THE village sprawled amid rolling foothills, beneath mountains whose snowcapped peaks floated like the tents of the gods. The sky was cloudless, not blue but a sullen, scorched brownish white. To the south, just visible in the distance, lay the desert. Its brutal, serrated corrugations swelled away to the horizon, and the thin cool wind that blew in from it abraded like a sanding disk.
Teddy Oberg strolled through the bazaar, flanked by personal guards and trailed by other rebels. One carried a video camera. Another, a device with a cloaking app that replaced their faces with those of approved citizens on the security cameras that festered like polyps on steel poles every hundred feet. They were wrapped in heavy robes against the sand and dust. They all had rifles under their wraps, except for Yusuf. He was a recent recruit, a heavily bearded, reticent, hulking twenty-something who claimed a technical education. Teddy had trained him to use the drone rifle, which he toted charged for instant use.
Teddy himself still carried the Chinese carbine he’d picked up last year. The bullpup design looked weird, but he liked it. No recoil, fast follow-up shots, easy to hide, and a great optic sight. They had hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo, looted from supply trucks and burned-out police stations and scavenged off dead Internal Security troops.
The cadre had come down from the mountains after the imam died. This was the next phase of the insurgency. Blending with the population, gnawing out the overlords’ infrastructure from within. In this particular village, the first guerrillas to enter had beheaded the mayor and the police chief, then shot their families and any Han residents misguided enough to remain. The government had bulldozed the mosque; the rebels reopened one in the former police station. Now the townspeople smiled and bowed to them in the street. The women covered their faces and stayed indoors. Other than that, Teddy had kept everyone’s heads down for a while, until they could close the trap on Marshal Chagatai.
ITIM was growing. There were cells in all the villages now, and recruiters in each of the scores of concentration camps the Chinese had set up to corral their restive minorities. Not only did thumb drives and DVDs circulate in every bazaar, smart young men and women were hacking the cyber infrastructure the Chinese had gridded over the province to detect “terrorists.” Using a CIA-furnished software tool, they spoofed the spyware every smart phone carried. They jammed and misled the facial identification systems that were supposed to identify security risks and predict terrorist actions. Now Qurban’s sermons played on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube, registering to the authorities as droning presentations on livestock management. The Han police and troops had to travel in armored vehicles. On foot, they were vulnerable to knifings, shootings, or simply being dragged into alleys and beaten to death.
And he’d laid a trap.
Tomorrow, it would be sprung.
Nasrullah’s opium-for-jade traders had spread the word. Surreptitiously dropping a clue here and an oh-so-casual reference there, in the hearing of collaborators, that the IEDs tormenting the authorities were coming from the high valley. A lab, a testing ground, and a school for those who built and planted them. From one of their embeds, a Uighur who served the security forces as a translator, they’d learned Chagatai had taken the bait. Under pressure to end the insurgency, the counterterror general was planning an assault. Even better, he planned to be in on the raid personally, arriving in his helicopter for an inspection and photo op as soon as the rebel base was secured.
Teddy paused, there in the bazaar, to look down at a blanket. Along with the usual brassware, plastic bowls, and cheap battery-powered fans, he’d spotted a strangely shaped hemisphere of grooved wood, half hidden, since the merchant was sitting on it. “Assalamu äläykum,” Teddy said, bowing.
The old guy bowed so deep over his wares his beard curled in his lap. “Wä-äläykum ässalam, honored chieftain Lingxiù al-Amriki,” he mumbled, gaze downcast.
They all knew who he was. Bad? No, good. To know was to fear. To fear was halfway to recruitment. Nasrullah was squeezing the bazaaris and shop owners. Taking half of what they made for the Cause. Using them to help distribute low-volume, high-value imports from Helmand down into the lowlands, then farther east into China proper.
“What is it that you have there, under you?” Teddy asked him.
The old man looked frightened. Reluctantly, he brought it out and handed it up, butt first.
