Black Site (19 page)

Soon Jamal had them moving again, rolling forward, breaking and turning and slowing in accordance with the conditions of the rough dirt trail.

Kolt’s appendages were numb and the stifling heat was cooking his brain, but he was thankful this Afghan agent was not rushing. Not pushing his luck. A breakdown would be catastrophic, not only because they would be stuck out here, but also because others would come to help, and Raynor did not want a dozen locals hanging around this truck, crawling under it to fix something. It was one of those Murphy’s Law–type scenarios that derail operators in the field from time to time, and Kolt hoped he was lucky enough to avoid that particular eventuality.

By three in the afternoon Kolt Raynor was literally choking on dust and diesel fumes in his hot box below and behind the cab of the truck. He had no sensation in his lower legs, and the back of his neck hurt from three hours in his contorted position. His water was gone, and the knuckles on his hands were burned where he was forced to position his fists against the scorching metal of the box.

He pictured Bob Kopelman, back at the auto shop in Lahore where this stash compartment had been enlarged. In his mind’s eye he saw the big, burly sixty-year-old peering into this tiny metal coffin and nodding. “That looks perfect.”

Raynor wished he could just shove one-third of Bob’s big ass into this hellish glove compartment right now.

Mercifully the truck came to a stop once again. He prayed it was time for him to get out, and within a couple of seconds, his prayer was answered. Jamal popped up the seat and slid open the hidden access plate to the stash compartment. The seventy-five-degree air rushed in like an arctic gale, and the daylight singed Kolt’s eyes when he poked his head out. Jamal had already flipped his driver’s seat forward to remove the rucksack, and softly but hurriedly he spoke to the American. “You must go. There is a caravan of donkeys and merchants behind me in the road. Ten men or more. They are only minutes away.”

“Okay,” Kolt said as he tried to pull himself up and out of the box, but his legs were not cooperating, his upper body had to extricate the rest of his body, and this took a half minute of grunting and twisting and pulling. Jamal had taken this time to pull the American’s pack from the bottom of the smaller metal box below his seat, and he heaved it out of the cab and let it fall in the dirt next to where Raynor tried to climb out from the backseat.

Kolt slid out gingerly and stood up as if wearing a new pair of prosthetic legs.

“Mister Racer. Please go. This way.” He pointed at a steep, wooded hill, marked by limestone outcroppings that ran from the rutted dirt track up toward the sky.

Jamal helped Kolt get the pack on his shoulders, and then the young Afghan literally pushed the American forward to the hill. “Hurry, please. It is not safe here.”

“I’m going, dude,” Kolt replied in frustrated English, and with a gait hindered by numb legs and sixty pounds of gear, he made it to the hillside, then began hauling himself up off the road by pulling on handfuls of thick foliage. Just seconds later he heard the truck’s transmission pop into gear, the machine start back on its way up the trail, and the driver’s-side door slam shut soon after.

Jamal was getting the hell out of there, and Kolt couldn’t say he blamed him.

TWENTY-THREE

It took over an hour for the infiltrator to find and establish his hide site. Over an hour of arduous climbing and hauling his tired and sore body up and over rocks, belly-crawling in the scrubs alongside open fields, fighting his way through thick pines and tall brush. All the while he followed his GPS map toward the hide Pete Grauer’s analysts had determined was the best place for him to get eyes into the compound. The location he ultimately chose was thirty yards or so from where Grauer had indicated on the satellite and UAV images back at Jalalabad. Raynor had hoped to get even farther away, maybe find something higher up on the hillside, in case this Jamal character sold him out to the Taliban and a crew of gunmen came up the mountain looking for him. But when he arrived at the general location of his overwatch, above the terraced poppy fields stepping down all the way to the banks of the river, he realized his options were few. Most places that gave a view of the compound four hundred yards away were exposed—open meadows—or else they were so steep and sheer that he could not get to them. He finally made his way above a large pine that grew out of a wall of broken limestone, and then used the thick needles as cover as he lowered himself down onto a ledge of rock with thick moss growing on its surface. The outcropping jutted away from the hillside just farther than the length of his body, and there was a slight incline toward the village. This and the thick tree above would keep his body concealed, with only his head and his spotting scope exposed to the far side of the valley.

