Apparently there were only two jailers, but they had good cover at the far end of the hallway. Plus they held a second advantage: Jack and Dom had no idea what was on the other side of the doorway. For all they knew, if they fired up the baked-brick hallway and into the room, their rounds might bounce around inside and hit the man they had come to save.
"Should we go get Chavez and come back?" asked Ryan.
"No time. We"ve got to get in there."
Together they thought for a moment. Suddenly Jack said, "I"ve got an idea. I take a nine-banger, I throw it short, just outside the doorway. As soon as the first bang goes off, we run."
"Into the nine-banger?" Caruso asked incredulously.
"f.u.c.k, yes! We shield our eyes. They"ll have to pull their heads in the room while it"s going off. When we get halfway up the hall you roll a flash-bang through the doorway, and that should stun them until we get in. We"ll have to time it right, but that should keep them occupied."
Dom nodded. "I don"t have anything better. But leave your rifle. Pistols only. We"ll move better, and we don"t want to hit Sam coming through the door."
The two young men slipped out of their rifle slings, and then pulled grenades from their chest pouches. Ryan drew his pistol and pulled the pin on his grenade.
Dom moved next to him at the edge of the corner. He patted his cousin on the shoulder and said, "No retreat. We start moving on their position, we can"t stop and turn back around. The only chance is to keep going."
"Got it," Jack said, and he slung the grenade around the dark corner with a side-arm toss.
After just a couple of echoing metal-on-stone clanks, the first explosion and flash rocked the hall and the men at the far end of it. Dom moved ahead of Jack, sprinted into the forty-foot-long line of fire of the enemies" guns, and he rolled his flash-bang far into the room like a bowling ball, right through the flashes and smoke of Jack"s nine-banger.
Together Caruso and Ryan ran forward with their eyes turned away from the bursts of fire.
The two jailers had tucked their heads back inside the small room to shield them from what they thought was an undertossed diversion. But by the time the last of the nine-banger"s pops finished and they readied to turn back to resume firing up the hallway, a small canister bounced into the room between them.
They both stared at the flash-bang as it went off, pounding their brains inside their skulls and dilating their blinded eyes.
Jack entered the room first at a run, but he"d caught enough of the effects of Dom"s flash-bang to disorient him. He ran right past the two men who"d fallen to the floor on either side of the doorway, and he crashed into the metal bars of the first cell before he was able to stop on his own.
"f.u.c.k!" he shouted, half blinded and all deaf, at least for the next few seconds.
But Dominic came in behind him; Jack"s body had shielded him from much of the light and some of the sound, so the exFBI agent still had his wits about him.
He shot both of the disoriented Haqqani fighters where they knelt on the floor, putting a bullet into the back of each man"s head.
"In here!" It was Sam. His cell door was only a few feet from Ryan, but he could barely hear him.
Ryan shined his light on the cells in the room. A Pashtun man was crouched against the wall of the first cell, a sick-looking white-skinned blond man lay on the floor of the second cell.
Ryan now shined his light into the corner. In the last cell, Sam Driscoll sat astride a dead Haqqani fighter, the man"s twisted neck in the American"s hands.
Caruso found the overhead light and flipped it on. He stared at Sam, as well.
"You okay?"
Sam looked away from the man he had just killed with his bare hands, the jailer who had planned to use him as a human shield, and he looked up at his two colleagues. "You boys playing army?"
Sam and Dom led the way back up the stairs while Jack and the Afghan carried the incapacitated Reuters reporter. It was a tough climb back to the ground floor, but once they were there, things became even more precarious. Chavez had cleared the upstairs, but now he and al Darkur were in the hallway near the stairs, firing toward the front of the building at enemy fighters positioned there.
The Pakistani major had been hit in the left shoulder and his rifle had been damaged by another round, but he continued to fire his pistol up the hall with his right hand.
Chavez saw that he had six people behind him now, and one was being carried. He nodded to himself and patted al Darkur on the shoulder. "Let"s find a way out of here before the enemy starts firing RPGs!"
They headed toward the back of the building, a limping Sam Driscoll in the lead with a salvaged AK. Now Chavez brought up the rear and fired constantly to keep heads down in the rooms and hallways near the front of the house.
The hallway came to a T and Driscoll went right, with the rest of the procession following behind. Sam came upon a large room at the back of the house, but the windows had been bricked up and there was no door.
"No good!" he shouted. "Try the other direction!"
Chavez led now. He was surprised that the enemy fire up this stretch of hallway had lessened noticeably. With Ryan and Caruso firing down the base of the T, Chavez and al Darkur darted across, and then ran into a long narrow kitchen. There was no exit here, but a small side door looked promising. Chavez opened the door, desperate to find a window or a door or even a staircase back upstairs.
