Asset Seven Read online

  ‘Come, Hashemi. Let’s show this traitor how the Palang hunts its quarry in the mountains.’

  Hashemi nodded in response but wondered if he had the stamina to keep up with these super-fit operatives in the challenging mountain environment. He’d kept the weight in his pack to a minimum as had Captain Dabiri but they both recognized they were nowhere near as fit and strong as General Shir-Del’s Palang troops. Following the General towards the helicopter, Hashemi hoped that the hunt would be over before his endurance was put to the test.

  General Shir-Del looked down at the jagged spires of the peaks as the helicopter contoured the tortured landscape. Through the earphones he heard the first helicopter reporting that it was two minutes to its drop-off location. He felt the old excitement spread from the pit of his stomach as the anticipation of dropping into a live operation against a trained and competent adversary became reality. He closed his eyes for a moment as he pictured the thought of the traitor Ardavan hearing the arrival of the helicopters and scuttling under a rock like a cockroach, hiding from the justice and punishment his treason deserved. General Shir-Del felt a wave of rage consume him at the thought of Ardavan’s treachery. That he could have respected Major Ardavan, seen positive traits in the man that he compared to those of his own, made his gorge rise. Shaking his head, the General listened as the call came from the first helicopter that it had dropped the Hunters and lifted off. The next call was from his own pilot giving him the two-minute warning. Zana leaned forward and waved his hand to attract the men’s attention and held up his two fingers. One of the helicopter crew yanked the door open and a blast of frigid air and the roar of the rotors invaded their warm cocoon. The helicopter dropped swiftly, and Zana felt his stomach lurch along with a burst of adrenalin, a muscle memory of the many times before when he’d entered a battle or firefight in exactly the same way. He whipped off the headphones and dragged his pack to the side of the door just as the wheels touched down and the aircraft gave a small bounce before settling. He was out of the door with a speed that belied a man of his age, pack over one shoulder as he jogged a small distance beyond the radius of the rotor blades. He threw himself on the ground and lay in the prone position, aiming his carbine into the area in front of him. Around him, the other men from the helicopter did the same as they took up their individual positions. A louder whine from the helicopter and an increase in the dust and debris battering him told Zana that the drop-off was complete and the helicopter lifting off. In the absence of the aircraft the silence was complete. Zana fitted a small earpiece and pressed his transmission switch.

  ‘Palang 1 this is Palang 2. Moving now.’

  A young Major led the two sections away from the landing site and along the track that the Reaction Force had identified. Zana looked at the soldiers ahead of him with a sense of pride, their moving, spacing and awareness now a natural extension of themselves. A cackling transmission came through his earpiece from the Reaction Force commander giving his location. They had been dropped further into the mountains, ahead of Zana and his Hunter Force. Their sections were moving towards the Hunter Force, looking to pressure Ardavan to break cover and identify his position. Zana looked up as a hand signal from the Major stopped their progress and each man took a knee, weapons pointing in alternate directions, every possible angle of attack covered. Zana stayed standing and walked past the kneeling men to the young Major who was studying the ground in front of him. He looked up as the General’s shadow crossed him. Pointing to some indistinct impressions in the dust, the Major pointed west.

  ‘One day old. Maybe a little more. Carrying weight and moving fast.’

  The General nodded. ‘Ardavan?’

  ‘Yes Sir. See here, this is the tread from our issued cold-weather boots. Only we possess such items. The length of his stride and depth of the heel shows a man running fast but in control. A trained and physically fit individual. Ardavan.’

  The General patted the Major’s shoulder and indicated for him to continue leading the patrol. Zana let a couple of the soldiers pass him before he took up his position in the line, scanning the boulders around them. Ardavan could be anywhere in this mess of rock formations but Zana also knew they had ways of smoking the traitor out. The patrol carried on in silence, the men’s breathing and the scraping of boots on rock the only sounds. Periodically, Zana answered transmissions from the Reaction Force ahead of him. They did not have a skilled tracker like he had but as their role was to harass Ardavan into breaking cover they didn’t really need that capability. A whispered message from the soldier to his front informed Zana that the Major wanted a word. He nodded and made his way to the front of the patrol where the Major was examining the dirt and looking around the general area. When Zana reached him, the Major picked up a small stick and used it to point to the indistinct impressions on the ground.

