Kealey ignored the radio traffic as he studied the unknown subject through his 2.25 power scope. Even with the green tint, it was clear that the man was Caucasian. He looked scared, but the fear was mixed with something else, something that Kealey could not decipher. He studied the man for a few seconds more, trying to figure it out. Then it hit him; the look on his face was fear mixed with utter resolve. It was one of the most dangerous combinations that Kealey knew of, and he had seen it before, most recently with Naomi in Madrid.
He was still weighing this discovery—and trying to push her face back out of his mind—when Manik asked, “Where are they going?”
“Back to the barn,” Massi said. “Looks like they’re putting him in with Fitzgerald. I still don’t see a weapon. . . .”
“Hold your positions,” Kealey said, cupping his hand over his lip mic to limit the sound. He shivered suddenly, a chill running down the length of his spine. He wasn’t sure where that had come from, but he was guessing it had something to do with the scene unfolding before him. The whole thing seemed fake somehow, scripted, as if one or both of the participants were only pretending to play his role. Still looking through the scope, he watched as Saifi prodded the hostage forward. Kealey didn’t know why that word was sticking—
the man could have been there of his own accord, and they had no proof either way—but it seemed to fit. There was just something about that look on his face, the tension in his shoulders, and the wooden way he was moving toward the barn. In fact, it looked as if his legs might give out at any moment.
But again, it seemed fake, somehow. Almost as if . . . The hostage was halfway to the barn when he stopped, turned on his heels, and launched a short, wild punch at his captor, catching Saifi high on the right cheek. As Kealey looked on in disbelief, the Algerian stumbled back, then tripped and went down hard. The radio traffic started up instantly, but Kealey heard none of it, his eyes glued to the man standing over Saifi. The hostage stood motionless for a few seconds, staring down at the Algerian like a deer caught in the headlights. He was clearly unsure of his next move, and for a moment, Kealey thought he might try for Saifi’s gun. But then he turned and started to sprint, running hard for the nearest safe ground. Running hard for the dark field in which Kealey and the rest of the team were lying in wait.
CHAPTER 42
SIALKOT
When the screams reached the back of the house, Balakh Shaheed thought—for a fleeting instant of pure, uncomprehending shock—that the general had decided to kill Fitzgerald. The screams were high-pitched, almost feminine, but not quite, and as he listened hard, he realized it was not a woman screaming, but a man. Moreover, he was screaming in Arabic, which ruled out most of the guards. Apart from Mengal, Amari Saifi was the only one in the house who spoke Arabic. Before Shaheed could properly absorb the situation, a dark figure streaked down the back of the hill, running hard away from the house.
Shaheed was the first to react. The second guard was actually closer, but he had been relieving himself in a flower bed when the alarm was raised and was still fumbling with his zipper when the figure ran past. In the dark, it was impossible to tell who was trying to flee, but Shaheed, thinking quickly, decided it had to be Craig, the American doctor. Qureshi was still locked in his surgical suite—Shaheed had seen to that personally—and Mengal was in the barn, watching over the secretary of state.
It had to be the American.
Cursing viciously, Shaheed grabbed his weapon, which was slung across his chest, and raised it to his shoulder. The safety was already off, a full 30-round magazine locked into place. The doctor was already outside the arc of the building’s lights; Shaheed did not have a visual, but he fired, anyway, the wooden stock of the AK-47 banging against his shoulder as he squeezed off a dozen rounds. As the echoes faded away, he cursed again and started running down the hill, going after the man who was trying to escape.