It was a great hide, unless he was detected, in which case he’d be in trouble, because he had absolutely
nowhere
to run. If he found it necessary to bug out in a hurry he could leave his gear behind, scale up the ten feet or so of rock behind the tree, and then make his way toward higher ground. But if he was sighted and men came up to root him out, they would be above and behind him before he knew it, and his little Makarov pistol wouldn’t do him a hell of a lot of good.

Unless, of course, he jabbed it into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

*   *   *

In the Operations Center at the Radiance base in Jalalabad, Pete Grauer stood next to the conference table with his hands on his hips and his gaze fixed on the monitor. Around him a half-dozen analysts and technicians adopted the same stance. They could no longer see their man on the screen. He’d shimmied down a rock wall behind a thick pine tree and was now undoubtedly hidden below it.

UAV pilot Pam Archer, while flying the Predator she dubbed Baby Boy from a trailer a hundred yards away from the OC, was nonetheless present in the room via an open radio link. Grauer had only to speak aloud and a microphone on the table would pick up his voice and transmit it directly into Archer’s headset.

“It looks like he’s found his hide,” Grauer said. Raynor had been under the tree for five minutes.

“Roger that,” replied Archer. “I show him about thirty-five meters south of where you instructed him to position himself. Is it possible his GPS is not functioning properly?”

“Negative,” replied Grauer. “Racer just found a spot he likes better. We all need to get used to him doing his own thing on this op. He’s played as fast and loose with his orders as possible since he was a second lieutenant.”

“Roger that.”

Grauer rubbed his hands through his thinning hair. “Okay, Pam. Good work. Best you get your bird out of there before anybody gets suspicious.”

“Yes, sir. Baby Boy is returning to base.”

Grauer punched a single number on his satellite phone. He waited thirty seconds or so for the call to make the requisite connections into near space and then back down to Peshawar, seventy miles away over the Pakistani border. “Yeah, Bob? It’s Pete. Our man is in position outside of objective Gopher. A few hours late, but his hide looks solid. Phase One is complete.”

*   *   *

By the time Raynor got his hide organized, his scope set up on its minitripod, and his thin layer of camouflage netting over himself and all his gear, the sky had faded to black and a thick mist began to grow over the river. With the naked eye he could still see the villager—cooking fires lit up the hillside like match glows through the growing vapor. Far below him at his one o’clock position, the stone bridge across the river was manned by a group of armed militia. Jamal would have crossed over this bridge to deliver the water and other supplies to Zar’s compound, and he would have regressed back over it, all while Raynor crawled up the hill. By now Jamal should be halfway back to Peshawar, no doubt thanking Allah for getting him through this stressful day.

Raynor was exhausted, but he took the time to look through his thermal monocular to scan the north–south limits of the valley. He took note of any heat signatures wherever he found them. A flock of sheep was across the water to his left. A small encampment of men were on his side of the river, but on the far side of the road to his right there were deer and foxes and wild boars up and down the steep forests on both sides.

He lowered the thermal and lay there, breathing in the pine- and cedar-scented air, feeling the moisture on his filthy skin, letting his naked eyes take in the starlight and the firelight and the wide expanse of the evening alpine vista.

The tranquillity of the scene fascinated him. Here he was in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, not one hundred klicks north of the most horrific and harrowing experience of his life, surrounded now by enemies too numerous to count and hell-bent on evil too ghastly to contemplate.

And yet it was beautiful.

The valley was fucking beautiful.

Kolt shook his head, covered himself in his patoo, and went to sleep on his thin mat, his bone-tired body covered by the camouflage netting.