The doorway led to a dark room roughly fifteen feet across and thirty feet deep. It seemed to be some sort of repair shop, but Ding didn"t focus on the room itself; instead he shined his rifle"s light quickly along the walls, searching for any other exit. Seeing nothing, he started to turn away to try to go back and fight with the others. But he stopped when something caught his eye in the low light.
He"d ignored the wooden tables and shelves in the room when looking for a way out, but now he focused on them, or more specifically, what was on them.
Containers of car parts and electrical components. Batteries. Cell phones. Wires. Small drums of gunpowder. Steel pressure plates and a blue fifty-five-gallon drum full of what Ding immediately a.s.sumed was nitric acid.
On the floor were mortar sh.e.l.ls, partially disa.s.sembled.
Ding realized he"d stumbled onto a bomb factory. The improvised explosive devices created here would be smuggled over the border into Afghanistan.
This explained why the Haqqani fighters hadn"t fired a rocket toward Chavez and his team here in the back of the house. If anything in this room detonated, the entire compound would be obliterated, the Haqqani men included.
"Mohammed?" Ding shouted, and al Darkur peered into the room.
Immediately he nodded. "Bombs."
"I know what they are. Can we use them?"
Mohammed nodded with a crooked smile. "I know something about bombs."
Ryan and Caruso were both down to their last magazine. They fired individual rounds from the top of the T down to the base. They knew they"d taken out a lot of the Haqqani members with rifle fire, but there seemed to be an unlimited supply of armed a.s.sholes remaining.
One of the Puma helicopters was flying in circles behind the compound. This Jack could tell from occasional automatic fire from his six-o"clock high, coming from outside the building. He could not actually hear the helo-with the gunfire in the narrow hallways his ears were trashed, so nothing less than small-arms fire up close or heavy machine guns at distance registered.
Chavez appeared just behind the two men, sliding a fresh magazine around and into their chest rigs. While he did this he shouted, "There is a bomb factory in the back!"
"Oh, s.h.i.t," said Ryan, realizing that he and his mates were, essentially, exchanging fire while sitting on top of a powder keg.
"Al Darkur is wiring an IED to blow the back wall. If he gets it right it should make us a hole in the back of the building. When it"s time to go, just turn and run up the hallway. I"ll cover your egress!"
Jack didn"t ask what would happen if Mohammed did not get it "right."
Ding next said, "Do not head out back until you toss your LZ beacons. The door gunner in the Puma has been rocking his MG for the past ten minutes. Don"t count on him to spot the IR strobe on your back. He"ll turn you into ground beef. Use your LZ marker as a second way to alert them that friendlies are coming out."
The two young men nodded.
"Sam and the Afghan will drag the wounded man, you guys just keep up the covering fire for them until the chopper lands and they get on board."
"Got it!" Dom said, and Ryan nodded.
Both Ryan and Caruso kept up the controlled fire, just enough to let the enemy know that, if they ventured up the hall toward the T, then they were going to pay a heavy price. They still took some fire, but it came from AKs that were just held around the corner and sprayed by their handlers, and the rounds banged along the walls, floors, and ceiling.
Twice al Darkur and Chavez pa.s.sed behind them as they took IED material out of the bomb factory on Jack and Dom"s right and carried it to the other end of the hallway on their left.
Within a minute, Chavez was back behind them. He screamed into their ears, "Get down!"
Both men dove to the stone floor of the hallway and covered their heads. Within a few seconds, an incredible boom from behind them pounded up the hallway with a concussive force that made Jack think the building would fall on top of them. Cracked mortar, stone, and dust did fall from the ceiling, raining down on all the men in the hallway.
Caruso was first to his feet. He ran up the hallway with Ryan close behind, pa.s.sing the wounded Reuters man being dragged by his shoulders by Driscoll and the Afghani prisoner.
Jack caught up to him as they entered the room with the bricked-over windows. Their weapon lights were useless with the dust in the air. They just continued on toward the far wall until, finally, they could see open sky. Immediately Dominic threw the flashing landing-zone signal into the rear of the compound. The beacon would, in theory, alert the gunmen in the circling choppers that friendlies were in that area so they should not fire.
As Dominic stepped into the rear courtyard he worried he would take a blast from the door gun of the chopper, but fortunately the Zarrar commandos had good fire discipline. The American crouched behind a small stack of truck tires and covered the north side of the compound, while his cousin went p.r.o.ne beside a large pile of rubble left by al Darkur"s bomb blast, covering the south side.
