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  He lit up what felt like cigarette number 315. It tasted just as shitty as cigs 233 through 314. He looked at what was before him on the monitor screen. It was Whiskey 2-2, from an altitude of about 2,000 feet, except that altitude was a magnification. Actually the bird was close to 22 miles up in the sky, rotating in a slow low-earth orbit, under the control of the geniuses at Langley, and it had cameras with lenses capable of resolutions nearly unbelievable only a few years before. They could probably tell if the Beheader had his eggs over easy or poached, if they wanted.

  What Laidlaw and his staff saw from 0-degree angle on high and through the drifting smoke and the hum of tiny jihadi insects that buzzed and bit and were otherwise invisible, was the dark ripple, which was the crest of a ridge, running diagonally across the screen. On it a tiny, almost antlike movement that signified ambulatory life was held under the white, glowing cruciform of a center-lens indicator. A whole lot of meaningless numbers—Laidlaw wasn’t good on tech stuff—ran across the border, the top, and the bottom of the image, and it took some getting used to. A compass orienter floated about the screen, establishing direction. With practice, you adjusted to the stylizations of the system, the 0-degree foreshortening, the brown-to-black-to-gray color scheme, the scuts of dust that blew this way and that, all the interfering digital reads and indicators, and learned to determine the difference between the two marines and the longer, squirmier forms of the goats, spilling this way and that.

  “How much longer?” asked the colonel, meaning how long before the satellite continued its way around the earth and Whiskey 2-2 passed from view for another twenty-four.

  “Only about ten minutes, sir,” S-2 said. “Then they go bye-bye.”

  They knew that these semiabstract forms against the opacity of the large monitor were Whiskey 2-2 and not some group of actual goatherders by virtue of the cruciform that kept the camera nailed. It signified the presence of a GPS chip and a miniaturized transmitter in the grip of Cruz’s SVD. The satellites told the chip where it was and the transmitter told the world what the satellite told the chip. This simplified the problematic issue of target acquisition and identification and meant that when the satellite was in range, it could eyeball the guys the whole way. But Whiskey 2-2 didn’t know this and both S-2 and Colonel Laidlaw felt a little uneasy about it. It was, in effect, spying on their own men without permission, as if an issue of trust was involved. The colonel justified it by telling himself it was necessary in the case of an emergency evac, if Lance Corporal Skelton, hurt or killed, couldn’t get to his radio and sing out coordinates. They could call in Air Force Warthogs and ventilate the area with frags and 30-millimeter while guiding in marine aviation for the extract if Whiskey found itself in a firefight.

  “Who’s that?” someone said.

  “Hmm,” said S-2.

  “Where, what, info please,” said Colonel Laidlaw.

  “Sir, ahead of them on the same axis, on the hilltop a little back, I’m guessing maybe a half mile out to the west, that is, to the right.”

  To spare the colonel the agony of translating the directions into an actual location on the gray wilderness of the monitor, S-2 ran up to the screen and touched what the exec had seen first. No goats, that’s for sure. No, it was a group of guys, slightly whiter against the dull sage of landform, only they were lengthier than goats and not moving, which meant they were in the prone. If they were facing in the right direction, they were on line to intercept 2-2’s line of route.

  “Taliban?”

  “Probably.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Shouldn’t be. They ran into Taliban patrols twice yesterday and once earlier today. To the Tals, they just look like goatherders.”

  “Yeah, but those guys were on their feet, standing, eyeballing, moving in their own direction. These guys are setting up. This could be an intercept.”

  The marine officers continued to watch the monitor as the drama played out in real time before them. Laidlaw lit another cigarette. S-2 didn’t say anything snarky. Exec didn’t suck up. Sniper Platoon leader, twenty-two, refused to speak. It just happened.

  The group ahead of 2-2 seemed to squirm, then settle. Damn, why hadn’t the staff seen them come in; maybe their direction of origin would have been an indicator.

  “How much time?” asked Colonel Laidlaw.

  “Two minutes.”

