“Listen, you’re going to have to go somewhere else now. Do you understand? Is there a place back where you were that you can hide, near the first place you called from?”
“No,” said McIntyre.
“Can you leave the phone on?”
“I’m worried about the battery,” he said, glancing at it.
“Get to a safe place and call again,” said Brott. “We have assets en route, but it’s going to take a while. It may take a long while.”
He couldn’t kill a kid who had nothing to do with him, who was just coming to wash the floor or the windows, for chrissakes.
“Yeah, I’ll call,” he said abruptly, then pushed the End button, got his guns, and went outside.
Chapter 15
Howe spotted the wreckage of the helicopter strewn across the side of a slope, then began arcing north- westward in the direction of the GPS coordinates he’d been given. He needed to strike a balance: go slow and low enough to be seen by McIntyre, and yet somehow not be slow and low enough to be nailed by some joker with a shoulder-launched SAM.
Couldn’t be done. He had to risk a good portion of his butt to save McIntyre’s.
Not that he wasn’t willing to make the trade. He just wanted to understand the equation.
“One, yeah, I see the debris,” said Timmy. “Uh, you got maybe two feet over that ridge, boss.”
“Come on, now, I have five at least,” said Howe, who was actually close to a thousand feet over the peak that rose two miles off to his left. Howe pushed toward a black-topped road that wound up one of the hillsides, trying to compare it with what the Pentagon colonel had described, which of course was itself second- or thirdhand.
“Got a couple of army vehicles back here,” said Timmy. “Uh, two transports, armored car or something in front — near that city.”
“That’s a city?” asked Howe. He began banking to get lower and take a closer look, putting his nose up slightly to make sure he didn’t run into anything while his attention was directed toward the ground.
“Not all of us were born in New York, you know.”
“Timmy, that’s not even a city in North Dakota.”
The radar synthesized a small downtown area of a dozen buildings. The three vehicles Timmy had spotted were moving northward on the road, parallel to the border. Howe looked down through the canopy as he passed, but he was roughly five thousand feet above them and moving close to four hundred knots; he could tell they were vehicles, and thought the lead one had a gun at the top, but there was no way he was reading license plates from here. He took the Velociraptor along the road, looking for more activity. Timmy, studying the passive IR plot from the sensor suite, nudged to his left when he got a flare of something.
“Fire, I think,” explained the wingman.
As they turned and started a fresh track, the Pakistani radar over the border — the one that had been targeted by the Indians to start all this — turned itself on.
“Somebody’s watching,” said Timmy.
“Roger that,” said Howe.
“Yeah, but I’d like to go pee on him anyway.”
“Eyes on the prize.” None of the radars associated with SAMs had come up. The Pakistanis had given the Pentagon a blanket assurance yesterday that no U.S. planes would be targeted, though for security reasons they had not been alerted to the Cyclops One search. The Indians had not agreed to permit “spy flights” over their territory.
The Osprey checked in; they were now thirty minutes away at top speed. He went over his game plan with Howe: If their pickup didn’t make his call back on time, they were going to try to drop the SF team near the last phone-in point so they could have a look around. They’d play it by ear from there. An MC-130 was being launched to stand by to refuel the Osprey if things took too long; a second assault team was being rounded up in Kabul, though launching it would take at least two or three hours.
Howe and Timmy would have to start thinking about a refuel soon as well.
“Couple of, uh, Land Rovers maybe,” said Timmy. “You got ’em?”
Howe glanced at his tactical screen, where Timmy had cursored them for him. They were moving across an east — west roadway into a village at the southwest, ten miles away from the crashed helicopter.
“You sure those are military?” Howe asked.
“No.”
“I’m going to get down there and get close,” he told his wingman. “Hang tough.”
“Only way to go. Got your six.”
Howe dipped his wing. He came over the road at three thousand feet — not counting the nine thousand or so holding the tar up in the mountains.
There were definitely troops in the back of the trucks. As Howe began to pull up he saw a glint of something. He went immediately for the defensive flares, accelerating away.
“They shoot at you?” Timmy’s voice was practically a shout.
“You tell me,” said Howe.
“Didn’t see anything.”
“Getting jumpy.” He pulled around to his left, angling in the direction of the road, trying to see where the troops were going. A puff of smoke erupted near a cluster of buildings that sat before a bend; the buildings looked like storefronts, with large colorful signs at the top. A pinprick of smoke fluttered across the other side of the bend, near a building. Howe saw movement, people running. Bingo.
“Have some action here,” he told Timmy.
“Is it ours?”
“Good question. I’m going to get back with the Pentagon people, see if they can get the Indians and Pakistanis to stop shooting up here.”
“Part the Red Sea next,” said Timmy.
Chapter 16
Duke went over the map with the copilot, trying to figure out the area where their pickup would most likely be. McIntyre’s last call had been made from a building on the outskirts of a small town, but he’d been spotted and had to move. He hadn’t called back yet.
The pilots in the Velociraptors reported fighting nearby. Whether it had to do with McIntyre wasn’t clear.
Duke moved to the back and laid it out for his guys. As he expected, they nodded and threw in a few positive suggestions. Not one of them pointed out that finding the American alive was a serious long shot.
The FBI agent had a pained expression on his face.
“Something up?” the captain asked, plopping into the seat next to him.
“Yeah,” said the agent. “I should’ve brought more coffee. Two thermoses just don’t cut it overseas.”
“You think we’re going to find him?” Duke asked.
“Question is probably whether you’ll find him dead,” answered Fisher. “But you’re kinda stuck, right?”
“If things got tough, could you handle a weapon?”
“Depends,” said Fisher. “The place we’re landing, that a nonsmoking area?”
Duke started to laugh. “Smoking.”
“Then I’ll lead the charge.”
