State of Honour (9 page)

The Chinook hovered before descending ten metres from the fort’s outer wall. After it touched down in the landing zone, the tail ramp lowered so that they could disembark quickly without squeezing through the cabin doors. A bearded master sergeant, holding an HK fixed with an AG416 40mm grenade launcher, led them through the smoke and swirling dust whipped up by the rotors, over the chunks of bricks and into the main courtyard. The downed Black Hawk was burning up in the far right-hand corner, the other circling in front of the bullet-ridden walls of the main building. The Delta told them to follow his steps, saying that they hadn’t swept the area and IEDs could be anywhere.

Tom saw a dozen bodies lying dead or groaning on the ground, including three operators, who were being attended to by medics. A group of women, hugging children and wailing, sat in the courtyard to the left. In front of them, a couple of Delta stood either side of the second masked interpreter as he attempted to comfort the innocents and obtain intel in the process. Directly behind him, four operators were securing those insurgents who’d surrendered or had been captured alive with plasticuffs before hooding them. At the doorways to the outer buildings, infrared lights visible only via the operators’ night-vision goggles signalled that they’d been cleared of any threat.

Tom, Crane and the others were met at the central door by another five Delta, all wearing mismatched uniforms and padded gloves. One was holding a Belgian Malinois dog on a lead, its eyes protected by a ballistic visor, its torso sheathed in body armour. The dog snarled when they came close, bearing huge fangs. Its Delta handler jerked the lead and took point. Sawyer remained behind, organizing the ongoing security of the periphery with the rest of the troop, together with the Rangers who had disembarked from a Chinook beyond the wall.

The interior was thick with dust and stank of stale smoke and kerosene. Guided by the operators’ helmet-mounted flashlights, the dog led the way, its snubbed snout tracking the scent of the secretary via an article of clothing taken from her bedroom at the embassy. The GPS had pinpointed the building, but the signal had faded en route, so it was impossible to tell her exact position in the many dark corridors and small rooms that constituted the fort proper. The corridors were on three levels and narrow, no more than two-metres high, creating a claustrophobic effect. The walls were uneven, the floors pitted and strewn with small rocks.

After five minutes or so, the dog, salivating now and snorting, moved down a slope below ground level. It stopped at a reinforced metal door at the end of a pitch-black corridor peppered with rat droppings. The air here smelled of something akin to rotting vegetables. An operator carrying an M4 Super 90 shotgun moved up before banging on the door and calling out. There was no answer. Tom clenched his jaw muscles, feeling anxious. Crane stepped forward and ordered the door blown open.

“We can’t risk it,” Tom said, intervening.

He knew that if the door opened inward, the secretary could be killed as it careered into her.

“Blow it down, son,” Crane insisted.

Ignoring Crane, the Delta spoke into his cheek mic. “A metal door, sir. Lyric could be beyond it. No question of knocking out the hinges with Hatton rounds. It’ll need an explosive breach.” After getting an order from Sawyer, he said, “Copy that.”

The rear operator came forward and placed a strip of adhesive breaching explosives over the lock, which would rip it apart. He primed it with two blasting caps, so that if one malfunctioned there’d be less chance of failure, and reeled out the connecting wires. Tom and the others retreated a way back down the dim corridor. As blast shields were held up in front of them they lowered their heads. Tom just hoped the door would blow back outwards.

“Fire in the hole,” the Delta shouted.

After a two-second delay, the explosion was ferocious, making the shields almost buckle, the shock wave exaggerated by the confined space. An operator ran forward, with bolt cutters strapped to his back. He leapt over the blown-down door, his red-dot laser scanning the room. He flipped up his night-vision goggles, activated his helmet flashlight and double checked for any sign of the secretary, a booby trap or Leopard.

“Clear,” he shouted.

The dog handler moved forward, closely followed by Tom and Crane. Tom saw the dog scratching at the floor. The Delta crouched down and used a gloved hand to clean the dirt from a small piece of flooring.

“It’s a hinge,” he said.

“Jesus,” Tom said, fearing they would find the secretary’s body beneath.

The Delta used the butt of his carbine to dislodge the small padlock securing the hinge.

“Watch out, Chris. It could be rigged,” an operator called out from behind.

A Delta brought up a blast shield and, crouching behind it, the man called Chris lifted the trap door. Nothing happened. He shone his flashlight down.

“One body, likely dead,” he said, clinically.

“Male or female?” Tom asked.

“Looks like a woman’s body.”