A Mauser broomhandle. The Bolo model, with the stubby barrel. Teddy racked the bolt and an ancient, green-corroded cartridge reluctantly ejected. Making sure that was the only one, he reversed the pistol and peered down the barrel. Pitted, but the lands still visible. He turned it over. The markings were faint, almost obliterated. But it seemed to be a real Mauser, unlike the Chinese and Spanish copies you ran into in out-of-the-way places in Asia. “Where did you obtain this?” he asked the old man.
“Sir, sir, I apologize. I did not know we were to turn in weapons—”
“That was the Han order. Not ours. Only oppressors disarm those they would rule. You are loyal?”
“Oh yes sir, yes sir. Three of my sons are with you. And a grandson—”
“This is good. So, the pistol…?”
“My father’s brother bought it from a shepherd. He found it on the mountain. With some bones.” The old man cast a frightened glance at Teddy’s guards. “Please, sir, accept it. As my gift. Will you not sit for tea? I will have my wife—”
Teddy didn’t need more iron to carry, and doubted he could find ammo if he did, but the camera light was on, the video guy crouching. He thumbed a gold Krugerrand from his belt and dropped it on the blanket. The merchant’s eyes widened. The cameraman backed off a step, swinging to zoom in on the coin, then on the merchant’s face. Teddy reversed the pistol and handed it back butt first. The merchant accepted it reverently, bowing over and over. “Xäyri xosh. Peace be with you,” Teddy said.
He could already hear the narrator in his head. “ITIM leaders are peaceful men. Generous to those who are loyal. Resist the Han and bring freedom to all Turkic peoples.” Folding his hands, Teddy tried his best to force a scarred and forbidding countenance into a friendly, approachable smile.
VLADIMIR was due in that afternoon. Teddy hadn’t seen his CIA handler since the night the imam had been poisoned, but the promised shipments had arrived. They included six hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, with primacord, fuzes, and remote detonators. The explosive had come up by donkey, the detonators separately. The supply drones had flown low and at night through the mountain passes, landed to drop their hazardous loads, then vanished once more into the dark.
Since the passing of the old imam, Teddy, Guldulla, and al-Nashiri—the ex-al-Qaeda fighter who now called himself Qurban, “The Sacrifice”—had shared leadership in an uneasy triumvirate. Headed, for the sake of appearances, by the Uighur.
But it couldn’t continue. Teddy had realized that as he’d knelt beside the imam. Guldulla—Tokarev—he trusted. The mustached fighter dealt openly. His only aim was to eject the hated Han from his homeland.
But the al-Qaeda man wanted more. Abu-Hamid al-Nashiri’s fanatics followed Qurban himself, not the Uighur, much less an American foreigner. Only the link with the CIA, and the supplies they provided, gave Teddy the upper hand.
How long that would last, he had no idea.
The school was two stories, cheaply built of concrete blocks by the government, and taken over by the rebels, who’d dismissed the students when they’d infiltrated two days before. Usually they blew up the schools and shot the teachers, but just now they needed a hideout and rallying point. Not to mention a hospital; the cafeteria had become a medical center, for rebels wounded in the last operation.
The room he entered now was a command center. Hastily set up screens lined the walls. Cables pastaed the floor. Notebook computers nestled on laps, their operators cross-legged on colorful rugs with geometric evocations of gardens, flowers, trees, fruit, and birds. Clamps tapped the high-tension line outside town, evading the consumption algorithms that otherwise would alert the army something new was drawing power here. He walked the space as images flickered, as lines of software lit intent young faces. One screen showed the activity of Marshal Chagatai’s wife’s personal cell. Another monitored communications with the helicopter-borne interior security unit that would carry out tomorrow’s raid.
Regular combat units had electronic warfare and signals intelligence sections. Teddy wanted cyber specialists, linguists, and code-breakers. Most of all, he needed signals intelligence. He wanted the ability to spoof, jam, spy on, and ultimately bring down enemy communications, drones, and surveillance.