  “Sir, I can reach Whiskey on the HF-90M. Give ’em a heads-up.” That was exec.

  “Sir, all due respect, but if you do that, Skelton has to hunker down, peel off his caftan, unstrap the radio, and talk into the phone,” said S-2. “All those are tells. If these guys are bad or there are some other bad actors, say in caves, we’re not picking up on, that gives Two-Two away for sure. The mission goes down. They get whacked for sure, or end up in a running gunfight.”

  “Shit,” said the colonel.

  “I don’t like the orientation. Those guys are prone, they’re setting up to shoot. Could the Agency have a team in there?” said Exec.

  “I got negative from liaison on that not an hour ago,” said S-2. “This is the only area op.”

  “Let it play out,” said the colonel, “goddamnit.”

  They watched. The two small forces drew inexorably together, the raggedy fleet of goats spilling across the landscape on the ancient track in the hills, and the six possible ambushers set up orthodox Camp Lejeune–style for a shoot, legs neatly splayed, maybe one up on his knees working binocs, the others bending into scopes.

  “I don’t like this one fucking bit,” said the colonel. “Where’s our goddamned Hellfire when we need it. I’d like to punch those bastards out, whoever they are.”

  “They’re probably birdwatchers from the National Geographic channel,” said S-2. “Or maybe missionaries from the World Orphan Relief League. Or—”

  But the question was answered. Two-two had reached its point of maximum closure with the unknown force on the hilltop and lay exposed to them.

  From twenty-two miles up, the satellite watched with God’s indifference as it picked up the spurting warp-speed blurs of muzzle flashes from the prone team, signifying high-rate-of-fire weapons.

  “Ambush,” said the colonel.

  WHISKEY 2-2

  ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  1605 HOURS

  It was raining goats. They flew through the air amid blasts of earth debris, some whole and bleating, some sundered and spraying blood, some atomized. The weather had become 100 percent chance of goat—red mist, gobbets of blasted flesh, unraveling intestines, the unself-conscious screams of animals suddenly sentient to the prospect of their own extinction.

  Then Skelton launched. He pinwheeled fifteen feet through the air, his face a study in wonder, spinning, legs and arms extended, defying gravity as he sailed.

  Ray lurched in that moment, saving his own life, for surely the gunner was shooting right to left, semiauto, had missed twice, hitting goat, the huge .50-caliber detonations unleashing waves of energy that flipped other goats airward and splattered them, then scoring a hard one that took Skelton solid, and then pivoted the huge weapon on the bipod another half a millimeter to plant one in Ray. But aiming for center mass, he was behind Ray on the action curve, and time in flight from half a mile out didn’t help and the express train hit Ray on the outer surface of the right thigh. It hit no bones, broke nothing full of coursing fluids, and delivered nothing but energy.

  Ray flew. He left the earth behind. He’d seen—and hit—enough guys with a .50 to know what the phenomenon looked like. Usually the delivered energy is so high—in the 5,000-foot-pound range—that a frail sack of blood and struts like a human being will flip through the air, sometimes as far as 30 feet, limbs askew, and land in a pile of wreckage. So it was with Ray, and he seemed to be in midair for a long while, and had a full measure of time to miss his mother and father, who had given him exactly what he wanted and needed, love and support and belief, and as well to miss the M
arine Corps, which took over when his parents were called away, and which had given him so many opportunities to do that at which he excelled, and then he hit the ground in a stir of dust and stones and sprigs of leaf and twig. He spat out a missile of phlegm and grit, thanked God he hadn’t landed on his back where such an impact would have driven the alien SVD into his flesh, possibly breaking some ribs and bruising his spine.

  The surviving goats bleated pitifully, racing this way and that in utter panic, not even stopping to shit.

  “Oh, God, Ray,” he heard Skelton scream, “I am hit so bad, oh, Ray, he killed me.”

  “Stay there,” he yelled back, “I’ll get to you.”

  “No, Ray, get the fuck outta Dodge. Fuck, he blew a hole clear through my guts and I can’t move, Ray, go, go, go.”