Tom’s face turned the colour of wet clay. He scrambled forward. Peering down, he shone his handheld flashlight into the hole. It was about two metres deep and three metres square. A small body, its face shrouded by a black square of muslin, lay against the far mud wall.

“Tom?” Crane said.

“It’s her clothes,” he replied “The body is dressed in her clothes.”

The dog barked and strained at the leash, desperate to descend into the hole.

“Go down, Tom,” Crane said. “It’s only right it’s you. But don’t touch the body.”

Tom tucked his flashlight into his webbed belt, slung his MP5 over his shoulder and lowered himself into the hole. He coughed, gagging on the smell of decaying flesh. After taking out the flashlight, he held it up and saw the emerald ring on the blackened finger, the pear-shaped necklace lying on the flat breasts. Was she burned? he thought, unable to conceive of such a death.

He pulled off his goggles and knelt down. Clenching his jaw, he lifted the veil. He saw a stained skull. The tracking device that had been hidden under the secretary’s skin was lodged between the two front teeth. They were black-green in colour, as if they’d been sculpted from serpentine stone. He arched back and slumped down in the damp earth. Breathing heavily, he took off his helmet and winced. He figured the reason for the intermittent signal from the sensors was down to their subterranean position.

Crane dropped down into the hole, his bulk almost filling the space. “This one’s been dead for as long as you’ve been waking up with a boner,” he said, putting his hand to his nose. He scanned around with his Maglite. “They threw a few dead rats in to make it smell convincing. You gotta hand it to them—this is cute.”

Tom didn’t have the strength to punch him; couldn’t even bring himself to swear.

Mullah Kakar lived in a dingy house in one of the oldest and cheapest sectors of Islamabad, with narrow streets and poor infrastructure. He’d rarely ventured out at first, and when he had he’d always been accompanied by his four bodyguards, all of whom were from Peshawar, and had fought against ISAF in Afghanistan. But after meeting up with the British ex-SAS soldier called Proctor in the foothills of the Hindu Kush five months ago, he’d taken to moving about the city more often, at least at night. As far as the Westerners were concerned, he was dead, after all. Besides, when the call had come from one of Brigadier Hasni’s men, ordering him to meet a driver at a coffee house a ten-minute walk away, he’d told his bodyguards that they would be leaving shortly. This was something that required little or no thought. When Hasni beckoned, a man moved, unless that man didn’t care for moving that much, and was content to push himself around in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

He switched off his fat, black-and-white TV, the grainy screen shrinking like a deflating balloon, and slipped on a pair of rubber-soled sandals, his mind fixed on the meeting at hand. Hasni, whom he knew on what he referred to as a professional basis, was as remote and dangerous as a snow leopard. But he’d controlled the ISI and therefore Pakistan’s foreign policy for over a decade. And although he professed to be a practising Muslim, Kakar knew that Hasni, like most high-ranking ISI officers, was motivated by two things only: political power and patriotism. Despite its historically pro-jihadist stance in Afghanistan, the ISI was essentially a nationalistic organization, rather than a religiously motivated one.

Kakar moved the blue-and-white sheet that separated his meagre living space from the equally cramped kitchen. He walked through the dim passageway to the wooden front door, the familiar smell of damp and sewerage filling his nostrils. As he got to the door he took out the photograph of his wife and three children. They’d been killed in a HIMAR attack five years ago. He knew that the mobile rocket launcher was accurate up to a distance of almost two hundred miles. He’d thought, at first, that his family had been in the wrong compound at the wrong time. But over the years, he’d come to the conclusion that the Westerners had killed them out of revenge for what he had done.

He placed the photograph into the pocket of a woollen vest, hanging on a hook screwed into the bare concrete wall. He knew that he would join them in Paradise one day. He just hoped it wouldn’t be too soon. He had a lot of revenge killing of his own to do first, despite the fact that he’d already murdered thirty-eight ISAF personnel since their deaths.

Apart from his young family, he had seen many people die in his country. Innocent men shot for talking on cellphones, the snipers having been told they were Taliban spotters. Others had been hauled off by security forces, tortured and never seen again, simply because their neighbours had wanted to earn a few hundred dollars or a acquire a small goat herd, the neighbours making up some story to rid themselves of someone they disliked, envied or who had slighted them over a family marriage proposal. The Westerners had been murderers, their materialism an infectious disease.

