Secrets of State (16 page)

“So you know who the Stoics are?”

“No.”

Sam looked quizzical.

“Do you know why I moved out here to the middle of nowhere?”

“Fishing?” Sam offered, on the theory that this answer was more polite than “bourbon.”

“Nah. I don't really like fishing. That's just what you're supposed to say at your retirement party. No, I moved out here for the skies.” Earl nodded toward the twin telescopes at the far end of the porch. “I didn't like to talk about this back in the world. It's a little too sissy for someone who was in my line of work. But I've been a sky watcher since I was a kid. The night skies out here are fantastic. There's no light pollution and we're up pretty high so you get a clear view of the stars. I'm hoping maybe someday to get my name on a comet, even if ‘Holly's Comet' comes dangerously close to copyright infringement.”

Sam nodded encouragingly, confident that Earl would eventually get around to the point.

“Do you know how astronomers—real astronomers, I mean—not us amateurs. Do you know how they find black holes?”

“With a very big telescope?”

“Well, yes. But not really. At least not directly. You can't see a black hole. The gravity is so strong it sucks in everything around it, including light. But massive gravity like that affects other things that are nearby, things like stars and planets. The black hole affects their movements ever so slightly. But with the right instruments, you can capture the change. Measure it. And from those measurements, you can tell that there's a black hole in a particular part of space.”

“So you don't have to see it to know it's there,” Sam suggested.

“That's right. Did you know that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy that just sits there eating solar systems like popcorn?”

“I'll confess that I did not.”

“Well, no one's seen it, but the astronomers are pretty sure it's there. You can see how it influences the stars around it, and it's the only explanation that fits the data. Now here's the thing. As important as that black hole is, you wouldn't want to get too close to it. It'd suck you in and scatter your particles across the eighth dimension or whatever. It would be decidedly unhealthy.”

The corner of Sam's mouth turned up just slightly at the Buckaroo Banzai reference. Earl Holly, legendary CIA case officer, was a closet science-fiction geek.
Who knew?

“And the Stoics are like that?” he asked. “You can't see them, but you can see what they do?”

“Pretty much. You can see its outlines because it's the part of what you're looking at that you can't see. You can see its shadow and you can see its effects. But don't get too close.”

“Weeder is a part of this?”

“I don't think he's a member. At least not a member of the senior leadership. He's a killer. An assassin. I think he does the wet work for the Stoics, or at least he used to. If he's with Argus Systems now, there's a good chance that the company is somehow linked to the Stoics. It'd be consistent with past practice.”

“So why would a group like that want a war on the subcontinent? Arms sales?”

“I don't think so. That would be a little too venal for the Stoics. They aren't salesmen and they aren't interested in money.”

“What does interest them?”

“Cassandra.”

“Another Greek?”

“The last one for now . . . I hope. Cassandra is a computer, an extremely powerful computer that some very smart people were using to model nuclear terrorism. Where a weapon might come from. Who would use it. How they would get it into the United States. Whether they might simply explode it or try to blackmail the government into pulling out of the Middle East, for example.”

“Let me guess. Cassandra decided that Pakistan was the most likely source of the bomb.”

“That's what my . . . friends . . . tell me.”

“I wonder how many millions of dollars the government spent to reach that blindingly obvious conclusion.”

“Not ‘M,' my boy, ‘B.' Billions.”

“And your friends the Stoics decided that a nuclear war was the way to solve the problem? Have India turn the country into a smoking pile of glass?”

“I don't think that's it.”

“Then what?”

Earl hesitated. For just a moment, Sam had the impression that he was about to say something important, to fill in a piece of the puzzle. But the moment passed quickly, and it was possible that Sam had simply imagined it. Hope, he knew, could do that.

“I'm not sure,” Earl said finally, although his answer was not quite—for Sam at least—believable.

They sat there in silence, listening to the sounds of the insects and birds from the woods.

“What are you going to do?” Earl asked after a while.

“I need answers.”

“Do you even know the questions?”

“Maybe not. But I think I know where to start looking for both.”

“And where's that?”

“On the other side of a big metal door on the fourth floor.”

“What's behind it?”

“Morlocks.”

SOMEWHERE NEAR RISHIKESH, INDIA

APRIL 12

T
he training was over. They were as ready as they were ever going to be, Khan thought. It was possible to overtrain. Too much rote practice dulled the reflexes, stripped a unit of its edge. The men on the assault team were all experienced. They knew how to fight. The training had been important to forge the group into a team. For the first time since joining the Hand of the Prophet, Khan felt that he was a part of that team. Jadoon's acceptance had opened the door. Khan had walked through it, building a rapport with the others through daily practice in unarmed combat. They were all good at hand-to-hand, but Khan was a cut above. He was exceptional.

The team sat together in the back of the truck, an ancient American-surplus “deuce and a half,” as it jounced over the Indian back roads that led from Chandigarh to Rishikesh. The men sat on wooden boxes. More boxes were piled up against the wall of the cab and strapped in place with nylon webbing. The driver was a local with HeM sympathies who knew these roads as well as he knew the faces of his wives and children. He had introduced himself as Ali.

