Black Site (47 page)

FIFTY

Pam stared intently at the monitor in front of her as Baby Boy crossed the border, one thousand feet above Torkham. Quickly she scanned readouts on the heads-up display to ensure all systems were operating nominally.

Her mobile phone rang. She pulled it out and looked at it.

It was Grauer.

“Hi, Pete,” she said.

“Pamela, what the hell is going on?”

“Everything is fine.”

“No, Pam, everything is
not
fine. I just got a call from Jalalabad tower. They want to know why I have two Predators flying. Since I have only one Predator pilot, I regard having two Predators in the air as a serious problem.”

“It’s going to be okay, Pete. I have a plan.”

“Which you will now tell me about.”

A slight pause. “Can you come to Baby Girl’s trailer?”

“I’ll be there in three minutes.”

She closed her phone and leaned forward toward the monitor.

*   *   *

Raynor found himself sprinting through late-morning traffic on the Torkham Road. Cars were stopped just around the bend from where he had been shooting it out with the Taliban. Men stood outside their vehicles; jingle trucks had disgorged their passengers to smoke and wait for the battle to end so they could safely restart their journey to the east.

Kolt jogged now, exhausted, blood dripping freely from the back of his head. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the two Taliban transport trucks rounding the bend slowly. They were three hundred yards back, searching for him up in the hills and rocks, apparently not taking into consideration that he’d actually be dumb enough to run down the middle of the highway.

A group of malicious-looking Pakistani men in turbans shouted at Kolt as he ran by their car. He held the semiautomatic sniper rifle, but he did not wave it at them. He just ignored their curses and kept going. Just ahead of them a small scooter pulled out of oncoming traffic and turned around, facing back to the west. Raynor glanced back over his shoulder again, and saw the Taliban trucks picking up speed, closing on him with purpose.

He’d been seen.

Cars parked on the highway began pulling off the road, getting out of the way of the charging trucks.

Kolt staggered forward, weakening by the step.

“Mister Racer! Mister Racer!”

Raynor stumbled as he stopped and looked at the man on the scooter.

Jamal stared back at him with his customary terrified expression.

Kolt just mumbled in English, “How the fuck…”

“Get on!”

Kolt climbed on the back of the scooter and Jamal lurched forward, racing up the empty western lane of the Torkham Road.

“Those trucks behind. They are coming after you?” Jamal asked as he looked at his rearview mirror.

Raynor needed a minute to catch his breath before he could answer. Finally, in Pashto, Kolt said, “Well, actually
now
they are coming after
us.
What are you doing here?”

Jamal stepped on the gas, but the tiny bike would never outrun the big trucks. The two vehicles loaded with gunmen closed quickly. “Mister Bob gave me a number to call if something happened to him. I called it last night. A man named Pete said that I should go to Torkham and wait for his instructions. He called me one hour ago and said that if I wanted to come to Afghanistan, where I will be safe and have a good job, I had to come and pick you up on the road from Landi Kotal. He did not say men would be chasing you!”

Kolt looked back over his shoulder. The two trucks were less than one hundred yards back.

“Go faster!”

“I can go faster only if you get off!” screamed Jamal.

A gun barked behind them. The highway on their right exploded into broken rock as rounds stitched up it.

Kolt knew they would not make it. The town of Torkham was just ahead. He could see the dust and haze in the distance. If they could get there they could find a place to hide, but they could not outrun the trucks behind them.

There was no way. The town was five minutes away and the trucks would be on them in one minute.

The bullets from the Talibani rifles were on them now. Another burst screamed through the air by Raynor’s ear.

He squinted ahead at the town before him. Willed it to come closer.

Then his eyebrows furrowed. “What the
hell
is that?”

Jamal looked up too now, and he almost lost control of his scooter.

A sleek white Predator unmanned aerial vehicle shot up the road right toward them, not fifty feet in the air.

With blurring speed it streaked over their heads. The thin white starboard wing tipped slightly, and the craft seemed to yaw to the right. Five seconds after passing directly over Kolt and Jamal’s position the big, buzzing drone had lined up perfectly on the first of the speeding trucks.

