Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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He would need at least another twenty seconds. And twenty seconds may as well have been a year in this exposed position. He wanted to look back but knew he couldn’t. He waited for the gunfire to start. But it didn’t come. His pursuers were shouting. He could make out their voices now.

“Run!” one of them yelled.

And then there was a sound, like the crack of thunder.

He charged upward, from handhold to foothold, his legs shaking violently from the buildup of lactic acid. Faster, he scolded himself. Go faster.

The thunder grew louder, building on itself. Gideon pounded upward, waiting for the gunfire, which still didn’t come, as he threw himself over the lip and collapsed onto the ground, his body heaving as he tried to fill his lungs.

Below him, the thunder subsided until the only sound Gideon heard was his own ragged breathing. The air was thinner up here. A soft breeze cooled his face.

Finally he peeked over the side, just a quick glance, to see where his pursuers were.

No one was there. Only a massive, roiling cloud of dust. For a moment, he couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at, but then he realized what had happened. He’d started a landslide. And not a small one. The boulders he dropped had caused some kind of seismic chain reaction that had sheared off a large part of the mountainside. Tons and tons of rock had cascaded down and buried the six men who had been trying to kill him.

He found himself remembering every detail of the pursuit up the cliff, every feeling, every thought—none of which, he realized, included a moment of moral equivocation. All the pacifist ideals he had invoked only yesterday during his speech at the UN? Not one of them had even crossed his mind. In fact, he felt the same exhilaration now as he had felt on the river, when he had confronted and beaten the men who’d been pursuing him by boat. He held his hands in front of his face, stretching his fingers. They weren’t shaking. A sense of well-being settled over him like a warm blanket, which he quickly shrugged off. This was not the time to reflect. It was time to act. If he had any moral reckoning to do, he would do it later.

As he surveyed the scene below, he reflected that the rock slide hadn’t just wiped away his would-be killers. It had wiped away the trail.

He had passed the point of no return. Either he would make it to Kampung Naga or he would die trying.

Beyond the rubble, the river wound into the distance, a brilliant red serpent, glowing with the reflected light of the setting sun. He only had another hour of daylight before he’d need to find a place to sleep. He stood, dusted himself off, and turned to enter the jungle. But something was nagging at him, tugging at the back of his brain. ItဠWhatever it was, he couldn’t put his finger on it. And he stopped trying to figure it out when he entered the jungle and found that he wasn’t alone.

A group of men stood before him in a half circle. Their complexions were darker than the Mohanese he’d seen before, and their hair was curlier and thicker. One of the men, the oldest, wore a pair of battered tennis shoes. The others wore only nylon soccer shorts, their feet bare. They all carried spears, which they pointed at his chest.

The man with the shoes screamed something at him.

“It’s okay, guys,” Gideon said evenly, slowly holding up his hands. “I’m not armed.”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

The man kept barking at him and was soon joined by several...

One of the men who had tried to kill him had spoken English.

But the men who were now surrounding Gideon and brandishing their spears couldn’t have cared less about his epiphany.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

KATE SAT ON THE floor, her hands tied behind her. The hostages had been thrust into the guest cabin on B Deck, the one that had been assigned to Cole Ransom. In the corner sat a bag and a notebook computer. Both wore scuffed aluminum nameplates with Cole Ransom’s name etched onto them. Kate realized, with a sinking feeling, that if they were the real Cole Ransom’s belongings, then something bad had happened to Ransom.

Ambassador Stearns was sitting stiffly on the floor next to Big Al Prejean. They hadn’t been in the room for more than ten minutes when the door opened and Earl Parker was thrust into the room.

After the door slammed shut, Kate said, “Are you okay? We were worried.”

Parker sat heavily on the bed and said, “I’m fine. He just stunned me for a minute.”

“Did you see any of my crew?”

Parker nodded. “They were herding them into the mess hall. A couple of your people tried to resist.” His lips curled. “They shot them like dogs.”

