Killing Ground

“The Kalashnikovs are just as old,” Bolan said.

“Probably scavenged off dead Russkies,” Kitt theorized. “We’ll haul ’em back to Bagram along with the bodies. Maybe AI can find something that’ll clue us in on where they set out from.”

When the captain’s headset squawked, Kitt excused himself and wandered off, leaving Bolan to muse over the fallen enemy. All but one of them looked to be in their early twenties, wearing black turbans and dark, loose clothing, much of it bloodstained with gunshot wounds. The oldest victim, and by far the most heavily bearded, had a scar along his right cheek and was missing two fingers on his left hand. When Bolan’s flashlight caught a gleam of metal beneath the folds of the man’s shirt, he leaned over and found an automatic pistol tucked inside his waistband. Like the C3s, it was handmade, a crude approximation of a U.S. Government Model 1911. Bolan had seen footage of Taliban camps where children worked by candlelight manufacturing such guns as a means of supplementing the insurgents’ arsenal. The weapons were notorious for jamming or even exploding when triggered, and Bolan wondered if that had been the cause for the man’s missing fingers.

Bolan had begun to search the man more thoroughly when Kitt returned.

“That was Little Bird,” he reported. “No luck tracking down any stragglers.”

“What about O’Brien?” Bolan asked. “Did they get to him?”

“We’ve got a problem there,” Kitt replied. “They went to ridgeline and can see where he tripped the mine, but there’s no sign of him.”

Bolan’s expression darkened. “He was shot through the neck. There’s no way he could have pulled through.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Kitt said. “My guess is the snipers took the body as some sort of consolation prize.”

Bolan’s stomach knotted with rage. If he’d had it all to do over, he’d have reacted the same way once the ambush had broken out, but that did little to ease his mind over the notion that Howitzer O’Brien had been left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

4

Remnants of a late-season hurricane had wandered far enough inland to lash Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with a torrential downpour that left Stony Man Farm, like many other estates scattered throughout the Shenandoah Valley, drenched and wind-battered. Barbara Price, mission controller for the Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group, was out helping the blacksuit security force tend to the damage. Sloshing through rain puddles, bundled up warmly against the late-autumn chill, the blond-haired woman gathered up snapped twigs and broken tree limbs that lay strewed in the orchards and added them to a growing heap in the truck bed of one of the Farm’s Ford F-150 pickups.

“Could have been worse,” one of the blacksuits told her as he stomped on the debris, compressing it to make room for more. Like the others, he had a web-holstered 9 mm pistol concealed beneath his down-lined ski vest and gave no appearance of being anything other than a hired farmhand. “A little colder and the trees would’ve iced over. If you think this is a mess…”

“We’re not out of it yet,” Price said, casting an eye on the dark, leaden clouds still massed over the valley. There was more rain in the forecast, and she could only hope the temperature wouldn’t dip low enough to threaten the trees further.

As Price gathered up the last of the fallen branches, a rumbling sounded overhead. It wasn’t thunder, but rather the familiar, mechanical drone of an approaching helicopter. Moments later, a small Bell 47 two-seater dropped below the cloud line and approached the camouflaged runway that lay between the orchards and the dormant planting fields.

“I’ll let you guys finish up,” Price said. She took a large thermos from the front seat of the truck and made her way to the runway. By the time a bulky, middle-aged man wearing a rumpled trench coat had disembarked from the helicopter, she’d filled the thermos cap with coffee.

“Not exactly fresh from the pot,” Price said, holding out the coffee. “It’s still hot, though, and way too strong.”

“Just the way I like it.” Hal Brognola, SOG’s director, mustered a wan, close-lipped smile. “Thanks.”

By the time he’d taken his first sip, Brognola’s smile had faded. Price knew it had nothing to do with the coffee. She’d been there to greet Brognola enough times after his return from Washington briefings to know from his expression that the President had just confided in him about some active global threat that would require placing the Farm’s elite covert operatives directly in harm’s way.

“Afghanistan?” she guessed as they strode from the runway. When Brognola eyed her, she went on, “I spoke with Striker earlier. He filled me in on the ambush.”

“The ambush is just part of it,” Brognola replied. “And so is the whole matter of this missing soldier.”

“Okay, you’ve got my attention,” Price said. “Let’s have it.”

“It has to do with the Afghan National Army and this whole call for pulling out Western troops.” When they reached the main house, Brognola led the way up the front porch, nodding to the blacksuit stationed near the front door. The security agent stepped aside, holding the door open. As they proceeded inside, the SOG director told Price, “At the same time we took this hit at Safed Koh, the ANA was routing a Taliban squad up to the north near Jalalabad.”

“They’ve been on a roll lately, haven’t they,” Price said. It was more of a statement than a question.

“That’s just it,” Brognola said. “Up until a few months ago, the pattern was always reversed, with us making headway and having to lend ANA a hand. Then there was all this clamor about pullouts and the Afghans decided they wanted to run their own operations without our input.”

