Renegade (2013) (30 page)

He would always remember his father’s face being as cruel and harsh as the mountain landscape. The Americans would remember Sabah as well, and Yaqub knew they would fear him.

Pike sat in the driver’s seat of the Humvee and gazed out at the inhospitable land around them. The Marine convoy raced through one of the valleys in the Safed Koh mountains. The temperature had
cooled slightly since they’d left Kandahar, but Pike knew it would be much colder in the ridges.

He kept reminding himself that Pakistan wasn’t that far away. A couple days’ walk, he’d be in Parachinar. That was as far as his plan went. After that, he’d have to see.

Cho and two other Marines rode in the Humvee. In the passenger seat, Cho gazed in silence at the land around them. He whistled tunelessly. The two Marines in the rear had sacked out, sleeping sitting up with their heads lolled back and rolling with the uneven gait of the Humvee across the rough road.

Radio chatter was sporadic. The Marines weren’t happy about leaving the camp, and Pike was certain they blamed him for their misfortune. No one dared get in his face, though. That was a bonus for having killed Captain Zarif and his men.

Cho glanced at the GPS. “Should be coming up on the marker in the next few minutes.”

Pike nodded.

“If it wasn’t for GPS, man, I don’t know how they’d tell one section of these mountains from the others.” Cho nodded toward the mountains. “How bad do you think it’s going to be up there?”

Pike gazed at the white-capped ridgeline. “With Zalmai Yaqub and his men?”

Cho shook his head. “No. The cold. Wherever Yaqub is, I don’t think we’re the guys who are going to find him. But we’re going to freeze our butts off while we’re up there.”

“Maybe.” Pike turned his attention back to the road.

“Hey, Pike.” Cho had turned to face him. “Not everybody’s going to be on your case about you blowing up Zarif and his boys. Me? I think you’re some kind of hero taking those guys on by yourself like that. A lot of the guys do. I heard that the information we’re getting out of that other Russian is going to save a lot of lives.”

“Good to know.”

Cho sighed. “You’re a hard guy to get to know.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to lighten up. If you’d told people what you were doing that night, you might have been surprised how many Marines would have gone with you.”

“Yeah, ’cause that would have really helped out with the whole stealth part of following Zarif.”

“Dude, take a compliment.”

Ahead, a line of pickups and vans approached the Marine vehicles. Pike kept his left hand on the steering wheel and reached for his M4A1 with his right. His stomach tightened in readiness. Out here in the wilderness, a lot of things could happen on the road.

Gunney Towers’s deep voice came over the frequency. “Hold steady but be alert.”

A minute later, the vans and trucks whipped by the Marine convoy. Pike watched them go, staring at the equipment racked on the tops of the vans and occupying the truck beds.

Cho peered at the passing vehicles too. “Guess all the repair work in Kandahar has drawn laborers out of the sticks.” He shook his head. “Wonder how much they’re going to get paid to risk getting shot or blown up.”

“Probably about the same as you.”

Cho frowned at that. “Man, you can be a total buzzkill.”

“I thought you weren’t looking forward to the camping trip.”

“I’m not.” Cho folded his arms over his chest. “But I’m figuring at least out here our chances of getting shot or blown up are probably less than they are back in the city.”

“If you want to stay alive, you won’t even start thinking like that.” Pike checked the rearview mirror and watched the caravan of laborers disappear over the distant hill.

DURING HIS CAREER
reporting from battlefields around the world, Jonathan Sebastian had sometimes entertained the idea of being KIA. Of course, the killed-in-action tag wasn’t really a designation for journalists, but dead was dead. He hadn’t thought about how he would be killed, though he knew most of the ways. He had seen bodies scattered all across the Middle East and in South America.

Rather, he’d mostly envisioned how he would be eulogized after he was dead. He’d won a lot of awards, gotten to meet a lot of important people, been in a lot of hot spots. He was certain he was a man whose death would not go unnoticed.

But even after everything he’d seen, he’d never once thought he was going to die locked in the throat of some wintry mountain so far from the main action. Now, though, he knew that was what was going to happen. He tried to focus, determining that the next time he got in front of the camera on a live feed, he would tell the world that Zalmai Yaqub had betrayed them, that the CIA agents everyone wanted to rescue were already dead.

Making such a broadcast would be heroic, and he had no doubt Yaqub’s men would exact immediate vengeance. Jonathan Sebastian would go out in a blaze of glory, sticking it to his Muslim captors and
saving dozens of lives. Now that was an epitaph he could live with. Metaphorically speaking.

He couldn’t save those three CIA agents, though. Couldn’t even save himself.