One of the SSG choppers had used its 20-millimeter cannon to take out the poles holding up the electric wires in the back of the property, so the helo landed near Major al Darkur, the prisoners, and the American operatives. Within seconds everyone was aboard and the helo lifted back into the air and immediately began racing for safety.
Inside the helicopter, all seven men who"d made it on board lay on the metal decking, arms and legs atop one another. Jack Ryan found himself near the bottom of the pile, but he was too exhausted to move, even to push the thick leg of the Afghani politician off his face.
It took another twenty minutes of nap-of-the-earth flying before the lights in the cabin of the helo came on and the pilot announced, through Mohammed al Darkur and his intercom-linked headphones, that they were out of danger. The men sat up, water bottles were pa.s.sed around, and al Darkur"s shoulder was attended to by the loadmaster of the aircraft, while one of the Zarrar commandos started an IV into the arm of the Australian Reuters correspondent.
The normally dry and stoic Sam Driscoll hugged each member of his extraction team, then he rolled into the corner and fell asleep with a water bottle tucked to his chest.
Chavez leaned over into Jack"s ear to yell over the engine noise, "Looks like you had a pretty close shave back there."
Jack followed Ding"s eyes to the canvas magazine rack on his chest. A jagged hole was torn through one of the pouches. He pulled out a metal and plastic P-90 mag, and found a bullet hole all the way through it. Fingering his way into the hole in his chest rig he fished out a twisted and sharp 7.62 round that had slammed into his ceramic breastplate.
In all the action, Jack had no idea he"d taken a hit right to the chest.
"f.u.c.k me," he said as he held the bullet up and looked at it.
Chavez just laughed and squeezed the younger man"s arm. "Not your time, "mano."
"I guess not," Jack said, and he wanted to call his mom and dad, and he wanted to call Melanie. But he had to put both those communications on hold, because he suddenly felt the nausea return.
Riaz Rehan had men on the inside of each and every major inst.i.tution in his nation. One of these inst.i.tutions was the Pakistani nuclear ordnance industry. He, through his own network of cutouts, was in contact with nuclear scientists, engineers, and weapons manufacturers. Through them he learned that in Wah Cantonment, near Islamabad, was the storage location of many of his nation"s nuclear devices. Several air delivery bombs, essentially U.S. Mark 84 conventional bomb cases packed with five-to-twenty-kiloton-yield nuclear devices, were kept at the Kamra Air Weapon Complex inside the ma.s.sive Pakistan Ordnance Factories there at Wah. The nuclear bombs were disa.s.sembled, but kept at something known as "screwdriver ready" status. This meant they could be a.s.sembled for deployment in hours if and when the head of state called for them to be made ready.
And, Rehan had learned from one of his high-ranking a.s.sociates in the Ministry of Defense the previous morning, the President of Pakistan had made the call.
So the first portion of Operation Saker had already succeeded. In order to ensure that the weapons were a.s.sembled and deployed to their battle stations, General Rehan needed to bring his nation to the brink of war. That done, he monitored his contacts in the government and nuclear weapons branches of the military, and waited like a coiled snake in the gra.s.s to make his next move.
The Pakistanis had long boasted that their nuclear weapons were protected by a three-tier national command authority security procedure. This was true, but ultimately it did not mean much. All one needed was the knowledge of the weakest link in the security of the device after its a.s.sembly, and some way to exploit this weakest link.
The general"s agents at Pakistan Ordnance Factories told him that around nine p.m. two twenty-kiloton bombs would leave the Kamra Air Weapon Complex by truck, and then they would be delivered to a special train in nearby Taxila. At first Rehan considered attacking the truck convoy. A truck is easier to disable than a train, after all. But there were too many variables for which Rehan could not control so close to the large military presence there in Wah and Taxila.
So he began looking at the rail route. The bombs would be delivered by a heavily guarded freight train to the air force base at SarG.o.dha, some two hundred miles of rail travel away.
A simple glance at a map was all it took to pinpoint the weakest link on the route. Just five kilometers south of the town of Phularwan, on a flat stretch of farmland bisected by the railroad, a cl.u.s.ter of abandoned mills and grain warehouses sat alongside wheat fields that ran right up to the tracks. Here a force could hide, ready to attack a train approaching from the north. Once they had achieved their objective the force could then load itself and the two ten-foot-long, one-ton bombs onto trucks, and access the modern M2 Highway, the Lah.o.r.eIslamabad road, where they could go north or south and disappear into either ma.s.sive metropolis inside of ninety minutes.
In the first week of December, a cold steady rain fell, beating on the tin roofs of the grain shacks that lay just four hundred yards from the edge of the rail line.
