The Jungle of-8 Read online

  None of the police gave a second look at the slim gap in the rank upon rank of books that lined the estate’s paneled library.

  2

  TRIBAL REGION

  NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN

  TODAY

  THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE HADN’T CHANGED IN TWO HUNDRED years. Except for the guns, of course. They had long been around, that wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was the type of weapon that had changed. Centuries ago, the bearded men toted bugle-throated blunderbusses. Then came the Tower muskets, followed by the Lee-Enfield rifles, and finally the ubiquitous AK-47s, which flooded into the region thanks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the north. And so good were these guns that most were older than the men who carried them. Didn’t matter if he was defending the region from a rival faction or heading off to the outhouse, a man without an AK at the ready was no man.

  All this ran through Cabrillo’s mind as he watched two Pashtun youths from the north, kids barely out of their teens, their beards just shadowy stubble on chin and cheek, try to wrestle a pair of goats onto an open-bed truck. All the while the assault rifles slung around their shoulders would slip and go across their chests, hitting the animals hard enough to make them fight the manhandling.

  Each time a gun slipped, the boy would have to pause and redirect it back over his shoulder and then try to calm the satyr-eyed goat. The distance was too great to hear, but Cabrillo could imagine the goats’ frightened bleats and the young men’s earnest pleas to Allah for easier ways to handle livestock. It never occurred to them to rest their rifles against the rickety stockade fence for the sixty seconds it would take to load the animals unencumbered.

  Take away the forty or so other armed men in the village encampment and he would have found it comical.

  He had to admire the kids for one thing. Though he was ensconced in the latest arctic gear, he was still freezing his butt off while they cavorted in a couple of layers of homespun woolen clothing.

  Of course Cabrillo hadn’t moved more than his eyelids in the past fifteen hours. And neither had the rest of his team.

  In Northern Waziristan, it was traditional that villages were built like citadels on the tops of hills. What grazing and farming was available was accomplished on the slopes leading to the town. In order for him and his people to find a suitable observation post that let them look down on the Taliban encampment, they had to find cover on an adjacent mountain. The distance across the steep valley was only a mile, but it forced them up a snow-and-glacial-ice peak and left them struggling to draw breath at almost ten thousand feet. Through his stabilized binoculars, he could see a couple of old men smoking a never-ending chain of cigarettes.

  Cabrillo rued the last cigar he’d smoked, while his lungs felt as if they were drawing on the metallic dregs of an exhausted scuba tank.

  A deep baritone came through his earpiece, “They wrangling them goats or getting ready to have their way with them?”

  Another voice chimed in, “Since the goats aren’t wearing burkas, at least these boys know what they’re getting.”

  “Radio silence,” Cabrillo said. He wasn’t worried about his people losing operational awareness. What concerned him was that the next comment would come from his second-in-command here, Linda Ross. Knowing her sense of humor as he did, whatever she joked about was sure to make him laugh out loud.

  One of the young shepherds finally set his wire-stock AK aside, and they got the animals into the truck. By the time the rear gate was closed, the kid had his weapon back over his shoulder. The engine fired with a burst of blue exhaust, and soon the vehicle was chugging anemically away from the mountaintop village. This was an al-Qaeda stronghold, and yet life in the rugged mountains went on. Crops had to be raised, animals grazed, and goods bought and sold. The dirty secret of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban was that while their followers were fanatics, they still needed to be paid. With the money long spent from last fall’s lucrative poppy harvest, traditional means of support were necessary to keep the fighters operational.

  There were roughly two dozen buildings in the town. Six or so fronted the dirt road that led down to the valley below, while the others rose behind them on the hill, connected by little more than footpaths. All were made of stone that blended in with the bleak surroundings, with low flat roofs and few windows. The largest was a mosque with a minaret that looked ready to topple.

  The few women Cabrillo and his team had seen all wore dark burkas while the men sported baggy pants under jackets called chapans and either turbans or flattened wool caps known as pakols.

  “Juan.” Linda Ross’s voice had an elfin lilt that went with her pixielike appearance. “Check out the mosque.”

  Careful so as not to draw attention, Cabrillo swung his binoculars a few arc degrees and zoomed in on the mosque’s door. Like the other three members of his team, he was dug into the side of the mountain, with a dirt-covered tarp over the foxhole. They were all invisible from just a few yards away.

  He adjusted the focus. Three people were coming out of the mosque. The one with the long gray beard had to be the imam, while the other two were much younger. They walked flanking the man, their expressions solemn as they listened to whatever the holy man imparted to them.

  Juan tightened the focus. Both of them had Asiatic features and no facial hair of any kind. Their clothing was out of place for this impoverished region. Their parkas, though of muted colors, were top quality, and they both wore new hiking boots. He looked closer at the smaller of the two. He’d studied that face for hours before beginning the operation, committing it to memory for this precise moment.

  “Bingo,” he said softly over their secure communications equipment. “That’s Setiawan Bahar. Everyone keep an eye on him. We need to know where they’re putting him up.”

