The Jungle

2

TRIBAL REGION

NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN

TODAY

THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE HADN’T CHANGED IN TWO HUNDRED years. Except for the guns, of course. They had long been around, that wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was the type of weapon that had changed. Centuries ago, the bearded men toted bugle-throated blunderbusses. Then came the Tower muskets, followed by the Lee-Enfield rifles, and finally the ubiquitous AK-47s, which flooded into the region thanks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the north. And so good were these guns that most were older than the men who carried them. Didn’t matter if he was defending the region from a rival faction or heading off to the outhouse, a man without an AK at the ready was no man.

All this ran through Cabrillo’s mind as he watched two Pashtun youths from the north, kids barely out of their teens, their beards just shadowy stubble on chin and cheek, try to wrestle a pair of goats onto an open-bed truck. All the while the assault rifles slung around their shoulders would slip and go across their chests, hitting the animals hard enough to make them fight the manhandling.

Each time a gun slipped, the boy would have to pause and redirect it back over his shoulder and then try to calm the satyr-eyed goat. The distance was too great to hear, but Cabrillo could imagine the goats’ frightened bleats and the young men’s earnest pleas to Allah for easier ways to handle livestock. It never occurred to them to rest their rifles against the rickety stockade fence for the sixty seconds it would take to load the animals unencumbered.

Take away the forty or so other armed men in the village encampment and he would have found it comical.

He had to admire the kids for one thing. Though he was ensconced in the latest arctic gear, he was still freezing his butt off while they cavorted in a couple of layers of homespun woolen clothing.

Of course Cabrillo hadn’t moved more than his eyelids in the past fifteen hours. And neither had the rest of his team.

In Northern Waziristan, it was traditional that villages were built like citadels on the tops of hills. What grazing and farming was available was accomplished on the slopes leading to the town. In order for him and his people to find a suitable observation post that let them look down on the Taliban encampment, they had to find cover on an adjacent mountain. The distance across the steep valley was only a mile, but it forced them up a snow-and-glacial-ice peak and left them struggling to draw breath at almost ten thousand feet. Through his stabilized binoculars, he could see a couple of old men smoking a never-ending chain of cigarettes.

Cabrillo rued the last cigar he’d smoked, while his lungs felt as if they were drawing on the metallic dregs of an exhausted scuba tank.

A deep baritone came through his earpiece, “They wrangling them goats or getting ready to have their way with them?”

Another voice chimed in, “Since the goats aren’t wearing burkas, at least these boys know what they’re getting.”

“Radio silence,” Cabrillo said. He wasn’t worried about his people losing operational awareness. What concerned him was that the next comment would come from his second-in-command here, Linda Ross. Knowing her sense of humor as he did, whatever she joked about was sure to make him laugh out loud.

One of the young shepherds finally set his wire-stock AK aside, and they got the animals into the truck. By the time the rear gate was closed, the kid had his weapon back over his shoulder. The engine fired with a burst of blue exhaust, and soon the vehicle was chugging anemically away from the mountaintop village. This was an al-Qaeda stronghold, and yet life in the rugged mountains went on. Crops had to be raised, animals grazed, and goods bought and sold. The dirty secret of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban was that while their followers were fanatics, they still needed to be paid. With the money long spent from last fall’s lucrative poppy harvest, traditional means of support were necessary to keep the fighters operational.

There were roughly two dozen buildings in the town. Six or so fronted the dirt road that led down to the valley below, while the others rose behind them on the hill, connected by little more than footpaths. All were made of stone that blended in with the bleak surroundings, with low flat roofs and few windows. The largest was a mosque with a minaret that looked ready to topple.

The few women Cabrillo and his team had seen all wore dark burkas while the men sported baggy pants under jackets called chapans and either turbans or flattened wool caps known as pakols.

“Juan.” Linda Ross’s voice had an elfin lilt that went with her pixielike appearance. “Check out the mosque.”

Careful so as not to draw attention, Cabrillo swung his binoculars a few arc degrees and zoomed in on the mosque’s door. Like the other three members of his team, he was dug into the side of the mountain, with a dirt-covered tarp over the foxhole. They were all invisible from just a few yards away.

He adjusted the focus. Three people were coming out of the mosque. The one with the long gray beard had to be the imam, while the other two were much younger. They walked flanking the man, their expressions solemn as they listened to whatever the holy man imparted to them.

