“Copy.”
“There’s a PJAK controlled camp approximately twenty-five kilometers northwest of your present position…”
It had been a dry fall, the old shepherd thought as he kicked absently at a clump of grass. Dust flew up, blowing in the wind. Very dry.
Clucking in Kurdish to his sheep, he turned away toward the camp that was, for this day, his home.
It was at that moment that a sharp buzzing stabbed at his ribs, startling him from his reverie.
Sweeping aside his robes with one hand, he reached for his belt with the other, disclosing a semiautomatic Glock and a small pouch containing a satellite phone.
The screen was bright with the caller’s number and he tapped in the encryption sequence. “Azad,” he answered briefly, his lips suddenly dry.
The voice on the other end was familiar to him, though he had only heard it once before in his life.
He listened in silence for a few moments before responding, “What you are asking is difficult. My young men encountered a Guard patrol not ten kilometers west of here within the last fortnight.”
“I’m not asking you to shelter him, only to ensure his safe passage to the Iran-Iraq border,” Kranemeyer retorted, flipping the shepherd’s dossier open on his desk. The black-and-white photo was a few years old, but revealed the face of a man old before his time. Intelligence reports indicated that Azad Badir had only just passed his sixtieth year, but he looked far older.
“I understand your request,” the shepherd replied in perfect, educated English. No wonder, thought the DCS, scanning down the first page of the dossier. Educated at Princeton, Badir had returned to his people only months before the 1979 Revolution. He had never completed college, but it had clearly left its imprint upon him.
The shepherd was still speaking. “…young men are in short supply, and we continue to lose them, Mr. Crane. A few every month, and yet still we fight. I can hardly spare those needed to escort your man to the border.”
“Your efforts are appreciated,” Kranemeyer answered cautiously. The official stance of the US State Department and the administration was that PJAK was a terrorist organization, but the outlook of the Clandestine Service rarely matched that of Foggy Bottom. “A deal, Mr. Badir. Get my man safely to the border and we’ll see that you get the weapons you need.”
“The weapons we need? Almost everything we need, we can ‘acquire’ from the Revolutionary Guards.” There was a trace of amusement in Badir’s voice.
“Then what?”
“My words, Mr. Crane.”
“Excuse me?”
“My word was ‘almost’. We cannot get everything we need. For some things we must rely on the munificence of the outside world. Such as Stinger missiles.”
The DCS took a deep breath, massaging his forehead with his fingers. Stinger missiles. Azad Badir could scarcely have asked for something more difficult, and the old fox knew it, Kranemeyer realized with a wry smile. The US still remembered how some of the old man-portable surface-to-air missiles it had supplied to Afghanistan back in ‘89 had fallen into the wrong hands, and subsequent administrations had clamped down upon their export.
“I will do my best, Mr. Badir. In the mean time, is my man welcome in your camp?”
“Mr. Crane, strangers are always welcome in my camp,” the shepherd replied, his voice rich with irony. “Send him to these coordinates…”
The world seemed to have gone silent, Harry mused. The desolate plateau showed no signs of life.
The young Australian was asleep, her knees drawn up to her chin as she leaned back against the earthen bank of the hide. It was just as well.
He didn’t want to talk. He had a man out there, somewhere in the gathering twilight. A man he was being forced to leave behind. Two hours.
Two hours before the spec-ops Pave Low would come in to pick them up. Two more hours in which Thomas might show up.
When his radio crackled with a burst of static, it startled him. “FULLBACK to EAGLE SIX, I have movement. A man coming in from the south-southwest.”
“Ident?”
“Unknown.”
“Hold your fire. It may be a friendly.”
The figure moved into his line of vision and his posture shifted, tracking its movement with the barrel of his AK.
Then a second figure appeared, slightly to one side of the first. And a third.
“EAGLE SIX, contacts hostile.” Tex’s voice over the radio. “I repeat, contacts hostile. Another pair converging on the area from southwest.”
“I copy,” Harry replied. “Hold tight.” He laid his Kalishnikov to the side and drew the Beretta from his belt, racking a cartridge into the chamber of the silenced pistol.
The five men spread out across the plateau, moving like shadows in the dusk. Harry adjusted his NVGs, illuminating them as green shapes, clearly silhouetted. One of them passed nearby and Harry held his breath. The hides were well camouflaged, but there was always the risk.
Should one of them step on the “roof” of a hide…
The indicator light on his GPS told him that he had arrived. Thomas shut down the instrument and stepped toward the shelter of a rocky outcropping, his pistol drawn in his hand.
Where were the Kurds?
The question answered itself in the next moment as a figure of an older man materialized out of the shadows.
“Mr. Patterson?” a voice enquired in English. The man was attired in a western-style shirt and jeans. In his hands he carried a Kalishnikov-style assault rifle similar to the one slung over Thomas’ back.
“Yes?” Thomas replied, half-turning toward him. Two more men appeared over the rise, surrounding him. Their rifles were leveled at his chest.
“ ‘Strange,” the man began, “ is it not? That of the myriads who before us passed the door of darkness through…’”
“ ‘Not one returns to tell us of the Road, which to discover we must travel too,’” Thomas responded with a smile, finishing the ancient Khayyam proverb and completing the countersign.
“Very good,” the man replied, still in the same smooth, cultured English. “We were told to expect you. Your weapons, please, Mr. Patterson?”