  ‘Here is Ardavan. You can just make out the heel impression. He’s still moving fast, same pace, same stride. Quite impressive at this altitude.’ He paused and looked the General in the eye. ‘But now, he’s no longer alone.’

  Zana frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  The Major shrugged. ‘There’s someone with him.’

  Zana felt a jolt of excitement. ‘American?’

  The Major stood and scratched at his chin as he pondered the question. ‘I don’t think so. The print isn’t clear as the ground is hard and his print overlaps Ardavan’s. I would say it is someone smaller and much lighter, carrying no weight.’

  Zana scanned the surrounding ridges and peaks. Who the hell is this now? Who could Ardavan possibly have arranged to meet up here? A guide? Zana discounted this possibility almost immediately. Ardavan had recce’d these routes so would be very familiar with them. A lover? Maybe. But nothing in his file showed any hint of a relationship with anyone. But then again, his file had also failed to spot any indications that he was an American spy. Zana turned to the Major. ‘Good work. Carry on and call for me when you find anything else of note.’

  After an hour or so, the tracks became harder to distinguish as the path changed from dirt to hard rock in places. The Major however, was a skilled tracker and always picked up the traitor’s trail eventually. At one point, the Major stopped for some time as he interpreted the ground sign to identify the activity. He called Zana forward and with the aid of a stick, walked the General through what he thought had occurred.

  ‘See here Sir; this is where he put his pack down for whatever reason. He then put it back on but did not head off immediately. Instead he walked to the edge of the ridge here and then turned around and carried on his way.’

  Zana nodded and looked at the coordinates of their current location on his map. ‘Yes Major. This is the area that the signal was identified as coming from. There’s a good chance that this is the spot and he paused here to call his CIA contact.’

  The Major stood and brushed the dust from the knee of his trousers. ‘He can’t be far ahead General so it’s only a matter of time until either the Reaction Force flushes him out or we track him close enough to scare him into giving up his position.’

  ‘Let’s get moving then. The sooner we get him panicked the sooner this is ended.’ He turned as the Major gave the hand-signal for the troops to follow him and slotted in between two of the front men. They still had hours to go before they lost the light and Zana was determined to close with the traitor before the coming of night aided his escape. He knew that he should have allowed Hashemi to request assistance from Tehran, but Zana wanted this ended on his own terms. He had no doubt that Hashemi would soon be receiving calls demanding updates, as all that his superiors knew was that the traitor Ardavan was being pursued. They probably believed that it was a hot pursuit where they were just behind their quarry and not, as they really were, hunting among the rocks and ridges of the formidable mountain passes.

  But Zana had hunted people before. Many times before. And with that experience came a sharply honed instinct; an ability to almost predict his quarry’s next m
ove. He had no problem with keeping VAJA Headquarters out of the loop until he had achieved his task, confident that the situation would be resolved by nightfall. As he negotiated his way over a rough rock fissure, a transmission from the Reaction Force made him stop mid-stride as he concentrated on the contents of the message.

  ‘Palang 2, Palang 1. We have visual on Target’

  11

  ZAGROS MOUNTAINS, NORTH WEST IRAN

  Karim looked through the scope and tracked the movements of the men below through the crosshairs of the rifle’s optics. He shook his head as he recognized one of the trainees from the Palang Course. This was a very clever move by the General, using troops who were both seasoned to the altitude and cold as well as being familiar with the geography of the mountains. He frowned as the implications ran through his mind. Karim had hoped that Tehran would send squads of ill-prepared VAJA officers to hunt him down, allowing him to maintain his advantage of experience. But the deployment of the Palang troops cut that aspiration dead. These were fit, well-motivated troops and Karim knew he would have to adjust his original plan in order to keep his exfiltration on track. He thought about the possibility of calling Vic and arranging for American assistance to pull him out, but Vic had warned him from the beginning that this would be almost impossible without incurring serious casualties and risk of capture. Karim had known that this would be the case, and that was why they’d planned such a challenging exfil plan that played to his strengths and experience while discouraging those following him. But that was when he’d thought his opponents would be the thugs from VAJA, not the special operatives of the Quds Force. Sighing, he lowered himself behind the rock and glanced at the sleeping figure of the boy.

