Before the morning brightened, Adam and Steve Branch took off for the Pakistani border, leaving Rotner and Hamid behind.
The Mitsubishi was balky starting. The problem was electrical, Branch concluded—that was why the dashboard lighting went in and out. Putting up the hood, he did a hasty fix on the wiring, his demeanor focused but untroubled. Adam was beginning to like the laconic Seal—Branch struck him as a highly skilled version of a certain American type, the man who could fix things and was undaunted by a challenge. There was comfort in this. For the next few hours, their fates were intertwined.
Adam felt less certain about their vehicle. The electrical problems might recur, and the SUV had a right-hand drive with a gearshift operated by the driver’s left hand, something neither man had experienced. Electing to find this amusing, Branch volunteered to drive. It became Adam’s job to keep watch to the front, back and sides, ready to react at the first hint of trouble. Both men had AK-47s beneath their seats.
They passed through the outskirts of town, Adam noting the pedestrians or peddlers along the patchy dirt road, then a cluster of stooped laborers making bricks with mud, clay, and hay, laying them out to dry in the sun. Without turning, Adam said, “Wonder how many centuries they’ve been doing that.”
“No way of telling,” Branch responded. “But we could drive past here decades from now, and their grandkids will be doing the same damn thing. Here a century lasts a thousand years.”
Adam nodded. “No joke. One guy I met in a remote village thought I was a Russian, even though they left here with their tails dragging twenty years ago. This place has a certain timeless indifference.”
They were in the countryside now. The dips and heights of the terrain became steeper, the rocks and potholes more punishing, sending jolts up Adam’s spine. They began fording shallow creek beds, the first few dry before they slowed to a crawl for another, this one swollen with water. Briefly, their tires spun, spattering rivulets of muddy water on the front and side windows. Branch jerked the gearshift, rocking the SUV back, then forward, straining for a purchase on the mud beneath. “Don’t like this for the wiring,” he observed. “Getting wet won’t help a bit.”
Looking out the window, Adam hoped that the SUV would not get stuck here in the open, leaving them exposed. The tires kept grinding until, mercifully, the four-wheel-drive skidded forward onto dry land, a last stretch of rolling terrain before they hit the mountains. “Got a football team?” Branch inquired.
“College or pro?”
“College, to start.”
“Not much to say,” Adam confessed wryly. “I went to Yale.”
Shifting gears, Branch shot him a look. “I can see the problem. What about pros?”
“I used to follow the Patriots.”
“I’m a Cowboys guy,” Branch said with satisfaction. “‘America’s team’—a stadium that looks like Disney World, and cheerleaders with perfect teeth and artificial boobs. Only one who’s had more plastic surgery is the owner. If that’s not All-American, I don’t know what is.”
“Guess you’d have trouble with the Patriots, then. Their bus has the demeanor of a second-tier Kremlin bureaucrat. It doesn’t exactly warm the heart.”
Branch shrugged. “At least tell me you don’t watch soccer. Never got it—a bunch of guys in shorts running around in circles, most of them from shitbag countries that don’t like us. And now they’ve got actual teams all over our great land, like sleeper cells. I keep asking myself which of them are illegals. Makes me wonder what we’re fighting for, I can tell you that.”
The commentary, Adam realized, captured a surprising streak of irony, Branch riffing on his Alabama background. He was about to respond in kind when a goat cantered onto the road ahead of them, followed by two more.
The seemingly prosaic sight made Adam instantly alert. A string of goats blocking the road could be happenstance, or the precursor to an ambush. Swiftly, he glanced around them. They were stuck—to the right was a four foot wall fronting some mud houses; to the left, trees lined the bank of a deep creek bed. More goats filled the road.
Branch braked to a stop. “No choice,” he said, and felt for the weapon beneath his car seat. “If there’s a stupider animal alive, I haven’t met them.”
Amidst the goats, a human being appeared from behind the wall—a boy in his early teens, Adam judged, prodding the recalcitrant beasts with a shepherd’s crook. He glanced at the SUV, then kept moving his charges along. As the last goat crossed the road, Adam felt himself relax a fraction, and then four other men appeared behind the herd.
They were of a different cast—bearded, hard-looking men who stopped in the road, openly staring at the Americans stalled five yards away. Adam felt Branch thinking along with him, trained to survive, knowing that at any moment they might have to kill these men. He could not tell whether the Afghanis had weapons concealed in baggy shirts. What was certain is that they had seen two men who, despite their dress and beards, were betrayed by Branch’s coloring as foreigners.
“So?” Branch inquired.
Adam thought quickly. “Let them go, or we’ll have to shoot the boy as well. Even if we do, we’d be leaving five corpses in an inhabited area. No point drawing that kind of attention before we’ve even started.”
The men kept staring at them, as though marking their faces. “If they call the wrong guy on their cell phone,” Branch observed, “we’re fucked.” But the fatalism in his voice conceded Adam’s point.
At last, the four men resumed following the young shepherd and his flock. In solemn imitation of an imperial despot, Branch intoned, “Let the boy live.”
He resumed driving as Adam glanced around them. One of the Afghans, turning, gave the SUV a final look.
