Black Site (23 page)

“Why?”

“I don’t know, and neither does Zar. He’s under orders from al Qaeda, but he’s also a Pashtun, and the Pashtun take care of their guests, even if their guests are their enemy.”

“Any idea when this AQ op is going to happen?”

“Negative, but I know who
does
know. The key to this op is a German guy who was here in the compound. I only saw him for a minute, but he had a German accent. Balding, silver beard. He was not an operator. He looked miserable and scared shitless meeting with us. Zar’s guards said he came from Peshawar, so hopefully he is still there. Have Grauer tell Langley. Maybe they can find this guy and unravel this mess.”

Kolt was happy to see Josh had not forgotten how to give orders. He nodded and said, “I’m on it.”

T.J. said, “I heard we nailed bin Laden.”

“Yeah, last year. Right up the street from the Pakistan Military Academy.”

“
Please
tell me the unit did the hit.”

Raynor shook his head. “It was Six.”

Timble groaned a little. “Well, that’s a damn shame.”

“Yep.”

“Now, Racer, don’t press your luck. Get out of here.”

“Okay.” He paused a moment. “Hey, I’ve talked to your mom and dad a couple of times.”

A long pause. “How’s Mom?”

“They are both okay. It’s tough, but
they’re
tough.”

“Yeah.”

“And tell Bouncer he’s got a baby girl. Two and a half now, I guess. His wife named her Hope.”

“He’ll appreciate
that
piece of intel. Now take off, and that’s an order. You’ve gotten everyone excited. You getting killed on the exfil would really darken the mood around here.”

Raynor smiled a little. Same old T.J. “I’ll see what I can do to keep my ass alive.”

“Good luck.”

Kolt hesitated. Then said, “Don’t jinx me, bro.”

A slight chuckle from the other side. “Right. I forgot. Go out and make your own luck, brother.”

“Will do. And Josh? Thanks for coming for me back in Waziristan. Sorry I made you do it.”

“It was a setup, Kolt. The Taliban were trying to sucker one of our ground incursions into a fight. They were ready for us.”

“Yeah, and I was the sucker who fell into the trap.”

T.J. said, “Someday you and I can have a good cry over a couple of beers, but why don’t you skedaddle for now?”

“Roger that. Y’all take care.”

“You, too.”

Raynor turned away from the pipe reluctantly.

Theoretically, he had just accomplished his mission. But in reality, he was far from claiming any success.

*   *   *

Kolt started heading south along the western wall, thinking he could take the culvert all the way to the southern wall, then make his way behind the hurja and back over into the Playground. But after no more than fifty yards he realized that this plan would not work. Ahead of him in the mist he could hear barking dogs. From the optics at his hide site and the photo reconnaissance by the Predator, he knew that straight ahead would be the rear of the main building. Apparently it was also where the kennel was located. The Kuchi dogs ubiquitous here in western Pakistan were deadly. A form of Central Asian shepherd, they were big and strong, growing to thirty-two inches at the withers. And though they were not vicious by nature, here they were nurtured to be aggressive to outsiders. He did not know how close he would have to get to the Kuchi dogs if he kept to this route. For all he knew the culvert was fenced in and part of their kennel.

Hell no,
he thought.
Better backtrack and give those monsters a wide berth.

This change of plans cost him a half hour. He had to retrace his steps, go all the way back behind the cement building where the majority of Eagle 01 was held, turn along the wall, and then make his way through the trees behind the latrine, crawl on his hands and knees to the main road through the compound, and then, after fifteen minutes waiting for a patrol to appear in the mist and then disappear behind him, cross the forty feet of open ground with his heart in his throat.

On the other side he made his way down to the eastern wall, turned south, walked low along it through the blackness, and headed toward the alley behind the barn.

More sentries passed on the road to his right, but he heard them in plenty of time to tuck down behind a stack of bags of mortar stationed there next to where a new poured-concrete building was in the process of being erected. As he waited for them to pass he checked his watch, saw that it was well past midnight now. After a minute lying low, he rose, took one step, and then heard a voice ahead in the mist.

