Full Assault Mode (38 page)

Kolt knew the pressure was starting to cloud his thinking and he took a few breaths. He needed to retrieve his materials first, stash them outside the camp, then consider how best to make his escape.

Kolt waited at least forty-five minutes, to be absolutely sure that Joma was in deep REM sleep. The terrorist had stopped tossing and turning and had rolled onto his right side, facing away from Kolt. Kolt quietly reached for his AK-47 next to his bedding and slowly slipped out through the tent flap. It was wicked dark, since the moon had not yet risen, giving Kolt the concealment he needed to move away from the tent area. He held his rifle low and waited a few minutes to allow his night vision to adjust before moving around the side of their canvas tent. Hugging the tall wall until he reached several pickup trucks parked in the corner of the compound, Kolt gently laid his rifle on the ground before quietly lifting a two-gallon container of gasoline from the middle truck bed. He secured his rifle and, with both hands full, left the cover of the vehicles and hugged the wall again until he reached the back gate. Kolt took a knee, set the jug down, and carefully checked the gate latch and chain to make sure he could open it quickly but, more importantly, quietly. Kolt knew he had two more important things to take care of before he bolted. First, he needed to grab his water canister, knowing dehydration would set in quickly as he moved across the desert, irritated that he forgot it when he first left the tent. Second, he needed to make a decision about Joma.

Leaving his rifle with the jug, Kolt backtracked to his tent at a crouch, keeping the tent between the sentry sitting in the corner guard tower and him. Only a few yards from the tent flap, Kolt froze. He had picked up on a second sentry patrolling the inner compound at thirty meters’ distance. Kolt slowly slipped closer to the side of the tent and took a knee in the shadow. He quickly assessed the situation, running the two options through his brain housing group while keeping an eye on both camp sentries.

Joma was an enemy of the state, for sure, and he certainly needed to be terminated with prejudice. Hell, that went for every terrorist in the camp. Kolt weighed the pros and cons, and, given the circumstances, he realized he had no good options. He knew that if Mujahid Timothy left without anyone’s knowledge and left a bigger-than-shit dead Joma behind, then the chance of locating Nadal the Romanian or interdicting the second nuke-plot cell inside the United States was shot. Even if he made it a clean kill, one with no blood, no sounds, no struggle, the larger, more important mission would be compromised. With only one of them gone, however, the mission for Joma still might go. Especially if they thought Timothy had simply gotten cold feet.

Yes, Joma had to live for the time being.

For the second time in a day, Kolt gave up the chance to kill an enemy of America. It was starting to piss him off, but he knew in each case it was the right thing to do.

It pained Kolt to leave Joma alive, but he didn’t see a way around it. Accepting it, he turned to penning a quick suicide note. He kept it short, but made it emotional and referenced Allah a few times for good measure. The crowning touch was his regret that he was too weak to see the great missions of the mujahideen fulfilled.

Kolt placed his note on his bed and slipped out of the tent. He paused and looked around the camp. He knew the senior leadership was in the collection of three small houses in the compound to the east. He desperately wanted to call in an air strike and take the whole place out, but, again, the risk was too great that it would tip off the terrorists that their nuke plot had been discovered.

“Fuck it, time to go,” Kolt whispered, setting off into the dark.

The night was cool and the sky clear. He’d have no trouble orienting himself by the stars. Kolt retraced his steps to the gas jug and the back gate. He slowly lifted the chain and eased the gate open just enough to squeeze through. He looked up to get his bearing and eased away from the compound walls, heading west toward Afghanistan.

*   *   *

Kolt figured he had been walking for at least three hours, skirting the dirt road that meandered generally west, careful to stay twenty to thirty meters off the edge of the road. It was mostly rolling desert terrain covered by small rocks and knee-high scrub with intermittent stretches of rough terrain, rocky outcrops that sapped his strength and tested his endurance.

Reaching a dense tree line high in the hills, he set the gas jug down before easing down on his left butt cheek to keep from opening his wound again and leaned against a large rock, wishing now he would have carried a jug of water instead of gasoline. Happy for the rest, Kolt looked up at the moon, sitting nearly directly above him, contemplating the time of night.

