Combat Ops

by Tom Clancy

  She surprised me. “Thank you. I . . . what they did . . . I cannot see my family again . . .”

  “You speak English?”

  “My father taught me.”

  I grinned weakly in understanding. “Okay. That helps. All I know is, we’re going to get you out of here. All of you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell them for me?”

  She nodded. I finished cutting her arms and legs free. She stood and spoke rapidly to the girls, who all began nodding. Brown came rushing into the chamber, took one look at the girls, at me, and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  “We’re getting them out.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aw, this has really gone to hell! We came here for Zahed, and we’re going home with them!”

  Hila turned back to face me. “You came here for Zahed?”

  I leaned over and nodded slowly.

  She glanced away, a pained look coming over her face. “He is very bad man.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  She pursed her lips, glanced back at the girls, as if thinking it over, then said, “I know where he is . . .”

  All the intelligence assets of the U.S. government had been unable to locate the fat man, in part because the intelligence they gathered was being corrupted by Bronco and his associates. Nevertheless, I would never, for the life of me, bet that the location of my target would be spoonfed to me by a teenaged girl who’d been taken prisoner.

  When I reflect and calculate the odds of what had happened, how I’d met Shilmani, how Hila had come to recognize me, what had happened to her and how she’d come to learn where Zahed was located, I could only blame fate.

  Or the merciless universe.

  Because if I hadn’t listened to her, if I’d just dragged them out of the cave and gotten out of there, I would’ve only had to deal with keeping Warris quiet—

  And not the rest of it.

  “Help me cut ’em free,” I told Brown. “Come on, come on.”

  The words escaped my lips, and not two seconds later, the chamber quaked and dust fell from the ceiling.

  “What the hell?” Brown gasped.

  “Captain!” cried Hume. “I hear gunfire coming from somewhere outside! And mortars!”

  “We have to move now, Scott!” added Warris.

  “We’re coming! We’ve got some girls up here. They’re coming down. We’re getting them out!”

  As Brown freed the girls, Hila told them where to go, and one by one they took off running.

  “They made us drink wine,” she told me as I cut another girl free. “They made us do things.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay. I am filthy. I am not a woman anymore. I am a dog.”

  I looked at her, grabbed her hand. “You’re not a dog.”

  “But I can never go home.”

  She started removing the gags from the remaining girls and reassuring them, while the guys kept screaming for me to come. The final two girls dashed off.

  “All right, get them and Warris out of here. Ramirez and the rest of Bravo should be waiting for you,” I told Brown.

  “What about you?”

  I lifted my chin to Hila. “She knows where Zahed is.”

  “Boss, what if she’s wrong?”

  I widened my gaze on Hila. “Are you sure?”

  She gave an exaggerated nod. “I hate him. He was the first one to have me. I know where he is.”

  “Oh my God,” Brown muttered under his breath.

  “I’m going with her.”

  “Not alone,” said Brown. “You fight with your buddy.”

  I shoved my silenced pistol into Hila’s hand. “That’s right. She’s my buddy.”

  She looked at me, scared, the weight of the pistol causing her shoulder to droop.

  “You’re crazy,” said Brown. “This is crazy!”

  “Just listen to me, Marcus. I need you to protect Warris. I need you to get him out. I’m worried about Joey, you know that.”

  “I know, boss. I won’t let Joey do anything stupid.”

  “Good. ’Cause I’m betting Warris won’t talk.”

  “Me, too. He owes us. Big-time.”

  “All right, so when you get out, contact Gordon. Tell them to track my chip. You’ll know where I am.”

  “Will do.” He thrust out his hand. “See you soon, you crazy mofo.”

  I gave him a firm handshake. “Thank you, Marcus.”

  Then I turned to Hila. “Which way?”

  My father raised three sons and a daughter, and my sister Jenn was unquestionably Daddy’s little girl. The old man was a hardcore disciplinarian with us boys, but my sister could get away with bloody murder. As a kid I could never understand his leniency toward her and was entirely jealous of it. As I got older, I didn’t begrudge my sister anymore. In fact, it took my entire life for me to realize that Dad was a cynic who simply needed my sister to remind him of all the beauty still left in the world.

  I wondered if Shilmani had felt likewise about Hila. As she led me through the next tunnel, I wondered if he’d be able to look Hila in the eye after what had happened to her. I knew the culture. I knew what happened to girls like her. But I didn’t want to believe that.

  She held up my pistol, and I had my rifle at the ready now, with the penlight attached. She led me down two more tunnels, and we descended yet another ladder into a small room with crates piled to the ceiling.

  “Guns,” was all she said.

  “So you came through here?” I asked.

  She frowned a moment, then realized what I was asking. “Yes, yes.”

  “Zahed is here? In the mountain?”

  She stopped and shook her head.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “He is in Sangsar.”

  My mouth fell open. “Aw, no. That’s no good. What do you think we’re going to do? Walk right down this mountain and into the village?”

  I guess I had spoken too fast. She frowned in thought, then finally said, “No, no. We don’t walk. We’ll run.” She tugged my arm, but I stopped dead.

