Black Site (17 page)

Pausing a few more seconds, he scanned below him with his light.

He was less than five feet from the ground.

A few seconds of jerking and heaving helped him the rest of the way to the pine-covered earth. The chute was tangled but he tore it out of the tree in under a minute, all the while thanking God that his jump was over.

TWENTY

Kolt buried his olive gray silk reserve parachute, harness, altimeter, oxygen mask, boots, and a small survival shovel in the forest. He unzipped his flight suit and let it drop to his knees before he hurriedly stepped out of each leg. He pulled off the Patagonia base layer as well. He retrieved his local canvas pack from the jump bag, and quickly donned his local garb.

He opened the jump bag and pulled out a pair of old ragged leather sandals that tied around the ankle and had a single loop hole for the big toe with a one-inch-wide band behind it, closer to the instep. The soles were made of several layers of tanned camel hide, and were as authentic as the rest of his clothing, with the exception of the hidden scent-reducing long johns.

When everything he no longer needed was well hidden he sat on a bed of pine needles and covered his head with his patoo, the capelike wool blanket that is wrapped either around the front of the body or over the head like a hood. He used it as a tent to cover his work, and then fired up his GPS. It took a moment to receive the signal from the satellite, but once the GPS got a fix on his position, he realized he’d landed three miles south of his original drop zone.

Three miles would not have seemed so bad, if not for the topography illustrated on the GPS. He’d landed in a pine forest down in a small basin, and to get to his destination he would need to head sharply uphill. There was no possibility of making his rendezvous with Jamal on time, but that wasn’t the end of the world. Kopelman would have warned his agent that he could expect unavoidable delays to the pickup window.

Raynor shouldered his backpack, wrapped himself in his patoo, and began walking north. His eyes took in what light they could, but he struggled to see through the darkness in the thick pines, hoping like hell he’d run across a path before long.

*   *   *

He stopped to rest on a cold rock at 6 a.m., after three arduous hours of constant uphill trudging. There was still no light and he’d not yet broken out of the pine and fir-covered hillside, but he had covered a respectable amount of ground considering the conditions.

He’d found a disused logging trail. It was level and cleared of brush enough to be useful, and it was completely devoid of traffic. This wasn’t unexpected during the middle of the night, but he did consider himself fortunate. These rural parts of the Tribal Areas were full of locals who regarded each and every outsider with utter suspicion, and a stranger walking through this valley would attract a
lot
of attention. He needed to get to his meeting point with Jamal as soon as possible, but he knew from his slow progress that he would not make it to the rendezvous until several hours after sunup.

He took a long swig of water from his hidden CamelBak and began marching once again up the hill.

The first living creature Raynor encountered in the Tirah Valley was a rail-thin cow, standing alone in a clearing of freshly cut cedar trees along the side of the trail. The animal startled him with its movement in the dawn’s light, but Kolt recovered quickly, passed the field of low stumps, and then made out other cattle milling in the distant mist.

He entered fallow fields, then left these behind him by following the trail along the side of a steep gorge, and found that the gorge and the trail spilled out onto the valley floor, where a village lay shrouded in fog. He smelled cooking fires, knew the women would be up preparing the morning meal even before the first prayer of the day, and he wanted to give this village a wide berth. He left the trail, climbed the steep hill to another clearing. Here he entered an orchard of peach trees, their branches bare this late in the year. Looking back behind him he eyed the village through the vapor. He saw baked mud buildings, all single-story, with flat roofs that made them look like the mortarboards of college graduates.

He wanted to stop and rest again, but he fought the urge and turned away, moved on up the trail.

A waterfall trickled off a cliff side and fell into a stream, and Kolt followed the stream down into a valley via man-made steps that ran alongside it, because a quick peek at his GPS told him to do so. The decline did not last, however, and soon he was climbing again, leaving the trail behind as it wound back to the northwest.

His legs ached and burned as the incline increased even more now. His lower back tightened under the weight of his heavy canvas pack. His three-year-old war wound ached, the fused vertebrae protesting every step.

