Dead or Alive

  “Risky move.”

  “Maybe, but maybe not as risky as sticking around the same place, knowing the odds were probably catching up to me. If you move and set up shop somewhere else, you not only stay free, but you’re also able to keep your hands in the pot.”

  Chavez was silent for a few moments. “You’ve got a good head, Jack.”

  “Thanks, but I kinda hope I’m wrong on this. If I’m not, something big may be coming down the road.”

  They’d managed to survive the storm, but it had been too close for comfort, the boat having been nearly battered to its breaking point. Four hours after they’d entered the squall, they broke through its western limits, finding themselves in calm water and blue skies again. Vitaliy and Vanya had spent the remainder of the day and part of the evening after they’d put ashore checking the boat for damage but finding nothing that would require them to return to port. And even if they had, Vitaliy wondered if Fred would have permitted it. His sacrifice of his man had been a shock to Vitaliy—not so much the decision itself but rather the lack of emotion it had evoked in Fred. These were serious, serious men.

  The lighthouse was their objective, though he still had no idea why anyone would want to go there. Situated atop Cape Morrasale on the Gulf of Baidaratzkaya, it wasn’t a particularly important navigation aid—not anymore, at least. There had once been a settlement here, probably a monitoring station for the nuclear tests on Novaya Zemlya, and some commercial fishermen had tried to make a go of it, but that had lasted only four seasons before the men and the boats had moved west to better grounds. The charts showed ten to twelve fathoms of water, and so there was little danger of running aground, and besides, most boats had Western-made GPS navigation to keep them in safe waters.

  His passengers were checking with their truck now, testing the engine and the A-crane. It should have offended him, what they planned to do, but he didn’t fish here, and nobody he knew did.

  He could just see the light, blinking away every eight seconds, just as the chart said it did. Once they reached their destination beach, the lighthouse would be less than a kilometer away, up a spiral switch-backed road that led to the top of the cliff. That was going to be the worst part, Vitaliy knew. No more than three meters across, the roads were barely wide enough to accommodate the GAZ.

  Why come here? he again wondered. The seas alone were daunting enough, but the journey by truck over this wasteland was a job for neither the fainthearted nor the irresolute. While it would take Fred and his men only ten minutes to reach the lighthouse, he’d told Vitaliy to expect they would be gone for the day, if not overnight. What could they be doing that would take so long? Vitaliy shrugged off the question; not his job to wonder. It was his job to drive the boat.

  Sea conditions looked glassy-flat, and the slapping of shore waves against the steel sides of his landing craft was hard to hear. On deck, his charter party was brewing up coffee on a small, gasoline-powered stove they’d brought with them.

  With a throaty rumble from the diesels, Vitaliy shifted the engines to reverse and increased the throttle, grinding away from the gravel beach. After a hundred meters, he turned the wheel to bring his boat about, and then consulted his gyrocompass before turning again, this time on a heading of zero-three-five.

  Vitaliy lifted his binoculars and swept the horizon. Not a thing in sight that God didn’t Himself put here, except for a buoy or two. The winter ice often swept them away or ground them into pulp, sending them to the bottom, and the Navy didn’t trouble itself to replace them as they should, because nobody came here in a deep-draft ship. Another indicator of just how far into the wildlands they were.

  Four hours later he opened the side window and called out, “Attention! Landing in five minutes.” He pointed to his watch and held five fingers out. He got a wave from Fred in reply. Two members of the party went to the truck to start the engine, while two others started throwing their duffel-bagged gear in the back.

  Peering through the window, his eye picked a spot to aim his boat for, and he came in at about five knots, enough to be properly beached but not so hard as to jam his bow hard on the stones.

  About fifty meters out he unconsciously braced for the impact and stopped his propeller. He hardly had to bother. The T-4 hit bottom, not too hard, and quickly came to a stop with the mild grinding sound of gravel on steel.

  “Set the anchor?” Vanya asked. There was a fair-sized one on the stern for hauling the boat loose of a sticky shore.

  “No. It’s low tide, isn’t it?” Vitaliy answered.