Juan tightened the focus. Both of them had Asiatic features and no facial hair of any kind. Their clothing was out of place for this impoverished region. Their parkas, though of muted colors, were top quality, and they both wore new hiking boots. He looked closer at the smaller of the two. He’d studied that face for hours before beginning the operation, committing it to memory for this precise moment.

“Bingo,” he said softly over their secure communications equipment. “That’s Setiawan Bahar. Everyone keep an eye on him. We need to know where they’re putting him up.”

The odd trio wandered up behind the main road, walking slowly because the imam had a pronounced limp. Intel said he got that limp when Kandahar fell back in 2001. They eventually reached one of the indistinguishable houses. A bearded man greeted them. They spoke at the doorstep for a few minutes and then the homeowner invited the two boys, both Indonesian, into his home. The imam turned to head back to his mosque.

“Okay, we got it,” Juan said. “From now on all eyes on that house so we know he hasn’t left.”

Cabrillo received a quiet chorus of “Roger that.”

Then, against his own orders, Juan swept his binoculars back to the main road as a white Toyota sedan that probably had a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer swung into town. No sooner had it stopped than the four doors were thrown open and armed men leapt out. Their faces were buried behind the tails of their turbans. They brought their weapons to their shoulders as they circled around to the car’s trunk. One leaned forward and keyed open the lock. The door raised slowly on its hydraulics, and three of the gunmen leaned in with the barrels of their AKs.

Juan couldn’t see what was in the trunk, or most likely who, and waited expectantly as one of the fighters lowered his gun so it hung under his arm and reached into the trunk. He hauled a fifth man from where he’d been lying in a fetal position. Their prisoner wore what looked like standard American-issue BDUs. The boots looked military too. His mouth was gagged, and a blindfold had been cinched over his eyes. His hair was a little longer than Army regulation and blond. He was too weak to stand and collapsed into the dirt as soon as he was free from the car.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cabrillo muttered. He turned his binoculars back to the house where Setiawan Bahar was sequestered and told his people to turn their attention to what passed for the town’s square.

Eddie Seng said nothing, while Linda Ross gasped and Franklin Lincoln cursed.

“Have we heard anything about a captured soldier?” Seng then asked.

“No. Nothing,” Linda replied, her voice tightening as one of the Taliban kicked the captured soldier in the ribs.

In his basso voice, Linc said, “Could have happened in the thirty hours it took us to hump our butts into position. No reason Max would have passed on news like that to us.”

Without taking his eyes off the house, Cabrillo switched radio frequencies. “Oregon, Oregon, do you copy?”

From the port city of Karachi more than five hundred miles to the south came the immediate reply, “This is the Oregon. Hali here, Chairman.”

“Hali, has anything come over the transom since we started this op about an American or NATO soldier kidnapped in Afghanistan?”

“Nothing over the news wires and nothing from official channels, but as you know we’re a bit out of the Pentagon’s loop right now.”

Cabrillo knew that last fact all too well. A few months back, after spending nearly a decade enjoying high-level access to military intelligence through his old mentor at the CIA, Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s private security company, known as the Corporation and based on a tramp freighter called the Oregon, had become a pariah. They had pulled off an operation in Antarctica to thwart a joint Argentine/Chinese bid to annex and exploit a massive new oil field off the pristine coast of the southern continent. Fearing the geopolitical risks involved, the U.S. government had told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt the mission.

It didn’t matter that they had succeeded spectacularly. They were seen as rogue by the new president, and Overholt was ordered not to use the unique services the Corporation provided. Ever again. It had taken all of Langston’s considerable influence in the corridors of Washington to keep his job following that episode. He’d confessed privately to Juan that the president had chewed off so much of his butt he hadn’t been able to sit for a week.

And that is what brought Cabrillo and this small team here, to one of the few places on earth never to be occupied by a foreign army. Even Alexander the Great had the sense to avoid Waziristan and the rest of the Northern Tribal Regions. They were here because a wealthy Indonesian businessman, Gunawan Bahar, had a son who ran away to join the Taliban, in much the same way youths of a few generations ago back in the United States ran off to join the circus. Only difference was that young Setiawan hadn’t developed mentally past the age of seven, and the cousin who’d brought him here had told the recruiter in Jakarta that Seti wanted to be a martyr.