“‘Meddling’ is how I think they put it.”

Brognola nodded. At the end of the main hall was a staircase. As they took the steps down, he said, “In any event, since this shift they’ve been catching all the breaks while we keep running into setbacks. It plays in nicely with their calls for autonomy, but the President and Joint Chiefs think it’s all a little too convenient. I’m inclined to agree.”

“Same here,” Price said.

Once they reached the basement, it was a short walk down to the mouth of a large underground passageway. There was a small electric rail car parked just inside the opening. Brognola took the wheel. Price rode shotgun.

“So I’m guessing it’s up to us to see if there’s something hinky going on,” she said as the car started down the tunnel.

“Correct. The bottom line is this,” Brognola said. “If the ANA is legitimately trouncing the Taliban, we want to know how they’re doing it. Just as important, we want to make sure they’re doing it on their own.”

“You think maybe they’ve cut a deal elsewhere?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Brognola said. “I’ve thought through a game plan, but I’d like your input before we run it past the cybercrew.”

“No problem,” Price responded, “That’s what a mission controller’s for.”

ONCE ALL THE FALLEN BRANCHES were loaded into the pickup, one of the blacksuits drove from the orchards to the Annex, a large outbuilding located on the far east perimeter of the estate next to a stand of young poplars that had been equally pummeled by the storm. Inside the building, limbs and twigs from the latter trees were being fed into the growling maw of an industrial wood chipper and turned into mulch, one of the by-products that was presented to the outside world as proof of Stony Man Farm’s agricultural reason for being. The various enterprises did, in fact, cover a portion of the Farm’s sizable overhead, but the site had a more far-reaching agenda. There in the Annex, one floor beneath the thick concrete slab upon which the wood chipper carried out its noisy duties, Price and Brognola had just emerged from the underground tunnel and were making their way to the Computer Room, nerve center for America’s best-kept secret in the covert war against those intent, one way or another, on bringing the country to its knees.

“That sounds like the way to go,” Price said, once Brognola had laid out his strategy for dealing with the situation in Afghanistan. “We’re going to have our hands full, though.”

“Fortunately, that’s something we’re used to,” Brognola replied as he opened the door for his colleague.

“I’ll apprise Striker while you brief the others.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The Computer Room was a vast brightly lit chamber with workstations positioned here and there, a far wall lined with large flat-screen monitors that flashed an ever-changing patchwork of display maps, news feeds and images from aerial sat cams. Three-quarters of the Stony Man cybernetic crew—Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and Carmen Delahunt—were on duty, laboring intently at their consoles to provide needed INTEL and logistical backup for SOG commando teams on assignment both at home and abroad. One by one, however, they took note of Price and Brognola’s arrival and quickly shifted their attention.

Price exchanged a brief greeting with the others, then ex cused herself and moved to a corner alcove, where she dialed out on a secured phone line routed through enough code scramblers to sidestep any possible attempt to intercept the call. Brognola, meanwhile, unbuttoned his trench coat and raided the liner pocket for a twenty-dollar Padron, one of two dozen such hand-rolled cigars presented to him by Phoenix Force leader David McCarter upon that unit’s successful return from a mission three weeks ago in Nicaragua. There had been a time, years ago, when Brognola would have lit up and shrugged off the gibes of those who took exception to the pungent smoke, but times had changed and the big Fed now contented himself with rolling the cigar between his fingers as he spoke or chewing on it.

“Where’s Akira?” he queried, glancing at a vacant station normally commandeered by the cybercrew’s youngest member, Akira Tokaido.

“Catnap in the lounge,” answered Delahunt, a fiery redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of the FBI. “We started a union while you were out and decided we deserve a little shut-eye when the brain cells overheat.”

Brognola rolled with the wisecrack. “Fine by me,” he said. “As long as you do it in shifts. Just don’t start asking for maid service and mints on your pillows.”

“Fair enough.”

Wethers, a one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor with neither the knack nor patience for small talk, cleared his throat, eager to steer focus back to more pressing concerns.

“Something came up at the briefing, I take it,” he said to Brognola. “Does it have to do with Striker and the Taliban?”

Brognola nodded, shedding his trench coat and draping it over the back of Tokaido’s chair.

SOG’s two commando units, Able Team and Phoenix Force, invariably handled missions as a group, but Bolan’s preference, as it had been when he first set out for Afghanistan, was to work alone, knowing the crew back in Virginia would cover his back. Brognola intended to do all he could to see that the Farm held up its end of the bargain. He quickly passed along news of the Safed Koh ambush, concluding with the update Price had received earlier from Bolan.

“We’ve had no luck rounding up anyone who left the attack site,” he said. “The feeling is they’ve managed to slip back into Pakistan, most likely with O’Brien’s body.”