The Midnight House (38 page)

THREE MINUTES LATER,
the Nissan and Mitsubishi rolled up. The Deltas stepped out, popped the trunk of the Nissan, pulled two bags of gear. Two operatives hid themselves inside the Mitsubishi, their silenced Glocks at the ready. If a Talib patrol happened down the cart track and decided to investigate, they had orders to shoot on sight. The other three Deltas and Maggs ran around the house and joined Snyder.

“Nice job, Chris,” Armstrong said.

Snyder nodded. Nothing more needed to be said. The five of them pulled on specially made gas masks that had penlights embedded in the rubber above their eyes—enabling them to see without having to carry flashlights—and stepped through the window into the corner bedroom. It was unadorned, not even a rug, just a couple of faded blankets on the mattress. Neither husband nor wife stirred. They were breathing, but slowly, irregularly. Snyder was sure he could smell the gas, though he knew it was odorless. He was glad for his mask.
Do androids dream of electric sheep?

“Let’s get them out before they OD,” he said.

They cuffed the man’s hands and feet together and taped his mouth shut and his eyes closed and carried him to the room that ran along the front of the house. They repeated the procedure with the woman and then moved into the boys’ room.

“Damn it,” Snyder said.

Faisal, the smallest boy and the one who’d gotten the biggest hit of gas, seemed to have overdosed. His lips were faintly blue and his chest wasn’t moving. Snyder pushed back the boy’s eyelids and saw only white. He felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one. Finally he picked up a slow thump, barely thirty beats a minute.

He picked up the boy and carried him out of the bedroom and set him next to his parents on a threadbare rug in front of a poster of the hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca, and began CPR, five chest pumps and three quick breaths, five and three, five and three, harder and harder. A rib cracked under him, but he didn’t stop.
Come on, come on . . .
He hadn’t killed this kid. He couldn’t have.

Then Faisal coughed. His chest rose an inch, two inches, higher, his heart awakening even as his brain slept. His mouth opened and air leaked out, not a last breath but a first. Snyder pulled away and watched the boy breathe. Armstrong walked in.

“He okay?” Armstrong said.

“I broke his rib, but yeah.”

“Then cuff him and tape his mouth.”

Snyder wanted to argue, but Armstrong was right. They couldn’t let him scream. He laid duct tape over the boy’s mouth.

“You watch ’em while we find this laptop,” Armstrong said.

“Yessir.”

Snyder closed his eyes and wobbled. He sat heavily on the couch and wondered if he’d somehow gotten a lungful of gas.

“You might want to draw your weapon, Snyder.”

Snyder reached for his pistol as Armstrong walked out.

 

 

THE KITCHEN HAD A TABLE
and six chairs, a wooden cabinet full of chipped plates and cups, a propane-fired stove, and—

“Concrete,” Maggs said. “They had to have a concrete floor.”

Compared to the rest of the house, the kitchen floor was magnificently built, a single solid slab. Henry Task, who at twenty-nine was the youngest member of the Delta team, grabbed pickaxes and hammers and chisels from his bag of gear. Armstrong pulled a metal detector from the second bag. Maggs wondered if a laptop held enough metal to trigger a detector under six inches of concrete. He checked his watch. Ten forty-five already, and they would need at least a few minutes to get through the concrete. They were cutting it close. They had to be over the bridge and out of Mingora by midnight.

Armstrong made a sweep, stopped by the base of the cabinet. “Getting something.” Maggs and Task pushed the cabinet sideways. Armstrong waved the detector over the spot where it had stood. “Not much, but it’s there,” he said. “I hope.”

Maggs and Task grabbed pickaxes and started swinging.

 

 

IN THE FRONT ROOM,
Dad woke up first. Not surprising, as he was the biggest and had gotten the smallest dose relative to his weight. He nodded his head sideways, the first hint of voluntary motion. A few seconds later, he turned on his side. Snyder tried to imagine the panic he must feel. He’d fallen asleep in his bed and woken up somewhere else, his hands and legs cuffed, blind and unable to speak, hearing men grunting in a language that wasn’t his. As Snyder watched, he flipped onto his back and thrashed, swinging his legs up and down, looking for any purchase.

“Stop,” Snyder said.

Armstrong ran into the room. He straddled the father and smacked him across the temple with the butt of his pistol, twice. The dull sound of metal cracking bone echoed off the concrete. The man groaned through his duct tape and his bound legs swung down.

“Snyder,” Armstrong said. “Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m sorry, Major.”

Snyder didn’t know if he had taken a hit of the gas or was simply exhausted. He’d never failed on a mission before. Then again, he’d never been on a mission like this before.

“Go into the kitchen and stay there.”

“Yessir.”

 

 

MAGGS AND TASK
and Bruce Irwin, the fourth Delta in the house, were chipping steadily into the concrete, their pickaxes rising and falling as steadily as the arm of an oil pump. Then Task stopped. “Sir,” he said. “I think I felt something.”

Maggs knelt down and saw the corner of a black plastic bundle peeking out of the edge of the hole they’d made.

“No more axes. Be a damn shame to put a hole in the hard drive.” Maggs and Task lay on the floor and pounded away, trying to enlarge the hole with hammer and chisel. The clank of steel on steel ricocheted through the kitchen. Maggs wondered if the neighbors would hear. No matter, because it was 11:20 already. One way or another, they were leaving soon.

