Just before he hit the water, Patrick pulled both throttles to IDLE, lifted them, and pulled them into cutoff. He then turned all the switches — ignition, power, and battery — off. They were passengers now, along for the ride.
The big bomber sank out of the sky like a stone. It smacked into the ocean less than a half mile from the approach end of the runway. The bomber skipped off the surface of the ocean, sailed into the air, and started to roll to its left — but just as it did, it skittered up onto the beach, crashed through the approach-end runway lighting, through the security fence, rolled right, and careened up onto the large mass aircraft-parking ramp on the north side of the runway. The bomber skidded to a halt on its belly just a few dozen yards away from several parked military aircraft.
The fire trucks were on the bomber within moments, dousing it with firefighting foam and water, but there was no fuel on the plane anyway, it didn’t break apart, and it had been shut down long before landing. It looked like a wounded duck shot out of the air by a hunter, but it was intact.
“Oh, God — we made it!” Rebecca said breathlessly. “I don’t believe it.”
“We made it,” Patrick breathed. “My God…” He made sure everything was switched off, then safed his and Rebecca’s ejection seats, unlatched the upper escape hatch, and climbed up on top of the fuselage. They were helped down by rescue personnel and taken to the base hospital. A huge crowd of sailors and airmen had come out to watch the bomber belly flop onto their little island.
As they were being wheeled into the hospital, Patrick could see several naval officers striding toward him, all wearing the angriest, most chew-ass expressions he’d ever seen. Sailors and spectators quickly peeled out of their way as if they were radioactive. Patrick completely ignored them. Instead he looked up and spoke, “Patrick to Luger.”
“Go ahead, Muck,” David Luger said. Their subcutaneous microtransceiver system gave them global communications and datalink capability anywhere in the world, even on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “Good to see you made it okay. Is Rebecca all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine.”
“Good. The commander there wants to have a word with you. I’m sure CINCENT and SECDEF will be on the line soon, too.”
“I copy,” Patrick said. “But put me through to home first.”
“Home? Patrick, the admiral wants—”
“Dave, put me through to my son, right now, and that’s an order,” Patrick said. “I’ve got to say hello to Bradley.”
Even with a new government in place in Afghanistan, the border-crossing points were not very well manned on the Afghan side — even on the larger highways there was usually only a small inspection and customs building, with a swinging counterweighted metal pole to delineate the border itself. Infiltrators never used the border crossings anyway; no one ever wanted to visit Afghanistan, and the country was certainly not going to keep anyone from leaving—why did Afghanistan need an armed border crossing?
On the other side, however, it was a different matter. None of Afghanistan’s neighbors wanted any refugees or accused terrorists to cross the borders freely, so the border checkpoints were usually well manned and well armed. Thus it was with the Republic of Turkmenistan.
Tabadkan was typical of almost all of the Turkmen border checkpoints — a small but heavily fortified Turkmen border-guard base with a few support buildings, a large tent barracks for enlisted men and a towable building for the officers, a supply yard with portable fuel and water tanks — and a detainment camp. The Republic of Turkmenistan routinely turned away anyone — refugees or rich folks, it didn’t matter — who did not have a visa and a letter of introduction or a travel itinerary drawn up by a Turkmen state travel bureau; but any people without proper identification papers or passports were placed in the detainment camp until their identities could be verified. The Afghan government usually sent officials to the border crossing to help in identifying its citizens and getting them released from Turkmen custody at least once a week, but in bad weather — or for a number of other reasons — it could sometimes take a month or more for anyone to come to this remote outpost.
So it was now — the detainment camp had almost a hundred detainees, substantially over its capacity. Women and children under age ten were in a separate sheltered area of the facility and were generally well treated; older boys and the men were in another section, exposed to the elements. Each man was given two carpets and a metal cup; four buckets of porridge made with mung beans and rice and four buckets of water had to serve about sixty men for the day. To keep warm, the men took turns around a single large peat brazier set in a lean-to made from hides — if a man was lucky, he might make a snack of a captured and roasted sand rat, jerboa, snake, or sand crocodile.
Zarazi examined all this with his binoculars from the relative safety of a sand dune about a kilometer east of the border crossing. The wind was howling now, at least forty kilometers an hour, blowing sand that stung like sandpaper rubbed across bare cheeks and foreheads. “Those bastards,” he spat. “They’ve got several dozen of our people caged up like animals.” He let his deputy commander, Jalaluddin Turabi, check through the binoculars. Sure enough, they looked like Taliban fighters, although from this range and with the winds kicking up, it was hard to be positive.
“No patrols out tonight,” Zarazi went on to Turabi, who was prone in the sand beside him, two scarves covering all but a tiny slit for his eyes. “We might actually pull this off, Jala.”
“We can just as easily go around this post, Wakil,” Turabi said worriedly. “We have enough supplies to last us another two or three days, long enough to make it to Yusof Mirzo’i or back to Andkhvoy. Once we get more weapons and ammo, we can come back for those men.”
“But they’ll be waiting for us to head back toward the city,” Zarazi said. “They won’t expect us to go across the border to Turkmenistan.”
“For good reason — there’s nothing but unmanned oil wells, scorpions, and sandstorms for a hundred kilometers,” Turabi retorted. “If we make it to the Kara Kum River, we may survive, but there’s nothing but Turkmen border guards until we reach Holach. What’s the plan, Wakil?”
“The plan is to stay alive long enough to strike back at the blue-helmets and the Americans who drove us from our homes,” Zarazi replied bitterly. “Revenge is the reason we must survive.”
“There’s no one to take out our revenge on in the Kara Kum wastelands, Wakil,” Turabi said. “Sure as hell not the Americans. They are nice and safe up in their supersonic stealth bombers, or sitting back at home flying their robot attack planes via satellite.”
“They are all cowards, and they must die like cowards,” Zarazi said. “I prayed to Allah while we were under attack, and I made a bargain with the Almighty — if He let me live, I would be His sword of vengeance. He answered my prayers, Jala. He is pointing the way, and the way is out there, in the desert — through this place, not around it.” He turned to his friend and fellow freedom fighter. “We will hoist the United Nations flags on our captured vehicles and turn on all the lights. We must act nice and friendly. Then we shall see what Allah has in store for us tonight.” Zarazi patted Turabi’s face. “Time to get rid of the beards, my friend.”
“Military vehicles approaching!” a sentry shouted. “Someone coming in!”
The commander in charge had just settled in for a catnap when the cry was relayed to him. Swearing, he got to his feet and joined his senior sergeant at the observation window facing the checkpoint. The sergeant was trying to see who it was through a pair of binoculars. “Well, Sergeant?”