Kate swallowed. “How many?”

“Five, maybe six. Everybody else settled down. I think they’ll be okay for now.” He shook his head sadly. “I know that’s not much consolation.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not.”

Parker didn’t reply.

“The guy who’s in charge says he’s Abu Nasir,” Kate said. “It seemed like you knew him.”

Parker nodded. But Kate detected something else behind his silent confirmation, something he was leaving out.

“Do you know what he wants?”

“He hasn’t told us yet.” Parker hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to continue; then, deciding that he would, he lowered his voice to a whisper that only she could hear. “But it’s my fault this is happening.”

“Your fault?”

“The man who calls himself Abu Nasir . . . his real name is Tillman Davis. He used to work for me.” Parker looked away in apparent shame as he went on to tell her about the secret mission he had initiated. He told her about Tillman’s transformation from covert operative to unrepentant terrorist, and about how he had enlisted Gideon Davis, who had come to Mohan with Parker to retrieve his brother. “Trusting Tillman was the biggest mistake of my life. And now Gideon . . .” His voice cracked with regret. “I should have left him out of this.”

Suddenly the steel door slid open, and an Asian man wearing a Sky TV T-shirt walked into the room, pointed at Kate, and barked in heavily accented English, “You! Come with me.”

Kate didn’t move.

“Just do what they tell you,” Parker said softly.

“Come!” the guard yelled. He yanked her toward the door, and she saw Big Al coiling to spring at him, but she shook her head sharply, stopping him before he did anything stupid.

“It’s okay, Al. I’ll be fine.” The sentry pulled a black cloth hood over her head, tying it loosely at her neck. Kate’s heart began beating faster, and her mouth felt dry as sandpaper. Were they going to hurt her, beat her, chop off her head?

The sentry guided her out the door and into the passageway. She couldn’t see through the blindfold, but the man exerted just enough pressure on her arm to steer her down the hallway without her tripping or banging into anything.

Her footsteps echoed as they moved slowly through the passageways. She tried to figure out where they were heading, but after winding around inside the rig for a while, she lost track. Eventually the man stopped.

She stood silently for what seemed like minutes. Finally another man spoke. He was behind her. “Knees,” the man said. She recognized his voice. It belonged to Abu Nasir, the man who had boarded her rig by impersonating Cole Ransom. “Knees,” he said again.

Before she could respond, someone kicked the back of her right leg, buckling the joint and forcing her to land on her knees.

“We have clear and simple objectives here, Ms. Murphy. We will not waver in those objectives. Harming you is not one of them, but if you try to get in the way, I will not hesitate to kill you.”

Only yesterday Senator McClatchy had been questioning her about Abu Nasir, a man who had seemed to her more mythical than real, the stuff of urban legend. And now she not only knew his real name and what he looked like . . . but he was on her rig, threatening her life.

“Please indicate that you understand me, ma’am.”

“I understand English,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

Someone punched her in the stomach. She gagged, almost falling on her face, but managed to remain upright.

“You may think that being flippant does not interfere with our objectives,” Abu Nasir said. “You would be wrong in that assessment. Are we on the same page now?”

She nodded.

“Outstanding.”

The blindfold came off. She blinked. She was in the mess hall, a trio of halogen work lamps blazing in her face. Squinting to better see the silhouetted terrorists, she made out an approaching figure whose features came into relief as he drew closer. He was carrying a crisply folded square of bright yellow material, which he tossed toward her, the momentum of his throw causing it to unfurl partially. It was some kind of jumpsuit.

“Put this on.”

Kate offered no response.

“If you don’t do it, I’ll do it for you.” His voice was flat, nonnegotiable.

She picked up the jumpsuit and said, “I need somewhere to change.”

“You have a place. Right here.”

