THE MIDDAY SUN BURNED DOWN
brightly on the Safed Koh mountains but didn’t completely strip away the lingering chill that hugged the high peaks and narrow trails. Winter hadn’t yet abandoned its grip on the land. Higher up, snow still covered the steep faces of the stony spires, and where Zalmai Yaqub had set up his trap, cold still radiated from the barren ground.
Yaqub lay prone on his stomach, elbows propped up to hold the binoculars he used to keep watch over the narrow passage that men and beasts of burden had trod over centuries of travel.
In his early forties, Yaqub had lived with war and strife all of his adult life. He had fought against the Russians with his father while little more than a boy, then against warlords and different governments that had tried to unite Afghanistan, and now against the Americans who thought they could do what their Soviet counterparts had not been able to do: break the country. He was lean and hard, capable of traveling overland on foot all day on only a mouthful of water if need be, and he knew a thousand ways to kill his enemies.
He wore a faded cloak over his gray
shalwar kameez
, the traditional long shirt and loose trousers of Afghan men. A turban covered his head, and his coal-black beard reached to midchest. Beside him, wrapped in a small blanket, the AK-47 assault rifle lay clean and ready.
A hundred and fifty meters away, looking like a smudge of shadow lying beside a big rock, Wali lifted his hand to signal the advance of their prey.
Yaqub signaled to his men, sending them all more closely to ground. He had trained them—every warrior who followed him—guided them in the ways of killing their enemies and worshiping their deity, taught them the need for their commitment not only to die for their beliefs but also to kill others with impunity. As their mullah, he had instructed them in the responsibility of
fard al-’ayn
, the individual duty concerning jihad. A man’s duty to God was to smite his enemies, and these men they hunted today were great offenders because they had turned away from their faith to pursue profit instead.
Moving slowly, holding the binoculars in one hand, Yaqub uncovered the AK-47 with the other. Only a short distance away, Faisal prepared the RPG-7. The rocket launcher would deliver swift death, and Yaqub did not intend a show of mercy. Everyone would die.
At the bend of the pass, a man appeared. He was young and lean, his face wrapped against the chill breeze that skated through the passage like a hunting hawk. He carried an American-made M16, and Yaqub chose to resent the man even more for that. The Western nations had equipped their allies for years, always turning the Afghan people against each other and against outsiders who did not follow the Western beliefs. Many of the weapons that Yaqub’s warriors carried had been captured during the war with the Russians. Al Qaeda armorers had learned to restore the rifles and keep them in peak condition.
Yaqub gently pulled the AK-47 into the ready position and flicked off the safety as the man continued his walk down the passage. Twenty meters behind the point man, the rest of the group followed, men and donkeys carrying the goods they intended to sell once across the Pakistani border.
The men were a mix of young and old. Yaqub was disappointed when he saw no Westerners among them. The men in the passage below were of the Northern Alliance, the collection of Afghan warlords that the Western powers had allied with.
The Northern Alliance was the weapon that the West had intended to keep aimed at the heart of al Qaeda. They were not friends of the West either, but the Northern Alliance did not like the true path of Islam. That way was too hard for the warlords, and they were weak warriors in Yaqub’s eyes. They were not given to holy pursuits.
As Yaqub saw it, a man who claimed to be Muslim yet did not act on the war with the West at the first chance offered could only be put to death for failing his sacred duty.
The men came closer. The man on point never hesitated, but he also did not neglect his duty. His head swung from side to side, but he was tired from marching all night in the cold, and Yaqub’s warriors were well hidden.
Fifty meters away, Yaqub slid his finger over the trigger and pulled through. The AK-47’s recoil was so slight and the rifle so well balanced that he hardly felt any movement. He fired two rounds at the lead man, watching him drop in his tracks, then shifted the rifle again to pick up other targets as the group broke for cover.
A few meters away, Faisal lifted the RPG-7 and readied his shot. The rocket lunged from the launcher, straight toward a luckless animal as it fought to get its head against its handler. The man held on to the lead rope as the donkey struggled and the packs on its back beat against it.
Then they vanished in an explosion that ran a river of fiery destruction in both directions along the passageway for a moment.
