Tangled Pursuit (23 page)

Wyatt waited until the helicopter took off and then left Ops, electing to walk the mile in the dark back to SEAL Team Three’s building. First, though, he wanted to stop at SEAL Intel, which was located just down the street from Ops. It was there that information from every possible resource poured in for rapid analysis.

They had a SEAL intelligence section, staffed mostly with women officers who were skilled at passing around all the intel and finding the gems hidden within it. Wyatt wanted to look over the shoulder of one particular officer. Lieutenant Amanda Harris was considered their top intel specialist. She could find needles in a haystack, which was a skill very few analysts possessed.

Wyatt wanted to get the details of the terrain that Tal and Jay would be inhabiting. Further, there were spring storms still moving through the area that could dump many feet of snow on the summits of the Hindu Kush mountains. More than one sniper team had been caught in one of those sudden, unexpected blizzards. Some had lost their lives, others a limb to the brutal frostbite. Being a sniper was one of the hardest jobs in the world, as far as Wyatt was concerned.

Walking quickly through the hot, sluggish breeze, he turned down another street that would lead him to the CIA building where the SEALs, Marine Force Recons, and CAG/Delta intel units were housed. They all shared intel with one another, wanting to keep their operators safe out there in the badlands.

As he showed his badge to the security people, they allowed him into the dimly lit area where a number of Navy officers worked intently at their computer screens. He spied his blond-haired friend Amanda, a petite five-foot-three-inch woman with blue eyes and a ready smile. She was twenty-five, married to a SEAL, and knew her business better than some intel officers twice her age.

“Chief Lockwood!” she said, waving to him. “Good to see you! What brings you over here again?”

He smiled a little and sat down at her desk. She was looking at a live video feed from cameras aboard a drone. “Need a favor, Mandy. I got a Marine sniper team just going out. Will you pull up their mission?”

Wyatt gave her the code number and saw it pop up on her computer screen.

“Uh-oh,” Amanda muttered, frowning. “They’re going to a real hot spot, Chief.”

“Why do you say that?” He tried to keep his voice level, but his heart was hammering hard.

She made a few taps on the keys to call up the nearest drone’s live feed. “Well, as you know, we expected the spring surge, and it’s happening right now. But the enemy is suddenly bringing over a hell of a lot of men. We’ve counted two thousand pouring through the area in the last six hours.”

“Hell,” Wyatt muttered, eyes narrowing, watching the drone footage intently.

“Yes. And that HVT? Sidiq Sharan? CIA’s picking up lots of sudden chatter that he’s coming across in two days.” She shrugged. “Could be a lie, of course. They’ve done this to us before. They’ll give a date and time and no one appears.”

“Are you running facial ID recognition off this footage on the men coming across the border?”

“Oh, yes.” She looked up at him. “Rest assured, if Sidiq is among them, he’ll be ID’d. We’ve got plenty of good photos of that guy.”

“Well, that sniper team going out right now is the one tasked with taking him down.”

She tilted her head. “Captain Talia Culver. I know of her. She’s got a stellar reputation for taking down HVTs.”

“Yeah, I know,” Wyatt said unhappily.

“Hmmm, what’s going on here, Chief? You’ve been over here a lot today, but I’ve never seen you look so worried. Is this a personal issue?”

Wyatt shot her a sideways glance. “Now, Mandy, there you go again.”

She blushed and pushed some blond strands away from her cheek. “Chief, you’re way too good-looking to be single forever. I keep telling you that.”

“Yes, and your fame precedes you, Mandy. You’re Bagram’s queen matchmaker. No, ma’am, I’m not telling you a thing.”

Her lips drew into an angelic smile. “Oh . . . Chief . . . I do believe there’s something going on there.”

Holding up his hand, he said, “Do me a favor? If you ID Sidiq, give me a call. I want to know about it immediately.”

“Will do, Chief.”

Wyatt left, knowing the challenges that awaited Tal and Jay once they were dropped below that ridge. It snowed regularly at that altitude. He clenched his fist and wished like hell he was up there with them. With what was going on, it was going to be one of the hottest spots in that area. And one of the most deadly.

