BRAINRUSH, a Thriller (32 page)

A dozen or more prisoner cells had been notched out of the rock on either side of the tunnel. Each of the ancient cells was about the size of a compact car, barely long enough to stretch out in and too short to stand upright. The openings were crisscrossed with rusted iron bars and crude padlocked gates.   

Only one of the cells was occupied. 

Francesca’s slim grip on sanity had grown dependent on the weak light that radiated from the bulb outside her cell. She couldn’t actually see it through the rusty bars, but she knew it was there, suspended from the tunnel wall just around the bend. The bulb must have been old—its element nearing the end of its life—because it flickered and buzzed constantly. At one point it had gone out, and a profound darkness had invaded her cell with such weight that she couldn’t even the see the toes of her bare feet. Before the scream fully formed in her throat, the bulb had sparked tenuously back to life, pushing at least some of the darkness away. 

Sarafina huddled next to her in the corner, sharing body heat in a vain attempt to ward off the bone-chilling cold of the solid rock that surrounded them. The young girl whimpered, prompting Francesca to tighten her hug as she rocked them back and forth. Another uncontrollable bout of shivers shook them both.

They still wore the same clothes from the night of the ball—Sarafina in her nightdress and slippers, and Francesca in her princess costume. The beautiful white dress was soiled and torn. A dark brown blotch stained the bodice from the cut inflicted on her neck by Carlo. Her feet were blistered and cut from the long walk up from the village and through the tunnels to her cell.

She remembered little else of the trip. Both she and Sarafina had been drugged as soon as they boarded Battista’s jet. When they awakened, they were bouncing in the bed of a covered truck climbing the road to the village. Her captors had treated them with disdain, caring little for their complaints. Only Carlo seemed to regard them with any interest. But his lingering stares curdled her stomach and sent shudders racing up her back.

Francesca’s hollow eyes fixed on the putrid waste bucket that was the only amenity in the small cell. It had been half full when they arrived, a leftover gift from the previous tenant. Now, after two days, it still hadn’t been emptied. 

What would she do when it was full?

Francesca closed her eyes.
How could she have been so easily deceived by Signor Battista? What was going to happen to them? 

Where was Jake?

Tears leaked down her cheek. She used her wrist to rub them away, trying to stay brave for Sarafina. 

Her heart leaped when a dark shadow passed in front of the light outside her cell. 

Carlo stood silhouetted behind the bars. One side of his scarred face was bathed in the light from the flickering bulb, revealing a gleaming dark eye filled with need. He wore camouflaged army fatigues. He just stared at her, his fingers dancing open and closed against his palm like a child waiting for a piece of candy. His nostrils flared with each breath. Francesca didn’t need her gift to sense the evil of his thoughts. 

Signor
Battista stepped into view, dressed in a dark green waistcoat over a white
dishdashah
and loose-fitting pants. His head was wrapped in a red-and-white-checkered
keffiyeh
.

“Hello, my dear,” Battista said with a cordial expression. “Sorry about the accommodations. But it’s the best we could do on such short notice.” 

Francesca pulled Sarafina’s head close to her chest.

Battista’s smile vanished, his bitterness plain. “If you had remained loyal to me instead of the American, all of this could have been avoided. So now you will help us in a different way.” 

Francesca glared at him. This man had been her employer. She had believed in him. How could she have been so wrong? Even now, as she opened her senses to him, she felt nothing but his conviction, his dedication to a cause that differed from what she had believed she shared. She couldn’t have been more wrong.   

She spit her words at him. “I would die before helping you.”

Battista took her attitude in stride, the teacher speaking to an insolent student. “And die you shall, my dear. Perhaps the child, too. But not soon, and certainly not by my hand. You can still be very helpful in our research. You simply must be taught to behave first.

“But first you shall be the cheese in our little trap. Even now Mr. Bronson has caught your scent, and is on his way here. How convenient, yes? But this time there will be no escape, for him or his infidel companions. Or for you.”

The news jolted her.
Jake coming here?

Sarafina stirred under her embrace.

Battista seemed genuinely sad at her pain, but it didn’t stop him from adding, “And when it is finished, you shall be taught the meaning of obedience.” He placed his hand on Carlo’s shoulder. Carlo leered at her.

Francesca fought to hide her terror, refusing to lock gazes with Carlo, afraid it would be the final nudge that would send her over the edge into madness.

 “Good-bye for now, my dear,” Battista said. “We must attend to some last-minute details before your friends arrive.” He tipped his head and disappeared up the tunnel. 

Carlo hesitated before following and released a guttural moan that drew Francesca’s eyes. Walking slowly, he moved his hand from one bar to the other, allowing his palm to caress each of the vertical shafts before moving on to the next. 

The muscles along Francesca’s spine quivered under his gaze.

Carlo chuckled and disappeared around the corner.

Francesca squeezed her eyes closed and forced his image from her mind. A short whimper escaped her throat.

Sarafina’s soft voice broke the silence. It was the first time she had spoken since their abduction. “Don’t worry. Not now. Jake is coming and everything will be all right. Just like he promised.”

Francesca wiped the tears from her face and wrapped Sarafina tightly in her arms. “You’re right, dear. He did promise.”

But they know he’s coming.

**

Two levels above Francesca’s cell, Battista and Carlo stood in an eight-meter-square underground war room. The walls were covered with local and regional maps. Whiteboards contained updated diagrams and notes on men and equipment disposition. Two rows of surveillance monitors covered a sidewall with rotating images from over one hundred and fifty cameras positioned throughout the mountain complex. There was a communication center along another wall where technicians monitored a tactical radar display, and a comm center that was slaved to master equipment housed in the security room one level beneath them. 

