The Ares Decision

59

Padshah Gohlam looked down at his watch, but the hands had ceased glowing. The movement of the stars suggested that it was past two a.m. and the aches beginning in his young body supported that estimate.

His training for this mission had begun almost the day he was born in a remote part of central Afghanistan. The mountains of the Hindu Kush were more barren but had the same penetrating cold, the same overwhelming solitude. His father, a great and pious man, had taught him to move silently and invisibly through the desolation, avoiding the Americans’ technology and ambushing their special forces as they tried to claim his country for Christendom.

When his father died, the Americans, who still believed the fiction that he was a supporter of the infidel invasion, had given the young Padshah a visa to study in Maryland. And he had suffered through it — the arrogant professors, the women sitting unashamed next to him in his classes, the curriculum devoid of God. In truth, though, he’d only been waiting to be called upon. Waiting for this night.

He reached up and gently folded back a branch of the tree he was sitting in, examining the tiny farmhouse a hundred meters away. Much of it was obscured by foliage, but there was a natural hole that revealed the driveway and part of the icy path to the front door. Once again, God had provided.

The snow started again, and he had to admit to himself that the Western hunting clothing he’d purchased was far superior to what he grew up with. So many of his enemies were still alive because of a slight cold-induced tremor in his hands. But not tonight.

He saw headlights for the first time in hours and lifted his rifle, sighting through the scope at the vehicle turning into the driveway. The door was thrown open and a shock of blond hair gleamed in the dome light as the woman pulled herself unsteadily from the car.

Probably drunk, he thought. Without the supervision of a father or husband, who knew what she might have been doing? This was what the Americans wanted to do to his people — strip them of their identity and turn their daughters into whores. How could a country that was unable to control its women ever hope to control Afghanistan?

She moved awkwardly along the slick ground, turning up the collar of her long coat as she picked her way toward the door. This was the great Randi Russell? The woman who had killed so many of his Taliban brothers? It was almost impossible to believe the stories now that he saw her in person.

She was initially in profile, and he waited until she turned toward the door, unwittingly squaring her back in his crosshairs. Gohlam took a breath and held it, quelling his excitement and concentrating on not subconsciously anticipating the rifle’s recoil.

The crack of it seemed impossibly loud amid the falling snow, echoing through the forest for a moment before fading into the ringing in his ears. Russell pitched forward, bouncing off the door before collapsing into the snow piled at the edge of the walkway.

Gohlam chambered another round before sweeping the scope across her blood-spattered back, finally letting the crosshairs stop on the back of her head. A silent prayer for the men who had fallen to her was on his lips as his finger began to tense again on the trigger.

The sound of the shot was all wrong, and instead of the satisfying impact of the butt against his shoulder, he felt the hot sting of wood shards penetrating his cheek.

It took him only a moment to understand what was happening, and he threw himself to the right, narrowly avoiding a second bullet that exploded against the tree trunk he’d been leaning against. Branches buffeted him as he fell, slowing his descent enough that when he hit the ground, he was able to immediately roll to his feet and start running. Another shot sounded and he waited for it to carry him to God, but instead it hissed harmlessly past.

Randi Russell tried to move, instinct telling her to get to cover when virtually every other system had shut down. She could hear shouting and gunshots but couldn’t feel her arms or legs. The flair of pain in her back had disappeared into numbness, and she found it impossible to discern whether or not she was breathing. The snow next to her had turned red and she tried to grasp what that meant.

“Randi!”

A sense of weightlessness came over her as she was dragged away from the house.

“Hold on, Randi!”

But she couldn’t. Not this time. She closed her eyes and the sense of weightlessness grew. They’d planned this so carefully. How the hell had she ended up being the one lying facedown in the snow?

Eric Ivers had Randi’s collar in one hand and his gun in the other, firing it in the general direction of the woods as the man he’d set up on the roof took much more careful shots.

“Almost there, Randi! Hold on!” he said, leaving a crimson trail as he dragged her behind her car. His partner sprinted across the street and disappeared into the woods as the voice of his sniper came over the radio. “I no longer have line of sight. The shooter is uninjured.”

Ivers swore under his breath as he eased Randi onto the driveway, unsure what else to do. He was a combat specialist, not a medic. In the end, he just rolled her onto her stomach so that if she vomited her passageway would remain clear, and then set off after his partner.

“Karen, do you have anything?” he said into his throat mike.

“Easy tracking because of the fresh snow. But I could use some backup.”

“On my way.”

Ivers entered the trees twenty-five yards south of where she had and ran hard, risking the use of open ground to make time.

He saw a muzzle flash ahead and adjusted his trajectory to take him into the darkness just behind it.

“I got him!” he heard Karen say over the radio. “The shooter is down. I repeat, the shooter is down.”

Ivers came in from the side, spotting her creeping toward a man lying across an icy log. He was on his back, struggling to sit up while she screamed at him to stay down.

The man released the rifle he no longer had the strength to wield and rolled far enough left that Karen wouldn’t be able to see his hands. From the opposite angle, though, Ivers saw him pull a metallic tube from the pocket of his camouflage parka.

“Bomb!” Ivers shouted. “Karen, get dow—”

He covered his eyes to protect them from the flash, dropping into the snow as a hot gale washed over him.

When he looked up, his partner was on the ground, clearly injured but not so badly that she couldn’t give him a shaky thumbs-up. Satisfied that she was all right, Ivers switched his radio to a separate encrypted channel.

“Mr. Klein. Are you there?”

“I’m here. Go ahead.”

“Randi’s down — she took a bullet dead between the shoulder blades. The shooter was booby-trapped and there’s not much left of him.”

“How did he get close enough to the cabin to take a shot?”

“I don’t know, sir. But I take full responsibility. The rest of the team was flawless.”

“This isn’t the time to start allocating blame, Eric. Is your situation stable?”

“We’ve got the start of a forest fire up here, Mr. Klein. I’m not sure the snow’s going to stop it.”

“Understood. An extraction helicopter is four minutes out. Burn the cabin and Randi’s car, then get out. The better we can obscure what happened there, the more time it buys us.”