Sacrifice (12 page)

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Drake said, extending a hand.

The older man neglected to shake it. ‘Don’t be. I’m a section leader in a CIA field unit, which officially makes me a pain in the ass for guys like you.’

Drake frowned. He had no interest in getting into some kind of turf war with this man, and didn’t understand why he was being so confrontational. ‘I don’t think you understand why I’m here. One of your men has been taken hostage –’

‘I know all about Hal Mitchell,’ Crawford interrupted. ‘The loss of a man like him is a tragedy, but I’ve got hundreds more men and women like him to worry about. They’re my priority now. Langley sends a Shepherd team out to find Mitchell – that’s great, I hope you do. And I’ll cooperate with you as long as you respect our operational security. But if you jeopardise our ongoing operations or put my personnel at risk, I will not hesitate to make it my life’s work to destroy yours. Clear?’

Drake understood where Crawford was coming from now. There were still a lot of men like him in the Agency; guys who had been out in the field a little too long, who had become a little too hardened to the realities of their profession. They weren’t necessarily bad people, but as Crawford himself had said, they could be a pain in the arse to deal with.

‘Clear.’ It was obvious Crawford would accept no other answer.

‘Outstanding. Now that we know where we stand, come with me.’ With that, he turned and started walking towards a two-storey grey concrete office block near the centre of the compound.

Drake had little choice but to follow him.

‘One of your teammates has already set up shop here,’ Crawford explained. ‘Quite a little firecracker. She didn’t take that speech as well as you did.’

Drake wasn’t surprised. ‘I need to speak to her.’

True to his instructions, Frost had appropriated a small conference room within the building’s labyrinth of corridors. Low-ceilinged, windowless and lit by fluorescent strip lights, the small meeting space had an oppressive, claustrophobic feel to it.

The young woman was seated at the modest table. Her laptop, several folders and countless sheets of paper were strewn across its surface.

She looked up only briefly, giving him a none-too-welcoming look. Clearly she was far from pleased at being lumbered with such a tedious job.

‘Find anything on Mitchell’s computer?’ Drake asked, helping himself to coffee from an urn in the corner.

‘Yeah, Jack Shit. You heard of him?’

‘We’ve met a few times.’ He took a sip of the coffee. It tasted bitter and nasty, but that didn’t stop him downing a mouthful. He looked at Crawford, who had come in behind him and closed the door. ‘I assume Mitchell wasn’t based anywhere else? He didn’t have any other offices to work from?’

‘If he did, he never told anyone about it.’

That was all Drake needed to hear. For the time being at least, Mitchell was a dead end. ‘Then we focus on Kourash,’ he decided. ‘What do you know about him?’

Crawford folded his arms. ‘Anwari? Nasty piece of work. He and his group have been linked to at least a dozen attacks in the past six months. Car bombings, sniper attacks, ambushes, you name it. This is the first time they’ve shot down an aircraft, though.’

‘I’ll need everything you have on the previous attacks. Targets, locations, forensics reports, everything. Provided that’s okay with you?’ he added with a hint of sarcasm.

‘I can have someone bring that up.’ He certainly
wasn’t going to do it himself. ‘What are you expecting to find?’

‘A pattern. Mitchell’s chopper wasn’t a random hit, so maybe the others weren’t either. If we can figure out his intentions we might know what he’s planning.’

‘Now why didn’t we think of that?’ Crawford snorted. ‘We’ve been on his trail for months, Drake. He’s a ghost.’

‘No. He’s a gambler,’ Drake corrected him. ‘I know how he operates. He doesn’t just want to hear a news report about his latest attack – he wants to see it with his own eyes. I’d bet my life he was there when they shot down that chopper, and wherever his next attack comes, he’ll be around.’

While he was undoubtedly a cunning and tenacious guerrilla fighter, Kourash’s weakness had been his vanity. Lingering near the sites of bombings and ambushes, believing himself safe behind disguises and false identities, he would watch his carefully laid plans unfold like some eighteenth-century general surveying the battlefield.

‘And you know all of this … how?’ Crawford was watching him closely now.

Drake fixed him with a hard look. ‘Because I captured him five years ago.’

