The Architect of Revenge: A September 11th Novel (43 page)

“Switzerland of the Middle East,” he said.

Jericho’s countenance grew dubious. “And
we’re
going to try to capture the bastard.”

“Interesting quandary for all parties involved, wouldn’t you say?” said Pruitt.

Mingora, Pakistan March 15, 2004

T
he wooden spoon shoveled another bite of ice cream into Morgan’s mouth. While he ate, he surveyed the people walking along the streets. Men stopped to greet friends and take tea while children played marbles on the sidewalk in front of stores that boasted precolonial flags flapping alongside hand-woven rugs. Drivers squeezed between the narrow canyons of two-story hovels, their heads stuck out of the windows like dogs sucking air.

There was nothing visibly female anywhere, save for the occasional black cloud that silently drifted past or sat on the open tailgate of a passing van, clinging tightly to elderly relatives or the stalk of a horizontal floor fan with its incidentally spinning blade. Morgan knew it was impossible to decide who the bad guys were. The Taliban dressed like everybody.

He wandered back to the young vendor, smiled, and bought a second cup of faluda
.

With his feet propped up on a newly purchased backpack and his satchel by his side, he slouched in a tattered folding chair borrowed from a shopkeeper and used the fresh wooden paddle to dig out a bite. The candied bean strings strewn on the top of the dense dessert were a pleasant oddity. The conglomeration never seemed to melt. Each cold dollop rolling on his tongue tasted better than the one before.

He’d probably get a third serving. It was that good.

The scope of the Vintorez sniper rifle poked his leg through the backpack.

Damn, that’s one powerful gun…

The subsonic muzzle velocity and noise suppressor kept the rifle silent, yet the Teflon-coated nine-millimeter bullet could still burrow into steel at one hundred yards. Morgan had spent the final week in the nearby hills, applying what Tony taught him—aligning the sights, then correcting for drift, wind, target elevation, and practicing with the night-vision scope.

When he got back to his room at the hostel, Morgan would take the gun apart cleaning it with surgical precision. Every item of equipment was checked and rechecked to make certain it functioned without fault. When he was satisfied, he organized the components in the backpack so each could be accessed in sequence.

A pearl of ice cream fell on his tightly trimmed beard, and his sleeve wiped it away. A nearby barber that morning had also shampooed and cut his mangy hair. His body felt born again from the indulgences.

“I’m ready, Jon,” he said behind his lips, hoping the e-mail he had sent from the Internet café had gotten to him. Anyone who had seen him huddled over the computer keyboard would have paid no attention to the trivial act, but its content would be monumental to the man he’d grown to love, the father-in-law he’d never have. It would be Morgan’s only message.

Between bites Morgan scanned a newspaper, pretending to be blind to movement around him and deaf to the incessant noise of buses, autos, and music that dumped out of every open store window. When rain fell, he lifted the paper over his head and looked at the bustling crossroads. Located in the heart of Mingora, all traffic moving through the Swat Valley passed that way.

Brakes screeched and everything with wheels stopped. A policeman in Raj uniform carved a path for three SUVs. Unhurried, the black beasts came through the intersection, turned a corner, and stopped in the bowels of a narrow side street. Several men got out. As the gray brigade of salwar kameez, white shirts, and black pants walked into a rug shop across from where Morgan sat, Morgan held a conceited smile. One man had a limp—and used a dervish walking stick with white streaks in it.

Coincidences don’t happen.

Morgan bought his third and final custard. He had to savor its sweetness again. The cardamom and vanilla were the subtle essence of the exotic perfume he sensed behind Caroline’s ears the first time they danced. Each taste loitered on his lips, the flavors reminiscent of the Scotch she loved to drink.

He finished his third helping. It would never be enough, but it would be his last.

Noon, Tuesday, March 16

“D
amn it’s hot out here,” Morgan’s whisper was barely more than a breathed thought.

He used his teeth to squeeze the valve open on the rubber tube. He sucked in some water from the hydration pack and kept listening through the buzzing insects and occasional bird chirps for man-made noises. It was dangerous to raise his head, so he stayed buried with his backpack in the furrow he’d dug just before dawn, hidden under the dirt wearing tactical clothing and a balaclava that matched the plains surrounding him. Since getting off the bus the evening before, he had crawled nearly a mile, but before the first hint of light, his journey paused, and he had remained motionless since then, his hand holding the silenced Makarov by his side.

In six hours the darkness would return and he could move. In one more day and two nights, he would be at the base of the cliff.

He urinated through his pants into the ground. His groin grew warm, then cooled. He didn’t care how crusty it got from the repeated soakings. With the fullness in his bladder gone, he relaxed and nodded off.

