Brute Force (4 page)

 

Y
aqub Feng lay on his stomach in the cramped belly of the swaying jingle bus, crammed between his brother and Jiàn Z
u, the ratlike Chinese snakehead. Ehmet had taken the spot along the outside edge where he could press his face to the metal grating where he could see out and get some semblance of breathable air. Jiàn Z
u had a similar position and view, but wedged in the middle, Yaqub could see only shadows and choked on the dust that sifted up through the cracks in the wooden floor.

A riot of sound and color on the outside, the brightly decorated bus looked like something out of a gypsy caravan. Lengths of dragging chain and countless tinkling bells hung along the bumpers and painted trim of the gaudy monstrosity that had a permit to take tourists across the border with China and up the Karakoram Highway as far as Karakul Lake. It was the perfect vehicle in which to hide in order to get out of Pakistan—for who in his right mind would hide in something that already drew so much attention?

“It would be much easier if we went out through Afghanistan,” Jiàn Z
u said, sounding hollow, as if he’d been kicked in the groin.

“My business is in Kashgar,” Ehmet muttered, still studying the situation outside the truck through tiny holes in the metal flashing. “I already told you that. It will not take long.”

“In Pakistan,” Jiàn Z
u said, “you are merely fugitives. In China you are human targets. Forgive me, but it seems foolish to walk straight into the mouth of the dragon when the Afghan border is as porous as a rusted bucket.”

Yaqub felt Ehmet’s body tense. He lifted his head enough to turn and face the center of the truck. The sight of dried blood caking the corners of his mouth was terrifying, even to Yaqub.

“Tell me, Jiàn Z
u,” Ehmet whispered. “Did we accompany you out of Dera Ismail Khan prison, or did you accompany us?”

“I am with you,” the Chinese man said. “And happy to be so. But it would make it much easier to do my job if you told me your final destination.”

Ehmet’s face remained neutral, as if he was passing judgment. “You should concern yourself with our immediate destination—and that is Kashgar.”

“As you wish,” Jiàn Z
u said. “I do have contacts there who will help us move about. When you are ready, I will make the necessary arrangements.”

Ehmet turned to peer out the grating again. “The guards are waving all the buses through, just as you told us they would.”

“Money and blood grease the gears of this world,” the snakehead said. “The drivers pay the guards well to let them pass unmolested.”

Brakes and springs squawked as the jingle truck lurched forward, sending up a cloud of dust through the floorboards that threatened to choke the three men.

Above them, wealthy passengers from Islamabad and other affluent cities snapped photographs and gasped at the vistas of the Pamir Mountains. These men and a small number of women, each with a respectable male escort, sipped tea and chatted nervously about caravan thieves on the old Silk Road, ignorant of the fact that three fugitives hid in the hollow floor just inches beneath their feet.

From the time the first explosion had rocked the prison, Yaqub had felt caught up in a terrible, unstoppable wave. Stunned at the loss of their leader, Ali Kadir’s men had ushered them quickly away from Dera Ismail Khan in an old Mercedes van, heading northeast along the Indus River. They had changed to a sedan in Rawalpindi, and then switched vehicles again in Abbottabad, this time to a large panel truck that carried a load of goats. Whatever the plan had been beyond that, it had died with Ali Kadir. In Abbottabad, the men seemed unsure of what to do next. Jiàn Z
u had told them to go to Nagar where he said he had a contact. They reached the small village before daybreak.

Jiàn Z
u had met with his contact, who’d shown them inside the jingle bus an hour before the first tourists arrived. It would be cramped to the point of crippling, he said, but under the present state of security in the country, drastic measures were a necessity. The bold and bloody escape had been a devastating blow to Pakistan in the court of public opinion—making the Feng brothers two of the most wanted men in the world.

Ehmet raised his head. “Do your contacts in Kashgar have food?” he said, loud enough to startle Yaqub, though there was no danger anyone above could hear him over the rattling jingle bus.

“Food?” Jiàn Z
u stifled a cough amid the swirl of road dust.

“Yes, food.” Ehmet nodded. “I have had nothing to eat since I snacked on Afaz the Biter.”

