“How’s that?”
Tom shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. You get home safely, you hear. And give Page my love.”
Tom hadn’t seen Steve’s wife in maybe two years, but he admired the woman, and he knew that his friend was devoted to her. Steve was a lucky man in many respects, he thought. His parents farmed three-hundred acres in Eastern Pennsylvania spit into cattle and soybeans. He had six siblings, all of whom were married and doing well. Steve had told him that growing up on a farm was like he imagined heaven to be.
As they parted company Tom thought his own early life couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Up until he was eight, he saw his father about once every three months, if he was lucky. He gave him a toy or twenty bucks. He looked handsome in his Army officer’s uniform. He was six-two with a natural muscularity, his black-onyx-coloured eyes and hair marking him out like a movie actor. He’d never married his mother, and Tom didn’t have his name, Dupree being her surname. His father was uneasy around him, avoiding physical contact, and there would be long silences between them. He was Louisiana Creole, his forefathers being colonial French who’d settled in the southern states. Tom excelled at French at school; did it, he supposed, to make his father proud in some remote way.
He clenched his jaw muscles now and tried to focus on something positive.
“Tom.”
It was Crane’s voice. Tom looked over towards the row of elevators and saw him walking across the tiled floor, his big legs striding out, his confidence restored. Tom stood up.
“It’s a goer. You ready for this?” Crane said, excitedly.
“Hell, yeah” he replied, thinking Crane’s mood had turned a full one-eighty.
“We don’t land until the Rangers have secured the site. You realize that, right?”
“How did you pull it off?”
“Apart from Houseman being sympathetic, which, I have to say, ain’t his natural disposition, I told him that you were the only man suitable to go along who she’d feel instantly comfortable with.”
“Thanks, Crane.”
“You know how to use an MP5?”
Tom nodded.
“I’ll make sure you have one.”
“You getting paid to keep me alive?” Tom asked.
Crane grinned. “If I was intent on keeping you alive, I woulda made sure you went home on that plane.”
The capital lay in a narrow valley of the Hindu Kush on the banks of Kabul River. The convoy of adapted Land Cruisers moved at speed, Tom sitting in the second vehicle beside Crane. Both men wore fatigues and body armour, their Heckler & Koch MP5 9mm sub-machine guns upright between their legs. They were fixed with suppressors. Crane had explained that all of the assaulters’ weapons were suppressed, so if they heard a round go off from a firearm that wasn’t, it meant it was from a hostile source.
The distance to Kabul International Airport was ten miles, the North Side Cantonment of which housed the command centre for the Afghan Air Force. They would utilize the seven helipads there for the mission, although the Afghans had been told an elaborate lie. Crane had told Tom that if they knew what they were up to, they would’ve all been arrested. Bagram Air Base, which had been used as a staging point for Special Forces’ missions along the northern Af-Pak border, was so depleted that it could no longer be used safely.
Kabul International was connected to the capital by a four-lane highway, shared with domestic traffic. As Tom stared out he saw the heat haze rising above it, the tarmac melting from the hours of intense sunlight.
“You wouldn’t believe this was Afghanistan, would ya?” Crane said, smiling.
“No. It’s changed a lot since I was here last.”
“Don’t get me wrong—you get outside the ring of concrete and steel and it’s still a Third World hellhole as bad as any I’ve seen.”
“You think we were right coming here?” Tom asked.
“It was a hornets’ nest. But staying as long as we did, hell, no. They sit down and talk, but you can’t tame these people. They’re tough, goddamn it. Toughest people I’ve ever met.”
“Nothing tough about IEDs,” Tom said.
“A necessity. They couldn’t fight a hundred thousand well-armed troops face-to-face.”
“So that’s all gonna be forgotten about now, huh?”
“Look, I do my job. Damn good at it, too. You know why?” Crane said, rhetorically. “Cuz I don’t hold grudges. That gives you ulcers. I got enough bad habits as it is.”
“That’s not what you said about the Pakistanis,” Tom said, massaging an aching bruise on his thigh.
“Always gotta have exceptions, Tom.”
Tom glanced at him. “How will they’ve treated her?”
“That depends,” Crane said, his voice serious.
“On what?”
“If she’s been compliant, they’ve likely just ignored her most of the time. But if she’s acted like the US Secretary of State, they’ve probably treated her worse than a stubborn goat.”
Tom watched Crane staring into space now, and wondered what was going through his mind. He hadn’t held back. He wasn’t the type. Fingering his Buddha in his pocket, Tom just hoped she’d acted as he’d instructed her to if the worst happened.
The military terminal was marked by a ring of black, red and green Afghan flags and what looked like relatively newly built redbrick buildings. As the Land Cruisers passed through the heavily guarded checkpoint, Tom felt a knot in his gut. He was both a part of it and a bystander; a voyeur, even. But as Crane opened the door and the sticky heat hit him he consoled himself by knowing that if she was there, she would be glad to see a friendly face at least.
Let her be there, he thought. Let her be alive.
The sound of the twin engines and huge tandem rotor blades scything the cold air was near-deafening as the special ops Chinook flew at almost two-hundred miles per hour. The Black Hawks had silenced rotors and engines, but by the time the Chinooks got there it would be game on. Dusk had fallen now and the clouds were high and wispy, the skyline above the mountains the colour of hacked strawberries.
Tom had been told to wear a seat belt and helmet to stop himself from knocking himself out if the helicopter had to take a sharp turn or got caught in downdraft. Although the cabin had been fitted out with padding, it still looked as if it was weeks away from being finished. But anything that wasn’t functional was left out, especially on a mission. The operators called the helicopter the flying school bus, which Tom thought inappropriate.
He sat on a red canvas, aluminium-framed seat, his feet placed firmly on the metal decking with exposed rivets. Crane, wearing a clear earpiece attached to a PTT radio, sat beside him, talking to one of the other CIA men who were in flight. An iron-pumper with a black beard and square face, a real Cro-Magnon hard case, who was nodding as Crane talked in short loud bursts like a drunk in a noisy bar.
From the oval porthole opposite him, Tom could see a four-blade Apache attack helicopter. It was a state-of-the-art killing machine, the nose-mounted sensor hub housing the night-vision systems for its 30-mm Chain Gun carried between the landing gear, and the Hellfire missiles and Hydra rocket pods on the stub-wings sticking out of the fuselage behind the cockpit. But he knew such weapons had been of little use