Tom Clancy - Locked On

Chavez appeared just behind the two men, sliding a fresh magazine around and into their chest rigs. While he did this he shouted, “There is a bomb factory in the back!”

“Oh, shit,” said Ryan, realizing that he and his mates were, essentially, exchanging fire while sitting on top of a powder keg.

“Al Darkur is wiring an IED to blow the back wall. If he gets it right it should make us a hole in the back of the building. When it’s time to go, just turn and run up the hallway. I’ll cover your egress!”

Jack didn’t ask what would happen if Mohammed did not get it “right.”

Ding next said, “Do not head out back until you toss your LZ beacons. The door gunner in the Puma has been rocking his MG for the past ten minutes. Don’t count on him to spot the IR strobe on your back. He’ll turn you into ground beef. Use your LZ marker as a second way to alert them that friendlies are coming out.”

The two young men nodded.

“Sam and the Afghan will drag the wounded man, you guys just keep up the covering fire for them until the chopper lands and they get on board.”

“Got it!” Dom said, and Ryan nodded.

Both Ryan and Caruso kept up the controlled fire, just enough to let the enemy know that, if they ventured up the hall toward the T, then they were going to pay a heavy price. They still took some fire, but it came from AKs that were just held around the corner and sprayed by their handlers, and the rounds banged along the walls, floors, and ceiling.

Twice al Darkur and Chavez passed behind them as they took IED material out of the bomb factory on Jack and Dom’s right and carried it to the other end of the hallway on their left.

Within a minute, Chavez was back behind them. He screamed into their ears, “Get down!”

Both men dove to the stone floor of the hallway and covered their heads. Within a few seconds, an incredible boom from behind them pounded up the hallway with a concussive force that made Jack think the building would fall on top of them. Cracked mortar, stone, and dust did fall from the ceiling, raining down on all the men in the hallway.

Caruso was first to his feet. He ran up the hallway with Ryan close behind, passing the wounded Reuters man being dragged by his shoulders by Driscoll and the Afghani prisoner.

Jack caught up to him as they entered the room with the bricked-over windows. Their weapon lights were useless with the dust in the air. They just continued on toward the far wall until, finally, they could see open sky. Immediately Dominic threw the flashing landing-zone signal into the rear of the compound. The beacon would, in theory, alert the gunmen in the circling choppers that friendlies were in that area so they should not fire.

As Dominic stepped into the rear courtyard he worried he would take a blast from the door gun of the chopper, but fortunately the Zarrar commandos had good fire discipline. The American crouched behind a small stack of truck tires and covered the north side of the compound, while his cousin went prone beside a large pile of rubble left by al Darkur’s bomb blast, covering the south side.

One of the SSG choppers had used its 20-millimeter cannon to take out the poles holding up the electric wires in the back of the property, so the helo landed near Major al Darkur, the prisoners, and the American operatives. Within seconds everyone was aboard and the helo lifted back into the air and immediately began racing for safety.

Inside the helicopter, all seven men who’d made it on board lay on the metal decking, arms and legs atop one another. Jack Ryan found himself near the bottom of the pile, but he was too exhausted to move, even to push the thick leg of the Afghani politician off his face.

It took another twenty minutes of nap-of-the-earth flying before the lights in the cabin of the helo came on and the pilot announced, through Mohammed al Darkur and his intercom-linked headphones, that they were out of danger. The men sat up, water bottles were passed around, and al Darkur’s shoulder was attended to by the loadmaster of the aircraft, while one of the Zarrar commandos started an IV into the arm of the Australian Reuters correspondent.

The normally dry and stoic Sam Driscoll hugged each member of his extraction team, then he rolled into the corner and fell asleep with a water bottle tucked to his chest.

Chavez leaned over into Jack’s ear to yell over the engine noise, “Looks like you had a pretty close shave back there.”

Jack followed Ding’s eyes to the canvas magazine rack on his chest. A jagged hole was torn through one of the pouches. He pulled out a metal and plastic P-90 mag, and found a bullet hole all the way through it. Fingering his way into the hole in his chest rig he fished out a twisted and sharp 7.62 round that had slammed into his ceramic breastplate.

In all the action, Jack had no idea he’d taken a hit right to the chest.

“Fuck me,” he said as he held the bullet up and looked at it.

Chavez just laughed and squeezed the younger man’s arm. “Not your time, ’ mano.”

“I guess not,” Jack said, and he wanted to call his mom and dad, and he wanted to call Melanie. But he had to put both those communications on hold, because he suddenly felt the nausea return.

Riaz Rehan had men on the inside of each and every major institution in his nation. One of these institutions was the Pakistani nuclear ordnance industry. He, through his own network of cutouts, was in contact with nuclear scientists, engineers, and weapons manufacturers. Through them he learned that in Wah Cantonment, near Islamabad, was the storage location of many of his nation’s nuclear devices. Several air delivery bombs, essentially U.S. Mark 84 conventional bomb cases packed with five-to-twenty-kiloton-yield nuclear devices, were kept at the Kamra Air Weapon Complex inside the massive Pakistan Ordnance Factories there at Wah. The nuclear bombs were disassembled, but kept at something known as “screwdriver ready” status. This meant they could be assembled for deployment in hours if and when the head of state called for them to be made ready.

And, Rehan had learned from one of his high-ranking associates in the Ministry of Defense the previous morning, the President of Pakistan had made the call.

So the first portion of Operation Saker had already succeeded. In order to ensure that the weapons were assembled and deployed to their battle stations, General Rehan needed to bring his nation to the brink of war. That done, he monitored his contacts in the government and nuclear weapons branches of the military, and waited like a coiled snake in the grass to make his next move.

The Pakistanis had long boasted that their nuclear weapons were protected by a three-tier national command authority security procedure. This was true, but ultimately it did not mean much. All one needed was the knowledge of the weakest link in the security of the device after its assembly, and some way to exploit this weakest link.

The general’s agents at Pakistan Ordnance Factories told him that around nine p.m. two twenty-kiloton bombs would leave the Kamra Air Weapon Complex by truck, and then they would be delivered to a special train in nearby Taxila. At first Rehan considered attacking the truck convoy. A truck is easier to disable than a train, after all. But there were too many variables for which Rehan could not control so close to the large military presence there in Wah and Taxila.

So he began looking at the rail route. The bombs would be delivered by a heavily guarded freight train to the air force base at Sargodha, some two hundred miles of rail travel away.

A simple glance at a map was all it took to pinpoint the weakest link on the route. Just five kilometers south of the town of Phularwan, on a flat stretch of farmland bisected by the railroad, a cluster of abandoned mills and grain warehouses sat alongside wheat fields that ran right up to the tracks. Here a force could hide, ready to attack a train approaching from the north. Once they had achieved their objective the force could then load itself and the two ten-foot-long, one-ton bombs onto trucks, and access the modern M2 Highway, the Lahore — Islamabad road, where they could go north or south and disappear into either massive metropolis inside of ninety minutes.