Killing Ground

“Where’s O’Brien?” the copilot asked.

“Caught a land mine up on the ridge,” Bolan told him. “Snipers started in on us before I could call for help. He’s gone.”

The copilot spit and readied one hand on the trigger operating the Little Bird’s outer machine gun. “Bastards!”

The men fell silent as the AH-6J banked into the clouds, using them for cover en route to the distant skirmish. Peering down through the mist, Bolan spotted another of the U.S. commando squads spread out in a column, threading their way along one of the mountain trails. They still had a few switchbacks to negotiate, however, and the Executioner doubted they’d reach the battle in time to be a factor.

Once they emerged from the cloud cover, Bolan saw a CH-47 Chinook hovering in place a quarter mile ahead over terrain that looked much the same as the area he’d just left—half-barren mountains ribboned with narrow trails and pocked by bombs and mortar fire. The Chinook’s tail gunner dispensed fire into the brush along a footpath high up near the top of a steep gorge. As they drew closer, Bolan saw a shadowed figure take a hit and plummet into the crevasse. Close by, a second Taliban crouched behind a large boulder, unseen by the tail gunner, drawing a bead on the Chinook with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. The Executioner whipped his H&K into firing position and steadied himself on the Little Bird’s skid. He cut loose with a single round, striking the boulder. When the Taliban turned toward him, Bolan was ready with a follow-up shot. This time he didn’t miss.

“Beat me to him,” the copilot shouted to Bolan. “Nice shot.”

Bolan pointed to the trail leading away from where he’d dropped the insurgent. “That looks like their way out,” he yelled. “Get me as close as you can!”

Bolan’s command was relayed to the pilot. The AH-6J promptly swerved right, then dipped toward the trail. Bolan crouched on the skid and waited until the chopper drew closer, then, clutching the MP-5, he pushed clear and dropped to the ground. He landed hard and felt a sharp pain in his right ankle as he lurched away from where the trailed dropped off into the abyss. He struck the rock facing just off the trail and winced as jagged gneiss bit through his shirt, drawing blood. Bolan ignored the wound and braced himself, ready to face the enemy.

3

Aden Saleh cursed as he watched one of his fellow warriors keel into the ravine, the victim of rounds fired from the large American warbird thundering out in the misty night air before him. The hope had been that dust storms forecast for the evening would have reached far enough into the mountains to thwart visibility and keep gunships from responding to the Taliban assault. Such had not been the case, now Saleh’s men were paying the price. Yes, they’d managed to take the enemy by surprise and decimate those who would have done the same to them, but the arrival of the helicopters threatened their chances of making a safe retreat to the tunnels through which they’d been able to reach the attack site undetected.

Saleh, a lean, grim-faced man who’d spent nearly half his thirty years rising up through the Taliban ranks, directed his wrath at the hovering Chinook, emptying the last rounds from his Kalashnikov, to little effect. His ammunition spent, he cast the assault rifle aside and yanked a 9 mm Ruger from his waistband. Fifty yards to his left, a smaller chopper had just deposited a soldier on the same footpath where he now stood. The entrance to the tunnel lay between them, but Saleh was closer to it and had no intention of letting the other man prevent him from making his getaway. He whirled and fired, forcing the enemy to cover, then charged forward, mere steps ahead of a strafing round fired his way from the Chinook.

Halfway to the bend where he’d last seen the American, Saleh threw himself to the ground and crawled off the path. He squeezed past a mound of holly just off the trail, then bellied his way beneath a rock formation protruding from the canyon wall. There, in the cold darkness, a manhole-size opening yawned its welcome. Saleh burrowed through the gap and wriggled past a loose boulder, following a narrow shaft to the point where it widened enough for him to rise to his knees. He had no interest in backtracking to reset the boulder that had earlier helped conceal the opening. If anything, at this point he hoped his pursuer would find the entrance and come after him.