CHAPTER 13

T
HE
MH
-47 HAD
dropped Tal and Jay on a snowy area just below a ridge in the Hindu Kush mountains. It had been dark, the wind bitterly cold and the snow ankle-to-knee deep. By the time dawn showed up on the eastern horizon, they’d struggled to the other side of the ridge, and Tal had chosen a hide. The snow was a bitch, dangerous and slowing them down considerably. She’d found a series of limestone caves beneath a wide yellow overhang at six thousand feet, and about five hundred feet below them, she’d discovered the perfect spot to create their hide.

Jay had gone back to do some serious recon on the cave system, making several drawings on a notepad he carried with him. While he was scouting, Tal was pushing rocks around to create their hide. A good hide was out in plain sight. It was never in obvious places like a
wadi
or ravine, near a grove of trees, or in a canyon or a valley. Snipers always wanted the high ground, and she was happy to be at fifty-five hundred feet, far away from that screaming, gusty wind that was now shrieking like a pissed-off banshee across the ridgeline above them. And they were below that ass-freezing snow line.

By the time Jay had returned, dawn was a weak gray line on the horizon, illuminating the Pakistan border a mile away. Tal had created a comfy rock nest for them and had already used a gray-black-and-cream camouflage tarp, spreading it across the hide to protect them from glaring sunlight, rain, snow, or the biting wind that whistled across the area. Then she had selected rocks to pull the tarp tight across their hide, using different sizes of stones to merge seamlessly with their surroundings. If nothing else, snipers knew how to blend in and not be discovered by their enemies.

Even better, the arrow-shaped limestone overhang above left a large, dark shadow across their hide as the sun moved across the sky. Every Taliban in the area probably knew about the overhang, and a person’s eyes would go to it first, not to the neutral gray scree slope below it. They’d gotten lucky.

Jay grinned as he pushed his NVGs up on his helmet. “Hey, I hit gold.”

“Really?” Tal turned, sitting down in their rocky hole. It was seven feet long and seven feet wide, big enough for two people. There was even a place in the rear for one of them to catch some sleep. “What did you find?” She saw Jay’s blue eyes gleaming. At twenty-seven, he was one of the few people she would trust with her life. Her spotter was thorough and careful, never missing any details.

He crouched down next to her, holding his drawing toward her to catch the rising light of dawn. “This is a huge cave system. First of all, the front entrance of this cave has a little soil, but not much. I found dried goat turds, but they’re really old. There’s a narrow goat trail in front of it, but it hasn’t been used, I’d say, for years. I found no human footprints anywhere outside or within it. The rear half of the cave is composed of white limestone, so I couldn’t see any tracks from that point onward.”

He slid his index finger over the sketch. “You go into this first cave and there are two tunnels at the rear. One leads north and the other south. The north one”—his voice rose optimistically—“ascends about two hundred feet into an upper chamber. There’s water available in there for us to get resupplied. There’s also a nice pool, large enough to take a quick wash in, but it’s going to be colder than hell because it was formed by melting snow from up on the ridge that moved through the cracks in the limestone.”

“Hey, maybe we’ll be able to clean up every once in a while. That would be nice.” Snipers rarely moved from their hides and never had the opportunity to get near water to clean their dirty, smelly bodies. Tal smiled up at Jay’s camouflaged face. They’d wipe off their paint come daylight and be invisible within their hide.

“I feel like we’re at the Ritz,” Jay said with a grin. “The other good thing about this cave is that it has a natural exit point.” He nodded toward the east, where the Pakistan border was located. “If we need to escape, we can. I think I should call this find in to HQ. The egress point is at eight thousand feet on the other side of that ridge, where we originally landed.” His mouth twitched. “That tunnel opening was only fifty feet away!”

“Crap, you’re kidding me,” Tal muttered, scowling. Had they known beforehand, it would have saved them hours of searching for a place to hide. Instead, they’d spent six hours up above the snow line, bitterly cold, their hands freezing despite their thermal gloves. They could have waltzed through that tunnel system and come out just above where they were at present.

“Never mind,” he muttered. “We’ll turn this intel in so the next sniper pair coming up here won’t have to freeze their asses off, too.”