 

F
orty minutes after they trotted out of K2 base camp, Quinn and Thibodaux had cut Abu Khalifa’s lead to less than two hundred meters. Light from the rising sun crept down the mountains and across the valley floor, turning everything a brilliant gold.

“Chair Force,” the big Marine said, never missing an opportunity to razz Quinn for being in what he considered the taxi-driving branch of the military. “You remember those pre-deployment training iterations they give you where every scenario devolves into a critically catastrophic shitstorm of death?”

Quinn shrugged as he moved. His friend’s philosophical path was a wandering one. “I guess.”

“Well, I’m here to tell you,” Thibodaux said. “Every op I go on with you starts out that way.”

“And?” Quinn said, waiting for the rest.

The Cajun grinned, batting his good eye. “I just wanted to say thanks.” Chuckling despite the almost nonexistent air, he nodded down the trail toward their fleeing target. “I gotta tell you though, I am tired of this runnin’ shit. What say we go ahead and give this guy a big hand hug around his neck?”

Quinn smiled. Jacques was good for keeping things light, even amid the chaos of battle. It helped him keep his mind off his daughter. “Not sure what he’ll give us, but I hope we have a few minutes with him before we have to break off and go after the Feng brothers.”

“Roger that,” the big Cajun said, gulping for air, but powering through like a good Marine.

Snow-covered peaks tore at the belly of the sky like fangs. Many of the world’s 8,000-meter giants surrounded the valley. The Gasherbrums, Broad Peak, and K2—the Mountain of Mountains—rose up around them, reminding the three tiny dots that were pursuers and pursued of how insignificant they truly were. It was no wonder this place was called the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods.

Quinn scanned the boulders ahead of the stumbling jihadist, searching for the hidden threats he knew were there. “See one, think two” was a philosophy that had kept him alive on countless occasions. There were few secrets in the tactical world anymore. The Internet was rife with training videos and war-fighting manuals that drew the veil of secrecy from even the most sacred of strategies. Posting a rear guard was far from a complicated procedure. Even a conscripted goatherd would remember to leave someone to watch his back trail. There was a high probability that the kill squad had left someone behind—and that someone was likely lurking in the shadows ahead, just waiting for Quinn and Thibodaux to enter his sight picture.

Hours of physical training left both Quinn and Thibodaux in excellent condition. They’d been living at the base camp long enough for their bodies to acclimatize, but prolonged jogging at 12,000 feet pushed them to their limits and slowed them to little more than a steady shuffle.

The valley narrowed ahead before spreading out along the river in a wide gravel bar, forming a little pass that made for a perfect choke point on their route. Going downhill, Quinn was able to keep the target in sight, but boulders the size of garage doors littered the riverbank, providing countless places for an ambush. Quinn took his eyes off the dangers ahead long enough to shoot a glance at Thibodaux. They were in the shadows, but the big man squinted his good eye as if he were staring into the sun. Like Quinn, he was watching Khalifa for some sort of reaction.

Quinn raised his fist the moment he saw the fleeing target’s head snap to the right. Something—or someone—in the rocks had caught his attention.

Puffs of dirt and debris rose from the ground and surrounding rocks a half second later, sending Quinn and Thibodaux diving for the cover of a car-sized boulder. The staccato crack of gunfire echoed across valley walls.

His back against the rough stone, Jacques held the rifle flat to his chest. “Sound’s bouncing all over these mountains,” he said. “Hard to get a fix on ’em.”

Quinn said nothing. He’d drawn his revolver the moment he’d seen the fleeing jihadi perk up. He wished for a rifle of his own, but posing as a cook made carrying a long gun impractical, so he made do with a rusty Colt revolver he’d traded for in Karachi. It came with half a box of relatively new .45 ACP ammo and two metal half-moon clips that held the rounds in the cylinder. Without his customary Kimber 10mm and a second Glock or Beretta, Quinn felt nearly naked with the six-shooter.

Thibodaux closed his good eye, listening intently as he pinpointed a shooter’s location, a hundred meters ahead in the boulders along the river. He swung the SCAR and pulled the trigger, silencing the would-be assassin with a well-placed shot. One down, a second shooter began to walk a series of bullets across the trail.

