But Jack Ryan Sr. made it clear instantly that he was not in a playful mood. "I had Arnie contact Gerry Hendley. He says you are overseas in Pakistan. I just need to know that you are safe."
"I"m fine."
"Where are you?"
"I can"t talk about-"
"d.a.m.n it, Jack, what"s going on? Are you in danger?"
Junior sighed. "We are working with some friends over here."
"You have to choose your friends carefully in Pakistan."
"I know that. These guys are risking everything to help us."
Ryan Sr. did not respond.
"Dad, when you get in office, are you going to help Clark?"
"When I get back to Washington, I"ll move mountains to get his indictment overturned. But for now he is on the lam, and there is not a d.a.m.n thing I can do about it."
"Okay."
"Do I hear helicopters in the background?"
"Yes."
"Is something going on?"
He knew he could have lied right now, but he did not. It was his father, after all. "Yes, something is going on, something much bigger than a couple weeks ago, and I"m in the middle of it. I don"t know how it"s going to play out."
A long pained pause on the other end of the line. Finally Ryan Sr. said, "Can I help?"
"Right this minute, no. But you definitely can help."
"Just say the word, son. Anything I can do."
"When you get into office, do whatever you can to help the CIA. If you can get them as strong as they were when you were President last time, then I"ll be a lot better off. We all will."
"Trust me, son. Nothing is more important. Once I get-"
Chavez and Caruso stepped out of the hooch with greasepaint on their faces and their bodies laden with gear. "Dad . . . I need to go."
"Jack? Please be safe."
"Sorry, but I can"t be safe and be here. And my job is here. You"ve done things . . . you know how it is."
"I do."
"Look. If something happens to me. Tell Mom . . . just . . . just try to make her understand."
Jack Junior heard nothing on the other end, but he sensed his father, stoic though he was, was in agony with the knowledge that his son was in imminent danger, and there was not a d.a.m.n thing he could do to help him. The younger Ryan hated himself for putting his father in this position, but he knew he did not have time to undo the damage he had just caused by making him worry.
"Got to run. I"m sorry. I"ll call when I can." If I can, he thought, but he did not say it.
And with that, Jack disconnected the phone and handed it back to Chavez, then stepped back into the little hut to grab his weapon.
The four Puma helicopters crossed into North Waziristan just after three a.m. The fat choppers flew low and close together to mask their approach, using roads through the mountains and deep river valleys to direct them toward their target of the town of Aziz Khel.
Ryan fought nausea as he sat on the floor of the helo, looking out at the dark landscape outside. He actually got to the point where he wanted to vomit all over himself to rid himself of any food or water in his stomach so that he might recover before go time. But he did not throw up, he just sat there, pinned tightly between Mohammed al Darkur on his right and Dom on his left. Chavez faced them, and five more Zarrar commandos sat with them in the chopper, along with a door-gunner manning a 7.62-millimeter machine gun and a loadmaster who rode up front near the two pilots.
The other choppers would be loaded up much the same.
Chavez shouted over the engines" roar, "Dom and Jack. I want you two guys on my back the whole time we"re inside the walls. Keep your weapons at the high and ready. We move as a unit."
Ryan had never experienced terror like this in his entire life. Everyone for fifty miles in every direction, save for the men in the four choppers, would kill him if they saw him.
Al Darkur had been wearing a headset to communicate with the flight crew, but he pulled it off and replaced it with his helmet. He then leaned over to Chavez and yelled, "It is almost time. They will circle for ten minutes! No more! Then they leave us."
"Got it," Ding answered back.
Ryan leaned forward into Chavez"s black-greased face. "Is ten minutes enough time?"
The diminutive Mexican-American shrugged. "If we get bogged down in the building, we"re dead. The whole place, inside and out, is crawling with Haqqani"s forces. Every second we are in there is a second some gomer has to draw a bead on us. If we aren"t out in ten minutes, we ain"t coming out, "mano."
Ryan nodded, leaned away, and looked back out the window toward the undulating black hills below.
The chopper lurched up dramatically, and Jack spewed vomit against the gla.s.s.
Sam Driscoll had no idea if it was day or night. Usually he could make a guess as to the time of day going by the guard rotation or whether or not his meal was just bread (morning), or bread with a small tin of watery broth (night). After weeks in captivity he and the two men still held with him had begun to think that the guards had switched the meals up to confuse them.
