Private Wars (32 page)

CHAPTER 40

Afghanistan—Hindu Kush Mountains—
Samangan Region

26 August, 0623 Hours (GMT+4:30)

They were ambushed before they came out of
the mountains.

The fact of the ambush didn’t surprise Chace. What surprised Chace was who was doing the ambushing.

They’d
departed Kostum’s stronghold before dawn, the sky just beginning to lighten enough to show the blue behind the black, and the last hard stars starting to vanish above. Kostum had insisted on guiding them back to Mazar-i-Sharif himself, leading the convoy, and leaving Ruslan behind in the stronghold, to limit his exposure. Lankford would wait in Mazar-i, and Chace would continue on to Tashkent. Once everything had been confirmed, Ruslan would join Lankford and proceed to the exchange, to be reunited with the boy.

Kostum assembled a convoy for them of guards and vehicles, three of the seven automobiles that he kept in a substantial garage. Chace and Lankford traveled in the middle vehicle of the convoy. The car was a four-wheel-drive Jeep SUV, like Fariq’s had been, but unlike Fariq’s it was in much better condition. Kostum drove, with Lankford beside him, Chace seated in the back. In the bed of the SUV, the graybeard who had escorted them to Kostum’s rode with them, Kalashnikov cradled in his lap.

They drove out along the base of the canyon for just over a kilometer before turning uphill, the vehicles following one another in a weaving incline that, to Chace, seemed impossibly steep. In the moments before they crested onto the road, she was certain their vehicle would topple over backward, and she envisioned herself being bounced around the interior of the car like a pinball as it fell, end over end, back to the canyon floor. It didn’t happen, and after a moment spent to allow the follow car to catch up, the convoy resumed its journey, wending along the mountainside, descending again.

Then they were hit.

The
explosion came first, just as the lead car began around a bend. Dirt and stone rained upward from the road, and the lead SUV veered wildly, fishtailing, then falling sideways, skidding to a halt, its wheels spinning uselessly in the air. Kostum slammed on the brakes, cursing. Chace didn’t have to turn around to know that the same thing was going on in the car behind them; it was why the lead vehicle had been hit first, to stop the convoy dead in its tracks.

She lunged for the passenger-side door, shouting, “Out! Get
out
!”

An RPG streaked down from above, fired from higher along the mountainside, and as Chace tumbled out of the car she heard the lead vehicle exploding, and she thought she heard the screams, too. Then the chattering of weapons fire began, the sounds of glass breaking and metal tearing, Kostum’s men desperate to exit their vehicles to return fire. Chace had been riding behind Lankford, and both had exited the Jeep along the downslope side, and she figured the drop had to be nasty, but it couldn’t be nastier than staying on the trail, exposed. She leaped over the edge just as she heard another explosion, quieter than the RPG blast, what she thought was a grenade.

It was a good drop, almost fifteen feet on the vertical, just enough of an incline that she could get her feet down and lie back, sliding on the rough terrain, feeling the rocks and earth tear at her clothes. When she came to a stop beside Lankford, he was already up, with his Browning in hand. Chace struggled to her feet, reaching around for her gun, and discovered it was missing. She looked up, saw the Walther snagged on the rocks above her, where it had been stripped from her back during the slide. She started to curse, then heard a third explosion, and above, on the road, another blossom of flame rolled skyward as the follow car took another RPG.

“Well, this isn’t good,” Lankford remarked.

Chace ignored him. It was a turkey shoot above, she was sure: Kostum’s men trapped in their vehicles, exposed as they exited, and the ambushers using the higher ground of the mountainside for cover. She couldn’t see any movement, but she could hear the weapons fire, and it didn’t sound right. Whoever had hit them wasn’t using Kalashnikovs. The bursts were becoming more controlled, more measured. Whoever was up there killing off Kostum’s men knew what they were doing.

“We can’t stay here,” Chace said.

Lankford nodded, checked around them, then indicated a direction farther downslope that would wind back around in the direction the convoy had come. Seeing no better route and no immediate reason not to take it, Chace began leading the way.

“Who do you think?” Lankford murmured, keeping his voice low. “Bandits?”