American runaways became carnies. Setiawan’s fate was that of a suicide bomber.

Hali continued, “Stoney and Murph have been trolling every database they can lay their hands on since you left.” Eric Stone and Mark Murphy were the Corporation’s IT experts, along with their other duties. “Nothing much by way of news out of any of the ’stans.”

“Tell them to keep an eye out. I’m looking at a blond guy in NATO gear who looks like he’s in a world of hurt.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications officer, said.

Cabrillo switched back to the tactical net. “Recommendations?”

Linda Ross spoke up immediately. “We can’t leave him here. We all know that in a day or two he’s going to be the star of a jihadist beheading video.”

“Eddie?” Juan asked, knowing the answer.

“Save him.”

“Don’t even ask,” Linc rumbled.

“I didn’t need to.” Juan still had the target house under observation and wouldn’t shift his focus. “What are they doing now?”

“They have him up on his feet,” Linda replied. “His hands are tied behind his back. A couple of the village kids have come out to see him. One of them just spit on him. The other kicked him in the shin. Hold on. The captors are shooing the kids away. Okay, they’re leading him up behind the square, heading in the same direction as our target house. And they’re walking, and walking, and . . . Here we go. Three houses left of where Seti’s staying.”

“Linc, take the target,” Juan ordered. He paused a beat for the big former SEAL to get his binocs fixated and then switched his own to where the four terrorists were pushing their blond captive into a mud and stone house that was indistinguishable from all the others.

Two of the Afghans took up guard duty outside the simple wooden door. Juan tried to peer through the open window next to it, but the inside of the humble house was too dark to discern more than vague movement.

The Corporation had been hired to get Gunawan Bahar’s son away from al-Qaeda, not rescue a foreign soldier, but as was the case in the operation in Antarctica, Cabrillo’s moral compass was the primary force behind their actions. Saving that stranger, while not getting paid the million dollars Bahar had already forked over with the promise of another four when his son was on a plane back to Jakarta, was just as imperative in his mind.

Juan recalled the tears in Bahar’s eyes when he had explained during their only meeting about how his son idolized an elder cousin and how this boy had been secretly radicalized in a Jakarta mosque. Because of the mental challenges Seti faced, Gunawan had told him, the boy couldn’t rationally join a terrorist organization, so in effect he’d been kidnapped and brought here to this al-Qaeda mountain retreat.

Cabrillo had seen the undying love in the man’s tormented expression and heard it in his voice. He had no children of his own, but he was president of the Corporation and captain of its ship, Oregon. He loved his crewmates the way a father must, so he could well imagine the anguish Bahar was suffering. If one of his own had been kidnapped, he would move much more than heaven and earth to see them returned.

“YOU MUST UNDERSTAND what a blessed child he is,” the father had said, “a true gift from Allah. Outsiders may look upon him as a burden, but they can’t possibly know the love my wife and I have for the boy. It is perhaps wrong for me to say this, but of our three sons little Seti is our favorite.”

“I’ve heard that from other parents of special-needs kids,” Juan had replied, handing over the white cotton handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit coat so the man could dab his eyes. Like a lot of Muslims, Gunawan Bahar wore his emotions on his sleeve. “He is untouched by the ugliness of the real world.”

“That’s it exactly. Seti is truly an innocent and will remain that way all his life. Mr. Cabrillo, we will do anything to get our boy back. Of his cousin, we do not care. His parents have disavowed him because they know what he has done. But you must return my precious Seti.”

Like many of the private contracts the Corporation handled over the years, this meeting had been set up by a mysterious facilitator named L’Enfant. Juan himself had never met the man who called himself The Baby, but the contracts he sent the Corporation’s way were always legit, more or less, and in order for potential clients to get on the man’s radar, their bank accounts had to be well vetted.

Juan had ordered Eric Stone and Mark Murphy to tear their newest client’s life apart and had additionally run the operation by Overholt at the CIA as a courtesy. Just because Langley was upset at Cabrillo and his team didn’t mean Juan wouldn’t check to make sure Bahar wasn’t under investigation.

The last thing they needed now was to unknowingly work for some terrorist mastermind.

Gunawan Bahar had turned out to be just as he had presented himself, a wealthy Indonesian businessman grieving for his kidnapped child who was willing to do anything to have the boy returned to his family.

