Assassin (John Stratton) (18 page)

The road was busy but he could see the three Suburbans ahead. It was a single lane in both directions, which would make it difficult for them to pass any of the big tankers, especially in a group of three. He guessed they would stick together – the lead driver would only overtake if he saw enough room for all three. Stratton knelt on the hatch and squinted ahead, the wind buffeting him. None of the people in the street appeared to notice him.

He saw the last turn to Bagram coming up. As far as he knew, it was the only remaining track they could possibly take to go back towards the base. The Suburbans went right by the turning, still heading south. Towards Kabul. He couldn’t begin to imagine why. Kabul had an airport, but why go all the way there? Maybe they weren’t intending to fly it out of the country, not yet at least. But if not, why not?

Whichever, Stratton didn’t want to go to Kabul, certainly not on the back of a fuel truck and wearing a US military camouflage suit. It was nearly seventy kilometres. He’d never keep up with the Suburbans anyway because eventually they would overtake. He would have to get off the truck somewhere and he’d be alone and vulnerable. There was nothing for it but to jump off and head back to Bagram.

The truck wobbled as it went over a bump and Stratton had to hang on tightly. He could still make out the Suburbans ahead. Their distinctive tail lights were hard to miss. The last of the houses gave way to the open ground of the Shomali plains. The mountains continued to form an endless barrier to his right. In front of him the land unfolded into a plateau, like massive, rolling waves, leading
down onto the arid flatlands that stretched as far as he could see. The air was cold on his face and hands. It was time for him to quit this task and let it go.

The driver changed down a gear as the road began a steep descent, slowing noticeably. Stratton crawled to the rear ladder and began to make his way down it. Way out in front along the road, a massive, thunderous explosion shook the night. The flash was enormous and the shockwave followed immediately, a powerful pulse travelling out from the centre of the blast. It came up the road and smashed the fuel truck’s windows. The vehicle rocked as debris filled the air.

Another, slightly smaller explosion followed, and Stratton saw a giant ball of flame balloon upwards, plumes of bright orange, red and yellow scarred with black.

Every vehicle swerved, unable to stop quickly enough, but the steep hill drew them down towards the cauldron. He heard crunching collisions all around. In front of them a fuel truck swerved and turned over on the steep verge, rupturing its huge tank. Stratton watched raw fuel spill out to flood the road and hillside. The truck immediately in front of Stratton’s jack-knifed and skidded off the road, swiping an oncoming truck. The gasoline from the burst fuel truck was washing down the road and somewhere flames caught and raced back uphill, spreading as they went, to the source. The fuel truck disintegrated in an almighty boom.

Gunfire followed all of this mayhem. The staccato bursts came from the high ground to the right of the road. Stratton
felt the searing heat of the fireball sucking the air from his lungs. The truck beneath him left the road and bounced to a stop in a ditch with a screech of tearing metal.

The nose of the cab came round as the driver desperately tried to control it, the brakes fully applied. It began to tip. Stratton hung onto the ladder, riding it, waiting for the right moment. The truck tipped violently over. Stratton was catapulted off. He managed to land on his feet and rolled forward, before hurrying to cover.

He watched the mayhem from behind a rock. It had been an attack. An ambush. The enemy was close. He reached for his rifle on his back but it was gone. He glanced around but couldn’t see it. There was no time to waste looking for it. He pushed off at the run as he pulled the pistol from its holster.

Tracer rounds were flying down from the high ground into an area of road about a hundred metres from Stratton. He watched an Afghan driver scramble from his vehicle and stagger a short distance before dropping to the ground. There were several more explosions. Much smaller ones. Stratton thought they were grenades or RPGs.

He found better cover behind a tree and decided to hold his position. He wanted to see what was happening. In particular to the spooks, if they were still there and hadn’t pushed on through. He wondered if the Suburbans had been the target. But they couldn’t possibly have been because the Taliban knew of the bomb. They had probably set the ambush and waited for the first target. Three shiny black Suburbans travelling nose to tail would have been
irresistible. The regular military didn’t travel like that. The Kabul to Bagram road wasn’t a very popular ambush site because of the number of military vehicles that moved along it. A night attack like this reduced the Taliban’s risks.

