Black Site (36 page)

But turning left he saw something just as disheartening.

Jamal’s yellow Hilux was there, surrounded by a half-dozen Taliban. Jamal was standing outside it, arms high, the muzzle of a Kalashnikov to the back of his head.

No.

Kolt retreated back into the alleyway. He checked behind him—there were a few people walking around, but he didn’t see any Taliban.

He looked back around the corner once again. He knew that if he could do anything for the young Afghan who’d saved his life, it would be right now, right this second, before Jamal was led away from the Hilux, taken away in a truck or pushed off for interrogation by more black-turbaned assholes.

Now or never,
Raynor said to himself. He raised the heavy rifle, hoped like hell it was accurate at fifty yards, and lined it up on the man with the gun at Jamal’s head. Jamal stood right by the open door to his truck. Kolt hoped he could remove the immediate threat to him. Then, if the kid had any sense, he would dive into his Hilux and take off.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but Jamal’s chances would be zero if the Taliban hustled him away from the scene.

Kolt Raynor fired the Lee Enfield. He did not look to see if his round hit the man covering Jamal. Instead, he racked the bolt of the heavy gun and quickly sighted on the next closest man. Fired again. Racked the bolt again and fired on a third target. He expected, at any moment, to be machine-gunned from behind. But he didn’t give a shit. The intel had been sent to the CIA. Bob was dead.

There was nothing else he could do for T.J. and Eagle 01.

Kolt did not give a damn if he lived or died anymore.

He was done.

He manipulated the bolt a third time, and then a fourth, lining up his sights each time on a fresh gunman.

After he fired the fifth round his smoking rifle was spent. He ejected the last empty cartridge, sending it arcing through the air ahead of a stream of gray smoke. Incoming gunfire began pocking the street and the building next to him. He paused only to look at the scene ahead.

Five dead men in the street, more running or crawling for cover.

The Hilux speeding off in the opposite direction.

“Go, kid!” Kolt shouted, hoping Jamal could make it out of town, dump the car, and then find his way out of Peshawar. It would not be safe for him around here, and there wasn’t a damned thing Kolt Raynor could do to help him.

Kolt turned back into the alley. Men scattered, hid in their shops or ran like hell into side streets. Others dived into rickshaws or pedaled their bicycles out of the way, desperate to get clear of yet another gun battle.

Kolt dropped the empty rifle, took the leather ammo satchel off his neck, and threw it down as well. He forced himself to jog away, armed now with only an empty Makarov replica.

A minute later he made his way out onto a small side street. A lone taxicab sat parked in the dust. A driver behind the wheel shouted into his cell phone.

Raynor climbed into the back of the taxi. The man turned and looked at him, saw the blood, the sweat, the torn tunic.

The Western features.

“Get out!” he screamed in Pashto.

Kolt pulled the empty Makarov pistol and jabbed the muzzle against the driver’s forehead, pressing it hard into the man’s black prayer cap. “Drive!” he said in Pashto, and the man spun around to his steering wheel and complied. Kolt kept the weapon in the back of the cab driver’s neck as they left Darra Adam Khel, heading back north on the Peshawar–Hayatabad road.

THIRTY-NINE

T.J. and his men had awakened slowly that morning, as usual, and then sat around in the dark talking once again about Racer’s visit three nights earlier. Zar and his men had been up that entire night, several times barging in on the chained Americans and standing there silently, glaring at the prisoners as if trying to decide if they really did have no idea what was going on. T.J. found out from a guard the next day that, as far as Zar and company knew, a junior AQ man and one of the local Taliban guards got into a fight with a knife and a gun, and they both lost.

Josh and the boys decided that Kolt must have killed one of the men out of necessity, and then killed the other to stage the crime scene to cover up his presence in the fort. Kolt’s ruse had worked, and the Delta men in the tiny cell now only prayed that Raynor had made it all the way to safety.

This morning had continued just as every other morning here at Zar’s camp. A breakfast of tea and flatbread, a daily team prayer service led by one of the staff sergeants, some mild calisthenics there on the small dirt floor in the cramped confines of their chamber, and then back to the bunks for discussion and idle conversation.