Soon the terrain rose so abruptly that he was forced to his hands and knees, pulling his way upward by grasping the trunks of firs and carefully setting the soles of his smooth leather sandals on rocky outcroppings before pushing himself higher.

Just off his right shoulder a long wash ran up into a saddle of the hill above him. He knew the going would be smoother there, if just barely. He began moving laterally but stopped when he heard a noise. He froze in a copse of wild mulberry trees in the fading mist, and listened hard again.

The sound repeated. He cocked his head.

A group of men chanting softly.

There.
In a small flattened-out section of the wash just above him, at the limits of his eyesight in the vapor, a group of a dozen men knelt on their patoos and prayed aloud.

At their sides, next to their ersatz prayer rugs, Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers rested on the ground.

They were either local militia or Taliban—either way, he’d come within thirty seconds of wandering out into the open right in front of them.

It had been too easy so far, and the long lonely walk was lulling him into false confidence.

Come on, Kolt. This isn’t the damn Smokies. This is Indian country.

He tucked deeper into the fir trees, continued on up the forested hill, slowly and silently, and passed to the left of the armed men, leaving them behind to complete their morning prayer.

*   *   *

By the time the mist burned away completely he had reached a highland plain, where he passed an opium field. The poppies were dormant this late in the season, short sticks preparing themselves for the winter cold.

Now he could see to the distant west and north. The land was green and lush, and the tall mountain peaks of the Kurram and Khyber ranges were snowcapped, sharp and beautiful in the distance back toward the Afghan border.

It reminded him of Wyoming.

For the first time he was thankful for the training he’d received in the States. He’d climbed, crawled, and walked for over seven hours, and his muscles, joints, and back ached, but his lungs had no problem with this altitude.

He was surprised to find himself feeling good as the first warm rays of the sun beamed onto his face.

But he knew this would not last.

TWENTY-ONE

Jamal Metziel turned the key back toward himself, silencing the rumbling engine of his old truck. It was daylight already, he’d arrived to the rendezvous point late, but an exact time was nigh on impossible with the terrible condition of the track that he’d been forced to drive for the past three hours. Quickly he leaped out of his Toyota Hilux pickup and lifted the hood, coated his hands with grease and grime from the air hose, and then wiped the evidence of his “truck repair” across his light blue kameez shirt. He pulled some tools from his truck bed, dropped onto his back, slid on grass and dirt under the vehicle, and waited there.

The ticking and clanking of the hot metal kept his attention for a moment, relaxed him to the dangers around him, but he knew he was not safe here.

The American would come soon, maybe any moment, and at that point the true perils would begin.

He was no fool—he knew the stakes. If he was caught helping a Westerner he would be killed.

But he did it anyway. He had made the difficult decision to help the Americans, and whatever came after that, Allah would decide. He would survive, inshallah, or he would die.

Inshallah.

Unlike most others here in western Pakistan, Jamal was motivated neither by tribal affiliation nor by religious precepts. His allegiance to America was personal, born out of his own experience and his own loss and his own pain, and this motivation rivaled anyone’s here in the FATA, from the most devout Wahhabis to the Pashtuns deeply instilled with the honor code of Pashtunwali.

Already Jamal had seen more death than most men his age. The Afghan was near thirty, and his every memory was laced with visions of blood, bribery, and backstabbing.

He did not remember the Russians attacking his village—they came just a few years before his birth—but he grew up with stories of the helicopter attack that killed his cousins and uncles.

He did, however, remember the bombing of his hometown as the Soviets left in 1989, and again around the time the Afghani Communists collapsed a few years later at the hands of feuding warlords. As a child he would squat in the corner of his home at night, unable to sleep as the bombs rained down on the hills surrounding Kabul.

Then the bombs stopped falling, but the danger had only begun. Because then the Taliban came.