  The odd trio wandered up behind the main road, walking slowly because the imam had a pronounced limp. Intel said he got that limp when Kandahar fell back in 2001. They eventually reached one of the indistinguishable houses. A bearded man greeted them. They spoke at the doorstep for a few minutes and then the homeowner invited the two boys, both Indonesian, into his home. The imam turned to head back to his mosque.

  “Okay, we got it,” Juan said. “From now on all eyes on that house so we know he hasn’t left.”

  Cabrillo received a quiet chorus of “Roger that.”

  Then, against his own orders, Juan swept his binoculars back to the main road as a white Toyota sedan that probably had a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer swung into town. No sooner had it stopped than the four doors were thrown open and armed men leapt out. Their faces were buried behind the tails of their turbans. They brought their weapons to their shoulders as they circled around to the car’s trunk. One leaned forward and keyed open the lock. The door raised slowly on its hydraulics, and three of the gunmen leaned in with the barrels of their AKs.

  Juan couldn’t see what was in the trunk, or most likely who, and waited expectantly as one of the fighters lowered his gun so it hung under his arm and reached into the trunk. He hauled a fifth man from where he’d been lying in a fetal position. Their prisoner wore what looked like standard American-issue BDUs. The boots looked military too. His mouth was gagged, and a blindfold had been cinched over his eyes. His hair was a little longer than Army regulation and blond. He was too weak to stand and collapsed into the dirt as soon as he was free from the car.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Cabrillo muttered. He turned his binoculars back to the house where Setiawan Bahar was sequestered and told his people to turn their attention to what passed for the town’s square.

  Eddie Seng said nothing, while Linda Ross gasped and Franklin Lincoln cursed.

  “Have we heard anything about a captured soldier?” Seng then asked.

  “No. Nothing,” Linda replied, her voice tightening as one of the Taliban kicked the captured soldier in the ribs.

  In his basso voice, Linc said, “Could have happened in the thirty hours it took us to hump our butts i
nto position. No reason Max would have passed on news like that to us.”

  Without taking his eyes off the house, Cabrillo switched radio frequencies. “Oregon, Oregon, do you copy?”

  From the port city of Karachi more than five hundred miles to the south came the immediate reply, “This is the Oregon. Hali here, Chairman.”

  “Hali, has anything come over the transom since we started this op about an American or NATO soldier kidnapped in Afghanistan?”

  “Nothing over the news wires and nothing from official channels, but as you know we’re a bit out of the Pentagon’s loop right now.”

  Cabrillo knew that last fact all too well. A few months back, after spending nearly a decade enjoying high-level access to military intelligence through his old mentor at the CIA, Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s private security company, known as the Corporation and based on a tramp freighter called the Oregon, had become a pariah. They had pulled off an operation in Antarctica to thwart a joint Argentine/Chinese bid to annex and exploit a massive new oil field off the pristine coast of the southern continent. Fearing the geopolitical risks involved, the U.S. government had told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt the mission.

  It didn’t matter that they had succeeded spectacularly. They were seen as rogue by the new president, and Overholt was ordered not to use the unique services the Corporation provided. Ever again. It had taken all of Langston’s considerable influence in the corridors of Washington to keep his job following that episode. He’d confessed privately to Juan that the president had chewed off so much of his butt he hadn’t been able to sit for a week.

  And that is what brought Cabrillo and this small team here, to one of the few places on earth never to be occupied by a foreign army. Even Alexander the Great had the sense to avoid Waziristan and the rest of the Northern Tribal Regions. They were here because a wealthy Indonesian businessman, Gunawan Bahar, had a son who ran away to join the Taliban, in much the same way youths of a few generations ago back in the United States ran off to join the circus. Only difference was that young Setiawan hadn’t developed mentally past the age of seven, and the cousin who’d brought him here had told the recruiter in Jakarta that Seti wanted to be a martyr.

  American runaways became carnies. Setiawan’s fate was that of a suicide bomber.

  Hali continued, “Stoney and Murph have been trolling every database they can lay their hands on since you left.” Eric Stone and Mark Murphy were the Corporation’s IT experts, along with their other duties. “Nothing much by way of news out of any of the ’stans.”

  “Tell them to keep an eye out. I’m looking at a blond guy in NATO gear who looks like he’s in a world of hurt.”

  “I’ll pass it on,” Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications officer, said.

  Cabrillo switched back to the tactical net. “Recommendations?”

  Linda Ross spoke up immediately. “We can’t leave him here. We all know that in a day or two he’s going to be the star of a jihadist beheading video.”

  “Eddie?” Juan asked, knowing the answer.

  “Save him.”

  “Don’t even ask,” Linc rumbled.

  “I didn’t need to.” Juan still had the target house under observation and wouldn’t shift his focus. “What are they doing now?”

  “They have him up on his feet,” Linda replied. “His hands are tied behind his back. A couple of the village kids have come out to see him. One of them just spit on him. The other kicked him in the shin. Hold on. The captors are shooing the kids away. Okay, they’re leading him up behind the square, heading in the same direction as our target house. And they’re walking, and walking, and . . . Here we go. Three houses left of where Seti’s staying.”

  “Linc, take the target,” Juan ordered. He paused a beat for the big former SEAL to get his binocs fixated and then switched his own to where the four terrorists were pushing their blond captive into a mud and stone house that was indistinguishable from all the others.

