Quest for Honor (31 page)

More police cars roared to a stop on the street flanking the field on the east. Men poured out and began firing. Two rounds came close to the boy, who looked up in fear. He was about twelve years old, and for a moment Fazeed thought he looked just like his own son at that age.

Fazeed was now under fire from two directions, and the boy was going to get caught in the crossfire. The general angled toward the boy and ran to him. “General!” the airman in the door yelled. “No! This way!” The machine gun chattered again.

Fazeed reached the boy and swept him up into his arms, turned and ran for the helicopter. Fifteen meters. Ten. Something sparked off the windscreen of the helicopter. He could see the pilot flinching. The helicopter had touched down, but now began to rise as the roar of the rotors increased.

The general felt something slam into his right leg and he staggered, falling to the turf, twisting so that he landed on his left shoulder, not on the boy, who was crying now. The helicopter was maybe eight meters away. The pain rushed through Fazeed’s body, like nothing he’d ever felt. He looked frantically toward the helicopter. More rounds were hitting it now, and the airman beside the gunner was knocked backward by a hit to his helmet.

Fazeed reached out toward the helicopter as two rounds struck him in the back. His hand fell to the turf, but he held onto the boy with his right, shielding him. Yes, he was so much like his son, wasn’t he? His last thought was the joy of knowing that he would now be with his son again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Somalia

T
he guards who
escorted him to the cell block were in ugly moods, and Jim was careful to do nothing to antagonize them, although he held himself erect and walked with purpose. He could not afford to show any fear to these people, not now. They put him back in his cell, but they didn’t lay a hand on him.

The door opened a minute later and Denise was shoved inside. The captain, Khorsandi, was in the doorway. “Compliments of Major Heydar,” he said with a salacious smile. “Enjoy the woman while you can. After you are killed by his men tonight, it will be our turn to enjoy her.”

“Surmayye a’raasac!”
Denise snapped at him. The captain laughed and stepped out, the door slamming shut behind him.

Jim reached out to her, but she turned on him with cold fury. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

She stepped closer, letting go of the front of her shirt. He couldn’t help noticing she wore no bra underneath. Had they taken it from her before? He sensed this wasn’t the time to ask. “You deliberately antagonized them in there. Setting yourself up for some ridiculous sort of tournament? How could you be so stupid?”

“Hey, wait a minute—“

“No,
you
wait. You’re going to get us all killed, you idiot!” She turned and took a couple steps away, holding her hands to the sides of her head. “My God. And I thought you’d be safe to take on the mission. I stood up for you, for God’s sake!”

“Take it easy, Denise. I had to do something to buy us some time.”

She faced him again, her anger only slightly cooled. “Jim, we train for these kinds of contingencies. There are protocols. Some things you can try, other things you can’t. Or shouldn’t, anyway. Challenging your captors to a duel is certainly on the don’t-ever-do-this list.”

“It looked to me like Heydar was setting the protocols in there. What was your idea? You demanded he let us call the embassy. That went over real well, didn’t it?” That brought a huff from her and she looked away again. “And what ideas do you have, exactly, about—“

She cupped a hand behind an ear and nodded toward the door. It took him a moment, but then he got it: she thought the cell might be bugged. Okay. He took a deep breath to calm himself. “What did you say to Khorsandi?”

“It was Arabic for ‘there is a shoe on your head.’ They consider that a big insult.” She said it with a tight smile. That was a good sign.

“Who are those guys, anyway?” Jim asked.

“Heydar and Khorsandi are Iranians, and I’m sure they’re officers in Quds Force. Very hard cases. Quds operatives do the dirty work out in the field for the Revolutionary Guard.”

“What are they doing all the way over here, in Somalia? Are they working with Joe’s people?”

Her anger was gone now, but maybe it hadn’t been real anger at all, just an act for anyone listening in. Either way, he was glad to see she was focused. They’d have to make some kind of escape attempt eventually and that was way outside his skill set. He had no illusions about their eventual fate; even if, somehow, he could beat four of these guys—and why didn’t he say three, or even two?—there was no way Heydar was going to let them walk out of here and hitch a ride back to K50.

“Shalita is a very big wheel in al-Qaida, and we’ve had some indicators in recent months that Iran is stepping up their support of these networks. That surprised us at first.”

“Why?”

“Because Iran is strongly Shi’a and al-Qaida is largely a Sunni operation. Remember your briefings back at Langley, Jim. They tend not to get along real well. Even before the founding of Islam, the Persians and Arabs were at each other’s throats more often than not.”

“That seems to be changing now.”

