The Afghan (31 page)

The days of pilots bobbing helplessly in a dinghy or lying in a forest waiting to be found are long gone. Modern aircrew have a lifejacket with a state-of-the-art beacon, small but powerful, and a transmitter that permits in-voice communication.

The beacons were picked up at once and the three listening posts had the men located to a few yards. Major Duval was down in the heart of the state park and Captain Johns had fallen in the logging forest. Both were still closed for access owing to the winter.

The cloud cover right on top of the trees would prevent extraction by helicopter, the fastest and the favoured way. The cloud base would force an old-fashioned rescue. Off-road vehicles or half-tracked vehicles would take the rescue parties to the nearest point along one of the tracks; from there to the downed airmen it would be muscle and sweat all the way.

The enemy now was hypothermia, and in the case of Johns with his broken leg, trauma. The sheriff of Whatcom County radioed to say he had deputies ready to move and they would rendezvous in the small town of Glacier on the edge of the forest within thirty minutes. They were nearest to the wizzo, Nicky Johns, with his broken leg. A number of the loggers lived around Glacier and knew every logging road through the forest. The sheriff was given Johns’s exact position to a few yards and set off.

To keep up the injured man’s morale McChord patched the sheriff right through to the communicator on the wizzo’s lifevest so that the sheriff could encourage the airman as they came nearer and nearer.

The Washington National Park Service opted for Major Duval. They had experience and to spare; every year they had to pull out the occasional camper who slipped and fell. They knew every road through the Park and, where the roads ran out, every trail. They went in with snowmobiles and quad bikes. As their man was not injured, a full stretcher service would hopefully not be necessary.

But as the minutes ticked by the body temperature of the airmen started to drop slowly for Duval but faster for Johns who could not move. The race was on to bring the two men gloves, boots, space blankets and piping hot soup before the cold beat them to it.

Nobody told the rescue parties, because nobody knew, that there was another man out in the Wilderness that day, and he was very dangerous indeed.

The saving grace for the CIA team at the shattered Cabin was that their communications had survived the hit. The commander only had one number to call but it was a good one. It went on a secure line to the desk of DDO Marek Gumienny at Langley. Three time zones east, just after four p.m., he took the call.

As he listened he went very quiet. He did not rant or rave, even though he was being told of a major Company disaster. Before his junior colleague in the Cascades Wilderness had finished, he was analysing the catastrophe. In freezing temperatures the two corpses might have to wait a while. The three injured needed urgent casevac. And the fugitive had to be hunted down.

‘Can a helo get in there to reach you?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, we have cloud right to the treetops and threatening more snow.’

‘What is your nearest town with a track leading to it?’

‘It’s called Mazama. It’s outside the Wilderness but there is a fair-weather track from the town to Hart’s Pass. That’s a mile away. No track from there to here.’

‘You are a covert research facility, understand? You have had a major accident. You need urgent help. Raise the sheriff at Mazama and get him to come in there for you with anything he has got. Half-tracks, snowmobiles, off-roads as near as possible. Skis, snowshoes and sleds for the last mile. Get those men to hospital. Meanwhile, can you stay warm?’

‘Yes, sir. Two rooms are shattered, but we have three sealed off. The central heating is down but we are piling logs on the fire.’

‘Right. When the rescue party reaches you, lock everything down, smash all covert comms equipment, bring all codes with you and come out with the injured.’

‘Sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the Afghan?’

‘Leave him to me.’

Marek Gumienny thought of the original letter John Negroponte had given him at the start of Operation Crowbar. Powers plenipotentiary. No limits. Time the army earned its tax dollars. He rang the Pentagon.

Thanks to years in the Company and the new spirit of information-sharing, he had close contacts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and they in turn were best buddies with Special Forces. Twenty minutes later he learned he might have had his first break of a very bad day.

No more than four miles from McChord Air Force Base is the army’s Fort Lewis. Though a huge army camp, there is a corner off-limits to non-authorized personnel and this is the home of the First Special Forces Group, known to its few friends as Operational Detachment Group (OD) Alpha 143. The terminal ‘3’ means a mountain company, or ‘A’ team. Its Ops Commander was Senior Captain Michael Linnett.

When the unit adjutant took the call from the Pentagon he could not be very helpful, even though he was speaking to a two-star general.

‘Right now, sir, they are not on base. They are involved in a tactical exercise on the slopes of Mount Rainer.’

The Washington-based general had never heard of this bleak pinnacle way down south of Tacoma in Pierce County.

‘Can you get them back to base by helicopter, Lieutenant?’

‘Yessir, I believe so. The cloud base is just high enough.’

‘Can you airlift them to a place called Mazama, close to Hart’s Pass on the edge of the Wilderness?’

‘I’ll have to check that, sir.’

He was back on the line in three minutes. The general held on.

‘No, sir. The cloud up there is right on the treetops and snow pending. To get up there means going by truck.’

‘Well, get them there by the fastest possible route. You say they are on manoeuvre?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Do they have with them all they need to operate in the Pasayten Wilderness?’

‘Everything for sub-zero rough-terrain operating, General.’

‘Live ammunition?’

‘Yessir. This was for a simulated terrorist hunt in Rainer National Park.’

‘Well, it ain’t simulated any more, Lieutenant. Get the whole unit to Mazama sheriff’s office. Check with a CIA spook called Olsen. Stay in contact with Alpha at all times and report to me on progress.’

To save time Captain Linnett, apprised of some kind of emergency while he was descending Mount Rainer, asked for exfiltration by air. Fort Lewis had its own Chinook troop-carrier helicopter, which picked up the Alpha team from the empty visitor car park at the foot of the mountain thirty minutes later.

The Chinook took the team as far north as the snow clouds would allow and set them down on a small airfield west of Burlington. The truck had been heading there for an hour and they arrived almost at the same time.

From Burlington the Interstate 20 wound its bleak path along the Skagit River and into the Cascades. It is closed in winter to all but official and specially equipped traffic; the SF truck was equipped for every kind of terrain and a few not yet invented. But progress was slow. It took four hours until the exhausted driver crunched into the townlet of Mazama.

The CIA team was also exhausted, but at least their injured colleagues, doped with morphine, were in real ambulances heading south for a helicopter pick-up and a final transfer to Tacoma Memorial Hospital.

Olsen told Captain Linnett what he thought was enough. Linnett snapped that he was security cleared and insisted on more.

‘This fugitive, has he got arctic clothing and footwear?’

‘No. Hiking boots, warm trousers, a light quilted jacket.’

‘No skis, snowshoes? Is he armed?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘It’s dark already. Does he have night-vision goggles? Anything to help him move?’

‘No, certainly not. He was a prisoner in close confinement.’

‘He’s toast,’ said Linnett. ‘In these temperatures, ploughing through a metre of snow with no compass, going round in circles. We’ll get him.’

‘There is just one thing. He’s a mountain man. Born and raised in them.’

‘Round here?’

‘No. In the Tora Bora. He’s an Afghan.’

Linnett stared in dumb amazement. He had fought in the Tora Bora. He had been in the first Afghan invasion when Coalition Special Forces, American and British, ranged through the Spin Ghar looking for a runaway party of Saudi Arabs, one of them six feet four inches tall. And he had been back to take part in Operation Anaconda. That had not gone well either. Some good men had been lost on Anaconda. Linnett had a score to settle with Pashtun from the Tora Bora.

‘Saddle up,’ he shouted and the ODA climbed back in their truck. It would take them up the remainder of the track to Hart’s Pass. After that their transportation would go back three thousand years to the ski and the snowshoe.

As they left, the sheriff’s radio brought the news that both airmen had been found and brought out, very cold but alive. Both were in hospital in Seattle. The news was good but a bit too late for a man called Lemuel Wilson.

The Anglo-American investigators of merchant marine who had taken over Operation Crowbar were still concentrating on threat one, the idea that Al-Qaeda might be planning to close down a vital world highway in the form of a narrow strait.

