“Let him go!” an unfamiliar voice commanded.
“He’s got the fucking key,” one of the soldiers shouted.
“What?”
“The key to the ignition!”
Usman staggered to the left as the shooters opened fire, this time off to the right. He hunched over again, and holding the wound to his side with his left hand ran as fast as he could into the desert, the soft sand catching his feet, wanting to trip him up, make him fall. His only consolation was that the sons of bitches coming after him would have the same problem. And one of them had cried out. With any luck he had hit the bastard hard.
The sand suddenly dropped away and he pitched forward onto his face and tumbled five meters into a depression. When he ended up on his stomach he rolled over onto his back and looked up to the crest of the sand dune. He was at the bottom of a bowl, with no easy way out.
He had managed to hold on to his pistol so when they came for him he would take them out. Maybe all of them.
Someone shouted something to the left, over the top of the dune, and immediately someone else to the right shouted back, and then others picked up the cry. Maybe a half dozen or more men, some of them speaking with a variation of the Gilgit tribal accent, one Baloch, another Brahui and two Pashtuns — the soldiers from Quetta — without a doubt all of them Taliban.
This had been trap from the beginning. Which meant that Captain Siyal or whoever had given the original orders was a traitor, as were the two guards from the air base, and possibly even the group captain.
But why put things like these into the hands of terrorists? All of a sudden he had at least one part of it: if the government fell American SEALS accompanying Nuclear Energy Support Teams would swoop down and disable as many of the weapons as they could. The highly trained NEST people, most of them nuclear scientists and engineers, were ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice to anywhere in the world. So it came down to losing the weapons either to the Americans or to the Taliban
It would be a perfect opportunity for India to launch a preemptive strike, which would very possibly embroil the entire region in an unwinnable war.
Usman laid his head back for just a moment.
The weapons were too heavy simply to pick up and carry away. They would need the SUV.
He sat up, took the car key from his pocket and making sure that no one had crested the dune and was watching him, tossed it as far as he could.
They might eventually find it, though maybe not until dawn, but by then when he hadn’t shown up at Delbandin the alarm might already have been sounded. Unless, of course, he’d never been expected to get that far in the first place. It never occurred to him that they might hot-wire the ignition.
He got to his feet, just a little dizzy now but not in any serious pain, and started for the wall on the opposite side of the depression down which he had fallen.
“I’ve got the bastard,” one of the soldiers cried from the crest.
Usman turned and fired in that direction, and kept firing until his pistol went dry, the slide locked in the open position.
He felt the Kalashnikov rounds striking his body before he heard the noise of the shots, and he fell back, dead as he hit the sand.
FIVE
The attacks across the city and down in Rawalpindi, where the Army General Headquarters was located, had increased just during the time Haaris had been inside with General Rajput. Small-arms fire and the occasional explosion rattled in almost every direction around Diplomatic Row in the Green Section. But there were no sirens.
Haaris had changed back into his blazer, white shirt and khakis, and he got off the elevator in the parking garage carrying a bright blue nylon shoulder bag, sealed with a U.S. State Department diplomatic tag. Word had finally come that the CIA knew that a man matching Haaris’s description had been kidnapped by the Taliban on the way from the airport. Traffic between Langley and the ISI had suddenly become heavy.
He tossed the bag in the backseat of the Fiat and got in with it.
Lieutenant Jura turned around. “It might not be such a good idea for you to be seen dressed like that tonight.”
“I’m back to being an American CIA officer.”
“If the Taliban spot you they won’t hesitate to kill you.”
“We’ll just have to take the chance. But this is the only way I’m going to get into the Aiwan to see Barazani.”
“There’s no way that the guards will let us through the gate, even if we could get to it. Right now there’s a crowd on Constitution Avenue and it’s growing.”
It was just what Haaris was counting on. “We’re going in from the Colony.” The Aiwan-e-Sadr, located between the parliament building and cabinet block, was actually a compound of several buildings in addition to the president’s main residence and workplace that were used as the residences of his staff and families, and was called the President’s Colony, just off Fourth Street.
“The guards there are just as likely to shoot first and ask for credentials later.”
“They’ve been told that I’m coming.”
“Yes, sir,” Jura said. “But if you’re carrying a weapon, I suggest that you keep it out of sight. It wouldn’t do you any good.”
They headed out of the garage and around to the main gate, where the barrier was immediately raised and they were waved through. The streets were all but deserted; it was something else Haaris had been counting on. The growing crowd at the Aiwan was draining Taliban and ordinary citizens alike from across the city. The same thing had happened during the trouble in Beijing some years earlier, and during the problems in Cairo and a dozen other capital cities just lately. The world was starting to light up, and how big and terrible the fires would become before they died down was anyone’s guess.
Haaris sat back in the seat. By now Charlene Miller, the president of the United States, would be assembling her security team in the Situation Room, if she hadn’t already done so, trying to figure out if the situation here had gotten critical yet.
He expected that at the very least she would have ordered that the NEST teams be alerted for possible deployment. She was an intellectual who preferred the calm approach; she leaned toward thinking things out, getting the opinions of her staff, working out all of the options, before coming to a decision. But when she made one it was firm and final.
Her favorite line to her directors of National Intelligence and the CIA was that blowback, the unintended consequences that often came because an operation had gone in some direction no one had anticipated, “will never be an option on my watch.”
The blowback this time was going to be more than any of them had ever imagined. Much more. And for a purpose.
Jura had to make a long detour around Constitution Avenue because of the crowd, which already stretched at least a kilometer from the Aiwan, to get to the rear of the compound and the heavily guarded gate into the Colony. Four soldiers from the president’s Special Security Unit, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s, surrounded the Fiat.
Haaris lowered the window and handed out his diplomatic passport. “I’m expected,” he said in English.
Jura rolled down his window and he translated into Punjabi, but the senior guard handed back Haaris’s passport. “Do you know the way?” he asked in good English.
“Yes, I’ve been here before.”
“Don’t leave the main driveway. And only you may go inside, your driver must stay with the car.”
They eased through the gate and Jura followed the broad driveway around the side of the Presidential Palace past several of the residences. BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars were parked in carports, but none of the buildings other than the palace showed any lights. The president’s staff and their families were keeping a very low profile this evening.