By 2005, he had acquired the mullah title. It happened in the way some people acquired accents. The more a person used it, the more people accepted it, until, in some peculiar way, the user believed it to be real as well. He was by this time devoted to the cause, both as an active fighter and strategist. Two years later, he’d planned and executed the act that had made him notorious. The murder of the British Defence Secretary in London.

As a result of the assassination and his subsequent bloody activities, the US had offered a million-dollar reward for information leading to his capture, or death. That hadn’t been revoked, so, unlike some Taliban leaders, who had received a tacit amnesty, he was still a wanted man. But ISAF had left his beloved homeland. God’s will, he believed. And now, he was a ghost.

And so it was without too much trepidation that he stood up from the seat at the small table and walked to the door as the black Mercedes pulled up outside, a man driving without others. His bodyguards rose with him, their handguns tucked into their belts, concealed by long shirts and vests. As Kakar approached the car the driver’s window slid down.

“Just you,” he said.

Kakar didn’t like his tone. Nothing short of dismissive, he thought. He nodded to his bodyguards outside the coffee house, and sat in the back of the sleek car, which eased into the traffic like a shark moving among its prey.

The ISI driver hadn’t said a word for a full twenty minutes, despite Kakar’s attempts to strike up an innocent conversation with him on three occasions. The man wore shades even though it was dark, and chewed gum noisily. He had a thick, sweaty neck, and Kakar felt the urge to take off a sandal and beat him over the head with it. But he sat tight. There was nowhere to hide apart from Pakistan. The alternatives were either too risky or too dire to contemplate. Yemen. Somalia. Syria. West Africa … the list got progressively worse.

En route to the Blue Area, the wide corridor that abutted the length of Jinnah Avenue – the city’s main highway leading to the principal government buildings – the view outside the car’s windows became progressively affluent. The roads became wider, the darkness rendered less oppressive by the increasing amounts of streetlights.

A few hundred metres up from a smoked-glass skyscraper, the car pulled into a tarmac driveway edged with black metal security posts shaped like water hydrants. Initially, the house reminded Kakar of a Hollywood mansion, with its terracotta-tiled roof, smooth pillars out front, and pale-cream walls, the entrance barred by a huge electronically controlled, wrought-iron gate. But then he noticed the extra security: concertina razor-wire atop the walls, and at least twelve armed guards, two of whom walked the perimeter with Dobermans.

As the well-lit gate opened the driver nodded to a guard, his sub-machine gun on full view. He fears assassination, Kakar thought. He knew he feared spies even more. They were everywhere, like the rats that plagued his dilapidated sector.

He shuddered involuntarily. He had never been to Hasni’s home before and he’d heard rumours that the man had built torture cells beneath it.

Walking through the dusty, narrow corridors, Tom felt desolate, his head hanging, his shoulders bunched. Crane was in front of him, shining the Maglite on the floor. He knew the secretary could be anywhere now. The thing about most kidnap victims was, if they weren’t found in the first twelve hours, they probably wouldn’t be found until they were released or … killed, he thought, shaking his head to help him remove the image. But he knew that the chances of finding her quickly without a Pakistani wanting to make easy money were remote.

Crane told him to watch out for a chunk of metal sticking out of the wall and shone a quick beam of light onto what looked like a rusted nail. He suggested that Tom tucked his pants inside his boots, adding that the scorpions were deadlier than the locals in these parts. Tom thought Crane sounded oddly parental, couldn’t figure it out. Ruminating on that brought other images into his head.

The house he and his mother had lived in was one up from a trailer, a tiny bungalow resting on breezeblocks, a yard no bigger than the living room. On his eight birthday, she was sitting at the kitchen table in a floral nightgown, her mascara doing an Alice Copper; her hair uncombed. Tom had come home from school, excited to see his father. But when he asked if he would be coming soon, she told him that he was never coming again. That he didn’t love them any more; that he had someone else in DC and would have other children; that he’d forget all about them.

She’d started crying herself to sleep that very night, kept it up for a full month. He cried along, too, at first, but grew tired of it and took to placing his head under his pillow instead. Tom hadn’t seen his father again until he was sixteen, several weeks after his broken promise to his mother had led to a tragedy so great that he’d felt like drowning himself in a bayou.

