SEAL Team Bravo: Black Ops IV (5 page)

“I’m on him, Chief.” It was Vince. “I can see a gun barrel poking out from behind the stonework. We need to wait for him to make a move, then I’ll take him.”

“Make sure you all keep your heads down while he’s still out there,” Nolan warned.

He ducked low and crawled across to Jack. The man’s eyes were open.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I went ten rounds with Mike Tyson, but the vest stopped the bullet. I’ll be okay, but we still need to fix that guy’s wound. He’s leaking worse than a sieve.”

Nolan looked at the casualty. The blood was flowing freely from where Jack had removed the steel fragment.

“What do I do, Jack?”

“Just like I was doing, strap a pad over it to stop the bleeding.”

“It’s a lot of blood, do you think it’ll be enough?”

“If you don’t do it right now, he dies.”

Nolan nodded and rammed the pad back on the bleeding hole, using his knee to hold it in place. The man started to come to, then lapsed back into unconsciousness. He strapped the second dressing over the first one and tied it as best he could. The bleeding had slowed dramatically, but whether it was enough, he’d no idea. He looked up as Will Bryce crawled over to him.

“How’s Jack doing?”

“He’ll live,” Nolan muttered, “but this Pakistani guy is touch and go.”

“Yeah, fucking Muslims, murdering their own people.”

“I am not a Muslim!”

They looked at the casualty. His eyes had flicked open, and his brown face, pale and gray with pain and blood loss, looked outraged.

“You what?”

“I am a Christian.” He managed a small smile. “My name is Danial Masih, and I can assure you I have never been inside a mosque in my life.”

They were both surprised, at least for a few moments, and not altogether convinced. Will said casually, “Not many Christians in this place.”

“You mean the town of Parachinar? No, I think you are right.” He closed his eyes in pain for a few seconds and then reopened them. He spoke again, painfully and slowly. “I was visiting my elderly uncle who lives there. I come from east of here, the city of Abbottabad. At least, I used to, although my son still lives there. I was an engineer there, and I,” he stopped again, working to martial his thoughts, “I…I worked for the city council.”

The men exchanged glances. Abbottabad was a city whose name had gone into infamy, the place were Osama bin Laden had sheltered. Until Seal Team Six put an end to his notorious career. The man tried to speak again and failed. He lapsed into unconsciousness, but he was breathing, despite the massive blood loss. They could see his chest moving as his body fought desperately to stay alive.

“What’ll we do with him?” Will asked.

“Do? We’ll have to take him with us. If we leave him here, he’ll die.”

Will was about to say something but stopped, and they ducked down as a hail of 5.56mm bullets parted the air overhead. It was Dan, he’d fired a long, well-aimed burst at the estimated position of the sniper, and Nolan saw chips of stone fly off the ruined hut. It was enough, the man moved, unsettled by the stream of bullets that must have ricocheted every which way around his primitive shelter. The sniper moved to find better cover, giving Vince Merano exactly the chance he was waiting for. Three bullets cracked out in quick succession, three precision 7.62mm rounds, and each one struck its target. They heard the scream from three hundred meters away, and suddenly the man appeared, black turban, long, black beard, and filthy robes, threaded through with pieces of bracken to camouflage himself. Vince was not a man to miss such a gift, and clearly the target was only wounded. He sent three more rounds that each struck the sniper, but this time at least one hit a vital organ. The man was flung back and disappeared behind the ruin.

Scratch one Taliban sniper,
Nolan thought.

“I can hear the helos. They’re on their way in!” someone shouted.

“Stay down! Stay under cover until we can confirm they’re ours and not the Pakis,” Nolan shouted.

He craned his head to look up at the sky, to see a pair of Marine Black Hawks, Sikorsky UH-60s descending toward their position. They landed a short distance away, and the Seals began running toward them.

Nolan and Whitman carefully carried Danial Masih across to one of the Black Hawks, lifted him gently through the door, and a medic took over. He seemed surprised that Nolan and Whitman were watching him, as if they cared.

“What? What is it? Is this guy important to you?”

“It’s be nice to see one survivor from the massacre back there, that’s all,” Nolan shrugged. “Will he live?”

“He should be okay. We’ll have to re-open the wound when we get back, and he’ll need some transfusions to replace lost blood, but other than that, he should be over the worst of it pretty soon.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Nolan nodded, and then he recalled Masih saying he was from Abbottabad. “Make sure he’s looked after. Our intel guys may want to talk to him.”

The man nodded absently as he listened to a message from the cockpit. “If you’re coming with us, the skipper says we’re running low on time. I’d get aboard if I were you.”

They climbed into the cramped fuselage and watched as the rest of Bravo boarded the two helos. The twin General electric T700 turbines were already spooling up, and the aircraft wobbled slightly as it rose slowly into the air. The racket inside the cabin of the roaring turboshaft engines woke Masih, and his eyes flicked open.

“Where am I?”

“It’s okay. You’re in a helo returning to Afghanistan, and we’ll take you to a hospital to get you fixed up.”

The man nodded weakly and closed his eyes again. Lucas Grant stood nearby, and he nodded across to Lieutenant Boswell.

“The last time I came out of Pakistan we were heading outta Abbottabad. Now that was one hell of a mission. That time it was the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment who brought us out. Those Black Hawks were quiet, too, not like these noise buckets. Real stealth jobs.”

Masih’s eyes flicked open again. He turned his head to look at Lucas.

“You were there? At Abbottabad?”