They had been traveling for two days. Khan was road-weary and his clothes were stained by dust that he could no longer be bothered to brush away.

At an unmarked junction, Ali turned off the macadam onto a rutted service road. He maneuvered the big truck skillfully as the road snaked up and over a series of steep hills. After nearly half an hour of nausea-inducing switchbacks, Ali pulled the truck onto a broad flat area looking out over a valley. He parked behind a boulder that was approximately the same size as the truck. This was a remote part of India. It was rough country with rocky and infertile soil. The vegetation was mostly scrub, with only a few windblown trees for shade.

Khan and Mashwanis retrieved a camouflage net patterned in gray and brown tiger stripes from one of the boxes and stretched it across the top of the truck. For what they had come to do, it was important to remain unseen and undisturbed, especially as the other boxes held Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and plastic explosives. These would be hard to explain away. Khan was acutely conscious of being part of a very small team operating in the heart of an enemy nation of one billion people. Their truck was like a raft floating on a hostile sea a three-day sail from the nearest shore.

Like the others, Khan was carrying false papers, an Indian ID card that identified him as Baahir Daoud. It might stand up to cursory scrutiny by a local cop looking for a bribe, but that was about it. India, like Pakistan and America, had secret prisons where enemy combatants could be disappeared. Conditions in these prisons were rumored to be inhuman, and the jailers did not shy away from torture as a tool of interrogation. None of the team would let themselves be taken alive.

When the netting was secure, Khan took a moment to survey the tactical situation. They were on the lip of a valley with sides steep enough that it might have qualified as a gorge. The valley floor was some seventy-five meters below where a double set of train tracks paralleled a dry streambed. At the far end of the valley, the train tracks and streambed diverged, with the tracks leading into a tunnel that cut through a mountain. The tunnel was the reason that they were there. He glanced at his watch. Eleven forty-five a.m. They had three hours.

Working quickly, they unloaded the truck. Ahmedani opened the boxes with a crowbar and Jadoon supervised the distribution of the equipment. Khan slipped a heavy bulletproof vest on over his shoulders and cinched it tight. He strapped a tactical holster holding an Indian copy of a Browning 9mm to his thigh and checked that the combat knife in his boot would draw smoothly and easily. Although the sun was strong, he wrapped a pair of low-end night-vision goggles around his neck. It would be dark in the tunnel. Ahmedani handed Khan a Kalashnikov. Khan popped the magazine off and reinserted it after checking the load.

Mashwanis had armed himself with an imposing-looking Dragunov sniper rifle that he leaned against the truck so that he could help Khan and Ahmedani finish unpacking the boxes. They had nearly finished when they heard something that made them freeze. The tinkling of a bell; a man-made sound coming from just around the curve in the road. They were not alone.

Responding to Jadoon's hand signals, the entire team went to ground, looking for whatever cover they could find. The truck itself was largely shielded from casual observation by the boulder and netting, but the vegetation here was sparse and the risk of detection was high.

Khan was sheltered behind a large rock and further screened by a clump of high grass. He had pulled the Kalashnikov from his shoulder on the way down to the ground, and he thumbed the safety off as he trained the weapon at the bend in the road. The others, he was confident, were doing the same.

The bell chimed again, closer this time.

Khan's grip tightened on the trigger. He sighted down the barrel, lining up with the likely kill zone.

With a pathetic bleat, a brown goat wearing a bell on a rope around its neck stepped into Khan's narrow field of view. He was so surprised that he almost pulled the trigger.

One by one, more goats rounded the corner, stopping here and there to pull at the dry grass by the side of the road. A moment later, the goatherd came into view. The boy could not have been more than ten. He wore loose cotton pants and a T-shirt. His hair was tied up in a Sikh-style turban secured with a dirty white cloth, and he carried a stick across his shoulders that seemed to be more of a toy than a tool. Swinging the stick off his shoulders, the boy used it to poke and prod some of the slower goats down the trail.

Khan kept his sights fixed on the goatherd, hoping that the boy would not turn in their direction.

Khan's rifle was aimed at center mass, or what there was of it on a boy nearly as thin as the stick he carried. His palms felt cold and clammy, and there was an almost unbearable tension in his back and shoulders.

He prayed silently to Allah.
Please don't let the boy turn around. Don't let him see us. Spare his life.

Jihad was struggle and Khan had accepted that he would have to kill if he was to fulfill his mission. He had no compunctions about killing armed men, soldiers who took on their roles willingly. This was part of jihad, and he had made his peace with it. Killing women. Killing children. That was something different. He had never killed a child and he had no desire to start now.

Unbidden, a vision of dead children from the wedding party in Afghanistan floated across his vision. Was this different? He was just a boy, but he was a danger to them. He could summon help.

The goatherd bent down and picked up a small stone. He threw it at one of his charges that had started to wander off the road. Chastened, the goat rejoined the herd. They were moving, but slowly. Agonizingly slowly.

The boy started to whistle a tuneless song that nevertheless had an air of carefree joy about it. Khan knew at that moment that he could not pull the trigger. The tension in his shoulders eased, and he slipped his finger onto the outside of the trigger guard. He could not kill this child. But the others on the team would not share his reservations. If the boy spotted them, he was as good as dead. It would not matter whether Khan squeezed his trigger or not.