Sweat poured down his face. He pulled off his mask, figuring the gas must have long since dissipated. He hammered away at a seam in the concrete, and the hole widened enough for him to slide his fingertips around the edges of the plastic. He tugged at it, wormed it forward inch by inch, no longer concerned it might be booby-trapped. This valley was its own trap. The bundle slid forward in his fingers, stopped, and then came free.

“Let’s go.”

Task began to pile the axes back into the bag, but Maggs grabbed his arm. “Forget it, Sergeant.”

IN THE LIVING ROOM,
Maggs held up the bundle to Armstrong, who raised a fist in silent triumph. They stepped out the front door and piled into the Nissan and the van and rolled out. Through the village. Through Desai. Over the bridge. Onto the road that led out of the Swat Valley and over the mountains. With every mile, Maggs felt himself relax. They’d put their necks in the guillotine, and somehow the blade hadn’t dropped.

Then they rounded a corner to start the long climb southwest. And they hit the roadblock.

An extended-cab Toyota pickup sat astride the pavement two hundred yards ahead, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod in its bed. Three Talibs stood beside the gun, two more inside the cab. The militants apparently hadn’t been expecting to face anyone coming out of Mingora. The .50-cal—actually a Russian 12.7-millimeter TUV—was pointed up the road, away from the van. But as they rolled close, the Talibs swung it around until its muzzle faced them. A man jumped out of the pickup.

“Halt! ”

“Major—” Snyder said.

Armstrong stopped the van, raised his hands, looked straight at the Talib. “Nothing fancy here,” he murmured in English. “We’re just gonna take them out. Maggs. You’re going out the back with your AK. You’ve got to hit the guys on the .50. I’ll floor it, crash into the side of the truck.”

“Done,” Maggs said.

“You ready, Chris?”

“Yessir.”

SNYDER WASN’T AT ALL SURE
he was ready. The TUV had a three-foot barrel and a range of nearly a mile. Up close, it had the power to vaporize skulls. And it was definitely up close. Snyder didn’t see how Maggs could get out the back and get a bead on the gunners before they took him and Armstrong out. He began to pray, silently,
Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .

“Cool,” Armstrong said, his voice steady as a pilot warning of turbulence ahead.

Behind them, Maggs dropped the safety on his AK, unlocked the doors of the van.

 

 

THE TALIB RAN TOWARD THEM,
his left hand raised, his right gripping his AK. From the back of the pickup, the gunner put a spotlight on them, its glare nearly blinding.

“Turn back!” the Talib yelled.

Armstrong eased off the gas, lowered his window. The van rolled forward. “Have mercy. We’re taking my father to Peshawar, the hospital!” he yelled in Pashto. “He’s very sick.”

The Talib stood in front of them, lowered his AK. “No exceptions to the curfew. Take him home.”

“Please. He won’t survive the night. He’s in the back. Talk to him.
Inshallah,
you’ll see.”

As Armstrong spoke, Maggs opened the back door and stepped into the road behind the van. Armstrong touched the gas and the van inched forward.

“I won’t tell you again. Turn around.”

Maggs stepped sideways and fired a three-shot burst at the gunner on the TUV. As he did, Armstrong floored the gas. The Mitsubishi leapt forward at the Talib in the road. He fired three shots, missing high, and then disappeared with a grunt under the van. The Mitsubishi thumped over him, front wheels and then back, and roared forward.

In the bed of the pickup, the gunner groaned and slumped forward just as he squeezed the trigger. The TUV’s burst missed high and wide. The Talib beside the gunner tried to push him aside, but Maggs laid out another burst. The rounds tore into the second man’s shoulder and knocked him into the bed of the pickup.

In the passenger seat, Snyder could only watch through the windshield as the van closed on the pickup. He had the distinct feeling that he wasn’t actually in the van, that he was watching a movie of the scene rather than living it. At moments like this, time was supposed to slow, he knew. He was supposed to remember the great moments in his life. Instead, a groaning feeling of unreality overwhelmed him—

The van rammed the pickup broadside and crumpled its passenger door, crushing the Talib in the passenger seat instantly. The impact tossed Snyder and Armstrong against their seat belts, which gave a few inches and then tightened and pulled them back. The van’s engine block was shoved backward, toward Snyder, as his seat popped forward, forcing his left leg up and out. The engine rammed Snyder’s leg and snapped his tibia and fibula as cleanly as wishbones.

As Snyder screamed, the driver of the pickup opened the door and ran through the brush, down the side of the hill, toward Mingora. Armstrong lifted his pistol and shot through the front windshield at him but didn’t get him.

Armstrong laid a hand on Snyder’s shoulder. “You okay.”

“I can’t move, Major. My leg.”

Armstrong looked down at Snyder’s leg, the ankle curled back under the calf in a pose even the best yoga instructor couldn’t have managed. Wounded Warrior Six. “We’ll get you out.”

“Yessir.”

Armstrong tried to pop his door open, but the frame of the Mitsubishi was bowed and the door wouldn’t come loose. He wriggled out the back of the van, the laptop in hand, as tendrils of smoke began to rise from the front of the Mitsubishi. Snyder shot out his window to get air. He hung his head out the side of the truck and coughed.

Maggs ran toward the pickup as the Talib in the bed of the truck came to his knees. The Talib’s AK had gotten caught behind him. He scrabbled for it as blood poured out of the shoulder. Then the Talib gave up and tentatively lifted his hands over his shoulders—

And as he did, Maggs fired a burst and he went down. No prisoners. Not here, not now.