Black Site (20 page)

It took a moment to be certain, but soon Raynor realized that the man in front had his hands clasped together like he was handcuffed.

Through the thermal sight he was unable to identify the prisoner. Raynor could only watch while he stepped into the latrine, and the guard waited outside. The militiaman seemed extremely relaxed: his weapon was turned upside down on his back, and the man strolled off a good twenty-five yards from the front of the outhouse while he waited. But he turned sharply and suddenly, and walked purposefully back to the latrine, as if the man there had called to him. The man in shackles appeared again, and the two returned to the buildings in the northeast corner.

Five minutes later the scene repeated in Raynor’s thermal scope. Again, the man in front was in irons. It was clearly the same sentry as before—he walked with the same relaxed gait, swinging his flashlight as he wandered around the open area between the latrine and the road from the gate toward the main building.

These two disappeared again in the distance, and then a third time the event was replayed. This man in front was taller and thinner than the first two. He was definitely not T.J., but one of the first two men certainly could have been.

Thinking back as he waited for the next man, Kolt felt certain that the posture and walk of the prisoners were Western. Maybe American, maybe not, but the men
seemed
like Westerners.

Kolt waited for the fourth man on the team to come out to the latrine, but after another half hour of pressing his eye into the rubber lens cap of the thermal device, he realized that the show was over for the evening.

He switched off the scope to save battery power, rolled onto his back, and stared up into the impenetrable fog that hung around him like a cold wet blanket. He knew now, with absolute certainty, that there
were
prisoners here at Zar’s camp. But that was something they were already reasonably certain of. Kolt also determined they were likely Westerners being held, but again, by Jamal’s deliveries of fresh water and medicine, this was already suspected.

“Shit,” Kolt muttered. He was going to need more than three thermal signatures across four hundred yards of fog to get a rescue mission approved for this compound.

He resigned himself to sleep. Tomorrow he’d have to do better. He could
not
take his eyes off that damn hillside.

*   *   *

But the second full day began as a virtual replay of the first. The fog hung in the air well past sunup, and then the village and the compound came alive with activity, but there was no sign of the operators of Eagle 01.

Men came and went. Women peered from the windows of their homes or traveled with male family members while completely ensconced in burkas. The villagers moved about the buildings of the village, and along the banks of the river, shepherds tended their flocks on meadows to the south of Kolt’s hide, and small children gathered tinder for firewood throughout the forest.

There was activity on the narrow logging road. Mule carts with supplies passed slowly; some stopped in the villages, while others continued all the way up the steep path to the compound.

Kolt could not see down into the area Grauer’s analysts had dubbed the Playground, the large courtyard building on the southern side of Zar’s fortress, but he noticed activity on the roads around it, so he assumed it was full of children, coming and going, just like in the Predator images.

These kids were unknowing and unwilling impediments to the military and intelligence forces of the United States of America just blowing the hell out of this fellow Zar and all his houseguests.

Kolt did not want to waste the day lying there in vain hoping that T.J. and his men would just appear, so he used the time to carefully plot the movements and rotations of the guards around the compound, and to pick out every static sentry in sight. He wrote it all down on a small notepad. All this would be crucial for a successful mission if a Delta hit was ordered up, but there would be no hit if Kolt didn’t get some real intelligence sometime soon.

Nevertheless, he busied himself with this work. He timed all the movements and even mapped out the potential fields of fire from the guard tower at the front gate, the men on the roof of the main building, and the forces manning the bridge.

The fog came in thick and heavy in the afternoon, just as it had the day before. Raynor was on his thermal scope before 6 p.m., pissed and frustrated, because this meant another day without identifying Eagle 01. In the hillside village ghostly beings appeared as if from thin air as they stepped out from behind buildings, the hovels warmed by fires shone as lighter gray than the colder dark gray facades around them, and the compound’s sentries continued their patrols, although now they appeared as ethereal beings floating through the air on the other side of the valley.

This was useless. Kolt put his head down on his patoo and cursed. Wished he had a shot of whiskey to warm his bones and calm his frustrations.

The first prisoner appeared again at 10:30 p.m., just like the previous evening. Again, he was escorted by an armed guard. This time, one by one, four men were led out into the cold, into the darkness, into the thick mist, delivered to the latrine, and left alone for five minutes or so to take care of their business.

Kolt was more convinced than the night before that these were the missing Delta men. The last man in the group even moved like T.J. No, he could not be certain, but he had an incredible sensation that he was looking directly at his old friend as he shuffled, hands together, across the compound to the latrine, and then back again.

Raynor switched off the thermal sight for the evening and dropped his forehead to his mat. He saw this entire mission falling apart because of this fucking fog. He’d do his four days here, he would obtain no video recording of the men’s faces, nothing would be seen, no actionable intelligence would be derived, and then he’d be pulled out. There would be handshakes and backslaps and the clucking hens in the intelligence community would say, “Well hell, of course we did all we could, we even had a guy from a PMC go to the site and spend four days there and he didn’t see a cotton-picking thing, so what else can we do?”

This was the sort of thing that had driven Raynor crazy back when he was in Delta. Missed opportunities. Failure.

It was also the sort of thing that had caused him to push forward that morning in Waziristan, getting his men killed in the process and creating this disaster.

Kolt tried to sleep, but cold, worry, and frustration kept him up through most of the night.

*   *   *

The flaw in the compound’s security setup revealed itself to Kolt Raynor on the morning of his third and final full day, right after the mist swirled up and out of the valley with the arrival of the sun’s rays.

Zar spent much effort protecting himself, but Raynor identified the Afridi warlord’s Achilles’ heel.