Upon their handshake, Bahar’s most fervid desire had become Juan’s, and not only because of the money. He felt a groundswell of anger toward anyone who would exploit a child like Seti, and it was made worse by what they intended the boy to do.

Now Cabrillo had taken responsibility for another life, that of the captured soldier. His desire to rescue him was as strong as his desire to save Setiawan.

Juan flicked his eyes to where the sun was setting over the mountains to the west, judging they had another thirty minutes till dusk and an hour until full dark. “Eddie, Linc, keep watch on the primary target. Linda, you’ve got where they’re keeping the soldier.”

Juan’s binoculars kept scanning the rest of the village and its access road.

The three acknowledged, and their careful observation continued. No detail was overlooked. Linc made sure to point out that there was a gap in the stone wall behind which they were keeping Seti that was big enough for Linda but not his muscled bulk. Linda reported that she’d seen in the flare of a match that there were two Taliban in the house with the prisoner and that he was most likely on the floor, judging by the angle of the Afghanis’ heads.

Just as the last of the sun slipped behind an icy peak and turned the underbelly of clouds blanketing the sky a dazzling shade of orange, Juan saw headlights approaching up the road below him. Three vehicles—the goat truck, the sedan with the prisoner, and now this new one—all in one day. Had to be what passed for gridlock in these parts, he thought.

It took several long minutes for the vehicle to make its grinding ascent to the mountain village, and the daylight was almost gone by the time it trundled into the square. A school bus, though half the normal length, it was painted in fantastical colors, with a string of beads hanging across the inside of the windshield and a rack on top that was currently empty. Garish trucks like this were the workhorses of central Asia, transporting people, animals, and goods of all kinds. When the team had passed through Peshawar on their way here, they had seen hundreds of them, no two exactly alike.

Cabrillo switched to night vision goggles. The NVG didn’t have the optical resolution of his regular binoculars, but with the light fading he could still make out more detail.

Several men stepped down from the bus. The first one was unarmed and greeted the village headman with a warm embrace. He looked vaguely familiar to Cabrillo, and he wondered if he’d seen that face on a terrorist watch list. The three that followed carried metal suitcases as well as the ever-present AKs.

Juan quickly assumed that this was a senior Taliban official and that the boxes contained video gear for the captured soldier’s execution. This was confirmed when one of the guards laid an elongated box on the ground and lifted the lid. The Taliban leader stooped to withdraw a three-foot-long scimitar straight out of One Thousand and One Nights, much to the delighted roars of the others.

Subtlety was not a virtue among these men.

Cabrillo described to the rest what he observed, and asked, “Is anyone thinking what I’m thinking?”

Linc replied, “That I broke the promise I made to myself after getting out of Tora Bora never to come to this part of the world again?”

“There’s that, yes,” Juan said with a chuckle, “but I was thinking that taking the bus would be a hell of a lot easier than hoofing it the twenty miles back to our SUV. We planned on carrying the kid out. He can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. The variable is if the soldier can walk that far. Stealing that bus negates the unknowns.”

“Sounds good to me,” Eddie Seng agreed.

“Linda?”

“What about its fuel load? Does it have the range to get us out of here?”

“There are no Exxon stations around here, so they must be able to get at least as far as Landi Kotal, the town on the Paki side of the Khyber Pass, maybe all the way to Peshawar.”

“Makes sense to me,” Linc said.

Linda nodded, then remembered no one could see her. “Okay. We go for the bus.”

The Muslim call to sundown prayers echoed across the deep valley, and the men in the town square and others from the village made their way toward the tumbledown mosque. The guards remained outside the building where they were keeping the soldier, and no one left the house where Seti was sequestered.

There was no generator in town, so as the twilight deepened some lamps were lit, emitting feeble light through dirty windows in a few of the houses. Both target houses had such lamps. Fuel was expensive, so the lamps were snuffed out one by one within an hour. Like the lives of so much of the world’s population, these people’s lives were dictated by the earth’s stately rotation.

Cabrillo and his team continued to watch the sleeping town through their night vision gear. The two guards maintained their vigilance for another hour before they too succumbed to oblivion. Nothing moved, no smoke from a chimney, no roving dogs, nothing.

They gave it another hour for good measure before emerging from their foxholes.

