Mick began his crawl. He’d left the Barrett behind as there was no point in dragging it along; it was no close-quarters weapon. He had a Beretta 92 with a wicked Gemtech suppressor sticking from its snout like a can of frozen orange juice. At close range, it would finish up this asshole and get them the hell out of town in time for martini hour at the Kabul Hilton. He slithered, pulling his way along, enjoying the chilled air and the freedom from the ache of the big Barrett he’d been toting for three or four days. This was the cool part, the part he always loved, the special part of special ops work: the silent stalk. He enjoyed his own war craft, his ability to undulate silently, to ignore on will alone all the prods and pricks and pokes of the rough ground and thorny vegetation he crawled over. He moved more quickly than the others because through the night vision goggles, he could see what rocks lay ahead, where the breaks were, where the smaller brush collected, and so his progress was more assured.
He made it to the crest in less than half an hour. He found a larger rock and eased around it, hearing at the same time the gentle moaning of a goat or two. In the green world of the goggles the goats glowed incandescently, about 30 yards ahead. Three or four seemed tethered to what had to be the sniper, some kind of less-glowing form concealed in robes on the ground, heaving in and out with movement as the lungs took in air and then spent it, once in a while kicking.
Shoot him, Mick thought.
But it was a long shot for a pistol, particularly one wearing a suppressor that might change the point of impact off the sights, which were hard to see even in the ambient light’s amplification. He had him. Wait it out. Be disciplined, wait it out, when 0500 gets here, we’ll all hit him at once and pump his ass on the ground.
Mick sat back and waited, selecting memories to keep him toasty through the long hour. Hmm, the two Japanese girls in Tokyo that night? Or that CBS correspondent in Baghdad, the Brit? Man, she was hot and she’d done half the guys in Delta. Or what about the black gal in Dar es Salaam. Boy, that was a night, even if he’d caught a dose. Or . . .
In this fashion, he passed the time quickly, pausing now and then for a recon through the night vision to make sure the guy was still there, snoozing fitfully on the ground amid his screen of goats. Their bleats and baas came softly through the night but the goats were so intent on keeping warm that no man-scent alarmed them. They drifted and moseyed around the sleeping form and meanwhile Mick explored the brothel of his memory for suitable pornographic energy to keep himself distracted from the slow slippage of time on his Suunto or the numb chill spreading through his lower extremities. He timed it perfectly, jigging to release at roughly 0450, giving himself plenty of time to clean off and settle in.
A last check of the pistol. Shell in chamber, yes, hammer down, yes, safety off, yes, magazine seated, yes, suppressor can cranked tight against the threading, yes. He rose to knees, then to haunches, the gun in one hand, steadying himself on the rock with the other and enough of a sleeve hike to show the face of the watch as the Suunto digits dissolved steadily toward 0500 until they yielded that number exactly.
He took a breath, raised himself full, shouted, “Go!” in his loudest sergeant’s voice, acquired the pistol in his support hand, and began moving ahead, examining the world through his goggles. He watched as incandescent goats fled at his approach, except for those tethered to the sleeper, and they bucked and busted against the ropes that secured them, sensing death on the come. The animals began a chorus of anguish, their voices involuntarily rising in pitch and urgency as those who could flee fled and those who couldn’t tried to, desperately.
Mick got within twenty feet and fired, saw the drama of the operating pistol as it ejected a shell through its slide blowback, fired again against the much shorter cocked trigger pull, and then settled into a rhythm and fired three more times, and for just a second saw the impacts of his bullets as they puffed gas into the sealed fabric around the body and then it was obliterated.
The others were close enough, and on Mick’s shots they fired, AKs blazing hot in the night, the extreme percussion of the small arms in the stillness of the air, the bullet strikes that stitched a beaten zone and ripped and tossed and pummeled the guy on the receiving end, who even as he was being speared multiple times by warheads moving at two thousand feet per second, began to issue copious amounts of blood-soak through his robe.
A goat fled by Mick, knocking his leg. Of the three tethered goats, two were hit by late-burst uncontrollables, and twisted angrily under the impact, knowing they had been killed; the survivor simply pulled desperately against his rope, finally broke it, and sped off.
