The Sixth Man (55 page)

To Michelle, Novel # 21, ready, load, launch! We did it again.

To Mitch Hoffman, my “Sixth Man.”

To Emi Battaglia, Jennifer Romanello, Tom Maciag, Martha Otis, Chris Barba, Karen Torres, Anthony Goff, Kim Hoffman, Bob Castillo, Michele McGonigle, and all at Grand Central Publishing, who support me in every way.

To Aaron and Arleen Priest, Lucy Childs Baker, Lisa Erbach Vance, Nicole James, Frances Jalet-Miller, and John Richmond, for helping with everything from A to Z.

To Maja Thomas, for realizing long ago that ebooks are definitely for real.

To Maria Rejt, Trisha Jackson, and Katie James at Pan Macmillan, for helping me to roll in the UK.

To Steven Maat at Bruna for taking me to the top in Holland.

To Grace McQuade and Lynn Goldberg, for superb publicity.

To Bob Schule, for your eagle eye.

To Kelly Paul, I made your character really tall, which you’re not, and also really smart and cool, which you definitely are.

To Eric Dobkin and Brandon Murdock, I hope you enjoy your namesakes’ roles, and the various charities certainly benefited.

To the Harkes Family, for the use of your name and for being great friends.

To Lynette and Natasha, and you know why.

And a special thanks and welcome to Kristen White, as the newest member of the team.

F
ORTY-FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS
.

That was how much the crate weighed. It was off-loaded from the tractor-trailer by forklift and placed in the back of the smaller box truck. The rear door was closed and secured with two different locks, one a key, the other a combo. Each was rated to be impervious to thieves.

The man climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck, closed the door, started the engine, revved the motor, cranked the AC, and adjusted his seat. He had a long way to drive and not much time to get there. And it was hot as hell. Maybe hotter.

He would have preferred an armed escort, perhaps an Abrams tank for good measure. The air was so hot that waves of visible heat shimmered in spots. The ground was rocky and, in the distance, mountainous. The roads were bad, highway amenities were nonexistent, and he was on his own. He had guns and plenty of ammo. But he was only one man with only one trigger finger.

He no longer wore the uniform. He had taken it off
for the last time about an hour ago. He fingered his “new” clothes. They were worn and not overly clean. He pulled out his map and spread it out on the front seat as the tractor-trailer pulled away, the forklift inside the trailer and secured.

He was now alone in the middle of nowhere in a country that was also, largely, in the middle of nowhere.

Other than the ninth century,
he thought.

As he stared out the windshield at the imposing terrain, he briefly thought about how he had ended up here. Actually, it was quite straightforward.

He had volunteered for the job.

Back then it had seemed brave, even heroic. Right now, he felt like a fool for accepting a mission that had such a low chance of survival for him. But wasn’t that, by definition, heroic?

Yet did he really want to be a hero?

The answer was irrelevant. He was here. He was alone. He had a job to do and he had better get to it.

In addition to the map he had GPS. Out here, though, it was spotty, as though the satellites above didn’t even know this was a country where people might need to get from point A to point B. Hence the old-fashioned paper version on the front seat.

He put the truck in drive and thought about what was in the crate.

More than two tons of very special cargo. It would carry him a long way. And it better. Without it he was certainly a dead man. Even with it, he might be a dead man.

He wondered again at his sanity for accepting this task. As he drove along the bumpy road he calculated
he had twenty hours of hard driving ahead of him if he hoped to get there in time.

They would be waiting for him. The cargo would be transferred and he would be transferred along with it. If they let him live. And that was largely up to him. Communications had been made. Promises given. Alliances formed.

That had all sounded good in the endless meetings with people in shirts and ties, their smartphones jangling nonstop. Everything seemed official, cut and dried,
t
’s crossed,
i
’s dotted, signed, sealed, and delivered.

Out here alone with nothing around him except the bleakest landscape one could imagine, it all sounded delusional.

He worked his way toward the mountains in the distance. He carried not one piece of personal information on him. Yet he did have papers that should allow him safe passage through the area.

Should,
not
would.

If he were stopped before he reached his destination he would have to talk his way out of it if the papers were deemed insufficient. If they asked to see what was in the truck, he had to refuse. If they insisted, he had a little metal box with a black matte finish. It had one red button on it. When he pushed that button he and everything else within a hundred square meters would disappear into vapor.

That was just the way it had to be. He did not want to push the button and be transformed into vapor. What sane person would?