  When he’d arrived in the dead of night to warn him, Karim had wasted no time; pack on his back and moving within the minute. He’d said only one word to the waif; Follow. They’d climbed through the night to gain as much elevation as they could before dawn, knowing that any movement after sunrise could lead the hunters directly to them. He had no idea why the boy had chosen to risk his life and warn him. Why the tired, hungry, disheveled orphan had stumbled and skidded his way along precarious paths and sheer drops to find and alert Karim. Wasn’t even sure how the boy had found him although when asked, he’d shrugged and said that Karim had left tracks that even a child could follow, dark or not. But he was glad the boy had found him. His timely intervention had enabled Karim to get them higher into the mountains where there was the possibility of skirting around the hunters as they tracked them along the trail below. The boy moaned and shifted in his sleep, retreating deeper into his fetal position on the scrubby patch of moss he’d chosen to lay on. Karim gave a soft smile. The boy was tough. Despite the privations he’d suffered, he’d trekked through the night then climbed hundreds of feet at a blistering pace. Karim had known from his labored breathing that Affan had been exhausted during the climb but not once had the boy fallen behind or asked Karim to slow down. They’d stopped only once, from necessity, for several minutes as Karim left something behind to aid their flight.

  Keeping his movements slow and taking care not to silhouette himself, Karim once again studied the movements of the troops below, noting the measured advance and use of cover. With their training and practice, they would not be an easy foe to defeat but Karim had one weapon in his arsenal that gave him at an advantage over the Palang troops: experience. Years of sabotage, ambushes, assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in countries all over the world had provided Karim with a wealth of operational experience that none of the Palang troops could hope to match. And that’s what he was relying on now. Through the scope, he watched as the lead soldier gave a hand signal to the men behind him. The troops began spreading out, encircling the small, rocky rise where Karim had paused earlier that morning. When the lead man reached the base of the natural rock wall that protected the rise, he took cover and waited. From his vantage point above them, Karim could see the leader was waiting for the men encircling the rise to get into position. There was no movement from the soldiers for some time and then, in a flurry of motion, the leader and two others leapt over the rock wall, weapons up on aim as they entered the small crater. Although he couldn’t quite see the expressions on their faces, he could imagine they were a combination of puzzlement and disappointment. Puzzlement that the woodsmoke they had been following was from the remains of a dying fire, and disappointment that the flash of color they’d seen from afar had been nothing more than a thermal shirt rammed between rocks. The leader of the troops must have transmitted something over the radio as the remainder of his men stood and advanced up the small rise to join the officer. Knowing what was coming, Karim readied himself and flicked the safety catch of his carbine to the fire position. As he watched, he saw one of the soldiers walking towards the higher rock formation at the other side of the crater and lean over to examine something.

  The explosion was louder than he’d expected, and Karim flinched at the noise. The sound ricocheted off the boulders and rock faces, echoing then dissipating through the maze of gullies and passes. Karim nodded in satisfaction; his pressure-pad initiated trap had worked better than expected. The area of the rise was shrouded in a thin cloud of smoke and dust debris that began to clear as Karim retrained the scope back on to the targets. The screams reached him first; agony, fear and anguish manifested in high-pitched vocalizations that bounced off the disinterested rock faces. The men who had not entered the crater began running towards it to aid their colleagues. Karim shot the first man through the pelvis and saw him tumble across the ground, mouth wide and hands clutching at the wound. Turning his attention to the second soldier, Karim fired a burst of rounds at the man’s lower body and watched as this soldier too, crashed into the hard ground. He didn’t want to kill the men. He needed them wounded and in agony so that they would have to be attended to and evacuated, tying up men and resources as Karim and Affan fled the area. Dropping behind the rock he looked up as the boy, sitting upright with his back against the rock stared at him with big round eyes. Karim grabbed his pack and nodded towards the peak looming above them.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  12

  ZAGROS MOUNTAINS, IRAQ

  Ned tabbed some keys on the laptop and the map on the screen zoomed into larger relief. He pointed at an area of compressed contours and looked up at the team.

