Line of Control (39 page)

    "How many of you are there?"

    "Only three of us," August informed him.

    "Three? What happened?" Friday asked.

    "We were caught in fire from the Indian army," August told him.

    "Is General Rodgers with you?"

    "No," Friday replied.

    "It's important that you watch for him and link up," August said.

    "Where is he?" Friday asked.

    "The general reached the Mangala Valley and is headed east," August said.

    "Satellite recon gave him your general position." "The valley," Friday said. His eyes drifted to where Samouel was moving through the darkness.

    "That's just ahead."

    "Good. When you link up you are to proceed to these coordinates on the pilot's map you're carrying," August went on.

    "Hold on while I get it," Friday said.

    The American crouched and set the phone on the ice. He pulled the map and a pen from his pocket. Friday tried to read the map by the green glow of the cell phone but that was not possible. He was forced to light one of his torches.

    The sudden brightness caused him to wince. He tried jamming the branch into the glacier but the surface was too solid.

    Apu reached over and held it for him. Friday remained crouching with the map spread before him.

    "I'm set," Friday said as his eyes adjusted to the light.

    "Go to seventeen-point-three degrees north, twenty-one point-three degrees east," August told him.

    Friday looked at the coordinates. He saw absolutely nothing on the map but ice.

    "What's there?" Friday asked.

    "I don't know," August told him.

    "Excuse me?"

    "I don't know," August repeated.

    "Then who does?" Friday demanded.

    "I don't know that either," August admitted.

    "I'm just relaying orders from our superiors at Op-Center and the NSA."

    "Well, I don't go on blind missions," Friday complained as he continued to study the map.

    "And I see that following the coordinates you gave me will take us away from the line of control." "Look," August said.

    "You know what's at stake in the region. So does Washington. They wouldn't ask you to go if it weren't important. Now I'm sitting up here with my forces depleted and the Indian army at my feet. I've got to deal with that. Either I or William Musicant will call back in two hours with more information. That's about how long it should take you to reach the coordinates from the mouth of the valley."

    "Assuming we go," Friday said.

    "I assume you'll follow orders the same way my Strikers did," the colonel said.

    "August out."

    The line went dead. Friday shut his phone off and put it away.

    Arrogant son of a bitch.

    Nanda's voice rose from the darkness.

    "What is it?" she asked.

    Friday continued to squat where he was. The heat of the torch was melting the ice beside him but the warmth felt good. The woman obviously had not seen what he was about to do before the telephone vibrated.

    "The know-it-alls in Washington have a new plan for us but they won't tell us what it is," Friday said.

    "They want us to go to a spot on the map and wait for instructions."

    Nanda walked over.

    "What spot?" she asked.

    Friday showed her.

    "The middle of the glacier," she said.

    "Do you know what might be out there?" Friday asked.

    "No," she replied.

    "I don't like it," Friday said.

    "I don't even know if that was Colonel August on the line. The Indian army might have captured him, made him give them the code number."

    "They didn't," a voice said from the darkness.

    Friday and Nanda both started. The American grabbed the torch and held it to his left. That was the direction from which the voice had come.

    A man was walking toward them. He was dressed in a white high altitude jumpsuit and U. S. Army equipment vest, and he was carrying a flashlight. Samouel was trailing slightly behind him. Friday shifted the torch to his left hand.

    He slipped his right hand back into the pocket with the gun.

    He rose.

    "I'm General Mike Rodgers of Striker," said the new arrival.

    "I assume you're Friday and Ms. Kumar."

    "Yes," the woman replied.

    Friday was not happy to have company. First, he wanted to be sure the man was who he claimed to be. Friday studied the man as he approached.

    He did not appear to be Indian.

    Also, his cheeks and the area around his eyes were wind blasted red and raw. He looked like he could be someone who walked a long way to get here.

    "How do you know that it was actually August who called me?" Friday demanded.

    "Colonel August spent several years as a guest of the North Vietnamese,"

    Rodgers said.

    "He didn't tell them anything they wanted to know. Nothing's changed.

    Why did he contact you?"

    "Washington wants us to go to a point northeast of here, away from the line of control," Friday replied.

    "But they didn't tell us why." "Of course not," Rodgers said.

    "If we're captured by the enemy we can't tell them where we're headed."

    He removed his radio and tried it. There was only static.

    "How did Colonel August contact you?"

    "TAC-SAT to cell phone," Friday replied.

    "Clever," Rodgers said.

    "Is he holding up all right?"

    Friday nodded. As long as August kept the Indians off their trail, he did not care how the pack animal was holding up.

    Rodgers walked over to Apu and offered him a hand. Water had begun to pool around the Indian's feet.

    "I suggest we start walking before we freeze here," Rodgers said.

    "That's it, then?" Friday said.

    "You've decided that we should go deeper into the glacier?"

    "No. Washington decided that," Rodgers replied. He helped Apu to his feet but his eyes remained on Friday.

    "Even though we don't know where we're going," Friday repeated.

    "Especially because of that," Rodgers said.

    "If they want to keep the target a secret it must be important."

    Friday did not disagree. He simply did not trust the people in Washington to do what was best for him. On top of that, Friday loathed Rodgers. He had never liked military people.

    They were pack animals who expected everyone else to obey the pack leader's commands and conform to the pack agenda, even if that meant dying for the pack. Standing up to captors instead of cooperating for the good of all. That was not his way. It was the reason he worked alone. One man could always find a way to survive, to prosper.