Ryan Kealey winced as the guard’s 7.62mm rounds plowed into the earth, tearing up the waterlogged soil a scant 20 feet in front of him. It took all his self-control not to fire back, but he knew the guard wasn’t aiming at him; he was trying to hit the man who had run down the hill just seconds before. The hostage was about 25 feet from Kealey’s position and closing fast, his outline clear against the lights in Qureshi’s garden. Kealey knew the same lights would impede the guards’ vision, which was why the recon team had approached from the north. He didn’t know if Mengal’s men had access to NVGs and were just too lazy to use them, or if they didn’t have them at all, but either way, they would be coming into the field. That much was already clear, and Kealey knew he had to be ready. The hostage was still running hard, but he was moving without direction, and through his scope, Kealey could see that he was waving his arms in front of his body, as though searching for obstacles. Kealey realized that after running through the well-lit garden, he was essentially operating blind in the pitch-black field. His biological night vision wouldn’t fully kick in for about two minutes, which would give the guards plenty of time to circle around and cut him off. Kealey could already see them streaming out of the house. They were congregating around Saifi, who had since climbed to his feet, still screaming his outrage. A quick head count yielded eight guards, not including the man who had fired after the hostage. That one was running into the field, his weapon at the ready. The hostage—if that was indeed what he was—had made his play, and it had failed. He was already dead; he just didn’t know it yet. He had been dead from the moment he decided to run; Kealey had never been more certain of anything. Now only one question remained, and that was how many people he was going to take with him in his failed bid for freedom.
He was now less than 10 feet away, stumbling forward, cursing and breathing hard. Kealey shifted his body carefully to the right, trying to get as far under the juniper as he could. At the same time, he raised his arm, propped his rifle in the thick branches of the lowlying shrub, and felt for his secondary weapon. At the abandoned factory outside of Sialkot, Kealey had handed out the weapons. He still didn’t know the overriding aim of Fahim’s organization, but one thing had been clear from the start: the group was extremely well funded, and a sizable portion of their budget had been devoted to arms. And if their primary concern was smuggling, as Machado had indicated, then they had kept the best stuff for themselves. Kealey had selected the SIG 550 with the night-vision scope—mainly because the weapon shared many characteristics with the M4 carbine, which he had trained and fought with extensively—but he had also found a suitable replacement for the knife he’d lost at the substation. It featured a flat-ground, drop-point, 6-inch blade. The steel itself was tapered—thick near the sturdy rubber handle, thinning down the spine to a uniform tip—and coated with matte black paint, which rendered it all but invisible in the dark. Now, as the hostage drew near, Kealey tensed and wrapped his right hand round the thick rubber grip, preparing the pull the knife from its sheath. He didn’t intend to harm the hostage, but he couldn’t save him, either, and Fitzgerald’s life took precedence. It wasn’t supposed to, but it did, and Kealey suspected that everyone on the team felt the same way. They had come too far and risked too much to lose her now, and for the most part, their sacrifices had been minimal. At least one other person had given much, much more to save the secretary of state’s life, even if she hadn’t intended to do so. Pushing that troubling thought from his mind, Kealey lay perfectly still, his chin sinking into the damp earth as the hostage stumbled past, completely unaware of his presence. Thankfully, the other members of the team had enough sense not to transmit. That didn’t mean they weren’t watching. Kealey knew all four operatives had their weapons trained in his direction, waiting to see what would happen. One or two of them might be tracking the second guard at the top of the hill, but for the most part, they’d be focused on the immediate threats: the hostage—who had become a threat the minute he decided to run—and the guard coming after him. The hostage was already behind Kealey’s position, moving north, and the guard was approaching fast fro
m the south.
Kealey could hear the man’s feet slapping the wet soil as he drew near. Without warning, the guard raised his weapon and fired again, the rounds whining 5 feet over Kealey’s head. Five, six rounds total. Kealey heard a grunt to his rear, a pregnant pause, and then a wet, heavy thump as a body fell face-first into the mud. The guard had stopped moving; apparently, he had heard his target fall. He began inching forward, and Kealey, lying nearly motionless beneath the juniper, drew his knife and waited, praying the man would pass him by. He could not believe the disastrous turn the mission had taken, but it could still be salvaged. If the guard walked by without incident, then no harm done; they would be able to maintain their positions, and the op could proceed as planned. It all came down to what happened next, and the footsteps were coming closer. . . .
