In the first week of December, a cold steady rain fell, beating on the tin roofs of the grain shacks that lay just four hundred yards from the edge of the rail line.
General Riaz Rehan, his second-in-command Colonel Khan, and Georgi Safronov lay on prayer mats in the dark, tucked in a shed behind a rusted-out tractor that hopefully would afford them protection from stray gunfire when the attack commenced.
Rehan was awaiting a radio call from a spotter in Chabba Purana, a village just southeast of Phularwan. The fifty-five Jamaat Shariat gunmen, the students from the Haqqani camp in Miran Shah, were spread out in the field on the west side of the tracks. They were positioned one man every three yards, and every fourth man held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and the rest wielded Kalashnikovs.
The Dagestanis, led by ex–ISI officers handpicked by General Rehan because of their paramilitary experience, were positioned fifty meters or so away from the track, and a ten-meter-long stretch of rail had been removed just moments before. The speeding train would come off the rails right there in front of Jamaat Shariat, it would grind into the dirt, and then the North Caucasus fighters would quickly go to work killing every last living thing in each and every car.
Rehan had forbidden smoking ever since the six big truckloads of men arrived earlier in the evening. Even though there was no one around for several kilometers in each direction, he also forbade speaking other than in a whisper, and all but essential radio communication.
Now his radio crackled to life. It was on an encrypted channel, but still the message was in code. “Ali, before you go to bed the hens must be fed. They will be hungry.”
Rehan patted the nervous Russian space entrepreneur crouched in the shed with him, then leaned into his ear. “That is my man up the tracks. The train is coming.”
Safronov turned to Rehan and looked to him. Even in the low light of a rainy night, the man’s face looked pale. There was no reason for Safronov to even be here for this attack. Rehan had argued against it, telling the Russian that he was too precious to the overall mission. But Safronov had insisted. He demanded to be with his brothers each step of the way on this operation. Though he had left the training early in North Waziristan, that was only because, at that point, he was working twenty-hour days in Moscow organizing the three rocket launches in Baikonur, and ensuring that only his handpicked scientists and staff would be there with him when the time was right.
But there was no way he would have missed tonight’s fireworks, Rehan’s dominant personality be damned.
Rehan had finally acquiesced to letting Georgi come along for the op, but he held his ground on having him take no part in the attack itself. He even demanded that the man wear a chest plate and remain in the shed until they loaded everything on the trucks, and Rehan had put Colonel Khan himself in charge of making sure the Dagestani remained safe.
There were a few other men nearby, as well, who would not be part of the gunplay because they played a bigger role in the op. The cold, calculating general knew that selling the fantasy that a band of mountain men from Dagestan could pull off such an incredible operation in Pakistan would be difficult if not impossible. Many in the know would immediately place blame on the Islamists in the ISI for helping them. To deflect this blame, Rehan had set up one of the organizations with whom he’d been working for more than a decade. The Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, an Islamic militant group in India, had been penetrated by agents from India’s National Investigation Agency a year prior. When Rehan learned of MULTA’s infiltration he did not get angry, and he did not immediately cut ties with them. No, he saw this as an opportunity. He took men from MULTA who were insulated from the NIA penetration, and he brought them into his fold. He told them they would be part of an incredible operation in Pakistan that would involve stealing a nuclear weapon, returning with it to India, and detonating it in New Delhi. The men would be martyrs.
It was all a lie. He documented their movements as he documented Indian intelligence’s infiltration of their organization, saving evidence that he could use later to cover the tracks of the ISI in the theft of the bombs. He had plans for the four MULTA men here tonight, but it had nothing to do with them leaving these fields with the bombs.
These men would take the fall for the theft of the weapons, and by association the Indian government would have to explain their involvement with the group.
In furtherance of this ruse, Rehan and his men planned the attack with an appearance of sloppiness. A group of Islamic fighters from India being duped by Indian intelligence into working with Dagestani partisans in Pakistan would not possess any semblance of military precision, and for this reason the plan involved mayhem and chaos to achieve its objective.
Rehan heard a radio call from the unit farthest to the north. They reported the lights of the train in the distance.
The mayhem and chaos would begin within moments.
Rehan’s plan never would have worked if the Pakistani government put as much effort into securing its nukes from terrorists as it did securing them from their neighbor to the east. The bomb train could have been longer, full of an entire battalion of troops, it could have had helicopter gunship escorts for the entire route, and the Pakistani Defense Force could have stationed quick-reaction troops along the tracks in advance of the train’s leaving Kamra on its way to Sargodha Air Force Base.
But all these high-profile measures that would virtually eliminate the chance that a terrorist group could overpower the train and take the weapons would also telegraph to Indian satellites, drones, and spies that the nukes were under deployment.
And the Pakistani Defense Force would not let that happen.
Therefore, the security plan for the train relied on supreme stealth, and an onboard force of one company of troops, just more than one hundred armed men. If stealth failed and terrorists hit the train, one hundred men would, under virtually all circumstances, be sufficient to repel an attack.
