Brute Force (3 page)

“Kadir was our transportation out of here,” Yaqub said, looking at Jiàn Z
u. “His men will give us a ride, but without him, we may need your contacts more than ever.”

The snakehead’s wispy mustache twitched under a pointed nose.

“You may be of some use after all.” Ehmet pointed a bloody hand toward the demolished wall. “Come. We have an appointment with a dragon.”

 

 

Alberto Moretti would die on the Savage Mountain. He’d known it for years—since he was sixteen. Sitting at the wobbly table in the glow of the command tent, he leaned a whiskered face against an open palm. Weary eyes squinted under the glaring hiss of lantern light. The chapped tip of his bandaged finger traced the route his team would take to the summit. He could envision each step—the different camps, the exact spots they would set ropes, the famous Bottleneck where climbers would traverse the face under a deadly serac—tons of hanging ice—before making their final push to the summit.

As an Italian, Moretti felt a special kinship with the naked chunk of rock and ice that loomed at the head of the valley. It was, after all, a team made up of his countrymen who had reached the summit first in 1954. Moretti had already climbed Everest—twice, the last time two years before, summiting on his thirty-fifth birthday. But all three of his bids to conquer K2 had ended in failure. The second highest and, arguably, the most deadly of the 8,000-meter peaks simply refused to admit him.

And Moretti was not alone. For every four climbers to reach the top, the Savage Mountain took a life. If you wanted the respect of the world, you climbed Everest. If you wanted the respect of other mountaineers, you climbed K2.

And climbing it was just what Moretti intended to do—if the rest of his group would ever arrive.

It had taken him the better part of a year to recruit a multinational team. Klaus Becke, a longtime climbing partner and friend, would be his second in command. The big German had radioed that he’d brought along a girlfriend. Moretti shrugged away any ill feelings over adding someone to the expedition this late in the game. Klaus was a showoff, but the most competent climber the Italian had ever seen. If he needed a pretty girl to cheer for him while he worked, Moretti didn’t care—so long as they made their weather window. July was going by awfully fast and K2 always seemed to grow angrier in August.

The porters had already made the five-day trek back down the trail to Askole, promising to return at the appointed time to help the expedition off the mountain. So far, eight members of the actual team had arrived in base camp—two Chinese climbers, two brothers from Wyoming, one Ukrainian, and the lone climber from Alberta, Canada. DuPont, the hulking Belgian, had wandered off again, doing whatever security professionals did in the wee hours of the morning. Considering the political climate in Pakistan, Moretti had not argued with the American brothers on the team when they suggested he hire someone to take care of security. Emile DuPont, a former legionnaire, if his story was to be believed, smiled more than Moretti would have thought for someone who was paid to have a fearsome look. Still, the Belgian was a huge man with a powerful military bearing and a sly smile that said he considered lesser men as food if the need ever arose.

And then there was Issam, the cook. He was a gaunt thing, stooped, with a dragging limp and a copper tint to his skin only slightly lighter than the Balti porters. Black eyes and a full beard made it difficult to pinpoint the man’s ethnicity. In broken English, Issam had introduced himself as a Moroccan. He generally kept to himself, but there was an air about the cook that put Moretti on edge, as if he was standing in the path of an avalanche. In truth, this dark man was much more frightening than their Belgian security guard.

Issam was, however, a dependable cook. Even now, when the Godwin-Austen valley was still cloaked in the indigo shadows of dawn, metal pots clanged and rattled in the adjacent cook tent where the Moroccan prepared breakfast tea and chipati, the thin, unleavened bread of the Karakoram.

The noise made Moretti hungry. He stood and stretched his back with the long groan of a man who’d spent half his life sleeping on the ice, then poked his head out the tent flap. The imposing pyramid of K2 dominated the northern landscape. The tip of its eastern summit was a brilliant orange with the rising sun.

A distant cry drew his attention back to the south, toward the Baltoro and the lower camps at Concordia. At first he thought it was an eagle, but the sound grew louder as someone in a bright yellow parka half ran, half staggered from the valley shadows toward the camp. Moretti realized it was a woman screaming for help.

And she was not alone.

