100

  HIGH ATLAS MOUNTAINS

  Abdul Gamoudi had made an excellent delivery. His closest friend owned the main ski shop in the area. He borrowed equipment and met his son at the foot of a high escarpment, 500 feet below the ice line. Gamoudi’s father arrived cross-country in a pickup truck full of equipment—boots, socks, climbing trousers, sweaters, weatherproof jackets, and, as requested by Gamoudi, nothing in bright modern colors, all of it in drab, almost camouflage coloring. There were sleeping bags, gloves, rucksack bergans, ice axes, crampons, hammers, nylon climbing ropes, and a small primus stove to heat food and water.

  Abdul had followed Jacques’s instructions to bring everything three people would require to stay alive up there for a week. He had also brought the “magic” cell phone.

  Abandoning the hired Ford, Rashood, Shakira, and Gamoudi climbed aboard the pickup. Rashood, sitting on the sleeping bags in the back, handed over 60,000 dirhams to Abdul, who now drove them even higher into the mountains to a point east of the ski-center village of Imlit.

  This was their last stop-off. They unloaded the truck and gladly put on warmer clothes, and distributed the climbing equipment, while Abdul drove into Imlit to collect food and water. When he returned, they dumped their old clothes and bags into the pickup
and made their farewells.

  Abdul smiled and shook hands with Rashood and Shakira, and he hugged Jacques. There were tears streaming down his tough, weather-beaten face as he stood alone on the mountain and watched them trudge off to the northeast, uncertain whether he would ever see his only son again.

  Gamoudi had selected a familiar but lonely route that would swiftly bring them into a rugged stretch of hillside with deep escarpments and plenty of cover. After two miles they stopped. Gamoudi sat on a low rock and fired up the cell phone.

  He pressed the power switch and then hit the single button that would relay him and his satellite position to the comms room in the U.S.S. Shiloh. He felt an instant tremor of excitement when the call went through immediately and a voice responded, “Comms.”

  However, Gamoudi’s excitement hardly registered compared to the exhilaration onboard the Shiloh.

  We got him! 33.08N 08.06W. He’s on the line. Captain. Comms. We got him right here…get Giselle…it’s Colonel Gamoudi, and he’s damn close.

  The words We got him were repeated about 200 times in the next half minute, Comms to Captain Pickard. Comms to the XO. Giselle. The ops room. Navigation room. The SEAL boss Lt. Cdr. Brad Taylor. Sometimes you don’t even need a telephone in a warship—everyone just finds out, from the engine room to the fore-deck, from the galley to the missile director. It’s a bush telegraph on the high seas, perfectly reliable and very fast.

  Captain Pickard spoke carefully. “Colonel Gamoudi, my ship is about eighty miles off the coast of Morocco, in the port of Agadir. How far are you from the port?”

  “I’m in the mountains, around one hundred miles east of Agadir.”

  “Are you in significant danger?”

  “Negative right now. But the French Secret Service has made three attempts on my life, and I have reason to believe there will be others.”

  “Are you alone?

  “No. Two friends.”

  “Can you make Agadir?”

  “I think so.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe five days’ trekking.”

  “Can you remain in communication?”

  “Affirmative. Say, every twelve hours?”

  “From now. Let me connect you with Giselle…but don’t waste your battery.”

  Jacques Gamoudi gave himself one minute on the line to his wife, who had recovered fully from being kidnapped in Pau and now wanted to know only that he was alive. There was no time for details, no time for explanations, just the overpowering sense of relief they were both safe, in his case temporarily, but for the moment safe.

  The Colonel shoved the phone in his pocket and climbed to his feet, leading his little group up the steep slopes of this craggy, barren moonscape. It was now clear that Agadir was their destination. Gamoudi selected a route that would take them off the beaten track, away from other trekkers and mountain guides.

  Over the next four hours they climbed almost 1,800 feet and a total of six miles. Here they took a rest and drank some water, and very slowly, Jacques Gamoudi turned to Rashood and said, “You don’t have to come any farther with me. I can find my way to the seaport. You have both done enough.”

  The Hamas General grinned and said, “If it hadn’t been for you, old friend, I’d be in a grave in Marseille. I’m not leaving you until we reach the dockyard. Besides, you never know when the French hit men are going to arrive.”

  “They’ll never find me,” replied Gamoudi.

  “Maybe not. But I’ll bet they’ll try. And they might get lucky.”

