Strike Force Delta (18 page)

“Are those F-14s?” someone finally cried out.

“If they are,” came the reply, “they're the worst-kept F-14s I've ever seen.”

The planes weren't carrying any military insignia. In fact, they weren't carrying insignia at all. Just blotches of black paint where the country markings usually would be.

Very strange.

Suddenly the big fighters began blinking their navigation lights. In the universal language of flight, this meant one thing: “Follow us—or else . . . ”

Dow hurried back up to the cockpit and took over the plane again. He told Clancy to open the emergency radio channel back to their home base. Clancy did so but found the signal was being blocked with interference. A quick check of all their communication options revealed the same thing. They'd suddenly been struck dumb.

They rode along in this tense formation for about thirty seconds. The two ragged F-14s drifted even closer to the big EC-130; soon they were dangerously close. There was no way the EC-130 could outrun them. And fighting them was out of the question.

Dow looked over at Clancy, who just shrugged.

“Anyone want to argue with these guys?” Dow asked the crew.

A chorus of, “No!” came back in reply.

Dow almost laughed. He'd had a premonition that he
and his crew would be seeing some kind of action soon—but he sure hadn't expected anything as weird as this.

Finally he just blinked the big plane's navigation lights three times in reply.

“OK, guys,” he said. “Lead on . . ..”

All the tales about Khrash were true. Everything that was bad about the Muslim religion could be found here. Hate schools. Bomb-making schools. Weapons schools. Schools for young terrorists. This was a place where women were used for just two things: rape and servitude. A place where children were molested, then disposed of like soiled tissues. A place where torture chambers and opium factories could be found inside the city mosques.

That was a lot of wickedness to fit inside just 1.4 square miles. Sometimes it seemed Khrash was bulging at the seams with evil.

Just about everything within the city limits was built of clay and stone, although a few taller apartment buildings in the center of town were constructed of steel and cement. The Farāh River bordered the city on the south, then cut around it up to the north. There was just one major road leading in and out of the place. Highway 212 went through the middle of the city, turned west, and
went over the Habeeb Bridge. From there it narrowed into a mountain pass that led up and into Iran.

Like many cities in Afghanistan, Khrash had a front gate. It was 22 feet high, made of wood and scrap metal. It anchored a wall, made of similar materials, that encompassed about two-thirds of the city, known as the Old Quarter. The rest of Khrash, the newer areas, was made up of blocks of warehouses, repair barns, and scattered housing. All of it was surrounded by wadis, manmade trenches that doubled as sanitation ditches and public latrines.

The main gate was guarded by members of the city's religious police. They manned two machine-gun posts atop the gate itself, as well as an ancient but still effective 75mm cannon left over from the days of the Soviet occupation.

There were 12 guards on duty this foggy early morning; all of them were on edge. There'd been some unseen tension in the city the day before, and this bad vibe had not diminished with the coming of night. Plus, most of them had spent hours the previous day searching Khrash for videotape cassettes. Old ones, new ones, anything that could be used. Their Chief needed a videotape badly. Incredibly, though, there were none to be found.

Electricity was usually at a premium in Khrash, so at night huge bonfires were built in metal pots located atop the city gate. Even on the darkest, dreariest nights, the light from these fires could be seen for miles. They lit a good portion of Highway 212 as it came up and over the nearby hill and into the city.

It was on this bumpy, potholed highway that the guards first saw the stumbling, bleeding ghost.

Or at least that's what he looked like. He came out of nowhere, naked, moaning loudly, leaving a trail of blood in his wake.

The guards almost shot him—that was their first reaction. But because there was the slightest chance this thing was invoking the mercy of Allah and the Great Mullah—demons had souls, too—to shoot someone under those circumstances could bring horrible bad luck. So the guards held off, and instead two were ordered off the wall to meet the phantasm before it reached the gate.

These two men did so, but only reluctantly. Carrying their weapons, cocked and ready, they went out the gate and approached the figure as he closed within one hundred feet of the city.

