Brute Force

Prologue

The cloying odor of too much makeup and not enough soap rose from the two ragged prostitutes outside the fence, assaulting the first peach-blossom breezes of spring. Two rows of chain link, the inner one alive with high-voltage current, did nothing to stop the smell from drifting into the guard shack just inside the fortified gate. A plywood sign hung from the wrought-iron arch across the narrow road, reading MUDAN ENGINEERING in large block letters with the Mudan logo, a blood-red peony blossom, painted ornately on either side.

Liang, the younger of the two guards working the shack, had heard the whispered brags from the soldiers stationed inside the warehouse, out of sight of the general public. The soldiers were young — Liang’s age — and enjoyed boasting about the importance and secrecy of their mission. Mudan’s official stance was that they manufactured crescent wrenches of beryllium alloy. But soldiers didn’t guard wrenches, no matter what they were made of. Soldiers guarded weapons.

Young Liang knew little about tools and nothing of women, least of all prostitutes who worked for no more than food and smelled like overripe lychee fruit. A head taller than his partner, Liang was bony and gaunt with thick, round glasses and a shaggy head that seemed much too large for his spindly body. The green guard uniform made him look like a praying mantis with a pistol.

A bright pool of light from the halogen bulbs atop the electrified fence chased the night back to the peach orchards across the narrow two-lane road. Fluttering moths circled in the glow above the women like flies drawn to their stench. It seemed that the prostitutes had materialized out of the darkness — a fact that only added to the uneasiness in Liang’s gut.

Inside the shack, Po, the older guard, raised a wild eyebrow when he heard the girls’ plaintive cries. Breathing deeply, he stood when he saw the girls, slicking back what was left of his thinning black hair and giving a gold-toothed grin. The prostitutes, noting his interest, pressed their faces against the outer fence, pushing painted lips through the links like feeding carp. Po was thirty years Liang’s senior. To hear him talk, he had a depth of experience with prostitutes.

“Let us in,” the girls keened, sounding like hatchlings demanding to be fed. “The night has a chill to it. We could keep you warm.”

“This has to be a test,” Liang whispered, his youthful voice tightly wound. His eyes flicked back and forth behind thick glasses, adding to his buglike appearance as he searched for any sign of the People’s Liberation Army colonel who he was certain had come to conduct a surprise inspection.

“It is no test,” Po chided. The proximity of willing women turned his voice into a hoarse whisper. He rifled through his paper lunch sack, looking for something to trade the women. He held up two boiled eggs and a glass jar of noodle soup, his eyelids drooping, heavy with lust. “This should be enough,” he said. “I know that one there with the ragged cloak.

“She is talented, that one. She has a scar in the shape of a lotus blossom on her buttock. You can take her if you want to take a look at it.”

“She’s old enough to be my mother.” Liang felt like he might throw up. “I do not care to see such a thing.”

“Suit yourself.” Po shrugged, pressing the button to open the gate. “You take the other one then. It makes no difference to me.” He elbowed his young protégé in the ribs and gave him a wink. “They said they are cold. Maybe we can just trade the eggs and keep the soup.” The older guard sauntered through the gap and began to talk terms.

A series of hollow woofs punctuated the squeak of gears and clanking chain as the electrified gate rumbled open. Liang watched in dismay as the two prostitutes pitched headlong against the outer fence, faces slack as they slid to the ground in lifeless heaps. He sprang for the red button that would close the gate as a barrage of suppressed gunfire cut down Po. A half breath later and the young guard felt the slap of bullets as they tore into his belly.

Liang was surprised that he felt no pain. He swayed in place, hand not quite on the red button, before slumping to the concrete floor. A dozen men, all dressed in black from head to toe, ran from the darkness of the peach orchard and filed in through the gate. Meticulous in their movements, two peeled off to form a rear guard beside the shack. Another reached in for the ring of keys on the wall inside the door. This one looked down at a gasping Liang with detached eyes. He had the face of a professional, someone who was accustomed to killing prostitutes and gate guards. Shot in the spine, Liang was no longer a threat — not worth the bullet it would take to put him out of his misery.