She went over to Jim’s makeshift bed and sat down, leaning back against the wall. The front of her shirt came open a bit more and Jim forced himself to look away. He sat down next to her, but kept a respectful distance. “I picked up on some things when I was posted to Djibouti in the last year or so,” she said. “They’re working hard at their nuclear program, but they’re not just sitting around otherwise. Iranian activity with Hamas and Hezbollah has increased. They’re also showing up more in Iraq and Afghanistan. We see their fingerprints in Egypt. They’re major players over here.”

“I’ve been following the news about the nuclear thing,” he said. “They’re still, what, two years away from getting the bomb? Three?”

She shook her head. “No, they’re much closer than that. Some of us think so, anyway.”

He was surprised at that. “That’s not what we’re being told.”

“You’re not in Wisconsin anymore, Jim. Welcome to reality.”

“Well, what the hell,” he said, “why not let the truth out? People need to know this, a lot of them would get upset if they knew these characters were that close.”

“Exactly. There would be demands that something be done, and a lot of important people don’t want to go in that direction. There’s an election coming up in just over a year, remember.”

“But we can’t just let them have the nukes, can we? For God’s sake, they could hit Israel, they could hit our troops. My brother’s base!”

She looked at him wearily. “Jim, we don’t make the decisions on policy. That’s up to the politicians. We just try our best to find out what’s going on, then let them know.”

“And you’ve told them about how close they are?”

“Of course,” she said. “But, you know, after the Iraq WMD mess, some people don’t listen to us very much.”

They were quiet for a long minute. International politics. Weapons of mass destruction. Things were a lot simpler back in Cedar Lake.

“Can you beat them?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Depends on who they pick. Depends on the rules.”

“We don’t know a lot about Heydar, but his name came up when I was in Djibouti. He made the 2000 Olympics in taekwondo, so if he’s training these men here, they won’t be pushovers.”

Jim couldn’t remember the name, but he hadn’t paid much attention to the martial arts competition back then, since he hadn’t yet resumed his own training. “Did he win?”

“What?”

“Did he win? In Sydney?”

She thought for a minute. “No,” she said at last. “Got beat in the opening round, I think. And as far as rules go, don’t expect any breaks. You may have to kill those men, Jim. Are you prepared to do that?”

She was looking at him so intensely it almost hurt. He looked right back at her.

“Yes.”

Jim awoke with a start. Some kind of noise from the window, he didn’t know what, but as his eyes adjusted, he could see they were still alone in the cell. It was a bit darker, must’ve been getting on toward late afternoon.

He was lying on the bedding, Denise next to him, curled up with his left arm around her. They had talked a bit more and then just sort of nodded off. He must’ve gone down first, the fatigue finally overcoming the tension and fear.

That question she had asked: Was he prepared to kill the men he would have to fight? He’d said yes, without any hesitation, any fear. Now, in the dusty, hot quiet of the cell, he thought about that. Could he really do it? In all his years of training, as realistic as much of it had been, he had never killed anyone, of course, never even seriously hurt anybody. He’d read a lot about it, but that was in the abstract. The reality was right here and now.

It was enough to make most men give in to the terror, but Jim realized that not only was his fear receding, he was actually looking forward to the challenge ahead. Now that was a curious thought, wasn’t it? But maybe not. Six years of hard training and study had delivered him here, where things were no longer abstract or artificial. His fate, his destiny, was waiting for him just beyond that wall.

One of his favorite books was
In Search of the Warrior Spirit,
and he had memorized one memorable passage:
The warrior within us beseeches Mars, the god of War, to deliver us to that crucial battlefield that will redeem us into the terrifying immediacy of the moment…We long for the encounter that will ultimately empower us with dignity and honor…

He had thought all along that he was doing all this for Suzy, for her memory, so that if he was ever tested again, really tested, this time he would come through. Now, though, he realized that it was something much deeper. The men out there were intent on taking his life and the lives of his friends, and from here they would move against other innocents. Eventually they would come to his own country again, maybe even to a small town in southern Wisconsin. They had to be stopped, and in the last ten years a lot of men and women, including his brother, had stepped forward to do just that. Now it was Jim’s turn.

He’d once read an essay by a former Army Ranger—what was his name? Grossman, that was it— about the three types of people in modern society. Most people are sheep; nonviolent, peaceful, just wanting to go about their business. A few are wolves, the sociopaths, who want nothing more than to kill the sheep. And protecting the sheep is the third type, the sheepdog. The sheep don’t like the dog, really don’t trust him; he looks a lot like the wolf, after all, he’s big and powerful and, when necessary, violent. But the sheep know that when the wolf shows up, only the sheepdog stands between them and death.

