Lindsay McKenna – Never Surrender (страница 14)

When he’d talked with Chief Phillips a week earlier, the SEAL had been blunt about Bay’s location.

“It’s a damn snake pit. Mustafa Khogani, cousin to Sangar Khogani, that a SEAL sniper team just took out last year, is heading up the Hill tribe efforts to put new rat lines through that Shinwari tribe valley. Mustafa is a sick son of a bitch.”

“Aren’t they all?”

“This guy is real special,” Phillips had snarled. “He sweeps down on a Shinwari village, kidnapping little boys and girls between six and twelve years old. He’s a sex slave trader. Some of our teams have found these children dead, dropped like garbage along rat-line trails a few days after they had been kidnapped. They were children who were badly injured during the kidnapping. The bastard is killing these children, not giving them medical aid to survive. We want this monster.”

A cold shiver had moved up Gabe’s spine as he’d heard Phillips’s icy rage. “I wouldn’t want to find one of those children,” he’d admitted, his voice hoarse. It would be the last thing he’d want to do—discover a dead child on some trail out in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s upsetting the platoon plenty. A lot of these guys are married and have children themselves. You can imagine them stumbling upon one of Khogani’s victims. Mustafa is a sociopath. He doesn’t care. He just discards them, keeping the healthy, uninjured children and then selling them to the highest bidder once they get them across the Pakistan border.”

“Jesus,” Gabe had whispered, rubbing his face. He couldn’t imagine the terror and grief of the Afghan parents. Worse, discovering their young son or daughter was found dead. Even more sorrow-compounding, finding out how the child had suffered and died. Gabe had seen the ruthless brutality in the Taliban ranks for too long, but this was new. And horrifying. “Can’t you get a sniper team tracking that bastard?”

“That’s what we’re doing. We’re coordinating a team with the SF captain over in that valley. That’s the one Bay is assigned to. The captain came crawling over here last week pleading, hands out, begging us to interfere and provide him a SEAL sniper team. He also asked for our sniper platoon assets to start scouring the hills above the village to capture Khogani and his bunch, but it’s a no-can-do. He’s got to get the ragged-assed Army in gear to do that. We have our own areas that need our attention and protection. He asked for a drone, but my hands were tied. We can’t even get one except for the Ravens our teams use out on patrol.”

Gabe’s mouth had thinned. “Did you tell Bay all of this?”

“No, couldn’t. This is SEAL intel. She’s with Army SF. I’m assuming the captain filled her in, though.”

Anxiety had feathered through him as he’d considered the info. “Maybe that’s why that SF captain is requiring her to stay in the village, then.”

“Probably so. I’d sure as hell ground her, too. What the military doesn’t need is for someone like Mustafa to get his hands on an American military woman. It’s something we all live in fear of happening. It would turn into a media nightmare.”

“I know...” Gabe had rasped. His mind leaped painfully to that scenario. Chief Doug Hampton had discussed his worry with him the day Bay had arrived at their platoon. So far, no woman combat soldier had ever been captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jessica Lynch had been captured in Iraq and it had been SEALs that had rescued her. Hampton said it would happen sooner or later as more women were on the front lines, that one would be captured, tortured, raped and, most likely, beheaded. And it would all be videotaped and then put up on the internet for the horrified world to see. It was only a matter of time. Hampton had been adamant with him to keep Bay protected and safe. No way, on his watch, was she going to fall victim to this terrifying scenario. He wiped his mouth, fear grating through his gut.

Gabe had ended that call with the chief, more anxious than before the conversation. Worry was eating a huge hole in his stomach.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MUSTAFA KHOGANI LAY on his belly, binoculars pressed tightly against his eyes, hidden among the brush overlooking the most southern Shinwari village in the valley below. Next to him, his second-in-command, Zmarai, was studying the village through his sniper scope.

“Something new,” Mustafa growled. He zeroed in on a woman in SF clothing who was holding a medical clinic for at least twenty children and women of all ages. The clinic was on the edge of the village, near a huge stand of trees that spilled out of a wadi, ravine, thousands of feet above them. The grove of trees provided shade from the blistering sun overhead.

It was a good place from a medical standpoint, but from a military strategy perspective, a very poor choice. But good for what he had in mind.

Zmarai said, hesitant, “A third of the village children are lined up. “Which ones do you want tonight when we sweep down there to kidnap some of them?” They routinely kidnapped young children, and they sold them into the sex slave trade across the Pakistan border. The children would then be cleaned up, given haircuts, new, clean robes and photos taken of them. From there, the photos were sent to prospective buyers across Asia and Europe. It brought in operating money to keep his lord’s army fed and supplied.

Snorting, Khogani said, “Tonight? Look at where they are! It would be easy to ride down into the wadi, undetected. We could get so close that a mere two-minute gallop would reach all of them. We’d catch them all off guard.”

“It’s daylight, my lord,” Zmarai rasped. They had always raided a village at dusk. He studied each young child waiting patiently beside their mother as the American military woman doctor treated them. Barely able to stand what would happen to any of them who were kidnapped, Zmarai closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get a stranglehold on his disgust. He was Muslim. And because he was one, the sale of children as sex slaves made him sick.

Pulling the binoculars away, Mustafa scratched his long, black beard. His mind seemed to consider the possibilities. Unlike Sangar, his cousin who had been murdered by SEAL snipers last year, Mustafa had more original ideas. Sangar had been too conservative and careful. Mustafa liked to keep his enemy off balance. He seemed sure that the Special Forces team in the village below them wouldn’t be expecting an attack in broad daylight.

“There’s a cave about two kilometers from here. We could reach it before the Americans could ever react with Apaches.”

Zmarai said, “Yes, there is a cave.” He worried about a drone high above, watching the whole attack. That wouldn’t be good for them.

Mustafa smiled. “And it goes back a long way, and we can come out the other side of the hill into another wadi, maintaining our cover.”

Nodding, the Taliban soldier looked over at his lord. “That is so. You want to strike hard, grab some of the children and then ride for that cave?” He wished for the thousandth time that Mustafa would lose his obsession with stealing young children. It was sick and perverted and against Islam. Otherwise, he was a brilliant, tactical Taliban leader.

“Yes.” Khogani sat up and crossed his legs. “But I want that woman doctor, too.”

Black brows raising, Zmarai stared in disbelief at him. “Her?”

Shrugging, he growled. “The bulk of my forces are ten miles from here up in the mountains. We have a lot of wounded men who are desperate for a doctor. She could treat them. We could have our own, personal American doctor.”

Compressing his lips, Zmarai thought long and hard. True, there were many Taliban soldiers who were wounded or in dire need of immediate treatment at their main cave right now. Although they could get bandages and drugs from the Pakistan hospitals across the border, they had no real medic among them. Their last medic had been killed when a B-52 bomber had dropped a laser-guided JDAM bomb on them during a night firefight a week ago. It had killed twenty of Mustafa’s finest soldiers as well as his own personal bodyguard. And without a medic riding with them, they would lose more men to bacterial infection than any amount of American bullets. The soldiers would die a slow, painful death, blood poisoning setting in and killing them.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.