She held his look for a long, defiant moment, then kicked off her shoes, unfastened her skirt, and let it fall to the ground. She unbuttoned her shirt and peeled it off, until she was left wearing only her bra and panties. She held Abu Nasir’s look the entire time. Not once did his eyes leave hers, not even for a flickering moment of voyeuristic curiosity about what her seminaked body looked like. She pulled on the jumpsuit, shrugging her arms into the sleeves, then stepping back into her shoes.

As she zippered the jumpsuit, Abu Nasir nodded toward the man just behind him, who now adjusted a tripod-mounted monitor toward her. Displayed on the screen in large capital letters were the words: MY NAME IS KATE MURPHY. A video camera was mounted on another branch of the tripod. “All you have to do is read the teleprompter, like those phony politicians in Washington.”

“No.”

“Fine. We’ll shoot you in the head. I’m sure Ambassador Stearns will be happy to read the statement.”

Kate tried navigating through her swirling emotions. Anger, fear, humiliation. Whatever message he wanted her to read—was it really worth dying for? She didn’t think so. Especially since whoever saw it would certainly understand that she’d read it under duress. “Okay,” she finally said, her voice soft as a whisper.

“See how easy that was?” Abu Nasir pointed toward the man holding the cue cards. “When he points at you, start reading.”

The man operating the monitor pointed at Kate, who began to read in as flat a tone as she could muster.

“My name is Kate Murphy,” she read. “I am the executive in charge of the Obelisk, which is now under the control of Abu Nasir.” When she read the next sentence on the scrolling text, Kate stopped and her mouth went dry.

“Just read what’s on the screen, Ms. Murphy. Please don’t make me shoot you in the head. I’m trying to save ammo.”

She didn’t want to continue, but short of dying on the

When Gideon was ten years old, he and Tillman had whittled spears out of hickory, sharpening the points with Case knives and playing a game of their own invention called Spartan. The rules were simple. You stood about thirty yards apart and threw your spears at each other. If you had to move to get out of the way of the other person’s spear, you lost.

Since he was Tillman’s junior by two years, Gideon couldn’t throw quite as hard or quite as accurately. So he usually lost.

One crisp fall day, he hurled the spear, and before it even left his hand, he knew that he had done everything right. The spear was heading straight for Tillman.

But Gideon’s euphoria vanished as quickly as it had appeared when he realized that Tillman wasn’t going to move. The spear arced gracefully through the air, seemingly as slow as a feather carried on a soft breeze. Gideon had watched his brother’s face. Tillman knew the spear was coming, too, knew it was going to hit him. But he didn’t so much as flinch– he just clamped his mouth shut and let it come.

The tip of the spear hit him just above the collarbone, passing through his right shoulder and out his back, clean as a knife through butter. He grimaced slightly, then turned a quarter turn, fell on his side and began, improbably, to snore.

Eighteen inches of bloody, sharpened wood stuck out of his back.

According to the doctor, a half inch lower and it would have hit the subclavian artery, killing him in under five minutes.

It was the only time Gideon’s father ever laid a hand on him. He doled out his son’s punishment as methodically as a tennis player practicing his forehand before a match.

The image of his snoring brother and the searing pain of his father’s hand on his backside came back to Gideon now, as he stood looking at the ring of spears pointing at him. They were tipped with sharpened scraps of iron that looked as if they might have been ripped from car hoods or forged from cook pots. Crude as they were, Gideon knew how easily they could slice through muscle and bone.

The men were still bombarding him with angry questions and accusations in a language he couldn’t understand, so he just kept talking in as soothing a tone as he could muster. “I’m just here to find my brother.” Gideon hoped that even if they couldn’t understand his words, they would understand his intent, but he might as well have been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “His name is Tillman. Tillman Davis.”

More shouting and spear waving, so he decided to try another tack. “Abu Nasir.” he said. “He calls himself Abu Nasir.”

The commotion suddenly stopped. “Abu Nasir?” one of them said softly.

“Yes. Abu Nasir.”

Two of the older men exchanged glances, their hostile suspicion giving way to curiosity.