The field agent said nothing to that. Doubtless he was now pondering the same question Drake had been asking himself since this thing began – why didn’t he kill him when he’d had the chance?

‘This is all great, but Mitchell will probably be dead by the time Anwari makes another attack. We need to find him first,’ Frost reminded them.

Drake nodded, realising he was losing perspective. ‘I’ve been thinking about that hostage tape. The yellow stains on the wall behind Mitchell,’ he said, recalling the
cracked brickwork with what looked like mould growing on it. ‘They looked like sulphur deposits. My guess is they’re holding him in some kind of industrial area – maybe a chemical plant or a factory. That’s our starting point. We need a list of all abandoned facilities in Afghanistan.’

‘That could be a hell of a long list,’ Crawford remarked. Afghanistan’s fledgling industrial base had been largely destroyed after the Soviets pulled out. There were abandoned factories and plants dotted all over the country.

‘Assuming they’re not moving him from place to place,’ Frost added.

Drake shrugged. ‘It’s a start. Worst-case scenario, we eliminate some of the places he
isn’t
hiding. In the meantime I suggest we—’

He paused, interrupted by the buzzing of the cellphone in his pocket. It was Keegan. Maybe he and McKnight had had some luck after all.

‘John, how’s it going?’

‘Could be better,’ the older man remarked. ‘We had ourselves some trouble out at the crash site.’

Drake felt a knot of apprehension tighten in his stomach. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘We were hit at the crash site. Got a little tricky but we’re okay,’ the sniper assured him, much to his relief. ‘We’re at the base hospital right now.’

That was all he needed to hear. ‘We’re on our way.’

The Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital, named after a staff sergeant killed trying to rescue injured comrades two years earlier, was a fifty-bed medical facility located on the west side of Bagram Air Base. It was the first port of call for many casualties brought in from the front line.

The smell of medical disinfectant as he hurried in through the main entrance stirred deep feelings of foreboding in Drake, despite Keegan’s assurance that neither he nor McKnight was seriously hurt.

A quick consultation with the corporal on duty at the front desk told him that both his teammates were in treatment room 3. Drake was there in under a minute, with Frost right behind as he threw open the door and strode into the room.

Keegan and McKnight were both there. Their clothes were torn and dirty, and both were nursing various cuts and bruises, though they seemed to have escaped major injury.

‘Are you all right?’

Keegan, with a couple of tape stitches holding together a facial laceration, flashed a defiant grin. ‘Never better, buddy.’

McKnight was less jubilant. She had pulled up her T-shirt to expose an ugly bruise just below her ribcage,
the discoloured skin cut and grazed. A female medic was busy applying a sterilised dressing.

Drake couldn’t help feeling a sudden pang of guilt. He had left them out there in the field while he returned to the safety of Bagram, and this was the result. ‘You’re hurt.’

‘Very astute, Ryan,’ she remarked with a wry smile. ‘But it’s nothing. Just cuts and bruises.’

Unconvinced, Drake glanced at the medic for confirmation.

‘We’ve patched her up, sir. She’ll be fine,’ the woman said.

That at least seemed to satisfy him. ‘Can we have the room, please?’

The conversation they were about to have wasn’t the kind he wanted to be overheard. Finishing up with the dressing, the medic packed away her gear and left the room.

‘What happened out there?’ Drake asked as soon as the door closed.

‘We had a close encounter with a sniper,’ was McKnight’s simple reply. ‘Fortunately John took him out first.’ She glanced at the older man with gratitude in her eyes. ‘Even then, Vermaak and the Horizon team pulled out. They blew the crash site before we could stop them.’

‘It was like fuckin’ Hiroshima, man,’ Keegan added. ‘They used enough C4 to sink a battleship. There’s nothing left.’

Drake’s heart sank. He was relieved beyond words that his two team members had returned more or less unharmed, but there was no escaping the fact that they had just lost a major avenue of investigation.

‘What about the sniper? Where did he come from?’

‘No idea,’ Keegan admitted.

‘Didn’t you find anything on him?’

The older man threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Never got the chance. Vermaak was so anxious to clear out of there, they left the body behind. Wasn’t in their job description, apparently,’ he added with a look of disgust.