A Reuters reporter from Australia was in the cell next to him. His name was Allen Lyle, and he was young, not over thirty, but he was sick with some sort of stomach virus. He had not been able to keep anything down for the past few days. In the furthest cell, the one closest to the door to the hallway, an Afghani politician was held. He"d been here only a few days, and he was getting occasional beatings from the guards, but he was in otherwise good health.
Sam"s legs had healed for the most part in the past month, but he had a significant limp and he could tell he had not avoided infection altogether. He felt weak and sick and he perspired through the night, and he"d lost a great deal of weight and muscle tone lying on his rope cot.
He made himself stand and hobble over to the bars so that he could check on the young guy from Reuters. For the first week or so the man badgered him relentlessly, asking him who he worked for and what he was doing when he was captured by the Taliban. But Driscoll never answered the guy"s questions, and Reuters man finally gave up. Now it looked like Reuters man might give up on his life within a few days.
"Hey!" Sam shouted. "Lyle! Wake up!"
The reporter stirred. His eyes opened to half-mast. "Is that a helicopter?"
f.u.c.king delirious, Sam thought. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d.
Wait. Sam heard it now, too. It was faint, but it was a chopper. The Afghan by the door stood and looked back to Sam for some confirmation as to what he was hearing.
The three jailers outside the cell heard it, too. They looked at one another, then stood and peered down the dark hallway, shouting to a guard somewhere out of Driscoll"s sight.
One of the men made a joke, and the three laughed.
The Afghani politician looked to Driscoll and said, "They say it is President Kealty coming to look for you and the reporter."
Sam sighed. It wasn"t the first time they"d heard Pakistani Army choppers overhead. They always faded after a couple of seconds. Driscoll turned to go sit back down.
And then . . . Boom!
A low crack erupted somewhere above him. Sam turned back to the hall.
Machine-gun fire came soon after. And then another explosion.
"Everybody get down on the floor!" Driscoll shouted to the other prisoners. If this was a rescue attempt by the PDF, and if there was any shooting down here, even out in the hall, then there would be ricocheted rounds banging all around this stone-walled bas.e.m.e.nt, and friendly fire would hurt just as bad as enemy fire.
Sam started to look for some measure of cover himself, but one of the jailers came to his cell. The man"s eyes were wide with fear and determination. Sam got the impression this f.u.c.ker was going to use him as a human shield if the PDF made it down into the bas.e.m.e.nt.
They"d been off the helicopter for nearly two minutes, and Jack Ryan had not yet seen the enemy. First they dropped into a knee-deep trash pit some one hundred yards from the target. Jack could not understand why the pilot had dumped them so far from their target until, upon running closer to the compound, they saw several rows of electricity poles and wires crisscrossing the open ground in front of the main gate.
Then, while Chavez set the water-tamped breaching charge at the perimeter gate, Jack, Dom, and Mohammed watched his six. They dropped to their knees and scanned the dark rooftops and gates of a cl.u.s.ter of walled compounds on the other side of a rocky plain, and they kept their eyes on the corners of the wall of the Haqqani compound to the north and south. Above them the big Puma choppers circled, occasionally emitting jackhammer bursts from door guns or staccato cracks from Zarrar commandos firing their small arms into the compound. A twenty-millimeter cannon fired from one of the fat birds sent explosive rounds into the hillside beyond the compound in order to let the forty Taliban supposedly in the barracks know that they needed to stay right where they were.
Finally, over the h.e.l.lacious sounds from above, Jack heard, "Fire in the hole!" and he found cover by pressing himself against the fourteen-foot-high baked-brick wall. Just seconds after this came the boom of the breaching charge, blowing the black oak and iron gates of the compound in like tossed toothpicks.
And then just like that, they were inside the walls, running for the main building, thirty yards ahead. Ryan saw the long low barracks some forty yards off his right shoulder, and just as he looked tracer rounds kicked up sparks near the dark structure from machine guns fired from above.
Jack was tight on Dom"s heels and Mohammed was just behind Jack, all the men running behind Chavez, who led the way with his AUG at his shoulder.
Jack was surprised when Chavez fired his rifle ahead. Ryan looked to see where the bullets were impacting and saw they were tearing up a small building or garage to the left of the main house. From there a bright light flashed and a rocket-propelled grenade launched into the sky but it seemed to have been poorly aimed.
Ding fired again and again, Ryan got his P-90 up to send some rounds downrange himself, but the team arrived at the wall of the main house before he even found a target in the night.
