Black Site (12 page)

“You made me, asshole. No one to blame but yourself.”

Raynor stood, turned, walked back out the front door, past the awed stares of Benji and the eight “dead” men watching through the windows of the front porch.

FIFTEEN

Pakistan

The four men shackled to their rope cots awoke to the sounds of vehicles outside their door. Two trucks by the sound of it, 4 × 4 pickups, because nothing else would survive the trek through the valley.

Three of the four rolled over and went back to sleep. They were not healthy. They tired easily and woke slowly. They were given next to no exercise, very little natural light, and a diet that, while recently much improved over what they’d lived on for the past three years, was by no means well balanced.

The man who remained awake was the leader, and his responsibility for the others meant he would not let himself go back to sleep. Josh Timble cocked his head and listened carefully, trying to pick up clues about the new visitors from any sounds. He had become an expert in the art of deriving intelligence while imprisoned. The sound of a vehicle, the mood of his guards, the change in the weather or in the quality of the bits of vegetables mixed in with his rice … everything was a potential source of information to be gleaned. He spoke more of the local language than the others, and he’d used this and his minimal Arabic to make friends with some of his captors over the years. This, too, was a crucial means of gleaning intel.

He’d already pegged the two trucks as Toyota Hiluxes, but this was no great feat. He’d been in this compound for two months now and had not heard a single engine larger than a tractor’s that was not connected to the ubiquitous pickup truck in Pakistan, the Hilux. During the day T.J. and his men were unchained and free to walk around the small room, and a high window slit in the stone-and-poured-concrete wall was accessible by stacking two of the beds on one another and then climbing up and stretching oneself. He’d done just that dozens of times he’d heard engines, and he wished he wasn’t shackled right now, so he could see if these trucks were Taliban or al Qaeda or just local vendors or allies of the warlord who ran this little valley fiefdom.

He pulled against his chain until his wrist burned, then let his arm drop back to the rope cot.

Hearing no more noise outside, he looked around his dark cell.

The room was twelve feet square, with dirt floors and reinforced concrete walls. It was featureless save for the four cots made of wooden posts and woven rope, and a two-foot-square indentation in the dirt in one corner from which a three-foot pipe made from empty mortar shells led out to a drainage culvert along the wall of the compound.

This was their “shower,” the corner where they poured the bucket of hot water over each other once a week.

The rest of the time the men kept a rock over the pipe to keep the bugs and rats out.

The window slit above his cot showed him it was morning, maybe six thirty. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Only the tiniest slivers of light came from the window slit and from below the heavy metal door to the room, but these served as their clock in the morning, the first indicators of daylight. Soon, T.J. knew, he would hear the steady thumping sound of the women pounding the morning bread behind the main building, and that told him it was an hour or so until breakfast.

The conditions here at this compound, run by a man they knew as Zar Afridi, were actually not all that bad. In the past three years they’d been kept in caves, in urban cellars chained or caged like monkeys, in dank underground bunkers, and even tied to trees on more than one occasion. They’d also been force-marched, or stuffed like cordwood into the backs of trucks, each man’s full body weight pressing down on whichever unlucky compatriot had been tossed in first.

No, this compound of Zar’s was not Club Med, but it was much better than anywhere they’d been before. They even got a tiny smattering of exercise during the evening walk. One at a time, each man was taken from the one-room stone hut that served as their prison and led, under guard and with hands chained in front of him, from the northwest corner of the compound, fifty yards to the east, where the simple outhouse stood in front of a copse of trees.

One hundred yards of strolling a day was not much exercise, nor was it much fresh air or solitude, but it was something.

The most interesting aspect of their imprisonment here in Zar Afridi’s compound was the arrival of the doctor at the beginning of their stay, and his decision that all the men immediately begin taking medicines to help wean them off the heroin they’d been given for years. The cruel drug had been cruelly administered to debilitate the elite war fighters and keep them compliant and addicted.

