Countdown to Midnight

Fourteen

The sun had set a little over an hour before, plunging Zaranj and its surrounding villages into almost total darkness. On the ground, a few points of light scattered across the blacked-out city showed where the influential and well-connected few lived. Most of those buildings were clustered in the blocks around the local warlord’s fortified compound.

A few more lights were on at the airport, the majority around the Quartet Directorate team’s chartered Il-76 cargo aircraft and its large canvas-roofed tents. The long gravel runway itself was unlit, largely invisible in the darkness. Since there was no moon tonight, only the faint glow of starlight offered any natural illumination.

Flynn stepped out of one of the tents. He shivered slightly in the cooler air outside. Once the sun went down, the temperature had dropped fast into the midfifties. He paused briefly to zip his light windbreaker all the way up.

Tadeusz Kossak followed him outside. The Polish sniper slung his HK417 carbine over one shoulder and tugged a plastic bottle out of one of his equipment pouches. He offered it to Flynn. “One last drink before you go? For luck?”

“For some strange reason, I’m guessing that’s not water,” Flynn said with a smile.

“Water?” Kossak sounded aggrieved. “What do you take me for? A savage?” He unscrewed the cap. “No, this the very best Polish-made vodka. One hundred proof.”

Flynn shook his head regretfully. “I’d better not.” He shrugged. “They’re not real big on alcohol around here as it is. But my next stop takes that kind of fundamentalism to a whole new level.”

The Pole shook his head in disgust. “Heathens,” he muttered. “However, I see your point.” His teeth gleamed in the darkness. “Then I will drink for you, Nick. Na zdrowie! Your health!” With a flourish, he took a quick swig and then decisively recapped the bottle before stowing it away. He made a show of looking out into the darkness around them before taking the short-barreled rifle off his shoulder. His voice turned more serious. “Come, I will escort you to your plane, as would any decent bodyguard of a very evil drug lord.”

“You think we’re being watched?”

“I know that we’re being watched,” Kossak countered gravely. “Certainly by at least one of that man Bokharai’s spies. And also quite likely by an agent for the local Taliban.”

Flynn nodded. Cover story or not, the presence of armed foreigners and a small squadron of different types of aircraft in this isolated corner of Afghanistan was bound to attract a lot of unwanted attention. But as long as both Bokharai and the Taliban anticipated making a profit from their activities here, neither side would want to cause trouble. In all probability, they would only watch and wait for several days to see what was really happening before they took any action. And that ought to give his Quartet Directorate team the opportunity it needed to carry out this mission — and then to vanish before the rival Afghan factions realized they had been duped. “Think you and Cooke and the others can hold down the fort here while I’m gone?” he asked.

“It will not be a problem,” the Pole assured him. “And if, as I expect, our friends in the Taliban come around soon demanding their own protection money, we will act like good little criminals and meekly pay what they ask.” His teeth showed again. “Admittedly, it would be cheaper and more satisfying to shoot them, but life is never perfect.”

Flynn nodded. This operation was expensive and getting more expensive by the minute. Between chartering the large Il-76 cargo jet, upgrading the BushCat and Predator as needed, and the bribes required to pay off potential troublemakers here in Afghanistan, the costs were already north of two million dollars. And unlike a government, the Quartet Directorate could not simply print more money. Thanks to shrewd investments made decades ago by its wealthier founding members, Four had deep pockets… but its resources were not limitless.

He shook himself mentally. That was another good reason to kick this mission into higher gear as planned. Besides, nothing about it would get easier or safer with the passage of time. With a curt, imperious gesture to the Pole for the benefit of any hidden observers, he headed straight for the BushCat, which was parked at the edge of the runway. Kossak trailed close behind him, still playing the role of a dutiful bodyguard protecting his dangerous employer.

The small fabric-skinned plane already had its propeller turning. Flynn came around behind the tail and ducked under its high overhead wing. There, safely out of sight of any watchers, he turned back to Kossak and thrust out his hand. “Okay, Tadeusz. Stay safe.”

“And you as well, Nick,” the Pole said solemnly as they clasped hands. “Good hunting.”

With a nod of thanks, Flynn swung away and climbed up into the cabin’s right-hand seat. He buckled in and put on a radio headset. Then he pulled the soft-sided door closed and latched it.

Laura Van Horn, looking far more comfortable now in jeans, a khaki shirt, and her own light jacket, was in the pilot’s seat on his left. Her eyes flicked from left to right across her instrument panel, studying the readings it showed. “Oil pressure and engine temperature are both in the green,” she confirmed aloud, evidently running through the last items of a preflight checklist. She reached out and tapped an icon on the large multifunction display Quartet Directorate technicians had installed in place of some of the original controls. A small bar turned from green to red. “Our transponder is off.”

She glanced sideways at him with a quick grin. “There’s no point in telling everyone where we are, right?”

Flynn nodded emphatically. Aircraft transponders were a critical part of air safety and traffic control. When interrogated by radar, a transponder automatically sent back a code identifying the plane and reported its current altitude. That gave radar operators a good picture of where all the aircraft flying in their sector were, greatly reducing the odds of midair collisions. But having a simpleminded radio transponder ever ready to blurt out your identity and precise location was the very last thing you wanted when you were attempting a covert, low-level penetration of hostile airspace.