    Nanda and Samouel both moved to where Rodgers was standing with Apu. If the Indian woman had decided to continue on to the line of control, Friday would have gone with her. But if she was joining Rodgers, Friday had no choice but to go along with them.

    For now.

    Friday extinguished the torch by touching it to the melted ice. The water would freeze in seconds and he could knock the ice off if they needed the torch again.

    The group continued its trek across the ice with Samouel in the lead and Rodgers and Nanda helping Apu. Friday kept his right hand in his pocket, on the gun. If at any point he did not like how things were going he would put them back on their original course.

    With or without General Rodgers.

    

    The Himachal Peaks Thursday, 11:41 p. m.

    

    It had been an arduous day for Major Dev Puri and the two hundred men of his elite front line regiment. This was supposed to be a straightforward sweep of the foothills of the Great Himalaya Range.

    Instead, it had become a forced march sparked by surprising intelligence reports, unexpected enemies, evolving strategies, and constantly changing objectives.

    The most recent shift was the riskiest. It carried the danger of drawing the attention of Pakistani border forces. Because of Pun's mission, it would be much easier for the enemy to cross the line of control at Base 3.

    The Indian soldiers had been marching virtually without rest since they left the trenches. The terrain was merely rugged to start. Then the higher elevations brought cold and walls of wind. The successful attack on the paratroopers had given the force a much-needed morale boost as they continued to search for the Pakistani cell. But darkness and sleet had battered them as they ascended. Now they were looking at a climb that was going to tax their energies to the limit.

    Then there was the unknown factor: the strength and exact location of the enemy. It was not the way Major Puri liked to run a campaign.

    Nearly eight hours before, the Indian soldiers had begun closing ranks at the base of the Gompa Tower in the Himachal cluster of peaks. The latest intelligence Puri had received was that American soldiers were jumping in to help the terrorists get through the line of control to Pakistan. That was where the parachutists had been headed. The Pakistani cell was almost certainly there as well. There was no way forward except through the Indian soldiers. The Pakistanis were undoubtedly exhausted and relatively under armed now that the Americans had been stopped.

    Still, Major Puri did not underestimate them. He never took an enemy for granted when they had the high ground. The plan he and his lieutenants had worked out was to have twenty-five men ascend the peak while the rest covered them from the ground with highpowered rifles and telescopic sights. Twenty-five more would be ready to ascend as backup if needed.

    One or another of the teams was bound to take the cell. One or another of the teams was also likely to take casualties. Unfortunately, Defense Minister Kabir did not want to wait for the Pakistanis to come down. Now that Americans had been killed there would be hard questions from Washington and New Delhi about what had happened to the paratroopers.

    The minister was doing his best to stall air reconnaissance from moving in to locate and collect the American remains. He had already informed the prime minister that Major Puri's team was in the region and would pinpoint them for the Himalayan Eagles.

    What Kabir feared was that air reconnaissance might locate the Pakistanis as well as the paratroopers. The defense minister did not want the cell to be taken alive.

    Using night glasses and shielded flashlights, the Indian troops had been deploying their climbing gear. They had detected faint heat signatures above and knew the enemy was up there waiting.

    Unfortunately, fly overs would not help them now. The fierce ice storms above made visibility and navigation difficult. And blind scatter-bombing of the region was not guaranteed to stop the cell.

    There were caves they could hide in. Besides, there were very holy, anchoritic religious sects and cliff-dwelling tribes living in the foothills and in some of the higher caves. The last thing either side wanted was to collate rally destroy the homes or temples of these neutral peoples. That would force them or their international supporters into political or military activism.

    The Indian soldiers were nearly halfway into the preparations to scale the cliff when Major Puri received a surprising radio communique.

    Earlier in the day a helicopter on routine patrol had reported what looked like the wreckage of an aircraft in the Mangala Valley.

    However, there was no room for the chopper to descend and search for possible survivors.

    Major Puri had dispatched a four-soldier unit to investigate.

    Two hours before, the men had reported the discovery of a downed helicopter. It looked like a Ka-25.

    But the aircraft was so badly burned they could not be certain.

    Puri called the Base 3 communications center. They checked with the air ministry. There were no choppers on special assignment in the region.

    Because the chopper went down in the narrow valley, rescue personnel would not be dispatched until the following day. A parachute drop at night was too risky and, in any case, there were no survivors.

    An hour later, Puri's group found the remains of ten American paratroopers. Major Puri relayed that information to the defense minister. The minister said he would sit on that information until after the cell had been taken. He had already come up with a scenario in which, regrettably, Puri's soldiers had mistaken the Americans for Pakistanis and had shot the team down.

    What surprised the Indian reconnaissance team was what they discovered on the body of one of the Americans. The soldier, a black woman, was hanging from a ledge by her parachute. There was a point-to-point radio in her equipment belt. Occasionally, the red "contact" light flashed.

    Someone in the communications link was trying to contact her or someone else in the link. That meant not all the soldiers had been killed.

    Unfortunately, the Indian soldiers could not confirm that. All they got on the radio was static.

    Puri expected that he would find those soldiers in the cliffs above, with the Pakistanis. But the Mangala Valley unit had employed infrared glasses in a scan of the region. They had come up with a different scenario.

    "We're detecting a very strong heat source several miles to the northeast," Sergeant Baliah, the leader of the reconnaissance unit, had reported.

    "There is a singular heat source on the glacier."

    "It could be some of the native people," Puri said.