The Towers (44 page)

Teddy told Swager to stay above and behind him and moseyed in, safety off, putting one boot carefully in front of the other, not taking his eyes off the crumpled bundles between the tumbled rocks as he neared them.

Only a few of the infiltrators had made it up to where he and Swager had been posted. The MG and claymores had torn up those who had. He found one still alive, but the way his chest looked, it wasn't worth wasting a pressure bandage. Teddy could see the man's heart beating. He looked up without expression. Then the pulsing in the middle of the blood stopped and he closed his eyes. “Enjoy Hell, asshole,” Teddy told him. Swager managed a laugh. Maybe the kid would harden up, after all.

Verstegen, on the tac net again: “Any prisoners, wounded, up where you are, Chief?”

“None here, sir.”

“Got a hard count?”

“Tough to say, they're mixed all in among these rocks.”

“Rough count.”

“Thirteen, fourteen … fifteen. Might be crawlers, though.”

Swager asked him, “What's disposition on these dudes, Chief? You heard anything?”

“The dog meat, you mean? Leave 'em for the villagers,” Teddy told him.

He stood among the bodies as the gray light kept growing. More baggy
shalwar kameez
, shaggy, stinking sheepskin coats, flat wool caps, old Soviet gas-mask bags, worn-out AKs. They didn't look as if they'd ever had much to eat, and even less in the recent past. They were all small and all had beards. Except the boys. One lay on his back, smooth-faced, arms flung wide, eyes and mouth open.

But no tall, bearded, hound-dog-eyed Arab. None in black capes or black turbans either. These weren't Al Qaeda. Not the fabled Fifty-Fifth Brigade, Bin Laden's bodyguard, the shock troops of the jihad. Bad guys, but not the ones they wanted. He glanced back down at the valley, into the mist or smoke that hazed the ground down there. The boiling kettle the men they'd killed had been trying to escape. He took off his cap and scratched his head all over. Call in resupply … they'd gone in light … ammo, batteries, water, chow. Search the night's crop for maps, documents, anything intel could use. But the valley kept drawing his eyes.

Was he really down there? Bin Laden? Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn't.

But if the guy thought he was coming through here, he had another thing coming.

 

21

Joint Special Operations Center, Bagram

THE
moving party had arrived. Five men, all laconically silent as they helped Dan and Henrickson and Wenck pack up. Everything resided either in their notebooks, the main server, or back at TAG. CIRCE herself was at TAG; the combined outputs resided remotely, accessed only by those with clearances and need to know via the SIPRNET—the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. So all they really had to move was their computers and any personal snivel gear—tissue boxes, M&M's, and clean socks. No one told them why; it had just come down. Within two hours they were set up again and operating out of the JSOC. Still at Bagram, still in a tent, but in a smaller, even more elaborately fenced compound-within-a-compound. “Should've had you plugged in here from the get-go,” Provanzano said, looking at their setup with fingers stuffed in the back pockets of his jeans. He kept sniffling, like a toddler with a cold.

“Need to take it easy on that inhaler,” Dan said.

“Only thing lets me get any sleep. Okay, you went to Gardez with Beanie. And you're reading the command net. So you know what we've got written for bin Laden's last act.”

“I know we're depending on the Afghan allies.”

“Almost correct. Once one of the A-Teams can get us a GPS fix on that bunker, we blow it down on top of him. We're not gonna tunnel-rat around. Just blow it and bury him. Which is why you're officially with us now. Can you do that?”

“I can't give you an unqualified yes.”

“Or a no? I see. Well, we fought off Big Army. With some help from upstairs. It's up to us to deliver. Get in and get this mopped up before winter closes us down.” Provanzano peered at a map Wenck had taped to an equipment rack. “What else've they got you doing? I think we can throttle back on Template. Since we know where he is.”

“We do?”

“The intercepted call.”

“They're not sure that's him.”

“We played it to a guy who knows him.” The CIA man winked and started to leave, then turned back. “Tell me when you're ready. Actually I don't know if we'll call on you, we have plenty of Air Force, but it's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. Any questions, ask Commander Laughland.” Provanzano waved forward a compact guy who'd just come in. He wore the black SEAL insignia on his BDU.

