Jackknife Read online

  There was no Bob Wilson, of course. Well, there probably was, almost certainly was in a country like this, but the owner of that post office box in St. Petersburg most assuredly was not really named Bob Wilson. But once the get-well card arrived, he would have the number of the cell phone that Hamed had carried with him at all times ever since.

  But it had never rung, not once, until now.

  Hamed fumbled the phone out of his shirt pocket and checked the little display window. UNKNOWN CALLER, it read, just as it should have. He opened the phone, thumbed the button to answer the call, and said, “Hello.”

  “Hey there, boy. It’s your Uncle Billy down in Fort Worth.” The male voice was…what was it they said on television? As American as apple pie? “How y’all doin’?”

  “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number,” Hamed said. The words were burned into his brain. “I had an Uncle Billy, but he passed away a few years ago.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry to hear to hear that. Sorry to bother you, too. Y’all have a good evenin’ now, hear?”

  The connection cut off. The call had lasted only a few seconds. But it had accomplished its purpose. Fort Worth, Hamed thought. That was in Texas. He had studied maps of the United States for endless hours back at the training camp. He knew where every major city in the country was located, and which highways to take in order to get there.

  He would start tonight. His tiredness from the day’s work was gone. It had vanished in an instant. The call to action had come at last, and further instructions would be waiting for him in Fort Worth. If he drove straight through, stopping only for gas, he could be there in less than a day. Some of the other members of his cell were probably even closer to the rendezvous point. Hamed was already looking forward to seeing them again.

  His coworkers would wonder why he didn’t show up at the office in the morning. He had been an exemplary employee, right from the start. But he didn’t care anymore, now that he had gotten the summons he’d been waiting for ever since he came to this despicable nation.

  Those godless infidels at the Midwest Regional Transportation and Freight Division of MegaMart, Inc., would just have to get along without Hamed al-Bashar from now on.

  CHAPTER 7

  Brad Parker crouched behind a large rock and peered down at the village, which was little more than a cluster of mud huts sprawled at the base of the hillside…except for the large, stone-walled compound at the edge of the settlement. Parker’s eyes, normally a light bluish-gray, darkened to the color of steel in moments of stress, tension, or anger.

  They were the same shade as a battleship now as they narrowed in concentration.

  “That’s the place?” he asked the man hunkered beside him.

  “Yeah, dude, that’s it.”

  The tone of voice sounded odd coming from a man who looked even more like a native of these hills than Parker did—and Parker was burned so dark by the fierce sun that he could pass for a Pakistani hill man when he had to. His companion really had been born and raised in these hills, but Oded Hatali—“Call me Odie, like that dumb dog in the comic strip, man”—had spent years in California working in the computer industry before being recruited by the Company. He had taken to American life like a duck to water, too, finding himself right at home in the Granola State.

  Odie was a natural linguist, speaking not only Urdu and Punjabi but also a dozen different tribal dialects and variations on Pakistan’s two main languages. When he put on the loose trousers and the long shirt common to Pakistani men, the outfit known as the shalwar-qamiz, and pulled a fur cap onto his head, he blended right in with the rest of the country’s teeming population.

  Brad Parker wore the same sort of garb, only he had a turban wrapped around his dark blond hair, concealing it. His face, all hard planes and angles, was dark enough for him to pass as a native if not too much attention was focused on him. He usually let Odie carry the ball whenever they had to talk to anybody, although technically Parker was the senior member of the duo. He was thirty-five, had joined the Marines at eighteen, fought in Desert Storm, moved over to SpecOps when he was twenty-five, joined the Company at thirty.

  So he had spent nearly half his life in the ragtag backwaters of the world, doing the dirty jobs that kept not only the United States but also the rest of the Western world safe—or at least, safer than it would have been otherwise. If the details of some of his missions had ever been made public, the crybaby left-wing politicians and the equally whiny news media would have pitched a shit fit…even though some of those self-righteous sons of bitches would have died in terrorist attacks, too. They had no clue how close to disaster they had come at times, no idea how things would have gone straight to hell without Brad Parker and a lot of other men and women like him, nameless, faceless heroes who fought the good fight in the far corners of the world, knowing all the while how reviled they would be by certain elements of society if the truth about their activities ever came out.

  Parker didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. He just wanted to protect his country from the bad guys, whatever it took.

  And if what he and Odie had discovered was true, there were some mighty bad guys down there in that compound.

  “The villagers you spoke to can be trusted?” Parker asked now.

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s not like they don’t have an ax to grind, though. From what they told me, the headman at Jihad U. down there had one of his merry little suicide bombers kill one of the village elders. Sawed the poor bastard’s head right off with a knife. The sheikh said the guy was working for the CIA.”

  “Was he?” Parker asked.

  “No, dude, that’s what makes it so bad. It was just a mix-up.” Odie grinned. “It was another of the elders who was passing intel to us. But he’s dead, too, now. Accident. Rock slide got him.”

  “You sure it was an accident?”

  “Yeah, there were witnesses, and I trust ’em.”