Less than two hundred meters down the valley, nine men trailed her through the shadowed boulders like persistent ants. Green military uniforms stood out against gray rock and dirty snow. The men moved methodically, not wasting their breath. Soon, their quarry would reach the base camp—and run out of places to go.

Moretti nearly jumped out of his skin when the Moroccan cook began to bang on a tin plate with a metal spoon, rousing the rest of the camp.

The Italian turned in a complete circle, hand on top of his head, scanning the barren ice and rocky crags that surrounded him.

“Where the hell is DuPont with his gun?” His whisper escaped on a terrified gasp.

The woman in the yellow parka was surely Klaus Becke’s type. As she drew nearer, he could see that she was tall with long brunette hair and the gaunt features the German liked so much. Even in the high-altitude base camp, she increased her speed when she neared the tents and stumbled up to Moretti five minutes after her first screams carried into camp. She slumped forward, hands against her knees, speaking between wheezing gulps of thin air.

Other climbers in camp began to emerge from their tents.

“They . . . killed everyone,” the woman panted. “I’ve . . . never seen any . . . thing . . . like . . .” She cast her eyes around the camp. “Klaus said . . . you have . . . gun. . . .”

“Klaus?” Moretti rolled his lips, fearing her answer.

“Dead.” The woman looked from tent to tent, then over her shoulder at her pursuers. Her voice was shredded, hoarse from her ordeal. “They . . . cut off his head. Please . . . tell me you have a gun.”

“DuPont, our security specialist, has one.” The Italian nodded. His eyes were glued to the uniformed men picking their way across the rock-strewn glacier toward camp.

Hands still on her knees, the woman looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot, her voice pleading. “Where is he?”

“I wish I knew,” Moretti said.

The woman sank to the ground. Moretti reached down and helped her back to her feet as nine frowning men strode into camp. Three of them were swathed in blood—the beheaders. The Italian sighed. He would indeed die on K2, but it would not be the mountain that killed him.

The apparent leader of the group, a man with a Fidel Castro cap, ordered all the climbers to form a line in front of the cook tent. A thick man with a fearsome black beard that was long enough to be shoved sideways in the morning breeze, he introduced himself simply as Khan. As if bragging about his intentions, he explained that his men were members of
Junood ul-Hifsa,
the jihadists who’d claimed responsibility for the cleansing at Nanga Parbat and the recent beheadings of two infidels posted online. The Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS—to intelligence officials these were all different and unique terrorist groups, but from the viewpoint of a neck with a knife to it, one militant Islamist was the same as any other.

The Ukrainian climber vomited when he heard the news. A murmured hush ran through the line. Moretti couldn’t help but think how much they all looked like the receiving end of a firing squad.

Khan seemed particularly interested in the woman they’d chased into camp, running her name together as “Lucyjarrett” when he spoke to her. It was only then that Moretti recognized her as a reporter he often saw on the American news. A media luminary, Jarrett would make a fine trophy head for a bunch of attention-seeking terrorists to display on an Internet video.

“How fortunate to find you here, Lucyjarrett,” Khan said. He reached to stroke the trembling brunette’s hair where it was pasted with sweat and tears to her pallid cheek. The action bordered on tender, but the cruel edge in the man’s voice made Moretti sick to his stomach.

“The US media speaks much evil of sacred things!” Khan drew back his hand as if he’d touched something filthy. “It is a blasphemy, worse than murder or fornication!”

Eyes clenched shut and trembling to the point that she looked as if she would collapse, Jarrett gave a frantic shake of her head. “You’ve never heard that talk from me.”

“Shut your mouth!” Khan spat. He threw a glance over his shoulder. A bony man to his right let a Kalashnikov rifle fall against the sling around his neck and took a small camcorder from his military jacket. He spread his legs as if to brace himself while he powered up the camera, then nodded when he was ready.

Khan’s lips curled into a half grin. “Perhaps you have not uttered the words, but you will pay for the sin.”

Two of the militants moved along the line, securing everyone’s hands in front of them with plastic zip ties. Moretti considered struggling, but thought better of it when one of them seemed to read his mind and prodded him in the ribs with the barrel of his gun.

Stepping forward, Khan grabbed Jarrett by the hair and yanked her head backwards, exposing her neck. Moretti gathered himself to lunge. He couldn’t let them murder her without doing something. They were all dead anyway.