CHAPTER 43
WASHINGTON, D.C. • SIALKOT
In the Situation Room beneath the West Wing, there was mass confusion and no small amount of panic. All eyes were fixed on the infrared feed from the 8X positioned in GEO 22,237 miles over Sialkot. The clouds had cleared enough over the past several hours to provide a limited picture, but even with the distortion, the fact that something had gone badly wrong on the ground was abundantly clear.
“Christ, who the hell is that?” Brenneman demanded over the chaos, not realizing that he was only contributing to the problem. He was pointing directly at the first heat signature, which had just stopped moving after a hard sprint north of the house. “And who is that going after him? What the hell is going on out there? ”
There was no immediate response, not that anyone had heard the question. Harper stared at the satellite phone plugged into the room’s audio system, waiting for Kealey to call and tell them what had just happened, but it stayed silent. He wondered if he would even hear it ringing over the cacophony in the small conference room. On the screen, the heat signature moving away from the house was drawing ever closer to one of the men lying prone in the field.
“Jesus, whoever that is, he’s going to trip right over one of them,”
Andrews said, his voice laced with undisguised tension. He was standing a mere foot from Harper’s left shoulder. “How far out are the helicopters?”
Harper opened his mouth to answer, but he was beaten to it by a USAF major, who held up a handset and lifted his voice to get the attention of everyone present. Strangely enough, he found success where the president had not, and once it was quiet enough, he said,
“The word is coming in from air traffic control at Bagram. Eagles 1 and 2 report they are still ten minutes out.”
The room fell silent for a moment; everyone present, even the most junior aides, understood what that meant. In the end, it took an army colonel standing frozen with a phone to her ear, not 3 feet from the grim-faced secretary of defense, to voice what everyone in the room was thinking. “Christ,” she murmured. “They’re not going to get there in time.”
Harper silently agreed as he stared at the heat signatures moving into the field. He had never felt more impotent. There was nothing he could do but watch as disaster loomed. He could only pray that the separate signatures would not converge, but even as he thought it, he knew that they would. The only question now was how the men on the ground would handle the unexpected change in plan. Shaheed was sure he had heard the American go down, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He waited for a moment, listening, but he couldn’t hear anything over the falling rain, the tanks in the distance, and the outraged screams of the Algerian at the top of the hill. Cursing the man’s stupidity—the general should never have brought him into this—Shaheed slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon and began moving forward slowly, each step planned and deliberate. He swept the ground with his eyes, searching for a lump that might represent the doctor’s body. He kept his right hand around the grip of his rifle as he used his left to brush aside the damp, waist-high grass. As his eyes started to acclimate to the dark, he picked up a few things he hadn’t seen before. There was a pine tree approximately 10 meters to his right, and to his left, nearly within reach of his arm, there was a small, low-lying shrub.
And beneath the shrub, he could see something that looked like a rock, or maybe a log. Shaheed hesitated. He was almost certain the American had fallen farther to the right, close to the pine, but as he stared at the dark shape beneath the vegetation, he could have sworn he saw it move. . . .
As the guard was firing his last barrage at the fleeing man, Kealey had taken advantage of the noise to adjust his stance. He’d planted his left hand in the damp soil and brought his right leg under him, wedging his foot against a large, partially buried rock. If he had to use it, the rock would serve as a starting block of sorts. It was all he could do without revealing his position, but it would give him a chance to move quickly and decisively if the guard stumbled over him. Right now, things were not looking too good. He knew he had to call in and tell Harper what had happened—the situation had changed drastically, and the helicopters might be forced to turn back—but it just wasn’t possible, and he could see the other operatives in his mind’s eye, swearing under their breath, wondering if they should take the shot.
Don’t do it, Kealey thought, hoping they could somehow hear his silent, urgent plea.Don’t fire. Just let him go. He doesn’t know I’m here. Just let him walk on by. . . . It wasn’t going to happen; Kealey sensed as much in the last crucial seconds. As the guard drifted past the juniper, he seemed to hesitate. With his head turned to the left, Kealey could see the outline of the man’s head, and he could tell from the profile that the guard was looking in his direction. Then he turned, took a few steps forward, and reached down with his left hand, his splayed fingers moving directly for Kealey’s left shoulder. . . . When he saw the contact coming, Kealey’s mind shut down, and his body took over. Operating on pure instinct, he launched himself up and batted the rifle aside with his left hand, pushing the muzzle away from his body. At the same time, he whipped the knife around in a short, controlled arc, plunging the blade deep into the guard’s neck, directly beneath the hinge of his jaw.
