Black Site (11 page)

Raynor scooped up everything in the bag, grabbed the Glock and the AK with his fingertips, and lugged it all awkwardly up a thin trail on the hillside.

Behind him the AKs cracked again, tearing brush and dirt on both sides of him.

Kolt stumbled several times before disappearing from view. Behind him he heard the chants of “Allahu Akbar,” and panic threatened to overtake him as he struggled upward.

THIRTEEN

Kolt had a fire built not long after dark, and by 9 p.m. he was warm and dry and fed, to the extent that rice and warm water could sustain him. Kolt had always found comfort in the wilderness. But this altitude was seriously sapping his strength, and he knew he needed sleep. His body craved alcohol—this cold-turkey method of drying out made his head heavy and his stomach twist with nausea. He found it hard to get comfortable, but finally he dozed on a thin bedroll near the fire, under a camouflage tarp erected as a tent. His rifle lay by his side, his pistol on his chest.

He awoke twice to stoke and feed the fire. Each time he tossed and turned and thought of booze before finally falling back to sleep.

A third time he woke, and instantly he knew something was not right. He reached for the Glock on his chest and found it missing. He felt out for his rifle and it was gone too. A heavy boot stepped on his searching hand and pinned it into the soft earth by the fire. His left arm was grabbed by a figure under the tarp with him, and someone dropped their body weight down on his legs.

He was pinned to the ground, and the blows came hard and fast, to his stomach and his bruised chest. Boots kicked his legs. The tarp disappeared, torn in the melee. Men shouted in Pashto—he had no idea the number of them, only that they were above him and they had him and they were making him pay for leaving the fire burning, announcing his position to the entire valley.

Someone slapped ice-cold mud into his face, forced it under his lips and into his nose.

And then, suddenly, the attack ceased, and everyone on top of him dispersed.

Monk knelt over him now. Kolt could not see his face, just recognized the silhouette in front of the fire, and his low voice.

“Haji won’t be so kind to you. You’ve got thirty-nine more engagements with us, Raynor. Are we going to kill you
every
damn time?”

Kolt said nothing. He pulled his arms in tight to his body, as if to ward off the blows that had already fallen. Monk stood and muttered something to his men. Immediately they began kicking at the fire, extinguishing the flames and the warmth with their boots. When nothing remained but a low pile of smoldering coals, two Taliban-dressed men grabbed Raynor by the shoulders and dragged him off his bedroll, pushed him up into a kneeling position, and slid a thick and wet wool bag over his head. Monk flipped the safety catch down on his Kalashnikov and stepped behind Raynor in the dark.

Raynor shouted out through the wool. “Monk! You know AQ and Taliban don’t execute soldiers in the field!”

Sergeant Kraus’s reply came just as fast. “You’re no soldier, asshole.”

A single gunshot cracked and the back of Raynor’s head ignited in fiery pain, his neck snapped forward, and he fell facefirst into the mud. Agony and shame and cold were prevalent in his mind. He did not move for a minute as he breathed wet wool.

When he did move, when he finally sat back up and took off the bag, he felt at the back of his head, fingered the knot at the base of his skull. They’d put the bag on him to keep the simulated round from doing even more damage. Still, it hurt like a bitch.

He turned around to yell again at Kraus, but all the men had melted away on the dark mountainside.

Kolt Raynor crawled on his beaten hands and knees back to his bedroll, pulled the torn tarp over himself like a blanket, rolled into the fetal position, and moaned.

*   *   *

“Two friendlies, coming in!” The shout came from down the hill, the voice muffled by the thick firs and pines and by the snowfall that drifted lazily toward the wet ground. Raynor sat on his pack and stoked the fresh fire in front of him, lifted a collapsible metal pot out of the flames, and poured instant coffee into three tin cups on a flat rock near the fire.

“Friendlies, my ass,” he muttered softly.

Raynor had bandaged his head to keep the mud out of the shallow swollen wound at the base of his skull. He’d also wrapped his two smallest fingers on his left hand together to reduce swelling in a sprained knuckle, and put antibiotic medicine and gauze on the oozing scrapes where the AK Sim rounds had broken the skin on his chest. His ribs and extremities were sore from the beating he’d taken the night before, and the cold had done nothing but stiffen his body further.