But before he moved, the Moroccan cook wagged his head in blatant disgust at the far end of the line. He said a few words in Arabic, and then began to speak in perfect English, absent the affected pidgin he’d always used to communicate with Moretti.

“This is cowardice!” the Moroccan said, speaking clearly and loud enough to cause Khan to pause. “She is unarmed and a guest in this country. As such she is subject to your hospitality.”

Khan’s chest heaved at the insult. His face darkened behind the beard. “I had thought to let you live if you were a good Sunni,” he said through clenched teeth. “But you will die alongside the American whore and her friends.” He smiled at the ashen woman as he drew a curved blade from his belt. “Your death will be slow and painful, so that others may—”

Moretti watched as the Moroccan cook ignored Khan’s diatribe and gave a slow and exaggerated nod.

The Italian flinched as the militant leader’s head snapped back from some unseen force, breaking like a melon struck with a hammer. With little left to hold it in place, the Castro cap fell to the ground. Something moist sprayed Moretti in the face. A moment later, the crack of a distant rifle echoed off the glaciers.

—Motto of the Mayotte Detachment,

French Foreign Legion

 

 

 

 

J
ericho Quinn began to move an instant before the 150-grain bullet thumped into Khan’s head. Standing at the far end of the line of prisoners, he knew Thibodaux would pull the trigger at his signal. Quinn also knew the round from the big Marine’s FN SCAR 17 would travel fast enough that there would be no apparent gap between Khan’s death and the death of the young jihadist who stood across from him.

Quinn was a dark man. He’d never been one to carry extra pounds, but months of living as a fugitive had left him with deep hollows in his cheeks and a hungry look. At thirty-six, the first flecks of gray had invaded a full black beard and the temples of his shaggy hair. The copper complexion of his Apache grandmother and his fluency in Arabic made it easy for him to pass himself off as a Moroccan. In reality, he was an agent with the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations or OSI. At least he had been before he’d become a fugitive.

The young jihadist across from Quinn flinched at the sudden thud of the bullet that plowed through his commander’s skull.

Hands bound, Quinn stepped forward, sweeping his foot inside the kid’s left knee and grafting downward. This sudden pressure bent the leg and forced the jihadist into the beginnings of a spin. Hands together, Quinn grabbed the rifle, trapping the young militant’s fingers and snaking his own thumb into the trigger guard as he twisted the weapon in a tight arc. The hapless kid continued to spin until his back was to his compatriots, making him a convenient human shield.

Quinn stepped in as the jihadist fell, bringing the short Kalashnikov up, firing as the muzzle moved across his opponent’s chest, stitching him with at least three rounds. Flinching from the impact and the concussion of the muzzle blast just inches from his ear, the young man abandoned his grip on the rifle and tried to push away. Quinn let him fall, engaging the line of remaining terrorists with short bursts from the Kalashnikov.

Jacques Thibodaux, the United States Marine Corps gunnery sergeant posing as a Belgian security specialist, worked methodically from a hide in the rocks above camp. Issued to Marines in the Special Operations Command, the FN SCAR was a Belgian design, so it made sense that a Belgian soldier of fortune would have such a rifle. Thibodaux took out the leader and two others while Quinn saw to the rest. Roughly four seconds after Thibodaux’s first round had entered Khan’s head just beneath his nose, seven other terrorists lay dead on the glacier. The last surviving attacker, a twentysomething youth with a great swath of blood on his chest from the recent beheading, abandoned his weapon and fled, careening down the boulder-strewn glacier as fast as his legs could carry him. He was not much older than the boy bleeding to death at Quinn’s feet, but with a much fuller beard. Quinn recognized the fleeing man as Abu Khalifa, a Pakistani Taliban wanted in connection with the murder of thirty-three primary school children during a school massacre the month before. The young militant zigzagged on the loose gravel in an effort to keep from getting shot. It was a useless effort. If Marines were anything, they were expert riflemen. Had Thibodaux wanted to take him, Khalifa would have only died with sore ankles.

Lucy Jarrett sank to her knees, her shoulders wracked with sobs. The brothers from Wyoming worked to free themselves from the restraints while other climbers fell back to the gravel, blinking in amazement that they’d survived. Alberto Moretti rubbed a trembling hand across the stubble on his face. His mouth hung open as he stared at Quinn.