Kolt knew he could never make it to a friendly coalition or U.S. base in Afghanistan without food and water, without a more precise form of navigation than the stars, or without finding a vehicle to steel. The cards would be stacked against him—he understood that, which is why he had humped the gas jug for the last three hours.

Kolt stood up and looked around the area. He lifted the gas jug to the top of the highest rock to serve as a point of reference as he moved away to find enough deadfall and brush to erect an aerial distress signal. Using the moonlight to carefully step around the basketball-size rocks lying sporadically on the hillside, he collected what he could carry and returned each time to the gas jug. Within a half hour, he had collected what he needed to erect the Delta Force in extremis distress signal. All he needed to do now was set it on fire.

The fire, and thus the distress signal, would be picked up by a Predator RQ-1 that Kolt hoped would be circling overhead. The drone would in turn bounce its image to whichever tactical operations center happened to see the signal—it would be so strange and out of place that they would be alerted that something was up. The unique design of the burning signal should, Kolt hoped, kick the signal all the way up to the JSOC center in Jalalabad. If … no, when that happened, the chances were extremely high that a Delta or SEAL Team Six assault force, or even a platoon of Army Rangers, would be sent to the border area to recover whoever had set the signal. Kolt was banking that it was just too unique of a signal to ignore.

Fire! Shit!

Kolt certainly knew it was a long shot. Erecting the distress signal wasn’t anywhere in Tungsten’s plan for Kolt. And now, as much as he knew it was entirely sketchy that it would, he realized that water wasn’t the only crucial item he left behind in the tent.

Without matches, Kolt’s inability to start a fire was now his biggest showstopper. He thought it over for a moment, searching for a solution. He needed something to start a fire, something to at least create a spark over a handful of dried brush, which he could massage with the right amount of man-made power while blowing to produce flame.

That damn prepper bracelet!

Kolt’s thoughts turned to Hawk and the prepper bracelets her Special Forces boyfriend, Troy, had made for her. She had shown him both of them, and they both had small whistles and fire-starting flint sticks woven into the paracord. Kolt realized Troy might not be the whacked-out end-of-the-world survivalist he thought he was.

But a spark couldn’t be that hard to create. Kolt looked around for a piece of metal that he could use to strike a hard rock. He felt the thirty-round magazine of the AK-47 that was slung over his shoulder sticking into his lower back and slipped the rifle over his head. He dropped the magazine and studied it in his hand.

Kolt realized that next to fire, maintaining noise discipline to prevent compromise was a close second. Banging a metal magazine against a rock was risky. Sound carries forever at night in the desert, and even though he had been careful on his march and was sure nobody was within striking distance of him, he couldn’t be sure at all that a small village was not hidden behind the hills, or even that a small camel caravan wasn’t bedded down nearby. The last thing he needed was a group of locals surrounding him. He had his night vision adjusted, but he would certainly be flock shooting with his AK-47’s iron sights. If it came to that, his mission was dead in its tracks.

Screw it! I can’t debate this all night.

Kolt moved to the distress signal he had laid out in the desert floor and doused it with the gasoline, thoroughly soaking it from center to end and on each leg. He emptied the jug and discarded it before gathering a handful of brush nearby. He balled the brush up in his fist, setting it gently on the dead fall. He reached for a rock, felt its strength, and dropped it. He reached for a second rock—it was heavier, more solid—and he banged it against another rock to test its strength.

Kolt cringed as the noise definitely carried across the vast desert floor.

Kolt grabbed the AK magazine, lined it up over the rock, and began striking downward just above the ball of scrub. The sound was even stronger, louder than the impact of just two rocks. After a dozen or so powerful strikes, Kolt saw a spark and dropped the magazine. He leaned over and cupped the scrub, protecting it from the wind, and began blowing vigorously.

After several quick breaths, the smoke flashed, and a small flame grew from the edge of scrub. Kolt blew a few more times, giving the flame the oxygen it needed to take, allowing the fire to grow and spread before setting it delicately on a larger portion of brush and the deadfall.

Within a few minutes, with the help of the doused deadfall, the fire successfully spread across the entire signal.

