The Fourth Horseman (3 page)

“Yes, I spoke to him less than ten minutes ago. The fool still thinks that he can talk his way out of this.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“He thinks that you’re here from the CIA to offer him backing. He’s waiting for you.”

“Will he try to call Washington?”

“He might, but we’ve seen to it that the Taliban have cut all the landlines to the Aiwan, and we control the cell phone towers within range.”

“How about satellite communications?”

“We have a good man in their computer section. Nothing will be leaving the Aiwan tonight.”

“Except me,” Haaris said. “Has it been reported to the CIA’s chief of station here that I’m missing?”

“The metro police reported an incident on their wire, one of dozens this morning.”

“No word from Langley?”

“No.” Rajput picked up his phone and said, “Now, if you please.”

A minute later a young man in army uniform without insignia of rank came in.

Haaris got to his feet and unwrapped the kaffiyeh. He stood still as the young technician secured what looked like a dog collar with a device about the size of a book of matches just below his Adam’s apple.

“Say, ‘My name is Legion.’”

Haaris spoke the words, but the voice coming from his mouth was nothing like his own. It was deeper, more resonant, the British accent almost completely absent.

FOUR

The four nuclear weapons, covered in wool blankets, were strapped to wooden cradles in the back of the Toyota SUV, the two uniformed guards sitting on top of them. They were south of Quetta, on the narrow highway to Delbandin, and Usman kept nervously looking in his rearview mirror. He could see the empty highway behind them, but he could also see the blank expressions on the faces of the two men, and he thought it was just like watching the zombie movies that were so popular.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting radiation sickness, sitting so close?” he asked.

Neither one of them wore name tags, and they could have been brothers, with slight builds, narrow faces, dark complexions, wide, dark eyes.

“They don’t leak,” the one on the right said. “And if they did you’d be in the same trouble as us.”

“You’re not nervous?”

“Just drive, Lieutenant. I’m not nervous, as you say, just damned uncomfortable.”

“And I have to take a piss,” the other guard said.

“I’m not stopping out here,” Usman said.

Ten minutes earlier they had passed through the town of Nushki, where nothing moved and very few lights shone. At this point they were fewer than thirty kilometers from the Afghan border, and Usman could feel the brooding hulk of the wild west country, once filled with friends of Pakistan who had now turned enemies. The mix of the nearness of the border and the weapons he was transporting had caused him to have waking nightmares: all he could see were hulking monsters, wave after wave of zombies, mushroom clouds, burning flesh, women and children screaming in agony. His armpits were soaked, his forehead was dripping, even his crotch was so wet it almost felt as if he had pissed himself.

He reached over and took from the glove box the SIG-Sauer P226 German pistol his father had given him as a graduation present from the military academy and laid it on the center console.

“There’s no one out here,” the one soldier said. “So you might as well let Saad take his piss, otherwise we’ll have to listen to him forever.”

“Thirty seconds,” Usman said. “Any longer than that and I’ll drive away without you.”

He slowed down, pulled off the side of the road and stopped. Immediately both soldiers got out and walked a few meters away.

Usman had asked for a radio in case he ran into trouble, but his request had been denied by his unit commander, Captain Siyal. He’d also been made to give up his cell phone.

“They have the capability of intercepting our radio transmissions and even our cell phone calls.”

“What if I break down in the middle of nowhere?”

“See that you don’t.”

“That makes no sense, Captain,” Usman had argued.

They were in Siyal’s office, and the captain spread his pudgy hands. “Personally I agree with you, but I too have my orders. Balochistan has been fairly quiet. Pick up your cargo, drive three hundred kilometers, hand it over and you’re done.”

The captain’s use of the word
cargo
bore no relationship in Usman’s mind to the things in the back of the SUV. The fact that Pakistan had more than one hundred of the weapons had given him a certain pride, a nationalistic fervor—until now. These things right here were not an abstraction. They were real. They were meant for only one purpose—to kill a lot of people.

