The Return Of Dog Team Read online

  Vang Bulo perched on the flat-topped rock, using his night-vision binoculars to keep watch on the eastern stretch of the pass. Hassani Akkad remained where he’d been pegged, sitting on the ground with a wire sliding noose leash connecting him to the massive dead tree branch. Akkad had been dealt a hard hand to play out in this game, but Kilroy was untroubled by any twinges of compassion for the gang boss. He’d seen the videos of some of the kidnapped captives that Hassani had sold to radical terrorist groups: the victims, knowing their cause, the cause of saving their lives, was hopeless, but going through the motions anyhow, begging their respective governments to accede to their captors’ impossible demands; the horror of their final agonies as they were butchered, heads grotesquely sawed off by the swords and knives of ski-masked, preening terrormongers.

  Kilroy saved his compassion for the victims. Hassani could go to hell.

  It was like hunting tigers. You hunt tigers by staking out a goat or pig or suchlike in the center of a clearing, climbing a tree overlooking the site, and waiting for a tiger to come prowling around, scenting fresh prey and hungry for a kill. Hassani in his day had left a plenitude of victims staked out for wild beasts to rend, maul and destroy: beasts that walked on two legs like men but were sunk far below the creatures of the wild, who killed only for food that they might live.

  Now, Hassani Akkad was the goat.

  Nine

  The sound of the wind was constant, sometimes rising in pitch to a high, thin wail; sometimes dropping to a low, sobbing moan; but mostly maintaining a kind of continuous, humming drone.

  It reminded Kilroy of the sound of an oud, a traditional stringed instrument of Afghanistan. He’d heard it played around the campfires of tribal allies while on missions in that fractious land. Played with a bow, the oud produced an effect in him that went from irritating to, ultimately, near hypnotic—though still somewhat irritating.

  A new note sounded in the mix of the wind’s midnight moaning. Kilroy’s ears tingled with it, and his pulse quickened.

  Vang Bulo must have heard it too, for at the same moment he stiffened, standing motionless on the flat-topped rock. Something hard and intent showed in that stillness, an internal vibration like a hunting dog on point.

  Kilroy spoke into the communicator. “Hear that?”

  “It’s them,” Vang Bulo said, after a pause.

  The newcomers could be heard before they could be seen. A signature sound of motorized vehicles preceded them. The sound was not uniform, for the engines did not operate at a steady rate. The noises rose and fell, depending on the difficulty of the terrain that the vehicles were traversing. This was rough, uneven country. Even the hard-packed brown clay of the gorge floor was textured like a washboard. Then, too, the twists and turns of the pass affected the motorized din. The vehicles’ growling thunder echoed, booming, along open straightaways and was muffled by the limbs and shoulders of massive rock formations.

  A trick of the landscape caused the oncoming din to fall off into near soundlessness just as the first set of headlight and searchlight beams thrust into the mouth of the corridor opening on the Rock of the Hawk.

  The flat top on which Vang Bulo had kept his vigil was empty, untenanted, the big man having already taken cover. Firefly lights floated above the ground at the east end of the passage. They came on, resolving themselves not into a pair of headlights, but instead into three larger orbs and two lesser orbs. A puzzling configuration, until further nearness caused them to reveal their nature. Each was a single headlight mounted on the handlebars of a motorcycle. Three motorcycles in all, riding in advance of the other vehicles.

  The bikes rode in triangular spearhead formation, with the lead bike being followed by a pair of two-rider jobs with sidecars. The sidecars were fitted with searchlights whose beams jutted out from them at varying angles. Headlight and searchlight beams both slashed across cliffside walls north and south of the pass.

  Kilroy said, “I’m suspending communication now.”

  Vang Bulo rogered that.

  Kilroy couldn’t risk an untimely message interrupting his concentration while he lined up the shot. He unplugged the earpiece, eased the headset off his face, and switched off the comm unit. Its plastic armature folded down to something about the size of a cigarette, which he dropped into an inside breast pocket of his utility vest. Behind the three motorcyles came a jeep with four men in it. Behind that came a scout car of the type that Kilroy and Vang Bulo had stolen. It was followed with an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier with a gun turret on top. Next came a two-and-a-half-ton truck with rail fence sides and no top, the carrier bed crammed with about eighteen armed troops. A jeep with a mounted machine gun brought up the rear.

