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Authors: David Hagberg

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BOOK: By Dawn's Early Light
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6

1720 LOCAL
THE MOUNTAINS SOUTH OF KHARAN DEPOT

Scott Hanson raised his binoculars and studied the barren desert terrain they had crossed in the past thirty-six hours. Looking back, the Kharan drop zone still swirled and seethed in a fantastic dust cloud that would probably last for days. There was little or no wind down there.

The depot seemed so impossibly far away now, and yet so close for all the effort they'd put into getting out of there after the blast.

Now they were being hunted like animals. It was the risk that they'd signed on for when they'd put on the uniforms of the SEALs and the army special forces. But those risks were nothing like the ones they'd taken since becoming civilians. Working for the U.S. military meant that if you were captured you stood a good chance of being treated as a POW. But working for the CIA meant that you were a spy and would be treated as such if captured.

That usually meant torture followed by more torture and then even more torture until your heart finally gave out. Not a pleasant way to die, their instructors at the CIA training facility, the Farm, had warned them.

“So don't get caught.”

Hanson was trying just that. Arrive. Look. Listen. Then get the hell out of there without the enemy knowing that you were around. But something had gone wrong.

He was trying to spot a dust plume from one of the Russian-made BTR armored personnel carriers they'd seen back at the depot. But nothing moved now down on the hardpan.

He lowered his binoculars and cocked an ear to listen. But there was nothing. If there was anything in the air it was too far away to hear.

Hauglar, waiting below with Amatozio and Harvey, rocked his hand palm down in the sign of a question. Hanson signaled for him to wait and raised the binoculars again.

That someone was coming was a foregone conclusion. Their position at the depot had been compromised. But he had moved his people south toward the mountains, the same way that they had come in, within a couple of minutes after the blast. It was dangerous, but hanging around posed the greater of the risks. Besides, they had stashed most of their equipment in a narrow hollow at about 8,500 feet. It was equipment they would need not only to make their escape, but to survive.

Hanson did another complete sweep with his binoculars. There was nothing. He breathed a little easier.

It was possible, however unlikely, that the Pakistanis thought they were dead. The military had conducted a test and now the entire world knew that Pakistan had made the leap from small-yield atomic bombs to high-yield thermonuclear weapons. It was an even bigger jump in war technology than from Stone Age axes to fifty-caliber machine guns. An atomic weapon was a popgun compared to a hydrogen bomb.

With luck, Jaybird Four, the
Jupiter
satellite watching India and Pakistan, had picked up the one crucial fact that the seismographs and ionization detectors halfway around the world couldn't have possibly found out: Pakistan's hydrogen bomb was small enough to be dropped from an airplane. Don Amatozio had been looking up range toward the northeast. He had paid the price for doing his job all too well and keeping an eye out for a test tower that wasn't there. The wooden structure he had seen was nothing more than a target. It had been ground zero.

Hanson switched off the binoculars' enhancement circuit and stuffed them into a zippered leg pocket of his camo jumpsuit as he made his way down the hill. He tried to raise as little dust as possible. They still had a couple of hours of daylight left, and he didn't want to advertise their presence. It wasn't the guy you spotted who would give you the most trouble, it was the bastard you
didn't
see.

“We're still in the clear,” he said, dropping down beside his banged-up crew. Of the four of them, he was the only one who had escaped any injury.

Bruce Hauglar, from Green Bay, Wisconsin—who they called the linebacker not only because of his hometown, but because of his size—had been flash burned on his back and neck. He was in a lot of pain, but so far he had refused any morphine. He was a lot more functional than the other two. As soon as they had gotten clear, Hanson had lathered Hauglar's burns with ointment and had bandaged them against infection and the extremely excruciating chafe from his uniform and equipment straps.

Amatozio, their radioman, was the worst off. He'd been looking up range when the hydrogen bomb went off at about five thousand feet. His face was burned, but the light and heat had also cooked all the liquid out of his eyeballs, instantly blinding him. His pain was almost beyond endurance. They had given him morphine, but they rode a fine balance: Too little painkiller and he would not be able to function, too much and they would have to carry him.

