The Return Of Dog Team Read online

  He was sitting on the ground now, legs extended in front of him, leaning back against the dead tree limb to which he was fastened. Adding to his woes was the fact that he’d been fitted with an explosive belt that was wrapped around his belly.

  It was like a money belt, only instead of being strung with pouches for hiding cash, it was strung with pouches containing blocks of plastic explosives, all rigged with electronic detonators tuned to a handheld remote-control device in Vang Bulo’s possession. It was also rigged so that any attempt to undo the belt without first disarming it would instantly set off all the explosives, unlikely though it was that Akkad could free his hands to even make the attempt to escape from the belt.

  His jacket was zipped closed, hiding the belt beneath it. The duct tape strips fastened over his mouth gagged him, preventing his giving warning of his booby-trapped condition, stifling his choking outcries. Above the gag his nostrils flared, gaping; his eyes bulged.

  The sand still flew, but the floor of the pass was protected from the storm, mostly. Some stray, wild winds still swooped down into the gorge, buffeting it. For the most part, though, it was gripped by an eerie stillness, counterpointed by the violence of the winds sweeping high above, over the clifftops.

  The winds blew with a shivery, moaning sound. A lonesome sound, Kilroy thought. The sound was lonesome. He was not. Between Vang Bulo and Akkad and his sniper rifle, he had plenty of company.

  He’d handled plenty of assignments working solo, often in hostile territory behind enemy lines. Generally, given his druthers, he preferred working alone. That way he didn’t have to worry about anybody screwing up but himself, and if he did screw up it would be his own damned fault.

  Most shooters work in two-man teams consisting of a shooter and a spotter. For this assignment, Kilroy was the shooter, and Vang Bulo was the spotter. But the Ugandan was more than just a spotter. He was Dog Team all the way, an action man. You could trust him to do his damned job and take care of himself and not do anything stupid. He was a pro.

  Having a partner expanded the possibilities of what Kilroy could do, of what they both could do. He couldn’t have worked this particular setup solo, couldn’t have gotten Akkad out here all by his lonesome. An insurmountable logistical problem for a lone hand. With Vang Bulo, it was doable.

  Kilroy’s handler was also working the Azif region. The handler was a real deep cover shadow agent, working so deep that he was practically subterranean. He and Kilroy were working different ends of the same assignment.

  Vang Bulo was unaware of the handler’s identity. This was standard Dog Team procedure, indeed standard intelligence procedure everywhere, information being disseminated on a need-to-know basis. Kilroy was senior man in the partnership, and so he was the one to interface with the elusive operative. Should Kilroy be terminated or otherwise neutralized, the handler would pair with Vang Bulo to complete the mission.

  Kilroy now half sat, half lay in the hollow behind the boulders. The bathtub-sized depression was thick with sharp pebbles and stone shards that jabbed him in the damnedest places.

  He was armed with a sniper rifle, an AK-47, a LAW, a string of grenades, a snub-nosed .38 in a side pocket, and a knife sheathed to the inside of his boot. Plus some other goodies.

  He had a pair of night-vision binoculars and a lightweight, miniaturized transceiver by which he could communicate with Vang Bulo. The headset consisted of an earpiece and a curved plastic arm no wider than a soda straw that ended in a tiny speaker bulb. The arm banded the lower half of the right side of his face while not touching it. The condensor microphones in the tip could pick up a whisper and transmit it with crisp clarity to a receiver.

  The space at the base of the rocks formed an upward-pointing triangle that was about four feet high at the apex. It provided clear, unbroken sightlines to the scene below. A clear, unimpeded line of fire, too. He had all his ducks in a row. Now if only Colonel Munghal would be so accommodating as to put himself in Kilroy’s gunsights.

  That was the loose end in the plan, a potential big one. There was no way to be absolutely sure that the Colonel would actually take to the field to personally command the retrieval mission. The odds were good that he would. Jafar Akkad had said that Munghal would head the detachment tonight, and he’d gotten his information from Hassani, who was in a position to know. Hassani certainly believed that Munghal would manifest himself at the appointed hour.

