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Shangri-la

The cleric, interpreter and one of the two guards left the tent, extinguishing all the lights except a single candle. Al-Zahrani put his arm around Camille's waist and pulled her close. His breath smelled, even from a few feet away. She met his lips and kissed him violently, channeling her anger into passion, seducing him into lowering his defenses. His mouth tasted like an old tennis shoe and his beard and moustache were steel wool, scratching her face. When she couldn't stand it any longer, she leaned her head back, inviting him to kiss her neck. She giggled, visualizing the soft sounds of bubbles rising to the surface in her witch's cauldron.

Keeping her bound hands pressed together so he couldn't see the nail, she touched his face with the sides of her little fingers and rippled her hands down his body as if she were a belly dancer. She stopped short of his hard-on.

Gross
.

Al-Zahrani shouted something to the guard as he shoved her down onto his sleeping mat and tore off the 5.11s she had left on underneath the jilbab. The guard blew out the candle.

His vigilance was waning.

Good
.

Just before the guard left the tent, al-Zahrani pinned her down. He groped at her breasts, shoving the jilbab up around her neck. Camille's hate was acid burning in her belly. She wanted to fight back, but she knew she had to force herself to play it out until the opportune moment. As soon as he got bored with her breasts, she would work her hands up into position. She prayed he wasn't a breast man who would linger forever. There was an artery in the stomach, but she doubted she could find it.

Playing with his chest hairs totally disgusted her, so she gave herself a break and worked her hands up to his beard, but when she got there it still had food in it and she didn't want to touch it. Just as she started to doubt if she could pull it off, he let her slip her arms over the top of his head and move her wrists right where she wanted them—behind his occipital bone at the lower back of his skull. She would've preferred to snap his neck, but it was impossible from that angle.

His cock pressed against her, trying to enter her. She wasn't in position yet and she had to get this right because she couldn't stomach this again. Wiggling her hips away, she evaded it while she put her right leg on his hipbone. Her foot there kept him stabilized so she could scoot slightly to the left and maneuver her arms into position.

Her forearms rubbed against his neck, underneath his ears and he laughed. She bent her right arm, bringing it down to her chest and pulling his head closer. As hard as she could, she thrust the nail at the sweet spot behind his left ear.

 

Al-Zahrani moved his head. She missed and the nail flew from her sweaty hands. He didn't notice. He shoved her foot off his hip bone and pushed hard into her. She was as dry as the Kyzyl Kum and it hurt like hell. The fucker had her pinned down like a pro wrestler.

She turned her head to the side and waited.

 

In less than two minutes, he pulled out and called for the guards and the interpreter. They were inside his tent within seconds. Al-Zahrani said something to her as he stroked her hair. She jerked her head away from him and turned her back to him and she pushed down the jilbab. The interpreter said it meant that she pleased him and they would stay married for the next three days.

At least they weren't going to kill her tonight, though the way she felt, it would've been welcome. She would have at least two more chances to take him out and thoroughly disgust herself in the process.

She could do just about anything, but not this again. She had to find a way to take out the fucker tonight.

 

Two of the guards escorted her from al-Zahrani's quarters. She forced herself to focus on situational awareness and not how utterly miserable she was feeling because she had to remain in control of her emotions if she was going to succeed.

They passed two huge tents with men sleeping on the ground inside. Nearly as many bedded down on mats outside to get away from the heat. She had seen another barracks on the other side of al-Zahrani's tent and estimated that the camp held three to four hundred tangos.

The last tent before the dark void between her shack and the compound was more of a canopy like the ones used in big weddings back home. Weddings—she couldn't let herself think about weddings. And they were
not
married.

Under the canopy, three dozen men sat on oriental carpets in four different groups. Each of them had an AK within arm's length and several wore belts with short daggers hanging off them. Some had Korans open in front of them, though she couldn't imagine that they could see to read from the few kerosene lamps scattered about. They stopped their debates long enough to watch her march by. She could feel their hate.

It was mutual.

 

One guard walked ahead of her, the other behind. Even after she had passed the last tent, she found no openings to escape.

They arrived at the shed and shoved her inside without tying her feet back up—her first lucky break of the day, she consoled herself, even though all she wanted to do was collapse on the ground and cry.

The shed was pitch black, but gradually she sensed someone else in with her.