Josh had no idea why the decision had been made to clean them up. At first he wondered if they were to be released, but he’d gotten no wind of that rumor whatsoever from his captors. Some of the guards were, in a word, stupider than the others, and they spoke a little too much, revealed things to T.J. without realizing what they were doing. There was no discussion by these simpletons with guns about setting the Americans free. No, if there were discussions about the politics of their captivity it always centered on a tug-of-war between the Taliban factions on one side of the rope and the foreign al Qaeda forces here in FATA on the other.

T.J. and his men were, of course, the rope itself.

Just when Josh was about to lie back on his bunk, footsteps approached the shack and Josh forced his mind to awaken and clear. At this time of the morning it was still early to see Zar himself, though he would be by to deliver the morning meal. It was an interesting dynamic of Pashtunwali, the local tribal code, that the owner of the property saw to the care of his prisoners. The warlord, who while certainly of no importance on a global scale, was unquestionably the local strongman, the big fish in the little pond that was this valley. Zar had personally been bringing food for the men each morning. The other guards saw to them the rest of the day, but Zar came and in a polite, if not friendly, manner asked after the men’s comfort and needs.

Timble took advantage of this, asking for fresh water and medicine for his men to help with the near-constant diarrhea they were suffering from. Sometimes it was delivered.

Sometimes not.

The chain outside the iron door was unlocked. This made a distinctive sound that stirred the other men in the room. Then the door opened, cutting the still dark air with a bright shaft of light.

The three men in the doorway looked like giants in silhouette before they entered. They were bigger and broader than the Pashtuns around here. They stepped inside, and Josh Timble blinked hard and rapidly.

Three American soldiers in full battle dress. Helmets on their heads, sunglasses over their eyes, and rifles slung across their chests.

Their uniforms revealed them to be Army Rangers.

Josh turned to look at his three cellmates, to make sure they were seeing the same vision. All three sat up quickly, rattling their chains with the movement.

T.J. had long thought of rescue, dreamed of it, but he wasn’t dreaming now.

Could this be?

No. Something did not add up. He knew good and well that there had been no firefight outside in the compound, and he could not believe Zar’s men had just evaporated into thin air.

He hadn’t heard a helicopter, hadn’t heard English-speaking voices. The women outside began pounding the bread flour. The start of a normal day.

No, he did not believe these three Rangers had just walked in the front gate without anyone noticing.

Still, he could see the light hair and skin on the three men, he recognized the Wiley X sunglasses, the Casio watches—the guns and gear all looked general issue.

They wore Colt M4 rifles across their chests.

His emotions overrode his logic. “Holy shit, guys. Where the hell did you come from?”

One of the men smiled and nodded. Gave the thumbs-up sign.

Spike sat on the cot next to T.J.’s. “Thank God!” he shouted.

The other two men just stared dumbfounded at their three rescuers.

But T.J. spoke quickly. The military officer in him was taking over from the captive he had been. “There is a hurja on the opposite side of the compound, that’s where the tangos are billeted. Probably a dozen-plus, all armed, there will be more in the main build—”

He stopped talking as more men stepped into the doorway, blocking the light from outside.

Two long-haired Pashtun gunmen, Taliban perhaps, an al Qaeda man in a trim beard and eyeglasses, and an older European-looking man with gray hair and a dusty white suit. They all entered the room behind the Rangers. The floor of the cell was flooded with men now; the four Delta captives just sat shackled to their rope cots and stared up at the bizarre scene in front of them.

T.J. muttered, “What the hell is going on?”

One of the Rangers removed his helmet and scratched his head while turning back to the men behind him. He wore a standard military haircut, well kept and tapered. Light brown hair stood no more than a half inch on the top of his head.

The al Qaeda man stepped farther into the room, out of the doorway, and addressed the man in the suit in English. “Good. Very good.” He then turned to the Rangers, spoke to one of them in Arabic. The man took his M4 rifle from around his neck and held it out for T.J. to take.

Josh just stared at the man. No one held a weapon up in any threatening manner. He was being asked to take hold of a rifle?

Bouncer said, “Don’t touch it. It’s a trick.”

Roscoe disagreed. “Take it, boss. Shoot these sons of bitches.”