The young guard watched helplessly as the dark men moved to the main door of the warehouse. They formed two lines, weapons ready, while one of them used the stolen keys to turn the lock on the door. Absent a warning call from the gate guards, the soldiers inside would have no idea what was about to happen. Liang heard more muffled shots as the attackers flowed into the warehouse like an unstoppable force, methodically killing the soldiers inside.

He was suddenly thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. His vision narrowed with each labored breath, like someone drawing a set of curtains. Soon, he could no longer see the warehouse, or the dark men when they trotted past him on their way out of the compound. He could not see what they carried with them. It didn’t matter. Liang had heard the stories. There was only one thing of worth in the warehouse.

These men had come for the Black Dragon.

The Uyghur stood with his back to the rough, unpainted stone. Youthful eyes locked on a shadow as it crept up the chipped concrete, fifteen feet across the crowded cell. Beads of sweat ran down his face, cutting trails through the grit and grime of captivity. Fifty-six other men squatted and slumped at his feet in a sea of hacking coughs and desperate groans on the filthy stone floor, all of them crammed into the fifteen-by-thirty-foot cell. The place was meant to house no more than a dozen prisoners, so the space along the wall was prime real estate, worth fighting for. The Uyghur did not have to watch his back when he stood at the wall — which made it a tiny bit easier to stay alive.

His name was Yaqub Feng, after his mother’s brother who had died as a martyr fighting the Chinese devils for a free East Turkestan. His brother, Ehmet, stood to his right along the same wall. At twenty-four, he was three years Yaqub’s junior. Shorter by six inches and more finely boned, Ehmet had the physical aspects of their father, a Hui Chinese Muslim. Though Yaqub had inherited their uncle’s name, Ehmet possessed a double share of the warrior’s fierceness as well as his indifference toward death.

Their cousin Mamoud, who’d been held with them by the American infidels at Guantanamo Bay, had died just hours after arriving in Pakistan. Cuba had been hot, but temperatures in the Punjab were unbearable, loitering over a hundred degrees, often throughout the night, cooking the minds and bodies of the men inside the prison degree by agonizing degree.

The sour stench of infection and human waste twisted up through the evening light, twining long shafts like a cancer on something beautiful — and adding to the captives’ misery.

“Yaqub Feng!” a fat Pakistani known as Afaz the Biter grunted from the far end of the room, where he straddled one of the three toilet holes cut into the concrete. “I will be finished here very soon. Come and spend time with your new friend Afaz.” Shirtless and glistening with sweat, the Pakistani prisoner’s distended belly rested on bent knees. He listed heavily to one side, the effect of some opiate smuggled in and sold by the guards. One of his ever-present stooges steadied him from the side, a hand on the slope of a hairy shoulder.

Yaqub ignored Afaz’s slurred summons and rubbed the stinging sweat from his eyes. Beyond the bars of the southwest wall, the evening sun wallowed toward the horizon in shimmering waves of heat. Crisscross shadows inched across the scarred backs and pitiful faces of the other prisoners before climbing up the stone on the far side of the room.

Afaz the Biter began to shout again.

“My men tell me you are Uyghur.” His jowly face was red from his efforts at the toilet. “I tasted the flesh of a Uyghur once.” He batted his eyes as if drawing on a pleasant memory. “It was much like good chicken. But… Feng… that is a Chinese name… and you look Chinese…. Chinese taste like dog.” The big man roared in a huge belly laugh, showing yellow teeth. “Lucky for me, I find dog to be delicious.”

Yaqub tried to ignore the Pakistani and kept his eyes on the shadow as it crept upward toward the tiny scratch he’d made in the stone the day before, minutes after his visitor had bribed the guards to see him. Together, the shadow and the scratch made a crude but reliable clock in a world where every minute seemed much like the last.

Ehmet leaned forward, glaring at the fat Pakistani. He turned to wink at Yaqub and spoke under his breath. “I will not let him eat you, big brother. I promise.” There was a feral quality in his brother, a certain lust for blood that frightened Yaqub, even as he offered his protection.

