Hunt the Wolf (5 page)

Donaldson looked at Jim Anders, who said, “Syrena, spelled s-y-r-e-n-a, was the name of a Polish sedan that went out of production in 1983.”

“It might be important,” Crocker said.

“Thanks, Crocker,” Donaldson countered snidely. “We’ll keep our eyes out for old Polish cars.”

“What about Zaman? Any idea where he is now?”

“Wherever he is, he’s probably planning more attacks against Americans.”

“I want another shot at him,” Crocker said, looking Donaldson in the eye.

“Go climb your mountain. Expect to make contact with a foreign national, six foot one, longish blond hair, early forties. His name is Mikael Klausen.”

“What’s he want?”

“He has something he wants to discuss with you. We’ll talk when you get back.”

L
eaves me
feeling like a fool,
Crocker thought, referring to the pencil-pushing, risk-averse Agency asshole Donaldson.
Calls the mission a fuckup…

Unfair.

Anger and anxiety had been eating at him throughout the one-hour flight from Islamabad to Skardu. When he returned to ST-6 headquarters in Virginia, he’d have to prepare a postoperations report. In it, he’d have to explain what went wrong with the mission and how Zaman had escaped.

Following that, he’d be subjected to a briefing called a hot wash, during which every detail of the mission would be picked over and second-guessed by dozens of officers from the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, and ST-6.

Now he wanted to get up and kick something or do some physical training, but there was nowhere to go in the DC-9 fuselage crammed with passengers, suitcases, plastic bags filled with clothes. A serious—some might say fanatical—athlete, Crocker hadn’t missed a day of PT in twenty years.

With no outlet, his indignation metamorphosed into rigorous self-examination. Soon he was questioning the decisions he’d made, his leadership, his intelligence.

Then, he got pissed off for criticizing himself.

What the hell am I doing?

Crocker’s father—the most straightforward, hardworking man he’d ever known—had taught his son to be ruthlessly honest.

But what he was doing was something else—a weird form of beating other people to the punch, or keeping himself in line. Maybe it was guilt left over from some of the wild things he’d done as a kid.

Anger begat anxiety, which turned into self-questioning, and then became no-holds-barred self-criticism.

He knew the vicious circle, because he’d traveled it many times. The outcome was always the same. Dizzying mental exhaustion. Emptiness at the pit of his stomach. A feeling of being unworthy and incomplete.

Some wise man had said: You can accomplish amazing feats of bravery and travel to the farthest reaches of the earth, but you can’t escape yourself. Or something like that.

The truth in those words chafed at Crocker, who twisted in the upholstered seat. Akil, buckled in beside him, could literally feel the heat radiating from the team leader’s body.

“What’s going on with you, boss? You look like you’re about to explode,” Akil remarked, tossing aside the copy of
People
with Sandra Bullock on the cover. Leave it to him to find the one magazine on the plane filled with photos of beautiful women.

Crocker grasped the armrest as the jet banked sharply. “I’ll get over it, Akil. I’m just a little…annoyed.”

“Why? Because we didn’t get Zaman?”

“Something like that.”

The plane started to descend through dense white clouds.

“Sniveling coward hides under a burka, pretending to be a woman,” Akil remarked. “Which means sooner or later we get to make him our bitch.”

Sometimes Akil’s devil-may-care attitude cut right through the bull.

Crocker grinned. “It’s that asshole Donaldson from the Agency.”

Akil frowned. “Where was he when we were in the shit?”

“In a meeting, probably, sipping a cappuccino.”

“Or jerking someone off. Next time, tell him to go fuck himself.”

Bursts of wind tossed the DC-9 from side to side. Crocker imagined circling back to Islamabad, finding Donaldson, and beating the living shit out of him.

But what would that accomplish, except getting him brought up on charges?

He turned to face the clouds churning outside his window and muttered: “Pencil-pushers like him make a career of second-guessing other people’s work. What is their purpose beyond that?”

“Boss, he’s not important. Forget him. Just another Washington parasite. The city’s swarming with them.”

“They get in our way. Live off the blood and sweat of others. Bureaucrats and fucking power junkies,” Crocker continued to vent.

“They whine a lot, but the next time they’re ready to nail some terrorists, who are they going to call?”

“Us, I hope.”

“We’re like the Ghostbusters. Only we eradicate fanatics with automatic weapons and WMDs.”