  Everything known about the man pointed to it. Munghal’s profile showed that he preferred to lead from the front. He was not a desk man. He liked to be out in the field, where the action was.

  So said the analysts, the Dog Team analysts. Kilroy had never met any such persons, not knowingly. If he had, they’d kept it to themselves. He had no idea where in the dizzying depths of the Dog Team’s clandestine apparatus they might be located, nor did he ask.

  Team players didn’t ask questions outside the realm of their immediate operational interest. That was made clear from Day One of their training program. Snoopy types were dropped from the program. They disappeared, and you didn’t see them any more. That didn’t mean they were dead. The military was huge and the world was wide, and there were countless posts to which they could have been assigned where one would never see them again. Of course, it didn’t mean they hadn’t been liquidated, either. The Dog Team was serious business, and the secret of its power lay in its secrecy.

  One thing was sure: the civilians at the Pentagon were out of the loop. This was Army business and damned sure not anyone else’s. Let those blankety-blank political types ever get their hooks into something like the Dog Team, and they’d never let go. A clandestine Army elite killer unit? They’d put it to work for their own agendas. Only that would never happen, because the Dog Team would never let it happen. When you got right down to it, a secret assassination unit was bad medicine, bad to mess with. It was easier for the politicos to find some other outfit or operation to get fat off of. Safer, too.

  Kilroy was unsure whether the Team was operated from somewhere deep within the labyrinth of the Pentagon or from a seemingly unconnected off-the-shelf civilian front company, or both. Or neither. The organization’s infrastructure was a mystery to him. Like any covert operation, it was rigorously compartmentalized. More so, due to the international illegality built into its structure. Nobody involved wanted to turn up at the center of a congressional probe or World Court war crimes tribunal proceeding. They were determined not to. Team personnel up and down the chain of command were insulated behind false fronts and third-party cutouts to preserve anonymity.

  Kilroy’s handler gave him the assignments and the vital intelligence needed to carry them out. Kilroy preferred it that way. The less he knew about other Team players, the less they knew about him, and the less they could tell if ever taken by the foe.

  No, Kilroy didn’t know the analysts who’d concluded that, given all the available facts, it could be predicted to a reasonable certainty that Colonel Munghal would obligingly present himself for demolition. How well did they know Munghal?

  It was now or never. If Munghal showed tonight, well and good. If not, then it was Game Over, the end of this op. The Top Dog and his planners would not dare risk al-Magid falling into the hands of the Iranians. They had dangled him way out at the end of the line, using him as bait to monkeywrench the siphoning of top Iraqi scientists through the pipeline into Iran.

  Behind it all lay the sinister genius of Dr. Bharat Turan Razeem, who, along with A.Q. Khan, was one of the fathers of Pakistan’s atomic bomb. While Khan’s role in disseminating illicit A-arms technology to rogue states such as Libya and North Korea was exposed to the world, Razeem continued to labor in secret, finally perfecting a process that he’d been working on for years.

  These steps culminated in the electron coupler, a relatively low-cost, high-yield device that served as a catalyst toward developing weapons-grade fissile material from the waste by-products of a nuclear reaction. If a country had a nuclear reactor, it
could use the device to leapfrog over many exacting and expensive steps toward building nuclear weapons. Needless to say, it was of great interest to any number of states desirous of arming themselves with an atomic sword.

  Such a one was Iran. Possession of a working electron coupler would circumvent the restrictions on importation of nuclear technology imposed by a U.S.-led blockade, an imperfect yet still effective ban. But Tehran lacked specialists in Razeem’s discipline of nuclear physics, having concentrated its resources on more conventional modes of processing radioactive waste materials into ingredients for an A-bomb.

  Iraq did not. Difficult circumstances and slim budgets after the 1991 Gulf War had caused Iraqi’s nuclear weapons establishment to take a closer look at Razeem’s process, then still a theory long from being established fact. Saddam’s research facilities had managed to make considerable progress on their own in the field, and were close to a breakthrough on the eve of the war against the Coalition.