Yaqub tipped his head toward the scratch on the wall. “We are almost there.”

“Afaz has many men,” a skinny Chinese smuggler named Jiàn Zŏu said, leaning around Ehmet. Narrow eyes flicked back and forth from Yaqub to Afaz, glowing with something that was not quite fear. “You look like people with a plan…”

Neither Yaqub nor Ehmet answered.

Jiàn Zŏu swallowed hard. “But what if your plan does not work in time? We should put our heads together.”

“What if?” Yaqub whispered. According to Jiàn Zŏu, he had been what the Chinese called a “snakehead”—a smuggler who was an expert at moving people across borders and evading authorities — until the day he was caught.

“I may as well fight alongside you,” Jiàn Zŏu said. He had a narrow face and a wispy black mustache, which, along with his darting eyes and twitchy movements, reminded Yaqub of a rat. “Your father was Chinese,” he reasoned. “That makes us cousins. We should take care of each other.”

The only other Chinese prisoner in the cell, Jiàn Zŏu had aligned himself with the Feng brothers from the moment they’d arrived from Islamabad two days before. If he was to be believed, he had contacts with Chinese triads and other organized crime groups all around the world. He’d been arrested when some of his underlings decided to begin trafficking in drugs along with their human cargo.

Ehmet looked the jumpy snakehead up and down. “If we get out of here, you say you have contacts in China?”

Nose twitching, Jiàn Zŏu seemed to sense that that something big was about to occur. “I have contacts everywhere, cousin.” He leaned in close. “My friends will make sure we are taken care of wherever you want to go — as long as we stay alive long enough to get to them.”

Afaz growled from the other end of the room. “You should come to me on your own, Yaqub Feng! My men will not be as gentle as I will be.”

Ehmet laughed out loud at that. “I will enjoy watching this one die,” he said.

Jiàn Zŏu swallowed hard, but Yaqub saw him reach into the waist of his filthy trousers and bring out a sharpened metal spike. The little snakehead might tremble at the thought of death, but he was willing to run trembling toward it. Maybe they should bring him along.

“If the stories are true,” Jiàn Zŏu whispered, “Afaz chewed his wife to death.”

“I can see you laugh,” the fat Pakistani roared. “You will not be laughing for long.” His stooge brought him a bowl of water to clean himself. He pushed it away and stood to pull his pants up around his waist. They were stained and torn, forming more of an apron than actual pants. Sweat bathed the mahogany rolls of fat that folded over his upper body.

Yaqub took a half step away from the wall. At six feet tall to Ehmet’s five and a half, the elder brother should have been the protector. That was not the case. Ehmet put out a hand and moved in front, placing himself between Yaqub and Afaz the Biter.

The Pakistani lumbered through the crowded room, shoving and kicking aside prisoners who didn’t move out of his way fast enough. Ten feet away, he stopped. Even listing to one side, he was a formidable man with powerful arms and a low, sloping brow over piggish eyes.

He pointed at Yaqub, clicking his teeth together.

On the wall, the shadow reached the scratch.

A half a breath later a horrific explosion rattled the prison, sending a cascade of dust down the ancient brick. All eyes turned toward the outer wall trying to make sense of the noise. Earthquakes were not unheard of in Pakistan — and could prove deadly to men trapped in a dilapidated pile of stone like Dera Ismail Khan Prison.

Ehmet looked at Yaqub and smiled. This was no earthquake.

A second blast roared directly outside the bars, sending a percussive fist into Yaqub’s chest. The pressure wave knocked him backwards, slamming both him and Ehmet against the stone. They’d dropped to their bellies as a third explosion tore the bars off the cell.

Prisoners coughed and choked as smoke and dust rolled into the room. It was difficult to breathe, and impossible to see. Panicked shouts and pitiful cries rose up with the dust throughout the prison complex. The rattle-can of submachine gunfire followed fast on the heels of the explosions. Outside the wall, a guard screamed for mercy — and then screamed again as he was shot. Ehmet pressed his face up from the concrete floor and grinned at his brother. Surrounded by death, he looked happier than he’d been in a very long while.

