When Turbee shared his news, it was Rahlson who stated the obvious. “So we apply Occam’s Razor reasoning to this. There were two likely candidates for the vehicle of the Emir’s terror. One was the nuclear threat, the other the stolen Semtex. Now that we know that the nuclear threat was a hoax, it gets knocked out of the picture. Only one possibility remains.”
“Wonderful,” replied Turbee. “Now all we need to figure out is where the Semtex is, and how it can possibly be used to destroy a major American city.”
“You’re the one who gets to tell Alexander when he shows up,” Khasha told Rahlson. “He’s used 95 % of TTIC’s work force to chase smoke for the last week.”
Turbee laughed loudly at the irony. “Now we’re the ones waiting for him to show. And we’re the ones who get to tell him how he screwed up.”
“Yeah,” said George, who had just arrived. “Maybe he’ll get to spend a night or two at St. Liz’s.”
48
In the Sefid Koh, Jennifer and Richard were moving east, in a desperate attempt to get within cell phone range. They ran for 15 minutes, then rested for five, as Richard tried to orient himself and recover. Jennifer urged him onward, but it was a losing battle. He was in terrible shape, his hair caked and matted with dry blood, and his clothes soaked in perspiration. He had become totally unfocused as a result of the pain, fatigue, and drugs. He was carrying on long and emotional conversations with the bone he had found in Inzar Ghar. It was late afternoon when Jennifer detected a distant but ominous sound. The dull whapping noise of rotors.
“Richard, that’s a helicopter,” she breathed. “Of course. The drug lords would have alerted the local police force. All they had to say to get a helicopter or two in the air would be that two dangerous cop-killing psychopaths were on the loose in the Frontier Province. That would be enough to get helicopters going back in the US. Why not here?”
“So it would.” Richard had perked up a bit when he heard the sound — the lucid side of his brain seemed to kick into action if the danger became more immediate, a fact for which Jennifer was supremely grateful. He grabbed her arm and pulled. “Let’s go, we don’t have a lot of time left.”
They continued on their upward journey. Occasionally a helicopter would come within a half mile or so, and they would duck down under whatever cover was available. The ascent was steep in parts, gentle in others, but ever upward. It was well into the afternoon when they reached subalpine grassland, dotted with small yellow cedars, poplars, and wormwood. There was nothing but sky at the far end of the pasture.
“Could be a drop off there,” said Jennifer. “Watch yourself.”
Richard was making grumbling noises, which sounded a bit like “yes.” He continued to moan in pain, and was mumbling incoherently about plane crashes and car accidents. He had obviously slipped back into his psychotic realm.
They covered the next 100 feet slowly, with Jennifer looking toward the sky anxiously, watching for helicopters or search planes. When they reached the pasture’s edge, Jennifer instinctively stopped, and pulled a reeling Richard back from the cliff. She leaned over the side and realized that she was looking at least 2,000 feet straight down. The precipice at the bottom of the drop snaked on for what appeared to be miles in both directions. There was no apparent path or negotiable trail visible. They had reached a dead end. The drug runners and their helicopters were looking for them, and would be broadening their search upward from the valley floor. They could not go back. Their only option was to follow the cliff edge, either to the left or to the right.
“Holy shit,” breathed Richard, still hanging on to the chunk of bone. “That’s half a mile straight down.” He was reeling, fighting vertigo and nausea, and backing slowly away from the cliff edge. Jennifer grabbed his shoulder, concerned that in his drugged and delusional state he would simply lurch over the edge, either from lack of balance or just because he believed that he possessed the power of flight.
“That way,” said Richard, pointing left, in one of his flashes of lucidity. “As the crow flies, that will take us further away from that fortress. They’ll be searching in concentric circles from there. Let’s put as many miles between them and us as possible.”
“Brilliant strategy. What do you think we’ve been trying to do for the past 12 hours?” came the acid reply.
Richard muttered under his breath and fumbled through his jacket pocket in search of more medication. Jennifer rolled her eyes again and grabbed him, dragging him along before he had a chance to pop any more pills. Soon they found themselves on a long plateau, with grassy fields between them and the cliff’s edge. Had their circumstances been less desperate, Jennifer would have taken time to survey the stunningly beautiful panorama beyond the ridge. Snow-capped mountains loomed in the distance, with small villages interspersed along the valley. At the edge of the horizon, obscured by haze, meandered the mighty Indus River.
“We need to go in that direction,” slurred Richard, pointing east.
“I agree,” said Jennifer. “But we’ll need to stay away from unprotected ground. We follow the edge from back there,” she said, pointing to the thicker tree cover that ran along the meadow about 50 feet back from the cliff. “Every once in a while I’ll go to the edge and see if there’s anything navigable along that face.”
“Shut up. I was talking to Zak,” responded Richard. “And besides, I can go check the cliff just as easily as you can.”
“Yeah. Right. You’d stumble and fall in a parking lot. As if I’m going to agree to you getting near a cliff,” Jennifer snapped. “As for taking you down that cliff without a path… I’d have to take a bunch of those pills to be crazy enough to do that.”
Richard mumbled incoherently in response.
Jennifer threw her hands in the air, finally losing patience with the situation. She wasn’t trained for the field. She’d never had to deal with people chasing her, trying to kill her. And the fucking CIA had partnered her with a drug addict! She didn’t know if she could count on him to help the situation, and now it turned out that she had to watch his every step, just to make sure he didn’t fall over the edge of a cliff while they were trying to escape. Now that the adrenalin of actually running was leaving her system, she was starting to feel like it was hopeless.
“Screw it, Navy boy,” she almost shouted. “I don’t know what the hell to do. Maybe just staying alive for the next 12 hours is all it’ll take. By then Buckingham may have got things moving on finding us. It’s all I can really think of.”
Richard began mumbling again, directing his comments primarily to Zak, who was silent as they retreated to the cover of the trees. The pounding pain in his head had not subsided, and he was desperately thirsty. He was down to his last few Vicodin. He would run out soon, and at the moment he feared that more than he feared the possibility of capture.
For the next half hour, as they walked through the trees, Jennifer made several short trips to the cliff edge, and each time coming back to Richard shaking her head. No trail, no easing of the precipice. Several times they shrank under the cover of the cedar and poplar trees, fearful of detection from the air. There appeared to be several helicopters now involved in the chase, and they were flying ever closer to their location. At one point they found a small stream that cascaded over the cliff edge. The water seemed to invigorate Richard, but in truth, it only helped him in swallowing another three Vicodin. The gnawing fear was increasing. He knew that he was slipping over the edge, but had lost the ability to care. It was all too much.
When he started feeling too dizzy and weak, he simply announced to Jennifer that he was going to sit down and await his fate.