Saleh crawled a few more yards, then squirmed clear of the shaft, entering a larger tunnel tall enough to stand in. He quickly brushed himself off, then made his way to the first turn. There he stopped and shoved the Ruger back in his waistband, and pulled from beneath the folds of his shirt a Soviet-made F-1 fragmentation grenade. He thumbed loose the cotter ring, then, pressing the safety lever, he drew in a breath, hoping to soothe the loud clamor of his racing heart. He needed to be able to hear the infidel’s approach, so that he would know when to let fly with the limonka and turn the entrance shaft into a death trap.

BOLAN STAYED PUT once the insurgent’s 9 mm serenade drove him to cover. There was no way for him to round the bend without placing himself back in the line of fire. By the same token, he figured the enemy would be unable to flee any farther without coming his way. Judging from the hail of gunfire spewing from the two choppers, the Executioner also thought there was a good chance any of the retreating Taliban would be dispensed with before they reached him.

As he awaited his next move, Bolan felt the warm trickle of blood running down his shoulder. He shrugged it off and tested his arm, then tried putting his full weight on his right foot. The ankle felt sprained, but not severely enough to hinder him, and he was certain that, at worse, he’d only need a couple stitches in his shoulder. He’d fought on countless times in the past with far worse injuries.

The firefight went on without him, but not for long. Soon the only shots were being fired from the helicopters, and then their guns fell silent, as well. As the Chinook lumbered away, the Little Bird pulled back from its firing position and briefly shone its light on the trail leading to the attack site, then slowly drifted Bolan’s way. Once the chopper was within shouting range, the copilot called out to Bolan.

“I think we got ’em all except the one just down the trail from you.” The man pointed to Bolan’s right. “Fucker dropped to his belly and went Houdini on us.”

“He couldn’t have just disappeared,” Bolan shouted back.

The copilot shrugged. “If you want to check it out, we’ll light the way.”

Bolan nodded, readying his MP-5. Once the searchlight illuminated the path before him, he ventured around the bend and cautiously made his way forward, slightly favoring his bad ankle. The dirt was etched with bootprints, all of them leading toward the staging site where the Special Ops force had been attacked. It was another twenty yards before he came upon more tracks. The imprints were different from the others, made by boots other than those worn by U.S. troops. All but one set of the tracks led to the ambush site; the other, headed the opposite way, had been made by the man whose retreat Bolan had hoped to prevent. There was a spot where the latter tracks stopped and had been smudged away, along with the other prints. Bolan surmised the reason and glanced to his right, where a small thicket of holly just off the trail had been partially flattened.

The Executioner pointed his gun into the brush while signaling for the Little Bird to shift position. Once the search light had been redirected, Bolan saw there was clearance beneath a protuberance in the rock wall that flanked the trail. Cautiously he dropped to a crouch for a better look. Just enough light made its way into the clearance for him to spot the tunnel opening.

Bolan signaled for the chopper to hold steady, then leaned inward. He was about to enter the cavity when he checked himself and stopped, heeding an instinct honed by years on the battlefield.

“I don’t think so,” he murmured to himself.

Bolan retreated long enough to track down a handful of stones lying along the side of the trail. Clustering them in his fist, he ventured back to the opening, took aim and flung them into the darkness.

Just as the Executioner took a step back there was an explosion. The ground beneath him shook, and he bent at the knees to steady himself as loose debris and frag shards flew out from the opening, laying waste to the holly. Bolan was spared the worst of it, except for a few bits of shrapnel that glanced off his shins.

The blast was short-lived, and in its wake a foul tendril of smoke curled its way through the collapsed remnants of what had once been the tunnel. Bolan could no longer see the opening, but he suspected it would no longer be large enough for anyone to squeeze through.

He was still staring at the damage when the chopper pulled closer.

“Tunnel?” the copilot shouted out to him.

“Not anymore,” Bolan called back.

IT TOOK ANOTHER ten minutes for two of the other Special Ops squads to reach the ambush site. With the fighting over, there was nothing left for them to do but help Bolan and the Chinook crew load casualties into the bulky gunship, which had touched down on a plateau eighty yards to the north. It was a sobering task. Of the twelve commandos who’d been attacked, eleven had been slain, their bodies riddled with far more kill shots than had been necessary to take them out. The twelfth commando was also near death and had passed out after confirming that the unit had been attacked by enemy forces who’d clearly used the hidden tunnel to slip undetected within striking distance.