Sharp gray mountains poked through the cumulus clouds. Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak, better known as Killer Mountain, glistened brilliantly in the distance. The view of the mountains momentarily pulled Crocker’s mind away from Donaldson. One of the things he loved about climbing was the opportunity it afforded to free his mind of the garbage that ate at him.

The work schedule usually provided the SEAL operators with a two-month OCONUS (outside the continental United States) deployment period, followed by two months of Special Skills training, followed by two months of standby. Crocker had convinced his ST-6 commanding officer to allow him to take his crew to the mountains as part of their two-month Special Skills rotation. Having them enter Pakistan as climbers not only provided a convenient cover for the AZ mission, the climb itself would afford Crocker’s men some much-needed downtime. They’d been going hard the last five-plus months—​deploying on one op after another, with no Special Skills training or standby.

The jet hit another air pocket and fell five hundred feet.

Akil: “You think the pilot knows what he’s doing?”

Some kid’s DVD player was blasting “Baby” by Justin Bieber, proof that his music had reached every corner of the earth.

Suddenly they saw tin roofs gleam through the swirling mist, which magically dissipated to reveal a valley of deep, luxurious green.

Seatbacks up. Buckles secured. The landing gear groaned as it locked into place.

As they neared an asphalt runway, Akil checked the altimeter on his watch. “Eight thousand one hundred and eighty-nine feet.”

Earlier in his career, Crocker had been part of a joint SEAL-Agency mission to La Paz, Bolivia, located at 13,000 feet. Most of the team spent the first two days sick and suffering from massive headaches because they landed without a chance to acclimatize.

He planned for his current team to climb approximately 10,000 feet beyond that, without supplemental oxygen. But they would be taking the ascent in stages.

The plane twisted violently right, seconds before it touched down.

“Hold on!”

Crocker, Akil, and Davis and Mancini, a row behind them, bounced in their seats and were tossed from side to side. A dark-skinned Tibetan-looking woman seated across the aisle leaned forward and threw up on her red flats.

Crocker passed her a headband that he kept in his backpack to clean herself with. She didn’t want to take it.

“Go ahead. You need it more than I do,” he said in English.

She nodded and replied:
“Shukran.”
(Thank you.)

“Aafwaan.”
(You’re welcome.)

Outside the little concrete terminal, Crocker breathed the thin air tinged with the smell of burning charcoal, then caught his reflection in the building’s plate-glass window.

The modern world wasn’t an easy place for a warrior with a conscience to find his way.

A girl had been killed and Zaman had escaped.

As the assault leader of ST-6/Blue, Tom Crocker carried a large responsibility on his shoulders—not just for his team, but for the millions of Americans it was their job to protect. Lou Donaldson was right. Zaman probably was planning more attacks against Americans.

Crocker badly wanted another shot at him. But he literally had to climb a mountain first.

Crocker had faced many extreme physical challenges in his decades as a SEAL: jungle ops in the Amazon, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, and Panama; air assaults in Grenada and Afghanistan; grueling mountain runs in Ethiopia and Korea; desert gunfights in the Middle East; and undercover ops in Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia.

Terrorists generally didn’t have much to lose. Many of them had experienced day-to-day combat, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, and the pangs of starvation. That’s why he always pushed his men to strengthen and further develop their combat mind-set. They needed to believe they could take on the most perilous, difficult enemy, and prevail.

As he waited with the others for their gear to be unloaded from the belly of the jet, Crocker’s mind doubled back.

How did one fully serve one’s country, which he believed in most cases projected good in the world, when duty to country sometimes involved inflicting violence and death on the innocent?

Physical danger he could handle, but the pull of conscience and the need to answer to civil society—the sheep—was more difficult.

That’s why the little girl’s death continued to gnaw at him.

Some warriors found relief in gambling, womanizing, or drinking. Others put their feet up and, beer in hand, numbed their brains with TV. He preferred to be outdoors, climbing, running, skiing, hiking, biking, kayaking, always physically challenging himself.

For one thing, he had huge reserves of energy. Secondly, as a kid growing up in New England, he’d spent weekends and vacations in the wilderness camping with his brother, sisters, and parents. That’s where he’d learned to appreciate and respect the power, beauty, and majesty of nature.

Nature made no judgments, and represented truth. Growth and destruction. Death and rebirth.