  ‘Satellite says there’s a bunch of activity in this area here. Multiple helicopters and troop movements. Problem for us is that area is in the vicinity of the Asset’s first Rendezvous Point.’

  Randy spat a wad of tobacco over his shoulder then pointed at the displayed screen.

  ‘VAJA chasing our boy?’

  Ned nodded. ‘That’d be my guess. Not much more intel than that I’m afraid. Vic’s requesting a drone but doesn’t think Washington will have the appetite for the risk. So, what we have is an Asset we need to get out being chased by a couple of helicopters of hostiles.’

  Dwight held his hand up for Ned’s attention. ‘Hey Ned, I’m getting intermittent comms signatures coming through. Probably person to person as they’re really weak but enough traffic to confirm the satellite’s observations.’

  ‘Thanks Dwight. Keep on it and see if we can nail down rough estimate of numbers.’

  Dwight gave the thumbs-up and returned to his work as Ned stood and stretched, looking around at his team. ‘My take on this is that we go in and grab the Asset as soon as he’s triggered the second RV. Looking at the map, that’s pretty tough country for the birds to land so we may need to locate a drop off some way from the target area.’ He watched the men exchange glances. He didn’t blame them; none of them were afraid of the fight, but on foot in the mountains of Iran and facing an enemy in their own backyard certainly held limited appeal. ‘I get it. It’s not ideal but this is the hand we’ve been dealt so we have to play it. It’s nothing we haven’t done before it’s just this time the combination of altitude and pursuing hostiles is gonna make it more challenging
. And who doesn’t enjoy a challenge?’ He gave a wide grin as he met each man’s eyes in turn and saw them smile back in acknowledgement. ‘Okay, go get some chow and some shut-eye while Vic and I square the plan away. The Asset should hit RV 2 by late afternoon so make the most of the time between now and then.’

  The men walked back to their sleeping areas, some priming their stoves while others crawled into the warm, down-filled bags, keen to grab as much sleep as they could in anticipation of the coming extraction. Randy walked some distance from the camp area and sat on a rock ledge, legs dangling over a drop of several hundred feet. He scanned the mountains around him, taking in the tortured buttresses and spires that dominated the skyline. Like most of the Delta operators, he’d done his share of mountain warfare, but these mountains looked a lot tougher than most he’d encountered. Lots of severe, steep slopes and loose rock. A terrible combination for anyone working in this environment, especially at night. The lack of suitable LZs was also not a welcome fact. Randy and the guys were strong, fit soldiers but if it came to a fighting retreat from a large squad of VAJA troops, this would be put to the test. In addition to that, VAJA would probably call up air support, something that Randy was sure Washington would not allow them to reciprocate. Taking a swig of his coffee, he tilted his head back and allowed the cool air to blow the hair back from his forehead, appreciating the rare moment of quiet and solitude. With a sigh, he opened his eyes and got to his feet, staring at the abyss directly below him. He stepped to the edge and let his toes hang over the enormous drop. He grinned at the memory of Laura yelling at him when he had done the same thing while on vacation in Yosemite. It had freaked her out, but she’d forgiven him soon enough, never able to carry an angry word for long. He thought about her and realized he was missing her a lot more on this rotation than on any other. He pictured her smile and the soft curls of her dark hair, a legacy of the Irish blood of her ancestors, and surprised himself by thinking about marriage. They’d been together nearly three years and she’d accepted Randy’s life without complaint or frustration, and he loved her all the more for that. He’d struggle to count the number of relationships he’d seen tank over the years because a wife or girlfriend couldn’t cope with the constant separation and short-notice deployments. But Laura had understood it was a fact of life from the beginning and had never been anything but supportive to Randy. Yes, marriage. Definitely. He shook his head and turned back towards the camp wondering what the hell was in the mountain air that could turn a man’s thoughts from killing Iranians to getting hitched.