  Colonel Munghal’s convoy.

  Kilroy picked up his night-vision binoculars and held them to his eyes, studying the column. The light-gathering optics banished darkness, their special lenses reproducing the scene in dull, fuzzy green-and-white light. They turned the nightscape into a green the color of stagnant pond water seen on a sunless day, yet somehow shot through with white flashes and gleams.

  The sidecars of both two-rider motorcyles were each equipped with swivel-mounted machine guns. The bikes were so close now that Kilroy could make out the riders with his night glasses. They wore helmets, goggles, short jackets, and driving gloves.

  The column made no attempt at stealth. Quite the reverse. Colonel Munghal was putting on a show of force to intimidate and deter what he thought were bandits and hijackers cutting in on the lucrative cross-border contraband trade, whose latest and most up-to-date commodity was trafficking in stolen Iraqi scientists.

  The plan was for the column to advance to the western end of the pass, halting just this side of the Iraqi border. Akkad gang members from the farmhouse would meet them there to deliver Professor Ali al-Magid.

  The column moved along at a steady, deliberate clip. Haste was dangerous in a landscape whose rugged terrain made the possibility of cracking a suspension or breaking an axle omnipresent. The motorcycles pushed forward, making their sputtering mosquito whine. On they came, nosing ahead of the column.

  The lead bike’s headlight beam fingered an obstruction in the middle of the gorge: Hassani Akkad. The vehicle halted, the two behind it following suit a few beats later. Searchlight beams, thinner and brighter than those of the headlights, pinned the unique roadblock. In the harsh glare of the lights, Akkad himself looked more animal than human, tethered to the dead tree limb. The wire leash around his neck was too short to allow him to straighten up. He got his legs underneath him, somehow managing to stand up on his knees—a difficult operation with his hands tied behind his back, and the wire loop cutting into the flesh of his neck.

  Behind the motorcycles, the jeep braked to a halt, causing the scout car behind it to pull up short, setting off a chain reaction that caused all the vehicles in the column to come to a stop. There was confusion, especially toward the rear of the line, as to what exactly had caused the halt. Heavy engines idled roughly, spewing gray-white exhaust from stacks and pipes. Exhaust and dust clouds raised by the column were swept away by the wind.

  Captain Saq was a passenger in the lead jeep. Behind it, the scout car’s front passenger seat was occupied by Colonel Munghal. He was protected by a windshield of bulletproof, armored glass. No fool he, he’d stay behind that protective shield while his subordinates investigated the cause of the delay and how to remedy it.

  Kilroy put down the night glasses and picked up his sniper rifle. It was a formidable instrument, a custom-made Swedish big-bore with a folding metal tube stock and was equipped with a night-vision scope. The bullets in the magazine were custom made, too.

  Kilroy hefted the rifle and got into a prone shooting position in the nest. He’d be firing through the triangular gap at the base of the two egg-shaped boulders. He pointed the weapon east toward the stalled column.

  Nearer, a lone motorcycle rider lowered his kickstand and dismounted, unslinging the light machi
ne gun slung across his back and leveling it at the strange apparation framed in the lights.

  The sidecar gunners shared his suspicions, training their swivel-mounted machine guns on Akkad. One thought to sweep his searchlight across the rocks at the base of the cliffs, searching for signs of ambush, scanning both sides of the gorge.

  Kilroy put the motorcyle machine gunners out of his mind. Vang Bulo had them covered and would handle them one way or another. Kilroy trusted him to cover his back. That freed him to concentrate on the job at hand.

  Kilroy lined his sights up on Colonel Munghal, a balding, pear-shaped guy in a gold-braided commander’s cap and military tunic. He had a black paintbrush mustache and a fussy little mouth and no chin. He didn’t look like much, but then, neither had Himmler. No doubt he felt pretty safe behind that armored glass windscreen.