Jim knew what type he wanted to be. And right now, the wolves were just beyond that wall.

Next to him, Denise stirred, muttering, and snuggled closer. He must’ve been whispering the lines that he’d recalled from the book, but she was still asleep. He couldn’t resist reaching up and stroking her hair, ever so slightly, not wanting to wake her. She stirred and moved, rolling slightly toward her back, and Jim watched the front of her shirt slide ever so slowly away from her breast. In spite of the circumstances, the sight of her nipple roused a heat inside him.

He considered reaching over to pull the shirt back into place, but if she woke up right then, it wouldn’t look real good. Better to just leave it be, look away, think of something else.

Yeah, sure. Even with her hair out of place, no makeup and at least twenty-four hours removed from a shower, she was still strikingly attractive. How could CIA use women this good-looking as covert operatives? Well, they’d evidently done it with that Plame woman. As he thought about it, he realized their looks would bring them some advantages. Men were pretty much the same all over. A guy was much more likely to let his guard down around a beautiful woman as opposed to a plain one.

She sighed and squirmed a bit against him. She was waking up, but before he could do anything, she had rolled to her right, on top of him, and then her eyes blinked open, their faces only an inch apart She came fully awake and pushed herself upward slightly, giving him a view that in other circumstances he would’ve considered spectacular indeed.

But he just said, “I think you need a different shirt.”

She smiled, leaned close to his ear and whispered, “After you beat these guys, be ready to move.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Afghanistan

K
rieger handed the
binoculars over to Mark and pointed to the west. “That patrol is very regular,” the German-American said. “Every day, they pass the checkpoint at 0900 going south, 1200 going north, 1500 south, and 1800 going north again.”

The border crossing was manned on the Afghan side by two squads of border police, occasionally augmented by ANA regulars. On the other side, Mark could see the Iranian guard posts. On the road that roughly paralleled the border on that side, three vehicles, two armored cars similar to Humvees and a larger truck, stopped and two soldiers from the nearest guard post went over to have a word with the man in the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle. After a couple minutes, the guards stepped back and saluted, and the small convoy started up again, heading south.

“What about nighttime patrols?” Mark asked.

“Maybe two per night. Usually only one.”

The orders had come down from ISAF just a few hours after the General and Krieger lifted off from Roosevelt two days ago. Contingency plans were quickly dusted off and somebody in the spook house deemed it more likely that Iran would be the scene of some action rather than Pakistan, so Krieger’s Unit 7 was sent here, to Farah province. The Provisional Reconstruction Team in this sector, based in the city of Farah, was a U.S. team, but overall the Italians were in charge of this province, which was part of Regional Command West. Most of their people were based in Herat province, to the north, but there was an Italian captain now assigned to the unit to act as liaison. Along with Mark, who had arrived here this morning, the roster now numbered twenty operators.

“We won’t be inserting at this checkpoint, though,” Mark said.

“No. When this patrol is well south of us, we will cross the border about ten kilometers to the north, assuming that we get a mission.”

“I have a feeling we will,” Mark said. His phone call from the General just before dawn had been short, and there was no further word about Jim in Somalia. Mark tried not to think about that, but it was impossible. Krieger had asked him to coordinate available air assets, and Mark was grateful to have something to keep him busy. Within the next couple hours a squadron of helicopters was due to arrive at their potential jumping-off point, a large FOB to the north. Those birds would have to be serviced and prepped for a mission and their crews would have to be fed and housed overnight. In addition to that, Mark was working with Air Force and Marine fixed-wing commands to have fast-movers on standby, just in case they needed help getting out.

The fact that he had only twenty men told Mark that their target, whatever it might be, wasn’t expected to be very big. Using the NATO unit also meant it would not only be top-secret but of high political sensitivity. The last thing anybody wanted now was a war with Iran, but apparently some people very high up the food chain felt there was something across the border over there that might be worth taking out. It would be a big risk, no doubt about it. Somebody back in Washington would have to grow a couple of big brass ones to issue a go order on something like this, which was why Mark thought it likely they’d be ordered to stand down within the next forty-eight hours. There weren’t a lot of big brass ones inside the suits in Washington these days, at least when it came to Iran. Popping an elderly terrorist in Pakistan was one thing; going across the Iranian frontier after a high-value target was something else again.

What he really wanted to do was go to Djibouti to help with the search for Jim and his team. He’d asked the General about that and was told no. There were plenty of assets over there to conduct whatever mission was called for, and the last thing they needed was someone riding along whose professional judgment might be in question due to having a relative in harm’s way. Mark understood all that, but if he’d been allowed to go he would not have hesitated.

