Ghost Target (Ryan Drake)

by Will Jordan

  Qalat said nothing to this, didn’t waste time trying to refute the accusations, because he knew it was futile. Cain would not have gone to this kind of trouble without proof.

  ‘I know your men were active in Turkey last year, that you were part of a failed attempt to steal a classified Agency computer file known as the Black List. You did this because you wanted an intimate knowledge of our covert operations here, you wanted to know whether we were nearing our goal. So you could stop us before we got too close.’

  Qalat couldn’t believe how much this man knew, how many pieces he’d managed to put together, how many seemingly unrelated events he’d assembled into a coherent narrative. He felt like he were trying to play chess against a man who had foreseen every move, countered every strategy, thwarted every advance. He was being outmanoeuvred, outplayed, outmatched in every way imaginable.

  ‘You seem to know a lot, Marcus,’ he said, somehow managing to retain his icy composure. ‘Very impressive, but I presume there is a reason I am still alive. Tell me what you want.’

  ‘You know what I want. Or rather, who I want.’ Cain took a sip of his coffee and laid it down on the table, keeping his eyes focussed on Qalat the whole time. ‘I want Osama Bin Laden, and you’re going to give him to me.’

  * * *

  ‘Jesus Christ, I don’t believe what I’m hearing,’ Mason gasped, listening in on the conversation as it played out over the radio net. ‘This isn’t happening.’

  ‘Bravo, tell me you’re recording this,’ Drake hissed, stunned by the conversation playing out in that safe house. With only an audio feed to listen to, he couldn’t actually see what was going on, but he didn’t have to. The words alone were enough to chill him to the core.

  ‘Every word, Alpha,’ Frost confirmed.

  ‘Good. Stand by to kill the external cameras on my mark. We’re going in.’

  Regardless of whatever shady deal might be on the agenda in there tonight, Drake hadn’t forgotten their true purpose here. Cain was on site and vulnerable, and they were unlikely to get a better chance at taking him down. This was it.

  ‘Wait,’ Mason interrupted suddenly. ‘Not yet.’

  Drake looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This isn’t some pissant arms deal we’ve stumbled on here. He’s talking about taking down the world’s most wanted man, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘He’s talking about a lot of things,’ Drake reminded him. ‘Doesn’t make them real.’

  ‘Suppose you’re wrong? Suppose Cain can actually make this happen? We interrupt this thing, and we might be killing our only chance to stop that raghead son of a bitch.’

  ‘Bravo is standing by. What are your orders?’

  ‘Wait one, Bravo,’ Drake replied quickly, turning his attention back to Mason. Whatever they were hearing over the radio net could be disinformation, speculation or even outright lies. ‘We didn’t come here to deal in chances. Cain’s our target, Cole. We stick to the plan.’

  ‘Plans change.’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘Especially this one,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you get it? You have any idea how many thousands, tens of thousands of people have died because of that one man, how many thousands more might die if he’s allowed to live? You want all those deaths on your conscience? Because they will be if we go in there now.’

  Drake had no answer for that. Mason was asking him to make an impossible choice – the life of one enemy against the possibility of killing another. The chance to protect the people he cared most about in this world, set against countless other innocents whose deaths could perhaps be averted.

  Perhaps.

  * * *

  Qalat regarded this adversary in thoughtful silence for several moments. So they had finally gotten down it. This was Cain’s endgame; the thread on which both their fates now hung. The death of the world’s most wanted man. The decapitation of the terrorist network that had spread years of fear and destruction across the globe.

  ‘An ambitious goal,’ he remarked coolly, giving nothing away. ‘And one that many others have set for themselves. Assuming for a moment—’

  ‘No more assumptions,’ Cain interrupted. ‘No more lies, no more suggestions, no more bullshit. I didn’t fly halfway around the world to your shithole of a country on an assumption, Vizur. We both know the ISI has been protecting him and probably most of al-Qaeda’s top commanders at least since the invasion. And we both know you’re one of the men who can lead us to him. So let’s not talk about what we assume, let’s talk about what you know.’