Grant grimaced at the wounded Pakistani, annoyed that he’d spoken out loud something that was supposed to be classified. “It ain’t any of your business, Mister.”

But the wounded man persisted. “Why did you not kill bin Laden?”

Lucas sighed in irritation. “Fella, Osama is history. Right now, he’s feeding the fish in the Indian Ocean if you hadn’t heard. Believe me, I know.”

Masih gave a low grunt of pain as he shifted position to look at the Seal. “Yes, I know about Osama. We all heard about it, but my question was why did you not kill the other bin Laden? I meant Riyad bin Laden, of course.”

“Who the fuck is he?” Boswell snapped. He’d been watching the wounded civilian carefully. “We’ve never heard of him.”

Masih sighed. “That’s a pity. The man you killed, Osama bin Laden, was sick. For the past two years he’d been preparing for his place to be taken by his half-brother, Riyad. He was already running many of the al Qaeda operations.”

“That’s a load of bullshit, Mister,” Lucas snapped. “We got the right guy, no question.”

Danial shrugged painfully. “As you wish. It makes little difference to me. After the raid, they singled me out as one of the few Christians in the city and accused me of sympathizing with the Americans. They said I was a spy and that I’d betrayed the Sheikh to the infidels. I had to leave the city, or they would have attacked and probably killed me. Fortunately, they did not threaten my son, so he is safe for the time being. He is still in Abbottabad. I think they did not realize who he was. But as a Christian, he is always fearful of attack if the Muslims decide they wish to harass him at any time. I had hoped to find work in Parachinar so he could travel north to join me, if I could persuade him to give up his job.” He shrugged, and his face twisted in agony as the movement reminded him of his wound. “After today, I doubt it will happen.”

The effort of speaking had been too much for him, and he lapsed into unconsciousness again. Boswell gave the man a derisive sneer.

“I guess he’s aiming to cash in on more of that reward money Washington was offering.”

He looked at Grant for consensus, but the former Seal Team Six member looked worried. He stepped closer to Nolan so he could speak above the noise of the engines.

“What do you think, Chief? I was on that operation, and we went through hell to terminate that bastard. I’d hate to think it was all for nothing.”

“I don’t know, Lucas. Osama was the pin up boy for terrorists all around the world, and no matter what state he was in when you took him out, it was a huge boost for all of us when he went down. The bastard deserved it, too, several thousand times over. I won’t forget the Twin Towers in a hurry or the USS Cole, or any of the other murders he carried out. He was a disease that had to be eradicated. And besides, there’s a new guy at the top, Ayman al-Zawahiri took over after bin Laden was chopped, didn’t he?”

Grant nodded uncertainly. “Yeah, I guess so. But what if he didn’t?”

“What do you mean, what if he didn’t? Didn’t what?”

“Take over. What if there was another bin Laden already running things, hiding in the shadows where we couldn’t pick him up on our radar, but still able to use the bin Laden name to stir up the Islamist fanatics and loonies?”

Nolan digested that scenario for a few moments.

Another bin Laden! Jesus Christ, that’s a nightmare scenario. The Islamists would be more motivated than ever to continue their trail of worldwide death and devastation. It could also mean the half-brother would likely be determined to avenge the death of his brother, the spiritual leader, and founder of the movement, racking up the action even more. Arabs are no slouches when it comes to the vendetta; they even put the Sicilians to shame. They sure enjoy killing, and they aren’t too fussy about who they murder, as their own people often find out to their cost.

“Lucas, I’d sooner not think about it. It sounds like a shitload of misery to me. We’d best hand Danial over to our intel weenies in Bagram, and let them take care of it from here on in.”

“I hate the idea of sitting back and waiting for the desk jockeys to get a grip on it,” Lucas muttered, his expression anxious. “I mean, there could be a lot at stake here. Fuck it, I smashed down the door, and I saw the bastard’s face. Did we miss the real target? Was it all for nothing?”

“No, my friend, Osama had to go. He deserved to go. As for this half-brother, let the guys with the computers go to work on it. Maybe CIA and NSA will get involved, but it sure is above our pay grade. Don’t worry about it, they’ll sort it out.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

But Grant looked a very worried man as the helo flew fast and low over the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan, and an uncertain future for all American troops in Afghanistan, if it was true.

That about sums up my future. What if it’s true? And that other thing. What the hell am I going to do about that?

Several days before, Carol had called from San Diego to tell him a couple of bulls were on their way out to Afghanistan to talk to him about a crime committed in the city. Carol Summers, his partner was a cop, a detective in the San Diego PD. He remembered feeling astonished; not only at what she’d said, but the way she said it. She sounded so cold and impersonal, and he couldn’t work out why.

Doesn’t she trust me? What about the future plans we made?

And then he’d understood. Nothing had really changed. She was just calling from the squad room, so she had to sound official. He tried to sound her out.

“What crime, what the hell do they want? What’s it about?”

“A rape, Kyle.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why do they want to talk to me about something like that? I mean, me personally. You know that’s crazy.”

“We had a walk in. A girl claimed she was raped a few weeks before by someone she identified as a Seal. She was pretty certain about it. She said she was traumatized for several weeks, and it took her that long to pluck up the courage to come in and file a complaint. She managed to get away from her attacker, but it was pretty close. By the time she came in, it was too late for a rape kit, of course, but her statement was pretty compelling. That’s why they need to talk to you.”

“I still don’t get it.” Her voice still sounded strange and distant. “You don’t think I did it, surely?”