Black Site (26 page)

Yep,
Raynor thought,
these assholes are about to call bullshit on twitchy Jamal’s story, which means one thing, and one thing only.

Raynor may have been the first here in the stream bed to figure it out, but he knew it wouldn’t take the others long to catch up.

This polite conversation was just about over, and a fight was just about to start.

Raynor’s right hand slid down to the bed of the cart, where his fingertips began walking along the oaken floor, searching for anything within reach that could be used as a weapon.

*   *   *

Abdul Salaam did not believe the frightened Afghan’s story. Moreover, these men might have money, food, or other goods that he and his cousins could use. They’d long spent the French aid worker’s cash. He would search them, he would relieve them of their belongings, and he would either kill them or send them on their way. The decision would be made by Allah, meaning that if the men showed they were good Muslims, if they could pray and recite the Koran to Abdul Salaam’s satisfaction, then he would let them leave on their tractor with the clothing on their backs. If not, he and his cousins would shoot them here and now.

“Get off your tractor. Both of you.” He turned to Dagar: “Check the cart for weapons,” and then to Jandol: “Get them down from there.”

Abdul Salaam covered the strangers with his AK. He took just a moment to unfold his stock to bring it to his shoulder, looking down for a split second to do so. When he looked back up he was surprised to see the Nuristani in the back of the cart standing up straight, quickly, and something appeared in his right arm. It was not a rifle, but it was long. He swung it like an ax at Jandol, who had stepped to the left of the cart. Abdul Salaam recognized it as a shovel just as it slammed into his older cousin’s face. A clang of heavy steel against hard forehead echoed through the low creek bed, Jandol’s head snapped rearward, and his body dropped limp onto the white stones.

Abdul Salaam’s eyes widened in shock and his finger began to pull the trigger of his automatic weapon. As the first round cracked out from his AK’s barrel, he saw the Nuristani sling a long instrument directly at him with his other hand. It cartwheeled through the air, directly at him. Abdul Salaam ducked as he fired, rounds shredded limbs and leaves from the trees above and behind the tractor, and he landed hard on the stones of the stream bed as an iron hammer whirled by, narrowly missing his head.

In panic Abdul held the AK’s trigger down hard and saw sparks on the grille of the red tractor. The recoil of his weapon pulled his fire up high and to the right, and the Afghan in the blue kameez seemed to be propelled backward through the air and into the cart behind him.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor dropped the shovel and grabbed Jamal by the collar of his shirt, yanked him off the seat of the tractor and out of the way of the gunfire with all his might, almost pulling the young man out of his sandals. Together they fell back in the cart and rolled all the way off the back of it, falling hard together onto the stony surface of the stream bed. Jamal would be safe back here for the next five seconds, so Raynor launched himself up and off Jamal and shot low to the right of the tractor, knowing he would find a gunman there. The lone Talib on this side of the cart had his weapon high over his head and was firing down over the side wall of the wooden cart. He was shocked to see the man appear at ground level to his left, and he swung his weapon at this fast-moving threat.

Kolt took the man down with a tackle that would have made the defensive line coach for his high school football team proud. He slammed his right shoulder into the slight man’s solar plexus, the rifle flew into the air, and the American used his momentum to drive his body down through the Talib as they both hit the rock-strewn earth. Kolt heard ribs crack but he did not even look at his victim. Instead, he lunged for the AK-47, scooped it off the stream bed, and rolled his body three times to the left, into the space between the big right rear tire of the Euroleopard tractor and the right tire of the wooden cart. Now he was directly under the cart itself, and he searched for a target on the other side. Gunfire rattled in the stream bed and beat off the surrounding hills. Immediately he aimed at the legs of the man running past on his left. With a five-round burst Raynor dropped the Talib to his knees. He could see the bearded man’s pain- and shock-stricken face now below the cart, and he fired one round into his chest, blasting him dead on his back.

There was one threat remaining: the leader, the man who had spoken, and the first man to fire. Raynor did not know how much ammo remained in this salvaged Kalashnikov, but he had no time to drop the magazine or check for a round in the chamber. He began rolling to the left again, his body came out from under the cart on the opposite side of where he had rolled under, and he stopped only when he bumped up against the man he’d just killed.