42° 09' 25.95 N, 62° 56' 52.31 E (Uzbekistan)

Hunter was feeling queasy when the Pave Hawk deposited him, G
ENGHIS
and Ashland at the release point on the other side of the rock ridge from the tango camp. Expecting to feel amped since he was only a three and a half kilometer hike from Stella, instead he fought away a nagging concern for her. He had done scores of extractions and he always went into them convinced that they could handle whatever came at them, but this one worried him. These stakes were too personal. As he humped the three kilometers around the ridge to the camp, he fought to get Stella off his mind and think of her only as their mission objective, codename G
RACKLE
. It didn't do much good. However he reframed it, he was still on his way to rescue the woman he loved.

The passage between the two open pits was a mound of soft sand that slowed them down. As they rounded the base of the ridge, Hunter could see the compound in the distance through the night vision device. It was a new moon and Hunter was happy he didn't have too much ambient light messing with the night vision goggles. The PVS-14 helmet-mounted monocle was far superior to the old PVS-7 head-mounted goggles that Rubicon had supplied him with. Camille didn't cut corners with her equipment. Tonight he hoped her investment would pay off.

 

Hunter carried a rucksack with a half-dozen Claymores. Despite his injuries, G
ENGHIS
wore a pack with the blasting cap assemblies. The spools were light, but the hundreds of feet of wire made them bulky. Ashland was traveling light, looking like a tango with a knock-off Adidas duffle bag. They were two kilometers from the far edge of the camp and Ashland had fallen behind. At least it was easy running. The ground was hard and level, packed down by tons of earthmoving equipment.

“How you doing?” Hunter ran alongside G
ENGHIS
. He didn't show any signs that his earlier injuries were affecting him, but he was the type who would never show it until he keeled over.

“Better than Ashland,” G
ENGHIS
said. “You trust him?”

Hunter laughed. “He's the fucker who started this mess. Burned me bad. Was afraid I'd blow his cover because I recognized him.”

“You think there's a chance he's working with the tangos?”

“Even with what you did back at the crash site, you're still the one I want watching my back.” Hunter jogged past him.

 

The Pave Hawk flew out of the crater and dropped Iggy off on the desert floor, upwind and a kilometer from the start of the ridge above the compound. He was relieved that the desert floor there was hard like in Iraq and he supposed that had to do with the way the winds whipped up from the crater, sweeping the rim clean. Whatever the reason, he was grateful. The M240G medium machine gun weighed enough on its own and the ammo cans were like carrying car batteries: dense, concentrated weight that didn't help the blisters on his stump. But Iggy knew it wasn't really the heavy, awkward gear that was irritating him as he jogged to his position. He had lost seven men in a stupid accident that had cut his team in half. The team was smaller than he knew he should be working with, but for Camille, he was willing to take the risk. He hoped to god those bastards hadn't messed her up too much yet, but he knew what they did to women—and to men.

Several minutes later, Iggy set down his gear and looked over the ridge at the terrorist camp. Through his night vision monocle, he found the reflection of the square inch of glint tape attached to the top of Hunter and G
ENGHIS
' helmets. It would be invisible to the tangos without night vision equipment, which he hoped they wouldn't be using. He could see they were approaching the training grounds on the edge of the camp.

Aside from the drop-off one hundred meters behind him, the spot was ideal: He was in range and sight of the entire compound. The tangos seemed to be slumbering away or at least they weren't loitering about. He took out his binoculars for a quick scan of the perimeter. Their only sentry post with four men was set up at the entry to the pit, but that was over a kilometer away from the camp.

The tangos were a trusting bunch.

Working as fast as he could, he set up the 240-Golf's tripod and bore-sighted the AN/PVS-17 night vision scope so that the crosshairs were aligned with the barrel. He fed the first rounds of the ammo belt into the machine gun.

“C
HALK
O
NE
this is T
IN
M
AN
. In position and standing by,” he said over the encrypted radio.

“Copy that,” Stone said.

With everything ready, he took out his thermal binoculars to confirm that they were targeting the right tents with the Claymores. The desert landscape held onto the summer heat as if it remembered the chill of the Uzbek winter and it made most things look shades of yellow and orange, but the dark red of body heat couldn't be mistaken. He guessed he was looking at three to four hundred tangos, snoozing away in three tents.

Now Iggy could start searching for Camille. Prisoners tended to be kept separated from others and he hoped to find a structure with only a few heat signatures inside. A terrorist training facility was not the type of place that usually held prisoners, so that made it even more likely they'd lock her up somewhere alone—if they hadn't already killed her. He shoved that thought from his mind as fast as he could.

He started with the structures closest to the entrance of the mine and worked his way toward the raiding party. In each structure he picked up several bodies and assumed they were tangos sleeping wherever they could find a good spot. The body density was far greater than he was looking for, so he kept scanning.