The sporadic gunfire continued. It appeared to be moving down the hill towards the road. Stratton moved off, keeping to the higher ground. He had to skirt the fireball but needed to keep in the darkness. The enemy was closing on their target. There didn’t appear to be any return fire.

Another explosion on the road. Muffled, like a fuel tank. Stratton kept moving forward and saw figures running, illuminated by the fires. A dozen or so of them. Then he saw two vehicles appear, driving towards the fire from the direction of the higher ground. They were pick-up trucks. They stopped on the road and more gunfire came from that same location. Stratton was still unable to see beyond the fire. He moved quicker, his pistol in his hand. Not a match for AK-47s but he had the darkness. The attackers wouldn’t hang around long anyway. Someone would respond to the attack soon enough and they knew that. They had the weapons and numbers for an ambush but not to take on a sustained attack by any substantial force.

He looked back in the direction of Bagram, wondering if a military convoy might be on its way, pushing through the disarray of abandoned and crashed vehicles. There was nothing. It was too soon. An engine revved loudly from beyond the flames. One of the pick-ups bumped off the road back into Stratton’s view. The driver gunned it as if trying to get the pick-up out of a rut. It jolted forward,
turned back onto the road, crossed it, went over a bump the other side and carried on across country. It soon disappeared from view.

The attackers were leaving.

Stratton headed down the hill. The flames were still unfolding in great sheets and the heat coming towards him was intense. As he got closer in he saw men clambering into the other pick-up. They looked like Afghan fighters. The vehicle started up and accelerated off in the same direction as the first. The gunfight was over.

He felt confident the ambushers had gone. As he moved further around the flames, he saw the black Suburbans for the first time since the explosions, all three of them. Two were lying on their sides off the road. The other was upright on the edge of the highway with all of its doors open. The armoured windows had been cracked and punctured and the skins twisted and torn like paper. He could see a shredded body in the front of the upright cab. Off the verge, the vehicle with the gantry holding the cigarette-like probes had sheared away and lay in the dirt, buckled beyond recognition. The upright Suburban, as far as he could tell, had been the lead vehicle and had contained the nuclear device.

As he approached it, he saw a body lying on the grass. One of the spooks. He wasn’t moving. Stratton got to within a couple of metres of him before having to stop due to the searing heat. He pulled his hood over his head and made a lunge for the man, grabbing hold of his harness and dragging him away.

Stratton tried to find a pulse. If there was life in him, it
was beyond what Stratton could do for him. Hopefully a military ambulance would get here soon. Stratton looked around for others but couldn’t see any. They were probably still in the vehicles. He went to the lead Suburban with its rear doors open. A couple of men lay inside the back, both dead, shot several times through their heads at close range. One of them was Mike Spinter. He had his eyes open, looking directly at Stratton. He looked the same in death as he had in life.

The large black-plastic container had gone.

Stratton looked for it around the immediate area, then remembered the clips the technician had used to secure the box. He went back to the Suburban and saw that all four had been undone. The box didn’t fall out of the vehicle. Someone had unclipped it and lifted it out.

The Taliban had taken it. Probably because it looked expensive. It wasn’t possible they knew that this convoy was carrying a nuclear warhead. The Taliban always inspected their victims if they had the time, and they took what they could. They would never have known what was in the box.

‘Don’t move,’ a voice said from behind him. ‘Stand perfectly still.’

It was a woman’s voice, American. The odds against her being anything other than friendly forces were extreme but Stratton did as instructed. His pistol was in his hand by his side. He had his back to her. He heard her moving above the sound of the fire. He caught a glimpse of someone in his peripheral vision. She was looking about the scene and inside the vehicles.

‘Turn around,’ she said.

Stratton obeyed slowly, until they were facing each other.

