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.
Juan quickly assumed that this was a senior Taliban official and that the boxes contained video gear for the captured soldier’s execution. This was confirmed when one of the guards laid an elongated box on the ground and lifted the lid. The Taliban leader stooped to withdraw a three-foot-long scimitar straight out of One Thousand and One Nights, much to the delighted roars of the others.
Subtlety was not a virtue among these men.
Cabrillo described to the rest what he observed, and asked, “Is anyone thinking what I’m thinking?”
Linc replied, “That I broke the promise I made to myself after getting out of Tora Bora never to come to this part of the world again?”
“There’s that, yes,” Juan said with a chuckle, “but I was thinking that taking the bus would be a hell of a lot easier than hoofing it the twenty miles back to our SUV. We planned on carrying the kid out. He can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. The variable is if the soldier can walk that far. Stealing that bus negates the unknowns.”
“Sounds good to me,” Eddie Seng agreed.
“Linda?”
“What about its fuel load? Does it have the range to get us out of here?”
“There are no Exxon stations around here, so they must be able to get at least as far as Landi Kotal, the town on the Paki side of the Khyber Pass, maybe all the way to Peshawar.”
“Makes sense to me,” Linc said.
Linda nodded, then remembered no one could see her. “Okay. We go for the bus.”
The Muslim call to sundown prayers echoed across the deep valley, and the men in the town square and others from the village made their way toward the tumbledown mosque. The guards remained outside the building where they were keeping the soldier, and no one left the house where Seti was sequestered.
There was no generator in town, so as the twilight deepened some lamps were lit, emitting feeble light through dirty windows in a few of the houses. Both target houses had such lamps. Fuel was expensive, so the lamps were snuffed out one by one within an hour. Like the lives of so much of the world’s population, these people’s lives were dictated by the earth’s stately rotation.
Cabrillo and his team continued to watch the sleeping town through their night vision gear. The two guards maintained their vigilance for another hour before they too succumbed to oblivion. Nothing moved, no smoke from a chimney, no roving dogs, nothing.
They gave it another hour for good measure before emerging from their foxholes.
Juan felt a few joints pop as he unlimbered himself. So many hours of immobility in the chilly air had stiffened him like a board. Like the others, he took a minute to flex feeling back into his muscles, moving slowly so as not to attract attention. His moves mimicked tai chi.
The team was traveling light, carrying just enough weapons and gear for the one night on the mountainside. They all carried the Barrett REC7 assault rifle with tactical lights slung under the barrels, but all armed themselves with their preference of pistols. Cabrillo favored the FN Five-seveN on a shoulder rig so he could clear the attached silencer quickly.
The terrain was rugged, with ankle-twisting boulders and fields of loose stones that could be dislodged into a hissing avalanche with an ill-placed boot, so the team moved cautiously, each covering the next, and always one person watching the village for any sign of movement. Like wraiths, they walked under the thin silver glow of a millimetric slice of moon, their NVGs giving them the advantage over both the landscape and the darkness.
Cabrillo led them into the village, hugging the walls, but not so close that their black uniforms would scrape against the rough-hewn stone. At a preplanned spot, Cabrillo stopped and dropped into a crouch. He pointed to Linda and Eddie before indicating they would rescue Seti. He and Linc would save the better-defended captive.
With the big ex-SEAL covering his back, Juan approached the back of the house where the soldier had been taken. He peered in through a window. Despite the grime caking the single pane of glass he could see three cots in the room. Two of them were occupied by the prone forms of sleeping men. The third cot didn’t have bedding, which meant it wasn’t likely there was another guy out roaming around.
The prisoner had to be in the house’s front room, which if tradition held would be a combination living/dining/kitchen area. Its only window was next to the door, so they would be going in somewhat blind.
Juan made a motion with his hands like he was parting water.
Linc nodded and started down along the left side of the house while Cabrillo padded along the right. At the corner both men paused. A minute turned into three, and Juan was starting to get worried. They had to coordinate their assault with the other team. He was waiting for Linda to give him a single click over the tactical radio, telling him she and Eddie were in position.
It was because he was straining his ears so hard that he heard it—a distant whine, like a mosquito at the far end of a long room. He knew that sound and realized they had to move now.
This could be a blessing or a curse, he thought just as Linda signaled they were ready. Linc had heard the click too, and he and Juan moved in such perfect accord that they were around the corner of the house at the same instant, striding forward at the same pace and moving their hands into the exact same position.
Momentum, along with Juan’s hundred and eighty pounds and Linc’s two-forty, came together as both men slammed into the seated and snoozing guards, cracking their heads together with just a fraction less force than needed to crush bone. The two men never knew what hit them and went from comfortable REM sleep to a near-coma state in a fraction of a second. They eased the guards onto the ground, making sure to hide their AKs under a wooden cart stacked with hay.
They waited a moment to see if the disturbance had been detected. Juan could still hear the faint buzz. He pointed to his ear and pointed up toward the night sky. Linc shot him a quizzical look, not understanding.
Juan stretched his arms wide and waggled them like an aircraft in flight.
Linc’s eyes went wide. He knew as well as Juan that there was usually only one kind of aircraft flying in Northern Waziristan—Predator drones.
There was no reason to think that this village was the unmanned aircraft’s target, but there was no reason to think it wasn’t. Intel on the Taliban leader who’d arrived in the bus might have filtered up the chain of command, and now CENTCOM had an armed drone overhead looking for a target of opportunity.
He wasn’t worried about them firing a Hellfire missile just yet. The rules of engagement were pretty clear that confirmation of the target’s location had to be verified before the trigger could be pulled. They’d wait until dawn to use the drone’s advanced cameras to pick their man. What bothered him was the chance that a local insomniac would hear the aircraft and raise the alarm.
More than anything, Juan wanted to call Lang Overholt and ask the old spook to find out if there was an operation in the works for this village, but two things prevented him. One was that he couldn’t risk talking while this close to the target, and the second was that Overholt would freeze him out, or worse, be frozen out himself.