  * * *

  ‘Are you hearing this, Alpha?’ Frost cut in over the radio net, her tinny voice resonating in Drake’s ear. ‘Jesus Christ, I think the son of a bitch is about to break.’

  Drake made his decision in that moment. A rain-soaked rooftop seconds before they were about to go into combat was no place for such philosophical musings, and he knew that if they delayed much longer they would lose their window of opportunity.

  One way or another, Cain was going down tonight.

  ‘We don’t have time for this—’

  He was silenced when Mason reached out and grabbed him by the forearm, his grip tightening like a vice. ‘It wasn’t your country that got hit by those bastards, Ryan,’ he said, eyes alight now with the kind of fire Drake had never seen before. ‘Cain’s a lowlife piece of shit, but I’m not going to let you—’

  It was Mason’s turn to fall silent as he felt something cold and metallic pressed against the side of his head. It was the long, chunky barrel of a silenced Colt M1911 automatic.

  ‘We came here for one reason,’ Anya said, thumbing back the hammer. ‘The mission is all that matters now. If you can’t see that, you are no good to us.’

  Far from looking frightened or angry at this show of force, Mason flashed a twisted, ironic smile. ‘So that’s where we’re at, huh? You going to let this bitch shoot me, Ryan?’

  Drake gave Anya a look warning her to back down, though whether she would was anyone’s guess. ‘I’d rather you came with me so we can finish this together.’

  ‘You know what’s at stake here.’

  ‘I do,’ he assured his friend.

  ‘You know we can’t sacrifice thousands of innocent lives just to save our own asses.’ He shook his head. ‘If you’re asking me to live with that, you’d better pull the trigger now.’

  Reaching out, Drake gripped his friend’s arm and leaned in close. ‘It’s not going to come to that. I swear to God, if the deal in there is real, we’ll find a way to make it happen. Even if we have to grab that ISI agent and beat the truth out of him ourselves.’ His gaze switched to Anya, who still held the weapon at the ready. ‘Right?’

  ‘I am here for Cain,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the man she was covering. ‘This war is no longer my concern.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Drake said, looking at Mason again. ‘Cole, I need you, mate. I need you to trust me, one last time. Please.’

  The man was torn. It was written on his face as plain as day. But he trusted Drake about as much as anyone on the face of the earth, and in the end, trust won out.

  ‘All right, goddamn it. All right.’

  Drake released his hold. ‘Lower the gun, Anya.’

  A moment’s hesitation, then the weapon was withdrawn, though the woman continued to watch Mason warily.

  Drake was reaching up for his radio transmitter when Mason gripped him by the shoulder, leaning in close. ‘For all our sakes, I hope to Christ you’re right about this one, Ryan.’

  Drake said nothing to this, and after a moment of simmering tension Mason withdrew to ready his Plumett grapple gun.

  Drawing a deep breath, Drake hit his radio transmitter. ‘Alpha to all units. Downfall is a go. I say again, Downfall is a go. Prepare to cut external cameras on my mark.’

  ‘Copy that, Alpha. Bravo is ready.’

  Anya returned to her sniping position, bringing her rifle to bear. ‘Charlie is read
y,’ she said, her voice low and steady.

  Stooping down, Drake seized the heavy grapple gun by its carry handle and hoisted it up to his shoulder, swinging the long ungainly barrel towards the target building.

  Chapter 52

  Qalat was taken aback by Cain’s abrupt change in tone, the almost brutish way he’d made his play. The facade of courtesy and civility had slipped aside, and not through choice. Cain’s barely restrained aggression spoke of years of pent-up frustration, disappointments and failures.

  That was when he realized the truth – his adversary had staged this meeting not out of cold, ruthless calculation, but out of desperation. He needed what Qalat had.

  That gave him an edge.