  Down below them they could see the climbers and walkers on the regular trail, almost all of them with guides, and some of them with mules carrying their baggage.

  “We just need to avoid being seen by any of them,” said Gamoudi. “The country’s steep and rough, but we must avoid the villages of Ouaneskra and Tacheddirt—that’s where everyone is headed. We’ll stop at a summer settlement called Azib Likempt. It won’t be open yet, but there’s shelter in some old stone huts.”

  They camped in there for the freezing cold night, cooked some sausages, and thanked God for the quality of the sleeping bags Abdul had purchased. By mid-morning on Saturday they were up beyond the snow line, through the windy mountain pass at Tizi-Lekempt, and on their way to the flat pastures high above the Azib.

  Right then, Ravi Rashood heard the first sound of a huge military helicopter, its massive rotor lashing noisily through the mountain air. The high peaks completely obscured the view, but the sound was so intense General Rashood guessed there were more than one.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Jacques, we have to find cover. Which way?”

  “That way,” snapped Le Chasseur, pointing southwest. “Come on…run…run…run.”

  Carrying their heavy burdens, all three of them set off down the escarpment, heading for a great rocky overhang they could dive behind. Gamoudi kept urging them forward. They reached the rock just as two AS532 Cougar Mark Ones came rocketing around the high southern slope of the mountain.

  The noise was ferocious, but the pilots were going slowly, making short low-level circles above the terrain, obviously in search mode.

  “Holy shit,” said Rashood, looking up. “Those fucking things have search radar, infrared heat-seeking and Christ knows what else.”

  “I’m too cold to register,” volunteered Shakira.

  “Quick, get under there!” yelled Gamoudi, “You too, Ravi. They’re headed straight toward us.”

  All three of them dived for cover, Jacques Gamoudi in last place. But it was immediately obvious that the helicopter surveillance crew had seen something. They circled around at low speed, one after the other, flying back only fifty feet above the ground, above the enormous rock that provided shelter for the three fugitives.

  Rashood, Shakira, and Gamoudi flattened themselves onto the ground, praying that the helicopters would not land and begin a ground search. There was no doubt in Colonel Gamoudi’s mind: the French could operate with impunity in Morocco, which was a privilege the United States did not have. Not good, he thought.

  The helicopters circled for twenty minutes, before clattering off, dead slow, almost reluctantly, to the west. “We have to get the hell out of here,” said Rashood. “Didn’t you get the feeling they thought they’d spotted something?”

  “I did,” said the Colonel. “And in my view they’ve gone to get permission to stage a military search up here.”

  “From the Moroccans?” asked Rashood.

  “No, no. Just from their superiors. But they might want to touch base with the Moroccan military before they go ahead. It’s a serious matter to start operations in a foreign country, especially if people are going to get shot.”

  “You’re not referring to us, are you, Jacques?” asked Shakira.

  “I hope to hell I’m not.”

  “Well, where do we go?” said Rashood.

  “I know somewhere, two miles west. The country’s pretty flat getting there, so we’ll have to be fast across the ground.”

  “How about if those wild men in the helicopters come back and start searching?” said Sharira.

  “That’s what bothers me,” said the Colonel. “If we stay here and they come back and land, we’re dead. We have to run and we have to run now, while the coast is relatively clear.”

  “That’s my view also,” said Rashood. “Come on guys, let’s go. Jacques, lead the way!”

  Running fast with the big packs was out of the question. Shakira carried less and could manage a decent jog, but it was very tough for the two men, who kept going at a steady military pace that would not break any records, but would probably have caused a person of normal fitness to drop dead.

  They made the shelter of a big shadowy rock face to the northwest, and fought their way along a mountain trail that was really not much more than a ledge. All the way along, the stones and dust beneath their feet shifted and crumbled. And all three of them tried not to look to the right, to the almost sheer drop of 2,000 feet to t
he floor of the valley.

  The helicopters returned when the three were at least a slow 200 yards from the destination Jacques Gamoudi had planned. Out of breath and holding on to any foliage that occasionally sprang out of the face of the mountain, they were now inching their way forward, grabbing with their left hands, trying not to slide over the edge.

  The mountain shielded them from direct sight of the pilots, unless the copters suddenly swerved westward and began searching the granite wall of this escarpment—which they very well might, at any moment. The fact was, there was no cover, and the only hope was for the French pilots to continue searching the reasonable side of Mount Aksoul, rather than bother with the sheer rock face on the west side, just below the summit—the side upon which only a lunatic would venture.