Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

The Washington-based general had never heard of this bleak pinnacle way down southeast of Tacoma in Pierce County.

“Can you get them back to base by helicopter, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir. I believe so. The cloud base is just high enough.” “Can you airlift them to a place called Mazama, close to Hart’s Pass, on the edge of the wilderness?”

“I’ll have to check that, sir.” He would be back on the line in three minutes.

The general held on.

“No, sir. The cloud up there is right on the treetops, and snow pending. To get up there means going by truck.”

“Well, get them there, by the fastest possible route. You say they are on maneuver?”

“Yessir.”

“Do they have with them all they need to operate in the Pasayten Wilderness?”

“Everything for subzero rough-terrain operating. General.”

“Live ammunition?”

“Yessir. This was for a simulated terrorist hunt in Mount Rainier National Park.”

“Well, it ain’t ‘simulated’ anymore. Lieutenant. Get the whole unit to Mazama sheriff’s office. Check with a CIA spook called Olsen. Stay in contact with Alpha at all times, and report to me on any progress.” To save time, Captain Linnett, apprised of some kind of emergency while he was descending Mount Rainier, asked for exfiltration by air. Fort Lewis had its own Chinook troop carrier helicopter, which picked up the Alpha team from the empty visitor parking lot at the foot of the mountain thirty minutes later. The Chinook took the team as far north as the snow clouds would allow and set them down on a small airfield west of Burlington. The truck had been heading there for an hour, and they arrived almost at the same time. From Burlington, Highway 20 wound its bleak path along the Skagit River and into the Cascades. It is closed in winter to all but official and specially equipped traffic; the SF truck was equipped for every kind of terrain, and a few not yet invented. But progress was slow. It took four hours until the exhausted driver crunched into the town of Mazama.

The CIA team was also exhausted, but at least their injured colleagues, doped with morphine, were in real ambulances heading south for a helicopter pickup and a final transfer to Tacoma General.

Olsen told Captain Linnett what he thought was enough. Linnett snapped that he was security cleared, and insisted on more.

“This fugitive, has he got arctic clothing and footwear?”

“No. Hiking boots, warm trousers, a light quilted jacket.”

“No skies, snowshoes? Is he armed?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“It’s dark already. Does he have a night-vision goggles? Anything to help him move?”

“No, certainly not. He was a prisoner in close confinement.” “He’s toast,” said Linnett. “In these temperatures, plowing through a meter of snow with no compass, going round in circles. We’ll get him.” “There is just one thing. He’s a mountain man. Born and raised in them.”

“Round here?”

“No. In the Tora Bora. He’s an Afghan.”

Linnett stared in dumb amazement. He had fought in the Tora Bora. He had been in the first Afghan invasion when Coalition Special Forces, American and British, ranged through the Spin Gahr looking for a runaway party of Saudi Arabs, one of them six feet four inches tall. And he had been back to take part in Operation Anaconda. That had not gone well, either. Some good men had been lost on Anaconda. Linnett had a score to settle with Pashtun from the Tora Bora. “Saddle up,” he shouted, and the ODA climbed back in their truck. It would take them up the remainder of the track to Hart’s Pass. After that, their transportation would go back three thousand years to the ski and the snowshoe. As they left, the sheriff’s radio brought the news both airmen had been found and brought out, very cold but alive. Both were in a hospital in Seattle. The news was good, but a bit too late for a man called Lemuel Wilson.

The Anglo-American investigators of the merchant marine who had taken over Operation Crowbar were still concentrating on threat number one, the idea that Al Qaeda might be planning to close down a vital world highway by blocking a narrow strait.

In that contingency, the size of the vessel was paramount. The cargo was immaterial, save only that venting oil would make the job of demolition divers almost impossible. Inquiries were flying across the world to identify every vessel of huge tonnage on the seas.

Clearly, the bigger the ships, the fewer there would be, and most would belong to respectable and gigantic companies. The principal five hundred ultralarge and very large crude carriers, the ULCCs and VLCCs, known to the public as “supertankers,” were checked and found to be unattacked. Then the tonnages were lowered in integers of ten thousand tons fully loaded. When all vessels of fifty thousand tons and up were accounted for, the strait-blockage panic began to subside.

Lloyd’s shipping list is probably still the world’s most complete archive, and the Edzell team set up a direct line to Lloyd’s, which was constantly in use. At Lloyd’s advice, they concentrated on vessels flying flags of convenience and those registered in “dodge” ports or owned by suspect proprietors. Both Lloyd’s and the Secret Intelligence Service’s Anti-Terrorist (Marine) desk joined with the American CIA and Coast Guard in slapping a “no approach to coast” label on over two hundred vessels without their captains or owners being aware of it. But still nothing showed up to set the wind socks flying in the breeze.

Captain Linnett knew his mountains, and was aware that a man without specialized footwear, trying to progress through snow over ground riddled with unseen trees, roots, ditches, gullies and streams, would be lucky to make a heartbreaking half a mile per hour across country.

Such a man would probably stumble through the snow crust into a trickling rivulet, and, with wet feet, start to lose body core temperature at an alarming rate, leading to hypothermia and frostbit toes. Olsen’s message from Langley had left no room for doubt: Under no circumstances was the fugitive to reach Canada, nor must he reach a functioning telephone. Just in case.

Linnett had few doubts. His target would wander in circles without a compass. He would stumble and fall at every second step. He could not see in the blackness under the tree canopy, where even the moon, had it not been hidden by twenty thousand feet of freezing cloud, could not penetrate. True, the man had a five-hour head start; but even in a straight line, that would give him under three miles of ground covered. Special Forces men on skis could treble that, and if rocks and tree trunks forced the use of snowshoes they could still do double the speed of the fugitive. He was right about the skis. From the drop-off point of the truck at the final end of the track, he reached the wrecked CIA cabin in under an hour. He and his men examined it briefly to see if the fugitive had come back to rifle it for better equipment. There was no sign of that. The two bodies, rigid in the cold, were laid out, hands crossed on chests in the now freezing refectory, safe from roaming animals. They would have to wait for the cloud to lift and a helicopter to land.

There are twelve men in an A team; Linnett was the only officer, and his number two was a chief warrant officer. The other ten were all senior enlisted men, the lowest rank being staff sergeant.

They broke down into two engineers for demolition, two radio operators, two medics, a team sergeant with not one but two specialties, an intelligence sergeant and two snipers. While Linnett was inside the wrecked cabin, his team sergeant, who was an expert tracker, scouted the ground outside. The threatening snow had not fallen; the area around the helipad and the front door, where the rescue team from Mazama had arrived, was a mush of snowshoe tracks. But from the shattered compound wall, a single trail of footprints led away due north.