  Another burst of .50s lit up the ridge line, delivering more theater of destruction. Goats flew, dust detonated from the earth, angry chips of stone and metal sang through the air. Ray was just a bit out of the beaten zone, as he’d been deposited by the whimsy of physics off the crest line, maybe a little below it, while poor Skelton was exposed for a second delivery.

  Ray squirmed left, pushed himself down, and wished he could get a good visual on his pard. If the boy was dead, no point in hanging around. If he was wounded . . . well, that was a different story, as he had his rifle and if he played it cool and those motherfuckers came to examine their kill, he could take a bunch of them down before they closed. Ray low-crawled a few feet back up, slipped behind the carcass of a dead animal and peered over the top. Neither part of Skelton appeared to be alive.

  Cocksuckers, he thought, and swore there’d come a time when he put the dead zero on these operators and watch them sag to stillness under the request of his .308 hollow points.

  But that would be in some distant future. For now, escape was the only sane possibility, and he slipped backward, well below the line of the crest, took a brief look around, and decided to head toward an arroyo a few hundred yards away that itself led to more complex geological structures. He knew if he hastened, he’d leave signs and these Pashtun mountain fighters were wicked on tracking. So he made an effort to run on an indirect route to his goal, also moving from stone to stone, from low bush to low bush for at least the first hundred or so yards, figuring that by the time they got there, they’d have to stop, hunt for tracks, and it would take them hours to discover his true line, maybe not by dark, which would in turn buy him a night’s worth of time to put distance between himself and them.

  But where would he go? He could peel around and head back to the FOB. Then what had Skelton died for? Meaningless death seemed so cruel to Ray. If you get whacked to do something, to take an objective, to get somebody out of a jam, that was one thing. If your death is random, just an abstract function of the physics of being at a certain place when a certain piece of lead flew through it, what have you got? You’ve got nothing.

  He considered as he dashed his odd, springy, half-legged way down the crest, then doubled back to the arroyo. He had his rifle, he had a magazine loaded with 7.62 × 54 Chinese match, his leg hurt like fucking hell but didn’t seem to have suffered any structural damage, and he could get through something as negligible as pain. He had a head start on these clowns if indeed they were hunting him, and they may have been just a mob of jihadis who’d recently recovered a .50 Barrett from a wrecked Humvee and decided to amuse their savage selves by blasting some goatherders and weren’t much interested in elaborate games of pursuit.

  He considered, he decided. Mission up. Finish the goddamned thing. Qalat by Monday night, then kill the motherfucker called the Beheader, then go home and cry for Billy Skelton.

  2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

  FOB WINCHESTER

  ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  1555 HOURS

  THE NEXT DAY

  The suspense was murder. S-2’s IT set up the satellite feed with the usual contempt that ITs have for the technically illiterate, though he knew, as did the whole battalion, that Ray and Skelton had been bounced. He couldn’t keep the speed and sureness with which his fingers flew to keys out of the equation though, that special IT thing that the officers regarded as mysterious and unknowable. That was just him.

  There had been no radio contact the long night through. Either Skelton’s HF-90M was junked by a slug or had fallen into a ditch or, as Marine Corps radios have a tendency to do, awarded itself an R & R in the middle of a combat operation, who knew? Commo people had been trying to reach 2-2 on the right freak, and on emergency freaks, Air Force freaks, even Afghan army freaks all night long. Not a goddamned peep.

  The image came up, the gray-green-black-brown surreal reality, Zabul from space as brought to you via station W-CIA in lovely downtown Langley, Virginia, and beamed half a world away to a roomful of tired marine officers smoking too much, worrying too much, and angry too much.

  The cruciform was untethered, as it always was. It seemed to move in a search pattern but it was really the television lens, aloft in the ether twenty-two miles over the Hindu Kush, that was moving. It was searching for the frequency of the GPS chip and transmitter embedded in the grip of Ray’s rifle.