“Cease fire, cease fire,” Mick yelled.
The guns went quiet except for one Izzie joker who’d evidently just changed magazines and was determined to get his full money’s worth out of the labor of the switch. His last thirty rounds served as the coup de grace, “Taps” and a fare-thee-well to the poor sonovabitch all shot to hamburger in his robes.
Then total silence except in the ringing inner ears of the shooters. Mick sniffed the delicious home-at-last smell of all the burned powder, felt a bit of wind whipping against the boys. One of the Taliban fighters kicked the two dead goats aside, and Mick bent to expose the corpse and was surprised to note that it wasn’t a man but just another goat, its legs tied, its muzzle tied, itself very dead from all the wounds that had pretty much shredded its torso.
Suddenly a flurry of SureFire beams came onto the mess and the blood was as boldly bright as Mick’s fuck-up.
“Shit,” said Mick. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“How the fuck—”
“What the—”
“The satellite said he was here,” said Mick, uncomprehending. “He was here, the eye in the sky, it said he was here.”
It was Tony Z whose SureFire found the gizmo. It lay under the dead goat, soaked in blood, clotted with dirt, but enough metal showed for Tony’s beam to catch. He bent, plucked them out, a small cylinder of metal the size of one joint of a man’s finger and a little, almost featureless plastic box.
“That’s the GPS chip and transmitter,” said Mick. “Fucker either knew or figured out how we were tracking him, and suckered us with it. Smart guy. Didn’t just toss it and clear the area but set us up to waste the night while he moved on. Goddamn his ass.”
It was then that the two Taliban guys started to chatter between themselves excitedly.
“What’re they saying?” Mick asked Tony.
“‘Where’s Mahoud?’ That’s what they’re saying. ‘Where’s Mahoud?’”
Where was Mahoud?
It only took half an hour to find him, by backtracking over the hill along the axis that had been assigned to Mahoud in the ascent. The peep of sun over horizon bringing rapid pink illumination to the vast sky was a big help as well.
He hadn’t made it very far.
Tony leaned over the still figure, facedown on the dust of Afghanistan, and pulled his head up for examination. There wasn’t much to see. His throat had been deeply and expertly cut from earlobe to earlobe. Not many of the anatomical structures remained unsundered, as if the cutter had truly enjoyed sending this one to Allah.
“I would say,” said Tony, “we are dealing with a very angry individual.”
QALAT
CAPITAL CITY OF ZABUL PROVINCE
HOURI DISTRICT
SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN
0130 HOURS
He sat in the shadows, drinking tea. Under his robes, the SVD with its unyielding structure and all its knobs, prongs, jutting edges, and lengthy barrel had to be wedged to the side, its sling loosened and the beast itself carefully adjusted so that it nestled against the length of his body, braced against the stiffness of his very bad leg. The leg itself, stressed beyond stress, now announced loudly that it had no further interest in completing the mission.
Ray sat far back in the crowded marketplace, at some kind of outdoor rude wooden cafe that looked rustic and slatternly, and he’d just finished some
kind of meal, a mystery meat that had to be goat (except, wasn’t meat supposed to be brown or red and not naval gunboat gray?), a thin gravy, lots of surprisingly good rice, and those patties of baked dough the Afghans ate, the ones that looked like Pop-Tarts but had no jam inside. But all in all, it could have been the best meal of his life, if for no other reason than that he was alive to enjoy it.
Tea: good, sweet, loaded with energy.
Rest: good, after the ordeal of the past few days.
