“Sir. I’ll be glad to walk you through the options we considered and rejected.”
“You believe this is your best bet.”
“Yes.”
“And Major Armstrong agrees.”
“You’re welcome to ask him yourself.”
Ulrich ran a hand through his thick black hair. “Nothing in writing,” he said finally. “If I have to sign for the stuff, I will, but nothing about what it’s for. And if it goes wrong up there, you don’t hang around. No matter what. Civ casualties, whatever.”
“Chivalrous, sir.”
“Don’t piss me off, Maggs.”
The equipment arrived the next day. Via diplomatic courier, naturally. No FedEx for this package. The questions they’d gotten from the engineers and scientists at Langley were entirely technical, about the size and layout of the target. The hypothetical and nonexistent target. Maggs had the distinct feeling nobody back home wanted to know what they were doing.
Meanwhile, the Deltas flew in a workstation from Bagram that used satellite photos to create a three- dimensional model of Damghar, the target village. The building images were schematic, but they were accurately placed and sized, giving the team a chance to practice driving through intersections that otherwise would be nothing more than lines on a map. Chris Snyder, who as team medic had the unpleasant job of using the equipment from Langley, ran through a half-dozen dry runs with it, the last three in complete darkness, before pronouncing himself satisfied.
“We really gonna do this?” Armstrong said on their second day of practice.
“Guess so,” Maggs said.
“It’s crazy, you know that, right,” Armstrong said. It wasn’t a question. “There’s tough and there’s dumb, and we’re on the wrong side of that line.”
“We don’t have to. We can tell Ulrich no.”
“The civvy risk is too high.”
“We don’t even know what’s on the laptop. If there is a laptop.”
Armstrong shook his head. “We’re going, aren’t we?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Then we best go sooner, not later. Only getting worse up there. Matter of time before they start blocking roads.”
“I was thinking the same,” Maggs said. “We go tonight. Supposed to be overcast, medium rain. Good for us. It’ll keep people inside, off the roofs.”
“It doesn’t look good when we get there, I reserve the right to pull out.”
“That’s the smartest thing anybody’s said this week.”
TWO HOURS LATER, they loaded the AKs and grenades and Glocks in the trunk of the Nissan. They put the special equipment into the black bag and the bag and the bicycle into the van. Then they rolled.
By air, only eighty miles separated Islamabad and Mingora. But the drive between the cities was a four- hour dogleg through a wall of mountains, west toward Peshawar and then northeast on the grandly named N-95, a winding two-lane road cut from mountain walls.
On the way up, they got stuck behind an old school bus whose white-and-green paint couldn’t quite conceal the yellow underneath. Farmers and villagers crowded four abreast on the seats, as children stood on their laps, poking their faces out of the windows. Every inch of the roof was covered with battered trunks and green plastic buckets and tiny wire cages filled with squawking chickens. The bus edged up the side of the mountain, pouring diesel smoke, and the more Armstrong honked, the slower it went.
Finally Armstrong gunned the van’s engine and swerved around the bus, which promptly accelerated. As the van reached the bus’s midpoint, a pickup truck rounded the blind curve in front of them. In the backseat, Maggs’s stomach churned. Watching the pickup come at them was like seeing a bullet in slow motion, the road’s geography shrinking second by second.
“Armstrong.”
Armstrong laid into the horn.
The pickup truck slowed but didn’t stop. The bus inched left. And somehow they fit three abreast on the two-lane road. As the pickup disappeared behind them they came around the corner — and saw that the road widened, creating a perfect passing lane.
“Wasn’t even close,” Armstrong said.
“Try to save some luck for the mission.”
THE SUN DISAPPEARED BEHIND the dusty brown mountains as they made their way down the pass. In the distance they heard the evening calls to prayer being called, mournful sighs that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
As night descended, the rain started. They passed a pickup truck of Talib militants, who looked at them curiously but didn’t try to stop them. An hour later, they reached the concrete bridge that ran across the Swat and connected Mingora with Derai. They were halfway across when Armstrong slowed the van.
“Is that—” he said. “Yeah, it is.”
“Oh, man,” said the Delta in the passenger seat, Snyder.
At the north end of the bridge, a headless body dangled upside down from a steel pole. Rain dripped off the corpse’s arms and shoulders. Its brown skin had been torn to ribbons. Its stomach was distended, swollen like a balloon in the summer heat. Above it, a sign proclaimed “Infidel Whoremonger Thief”in Arabic and Pashto.
“They really are in charge up here, aren’t they?” Maggs said.
“And they don’t like thieves much,” Armstrong said.
“They do that to a thief, wonder what they’d have in store for us,” Snyder said.
“Probably best not to find out.”
THEY PASSED THROUGH TOWN, passed the old man and the white cat and the bombed-out police station. They made the turn onto the road that dead-ended in Damghar Kalay. Halfway down, the Mitsubishi cut its lights and pulled over. The Nissan followed.
Maggs pulled the bike and the black bag from the back of the van and tucked the bag into the wire basket attached to the bike’s handlebars. Snyder slipped a Glock with a silencer onto a specially made holster attached to his thigh, under his dark blue
“Copy,” Armstrong said.
Then, without even a “good luck” or a “vaya con Dios,” Snyder hopped onto the bike and rode toward the village a mile away.
22
One wood. Two iron. Pitching wedge. The totems of a civilization dedicated first and foremost to its own entertainment. The clubs rattled in the blue Callaway bag, protective covers atop their precious heads, as Jim D’Angelo walked down his driveway toward his Cadillac Escalade. D’Angelo was a golfer in the John Daly mode, a meaty man with a jiggly stomach and giant haunches.
“You know, that’s a hybrid,” Shafer said. “He’s a real environmentalist.”
“Hope it’s got a reinforced chassis,” Wells said. He and Shafer were watching the Escalade from a Pepco — Potomac Electric Power Company — van down the street.