  “We can’t go to Sangsar.”

  “Yes, we’ll go!”

  “How?”

  She made a gesture with her hand. “Under . . .”

  “You mean there’s a tunnel that leads all the way there?”

  She beamed at me.

  While I was heading off to Sangsar, Brown, Hume, and Warris, along with the group of girls, were rushing back through the tunnels, following the beacons we’d left. The guys were not happy with my decision to free the girls and attempt to save them, but they obeyed orders and later told me they would’ve done the same thing. It was sickening to realize what’d been happening in there.

  Warris had told them that my decision to search for Zahed alone was foolish and indicative of my poor judgment. Brown had told him that saving his sorry ass was also indicative of my poor judgment. I liked that.

  As Hila and I kept moving, I reminded myself that no, you could not generalize and say that all Taliban liked to rape young girls, but we could definitively state that Zahed’s men had taken it upon themselves to establish a terrible prison for them. The acts were inexcusable and when I looked at Hila, even for just a second, I wanted to kill Zahed more than anything. He was, in my mind, the symbol for all that was wrong with the country, all that was wrong with the war. And my hatred burned hotter as she dragged me by the wrist and led me down the next tunnel.

  The emotions were all over the place at that moment. I felt as though I’d been chasing the fat man all my life, and soon there’d finally be closure, but then I worried for Hila and imagined my own death, the gunshot to my heart, the throbbing pain, the blood seeping into my lungs.

  The passageways grew shorter, each ending abruptly with another ladder that we took down, always down, and it was clear we were descending the moun
tain from the inside. A lantern lit the passage at each ladder, and we encountered no resistance. I grew more at ease—

  Until at the end of the next passage we spotted a man coming up a ladder.

  Hila fired at him first, the kickback of the pistol startling her. She hit him in the shoulder with the first round, but the second went over his head and ricocheted off the wall.

  I put two rounds in his chest, and he fell backward off the ladder. I ran over there, checked below. No other movement. Thankfully, he’d been alone.

  It wasn’t until I started back that I felt the pain in my arm and stopped, directed a second light down, and saw that I’d been hit, probably from that ricocheting round.

  She saw it, too, and started crying and pointing to herself, as if to say, It’s my fault.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just caught me a little. See? In and out?”

  I reached into my back pocket, where I kept a small plastic bag filled with antiseptic wipes and bandages. I handed the kit to her. “Fix me up. Quick,” I said.

  She nodded and got to work, applying the antiseptic and the bandage. The wound looked worse than it was, but it still hurt like a mother. When she was finished, I thanked her and she grabbed me by the other arm. “This way.”

  We climbed down the next ladder and found ourselves in a concrete drainage pipe that left me hunched over. The pipe ran straight away for as far as I could see, and I guessed that it led all the way under the village wall and into Sangsar proper. I still couldn’t receive any satellite signals on the Cross-Com, so I just took it off and shoved it in my hip pocket.

  The pipe was littered with rocks and lined with a fine layer of sand, but there was certainly no water, so although I’d described it as a drainage pipe, its primary use was clear: smuggling. There were both boot and tire tracks in the sand. They’d brought wheelbarrows into the pipe or other wheeled carts to move their opium back and forth.

  I had to get word of this passage back to higher, in the event I didn’t make it back. I’d thought bombing the tunnels we’d found would help stop the attacks on Senjaray, but we’d barely put a dent in Zahed’s clandestine highway. But this pipe, this could be the main artery, I thought.

  We were losing our breath, and as we picked up the pace and continued on for meter after meter, I repeatedly glanced over my shoulder to watch the light drift away and the darkness consume the rest of the shaft.

  “Are we getting closer?” I asked her.

  She looked at me. “Close?”

  “Zahed is here?” I asked.

  “Soon,” she said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  While we had been considering a major offensive against the Taliban, they had, unsurprisingly, been thinking about the same thing. And unbeknownst to us, they had planned to launch their attack only a few hours after I’d taken my team into the mountains. Call that ironic and interesting timing.

  What gave them pause, however, was our placement of the Bradleys in the defile and the firing of that flare. My simple diversion had changed the enemy’s entire battle plan. We later learned that they thought we’d been tipped off, and that had sent Zahed into a state of panic. From what we could gather, he launched a halfhearted offensive, committing only about half of his troops to the fight, while pulling the rest back to Sangsar to help ensure his escape.

  But I was unaware of those facts as Hila took me through the concrete pipe. Had I known that Sangsar would be swarming with at least two, maybe three hundred of Zahed’s best trained fighters, I might’ve given the decision more thought.

  But I was blithely unaware.

  And Hila had assured me that the fat man kept only two or three guards around him at all times.

  Not three hundred.

  Far ahead, my light finally picked out the edge of the pipe, which led directly into another tunnel, one only about three meters long.

  The air was filled by other scents I couldn’t quite discern: incense, cooked meat, burning candles, something. And then I paused, glanced back at Hila. “Here?”

  She raised an index finger, and her gaze turned up.

  I nodded. The concrete pipe had led to a tunnel that I believed emptied into a basement.