Except that he kept flirting with the idea that the Marines or the CIA or someone would arrive in the nick of time and take him out of the mess he was in.

He liked that idea, even though he knew the odds of such a rescue happening were infinitesimal.

He sat huddled under a thin blanket in the corner of the cave he’d been assigned to and wondered what time it was. This was the fourth day after his last broadcast. This was the day Yaqub had threatened to kill the CIA agents that the world didn’t know were already dead.

One of his captors approached him with a pistol in hand. “You will come with me now.”

“Where?”

“To make broadcast.” The man waved his hand impatiently.

Sebastian looked around. “Where’s Yaqub?”

“That is of no concern to you. Come.” The man waved again.

“I want to talk to Yaqub.”

The man lashed out unexpectedly, smashing Sebastian across the face with the pistol barrel. Pain exploded inside Sebastian’s face and curled up inside his skull like a dying rat. Blood trickled down to his chin from the corner of his mouth.

Shoving the pistol into Sebastian’s face, the man grabbed his shirt collar and slammed him into the wall behind him. “You come make broadcast—” he mashed the pistol into Sebastian’s cheekbone under his left eye—“or you
be
broadcast. You decide. Either way, they get message.”

Fear quickly eroded the pain, and Sebastian pushed himself to his feet despite the dizziness swimming in his head. He followed his guide to the other room.

Even though the bodies of the CIA agents had been removed, Sebastian could still smell the death clinging to the stone walls. On autopilot in front of the camera, he started straightening his clothing and his hair. The actions were ingrained habits but this was the first time his hands had shaken so badly since he’d first gotten up in front of a camera in junior high school journalism class.

“Here is the paper.” The man handed Sebastian a copy of the newspaper.

With shaking hands, Sebastian opened the paper. He peered at the front page, at the date, and did the math. He’d been correct; today was the deadline day. He also scanned the paper, hoping for news of prisoner releases.

There were none. A sinking sensation opened up in the pit of Sebastian’s stomach.

“Are you ready?” The hard-faced man stared at him.

“Ready?” Sebastian had to struggle to get his voice to work. In the past, he could count on one hand the number of times his voice had failed him—and have fingers left over.

“Yes. To report.” The man passed over a paper filled with compact writing. “You will read this as it is written. If you fail to do this, I will shoot you.”

Sebastian clung to that idea. If he failed to read the paper, he would die. So it stood to reason that if he did as he was instructed, he would live. He studied the writing, realizing that he was going to be delivering Zalmai Yaqub’s promise of death to the enemies of his God and the man’s call to other believers to strike down the Westerners.

“Yes. You are ready. Begin.” The man waved to the cameraman.

Bright light bathed Sebastian, and he unconsciously stood a little straighter. “This is Jonathan Sebastian, and I am here to deliver Zalmai Yaqub’s promise of vengeance.” He thought briefly of telling whoever was listening that no rescue should be tried and it was too late for all of
them. But he desperately hoped someone was coming. And he hoped that if he did as he was instructed, he would live. He clung to that. “You have failed to release the prisoners. Now you are going to see the costs of your decisions. . . .”

Standing in a waist-high snowdrift that was covered with a crust not quite thick enough to support the weight of a full-grown man, Heath studied the mountains ahead of him. He and his team had been marching since early morning after leaving the Humvees at a secure location. A lot of the terrain ahead of them had to be covered on foot.

Last night had been physically demanding. Despite their cold-weather gear, he hadn’t ever truly gotten warm, and he was willing to bet that none of his Marines had either. He’d scheduled regular breaks to accommodate the fatigue created by the harsh climate, and he also made sure each Marine was hydrating. The cold-weather climate was as severe as a desert.

He’d been assigned a platoon, three squads under two sergeants and a corporal. Bekah Shaw and three other female Marines had been attached primarily in support positions to speak with any Afghan women they encountered in the villages during their search. Female Afghans wouldn’t talk to male Marines because of religious convictions or fear of reprisal from their men.

Heath had split the squads up, working the grid he’d been assigned to search. Thirty-six Marines, two Navy corpsmen, and an attached weps specialty unit operated under his command. He kept the squads moving, covering as much of the western face of the mountains as he could while keeping them safe.

So far since their insertion, they’d had a couple close encounters with local Afghan caravans that Heath suspected were ferrying opium into Pakistan across the Durand Line. None of the men involved had
admitted to seeing Zalmai Yaqub. Maybe that was true, but Marines had tagged one of the animals on each caravan with an electronic tracker so they could be traced by the Predator drones that patrolled high above.

