Rourke shook hands with each of the men, a longer handshake for the corporal, Ahmed. At first, Rourke had confused the man with Achmed because of the similarities of their names. “Good luck, pal,” Rourke whispered, clasping his shoulder and returning the warm smile in his eyes. “Here,” he added impulsively, handing the man the Heckler & Koch flare pistol from his pocket. “You’re the team leader now. You’ll be needing this.”
Rourke turned and walked back toward Muhammed. The helicopter coming for them was already looming large on the horizon, the distant whirring of its rotor blades like the drone of an insect.
They waited together, Rourke and Muhammed, without speaking. The helicopter hovered over the mountain road a moment, then angled down and landed-uncomfortably close, Rourke thought, to the embankment.
He ran around to the starboard side of the machine and slid in beside the pilot. Muhammed got into the back. Rourke turned and shot a final wave to the men he’d trained.
They didn’t see it. Already, they were clambering back up the embankment, toward the mountains, to attempt to intercept the men who had been destined to receive and transfer the shipment of raw opium.
The pilot swung the helicopter out over the gorge and flew parallel to the mountain road for several kilometers, then started climbing. Rourke turned to look behind him, feeling at the same moment, Muhammed’s hand on his shoulder. “We are flying toward the Khyber Pass-it is not far. One of our border outposts was making its regular transmission, then suddenly the radio went silent. We want to be sure it is only some sort of equipment failure.”
“Fine,” Rourke said, nodding, but disinterested. He stared out the bubble dome and down to the valley floor thousands of feet below. After another moment, Muhammed said, “Tell me-I have read your file-but how does a man become a weapons expert, a survival expert, making a living out of teaching counterterrorist techniques?”
“You read the file,” Rourke said, chewing the stump of cigar between his teeth. “Like it says, I did counterterrorist work for the CIA.” His eyes crinkled into a smile-he’d actually been a field case officer in the Covert Operations Section. “Weapons,” he went on, “were just a natural part of than-I’ve always been good with guns, ever since I was a kid. Hunted a lot, liked the woods, backcountry camping. Sort of led me into survivalism. And I read the newspapers-scared hell out of me, too. So I learned everything I could about survival. I was on a job like this once, in Latin America,” he said, finding himself shouting over the whir of the chopper blades. “Anyway,” he went on, holding the cigar butt in his fingers and staring at it as he spoke, “those were my wilder days-back with the Company. With a bunch of anti-Communist partisans, I got ambushed. My right leg got shot up. Everybody else was killed. I was left for dead. I had a .45, an M-16 and a bayonet-no food, nothing in the way of medical supplies except some antibiotics. I couldn’t get out of the jungle for six weeks. Then, when I did, the Communists had already taken over the country and I had to steal a boat-spent ten days in open water before I hit the Florida keys. I was dehydrated, infected, sunburned and had about everything wrong with me except athlete’s foot.”
“Athlete’s foot?” Muhammed asked, “This is a-”
“You know-between your toes.”
Rourke laughed.
“Ah, yes, we call it by another name.”
“Yeah, well,” Rourke continued, “but in spite of it all, I survived. Pretty proud of myself, I was. I’d learned a whole hell of a lot-particularly how much I didn’t know. Went back to reading everything I could, going to every lecture I could, sorting through all the gimmickry and gadgets. There’s more stuff to learn every day.”
“But what is the purpose to it all?” Muhammed said. “Learning for itself is a noble purpose, to be sure, but-”
“Naw-it’s a lot more practical than that,” Rourke said, lighting the cigar again and getting an angry glare from the tomb-silent pilot sitting beside him. “There are enough loonies loose in the world today to screw up the planet so bad that survivalism training is going to be the only thing than’ll keep people alive-maybe. What do you need-a runaway laboratory virus, a global economic collapse, a world crop failure?”
Below them now, Rourke saw the familiar craggy geography of the Khyber Pass, the historic gateway from Afghanistan to Pakistan. These days, he thought bitterly, Afghanistan was a Soviet satellite or the next best thing to one. Muhammed leaned forward, speaking to the pilot, “Take the machine down-I want to see our border outpost from the air before we land.”
Rourke reached into his borrowed jacket and took the tinted aviator sunglasses from their case and put them on, peering down toward the summit of the mountain.
“Ahh, Muhammed?”
“What is it, John Thomas?” Muhammed said.
Making a sharp, downward stab with his right thumb toward the Pakistani side of the pass, directly below them now, Rourke almost whispered, “Well, remember, I was talking about some of the reasons to study survivalism. I left out one-probably the most likely one as it looks from here.”
The Pakistani officer edged forward in his seat, his face inches from Rourke’s right shoulder. The smile which he usually wore degenerated into a blank stare, then froze into a grimace of fear. “Climb. Get us out of here”‘ Muhammed shouted.
Bending forward to light his cigar again, staring down as he did at the endless column of Soviet trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers rolling across the Khyber Pass below him, Rourke said, half to himself, “Yeah, Muhammed-one of the surefire best reasons for survivalism might be World War Three.”
Chapter Two
Corporal Ahmed Mahmude Shindi, his voice low, his speech clipped, rasped, “We cannot risk the radio. They may have all our communications channels monitored. You two,” he whispered, gesturing to another corporal and a private, “must go back, back to the road. Follow it until you reach an outpost, and report what we have seen. Stop for nothing. Do whatever you must. But it is imperative that you get through.”
The clouds which, throughout the day had been dark gray at the lower elevation, were now a black shroud through which the setting sun winked orange. Heavy snow, each flake the size of a large coin, began to fall.
Ahmed brushed the snow from his field glasses and hunched lower toward the barren wet ground as he edged up toward the rim of the gorge. A quick glance back over his left shoulder confirmed that his men were already setting out to alert military headquarters. Looking down into the dry rock bed several hundred yards beneath him, he saw Soviet troops half covered by the canvas shrouds of their stake trucks. And Soviet tanks, armored personnel carriers-all moving along the road below in a rapid single column. He refocused his binoculars back along the way from which the Soviets had come. He could see no end to the convoy.
The wind was gusting. The snow whirled around him like dust devils. Crawling back toward the small cave in the shelter of overhanging rocks under which his seven remaining men huddled, Ahmed’s mind raced. Rourke who had taught him more than he had ever learned from anyone else about fighting and survival, had always repeated one admonition-to keep his head; regardless of the task, to do what you knew was the right thing in the right way.
“What,” Ahmed asked himself, “is the right way of this?” Against the thousands of troops pouring along the road, down from Afghanistan, what could eight men hope to accomplish? He found himself shaking his head as, shivering with the cold and dampness now, he crawled under the lip of the low rock outcropping and into the small cave beside his men. “What do we do, Corporal?”
It hardly mattered to Ahmed which of his men had asked the question-they all had the question in their minds. He said nothing for a moment-Rourke had been like that. The American had never talked just to talk. He had said little, in fact. But what the American had said when he did speak was always worth remembering.
Slowly, Ahmed formulated the possible actions he could take. “There are thousands of Soviet troops coming down from the Khyber Pass-you have all seen this. We are eight men only. We cannot stop them. But if we withdraw and simply let them proceed, we will be failing our responsibilities as Pakistanis-as men. If we can do something that delays their invasion of our country by even so much as a single moment, we will have done something to help our people. We will have struck a blow. If we stay here, my friends, we will be safe, at least for the moment. If we fight-and we may achieve nothing-we will most surely die. I cannot make the decision for you. But I…I will fight.”