Afternoon, Wednesday, March 17

Morgan shrank his body deeper in the dirt. The voices were closer than others had been. His presence wouldn’t be discovered unless one of them happened to step on him. That wasn’t going to happen. His route was well outside the land-mine boundary being established. That assurance came earlier in the day when somebody tripped a wire. After an abbreviated scream, the permanent mistake distracted other men long enough for Morgan to look up, mark the perimeter and disappear back into the ground.

As the heat softened with sunset, Morgan began to snake through the brush and past rocks inches at a time. Smoke from distant crackling fires occasionally drifted his way, carrying the smells of roasting lamb and goat. He had no desire for either. He was ingesting all the calories and water he needed; anything more refined was irrelevant.

His crawl ended when he got to the cliff. He used the night-vision scope to scan his surroundings, noted the time on his watch and dug his final trench. He didn’t want to stop or sleep. All he wanted to do was climb the hundred-foot wall, but that desire would have to wait. Twelve hours needed to pass, so he sat with his knees bent and stretched his back, then lay flat and looked at the stars.

She was up there.

“I love you, Cay,” he said.

He knew he would join her soon.

When the golden orb finally set, Morgan settled into the hole and closed his eyes.

Nightfall, Thursday, March 18

With the darkness cloaking him, Morgan buried the gear he no longer needed and scaled the rock wall to the ledge. After resting, he used his binoculars to count the fires. There were dozens. Encircling every flame were vehicles, countless human silhouettes moving in every direction between.

He looked at the building below. Only one truck was present outside the front wall near the gate. A kerosene lamp glow emanated from several windows. An occasional shadow suggested someone was inside, but nothing more.

Morgan switched on his night vision scope and turned to scan the cliffs.

As of yet, no lookouts were in position.

He put the rifle away, removed the satchel from the backpack, and used it as a pillow. Beneath the overhanging stone roof, he waited for the sun to rise.

For weeks satellites had mapped the terrain and examined the passing trucks as they spewed exhaust. Deeper inspection revealed only normal sorts of cargo and boxes—and none of the trucks moving along the route ever turned from the road toward the building.

As the week progressed, motorized activity in the area increased. The machines in space watched men and vehicles collect in the meadows, and the embers from their fires streak toward the night sky. Every time a tarp was off the flat bed of a truck, a camera saw weapons. The NGA published the reports to a classified list of customers, who in turn integrated the information for their own needs.

Friday afternoon reconnaissance drones departed. Replaced by Predator Reapers with missiles on their bellies, they waited thousands of feet above the target while their engines spooled silently.

Concealed in the morning’s shadows, Morgan was invisible on the guano-splattered perch. Blending in with the rocks, he watched the jamboree grow larger as more vehicles bounced into the meadows.

He removed his Koran and leafed through the pages as he had so many times before. His eyes stopped on feminine handwriting he immediately recognized.

ßÇÝÑ

Infidel.

“Nadia…”

His suspicion had been right all along. He wrapped the book in the white cloth and zipped it back inside his tactical pants pocket.

“That’s thanks for saving your ass…”

Friday, March 19

A
catering truck arrived in the morning. Morgan watched as it turned from the highway, staggered up the uneven road, and went through the open gate. It stopped on the side of the building. Two men got out with pistols on their hips. They opened the rear door and removed some power cables.

As they fed the male plugs under the barbed wire to the outside of the wall, one of the men cut his wrist on a prong. Morgan heard him swear.

“What a pussy…”

They fed the female ends into the building over a window sill, went back into the truck, and emerged with a generator and fuel can, which they rolled on dollies out the gate to where the cables hung. After they carried in large ice chests, tables, chairs, lamps and floor fans, one of the men parked the truck down the hill and walked back to the generator. He flipped a switch and went inside.

Morgan could hear the engine hum.

Behind him inside the cliff walls, Morgan heard radio chatter. He put on his headset and located the active frequency. The exchange included comments about exploded mines a month earlier on the trail.

“Sorry your buddies didn’t leave me a few more for you,” Morgan said. After confirming their positions through the binoculars, he hid back under the rock roof.

In the afternoon a van arrived. Men in desert fatigues got out with machine pistols strapped to their thighs. They opened the rear hatch, removed AKs, rocket launchers and surface-to-air missiles. Picking up their weapons each moved to an assigned position. Two of them appeared on the top deck of the building. After leaning the rocket-propelled grenade and surface-to-air launchers in corners, they removed the tarps.

Morgan’s prior speculation was spot on. It was a fifty-caliber Russian NSV machine gun with lots of extra ammunition.

“Command,
Reaper One
here,” said Predator pilot Mike Powers, as he controlled the drone’s high-resolution camera from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, nine thousand miles away.

“Go ahead,
One,
” said Sergeant-Major Coretta Graham.