  Iran’s feared and fearsome secret service, the Pasdaran, learned of the Iraqi effort and reached out to collect the cream of the Razeem process initiates. Colonel Munghal was put in charge of the acquisition operation.

  Munghal used Captain Saq as a go-between to Iraqi crime boss Hassani Akkad. Akkad was already in the kidnapping game, so it was no big deal for him to target nuclear physicists along with foreign journalists, volunteer aid workers, truck drivers, and the like. Munghal picked the top Iraqi scientists he wanted, and Akkad picked them up. The captives were moved by night to a series of safe houses in Azif and outlying districts, terminating at the farmhouse west of Rock of the Hawk pass. From there, they were handed over to Captain Saq and the Iranians.

  After the first few disappearances, Army counterintelligence detected the pattern and the plot. Monitoring of the small circle of Iraqi Razeem process specialists narrowed the field of choices for next prospective victim down to a relative few.

  The likeliest was Professor Ali al-Magid. He taught at a graduate school of the provincial university. One weekday at lunchtime, he stepped into an elevator. In it were two men, strangers to him. The doors closed, and the car began its descent. There was a faint hissing sound, as of air escaping a leaky tire. The professor felt a sharp medicinal or chemical taste tingling at the back of his throat. His face flushed. He felt very hot. His head seemed to swell from the inside out, blowing up like a balloon. He tugged at his collar to loosen it. His knees buckled. The next he knew, he lay on his back on the floor of the elevator car, looking up at the two other passengers. They seemed a great distance away and receded still more as he lost consciousness.

  The two men were U.S. intelligence agents, spies. Operatives. They had exposed al-Magid to an invisible knockout gas released from a pen-sized canister wielded by one of the duo. They both wore nose filters.

  The elevator went straight down, with no stops, to the basement. There one of the men produced a long, silvery tube like a tire air pressure indicator and stabbed al-Magid in the side of the buttocks with the pointed end. This object injected a pinhead-sized chip through his garments and into his gluteus maximus, burying it out of sight in his flesh.

  A stimulant to hasten recovery from the short-lived effects of the gas was administered to the unconscious man via an aerosol nasal spray. The next thing al-Magid knew, he was lying on his back on a padded bench in the lobby of the science building. A knot of individuals clustered around him, looking down at him with a ring of faces whose expressions varied from concern to curiosity to indifference. None of these faces belonged to the two men who had ridden with him in the elevator.

  The professor was informed that he’d fainted in the elevator and been brought to this bench in the lobby to recover. He was more confused than anything else. They told him that he must have been working too hard and that he should go home and get some rest. He did so. He had a splitting headache, and his hip and rear were sore and bruised, probably from when he’d fallen. So he told himself.

  He was oblivious that he’d been hung out to dry and left with his ass flapping in the breeze. His colleagues and other likely kidnap targets among the Razeem process specialists all had their security details strengthened, while he was left unguarded. He was bait.

  Hassani Akkad rose to the bait. His gang closed in on al-Magid, tightening the circle until there was no way out. Then they made the swoop. The professor was snatched in early morning, after he’d left his apartment on the way to work. Akkad’s goons had hustled him into the backseat of a car that whisked the professor away.

  After that, it was a nightmare of fear, intimidation, and deprivation as al-Magid was inserted into one end of the kidnap pipeline. He was kept blindfolded or hooded for hours at a time, until he lost track of whether it was day or night. He was occasionally struck or kicked, and randomly terrorized. Actually, for an Akkad gang abductee, he was decently treated. That’s because the Iranians were paying for him to be delivered intact and functioning. Other kidnap victims rarely fared so well.

  Hassani’s connection to Captain Saq had resulted in a surplus of weapons being shipped across the border into Iraq. By making the arms available at bargain prices to militia leader Waleed Tewfiq, Akkad established an alliance with the Red Dome Mosque cadre. This fact allowed him to operate safe houses in the district. Coalition forces stayed out of Old Town to avoid provoking a confrontation with the imam and his followers that might enflame Shiite sentiment against the American-sponsored Iraqi interim government.