“Faisal!” Yaqub ejected the empty magazine from his assault rifle and shoved a fresh one home. “Do not shoot the donkeys carrying the cargo! Leave those!”
“Forgive me, Zalmai. I shot too soon.” Faisal laid the rocket launcher aside and picked up his rifle.
Knowing there was no use remonstrating the man for his mistake, Yaqub instead focused on shooting the caravan survivors. It would not matter if some of them escaped, and he was certain his men would not get them all now, but they were the enemies of his God and he did not want any of them to avoid the divine retribution he was delivering.
The caravan warriors knew they were in dire straits. They scattered like lambs, none of them attempting to gain control over the others and organize a defense.
Filled with the familiar bloodlust that fueled him, Yaqub rose to his feet and ran to the edge of the passageway as several of the caravan warriors tried to scale free of the kill box. He fired into them at point-blank range till the assault rifle cycled dry. Frustrated as the caravan men continued to rise, he dropped the AK-47 and gave ground before them.
“Faisal! To me!” Yaqub drew the Russian Tokarev holstered at his hip and fired it dry too, but by then, four men were almost on top of him.
“I cannot!”
A glance in the man’s direction showed that Faisal was in danger of being overrun as well. He, too, had dropped his rifle and was pulling his pistols.
Beseeching God, calling for holy wrath, Yaqub freed the
pesh-kabz
at his waist. The thick blade was broad at the hilt but tapered down to a near-needle point. In its initial design, it had been forged to penetrate armor, capable of sliding between the rings or the plates and plunging into the man under the defenses. Permutations of the knife had been carried for centuries.
The knife remained deadly in the hands of a warrior who knew
how to use it. Yaqub had learned his martial skills from his father, but several warriors over the years had contributed to his acumen.
Keeping the knife hidden at his side till the last moment, Yaqub continued stepping back before the onslaught of caravan warriors fleeing for their lives. Then he whipped the knife up into the nearest man’s throat, feeling the warm blood spill over his hand and run along his arm to his elbow.
Fear and the knowledge of his unavoidable death widened the man’s eyes. Setting himself, Yaqub put his weight behind his knife arm and pushed forward again, breaking the advance of the men. Yaqub grabbed the dying man’s coat in his free hand and whipped him to the left, into the path of the man on that side, as he slid the knife free.
Twisting, stepping back again, Yaqub looked at the warrior on his right. The knife got the man’s attention at once, and he brought up the American semiautomatic pistol. Fearlessly, Yaqub stepped forward into the man as his opponent’s arm extended, getting inside the instinctive response. Yaqub set his feet even though the pistol blasted almost in his ear, swiveled his hips, and drove the
pesh-kabz
into the man’s stomach.
Mortally wounded, the man folded over Yaqub’s out-thrust arm. The dying man’s hot breath and plaintive moan pushed into Yaqub’s ear.
“Death is upon you, you weak, traitorous dog!” Yaqub plucked the pistol from the man’s nerveless fingers, shoved his chest against the falling man to knock him away, and dragged the knife free as he raised his captured weapon.
Three men ran by Yaqub, avoiding the battle he waged upon them. He fired into their backs, emptying the pistol. They stumbled and fell, dead or dying, and he didn’t care. A short distance away, Faisal was desperately fighting to stay on his feet. Gunshots rang out between him and the men trying to barrel over him.
One of the men fell as Yaqub let go of the pistol and stepped
toward the scuffle. He moved in behind another of the men and thrust the long knife between the man’s ribs. He shuddered and went down. Striding over the corpse, Yaqub grabbed the beard of another warrior, yanked his head around, and pierced the man’s chin.
The next man turned to face Yaqub, whipping his rifle around, but the al Qaeda leader ducked beneath the blow and hacked at the inside of the man’s back leg with the knife. The blow caused the man’s leg to go slack. Yaqub grabbed the rifle and yanked it from the fallen man.
Managing the rifle one-handed, Yaqub aimed the weapon at the next man staggering up from the passage, then pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Snarling an oath, Yaqub flung the rifle at the man and went to meet him.
The man came to a stumbling stop, though, and fell forward on his face, shot by another of Yaqub’s warriors.