“
One
reporting eleven men on site now. Two remain in structure. Three snipers in cliffs, one RPG, one SAM. Two men on the roof with NSV, RPGs, SAMs. Men on station at the outside corners. RPGs near northwest wall.
Unfriendlies
carrying sidearms, AKs, radios, extra munitions. Images and targeting data on the way.”

“Command,
Reaper Two
radio check,” said Brian Larsen who was maneuvering the second drone south of the target area.

“Five by five,” Graham answered. “Go ahead.”

“Command, there are fifty or more vehicles now—mostly pickups and cars—scattered through the fields west of the cliffs, almost a forest of AKs down there. Estimating several hundred men at a minimum, no evidence of children. You should be seeing this.”

“Confirm,” Graham replied. “We’re getting them.”

The team in the operations room at Central Command in Tampa, Florida, would manage the mission timeline and coordinate every offensive and defense procedure.

A few minutes before, commanding the Joint Special Operation, Admiral James Llewellyn had sat down behind Graham in his raised chair and plugged in his headset, listening to the conversation. For the moment the communication loops were busy but not overflowing. As the mission progressed, however, every exchange channeled through the Pentagon, the Combined Air Operations Center in Kuwait, CIA, NSA, and Central Command would constrict to cryptic acronyms.

On the giant video screen beyond the trenches of individual computer stations, Llewellyn looked at the processed images taken from the drone seventeen thousand feet above the target area. He knew reality for that place would change soon after dark.

“Admiral.” Graham turned to speak off-mike with him. “I’ll open the link to the White House shortly.”

He nodded and looked at his watch. His world would get busy soon.

As sunset approached, the electric generator’s hum became more distinct. Minutes later several cars and SUVs stopped at the gate. Morgan removed his balaclava a final time and smeared black camouflage paint on his face, neck and hands before inching close to the edge. With his finger resting on the Vintorez trigger guard, he watched through the scope, evaluating the profiles of the passengers as they got out. With weapons by their sides, figures in dark clothing assisted arthritic men with long beards and flowing white robes into the building. From the SUVs, bodyguards escorted several men in suits.

“Wants everyone there first,” he said to himself.

The vehicles left the gate and went down the hill to park.

Morgan revised the tally.

“Nineteen guards…”

He rolled to his back. The night-vision scope on his Vintorez sniper rifle scoured the cliffs.

The glowing diode on a lookout’s scope betrayed him.

One.

Another slight illumination came across a chasm.

Two.

A match that flared against black rocks was shielded too late.

Three.

They hadn’t moved.

Morgan shut off the scope and sat with his back against the rock wall. With the rifle across his chest and the headphone covering an ear, his eyelids drooped to avoid fatigue as he waited for the guest of honor.

Morgan’s headphones crackled, jarring him. Through the binoculars he studied a procession of headlights passing the turnoff and continuing along the highway for several miles, then the beams went dark. At the extreme edge of the haze, the caravan seemed to be turning around.

“That’s damn curious,” he whispered.

Looking over the edge, Morgan saw the guards outside the wall step farther away. Their guns were no longer behind their backs but hanging from their shoulders horizontally by the slings, with the muzzles facing the directions they looked.

“Command,
Reaper One
…five new vehicles returning to target. Big SUVs.”

“Copy,” said Graham. “Admiral, the teams report ready
.
”

“Okay,” he said. “Tell everyone to stand by.”

He pressed a button and had a private exchange through his headset.

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Llewellyn nodded grimly to the men and women at the consoles.

“Ladies and gentlemen…” he said in a serene voice. “POTUS authorizes
Hell-bound Chorus
. I repeat: Operation
Hell-bound Chorus
is approved.”

In the expected momentary hush, the admiral prayed silently.
Lord, protect us…and please forgive me…

“Commence,” he ordered.

The master command was relayed.

“
Chorus
initiated, sir,” said Graham.

In Afghanistan the rotor blades of the Kiowa Warrior helicopters began twisting, then the SEAL teams aboard four Blackhawks heard the rush of air compress out their idling engines. As they throttled up, whimpers of the turbine blades blended into accelerating howls. The pilots adjusted the pitch levers, and the aircraft lifted away from the ground.

To provide close air support, a duo of heavily armed four-engine Specter Gunships released their brakes and the Spookys, as they were called, began lumbering down the tarmac. Miles away a pair of Thunderbolts climbed out of Bargram Airfield. The fearsome jets would clear heavier weapons in the surrounding area and soften up the target.

All the planes headed to an invisible rendezvous box in the sky close to the Pakistani border. In planned sequence they would cross into that country’s airspace.

“Aircraft airborne, sir,” Graham informed Llewellyn. “All are in the green.”

The timeline instantly began to compress.