“So she says ‘whisper,’ what next?” asked Dewey.
“If she says ‘whisper,’ you’re operational,” said Bradstreet. “It means everything is cool. Follow Margaret. She has the weapons, communications, transportation, money, a little food and drink, everything. Once you go live on COMM, we’ll be back in touch, obviously.
“From Saddar, you’re going hunting for General Karreff. He’ll be in one of four places. He has a couple of homes, a mistress, and he works late. If he’s still at Northern Command HQ, that will be a problem. We’re counting on him being in a less secure environment.”
“What if he’s at the base?” asked Dewey.
“If he’s at the base, we’ll send you straight out to Bolin,” said Polk. “We’ll take the risk that we can force a regime change through him.”
“All three of Karreff’s other possible locations are apartment buildings. We’ll give you the lay of the land when you’re online in Rawalpindi; the number of guards, what floor he’s on, that sort of information.”
“Got it.”
“After you get rid of Karreff, you’ll drive here,” said Bradstreet, pointing to the map. “In the hills north of Islamabad. There, a chopper will take you and your team to the war front to find Xavier Bolin.”
“Whose chopper is it?”
“It’s ours,” said Bradstreet. “We slipped it into Pakistan two days ago. It’s in a barn up there. The pilot is a writer for
The Washington Post
who also happens to be CIA paramilitary. It’s a low-observable, stealth Black Hawk.”
Dewey nodded. “What time will he be live?”
“By the time you step foot in Al-Magreb,” said Bradstreet. “So whether you take out Karreff or not, you’ll have a chopper at your disposal.”
“Good.”
“The chopper’ll drop you off as close to Bolin as he can. We’ll determine what the best route is as we get closer to the event.”
“Does Bolin speak English?” asked Dewey.
“Yes,” said Polk. “But Millar is fluent in Urdu just in case.”
“Once you’re at Bolin’s location, then it’s up to you in terms of how you assault, when, and, of course, what you say to convince him,” said Bradstreet.
“Use some of that legendary Delta charm,” said Polk.
Dewey stared blankly at Polk.
“Assuming he agrees, next step will be having Bolin reach out to India’s war command,” said Bradstreet. “We could be pressing time by then and we don’t want them to get an itchy trigger finger.”
“It all sounds straightforward,” said Dewey.
“There is a scenario you need to be aware of,” said Bradstreet. “Let’s go back to Al-Magreb for a second. What does Margaret say if everything’s cool?”
“Whisper,” said Dewey.
“Exactly,” said Bradstreet. “If however, Margaret says the word ‘thunder,’ it means get the hell out of there. It means the operation was blown or New Delhi is moving sooner than we anticipated. Steal a car and head east, into Kashmir. Take Margaret with you. She’s a messenger only so she won’t know about the full operation until just before it begins. Get over the Line of Control with your team before India strikes or El-Khayab finds you.”
BAGRAM AIR BASE
PARWAN PROVINCE
AFGHANISTAN
At a quarter after twelve in the afternoon, beneath an overcast gray sky, the black CIA E-3 Sentry landed at the U.S. Air Force’s Bagram Air Base near Kabul. The plane stopped at the end of the runway. A set of air stairs was driven to the side of the big plane as the door opened.
Bradstreet was the first down the stairs, followed by Polk, then Dewey.
Less than twenty feet away, a heavily modified Sikorsky MH-60M Black Hawk idled, the attack chopper’s rotors cutting through the air, blowing sand and gravel across the cement tarmac.
Standing next to the chopper was Iverheart, long black hair, a mustache and a layer of stubble on his face, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a flak jacket on. He was six feet one, not quite as tall as Dewey, and his hair was not the blond from the photo. Across his chest, aimed at the ground, was a Colt M203 carbine combo assault rifle and grenade launcher.
He took a few steps toward Dewey, Polk, and Bradstreet.
“Rob Iverheart,” said the soldier, looking at Polk, Bradstreet, then Dewey. “You must be Dewey.”
“Yeah,” said Dewey as they shook hands. “How you doing, Rob?”
“Not bad. Thanks for asking me to come along.”
“I’m not sure you should be thanking me.”
“I’m going to get you two dropped off,” said Bradstreet. “I’m still waiting on confirmation that your third team member is on the PIA flight out of Heathrow. I won’t have it until we’re in Gerdi. If he’s not on the flight, I’ll volunteer, Dewey.”