Juan felt a few joints pop as he unlimbered himself. So many hours of immobility in the chilly air had stiffened him like a board. Like the others, he took a minute to flex feeling back into his muscles, moving slowly so as not to attract attention. His moves mimicked tai chi.

The team was traveling light, carrying just enough weapons and gear for the one night on the mountainside. They all carried the Barrett REC7 assault rifle with tactical lights slung under the barrels, but all armed themselves with their preference of pistols. Cabrillo favored the FN Five-seveN on a shoulder rig so he could clear the attached silencer quickly.

The terrain was rugged, with ankle-twisting boulders and fields of loose stones that could be dislodged into a hissing avalanche with an ill-placed boot, so the team moved cautiously, each covering the next, and always one person watching the village for any sign of movement. Like wraiths, they walked under the thin silver glow of a millimetric slice of moon, their NVGs giving them the advantage over both the landscape and the darkness.

Cabrillo led them into the village, hugging the walls, but not so close that their black uniforms would scrape against the rough-hewn stone. At a preplanned spot, Cabrillo stopped and dropped into a crouch. He pointed to Linda and Eddie before indicating they would rescue Seti. He and Linc would save the better-defended captive.

With the big ex-SEAL covering his back, Juan approached the back of the house where the soldier had been taken. He peered in through a window. Despite the grime caking the single pane of glass he could see three cots in the room. Two of them were occupied by the prone forms of sleeping men. The third cot didn’t have bedding, which meant it wasn’t likely there was another guy out roaming around.

The prisoner had to be in the house’s front room, which if tradition held would be a combination living/dining/kitchen area. Its only window was next to the door, so they would be going in somewhat blind.

Juan made a motion with his hands like he was parting water.

Linc nodded and started down along the left side of the house while Cabrillo padded along the right. At the corner both men paused. A minute turned into three, and Juan was starting to get worried. They had to coordinate their assault with the other team. He was waiting for Linda to give him a single click over the tactical radio, telling him she and Eddie were in position.

It was because he was straining his ears so hard that he heard it—a distant whine, like a mosquito at the far end of a long room. He knew that sound and realized they had to move now.

This could be a blessing or a curse, he thought just as Linda signaled they were ready. Linc had heard the click too, and he and Juan moved in such perfect accord that they were around the corner of the house at the same instant, striding forward at the same pace and moving their hands into the exact same position.

Momentum, along with Juan’s hundred and eighty pounds and Linc’s two-forty, came together as both men slammed into the seated and snoozing guards, cracking their heads together with just a fraction less force than needed to crush bone. The two men never knew what hit them and went from comfortable REM sleep to a near-coma state in a fraction of a second. They eased the guards onto the ground, making sure to hide their AKs under a wooden cart stacked with hay.

They waited a moment to see if the disturbance had been detected. Juan could still hear the faint buzz. He pointed to his ear and pointed up toward the night sky. Linc shot him a quizzical look, not understanding.

Juan stretched his arms wide and waggled them like an aircraft in flight.

Linc’s eyes went wide. He knew as well as Juan that there was usually only one kind of aircraft flying in Northern Waziristan—Predator drones.

There was no reason to think that this village was the unmanned aircraft’s target, but there was no reason to think it wasn’t. Intel on the Taliban leader who’d arrived in the bus might have filtered up the chain of command, and now CENTCOM had an armed drone overhead looking for a target of opportunity.

He wasn’t worried about them firing a Hellfire missile just yet. The rules of engagement were pretty clear that confirmation of the target’s location had to be verified before the trigger could be pulled. They’d wait until dawn to use the drone’s advanced cameras to pick their man. What bothered him was the chance that a local insomniac would hear the aircraft and raise the alarm.

More than anything, Juan wanted to call Lang Overholt and ask the old spook to find out if there was an operation in the works for this village, but two things prevented him. One was that he couldn’t risk talking while this close to the target, and the second was that Overholt would freeze him out, or worse, be frozen out himself.

If the Corporation was going to continue enjoying the successes they had, they needed to mend fences in Washington, and soon.

He peered through the window, and when he saw nothing but his ghostly reflection, he realized the glass had been blacked out. He pulled his rifle up behind his back and drew his silenced automatic from its holster. Linc did likewise.

The door had no lock or latch. It was just seven poorly sawn boards held together by a lattice backing.