Thibodaux looked down at the Colt in Quinn’s hand and grimaced. “Tell you what, Chair Force, how about you let me do the heavy lifting on this one. I’m not convinced that blunderbuss won’t blow up in your hand and kill us both.”

“How many rounds you have?” Quinn asked, nodding to the SCAR.

The Marine patted the magazine that jutted from the rifle’s action. “Seven here,” he said. “And another mag of twenty in my pocket. But, I don’t reckon there are more than two or three bad guys up there.”

The whap of rotors combined with the high metallic whine of aircraft engines drowned out the sound of gunfire. A hundred feet off the deck, two Alouette III helicopters, olive drab and bearing the green-and-white dot of the Pakistan Air Force, flared to slow and hover as they moved down the trail on the other side of the ambushers and directly in front of the fleeing jihadi. Designed for the rigors of operations at extremely high altitudes, the Aérospatiale Alouette IIIs were a favorite of both the Pakistan and Indian Air forces.

Quinn shielded his eyes with a forearm trying to block the swirling gray cloud of glacial dust. The lead chopper inched forward a few yards at a time, searching the rocks like a hunter kicking the grass to flush a bird. A moment later, a rocket hissed from the cylindrical pod on the Alouette’s struts, slamming into the ambusher’s nest. The blast was close enough that bits of stone and dead jihadist rained down on Quinn and Thibodaux where they knelt behind their boulder. The choppers loitered over the area for another full minute, no doubt using a FLIR or Forward Looking Infrared scope to search for remaining threats.

Quinn could see Khalifa through the dust, lying stunned on the gravel at the side of the trail, his uniform reduced to a pile of rags. The concussion had likely rendered him half deaf, but he was still alive.

Both Quinn and Thibodaux shielded their eyes as the Alouettes settled onto the gravel and the engine sounds whined down. A steady mountain wind pushed the dust away in a matter of moments, revealing a team of six extremely fit-looking men in maroon berets and camouflage battle dress. Each carried a Steyr AUG Bullpup rifle in his hands and a dour expression on his face.

“They don’t look too awful happy,” Jacques said, letting the butt of the rifle slide down to his boot toe, holding it by the barrel, but not giving it up completely. “Reckon they’re here to help us or shoot us in the beak?”

“We’re about to find out,” Quinn said. “See the guy standing out front?”

“He’s the one you told me went to the US Air Force Academy?” Thibodaux said. “The one with a mustache the size of a Kleenex box?”

“For a semester.” Quinn nodded. “We were roommates.”

“Friends then.” Thibodaux nodded.

“There was one little thing.” Quinn took a deep breath. “We had a little boxing match the last day of the semester.”

“Great,” Thibodaux groaned. “I guess I’ll understand it if they shoot us then.”

The apparent leader of the squad stood out front, arms folded across a narrow chest. A gleaming gold tooth peeked from behind a bushy black mustache that looked far too wide for his face. He’d always been thin, but the years since the academy—and likely the weight of command—had added depth to the hollows of his cheeks. Two men slung their rifles and stepped forward to grab the panting Abu Khalifa. One punched him in the belly, doubling him over in pain before the other cuffed his hands behind his back. The first soldier unslung his rifle and pointed it at Khalifa’s head while the other patted him down for weapons. When it was apparent that he didn’t have any, they kicked his feet out from under him to send him sprawling to the rocky ground with no means to catch himself. He landed with a thud and writhed on his side at the wing commander’s feet. The commander studied the jihadist for a moment from behind his big mustache, and then turned to peer at Quinn. There was a glint of mischief in his brown eyes. Hands clasped at the small of his back, he breathed deeply from the mountain air as if he owned the place.

And that was not far from wrong. A smile formed on the man’s face, just a hint at first, but by the time he reached Quinn, it had turned into a full-blown grin. The slender Pakistani embraced him in a full hug, grabbing both shoulders and then stepping back to give him a once-over.

“It has been too long,” the man said.

“It has.” Quinn smiled, glancing at Thibodaux.

“Jacques,” he said. “I’d like you to meet Wing Commander Mandeep Gola of the Pakistan Air Force.”

Thibodaux grinned, extending his hand. “I’ll bet you have some juicy stories to share.”