Tall, lean Mike Harvey, who was a fearless expert with just about every type of explosive known to man, had not been injured in the bomb blast. He had been hurt on the third day out. He'd gone down on his left knee when they'd landed to refuel, felt a sharp pain in his calf and moments later a vicious-looking giant scorpion at least eight inches long scurried off. Within a couple of hours his leg had begun to swell and he'd developed a fever, chills, and nausea. He was still weak, and his leg was still extremely painful and swollen to three times its normal size, but he was recovering.

“How much farther to where we left our gear?” Hauglar asked, gritting his teeth. He was sweating, but not because the heat of the day. In fact, the desert was already cooling off. And he wasn't thinking straight.

“Another eight or ten K,” Hanson said. “How are you holding out?”

“I'll manage.”

He would have to manage, Hanson thought, or all of them would die out here. Hauglar was helping Amatozio, and Hanson had to practically carry Harvey at times. Another ten kilometers, especially up the steep hills and into the mountains, would take them until midnight, if they were lucky.

“Are we near the hills yet?” Amatozio asked. He sat against a rock, holding his head in his hands. His voice was scratchy.

“We're at the front range,” Hanson said.

“Try the satcom again. We might be far enough out from the drop zone for us to get through.”

The SSIX-Mini was a high speed burst field transceiver that could talk to the same constellation of satellites that were used to get messages to U.S. submarines. A voice message that might take ten seconds to speak was stored in the transmitter's memory where it was compressed into a one millisecond bundle that was encrypted and then flashed to the satellites. Responses were decrypted and reconstituted inside the receiver and came out sounding like computer-generated voices, which in effect they were.

Hanson took the radio from Amatozio's pack and flipped up the boxy six-inch antenna. The transceiver looked like an old-fashioned cell phone except that it was about half the size of a carton of cigarettes and a lot heavier because of the extended batteries.

He switched on the power and when the ready message came up on the display he keyed the tactical channel stored in its memory.

“March hare, March hare, this is spring wind leader. Say again. March hare, March hare, this is spring wind leader. Acknowledge. Over.”

March hare was their mission control on the top floor of the embassy back in Kuwait City.

There was no static from the tiny speaker; no sounds, in fact, that would indicate the unit was operating. Only encrypted messages would be recognized and processed. Everything else was blocked out.

“Try again, Scott,” Amatozio said.

“March hare, March hare, this is spring wind leader with red warren. Acknowledge. Over.”

Red warren was the name of the mission.

There was no reply. Hanson's gaze strayed to the remnants of the thick haze that still hung over the drop zone. It was slowly drifting to the northeast toward the sparsely inhabited mountains of Afghanistan. The upper-level winds and jet stream would eventually tear it apart and disperse it, though there would be fall-out. By now there'd be a lot of international outrage over the test. But communications with their satellites were not going to be possible until sometime later tonight. They would have to get much farther south and much higher into the mountains before they would finally be in the clear.

In the meantime they would have to survive.

Hanson shook his head. “We're still too close to the drop zone.”

“I didn't really think that it would work this close, but it was worth a try,” Amatozio said. He was obviously in a great deal of pain. His head was completely bandaged, making him look like the invisible man in the old movie.

Hanson figured that he would be able to face just about any kind of a debilitating injury: lose an arm or a leg, or even be paralyzed from the waist down like the
Superman
actor. But he didn't think that he could ever take being blind. He wanted to see his children grow up, walk his daughter down the aisle when she got married, watch sunsets with his wife.

Hauglar and Harvey were looking at him.

“We have two choices,” he said, putting his morbid thoughts out of mind. “We either find a hiding spot up in the hills and hold out until we can establish comms with Kuwait City—it would be up to them to get us out—or we make it to our equipment drop.”