Suddenly remembering that Uncle Earl had given him a recent photo of his bearded brother, Gideon reached slowly into his p. &ñ€ocket and pulled it out.

The oldest man snatched it from him, studying the photo, then looked up at Gideon. The others crowded around, setting off a raucous debate. Several of the men pantomimed stabbing Gideon with their spears. Did these men work for Abu Nasir, or were they rivals? Did they love him, hate him, what? He wasn’t sure.

Abruptly, they came to a decision and settled down.

The old man pointed his spear at Gideon’s chest and then nodded once, as if bestowing some seal of approval on him. “You. Abu Nasir. Come.”

“Okay.” Gideon smiled and nodded vigorously. Keep smiling, he thought. Keep smiling.

The men—there were seven of them—turned and began to walk silently back into the jungle. Gideon followed. They walked for several hours, stopping several times to listen carefully before moving on. Although their faces betrayed no emotion, it was clear that they were nervous. Gideon got the impression they were worried about being ambushed.

They followed a hardpacked trail, which was only sporadically overgrown. Several of the men carried machetes, but they used them only once to clear the trail.

Late in the afternoon they came to a ruined patch of land where a village had stood until recently. Black soot and cinders were all that remained of its grass-and-bamboo huts. The air smelled of rotting meat. The carcasses of a sow with her litter of piglets lay in a heap, thick with buzzing flies. Since pork had to be a prized food here in the jungle, Gideon couldn’t imagine several hundred pounds of meat being left to rot by local tribesmen.

Then he saw a body, a woman, lying tangled in the underbrush. And then it was as though some key had turned in his vision. Suddenly he could see more dead people—women, old men, children—lying around the periphery of the clearing.

The highlanders kept their eyes straight ahead of them, not remarking or even looking at the evidence of tragedy around them. Who did this? Gideon thought. But no one was there to answer him.

Soon they were back in the jungle, the light waning. Gideon realized that other than the tin of peaches, he hadn’t eaten all day. With all the physical activity he’d been engaged in, he was starving. As the light began to die, the highlanders finally stopped. They sat in a circle, silently eating dried meat and some kind of smelly goo wrapped in broad leaves. The men never offered him anything, and he didn’t ask.

As night fell the sounds of the jungle filled the darkness. Hoots and howls, growls and buzzing noises. Except Gideon saw no animals, no monkeys or snakes, nothing but mosquitoes and moths nearly as big as his hand, which thudded around in the trees above him. The highlanders never spoke. One of them moved away from the group—presumably to serve as sentry. The others simply lay down on the cold, hard dirt and fell asleep.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

The night brought on a damp cold. Gideon’s stomach knotted...

The ground was hard, and every part of his body was sore. Insects skittered around in the leaves. Gideon felt as alone as he’d ever felt in his life. Even on the nigh siñ€t when his father and mother had died, he had not felt quite so alone. At least he’d had Tillman.

Tillman. He was here because of Tillman. The thought of seeing his brother again comforted him.

And then he slept.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PRESIDENT DIGGS ENTERED THE secure Situation Room deep beneath the White House, trailed by Elliot Hammershaw. Everyone stood, all nine members of the ad hoc working group that the president and Earl Parker had assembled only a few days earlier to plan and support their covert operation to retrieve Tillman Davis. The group included Admiral Dirkson Reed, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a compact man with silvered hair and piercing forest green eyes, who had earned his reputation for courage under fire as commander of the nuclear sub the USS Reagan—a reputation he had burnished many times over in combat and in the halls of power. In the nearly twenty years that Diggs had known the admiral, he’d never seen the man as rattled as he looked right now. Diggs had come here to discuss the implications of Gideon Davis’s ambush, fully expecting that it would mean the end of their covert attempt to shore up the sultan in his escalating civil war. But seeing Admiral Reed’s eyes, he braced himself for even worse news. Which is exactly what he got.

“Admiral, give me the sitrep on Gideon Davis.”

