Act of Terror (22 page)

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Authors: Marc Cameron

BOOK: Act of Terror
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C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-ONE
T
hey rolled through the gap between two great, guardian-like boulders and into Afghanistan an hour before sunset. There was nothing to mark the nameless pass but for a stone cairn topped with the skull of a heavy-horned Marco Polo sheep. A half mile in, they were met by a crude, hand-painted and weatherworn sign showing a human figure with his leg being blown off by a land mine. It was a notice to all to keep to the relative safety of the trail.
Quinn stopped for a moment to check the map Gabrielle had drawn, comparing it to the topographic tour map Umar had supplied. The detail gave out thirty miles into Afghanistan. Quinn hoped that would be enough.
The next forty-five minutes saw them descend six thousand feet. A camp at ten thousand feet would be uncomfortable for flatlanders, but it would be infinitely better than one at sixteen thousand. Quinn slowed, turning back to Garcia, two bike-lengths behind him. It was impossible to tell behind her full-face helmet, but her eyes said she was grinning.
Ten minutes later they'd hidden both motorcycles behind a faded gray boulder, in a fold of the mountain of the main trail. Quinn removed his heavy armored jacket, setting up camp in the suspendered riding pants and a gray long-sleeved wool T-shirt. While cotton might be king in the south, growing up in Alaska had taught him wool was the way to go when things got wet and cold.
Garcia still wore all her gear against the chill and donned a Nepalese wool beanie with earflaps and braided cords.
“You've come a very long way from Cuba,” Quinn chuckled. He situated the aluminum poles of their mountaineering tent over the flattest patch of rubble he could find. They'd told Umar they were married as part of the cover story—he would have been unhappy sending an unmarried woman out alone with Quinn. Wanting to save space on the smallish Enfields, the big Ugyhr provided only one tent. Luckily, it was a three-person, which in mountaineering terms translated as “tight for two.”
Garcia squatted opposite Quinn and helped him thread the poles into the sleeves of the bright orange fabric. “Must be old hat for you,” she said, teeth chattering. “I suppose this is a lot like Alaska?”
“In some ways.” Quinn looked to his left at the sheer rock face that faded into a layer of clouds a thousand feet above. Fifty feet to his right an abrupt ledge fell away to nothingness for nearly a mile. Howling winds raced off hidden glaciers and the distant hush of a river whispered up from the valley floor. “Yeah, I guess it does remind me of home.”
Quinn finished snapping in the last pole and looked up to see Garcia shaking her head and blinking as if she was dizzy.
“We should feed you and get to bed,” he said.
She smiled weakly. “Not tonight, honey. I have a headache.”
He took her by the shoulders and led her to the base of a car-sized rock, where he made her a sort of nest with their bedrolls and sleeping pads. “You sit here while I whip us up my two-mile-high specialty.
Garcia drew her knees to her chest, drawing her neck inside her jacket like a turtle and her hands into her sleeves. Only the pink tip of her nose showed above the collar of her coat.
“Seriously,” she moaned. “I don't want to be a whiner, but I feel like someone may be digging my eyes out with a spoon. I couldn't eat a bite.”
“It's the altitude,” Quinn said. “I should have paid attention to it earlier.”
“I'm a big girl, in case you haven't noticed.” She let her head loll back against the boulder.
“You rest. I'll make supper,” he said. He thought:
Oh, I've noticed all right
.
 
