Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

In its first “locate” role, it does not depend on daylight or dark, wind or rain, snow or hail. Mr. Raytheon had been kind enough to provide a synthetic aperture radar and infrared thermal imager that can pick out any figure in a landscape emitting body heat. Nor is the image a vague blur; it is clear enough to differentiate between a four-legged beast and a two-legged one. But it still could not work out the weirdness of Mr. Lemuel Wilson. He, too, had a cabin, just outside the Pasayten Wilderness, on the lower slopes of Mount Robinson. Unlike the Seattle surgeon, Wilson prided himself on his capacity to overwinter up there, for he had no alternative metropolitan home. So he survived without electricity, using a roaring log fire for heat and kerosene lamps for lighting. Each summer, he hunted game, and air-dried the meat strips for winter. He cut his own logs, and foraged for his tough mountain pony. But he had another hobby.

He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wave bands of the sheriff, emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the wilderness and teams of professionals struggling toward the spot. Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term “interfering busybody.” Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the wilderness to reach the park and rescue Major Duval. His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact. He did not see the man come at him. One second, he was urging his pony through a deeper-than-usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snowbank was a man in a space-age, quilted silver, two-piece suit. There was nothing space age about the bowie knife, invented around the time of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged Wilson off his pony; as he crashed down, the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.

A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the Hercules AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all. “This is Spectre-Echo-Foxtrot calling Team Alpha. Do you read me, Alpha?” “Strength-Five,” reported Captain Linnett. “We are twelve on skis down here. Can you see us?”

“Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,” said the infrared operator four miles above them.

“Comedy comes later,” said Linnett. “About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?” There was a pause-a long pause.

“Negative. No such image,” said the voice in the sky.

“There must be,” argued Linnett. “He is up ahead of us somewhere.” The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind, in the darkness, stood Mount Lago and Monument Peak. Linnett’s men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the escaping heat. So Linnett was closing on him. The skis were sliding easily across the shoulder of the mountain, and there was more forest up ahead. The Spectre fixed his position to within a yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn, or for what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.

Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.

“Check again,” asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of a heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then…

Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired pony off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the pony beneath him that he was climbing. “I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,” said the imager operator. “Right up to the border. In that arc, I can see eight animals. Four deer; two black bear, who are very faint because they are hibernating under deep cover; what looks like a marauding mountain lion; and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.”

The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The pony was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onward, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.

“Sir,” said one of the engineer sergeants, “I’m from Minnesota.”

“Save your problems for the chaplain,” snapped Linnett. “What I mean, sir,” said the snow-caked face beside him, “is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It can’t be a moose.”

Linnett called a halt. It was welcomed. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an overwintering idiot with a stable. Somehow, the Afghan had gotten himself a pony and was riding away from him.

Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The mountain lion was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion. The first thing the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the pony, and the pony was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson ’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backward over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.

He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the pony and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped round the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. The pony was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The pony crumpled, lying half across the body of the mountain lion. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the mountain lion were under the pony.

He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards ahead of him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it but it masked his escaping heat. “Take out the moose,” said Captain Linnett. “I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.”

The operator studied his image again.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.”

The “destroy” part of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the 105mm M102 howitzer, which is so powerful that using it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.

Next comes the 40mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish antiaircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the GAU-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires eighteen hundred rounds per minute, and each round is a 25mm-one-inch diameter-slug, one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football field for thirty seconds, nothing much bigger than a mouse would be left alive. And that mouse will die of shock. The maximum altitude for the GAU-I2/U is twelve thousand feet, so the circling Spectre dropped to ten thousand feet, locked on its target and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the pony in the forest. “There’s nothing left,” remarked the imager operator. “Man and beast, both gone.”