Quickly he trained his weapon forward.

The leader of the Taliban squad was in a low crouch. He had just reloaded his weapon and was bringing it back up to his shoulder.

Kolt Raynor lay flat on his chest, snap-aimed the automatic rifle’s iron sights at his target, and pulled the trigger back hard.

A single round popped from the gun and then it ran dry. The spent cartridge ejected in a smoking arc over his right shoulder, and Kolt rose quickly to his knees.

One shot was all he’d needed. The Taliban leader lay crumpled in a heap, facefirst on top of his gun.

*   *   *

Raynor found the man he’d tackled still alive on the other side of the cart, but the Pashtun was out of the fight. He lay on his back and stared at the infidel above him. His breath came in short wheezes, the broken bones rattling in his chest along with the raspy breath.

Kolt quickly searched him for more weapons, found a rusty Makarov pistol, and shot the man through the forehead with it.

There was no way he would leave a survivor here to tell others what had happened.

He then found Jamal right where he’d left him, lying facedown in the dry creek behind the wooden cart. Instantly Kolt’s heart sank. Smears of blood on the young man’s clothing, and on the rocks around him, convinced Raynor that the agent who had come to save him had been shot in the first barrage by the Taliban leader. But Raynor quickly ran his hands all over Jamal’s body, and found him to be free of serious wounds, and also very much alive. Jamal climbed back to his feet, seemingly as frightened by all the rough and inappropriate touching by the American spy as he had been by the dozens of bullets fired in his direction.

Kolt found the source of the blood soon enough. His own knees, elbows, and forearms were cut from the rocks of the stream bed. His local clothing was tattered and torn. He felt not one iota of pain at the moment—a near overdose of adrenaline saw to that—but he knew his bruised and abraded appendages would sting and burn like hell in no time.

Considering the other possible outcomes of the event that had just transpired, he was thrilled to find himself only banged up and dripping a small amount of blood.

But there was no time to celebrate. Two of the tractor tires had been pierced by AK rounds and were now flat. Kolt knew they had to leave the vehicle behind and get out of there before others came to the sound of the gunfight. He grabbed the thin Afghan by the arm, then pulled the satellite phone from under the seat.

The phone was in pieces. It had taken a 7.62 mm round directly into its body. Raynor crammed the pieces into his pockets nonetheless.

“Is there anything on this tractor that can be led back to you or Bob?” Kolt asked it in broken Pashto, and his pronunciation and bad grammar, coupled with Jamal’s shock and ringing ears from all the gunplay, slowed the response.

Finally Jamal said, “No. There is nothing.”

“Good. Let’s go!” Kolt instructed. He grabbed the Kalashnikov from the dead Taliban leader, and the two men ran up the dry creek bed toward the trees and hills to the north. Kolt had gone no more than ten yards when he felt pain in his feet. He stopped, looked down, and realized his feet were bare.

He’d forgotten that he’d lost his sandals in the river the night before. He tiptoed over to the closest dead Talib and removed his sandals. They were a tad too small, but they were better than racing barefoot through the woods.

THIRTY-ONE

Bob Kopelman stared blankly out a window covered with clay dust, out past the front gate of the warehouse compound, out past the busy Grand Trunk Road, and toward the mountains to the south. The sun was setting off to his right, his men were hours overdue, and his dozen calls to Jamal’s phone had gone unanswered.

He’d been in contact with Pete Grauer over the border in Afghanistan and asked for a UAV overflight of the route he expected Racer and Jamal to take, but Grauer had demurred until evening, wanting to bring less attention to his drone activities at the base and over the border.

So Kopelman sat there, staring out the window, worrying about his men, worrying about encountering bandits on the road himself if he had to go back to Peshawar after dark, worrying about thieves hitting this warehouse, since he’d sent the security detail home hours earlier so that they would not see the American spy.

Worry came with his line of work, but the importance of this operation and the thin resources allotted to him caused him to agonize on this afternoon more than on almost any other job in his long career.

