“I’m OK,” he replied, rolling to his knees and then standing. “This stuff is just plastic. Realistic as hell, but only a special effect that no satellite camera would ever detect. The gate swings open, then closes tight again.”
“And there’s a door!” she said.
An opening in the rock had been machined to be almost perfectly square; it reached back about six feet into the slab, where a solid metal door with a big lever handle blocked the other end. With no light, it had been invisible behind the bushes.
“Yep.” He was on a knee now, studying the area for possible booby traps or other surprises. A camera was secured by a wall brace, and he smashed it with the stock of his rifle.
“We’re going inside?” Beth asked.
“Yep.”
THE BRIDGE
S
ERGEANT
H
AFIZ
DECIDED TO
go out himself. Two patrols were now out of contact, and he was out of guards. The three corporals who had led the patrols were absent—he did not know where they were—and all of the Taliban security forces were either dead or unaccounted for. All that was left was the approximately one hundred civilian workers on the night shift and the ten men of the NMO security team. The civilian construction workers would be even more useless in the valley than the Taliban roughnecks, and Hafiz would be damned before he begged help from Ayman al-Masri. By the process of elimination, that left it on his shoulders.
That was probably best, he thought, as he walked to the western end of the bridge, descending stairwells along the way because he could move faster on foot than waiting for an elevator. Getting around the complex reminded him of being within a big ship, where multiple levels were woven together for a common purpose. The comm operations were near the top, on the east end, but he did not want to call Islamabad again. General Gul would want answers that he did not have. He had already given cause for concern by pestering them for the regular troops.
The defense control system was housed on the eastern side, deeper into the mountain. It would have been nice if the chief engineer had picked some other time to go crazy, so he could have been in there to work the fancy defense suite and its deadly electronic network. Hafiz brushed the thought aside. He had to deal with reality, not fantasy.
He came to his own small quarters, a single square in which were a small desk, a few shelves, a single bed, and a bathroom. His gear was folded in neat stacks, and he pulled out a rubberized poncho, then retrieved the AK-47 beside the bunk and headed toward the lower exit, pulling on the rain gear. The weapon had been cleaned the previous night and had a full magazine, but Hafiz checked it anyway before slinging it across his shoulder.
A little room just off the entryway contained supplies for maintenance workers and people heading outside, including a rack of rechargeable battery-powered lanterns. Hafiz chose one that threw a powerful beam.
I really don’t want to go out into this mess,
he thought.
What excuse could they possibly have for not reporting in? When I find them, I will put my boot up their backsides hard enough to rattle their teeth.
He picked up a fully charged radio, then headed for the main hatch.
Hafiz pushed down the lever to unlock the main door and gave it a shove.
* * *
B
ETH
L
EDFORD WAS FLAT
against the wall on the right-hand side of the door, reaching out with her left to push down the lever. Kyle Swanson was on the opposite side, also with his back to the wall, weapon poised and his finger on the trigger, ready to charge in as soon as she yanked it open far enough. You never knew what was behind any closed door.
Hafiz registered that something was not right as soon as the door had opened just enough for a strong burst of fresh wind to hiss in, indicating the outer gate at the other end was open to the storm. The door continued to swing outward, seemingly on its own, for unseen by Hafiz, Beth Ledford had grabbed the handle on the other side and was pulling on it. Hafiz dropped the lantern, which bounced on the concrete slab floor and sent the beam of light dancing in the darkness. He fumbled to pull the AK-47 from the shoulder sling as a shadowy figure appeared in the open space, with a rifle already pointed at him. Hafiz did not panic, although he realized that his opponent had the advantage.
Swanson had stepped forward and saw a large man bulked up in a poncho, unlimbering a weapon and staring straight at him.
I see you, you see me, but I saw you first.
He fired a three-round burst, then smashed shoulder-first into the big man and stepped over him to clear the rest of the room.