One of the Taliban produced a key and unlocked T.J.’s restraints. He stepped away and Josh Timble stood, reached out, and took the gun from the Ranger’s hands.

Everyone in the room stared intently at him.

Josh immediately dropped the magazine, looked into it, and found it empty. He pulled the charging handle back and found the weapon itself empty.

He looked up at the men. They continued to stare at him like he was a monkey in a cage.

“What the fuck?” asked Spike.

Timble racked the charging handle again while he looked at the men. A third time. He looked down at the weapon for a moment, rotated it in the bad light, then held it back up to the crowd in front of him.

“It’s a fake.” He tossed it roughly to the al Qaeda man in the wire glasses, who struggled to catch the empty gun. Then T.J. reached out to the Ranger, put his hand on the man’s chest rig, ran his hands across the stitching of the plate carrier on his armor, and looked back up to the men in his cell. “Phony. All this gear is counterfeit.”

The al Qaeda man deflated somewhat. The suited man seemed to grow defensive. He began moving forward to speak, but the al Qaeda man stayed him with a raised hand. Instead, he spoke in English to Timble. “Why do you say this?”

T.J. did not answer. Instead, he looked at Roscoe. “You still remember your Russian?”

“Sure, boss.”

He pointed to the oldest-looking man in a Ranger uniform, a cold-eyed blond of about thirty-five, who stood five feet in front of him. “Tell this motherfucker that I just called him the son of a Chechen whore.”

Roscoe translated, and immediately the “Ranger” leaped at T.J., knocked him down on the cot, and reared back to smash his fist into the face of the weakened American. The al Qaeda man shouted in Arabic, the Ranger’s raised fist froze above his intended target, and he climbed back up slowly. His face remained red with fury.

Josh sat up on the bed, shook his head at all the men in front of him. “Don’t know what your plan is, but unless you’re heading to a costume party in Mullah Omar’s cave, you’re going to get your dumb asses killed.” He laughed cruelly. “You didn’t fool me, and you won’t fool anyone else.” The faces of some of the visitors to the cell, obviously the ones who spoke English, contorted with fresh anger. All the men filed out and the door slammed behind them. In seconds the sound of the chain and the padlock, and then retreating footsteps and arguing.

Raised voices.

T.J. tuned into the voices, and for an instant he was certain he heard English with a German accent.

He had stopped smiling the instant the men turned away from him. His smile had been as fake as the faux Americans and their equipment.

“How did you know, boss?”

“Educated guess. AQ has used light-skinned Chechens or Nuristanis before. These guys didn’t look like any of the Nuristanis I’ve come in contact with. Not all Chechens speak Russian, but I figured if they
were
Chechen, the oldest guy would know enough to get the gist.”

He looked to his men now, still sitting on their cots, their eyes still wide in shock at all they had just seen. “Damn it, boys. That shit was fake, but it was close enough to get them through any security checkpoint I’ve run across in Afghanistan.”

They all understood the ramifications, and these men’s mood sank as they imagined what horror would befall their unsuspecting comrades over the border.

SIXTEEN

Pamela Archer stood on the tarmac, just a few hundred yards away from the runway at Jalalabad Airport. The U.S. Air Force controlled the airport and runway, but Pamela’s employer, Radiance Security and Surveillance Systems, had its Afghanistan base here, adjacent to the U.S. military installation. There was also access, via this tarmac and taxiway, to the runway itself, and here Pam stood among a large group of Radiance employees.

She was the only female.

All eyes were on the Radiance 727 landing in the hazy morning. It touched down, applied its reverse thrust, and kicked up a swirling cloud of dust behind it. Soon it turned onto the taxiway and began slowly heading in their direction.

While she awaited the arrival of the aircraft Pam Archer looked off to her left, toward her Predator drones. Her two babies sat sleek and still on the tarmac in front of their hangar. Pam allowed herself a little smile. Before joining Radiance Security and coming out here to Afghanistan she’d served twelve years in the Air Force, and many of those years were spent flying drones from Creech AFB in Nevada. But in the Air Force she and her birds were rarely in the same hemisphere, much less so close that she could walk over and touch them.