Even in the dark, Kealey could see the man’s reaction. His head jerked back and to the right, partly from the impact and partly in an effort to pull away from the knife. Blood and spit sprayed out of his mouth as the tip of the blade delved into his opposite cheek. His face tightened into a grimace, and his mouth fell open, his partially severed tongue protruding between bloodied teeth. He was obviously trying to scream, but all that came out was a wet, guttural hiss. He dropped the rifle and lifted his hands to grip Kealey’s right arm. It was a completely instinctive reaction, but there was nothing he could do; the damage was already done, and the wound was fatal. The guard just didn’t know it yet.
The knife was buried up to the hilt, and Kealey had to pull hard to extract it. The man automatically started to fall, and Kealey followed him down. He landed hard on his back, and Kealey was on top of him in an instant, ready to finish the job. As the man stared up at him, his face contorted with rage, pain, and fear, Kealey drew the knife firmly across his throat, severing the trachea, the carotid artery, and the connecting muscle tissue with one deep, powerful cut. Blood sprayed out of the wound immediately, splashing onto Kealey’s face, arms, and hands, but he repeated the process, then did it again, determined to extinguish the stubborn light in the other man’s eyes. Once he was sure the guard was dead, the strange ringing noise in his ears began to subside, and gradually, he picked up on the traffic coming over his earpiece.
“Ryan, are you there?” It was Owen, his tone controlled but urgent. “Goddamn it. What the fuck just happened? Where’s the hostage . . . ?”
“He’s down,” Kealey rasped. The short, one-sided fight had left him breathless, though the adrenaline was still pumping hard through his veins. He rolled off the dead guard, crawled the short distance to his hiding spot, and felt for his rifle. It was right where he’d left it, in the lowest branches of the juniper. “The hostage is dead, and so is the guard.”
“How the fuck did that happen?” Owen demanded. “Why did you . . .”
Kealey ignored the rest of the question as he planted his right knee in the sodden earth, lifting the rifle to his shoulder. Peering through the scope, he saw that the guards—all eight of them—were fanning out, preparing to enter the field. The figures were blurred for some reason, and Kealey realized he had blood in his eyes. Wiping it away with the back of his hand, he flicked it into the grass, then resumed watching. One of them had a portable radio up by his face; clearly, he was trying to raise the missing guard. There was no sign of Benazir Mengal—Kealey assumed he was still in the barn—but the Algerian was standing behind the cluster of armed men, screaming incessantly after them.
“The guards are coming in,” Massi said, almost as if he could read Kealey’s thoughts. The air force veteran sounded completely calm and in control. “Looks like we’re missing a few.”
“I count eight,” Kealey said. He thought back to the detailed notes that he had acquired from Fahim’s men. “Eight plus Saifi. Mengal’s in the barn . . . That leaves at least two unaccounted for.”
“So what the hell do we do?” Manik demanded. He sounded shaken, which didn’t surprise Kealey at all. While Massi was a hardened combat veteran, Manik was on the other end of the spectrum. He had undergone some kind of paramilitary training—otherwise, Harper wouldn’t have sent him—but he was easily the least experienced man in the group. Kealey was torn. A hostage was dead, and he had killed a guard, which dramatically limited their options. The op was blown regardless, but now he had a decision to make. Should he violate standing orders and go in after Fitzgerald, or should he wait and hope that the guard wasn’t found until the assault team arrived? That didn’t seem likely, as the assaulters were at least . . . He checked his watch and swore under his breath. They were at least eight minutes out. Part of him fantasized that he could already hear the sound of rotors chopping the damp, humid air, but he knew all too well how long eight minutes could seem in a combat situation.
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