  They throttled the diesels down to idle, moved to the ramp-control lever, and bled the hydraulics. The ramp dropped under its own weight and crashed down on the beach. The beach gradient was fairly steep, it appeared. Hardly a splash of water when the ramp went down. One of the men climbed into the GAZ’s cab and pulled it forward, brake lights flashing as he navigated the ramp, then pulled onto the gravel, the chain waving off the end of the crane like the trunk of a circus elephant. The truck ground to a stop. Fred and the rest of the men walked down the ramp and onto the beach—save one, Vitaliy now saw, who stood at the top of the ramp.

  Vitaliy left the wheelhouse and walked forward. “You’re not taking this one?” he called to Fred.

  “He’ll stay behind to lend a hand if you need it.”

  “No need. We’ll manage.”

  In reply, Fred simply smiled and lifted his hand in a wave. “We’ll be back.”

  45

  CLARK TOOK IT AS a sign of his advancing age that he’d grown increasingly intolerant of air travel. The cramped seats, the bad food, the noise . . . The only thing that made it remotely tolerable were the Bose noisecanceling headphones and a horseshoe neck pillow he’d gotten for Christmas, and a few tablets of Ativan Sandy had given him for the trip. For his part, Chavez sat in the window seat, eyes closed as he listened to his iPod Nano. At least the seat between them was empty, which gave each of them a little more elbow room.

  After his discussion with Hendley and Granger, he’d found Ding, brought him up to speed, then called Mary Pat’s cell and arranged to meet her at home later in the afternoon. At her urging, he arrived early and shot the breeze with Ed for an hour before she arrived. While Ed started dinner, Clark and Mary Pat retreated to the back deck with a pair of beers.

  Ignoring Hendley’s “tread carefully” warning, Clark laid his cards on the table. They’d known each other too long for anything less. Mary Pat didn’t bat an eye. “So Jack did it, huh? Always wondered if he’d gone through with it. Good for him. Well, they didn’t waste much time snatching you two up, did they? Who tapped you?”

  “Jimmy Hardesty, about ten minutes after Alden canned us. The thing is, Mary Pat, I think we’re working on the same puzzle. If you’re not okay with cross-decking whatever intel we dig up ...”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “For starters, we’ll be breaking at least three federal laws. And be risking the wrath of the Aldens at Langley.”

  “If we can get this asshole—or even get a little closer to getting him—I’ll be fine with that.” Mary Pat took a sip of her beer, then glanced sideways at Clark. “Does this mean Hendley’s footing the bill?”

  Clark chuckled. “Call it a gesture of goodwill. So what’s it going to be? A onetime deal, or the beginning of a wonderful friendship?”

  “Share and share alike,” Mary Pat replied. “Bureaucracy be damned. If we have to put our heads together to get our man, so be it. Of course,” she added with a smile, “we’ll have to take credit, seeing as how you guys don’t exist and all.”

  Half a tablet of Ativan and a beer helped Clark pass the last five hours of the flight in a deep, untroubled sleep. As the plane’s wheels bumped and squelched on the Peshawar airport’s tarmac, he opened his eyes and looked around. Beside him, Chavez was stuffing his iPod and paperback into his carry-on.

  “Time to work, boss.”

  “Yep.”

  Surprising neither of them, thei
r passage through the airport’s customs and immigration line went slowly but without incident. An hour after entering the terminal, they were outside at the ground transportation curb. As Clark raised his hand for a cab, an accented voice behind them said, “I would advise against that, gentlemen.”

  Clark and Chavez turned to see a lanky white-haired man in a powder-blue summer suit and a white plantation hat standing behind them. “The cabs are death traps here.”

  “You would be Mr. Embling,” Clark said.

  “Indeed.”

  Clark introduced himself and Chavez, using first names only. “How did you—”

  “A friend e-mailed me your flight information. After that, it was simply a matter of looking for two chaps with the appropriate air about them. Nothing obvious, mind you, but I’ve developed something of a . . . radar, I suppose you would call it. Shall we?”