As a teenager, neighbors spoke of Jamal having been blessed with his father’s hands. While most kids peddled tainted gasoline on the side of the road or pushed a cart of hay, Jamal learned his father’s trade, repairing and building weapons. It was honest work, not smuggling guns or harming anyone. No, Jamal’s father did a thriving business restoring everything from seventeenth-century swords and shields to mid-eighteenth-century muzzleloaders.

But the Taliban were in charge of Kabul now, and the Taliban had enemies. They demanded firepower, not souvenirs.

Soon Jamal’s father was put to work for the Taliban. His new masters reasoned that if he could make an old bolt-action Enfield look showroom new, then he could certainly file the iron sites on a Kalashnikov properly.

Jamal knew his father wasn’t happy. But he also knew it was healthier to submit to the pressure than to resist the bearded and black-turbaned fighters that visited his small back-alley shop every few days. Jamal vowed to make it as easy on his aging father as he could. He sat cross-legged on a soiled green pillow and delicately sanded and filed the trigger mechanisms of the AK, the most prolific Eastern Bloc rifle in the world.

And then the Americans came.

By the time of the terror attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Jamal had all but inherited his father’s shop. Within weeks the Taliban fled Kabul and the Westerners arrived. Jamal noted the incredible interest the foreigners had in Chicken Street just up the road from the old abandoned American embassy. He wanted in. Reluctantly, his father agreed to move the shop two streets over to the back room of a carpet vendor. Jamal wasn’t looking for a secretive location, but it was all they could afford.

Jamal was astonished by the new and insatiable desire for junk weapons. Americans were willing to pay top dollar and in U.S. currency for the same rifles he contemplated leaving behind in the old shop during the move. Jamal worked hard, restoring weapons for these polite and well-to-do foreigners, and within a year his shop was well known throughout Kabul.

Jamal Metziel did harbor concerns that Taliban spies would notice the profits he was raking in from the Westerners. Kabul had fallen a year earlier and the ruling shura had moved across the border to the Northwest Frontier Province, but that did not mean there was no Taliban influence on the bustling streets of the Afghanistan capital.

The beards and black turbans were gone, but the Taliban’s henchmen were not.

Jamal liked the Westerners and feared the Taliban, but one night black helicopters landed in the square near his shop, and green-eyed soldiers poured out. Jamal, his two teenage brothers, and his ailing father were snatched up by American Special Forces. He was surprised the women and children in the compound weren’t shot on sight. He had heard the stories of how the Americans valued only the fighting-age males and would kill the women during these roundups. But the women were left alone.
Must be another group of Americans,
he decided. He and his brothers and father were classified as PUCs—persons under custody—and flown to Bagram for lengthy interrogation.

Jamal was surprised that he wasn’t tortured. He had figured his father certainly had been, as the interrogators only seemed to want to know about his father’s relationship with the Taliban and where Osama bin Laden was. They must have believed them all because within three weeks they were given new clothes, one hundred dollars each for their trouble, a bottle of water, a new Koran, and a nighttime helicopter ride to Kabul airport, where they were curtly released without so much as a wave good-bye. In talking with his father and brother on the way home he was astonished to learn that no one had been beaten by the Americans.

The very next night the Taliban came to their shop. Jamal’s father was taken in the night by a half-dozen armed men. Jamal and his brothers were knocked around a bit as they tried to come to their father’s aid, but they were left behind. It was clear the jihadists had questions of their own. What had Jamal’s father told the Americans?

Jamal was in the shop when he heard the news. His father’s body had been hung by its bare feet from a telephone pole in the western part of Kabul. His head was found stuffed inside a bloody burlap sack a few feet from the pool of blood that had drained from the headless torso.

Jamal was crushed and confused. His father had always done exactly what the Taliban asked. He never openly resisted, only in private to his family at home.

The young Afghan sold the shop to the carpet vendor for practically pennies. He didn’t care—he just wanted to get out of Kabul and protect his brothers and mother. They packed their meager belongings and headed east toward Jalalabad. But before they could settle in there they learned that the underground Taliban was alive and well in Jalalabad, so they continued to Pakistan and a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar.