The Afghan (32 page)

Beside the deep fireplace in the main sitting area was a box of matches and several long tapers, clearly for lighting the logs in the grate; also a bundle of candles in case the generator failed. The intruder had used both to find his way around. Captain Linnett turned to one of his comms sergeants.

‘Raise the county sheriff and find out who owns this place,’ he said. He began to explore. Nothing seemed to be smashed, but everything had been rifled.

‘It’s a surgeon from Seattle,’ reported the sergeant. ‘Vacations up here in the summer, closes it all down in the fall.’

‘Name and phone number. He must have left them with the sheriff’s office.’ When the sergeant had them he was told to contact Fort Lewis, have them call the surgeon at his Seattle home and put him on a direct patch-through. A surgeon was a lucky break; surgeons have pagers in case of an emergency. This situation definitely rated.

The ghost ship never went near Surabaya. There was no consignment of expensive oriental silks to be taken aboard, and the six apparent sea containers on the
Countess of Richmond
’s foredeck were in place anyway.

She took the route south of Java, passed Christmas Island and headed out into the Indian Ocean. For Mike Martin the onboard routines became a ritual.

The psychopath Ibrahim remained mainly in his cabin and the good news was that most of the time he was violently ill. Of the remaining seven men, the engineer tended his engines, set at maximum speed regardless of fuel use. Where the
Countess
was going she would need no fuel for a return journey.

For Martin the twin enigmas remained unanswered. Where was she going, and what explosive power lay beneath her decks? No one seemed to know, with the possible exception of the chemical engineer. But he never spoke and the subject was never raised.

The radio expert kept a listening watch and must have learned of a sea search taking place right across the Pacific and at the entrances to the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. He may have reported this to Ibrahim but made no mention of it to the rest.

The other five men took turns in the galley to turn out plate after plate of cold tinned food, and also took turns at the wheel. The navigator set the heading – always west, then south of due west to the Cape of Good Hope.

For the rest, they prayed five times a day according to scripture, read the Koran yet again and stared at the sea.

Martin considered attempting to take over the ship. He had no weapon other than the chance to steal a kitchen knife, and he would have to kill seven men, one of whom, Ibrahim, he had to presume had one or more firearms. And they were scattered from the engine room to the radio shack to the forecastle at the bow. If and when they came close to a clear target on shore he knew he would have to do it. But across the Indian Ocean he bided his time.

He did not know whether his message in the divebag had ever been found or was tossed into some attic unread; and he did not know he had triggered a global ship-hunt.

‘This is Dr Berenson, whom am I talking with?’

Michael Linnett took the speaker from the set on the sergeant’s back and lied.

‘I am with the sheriff’s office at Mazama,’ he said. ‘Right now I am in your cabin in the Wilderness. I’m sorry to have to tell you there has been a break-in.’

‘Hell, no. Dammit, is there damage done?’ the tinny voice speaking from Seattle asked.

‘He broke in by smashing the main front window with a rock, doctor. That seems to be the only structural damage. I just want to check on theft. Did you have any firearms here?’

‘Absolutely not. I keep two hunting rifles and a scatter gun, but I bring them out with me in the fall.’

‘OK, now, clothing. Do you have a closet with heavy winter clothing?’

‘Sure. It’s a walk-in right beside the bedroom door.’

Captain Linnett nodded to his team sergeant who led the way by flashlight. The closet was spacious, full of winter kit.

‘There should be my pair of arctic snow boots, quilted pants and a parka with zippered hood.’

All gone.

‘Any skis or snowshoes, doctor?’

‘Sure, both. In the same cupboard.’

Also gone.

‘Any weapons at all? Compass?’

The big Bowie knife in its sheath should have been hanging inside the closet door and the compass and flashlight should have been in the drawers of the desk. They were all taken. That apart, the fugitive had ransacked the kitchen, but there had been no fresh food left there to rot. A newly opened, and emptied, tin of baked beans and the can opener lay on the worktop with two empty cans of soda. There was also an empty pickle jar that had been full of quarters but no one knew that.

‘Thanks, doc. I’d get up here when the weather clears with a team for a new window, and file a loss claim.’

The Alpha leader cut the connection and looked round at his unit.

‘Let’s go,’ was all he said. He knew the cabin and what the Afghan had taken shortened the odds and they could even now be against him. He put the fugitive, who must have spent over an hour in the cabin to Linnett’s thirty minutes, at two to three hours ahead, but now moving much faster.

Swallowing his pride he decided to bring up some cavalry. He called a pause and spoke to Fort Lewis again.

‘Tell McChord I want a Spectre and I want it now. Engage all the authority you need; Pentagon if you have to. I want it over the Cascades and talking to me direct.’

While waiting for their new ally to show up, the twelve men of Alpha 143 pressed on hard, pushing the pace. The sergeant-tracker was at point, his flashlight picking up the marks of the snowshoes of the fugitive in the frozen snow. They were pushing the pace, but they were carrying much more equipment than the man ahead of them. Linnett estimated they had to be keeping up, but were they gaining? Then the snow started. It was a blessing and a curse. As the deceptively gentle flakes drifted down from the conifers around them, they covered the rocks and stumps, permitting another quick pause to switch from shoes to the faster skis. They also wiped out the trail.

Linnett needed a guiding hand from heaven and it came just after midnight in the form of a Lockheed Martin AC-130 Hercules gunship, circling at twenty thousand feet, above the cloud layer but looking straight through it.

Among the many toys that Special Forces are given to play with the Spectre gunship is, from the viewpoint of the enemy on the ground, about as nasty as it gets.

The original Hercules transport plane has been gutted and her innards replaced with a cockpit-to-tail array of technology designed to locate, target and kill an opponent on the ground. It is seventy-two million dollars’ worth of pure bad news.

In its first ‘locate’ role it does not depend on daylight or dark, wind or rain, snow or hail. Mr Raytheon has been kind enough to provide a synthetic-aperture radar and infra-red thermal imager which can pick out any figure in a landscape that emits body heat. Nor is the image a vague blur; it is clear enough to differentiate between a four-legged beast and a two-legged one. But it still could not work out the weirdness of Mr Lemuel Wilson.

He too had a cabin, just outside the Pasayten Wilderness on the lower slopes of Mount Robinson. Unlike the Seattle surgeon, he prided himself on his capacity to over-winter up there, for he had no alternative metropolitan home.

So he survived without electricity, using a roaring log fire for heat and kerosene lamps for lighting. Each summer he hunted game and air-dried the meat strips for winter. He cut his own logs and gathered in forage for his tough mountain pony. But he had another hobby.

He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wavebands of the sheriff, the emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the Wilderness and professional teams struggling towards the spot.

Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term ‘interfering busybody’. Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities had replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the Wilderness to reach the Park and rescue Major Duval.

His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact.

He did not see the man come at him. One second he was urging his horse through a deeper than usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snow bank was a man in a silver space-age-material quilted two-piece.

There was nothing space age about the Bowie knife, invented around the time of the siege of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged him off his horse; as he crashed down the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.

A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all.

‘This is Spectre Echo Foxtrot, calling Team Alpha, do you read me, Alpha?’

‘Strength five,’ reported Captain Linnett. ‘We are twelve on skis down here; can you see us?’

‘Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,’ said the infra-red operator four miles above them.

‘Comedy comes later,’ said Linnett. ‘About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?’

There was a pause, a long pause.

‘Negative. No such image,’ said the voice in the sky.

‘There must be,’ argued Linnett. ‘He is up ahead of us somewhere.’

The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind in the darkness stood Lake Mountain and Monument Peak. His men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the heat escape. So he was closing on the fugitive. The skis were running easily across the shoulder of the mountain and there was more forest up ahead.

The Spectre fixed Linnett’s position to the yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn or what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.

Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.

‘Check again,’ asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible too, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then . . .

Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired horse off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the horse beneath him that he was climbing.

‘I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,’ said the imager-operator. ‘Right up to the border. In that arc I can see eight animals. Four deer, two black bear that are very faint because they are hibernating in deep cover, what looks like a marauding mountain lion and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.’

The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The horse was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onwards, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.

‘Sir,’ said one of the engineer sergeants, ‘I’m from Minnesota.’

‘Save your problems for the chaplain,’ snapped Linnett.

‘What I mean, sir,’ said the snow-caked face beside him, ‘is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It cannot be a moose.’

Linnett called a halt. It was welcome. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an over-wintering idiot with a stable. Somehow the Afghan had got himself a horse and was riding away from him.

Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The cougar was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion.

The first the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the horse and it was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backwards over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.

He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the horse and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped around the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. It was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The horse crumpled, lying half across the body of the cougar. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the cougar were under the horse.

He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards from him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it, but it masked his heat-source.

‘Take out the moose,’ said Captain Linnett. ‘I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.’

The operator studied his image again.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.’