Yousef stepped out of the truck and sprayed the rocks with a full clip of ammunition. Sparks popped up as the bullets careened off the harder rocks. He stooped down below the truck, ejected the empty magazine, and loaded another.
Just as Yousef turned to spray the rocks with another clip, he felt a metal cylinder pressed against the back of his head.
“Put the rifle down.” The voice was in English.
Yousef didn’t turn around. Without doubt, the man he knew as Sadik Zabara would squeeze the trigger. He heard not an inkling of hesitation in his voice. Yousef dropped the rifle.
“You will not escape this valley,” said Yousef. “You will die here.”
“Lie down on the ground.”
Yousef lay spread-eagled with Parker’s foot on his back. Parker slid his hand down the side of Yousef ’s coat, finding a cell phone. He tossed it into the rocks.
Yousef started to raise himself up, and Parker popped him on the side of the head with the pistol.
“Who are you?”
Parker didn’t answer.
“I’ll have them cut your throat with a dull blade.”
Parker ignored the threat and searched through the other side of Yousef’s coat until he found what he wanted. The international cell phone.
“You have meningitis. You can feel it by now. The fever. Neck and head pain? At best, you have a few hours of consciousness left. Do you understand?”
Now Yousef lay in silence.
Parker turned the cell phone on, hunching below the truck and out of sight of the approaching trucks. The phone only had two numbers in it. He looked at them closely, memorizing the numbers carefully despite his head aching, nausea, and fever overwhelming his body.
312?
Chicago.
Parker crushed the second phone and tossed it far in to the darkness. He turned to Yousef.
“December twenty-first, 1988. You recognize the date?”
“No.”
“How about Pan Am 103?”
Sullen silence.
Parker cracked Yousef on the back of his skull with the pistol butt. It was a good, solid hit, but only intended to stun him. Yousef would remain conscious, but the disease would continue its progress. The lining to his brain would continue to swell and the bleeding would start. Blood seeping out of the corners of his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes turning black, with the blackness progressing up his legs and arms. Shortly, his legs would not work. He would try to speak, but nothing would come out. Soon the smell of rotten flesh from gangrene would keep any human away. It would not be a fair death nor one that Yousef would want his young son to watch. It would only be fair to the many whose deaths Yousef had caused.
“With exactness grinds He all.” Parker slipped into the darkness.
CHAPTER 71
“What the hell is going on?” Scott looked at the thermal sensor from the Predator floating over the valley. An armada of vehicles was coming up the valley, each vehicle loaded with small white thermal dots signifying an army of men.
“Sir, it’s a pile.”
The airman moved the thermal sensor on the aircraft. In the hillside above the valley two white dots were moving back up the valley. Farther up, three more white dots were on the ridgeline.
Scott could see two white dots next to the lead vehicle. The truck remained motionless. Its lights stood out in the thermal-registered darkness like the beacon of a lighthouse.
“We need some help.”
Prevatt sat in the chair in front of the terminal. “I have a fully loaded Predator on station to the south. I can get it up there in thirty minutes.”
“But can we get them out of there?”
Prevatt was silent for a moment.
“You had a mission of Blackhawks, but the wind and altitude killed it.” Even in perfect weather, Blackhawk helicopters could, at best, climb to a ceiling of fifteen to twenty thousand feet, which barely puts them in the valleys of these ranges.
“Sir, we have another problem.” The junior airman zoomed the view on another terminal out to a hundred-mile radius. It was the radar for the sector. Several objects were moving in from the south.
“Pakistani Air Force.”
“A flight of helicopters.” The airman spoke up. “On the other side of the front.”
“Maybe they can help,” said Scott.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They will assume that no one is friendly up there,” Prevatt cut in, “and if we tell them otherwise, they will probably take your men down just out of spite. Remember: They’re missing a couple of freshly stolen nukes. They are royally pissed off. I expect they’ll shoot at any moving target. Period.”
“What are our options?”
“Your men could pull back into the mountains and wait a couple of weeks.”
“That’s not an option. One of them is very sick.” Scott knew that Parker would never make it another day, let alone another week. Plus, he was contagious. “By now, more than one.”
“We have a Marine special-ops team about an hour south of here,” said the younger airman.
“If an Army team can’t get in with Blackhawks, what are the Marines supposed to do to get there in time?”
“They — ah — have another way of getting there.”
Scott looked at the convoy of trucks moving up the pass, then to Prevatt. “What do you think, Colonel?”
Prevatt shrugged. “It’s our only choice.”
CHAPTER 72
Whap, whap.
Bullets started to pop over Parker’s head as he struggled to get back to Moncrief and the safety of the rocks.
Whap. Zing.
Jesus, how many of them are there?
Parker tried to zig and zag, but the disease seemed to have affected his sense of balance. Every step felt as if his foot were sinking into a bog. The wind did the rest, resisting every step he tried to make. He bounced off the boulders, trying to keep his balance.
A much larger caliber bullet flew over his head. This time the rifle was firing from the rocks ahead and shooting back toward the approaching convoy. Moncrief’s Windrunner was tearing through the engine blocks of the vehicles in the chase. Occasionally, a man would drop as well. The .338 bullet needed only to strike a meaty portion of the target’s body, for then the force of the blow would punch out the arm or the leg or the flank of the target. It was like being pummeled at close range with a shotgun loaded with ball bearings.
Whoosh.
Parker heard the small crack that followed as the round passed through the air at supersonic speed. But this time the rifle was coming from yet another direction. From behind Parker came a long, sickly moan.
Gut shot, he thought automatically. Another sniper from our team, shooting to wound.
Others in the army heard the man’s moans and cries for help, and with those cries others began decelerating their trucks, lightening their attack. The rat-tat-tat of AK-47s slowed, like popcorn finishing in a microwave.
“William?”
Parker heard the voice from behind a rock that he just passed.
“Gunny?”
“Well, I hope you got what in the hell you wanted to get. Does the word Alamo mean anything to you?” Moncrief’s wide smile could be seen in the flash of headlights from the trucks.
“I bet you tell jokes at your best friend’s funeral too, don’t you?”
“We need to head up to our alternate rendezvous site. It’s about a click.” Moncrief didn’t even ask if Parker could make it. It didn’t matter. He had to make it.