This rebellion would be fought in cyberspace as much as with rifles and rocket grenades.
Not that they hadn’t been expending a lot of those as well. He’d reserved two hundred pounds of the C-4 for IEDs. The old cave actually was a school, but each day the completed devices had been packed out. And each day, he’d reduced the number of students, replacing them with volunteer fighters.
They probably wouldn’t make it out. But they knew that, and had embraced martyrdom.
One of the young women caught at his robe as he passed. She wore a blue headscarf patterned with butterflies. The Hajji Qurban had demanded they be in full hijab, but Teddy had vetoed that. He liked to see their faces. After a protest, the ALQ veteran had given way with his usual tranquil smile.
“I do not understand what I am reading.” She showed Teddy, but it was in Chinese and he wasn’t up to recognizing more than a couple of the ideographs. He got “internal security” and “special artillery” but that was all. “What’s the problem?” he asked her. Thinking, Damn, she’s got nice lips.
As if sensing his attention, she looked down. “This unit they mention is not in the table.”
They actually had the Southwest Frontier’s Table of Organization, listing and describing every unit assigned to western China. A convert to Islam had filched it from General Chagatai’s helicopter, scanned it, and returned it the same night. Teddy had wanted to know how committed the guy was—if he could steal a manual, surely he could plant a bomb—but he’d already been rotated out. Still, they had plans for Chagatai … he refocused. “It’s not in the TO? What’s the unit title?”
“The 103rd Special Counterterror Unit.”
“Infantry? Cyber? What?”
She said it might be artillery, but couldn’t really tell. Only that it had been deployed the night before to a code-named location.
Teddy stroked his beard. Since they didn’t have the key to the code, no telling where it was. Most likely, though, close to the cave complex. Mountain artillery? Part of the strike force the marshal was putting together to hit what he thought was an IED school?
A rebel appeared in the doorway. “For you, Lingxiù,” the man said, extending a slip of paper. The rebels didn’t use digital communications themselves. Only paper, or more often, simple verbal codes.
Teddy unfolded it. Nodded.
Vladimir had arrived.
The agent was being held in a hut outside the village. Teddy debated going there, but decided bringing him in was the better course. That way he could see what the Agency’s money was buying.
THEY embraced, awkwardly, but more easily than the first time, a year before. This was the third visit by the man they knew as Vladimir. He looked different, and it took Teddy a second glance to make out why. “What happened to the beard?”
The agent shrugged. “Hurt my credibility in the Agency.”
“It helps your cred here, bro.”
“I’ll work on it.” He clapped Teddy’s shoulder. “You’re looking good, though. How’s the leg holding up?”
They chatted as he led the way to the schoolhouse, but Teddy’s handler fell silent when they entered the command center. He stared around, then whistled. “Impressive. I had no idea.”
“You can’t run an old-fashioned insurgency. Not against the Chinese.”
“I see that, I see that. And, wait, what’s that—a typewriter?”
“Can’t embed spyware in it. Can’t be intercepted. We use it to type five-letter code groups.”
“Fascinating, Look, we should get you to do a piece in Studies in Intelligence. How to run an insurgency in a cyber-hostile environment—by Theodore Oberg.”
The name sounded weird, as if it had been his in some previous incarnation. But it wasn’t anymore.
He was the Lingxiù.
But he couldn’t tell this guy that.
So instead he took the agent’s hand and led him into the cafeteria, which was filled with wounded and groaning men attended by hastily trained medics. Into the armory, where weapons were being repaired. He showed him a drone they’d jammed and recovered when it fell from the sky. Vlad kept shaking his head and exclaiming.
Until finally they were in Teddy’s own room. Actually, the janitor’s closet. Dandan had fixed it up some, but it fitted his image as the ascetic, luxury-spurning battle commander. Had to think about shit like that if you wanted to lead a rebellion. They settled on the carpet, and the girl brought tea and crackers. Teddy was settling in for another tea-and-chat session when a dull concussion tinkled the cups on the tray.
