Crosswhite retrieved his weapons, pausing to make sure their pursuers were dead before dashing back down the passageway. He called out over the radio: “Alpha, the claymore did its job. I’m moving to catch up.”
“Roger that,” Alpha replied. “Take a left at the end of the passageway, then another right. We’re about fifty yards from your position, behind a stone wall. Be advised we are taking fire!”
Crosswhite could hear the rotors of the Black Hawk helicopters arriving high overhead now, well inside of the outer marker. He got them on the radio next.
“Bank Heist Two, be advised we’re in a running fight down here! There’s no way for you to extract us safely at this time. Pull back to the outer marker. Over!”
“Bank Heist One, be advised we are maintaining an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet. If you will activate your infrared strobes, we’ll try and put a little bit of heat on those bad guys for you. Over.”
Crosswhite kept moving, realizing the helos were maintaining an altitude of 3,500 feet because an enemy RPG-7 self-detonated at a distance of roughly 3,000 feet. He doubted, however, that an RPG would fly that high if fired straight up into the air. “Negative, negative, Bank Heist! The bad guys are all mixed in with the civilians down here.”
He could hear small arms chattering elsewhere in the village now and realized the helos had already begun taking fire. He switched on the infrared strobe attached to his combat harness and ordered the rest of the team to do the same so the helo gunners could tell friend from foe. He heard a loud explosion high over the village and realized that some wing nut had just tried to shoot down one of the helos with an RPG.
“Bank Heist Two, did you take any damage from that RPG? Over.”
“Negative, Bank Heist.” The pilot’s voice sounded almost bored. “Listen, we’ve got a pretty good visual on both you and the enemy now. They seem to have anticipated your march route out. They’re assembled and waiting for you in the rocks just below the village. Why don’t you clear us to fire and let us expedite your exfiltration? Over.”
Crosswhite realized that by now either the NSA or the CIA — or both — would be intercepting all of this excessive radio traffic and that pretty soon their unauthorized mission would be hitting prime time. “Bank Heist, you advise they’re clear of the village? Over.”
“Roger that, Bank Heist. But we’d better fire soon, because they’re moving back toward the village now. Over.”
“Take ’em, Bank Heist.”
“Roger that. Get your heads down, gentlemen.”
Crosswhite managed to reestablish contact with the rest of the team just as the Night Stalker gunners began to engage the Taliban fighters outside the village with a pair of M134, 20 mm Gatling guns that fired up to 6,000 rounds per minute. From their position behind the stone wall, they watched as the Taliban broke from the cover of the rocks, running for their lives in every direction. The hot 20 mm tracers sought them out like red laser beams, exploding their bodies with hundred-round bursts of fire, raking the mountainside with great, sweeping arcs of fire. Within a few seconds, twenty-five Taliban fighters were obliterated.
Crosswhite ordered the team out from behind the wall. They made their way five hundred yards down the mountain to a relatively flat piece of real estate they had preselected as their extraction zone and waited for the first Black Hawk to set down. The second helo remained on station high overhead, providing top-cover.
The crew chief jumped out and saluted Crosswhite. “The word’s out, Captain. We’ve just received orders to return to base immediately. We haven’t acknowledged the transmission, but they know we’re listening. We should have F-15s buzzing the area any time now.”
Crosswhite signaled for Naeem to be brought front and center. “Sergeant Major… this is Romeo.”
The crew chief raised the visor on his flight helmet and grinned in the Taliban leader’s face. “Congratulations, Mr. Taliban. At this particular moment in time, you have the distinction of being the unluckiest man on the entire planet.”
CHAPTER 32
Robert Pope stood in a dark room before a bank of high-resolution video monitors used for viewing the live feed from a CIA spy satellite locked in a geosynchronous orbit some two hundred miles above the earth’s surface. He allowed his mind to drift as he watched the Black Hawk helicopter lift into the air. The battle of Waigal Village was apparently over, but it did not appear that the rescue team had located Sandra Brux, and the identity of their male prisoner remained to be seen. The call sign Romeo meant nothing to him. He patted a lone pair of technicians on their shoulders and turned for the door.
“Nice work, ladies. Make sure that video card disappears into the proper black hole, will you, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
He gave them a wink and slipped into the hallway. Pope wasn’t remotely worried that anyone would ever find out he had watched the unauthorized mission — from start to finish — without reporting it to the director of the CIA. He was at the very tip-top of the intelligence food chain. No one knew more about the systems than he did, and no one oversaw his work. The buck stopped with him in his private little corner of the world. Many of the computer programs he used these days were programs that he had custom written for his own personal use, secret programs running parallel to the authorized programs he was supposed to be using for the intelligence-gathering tasks he was charged with carrying out on behalf of the United States Government. As a result, if anyone ever did attempt to backtrack his activities, they would find nothing more than series after series of very boring, very legitimate, and routinely mundane intelligence exercises… all of them accurately dated, reviewed, and evaluated.
Pope’s philosophy was very simple: Why stop at having one brilliant, exceedingly loyal young woman for a protégée when you could have two? This not only doubled the amount of work they could get done on his behalf; it doubled the amount time he could spend ignoring what he was supposed to be doing while researching the things that truly interested him. For instance, what was the Russian navy up to in the Sea of Okhotsk — and why had he been ordered to ignore it? Why were American oil prospectors poking around in regions of the African continent where there wasn’t supposed to be any oil? And why was the Israeli Mossad suddenly so interested in spying on the Mexican government?
The answers to these sorts of questions might all end up being very benign by the time he puzzled them out, but Pope found the questions themselves much too intriguing to ignore. Similarly, once he had realized that elements of the American Special Forces community were preparing to go off the reservation in an attempt to rescue Sandra Brux — rather than sit idly by while Washington considered the political angles — he had been far too fascinated by their audacity even to think about blowing the whistle. Still, he had warned the director of the possibility, even if only subtly.
He sat down at his desk and passed the time musing as he awaited the inevitable text message from the DDO. The NSA had certainly intercepted the clandestine mission’s radio traffic, and by now an emergency action message would have been sent directly to the CIA station chief in Kabul, who would have then gotten into immediate contact with the chief of the Middle East bureau, who would have in turn made a direct call to the deputy director of Operations for the CIA — Cletus Webb.
Almost to the exact minute of Pope’s estimated time, the iPhone resting on his desk began to buzz with the anticipated text message: CONTACT ME AT HOME IMMEDIATELY!