“Pam.” Kolt muttered the name with stunned admiration, transfixed by the craziest thing he had ever seen in his life.

*   *   *

Pam Archer kept a steady left hand on the joystick, an impassive face, her eyes locked on her main monitor. She went to full throttle, twitched down to ten feet over the highway. With the slight tailwind and the descent, her heads-up display read 162 miles an hour.

Pam’s drone was no longer a passive monitor of events.

Baby Boy was now a huge kinetic missile.

The first truck saw the aircraft and jacked out of the way, ran off the road, and kicked up dust as the driver fought to keep the vehicle on its tires. The driver tried to pull it back onto the road, but he fishtailed, swerved, crossed the highway, and came to a jolting stop in the low boulders on the south side. The dozen men in the back were tossed all over the highway.

The second truck was not nearly so lucky. With a combined speed of over 210 miles an hour the UAV and the cab of the flatbed slammed together. A fireball erupted as the gas tanks ruptured amid torn electrical wires and the resultant sparks of metal on metal. Most men in the vehicle were incinerated instantly. A few Taliban burned and flailed as they flew through the air, their bodies landing and shredding into burning bits of flesh and clothing and battle gear on a long scatter path up the road.

Kolt and Jamal slowed slightly as they both looked back in awe at the smoke and flames and wreckage behind them. Kolt just shook his head in dibelief.

It was the craziest damned thing he’d ever seen.

“A kamikaze Predator,” he mumbled to himself.

He thought of Pam, and smiled.

But Jamal quickly brought him back to the here and now. “Mister Racer. What do we do now?”

Kolt patted the young Afghan on his shoulder as they closed on the border town of Torkham. He shrugged. “How ’bout I buy you a cup of tea?”

*   *   *

Archer ran from Trailer 1 to Trailer 2. Just as she made it to Baby Girl’s trailer, Pete Grauer arrived and stepped inside with her. Pam helped Jay out of the cockpit seat. The young security guard looked relieved at first, but then he turned ashen-faced upon seeing the ex–Ranger colonel.

“Enjoy yourself, son?” Grauer asked.

“No! No, sir!”

“Out.” Grauer waved the man out of the trailer.

Pam settled in and disengaged the autopilot, taking control of Baby Girl, turning her back over the Torkham Road.

Grauer said, “You crashed the UAV, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. We needed to buy Racer some time.”

Thirty seconds of silence ensued. “Do you think I just get the Predators insured with collision coverage at State Farm?”

Archer cleared her throat nervously. “No, sir.” She did not look back, only focused more intently on her work.

Another thirty seconds of silence other than the various mechanical hums of the trailer.

Grauer spoke again. “Archer.”

“Sir?”

A sigh from the man behind. “That was incredible. Nice work.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And Archer?”

“Sir?”

“
Never
again.”

“No, sir. Absolutely not.”

EPILOGUE

Delta Force Colonel Jeremy Webber’s Chinook helicopter landed at 1300 hours. He climbed out of the side door and was followed by an eight-man contingent of snipers, spotters, and assaulters. The men took up positions on the hill overlooking the Torkham border crossing. Two more assaulters, Benji and Monk, stepped out of the helicopter as well, and they followed their commander down the steep road toward the crossing point.

Webber carried a leather satchel under his arm.

The road was congested with travelers, merchants, kids, goats, trucks, rickshaws, and taxis. Several U.S. Army Humvees were parked on the Afghani side. Webber, Monk, and Benji walked past them without a glance, though the young soldiers in the Humvees stared at the odd clothing of the three Americans, tactical attire that proclaimed the men to be of no particular branch of service or specific unit. They looked more like private bodyguards, but they appeared to be unarmed, and they had arrived in a Chinook and not an SUV.

The three men made their way to the Pakistani checkpoint and asked to speak to the official in charge. With stern glares and serious voices the men commanded attention. The border crossing’s officer in charge appeared. He wore the attractive beret and uniform of the Pakistani Frontier Corps and sported a mustache that made him a dead ringer for the late Saddam Hussein, apart from his much ruddier complexion.