Again, it was a foggy, dark morning, and so it took a few moments for the guards to realize that this was not just a man, bloody and near death; it was actually someone they knew. One finally shone his flashlight in his eyes; only then did they realize it was the
kardiss
named Harbosi.

The guards stopped dead in their tracks. There was something very wrong here. Unclothed, Harbosi was smeared with blood. His hands were heavily bandaged and those bandages, too, were soaked through with blood. Blood was also gushing from his mouth. Most disturbing, though, a bloody bag had been tied around his neck.

What had happened to him?

The two guards finally stopped Harbosi and ordered him to raise his hands. But he had no hands to raise. They'd been cut off. Then the man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. His tongue has been cut out as well.

All he had was the bag, and a note, written in ink on his chest, that read:
Take Me to the Chief
.

The guards knew where to find him.

The Chief lived in a palatial apartment on the bottom floor of one of the Holy Towers. Located in the city's center, this was where most of Khrash's privileged officials lived, especially higher-ups in the religious police. At 11 stories each, the two towers were among the tallest buildings in the city, and that included the trio of minarets.

Carrying Harbosi in the back of their pickup truck, the two guards pulled up to the Chief's door and knocked for five long minutes before they heard some kind of movement inside. The door finally opened and a teenage boy stumbled out onto the street. He looked almost as bad as Harbosi. Beaten up, bloody, certainly dazed. The guards simply pushed him on his way—they knew of the Chief's sexual peccadilloes. They all had them. This was not the reason they were here to see him.

The Chief himself came to the door. He was in his fifties, a large, terrifying man with a bald head and scars running along both cheeks. Nobody really knew where the Chief came from. He wasn't too sure himself. There were some indications, though, that he was from Chechnya, the Muslim republic in Central Asia that was once part of the old Soviet Union.

That made him tougher than even the toughest Afghanis. In addition to being the most powerful man in Khrash, he was also widely known as a sadist. And at the moment, he was furious with the two guards for interrupting his tryst. Even a glance at the bleeding Harbosi in the back of the truck didn't dispel his anger.

“What is
he
doing here, like this?” the Chief demanded of the guards. “I sent him out looking for videotapes hours ago.”

The Chief was big enough to beat both guards to death at the same time. They were trembling as he took two giant steps out into the alley.

“Your
kardiss
is near death,” one told him. “And he says he has very important information for you before he leaves us. That is the only reason we brought him here like this.”

This got some of the Chief's attention. He walked to the back of the truck and yanked Harbosi out onto the pavement. Then the Chief looked down at his flunky. The massive blood loss was something the Chief had seen before. He, too, had been a commander in the Taliban army before the Americans arrived.

“This man can no longer speak,” the Chief said. “And he has no hands, so he can't write, either. How am I going to get this ‘important information' from him?”

That's when the guards retrieved the bloody bag.

“Are those videotapes?” the Chief asked them.

Neither guard replied. Instead they just handed the bag to him, jumped back into the truck, and drove away.

The Chief climbed the stairs eleven stories up to the top floor of the Holy Tower.

He did it in two minutes, an accomplishment for a man of his size. But he was in a bit of a hurry. And not for a good reason.

Once on the top floor, he knocked on the only door up there. It led to a large apartment that many called the Penthouse, though such a thing didn't really exist in Khrash. The door opened and the Chief was looking in
at a man who was nearly double his own substantial girth. This was Saheeb the Syrian, one of Al Qaeda's chief bodyguards. He was someone the Chief disliked greatly. Saheeb looked recently awakened.

“I have to see him,” the Chief told him directly.

“He's asleep,” the bodyguard growled. He started to close the door.

The Chief couldn't waste time. He pulled his handgun out and placed it against Saheeb's temple.

“I said I have to see him,”
the Chief repeated.
“Now.”

