ivory-white beard, hunched back, and barely five feet tall. He kept shaking his head at Moore and the others, as though he could will them away.
“Let me do the talking,” Moore told Ozzy.
“Yeah, because I’m about to tell him off.”
“Hello, Chief,” said Moore.
“What are you doing here?” the chief demanded.
Moore tried to temper his anger. He tried, all right. And failed. “Before we were attacked by the Taliban, we came in peace, looking for these two men.” Moore shoved the pictures into the chief’s hand.
The man gave the photos a perfunctory glance and shrugged. “I’ve never seen them before. If anyone in this village is helping the Taliban, he will suffer my wrath.”
Ozzy snorted. “Chief, did you know the Taliban were here?”
“Of course not. How many times have I told you this, Captain?”
“I think this might be the fourth. You keep telling me you don’t help terrorists, and we keep finding them here. I just can’t understand that. Do they accidentally drop down out of the sky?” Ozzy had clearly damned to hell the “art and science” of negotiation.
“Chief, we’d like to continue our search with your help,” said Moore. “Just a few men.”
“I’m sorry, but my men are very busy protecting this village.”
“Let’s go,” said Ozzy, turning away and marching off with Bob-O behind him.
The cleric stepped up to Moore and spoke in English: “Go home with your friends.”
“You’re helping the wrong people,” Rana suddenly blurted out.
Moore glared at the young man and put a finger to his lips.
The cleric narrowed his eyes at Rana. “Young man, it’s you who are very much mistaken.”
It took another two hours for Ozzy’s Special Forces team to comb through the village and surrounding farmhouses, ever wary of another attack.
In the meantime, Moore questioned the man they had captured. “I’ll say it again, what’s your name?”
“Kill me.”
“What’s your name? Where are you from? Have you seen these guys?” He shoved the pictures into the man’s face.
“Kill me.”
And it went on like that, over and over, until Moore got so frustrated that he gave up before he said something he shouldn’t have. Moore’s CIA colleagues would take over the questioning anyway. Might take a week or more to crack this guy.
When Ozzy’s team finally returned to the helicopter, Moore debriefed them before they took off.
“This farmhouse right here,” Moore said, pointing to the home on a satellite photograph. “It’s pretty far back. Anyone get it?”
“We did,” said Bob-O. “Old farmer with one eye there. Couple of sons. Not happy to see us. They didn’t fit the description of your guys.”
“So there it is,” said Ozzy.
Moore shook his head. “My guys are here. They’re probably watching us right now.”
“And what’re we going to do about it?” asked Ozzy, throwing up his hands. “We’re between a rock and, well, another rock. And some mountains. And some pissed-off tribesmen. And some dead Taliban. Better tell your boys back home to ship these folks some Walmart gift cards for their trouble.”
The surprise visit wasn’t a total loss. Moore’s bosses had been unsure which way the chief’s loyalty was swinging these days, and now they knew. To believe that not a single person in this part of Shawal had seen Moore’s targets was ridiculous. They’d seen them, talked to them, perhaps trained and eaten with them. Moore had experienced this time and again, and for now there was nothing else he could do but leave behind the photographs and ask for the chief’s assistance.
“Was the mission a failure?” asked Rana.
“Not a failure,” answered Moore. “We’ve just been delayed by some unforeseen weather.”
“Weather?”
Moore snorted. “Yeah. A big shit storm of silence.”
Rana shook his head. “I don’t know why they choose to help the Taliban.”
“You should know that. They get more from the Taliban than anyone else,” Moore told the young man. “They’re opportunists. They have to be. Look where they live.”
“You think we’ll ever catch those guys?”
“We will. It just takes time. And that’s my problem, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps Wazir will have some news about your missing friend.”
Moore sighed deeply in frustration. “That’d work. Either way, I’ll be out of here by tomorrow night, and I just wish I could have some vengeance for what they did to the colonel and his family. If those guys just walk away, that’ll never stop burning me.” They climbed aboard the chopper and within ten minutes were in the air.
Before they even landed in Kabul, Moore saw that he’d received a phone call from Slater.
The Mexican guy in the photograph, Tito Llamas, a lieutenant in the Juarez Cartel, had turned up in a car trunk with a bullet in his head. Likewise, Khodai’s associates who’d been photographed with Llamas had all been murdered. The only guys in that picture who hadn’t turned up dead thus far were the Taliban. Moore needed to get back to Islamabad ASAP. He wanted to talk to the local police about Llamas and see if there were any other leads he could gather. He thought he might buy himself a little more time by “accidentally” missing his flight back home.
He didn’t reach the city until morning, and he told Rana to go home and get some sleep. He went to the police station, met with the detectives there, and positively identified Tito Llamas’s body. The cartel member had been carrying falsified documentation, including a fake passport, and Moore was able to share with the local police what data the Agency had on the cartel member. Needless to say, those detectives were grateful.
A surprise e-mail from the old man Wazir was very welcome — that was until Moore read its contents.
The two other Taliban in the photograph that Wazir had mentioned were unimportant and were actually Punjabi Taliban, named for their roots in southern Punjab. They were distinguishable because they did not speak Pashto and traditionally had ties with groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed. The Punjabi Taliban now operated out of North Waziristan and fought alongside Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
But that history lesson wasn’t the important part of the e-mail. Wazir had found the men, but both had been murdered. He said the Taliban had discovered their security leak and had killed everyone associated with it …except Moore, of course, and he was no doubt at the top of their hit list.
Maybe it was time to go home.
7 TRAVEL PLANS
Samad and his two lieutenants had fled the farmhouse before dawn and had made the laborious ten- kilometer hike across the border and into Afghanistan. They chose a well-beaten path and had joined a small group of five merchants so as not to draw any attention to themselves. As Samad had reminded his men, the Americans were watching from the sky, and if they took what seemed like a route with better tree cover, their vibrations might be detected by one of the many REMBASS-II unattended ground sensors that the American Army had carefully hidden along the border. That movement would subsequently trigger one of the Americans’ many Kennan “Keyhole-class” (KH) reconnaissance satellites that would begin taking pictures of them. Their images would almost instantaneously flash across screens in Langley, where analysts sat twenty-four-seven, waiting for Taliban fighters like him to make such mistakes. The response would be swift and fatal: a Predator drone piloted by an Air Force lieutenant colonel sitting in a trailer in Las Vegas would drop Hellfire missiles on his target.
