‘Don’t cry … You’ll get your money—’
‘I’m not worried about the money, Crawford!’ Jason snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake! We’ve just captured Fahim Al-Zahrani! And up in those mountains, I saw someone who might well have already called for help to try to set him free. As far as I see it, the entire fucking battalion should be here!’ He snatched the sat-com off the colonel’s belt and held it up. ‘Make the fucking call to General Ashford … or I will,’ he threatened.
The two guards exchanged nervous glances. Even Al-Zahrani took interest.
Crawford’s baleful eyes went wide. ‘I don’t take kindly to insubordination, soldier,’ he hissed through clamped teeth.
Jason stepped closer, so that his nose practically touched the colonel’s. ‘I don’t take kindly to incompetence,’ he rebuffed confidently. ‘Fuck this up and you’ll be facing a shit storm in front of a military tribunal. Plenty of men here are witness to how you’re handling this. I’m hugely interested in the success of this mission. Lots of innocent lives depend on it. Need I remind you, sir, that is why we’re all here.’
Without breaking eye contact, Crawford plucked his phone from Jason’s hand. He cocked his head sideways. ‘That’ll be all, Sergeant.’
‘Make the call,’ Jason repeated. He took two steps back and paused. Before he turned to leave, he added, ‘And just so we’re clear, Crawford: I’m not your soldier.’
44
Though Jason wasn’t fond of Crawford’s leadership style, he had to admit that the colonel’s platoon was a well-oiled machine. In less than fifteen minutes after relaying Crawford’s command to Staff Sergeant Nolan Richards, a human chain of twenty marines outfitted with respirators stretched through the cave’s passages and began ferrying out the blast debris. Camel, Jam and Meat joined them. The remainder of Crawford’s platoon went about securing the camp.
With Crawford focused on interrogating Al-Zahrani and the platoon set to work, Jason was intent on having a closer look at the cave’s burial chamber. He grabbed a flashlight and filed past the marines lined up in the entry tunnel. At the T, he split right from the marines and moved swiftly through the winding passage.
Drawing lessons from the PackBot’s earlier exploration, he tried to avoid the tunnel branches that led to dead ends. But the further he progressed into the mountain, nothing differentiated one passage from the next. Twice he forked off down passages terminating in solid rock and had to backtrack. Each time, he pulled out his knife and scraped an ‘X’ into the wall on either side of the passage.
Along the way, he managed to locate one of the surveillance cameras the bot had detected in the ceiling. Surprisingly, there was no visible wiring. Surrounded on all sides by rock, wireless signals would be near impossible. So where did the wiring run to? He didn’t have time to investigate the matter. He had to keep moving before Richards came looking for him.
The subterranean atmosphere was completely disorienting; the air cool and loamy, thin on oxygen. It felt as if the earth had swallowed him whole. Imagining Al-Zahrani groping through the pitch black with no hope of escape gave Jason bitter satisfaction. It was hard to believe that after so many months chasing ghosts, the A-list madman was now their prisoner — bound like an animal.
Over the past months, the intelligence Jason’s unit had pieced together through monitoring chatter and milking informants had pointed to a band of heavily armed operatives moving furtively from south to north, bouncing from one safe house to the next. Certainly cause for concern. But none of the intel even remotely suggested that Fahim Al-Zahrani might be among the group.
That was how the dirty business of counter-terrorism functioned: for every truth there were provocative rumours. Like the claim made by an informant in Baghdad which suggested that these phantom operatives had acquired two Soviet suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (over sixty of which were still unaccounted for after the fall of the Motherland) and were planning to erase Jerusalem and Washington DC from the map.
Accepting ‘intelligence’ at face value was anything but smart. ‘Nothin’ but a bunch of drama queens,’ Meat had once said.
The tedious process of sifting good information from bad information had persistently put Jason’s unit one step behind their quarry. Only when Jason moved on to more aggressive tactics did a clearer picture begin to take shape. Case in point: the tips extracted from a former Ba’ath Party lieutenant who’d sung like a canary after only one night of sleep-deprivation in a brightly lit windowless room with Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ playing in a loop at blaring volume. Among other titbits, Britney got him to confess that he’d helped arrange transport for the quarry, from Mosul to Kirkuk, and that travelling with the group were senior Al-Qaeda members seeking safe passage to Iran. All true. Thanks, Britney.
From there, Hazo’s contacts in Kirkuk pointed them to a local imam who’d been rumoured to have briefly hosted a number of unsavoury guests. Enter bright lights, Britney Spears and one sleepless night and the imam had provided detailed descriptions for the four-wheel-drive vehicles he’d procured for the operatives. Shortly after Jason requested aerial surveillance support from one of the Predator drones flying reconnaissance rounds over the northern plain, the caravan had been spotted heading east towards the Zagros Mountains. An hour later Jason’s unit had staged a hasty ambush.
Now Jason was certain that the only contraband the Arabs aimed to smuggle over the mountains was far more ominous than plutonium: it had been Fahim Al-Zahrani himself. And Jason still feared that Al-Zahrani was plotting an escape. Crawford had better call for backup, he thought.
Finally, the passage widened and yielded to the cave.
At the opening, Jason paused and moved the light beam left to right. All along the walls the bone piles were stacked high — a circle of death.
What happened to these people? Jason wondered as he paced forward and shone the light on the skeletal remains. There had to be thousands of skeletons stashed unceremoniously in this cave. This was definitely not a modern mass grave, like Crawford wanted to believe. But it certainly was evidence of a large-scale burial. There was no telling if the bodies had been buried at the same time.
Working the cave counterclockwise, he walked the perimeter while using the light to scan the bones. Every few feet, something would catch his eye and he’d paused to examine the remains and hunt for clues. Even if these bones came from victims of an ancient war or genocide, there’d be signs of trauma — broken bones, cleaved limbs, gouges left behind by sharp blades. But there was nothing extraordinary about anything he was seeing.
Conversely, modern genocide wasn’t about torture: its focus was annihilation — speed and efficiency. It wasn’t uncommon for dozens or hundreds to be gunned down en masse by automatic weapons. Or if ammunition was slim, the modern executioner might opt to work his way along a line-up and deliver single-round headshots. Like Saddam’s henchmen had done to Hazo’s dad. There was no evidence of that here. Not one bullet hole. Even if shots had been delivered to the torso, once the flesh decomposed, the slugs would drop out from the bones.
Furthermore, the lack of clothing or personal effects strongly countermanded Crawford’s chemical-weapons hypothesis. Not to mention that not a trace of flesh remained on these bones. That pointed to an event long, long ago. Well before Kurds were victimized by Saddam and his Ba’ath Party goons.
There definitely was a story to be found in these bones. But what could it be?
The bot sonar hadn’t picked up any other exit tunnels branching out from this cave. Seeing how the bones were piled so high, however, Jason wondered if the sonar signal had been obstructed. Maybe there was something to be found behind the bones? There was only one way to determine if that was the case.