  Embling led them to a green Range Rover with tinted windows parked beside the curb. Clark got in the front passenger seat, Chavez in the back. Soon they were pulling out into traffic.

  Clark said, “Forgive me, but your accent—”

  “Dutch. A throwback to my service days. There’s a significant Muslim population in Holland, you see, and they’re fairly well treated. Much easier to make friends—and stay alive—as a Dutchman. A matter of self-preservation, you see. And your covers?”

  “Canadian freelance writer and photographer. Spec piece for National Geographic.”

  “That’ll do in the short term, I suppose. The trick to blending is to look as though you’ve been here awhile.”

  “And how do you do that?” This from Chavez.

  “Look scared and disheartened, my boy. As of late, it’s the Pakistan national pastime.”

  Care for a quick tour of the hot spots?” Embling asked a few minutes later. They were driving west on Jamrud Fort Road, moving toward the heart of the city. “A little who’s who of Peshawar?”

  “Sure,” Clark replied.

  Ten minutes later they pulled off Jamrud and headed south on Bacha Khan. “This is the Hayatabad, Peshawar’s version of your South Central Los Angeles. Densely populated, impoverished, very little police presence, drugs, street crime ...”

  “And not much in the way of traffic laws,” Chavez said, nodding through the windshield at the zigzagging stream of cars, trucks, man-hauled carts, and mopeds. Horns honked in a nearly continuous symphony.

  “No laws at all, I’m afraid. Hit-and-runs are almost a sport here. In years past, the city’s made some effort to lift the neighborhood, mind you, but they never seem to get any traction.”

  “Bad sign when the police stop showing up,” Clark observed.

  “Oh, they show up. Two or three cars pass through twice a day, but unless they see a murder in progress, they rarely stop. Just last week they lost one of their cars and two officers. And when I say ‘lost,’ I mean they vanished.”

  “God almighty,” Chavez said.

  “Not around here,” Embling muttered.

  For the next twenty minutes they drove ever deeper into the Hayatabad. The streets grew narrower and the homes more ramshackle until they were passing huts of corrugated tin and tarred-over cardboard. Vacant eyes watched Embling’s Range Rover from darkened doorways. On every corner, men stood clustered, smoking what Clark assumed wasn’t tobacco. Garbage lined the sidewalks and blew down the streets, pushed along by dust devils.

  “I’d be a whole lot more comfortable armed,” Chavez murmured.

  “No worries, my boy. As luck would have it, the Army’s Special Service Group is fond of Range Rovers with tinted windows. In fact, if you look behind us right now, you’ll see a man running across the street.”

  Chavez turned around. “I see him.”

  “By the time we reach the next street, doors will be slamming.”

  John Clark smiled. “Mr. Embling, I can see we’ve come to the right person.”

  “Kind of you. It’s Nigel, by the way.”

  They turned yet again and found themselves on a street lined with a mixture of cinder-block stores and multistoried homes of unbaked brick and wood, many of whose façades were either fire-blackened or pockmarked with bullet holes, or both.

  “Welcome to extremist heaven,” Embling announced. He pointed at buildings as they drove past, reciting as they went the names of terrorist groups—Lashkar-e-Omar, Tehreek-e-Jafaria Pakistan, Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan, Nadeem Commando, Popular Front for Armed Resistance, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen Alami—until he turned yet again, where the list continued. “None of these are official headquarters, of course,” he said, “but rather something akin to clubs, or fraternities. Occasionally the police or the Army will come in and conduct a raid. Sometimes the targeted group goes away altogether. Sometimes they’re back here the next day.”

  “How many in all?” Clark asked.

  “Officially . . . almost forty and counting. The problem is, the ISI is doing the counting,” he replied, referring to the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s version of the CIA. “Military intelligence to some extent as well. It’s the proverbial fox-guarding-the-henhouse scenario. Most of these groups either receive funding, or resources, or intelligence from the ISI. It’s become so convoluted that I doubt the ISI is counting wickets anymore.”

  “That damage back there,” Chavez said. “From police raids?”