“You are not from Morocco,
signore
,” he whispered.

Quinn pulled his hands loose from the zip tie. “Yes,” he said. “I am not.”

Jacques Thibodaux trotted into camp a moment later. The massive Marine carried the desert-tan FN SCAR rifle in one hand and a small black satellite phone in the other. He looked sideways at Quinn. “Are you whole, Chair Force?” he asked, his Cajun accent palpable in even a few words.

Quinn tossed the zip tie on the ground and rubbed his wrists to get back the circulation. “I’m good.”

Thibodaux whistled under his breath, looking at the body count. “I’d have sore feet if I kicked as much ass as you.”

Quinn ducked into the cook tent to retrieve a small backpack, which he slung over his shoulders. He eyed the diminishing dot that was Abu Khalifa.

Thibodaux fished a black patch from the pocket of his pants. “Glad that’s over,” he said. “I was gettin’ tired of pretending to see out of my bad eye.” Broad shoulders and muscular arms filled a navy-blue commando sweater. Close-cropped hair and an impossibly square jaw gave no doubt that he was a military man. The black patch only added to the intensity of the gaze from his good eye.

“
Miiiitzica!
” Moretti gasped in the Sicilian equivalent of
pleeease
. All this new information, fresh on the heels of nearly being murdered, had knocked the man for a loop. “And you are not from Belgium?”

Thibodaux gave the astonished Italian a shrug. “I ain’t never even been there,
cher
,” he said. “Shit!” The Cajun gave a sheepish grin and passed the satellite phone to Quinn. “I about forgot. The boss wants to talk to you.”

Quinn took the phone, looking at the screen while he adjusted the tilt of the antenna to get a better signal. A cold wind from the glacier blew against his face.

“Hello?”

“News?” Winfield Palmer asked. The national security advisor to the former president was not the sort of man to exchange pleasantries. Driven to find those responsible for the assassination of his friend and former boss, he had no time for anything but information that moved the investigation forward. The fact that he was in hiding from the current administration—and harboring the director of the CIA, who was also a fugitive—only added to his curt demeanor. The simple stress of knowing that you only had a few moments, even on a secure line, before the NSA or some other government agency unraveled the code on your call, was enough to give lesser men a heart attack. The satellite phone functioned as a portable version of an STE or Secure Terminal Equipment, scrambling the signal with a morphing code that had to be keyed into each separate handset in order to decipher it. Speakers could use plain talk for a time, but at the end of the day it was still government encryption. Some NSA nerd would eventually find a way to hack the program if they stayed on the line too long.

Quinn’s eyes flicked from the bodies of the dead terrorists and down the valley to the fleeing survivor. “Things got a little wild here for a few minutes. We do have one Abu Khalifa in our sights, so that’s something. I’m hoping he should lead us to something more solid.”

“Let the Pakistanis worry about Khalifa,” Palmer said. “There’s been a development.”

Quinn was normally unflappable, but he perked up at that particular word, especially since it made Palmer blow off a high-value target like Abu Khalifa.
Developments
were never a good thing where Win Palmer was concerned. Good things didn’t develop. They fell off the radar. Situations that were likely to get Quinn killed qualified as developments.

“The boys we transferred from Gitmo are in the wind,” Palmer said, referring to the Fengs, Uyghur prisoners the new US President had turned over to Pakistan. It was just one more way the POTUS found to try to stir up a war with China, who insisted they had the moral right to try the Uyghur prisoners as terrorists for bombing a passenger train in Xinjiang Province. President Hartman Drake had been beating the war drum for months—and the escape of these terrorists was likely to push the Chinese President over the ledge.

“All three escaped?” Quinn asked.

“Just the brothers,” Palmer said. “Evidently the cousin died shortly after they arrived in Pakistan. But two of them are bad enough.”

“When was the escape?”

“Last night,” Palmer said. “From Dera Ismail Khan.”

“You’d think they’d learn,” Quinn mused, remembering the Taliban attack on the same prison in 2013. “Any idea which way they’re heading?”