General Riaz Rehan, his second-in-command Colonel Khan, and Georgi Safronov lay on prayer mats in the dark, tucked in a shed behind a rusted-out tractor that hopefully would afford them protection from stray gunfire when the attack commenced.
Rehan was awaiting a radio call from a spotter in Chabba Purana, a village just southeast of Phularwan. The fifty-five Jamaat Shariat gunmen, the students from the Haqqani camp in Miran Shah, were spread out in the field on the west side of the tracks. They were positioned one man every three yards, and every fourth man held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and the rest wielded Kalashnikovs.
The Dagestanis, led by exISI officers handpicked by General Rehan because of their paramilitary experience, were positioned fifty meters or so away from the track, and a ten-meter-long stretch of rail had been removed just moments before. The speeding train would come off the rails right there in front of Jamaat Shariat, it would grind into the dirt, and then the North Caucasus fighters would quickly go to work killing every last living thing in each and every car.
Rehan had forbidden smoking ever since the six big truckloads of men arrived earlier in the evening. Even though there was no one around for several kilometers in each direction, he also forbade speaking other than in a whisper, and all but essential radio communication.
Now his radio crackled to life. It was on an encrypted channel, but still the message was in code. "Ali, before you go to bed the hens must be fed. They will be hungry."
Rehan patted the nervous Russian s.p.a.ce entrepreneur crouched in the shed with him, then leaned into his ear. "That is my man up the tracks. The train is coming."
Safronov turned to Rehan and looked to him. Even in the low light of a rainy night, the man"s face looked pale. There was no reason for Safronov to even be here for this attack. Rehan had argued against it, telling the Russian that he was too precious to the overall mission. But Safronov had insisted. He demanded to be with his brothers each step of the way on this operation. Though he had left the training early in North Waziristan, that was only because, at that point, he was working twenty-hour days in Moscow organizing the three rocket launches in Baikonur, and ensuring that only his handpicked scientists and staff would be there with him when the time was right.
But there was no way he would have missed tonight"s fireworks, Rehan"s dominant personality be d.a.m.ned.
Rehan had finally acquiesced to letting Georgi come along for the op, but he held his ground on having him take no part in the attack itself. He even demanded that the man wear a chest plate and remain in the shed until they loaded everything on the trucks, and Rehan had put Colonel Khan himself in charge of making sure the Dagestani remained safe.
There were a few other men nearby, as well, who would not be part of the gunplay because they played a bigger role in the op. The cold, calculating general knew that selling the fantasy that a band of mountain men from Dagestan could pull off such an incredible operation in Pakistan would be difficult if not impossible. Many in the know would immediately place blame on the Islamists in the ISI for helping them. To deflect this blame, Rehan had set up one of the organizations with whom he"d been working for more than a decade. The Muslim United Liberation Tigers of a.s.sam, an Islamic militant group in India, had been penetrated by agents from India"s National Investigation Agency a year prior. When Rehan learned of MULTA"s infiltration he did not get angry, and he did not immediately cut ties with them. No, he saw this as an opportunity. He took men from MULTA who were insulated from the NIA penetration, and he brought them into his fold. He told them they would be part of an incredible operation in Pakistan that would involve stealing a nuclear weapon, returning with it to India, and detonating it in New Delhi. The men would be martyrs.
It was all a lie. He doc.u.mented their movements as he doc.u.mented Indian intelligence"s infiltration of their organization, saving evidence that he could use later to cover the tracks of the ISI in the theft of the bombs. He had plans for the four MULTA men here tonight, but it had nothing to do with them leaving these fields with the bombs.
These men would take the fall for the theft of the weapons, and by a.s.sociation the Indian government would have to explain their involvement with the group.
In furtherance of this ruse, Rehan and his men planned the attack with an appearance of sloppiness. A group of Islamic fighters from India being duped by Indian intelligence into working with Dagestani partisans in Pakistan would not possess any semblance of military precision, and for this reason the plan involved mayhem and chaos to achieve its objective.
Rehan heard a radio call from the unit farthest to the north. They reported the lights of the train in the distance.
The mayhem and chaos would begin within moments.
Rehan"s plan never would have worked if the Pakistani government put as much effort into securing its nukes from terrorists as it did securing them from their neighbor to the east. The bomb train could have been longer, full of an entire battalion of troops, it could have had helicopter gunship escorts for the entire route, and the Pakistani Defense Force could have stationed quick-reaction troops along the tracks in advance of the train"s leaving Kamra on its way to SarG.o.dha Air Force Base.
But all these high-profile measures that would virtually eliminate the chance that a terrorist group could overpower the train and take the weapons would also telegraph to Indian satellites, drones, and spies that the nukes were under deployment.
And the Pakistani Defense Force would not let that happen.