Breathing hard, the back of his throat alternately feeling frozen and too hot, Yaqub bent down and retrieved his rifle. He sheathed the
pesh-kabz
through his belt and shoved a fresh magazine into the AK-47. He walked to the edge of the passageway, knowing from the sporadic gunfire that the fighting was very nearly over.
He stood, swaying, over the narrow valley of carnage and looked down at the corpses and blood that lay strewn across the ground. He had lost men. He knew that. Losses were an acceptable part of his war. In his heart, he knew that he had been saved to continue the righteous work that had been laid before him. He would climb over the bodies of his enemies and the
kuffar
alike to reach the feet of God.
PIKE SAT AT A TABLE
in the United States Marshals Office and tried not to be irritated. He stared at the shuttered window on the other side of the room and wished he were back at the garage instead of here. At least there he could have been doing something worthwhile. Talking didn’t get much done, especially with the prosecutor assigned to the case that had brought him into the witness protection program.
“Is anything I’m telling you boring you, Mr. Morgan?”
Squelching an immediate and scathing response to federal district attorney David Clement, Pike eyed the man. “Pretty much everything you’re saying is boring me.”
Clement’s face turned red and his ears burned. He was in his late thirties, a guy who still viewed himself as on the way up in his job field. As a result, he was aggressive and a true pain. He was twenty pounds too heavy, soft from sitting at a desk job and pushing papers most of his days.
Pike knew the type and didn’t respect the man. During his juvie years, while shuttled out to various foster homes from the orphanage, Pike had seen far too many David Clements. They were happiest when they were checking boxes and filing paperwork. Men and women like Clement didn’t want to get to know the people involved or the circumstances that had brought them together. They just lived to churn paper.
Clement sat there in shirtsleeves and a tie, his hair moussed into place. His expensive briefcase lay on the table to his right. His tablet PC occupied the space to his left. Those were standards that marked Clement’s importance.
At least, they were supposed to be. Pike was bored of them as well.
Behind Clement, through the glass walls of the interview room, three US Marshals drank coffee and worked the phones at their desks. One of them was a woman Pike had seen before and thought was pretty good-looking. And she had a nice smile. He could tell from the smile that she went for bad boys. If she wasn’t careful, that would cost her one day.
“You know, that’s a pretty pitiful attitude you have there.” Clement narrowed his gaze and tried to look tough.
Pike could hear the silent “mister” at the end of the declaration that the prosecutor left out at the last minute. The decision was a good one. Leaving it in would have irritated Pike further and probably prematurely ended the conversation.
Pike eyed the man. “How do you figure?”
“We’re protecting you from people who want nothing more than to see you dead.”
Pike folded his hands together on the table and barely resisted the impulse to reach across the space and grab the man by his shirtfront. At Pike’s side, US Marshal Bill Dundee tensed up a bit and leaned forward. He was an older man, in his late fifties, and had a calm air about him that reminded Pike of Caleb Mulvaney, the Dallas homicide detective who had gotten Pike into protective services.
Dundee cleared his throat. “Maybe we could take a little break.”
“Is that what you think?” Pike’s voice was a low roar in the room. “That you’re protecting me?”
Clement was fast on the uptake, obviously realizing he’d screwed up, but he was too stubborn or too stupid to let go of it. Like a dog
that had shoved its head through a hole in the fence to get a bone but was unwilling to drop it when it wouldn’t fit back through. “Of course we’re protecting you. If not for the protection we provide, the Diablos would have killed you after they killed Peter Tull. You’d be dead by now.”
For a moment, Pike wasn’t in the interview room anymore. He was back in that roadside bar off Interstate 35 outside of Dallas trying to hold Petey together. Blood stink filled Pike’s nose, something he’d become familiar with, and something he could never forget.
Petey was trying to talk again, trying to say he was sorry for getting them crossways with the Diablos. And Pike knew in his heart that if Petey had gotten away with his score and they’d gotten down to Mexico the way he’d thought they would, Petey would have been laughing, buying the beer and the women.
That was a nightmare that played through Pike’s evenings on a regular basis. That scene was always there waiting for him, poised patiently to steal over him at a moment’s notice. As he held his friend, Pike remembered all the good years, back when Petey hadn’t gotten hooked on drugs and alcohol and playing against the odds. They’d been friends, sharing some of the same foster homes, sometimes at different times.