‘We just heard from an army patrol sent in to retrieve the body,’ McKnight added. ‘There was no sign of it.’

Drake couldn’t believe what he was hearing. First the Horizon team tried to stop them accessing the crash site altogether, then they acted as if they owned the place, and to top it all off they had destroyed a crime scene and left a dead enemy combatant unrecovered. Their actions might well have sunk the entire investigation.

Seeing those thoughts reflected in his eyes, McKnight grabbed her rucksack, lying discarded on a nearby bed. ‘It’s not all bad news. In fact, I’d say we might just have lucked out.’

‘How so?’

Reaching into the pack, she lifted out a small metal object and tossed it across the room. Instinctively Drake caught it and held it up to the light to take a closer look.

It was metal, cylindrical in shape, and relatively heavy for its size. The outlet nozzle at one end suggested it was an engine of some kind, and the smell of propellant confirmed this theory. He had no idea what purpose it served though.

‘I found this at the launch site, just after Keegan took the sniper down. In fact, if that guy hadn’t attacked us, I might never have found it at all,’ McKnight explained. ‘You know what it is?’

‘I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’

‘It’s an ejector motor,’ she said, looking like
an archaeologist who had just uncovered a priceless artefact. ‘When you fire a surface-to-air missile from a shoulder launcher, a little disposable rocket like this pushes the missile clear of the tube. Once it’s a safe distance away, the missile’s own engine ignites and off it goes. The ejector motor just falls away when it’s served its purpose.’

Taking his eyes off the rocket motor, he looked up at the woman who had recovered it. ‘Can you work out what kind of weapon this came from?’

‘I can tell you right now,’ she said. ‘It’s an FIM-92 Stinger.’

Stunned silence greeted her words as the implications sank in.

Mitchell’s chopper had been shot down by an American missile.

‘How sure are you?’ Drake asked. He doubted she would have made such a claim if there was any doubt in her mind, but he had to know.

‘I’ve seen these things a dozen times before, and I’ve studied their technical drawings more times than I can count,’ she assured him. ‘I know what to look for, and I’d bet my life that it came from a Stinger. I’ll need to check on the serial numbers to work out what batch it’s from, but there’s no doubt in my mind.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Keegan said, frowning. ‘Where the hell would these assholes have got their hands on a Stinger?’

Frost looked at the older man in exasperation. ‘From
us
. Don’t you get it? We sent hundreds of these things here twenty years ago.’

It was an open secret nowadays that the Agency had channelled billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment to the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion.
At first it was Russian-made weapons bought from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and even corrupt Red Army logistics officers in Afghanistan itself. But as the war escalated, the assistance became more and more overt.

Soon state-of-the-art anti-aircraft missiles like the Stinger were flooding the country, and shooting down Russian gunships and fighter-bombers with deadly efficiency. Much as in Vietnam twenty years earlier, the weapons of one superpower were being used by proxy to fight a war against the other.

‘The Agency supplied weapons like these to the Afghan rebels back in the eighties. When the war ended, we tried to buy them back.’ Drake glanced at McKnight with a raised eyebrow. ‘It seems we missed a few.’

The Mujahideen, though united against a common enemy in the Soviets, had never been a coherent group. Ethnic and tribal feuding had been rife even during the invasion, and when they no longer had a common cause to fight for, those simmering tensions erupted in full-scale civil war.

With the country descending into anarchy, the weapons supplied by the CIA were scattered amongst the various warring tribes, changing hands so quickly they soon became impossible to track down. The West had created a monster, and could do nothing but watch as it consumed the very country it was supposed to liberate.

Keegan was quick to see the implications. ‘Christ, if news like this got out—’

‘It would be a public-relations disaster,’ McKnight finished for him. ‘American troops shot down by American-made weapons. The media would be all over it.’

‘I say let them,’ Frost decided, disgusted by what she’d heard. ‘The assholes who gave them the weapons deserve to be punished.’

‘You’re missing the bigger picture,’ McKnight cut in. ‘ISAF, NATO, and especially the White House want to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Bush doesn’t want to go down in history as the guy who led us into a second Vietnam. But if news got out that the insurgents had surface-to-air missiles, any chance of leaving Afghanistan goes up in smoke.’