 
A couple of aspirin and Quinn's mutton noodle soup worked miracles. Ronnie went from feeling like she'd been trampled by a camel to aching as though she'd just been dragged by one. The pain in her head down to a dull throb, she was able to concentrate on Jericho.
“Hard to breathe up here,” she said, wanting to make conversation.
“There's this sign on the wall above the swimming pool at the Academy,” he said. “
The Air Is Rare
.” He held a mug of soup under his chin. Steam curled around the stubble of beard that seemed twice as dark as it had only a few hours before. “We have an early start if we want to find the Kyrgyz camp tomorrow,” he said.
The wind had died off with the sun. A thick layer of fog had settled in, rendering the orange tent almost invisible just a few feet away. They had to wear headlamps to keep from walking off the cliff.
Quinn played his light toward the tent. “Sorry about the cramped arrangements.”
“No problem.” She got up with a groan. “I've watched enough Bond movies to know this is the way things always work out. I only need to know if I'm the girl spy you end up with as the credits roll or the sacrificial one who has passionate sex with you, then dies halfway through the movie.”
“Remains to be seen,” Quinn mused over his mug, blowing away a plume of steam.
“Anyway,” she added, “you look too beat to try anything tonight, Mr. Bond.”
“Sex is messy.” Quinn shrugged. “We'd probably knock the tent off the ledge—or your head would explode from all the exertion.”
Garcia pursed her lips, thinking that over. She eyed him carefully. “I'm not sure if you're trying to talk me out of or into sleeping with you... .”
“Oh.” Quinn grinned. “In Umar's infinite wisdom, he believed a married couple should have blankets instead of warm down bags. We're sleeping together all right. But that's as far as it goes.”
“Because of your ex-wife?” Garcia went out on a limb.
“Maybe so.” Quinn shrugged. “But don't necessarily expect the same resolve when I'm at altitudes below ten thousand feet.”
“I'll make a note of that.” She grinned.
Garcia stripped down to her black wool long johns before kneeling to crawl in the vestibule door. Exhausted or not, she hoped Quinn was watching her.
She wore the floppy Nepalese hat to bed. Using her rolled fleece jacket as a pillow, she tugged her side of the blanket tight around her shoulders as he maneuvered beside her. He piled the riding jackets over their feet but kept the blanket on his side turned down to his waist. Cuban versus Alaska blood, she thought. It made sense.
“Why did your parents pick Jericho?” she asked in the darkness.
Quinn sighed. He clicked on his headlamp and rolled up on his shoulder to stare at her. “I thought you were exhausted.”
She batted her eyelashes, hoping she didn't look too much like a silly cow.
He snapped off the light and threw an arm across his forehead, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “My dad wanted to name me Gideon, but his sister stole the name for my cousin a month before I was born. I guess they figured Jericho was the next best name from the story ... Gideon's trumpet and all.”
Ronnie couldn't help but think he was in his element—hostile terrain in a hostile country.
“What's he do now? This cousin of yours.”
“A big-shot banker in Anchorage,” he said. “Pretty wealthy, as a matter of fact.”
“Banker or secret government agent ... let me see... .”
“He's home in a soft bed right now.” Quinn rearranged the blanket, trying to situate his body between the rocks under the tent floor.
For a long moment there was no sound but distant wind and rivers.
“You know this really sucks,” Ronnie said suddenly, not quite ready to give up Quinn's company to sleep.
“Why's that?” he said through a long yawn. She could just make out the outline of his chest, rising and falling in the shadows.
“Well, most couples have these sorts of sweet little conversations when they're breathless and spent. You have to lie there and listen to me snore and pass gas all night without any of the ... you know, fringe benefits.”
Quinn yawned again, longer this time, shuddering. “Could be worse. You could have night terrors and wake up trying to kill someone.”
She scrunched up next to him, stealing the warmth of his body. Smelling the musky odor of his skin.
“Is that what you do?”
“Only when I'm extremely tired ...”
Through the darkness, she thought she saw him smile.
MONDAY
October 2
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-TWO
D
awn took its time in the protected valleys of the High Pamir. The mist was gone, but the morning would linger gray and clammy-cold for hours before the sun finally peeked over the knife ridges high above. A brisk wind popped at the tent fly.
Quinn stirred under the blankets, feeling the familiar aches in his shoulders and hips from too many nights on the unforgiving ground. His hands felt like claws from gripping the Enfield's handlebars all day. The effects of the fight with Umar left him with a stiff neck and a wrenched knee that was sure to give him problems when he got older. He thought of the Chinese proverb:
When two tigers fight, one is injured beyond repair—and the other one is dead
.
During the night Ronnie had rolled half on top of him. Her arm flailed across his chest, the warmth of a long leg draped over his thigh. Quinn lay still for a moment, feeling the moist, fluttering puff of her exhausted breathing against his neck.
Bootystan
, he thought.
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques. If you could only see me now ...
Trying not to wake her, he wriggled out of the tent, stifling a gasp as he stepped into his chilly riding pants and stiff Haix patrol boots. He munched a piece of naan from his day pack—courtesy of Umar's wife—and swung his arms trying to warm up. In the muted light, he could just make out the outline of a path he hadn't noticed the night before. Likely a game trail used by ibex or Marco Polo sheep, it ran at an angle to a small plateau about a two hundred feet above the camp.
“What do you see?”
Quinn jumped at Ronnie's voice behind him. She'd poked her head out the tent door.
“I'm thinking I'd like to take a look at what's up there. It might give me a glimpse of what's ahead of us.”
“Take the bike.” She yawned, catlike. “I'm awake. Anyway, a girl could use a little privacy first thing in the morning.”
Quinn looked down at the Breitling. “Oh-seven-fifty Afghan time,” he said. “I should be back in twenty minutes.”
“Sounds good.” She pulled her head back inside the tent. “I'll heat up some of that goat's head soup or whatever it was.”
 