Dewey looked at Bradstreet with a blank expression on his face. He nodded. “Well, it’s either you or Polk.”
“I’m almost sixty years old, Andreas,” said Polk, laughing.
“Sixty’s the new forty. Besides, it always helps to have someone on your team you can outrun.”
Everyone laughed. Dewey looked at Iverheart.
“You ready?” asked Dewey.
“Yeah,” said Iverheart. “I’m ready.”
“See you on the other side,” said Polk.
Dewey turned and walked toward the chopper, followed by Iverheart and Bradstreet.
Dewey noted the Black Hawk’s M-240 machine guns bolted to the side of the chopper, along with half a dozen AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles strapped to the rails. He climbed into the cabin, followed by Iverheart and Bradstreet. On board were two gunners from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, who would be manning the M-240s.
Both pilots were helmeted and goggled. One turned and looked for an acknowledgment that they were ready to liftoff. Bradstreet gave him a thumbs-up. The speed of the rotors picked up, grew louder, and the chopper bounced. Then it lifted into the balmy sky above Bagram.
“Put these on,” barked the crew chief, pointing at helmets dangling along the wall at the back of the cabin.
Dewey sat back against the wall, Bradstreet and Iverheart to his left. He watched the Black Hawk gunners belt themselves in, then set up behind the big machine guns.
“You guys First Battalion?” asked Iverheart.
“Yes, sir,” said the crew chief.
“How’s the hunting?” asked Iverheart.
“It’s been a tough month, sir,” said the gunner. “We lost a chopper a week ago.”
The chopper ride began above brown, rocky terrain, with long steppes of flat fields, farmed by locals. Soon, as the chopper flew deeper into the mountains east of Bagram, the hills became increasingly steep. The chopper ascended. Dewey moved behind one of the gunners. The mountains were jagged and teeth-like and they looked like they went on forever. This was the Hindu Qu’ush, a mountain range that stretched to the Himalayas. It was spectacular but desolate; a stunning vista of snowcapped peaks too numerous to count. In the wake of 9/11, it had been the home of Osama bin Laden, and it was easy to see why. There were too many peaks, hillsides, and rocky outgrowths to count and they went on for as far as you could see.
“It’s about a hundred miles,” said the crew chief, looking back at Dewey. “We’re going to try and avoid the villages. These fuckers’ll still be out here though. We’re also gonna shoot up high, above ten K. We should be fine, have you there in thirty.”
The pilot steered the Black Hawk high up into the sky, and the temperature aboard the chopper dropped. Within fifteen minutes of takeoff from Bagram, they were flying at ten thousand feet, moving a hundred and eighty miles per hour to the east. The gunners slid the doors to the chopper shut. It was still loud inside the cabin, but there was no wind.
Both of the gunners were young and had 101st Airborne tabs on their chests. The gunner on the right sat against the front of the compartment. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out and lit one. After he smoked it down to the filter, he reached to his left, slid one of the windows open, then flicked the butt out.
Dewey glanced at the other gunner, who was slightly older and had removed his helmet. Neither was older than twenty-one or twenty-two years old.
“How long have you guys been running ops out of Bagram?” asked Dewey.
“I been here going on six months,” said the gunner who’d been smoking. “For the last month, daylight duty, so that’s slightly more fun though you tend to get shot at more.”
“How’s it going?” asked Dewey.
“Okay. They’re like fuckin’ rabbits. Terries keep multiplying.”
“What about the Reapers?” asked Bradstreet. “Are they helping?”
“All we see are the aftereffects,” said one of the gunners. “Don’t get me wrong, we gotta be using ’em. UAVs are helping. But we get the fallout. If a village is hit, and some kid gets killed, we’re the ones who see Allah’s wrath, so to speak.”
Bradstreet, to his left, was holding his hand to his ear; he had a COMM bud and he was speaking quietly with someone. He turned to Dewey.
“Millar’s in the air,” he said quietly. “He left London ten minutes ago. He’s briefed. He lands sometime after dinner. We’re almost at Gerdi.”
Dewey leaned back and zipped up his jacket. He put his hands in his pocket and felt a small, round object. He pulled it out and looked down at his fingers. It was the cyanide pill he’d popped out of the terrorist’s mouth in Cooktown. He put it back in his pocket.