“Sounds too precise,” Chace answered, eyes on the slope. Calling the terrain treacherous was generous, and the last thing she wanted was a broken ankle. “Sounds more like a military strike.”

“Maybe the Americans? Removing another warlord?”

“Christ, let’s hope not.”

The gunfire from above had stopped, the last echoes bouncing away from them, off the mountains. Chace moved behind a substantial boulder, dropped down flat behind it.

“Sevara?” Lankford asked, dropping down beside her.

Chace shook her head. The timing didn’t fit, it wasn’t right. If this attack was courtesy of Sevara, she’d have had to move damn fast to make it happen. It hadn’t been twelve hours since Chace had spoken to Crocker in the Ops Room. Even if C had gone straight to the FCO and the FCO had agreed and gone straight to the U.K. Ambassador in Tashkent, there hadn’t been enough time. Not to mention that the Ambassador wouldn’t have wanted to bother the President of Uzbekistan in the middle of the night about this.

“It’s not Sevara,” she said. “Got to be someone else. Question is who?”

“It’s fucking Afghanistan,” Lankford muttered, peering around the side of the boulder, the Browning held in both hands. “Take your pick.”

For several seconds, neither of them moved, listening hard for more sounds of gunfire or combat. Nothing came back to them.

They couldn’t just sit and wait. Two of the convoy vehicles had been taken out, which meant, as far as she knew, the third was still intact. If it was a robbery, even if it wasn’t, whoever had sprung the ambush wouldn’t just leave it there. If they decided to withdraw, they’d take the vehicle with them, leaving Chace and Lankford stranded.

And if they weren’t withdrawing, it meant that it was a hunting party who had no intention of leaving the job half done.

She cursed the fact that she hadn’t moved the Walther to a front-carry this morning. She still had her knife, a folding Emerson blade she’d scored off Kittering in a bet years before, but it required getting very close, and from the sound of the weapons they’d heard, she didn’t think close would be terribly likely. She needed a gun of her own.

“We need to get back up to the road,” she said. “And fast. Come around behind them.”

“Don’t want to get stranded,” Lankford agreed. “Figure another hundred yards or so back the way we came, then up again?”

Chace nodded. “I lost my gun. You’ll have to lead.”

Lankford slid around her, swapping places. “Now,” he said.

They broke from their cover, Lankford leading, running low and as fast as they could along the mountainside. The ground was covered with a layer of loose earth and rocks, and the footing remained dangerously uneven. Another chatter of weapons fire bounced off the mountains, but the echo made its direction impossible to determine, and Chace couldn’t tell if the shots were targeted at them, at someone on the road, or at someone else, somewhere else altogether.

Lankford slid to a stop at the edge of a ravine running down from the road at almost ninety degrees, looked back over his shoulder to Chace. She nodded to him, and he wedged himself into the narrow space, using it to climb. Chace pushed herself into the crevice, trying to keep in cover as much as possible. She looked up toward the top of the ravine, saw Lankford disappear back onto the road, waited for him to reappear, to give her the signal that it was safe to climb.

Her heart was pounding, and she could feel perspiration running down her back, stinging the skin scraped during the downhill slide. Her mouth was dry from dust, it had filled her nostrils as well, and as soon as she realized that, she had to fight the urge to sneeze.

A pebble dropped down from above, bounced off her hand, and she looked up quickly to see Lankford sending hand signals her way, telling her to come up, and to stay quiet.

Chace pulled herself farther into the ravine, chimney-climbed her way to the top. Lankford pulled her the last three feet, onto the narrow road, and she rolled past him, then came up. They had backtracked far enough to be beyond the bend. Black smoke drifted from farther down the trail.

Lankford tapped her shoulder, started with the hand signals again. Three, no, six men, all armed.

Jesus Christ, six,
Chace thought.
We’ll have to draw them out
.

She pulled out her knife, unfolded it, and Lankford raised an eyebrow at her, as if to question her sanity, and the look she gave him in return begged for a better option. Lankford inhaled, then pointed to himself, then down the trail, to the bend. Chace shook her head, indicated herself and the same direction, then indicated Lankford and the rising mountain slope. He saw the wisdom of it immediately, nodded, and began climbing again.