The pride he felt in being a small part of it had pushed him to develop his body. A skinny teenager, Crocker had spent many sweaty all-nighters in his father’s garage, lifting weights to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Stones. He became a fanatic. Some nights he’d work out until an hour or two before his mother got him and his siblings up and ready for school.

He sat remembering those days. The simplicity of knowing what was expected of him; the loving warmth of his family.

“Legs” by ZZ Top just happened to be playing on the cassette player of the multicolored Nissan cab. An old Ford Taurus followed them, carrying Akil and the rest of their gear.

He panicked for a moment, thinking they’d lost Ritchie, then recalled that he was back in Islamabad with the attractive nurse, waiting for his leg to heal.

The gray-haired driver negotiated potholes as the sweet smell of barbecued lamb wafted through the cracked and taped side window.

“Jesus, that smells good,” Mancini remarked.

“Sure does,” Crocker echoed.

Davis, his stomach still halfway up his throat from the landing, looked at the two men and shook his head. “You guys got to be kidding.”

The joke was that Mancini had a stomach like a cement mixer. He could eat anything.

Mancini: “Boss, you think we can stop and try some of that lamb kebab?”

“We’ll eat at the hotel.”

“Doubt if the grub there will taste half as good as that. The stuff they sell on the streets is always better.”

“So are your chances of getting food poisoning.”

Brownish yellow dust covered everything, including the dozens of stalls that sold items that ran the gamut from trekking supplies to souvenirs. The dirt shoulder that passed for a sidewalk was crowded with a mixture of Shins, Pashtuns, Hunzakuts, and Uyghurs. Looked more like Tibet than Pakistan.

Before dinner, Crocker set out on an eight-mile run in the foothills. As his muscles worked and his lungs filled with the fresh mountain air beyond the town limits, he felt better. The starry sky and sliver of moon reminded him of his boyhood home in New England. The shadows of giant peaks looming ahead promised new adventure. The Pink Floyd song “High Hopes” echoed in his head, especially the lyric “consumed by slow decay.”

The next morning, fed and rested, the four Americans set out in two rented Land Rovers for the seven-hour drive to Askole. Zaman and the dead six-year-old girl had faded in the memories of the others, but for some reason Crocker’s mind hadn’t completely let them go.

Amends had to be made. Scores remained to be settled.

His determination to get AZ didn’t dissipate, even in the face of rugged mountainous terrain and thin air.

To call what they traversed a road was something of an exaggeration. But he’d been on worse—recently in Afghanistan, and several months ago in Bolivia, where he and his team had been sent to take out the leaders of a ring of narco-terrorists.

The members of SEAL Team Six wound their way up small hills into lushly vegetated, irrigated farming villages. Between these green oases they passed over stretches of stark desert, through river basins and canyons of sharp granite.

Crocker thought of past missions he’d been on and the casualties they’d produced—Cubans in Grenada, PDF in Panama, Saddam’s soldiers in Iraq, Salvadoran rebels, Afghan Taliban and mujahedeen, Colombian, Bolivian, and Honduran drug-war casualties. There was a fellow adventure racer who had died of heatstroke in Utah, fellow bikers he’d seen destroyed in motorcycle accidents, frozen climbers in Alaska and in the Himalayas.

He wondered about the toll they’d taken on his soul.

Not that he’d ever had a problem killing people when he thought it was necessary. At seventeen, he’d taken his first life—that of a sadistic gangbanger fresh out of prison who’d beaten up a female friend of his, a sweet lost soul with blue eyes named Patty Norris.

When a red-hot young Crocker confronted the punk, who outweighed him by at least 125 pounds, the ex-con drew a snub-nosed .38, smiled, and asked: “What the fuck do you want, kid?”

Crocker didn’t panic. Surprised the bastard with three sharp punches to the face.

As the gangbanger bent down to retrieve the pistol that he’d dropped, Crocker smashed the side of his head with a large rock. The big ex-con hit the ground, twitched a little, but never got up.

In all the many times Crocker had thought about that encounter since, he’d never felt remorse. One less evil scumbag to plague the innocent. To his mind, he’d made the world a safer place.

They had to stop where a river had washed out part of the road. The four SEALs stripped to their T-shirts and tossed boulders into the narrow, busy channel. Within an hour, they were back on their way, smiling, munching on lamb sandwiches, cracking jokes.