Savage Deadlock. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ military directly, rather than coming through Foreign Affairs, there was an extra layer of interference to run before the matter came to me. An extra layer that had something to say, and doesn’t want to relinquish that say.”

      “Bureaucratic bull, Hal. It has nothing to do with me. I have a job to do, and although there’s nothing wrong with our military, they’re on display and there are things that they just can’t be seen to do that I can.”

      Brognola grimaced. “I understand, Striker. Hell, I agree with you. But—and this is crucial—they have a very good case for keeping an eye on this. Yasmin may not want to come willingly. Okay, so you could just extract her like she was a captive, but that might make further negotiation with her difficult for both the Pakistani administration and for ourselves. However, what if there was someone with you who had worked alongside her at MIT? And what if that person was also female, and so more likely to be able to relate to the issues that drove Yasmin to such action?”

      “Come on, Hal—it’s not about her being a woman, but are you seriously suggesting I take a civilian into what might as well be a war zone?”

      Brognola coughed. “That’s the thing, Striker—the woman I have in mind isn’t a civilian. She’s a soldier. A serving officer. A little like General Sandila, she has a physics degree as well as a military rank. She’s a captain.”

      “What kind of combat experience does she have?”

      “Two tours of Afghanistan. She’s familiar with that part of the globe. Even if she hasn’t actually been into Balochistan, she does at least have an understanding of the territory, both physical and political.”

      “It’s better, but it’s still not ideal.”

      “It’s a done deal, Striker. She’s here, waiting. Captain Tamara Davis.”

       Chapter Four

      It happened on the sixteenth day. Maybe she was tiring of the wait and her mind was wandering? Maybe she was beginning to realize that idealistic dreams were one thing, but actually making them happen required a skill set that was completely alien to her? Whatever the reason, Yasmin had let her vigilance slip, and it was disastrous for the whole group.

      Yasmin had been on night patrol. Along with Benazir Suri, a former politics student who had become radicalized while studying the Red Army Faction and believed that some of their tactics in 1970s Germany could be applied to Pakistan in the 2010s. It was dubious reasoning, in Yasmin’s opinion, but perhaps it was a measure of both her naivety and her desperate desire for change.

      For both women, the harsh reality of living in a camp in the hills had been a wake-up call. Adjusting to rough living after a wealthy upbringing and academic life was proving to be hard. It might have seemed a little more worthwhile if their movement was gathering steam, but several of the women in the group—the villagers who had run from virtual slavery and who had the knowledge and skills that Suri and Yasmin sorely lacked—were frustratingly taciturn and patient. They were content to sit and wait.

      The terrain around them was not the lush riverside that Yasmin had been used to. As they traveled farther from the river’s lifeblood, the streams became trickles that snaked in and out of rock, running too deep in places to be easily accessed. The steeply rising crags of rock made it hard to gain sustenance from the ground or seek shelter from the extremes of heat and cold. The moss, lichens and tufts of wiry grasses offered little for the emaciated goats that roamed the area. The few villages in the region scraped an existence off the land and the goats that young shepherds nervously gathered in, keen to avoid the wrath of any bandits who found camp and fought their desultory battles in the unforgiving landscape.

      As the sun fell from the sky that evening, Yasmin and Suri started to tramp across the rocky paths and ravines that dotted the hillsides. There were ample hiding spots, but that also meant there were ample places for enemies to conceal themselves. Once the light had faded from the sky, the two women used only the moon and stars to guide them, perpetually praying for the night to remain cloudless as their eyes and senses had not had the lifetime of adjustment to the dark that the hill-born women had.

      As they picked their way along the designated route, which circled the camp at a radius of half a klick, give or take the odd hundred meters to detour around impassable rock falls or clusters, they talked about what they wanted, and about their frustrations, punctuated by cursing as they stumbled, turned their ankles, and gashed and grazed themselves on terrain that seemed to mock their very presence.

      “If we’re going to do anything other than rot out here and wait for a bunch of men to come and try to smack us down, then we need to take some kind of action soon,” Suri moaned as she sat on a rock and massaged an ankle. Even though they both wore stout walking boots and had their ankles bound for support and padding, they were still limping at the end of each night’s patrol.

      Yasmin was small and compact. Her father used to worry that she might be physically weak, but she was nimble and wiry. Suri, on the other hand, was tall and slim in a way that Yasmin had seen English writers describe as “willowy”—almost as though she had grown too tall for her own strength. Yasmin doubted that her companion could survive in the wild for long. She herself was finding it hard, but Yasmin would bet on herself for the long haul once she had adjusted.

      “I know why you want to act,” she said with meaning, “and I want to, as well. But the question is what kind of action? It has to be something that counts. We’re small in number, so we could be easily overwhelmed. We need to make an impact that will rally others to our cause and put us on the international stage.”

      Suri snorted. “Maybe we should pretend we’re peasant girls and get ourselves shot in the head.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m just tired, cold and pissed off.”

      “We all are.” Yasmin grinned. “But we do have one major advantage. The NCA will know by now what I took. Even if they write me off personally and get another research scientist, they know what I’m running around with, and that’ll scare the living crap out of them. They’re not going to risk charging in and shooting without asking, just in case one of their trigger-happy boys has an accident.”

      “Well, yes,” Suri said slowly. “Of course we can use it as a bargaining tool, and of course it gives us some protection. The problem is, if we just sit on our asses with it, they have no demands to meet.”

      Yasmin sighed. “It would be good if we could agree on what the demands are and actually move this forward.”

      Suri laughed. “You sound like you’ve spent too long working for the government. ‘Move this forward...’”

      Yasmin punched her friend in the shoulder. “Get your lazy ass up and let’s get going. The last thing we want is to be caught standing around like a pair of idiots.”

      Suri dragged herself to her feet, swearing softly as she put pressure on her aching ankle, and followed in Yasmin’s wake.

      * * *

      IFTIKHAR AND AYUB had not been expecting to hit the payload when they had taken this sortie. Their ten-man militant cell was twenty klicks to the west, deep in the foothills of the peaks that separated Pakistan from Afghanistan and Iran. The range was long and—if not impassable—accessible only to those who had spent years learning its contours. Their group was part of a supply chain that took food and ordnance from one country to another, feeding the needs of rebel factions on each side. Their pipeline was partially supplied by sympathetic Pakistani military men, mostly in quartermasters СКАЧАТЬ