But Rehan was prepared for one hundred men, and they would not stand a chance.
The lights of the train appeared in the flat distance, just a kilometer away now. Rehan could hear Safronov’s heavy breathing over the pattering of the rain on the tin roof. In Arabic the general said, “Relax, my friend. Just lie here and watch. Tonight Jamaat Shariat will take a first important step in securing a Dagestani homeland for your people.”
The Pakistani’s voice was full of confidence and fake admiration for the fools out there in the grass. Inwardly he was hoping they wouldn’t fuck it up. Out there with Jamaat Shariat were a dozen of his own men, also ready with small arms and radios to organize the attack. He had no idea how well the Haqqani trainers had prepared these fifty-five mountain men, but he knew he was seconds away from finding out.
The train itself appeared in the rain, screaming forward in the night behind its white light. It was not long, only a dozen cars. Rehan’s contacts at Kamra Air Weapon Complex had no way of knowing which car the devices would be loaded into, and he had no one at Taxila railroad station to confirm this either. Obviously it would not be in the engine, and common sense said it would not be the rear car, as the security detail would logically post a portion of the force at the back in case of attack from the rear. So Jamaat Shariat had been ordered to fire their RPGs only at the engine and the last car, or at any large clusters of dismounted troops only when they were well away from the train. The RPGs could not set off a nuclear explosion even if they hit the bombs themselves, but they could very easily damage the weapons or set the rail car containing them on fire and make it difficult to extract the two big bombs.
Again, Rehan worried. If this did not work, his plan to take control of the nation was dead.
The conductor of the deployment train must have seen the missing portion of track ahead; he slammed on his brakes, and they squealed and screeched. Georgi Safronov tensed perceptibly behind the rusty tractor with General Rehan and Colonel Khan. Rehan started to calm him with gentle words, but suddenly a Kalash
nikov rifle opened up, firing fully automatic, while the train was still moving.
Another AK joined the chorus, the sound barely perceptible over the incredible noise of the brakes of the locomotive.
Still, Rehan was furious. Jamaat Shariat had jumped the gun.
Rehan shouted into his radio at his men in the field, “They were not to fire until the train derailed! Shut those bastards up, even if you have to shoot them in the head!”
But just as he finished his transmission, the heavy engine skidded off the track. Behind it, like a slowly collapsing accordion, the other cars turned both in and out. The train came to a slow, labored stop in the rain. Small fires ignited in the braking system.
Rehan started to countermand his last order, he pressed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie, but instead he held the device in front of Safronov’s face. Softly the general said, “Give your men the order to attack.”
The terrified Russian millionaire’s white face filled with color in an instant of animalistic pride, and he shouted so loud into the microphone of the walkie-talkie that Rehan was certain his call would come out distorted on the radios of his gunmen.
“Attack!” he screamed in Russian.
Instantly the field ahead of the men in the shed flickered with the lights of launching RPGs. A couple streaked over the train, arcing off into the night, and one detonated against the second-to-last car on the tracks, but four more rocket-propelled grenades hit their mark on the engine, turning it into a fireball of twisted metal. Two more grenades slammed into the rear car, killing or maiming everyone stationed there.
The AK chatter from the field was incredible—loud and angry and sustained. Return fire from the train cars took a long time to begin. No doubt the hard braking and the derailment knocked the men around inside like beans shaken in a can, and they were in no position to fight in those first seconds. But finally large cracks of semiautomatic .308 fire from big HK G3 battle rifles began answering the Kalashnikovs in the wheat field.
More RPGs detonated against the train, mostly at the front and the rear, but some of the Dagestani forces controlling the launchers seemed, to General Riaz Rehan’s way of thinking, to have extremely poor fire discipline. He heard shouts in the walkie-talkies, in Urdu and Arabic and Russian, and from across the dark rain-swept field, he watched the soldiers on the deployment train die.
These soldiers were not bad men. Many would be good Muslims. Many would support Rehan’s cause. But in order for Operation Saker to succeed, some men would need to be martyred.
Rehan would pray for them, but he would not grieve for them.
Rehan used night-vision binoculars to watch the action from the shed. A group of ten or so PDF soldiers managed to make it out of the train; they attacked into the ambush in a disciplined fashion that made the general proud to be associated with such men. But the ambush line was too wide, the force in the wheat field too numerous, and the men were slaughtered within seconds.
The entire firefight lasted just over three and a half minutes. When the ISI officers in the field called a cease-fire, they sent teams of Jamaat Shariat fighters into each car, one at a time, so that there was no blue-on-blue shooting between the cars.
This took five more minutes, and resulted in what Rehan could tell just by listening was the execution of the wounded or the surrendering.
Finally a radio transmission came over Rehan’s walkie-talkie. In Urdu, one of his captains said, “Bring the trucks!”
Immediately two large black dump trucks pulled out from behind the warehouses and drove up a wet road through the wheat field. A third vehicle, a yellow crane truck, followed behind.