Using his iPad, Heath pulled up the recent topographical maps that the intel division had put together. They had satellite access, and he flicked through his platoon’s progress with a few hand gestures.

When he finished, he scowled.
It’s too much and we’re too little.
The only solace he had was that none of the other S & R teams in the mountains had turned up anything either. But that was cold comfort. It was as if the Safed Koh range had simply opened up and swallowed Zalmai Yaqub, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

Heath’s MBITR crackled for attention. “Indigo Leader, this is Indigo Two.”

Heath turned so the wind wouldn’t interfere with the mike’s transmission. “Go, Two.”

“Checked out that village. Nobody home. Nobody’s been home in a long time. Place is a ghost town.”

“Roger that, Two. Leader confirms no joy.” Heath marked the map, adding one more confirmed area to his grid. One of the caravan leaders they’d talked to had told them about the village. Heath hadn’t held out a lot of hope, but it had been a more defined target than their other blind searching. “Proceed to your next twenty.”

“Roger that, Leader.”

Heath glanced farther uphill and spotted Pike seated on a rock that jutted up from the snow. He’d assigned Pike to his squad, keeping the man where he could watch over him. Since his incarceration, Pike had drawn apart from everyone even more than he’d already been.

Heath had kept Bekah in his squad as well, but that had been for different reasons, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the preferential treatment he was showing.

Pike sat with an M40 bolt-action sniper rifle across his thighs. He
carried a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun as well for close encounters. He was a qualified sniper, and the assigned position allowed him to act as scout and gave him distance from the other Marines. He didn’t seem to have a problem working with Private Cho, his primary assigned partner, but some of the other Marines harbored resentment over the S & R assignment.

Hollister had let it leak through the grapevine that the posting had been punitive, directly related to Pike, but Heath knew that his team was also up in rotation. The major had just claimed the assignment as his own bit of justice.

“Indigo Leader, I have a communication directive from Command.” The voice was flat.

Excitement flared through Heath. That was the first time he’d had contact with Command since taking the field. “Roger that, Command. Switching to Tach One.” He made the freq change to his MBITR. “Indigo Leader here.”

“Be advised that we have confirmed the location of your target, Indigo Leader. Another television transmission is currently in progress and we have identified the source. We’re sending encrypted transmission to your device.”

“Roger that.” Heath opened his iPad link to Command and watched as downloads initiated.

“The source is two klicks from your present location.”

The announcement startled Heath, jerking his attention from the iPad to the ridgeline. They’d almost reached another summit, but there was no indication that anything was there.

However, the map that unpacked on his iPad showed the target area was somewhere in that rise. A red dot pulsed in the midst of a narrow valley.

“We’re scrambling a team, Indigo Leader, but the air gets thin up there. Can’t reach your present twenty with helos.”

“Roger that.” At their current altitude, a helicopter wouldn’t be able to function well, and the wind shears clinging to the mountains would make an accident probable.

“We have decided to send you people in and follow up with a secondary unit we can mount from here. Our best estimation is that the support group will only be five or six minutes behind you. Indigo Six will intersect with both your group and the support team thirty-seven minutes after that. Given the fact that your target has promised to get bloody in this, you’re to get inside that area and lock it down as quickly and as safely as you can. We want those people out of there safely if possible, and we want that tango leader put down or locked down. You’re cleared to engage.”

“Roger that, sir. We’re on our way.” Heath clicked out of the freq, then called for Towers and his squad leaders. Less than a minute later, Indigo Team was en route, pushing through the tall snowdrifts and closing on the target.

Yaqub got out of the van dressed in stained work clothes. He walked to the rear of the vehicle and opened the doors. Faisal handed him a toolbox that contained an AK-47, a pistol, and magazines for both weapons instead of tools. The box was heavy and hung at the end of his arm.

Faisal and another man emptied a wooden crate that had contained plumbing hardware and slid in one of the Russian missile launchers he had purchased with the opium shipment.

As they crossed the street, an Afghan National Police truck rolled past. For a moment Yaqub worried that his plan might be discovered early, but the ANP vehicle kept rolling. Perhaps the men in the truck knew who he was and what he was doing, and perhaps they only believed he was a plumber. The corrupt Afghan National Police
officials had assigned al Qaeda sympathizers to the area as support. If the American military attacked, the Afghan National Police would fire on them.

Normally the area outlying the airport would have been subject to Marine security, but as the United States military had pulled back, more and more of the areas had been given over to the Afghan National Police to patrol and protect. With the recent attacks inside the city, as well as the capture of the journalist, Jonathan Sebastian, the American forces had concentrated more on containing the violence there. Their men were stretched thin, and the search up in the Safed Koh mountains taxed them further.