  ‘Very well,’ Qalat said at length, deciding to give the man what he wanted. To a point, at least. ‘You’re right, of course. Since you seem to value plain speaking, here it is. We have been protecting senior leaders of the global jihad, we have undermined the CIA’s efforts to track them down, and we’ve been doing it for some time. Successfully, I might add.’

  * * *

  Ignoring the rain still lashing down around him, Drake stared down the grapple gun’s primitive iron sight at the communications dish mounted on a steel frame at one corner of the building’s roof about 70 yards away. A difficult enough mark to hit under ideal conditions, never mind in darkness with rain weighing down the cable and interfering with his vision.

  All he could do was take his best shot, and hope.

  Beside him, he could make out the dark shape of Mason crouched low, weapon similarly trained on the target. Two chances to make the hit.

  And no more time to waste.

  ‘On my mark, Bravo,’ he said, flexing his trigger finger. ‘Three, two, one… mark.’

  A couple of hundred yards away, Frost enabled a single pre-prepared command on her laptop, killing power to all external cameras. An instant later, their feeds went blank on her screen as they shut down.

  ‘Cameras down, Alpha. I say again, they’re blind.’

  Making one last fractional adjustment to his aim, Drake let out a barely audible breath and pulled the trigger.

  There was no deafening crack or boom as with a conventional firearm. His first impression was of a sudden, powerful whoosh as the Plumett’s compressed air cartridge discharged, sending the steel grapple hook and its attached cable arching over 70 yards of open air.

  The kinetic energy of the blast caused the weapon to kick back against his shoulder, but Drake was oblivious to it now. All his attention was focussed on his hook as it rocketed through the air towards the communications array, joined an instant later by a second projectile from Mason’s weapon.

  Both hooks raced towards their objective, angling slowly downwards as their velocity slowed and gravity began to take hold, high-tensile cable spooling out of their reels like fishing rods that had just hooked a prime catch.

  Then suddenly Mason’s gun jerked forward, nearly torn from his grasp. His hook instantly came to a halt and dropped straight to the ground as if it had collided with some invisible wall.

  ‘Shit! Fuck!’ the man snarled in frustration, looking down at the kink in the cable that had snagged on his reel as it was unspooling, jamming it.

  Drake paid the malfunction no heed. There was nothing that could be done about it now. Instead he watched as his own hook arched downwards, plunging towards its target like some ungainly projectile hurled from an ancient siege engine.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he whispered, praying that his aim had been true.

  Contact.

  He had aimed high, he realized with sickening dismay, his hook missing the solid steel framework that the dish was mounted on, and instead striking the dish surface itself.

  Drake winced, waiting for it to simply bounce off the metal surface and fall uselessly onto the roof below, where there was nothing that it could conceivably hook onto.

  Instead, to his amazement, the barbed projectile punched straight through the thin metal mesh that made up the dish skin, swinging freely on the other side where one of the three prongs caught on the dish mounting arm below.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he gasped.

  A hinged metal bracket, easily an inch thick and designed to not only support the dish’s weight but also keep it in position even if it was being buffeted by bad weather, the mounting arm was about as good a grapple point as he could have hoped to hit. It should, in theory at least, be enough to support the weight of a man.

  He would find out in a few seconds.

  Dropping the gun, he gripped the trailing cable in his gloved hands and pulled it as taut as his strength would allow, locking it into place at the anchor point placed there during yesterday’s recon trip.

  ‘Alpha has one firm lock,’ he spoke over the radio, notifying the others of the situation. ‘Preparing to move in. Any sign of activity, Bravo?’

  ‘Nothing yet, Alpha,’ Frost replied, her voice as taut as the cable trailing off into the night. It seemed the sound of the hook’s impact hadn’t been noticed.

  As Drake picked up the simple handheld pulley used for his descent down the zip line, Mason sprinted over to him. ‘Fucking cable jam,’ he growled under his breath as he removed his own pulley from his harness.