Sergeant Hafiz felt the impact of the bullets. The shock of the attack masked some of the pain; then his head collided with the floor and his face came to rest with his eyes staring directly into the fierce glow of the lantern. He tried to make his hands grab the rifle so he could fight back. His body would not answer his brain’s command.
Hafiz could detect the nearness of his attacker, but there was nothing he could do. There was a brilliant flash, but he did not hear the rifle fire when Beth Ledford pumped a final shot into his head.
21
B
ETH AND
S
WANSON EACH
grabbed a wrist of the lifeless, heavy body of Sergeant Hafiz and hauled it outside to dump it in the soggy brush beside the trail. Returning through the gate that camouflaged the entrance, they swung it closed behind them and were in the tunnel and shut the inner door. Smeared blood streaked the smooth floor, and it was eerily still. Swanson pulled Ledford by the collar and put his mouth close to her ear.
“You stay on my six at all times, Coastie. Do what I do. No questions, and don’t hesitate,” he said. “We have to push forward as far as possible. If we get contact, follow my lead.”
She gave a quick nod but did not reply. That life-taking bullet she had fired point-blank into the big soldier’s head was something that she had watched Kyle do to the targets they had downed on the patrols, so she had copied the same move, pulling the trigger without emotion. Once it was done, the man was surely no longer a threat to them. It may have been standard operating procedure in special operations, and she had learned it in a violent way on the job, but she was not yet to the point that it would have no effect on her.
When she removed the night-vision goggles, Kyle saw tears welling in the blue eyes of his baby-faced assassin before she wiped them with her dirty sleeve. Because she had been going along so well, he had momentarily forgotten that she had not been trained for these gut-wrenching missions, that her surge of adrenaline had limits; she was running on fumes, and they had a long way to go. He pulled her into a hug, just as he would soothe a thoroughbred horse, or any first-timer getting a taste of close-up death. “You’re doing great, Beth,” he said. “As good as anybody, and better than most. Now let’s do this.”
The first steps were the hardest as they moved into unknown territory, but they had no choice. They were totally exposed in the hallway, which measured about six feet wide, big enough for a small tractor to pull a trailer of material or supplies. The ceiling was about seven feet high and supported by webs of metal girders. Neat clusters of pipes hid the electrical wiring, and long fluorescent bulbs glowed with a bluish tint. The low hum of electrical generators could be heard from elsewhere in the complex, and the constant vibration was transmitted through the stone walls.
Twenty feet down the hallway, on the right-hand side, was a closed door, and they crept toward it, stacking against each wall. Swanson saw it had no lock, just a knob, and he motioned for Beth to give it a slow turn. She opened the portal into a small room that was filled with neat stacks of cardboard and wooden boxes, routine supplies that probably serviced nearby facilities, including the entranceway. He motioned her inside, closed the door, and turned on the lights.
Mops and brooms stood around like spindly sentries, radios and flashlights were recharging on a long metal rack, and a pile of fresh towels lay on a shelf. The tangy odors from the jugs and bottles of various disinfectants and cleaning fluids assaulted their nostrils. A bin of dry rags occupied one corner. Kyle tossed a towel to Beth and used another to rub away the mud that was thick on his boots.
Beth took off the black beanie and shook her blond hair, then worked the towel into it hard and wiped her face. She tossed the hat aside, then also went to work on her boots. “I don’t think it matters any longer if they happen to notice I’m a woman,” she said. “I’m good to go, Gunny. Just some nerves.”
Kyle peeled off his own wet wool beanie and dried the top of his head and his face with a soft towel. It felt better. “This place is incredible. From the outside, it seemed like part of the mountain, but inside, it is something else entirely.”
“You think my brother got this far?”
“Probably. Even farther. Maybe the door had been left open to bring in supplies or something and they stumbled upon it and just came on in to explore, like kids on a holiday hike.”
Beth looked around the room. “There’s nothing here that would be worth killing them. That’s not it.”