“Mariposa is working on that problem for us,” Palmer said, sniffing like he had a cold. “She’ll come up with something soon.”

Quinn couldn’t help but smile at Palmer’s code name for Emiko Miyagi—
Mariposa
, the Spanish word for butterfly. Thibodaux had scoffed when he heard it, saying she was more like “One of those Japanese hornets-of-the-terrible-stinging-death.”

Not much over five feet tall, every inch of her was what Thibodaux called badassery and bitchitude, but Quinn respected her as the warrior that she was. Both men had learned the hard way that fighting Miyagi was like doing battle against a chainsaw.

“Roger that,” Quinn said. If there was something to be found, he knew Emiko would find it.

“Listen.” Palmer’s voice was distant, as if he were mulling over some bit of news and deciding whether or not to share it with Quinn on the phone. “There’s a good chance these guys are heading back to China. I don’t have to tell you how important it is that you find them before they wreak enough havoc to convince the Middle Kingdom it’s time to have a go at World War III. . . .” Palmer broke into what sounded like a ragged tubercular cough.

“Are you doing okay, sir?” Quinn said. He’d never considered the idea that Winfield Palmer was subject to the ravages of disease that plagued normal human beings.

“I’m fine,” Palmer snapped, a little too quickly and sounding far from it. “Call me back when you know something. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you found these guys before they get out of Pakistan.”

He ended the call without another word.

Quinn folded the antenna and stood for a long moment, staring at the looming black pyramid of rock at the head of the valley.

“What?” Thibodaux shrugged, palms up, waiting to hear Palmer’s news.

“Grab your pack,” Quinn said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

Moretti stared down the glacier, still wearing his hand on top of his head like a hat. “I must call the authorities. . . let them know what has happened,” he muttered. “There are dead to tend at Concordia camp.”

Quinn touched the Italian’s arm. “I need you to wait a few hours before you call anyone,” he said.

“Wait?” Moretti turned to look at him, incredulous. “That murderer has a head start. If I wait, he will slip away.”

Quinn nodded down the trail, then looked back at Moretti. “We need to talk to him. To try and find out who’s behind this attack.” He shot a glance at Thibodaux. “Once the Pakistanis have him, he’s gone.”

Lucy Jarrett looked up from where she sat slumped on the ground with her head between her knees. Tears plastered her hair against swollen cheeks. She shook her head, in a deepening daze, her eyes narrow and accusing.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said with the clogged nose of someone who’d been crying for half a day. “If you knew they were going to attack, why weren’t you waiting at Concordia? You could have saved Klaus . . . and the others.”

Jacques gave a shake of his head, kneeling down in the rocks to lay a wide hand on the woman’s shoulder. It was nothing short of amazing that a man as large and intimidating as Jacques Thibodaux could somehow muffle the dangerous aspects of his nature and turn himself into a giant teddy bear. Quinn supposed having seven young sons had given the Marine plenty of training.

“I wish we would have,
cheri
,” Thibodaux said in a quiet voice Quinn knew was capable of uprooting trees. “But the information we had said these guys would attack when everyone had formed up here at base camp. We thought they had access to a helicopter, so we assumed they’d come directly here.”

Jarrett stared into the morning air, her breath forming a vapor cloud around her blank face. She said nothing, because there was nothing more to say. Death, especially the death of a friend, was impossible to process quickly. Quinn knew that all too well.

“I will give you two hours,
signore
,” Moretti said, hand on top of his head again. Hatred began to chase the stunned look from his eyes as he stared down the valley. “But that one killed my friends. He must not get away.”

“Oh,” Quinn whispered, his eyes falling to a sobbing Lucy Jarrett. “He won’t get away.”

He gave a quiet nod toward Thibodaux, letting him know it was time to move. Neither man would say it in front of anyone in the climbing party, but the massacre at Concordia was the least of their worries. No matter how much he wanted to follow Abu Khalifa all the way back to Jalalabad, Quinn’s first priority was find the Feng brothers, and with any luck avert a war with China.

Stepping away from the others, he opened the antenna on the secure satellite phone. To locate the Feng brothers, he’d need transport, and the quickest way to get that was to call a particular wing commander in the Pakistan Defense Force. The last time they’d seen each other, Quinn had knocked out the other man’s tooth.