Vladimir tensed. “What was that?”
Teddy had half risen when a second, much louder detonation rattled the mop buckets. He grabbed his carbine, jumped to his feet, and rushed out.
In the control room the guys and girls were still working away, heads down. Damn, Teddy thought. I got me some serious operators here.
Then the first shell came through the roof.
It exploded in the cafeteria. The whole school rocked. The second landed just outside, in the playground. Teddy caught the flash. But even as he ducked under a desk and the window blew in, he was thinking: That wasn’t high explosive.
“What the fuck,” he muttered as a billowing mist swept off the playground and filtered through the shattered window. Other detonations shook the ground and the air. Other shells, but only a few went off with the ear-shattering crack of high explosive. It wasn’t a crushing barrage. More like a carefully spaced scattering, some near the school, others farther away.
Then his eyes stung. Vladimir seized his arm. “It’s gas,” the CIA agent yelled. He yelled it again, to the room, in Chinese.
They began screaming and jumping up. “Save the computers,” Teddy yelled, and laptops slammed shut and plugs were yanked from extension cords. “Into the basement!”
“No!” Vladimir shouted. “It’s chlorine. Chlorine settles. Get them outside. Disperse and fight. That’s all we can do.”
“It isn’t all,” Teddy yelled back. His throat burned. The faintly green vapors were almost invisible, but breathing them was like drinking bleach. He could feel his lungs dying. His sight swam in tears. He picked up a discarded headscarf from the floor, tied blue butterflies over his mouth and nose. “Follow me.”
The air outside was choking, smoky, filled with screams. Shells were still falling all across the town. This was a big attack. A house exploded across the street. The upper floor lifted for a fraction of a second, then disintegrated into a cloud of the dried mud it had been molded from. The ocher dust mingled with the green mist rolling through the streets, darkening the air, turning it the ominous reddish brown of dried blood. The townspeople were running like ants. They carried children, coughing and sneezing. Some fell as he watched, to lie convulsing and kicking, hacking a bloody foam at nose and mouth.
“Get on the rooftops,” he yelled to a passing family. “The gas settles.” The father sneered at him, spat a curse, and pushed past.
Vlad, beside him. “Helos,” he said through a muffling sleeve, and pointed.
Teddy wheeled, and saw the familiar shapes. He unslung the carbine and checked the magazine. Inadequate, but all he had.
The gunships came in first. Z-10s, in their trademark tight formation. Behind them, staggered at different altitudes, the bulky, carpenter-bee lumberings of the troop carriers. But with something under them he didn’t recognize. Floats?
The gunships banked and went in. He couldn’t see what they were firing at, but the oddly pedestrian stutter of miniguns drifted down from the sky.
“You should have given us those Stingers,” he said.
Vlad grimaced, admitting Teddy was probably right. Then yelled, “Gas dispensers.”
The lead pair of transports tipped into a shallow descent, and banked outward, one left, the other right. A silvery mist trailed out behind them, whirled and spread by the rotor wash as it descended, encircling the town.
Teddy nodded, pointing the carbine up, but not firing. They were far out of range.
The Han weren’t just after the rebels. Though they were the main target, no doubt.
They were going to kill everyone in town.
Chagatai had struck first. And neither Teddy’s cyber team nor Nasrullah’s spies had warned them.
Qurban lurched out of the scrum fighting to escape the school and collided with them. He recoiled, then grabbed both Americans and dragged them after him toward the bazaar.
Teddy resisted, then gave way and ran with him. They weren’t getting out; the wall of gas and strafing the Chinese were building around the town was locking them in. The only alternative was to go to ground, endure, then kill as many of the black-clad troops as possible when they landed. Go down fighting.