On either side of him, close by, were his weapons. He’d cleaned them at first light, their chambers were loaded, and spare magazines rested at the ready in a shoulder rig by his side.

Monk and Benji appeared from the wood line near the camp. They wore camouflage fatigues and small backpacks, and they sat down in the dirt by the fire, each taking a cup of black coffee from Kolt as they came to rest.

Kolt opened the conversation. “No chance I can get a couple of days to get acclimated to the altitude? The air is thin and—”

Monk interrupted. “No chance.”

Kolt rubbed the aching bulb on the back of his head. “Who is in the opfor? Other than you, I mean?”

“Haji we scarfed up in Konar Province. You may recognize one or two if you look close enough. Radiance Security hired them to come to the States. Bet they figured they’d be riding rides at Disneyland and not just exchanging one cold-assed valley for another. I’m in charge of them.”

“Yeah, I put that together when you executed me.”

Benji laughed into his coffee cup, stifled himself after a second. Monk just stared out over the foggy morning valley.

Raynor looked to him. He started to complain, to tell Kraus that throwing him up here at ten thousand feet in the snow and pummeling the shit out of him was not the training that Webber and Grauer had promised. But he held his tongue. Kolt knew better than to whine.

Monk would enjoy that, and Kolt did not want to give the big sergeant the satisfaction.

Kolt fought the urge to bitch, and instead just asked, “So, what’s on today’s lesson plan?”

Monk sucked the steaming coffee down his throat. He motioned to all of Raynor’s gear. “Today you’re going to get all this on your back, descend the valley, cross the floor, and then ascend to nine thousand on the other side.”

Raynor just looked off at the mountains on the far edge of the valley, thinking about his sore ribs and the heavy straps that would soon be cinched tight across them.

“You’ll make camp, and then come back down the mountain and meet us at the ranch. We’ve got some gear lists to go over, some maps to memorize, codes and radio freqs, shit like that. Then, after dark, you’re heading back up to your camp.”

“Where I’ll no doubt get jumped by you and your gunners.”

Monk smiled for the first time. “No doubt at all.”

“Is there a medic at the ranch?”

“Sure is. You hurt?”

“No. Just planning ahead.” He thought a moment. “I need some O2.”

“No. You’re good. We won’t start pushing you for a couple more days.”

“Look, Monk. I’m more amped up than anybody about getting T.J. back. I just need—”

Monk tossed the dregs of his instant coffee over the fire. Stood up. “The problem is, Raynor, that you need to be switched on,
not
amped up. Your good intentions aren’t going to amount to jack squat in Hajiland. We are going to make it uncomfortable for you now, miserable for you in a couple of days, impossible for you before the week is out. You aren’t going to make it through this, you are going to fail, fall by the wayside, and then Webber and Grauer can move on and find a qualified former Unit member to do this job.”

“So you think I’m just wasting everyone’s time here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“This is because I was an officer, isn’t it?”

“In some ways, yeah, that’s what this is about. What has to be done in Khyber has nothing to do with being an officer.”

“Bullshit. I led men into combat. I have fought—”

“Yeah, and that last batch of men you led into combat are dead, so you don’t have anybody left to lead. What is needed now is a man who can lead his own body, and Raynor, you don’t seem to exert the same kind of control over yourself that you did on others.”

“Then tell Webber I’m unsatisfactory, and then we can all move on!”

“I would love to tell him you are unsat, but he isn’t going to take my word for it. You’ll have to quit or drop dead on this mountain. So either you get your shit together and get ready for this mission, or by God I will do my damnedest to drop you dead on this mountain.
If
T.J. and the boys are over there,
if
they are alive, then you can be damn sure we aren’t going to get a second chance to prove it. I have been against you going from the very beginning, I know you are going to fuck it up, so the best thing that can happen is you fuck it up in Wyoming, so you don’t compromise a real attempt at a rescue. Your failure is the best thing to increase this mission’s chances of success.”

Kolt stood angrily, began breaking camp. It was going to be a long day, and arguing with David Kraus wasn’t going to make it go by any faster.