As for the Taliban, six men had been cut down just off the trail near the rocks and dwarf spruce that they’d taken position behind once the first shots had been fired. At least two more were reported to have gone over the side during the ensuing firefight. There was no way of knowing, at this point, how many men had managed to retreat back into the tunnel before Bolan’s arrival. The Executioner had inspected the blasted opening shortly after the explosion and confirmed that it was too collapsed and choked with debris to be of use. The AH-6J Little Bird had set out to comb the surrounding mountains in hopes of spotting anyone using another way out of the tunnel. Bolan doubted that anything would come of the search. One of the arriving squad leaders was of a similar sentiment.

“Fuckers are like cockroaches,” Captain Rob Kitt said. Kitt was a pallid, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties. He wore a headset-equipped helmet bearing the same camo pattern as his fatigues. “If you can’t stomp ’em before they slip through the cracks, forget about it.”

“You got that right,” another of the commandos said. “Hell, we could punch these mountains with bunker busters from now till doomsday, and there’d still be tunnels left for them to scurry through.”

While the last of the U.S. casualties were being carted off, Bolan and Kitt, each clutching a high-powered flashlight, took a closer look at the slain Taliban fighters and their weapons. In addition to AK-47s and the ASG-17 grenade launcher Bolan had prevented from being used on the Chinook, the terrorists had carried out their attack with knockoff G-3s as well as at least two well-worn M-16s that looked as if they dated back more than twenty years to America’s campaign to support mujahideen forces opposed to the Soviet occupation.

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Kitt murmured as he inspected one of the M-16s. “Killed with our own goddamn weapons.”

“The Kalashnikovs are just as old,” Bolan said.

“Probably scavenged off dead Russkies,” Kitt theorized. “We’ll haul ’em back to Bagram along with the bodies. Maybe AI can find something that’ll clue us in on where they set out from.”

When the captain’s headset squawked, Kitt excused himself and wandered off, leaving Bolan to muse over the fallen enemy. All but one of them looked to be in their early twenties, wearing black turbans and dark, loose clothing, much of it bloodstained with gunshot wounds. The oldest victim, and by far the most heavily bearded, had a scar along his right cheek and was missing two fingers on his left hand. When Bolan’s flashlight caught a gleam of metal beneath the folds of the man’s shirt, he leaned over and found an automatic pistol tucked inside his waistband. Like the C3s, it was handmade, a crude approximation of a U.S. Government Model 1911. Bolan had seen footage of Taliban camps where children worked by candlelight manufacturing such guns as a means of supplementing the insurgents’ arsenal. The weapons were notorious for jamming or even exploding when triggered, and Bolan wondered if that had been the cause for the man’s missing fingers.

Bolan had begun to search the man more thoroughly when Kitt returned.

“That was Little Bird,” he reported. “No luck tracking down any stragglers.”

“What about O’Brien?” Bolan asked. “Did they get to him?”

“We’ve got a problem there,” Kitt replied. “They went to ridgeline and can see where he tripped the mine, but there’s no sign of him.”

Bolan’s expression darkened. “He was shot through the neck. There’s no way he could have pulled through.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Kitt said. “My guess is the snipers took the body as some sort of consolation prize.”

Bolan’s stomach knotted with rage. If he’d had it all to do over, he’d have reacted the same way once the ambush had broken out, but that did little to ease his mind over the notion that Howitzer O’Brien had been left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

4

Remnants of a late-season hurricane had wandered far enough inland to lash Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with a torrential downpour that left Stony Man Farm, like many other estates scattered throughout the Shenandoah Valley, drenched and wind-battered. Barbara Price, mission controller for the Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group, was out helping the blacksuit security force tend to the damage. Sloshing through rain puddles, bundled up warmly against the late-autumn chill, the blond-haired woman gathered up snapped twigs and broken tree limbs that lay strewed in the orchards and added them to a growing heap in the truck bed of one of the Farm’s Ford F-150 pickups.