In that contingency the size of the vessel was paramount. The cargo was immaterial, save only that venting oil would make the job of demolition divers almost impossible. Enquiries were flying across the world to identify every vessel on the seas of huge tonnage.

Clearly the bigger the ship, the fewer there would be of them, and most would belong to respectable and gigantic companies. The principal five hundred ultra-large and very large crude carriers, the ULCCs and VLCCs, known to the public as supertankers, were checked and found to be unattacked. Then the tonnages were lowered in modules of ten thousand tonnes fully loaded. When all vessels of fifty thousand tonnes and up were accounted for, the ‘strait blockage’ panic began to subside.

Lloyd’s Register
is probably still the world’s most comprehensive archive and the Edzell team set up a direct line to Lloyd’s, which was constantly in use. On Lloyd’s advice, they concentrated on vessels flying flags of convenience and those registered in ‘dodgy’ ports or owned by suspect proprietors. Both Lloyd’s, and the Secret Intelligence Service’s Anti-Terrorist (Marine) desk joined with the American CIA and Coastguard in slapping a ‘no approach to coast’ label on over two hundred vessels without their captains or owners being aware of it. But still nothing showed up to set the storm cones flying in the breeze.

Captain Linnett knew his mountains and was aware that a man with no specialist footwear, trying to progress through snow over ground riddled with unseen trees, roots, cracks, ditches, gullies and streams, would be lucky to make a heartbreaking half a mile per hour across country.

Such a man would probably stumble through the snow crust into a trickling rivulet and, with wet feet, start to lose body core temperature at an alarming rate, leading to hypothermia and frostbite in the frozen toes.

Olsen’s message from Langley had left no room for doubt; under no circumstances must the fugitive reach Canada, nor must he reach a functioning telephone. Just in case.

Linnett had few doubts. His target would wander in circles without a compass. He would stumble and fall at every second step. He could not see in the blackness under the trees where even the moon, had it not been hidden by twenty thousand feet of freezing cloud, could not penetrate.

True, the man had a five-hour head start; but even in a straight line, that would give him under three miles of ground covered. Special Forces men on skis could treble that, and if rocks and tree trunks forced the use of snowshoes, he could still double the speed of the fugitive.

He was right about the skis. From the drop-off point of the truck at the end of the track, he reached the wrecked CIA Cabin in under an hour. He and his men examined it briefly to see if the fugitive had come back to rifle it for better equipment. There was no sign of that. The two bodies, rigid in the cold, were laid out, hands crossed on chests in the now freezing refectory, safe from roaming animals. They would have to wait for the cloud to lift and a helicopter to land.

There are twelve men in an ‘A’ team; Linnett was the only officer and his Number Two was a chief warrant officer. The other ten were all senior enlisted men, the lowest rank being a staff sergeant. They broke down into two engineers (for demolition), two radio operators, two ‘medics’, a team sergeant (not one but two specialities), an intelligence sergeant and two snipers. While Linnett was inside the wrecked Cabin his team sergeant, who was an expert tracker, scouted the ground outside.

The threatening snow had not fallen; the area around the helipad and the front door, where the rescue team from Mazama had arrived, was a mush of snowshoe marks. But from the shattered compound wall a single trail of footprints led away due north.

Coincidental? thought Linnett. It was the one direction the fugitive must not take. It led to Canada, twenty-two miles away. But, for the Afghan, forty-four hours of hiking. He would never make it, even if he could keep in a straight line. Anyway, the Alpha team would get him halfway there.

It took another hour to cover the next mile, on snowshoes. That was when they found the other cabin. No one had mentioned the other two or three cabins that were permitted in the Pasayten Wilderness because they pre-dated the building prohibition. And this one had been broken into. The shattered triple-glazing and the rock beside the gaping hole left no doubt.

Captain Linnett went in first, carbine forward, safety catch off. Round the edges of the shattered glass two men gave cover. It took them less than a minute to ensure there was no one present, either in the cabin, the adjacent log store or the empty garage. But the signs were everywhere. Linnett tried the light switch, but the power clearly came from a generator when the owner was in residence, and that was closed down behind the garage. They relied on their flashlights.