With signal burning, Kolt began a slow walk around the fire. He cradled his AK-47 as he walked. He wanted the Predator to see him. As he walked, a thought occurred to him. As far as the SEALs and Delta were concerned, no one from their command was missing. So who the hell would have set the distress signal?

“Come and find out,” Kolt whispered to the stars, hoping someone somewhere was curious.

TWENTY-FIVE

“What do we have, Sergeant Major?” General Allen asked after having been summoned from his personal quarters minutes earlier. He had hastily thrown on his fatigue pants and brown cold-weather top but didn’t bother with his fatigue top.

“Well, sir, I know what we have here, but I can’t explain why we have it,” said JSOC Sergeant Major Castor as he pointed to the plasma screen from the center of a standing-room-only crowd of night shifters, all inquisitively staring at the odd thermal image in white-hot mode.

“What’s the source?” Allen asked, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“The 25th ID in Kandahar. Their Predator picked up a strange fire near the border, about fifteen miles west of Gulistan,” Castor said. “They didn’t know what it meant, if anything, so they asked around.”

The new JSOC commander, Lieutenant General Seth Allen, having replace Admiral Mason just a few weeks prior, wasn’t too keen on launching aircraft for something that could be a Taliban trap. General Allen was a longtime Special Forces man, for sure, well known throughout the community, but he wasn’t stupid. He motioned for Castor to step away from the crowd and led him over to the coffee table near the tent’s front entrance.

“What’s your take on this?” Allen asked in a low tone, wary of anyone that might invade their space.

“Well, sir,” Castor said, “it is unmistakably the correct ground-distress signal we teach our Tier One operators. Nobody can dispute that.”

“Are we missing anyone?”

He shook his head no. “Every team is accounted for. All radio checks have come back solid. We don’t know who that is.”

“So it could be a Taliban- or AQ-baited trap,” Allen said.

The comment wasn’t lost on Castor. He knew very well the pain of losing the SEALs and others, thirty-eight in all, when the National Guard CH-47, call sign Extortion 17, was shot out of the sky by Taliban rocketeers just a couple of years earlier—a tragedy that is still considered the worst loss of U.S. military life in the entire twelve-year campaign.

“It may not be an active SMU operator,” Castor said. “We have a lot of former guys doing independent contract work for the agency.”

Allen knew this to be true. Ever since 9/11, JSOC personnel were highly recruited by the CIA, which meant the signal could be from a former JSOC operator. The CIA had numerous former operators on their rolls now as ICs. They had been supporting CIA covert operations around the globe, operating all over the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Yes, they were active and very discreet in the war on terror, and the one country that could boast having the most covert American operators on their soil was without question the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

“Do they have their personnel accounted for?” Allen said.

“Chief of station in Kabul already called, sir; they are one-hundred-percent sure they are good to go,” Castor said.

“Damn it!”

“Sir, do you see the man in the image walking around the burning signal in a large circle?” Castor said.

“Sure, why?” Allen said, not sure where his sergeant major was going with the question.

“That’s the signal that the man is compromised but his location is secure,” Castor said. “In other words, sir, if the guy felt threatened, he wouldn’t be near the fire at night because it’s a bullet magnet.”

Allen nodded, confirming he understood the significance of what Castor was saying. The general thought about it for a few seconds, beginning to feel the enemy threat may be low.

“Sir, it is a tough decision for you. But I have been in this business as long as you, fourteen years in the Unit. I wish I could explain it, but in my opinion there is a friendly out there that needs help.”

“I agree, Sergeant Major,” Allen said without hesitation. “Let’s spin up the JOC. Wake up the key leaders and let’s assemble in the war room in ten mikes. We gotta get this done in this cycle of darkness, or we’ll have to push twenty-four hours.”

The wheels of war were spinning up quick.

Afghanistan-Pakistan border

Just after 0400 hours, three MH-60M Stealth Black Hawks lifted off from Kandahar Airfield, having stopped en route from J-bad to top off from the fuel trucks. They executed a sharp turn to the east and headed toward the Afghan-Paki boarder, south of the faint lights pockmarking the village of Spin Boldak.