Tal nodded. Sniper teams rarely went back to the same area twice, but at least, knowing this route, they could make it easier to get to another area rather than fight that ridge. The Taliban had binoculars and sniper rifles of their own on the Af-Pak border, just a mile from their present site.

She knew once she fired her Win-Mag, those snipers across the border would hear the sound and pretty much be able to hone in on where they were located. They could use their binoculars and long-range riflescopes to call in the discovery. Then, they’d triangulate and locate from where the bullet had been fired. The enemy could fire into their location. Tal knew they’d have to swiftly abandon their hide and find another elsewhere if they were detected. The Taliban would send up a team and investigate the area as quickly as possible, for sure. And they couldn’t be found in the area.

“Hey, partner, you’ve made a great find!” She grinned enthusiastically. “Tell me more.”

“Now, this south tunnel is interesting, Tal. It spans about a quarter mile, losing about five hundred feet of altitude. And then the tunnel splits again. There’s a lower cave here, a small one, but you can stand up in it. But it’s the other tunnel that goes another five hundred feet farther down. That cave is huge; there’s a natural crack in the ceiling, so you’d get daylight in there, and a big pool of water, too. Plus, there’s another egress route.”

Jay folded up the paper, placing it in his pocket. “That means that if things go to hell for us here, we have several planned egress routes, and we’d be able to exfil the area more easily via a helo. I want to call this intel in on our sat phone to the CIA HQ at Bagram. I already got the GPS on each of the two caves in case we have to get out of Dodge in a helluva hurry.”

Nodding, Tal hauled her Win-Mag out of its protective nylon sheath, moving to the lip of their hide overlooking the border area. She snapped the bipod into place near the front of the barrel, positioning it so she could look through her Nightforce scope. “Call it in. They need to know our GPS anyway, now that we’re settled.”

“Roger that,” Jay said, pulling their sat phone out of the side pocket of his ruck. “I’m going to be detailed in my call because we’re in a constantly changing situation here.”

Tal placed several blankets over the stones so that as she lay on her belly to look through the scope of her rifle. “Do that. And get the latest update on the flow across the border. Check the number of men coming across, okay? I want that bastard Sidiq, if he’s in those groups.”

“Got it,” Jay murmured.

Tal kept one ear keyed to Jay’s quiet conversation with the black ops people at Bagram. Major Tom Dickenson was listening in, too. It was his job to keep tabs on all six of his sniper teams now out in the field. Tal trusted Dickenson. He was a damn good CO, and she’d worked with him for the past two years. He had their backs.

She flipped up the covers on the front and back of the Nightforce scope. Then she draped gray netting across the barrel so it couldn’t be detected when the sun came up, striking the front of the rifle. Taliban snipers were constantly moving their spotter scopes along this side of the mountain because everyone knew it was an ideal position for snipers to kill soldiers coming over the Af-Pak border.

She heard Jay sign off. Getting comfortable, Tal slowly moved her scope to the border area. There was a lot of activity, mostly foot traffic, but she spotted a group of around twenty Taliban on horseback galloping over the border heading into Afghanistan. They wanted to make it to one of the hundreds of limestone caves in this mountain range to hide in before broad daylight exposed them to Apache combat helicopters patrolling the area.

American Apaches were always flying the border route, sending Hellfire missiles toward anything that looked suspicious. Once night fell, the border would become more active with camel, donkey, and human caravans all carrying fertilizer to make IEDs to makers in Afghanistan. These caravans had one man who was the leader, wearing a pair of NVGs, night vision goggles, so he could lead the group along a ratline or goat path. Otherwise, Taliban didn’t move at night precisely because they had no money to buy something as expensive as NVGs to see where they were going. During the day, people on foot crisscrossed the border. Some were there for legit reasons, some were not, and that’s where drone recognition software picked out the enemy’s face from people who routinely crossed the border for food, work, business, or visiting relatives. There was little to do except watch and wait as the long hours crawled by. Tal would sleep for four hours, and then Jay would catch his share as she took over surveillance.

Maybe, Tal thought, they’d even grab a dip in that one nearby cave pool just before dawn, if things were quiet. Tal was dying to scrub off the fine dirt and grit that always worked beneath her uniform, no matter how hard she tried to stay clean. Her skin was always raw and badly chafed after an op.