FOURTEEN

Kolt was “killed” again five hours later. He’d spent an hour at the ranch meeting and getting started with his Pashto instructor, a middle-aged woman in a hijab face covering who did not know his name; nor did he know hers. An hour later the Afghani opfor hit him on a mountain pass at nine thousand feet, a typical L-shaped ambush, and Kolt knew he should have seen it coming. He marveled at the ease with which these Afghans could handle the altitude, and he wished he was as thin-blooded as they. After the hit he struggled higher up the mountain, and he made it through the night without another attack.

But when he was hit again the next morning on his way down to the ranch, he managed to shoot three enemy and break contact, sliding and splashing and rolling down a hill until the opfor gave up the pursuit.

Day three found Raynor with a serious head cold. The altitude and the low temps had swollen his sinuses shut, his weakness growing worse instead of better. By day four he was on a cot in the ranch, getting injections of antibiotics and vitamins from the doctor. Though sick as a dog he kept his language training up. That, he felt, would be the extent of his work until he got back on his feet, but he was wrong. Monk and his Taliban attacked him in the building itself—they did not give him a day off just because he was sick. He was pulled from his cot in the hallway, pushed back down into the kneeling position, covered with the hood to absorb some, but not enough, of the impact from the Simunitions round, and “executed” again by the Delta master sergeant.

After being cleared by the doctor he was led down to the front door. His pack was waiting for him outside in the rain, and he hefted it with tired and sore muscles and staggered off into a mountain storm. “You’re discharged from the hospital,” growled Monk as Kolt stepped out into the weather.

It got worse before it got better, but it
did
get better. On day eight, just after a grueling one-hundred-foot rock-climbing ascent with Benji, four of Monk’s Afghans attacked in a pincer move, attempting to pin Raynor against the rock wall. But Kolt took down the two men on his left, flanked the others as they moved in for the kill, and destroyed the rest of the opfor arrayed against him.

His physical and mental strength began to grow with each passing day. Not in a straight line—day eleven had him back under a doctor’s care, and day fourteen had him on the verge of quitting after he was executed by Kraus yet again while sitting at a picnic table studying Pashto with his teacher. But by day seventeen he’d dropped twenty pounds of fat, revealing lean muscle that was hardening by the day, and his body was sufficiently acclimated to the altitude for him to operate the entire day without teetering on the edge of collapse. He also improved his Pashto, practiced with the gear he’d be taking with him over the border, studied maps of the FATA, and finally took down all eight opfor, when Kolt found a hide above their staging area for an attack on his camp, and then sniped them one by one with his AK at sixty yards as they struggled to pinpoint the origin of fire.

Two days later he “killed” all eight of his opponents again, the last two in hand-to-hand combat that ended with both Taliban tapping out, and with muscle spasms in their necks and bruises on their backsides that would nag the fit young Afghans for days to come.

*   *   *

On his final full day in Wyoming, Raynor staged another surprise attack on Monk and his forces. Most of the Afghans had long tired of the hunt, especially after they found themselves, as often as not, the prey. They were just leaving the ranch in the early-morning darkness, with a plan to set a dawn ambush in the tall grasses a kilometer up the trail Kolt would take into the valley. But their quarry had come down during the night, positioned himself by their 4×4s, and ferociously attacked and killed every last man as they sleepily began to lace up their boots and load their guns on the front porch. Monk made it into the front door of the lodge, but Kolt chased him back inside, rushed right past Benji and the doctor, and kicked Kraus’s pistol out of his hand the instant he raised it to fire. The master sergeant put his hands up in surrender, smiled, and began complimenting his pupil on how far he’d come in three weeks.

“I gotta hand it to you. I didn’t think you had—”

“Shut the fuck up!” barked Raynor, a hard, wild look in his eyes. He spun Monk around, turning his face toward the paneled wall of the huge great room. Kicked at the back of the older man’s knees until he dropped into a kneeling position.

“Benji, you better get Monk a padded hood.”

Kraus’s hands were still up in the air. Furious, he shouted, “Americans don’t execute prisoners, Raynor!”

“American
soldiers
don’t, Sergeant. But, like you said, I’m no soldier.” Benji rushed over with the hood, put it over Monk’s head, and Kolt shot David Kraus in the skull with the powerful simulated round. Knelt down over him afterward.