“I need you with Unit 7, Mark,” the General had told him. “Krieger and his men are pros, but they’re not directly under my command. I want someone with them who represents ISAF.” Undoubtedly the General had used a good portion of his considerable horsepower to make that happen, and Mark wasn’t about to disappoint him.

Krieger looked at his wristwatch. “We should be getting back,” he said. “Considering the air assets we’ve been given, our options for a target area are limited. We should start planning the most likely scenarios, yes?”

“Sounds good to me,” Mark said. He took one last look across the border, into Iran. The mountains in the distance loomed large. “The Aladagh,” he said. “There must be something in there that’s going to be worth risking the lives of a lot of men.”

“Undoubtedly, Colonel. Perhaps we can figure out what that might be.”

Night was starting to fall. Mark buttoned up his heavy coat against the cold. The elevation was not quite as high as it was back at Roosevelt, but it still didn’t take long for the heat of the day to dissipate, and the space heater inside the tent was hopelessly outgunned.

“The Aladagh range,” Krieger said, pointing down at the map of eastern Iran. “What can you tell us about this area, Baris?”

The Turkish sergeant, short and rather swarthy with an unruly shock of black hair, traced a finger down from the Caspian Sea south and east toward the Afghan border area. “They are not as high as the Zagros in western Iran,” he said in accented English. “In the north, from the Caspian, they are called the Elburz, then the Aladagh. The region is known as Khorasan, now divided into three provinces. Here is the major city, Birjand. The ethnic mix is mostly Persian, but many Pashtun also. It is on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route. Today there is much movement of opium from Afghanistan through here.”

Krieger turned to a British lieutenant who served as the unit’s intelligence officer. “Nelson, what about nearby military installations?”

The Brit was slender and looked like a guy you might see throwing darts at a country pub after a day tending sheep, but Mark had already found out he knew his stuff. “Nearest Iranian Air Force base is here, at Mashhad International Airport.” He indicated a city in the extreme northeast. “They have an F-4 squadron, about ten aircraft, plus a tanker and a couple small transports. As for the Army, there is a caserne near Birjand, with about five hundred troops, a dozen tanks, and most important for us, a squadron of attack and transport helicopters. I would estimate that they could put troops on the ground anywhere along this border region inside of four hours after an alert. But for anything we might be doing in this region, our main concern should be their special forces. Recent intel indicates that a unit of their Takavar is based somewhere in this region.”

“Do we know what unit?” Mark asked.

“We think it is 7-Tip 65 Nouhad,” Nelson said. “Said to be the best they have. Are you familiar with that unit, Colonel?”

“I was on a mission with a French Foreign Legion platoon a few months ago,” Mark said. “North of here, in Herat. We were interdicting an opium route used by a local warlord to move his product into Iran. Just this side of the border there was a firefight with some of the warlord’s fighters, backed by a squad of Takavaran.”

“What did you gather about their capabilities?” Krieger asked.

“They didn’t go down easy,” Mark said. “They’re not at the level of top NATO units, but mainly because our equipment is better and we can count on better logistical and tactical support in the field. I’ve heard their training is first-rate, but even if we’re on their turf, our biggest advantage should be our combat experience.”

Krieger nodded. “Gentlemen, I think we can assume that if we get a go order for a mission, it will involve a strike against an HVT. We might further assume this Nouhad unit will be nearby.”

“That will make things interesting,” Nelson said.

The briefing lasted another half-hour, during which Mike Marolda, the captain in charge of the helo detachment, offered his insights. Mark was gratified to have the Night Stalkers on board. The 160
th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) had delivered the SEALs to Abbottabad, not to mention a ton of other ops around both theaters since 9/11. Mark had met Marolda during his last Iraq tour and he was a first-class pilot. He’d brought three Black Hawks and three Apaches with him. If Unit 7 was going across the border, they’d have some of the best aviators in the world carrying them.

Mark visited the FOB comm shack after the briefing, asked if there were any messages for him, and was told no. The General had promised to keep him apprised of the situation in Somalia. No news is good news, Mark thought as he went back out into the Afghan night. Only this time, he didn’t think it was true.

He looked to the southwest. Thirty-five hundred miles in that direction, his brother was in trouble, and there wasn’t a damn thing Mark could do about it, except offer up a prayer. He gazed up into the night sky and the vast pantheon of stars. “God, I know you’re watching over Jim right now. Please bring him back home.”