Dan mustered his strength, but Laughland's grip wasn't as daunting as it could have been. “Dan Lenson.”

“Denny Laughland. Heard about you, sir. You've worked with us before.”

“Yeah?” Dan was always astonished at how small a town the Navy was.

“Obie Oberg told me about hijacking the Iranian sub. How you got them out of it when he figured you were toast. Good job.” This seemed to dispose of the courtesies, because Laughland went straight into asking what Dan could do for an assault in terms of missile support.

“Can't answer that yet, Denny. We need to get intimate with the topography. Especially those mountains to the south.”

Laughland nodded and checked his watch. “We do a roundup at 2000. Let's see where we are by then.”

Dan got more coffee at the mess in the back of the JSOC, abandoning his fantasy of a nooner. He and Henrickson and Wenck worked the mission profile all afternoon. Tora Bora was actually at the foot of a mountain range. They needed specifics—exact location of the caves, depth, structure, geologics. But the databases were bare. Special Forces had tried to penetrate the valley, get ground-truth intel, but hadn't made it in far. Plus, both altitude and terrain worked against a missile that had never been designed for mountain warfare.

Still, they worked the problem, and eventually Wenck found a pass to the south they might squeeze the missile through at the very end of its range, if they let it loiter en route to burn off its fuel load. Scrutinizing the topos, Laughland found several more passes, though most had approaches that rose too abruptly for the Block IIIs. And even if the bunker was deep in the valley, Henrickson found a way to combine a wide sweep north to shed altitude with the pop-up/terminal dive maneuver to get the missile down there. Exposing the airframe to fire, true, but the numbers showed a 90 percent–plus probability of survival. Dan multiplied this by the probable losses going through the passes. The results looked expensive, but war was never cheap.

By midafternoon he was confident about taking out a bunker of any reasonable size and construction. After all, the Tomahawk warhead had been designed to drive almost four hundred kilos of PBXN and a hardened detonator through the armor of a Kynda-class cruiser. Henrickson set up a five-missile mission from
Bremerton,
on station with the
Kitty Hawk
battle group. Striking one after the other, they calculated three surviving missiles should blast through forty feet of concrete or granite.

Meanwhile, though, those passes nagged. If there were routes through the Spin Ghahr, not only could missiles travel north, escaping AQT could go south. The Pakistani army was supposed to be in blocking positions. But were they up in the passes, the natural bottlenecks? Or down in the valleys?

Not in his in-box, but Dan couldn't let it go. When he had the mission as close to finished as possible without final coordinates, he left the sub on one-hour standby to terminal programming and went to find Provanzano.

First stop: mess line. The CIA man wasn't there, but Dan got a tray. He'd discovered years ago at sea that, to some extent, calories compensated for lack of sleep. Men stood nodding off, gazes distant. He ate at a folding table with three he didn't know. “Your guys doing all right?” one asked another. “Or are you still trying to kick-start 'em?”

“They're moving. Only trouble is, they all went home for dinner last night.”

“They come back this morning?”

“Most of 'em.”

Dan assumed this meant Afghans, but didn't ask. He leaned over his MRE and shut his eyes for a moment.

Someone shook him awake. He discovered his face pressing into the table. “No rest, buddy,” one of the specfors said. “Last inning. Full-court press. Finish this up and go home.”

When he got back, the CIA man was sitting with Henrickson, looking at the screen. “There's over thirty passes, just on the topo,” the CIA man was saying. Dan looked down at the top of his head, suppressing a sudden urge to pull him over backward. This was
his
chair.

Damn. He had to get some sleep soon. “Tony. I help you?”

“We were looking at escape routes. Looks like you were, too.” Provanzano rubbed a receding hairline with small white pimples breaking out on it. “In case he doesn't just sit still and wait for us to come to him.”

Dan remembered the discussion at the JOC. “I thought that was his strategy. Sucker us in and clobber us.”