“His status is unchanged, Mr. President.”

“Then you still haven’t heard from Tillman Davis.”

“Actually, sir, we have.” The admiral’s jaw clenched, trying to curtail his rising anger. “He’s apparently seized the Obelisk.”

Diggs blinked, trying to get his head around the words. “Earl Parker is on that rig. I just talked to him an hour ago.”

“We only learned about this ourselves a few minutes ago.”

“From what source?”

“YouTube, sir.”

“YouTube?”

Admiral Reed nodded at the air force sergeant who ran the communications equipment in the Situation Room.

The president watched as the oversize LED screen at the front of the room lit up, revealing a grainy video framed by the ubiquitous YouTube player. An attractive woman in her early thirties, wearing a neon yellow jumpsuit, was on her knees, addressing the camera. She appeared calm, but her eyes betrayed her terror. Behind her were several masked men holding AK-47s.

“Turn up the volume,” Diggs said.

The terrified woman’s voice sounded strangely quiet, even as it boomed out over the speakers: “My name is Kate Murphy,” she read. “I am the executive in charge of the Obelisk, which is now under the control of Abu Nasir. Because of U.S. support for the corrupt CIA puppet, the so-called Sultan of Mohan, Abu Nasir’s men have seized the rig and are holding hostage the surviving members of my crew along with Ambassador Randall Stearns and Deputy National Security Advisor Earl Parker.” She paused, letting out the tight bggs t‡reath she’d been holding, then resumed. “A bomb of sufficient power to destroy both the rig and all its occupants has been planted on the Obelisk. Our demand is simple: in exchange for the lives of the hostages, the president of the United States must recall all U.S. military forces from Mohan, including all CIA operatives, all contractors, and all so-called military advisors. If this demand is not met by eight o’clock a.m. tomorrow, Abu Nasir will kill the hostages and destroy the Obelisk. There will be no negotiation and no further contact.”

The woman looked past the camera, glaring defiantly at some offscreen presence, as if to say, Are you satisfied? Then the image froze and a superimposed window appeared, giving the viewer the choice to replay the video or to share it with a friend.

President Diggs jabbed his finger toward the monitor. “I want that taken down now before the media gets hold of this. Get those YouTube sonsuvbitches to take that down.”

“It’s too late, sir.” Hammershaw looked up from his cell phone, then turned the screen toward the president to illustrate his point. “At least a dozen news agencies are already running the story.”

“Eight a.m. local time tomorrow. How long does that give us?”

Hammershaw looked expectantly at a representative of the CIA.

“Twenty-three hours, sixteen minutes.”

Diggs exhaled sharply, but his anger burned off quickly, giving way to confusion. “I don’t understand . . . Tillman Davis knows better than anyone that our national policy is never to negotiate with terrorists. He knows damn well we’ll never agree to what he’s asking. So what the hell is he thinking?”

Diggs scanned the room, but no one spoke, so he went ahead and answered his own question.

“Whatever his endgame is, this confirms that Tillman Davis has cast his lot with the insurgency and needs to be defeated. If we don’t stop him before his deadline . . .” The president trailed off, turning inward as he realized the implications of failure. “If Abu Nasir kills those hostages, we will have no other choice except to respond with force. Their deaths would constitute nothing less than an act of war, and the American people will demand reprisal against the insurgents.”

Admiral Reed said, “As you requested, sir, the Joint Chiefs have been wargaming several scenarios with the Sultan’s military staff. There’s not a single option that uses less than an entire division of American troops.”

“A division!” Elliot Hammershaw said. “The president is talking about reprisal, Admiral, and you’re talking about a straight-up war!”

“War? That’s your word, Mr. Hammershaw,” the admiral said. “I’m just a military man giving you military—”

The president interrupted, “Bottom line is, we need to take back that rig.”