Lunch came after noon, again, just like every other day. And then after lunch, they returned to the discussion of Racer’s visit, and then slept, dreaming of freedom.

Everything changed in the middle of the afternoon. Men entered the cell, Zar’s men, and Zar Afridi himself followed behind them. There was a nervousness in the actions of all the visitors. Few words were spoken, the three sergeants were ordered to sit on their cots, and T.J. was ordered out of the cell.

At gunpoint he was led out into the sunny afternoon and then ordered to dunk his long hair and bearded face in a water bucket positioned by a low stepstool. He did as he was told, then sat on the stool. Hurriedly an old man came toward him with a long straight razor.

T.J. shot to his feet, and his arms rose in defense. Zar stepped forward, spoke to his prisoner in Pashto. “No, my friend, it is fine. We have been instructed to cut your hair and to shave you. To put you in new, clean clothes.”

“Ordered by who?”

“TTP,” Zar said. T.J. knew he was talking about Tehrik-i-Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban.

If this news was supposed to put T.J. at ease, it failed miserably. He asked, “Why?”

“I do not know.”

Timble looked over the old man with the razor. He certainly did not appear as if he had nefarious intentions. Josh asked if he could just shave himself and cut his own hair, but no one, Zar Afridi included, was going to let him wield a straight razor.

In ten minutes it was done. He’d had his head shaved just once in the past three years. Up in Hazara the previous summer the prisoners had been so infested with lice that their captors had had to remove all their hair. Otherwise, the men had worn long hair and beards, just like their Pashtun jailers, but only Bouncer, a Puerto Rican staff sergeant named Tony Marquez, looked much like a Pashtun.

T.J. reentered the cell. His men just stared at his thin, bare face, and then Marquez was led out of the room.

The barber made quick work of all the others. One of the men even caught a glimpse of the CIA helicopter pilot, Skip Knighton, as he was led from the main building to get his head shaved.

Afterward, back in the darkness of their cell, the men of Eagle 01 tried to figure out what was going on. Were they to be released? Were they to be involved with the Chechens in the phony American Rangers uniforms? No one knew.

In the early evening, Lieutenant Colonel Josh Timble heard a commotion in the compound outside the walls of his cell. Quickly he and Staff Sergeant Troy “Spike” Kilborn placed the two rope cots on top of one another, and Josh climbed upon them. Staff Sergeant Tony “Bouncer” Marquez, the fittest of the four men housed in the twelve-foot-square hut, hustled onto the shaky contraption and dropped down onto his hands and knees. T.J. climbed onto Marquez, pulled himself up to the vent slat at the top of the wall, and looked out into the compound, while Staff Sergeant Tim “Roscoe” Haynes held him steady from behind.

It was foggy, and the sun’s direct light had left the valley for the day. Out of the low light and the mist, three four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup trucks with canvas-covered beds pulled to a stop on the long driveway not fifty feet from the Americans’ cell. A dozen men climbed from the vehicles. T.J. tried to identify the new arrivals to Zar’s compound from his lousy vantage point. He could tell only that they were all armed and that most wore prayer caps or bare heads. At first glance they did not look like the Pakistani Taliban he had been around the majority of his time in captivity. He noticed Zar Afridi himself come out to greet the men. The warlord walked with several of his militia by his side.

T.J. expected to witness the long and friendly Pashtun greeting, followed by a slow walk either toward the hurja on the far side of the fortress, or at least toward Zar’s main building. But there was no greeting, only a rushed conversation while all fifteen men marched directly toward the Americans’ cell.

“Down, down,” Josh instructed, and Roscoe helped him down from the vent. Spike and Bouncer scrambled to put the cots back in place.

All four men had just made it back to their respective positions when the iron door was unlocked with a series of loud clangs and the gritty sliding of an old iron bolt, and more early-evening light shot into the room in a growing shaft that reached T.J. on his cot against the far wall.

“Everyone up!” The first man through the door shouted it in English. Zar’s two sentries held handcuffs and leg irons. They hustled around the men who entered the cell and began restraining the four Americans.