In the middle of the camp, he found something. The pattern appeared to be a single individual with two others positioned less than three meters away. He swapped the thermal imaging binoculars for standard night vision ones. The structure appeared to be a small tent, but it was difficult to see much more because of the camouflage netting blowing in the wind. The pattern was consistent with a prisoner being held by two guards, but he couldn't imagine anyone stupid enough to hold a prisoner in a tent. It was more likely the camp's head honcho. He radioed Stone instructions for one of them to check it out after they had infiltrated the camp. Switching back to the thermal binoculars, he kept searching.

Please be alive
.

Shangri-la

“Hunter?” Camille said in an intentionally weak voice, just in case it wasn't him. Then fell to the ground, pretending to whimper as she moved toward her cache of buried nails. No one answered, but she heard breathing and kept herself turned toward it while she ran her fingers along the exposed wooden frame, searching until she found the knot that marked where she had buried the nails.

“Cut the bullshit, Camille.”

Joe Chronister.

“Joe? Thank god you're here.” She lied. She had no illusion that he was there to rescue her. If he was in the heart of the terrorist camp, it could only mean that he was somehow working with the tangos. The only question was, was he working on his own or with the CIA? At that moment, it didn't matter much. All she really cared about was surviving to wreak revenge on al-Zahrani. Her fingers sifted through the sand until she found the nail. “He raped me.”

“Stay where you are. I've got a Glock trained on you in case you can't see it.”

He shined a flashlight on her. She squatted, so he couldn't easily see that her legs weren't tied and she contorted her face before she looked up. He had a false beard and was dressed like a
muj
in a dishdashah. As a smart operative, it was a safe assumption that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. She would have to plan her attack accordingly. She shielded her eyes with her forearm, holding up her bound hands to help paint the picture of a distraught female prisoner. It wouldn't take much acting.

“You shouldn't have come here, Camille. You fucked things really good. I set you up for a nice little excursion to Ukraine. You would've kept your pretty ass safe.”

“He violated me, Joe.” Her voice cracked and she whimpered. She forced herself to flashback to al-Zahrani rooting around on top of her and let herself feel the pain until she started crying.

“Pretty impressive operation, we've got here, isn't it? You're one of the few people who can really appreciate the brilliance of what I've got going on here. Everything you see here—Rubicon is pulling the strings.”

Camille cried harder, then started sobbing. She fell into the part far too easily. She knew she was in danger of believing herself a victim and losing her edge. She pulled herself back and began moaning, breathing through her mouth as if she couldn't stop crying.

“Enough of the fucking theatrics. You listening to me?” Joe stepped closer.

Camille rocked herself as she whimpered. Joe Chronister was not someone she had ever thought of as needy, but she realized then that he had a strong need for her to appreciate his work. The more she ignored him, the more he talked.

“I told al-Zahrani he could keep you a couple of nights so it didn't look bad in front of the boys, then you're coming over to us at B
ALI
H
AI
. It's our duck blind that we use to keep an eye on this goddamn place. It's also a prison—and a well built one I might add, thank you KGB. It's a hundred feet down inside an old gold mine that dates back to tsarist times. B
ALI
H
AI
is the jewel in our newly privatized little gulag chain. With Congress and that
Post
reporter Dana Priest breathing down our neck about Agency-run black sites, we're putting them under new management—privately-run prisons, just like stateside. You don't even need presidential approval when the other motherfucker is the one who's doing it. That's the beauty of outsourcing—plausible deniability. Gotta love it.”

She looked up, counting on her puffy eyes. “He raped me. They had AKs. They pinned me down and held me,” Camille said in a near-whisper. “They held me while he…” She gasped for air and then continued “raped me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Is this for real? You're sniveling like my goddamn wife, for christssake. Pull it together, Camille. What the hell happened to fuck you up like this so fast?”

“Al-Zahrani,” she whispered as quietly as she could. “He, he…raped me.”

“I can't hear you. What'd you say?”

Chronister bent down toward her and Camille sprang.

She shoved the nail deep into his left eye as she twisted her body at a forty-five-degree angle so she would be clear in case he managed to discharge the weapon. He screamed and the flashlight fell to the ground as he raised his hands up to his eye. Camille put her hands over the hand that was holding the gun. She guided his right hand across his chest underneath his left armpit to avoid any bulletproof vest, then she twisted his wrist into a downward angle. She pulled the trigger, sending a round through his heart and lung.

“That's for Jackie and the others, you asshole,” Camille whispered before letting him drop.