Admiral Reed spoke. “Sir, I’ve already ordered Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta to deploy. Both units can be in Mohan within ten hours, well before Tillman Davis’s deadline. But I’ll let General Ferry address the tactical specifics.”

he �€†

General Ferry, commander of SOCOM, stood. He had the tall, rail-thin frame of a competitive long-distance runner and the combative eyes of a cage fighter. “We’re repositioning a satellite so we’ll have aerial recon in a few minutes. But at this point we have very little intel as to the disposition of the folks on the rig. In the YouTube video at least four enemy can be identified. In all likelihood he’s got significantly more men than that. Tillman Davis has seized a large number of maritime targets in the recent past. In every case, his forces were not only well equipped and highly trained, but they were also more than sufficient in size for the task at hand.”

“So how do you plan to take the rig, General?” the president said.

“Before we can give you a definitive operational assessment, we need some answers. Beyond the leverage he’s got with the hostages, what other measures has he taken to defend the rig? Does he have any antiaircraft or antiship capability? Will he use his hostages as human shields? Until we answer those questions, there is no way to predict the probability of success, or to assess how many hostages might be killed if we do succeed in reacquiring the rig.”

President Diggs was not happy with this answer. He stared at the general, waiting for something more definitive.

The tense silence was broken by Dave Posner, a young, nervous-looking CIA analyst in an ill-fitting suit, who raised his hand tentatively as he spoke. “And then there’s the weather issue, sir.”

“Weather?” the president said.

General Ferry shot Posner an irritated glance. “There’s a typhoon off the Philippines. If it hit the rig, it would obviously bottle up the rig until the storm passed.”

“Bottle up?” the president said.

Ferry explained. “Right now the seas are running at close to thirty feet, so an assault by sea would have a high likelihood of failure. The best option for attack is aerial insertion—what we call a HALO jump—high altitude, low open parachuting. Preferably with fire support from helicopter gunships. Obviously even that would be impossible if the rig was in the middle of a typhoon. But it’s only a five percent chance.”

“That seems a fairly negligible risk,” President Diggs said hopefully.

“Actually, Mr. President . . .” Posner cleared his throat. “I’ve just received an update. The typhoon appears to be heading west.” An image of Southeast Asia appeared on the big screen at the front of the Situation Room. A vast white swirl had enveloped all of the southern Philippines. It looked perilously close to a red triangle indicating the location of the Obelisk. “If it keeps turning, it might hit the Obelisk.”

Diggs felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “Can you quantify that?”

“Hong Kong says there’s a sixty percent chance now.”

The president’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “How much time before it hits?”

Posner squinted briefly at his monitor. The only sound in the room was the clicking of keys on his keyboard. Finally he looked up. “If it hits?—the outlik�€†skirts of the storm could be there within four hours.”

The president turned and looked at General Ferry. “Tom? We need a Plan B here in case this storm keeps turning. Can you get your men on that rig inside of four hours?”

“There’s a Delta Force in Hawaii.”

“I take it that’s a no.”

General Ferry’s jaw clenched. “Flight time to Mohan is six hours minimum. And once the storm hits, it would severely impede their insertion.”

“Sixty percent, that’s pretty high,” the president said. “Have we got any other options?”

Ferry swallowed but didn’t answer.

“Give me options, dammit!”

Ferry looked briefly at the floor and said, “There’s a platoon of SEALs from SEAL Team One in Mohan. Sixteen men.”

“Can they take the rig in the next four hours?”

“Possibly. With enough support and the right equipment.”

“And luck,” added Admiral Reed.

The strain of the moment was starting to fray the president’s nerves. “I need that rig, General. I can’t take a chance of that storm hitting before the deadline runs out.”

It was obvious that Ferry was reluctant. The odds would be heavily stacked against such a hastily organized mission. But President Diggs had to weigh the lives of sixteen SEALs against all the lives that would be lost if this turned into an all-out war.

The yawning silence was broken by the sound of a vibrating cell phone. Elliot Hammershaw scowled as he read the number on the display window. “Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. President, but I have Senator McClatchy.”