As they emerged into the square a toadstool of flame and black smoke rammed upward to the north. Teddy couldn’t see what it was, but Qurban’s walkie-talkie crackled like a brushfire with rapid Arabic. “One of the black birds has fallen,” the squat hajji yelled back. He made a ninety-degree spin move and pelted full tilt into another alley. Teddy and Vlad sprinted after him. Standing in the open didn’t seem like a good tactic, with the gunships lining up for another strafing pass. A ripple of shells exploded behind them, tearing the marketplace apart into screams, blood, wreckage, and smoke.
Qurban’s back-turned face. An open mouth in a gray beard. “One of their helicopters crashed. An opening. To the north. We must go up.”
Apparently “up” in this context meant scrambling up a ladder to the rooftop. Here in town the flat roofs were separated only by a few feet, enough to jump. They scurried helter-skelter over the rooftops, boots skidding on terra-cotta tiles and corrugated iron. In the alleys below the mist swirled. The dying littered the streets, flopping like beached fish. When they had to descend a staircase and cross to the next roof, Teddy tried to hold his breath, but sensed fluid building in his lungs. He wheezed and coughed until he retched, doubled over, but still couldn’t clear his airway.
A black silhouette flashed above them. He dashed away snot and tears with a sleeve, unlimbered the carbine, and fired out a magazine, the butt pressing his shoulder, leading his target by eye. As he’d expected, his bullets made no visible difference. He jammed in a second magazine and resumed scrambling across the roofs.
But he was tiring. Losing it. Didn’t seem to be able to get enough to breathe, no matter how hard he panted.
As the slope rose the homes began spacing out, becoming separate compounds. The three fugitives were on the ground now, retching and stumbling. A pyre of black smoke rose ahead. Qurban was headed right for it. Teddy noted the direction of the plume at the same moment Vlad screamed not to go that way. “Go upwind. Upwind! Whatever’s in those belly tanks is in that smoke.” The hajji hesitated, then nodded.
They circled the crash site. Bodies in black uniforms lay crumpled around it, smoking or on fire. One struggled to rise, and Teddy put a double tap into his back. Around them other rebels, some with rifles, most without, struggled through the brush and rugged shallow ravines. Trying to filter out. A gunship circled. As he’d trained them, everyone froze in place. It seemed to work. The ship droned past, gaining altitude.
Qurban gained the shelter of a hole in the ground, and Teddy and Vlad tumbled in with him. They coughed and panted. Vlad blew drooling strings of red-tinted snot into the dry soil. “Well, that was unexpected,” he muttered.
Teddy bent over, gripped with uncontrollable laughter at the same moment he was racked with coughing spasms and an overwhelming desire to barf. He hacked and guffawed. Finally he wiped both hands down his slick, filthy face. “Sorry.”
“Teddy, this is a fucking disaster,” the CIA man said. “Somehow they knew this was your HQ.”
“Not my HQ. Distributed operations.”
“Well, they knew we were here. Unless you think this was a random attack on a Uighur village?”
Teddy said he didn’t have any idea. But then, remembered the detection of the special counterterror unit. Maybe artillery, the headscarved girl had said. What had happened to her, anyway? And Dandan, was she still back there? Well, bed slaves were expendable.
Vlad persisted. “They knew you were here. Or anyway, that a leadership node was here.”
“Maybe they were tracking you,” Teddy said. “That’s possible too. Right?”
Small-arms fire crackled from back in the town. The high-pitched snapping of the Chinese rounds, answered only now and then by the lower-pitched barks of AKs. Teddy coughed again, not feeling much like laughing now. It sounded like the Chinese were shooting anyone left alive.
Vlad said, “I doubt that. The leak was probably from within your organization. Who wasn’t here today?”
“I did not see Nasrullah,” Qurban put in. He blew his nose in his fingers and slung it into the soil, then reseated the magazine in his AK and cast a glance skyward. “But we should move. The black devils will be combing the village. Counting the bodies of the Faithful for their masters in Beijing.”
Teddy checked the sky too. Clear. For the moment. The transports must have gone back for a second wave. “Let’s move,” he grunted, and scrambled out of the gully.