A big colorful bus slowed on the road in front of his gate, pulled to a stop on the gravel right in front of it. Gold and silver mirrored baubles adorned the bus like Christmas ornaments, and they caught the setting sun and sent it like laser beams into Kopelman’s eyes. He turned away from the grimy window for a moment, and when he turned back, the bus was pulling back out onto the road.

Jamal and Racer stood at the gate.

“It’s about time!” Bob exclaimed as he reached for the keys on the desk and shot outside into the swirling clay dust.

Once back inside the warehouse office, Bob greeted Jamal with a traditional Pashtun greeting consisting of a squeezing of the arm by the shoulder, with the other hand placed on the chest.

While still holding on to Jamal’s arm, Bob regarded Raynor. The ex-Delta man looked like hell. His clothing was torn and streaked with blood, and the exposed skin on his filthy body was covered with cuts, bruises, and scratches. “You need a doctor?” Bob asked.

Raynor just shook his head.

“No? Well, you just might when I finish kicking your ass.”

Kolt cocked his head like he did not understand. Kopelman turned away, reached over to a single-eye electric burner, and hefted a metal pot. He poured hot green tea into a cup for Jamal. He sugared it heavily and poured in a long stream of hot milk from a shallow pan, and stirred it some more. Jamal thanked him and sipped greedily. The American ex–CIA man then reached into a little fridge and tossed a bottle of water to Raynor.

Kolt guzzled the cool water, poured a little on his long matted hair, and let it run down his back, where more cuts and bruises from the river adventure and the shoot-out in the dry creek bed were hidden under his kameez.

Jamal began speaking as soon as he’d had a few sips of tea. He told Bob about rushing in the tractor to rescue the American, about discovering him half conscious under the cedar tree, about the run-in with the Taliban and the fight that ensued, or at least what he saw of it, which was nothing but the end result. Four dead, the last one by execution.

Then he spoke of the forced run for much of an hour, all the while with the American prodding him onward. Then hours of walking, with no rest, no water, no tea. Then the arrival at the bus stop, the stress and fear of Mister Racer doing or saying something to reveal himself, and finally the connection to the bus that brought them there.

Kolt didn’t understand half of it, but he got the gist of the message Jamal was trying to impart to Bob Kopelman.

Mister Bob, working with Mister Racer sucks!

Kopelman took it all in. He sipped sweet green milk tea himself while the story unfolded. Finally he turned and looked at Racer. Just stared at him for a long time like an incredibly annoyed father. “Pete told me I’d have my work cut out for me with you. Would it have been too much for you to just accomplish the mission we agreed on?”

Raynor was defiant. “I did a lot more in a lot less time.”

Kopelman snapped back. “By risking everything! It’s not just your life to piss away, kiddo. Jamal could have been picked up at any point on that retrieval, and Jamal can be connected back to me! I have other associates who would have then been rounded up. Don’t try to sell me that ‘I’m a one-man army’ bullshit, because I’ve heard it all before, and everyone who ever said it either is dead, or else suddenly learned to sing the praises of teamwork when it came down to getting a team of operators together to extract him from whatever shitty situation he’d managed to fall into all by his lonesome! You had a simple, manageable mission to accomplish—”

“That wasn’t going to get us eyes on the men!”

Bob started to shout again, but instead he just slammed his hand against the metal table. The sound exploded like a bomb in the tiny room. Jamal stayed out of any argument, looked off into space, and sipped his tea, holding his hot cup with his thin fingertips. His hands still jittered from the events of the day.

Raynor may not have expected a ticker-tape parade once he’d made it back out of the valley, but he also had not expected this washed-up CIA geezer’s vitriol.

He said nothing, just sipped water and brooded.

After a moment Kopelman seemed to regain some composure. “Nevertheless. You are here now.… Did you find the American prisoners?”

Raynor nodded.

“At least you accomplished that.”

At least?

“Are you okay?” he asked in Pashto.

Kolt nodded. “Yeah, just some scrapes. I got banged up when—”

“I am talking to Jamal.”

“I am okay, Mister Bob.”

Kopelman addressed Racer. “We’ll stay here tonight. It’s not safe on the road after dark. I’m going to let
you
contact our associates over the border. I am sure Pete will be interested in talking to you.”