But all through that, they’d had each other’s back.
A sack of venom broke open inside Pike’s chest. He rose from the chair, surging to his feet like a lion, barely keeping himself on his side of the conference table.
“You’re not protecting me! The only reason I came to you people was so I could get
all
the Diablos responsible for killing Petey! Now three years have come and gone. Months ago, I was told I was done with this, that those guys who killed Petey were going away forever. Now you’re telling me that the prosecutor’s office wants to open that case back up, that those guys have cut a deal and are gonna walk?”
Pike still couldn’t believe that. Everything had been locked in. Now the legal team had dropped the ball and everything he’d done was for nothing.
“They’re not going to walk.” Clement strained to be calm, but his tone was so forced it was like he was talking to a child. “We’ve got a chance here to do some more good. To take down more of the Diablo organization, as well as some of the crime families they’re in bed with. I promise you, those guys who killed your friend will
not
walk. That’s not going to happen. We just need you to testify some more.”
Pike cursed and slapped the table with his open hand, causing Clement and Dundee to flinch. “I didn’t sign on to make a career out of this!”
“Yeah, you did. When you took on that new identity, you guaranteed your compliance.”
“Then there’s no more compliance.” The back of Pike’s neck felt hot.
“Their defense attorney is prepared to put guys on the stand who will say
they
killed your friend, not the men we put away.”
“They’re lying.”
“We know that. But it will end up being your word against theirs in a court of appeals. What we have to do is work together. We need you to leverage a takedown of more of the Diablos. We’ve got to get the whole organization, not a handful of guys.” Clement’s face hardened. “You’re going to do what we need you to do, Mr. Morgan. You’re going to play ball the way we tell you to.”
Teetering on the edge of control, Pike leaned across the table. “No, I’m not here for your
protection
.”
Dundee stood at Pike’s side. The marshal tried to take Pike by the arm.
Pike yanked his arm away, never shifting his gaze off the prosecutor. “Don’t expect to come down here and order me around like I’m somebody that belongs to you.” He regained control of his voice. “I
don’t. I’ve been my own since I can remember. You want to know the only man that’s ever
protected
me, Counselor?”
Clement looked pale and stared down at the tabletop. In the background, on the other side of the glass walls, the marshals went on alert. Situations arose pretty quickly in the office as tempers flared.
“Petey, that’s who. I had trouble, I didn’t have to look over my shoulder. Petey was there.”
Until the day I wasn’t there for him.
The thought hit Pike between the eyes like a sledgehammer. The guilt that he’d thought dead and buried for so long came screaming back like a Harley running straight dual exhaust, popping and snarling.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking you and these marshals are replacing Petey. You’re not.” Pike’s chest tightened. “You’re just a means to an end, brother. Nothing more. If you have a problem with me, we can call it quits right here. I’ll go on my way and take care of this situation myself. I’m not a big fan of your department right now.”
“Pike.” Dundee spoke calmly. “That’s not what he’s saying. That’s not what we want. They need you now more than ever.”
Clement evidently grew some courage with Dundee standing between him and Pike. “Did you threaten to kill the Diablos? Is that what you just did?”
Pike leaned around Dundee. “I didn’t threaten. That’s a promise.”
Clement looked at Dundee and shook his head. “My office can’t deal with this attitude, Marshal. Surely you see that.”
Dundee held up a hand. “Maybe you could just refrain from speaking for a moment, Counselor.”
“Me?” Clement looked apoplectic. “Marshal, I’m not the one who just threatened to commit murder or walk out on this arrangement, and I’m
not
the one who burned down a crack house.”
Dundee kept focused on Clement and spoke in a flat, no-nonsense voice. “Get some air, Mr. Clement.”
For a moment the attorney looked like he was going to argue; then he cursed, pushed up from the table, and stalked out of the interview room.
Without a word, Dundee leaned a hip on the conference table and crossed his arms. He held his silence for a time, then looked at Pike. “If it was up to me, I’d give you a commendation for burning down the crack house.”
Pike sat back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Denying knowledge of anything criminal was second nature to him.
Dundee smiled. “I didn’t think you would, but this office has had to dissuade a determined homicide cop in Tulsa from looking at you for that crack house. And he’s pretty certain you did it.”