THEY had a rally point to the north, between the village and the pass out of which they’d descended to the lowlands. Only a scatter of stone shepherds’ huts, with half-dug-out caves leading back into the mountain, but he’d stocked it with food and ammo for just such a contingency as this.
A chill was descending, walking down out of the high ravines, as the leaders convened that night around a shielded fire. The rest of the surviving rebels were getting their heads down in another hut.
Teddy. Guldulla. Qurban. Vlad.
And Nasrullah, the youngest. Their link with the lowland traders, and their chief spymaster. He’d shown up two hours after the attack, explaining he’d been held up while making the final arrangements for the ambush at the old cave site. “Which is still on, yes?” he asked, warning his hands at the fire and ignoring the chilly reception the hajji, in particular, had given him.
“I don’t know.” Teddy was suspicious too. Vlad sat a few feet off, keeping his counsel. “If our HQ got blown, did our trap for the marshal?”
The younger man spread his hands. “The charges are planted, yes? The arrangements are made. It is too late to stop.”
Teddy had to agree. Reluctantly. If there was even a micro chance to terminate Chagatai, they had to take it. He turned his cell on and called up the app that gave him remote viewing of the cave mouth. Yusuf, his tech guy, had set up six cameras. They showed the uphill approach to the valley, the sky overhead, and two views of the cave entrance. The interior cameras, when he toggled to them, showed the interior of the main cavern, with its toppled statuary and the carefully arranged paraphernalia of bombmaking.
And far above, packed into the bats’ holes in the cave roof, four hundred pounds of plastic explosive.
But if their location had been given away, maybe their trap had been blown too.
He kept toggling between the sky screen and the one showing the valley. Anyone invading had to come either by helo or on foot. But nothing stirred. The dusk deepened, and the fire crackled.
Finally Guldulla stirred. “They aren’t coming.” He looked around at the fire-lit faces. “They knew.”
With a smooth, practiced movement, Qurban drew a pistol from under his sheepskin coat. Nasrullah had only an instant to gaze into its muzzle, just long enough for his eyes to widen.
The bullet threw the Uighur spymaster’s head back. Qurban fired twice more, so rapidly it was all one burst, into the groin and chest. Nasrullah was dead before he sprawled backward full length on the sand.
A wisp of powder smoke drifted on the breeze. The fire crackled. Nasrullah’s legs twitched, spasmed. Then, slowly, the tremors died away and the corpse lay still. The old hajji clicked his safety back on. He slid the pistol away again as the others stared at him in horror.
“You had no right to do that,” Teddy sputtered at last.
Qurban said coldly, “He was the traitor. That is plain.”
“Why ‘plain’? If he tipped off the marshal, why would he show up here again?”
“To continue his treachery. That is obvious.”
“It could have been someone who worked for him. One of his spies.”
“Then he was incompetent. In any case the punishment is the same.” Qurban drew up his legs, in their ragged trousers, and glared around at them. “When will you learn you are leading a jihad? There is no room for mercy here. A whole town died. Because of him? No man can know. But all will see that we execute justice. If he was innocent, Allah will welcome him. If he was guilty, he will burn in Jehannum. There, let that be an end to it.”
Teddy glanced at Vladimir, who looked shaken. The agent, though, didn’t speak. So he had to. He turned to Guldulla. “Tok, you’re our leader. Our judge. Not this guy. Whatever he thinks.”
But the Uighur was gnawing his mustache. “I agree, that was a hasty trial.”
“That wasn’t a trial. That was murder.”
“True. It was done too quickly. But l cannot bring him back, Lingxiù. Nor can you. And perhaps the hajji is right. Perhaps he was a double agent. Working for the Han, while pretending to spy for us. Was it not he who told us Chagatai would be there? And he did not come.” Guldulla sighed, and nodded heavily. “Perhaps it is best to let this pass quietly. He was cleaning his pistol, and it went off. But … someone will need to take his place,”
“Yusuf,” Qurban put in. “He is skilled, and trustworthy as well.”