One goat broke off from the herd and rambled toward the spot where Ahmedani was sheltered behind a rock that looked to Khan much too small to conceal his ample girth.

Don't follow the goat,
Khan pleaded silently.

The boy glanced quickly at the wayward animal, clearly bored by his formal responsibilities. He did nothing to indicate that he had seen Ahmedani pressed flat against the earth behind the boulder with his Kalashnikov trained at the goatherd's head.

Don't follow. Don't.

The goat seemed to lock eyes with Ahmedani. It cocked its head to one side as if curious about why a man would be lying on the ground just there.

Don't.

The boy threw a stone.

The goat retreated slowly back to the group, the bell around his neck clanking disconsolately.

The goatherd turned his back on the HeM jihadis and led his small flock down the road. Moments later, he had rounded the next curve and was lost from sight. The sound of the bells grew fainter and then disappeared altogether.

The boy would live.

Now it was time to kill.

•   •   •

There was one last box
in the back of the truck. It was square and approximately a meter in length along each dimension. Khan helped Ahmedani wrestle it out onto the ground. The box was steel, painted dark green, and covered with numbers and cryptic symbols. The most unusual thing about the box, however, was the lock, a sophisticated-looking LED keypad rather than a combination or key lock. It was heavy. Ahmedani grunted with effort as they manhandled it out of the truck, and Khan felt his back muscles strain from the unexpected weight.

They loaded the now-empty wooden boxes that had held weapons, armor, and tools back into the truck. Mashwanis prepared a sniper's nest that gave him a clear field of fire in the direction of the railroad tracks.

Khan and Ahmedani packed explosive charges in a backpack and half walked, half slid down a scree field to the track. They followed the tracks into the tunnel. Khan slipped on his night-vision gear. It was an older model, but more than adequate for the conditions in the tunnel, which were closer to low light than to darkness.

The tunnel was maybe a kilometer long, and it cut right through the heart of the Mohand mountain range. On the far side, the microclimate was different. Just one valley over, the countryside was lusher, with tropical vegetation taking over from rock and arid scrub. Thick stands of rhododendron covered the slopes.

It took nearly twenty minutes to find what they were after. Some thirty feet up the southern slope, Khan saw a large boulder set firmly into the soil. Ahmedani used a trenching tool to dig a hole at the base of the rock. Khan placed one of the charges in the hole and set the timer for sixty seconds. The earth muffled the sound of the explosion, but it was a powerful charge and Khan had set it well. The blast knocked the stone free and sent it rolling downhill, slowly at first but gathering speed.

When it reached the bottom, the stone was moving so fast that it bounced completely over the train tracks and started up the reverse slope. Khan cursed under his breath. But the rock rolled back, this time stopping right on top of the rail line.

“Bull's-eye,” Khan said in English.

Ahmedani looked at him quizzically.

“Nice shot,” Khan offered in Urdu by way of explanation.

The train crew would be able to move the rock eventually and repair any damage to the rails. It would take time, however. And it would make noise.

They walked back through the tunnel to rejoin their comrades. Jadoon and one of the other jihadis, a rat-faced Punjabi named Umar who had more than twenty HeM operations under his belt, had brought the heavy box down to the railbed and stashed it in the culvert that ran alongside the tracks. The last of their number, a taciturn Pashtun tribesman who called himself Amir Kror, was cutting brush to screen it from view. Amir Kror was the name of a famous eighth-century warrior poet and Khan considered this nom de guerre something of a boastful affectation. The original Amir Kror had written poetry of timeless beauty. This Amir Kror was barely literate.

Khan looked up the slope toward the truck, trying to see it from the vantage of the train engineer. If you knew what to look for, it was possible to make out the shape of the truck behind the camouflage netting, but only if you knew what to look for. Moreover, the train would be moving at least forty miles an hour and the engineer would be thinking about the approaching tunnel rather than gawking at the unremarkable scenery. He would not see the truck. Atal Mashwanis was even harder to spot. Khan had to squint and concentrate to pick out the telltale shape of the Dragunov barrel peeking shyly through the firing gap in the sniper's nest. Atal was insurance. If he fired his weapon, it meant that something had gone wrong. But if something went wrong, they would be glad he was there.

The preparation was complete. Now they had only to wait. As always, the waiting was agony. From his time in Afghanistan, Khan knew that each soldier developed his own strategies for managing this period, the limen between peace and violence, between the quotidian world of the everyday and the insane, upside-down, bizarro world of combat. Some of the soldiers in the highly trained irregular unit he served with in Afghanistan would spend the time obsessively caring for their weapons, the tools of their chosen profession. They cleaned gun barrels that had already been scrubbed raw and smooth, and sharpened combat knives that could slit a throat as easily as they opened a letter. Others stole furtive glances at pictures of loved ones or pored over tactical maps that they had long ago committed to memory. Khan prayed.

“Subhana rabbiyal a'la wa bihamdihi,”
he murmured softly as he, Jadoon, and the others crouched down low in the culvert.
Glory to my God the most magnificent.