  Two of the Afghans took up guard duty outside the simple wooden door. Juan tried to peer through the open window next to it, but the inside of the humble house was too dark to discern more than vague movement.

  The Corporation had been hired to get Gunawan Bahar’s son away from al-Qaeda, not rescue a foreign soldier, but as was the case in the operation in Antarctica, Cabrillo’s moral compass was the primary force behind their actions. Saving that stranger, while not getting paid the million dollars Bahar had already forked over with the promise of another four when his son was on a plane back to Jakarta, was just as imperative in his mind.

  Juan recalled the tears in Bahar’s eyes when he had explained during their only meeting about how his son idolized an elder cousin and how this boy had been secretly radicalized in a Jakarta mosque. Because of the mental challenges Seti faced, Gunawan had told him, the boy couldn’t rationally join a terrorist organization, so in effect he’d been kidnapped and brought here to this al-Qaeda mountain retreat.

  Cabrillo had seen the undying love in the man’s tormented expression and heard it in his voice. He had no children of his own, but he was president of the Corporation and captain of its ship, Oregon. He loved his crewmates the way a father must, so he could well imagine the anguish Bahar was suffering. If one of his own had been kidnapped, he would move much more than heaven and earth to see them returned.

  * * *

  “YOU MUST UNDERSTAND what a blessed child he is,” the father had said, “a true gift from Allah. Outsiders may look upon him as a burden, but they can’t possibly know the love my wife and I have for the boy. It is perhaps wrong for me to say this, but of our three sons little Seti is our favorite.”

  “I’ve heard that from other parents of special-needs kids,” Juan had replied, handing over the white cotton handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit coat so the man could dab his eyes. Like a lot of Muslims, Gunawan Bahar wore his emotions on his sleeve. “He is untouched by the ugliness of the real world.”

  “That’s it exactly. Seti is truly an innocent and will remain that way all his life. Mr. Cabrillo, we will do anything to get our boy back. Of his cousin, we do not care. His parents have disavowed him because they know what he has done. But you must return my precious Seti.”

  Like many of the private contracts the Corporation handled over the years, this meeting had been set up by a mysterious facilitator named L’Enfant. Juan himself had never met the man who called himself The Baby, but the contracts he sent the Corporation’s way were always legit, more or less, and in order for potential clients to get on the man’s radar, their bank accounts had to be well vetted.

  Juan had ordered Eric Stone and Mark Murphy to tear their newest client’s life apart and had additionally run the operation by Overholt at the CIA as a courtesy. Just because Langley was upset at Cabrillo and his team didn’t mean Juan wouldn’t check to make sure Bahar wasn’t under investigation.

  The last thing they needed now was to unknowingly work for some terrorist mastermind.

  Gunawan Bahar had turned out to be just as he had presented himself, a wealthy Indonesian businessman grieving for his kidnapped child who was willing to do anything to have the boy returned to his family.

  Upon their handshake, Bahar’s most fervid desire had become Juan’s, and not only because of the money. He felt a groundswell of anger toward anyone who would exploit a child like Seti, and it was made worse by what they intended the boy to do.

  Now Cabrillo had taken responsibility for another life, that of the captured soldier. His desire to rescue him was as strong as his desire to save Setiawan.

  Juan flicked his eyes to where the sun was setting over the mountains to the west, judging they had another thirty minutes till dusk and an hour until full dark. “Eddie, Linc, keep watch on the primary target. Linda, you’ve got where they’re keeping the soldier.”

  Juan’s binoculars kept scanning the rest of the village and its access road.

  The three acknowledged, and their car
eful observation continued. No detail was overlooked. Linc made sure to point out that there was a gap in the stone wall behind which they were keeping Seti that was big enough for Linda but not his muscled bulk. Linda reported that she’d seen in the flare of a match that there were two Taliban in the house with the prisoner and that he was most likely on the floor, judging by the angle of the Afghanis’ heads.

  Just as the last of the sun slipped behind an icy peak and turned the underbelly of clouds blanketing the sky a dazzling shade of orange, Juan saw headlights approaching up the road below him. Three vehicles—the goat truck, the sedan with the prisoner, and now this new one—all in one day. Had to be what passed for gridlock in these parts, he thought.

  It took several long minutes for the vehicle to make its grinding ascent to the mountain village, and the daylight was almost gone by the time it trundled into the square. A school bus, though half the normal length, it was painted in fantastical colors, with a string of beads hanging across the inside of the windshield and a rack on top that was currently empty. Garish trucks like this were the workhorses of central Asia, transporting people, animals, and goods of all kinds. When the team had passed through Peshawar on their way here, they had seen hundreds of them, no two exactly alike.

  Cabrillo switched to night vision goggles. The NVG didn’t have the optical resolution of his regular binoculars, but with the light fading he could still make out more detail.

  Several men stepped down from the bus. The first one was unarmed and greeted the village headman with a warm embrace. He looked vaguely familiar to Cabrillo, and he wondered if he’d seen that face on a terrorist watch list. The three that followed carried metal suitcases as well as the ever-present AKs.