They drove another eight miles or so, at some unknown point crossing the Pakistani border, unmarked by wire or sensors or guards. A no-man’s land—the province of warlords, jihadists and Adam’s sometime business partner, Colonel Rehman, whose Afghan agent had set their operation in motion. A hall of mirrors, Adam amended.
“That shepherd,” Branch remarked after a long silence, “sort of reminded me of my oldest boy. Stringy like that, with the body of a pass catcher.”
This scrap of information made the Seal seem complex. “You have a family?” Adam inquired.
“I have kids—two boys and a pretty girl in the middle. Looks like her mom, who had the ingratitude to divorce me.” Hitting the brakes, Branch slowed to navigate the steep twisting road. “Called me uncommunicative, if you can imagine that.”
“I can’t. Think of how close we are already.”
“Soul mates. Guess it helps to have killing people in common.” The humor bled from Branch’s voice. “You’re with your family, and you remind yourself they’re the reason we do stuff like this—that, and the thrill of it all. But they don’t really want to hear about it, and you don’t really want to tell them. So you just wall it off.”
The observation struck a chord from Adam’s sessions with Charlie Glazer. “What choice do we have?”
Branch glanced at him. “You married?”
“Nope. I’ve been hoping to miss the first divorce.”
“Got a girlfriend, at least?”
Involuntarily, Adam found himself distracted by an image of Carla—her face close to his, the electric jolt that came from the feel of her lips, the press of her body. “Not really. Just someone I’d like to see again.”
Only after he spoke the words did Adam appreciate their context. He looked around him, seeing nothing but the harsh, jagged terrain of the mountains that enveloped them as they climbed. His last phrase lingered there, unanswered.
At length they reached the snow-topped ridges that marked the beginning of their descent into the badlands. “Crappy place for an operating base,” Branch observed, “but perfect for al-Qaeda. They could stash our POW anywhere.”
“Guess that’s what the rush is about. Right now, we may actually know where he is. But once they move him, he’s a ghost again.”
They crept with agonizing slowness down a narrow twisting road, Branch braking constantly, glancing at the GPS as Adam scanned the terrain—a sheer cliff hugging the driver’s side, a deep ravine on their left. Branch slowed the SUV to a crawl; the drop was at least two football fields in length, and skidding would be fatal.
Suddenly, the motor died. The SUV was still, a metal shell.
“Fucking electricals,” Branch said between gritted teeth. “Why now?”
Both men knew their roles. Grabbing his weapon as he jumped out of the driver’s side, Branch slung it over his shoulder and raised the hood. Adam closed the passenger door behind him and leaned against it two feet from the ravine, cradling his weapon as he looked to the front and back for any sign of trouble.
Peering beneath the hood, Branch began tinkering with the wires. “Like the goddam Gordian knot,” he said. “No wonder Japan got so screwed up.” Then his concentration became too intense for speech.
“Hate to ask,” he finally said. “But I need you to hold a wire.”
Reluctantly, Adam abandoned his surveillance. Taking a string of green wire from the Seal’s hand, he scanned the road behind them, his sight line partially blocked by the hood.
“Getting there,” Branch muttered, and then Adam detected a faint new sound. Like the buzzing of a swarm of bees, he thought, but could not yet pick up its direction.
“Hear that?”
Branch glanced up, cocking his head. All at once, there was a crack of glass breaking, the percussive sound of bullets striking metal like the banging of a ballpeen. From the road, Adam thought, and cried out, “Down . . .”
A hammer blow struck the center of his back, a round pinging off his body armor. Adam jerked upright. A second bullet passed through his left shoulder with the force of a blow from a steel bat.
Blood spurted out as Adam dropped to the ground, stunned, instinctively using the truck as cover. Clamping his wound with his good hand, he peered out from behind the truck and saw two men on a motorcycle—a driver and a shooter. “Behind us,” he shouted.
Kneeling, Branch began spraying bullets. The driver veered to evade fire, the shooter stymied from aiming. “Loading magazine,” Branch spat.
Out of bullets, Adam knew. Pulling himself upright, he felt a searing pain course through his left arm, then saw the motorcycle steady itself, the shooter taking aim as they sped closer.
With one hand, Adam jerked his AK-47 and began firing at the driver, the percussive recoil jabbing his good shoulder. The motorcycle wobbled; in slow motion, the driver tipped to the side and toppled with his vehicle onto the hard dirt road. The haze of shock filled Adam’s eyes, white flashes obscuring his vision. As though he were watching from a distance, he saw the shooter rise to his knees and begin returning fire.
A round popped by Adam’s jaw. The shooter’s head snapped back, a gaping hole where one eye had been. As Adam slumped against the windshield, he saw Branch fire again, the shooter’s chest twitching as he fell backward.
Adam dropped his rifle, right palm pressed against the hole in his shoulder. It pulsed with pain; blood seeped from between his fingers. Without glancing at him, Branch ran forward, firing at their prone attackers. Their bodies skittered with each bullet in an eerie death rattle. Only then did Branch turn to see Adam sliding down the side of the car, his white shirt soaked in carmine.