Three minutes after the first explosion, the gunfire outside had dwindled to sporadic spurts and volleys. A dark man with a flowing black beard that reached the middle of his chest stepped through the cavernous breach in the outside wall. He wore the green uniform of a prison guard and carried a short Kalashnikov rifle at low-ready. He cast dark eyes around the room until he saw the two Uyghur men. Prisoners who had not known to get away from the outside wall prior to the explosion were scattered around the room in various stage of dismemberment.

“I am Ali Kadir,” the man with the beard said, grabbing Yaqub by the arm and hauling him to his feet. “We have come to set you free.”

Yaqub nodded, blinking. It was one of Kadir’s men who had come to see him the day before.

“We must hurry,” Kadir said. “There is a vehicle waiting outside. There are three of you.”

Ehmet shook his head. “Our cousin is dead.”

Jiàn Zŏu scuttled up in the cloud of dust. “Take me with you,” he said. “My contacts will be of use, I swear it. I assume you wish to get out of Pakistan. I am an expert at moving people from one country to another.”

Ali Kadir opened his mouth to speak as a prison guard stepped through the hole in the wall, spraying the room with bullets. One of the shots hit him in the back of the neck. Kadir fell instantly, a look of bemused surprise on his lips, and was dead before he hit the ground. Jiàn Zŏu snatched up the Kalashnikov as he fell and dispatched the guard with a short burst.

“See,” he said, licking his lips. “I told you I could be of some use.”

Yaqub looked at Ehmet, who shrugged. “I don’t care,” the younger brother said, before pushing his way through the rubble to a stunned Afaz, who now lay sprawled on his back. Ehmet bent over the Pakistani, kneeling close to his face. Without warning, he ripped into the flesh of the screaming man’s cheeks as if he were feeding. Blood covered the young Uyghur’s lips and chin when he finally looked up. It dripped from the corners of his mouth and ran down the front of his tattered prison shirt.

Surviving prisoners, guards complicit in the escape, and Jiàn Zŏu watched in disgusted horror as Ehmet Feng spat a grisly chunk of meat on the floor. He had torn the face off Afaz the Biter. Even Yaqub, who admitted to a mild disposition, felt a surge of pride at his brother’s ferocity. The story of the young Uyghur would be passed on for generations.

Ehmet turned to give Jiàn Zŏu a hard glare.

“You fought with us, you will come with us,” he said through bloodstained teeth.

Yaqub shot a glance toward Ehmet, nodding. People always looked to him because he was older and taller — but everyone now knew which brother was truly in charge.

“Kadir was our transportation out of here,” Yaqub said, looking at Jiàn Zŏu. “His men will give us a ride, but without him, we may need your contacts more than ever.”

The snakehead’s wispy mustache twitched under a pointed nose.

“You may be of some use after all.” Ehmet pointed a bloody hand toward the demolished wall. “Come. We have an appointment with a dragon.”

Alberto Moretti would die on the Savage Mountain. He’d known it for years — since he was sixteen. Sitting at the wobbly table in the glow of the command tent, he leaned a whiskered face against an open palm. Weary eyes squinted under the glaring hiss of lantern light. The chapped tip of his bandaged finger traced the route his team would take to the summit. He could envision each step — the different camps, the exact spots they would set ropes, the famous Bottleneck where climbers would traverse the face under a deadly serac — tons of hanging ice — before making their final push to the summit.

As an Italian, Moretti felt a special kinship with the naked chunk of rock and ice that loomed at the head of the valley. It was, after all, a team made up of his countrymen who had reached the summit first in 1954. Moretti had already climbed Everest — twice, the last time two years before, summiting on his thirty-fifth birthday. But all three of his bids to conquer K2 had ended in failure. The second highest and, arguably, the most deadly of the 8,000-meter peaks simply refused to admit him.

And Moretti was not alone. For every four climbers to reach the top, the Savage Mountain took a life. If you wanted the respect of the world, you climbed Everest. If you wanted the respect of other mountaineers, you climbed K2.