  With a gesture for her to remain behind me, I shifted farther into the tunnel, reached the edge, then hunkered down and slowly lifted my penlight.

  “Whoa . . .” The word escaped my lips before I could stop it.

  We were in a basement all right, a huge one. Fifteen-foot-high concrete walls rose around the perimeter, and I estimated the depth at more than one hundred feet. The place had been converted into a subterranean warehouse, with long rows of opium bricks, crates of ammunition and guns, and more MREs, along with dozens and dozens of wooden boxes whose contents were a mystery.

  I shifted to one box and opened it to find a bag labeled in English: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I snorted. Fertilizer for making bombs.

  At the back of the basement rose a wooden staircase leading up to a door half open, flickering light wedging through the crack. When I looked back, Hila was right behind me. She hadn’t held back like I’d asked.

  I glanced up at the wooden planks and ceiling, listened as people shifted and creaked overhead. Hila’s breathing grew louder. I leaned down, grabbed her wrist, and led her along a row of opium bricks, then crouched down at the back.

  “Zahed is up there?”

  She nodded.

  I thought of the Predator, of somehow getting a signal off to that controller, getting him to bomb the whole place while we escaped back through the drainage pipe. Simple. Clean. The only problem was I couldn’t confirm that the fat man was up there. I wanted to see him for myself.

  “Is it a house up there?”

  “Yes. He stays in a big room.”

  “All right.” I didn’t think I could get more out of her, and she wanted to come with me.

  “No,” I told her. “You stay here, be quiet, and wait for me . . . okay?”

  She looked about to cry.

  “Please . . .”

  “Okay.”

  As I stole away, shifting quickly from row to row of crates and opium bricks, I asked myself, What the hell am I doing?

  The door at the top of the staircase creaked open, and two Taliban fighters came charging down the stairs with a purpose. I tucked myself deeper into the crates and just watched them jog through the basement and head straight into the tunnel. I looked far down the row at Hila, hidden between two crates now. She’d heard them but she didn’t move. Perfect. That kid had a lot of courage, all right.

  I gave myself a once-over and tightened the shemagh around my face. I was about to step forward and mount the staircase when I thought better of it and shifted back to my spot. I was panting. What the hell had just happened? Had I just chickened out? I wasn’t sure. I dug into my pocket, ripped down the shemagh again, then donned the Cross-Com and gave the verbal command to activate the device.

  The monocle flickered, came to life, but the HUD showed no satellite signal. I was still too deep. I removed and pocketed the unit, then took several long breaths. I checked my magazine, my second pistol with silencer, was ready to rip open my shirt to expose the web gear beneath and the half dozen grenades I carried.

  Once more, the door above opened, and three more Taliban fighters came running down and dashed across the basement, on their way toward the tunnel.

  I kept telling myself that if I waited any longer, the fat man would be gone. Either he was up there right now packing his bags, or maybe it was all for naught. Maybe he’d already left.

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  My arm was stinging again as I hustled up the stairs—a reminder that getting killed was going to hurt. Oh, yeah. I shivered and passed through the door.

  A long hallway stretched out in both directions. A living room lay to the left, with tables, chairs, even a very Western-looking leather sofa and flat-screen TV mounted to the wall, all very posh despite the mud-brick walls. Candles bu
rning from wall sconces lit the pathway to my right, where a large kitchen with bar and stools, again very Western, was set up beside another eating area.

  Someone shouted behind me. I turned to him, a guy about my age with a salt-and-pepper beard.

  He asked me something, then asked me again.

  I shook my head. He shoved me out of the way and jogged down the hall. I ran after him. “Wait!” I cried in Pashto. “I need to see Zahed!”

  But he kept running. I slowed, reached the edge of the kitchen as something or someone moved behind me. I whirled.

  Hila stood there, pistol in one hand.

  “I told you to stay down there!” I cried through a whisper.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see Zahed! I know where!”

  She grabbed my wrist and tugged me toward the hallway ahead.

  I grabbed her by the mouth, pulled her into the kitchen, then ducked down beneath the bar and stools. I rolled her over, my hand still wrapped around her mouth, and said, “If they see you, they’ll kill you.”

  She didn’t move.

  I slowly removed my hand.

  “You have to go back,” I told her, pointing down toward the basement.

  She shook her head.

  I gestured to my eyes. “If they see you, they will kill you.”

  “I know what you said. I don’t care. I am dead already. To my family. To everyone who knows me. Let me help you. Let me get revenge against Zahed.”

  The decision pained me. If I dragged her along, the second we were spotted we’d be accosted, maybe even shot. I could concoct some story, but I didn’t like that. I didn’t want her around. I couldn’t bear to see her get killed, not after what had already happened to her.

  I told myself that if I could save her, maybe it all meant something. Maybe I wasn’t just a puppet whose strings were being pulled by asinine politicians.

  But she could save me time, get me to Zahed more quickly. I would have to comb through the entire house. She seemed to know exactly where he’d be.

  She made the decision for me. I released my grip on her at the sound of approaching men, and she bolted around the bar before I could grab her.

  The men passed, heading toward the basement door, and she ran out into the hall, waving to me.