  Munghal’s face was angry, and his mouth was open and shouting. Kilroy centered the scope crosshairs in the middle of his face, between the eyes.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Kilroy had always figured that when he finally got his shot at Munghal, the colonel would be sitting behind bulletproof glass in an armored vehicle. That was why he’d had special ammunition provided for the hit in advance.

  Explosive-tipped bullets were no good here; they’d explode on contact with the armored glass, spending their force and possibly missing their target. His rounds were tipped with ultrahard, ultratough titanium alloys and hand loaded with a high-velocity propulsive powder mix.

  The bulletproof armored glass was sufficient protection against most bullets, but not against specially constructed rounds like the ones Kilroy was using. The hard, high-velocity slug pierced the windshield, drilling a neat, round hole through several inches of armored glass.

  Behind the glass lay Colonel Munghal. The bullet drilled him too, right between the eyes.

  Kilroy fired a second and third shot in quick succession. The target placement was so precise that barely a fingernail clipping’s width separated each of the three holes.

  Munghal’s head above the eyebrows disintegrated into mist.

  Rifle reports were still echoing in the gorge when the lone motorcyclist fired his machine gun in the general direction from which the shots had come.

  The sidecar machine gunners swiveled their weapons, bringing them up toward the twin boulders on the fan, sheltering the sniper’s nest. That’s when Vang Bulo used the remote to trigger Hassani Akkad’s explosive belt. There was a flash of light, very bright. For an instant, Akkad’s form was a black blur at the heart of a fireburst. Then it came apart, vaporizing.

  The blast cut down the motorcycles and their riders, obliterating them. A wall of flame whooshed through the gorge, incinerating all trees, brush, and weeds before it. It licked out, engulfing the jeep before spending its force impotently against the scout car. But the jeep was an inferno, its passengers human torches.

  One of them was Captain Saq. He half lunged, half fell out of the jeep, his clothes on fire. Bellowing, roaring, he charged blindly off to the side, toward the gorge’s north wall. He got about a dozen yards or so before collapsing, tumbling to the ground. His clothes were on fire. So was his flesh. He rolled around in the dirt, trying to snuff out the flames. He succeeded, mostly. He shuddered, kicked, then lay still, his blackened form smoking. Half his face had been melted away.

  Flaming debris rained down from the human bomb blast, scattering pieces of motorcycle scrap metal on the floor of the gorge. A burning tire bounced to the ground and rolled away, a wheel of fire. The inside of the jeep was a mass of flame. It burned with a sound like a high wind whipping banners and pennants, snapping them in the breeze. There was a lull that lasted several beats. Then the turret gun in the armored personnel carrier opened up with a series of jackhammer bursts, firing wildly and virtually at random. The gunner had no idea what he was shooting at. Rounds ripped into rock walls, ricocheting wildly, punching out rows of melon-sized craters and sprays of stone chips.

  Kilroy went back to work. He didn’t use the scope because the explosions and fireballs going off would bulldoze the sight’s sensitive optics, causing the light-gathering lenses to white out. He aimed with the naked eye, pointing the rifle at what he wanted to hit, a method that usually worked for him.

  He drew down on the scout car’s forward compartment. The pulverizing of Colonel Munghal’s cranium had sprayed the scout car driver with disintegrated matter. It stung and tore like a faceful of hornets, hitting him with such force that it stunned him. The actual physical impact had left him punchy. Kilroy shot him, the round drilling windshield and driver. The armored glass screen now had four neat little round holes punched through it. The driver fell, crashing back against the seat, then forward to sink out of sight.

  The scout car wasn’t going anyplace just yet, not until somebody else took the wheel. The column’s forward motion was blocked, too. The Iranian troops knew that they were under attack, but they didn’t know by whom or how many. The way they were getting hit, so hard and fast, made them think that they were under assault by an overwhelming force. They didn’t know that Colonel Munghal was defunct, either. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the final outcome if they had known.

  The armored personnel carrier’s turret gunner must have seen some muzzle flashes coming from Kilroy’s weapon in the sniper’s nest. The armored turret rotated, swinging the gun in line toward the fan and elevating it toward the twin boulders that sheltered the nest. The troops in the back of the truck were starting to react, grabbing up their weapons and blindly firing at the sides of the gorge. Some began hopping down to the ground.