And climbing it was just what Moretti intended to do — if the rest of his group would ever arrive.

It had taken him the better part of a year to recruit a multinational team. Klaus Becke, a longtime climbing partner and friend, would be his second in command. The big German had radioed that he’d brought along a girlfriend. Moretti shrugged away any ill feelings over adding someone to the expedition this late in the game. Klaus was a showoff, but the most competent climber the Italian had ever seen. If he needed a pretty girl to cheer for him while he worked, Moretti didn’t care — so long as they made their weather window. July was going by awfully fast and K2 always seemed to grow angrier in August.

The porters had already made the five-day trek back down the trail to Askole, promising to return at the appointed time to help the expedition off the mountain. So far, eight members of the actual team had arrived in base camp — two Chinese climbers, two brothers from Wyoming, one Ukrainian, and the lone climber from Alberta, Canada. DuPont, the hulking Belgian, had wandered off again, doing whatever security professionals did in the wee hours of the morning. Considering the political climate in Pakistan, Moretti had not argued with the American brothers on the team when they suggested he hire someone to take care of security. Emile DuPont, a former legionnaire, if his story was to be believed, smiled more than Moretti would have thought for someone who was paid to have a fearsome look. Still, the Belgian was a huge man with a powerful military bearing and a sly smile that said he considered lesser men as food if the need ever arose.

And then there was Issam, the cook. He was a gaunt thing, stooped, with a dragging limp and a copper tint to his skin only slightly lighter than the Balti porters. Black eyes and a full beard made it difficult to pinpoint the man’s ethnicity. In broken English, Issam had introduced himself as a Moroccan. He generally kept to himself, but there was an air about the cook that put Moretti on edge, as if he was standing in the path of an avalanche. In truth, this dark man was much more frightening than their Belgian security guard.

Issam was, however, a dependable cook. Even now, when the Godwin-Austen valley was still cloaked in the indigo shadows of dawn, metal pots clanged and rattled in the adjacent cook tent where the Moroccan prepared breakfast tea and chipati, the thin, unleavened bread of the Karakoram.

The noise made Moretti hungry. He stood and stretched his back with the long groan of a man who’d spent half his life sleeping on the ice, then poked his head out the tent flap. The imposing pyramid of K2 dominated the northern landscape. The tip of its eastern summit was a brilliant orange with the rising sun.

A distant cry drew his attention back to the south, toward the Baltoro and the lower camps at Concordia. At first he thought it was an eagle, but the sound grew louder as someone in a bright yellow parka half ran, half staggered from the valley shadows toward the camp. Moretti realized it was a woman screaming for help.

And she was not alone.

Less than two hundred meters down the valley, nine men trailed her through the shadowed boulders like persistent ants. Green military uniforms stood out against gray rock and dirty snow. The men moved methodically, not wasting their breath. Soon, their quarry would reach the base camp — and run out of places to go.

Moretti nearly jumped out of his skin when the Moroccan cook began to bang on a tin plate with a metal spoon, rousing the rest of the camp.

The Italian turned in a complete circle, hand on top of his head, scanning the barren ice and rocky crags that surrounded him.

“Where the hell is DuPont with his gun?” His whisper escaped on a terrified gasp.

The woman in the yellow parka was surely Klaus Becke’s type. As she drew nearer, he could see that she was tall with long brunette hair and the gaunt features the German liked so much. Even in the high-altitude base camp, she increased her speed when she neared the tents and stumbled up to Moretti five minutes after her first screams carried into camp. She slumped forward, hands against her knees, speaking between wheezing gulps of thin air.

Other climbers in camp began to emerge from their tents.

“They… killed everyone,” the woman panted. “I’ve… never seen any… thing… like…” She cast her eyes around the camp. “Klaus said… you have… gun…”

“Klaus?” Moretti rolled his lips, fearing her answer.

“Dead.” The woman looked from tent to tent, then over her shoulder at her pursuers. Her voice was shredded, hoarse from her ordeal. “They… cut off his head. Please… tell me you have a gun.”