Crowds: very good. People swirled everywhere in this city of thousands, most of them nut brown men in strange headgear or head- and face-obscuring turbans, dishdashas in blazing colors or patterns obscuring bodies, the necks draped in long scarves—graceful, scrawny, furtive, loud, animated, with faces that looked like the beaten hide of an African shield. Many were Pashtun tribals, openly carrying daggers or AKs that nobody was going to take from them; many were city folk, in suits with shirts but no ties. Many were women, some in tribal outfits, some in the Afghan version of the latest hot look from a New York they saw only on CNN satellite pickup, some young, some old. But so many of them. They traveled by every conveyance known to man, from bike to motorbike to motorcycle to tri-wheel covered motorcycles to pickups to full-blown lorries to the odd sedan, all of them competing for space with other life-forms, dogs, goats, even the occasional cow and some humped, hairy beasts that looked like Star Wars creatures. The place baked in the odors of combustion and methane and probably piss and keefe too, and a kind of blue haze of dust and exhaust hung low over everything.
Nobody seemed to have noticed Ray. It helped that he was dark, that his eyes were deep and brown to a degree that could have concealed an Islamist’s serpentine way of thinking even if it only concealed a rigorous Catholic boyhood, and that he was thin, wiry, ropey, graceful, and with his thick dressing of robes, almost anonymous. The exoticism of his face could easily have been Mongolian, Chinese, Tartar, Uzbek, anything; it surprised nobody.
His plan: to sit here till twilight. In the falling darkness, he’d mosey the several blocks to the warlord Ibrahim Zarzi’s compound and examine the Many Pleasures Hotel across the way. Getting into it shouldn’t be too hard. The idea was to rent a room there tomorrow morning, sleep a bit, then carefully ease his way up to the roof. No door or lock could stop him, for he was as clever in the ways of penetration as he was clever in the ways of evasion.
He’d slide into shoot position just a few minutes before it went down. He wouldn’t be at the building’s edge, but as far back as possible while still retaining the angle. He’d thought this out; it wouldn’t be the classic sniper’s rested shot, off something like a bench. No, he’d be in character as the tribal wanderer until the very last, squatting on the roof. At the proper moment, he’d rise, lifting the rifle with him. If there was some structure upon which he could lean to stabilize himself, that would be excellent. If not, he’d take the kill shot offhand. It was only a little over 200 yards and he had superb offhand skills, something not many snipers build on but which had obsessed him one year at Camp Lejeune as a weakness in his game. He could hit that shot one hundred out of one hundred, no problem. He might even have time for a follow-up, put another one into the already stricken man.
In the courtyard there’d be chaos, craziness, insane hubbub. It would take a few minutes for things to calm down, for someone to issue orders to Zarzi’s well-armed militia, for the pathetic Afghan police or the hopelessly incompetent Dutch peacekeepers to be called. Ray would use that time to dump the rifle, and slip out of the hotel and off into the crowds.
Ray took another sip of tea.
It was as good a plan as could be imagined.
But it didn’t deal with the problem.
The problem was: there was a mole somewhere who’d given him up to the contractors.
He was blown. He was hunted.
Now what does a nice Catholic boy do about that? He hadn’t figured it out yet, but he knew one thing. He’d have to slit some more throats.
UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM
QALAT OUTSKIRTS
ZABUL PROVINCE
SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN
1700 HOURS
The city shimmered before them in the afternoon sun. It almost looked like Oz or Mecca or the Baghdad of the many tales, white and dignified, sprawled across the plain under the mountains, except for the fact that it was utterly crappy. It had a skyline that consisted of a few decrepit buildings of the sort that were old fashioned in 1972 when they’d been built, and the rest low-rent ramshackle construction improvisations, none more than a couple of stories high, thrown together more or less on the fly, wherever. Mick and his pals wandered farther, heading downtown.
What lay farther along was, to the Western mind, somewhat baffling: a maze of dusty, crowded streets lit up by a riot of color and confusion, Arabic signs amid universal symbols like small Coke bottle signs, a brand of Japanese gasoline, pictures of kabobs, the ubiquitous BankAmericard and MasterCard symbols, Indian teas. Other identifiables amid the clutter consisted of but were not limited to carts, shops, tents selling mostly woven things gaudy with color, pots, guns guaranteed to fire at least fifty times before exploding, kabobs, rice balls, custard, more pots, whatever. The vehicles seemed from 1927, many of them with an odd number of wheels, many painted extravagantly. You could not move in the place without raising a shroud of dust, for less than 2 percent of the roads were paved.