“Apart from the one of him nearly killing me in front of my parents?” Mandeep gave a deep belly laugh. He steered Quinn and Thibodaux out of earshot of his men. “As a matter of fact, I do know some interesting tales.” His words clicked with heavily punctuated Pakistani English. “But I am afraid we must save the best ones for another time. My superiors report that the escaped brothers have killed a small contingent of military police on the road between Gilgit and Chitral.”

Quinn nodded, picturing a map of Pakistan in his mind. “The Fengs were thought to have ties with al Qaeda cells operating out of some caves in Waziristan and even more across the border. You think they could be heading for Afghanistan?”

Mandeep smoothed his great mustache with a thumb and forefinger and sighed. “Many in my government believe just that. Or at least they say they believe so. But reports also say the security at Dera Ismail Khan prison was extremely tight. I have it on good authority that half the guard force had called in ill the night of the escape.” He shrugged. “It took the help of someone with power and connections to ensure their escape in the first place. I see no reason those same powerful and connected entities would not work to deceive everyone regarding their direction of travel.”

“Even killing their own guys,” Thibodaux muttered, disgusted, but not really surprised. “That’s messed up.”

“Indeed,” Gola said. “These killers have ties to Kashgar and my gut tells me that is the way they have gone.” He smiled at Quinn. “Do you still trust in your gut, the way you did at the Academy?”

“I do,” Quinn said. Even as a child growing up in Alaska, he’d learned that no matter what you called it, sixth sense, instinct, or a gut feeling—life offered subtle clues that only the subconscious could read. The Japanese called it
haragei
—art of the belly—and it was the foolish person that did not listen to it.

“There is a good chance that they have already crossed the Khunjareb into China,” Mandeep continued. “My government has set up a task force and the foreign ministry is working with Beijing for permission to send investigators into China.”

“Politicians,” Thibodaux scoffed. “How’s that working out?”

“As one might expect, I am afraid.” Mandeep smoothed his mustache in thought. “But at my lowly level, I maintain certain connections that help me circumvent such political entanglements. The Feng brothers’ escape has made Pakistan a laughingstock. I wish to see these terrorists captured at once and I do not care who does it.” He nodded toward his Alouette, brightening some. “My men will take custody of your prisoner. I’ve made arrangements to fly you across the border as far as Tashkurgen, where I meet with my counterpart in the PLA Air Force for a periodic lunch. I have taken the liberty of setting up ground transportation for you from there.” Mandeep put a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “I know how much you like motorcycles, my friend, but was simply too rushed to find anything but a small van for you to use.”

It made sense that the Fengs would go to a familiar area to roost. And getting as far as Tashkurgen by air would cut their time to Kashgar in half. He hated missing the opportunity to interrogate Khalifa. Quinn suspected Qasim Ranjhani—a terrorist with ties to President Hartman Drake—was behind the Concordia massacre and Khalifa was their first real lead to where he might be hiding.

The jihadist appeared to read Quinn’s mind and looked up with a sneer from where he sat beside the Alouette’s strut. “I am a man of no consequence,” he mumbled in a voice much higher than Quinn had expected, as if reading from a prepared script. “You and your kind are no more than dogs. Inshallah, we will cleanse the earth of infid—”

Mandeep Gola’s pistol seemed to leap into his hand. He spun and put two rounds into the jihadist’s face, obliterating Quinn’s chances of getting any information.

The wing commander holstered his pistol with an exhausted groan. “We are already familiar with Abu Khalifa’s ties to the Taliban. He is one of fifteen men responsible for the murder of the children of my friends. Such a man’s absence from the earth is far more beneficial than any questionable intelligence he might have provided.”

Two of the soldiers picked up the mutilated body and dragged it toward the other chopper. Mandeep shook his head as if to clear it from the killing. The broad smile crept back across his face as he looked at Quinn.

“Come,” he said, disappearing around the left side of the aircraft to give it a quick once-over before he climbed in. “We should be on our way.”

Ahead of Quinn on the Alouette’s boarding ladder, Thibodaux stopped to glance back at the second chopper where two of Mandeep Gola’s men zipped the mess that was Abu Khalifa into a body bag. A third Pakistani stood by with his rifle across his chest, staring back across the rocky terrain with a blank face.