She was almost as tall as him, wearing grey US Army fatigues, no hat with short hair. She had intense, intelligent-looking eyes and was holding a large semi-automatic handgun. A Magnum 0.44 or 0.50. An unusual weapon for a regular soldier to carry. She wasn’t bulky but she looked strong. There were no markings on her uniform. No insignia, rank or unit.

‘Any other of your team survive?’ she asked.

Stratton had a choice to make.

‘I can’t find any,’ he said.

She looked around at the dead men. ‘You were lucky.’

It didn’t sound like a question so he didn’t say anything, until she looked at him as if waiting for a response.

‘I have no idea how I survived,’ he said.

She looked into the back of the lead vehicle. ‘The device was in here?’

Another surprise. She not only knew about it, she knew which SUV it had been in. He wanted to ask her who she was. Why she hadn’t been with the team.

She was looking at him, aware that what she’d asked had surprised him. ‘We work for the same people,’ she said. ‘My job is to monitor the device.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I said. My job is to ensure the device is secured. Nothing else.’

‘The Taliban must’ve taken it,’ he said.

‘Which direction did they go?’

‘That way,’ he said, pointing south-east.

She walked to where she could see the open country, holstering her gun. After a moment she walked into the darkness without a word or a look at him.

Stratton stepped away in search of cooler, less acrid air to breathe. The land dropped away in front of him. The vast panorama looked dramatic in the starlight. Kabul was far out of sight due south, where the icy mountains on his right headed towards. He saw lights along the base of the mountains, a line of tiny white pinpricks. They were vehicles heading along the highway towards Bagram. But the ambushers hadn’t used that road. They had cut across country because they didn’t want to run into any roadblock set up by coalition or Afghan security forces.

As he looked across the plain south-east of where they stood, he saw a sudden distant flash of red, well away from any roads. It appeared again. Vehicle tail lights. It had to be the Taliban who had stolen the warhead. The frustration welled in him. He could only stand and watch them get away, unable to pursue them.

Someone was going to be very upset about this.

A vehicle started up and pulled onto the road and stopped level with Stratton. It was a standard, dirty, drab-green US Army Humvee with armoured door panels, extended front bumper, long whip antenna and spare wheels on the back with fuel cans and shovel. The woman was at the wheel, looking at him through the narrow opening of the driver’s window. There was no one beside her in the passenger seat.

He wondered if she was about to offer him a lift back to the base. No doubt she’d called in support. The priority for him was the bomb. It was still close. An air asset would be perfect, with an assault team. But by the time they had organised all that the Taliban and the bomb would be long gone.

She was a hard arse, or at least she put on a convincing act. He wondered just how tough she was.

‘I don’t suppose you’d consider lending me your Humvee,’ he said.

She gave him a blank look. He took it to mean ‘Get lost’.

‘Aren’t you interested in pursuing them?’ he asked.

‘That is my directive,’ she said. ‘To ensure the device remains on track.’

‘Directive?’ he muttered to himself. It was time to see how tough she really was. He looked back in the direction of the lights he had seen in the distant sea of blackness. After a few seconds they flickered again. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s them.’ He looked back at her for a reaction. ‘You up for it?’

She looked past Stratton where he had pointed. Then she looked back at him, as though studying him. ‘Get in,’ she said.

It would seem she was up for it, in principle. But he knew saying and doing were two very different things. As was chasing Taliban and then catching them. He walked around the vehicle to the passenger side, opened the heavy door and climbed in. He glanced into the back. Other than some body armour and what looked like weapons boxes, it was empty. He had travelled in Afghanistan on his own but always as a local, and rarely without the support of other operatives not far away. She seemed to be totally alone, in military fatigues, in a US military vehicle. And a woman.

As he slammed the door shut, she shoved the heavy vehicle into gear and it shunted off, its headlights cutting into the darkness.

‘See those tracks,’ he said, pointing at tyre marks leaving the road and going downhill. She followed them. The vehicle jolted heavily as it went over an edge and down a gentle incline. She grabbed a pair of night-vision goggles
out of the dashboard and pulled them on. Then the vehicle’s lights went out. For Stratton, everything turned black.