  “No, no. That’s the work of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. They are without a doubt the biggest dog on the block. Any time one of these guppies swims in the wrong pond, the URC comes in and swallows them up, and unlike with the local authorities, when that happens, the group stays gone.”

  “That’s telling,” Clark replied.

  “Indeed.”

  Through the windshield, a few miles away, they could see a plume of smoke gushing into the sky. They felt the crump of the explosion in their bellies a few moments later. “Car bomb,” Embling said lightly. “Average three a day here, plus a couple mortar attacks for good measure. Nightfall is when things get truly interesting. I trust you can sleep through gunfire, yes?”

  “We’ve been known to,” Clark replied. “I have to tell you, Mr. Embling, you paint a bleak picture of Peshawar.”

  “Then I’ve given you an accurate portrayal. I’ve been here on and off for nearly four decades, and in my estimation Pakistan is at a tipping point. Another year or so should tell the tale, but the country’s about as close to being a failed state as it’s been in twenty years.”

  “A failed state with nuclear weapons,” Clark added.

  “Right.”

  “Why do you stay?” Chavez asked.

  “It’s my home.”

  A few minutes later Chavez said, “Back to the Hayatabad . . . What I’m wondering is who doesn’t live there?”

  “And a good question it is,” Embling said. “Though it’s a subjective measure the three big players here—the URC, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Sipah-e-Sahaba, formerly Anjuman—are generally clustered around the Peshawar cantonment—the Old City—and the Saddar area. The closer to the cantonment they are, the more dominant they are. The URC currently holds that title.”

  “As luck would have it, we’re primarily interested in those areas,” Clark said.

  “Imagine that.” A smile from Embling. “My house is just outside the cantonment, near Balahisar Fort. We’ll have a spot of lunch and talk shop.”

  Embling’s houseboy—a term Clark had trouble wrapping his head around, despite knowing it was common here—Mahmood served them a lunch of raita, a yogurt and vegetable salad; lentil stew; and kheer, a rice pudding, to which Chavez took a ravenous liking.

  “What’s the boy’s story?” Clark asked.

  “His family was killed during that bad business following the Bhutto assassination. He’ll be going to Harrow in Middlesex next year.”

  “That’s a good thing you’re doing, Nigel,” Chavez said. “You don’t have any—”

  “No.” Curt.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to
stick my nose in your business.”

  “No apology necessary. I lost my wife in ’79, when the Soviets invaded. Wrong place, wrong time. Who’s for tea?” Once he’d poured everyone a cup, he said, “What’s it going to be, gentlemen? Person, place, or thing? What you’re after, I mean.”

  “For starters, a place. Places, plural, actually,” Clark replied. From his briefcase he pulled out a digitally enhanced copy of the Baedeker’s map, then pushed aside the cups and saucers and unfolded it on the table. “If you look close—”

  “Dead letter drops,” Embling interrupted. He saw Clark’s and Chavez’s astonished expressions and smiled. “In the ancient days of espionage, gentlemen, dead drops were our bread and butter. Three-dot cluster for drop-off; four for pickup?”

  “Reverse that.”

  “How recent is this map?”

  “No idea.”

  “So we have no way of knowing whether the drops are still active. Where did you—”

  “In the mountains,” Chavez replied.

  “A dark and dank place, I’m guessing. The previous owners—were they present?”

  Clark nodded. “And did their damnedest to destroy it.”

  “That’s a point in our favor. Unless I’m off the mark, the three-dot clusters aren’t intended so much as a pickup location as they are a pickup signal.”

  “Our thought as well,” Clark replied.

  “Is your interest in what’s being dropped off and picked up, or who’s doing either or both?”

  “The who.”

  “And do you know the signal?”

  “No.”

  “Well, in all probability, that’s the least of our worries.”

  Chavez asked, “How so?”

  “We’re not so much interested in the signal’s correctness as we are in identifying who takes an interest in it. In that case, we’ll have to chose our location carefully.” Embling went silent, clicking his tongue and staring at the map. “Here’s my suggestion: We take the afternoon on doing a little recce—”