It took only seven minutes to offload the bombs from the train onto the trucks. Four minutes after this and the first of the trucks full of Dagestanis had hit the Islamabad–Lahore road and turned to the north.
As Rehan and Safronov climbed into one of the vehicles, a long salvo of gunfire rang out from one of the abandoned warehouses. The weapons doing the firing were PDF G3 battle rifles, but Rehan was not worried. He had ordered his men to pick up weapons from the train’s security force, and then use these weapons on the four MULTA men who, up until the moment the ISI shot them dead, thought that they would be returning to India with these weapons.
The ISI had Dagestanis carry the bodies into the field and dump them.
Jamaat Shariat lost thirteen men in the ambush. Seven died outright, and the others, men injured too badly to survive the trek ahead of them, were shot where they lay. All the bodies were loaded on trucks.
The first of the PDF response to the train attack arrived just twelve minutes after the last of Rehan’s trucks left the wheat field. By then the two bombs were nearly fifteen kilometers closer to the impenetrable metropolis of Islamabad.
68
Since returning from Pakistan weeks earlier, Jack had seen Melanie almost every day. Usually he would leave work a little early to head down to Alexandria. They would walk from her apartment to dinner unless it was snowing or raining, in which case they’d take the Hummer. He’d stay the night, getting up the next morning at five to beat the traffic for the thirty-mile drive back to Columbia.
She’d mentioned something about wanting to see where he lived, so Saturday afternoon he picked her up and took her back up to Columbia for the night. They dined on Indian at Akbar, then they stopped in for a drink at Union Jack’s.
After a beer and some conversation, they went back to Jack’s apartment.
Jack had had girls over to his place before, although he was by no means a playboy. Normally, if he thought he might have company over later in the evening, he just gave his apartment a once-over while grabbing his keys and heading out the door to go out, but for this date he had cleaned thoroughly. Mopping his hardwood floor, changing the sheets on the bed, scrubbing his bathroom from top to bottom. He’d play like he always kept the place so spic-and-span, but he was reasonably certain Ms. Kraft would be sharp enough to figure out that was not the case.
He liked this girl. A lot. He’d known that from the start, had felt the kindling of something on their early dates. He’d missed her when he was in Dubai, and when he was in Pakistan he wanted nothing more than to hold her, to talk to her, to get some sort of validation from her that he was doing the right thing for the right reasons and that everything was going to work out.
Shit, Jack thought. Am I going soft?
He wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that two bullets had come within inches of ending his life in the past three weeks. Was that what was behind the feelings he was developing for this girl? He hoped that was not the case. She did not deserve someone falling for her as a result of some personal issue or a near-death experience. No, she warranted the head-over-heels feeling without any artificial additives.
His apartment was pricey and full of nice furniture and modern, open spaces. It was very much a bachelor pad. When Jack excused himself to go to the bathroom, Melanie snuck a peek into his refrigerator, and she found exactly what she expected. Not much but wine, beer, Gatorade, and days-old takeout boxes. She also gave his freezer a quick scan, she did work for a spy agency, after all, and found it filled with ice bags, many of which had melted and then refrozen.
She then opened a couple of cupboards in his kitchen by the freezer. Ace bandages, anti-inflammatories, Band-Aids, antibiotic ointment.
She remarked on this when he came back to the room.
“Any more bumps and bruises on the slopes?”
“What? No. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering. I saw the emergency aid station you have set up.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been snooping?”
“Just a little. It’s a girl thing.”
“Right. Actually I was taking a mixed martial arts class in Baltimore. It was great, but when I started traveling a lot for work I had to quit.” Ryan looked around the room. “What do you think of my place?” he asked.
“It’s beautiful. It lacks a wom
an’s touch, but I suppose if it had a woman’s touch, I’d have to wonder about that.”
“That’s true.”
“Still. This place is so nice. It makes me wonder what you think about that little dump I’ve been making you stay over at.”
“I like your place. It suits you.”
Melanie cocked her head. “Because it’s cheap?”
“No. That’s not what I mean. I just mean, it’s feminine and it still is full of books on terrorism and CIA manuals. It’s kick-ass. Like you.”
Melanie had adopted a defensive posture. But she relaxed. “I’m really sorry. I’m just feeling a bit overwhelmed by your money and your family ties, basically because I come from the other side of the tracks, I guess. My family never had any money. Four kids didn’t leave much of my dad’s military pay left over for nice things.”
“I understand,” Jack said.
“You probably don’t. But that’s my problem, not yours.”
Ryan walked over to Melanie and put his arms around her. “That’s in your past.”
She shook her head and pulled away. “No. It’s not.”
“Student loans?” Ryan asked, and then immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. I just—”
Melanie smiled a little. “It’s okay. Just no fun to talk about. Just be thankful for your family.”
Now Jack was the one to go on the defensive. “Look, I understand that I was born into money, but my dad made me work. I’m not riding the family name to the bank.”
“Of course you aren’t. I totally respect that about you. I’m not talking about money.” She thought that over for a second. “Maybe for the first time I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about your family. I see how you talk about them. How you respect them.”