  “What’s the connection between the man who was decapitated and the ones who told you about all this?”

  “They’re his sons,” Odie explained. “So they’ve got a blood debt marked up against the Jihadists. They’re not crazy about Westerners, but they hate the sheikh and his people even more.”

  Hatred was the fuel that ran this entire part of the world, Parker reflected. The feel-good liberals back in the States insisted that everybody was alike under the skin, that there were no real, fundamental differences between people from different cultures. Deep down everybody was human and wanted the same things, said the doctrine according to the Sixties, still the religion of the left.

  But that was bullshit, Parker knew. Sure, the people of this region loved their families. But they loved hating their enemies even more. The smallest grudge could bring on a bloody, lifelong war between two factions. How the hell could you even hope to deal rationally with somebody who hated their neighbors and wanted to kill them because of something somebody’s ancestors had done to somebody else’s ancestors a thousand or fifteen hundred or even two thousand years ago?

  The answer was, you couldn’t deal rationally with them. But you couldn’t let yourself be seduced by their culture of hatred either. You just did your job. Pragmatically, even ruthlessly when you had to, but you didn’t let yourself hate these people.

  Because that would make you just as bad as they were.

  The bleeding hearts had that much right anyway, even though they would never understand the realities behind it.

  “How many men in the compound?” Parker asked.

  “The sheikh went back to France and took his entourage with him. But they’ve got a new crop of homicidal-maniacs-in-training down there, plus the instructors…say thirty to thirty-five, give or take a few.”

  “And how many fighters can your contacts muster?”

  “Twenty-five tops.”

  “So we’re going to be outnumbered.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll have the element of surprise on our side,” Odie said. “Those guys
think they’re safe since the Americans gave Afghanistan back to the Taliban.”

  “The Americans didn’t give Afghanistan back,” Parker growled. “One woman did.”

  “The people put her in office.”

  “Yeah, and they’re already damned sorry they did it. I’ve got a hunch they’ll be even sorrier before it’s all over.” Parker shook his head. They weren’t here to talk politics. “I could call in some air support, but then the Pakistani government would get its panties in a wad. Anyway, if I did that, then it would look like something we’ve done. I want those people to do it.”

  He pointed at the village.

  “Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizb ut-Tahrir…those are all local cancers, when you get down right to it,” Parker went on. “If we cut ’em out, they’ll just grow back, more malignant than ever. But if the locals rise up and get rid of them, maybe then we might see some real progress.”

  Odie nodded. “A holistic approach to the war on terror. I like it.”

  Parker’s hand tightened on the rifle he carried and his expression grew solemn. “Pass the word to your contacts. We’ll hit the compound an hour before dawn.”

  The night was cold and quiet. It sometimes snowed in these hills during December, but that was rare because overall the climate was too dry for much precipitation to fall. The temperature could get bone-chillingly cold, though, especially when the wind swept down from the Hindu Kush and whistled through the Khyber Pass.

  When Brad Parker was a kid, he had read adventure stories about this region by authors like Talbot Mundy and Robert E. Howard. He would have given a lot to have some guys like Athelstan King—“King of the Khyber Rifles!”—or Francis Xavier Gordon with him tonight. Gordon, also known as El Borak, Howard’s Texas gunfighter turned American agent in the Hindu Kush, would have known how to handle terrorists. Hell, he probably would have been able to ferret out Osama bin Laden.

  But that was fiction, and long-ago fiction at that. This was real. This was now.

  This was the time when the killing was about to start again.

  Parker and Odie and twenty-two other men were pressed against the wall of the compound. Millions of stars glittered in the frigid heavens above the village. The light from those stars failed to glitter on the barrels of the M-4 rifles the men held, because the metal surfaces of the weapons had been rubbed down with soot. They could be cleaned up later, when this early morning’s work was finished.

  Odie had led Parker to the house where the tribal fighters were gathered. They were fierce, dark-faced men. Most sported jutting black beards. Black cloaks concealed their lighter-colored clothing. Their eyes had burned with hatred in the lantern light inside the house. The only electricity in the village was in the compound, powered by a generator. But that allowed the whole place to be lit up with floodlights whenever danger threatened, Haj al-Barmuz explained to Parker. Haj was the eldest son of the man who had been beheaded at the orders of the foreign sheikh.

  “The first thing we’ll need to do is knock out that generator,” Parker had said in the local tribal dialect to Haj and the other men. He wasn’t as fluent in that tongue as Odie was, but they didn’t expect him to be. They knew he was an American and were willing to forgive that, since he was also the enemy of their enemy. Nor had the older men among them forgotten how the Americans had helped the mujahideen in neighboring Afghanistan fight back against the invading Soviets, more than a quarter of a century earlier.

  Of course, the mujahideen had repaid the Americans for that aid by fostering some of the most virulently anti-American terrorists to be found anywhere, and Parker hadn’t forgotten that. These men who were his allies tonight might want to behead him as a godless infidel tomorrow…but he would worry about that once the Hizb ut-Tahrir training compound had been destroyed.