Teddy shuddered inside. He hadn’t realized the big technician was one of his enemy’s young radicals. And he’d been beside Teddy all day, a knife’s-length away.
But the gray-bearded terrorist was turning to him now. Putting his hand on Teddy’s knee. “You too, al-Amriki. Do you agree, the traitor had to die?”
Teddy hesitated, looking into those gray-blue orbs. Mustering his own will to meet them. He’d liked Nasrullah. Trusted him. The kid was into some hinky deals, sure. Trading the fat-marbled jade of Xinjiang, silver and gold and surplus weapons to the Pashtun for opium, and opium back east for weapons and information and money for bribes. He probably had dirty hands … but you couldn’t run an espionage network with clean ones. And his own palms weren’t exactly pristine.
But now … replace him with one of Qurban’s minions?
The strategy was clear. First Imam Akhmad, then Nasrullah. Step by step, the professional jihadist was liquidating the original leaders. Taking over the rebellion. Remaking it in the blood-stained image of the evil he’d served before.
Teddy had no doubt he himself was the next target.
Beneath his tunic, he wrapped his fingers around the hand grip of his Makarov. Watching Qurban’s shoulder in the flickering light. Waiting for the intention movement. Across the fire, he glimpsed Vladimir’s fingers snailing toward his own gun.
But the hajji didn’t move. And after a moment Teddy forced himself to say, “I agree with our leader. The traitor had to die.”
THEY slept in the hut with the others that night. But Teddy couldn’t sleep. His lungs burned. He couldn’t catch his breath. So he kept one hand on his thin-blade and lay listening. Maybe a drowse toward morning, but every snore and crackle as someone turned over in the straw startled him awake again.
That last time he woke, someone was crouching over him. The blade whipped out, and he stabbed up with every bit of force he could muster.
To have his wrist caught, and the blade twisted harmlessly away. “It’s me,” Vladimir whispered, lips touching his ear.
“What do you want?”
“I’m leaving. Come outside.”
The thin dim cold of morning. The mountains were black cutouts against gray sky. Stars still glittered. His CIA liaison sagged to perch on a stone. A Zippo click-clanged open, followed by the rasp of the striker wheel against flint. “Want one?”
“No, I … okay.” Teddy accepted the smoke. The first inhalation triggered the burning in his chest all over again, and he stifled what felt like his lungs convulsing. He hastily passed it back. “You leaving?”
“Need to get back. Need to turn over something. And orders.”
Gold clinked as Vladimir laid a soft bag in his hands. More Krugerrands. “To keep things going,” his contact said. “You can bounce back from this.”
“I thought we had Chagatai. But he outsmarted us.”
“Not every operation succeeds. You rebuild, and move on to the next.”
“They killed everyone in that town. Everyone.”
“Like Lidice. I know. Chagatai will stand trial after the war.”
“Do you see now? I was right about that al-Qaeda son of a bitch.”
“He’s an inspirational speaker. He’s built your numbers.”
“He’s turning it into a jihad.”
“If that’s what it takes to force Beijing to the table, we can deal with it later. By then you’ll be out of here. But before you leave, we have one more tasking.”
He slid his cell out of his pocket. After a hesitation, Oberg withdrew his as well. A faint note chimed as they synced.
“What is it this time?” Teddy muttered.
“We’re calling it Operation Jedburgh.”
“Go on.”
“We’ve identified a heavy missile base northeast of the Taklimakan. There’s a contingency plan to take it out with nukes. But it’d be less risky if we could do it with a ground assault.”
Teddy didn’t like it. “Less risky? Not for us. Take out a launch site … that’s gonna be heavily guarded. Special sensors. Special troops.”
“Your people destroyed Jade Emperor.”
“We took seventy-five percent casualties.”