The sound of the main rotor pulsing the air became a steady din, monotonous and calming in its own way. Dewey sat back and tried to clear his mind. He thought, for whatever reason, of Australia, of the little girl, Nicola Chasvur. He looked down at his fingertips, which were still a little raw from the climb up the rock face.
Dewey turned back to the window. To the south, behind them now, the crags settled into a long valley of rounded green hills that spread out for miles. A thin black strip meandered down the middle of the long valley, the Kunar River. In the distance, beyond the green and brown valley, the low tan and brick buildings of Jalalabad were tiny dots, like building blocks, in the receding distance.
The next miles went quickly, and Dewey felt the chopper begin to descend.
The Black Hawk moved lower and the gunners opened the doors, taking up positions on the M-204s. The wind came into the cabin, furiously at first. The chopper slowed as they descended down into the air just atop snow-covered crags of mountain. They cruised over gray and black ledge at more than one hundred and fifty miles per hour, the high whirring no doubt alerting anyone who might have been below.
Suddenly, the low cracking sound of distant gunfire could be heard over the chopper blades. The gunner to the port side of the chopper opened fire, pulsing the big machine gun at a distant bluff, blindly.
“Some punk with a Kalashnikov,” said the gunner after several short bursts of machine gun fire. “If he hit us it would barely dent the side of the chopper. There’s no way I’ll hit him but you never know. Kind of satisfying knowing you might.”
He fired another volley down into the rocky bluff.
After several more miles, the pilots began to tilt the Black Hawk toward the ground, until they were barely a hundred feet above the craggy, brown hills northwest of Gerdi. The chopper was as visible and vulnerable now as it would ever be. The gunners held the M-204s with both hands, targeting the ground with the nozzle of the big weapons, waiting for signs of attack from below. None came.
They passed over a series of clay huts that grew into a small hillside neighborhood of handmade buildings; wood and mortar huts and outbuildings. Finally, after passing one last stretch of brown hills, the chopper arced hard to the left and then descended toward a clearing, at its center a warehouse, roofless, charred long ago by fire, now abandoned.
In the middle of a dirt parking lot, a small group of men stood in a loose semicircle. They were dressed in white, with brown vests and black headdresses. Each man held a Kalashnikov and watched as the chopper circled and came closer to the ground, then touched down.
“Don’t put the cannons on them,” barked Bradstreet.
The gunners both turned.
“You sure?” asked one of them. “Those are Taliban, sir.”
“Trust me,” yelled Bradstreet. “Take the guns off them.
Now.
”
Both gunners, simultaneously, raised the nozzles of the M-204s, aiming them at the sky.
Behind the group was a long, beat-up tractor-trailer with strange-looking letters in Urdu, like hieroglyphics, and a hand-painted picture of a walnut.
Two of the men on the ground broke away, walked to the truck and opened the back door.
Bradstreet stood as the rotors settled into a slow churn. He patted one of the pilots on the shoulder.
“I’m coming back,” said Bradstreet. “Two minutes.”
Bradstreet climbed from the chopper and jumped down to the brown dirt. Dewey followed, then Iverheart.
Bradstreet, Dewey, and Iverheart walked toward the group of men. They were young, Dewey noticed, all of them in their late teens or early twenties. One of them, with long hair and a beat-up Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, stepped forward. He dropped a cigarette to the ground as he walked toward Bradstreet.
“Hello, Van,” he said with a heavy accent, extending his hand.
“Afternoon, Mainiq,” said Bradstreet.
Mainiq’s demeanor was serious. He was large, at least six feet four tall, and broad-shouldered. Dewey noticed he had only a few teeth, and the ones he did have were brown and yellow. He looked tough, mean even.
Dewey felt an odd chill running up from his spine.
“Mainiq,” said Bradstreet, “this is your cargo.”
“Hello,” said Mainiq, nodding.
Dewey stared back, emotionless. “Hi,” he said.
“What’s your name?” asked Mainiq.
“You don’t need to know our names,” said Dewey.
“Fine, fine. Whatever. Where is the money?”
Bradstreet pulled a yellow envelope from his coat pocket. “Here’s twenty-five thousand. You get the other seventy-five when they’re both safe on the ground in Rawalpindi.”
“Yes,” said Mainiq, taking the envelope. “They will get there nice and safe, like I always do. Let’s go. We need to get going. Follow me.”
He led them to the back of the eighteen-wheeler. Inside, another man held a flashlight. Dewey climbed up into the back of the truck, followed by Iverheart. Mainiq climbed up after them.