  It drifted, this way and that, seeming to float without a care in the world as before it the panorama of the ragged landforms of Zabul fled, mostly dust broken by rocks and ridges, except the part where the rocks and ridges were broken by dust.

  “Goddamn,” said Colonel Laidlaw, halfway through Marlboro number 673. “Make it work faster, Lance Corporal.”

  The lance corporal didn’t answer, not out of rudeness but because he knew the colonel’s style was to make comically infantile demands as a way of amusing everybody within earshot.

  And then—

  “Lock-on! Lock-on!” said the lance corporal.

  Indeed, as a glowing message in the bottom quadrant of the screen made clear, the frequency hunting doohickey in outer space had located Whiskey 2-2’s signal and clenched it between its electronic jaws. The terrain that lay before it looked like—well, it looked like any other terrain in Zabul.

  “Is it him?” Exec wondered. “It could be some Taliban motherfucker with a shiny new rifle.”

  “Where is it, S-Two?” the colonel demanded humorlessly. “I need a location.”

  “Yes, sir,” said S-2, reading the satellite coordinates and trying to relate them to the geodesic survey map he had pinned to a table. He calculated quickly. “I make him to be about seven miles east of the location of the ambush, still moving on a line to Qalat, still aiming to come in from the west.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Exec. “He’s got goats.”

  It was true. Somehow, some way, the survivors of the goat massacre had managed to track Ray down amid the arroyos, switchbacks, and fissures of Zabul and had reassembled around him. Yes, that would have to be him, a slightly glowing figure at the center of the smaller but just as annoying platoon of goats, moving down a dusty trail.

  “That is one tough Filipino,” said S-2.

  “I believe he’s got some conquistador blood and maybe a little kamikaze DNA in him. Nothing stops the Cruise Missile,” said Ray’s section lieutenant.

  “Look!” said S-2. “Is that what I think it is?”

  He pointed.

  Down at the bottom of the screen, slightly hidden behind a fusillade of rushing integers from a digital readout that no one in the room understood, not even the IT, six glowing figures picked their way across the landscape. They had arranged themselves in classic tactical diamond formation, with a point man and two flankers out a hundred yards in each direction. They moved, it was evident, with easy, practiced precision.

  “They’re hunting him,” someone said.

  “S-Two, give me a range.”

  S-2 did the calc and said, “They’re within a mile. They’ve got a vector on him too. I don’t think they’re tracking. They’re moving too fast to be tracking.”

  “How the fuck did they stay with him d
uring the night?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Those fucking goats are slowing him down.”

  “But if he doesn’t have the goats, then he attracts attention. He’s got to stay with the goats, and he knows it.”

  “S-Two, get your Agency liaison on the horn and see if we can authorize a Hellfire into these guys.”

  “I’ll try, sir, but they’re very close to the vest with the Hellfires these days.”

  S-2 made the call; clearly it didn’t go well. At the frustration point, the colonel took over.

  “This is Colonel Laidlaw. Who am I speaking to, please?”

  “Sir, it’s McCoy.”

  The colonel saw McCoy: thirty-five, redheaded, from Alabama, the ops chief’s right-hand boy, a former Delta commando.

  “Look, McCoy, I’ve got a sniper way out on a limb and six bad boys moving in on him. You can see it on satellite feed yourself.”

  “We’re watching it even now, Colonel. This is the Beheader mission, right?”

  “That’s it. Look, I want to put a Hellfire blast-and-frag from a drone into those guys before they get much closer or before they separate too far for one strike. You’ve got a Reaper floating somewhere in the area?”

  “Sir, I have to advise negative on the request. Sorry about your kid, but our directive is only to strike ID’d targets and then only with Langley clearance. I just can’t do it.”

  The colonel gave the guy a few minutes of choice Marine Corps invective, but McCoy wouldn’t—couldn’t—budge and the ops chief was out in some hamlet or other reaching the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by teaching dental hygiene or constitutional democracy or something.

  “Okay,” said the colonel to S-2, handing the phone back. “Keep trying. Go to 113 Wing at Ripley. Maybe we can send an Apache.”