It seemed like Zar’s biggest worry was Hellfire missiles from Predator drones, and there was but one way for Zar to counter that—place himself as close as possible to large numbers of civilians. This he had accomplished with the compound on top of the village, but Zar had gone one better with the construction of the Playground. He packed kids up against his fort like sardines, put them on display during the day, and then tucked them into their beds at night, still well within the blast radius of any missile hitting the main building of the compound or the hurja where al Qaeda and the Taliban sought shelter when they were in the valley.

That was his anti–air-to-ground ordnance plan, and, Raynor conceded, it was pretty damned foolproof.

Zar’s next biggest concern would be the threat of American commandos being choppered directly into his compound. But Raynor had searched in vain for anything that would preclude Delta from assaulting, fast-roping out of Black Hawks inside the compound walls, directly in front of the main building and the hurja. Yes, there were men with light weapons inside, but Kolt had seen nothing in the past forty-eight hours that would rule out a rescue attempt by helicopter, should he be able to identify the American prisoner.

It would be tough, and it would be bloody, but an assault on the compound would, in Kolt Raynor’s estimation, be doable.

Just below this on Zar’s threat matrix would be fears of a ground attack. The logging trail that led into Shataparai was guarded by men with guns in fortified positions. They would have radios and they would be in contact with Zar’s militiamen all over the valley. If invaders appeared, even kilometers away, there could be more security in Shataparai itself in moments, meaning the steep village pathways toward the compound would be one fatal funnel after another ready to repel a ground attack from the road. The stone-and-concrete walls of Zar’s lair were twelve feet high, and the main gate was steel with a guard tower alongside it—any ground assault would be met with a wall of lead outside the walls of the compound.

Yeah, Zar was ready for the Frontier Corps or the militia of a rival Pashtun strongman charging straight up the middle toward his fort.

Clearly the warlord who ruled over this area had a lot of enemies, and a lot of fears, but one thing he did not seem to guard himself against very well was the potential for a lone man infiltrating his compound under cover of darkness.

The Playground, this newish construction pressing up against the southern wall of the compound, was the key. In his attempt to make his home and guesthouse safe from missiles, Zar had unwittingly damaged another aspect of his security. The hillside south of the Playground was steep and thick with alpine trees, but it was free of other structures and not patrolled by anyone Raynor had seen through his binoculars during the day, or through his thermal scope during the night. Certainly no large force would be able to scramble alongside the sheer valley wall undetected. But one man, one man possessing enough skill and daring, could make his way right up to the Playground, over the wall of its large courtyard, and then sneak right up to the wall of Zar’s fortress.

But what about the patrolling sentries inside the stronghold? Kolt had spent thirty-six hours, on and off, monitoring and recording and mapping their movements, and he had come to a conclusion: the answer lay in the time frame—one minute, thirty-seven seconds.

One minute and thirty-seven seconds was the minimum amount of time between patrolling perimeter guards passing a particular point inside the compound at any time of the day or night. Sometimes it took them longer, but they were never less than one minute, thirty-seven seconds apart.

Any potential interloper into the fortress would need to get over the wall after one guard passed, and then find a hide or move out of the path of the next man, all within a minute and a half.

It would not be easy. Shit, it would be the most challenging thing Raynor had ever attempted. But he felt he could do it. With the dark of night, with the thick evening fog, with his training and his gear … yes. He could get in there and get eyes on T.J. and the boys.

And he knew he had little choice.

Jamal would return for him the following day, and Kolt had no illusions that the fog that had fallen the past two nights would not be back this evening.

Damn it, Kolt. Are you really going to do this?

He lay there and thought about it throughout the day, but by midafternoon he knew what his decision would be.

It was obvious.

He was going into the compound.

Grauer would be pissed, but only if he failed.

And he would not fail.

The Playground was the way in, but figuring out how to infiltrate from the southern wall would be tough. He could get across the river, he could skirt the village, he could come to the Playground from the wooded hillside to the south, but he did not know if the kids and their supervision would be in the courtyard or not. If not, if it was just a big empty dirt patch, he’d be in good shape.

But if it was full of sentries or dogs or even kids, he’d be in serious trouble.

In the late afternoon women shrouded in their burkas appeared on his side of the river. There were two dozen in total, moving in small groups of two or three up the fallow stepped fields closer to his position. Kolt was not worried about being seen. Even from the highest of the terraced fields, there was still a hilly tree line and then a sheer limestone cliff between his position and the women. They strolled all the way to this tree line, and they began to gather armloads of small sticks and branches, kindling for their fires.

In his intelligence briefing with Kopelman back at Radiance’s Operations Center, Bob had told him that if he saw women working in the fields or gathering wood, then it was a good bet that there was not a strong Taliban presence in the area, because the Taliban did not allow women to work outside of the house, even to gather fuel for their fires.

A good bet.
Yeah, that sounded so much better to Raynor in a conference room on the other side of the border. The women before him now indicated something
might
be the case, but was he ready to risk his life on it?

Kopelman had also warned him that the women would know how to shoot Kalashnikovs, and many would be better shots than the men. He didn’t see weapons hanging off the outside of the burkas, but even without weapons the women of this village would be a danger.

The two dozen women filled their arms, their backs, and, in some cases, their heads with kindling and firewood, and they returned over the bridge and back to their village. The cooking fires began burning as the mist fell in late afternoon. Kolt caught the scent of gently wafting wood smoke through the moisture long after the village disappeared from view.

He ate a little of his rations and sipped water, preparing himself and waiting until nightfall. His stomach turned with nervous energy and concern, but despite his fears, he was determined, and Kolt Raynor was a man who acted on his resolve. He knew he’d be heading for the compound as soon as the village went to sleep.