Page 19 of The Devil's Ransom

“Why can’t I just kill both of them? Be done with this?”

“Haqqani wants Jahn Azimi alive. He wants to administer justice personally. That is your mission. If he is killed, don’t bother coming back, because Haqqani will do to you what he wanted to do to Jahn.”

Chapter12

Jennifer circled the cable car parking lot, letting us get a quick shot of the atmospherics of the area. The sun was beginning to set, throwing shadows everywhere, but I could still see about twenty cars in the lot, meaning it was going to be crowded up top. Hopefully, the gazebo was as off the beaten path as Carly seemed to think it was. I most definitely would have liked an earlier trip just to conduct a reconnaissance of the area, but the time was too short, so I’d be seeing it for the first time like everyone else.

Jennifer parked, and Carly pointed to an alley leading up the hillside, blocked by a simple length of chain on two steel poles. Carly said, “That’s the road. You can go get a visual of the lock once the team is set and I leave.”

Driving the Rover behind us, Veep pulled into the parking slot to the right. I exited the vehicle and waved him and the rest of the team over to the hood of Jennifer’s vehicle. I said, “Okay, nothing in the plan has changed. Knuckles and I will go up top and get eyes on the gazebo. Veep and Jennifer stay down here to conduct exfil. Brett, you head to the restaurant at the old cable car terminal. Keep eyes on until you see the target take the stairs and give us a call.”

I turned to Carly and said, “I’ll give you a call once I’ve cleared the area and see no threats. You’re the stationary element, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the wave-off?”

She held up a hat, saying, “This on my head. No hat, and meeting is a go.”

Every meet had a stationary element that set up the site—usually the one who’d called the meeting, in this case, Carly—and a moving element, the source or asset that was coming to talk. Once the site was set up, an intricate dance would play out, with a far signal indicating whether the meet site was secure or dangerous. In this case, it was a simple hat. Carly bareheaded meant the man could approach. The hat on her head would tell him to keep moving and reestablish contact because there was a threat, which was my job to determine.

His far-side recognition was simply a male with a child. He’d approach, and then the near-side dance would commence. A give-and-take of verbal phrases that would ensure both were who they said they were. Once that was done, Carly would signal me on the radio, and I’d call Jennifer. Twenty minutes later, we’d all be happy campers headed back to our aircraft at the dig. Two hours after that, we’d be in the air, mission complete.

At least that was how it was supposed to work, but the enemy always got a vote, no matter how hard you planned.

I looked at my watch and said, “Guess we’d better get going. Comms check.”

Individually, one by one, each team member called me, ending with Carly. I said, “Good to go.” I turned to Knuckles and said, “Ready?”

“Yeah. Let’s roll.”

Knuckles and I left the vehicles and went toward the cable station. We passed the rusting ticket room, going up some concrete stairs past the defunct cable car, still hanging on its steel towline,stoically waiting on someone to board. Something that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Knuckles pointed to a second staircase, one that was much wider, with flagstones of granite instead of concrete. It snaked up the hill less steeply than the one next to the cable car, a landing after every tenth step or so. We started up it, seeing at every level a marble monument to the left and right, the pictures of soldiers embedded into the rock like a tombstone. Knuckles said, “What do you suppose that is?”

I said, “I think it’s the pictures of Tajikistan soldiers that received the Soviet Union’s version of the Medal of Honor. But I could be wrong. Either way, it’s dead guys from the war.”

Fifteen minutes later we reached the top, seeing the World WarII monument spilled out in front of us, the area having a large amphitheater with the monument itself a long dark granite wall running down the length, gold Cyrillic lettering under a hammer and sickle describing what I assumed was the valiant fight during the war. The amphitheater had a little bit of a crowd, with families eating picnics on blankets and packs of teenagers sitting around like stray cats, smoking cigarettes and sneaking nips from bottles.

I pointed at a path leading away from the memorial, the single track disappearing into the foliage, saying, “Gazebo is supposed to be down that way.”

Knuckles and I took the path and entered the woods, the sounds from the amphitheater becoming muted by the vegetation. Eventually, we reached a small open area on a cliff, the gazebo right on the edge.

Small, maybe fifteen feet across, it was made of black iron with a wooden bench running around the circumference inside. To the left of it was a one-lane blacktop road, running to the back of thememorial itself. To the right the path continued on deeper into the woods, the setting sun causing shadows that made it hard to see. Which was good for us.

I pointed at the road and said, “That’s exfil. Let’s find a place to set up.” We left the path, went behind a patch of scrub, and Knuckles got in the prone, looking under the foliage toward the gazebo. He said, “This’ll work.”

I got down next to him, looking not at the gazebo, but at any avenues of approach behind us. I didn’t want a surprise lurking here in the bushes. The wooded area became much denser behind our position, to the point that we’d definitely hear someone coming from the rear.

The path to the right of the gazebo gave me some concern, but we could see down it a fairly long way, about fifty meters, and it was coming from the bottom of the hill, which meant it wouldn’t be in play. Any threat coming up from the bottom would be pre-planned, which wasn’t in the cards. The only threat we had to worry about was someone following our target into the meet site because they knew who he was. Anyone using that path would be a pack of teenagers sneaking around after sunset, and we were only early warning. All I’d have to do is call off the meet if someone came up.

I got on the net and said, “Meet site is clear. Nobody in the gazebo, and nobody around.”

Carly came back and said, “Thirty minutes until linkup.”

“Then you need to start moving. It took a good fifteen minutes to get up here.”

We settled down behind the copse of bushes and began to wait. I heard Brett call that he saw Carly on the stairs, then after a few minutes saw her coming down the path. By now the sun wasbelow the horizon, but there was enough nautical twilight to see clearly. She sauntered down the dirt track not looking around, not trying to find us, which was expected.

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