He dove to his face, made himself as small as possible, and waited.

The voice grew louder. It was Arabic, not Pashto, this Raynor could easily discern. A man appeared in front of him. He was not as tight against the wall as was Kolt, but still he would pass close. He spoke into a handheld radio. Raynor could see the short-barreled AK-74 hanging low on the man’s chest. As he came within thirty feet Kolt saw that the man wore dark blue or black clothing and a white skullcap.

He was most definitely one of the al Qaeda men Josh had warned him about. He passed to Raynor’s right, ten feet or so on the other side of the stack of building materials. Kolt could hear an Arabic transmission over the radio. He expected the sound to dissipate as the man walked on, but instead the conversation continued at the same volume. After a half minute or so Kolt climbed to his knees, carefully looked over the bags of mortar, and saw that the AQ operative had sat down on a stack of building stones, facing toward the road, away from Raynor. There the man continued his conversation over the radio.

The two men were only ten feet apart. Kolt hated to chance it, but he also did not want to just sit here and run the risk of being spotted. He shouldered up to the eastern wall, stayed as low as possible, and crept off into the darkness and the mist, away from the Arab.

He moved slowly now. The large barn was just ahead. Kolt headed for the dark alleyway between the barn wall and the fortress wall. Just beyond was the door that had been guarded by the static sentry earlier. Checking it through his thermal, he saw no sentry there now. There were heat signatures from cracks in the stone of the barn, but Kolt knew they would be animals: horses and goats and chickens, and whatever else Zar’s men kept there. He entered the narrow alleyway. Any tiny bit of light his well-adapted eyes had been pulling from the sky’s glow through the mist disappeared. He heard a bit of shuffling from the goats and donkeys through the openings in the barn as he walked forward, and he smelled the creatures too, but he much preferred these farm animals to the hyperalert dogs on the far side of the compound.

As he walked he kept his eyes fixed on the door in the wall ahead. Kolt would love to use this exit to get the hell out of the compound, but he dared not. He did not know much about the village itself—the narrow roads and alleyways on the steep hill around the mud and stone structures would be like a rat’s maze in the dark.

No, the wall to the Playground was how he got in, and that would be how he’d get out.

Raynor walked forward, passed in front of the last opening in the stone barn, and heard a noise on his right. He thought it must have been a donkey, shuffling there in the straw. He peered into the near-impenetrable darkness as he passed.

And found himself eye-to-eye with a bearded man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle.

In a fraction of a second Kolt determined he was Taliban.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The sentry was clearly as startled as Raynor. A faint shaft of soft light reached from the open area at the end of the barn, just enough for each man to be aware of the presence of the other.

“What are you doing?” asked the guard in Pashto.

As a response, Kolt drew his black knife and plunged it forward, low at the man’s stomach, but it clanked off a rifle magazine in one of the pockets of the sentry’s chest bandolier. The Talib began to cry out, but Raynor launched on top of him, and covered his mouth with his hand and then his forearm as the two men crashed into the hay in the barn.

They kicked at each other while locked in violent embrace. Here, deeper in the barn, light from the entrance to the fenced-in corral reached just to where the two men fought in the straw.

Around them the animals stirred: a bray from a donkey, the fast shuffling left and right of horses in their stalls, the clucking of a hen. Kolt shoved his forearm deeper into the mouth of the sentry to keep him quiet, expending just as much effort and concentration on this task as he did on desperately trying to kill the man with his blade.

After a moment more Kolt got his knife positioned again above the sentry, but the man’s strong torso pushed the American to the side, and he lost his advantage.