A minute later, Tom strolled out into the evening air, which stank of the aftermath of weapons’ discharge and burning gasoline. Ahead of him, he watched Crane scratch his blond-grey hair and light a cigarette. The Black Hawk was smouldering in the courtyard. It would be subjected to delayed explosives a short while after they’d left the site, which would destroy the communications systems and sensitive onboard data. In front of it, operators were carrying the remaining wounded on stretchers to the Chinook outside the fort to be flown back to Kabul for treatment. A worried-looking medic knelt by a Delta who lay on a poncho liner, his ballistic vest a metre or so away. He was holding two pads, part of an automatic external defibrillator, as another medic pumped the man’s chest with his palms. Those who’d fallen were already encased in black canvas body bags, positioned in a sombre row by the large hole in the clay-brick wall.

The seized weapons had been stacked in a pile. An operator was crouching down beside them, priming explosive charges with a delayed detonator. Two more Delta were snapping away at the haul with digital cameras, an activity called sensitive site exploration, or SSE. This was more a political necessity than a military one, something to counter any subsequent accusations that they’d just decimated a peaceful settlement occupied by harmless refugees.

Tom rubbed his eyes, feeling even more inept than he had onboard the Chinook. But there was another emotion, too: a deep sense of grief for those who had perished here. As he took off his helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead he saw Crane speaking to the back-up interpreter before walking over to him.

“We leave in five minutes tops,” Crane said.

Tom reckoned the Pakistani Air Force had scrambled jet fighters.

“The Shias thought we were Pakistani Special Forces,” Crane said. “Hence the rumble. But here’s the thing. The interpreter questioned a man about that corpse in the hole. A married woman got caught with a local male twenty years ago. They stoned her to death. Some outsider paid the headman to have her dug up and put down there, together with the clothes and GPS jewellery. Guess they lodged the sensor that was under Lyric’s skin between the skeleton’s teeth, too.”

“That’s real nice. But I still think the ISI have to be involved,” Tom said.

“That’s like saying JFK had to have been killed by two shooters.”

“Excuse me?”

“Speculation based on zero proof and an obsession. Classic traits of a conspiracy theorist. I knew you were one,” Crane said, taking a pull on his cigarette. “In any event, the chances of us tackling the ISI are about the same as a Bernstein becoming the next Pope. You can’t see the risks, for Chrissakes? Pakistan is a nuclear state that refused to sign the no-first-strike treaty. And just now it ain’t exactly a stable country.”

They walked together to the hole in the wall, seeing the Chinook ahead of them. A line of Rangers with snipers on the flanks were ensuring that civilians or random insurgents didn’t get within a hundred metres of the fort.

“You still think the Iranians are behind it?” Tom asked, questioning his own reasoning.

“If they are involved, there’s alotta folks back home who’d like the opportunity to kick their ass. And the Israelis are straining at the leash, that’s for goddamn sure. The Saudis, too.”

“Do the Iranians have nukes?”

“Not yet. Still, this gets outta hand, New York will be as safe as the Swat Valley. But nowhere near as goddamned beautiful.”

They reached the Chinook, and Crane stubbed out his cigarette after getting berated by the huge crew chief.

“At least the dog’s still alive,” he said as the Belgian Malinois started barking.

“Jesus, Crane, don’t you ever let up?” Tom shook his head, exasperated.

“What you want me to say?”

“That my men died well,” Sawyer said, coming up behind them.

Tom turned first. Sawyer’s night-vision goggles were flipped up on his helmet. His face was streaked with blood, his carbine hanging limp from the belt clip.

“Yeah, they did, young man,” Crane said, turning around. “But I just happen to be an animal lover. And it ain’t nice to listen into other people’s conversations, except if you’re getting paid to do it like me.”

“You might want to keep your wisecracks for when we get back to base, sir.”

“You think I haven’t seen men die in the field before? My own men. You deal with it your way, and I’ll deal with it mine. What are you, twenty-seven? I’ve been in the field longer than you’ve been eating solids. And don’t forget who’s really in charge here,” Crane said, with a dismissive flick of his hand.

“That’s fine with me, sir. I’m just telling you that if you speak like that again, you and me will have a problem.”

Sawyer was standing ramrod straight now, his eyes narrowing.

“You talk to me like that again, son, I’ll stick your fucking carbine up your ass. Truth is, I think you’ll enjoy it,” Crane said, jabbing the air between them with a thick finger.

Tom saw a couple of operators getting interested in what was being said, their sleeves rolled up, as they took snapshots of the perimeter.

“Enough,” he said, putting his hand out between them. “You two wanna dance, dance back in Kabul.”

The co-pilot appeared on the Chinook’s tail ramp, called out, “You guys need to get over here. A video has appeared on YouTube.”