“This mission could end the war. I’m serious. It’s that important.” Vladimir’s voice went urgent, cajoling. “Once you hit the base, we’ll pull you out. We’ve discussed this with the Teams. You’ve spent long enough out in the cold. A well-deserved rest. Promotion to warrant, with pay backdated to your capture. A training assignment, back in San Diego. Where Salena lives, right? Then medical retirement, if you want it. Or if you don’t, a senior position with the Agency. Special Activities Division.”
Teddy tried to visualize what the guy was talking about. Back to the United States? When he’d only found meaning out here, in the mountains. Found God, or something enough like Him that his fucked-up, wasted, cunt-chasing life finally seemed to make sense.
There is no choice. There is no chance.
There is only My will.
Was this His will?
Shielding the glow, he thumbed the phone on. Flicked through the map, then the plan. His heart sank. “You’re asking for all the effectives we have left.”
“It’s that important.”
Important? Or an extermination strategy, a suicide mission designed to snuff out the rebellion? A fucking missile base … he’d have to lie to his guys. They wouldn’t see the point. His leadership was shaky enough now.
Finally he murmured, “You wouldn’t even give us Stingers. And you saw what those gunships did to us. Sorry, I can’t sign up for this one, Vlad.”
The other didn’t answer for a time, just sat, an immobile shadow. Finally he murmured, “I got to take a piss. Be right back.”
THE satellite channel was clear tonight. The agent waited, shivering in the cold, while his call went from the monitor up to those he reported to. He blinked up at the coldly shining stars. One was probably the tiny satellite that was bouncing his voice around the world.
Finally his supervisor came on the line. He muttered, “Mister P, this is Andres.”
The news didn’t go down well. “Can we really count on this guy’s loyalty?” his supervisor asked. “Is he going native on us?”
“Give me one more chance to turn him around. He wants MANPADS.”
“Forget it. No Stingers to insurgents.”
“He took major losses from gunships yesterday. He won’t do it without them.”
“I’m not going up the line with that.”
“Then he won’t take the mission, sir. And I can’t say he’s in the wrong. The Chinese decimated his people from the air. He had no way to fight back.”
Silence. Voices, in the background. Then, finally, “We’ll have to disavow.”
“Is Jedburgh that important?”
“Important? Yeah. It’s crucial. So … if that’s what it takes. A limited number. On loan. With the short-life batteries. So they can’t go rogue on us later.”
He trudged back to the hut. Squatted, again, on the same rock. The black silhouette of the rebel leader waited opposite him. Oberg coughed hard, an agonizing sound that was more like a retch. Vlad’s lungs ached too. He couldn’t help thinking of all the villagers. Gassed to death.
They had to bring Zhang down. If they had to make sacrifices to do it …
“I got you Stingers, Master Chief,” he muttered. “They didn’t want to release them. But they will. For this one mission. There’ll be more gold too. Guns. Medical supplies. Eavesdropping equipment. Even your own recon drones, if you want them.”
The SEAL’s silhouette remained still. Silent. As if pondering. Finally he murmured, “And this mission will end the war?”
“Yes.”
TEDDY sat motionless, thinking it over. He hacked and spat. Closing his eyes, he flashed back on the terror of the flight over the rooftops. The corpses carpeting the streets. Exterminated by their own government, and any survivors murdered.
No. It wasn’t their government. Just brutal oppressors, who massacred them because they wanted freedom. Maybe not the CIA’s brand of freedom, or America’s. But their own.
If he agreed, a lot of his men would die. Or Qurban might succeed in turning them on him.
But if Jedburgh worked, it might finish the war.
Was this His will? Or the warped desires of ignorant, deluded men?
He coughed again, dreading the welling of fluid in his lungs. Well, he could pull out, if it looked too dangerous. And with more gold, guns, shoulder-fired missiles, they could rebuild from today’s catastrophe. Grow the rebellion. That was his mission out here, after all. And surely that had to be Allah’s will too.
But even he could hear the doubt in his voice as he muttered reluctantly, there in the dark, “Okay. We’ll give it a shot.”