They walked to the next room, and the next, working steadily until they cleared the lower corridor, but still found nothing of interest other than the sprawl of the subterranean labyrinth. Some areas were still under construction, with tools, wiring, and lumber strewn about.
An unexpected, high-pitched whine was barely audible in the silence. “We’ve got contact,” Beth said while Swanson was opening still another storage room. They both ducked into the darkness and closed the door, keeping their weapons ready. The whining came closer and passed them by, then stopped. A door opened down the hall; there were slow footsteps, and a grunt and a scrape as something was moved. Ledford flicked on her flashlight and shone the beam around. Boxes were everywhere, and she knelt to read the black printing. She took a quick, sharp breath, then snapped off the light when the whine resumed, suddenly closer and louder.
It passed by again, heading the other way, and Swanson eased the door open and spotted the disappearing rear end of a blue golf cart with a couple of boxes stacked in the rear. The driver wore brown coveralls, but there was no weapon visible. Some civilian worker who had not been looking for anything unusual in this netherworld and had paid no heed to the mixture of grime and blood at the entrance. That sort of luck would not last.
“We’re clear here. Ready?”
“Wait, Kyle. Take a look at this first. Boxes of ammo.” She flashed her light toward the door, found the light switch, and clicked it on, flooding the room with fluorescent brightness. Swanson immediately saw a box with stenciled markings that identified it as a case of 7.62 × 39 mm ammunition. The room was filled almost to the ceiling with ordnance of various kinds, not just the 7.62 bullets common to the AK-47 but canisters of machine-gun belts, rockets for grenade launchers, and heavy weapons shells.
He took off his pack and placed it on the floor. “This is more like it, Coastie. Your brother and his friends at least discovered storage rooms crammed with ammo and weapons. That alone would prove that this bridge is not just some benign structure built to hurry traffic along the road. If word got back to the U.S., then Washington would start asking uncomfortable questions that Pakistan would not want to answer.”
“Would that really be worth killing them for? Maybe just shoo them away with some cover story, like being a storage area for ammo needed to fight the warlords.”
“Whatever. It’s too good for us to pass up,” he said. “You keep watch while I bury some C-4 in this pile. We can command detonate it later on if we need a diversion.”
While he planted a brick of explosive and readied the detonator, Ledford stood facing the door, and her eyes came to rest on a square metal frame around a piece of paper encased in plastic. She stepped closer. It was a computer-created image that looked like the layout for a subway. “Here’s some kind of map,” she said.
“Grab it,” Kyle said, and Beth used her fingernails to pry the map from its frame, then dropped it beside Kyle to keep her hands free on her weapon.
“I’m done with this,” he said, then shouldered into his pack again and spent an extra minute studying the paper. “It’s a map, all right, like the kind a hotel puts in guest rooms to show escape routes in case of fire. It diagrams the entire floor that we’re on, and it looks like there’s nothing down here but supply and storage areas and that outside exit. An elevator is at the far end of the corridor to ferry things up, and there’s a stairwell just down the hall from here. OK. We’ll head up one level.”
* * *
A
YMAN AL
-M
ASRI DID NOT
go to bed. He would not consider doing so until he heard from Hafiz that all was well. As a veteran security specialist, and responsible for the safety of the Commander, he was uncomfortable with the performance of the Taliban, and Hafiz had seemed uncharacteristically unsure of himself. The odds against two patrols being simultaneously stymied and one destroyed were enormous. Nothing had been heard from them, and now Hafiz himself had not reported in. Thirty minutes had passed. A vague sense of unrest was bothering al-Masri, a feeling that had served him well over the years as an early warning that something was happening; something much worse than a storm.
He left the living quarters to awaken his small group of inspectors and guards and told them to arm themselves. “Troubling things are happening,” he said. “We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into carelessness by the sheer size and apparent strength of this huge fortress, or its electronic wizardry, or the promises made by others that it is safe.”