Mick had ditched the ball cap—a long-billed SureFire giveaway for big-time customers in the trade—for his own turban, and by this time, he’d become expert in draping it so his features were obscured. The sunglasses and beard helped, but what helped most was that Qalat was still tribal, meaning really lawless, and there were enough Westerners about of dubious pedigree that the addition of a few more didn’t set off signals. He didn’t have to pretend to be native, just psycho, not a stretch for him. Plus, he was escorted by two heavily armed Tals, whose glares and do-not-approach hand signals were enough to keep him safe from all but the most insane militia. And there was Mick’s size, impressive, and his body language, which said fuck-not-or-die, and his own AK-47, the Barrett being stashed in the foothills, to be picked up if time and circumstance permitted. Then too he had Tony Z and Crackers the Clown, also festooned with AKs, robes, grenades, daggers, and dust, and those two serious pilgrims amplified the fuck-not-or-die message.
Mick’s ears were still red. Such a reaming he’d gotten. Mr. MacGyver had not been a happy camper, wherever he was, whomever he worked for. Mick winced at the conversation, held at 0730 that morning.
“Make me happy,” the control had said in answering and when Mick merely swallowed, accepting that which was about to be bestowed, his voice box seemed disconnected from his brain. Mr. MacGyver had said, “You bastard. You moron. You idiot. You had his location, the cover of darkness, the advantage in numbers, firepower, ruthlessness, aggression, and experience, and yet he defeated you. Bogier, you were highly recommended but you are a total loss. Where is he?”
This was the part Mick dreaded.
“Qalat. I guess.”
“You guess? You guess?”
Mick laid it out, the trick with the GPS transmitter, the throat-cutting of Mahoud, the night lost in slow approach and final assault, and the fact that if the marine was six or seven hours ahead of them, he was already there or damn near.
“Who knew he was that good? He was really good.”
“So not only did you fail, but he also ditched the GPS, which means we won’t be able to track him on any screen? Is that right?”
“I guess so.”
“You’ve got it. That’s you we’re tracking, that’s what you’re saying.”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so. You guess so. You were paid to do a job and he has outfought you at every turn. Who is he, Superman?”
Mick wanted to say, Hey, asshole, you were the one who told me the GPS was him, so it was you he outfoxed, not me. What was I supposed to do, assa
ult the position or set up perimeter security with six guys? Yet he also knew it was his refusal to close when he had the chance and instead wasted another hour and a half jerking off while his team positioned itself that had really cost them badly. No way they could catch up now.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Ever hear of a lovely Japanese thing called seppuku? Gut splitting. Just open your guts with a very sharp blade and die quietly, all right?”
Mick waited as MacGyver’s rage crested.
“All right,” the control finally said, “you’ve left us with a very big problem. I will have to make some arrangements from this end. You go into Qalat and find a place near the compound. I may need you to move quickly if I can get done what I need to do. You call in at 0700 hours tomorrow your time, and we’ll see where we are.”
“Got it,” said Mick. “Out and—”
But he was talking to dead air.
UN PEACEKEEPER HUMVEE
PLATOON C, 5TH ROYAL Dutch Marines
ROYAL DUTCH MARINE OUTPOST
QALAT
ZABUL PROVINCE
SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN
2300 HOURS
Ray popped the lock, slid in. These royal marines must be aching for a bad suicide bombing because their post security was so porous anyone could get in or out. It probably represented their absolute hatred of this job and this country. Imagine: you join the Royal Dutch Marines well aware that you’re not going into combat anytime soon, and that you’re basically signing up for a lifetime sinecure with cool guns; but you end up in an outpost in a slum city on the edge of the wildest area in Pakistan, surrounded by men who want to kill you. And your job, really, isn’t to win any war, it’s to represent some politician’s alliance with an American ideal that has nothing to do with the Netherlands. Wouldn’t you be depressed? And if you’re depressed, you quickly turn fatalistic and lazy, and the next thing you know, you’re getting by on luck alone. Maybe you’ll get blown up, maybe you won’t, now pass the hooch, please, and a little of that fine Afghan keefe that will help the time fly faster.