*   *   *

His eyes opened slowly, blinked, and then focused on the GPS he’d positioned on the moss just a few inches from his face. The clock on the device indicated it was not yet 7 a.m., there was hardly any light yet in the sky, but he knew instantly that something had awakened him.

A soft but persistent thumping in the distance, like someone banging on a door.

He’d heard that sound before, in Afghanistan. Women up early, beating flour on the millstone, making the morning bread.

Kolt rolled onto his belly and stretched. “I’ll take mine with a big cup of black coffee.” A pause. “And a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

Kolt’s body felt cold and tight. His muscles, from his calves to his thighs, throughout his lower back and all the way up high in his shoulders, were stiff and sore from the climbing and pack hauling the day before, and the hard surface and cool night had compounded the complaints his muscles now sent him via his central nervous system.

He looked across the valley. The village was just beginning to awaken. A rooster crowed, and smoke from morning fires drifted up in the morning mist. Soon there would be movement on the alleys and dirt roads of the steep village, and by then there would be enough light to use his optics. He wondered what all the people who farmed the poppy fields did between growing seasons. He imagined there would be some men in the village for whom this was the only convenient time of year to be a member of the warlord’s militia.

And then he wondered about T.J. Was his best friend, the man he’d thought dead for three years, really only four hundred yards away from where he now lay?

Perhaps so, but four hundred yards had never seemed so great a distance to Kolt.

The fog burned out of the valley shortly after nine in the morning. He had used the time to eat cold rations and sip water. He tucked behind the lip of the rock and did a slow set of push-ups to warm his body a few degrees, and then, with the daylight and the clear view across the river valley, he crawled forward to his spotting scope and looked at the compound at the top of the village.

He had a good view over the eastern wall. Through his lens he could see armed sentries walking on the road that ran from the main gate, to his right, toward the main building, in the center of his field of view. The hurja, the guesthouse where it was thought the al Qaeda operatives and Taliban soldiers slept, was to the left, higher on the hill, and the barn was just on the other side of the wall nearest to him.

In the distance, still partially obscured by mist drifting up from the grasses that grew there, were several buildings back near the far wall of the compound. Grauer’s analysts suspected the prisoners were housed in one or more of these simple stone-and-poured-concrete structures.

Raynor peered through his spotter’s scope at these buildings, looking for any indicators of use. Were they storerooms, tack rooms for the horses’ and donkeys’ gear, sleeping quarters for the guards? Or were they prison cells?

For hours he busied himself with the study of these structures, pausing only to quickly scan other parts of the compound or the village, or to give his eyes a brief rest from the strain.

Throughout the day he learned nothing that Pam Archer had not already discerned from the cameras on her drone.

Shit.

TWENTY-FOUR

The fog rolled back in around five in the afternoon, earlier than the day before. It was thicker, coiling wisps above the river, heavy wet clouds drifting lazily through the cedars and mulberry trees on the hillside. By six Raynor could no longer make out the compound, his night vision gear was useless through the vapor, so he had to switch to his thermal.

A thermal monocle illuminates the signature from any heat source. Besides showing car engines, stones warmed by the sun, animals, and any other generator of warmth, it displays a silhouette image of a human body, but it does not show the identity, as everyone looks essentially like a white or black ghost through the optic. He could see men in the compound through the mist, but the device was utterly useless for his task, obtaining proof of life of six specific men.

He began to worry that this fog might be a serious problem for his mission. What if the prisoners—assuming they were in the compound—were let out only in the late evening? If that was the case, and the mist pattern of the day held for the next two, then how the hell was he going to get eyes on T.J. and the guys?

Frustrated by what he saw as a wasted day in his hide, he decided to call it off for the night, to hope for better weather conditions in the morning.

He had just started to move his eyes out of the thermal sight when new movement caught his attention. From the northeastern corner of the compound, two men walked toward a shack in front of a copse of trees along the north wall. The Radiance analysts had determined the small stone building to be a latrine for the guards. Kolt could tell that the man in back held a flashlight in one hand, and he illuminated the way forward for the other.