 
The trail up the mountain was strewn with baseball-sized rocks and steep enough Quinn had to keep the bike going forward or risk sliding back down. Umar had replaced the little bike's stock Avon tires with decent enough Chinese-made
Cheng Shin
knobbies suitable for the washouts and gravel roads of the western frontier. It climbed without complaint.
The trouble with the Enfield was that, being old-school, some parts were prone to break. The bolts that held on the muffler had sheared off somewhere along the way since they'd left Kashgar. Quinn knew he'd have to figure out a way to jury-rig the exhaust before it fell off or risk deafness and an avalanche from blatting engine noise.
The bikes had their flaws, but the simple beauty of the Enfield was its fixability. Every village from the southern tip of India to the Mongolian Steppe had at least one shade tree mechanic who was familiar enough with the thumper to repair it with little more than a metal file and a screwdriver. Quinn felt confident he'd be able to figure something out when he got back to camp.
At the top of the goat path he was greeted by row after endless row of jagged peaks and rivers of flowing glacier ice. The world seemed nothing but muted shades of blue and slate gray.
The trail he'd hoped to scout disappeared around yet another plateau. It was easy to see how someone could hide in such a forgotten place high on the roof of the world.
Disappointed, Quinn turned the bike, rolling it to the lip before starting the short but steep ride back to camp. His breath caught hard in his chest when he peered over the edge and he took a reflexive step back, out of sight.
Less than two hundred feet below, a pair of men in rolled Afghan
Pakol
hats and knee-length
shalwar kameez
shirts fingered through their gear. A third man Quinn recognized as the young camel herder from the day before stood behind Ronnie, pinning her arms.
Adrenaline surged through Quinn's body as he realized he had no weapons. Each of the men had a rifle slung over his shoulder. In this part of the world, they were sure to have knives as well.
Every few seconds the camel herder craned his long neck to gaze up the trail, obviously expecting Quinn to return from that direction. He'd likely convinced his friends to travel all night in order to rob the rich tourists. The other two bandits tossed through clothing and camping gear as they searched for anything of value. It wouldn't be long before they realized the only thing in camp worth selling was Veronica Garcia.
Quinn formed his plan as he went, relying on instinct over intellect. Jumping from the Enfield, he found a rock and bashed at the damaged muffler where it joined the straight pipe coming directly off the engine. In seconds he was able to shear the remaining screw and rip the muffler away.
Moments later he sat aboard the silent bike. A soft wind blew in his face. Looking over the edge, he shifted into third. He kept an eye on Ronnie while he slipped the Breitling from his wrist and unscrewed the crown on the lower barrel that contained the emergency location transmitter. He stopped short of pulling out the wire that would activate the satellite beacon.
Gripping the watch between his teeth, Quinn made certain the Enfield's ignition switch was turned on. For his plan to work, he'd need the element of surprise and a hell of a lot of luck. The camel herder already knew he was unarmed—but he hadn't counted on the Breitling.
Quinn pressed the clutch so he could pop it when he wanted to start the bike, and released the brake. He was rolling.
A hundred feet above the bandits, the trail leveled before making the final drop to camp. Quinn popped the clutch here. The Bullet's 499cc engine shuddered, skidding the back wheel in the loose gray shale. Thankfully, it caught enough traction and thumped to life. Without a muffler the little bike rattled and popped like a fifty cal.
“
Made like a gun
,” Quinn whispered the Royal Enfield slogan through gritted teeth. And that was just how he intended to use it.
Rolling on all the power he had, he yanked back on the handlebars, praying they didn't snap off in his hands. The bike rose to an agitated wheelie, bouncing over the rocks, rearing like an angry horse.
Two of the men dove for cover at the sound of a sudden attack. The camel herder shoved Ronnie to the side. He brought up the Kalashnikov and began to fire.
The Enfield's chassis and engine gave Quinn some protection from the gunfire, but he was thankful the guy used the regional “spray and pray” tactic with no attempt at aiming his shots.
Rocks and debris skittered down the mountain ahead of the bike. The deafening crack-crack-crack of rifle fire and motorcycle engine slammed off the cliffs and echoed through the canyons. Thirty feet out, Quinn used his teeth to tug the coiled antenna wire on the Breitling, activating the locator beacon. He tossed the watch toward the two bandits standing beside his gear and plowed the Enfield straight into the camel driver, sending him and the bike over the edge and flailing through empty space.
Quinn bailed off the bike a split second before the front wheel impacted the startled man in the chest. He grabbed Garcia by the arm.
“Run, run, run!” he yelled, dragging her over the edge.
An instant later the high clouds gave a piercing hiss and a Hellfire missile struck the men above with pinpoint accuracy. The entire mountain shook with the explosion.
On the narrow ledge below, Ronnie screamed. Her wrist slipped from Quinn's grip and they began to slide on loose shale toward the jagged lip of rock—and oblivion.

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