Cabrillo pressed a gloved hand against it, testing how easily it would open. It moved slightly, the hinges fortunately greased with animal fat so they did not squeak. For the first time on the mission, he started to feel the icy fingers of apprehension. They were putting their primary duty in jeopardy for this, and if something went wrong, Setiawan Bahar would pay the ultimate price.

He pressed on the door a little harder and glanced through the crack with his NVGs. There wasn’t enough light for the sophisticated electronics to amplify, so he opened the door wider. He felt it tap gently against something on the floor. He pulled off a glove, squatted, and reached a hand around the bottom of the door. His fingers touched something cold and cylindrical. He explored the shape and found two more. They were metal cans stacked in a little pyramid. Had the door opened farther the cans would have fallen. There would be ball bearings or empty shell casings in the cans so they would rattle when they tumbled. A simple, homegrown burglar alarm.

Juan gently lifted the topmost can, set it outside, and then retrieved the other two. He was able to open the door enough for his goggles to pick up details. A large picture of Osama bin Laden graced the far wall next to the door leading to the bedroom. He saw a stone hearth that was long since cold, a low table without chairs sitting on a threadbare carpet, a few pots and pans, and murky bundles of what he assumed were clothes. Another bed was pushed up to the right-hand side, and reclining with his back to the stone and an AK-47 across his lap was another sleeping guard.

Opposite him was a second indistinct shape. It took a few seconds for Juan to figure out it was a man lying on the floor. He was facing away from Cabrillo and balled up tightly as if protecting his abdomen from being kicked. Prisoner stomping was de rigueur for the Taliban.

Unlike in the movies, where a silenced pistol makes no more sound than a blowgun, the reality was that a shot fired here would wake the man in the back room and probably the neighbors as well.

Moving slowly but deliberately, Cabrillo eased into the hovel. The sleeping guard made a snuffling sound and smacked his lips. Juan froze in midstep. He could hear deep snoring from the other room. The guard shifted into a more comfortable position and fell deeper asleep. Covering those last few feet, Juan came up to the man and swung his hand like an ax against his carotid artery. The shock of the blow temporarily short-circuited the guard’s brain, giving Juan the time to cut off his air long enough to render him unconscious.

Linc was already in motion. His knife cut through the plastic zip ties securing the prisoner’s ankles and wrists while a big meaty hand went over the man’s mouth to prevent him from calling out.

The captive went rigid for a moment, then rolled onto his back with Lincoln keeping his hand in place. It was too dark for him to see what was happening so Linc leaned close to his ear and whispered. “Friend.”

He felt the man nod under his hand, so he took it away and helped the prisoner to his feet. Linc put one shoulder under the man’s arm, and with Juan backing out behind them, his pistol trained on the bedroom door, they made their escape out of the house.

Even with Linc supporting a lot of his weight, the prisoner was limping heavily. They moved away from the building, keeping to the deepest shadows. Cabrillo switched back to his assault rifle. They emerged in the town square near the mosque and found cover behind a stone wall. Out in the street they could see the brightly painted bus. The moonlight gave its paint scheme an ominous cast.

“Thank you,” the captive whispered in a deep Southern drawl. “Ah don’t care who you are, but thank you.”

“Don’t thank us until we’re well and gone from here,” Cabrillo warned.

Movement farther down the road caught Juan’s attention. He sighted down his weapon, his finger just outside the trigger guard. A single click in his radio headset told him that Linda and Eddie had rescued the boy. He looked closer. That was them at the end of the street. He gave her a double click in response, and the two parties met next to the bus.

They had used drugs to render Seti unconscious, figuring it would be easier to deal with him as deadweight than to risk the possibility of his crying out in panic. Linc immediately took the boy from the much smaller though deceptively strong Eddie Seng and tossed him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Eddie popped a small penlight into his mouth, slid through the bus’s accordion door, and set about hot-wiring the engine.

Cabrillo scanned the skies, his head cocked as he listened for the Predator he felt certain was still up there. Were they being watched right now? If so, what did the operators at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base think? Were they a choice target, and at this minute was the drone’s operator moving his finger to the button that would unleash the deadly Hellfire antitank missile?

To distract himself from something he had no control over he asked Linda, “Any problems?”