“Maybe so, but there's also a strain of thought we're finding in some of the recovered documentation that says, when you're threatened by overwhelming force, retreat. Classic guerrilla tactics. Live to fight another day. They've got a safe haven twenty miles away. I know what the Army thinks, but we might need to do something more.”

“At least, kick it up the chain,” Dan said.

“Exactly.” Provanzano stood. “Let's go see Faulcon.”

Dan took a moment to react. “General Faulcon?” The commander of all Special Forces in Afghanistan.

“Why the hell not? He's a real approachable guy.” Provanzano sniffed and strolled away. After a moment, Dan followed.

*   *   *

THE
general was so gaunt his face looked vacuum-sealed. They said he had only one good eye, but Dan couldn't tell which one. Both were cold as a cryogenic experiment. His office was a corner of the TOC walled off with vertical dividers. A map of the Tora Bora valley was overlaid with grease-penciled Mylar, with numerous erasure smears. Remaining were curved arrows showing three axes of advance into the valley, the inward-toothed embrace Dan knew now meant “isolate,” and the pronged arrows and bar that meant “clear” in NATO tactical shorthand. Each was lettered with the name of an Afghan warlord and the designation of his accompanying A-Team.

Faulcon's glance said he and Provanzano had a working relationship. “This is the guy I told you about,” Provanzano provided by way of introduction. The general nodded in Dan's direction, then seemed to recall something. He frowned, then stood.

Faulcon saluted. Dan nodded, feeling awkward as always, then decided, to hell with it. And saluted back, even though the Navy didn't salute indoors. What could they do? Take away his birthday? Although Nick Niles probably would, if he could figure out how.

“The Medal winner,” Faulcon said, sticking out bony fingers. “I'm honored.”

“Thank you, sir.” Dan endured a grip that felt as if it could fracture phalanges. “It should've gone to a National Guard doctor, and some marines. But I wear it in their honor.”

Faulcon motioned to chairs. “What's on your mind, Tony?”

Halfway through the explanation Faulcon swiveled to a terminal and began bringing up screens. He studied one as Provanzano finished, then rotated the monitor toward them. Pricks of white dotted a black featurelessness. “IR,” he said. As if every word cost him a dollar.

Dan leaned to see, but got no wiser. “Uh, what are those, General?”

“Campfires. Reaching up toward those passes.”

“We haven't seen that imagery yet,” Provanzano said. “But it only backs us up. What's our level of confidence in the Pak army?”

Faulcon considered. “Low.”

“What if he doesn't want to stay and face the music?”

“I'm aware that's a possibility.”

“Of course you are. Come on, Randy. I can give you two Twelve teams. You can draw assets from Ka-Bar and Cutlass. SAS, SBS, SEALs. Spot them in the most likely passes.”

The general thought. “The passes are in Pakistani territory.”

“So what?”

“No penetration. Even in hot pursuit. We need their cooperation.”

Dan said, “There are, what, customs agents in these passes? Pakistani border guards? I don't think so. Who's going to see our troops?”

Faulcon's shoulders moved fractionally. “Pakistani special operations.”

“In the
passes
?” Provanzano shook his head like a wet Labrador. “They're not going up there. Not those boys. If anybody's going to block them, it's got to be us.”

“I proposed that yesterday. And was turned down.”

“Sometimes you have to disobey a stupid order,” Dan said.

Both men glanced at him, Faulcon with evaluating eyes, Provanzano with a smirk. The general leaned to a phone console. “Sergeant? I need the JAG in here.”

The legal officer looked as lean and fit as any of the other officers in the headquarters. A little older, that was all; Harrison Ford–ish; slightly graying. Provanzano went over it again with him.

“You want to be very wary about irritating the Pakistanis,” the adviser said. “We're going to be dependent on them, if he does escape.”

“Let's see. We're going to neglect an opportunity to catch him, so we have a better chance later on?” Provanzano chuckled. He seemed to be ribbing the general, as an equal, perhaps even a superior.

“The ambassador to Pakistan has threatened to resign if we do any cross-border incursions. Musharraf has promised to render OBL to us.”

Provanzano: “Again: Does he have the capability to do that? In a part of the mountains he doesn't even govern?”