  A blast erupted that made the first look tame. Vang Bulo had delivered his knockout punch. Earlier, he’d sowed the sides of the eastern branch of the pass with a double line of claymore antipersonnel mines. The infernal devices consisted of bricks of plastic explosive lined with scores of steel ball bearings. Their detonators were all linked together so that the master key tripped them all simultaneously. Now, supersonic sheets of white-hot shrapnel scourged the column, ripping it broadside along its flanks. All those in its path were cut down. Shockwaves buffeted the sides of the convoy vehicles, rocking them in their tracks. The lead jeep toppled and rolled, bursting into flame.

  The white intensity of the blastfire glare flashed lightning-like, fading quickly. Where ranks of troopers had been, the ground was littered with their bodies, sieved and smoking. The relative dimness vanished once more, eclipsed by a fireball that was the exploding gas tank of the troop truck. White-hot shrapnel from the claymores had peppered and pierced it, igniting the fuel load. It blew red, thrusting upward a pillar of fire that mushroomed at its crown, rolling in on itself.

  The truck, what was left of it, was smoldering wreckage. The scout car had not moved since Kilroy shot Munghal and the driver. Its undercarriage was on fire, flames licking up the vehicle. A figure opened a side hatch and crawled out of it, dragging himself to the south side of the pass.

  Only the armored personnel carrier still stood intact and battle ready. Firing resumed from the armored personnel carrier’s turret gun. It fired at the sniper’s nest, but the gun’s elevation was too high, and the rounds passed harmlessly above the top of the rocks, pounding the cliff wall high overhead. Rocks rained down around Kilroy, each one as big as a cobblestone. None of them hit him. He lay cradled in the hollow behind the boulders, keeping his head down, eating dirt.

  The firing paused. Kilroy reached for a LAW, or light antitank weapon, that lay beside him. It looked like a three-foot length of OD green plastic pipe. He shucked off the forward and rear protective lids at each end of the container, then unlimbered the underside pistol grip attachment and the topside sighting posts. Heavy enough to stop an APC, he hoped.

  The APC was on the move, advancing, shouldering aside the crippled and abandoned scout car. It lurched deeper into the gorge. Some of the personnel it was carrying were still functioning. They began shooting out of the gun ports in the sides of
the rear carrier box.

  Vang Bulo popped up from behind a rock long enough to throw a grenade at the APC. It bounced off the armor plate hull and exploded. The blast rocked the vehicle but left it undamaged. A mechanized whine sounded as the turret rotated, swinging the gun barrel toward the rocks behind which Vang Bulo was taking cover.

  Kilroy edged around the more eastward boulder, holding the LAW tube over his shoulder. He loosed a rocket at the APC. The missile generated a terrific backblast that trailed harmlessly behind the shooter. It arrowed toward the APC, striking it in front where the turret met the hull. The blast blew the turret off the machine, launching it into the air as easily as popping the cap off a bottle.

  The APC shuddered, froze. The engine stalled. When the smoke cleared, a hole stood where the turret had been, rimmed by a collar of jagged, still-seething fused steel. Vang Bulo tossed a grenade into it. Smoke and fire jetted out of the hole.

  The column was kaput, but that was only incidental to getting Colonel Munghal. Who’d been got.

  Ten

  Time to withdraw. Exfiltrate.

  No immediate threat showed from the wrecked remains of the column, but Kilroy was careful to shelter behind the rocks while stowing his weapon away. Swiftly, efficiently, with no wasted motion, working by touch, he broke down the sniper rifle to its components and fitted them into its protective carrying case. It was a precision instrument, one that he was used to and that had served him well and would continue to do so in the future. Provided he got away with a whole skin, of course.

  He put the gun case in a carrying sack that he slung across his shoulders. He grabbed his AK-47, ready to move out. He didn’t bother with the communicator. He chose to rely on a time-honored, low-tech option: a big mouth and lung power.

  He shouted, “Cover me, Alpha!”

  “You’re covered, Bravo!” Vang Bulo shouted back.