T.J. looked at the English speaker. He was young, early thirties tops, and he wore a long black beard and long black hair. His skin was very fair, his eyes were hazel green, and his posture was proud and erect. His two words of English were surprisingly clear for a Pashtun or an Arab. T.J. wondered if he might be a Westerner.

Next to him stood a man T.J. recognized. He was the AQ man in the glasses who had come in with the German and the Chechen “Rangers” a few weeks back. At the time, Timble had been concentrating on the fake Americans. But now he focused on the al Qaeda operative. He was in his late thirties, had well-manicured hands and a clean bearded face.

And he possessed the coldest black eyes Timble had ever seen.

Spike had commented after this man’s last visit to the cell that his accent was certainly Turkish. T.J. hadn’t noticed, but Spike knew languages better than anyone else on the team.

As Josh felt the hot metal cuffs snap on his ankles, repeating a miserable process that he’d been subjected to hundreds of times in the past thirty-six months, he suspected that the time for the mysterious operation, in which he and his men would be probably be unwilling participants, had just come.

“Where are we going?” he asked the AQ man in Turkish. He did not know much of the language, but he wanted to assert himself by showing this al Qaeda strongman that he knew the man’s country of origin.

But the dark man with the dark eyes and the trim beard did not answer. Instead, the light-skinned longhair spoke. Again, in English. “You are the officer. I understand you are called T.J.?”

The man spoke with no foreign accent whatsoever. He sounded exactly like an American.

T.J. slowly stammered his response. “That’s right. Who are you?”

The bearded man did not answer the question; instead, he said, “There has been an incident in Darra. You are no longer safe here, so I will be taking charge of you.”

T.J. looked around the room for Zar Afridi, but he had remained outside. Zar was in control of the captives, and a Pashtun host took responsibility for his guests. T.J. looked at the English speaker and said, “Zar and his militia might have something to say about that.”

“Yes. Pashtunwali can be an annoyance when it is used to protect someone other than oneself.” He waved a hand in the air. “But there is a way around that. I have personally assured Zar that you and your men will not be harmed. I will ensure your safety during our sojourn. Afterward, I have promised him, I will return you all to his care.”

“Our sojourn?”

“We are taking a trip, and we leave immediately. To avoid the prying eyes of coalition drones, a covered truck will be backed up to the door here, and your men will climb into the back. You will ride in the backseat with me and one of my men. Your helicopter pilot friend will travel in another vehicle. If you or your men make any attempt to escape, the pilot will be shot. Do I make myself clear?”

T.J. just nodded. He slowly looked to his three men, and said, “Do what he says.”

T.J. imagined his face showed the same level of shock as the others’. There was no question now. This guy
was
an American. He’d always known there were Americans who belonged to al Qaeda. But he imagined them living in Karachi or Cairo or Berlin or London, working the Internet or drinking tea and smoking hookahs, not actually operating in the field. This fellow countryman seemed to be a full-fledged operative.

Seconds later a truck backed all the way to the cell door, and armed gunmen opened the canvas back of the covered vehicle. They used their rifle barrels to motion the shackled Americans inside.

Once they were chained in the truck, a group of five children, following orders from several armed men, piled into the vehicle. Two more stood on the small running boards and held on to the outside. These were the human shields. T.J. knew that if any drones were watching now they would not strike these vehicles.

T.J. and his men left the relative safety of Zar Afridi’s compound in the custody of al Qaeda.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later T.J. bounced and bumped in the backseat, jostled with the uneven surface of the broken logging trail. The truck had wasted no time in getting out of Zar’s compound and then leaving Shataparai. They’d backed into a small cave in the mountainside, where they’d left the children behind. The truck now crossed the bridge, and T.J. sensed that they were heading northeast along the geographical contours of the floor of the Tirah Valley. His cuffs scratched his ankles and wrists as he bucked in the rear seat, a dark-skinned gunman on his right and the mysterious American on his left.

In the front seat were an armed driver and an armed passenger. They were Pashtun, probably not al Qaeda, but the American spoke to them in Arabic, and they followed his orders.

“Who are you?” T.J. asked in English.

“I am Daoud al-Amriki.”