“DuPont, our security specialist, has one.” The Italian nodded. His eyes were glued to the uniformed men picking their way across the rock-strewn glacier toward camp.

Hands still on her knees, the woman looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot, her voice pleading. “Where is he?”

“I wish I knew,” Moretti said.

The woman sank to the ground. Moretti reached down and helped her back to her feet as nine frowning men strode into camp. Three of them were swathed in blood — the beheaders. The Italian sighed. He would indeed die on K2, but it would not be the mountain that killed him.

The apparent leader of the group, a man with a Fidel Castro cap, ordered all the climbers to form a line in front of the cook tent. A thick man with a fearsome black beard that was long enough to be shoved sideways in the morning breeze, he introduced himself simply as Khan. As if bragging about his intentions, he explained that his men were members of Junood ul-Hifsa, the jihadists who’d claimed responsibility for the cleansing at Nanga Parbat and the recent beheadings of two infidels posted online. The Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS — to intelligence officials these were all different and unique terrorist groups, but from the viewpoint of a neck with a knife to it, one militant Islamist was the same as any other.

The Ukrainian climber vomited when he heard the news. A murmured hush ran through the line. Moretti couldn’t help but think how much they all looked like the receiving end of a firing squad.

Khan seemed particularly interested in the woman they’d chased into camp, running her name together as “Lucyjarrett” when he spoke to her. It was only then that Moretti recognized her as a reporter he often saw on the American news. A media luminary, Jarrett would make a fine trophy head for a bunch of attention-seeking terrorists to display on an Internet video.

“How fortunate to find you here, Lucyjarrett,” Khan said. He reached to stroke the trembling brunette’s hair where it was pasted with sweat and tears to her pallid cheek. The action bordered on tender, but the cruel edge in the man’s voice made Moretti sick to his stomach.

“The US media speaks much evil of sacred things!” Khan drew back his hand as if he’d touched something filthy. “It is a blasphemy, worse than murder or fornication!”

Eyes clenched shut and trembling to the point that she looked as if she would collapse, Jarrett gave a frantic shake of her head. “You’ve never heard that talk from me.”

“Shut your mouth!” Khan spat. He threw a glance over his shoulder. A bony man to his right let a Kalashnikov rifle fall against the sling around his neck and took a small camcorder from his military jacket. He spread his legs as if to brace himself while he powered up the camera, then nodded when he was ready.

Khan’s lips curled into a half grin. “Perhaps you have not uttered the words, but you will pay for the sin.”

Two of the militants moved along the line, securing everyone’s hands in front of them with plastic zip ties. Moretti considered struggling, but thought better of it when one of them seemed to read his mind and prodded him in the ribs with the barrel of his gun.

Stepping forward, Khan grabbed Jarrett by the hair and yanked her head backwards, exposing her neck. Moretti gathered himself to lunge. He couldn’t let them murder her without doing something. They were all dead anyway.

But before he moved, the Moroccan cook wagged his head in blatant disgust at the far end of the line. He said a few words in Arabic, and then began to speak in perfect English, absent the affected pidgin he’d always used to communicate with Moretti.

“This is cowardice!” the Moroccan said, speaking clearly and loud enough to cause Khan to pause. “She is unarmed and a guest in this country. As such she is subject to your hospitality.”

Khan’s chest heaved at the insult. His face darkened behind the beard. “I had thought to let you live if you were a good Sunni,” he said through clenched teeth. “But you will die alongside the American whore and her friends.” He smiled at the ashen woman as he drew a curved blade from his belt. “Your death will be slow and painful, so that others may—”

Moretti watched as the Moroccan cook ignored Khan’s diatribe and gave a slow and exaggerated nod.

The Italian flinched as the militant leader’s head snapped back from some unseen force, breaking like a melon struck with a hammer. With little left to hold it in place, the Castro cap fell to the ground. Something moist sprayed Moretti in the face. A moment later, the crack of a distant rifle echoed off the glaciers.