He drove for twelve straight hours and saw not a
single living person. He saw one camel and one donkey wandering around. He saw a dead snake. He saw a dead human body, its carcass being reduced to bones by vultures. He was surprised there was only one dead body. Normally, there would have been a lot more. This country had certainly seen its share of slaughter.

During the dozen hours he saw the sun set and then rise again. He was heading east, so he was driving right into it. He lowered the visor on the truck and kept going although he was tired and his eyes were heavy. He played CD after CD of rock music, blasting the truck cab. He played Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” twenty times in a row, as loud as his ears could stand. He smiled every time the baseball announcer’s voice came on. It was a little bit of home out here. Who could have imagined?

Still his eyelids drooped and he kept jolting back awake after his truck had strayed across the road. Luckily, there was no other traffic. There were not many people who would want to live around here. Foreboding would be one way to describe it. Dangerous would be another, more accurate, one.

Dante’s
Divine Comedy
might be the best description of all. He was clearly not in
Paradiso
or even
Purgatorio
. He was smack in the
Inferno
part. Only he lacked the poet Virgil to show him the way.

Thirteen hours into the trip he grew so tired that he had decided to pull off the road and take a quick nap. He had made good progress and had a little time to spare. But when he saw what was coming his weariness vanished. His nap would have to wait.

The open-bed truck was approaching directly in
front of him, the vehicle placed squarely in the center of the road, blocking passage in either direction.

Two men sat in front and three stood in the bed, all holding subguns. They were coming on fast; he had no possible way to avoid them. He had known this might happen.

He pulled partially off the road, rolled down the windows, let the heat waves push in, and waited. He turned off the CD player and Meat Loaf’s baritone vanished.

The smaller truck stopped beside his. While two of the turbaned men with subguns pointed their weapons at him, the man in the truck’s passenger seat climbed out and walked to the cab door of the other vehicle. He also wore a turban; the bands of sweat seared into the material spoke of the intensity of the heat.

The driver looked at the man as he approached.

He reached for the sheaf of papers on the front seat. They sat next to his fully loaded Glock with one round already in the chamber.

“Papers?” the man asked in Pashto.

He handed them through. They were straightforward and appropriately signed and distinctively sealed by each of the tribal chieftains who controlled these stretches of land. He was counting on it that they would be honored. He was encouraged by the fact that in this part of the world not abiding by a chieftain’s orders often resulted in the death of the disobedient ones. And death here was nearly always brutal and never entirely painless.

The turbaned man was profusely sweaty, his eyes red and his clothes as dirty as his face. He read through
the papers, blinking rapidly when he saw the august signatories.

He looked up at the driver and appraised him keenly. He spoke first in Dari and then in Pashto. The driver answered solely in Pashto.

The papers were handed back.

The man’s gaze went to the back of the truck, his look a curious one. The driver’s hand closed around the small black box.

The man spoke again in Pashto. The driver shook his head and said that opening the truck was not possible. It was locked and he did not have a key.

The man pointed to his gun and said that that was his key.

The driver’s finger hovered over the red button.

He said in Dari, “The tribal leaders were clear. The cargo could not be revealed until its final destination. Very clear,” he added for emphasis.

The man considered this and slid his hand down to his holstered sidearm.

The driver’s finger grew closer to the button as he watched the other man.

He tried to keep his breathing normal and his limbs from twitching, but being seconds from getting blown into oblivion did certain physiological things to the body that he could not control.

The man finally withdrew, climbed back into the truck, and said something to the driver. Moments later the truck sped off, kicking up dirt behind its rear wheels.

He waited until they were nearly out of sight, heading in the direction opposite to his, and put the truck back into gear. He drove off slowly at first, and then
punched the gas. His weariness was gone. Every sense he had was at its highest acuity.

He didn’t need the music anymore. He lowered the AC because he suddenly felt rather cold.
Perhaps from having Death in such close proximity
?

He followed his directions, keeping to the exact route. It did not pay to stray out here. He scanned the horizon for any other pickup trucks coming his way, but none did.

He could imagine that word had been communicated up and down the line here that the cargo truck was to be given safe passage.

Nearly eight hours later he arrived at his final destination. The dusk was starting to gather and the wind was picking up. The sky was streaked with clouds and the rain looked to be a few minutes from pouring down.

When he arrived here he had expected one precise thing to happen.

It didn’t.

T
HE FIRST THING
to go wrong was that his truck ran out of gas as he pulled into the stone building’s rear door. He had extra fuel tanks, but someone had miscalculated.