“Piece of cake,” she replied with a cocky grin. “We released the knockout gas, waited for it to take effect, and just waltzed in and grabbed the kid. I left a window open a crack so the gas will dissipate. They’ll wake up with monster headaches and no idea what happened to their young would-be martyr.”

“How many in the house?”

“Parents, two of their own children, plus Seti and his cousin.” A troubled look crossed Cabrillo’s face. Linda added, “I thought that was strange too. No guards, right? But the two Indonesians are here because they volunteered. No need to guard them at all.”

“Yeah,” Juan said slowly, “you’re probably right.”

“I’m ready,” Eddie announced from under the driver’s seat, an exposed nest of wires in his hand. All he needed to do was twist two leads together and the big diesel would rumble to life.

The engine noise was certain to attract attention, so once the bus was hot-wired, they had to get out of Dodge as fast as they could.

Setiawan was strapped into a seat using one of their combat harnesses. The prisoner, whose name they hadn’t bothered to ask, was in a row behind him. Linc and Linda had the first two seats, so Cabrillo took up a position in the back so he could cover their rear.

It was just then that all hell broke loose.

A shouted cry rose over the sleeping town from the direction of where they’d kept the captured soldier. One of the guards they’d knocked out had come to.

“Eddie, go!” Juan yelled. They had a minute, or less, before the tribesmen got organized.

Seng touched the two wires, creating a tiny arc of electricity, and then twisted them to keep the starter engaged. The engine shuddered but wouldn’t fire. It sounded like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. He feathered the gas pedal, trying to finesse the engine, but it still wouldn’t start. Before he flooded it, Eddie separated the wires, gave it a couple of heartbeats, and tried again.

The motor snarled and sputtered but refused to catch.

“Come on,” Eddie cajoled.

Cabrillo wasn’t paying the drama at the front of the bus any heed. His eyes were glued out the rear window, searching for signs of pursuit. A figure burst from a narrow alley between two houses. Juan had the REC7 to his shoulder and triggered a three-round burst. Glass cascaded to the floor of the bus in a shower of fine chips while the bullets chewed up the ground at the man’s feet. Three eruptions of dust stopped the man in his tracks, and he lost his balance and fell to the ground.

Juan noticed in passing that the man hadn’t taken the time to arm himself before rushing to investigate the engine noise. He could have shot him dead but instead let him scramble back undercover.

“Eddie?” Cabrillo shouted over his shoulder, certain that the echo of gunfire had awoken every jihadist in a half-mile radius.

“Just a sec,” Seng called back, though there was no sense of tension in his voice. That was Eddie—cool under any circumstances.

Cabrillo scanned the streets as best he could. He saw lamps being lit behind a few windows. The entire village was going to be coming after them in moments. Though the bus would make a pretty good defensive position, the team didn’t have the ammo for a protracted gun battle. If they didn’t get out in the next few seconds, they never would.

The engine fired, and Eddie didn’t give it time to warm up before wrestling it into gear and hitting the gas. The old bus lurched like a startled rhinoceros, kicking gravel from under its bald tires.

A pair of guards emerged from the same alley as the first man and cut loose with their assault rifles, firing wildly from the hip in continuous bursts of unaimed fury. Not a single round hit the bus, but the fusillade kept Juan pinned to the floor, and the men had vanished around the corner by the time he was up and had a sight picture. He put three rounds downrange to keep them back.

The bus had the acceleration of an anemic snail, so as they slowly pulled from the square they were open to more gunfire from hidden alleys and behind stone walls. One burst raked across the row of windows, blowing out the glass and raining shards on the people inside. That particular assault inexplicably cut off, but more bullets pinged against the roof and sparked off the engine cover.

And then they were free, pulling past the mosque where the gray-bearded imam regarded them stoically as they roared by. Juan continued to watch out the rear window to see if anyone was chasing them. Several fighters were out on the main street, their rifles raised over their heads as if they’d won a great victory.

Let ’em think what they want, Juan thought as he slumped onto one of the hard bench seats. The padding had long since vanished, and he could feel a metal support beam digging into his flesh. That little bit of discomfort reminded him of the greater problem they might still be facing. The bus belonged to a senior Taliban officer, someone Cabrillo was now certain he recognized but couldn’t name. The odds were good that he was under observation by the U.S. military. While the powers that be might not understand what had just happened back in the village, if they wanted this guy dead, now was the time to unleash the drone’s missile.