He looked over his shoulder in time to see both soldiers lighting cigarettes. He couldn’t believe it. His nerves were jumping all over the place now, and the nearly absolute darkness of the night was pressing in.

Grabbing his pistol, he started to get out of the SUV, but for whatever reason he took the key from the ignition and put it in his pocket.

“What the hell are you men doing?” he shouted, walking around to the rear of the Toyota.

“A change of plans, Lieutenant,” one of them said, and he turned around, a pistol in his hand.

Usman reared back, and at the same time the solider to his left fired one shot that went wide.

Someone else from the darkness off the side of the road opened fire with a Kalashnikov, the rattle distinctive. The rounds slammed into the side of the SUV.

Usman ducked low as he raced across the road in the opposite direction and into the desert, the soft footing making it almost impossible for him to move fast.

Another burst of fire came from the highway, but then someone shouted something, and Usman continued running, as one of the soldiers answered.

“It doesn’t matter, let the bastard go. We don’t need him now.”

Only then did Usman remember the pistol in his belt. He stopped and turned around as he drew it and fired four shots in rapid succession at the side of the SUV, about twenty meters away.

Someone cried out, and Usman took several steps back toward the highway, when another burst of Kalashnikov fire bracketed him, one round slamming into his left side, knocking him backward but not off his feet.

“Let him go!” an unfamiliar voice commanded.

“He’s got the fucking key,” one of the soldiers shouted.

“What?”

“The key to the ignition!”

Usman staggered to the left as the shooters opened fire, this time off to the right. He hunched over again, and holding the wound to his side with his left hand ran as fast as he could into the desert, the soft sand catching his feet, wanting to trip him up, make him fall. His only consolation was that the sons of bitches coming after him would have the same problem. And one of them had cried out. With any luck he had hit the bastard hard.

The sand suddenly dropped away and he pitched forward onto his face and tumbled five meters into a depression. When he ended up on his stomach he rolled over onto his back and looked up to the crest of the sand dune. He was at the bottom of a bowl, with no easy way out.

He had managed to hold on to his pistol so when they came for him he would take them out. Maybe all of them.

Someone shouted something to the left, over the top of the dune, and immediately someone else to the right shouted back, and then others picked up the cry. Maybe a half dozen or more men, some of them speaking with a variation of the Gilgit tribal accent, one Baloch, another Brahui and two Pashtuns—the soldiers from Quetta—without a doubt all of them Taliban.

This had been trap from the beginning. Which meant that Captain Siyal or whoever had given the original orders was a traitor, as were the two guards from the air base, and possibly even the group captain.

But why put things like these into the hands of terrorists? All of a sudden he had at least one part of it: if the government fell American SEALS accompanying Nuclear Energy Support Teams would swoop down and disable as many of the weapons as they could. The highly trained NEST people, most of them nuclear scientists and engineers, were ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice to anywhere in the world. So it came down to losing the weapons either to the Americans or to the Taliban

It would be a perfect opportunity for India to launch a preemptive strike, which would very possibly embroil the entire region in an unwinnable war.

Usman laid his head back for just a moment.

The weapons were too heavy simply to pick up and carry away. They would need the SUV.

He sat up, took the car key from his pocket and making sure that no one had crested the dune and was watching him, tossed it as far as he could.

They might eventually find it, though maybe not until dawn, but by then when he hadn’t shown up at Delbandin the alarm might already have been sounded. Unless, of course, he’d never been expected to get that far in the first place. It never occurred to him that they might hot-wire the ignition.

He got to his feet, just a little dizzy now but not in any serious pain, and started for the wall on the opposite side of the depression down which he had fallen.

“I’ve got the bastard,” one of the soldiers cried from the crest.

Usman turned and fired in that direction, and kept firing until his pistol went dry, the slide locked in the open position.

He felt the Kalashnikov rounds striking his body before he heard the noise of the shots, and he fell back, dead as he hit the sand.

FIVE

The attacks across the city and down in Rawalpindi, where the Army General Headquarters was located, had increased just during the time Haaris had been inside with General Rajput. Small-arms fire and the occasional explosion rattled in almost every direction around Diplomatic Row in the Green Section. But there were no sirens.