Hauglar shook his head. “Sorry, Scott, but even if we could stay hidden down here long enough with what little food and water we have, it'd be one hell of a rescue operation this far inland. The Pakis are going to be real alert right now considering that they just gave the finger to the rest of the world.”

“You're right, but making it all the way up to where we hid our equipment isn't going to be easy.”

“Everybody can give me the rest of their rations and most of their ammunition, and I'll stay here,” Amatozio suggested. “I sure as hell can fight a delaying action.”

“For Christ's sake, you can't see a thing,” Harvey said.

“If I hear somebody coming I can lay down some suppressing fire. Make them think—”

Hanson cut him off. “I'm not leaving anybody behind. Not even someone as ugly as you. We all stay or we all go. It's as simple as that.”

“Trying to hide out in the hills isn't going to do us any good,” Harvey said. “If I have to climb a mountain backwards on my ass because I can't use my leg, it'd be better than getting captured.”

“Agreed,” Hauglar said.

Hanson looked over his shoulder toward the mountains that rose like a nearly impenetrable wall above them. If they stayed here their chances of survival were nil. But if they attempted to climb eight or ten klicks up into the rugged mountains in the condition they were in, their chances wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot better. But then a little better was still better than zero.

Hanson stuffed the satcom in his own pack and slung it over his shoulders. “Let's move out, we have a long climb ahead of us.”

He reached to give Harvey a hand, but the former army special forces lieutenant got up on his own with a grunt of pain. “I might not do the two-twenty in record time, but I'll manage on my own for awhile.”

“Are you sure?”

Harvey nodded. “Might even help get rid of some of the stiffness.”

“Does it hurt?”

Harvey managed to laugh. “No more dumbass questions, okay, boss? Let's just get going.”

Hauglar grabbed his pack and helped Amatozio to his feet. He gave a nod.

Hanson turned and started back up the arroyo to the crest of the first hill, moving slowly, picking the easiest if not the fastest way up. They would have to conserve their strength now as best they could. By tonight the going would be much steeper, the terrain more rugged, and it would be cold.

The trip up into the mountains with the paragliders had been nerve-racking but exhilarating. These weren't the Himalayas, but until Harvey had taken the scorpion sting they had been feeling pretty good about themselves. Afterwards it had become a matter of desperation: getting over the last snow-covered pass that led down to the desert floor and the Kharan test depot on the other side.

Then, as now, Hanson had made the decision not to leave anyone behind. He had wanted to scrub the mission, but the others, especially Harvey, insisted that they had done the tough part. It would be criminal to turn around and head for home now that they were this close.

But it had been a mistake on Hanson's part. One, he thought, that could very well cost them their lives.

Harvey had slowed them down getting into position at the depot, had slowed their escape and now he and Amatozio were seriously handicapping their retreat back up into the mountains. Of course it was a moot point, because once they got to where they'd stashed their equipment and supplies it would be the end of the line for them anyway.

Hanson reached the top of the hill, took out his binoculars, and again studied the way behind them for any signs of pursuit. But the floor of the desert was clear, and he still couldn't hear anything in the air. Even now, of course, his hearing was affected by the bomb blast. In fact, for the first day and night afterwards none of them could hear a thing. It was only in the past couple of hours that their hearing had started to come back to normal.

Hauglar and Amatozio passed Hanson and started down a narrow defile that descended about twenty meters before the path opened up toward the crest of the next hill.

Harvey came up beside Hanson. “Anything?”

“No, we're still in the clear,” Hanson said, pocketing the binoculars. They started after Hauglar and Amatozio.

“What happens when we get there, Scott?” Harvey asked. He kept his voice low.

“Well, for one we should be able to talk to red warren. And we'll have food and water and some heavier firepower.”

“Right, and then what?”

“That'll be up to Kuwait City—”

“No, it'll be up to Washington, and you know it. We're too goddamned far inland for any kind of a rescue mission to work. But they'll try it anyway because of who you are. No offense meant, Scott, but a lot of good people could get killed.”

BOOK: By Dawn's Early Light
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