QAIS KOTAL. SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS. SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
Hagen and Martin led the stack, wearing their night vision goggles while rushing into the corridor. Stark watched their greenish figures running ahead of Kira and him while Larson and Sergei brought up the rear. Ryan and Monica kept overwatch while the last two Russians in Kira’s team remained covering the pass.
The smell of burned flesh overpowered all other smells. Luckily both teams were all too familiar with it. It hung in the hazy air as they jumped over carbonized figures at every turn, amid twisted and charred hardware. The heat absorbed by the walls during the seconds following the blast now radiated from shimmering surfaces. Invisible waves of warmer air bent the surrounding colder air, distorting the picture in front of them like a mirage in the desert.
“Definitely the hot gates now,” Kira said, earning a sideways glance from Stark as they negotiated the corridor, cruising through the scorched violence of a Hellfire missile.
They were inside in another minute, scanning the large, hazy interior with overlapping arcs of fire, searching for anything that moved, but the place was largely empty, just burned furniture and a handful of seared bodies thrown about by the explosion.
The entrance room connected to three corridors. Stark looked at Hagen and Martin before stretching two fingers toward the hallway to their right, ordering Larson and Sergei to the left passageway while he and Kira took the center one.
Even with the blast, there was still a reasonable chance that someone might have survived it, perhaps locked inside some interior vault-like enclosure. So caution called for tossing concussion grenades at every turn. The echoing blasts pounded their eardrums as the combined teams cleared each chamber.
It didn’t take long for Stark and Kira to realize that something was seriously wrong. Aside from the three bodies in the main hall, each space they checked was devoid of people. Kitchen, bedrooms, everything. And the other two teams reported similar results.
“What is happening, Hunter? Where is the bomb? Where is everybody?” Kira asked, walking inside the last chamber, a lab of sorts, with tables and walls packed with tools. Blood stained the floor next to a small pile of bandages and other medical supplies.
Stark stared at everything in disbelief as Kira’s slim figure, cloaked in black, suppressed AK-9 in hand, inspected the closets and under each table. She poked at everything, opening cabinet doors and desk drawers, rummaging through the hardware on each lab table, but in the end there was nothing even remotely close to resembling a nuclear bomb. Just general electronics equipment of the Radio Shack variety and assorted tools.
Nothing, he thought. We have nothing.
“Did they trick us?” Kira asked as they walked back into the hallway.
“I don’t see how,” he replied. “You said that your tracking device pointed to this hideout.”
“It did. But it has gone silent.”
Stark looked down the long and hazy hallway, trying to get inside the heads of an enemy that was as crafty as it was deadly. He could not conceive of any scenario in which the Taliban would have not left itself a back door to escape, and that meant that his team just had not been able to find it.
It has to be here. Somewhere.
“What do we do now, Janki mishka?”
“The only thing we can do. We check it again. Top to bottom.”
She looked up. “What top?”
Before he could reply, Larson came on the ops frequency.
“Colonel … the place is cleared, and no one—and I mean no one—is fucking home.”