“Is here.”
“Start for the customs house. Tell them you need to pay your duty. Tell them loud as you can.”
“They will think I am insane, offering money without argument.”
“Good.” Marc turned to the others. “Have your spray and your firearms at the ready. Track Fareed, stay unseen. If the officers don’t emerge from the guardhouse, hit it hard.”
Josh asked, “What about you?”
“I’ll circle around back, try to find a rear entrance. Let me know when you’re in position. Ready? Let’s move out.”
Fareed started around the rear of the truck, out where the lights were brightest. The rest of them slipped forward to where the truck’s hood met the shadows.
Beyond the light’s perimeter there was nothing but rocky earth and the detritus of a guard station. Marc moved silently, tracking Fareed. Josh and Yussuf molded to the wall by the side window as Marc moved around back. Duboe held to one pace behind Fareed, playing like a dumb lackey, both men doing their jobs extremely well. Fareed crossed the parking lot, fanning the bills over his head and calling loudly.
Rounding the back of the guardhouse, Marc found a door whose upper half was glass. A shade was pulled down, but a tight slit of light shone at the bottom. Marc risked a glance, saw a large room lit by a bare overhead bulb, and a pair of legs stretched out from behind a side cupboard.
Marc tested the handle, turned it silently. The door was latched at shoulder height. Marc caught a glimpse of a ready room with a burner and a bare table and chairs. He smelled old coffee and grease.
“Three guards in the front room,” Duboe muttered in Marc’s earpiece.
“Go.”
Marc slammed his good shoulder into the door. The latch snapped off. He piled into the rear room and surprised the officer whose chair leaned against the side wall. His belt was open, gut spilling over his trousers. He froze in the process of lifting a cigarette to his mouth. Marc sprayed him tight in the face and raced through the door leading to the front.
Pistol in one hand and canister in the other, Marc flung open the door and ran silently down the narrow hall.
He entered the front room to find Fareed gaping at a guard, who was in the process of rising and aiming a gun at his chest. The guard’s face was turned away from Marc, so using the spray risked bringing Fareed down instead. Marc hammered the guard in the temple with his gun.
The room was suddenly very crowded as Josh and Yussuf shot through the door. Duboe went for the guard closest to the doorway, shoving him across the room and ramming him against the wall.
Marc spun and chopped at the third guard, but the man used the radio to shield himself as he tried to aim his side arm. Marc rammed the table hard into the man, then leaped over and gripped the gun hand, bringing it down into the radio. Sparks flew and the guard jerked as the electric current drilled him. The man slumped to the floor beside his two mates.
Marc rasped, “Anybody hurt?”
Fareed puffed, “Is all good.”
While Josh sprayed each of the downed guards, Marc checked out the front door. The parking area was silent, the night empty. “Let’s move these guys out the back way.”
They were struggling across the rocky earth when Hamid and two others appeared. Together they bundled the limp bodies into the second bus, where the prisoners were trussed and gagged and sprayed a second time.
Marc and Duboe and Josh stepped out and checked the night. The trucker still stood on his rig’s other side, his hands full of papers. He was watching the guardhouse and muttering to himself. Beyond the barrier separating them from the Iraqi border, a long row of trucks waited their turn. Two motors rumbled. Otherwise the night was silent.
Marc said, “We’re done here. Let’s move.”
Chapter Forty-Three
E leven and a half miles past the border, the terrain shifted drastically. Marc knew the exact distance, because Duboe’s laptop came equipped with a military-grade GPS. Josh watched the shifting map over Marc’s shoulder. “They plant a satellite on permanent duty overhead, just for little old us?”
Duboe did not respond.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
A half-moon had risen above the ridgeline. To their right, a rocky stream glinted as it meandered along a wide gulley. Josh said, “Come monsoon time, that whole valley will be filled to the brim. The water will hold enough force to carry away trees, trucks, bridges, whole villages.”
Duboe asked, “Where’d you see that, Afghanistan?”
Josh did not reply.
“What I figured,” Duboe said.
The valley was lined by tall slender trees with bushy tops, shaped like a child’s drawing. Duboe said, “Reminds me of the cottonwoods back home. You never go wrong, digging for water around a cottonwood. No matter how dry the country. Only problem is, the roots can go down twenty feet or more.”
Josh asked, “Where you from?”
“Abilene.”
One of Josh’s men two rows back said, “They grow ’em mean in Abilene.”
“You’re about to find out just how true that is.”
“Old man like you,” Josh scoffed, “probably need to carry you.”
“We hit ground zero,” Duboe said, “you’ll be eating my dust.”
“Big words, old man.”
The laptop gave off a soft chime. Duboe said, “We take the left fork two hundred meters ahead. Pass through a village. The road enters the foothills immediately after. Turnoff is a dirt road ten miles beyond this turning.”
Marc asked through his comm link, “Hamid, you catch that?”
“Yes. Is good.”
The road swung away from the river, trundled through a ramshackle collection of hovels, and started to climb. The curves were easy at first, the slope gentle. But soon enough the road entered a series of switchbacks so severe the buses ground down to first gear and fought for a hold. The men stared over the precipice at villages and moonlit fields and a distant ribbon of water.
Marc asked, “How are we doing on time?”
Their aim had been to arrive in the night’s final hour. Duboe checked his watch against the GPS and replied, “We’re in the green.”
Marc moved up the central aisle and sat in the seat opposite Fareed. “You good to go?”
“Yes, everything very clear.” Fareed hesitated, then was urged on by a whisper from one of the other Iranians. “Only please, one question.”
“Fire away.”
“How we are to return? I ask…” Fareed stopped because Josh had moved forward to crouch beside his seat.
Marc said, “Go on.”
Fareed eyed the soldier nervously. “If you do not plan to return, is good. No, not good. But we are with you still.”
“I do not send my men on suicide missions,” Josh said. “Rangers do not leave Rangers behind.”
“Josh, be cool,” Marc told him.
Fareed said, “When the border guards do not check in, their headquarters will worry. The truckers, they will also call and complain about the wait and no guards. The Revolutionary Guard, they will send, what you say…?”
“Reinforcements.”
“Yes. Many. And they will patrol all the border area.”
Marc said, “We have a plan. That’s all I can tell you right now. But we are coming back, and you are coming with us.”
Josh leaned in close and said, “You are part of our team. My task is to do the job, then get the whole team out alive.”
Fareed studied the soldier’s face, and decided, “I am thinking it is very not good to have you be my enemy.”
“You got that right.”
Duboe called forward, “Turning is five hundred meters on your left.”
Josh patted Fareed’s shoulder. “Time to put your game face on.”
The Iranian frowned. “What is this, game face?”
But Josh was heading back down the aisle.
– – The road was far more than a simple trail, as Marc had suspected ever since seeing the image of the seven trucks. The turnoff was rutted and barred by a rusting metal gate with signs in Farsi. Barbed-wire fencing stretched out in both directions. Josh and Marc checked the fence for trip wires, then broke the lock and pulled the gate wide. They motioned the buses forward, then off-loaded the trussed and still unconscious border guards into heavy undergrowth.