Van Horn reached back into the tiny cargo area just aft of the BushCat’s cabin. Flynn’s small suitcase was already stowed there, behind his own seat. She turned back around holding two pairs of night vision goggles. She handed one to him and donned the other herself, adjusting it to fit over her radio headset.

He followed her lead and switched the goggles on. The darkness around him brightened immediately, turning their surroundings almost as clear as day, though without any real distinct color. Everything was in shades of black, white, and gray. The unlit gravel runway, largely invisible before, now stretched out plainly to both sides of the small plane. “Let there be light,” he said with satisfaction.

“And a darned good thing, too,” Van Horn replied with a husky laugh. “Because otherwise I’d basically be flying blind.” She pushed another control, tuning the BushCat’s radio to a low-powered tactical channel. “Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat. We’re ready for takeoff,” she said into her headset mike. “Report your status.”

“Tomcat is in position, Tiger Cat,” Sara McCulloch replied from her remote piloting station inside the Il-76. “Ready when you are.”

“Copy that,” Van Horn said. “Rolling now.” She released the brakes and ran up her throttle a little more. The aircraft’s one-hundred horsepower Rotax 912ULS four-stroke engine responded smoothly. Slowly, the BushCat trundled forward onto the runway and, guided by her feet on the rudder pedals, swung into position. She braked to a stop. Then she reached up to the flaps control handle over her head, pulled it down a notch, and locked it in. “Flaps set at seventeen degrees.” She leaned forward and pushed another icon on her main display. “Fuel pump is on for takeoff.”

“Tomcat is standing by at your six,” McCulloch radioed. “I have your aft IR beacon in sight.”

Flynn checked one of the little mirrors the ground crew had attached just forward of the doors. There, back behind them near the north edge of the runway, he could see the Predator UAV. The praying mantis shape of the drone now looked pregnant. A streamlined cargo container had been slung below its long, thin fuselage. Fully loaded now, the Predator needed at least five thousand feet of runway to get into the air, a far cry from the few hundred feet required by the BushCat. Dust kicked up by the drone’s rear-mounted propeller eddied away downwind, appearing as a bright white plume in his night vision goggles.

“Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat,” Van Horn said calmly. “Departing runway one-six.”

She revved up again and started her takeoff roll. The little plane gathered speed fast and lifted off smoothly, climbing fast into the night sky. At five hundred feet, she pushed the flaps control handle back up and leveled off. They flew on low over Zaranj, continuing south by southeast at eighty-two knots to maintain the deception that they were headed for Pakistan.

Flynn checked the mirror again. The Predator was still on their tail, trailing them by several hundred yards. He turned back around in time to see the last clusters of mud-brick houses on the southern fringe of Zaranj sliding past beneath their wings. Ahead, beyond the BushCat’s whirring propeller, a desolate landscape stretched in all directions — an empty, lifeless country marked only by the snakelike ripples of bone-dry watercourses and low mounds of heaped earth and rock.

Twenty minutes later, Van Horn tweaked her centerline control stick to the right and forward a little, initiating a gentle, descending turn to the southwest. “Tomcat,” she radioed. “Starting my run for the border.”

“Copy that, Tiger Cat,” the drone’s remote pilot acknowledged. “Following you around.” A sensitive receiver aboard the Predator had picked up the BushCat’s short-range radio transmission and relayed it back to Zaranj via satellite link.

Concentrating hard, Van Horn leveled off again — this time at just a hundred feet. They were low enough now to make out individual boulders, lone dwarf trees, and clumps of withered thornbushes through the windshield. She continued making small adjustments to their altitude, climbing a few dozen feet to clear low rises and then descending back down into the shallow valleys beyond. “Next stop, Indian country,” she said conversationally. She shot Flynn a quick, slashing grin. “Having fun yet, Nick?”

“Oh, more than I can say, ma’am,” he drawled, working hard to sound unfazed. “But I’d sure appreciate it if you kept your eyes on the road.” He’d never much liked flying so close to the ground. And right now, he couldn’t help visualizing the little aircraft’s fixed landing gear smacking into a big rock or snagging in the branches of a tree — sending them cartwheeling to destruction. Then he shook his head at his own foolishness. All things considered, it was probably a bit late to start regretting his career choices.

Van Horn’s smile grew a little bigger. “Relax, cowboy. This is still the easy part of the trip. It only really gets hard when we hit the mountains.”

Flynn winced. “You know,” he said tightly. “Hit isn’t exactly the word I’d have chosen right there.”

She laughed. “I was speaking figuratively, not literally.” She shrugged. “Besides, if you’d been a professional aviator when you were in the Air Force, instead of an intelligence puke, you’d know that we call the process of interacting with the ground in an uncontrolled manner a crash.”

Realizing he was in an unwinnable fight, Flynn held up his hands in surrender.

Little more than a shadow gliding through darkness, the BushCat flew on just above the desert floor, arrowing southwest toward the border with Iran. The Predator tagged along behind it. They were still more than three hundred nautical miles and almost four hours flying time from their destination.