“Could have been worse,” one of the blacksuits told her as he stomped on the debris, compressing it to make room for more. Like the others, he had a web-holstered 9 mm pistol concealed beneath his down-lined ski vest and gave no appearance of being anything other than a hired farmhand. “A little colder and the trees would’ve iced over. If you think this is a mess…”

“We’re not out of it yet,” Price said, casting an eye on the dark, leaden clouds still massed over the valley. There was more rain in the forecast, and she could only hope the temperature wouldn’t dip low enough to threaten the trees further.

As Price gathered up the last of the fallen branches, a rumbling sounded overhead. It wasn’t thunder, but rather the familiar, mechanical drone of an approaching helicopter. Moments later, a small Bell 47 two-seater dropped below the cloud line and approached the camouflaged runway that lay between the orchards and the dormant planting fields.

“I’ll let you guys finish up,” Price said. She took a large thermos from the front seat of the truck and made her way to the runway. By the time a bulky, middle-aged man wearing a rumpled trench coat had disembarked from the helicopter, she’d filled the thermos cap with coffee.

“Not exactly fresh from the pot,” Price said, holding out the coffee. “It’s still hot, though, and way too strong.”

“Just the way I like it.” Hal Brognola, SOG’s director, mustered a wan, close-lipped smile. “Thanks.”

By the time he’d taken his first sip, Brognola’s smile had faded. Price knew it had nothing to do with the coffee. She’d been there to greet Brognola enough times after his return from Washington briefings to know from his expression that the President had just confided in him about some active global threat that would require placing the Farm’s elite covert operatives directly in harm’s way.

“Afghanistan?” she guessed as they strode from the runway. When Brognola eyed her, she went on, “I spoke with Striker earlier. He filled me in on the ambush.”

“The ambush is just part of it,” Brognola replied. “And so is the whole matter of this missing soldier.”

“Okay, you’ve got my attention,” Price said. “Let’s have it.”

“It has to do with the Afghan National Army and this whole call for pulling out Western troops.” When they reached the main house, Brognola led the way up the front porch, nodding to the blacksuit stationed near the front door. The security agent stepped aside, holding the door open. As they proceeded inside, the SOG director told Price, “At the same time we took this hit at Safed Koh, the ANA was routing a Taliban squad up to the north near Jalalabad.”

“They’ve been on a roll lately, haven’t they,” Price said. It was more of a statement than a question.

“That’s just it,” Brognola said. “Up until a few months ago, the pattern was always reversed, with us making headway and having to lend ANA a hand. Then there was all this clamor about pullouts and the Afghans decided they wanted to run their own operations without our input.”

“‘Meddling’ is how I think they put it.”

Brognola nodded. At the end of the main hall was a staircase. As they took the steps down, he said, “In any event, since this shift they’ve been catching all the breaks while we keep running into setbacks. It plays in nicely with their calls for autonomy, but the President and Joint Chiefs think it’s all a little too convenient. I’m inclined to agree.”

“Same here,” Price said.

Once they reached the basement, it was a short walk down to the mouth of a large underground passageway. There was a small electric rail car parked just inside the opening. Brognola took the wheel. Price rode shotgun.

“So I’m guessing it’s up to us to see if there’s something hinky going on,” she said as the car started down the tunnel.

“Correct. The bottom line is this,” Brognola said. “If the ANA is legitimately trouncing the Taliban, we want to know how they’re doing it. Just as important, we want to make sure they’re doing it on their own.”

“You think maybe they’ve cut a deal elsewhere?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Brognola said. “I’ve thought through a game plan, but I’d like your input before we run it past the cybercrew.”

“No problem,” Price responded, “That’s what a mission controller’s for.”

ONCE ALL THE FALLEN BRANCHES were loaded into the pickup, one of the blacksuits drove from the orchards to the Annex, a large outbuilding located on the far east perimeter of the estate next to a stand of young poplars that had been equally pummeled by the storm. Inside the building, limbs and twigs from the latter trees were being fed into the growling maw of an industrial wood chipper and turned into mulch, one of the by-products that was presented to the outside world as proof of Stony Man Farm’s agricultural reason for being. The various enterprises did, in fact, cover a portion of the Farm’s sizable overhead, but the site had a more far-reaching agenda. There in the Annex, one floor beneath the thick concrete slab upon which the wood chipper carried out its noisy duties, Price and Brognola had just emerged from the underground tunnel and were making their way to the Computer Room, nerve center for America’s best-kept secret in the covert war against those intent, one way or another, on bringing the country to its knees.