Colonel Webber extended a hand. “Good afternoon, Major. I wonder if I could have a moment of your time.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Is there someplace quiet we can go? Your office, perhaps?”

Monk and Benji stood silently behind as the two men walked off down a hall.

Fifteen minutes later a scooter pulled up to the Pakistani side of the border crossing. On it sat a thin Afghan and another man, lighter-complected, with a scruffy beard and a filthy face. The man on the back of the scooter wore a brown turban, but a splotch of red blood could be seen soaking through it. His right arm was bandaged. He seemed almost asleep.

A guard asked them for their papers. The two men on the scooter did not move. As the guard began to speak to them again, the officer in charge came out of the customs shack, walked up to his young soldier, and told him that the two men on the scooter were permitted to exit the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The guard shrugged, the scooter drove forward, and the major returned to his building.

When the OIC returned to his office the Americans were gone, but the older man’s satchel remained on his desk. Upon opening it the major found five thousand dollars.

He’d hoped for a little more.

Minutes later he heard the helicopter taking off over on the Afghanistan side.

*   *   *

Daoud al-Amriki was proud that he was to die in the presence of his leader. It had been two weeks of hard travel from Pakistan to Yemen, and at each stop along the route, at each safe house or conveyance along the way, a little more of Daoud al-Amriki’s free will and liberty had been taken from him. They’d taken his gun in Karachi, his documents and phone on the boat to Aden, his wallet and his money on the road into Sanaa, and then they’d removed his clothing as he went into the hills to the north, replacing them with a peasant’s rags.

The chains came on soon after, and the hood not long after that.

Now he sat, hooded and chained, in a room on a farm somewhere near Sa’dah. He knew this only because he’d been here once before, under different circumstances, of course. He remembered the smells of the tea and the baked bread. The scents of the Red Sea and the desert mixing with one another.

On that visit, he’d come to seek audience with his leader. To lay out his brave plan, and to promise a great victory against the infidels.

This time he had come in chains. In defeat.

He had come, inshallah, to die.

Men entered the room and stood around him. He thought they would remove his hood but they did not. Instead, they lifted him to his feet and led him to another room in the same building, where they pushed him down onto his haunches, and only then did they remove his hood.

He blinked in the fresh light, taking it into his sore eyes in doses as his head hung toward the floor.

Finally, when he was ready, he lifted his head. In front of him, just as he had expected, was Anwar al-Awlaki.

The American-born operational leader of al Qaeda looked healthy and tan. He sat in clean, flowing white robes and a simple cream-colored turban. His black beard, flecked with bits of gray, and his wire-rimmed eyeglasses did not obstruct the serious expression on his face.

Sitting around Awlaki in a semicircle were a half-dozen other men. Al-Amriki did not know any of them.

Daoud al-Amriki greeted them all with a blessing, and a blessing was returned.

Then the young American looked to his leader and said, “I failed you in Pakistan. I will not blame anyone but myself for what happened. I failed to prepare, to anticipate. I failed to—”

Al-Awlaki lifted a hand. Al-Amriki went silent. “You will go to America,” he said in perfect English.

Daoud cocked his head. He could not believe he understood the soft voice of the man in front of him. “I?
I
will go?”

“You will attack the infidels from within. You will make a great victory for the believers.”

“Yes.” Al-Amriki looked to the other men. One of them gave him a curt nod, as if to say,
This will all be explained later.

“Yes.” Daoud al-Amriki said it again, louder, with passion.

A man crawled over to him with a key, and unlocked Daoud’s chains.

The bearded man in the flowing white robes spoke once more. “And this time you will not fail. Inshallah.”

“Inshallah,” said David the American, rubbing his wrists. He looked up at his leader and he smiled.

Inshallah.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I hated Mrs. Johnson’s English class. In fact, I applied most of my time to figuring ways to avoid the work and work the system.

We had it all figured out. We matched test days to our skip days. We infiltrated school grounds the same afternoon, usually about twenty minutes after Mrs. Johnson had headed for her faded yellow station wagon with the simulated wood grain side panels and just before the coach expected us on the ball field. After all, at our high school it was often said we worked ball and played school.