They scooted down the wall, closer to the front door, Ding still in the lead. Chavez nodded to Caruso, who quickly raced across the closed door and pressed up against the wall on the other side. Chavez nodded to Ryan, who started to pull a stun grenade from a pouch hanging on his right thigh. But as he reached for it he saw a second and a third RPG flying through the air, launched from the grounds behind the main building. Both grenades looked like they were perfectly aimed at a Puma that flew nearest to the barracks buildings.
And they were. The first RPG streaked right by the pilot"s windscreen, and the second slammed into the tail just aft of the two engines. Ryan stood fascinated, watching as the tail exploded and the aircraft spun away to the right, turned nose down, and disappeared behind a plume of black smoke.
The crash came outside the wall, lower on the rocky plain.
Immediately one of the three remaining helicopters veered out of its tight circular pattern around the Haqqani compound and flew off toward the crash.
"s.h.i.t!" said Chavez. "We"re losing our cover. Let"s go!"
Dom kicked open the front door of the house, and Ryan tossed his stun grenade into the entry hall, staying just to the left of the doorway and out of the line of fire from inside the building.
Boom!
All four men rushed in; Dom and Ryan went to the right and Ding and Mohammed shifted to the left alongside the wall. They used flashlights mounted onto their weapons to illuminate a dark open room. Almost instantly Dominic saw movement through a doorway on the right. He shifted his light"s beam, it flashed off the metal of a rifle, and Caruso fired a ten-round string of fire into the doorway.
A bullet-riddled bearded man fell out into the room by a wooden table, his Kalashnikov tumbled out of his hands.
Behind them in the courtyard, small-arms fire crackled. These were not guns fired from circling Pumas. No, these were AKs from the compound"s guard force. The fire picked up, and it became clear that the men in the barracks had broken out; they were either targeting the choppers or heading toward the main building. Perhaps both.
Chavez, Caruso, Ryan, and al Darkur moved in a tactical train down a low hallway, clearing a few rooms on the left and right as they moved, using the same "wall-flood" tactics they had used to breach the first room. They"d hit a doorway, enter fast with guns high and lights on, the first and third men moving up the wall to the left of the entrance and the second and fourth men going right.
After the third empty room they came back into the hallway, and Mohammed al Darkur cut down two men trying to enter the front doorway. After that he dropped to his kneepads, keeping his gun trained on the door where men from the barracks would enter.
"Keep going! I"ll keep them back!"
Chavez turned and led the way, with Ryan and Caruso right on his heels.
They made a turn, Ding shot at a gunman retreating up a staircase on his left, then knelt to reload his gun. There was another stone staircase on the right, heading down into a bas.e.m.e.nt enshrouded in darkness.
Outside, large RPG explosions were mixing with small-arms fire.
Domingo turned back to the others, now shouting over the sound of al Darkur"s cracking rifle. "We don"t have any time! I"ll check upstairs, you guys go down! Meet back here, but watch out for blue-on-blue fire!"
With that Chavez hustled up the stairs and out of view. Caruso took a tentative lead down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, shining his light ahead of him. He"d gotten no more than halfway down the uneven stone steps when a rifle up ahead boomed, and the steps and walls sparked around him as copper-jacketed ammo struck and bounced.
Caruso backpedaled up the stairs but crashed into Ryan. Both men fell and tumbled forward, sliding down the stairs on their gear packs before coming to rest in the dark hallway.
The gunman ahead continued firing. Ryan found himself on top of Caruso, pinning his cousin down, so he rose to his knees, aimed perfunctorily on the flashes ahead, and dumped twenty rounds from his weapon at the threat.
Then, through the ringing in his ears, he heard the clinking of his own hot bra.s.s bouncing against the stone before it came to rest all around him. Then he heard a heavier metal thud as a rifle fell to the floor ahead. He shined his light and saw a Taliban slumped against the wall at a turn in the bas.e.m.e.nt hall.
"You okay, Dom?"
"Get off of me."
"Sorry." Ryan climbed off and stood up. Dom stood up, as well, and then covered ahead while Jack reloaded his P-90.
"Let"s move."
They made it to the corner and then looked around. Up ahead was a single room at the end of the hall. Inside it was dark, but not for long.
AK fire from two rifles rang out, sending showers of sparks all the way up the hall toward the two Americans as the bullets pinged off the stone wall.
Dom and Jack tucked their heads back.
"I"m thinking that looks like it could be the jail."
"Yeah," agreed Ryan.