From this room, Battista and his team would manage the defense of the facility and spring their trap on Jake and his men.

Battista studied the three men seated at the long oval table in the center of the room. Two of them were dressed in desert camo paramilitary uniforms, bearing embroidered bars of rank on their lapels. The third, Abdullah, was Battista’s second in command. He wore traditional Afghan mountain clothing, a loose-fitting long white shirt covered by patterned waistcoat, baggy tan pants, leather boots and a white turban. He had twin bandoliers of 7.62 ammunition slung from shoulder to waist. His full black beard was tinged with gray.

Battista continued to fill the men in on the intelligence he had received. “We know they are arriving sometime in the next twenty-four hours, that there are only about a dozen men on the team, but they appear to be very experienced.”

Abdullah bowed his head in deference to Battista, calling him by his preferred title when here in the mountains. “
Sheikh
, any details on their intended insertion point?”

“Not yet. But perhaps soon.”

“No matter, we will be ready,” Abdullah said as he walked over to the largest of the maps. He pointed to the road leading into the village. 

He moved his finger to the ridgelines surrounding the village. “We will position fifty men here—well hidden—and another fifty on the ridges around the lower cave entrance. That will leave an additional eighty in reserve in the cavern barracks.”

When there were no questions, Abdullah continued. “We will allow them to pass through the village unhindered. Before they arrive at the lower cave entrance, we will move in behind them to cut off their escape. They will be completely surrounded. Outmanned and outgunned.”

 “You sound confident,” Battista said. “But this man has fooled us before. What if they approach by air?”

“Let them try.” Abdullah drew a wide circle around the peak of the mountain. “I have stationed five separate two-man teams with Igla-1S portable SAMs to provide us with full coverage around the mountain. It would be suicide for them to attempt it.”

“And if they take out our radar first with an aerial attack?” Battista asked.

“Assuming the American’s private team was able to muster such firepower—which we have already agreed is highly unlikely—it would be a fatal mistake for them to do so, because then we would know they are coming by air.” Our SAM teams operate independent of the radar and would take out any helicopters with ease. If they attempted an air assault with paratroopers, they would be shot dead before their chutes ever opened. We have a specialty team stationed in the upper cavern for just such a circumstance.” 

Battista nodded. “And the cliff approach?”

“My
sheikh
, in a thousand years, the five-hundred-meter sheer wall has never been climbed, even by our own people. It certainly cannot be scaled by an assault force with all their gear. In any case, we have sentries keeping an eye there as well.”

Battista was pleased with Abdullah’s thorough preparation. “Well done. Now we wait.”

Twenty-five thousand feet over Afghanistan

T
he passenger compartment of the V-22 Osprey was about the size of a school bus, with inward-facing seats designed to hold a twenty-four-man assault crew. There were only fourteen on board, but with all the extra equipment packed in around them, it was still a snug fit. 

It was two in the morning. The former SEALs, Tark and Willie, would make the high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) jump in a few minutes. The rest of them would land thirty minutes later.

Jake took a deep breath to steady his nerves. He hadn’t been this keyed up since prepping for his first combat mission over Iraq, the one that never happened. There was a big difference here, though. It was one thing to be going on a strike mission in his F16-E, knowing he’d be drinking beers a few hours later at the stag bar. He’d been thoroughly trained for that, especially the beer-drinking part. But now he was going in as a ground-pounder to infiltrate a heavily armed group of terrorists who would love nothing better than to rip him apart and dissect his brain. 

He adjusted the red-and-white
keffiyeh
around his head again, the style favored by Battista’s Afghan tribe. It felt awkward, though he had to admit the rest of his disguise was pretty comfortable—baggy pants, a long cotton shirt covered by a thick earthy-colored vest, and the head wrap, with its end trailing down his back like a long ponytail. His artificially darkened skin complemented the brown contacts he wore. 

Tony sat beside him, his eyes closed. Tony didn’t need the contacts or the fake tan to complete the disguise, but otherwise he wore pretty much the same getup as Jake, though he had a bandolier of 7.62 ammo strapped across his chest and an AK-47 by his side. The two of them would be going in together. 

Jake regretted that he’d had such little time during the long flight to refine his body mannerisms and colloquialisms with Azim. The entire mission depended on him talking his way into the facility in order to place Marshall’s flash drive into one of the terminals. If he didn’t get that done, the rest of the operation would collapse. 

Jake’s pulse quickened as his imagination dwelled on the prospect of making his way through the tunnel complex, with all that rock surrounding him—not a good idea for someone with claustrophobia. Thoughts of the tunnel getting smaller, the lights going out, of being immobilized in a cave-in, crushed—all set his heart to pounding. He clenched his fists on his lap.

 Marshall startled him with a rap on the shoulder. “You feeling all right?”

“Just a little gas.” Jake rubbed his stomach with the moist palm of his hand. 

“Good,” Marshall said. “Here’s my little miracle worker.” He handed Jake a small flash drive. “Plug it into a USB port on any one of the terminals in the security room. It’ll self-boot and a small password screen will pop up.”  

Jake pocketed the small drive.

Marshall unfolded two single-spaced pages of text and commands and handed them to Jake. “Then follow these instructions to the letter. Memorize it. It has to be exact.”

Jake studied the pages, locking them into his memory. Half a minute later, he handed them back.

“Got it.”

“That’s it?” Marshall said, holding the paper out. “You don’t want to keep this just in case?”