Chace took a moment to give Lankford time, watching the bend in the road, where she was certain that, any moment, a member of the ambush team would appear. She risked a glance away to track Lankford’s progress. He climbed swiftly, and as she looked he stopped ascending and began making his way alongside, following the bend.

There’d been a time, when Lankford had first joined the Section, that Chace had thought he wouldn’t make it, that he wouldn’t last. They’d done a job in St. Petersburg together, and he’d blown it, but then again, so had she, and Crocker had been quick to point that out when she’d returned to London complaining about Lankford’s performance. She’d wanted him out of the Section, and Crocker had refused to terminate him.

At this moment, she was very glad for Crocker’s refusal.

Lankford crouched down, working himself into cover behind another cluster of boulders, and she saw him glance back her way. She gave him a wait signal, then started along the road, the knife in her right hand, gripped for an upward thrust. She went as quietly as she could manage, which meant going slowly.

She heard voices as she approached the bend, and it took her a moment to understand the words being said as Uzbek, and not Pashto. So it hadn’t been just a robbery, just an ambush. Whoever this was, they’d come looking for either Ruslan or Lankford and Chace. But Chace was positive it couldn’t have been Sevara who had sent them; it didn’t make sense. The timing simply made it impossible, not unless Sevara had somehow known that Chace and Lankford were with Kostum.

Just shy of the bend, Chace held up. She took two deep breaths, filling herself with as much oxygen as she could, adjusting her grip on the knife. One of the voices sounded close, and she hoped it was very close indeed.

She looked up above her, to where Lankford crouched waiting, watching, and gave him the go signal. He returned it, began moving again, this time much more cautiously. The idea was that he’d take a position around the bend but well above the road, preferably one in strong cover. As soon as he had position, he’d open fire, and Chace would move. She licked dust from her lips, waiting. He didn’t have a lot of bullets. He’d have to make them all count, and she would have to work fast.

Then the Browning spoke, two shots, and someone cried out, and immediately upon that, there was shouting in Uzbek, and a barrage of return fire. Chace shoved off the slope and sprinted, the knife in her right held low and ready.

The lead and follow cars had been the ones to burn, their carcasses still smoldering on the trail as Chace came around the bend. There had been six in the ambush team, but Lankford had dropped one with his opening shots, and the man’s death had achieved the desired result. Along the trail, the remaining five were all facing the mountainside, looking up, three of them with M-16s at their shoulders, laying down a spray that chewed the rocks and earth above. Their clothing was closer to Chace’s and Lankford’s than to what Kostum and the others sported, and it confirmed it for her that these men had come from Tashkent.

The nearest of them was fifteen feet away when she made the turn. He was firing furiously at the mountainside above, and Chace made straight for him. He caught her motion in his peripheral vision at the last second, too late, trying to turn toward her and bring the rifle down at the same time. The result was that he turned into her knife as she drove the blade into him, punching above his stomach, then thrusting up with all her might. His eyes bulged and his arm came down, and Chace yanked both her knife and the M-16 from the man, then dropped her blade, turning the automatic rifle in her hand.

There was a shout from down the road, one of the gunmen spotting her, and the firing stopped abruptly, and in that split second the scene seared itself into her mind. She tasted her sweat and the cordite and the acrid smoke from the two burning vehicles, saw the man she’d stabbed doubled over, facedown. She saw the others, the bodies of Kostum’s men burnt and shredded by the RPGs or the M-16s, and the gunman that Chris had hit, flat on his back, his left leg tucked awkwardly beneath him, his blood sucked up by the thirsty earth. She saw Kostum himself, slumped against the rear wheel of the Jeep, bloodied and beaten, in the shadow of two men, each with pistols in their hands.

Two men she knew in her nightmares, one young and big who had grown erect at the sight of her pain and fear, the other older and shorter and disinterested to the point of inhuman. She saw Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev, and they saw her at the same moment the other gunmen saw her, and perhaps they recognized her then, perhaps they didn’t, but Chace had no doubts, and she understood it all in that fraction of a second; this hadn’t been Sevara’s doing, it had been Zahidov’s, and that explained everything.