Pulling his focus back to the current situation, he let go of the reins and allowed his hand to creep toward his robes. He had with him the GPS Morse code transmitter, hidden deep inside one of his pockets, and started to type out a new message, his hand hidden. He kept his face passive. He knew that those with him were warriors who lived and died by spotting enemy action, even that done in a surreptitious manner, immediately. The risk was huge, but so was the impending threat.
AM HEADING TOWARD EMIR HIDEOUT. EARLIER COMMUNICATION CONFIRMED. TARGET PROBAB—
That was as far as he got. In his effort to conceal what he was doing, he’d been holding his hand at an unnatural angle on the small transmitter. It slipped and flew out of his hand, and through a hole in his cloak, landing on the hard shale and clattering as it bounced off the rocks. Marak looked up instantly, his hard and ruthless eyes scanning the slope to find the cause of the noise. With a quickness that belied his size, he dismounted and threaded his way between the shale and rock to retrieve the small device.
“Yousseff, look at this.” Marak held up the small silver device, no larger than a watch, with its two small buttons and softly pulsing red light. Yousseff immediately identified it.
“It is a GPS locator.” Yousseff had used similar devices many times in his own business. He motioned to the two other riders. “Who?” he asked.
“Him.” Marak pointed to Zak. “It fell out of his chapan.”
“You, Shayam? You would betray us?” Yousseff shook his head. “Marak, take him,” he ordered.
Zak knew the game was up. He would be Shayam no longer. So close, he thought. More than four years getting here. Now here he was, almost on top of the lair, and the mission was disintegrating, thwarted by a hole in a damn cloak. Zak had seen other men caught betraying Yousseff, and knew that the next few hours would not be pleasant. He made the quick decision that he would rather die fighting, and reached for his revolver, a copy of a 9 mm Beretta. He pulled it out and fired a round, but Marak had reached for his own weapon at the same instant, pushing his master to the ground.
“Down Youssi!” he yelled, firing simultaneously.
Zak’s bullet only grazed Yousseff’s right shoulder. When he fired, his horse bolted at the abrupt noise, and caught Marak’s bullet in the neck. It reared in shock and pain, throwing Zak into the hard shale rock, almost at Marak’s feet. The sharp rock he landed on sliced open his thigh.
Pain flooded through him. He saw Marak’s massive arms reaching down for him, to yank him up off the stony ground. He could feel blood running down his leg from the wound, and wondered vaguely if the bleeding was serious. Then he forgot about his leg. Marak was a large and powerful man, standing over six feet tall, with the body of a weightlifter and the fists of a boxer. He grabbed Zak by the neck and rammed his enormous fist into his nose, smashing it. A second blow and Zak felt his jaw crack. His nervous system was flooded with piercing waves of pain, then mercifully shut down as he plunged into unconsciousness.
Yousseff reached for the device and examined it. He found the on/off switch and turned it off. “Here is what we need to do,” he said, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead and speaking quickly. “Take this man, Shayam, or whoever he is, along the Path of Allah, and to the dungeon below Inzar Ghar. Extract from him whatever information you can, and drop his body into some remote canyon in the Hindu Kush. Vince will be waiting for me at the shipyard in Karachi, as we’ve already planned. I need to be there in three days. Marak, Ghullam, be at the Islamabad hangar early tomorrow morning. There will be much to arrange.”
“What about you?” asked Ghullam. “Surely you’re not going the rest of the way alone?”
“There is no choice, Ghullam. It will be fine. I grew up in these mountains. They are home to me.” Yousseff turned again to Marak. “Marak, old friend, you saved my life. Thank you.”
“Yousseff, you have saved mine many times. And in any event, you are the boss,” replied Marak. “You do recall that, don’t you?” he added with a grin, rather sheepishly rubbing the back of his head with his hand.
“Yes, I do remember,” said Yousseff, looking down on Jalalabad. For a few moments he grew quiet as his mind wandered back. “Yes, I do.” He had never forgotten it. He allowed his mind to return to the childhood fight that had shaped his life. The day he had learned never to be where his adversaries assumed he would be. Now he based his life on that principle, and his vast smuggling operations incorporated the theme over and over again.
Yousseff Said Al-Sabbhan was 12, and weighed in at 87 pounds. Marak el Ghazi was 14, and weighed over 110. Yousseff, while physically quick, was no match for Marak’s snakelike reflexes, or his much greater physical strength. Marak had already earned the nickname Rasta, which meant “snake.” If the match had been taking place in Las Vegas, the odds would have been 50:1, or worse, against Yousseff. The younger boy knew this, but had no choice. Marak had cast dishonor on Yousseff’s family by calling one of his sisters a whore. When Yousseff had demanded an apology, Marak had responded by calling all of his sisters, and his mother, whores. He had then continued the taunting, saying that he would only apologize if he was forced to. Marak had challenged Yousseff to fight, and the small boy had accepted. He now regretted having acted so impulsively. He knew he had no chance of winning, much less coming out undamaged. But the duel had been set. The Four Cedars. Noon. Tomorrow.
“Youssi,” said Izzy, the little friend who had been faithful since his earliest memories. “What are you going to do? He’s twice your size, and mean as a cornered dog. He’ll kill you!”
“Don’t know, Iz. But I can’t back down.”
“Youssi, please don’t,” sobbed Rika, the bright-eyed ten-year-old girl who thought she was in love with him. “He’s too big, he’s too mean. Don’t.”
“Rika, he has called my sisters whores. He can’t get away with that.”
The Four Cedars was in fact a small cedar grove just south of Jalalabad. The space marked by the four trees formed a large arena, about 20 feet square in dimension. Schoolboys often settled disputes there; the statement “I’ll see you at the Four Cedars” was clearly understood as a call to battle. Yousseff knew the area well — not from fighting, which he was not interested in or good at, but from the climbing that he loved. He had spent many delicious afternoons perched in the tops of these cedar trees. There was a special group of branches near the crown of one of the trees that permitted him to lie securely, flat on his back, more than 60 feet above the ground. He loved to gaze upwards at the clouds and feel the gentle rocking motion of the tree in the wind, drifting, free from gravity. He had made a bet with one of his friends earlier that year that he could scoot to the top of one of the trees and make it back down in less than 20 seconds, and won. When Marak had said to name the place, he, for reasons he did not understand, had named the Four Cedars. Maybe instinctively he had felt that battles are more easily fought on home turf. The Four Cedars were more a home to him than to Marak, albeit from a different vantage point.