The bodyguard relented. The Chief pushed past him and into the dark and filthy living room. There was a bedroom off to one side; the sound of loud snoring was coming from it. The chief went toward it.

The bedroom was just as disgusting as the rest of the apartment. Here he found another large man asleep on a bed of very matted straw; it was obvious that Saheeb had been lying next to him just seconds before. The Chief lit a candle and gave the sleeping man a shake. The figure barely stirred but then fluttered his eyelids. The Chief winced. The man on the mat had only one good eye. The other was an empty, bloody socket.

It was Jabal Ben-Wabi. The infamous Al Qaeda hatchet man better known as the Patch.

Still half-asleep, Ben-Wabi's first conscious act was to pull his patch back on from the top of his bald head. Then he looked up at the police chief.

“Why are you here? Why are you disturbing me like this?”

“One of my
kardisses
just stumbled back to the city, beaten and bloody,” the Chief reported. “I had sent him out to the fringes looking for videotapes—as you had asked.”

Jabal's one good eye opened wider. “And he found some for me?” Getting a videotape was very important to him.

The Chief shook his head. “No—but he did come upon some very disturbing news.”

Jabal finally sat up. “Other than we are still without videotapes, what disturbing news could he possibly have??”

The Chief handed Jabal the bloody bag Harbosi had been carrying around his neck.

Jabal blindly reached inside. He came out with Harbosi's two bloody hands, hacked off but still tied together with cord. Jabal turned white. There was something still clutched in the cold, dead fingers. It was a badge, taken off the shoulder of a uniform. It showed a drawing of the Twin Towers of New York City, with the letters
NYPD
and
FDNY
floating nearby and an American flag in the background. Beneath were the words
We Will Never Forget
.

Jabal dropped the pair of bloody hands to the floor.

“Praise Allah!” he cried. “The Crazy Americans . . . they are here?”

“That's the message,” the Chief replied. “And this is the proof. They let him live only so he could bring these to you.”

Jabal looked about to faint. The Chief studied him. He knew Jabal to be one of the most ruthless men in the jihad movement. He'd personally seen Jabal behead women and children—and certainly more than a dozen hostages captured by Muslim terrorists in Iraq. Jabal had had no qualms about chopping . . . chopping . . . chopping away at some struggling, screaming victim's neck and dealing with all the gore something like that
entailed. But now, at the mere mention of the Crazy Americans, for the first time the Chief actually saw Jabal look frightened.

Saheeb the Syrian now spoke. He addressed Jabal directly.

“My sheikh,” he began. “There is no real reason for concern. Even if these unbalanced Americans are in the area, we know their numbers are few. We have never heard of them being more than a few dozen people. On the other hand, we have a whole city here, filled with loyal mujahideens. These crackpots might be able to do their magic tricks when they catch one of our unfortunate brothers out on his own. But we are strong here together. They have little chance of hurting us.”

But the Patch wasn't buying it. Having the Crazy Americans on his trail was his worst nightmare come true.

“You don't know them,” he spewed back at the bodyguard. “They can do things others cannot. They're demons. Even their own people call them Ghosts.”

Saheeb frowned. It was his job to not only protect the Patch but also provide all of his comforts, including calming him down when needed. He said: “Again, my sheikh, this is probably just a bluff, by the CIA, because, well . . . you know. It was a long shot by them, a wild guess that at best this message would get to you. These Ghosts probably don't even know we are here . . . .”

No sooner were these words out of Saheeb's mouth when the entire apartment building began to shake. A deep rumbling suddenly filled the room, getting louder by the second.

“What is this?”
Jabal cried out.

In the next second, a huge airplane roared by the apartment window. It just missed hitting the building it
self, not 10 feet away from its wingtip. It was moving incredibly fast.

Jabal and Saheeb hit the floor. Only the Chief remained upright. He was able to catch a fleeting glimpse of the aircraft as it went by. It was the craziest-looking airplane he'd ever seen. And the noise was incredible. The apartment house was literally trembling in its wake.