  ‘Not your fault, mate,’ Drake replied quickly. Such things could, and unfortunately did, happen to the best of them. ‘I’m up first. Give me three seconds to get clear, then come down after me.’

  Mason eyed the single line doubtfully. ‘Will it take our weight?’

  That was the golden question. In theory the line had a tensile strength of over 500 pounds; slightly more than the combined weight of the two men plus their gear. But the unexpected jam in Mason’s line might be indicative of badly maintained or flawed cables, either of which could result in a fast one-way trip to the ground. Drake could only hope the two sets had come from different manufacturing batches.

  ‘We’ll find out in a minute,’ he said, snapping his pulley into place and locking it in. ‘Get ready. Three seconds. Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Taking a breath, Drake gripped the line tight and braced one foot against the parapet running along the edge of the building.

  ‘Ryan?’

  Surprised, Drake glanced down at Anya. The woman had briefly taken her eyes off the rifle scope to look at him. She said nothing, but he could sense her struggling to find the words, straining to say something that would encapsulate everything she was feeling at that moment.

  Knowing that was one battle she couldn’t win, he took the lead for her.

  ‘I’ll see you again,’ he promised, giving her a wink.

  With that, he rocked back once to gain a little momentum, tightened his grip on the pulley and launched himself towards the distant building.

  * * *

  For several seconds, not a sound could be heard in that expansive living room. Cain stared at Qalat across the table, as if struggling to believe that the man had so openly admitted to something of this scale, that he would so brazenly flaunt the fact that his own agency was working to protect the most wanted man in the world.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to ask me?’ Qalat said, breaking the silence.

  ‘Ask you what?’

  A flicker of a smile. ‘Why, of course? Is that not what every man in your position wants; to know why his supposed allies would betray him? To understand his adversary?’

  It was Cain’s turn to smile. ‘No, Vizur. I’m not going to ask, because I honestly don’t care. Maybe it’s religious ideology, maybe it’s intimidation, maybe it’s part of some regional power play. Hell, maybe it’s something as simple as money.’ He shrugged, dismissing it all. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

  Reaching down, Cain carefully picked up his coffee cup and took a sip of the steaming black liquid.

  ‘Let me tell you something – I’ve been playing this little game of deception for 30 years. I’ve persuaded Soviet generals to defect; manipulated tribal leaders out to set
tle blood feuds; made alliances with warlords in every shithole from Afghanistan to Africa; bribed, assassinated and blackmailed government officials, and worked with and against intelligence operatives from pretty much every agency on the face of the earth. You know what I learned? All of them are the same, when you get right down to it. All of them do what’s in their own best interests at any given moment. And right now, what’s in your best interest – and I can’t stress this enough – is to tell me where he is.’

  * * *

  Drake clenched his teeth, his arms and shoulders straining as his full weight settled on them, the cable flexing and bouncing but holding firm. Within moments, the apartment building had receded behind him as he accelerated down the zip line, rain and wind whipping into his face and rooftops flying past below. The pulley on which his fate now rested screamed with increasing speed as the cable raced through it.

  There was no going back now, no way to stop what was coming, no means of protecting himself. If a guard appeared on the rooftop terrace he was aiming for, Drake couldn’t hope to bring his weapon to bear. He’d just have to trust that Anya’s sniping skills were at their best tonight.

  For now, all he could do was hang on tight, take the strain and brace himself for the landing as the target building hurtled towards him.

  A second jolting flex on the line told him that Mason too had begun his descent. Once more he tensed up, waiting with bated breath for that sudden ping, that loss of tension that would tell him the line had failed.

  But it never came. Despite the increased weight, the single cable held firm.

  The target building was approaching fast out of the night now, its external security lights putting him in mind of car headlamps hurtling towards him. Drake tried not to think of himself as a deer about to be turned into roadkill as he brought his legs up, ready to take the impact as he approached the upper wall.