Haaris had changed back into his blazer, white shirt and khakis, and he got off the elevator in the parking garage carrying a bright blue nylon shoulder bag, sealed with a U.S. State Department diplomatic tag. Word had finally come that the CIA knew that a man matching Haaris’s description had been kidnapped by the Taliban on the way from the airport. Traffic between Langley and the ISI had suddenly become heavy.

He tossed the bag in the backseat of the Fiat and got in with it.

Lieutenant Jura turned around. “It might not be such a good idea for you to be seen dressed like that tonight.”

“I’m back to being an American CIA officer.”

“If the Taliban spot you they won’t hesitate to kill you.”

“We’ll just have to take the chance. But this is the only way I’m going to get into the Aiwan to see Barazani.”

“There’s no way that the guards will let us through the gate, even if we could get to it. Right now there’s a crowd on Constitution Avenue and it’s growing.”

It was just what Haaris was counting on. “We’re going in from the Colony.” The Aiwan-e-Sadr, located between the parliament building and cabinet block, was actually a compound of several buildings in addition to the president’s main residence and workplace that were used as the residences of his staff and families, and was called the President’s Colony, just off Fourth Street.

“The guards there are just as likely to shoot first and ask for credentials later.”

“They’ve been told that I’m coming.”

“Yes, sir,” Jura said. “But if you’re carrying a weapon, I suggest that you keep it out of sight. It wouldn’t do you any good.”

They headed out of the garage and around to the main gate, where the barrier was immediately raised and they were waved through. The streets were all but deserted; it was something else Haaris had been counting on. The growing crowd at the Aiwan was draining Taliban and ordinary citizens alike from across the city. The same thing had happened during the trouble in Beijing some years earlier, and during the problems in Cairo and a dozen other capital cities just lately. The world was starting to light up, and how big and terrible the fires would become before they died down was anyone’s guess.

Haaris sat back in the seat. By now Charlene Miller, the president of the United States, would be assembling her security team in the Situation Room, if she hadn’t already done so, trying to figure out if the situation here had gotten critical yet.

He expected that at the very least she would have ordered that the NEST teams be alerted for possible deployment. She was an intellectual who preferred the calm approach; she leaned toward thinking things out, getting the opinions of her staff, working out all of the options, before coming to a decision. But when she made one it was firm and final.

Her favorite line to her directors of National Intelligence and the CIA was that blowback, the unintended consequences that often came because an operation had gone in some direction no one had anticipated, “will never be an option on my watch.”

The blowback this time was going to be more than any of them had ever imagined. Much more. And for a purpose.

*   *   *

Jura had to make a long detour around Constitution Avenue because of the crowd, which already stretched at least a kilometer from the Aiwan, to get to the rear of the compound and the heavily guarded gate into the Colony. Four soldiers from the president’s Special Security Unit, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s, surrounded the Fiat.

Haaris lowered the window and handed out his diplomatic passport. “I’m expected,” he said in English.

Jura rolled down his window and he translated into Punjabi, but the senior guard handed back Haaris’s passport. “Do you know the way?” he asked in good English.

“Yes, I’ve been here before.”

“Don’t leave the main driveway. And only you may go inside, your driver must stay with the car.”

They eased through the gate and Jura followed the broad driveway around the side of the Presidential Palace past several of the residences. BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars were parked in carports, but none of the buildings other than the palace showed any lights. The president’s staff and their families were keeping a very low profile this evening.

With the windows of the Fiat down they could hear the low rumble of the crowd around front. So far the demonstration was peaceful, though no one thought that would last. The Taliban were attacking in a dozen or more spots around Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and possibly in other key cities, though information broadcast over television and radio was spotty at best. But the people were demanding that the government do something about it. The police and especially the army were nowhere to be seen. So far as the ordinary citizen knew the cowards had barricaded themselves inside their bases. Even the air force, which should have sent jets aloft to fire on the enemy, were absent from the skies.