Goats in the corral stirred with the movement now, but the American kept his forearm in the Pashtun’s mouth to stifle his shouts. Kolt realized in an instant that the sentry was trying to fire his weapon to raise the alarm. Raynor needed both hands to simultaneously cover the man’s mouth and prevent the rifle from firing. He dropped the knife into the deep hay. The gun was positioned between the two men, its barrel pointing harmlessly at the side of the corral, but a single squeeze of the trigger would call out the enemy cavalry, and Raynor could
not
let that happen. The Talib had just jammed the safety down to unlock the bolt, but Raynor forced his thumb over the safety of the weapon and flipped it back up to where the gun would not fire. He pulled at the rifle but could not get it out of the other man’s hands, so, with his hand still on the rifle’s receiver and the thumb holding the safety lever up with all his strength, Raynor threw all his weight forward, jamming the gun between his body and the Taliban man’s face. The impact stunned the bearded man for a moment, just long enough for Kolt to pull the rifle away, heave it against the wall of the barn, grab the knife in the dirt, and then fall forward with it, plunging it into the sinewy but yielding throat of the sentry just as he began to shout.

The man kicked and writhed in panic and pain, but Raynor covered his mouth again, and pushed and turned the long black blade until every last twitch had ceased.

He crawled off the dead guard quickly, immediately worried about the noise the two of them had made while locked in their death grip here in the darkness. Raynor hefted the Kalashnikov, took up a prone firing position in the bloody hay. His wide eye peered through the notch sight toward the main building of the compound, lost somewhere out there in the mist.

After a few seconds the animals quieted back down, and the only sound remaining was Raynor’s heavy breath.

He took his eye from the rifle’s sight, looked back at the body lying next to him. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” he whispered over and over.

What now?

He could not leave the dead man here. It would be clear in minutes that an infiltrator had been in the compound and had escaped. Had he seen the Americans? The AQ men in charge of the operation would pull T.J. and his men out of here immediately, before a rescue mission could be mounted. This opportunity to repatriate Eagle 01, as implausible and tenuous as it was already, would evaporate completely.

Kolt had to come up with something fast. He looked down at the dead man; around the body, steam rose from the blood glistening on the straw.

“Shit,” he said again.

Unless the compound was ready to believe this man had committed suicide by nearly decapitating himself, the entire mission had just been compromised.

Unless … Raynor’s head swiveled to the right.

Maybe.

On the other side of the barn, back the way he had come, was twenty yards of open ground. Then there was the small stone building under construction.

And sitting there had been the man from al Qaeda.

Yes. He’d have to hurry, but it was the only option.

Kolt Raynor stepped back out into the darkened alleyway behind the barn.

*   *   *

Three minutes later the al Qaeda operative finished his conversation on the radio, shut the radio off, and stowed it in his vest pocket. He stood and began heading back to the hurja across the compound.

Kolt took him from behind as he walked, used his rock-hard arm muscles to cut off air and blood and any sound, performed this trifecta while lifting the man’s feet off the dirt and whipping him into the air toward the back of the partially constructed building.

They fell together, and Raynor realized this man was not half as strong as the Pashtun guard. Maybe he lived a city life, came from Riyadh or Baghdad or Cairo. True enough, Kolt had this man in a more compromising position—the Arab’s options were few with a man squeezing the life out of him from behind. Still, the al Qaeda operator did not possess nearly the functional strength of the Taliban sentry.

And Kolt could not have been happier about that.

In under twenty seconds the man was out cold.

If this worked the way Kolt hoped that it would, that animosity T.J. had mentioned between the Taliban and al Qaeda around here was about to get ratcheted up a couple hundred notches.

Kolt heaved the unconscious Arab onto his shoulder, struggled to walk with him back toward the corral. He heard footsteps and conversation on the main road—a patrol of sentries no doubt—so he picked up his pace and hoped the darkness and the fog would aid him one more time tonight.

He made it behind the barn, lowered the man to catch his breath, and then hefted him up once again. It took another two minutes to get the man inside the barn, where Kolt leaned him against the stone wall in a sitting position across the dim room with the hay-strewn flooring. A donkey was tied by the neck to a wooden support beam, and Raynor smacked its haunches to move it out of the way. When the donkey ambled around to the other side he placed his knife in the unconscious man’s right hand. Then he crawled back over to the dead sentry. He picked up the AK, set the Safety/Selector switch to fire, and raised the rifle toward the Arab.

Kolt hesitated. He lowered the rifle and went back out the back of the barn, stepped softly all the way to the women’s entrance, and tried the door latch.