“That sounds like the way to go,” Price said, once Brognola had laid out his strategy for dealing with the situation in Afghanistan. “We’re going to have our hands full, though.”

“Fortunately, that’s something we’re used to,” Brognola replied as he opened the door for his colleague.

“I’ll apprise Striker while you brief the others.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The Computer Room was a vast brightly lit chamber with workstations positioned here and there, a far wall lined with large flat-screen monitors that flashed an ever-changing patchwork of display maps, news feeds and images from aerial sat cams. Three-quarters of the Stony Man cybernetic crew—Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and Carmen Delahunt—were on duty, laboring intently at their consoles to provide needed INTEL and logistical backup for SOG commando teams on assignment both at home and abroad. One by one, however, they took note of Price and Brognola’s arrival and quickly shifted their attention.

Price exchanged a brief greeting with the others, then ex cused herself and moved to a corner alcove, where she dialed out on a secured phone line routed through enough code scramblers to sidestep any possible attempt to intercept the call. Brognola, meanwhile, unbuttoned his trench coat and raided the liner pocket for a twenty-dollar Padron, one of two dozen such hand-rolled cigars presented to him by Phoenix Force leader David McCarter upon that unit’s successful return from a mission three weeks ago in Nicaragua. There had been a time, years ago, when Brognola would have lit up and shrugged off the gibes of those who took exception to the pungent smoke, but times had changed and the big Fed now contented himself with rolling the cigar between his fingers as he spoke or chewing on it.

“Where’s Akira?” he queried, glancing at a vacant station normally commandeered by the cybercrew’s youngest member, Akira Tokaido.

“Catnap in the lounge,” answered Delahunt, a fiery redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of the FBI. “We started a union while you were out and decided we deserve a little shut-eye when the brain cells overheat.”

Brognola rolled with the wisecrack. “Fine by me,” he said. “As long as you do it in shifts. Just don’t start asking for maid service and mints on your pillows.”

“Fair enough.”

Wethers, a one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor with neither the knack nor patience for small talk, cleared his throat, eager to steer focus back to more pressing concerns.

“Something came up at the briefing, I take it,” he said to Brognola. “Does it have to do with Striker and the Taliban?”

Brognola nodded, shedding his trench coat and draping it over the back of Tokaido’s chair.

SOG’s two commando units, Able Team and Phoenix Force, invariably handled missions as a group, but Bolan’s preference, as it had been when he first set out for Afghanistan, was to work alone, knowing the crew back in Virginia would cover his back. Brognola intended to do all he could to see that the Farm held up its end of the bargain. He quickly passed along news of the Safed Koh ambush, concluding with the update Price had received earlier from Bolan.

“We’ve had no luck rounding up anyone who left the attack site,” he said. “The feeling is they’ve managed to slip back into Pakistan, most likely with O’Brien’s body.”

“By Pakistan I take it you mean the tribal region,” Delahunt said.

“That’s always been our premise, and there’s nothing here to suggest otherwise,” Brognola said. “The ambushers we were able to recover are with Army Intelligence at Bagram. They’re going through personal effects while the bodies are autopsied to see if there’s some dietary tip-off as to where they might have been holed up.”

“Dietary tip-off?” Kurtzman asked. “That’s a new one on me.”

“Different tribes, different crops,” Brognola said. “If any of them have undigested food in their system, it could be as good as finding fingerprints in a homicide case.”

“‘Alimentary, my dear Watson,’” Delahunt said, invoking a Sherlock Holmesian British accent. When Wethers shot her a stern glance, she told him, “C’mon, Hunt, a little levity won’t grind things to a halt, okay?”

“Does that make it another one of our ‘union perks’?”

Delahunt laughed. “Hey, what do you know, Hunt made a funny.”

“Okay, people,” Brognola interceded. “Can we get back to the task at hand? Following up on this ambush is just our first step. There’s a wider picture we need to be looking at, as well.”