  Odie had referred to the place as Jihad U., and that was a good description of it. Fanatics from all across the Middle East and even as far away as Europe came here to learn all the skills necessary to carry out terrorist strikes anywhere in the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir meant “the party of liberation,” and while the group’s original purpose had been to assist the Palestinians in driving out the Israelis, in recent years their goal had grown to include forcing all the foreign devils off Islamic soil.

  These efforts were aimed mostly at the American military, which still had a considerable presence in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, but some of the European countries, notably England and France, had come in for their share of grief. Members of Hizb ut-Tahrir had their bloody hands in all sorts of pies; even when other groups claimed responsibility for terror attacks, like the recent deadly bombings in Liverpool and Marseille, the operations had been financed by Hizb ut-Tahrir and the suicide bombers had been trained in their grisly work right here at this very compound.

  When Parker had mentioned taking out the generator, Haj had grinned and motioned for a couple of his men to open a wooden chest in a corner of the room. From it they took a pair of RPG launchers. Parker recognized the weapons immediately. They were older models, but the rocket-propelled grenades they fired still packed a punch. Parker gave Haj an approving nod, and didn’t bother asking where the men had gotten the launchers. He didn’t care, as long as the damned things worked.

  “We know the building in which the generator is located,” Haj had explained. “Two of my men will blow it up, and then the rest of us will attack.”

  Those two men would be taking a big chance, Parker had thought, but he didn’t bother saying it. The guys would know what they were letting themselves in for.

  The group had a three-quarter-ton truck. The plan called for that truck to crash through the gates of the compound, carrying a driver and the two men who would handle the grenade launchers. As soon as the gates were breached and the generator had been knocked out, the other men would enter the compound and begin killing everyone they could find before placing explosive charges to level the place.

  The current class of trainees gave the enemy a numerical advantage, but the would-be jihadists hadn’t been there for very long. They were raw, mostly untrained, and untested when it came to their fighting skills. The odds against Parker’s group of ten were not insurmountable.

  Death and destruction were the main goals, but acquiring intel was always vital. Parker planned to scour the place from one end to the other as soon as all the occupants were dead and see what he could find before they blew it up. You never knew what a raid like this might uncover. The plans for 9/11 had been floating around for quite a while before the day itself arrived. All those deaths could have been prevented with a stroke of luck here and there.

  Odie touched Parker’s arm and leaned close to his ear in the darkness. “The truck’s coming,” Odie said.

  Parker heard the low grumble of the engine, too, and thought that if he could hear it, so could the guards inside the compound. But they wouldn’t think anything of it, he told himself. This was an agricultural area. The guards would think that one of the local farmers was coming in early to get a jump on everybody else at the market.

  Parker squeezed Odie’s shoulder. “Pass the word,” he whispered. “Tell everybody to be ready to move.”

  Parker’s heart slugged hard in his chest. After all this time, all the covert actions, all the firefights, he still felt adrenaline coursing through him and was grateful for it. If he ever reached the point where his heart didn’t beat fast before going into battle, it would be time to give up this job. Go back to Langley and stand in a classroom and teach other agents how to carry out ops like this.

  Yeah, like that was going to happen.

  Like he would ever live that long.

  The truck rounded a corner, starting to pick up speed as it came into view, and headed straight toward the gates. The guards inside tumbled pretty quickly to what was going on. Parker heard them yelling to each other in Arabic. Floodlights mounted on the walls blazed into life, illuminating both the interior of the compound and the area outside the walls. Parker s
quinted against the glare. Guns began to pop and bullets pinged off the front of the truck, which had steel plates bolted to it to serve as primitive armor. Men inside the compound screeched in surprise and outrage.

  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, boys, Parker thought as he tightened his grip on his rifle.

  CHAPTER 8

  The truck never slowed down, even though several bullets found the windshield and spiderwebbed the glass. That meant either the driver wasn’t hit or if he was, he was still able to keep his foot on the gas pedal. The truck hit the gates with a shattering, rending crash of metal and wood.

  The volume of fire from inside the compound increased. Even though Parker couldn’t see what was going on from where he was, he had been over the plan enough times with Haj and the other tribal fighters to know what was happening. The two men with grenade launchers were drawing beads on the building that housed the generator, exposing themselves to the fire of the guards so they could get a clean shot…

  Parker heard the whoosh! whoosh! of both weapons being fired, followed a heartbeat later by twin explosions that shook the ground under his feet. The floodlights went off as if someone had thrown the switch. Parker knew that wasn’t the case, though, because he could no longer hear the steady chug-chug-chug of the generator. The RPG guys had blown it to hell.

  “Go, go, go!” Parker called in English to Odie, who relayed the order in the local dialect, not that all the tribal fighters needed the translation. Parker figured most of them would understand the tone of his voice.

  The men dashed toward the gates in the sudden darkness. Another whoosh sounded, and something blew up inside the compound. At least one of the men with the grenade launchers had lived long enough to get off a second shot. But no more explosions came as Parker, Odie, and the men from the village darted through the opening where the wrecked gates had stood and split up around the now-stopped truck. The rifle fire continued unabated, though.