“Look, if you guys were going to pull the pin on that, we’d already be at it. Nobody got killed in that crack house. How many people did those dealers kill while they were in operation? How many teenage prostitutes did they put into business? No, that crack house was a blight. It had to go, and the local PD didn’t seem overly concerned about it.”
“It’s not the crack house the DA is concerned about. They’re afraid that the other Diablos are going to figure out where we’ve got you stashed if you raise your profile. If those guys do learn where you’re at, you know you’re a heartbeat away from becoming a dead man.”
“I’m not worried about the Diablos.”
“Yeah, I didn’t figure you were. Clement out there thinks you’ve got some kind of death wish.” Dundee silently studied Pike. “You don’t, do you?”
“If I did, I’d have already been dead by now. You run the roads I do, dying gets to be pretty easy.”
Just ask Petey.
“Maybe. But Clement’s boss isn’t happy that you’re serving in the Marines either. The Marshals Office had to work long and hard to close that deal. Being a Marine isn’t exactly a low profile.”
No, it wasn’t, but being in the Marine Reserve—getting to go overseas to handle different theaters of action—had helped keep the edge off. Putting the crack houses out of business had helped too. If Pike could have, he probably would have joined the Marines full-time for a while because now that Petey was gone, he didn’t know what to do with himself, but his record prevented him from a full-time bid at the moment. The Marines didn’t know exactly who he was, and they were a selective breed. Pike respected that about them.
“I’m not a guy who’s going to sit on his hands, Marshal.” Pike kept his voice low and level, but the anger inside him still struggled to get out. He hated these meetings. They underscored his helplessness to get all of Petey’s killers. “I told you that when Mulvaney brought me to you people.”
Dundee chuckled. “That you did, Pike, but I guess we weren’t expecting you the way you are. You’re kind of raw.”
“I say what I mean.”
“A little tact might help.”
Staring through the glass walls, Pike watched Clement as he spoke on his cell phone and gestured in short, explosive movements. The man clearly wasn’t happy.
“Is the DA going to make a deal with the Diablos?” Pike asked the question almost offhandedly, like he didn’t truly care. But the pure truth of the matter was that he only stayed put right now to make sure the Diablos who killed Petey got taken down. He thought he’d accomplished that, and now it was about to slip through his fingers.
“Yeah, he is if he has to. But it doesn’t have to come to that, Pike. They need you to work with them some more, tell them more about the Diablos and their organization. If you do this—if you can deliver—they’ll take the Diablos gang down.”
“Then why hasn’t that already been done?”
Dundee sighed. “Because the Diablo biker gang is turning out to be more connected than anyone had thought. Besides the drugs and prostitution rackets you told us about, that gang is tied in pretty tightly with human trafficking and the Mexican cocaine cartels. The Diablos are running product and money up I-35 and across I-40.”
“So? Sounds like more reason to take them down.”
“If the prosecutor was just after the Diablos, sure. But now he’s not just after them. He wants more. Your testimony gives us some of the Diablos through the murder of your friend. Guys who are important to the organization, but they can be replaced. Subsequent investigation has netted us inroads to the trafficking networks, but the prosecutor has to have one to connect the other. You’re the connection. That’s why the prosecutor’s office doesn’t want you getting inadvertently burned by the Tulsa PD. We lose you, we lose the house of cards the prosecutor has been building for the last three years. Believe me, nobody wants to give that up.”
Pike understood that because the situation had been explained to him dozens of times. In fact, he’d been counting on it to keep him from getting into any serious trouble.
“The prosecutor doesn’t want those guys you put away back out on the street either. He’s coming up on an election year, and he’s not going to settle for getting the small players the Diablos want to dangle out there for him when there’s so much more ripe fruit hanging on low branches to be plucked by anybody savvy enough to figure it out.” Dundee shrugged. “So that means you have to cool your heels a little longer and let justice take its course.”
“Any idea how soon that’s going to be? Because justice has been dragging its tail for the last three years.”
“All I’m told is soon. And to be ready so I don’t have to get ready.”
“The DA’s getting greedy.” Pike shook his head. “I’ve seen that
happen too many times to guys with more on the ball. He’s going to screw around and not be able to prove anything.”