Finally he had the entire rig set up and stood up, groaning as his bad knee protested. One of these days that damned thing was going to go out entirely. Hopefully not today.
Mikhail looked at him quizzically for a second and then picked up the two coils and tossed them over the side. Both, fortunately, fell straight and true without tangling and the tips hit the ground, barely.
The reason for the quizzical look, Mike realized, was that he should have tossed the loops. His brain was really working slow.
Nonetheless, he pointed to Sawn and then at the rappel at which Sawn nodded and stepped forward.
Everyone had already donned their climbing harnesses. These were padded nylon that ran around the upper body and under the arms. Earlier harnesses and those used for “light” mountaineering were a seat. But the upper body harnesses were necessary when you were working with rucks. Without them you tended to dangle upside down.
Sawn picked up the doubled ropes and attached them to his figure-eight. There were, Mike swore, as many ways to rappel as there were climbers. However, one of the simpler involved wrapping the rope through a doubled metal circle that looked vaguely like an 8 with one end much smaller than the other. They were only good for relatively short rappels, longer ones required a device called a “ladder.” But Mike wasn’t planning on doing any ten thousand foot rappels on this mission.
Sawn looped the ropes through the figure-eight, hooked it to his harness with a carabiner and stepped to the edge. He seated the ropes by leaning back on them while holding himself in place by the rappel line. The method of descent was simple. The tied rope ends, called the standing end, ran to the figure-eight then through a complex double loop. The untied end, the running end, then was held in the right hand of the climber. If he pulled the rope around his back it stopped him. Pulling it out to the side permitted the rope to slide through his hand. The left hand was placed on the standing end for stability. The important thing was to remember to bring the arm around rather than “grabbing” the running end. Grabbing didn’t get you anything but a burned glove. The gloves Mike had ordered had leather palms specifically for rappelling but if the rope ran through the palm too fast or was gripped too hard it was going to burn through, anyway.
When he was sure the ropes were set Sawn walked backwards to the edge of the cliff, looking down over his shoulder, placing his feet carefully on the ice-covered edge of the cliff and shaking the rope slightly to keep it from binding. At the top of a long rappel the weight of the rope tended to stop the climber from descending due to friction across the figure-eight. Once his full weight hit, though, it would smooth out.
Finally, he was in an “L” shape, feet planted on the wall and ruck dangling below him. At that point he began bounding slightly outwards from the cliff, falling a short distance on each bound, stopping when his feet hit the wall then bounding out and down again. He took it slow, which was good, but it meant the team was going to be rappelling when the sun came up. Bad.
Mike started putting in another set of ropes. Sigh. God he was tired. Hopefully something was going right on this mission.
“So far, so good,” Rashid said as the Nissan pickup bounced down the potholed road.
Al-Kariya nodded but didn’t answer, continuing to run a string of worry beads through his fingers.
The king-cab pickup was the third truck in a convoy of nine, each of them holding four to five hand-picked mujaheddin. Most of them Al-Kariya had known, off and on, for years.
Although he was now a “senior financier” he had not always had that job. After getting a degree in finance from Princeton he had disappeared for several years in the late 1970s. The first stop of his wide travels had been to the new government of Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini had recently overthrown the Shah and instituted shariah law. This was a goal the Prophet, praise be upon him, decreed all good Muslims must strive. And the young Al-Kariya, then using the name Al-Dubiya, had reveled in the triumph of the True Faith over the secularism of that pig the Shah. Yes, Khomeini had been, in many ways, a blasphemer. The Shia branch of Islam believed that Mohammed had not been the last prophet, true blasphemy. But Khomeini had made much of the oil wealth of the nation available to any group that was willing to strive for world-wide jihad and the imposition of true shariah.
Managing that wealth, stealthily, was difficult however. Moving the money was a pain when the Americans, French, Germans and Israelis were always poking in where they weren’t wanted. Al-Kariya had seen his proper place in the world-wide jihad clearly. He knew the theoretical details of international finance back and forward. He knew the gaps, the hidden ways.
But you didn’t just get handed a bunch of money no matter what your financial CV. You had to prove you truly supported the jihad. You had to be “made” in the fraternity of the mujaheddin.
Thus, after a brief trip to the Bekaa Valley for training in a PLO camp, his next stop had been Afghanistan where the war against the pig Russians was in high gear. There the Americans, for reasons everyone recognized as cynical, were pouring in material and funds. And there the young man with the soft hands and mind of a calculator had been “made” killing Russian conscripts patrolling in the mountains they feared and hated.
That was a long time ago, though. Now he remembered the smells, the fear, of those missions. It had been a long time since he had had his kidneys jolted out by horrible roads. A long time since he’d been surrounded by unwashed fighters.
Some of them, though, he knew from those long ago days. The fighters in this convoy were the best the jihad had to offer. These weren’t human bombs or half-trained zealots that pointed their weapons in the direction of the enemy and sprayed their fire. Every member of this security detail had been on multiple battlefields, fighting the Russians, the Israelis and, especially, the Americans in multiple countries. They had fought, survived and often triumphed. Most were older though few as old as Al-Kariya. Haza Saghedi, though, the team leader riding in the fourth truck, he was an old comrade in arms from Afghanistan. Pashtun, raised in the fiercest of warrior traditions, he had even fought on the side of the Saudis in the war against Iraq. Then, later, he had been in Iraq fighting the Americans. He had taken the path of true jihad, fighting the infidels on every front and surviving. It was he who had picked most of the fighters in the convoy.
Al-Kariya assumed that if the Russians saw an advantage they would try to betray them. Piled next to him in the back seat of the truck was a king’s ransom; any king you’d care to name. And the areas they were traveling through could not be considered “safe” by any rational human. Thus he had ensured that the very best were guarding it, and him. Yes, things were going well.
But all he could think as they bounced down the atrocious road was how much he wished he were back in his comfortable office, sitting in his two thousand dollar chair, with a glass of tea by his hand and clicking on his laptop.
Instead of having his kidneys jolted out.
“I’m getting too old for this,” was his reply.
It was less than twenty minutes before first one, then two and finally seven tractor trailers made the sharp final bend into the valley. By the time the seventh was on the flats a machine-gun toting GAZ, a Russian made military SUV, had pulled into the newly laid helo-port in the lead of the first truck.