He scooted back to the shattered rear window and watched the sky. Eddie saw him in the cracked mirror over the driver’s seat and called out, “Anything back there?”

“Not on the ground, but I thought I heard a Predator when we were waiting to go in, and, if my hunch is right, this bus has a big old target on its roof.”

For the first couple miles out of the town, the road followed the valley floor, with wide, open crop fields on either side. But from studying topographical maps before the mission, Juan knew it would enter a steeper grade and snake through about a dozen hairpin turns. To the left of the road was the canyon wall while to the right the landscape fell away in a frighteningly steep grade. Once on that section of dirt tract, they would have no maneuverability whatsoever.

If he was calling the shots back at Creech, he’d wait until they were halfway down and then put the Hellfire up their tailpipe. With that in mind, he shouted over the beat of the knocking engine, “Hey, soldier?”

“Me?” the blond man asked.

“I know everyone else’s name on the bus, so yeah. Are you in any condition to hoof it for about fifteen miles?”

Cabrillo appreciated that the guy took a moment to think through his answer. “No, sir. Ah’m sorry, but Ah’ve been through the meat grinder since they grabbed me. Nothing’s broken, but a whole lot’s sprained.” He lifted his shirt to show a sea of dark bruises across his chest and stomach to go with the shiner around his left eye. “Ah can do maybe five miles over flat ground, but in these mountains Ah won’t make it one.”

“Why are you asking?” Linda wanted to know.

“The canyon up ahead could be a death trap if I’m right about the Predator. I’m thinking about ditching the bus and going back to our original plan.”

It would be asking too much of Linc to carry the guy out, though Juan knew the big man would give it one hell of a try. He considered making the trek in stages, but the longer they remained in the region, the greater the risk of being discovered by the countless roving Taliban patrols.

“Chairman, we’ve got a problem,” Eddie said suddenly. “I see headlights approaching.”

Cabrillo cursed under his breath. Thinking it made it happen. The only people out on the roads at night were the Talibs or their al-Qaeda allies.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Play it cool. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

The twin beams of light lancing out from the darkness bounced along about a half mile farther down the road. Then they swung broadside to the lumbering bus and went still. The approaching driver had angled their vehicle into a roadblock.

The good luck they’d had escaping the village had run out.

“Now what?”

“Give me a sec,” Juan replied in that same cool tone Eddie had used earlier. “What kind of vehicle do they have?”

“By the time I’ll be able to tell it’ll be too late,” Seng replied.

“Good point,” Juan said grimly. Though Juan spoke Arabic like a Riyadh native, he doubted he would be able to bluff their way past a checkpoint, not with an ethnic Chinese, a black guy, a blond one, an Indonesian kid, and the all-American girl next door.

“Go around them, and pray there isn’t a minefield next to the road. Guns at the ready.”

“Mr. Chairman,” the stranger said. “My shooting finger’s just fine.”

Juan paced forward and handed him his FN Five-seveN. “What’s your name?”

“Lawless,” he said. “MacD Lawless. Ah was a Ranger before turning to the private sector.”

“MacD?”

“Short for MacDougal. My middle name, which is only marginally better than my first.”

“Which is?”

The guy was handsome, and when he smiled he looked like a recruiting poster or a Calvin Klein model. “Ah’ll tell you when I know you better.”

“Deal,” Juan said, peering out through the windshield.

In the feeble glow cast by the bus’s headlamps he could see it was a dark pickup truck that had pulled across to block the single lane. Three men stood in front of it, their heads sheathed in turbans, their weapons trained on the bus. Two more fighters were in the open bed, one hunched over a heavy machine gun, the other ready to feed it a belt of ammunition that he cradled like an infant.

“They get us with that chatter gun,” Linc warned, “and it’s all over but the crying.”

“Looks like these guys didn’t get the memo about this being Tommy Taliban’s Magical Mystery Tour bus,” MacD quipped. Cabrillo’s measure of the man went up a notch. Anyone who could make bad jokes before combat was okay by him.

“I’m going to break left,” Eddie said, “to put the pickup’s cab between us and that old Russian PKB.”

Juan had already known which way Eddie was going to turn because it made the most tactical sense, so he was already hunkered under a window on the right side of the bus, his rifle barrel just showing above the pitted chrome sill. His mouth had gone metallic as a fresh burst of adrenaline shot into his system.