  Akkad kept al-Magid penned in a safe house within sight of the mosque’s minaret towers for several days while finalizing the arrangements for his delivery to the Iranians. Complicating matters were the sudden, violent attacks on gunrunners and their customers in the borderlands. The massacre of Fadleel and company, the slaying of the scout car crew, and the disappearance of the vehicle itself had sent shockwaves up into the Iranian military intelligence apparatus.

  Colonel Munghal sent word to Hassani Akkad that he was to spearhead the al-Magid acquistion himself to overawe by his fearsome presence the interloping marauders and bandits who were preying on the established marauders and bandits in the region.

  Colonel Munghal had begun his career in Iran’s security apparatus as a lowly noncom in the Shah’s SAVAK secret police, where he’d proven himself an ace interrogator and torturer. He wasn’t so high up that he couldn’t reverse field and throw in with the ayatollahs during Khomeini’s rise. He picked a good time to turn his coat, throwing in with the rebels when the outcome of the struggle still seemed in doubt. He had no doubt that the regime would be overthrown. Few were in as good a position as he to appreciate the extent of the weaknesses of the Peacock Throne.

  He did for the Islamic Revolution what he’d been doing for the Shah; namely, rooting out rebels, subversives, dissidents, and other foes or potential foes. He flipped his old network of thugs, spies, and informants, turning them against the counterrevolutionaries for whom they’d once worked. He was ruthless, merciless toward those whom the mullahs of Qom set him against. When he targeted a loyalist or suspected loyalist—or someone felt to be hostile to the new regime—he targeted not only that unfortunate individual but also his or her spouse, children, family, and friends for imprisonment, brutality, torture, and sometimes, mass executions.

  The period after the Shah’s downfall, when the ayatollahs consolidated their reign, was a busy one for Munghal. Purges were conducted on a societal level, with Bahai’ists, communists, secularists, intellectuals, dissidents, and others liquidated by the tens of thousands. That’s when wholesale murder demanded a military approach, and he began his rise through military intelligence ranks into the elite Pasdaran spy service.

  Now, at the height of his power and prestige, Colonel Munghal was wanted dead by the intelligence services of a half-dozen Arab countries, Israel, and the U.S., not to mention his own homegrown competitors for power in Tehran’s top ruling circles.

  All that remained now was the waiting.

  Waiting . . .
Kilroy had no problem with waiting. Like Jesse James in the traditional folk ballad, Kilroy, too, “came from a solitary race.” His was the infinite, terrible patience of the hunter. Besides, he couldn’t afford to get excited. Excitement switched on all kinds of internal conflicts, including accelerated heart and respiration rates, which could make vital eye and hand coordination a hair less sure. He wanted to keep himself steady and make his shot.

  Kilroy kept his mind busy by calculating the mechanics of the shot. A lot of negative factors were in play. The sandstorm was the greatest handicap to a successful shoot. The wind was not constant, but rose and fell in force. That could affect the ballistics of the shot, depending on the weight of the round and the type and amount of gunpowder in the cartridge. On the other hand, it was an asset in that he was counting on it to help confuse the enemy and facilitate his and Vang Bulo’s getaway. They weren’t in this game to seek martyrdom. That was the other side’s hang-up. The Kilroy/Vang Bulo partnership was a going concern, and they meant to keep it that way.

  The greatest variable was the final disposition of the target. There was no telling exactly where Colonel Munghal would be at the moment of truth. He might be close to the sniper’s nest, or far to the east at the opposite end of the gorge. Kilroy was going to have to estimate where and when the window of opportunity would be at its widest. A tricky element, for if he held his fire waiting for the optimum shot, chance might intervene to deny him the target.

  Kilroy checked his calculations, juggling them in his head, keeping them in flux. He wouldn’t know which formula to use until he was actually lining up the shot. Every now and then he rose and stretched, shaking out his arms and legs, not wanting to tighten up. He didn’t stray too far from the nest. The fan of dirt and rock surrounding him was too loose and unstable to stroll around on. The night was warm, hot, when the south wind blew hard. At least he didn’t have to worry about keeping his hands warm and supple.