“And?” Quinn said, waiting for the rest.
The Cajun grinned, batting his good eye. “I just wanted to say thanks.” Chuckling despite the almost nonexistent air, he nodded down the trail toward their fleeing target. “I gotta tell you though, I am tired of this runnin’ shit. What say we go ahead and give this guy a big hand hug around his neck?”
Quinn smiled. Jacques was good for keeping things light, even amid the chaos of battle. It helped him keep his mind off his daughter. “Not sure what he’ll give us, but I hope we have a few minutes with him before we have to break off and go after the Feng brothers.”
“Roger that,” the big Cajun said, gulping for air, but powering through like a good Marine.
Snow-covered peaks tore at the belly of the sky like fangs. Many of the world’s 8,000-meter giants surrounded the valley. The Gasherbrums, Broad Peak, and K2—the Mountain of Mountains — rose up around them, reminding the three tiny dots that were pursuers and pursued of how insignificant they truly were. It was no wonder this place was called the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods.
Quinn scanned the boulders ahead of the stumbling jihadist, searching for the hidden threats he knew were there. “See one, think two” was a philosophy that had kept him alive on countless occasions. There were few secrets in the tactical world anymore. The Internet was rife with training videos and war-fighting manuals that drew the veil of secrecy from even the most sacred of strategies. Posting a rear guard was far from a complicated procedure. Even a conscripted goatherd would remember to leave someone to watch his back trail. There was a high probability that the kill squad had left someone behind — and that someone was likely lurking in the shadows ahead, just waiting for Quinn and Thibodaux to enter his sight picture.
Hours of physical training left both Quinn and Thibodaux in excellent condition. They’d been living at the base camp long enough for their bodies to acclimatize, but prolonged jogging at 12,000 feet pushed them to their limits and slowed them to little more than a steady shuffle.
The valley narrowed ahead before spreading out along the river in a wide gravel bar, forming a little pass that made for a perfect choke point on their route. Going downhill, Quinn was able to keep the target in sight, but boulders the size of garage doors littered the riverbank, providing countless places for an ambush. Quinn took his eyes off the dangers ahead long enough to shoot a glance at Thibodaux. They were in the shadows, but the big man squinted his good eye as if he were staring into the sun. Like Quinn, he was watching Khalifa for some sort of reaction.
Quinn raised his fist the moment he saw the fleeing target’s head snap to the right. Something — or someone — in the rocks had caught his attention.
Puffs of dirt and debris rose from the ground and surrounding rocks a half second later, sending Quinn and Thibodaux diving for the cover of a car-sized boulder. The staccato crack of gunfire echoed across valley walls.
His back against the rough stone, Jacques held the rifle flat to his chest. “Sound’s bouncing all over these mountains,” he said. “Hard to get a fix on ’em.”
Quinn said nothing. He’d drawn his revolver the moment he’d seen the fleeing jihadi perk up. He wished for a rifle of his own, but posing as a cook made carrying a long gun impractical, so he made do with a rusty Colt revolver he’d traded for in Karachi. It came with half a box of relatively new .45 ACP ammo and two metal half-moon clips that held the rounds in the cylinder. Without his customary Kimber 10mm and a second Glock or Beretta, Quinn felt nearly naked with the six-shooter.
Thibodaux closed his good eye, listening intently as he pinpointed a shooter’s location, a hundred meters ahead in the boulders along the river. He swung the SCAR and pulled the trigger, silencing the would-be assassin with a well-placed shot. One down, a second shooter began to walk a series of bullets across the trail.
Thibodaux looked down at the Colt in Quinn’s hand and grimaced. “Tell you what, Chair Force, how about you let me do the heavy lifting on this one. I’m not convinced that blunderbuss won’t blow up in your hand and kill us both.”
“How many rounds you have?” Quinn asked, nodding to the SCAR.
The Marine patted the magazine that jutted from the rifle’s action. “Seven here,” he said. “And another mag of twenty in my pocket. But, I don’t reckon there are more than two or three bad guys up there.”
The whap of rotors combined with the high metallic whine of aircraft engines drowned out the sound of gunfire. A hundred feet off the deck, two Alouette III helicopters, olive drab and bearing the green-and-white dot of the Pakistan Air Force, flared to slow and hover as they moved down the trail on the other side of the ambushers and directly in front of the fleeing jihadi. Designed for the rigors of operations at extremely high altitudes, the Aérospatiale Alouette IIIs were a favorite of both the Pakistan and Indian Air forces.
Quinn shielded his eyes with a forearm trying to block the swirling gray cloud of glacial dust. The lead chopper inched forward a few yards at a time, searching the rocks like a hunter kicking the grass to flush a bird. A moment later, a rocket hissed from the cylindrical pod on the Alouette’s struts, slamming into the ambusher’s nest. The blast was close enough that bits of stone and dead jihadist rained down on Quinn and Thibodaux where they knelt behind their boulder. The choppers loitered over the area for another full minute, no doubt using a FLIR or Forward Looking Infrared scope to search for remaining threats.
Quinn could see Khalifa through the dust, lying stunned on the gravel at the side of the trail, his uniform reduced to a pile of rags. The concussion had likely rendered him half deaf, but he was still alive.
Both Quinn and Thibodaux shielded their eyes as the Alouettes settled onto the gravel and the engine sounds whined down. A steady mountain wind pushed the dust away in a matter of moments, revealing a team of six extremely fit-looking men in maroon berets and camouflage battle dress. Each carried a Steyr AUG Bullpup rifle in his hands and a dour expression on his face.
“They don’t look too awful happy,” Jacques said, letting the butt of the rifle slide down to his boot toe, holding it by the barrel, but not giving it up completely. “Reckon they’re here to help us or shoot us in the beak?”
“We’re about to find out,” Quinn said. “See the guy standing out front?”
“He’s the one you told me went to the US Air Force Academy?” Thibodaux said. “The one with a mustache the size of a Kleenex box?”
“For a semester.” Quinn nodded. “We were roommates.”
“Friends then.” Thibodaux nodded.
“There was one little thing.” Quinn took a deep breath. “We had a little boxing match the last day of the semester.”
“Great,” Thibodaux groaned. “I guess I’ll understand it if they shoot us then.”
The apparent leader of the squad stood out front, arms folded across a narrow chest. A gleaming gold tooth peeked from behind a bushy black mustache that looked far too wide for his face. He’d always been thin, but the years since the academy — and likely the weight of command — had added depth to the hollows of his cheeks. Two men slung their rifles and stepped forward to grab the panting Abu Khalifa. One punched him in the belly, doubling him over in pain before the other cuffed his hands behind his back. The first soldier unslung his rifle and pointed it at Khalifa’s head while the other patted him down for weapons. When it was apparent that he didn’t have any, they kicked his feet out from under him to send him sprawling to the rocky ground with no means to catch himself. He landed with a thud and writhed on his side at the wing commander’s feet. The commander studied the jihadist for a moment from behind his big mustache, and then turned to peer at Quinn. There was a glint of mischief in his brown eyes. Hands clasped at the small of his back, he breathed deeply from the mountain air as if he owned the place.