'Absolutely, sir!' or 'Already done, sir!' Still, Hawke felt the pressure. He had his eye on his watch the entire time, knowing every moment lost meant the missing nuclear weapon might be lost to him forever.
He was also assisted in the time-compressed logistics of the operation by Lieutenant Amir, a small, handsome chap, a veteran, a much-decorated soldier who'd been wounded in the barricade attack, but who seemed impervious to pain. Hawke, in fact, had left him for dead in the Pak ambulance. Many of the men under his command had died in the barrage at the barricade and Amir was eager to seek retribution against the Taliban militants, to help Hawke mount an expedition into the provinces and run them to ground.
After many sat-phone consultations about the impending mission with C back in London, most of them at great length, Hawke's team had chosen the northernmost Pakistani Army outpost, Wanabah, an ancient enclosure of mud and stone, heavily guarded against the frequent Taliban attacks, to ready themselves for the impending journey on horseback. The outpost sat at the very edge of the desert they would have to cross before heading through the valley and up into some of the highest mountains on earth.
C's initial inclination, after consulting with the British Army forces in neighboring Afghanistan, and his CIA and Pentagon counterparts in Washington, had been to call in B-52s and drone air-strikes out of the secret Shamsi AFB to take out the objective. He thought it far too dangerous for Hawke and his small band of fighters to venture alone into a Taliban-infested area where thousands had died. 'Pound that mountain into powder and come home safe, Alex,' Sir David Trulove had said.
Hawke had patiently explained that there was no hard target yet, only endless mountain ranges. Any one of those mountains might be the command-and-control bunker of Abu al-Rashad, headquarters of the Lion of the Punjab. There would simply be no way to confirm his exact position, his actual presence, or that of the stolen nuclear device, without a boots-on-the-ground incursion and reconnoiter.
Hawke also pointed out that these mountains were home to many non-Taliban Pakistani villages, farmers, and goatherds. Their deaths at the hands of U.S. bombers, he said, would be morally and politically indefensible in the highly charged geopolitical climate of this region and this war.
C extracted a promise from Hawke that as soon as he had this confirmation, and the precise GPS coordinates of the enemy stronghold, he would call in strikes and let the U.S. Air Force do its job. Hawke had no choice but to agree. It was, after all, an order. Hawke's philosophy: always do exactly what you think is necessary and apologize later.
While satellite communications, ammunition, food stores, and water were being assembled for loading onto the camels and pack mules, crash courses were under way. Harry Brock was drilling the militia in the use of the U.S. M4 assault rifle on a makeshift shooting range while both Amir and the newly bearded Abdul Dakkon spent every minute of free time giving horseback riding instruction to the team.
Sahira, it turned out, was an equestrienne, a horsewoman all her life. She had no trouble controlling these fearsome horses, horses descended from the beasts Genghis Khan had ridden out of Mongolia. But camels, she soon learned, required other skills. Simply putting up with nasty, smelly, farting brutes being the least of it.
Lieutenant Amir, who had shed his army uniform for mufti and had asked to be called by his nickname, Patoo, worked with Sahira until she was comfortable with the camels. Or, at least, claimed she was comfortable. She didn't believe any human being could ever be comfortable with camels, and vice versa.
She wasn't one for complaining, Patoo noticed, and it made him somewhat less anxious about having such a beautiful young woman venture deep into enemy territory. He'd spoken to Hawke privately. Hawke understood his concern, but he said her presence would be critical should they find the stolen nuclear device.
Patoo conceded the point, but he looked Hawke straight in the eye and told the Englishman in no uncertain terms that, if she went along, under absolutely no circumstances should they allow the Taliban fighters to take this woman alive.
'You understand what that might mean, Commander Hawke?' Patoo said. 'In extreme circumstances? Your obligation?'
Hawke looked at him for a very long time before replying, a searing image of Anastasia being loaded aboard the doomed airship flashing through his mind.
'Lieutenant, there are very few men alive who understand what you mean better than I.'
Hawke was all too well aware that, in extremis, he himself would have to kill Sahira before letting her be taken captive. Patoo was right. This woman's unspeakably cruel death at the hands of these animals would be unthinkable. War. He'd given up this hell and tried to end his own life because of the overwhelming pain. Now, he was back in its grip and the heavy consequences were weighing upon him to the point where he had to just shove it all aside and concentrate on the job to be done. The job of the simple warrior.
Stokely Jones had already given their little expeditionary force a name: the Rat Patrol. Some bloody American TV show in the 1960s, he'd told Alex. Chaps in Jeeps with machine guns, three Yanks and one Brit, roaring around in the desert wreaking havoc on Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps. Brock had picked the moniker up, and now everyone was using it.
Stokely Jones had never sat a horse in his whole damn life, and he obviously wasn't very happy about the idea either, Hawke noticed with a grin. The idea of Stoke finally encountering a foe who was bigger and stronger than he was made Stoke nuts.
'Look at him, eyeballing me like that,' Stoke said to Patoo, who was holding the reins of a huge black Arabian, snorting, bucking, and pawing the sand. 'Horse doesn't like me and I ain't too crazy about him, either. You think I could kick this horse's ass in a fair fight, Patoo?'
'No.'
'Well, let's just hope it doesn't come to that,' Stoke said, sticking his boot in the stirrup. 'I pity this poor sonofabitch if he pisses me off.'
'You see those hazy mountains in the distance beyond the desert, Mr. Jones?' Patoo said. 'Many thousands of meters high. Freezing wind and icy ledges sometimes only one meter wide. You wish to walk up there, brother?'
Stokely got on the damn horse.
An hour later, as the air cooled dramatically and the setting sun shot red arrows of light streaking through the haze, Stokely and Harry Brock were racing each other across the sands, up and down the windblown dunes, shouting curses and laughing at each other, galloping hell-bent for leather around and around the army compound. Hawke looked up from the weapon he was cleaning and caught a glimpse of them through an opened window. He smiled. The team was coming together. And when a team makes a commitment to act as one, the sky's the limit.
Tonight the thirty grizzled Pak militia fighters who would accompany them were preparing a great feast around the bonfire in the center of the compound. Hawke was much reassured by the look of these battle-tested men. They'd been fighting the Taliban through the long, tough years, the house-to-house combat for control of strategic towns and villages.
Patoo and his militia were veterans of those cruel battles. He had told Hawke over dinner the first night, 'Sir, every street battle in those days was like getting into a fistfight in a phone booth.'
At dawn the little army led by Alex Hawke would mount up, ride out through the massive wooden doors of the army outpost, and begin their journey across the trackless desert toward the mountains waiting on the horizon.
'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we ride,' Hawke said softly to himself, smiling at the quaint old English homily before going back to work on his weapon, scrubbing the works of his M4 assault rifle with a toothbrush.
AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT, ANOTHER Englishman, fifty miles or so to the north of Hawke's position, was completing his ride. He and his camel herder had journeyed down from the mountains, his own horse slipping and sliding on the icy ledges where a single misstep might mean a death plunge of thousands of feet.
This particular mountain had, long before the existence of the written word, been known as Wazizabad.
Smith had made the journey down from the mountain many times, however, in far worse conditions, and so he was not overly concerned with death; or rather, not concerned with his own death, to be precise. The imminent death of others was a red fever in his brain; it was the only thing he lived for. He rode on.
Smith, ever the sensualist, enjoyed the occasional feel of level earth beneath him, the warmer temperatures of the lower altitudes, and the brilliant rays of the dying sun striking his cheeks. He rode toward the desert, through passes often so narrow he could barely scrape through. During the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838, the British had marched an army of twenty-one thousand men through this same pass to retrieve 'British honor' in
