The Shadowmen Read online

  McGarvey could feel the darkness all around him and the water rising over his head. It had been one of the most horrible experiences in his life—other than witnessing the murders of his wife and daughter. He’d felt a sense of helplessness and panic both times, because he’d not been able to fight back.

  “Call the military intelligence people; let them go out there and arrest him,” Pete said. “He’ll be charged with two murders.”

  “No.”

  “Why, goddamn it? Can you tell me that much? You could get yourself—both of us—killed. At least let me know why we’re doing this.”

  “Why I’m doing this.”

  “All right—you!”

  “Katy and Liz.”

  Pete had looked away. “Shit,” she’d said softly.

  Now that the gold had been found and taken away, there was no need for security. During the day, there would be employees tending to the tourists, but at night, after the castle was closed to the public, it was only the old man. There was no reason for Kallinger to have killed him except to send another message.

  McGarvey left the body where it lay and brushed past Pete. Otto had found out that of the three openings into the crypts, two were blocked by heavy steel bars, leaving only one way in or out. The entrance was just beyond an inner gate to the west of the caretaker’s house and halfway along what remained of one the walls on the side of the castle facing out across the countryside, mostly filed with olive groves.

  The gate was open, and moving low and fast, Mac and Pete made their way to the entrance to the crypt, its steel gate also open. Stairs led down to the first chamber of what had originally been part of the castle’s keep about fifty feet below. From there, low tunnels lined with coffins or remains wrapped in linen sloped back under the hill, in some places to a depth of two hundred feet. Small electric lights illuminated the stairs, but the bottom was lost in darkness.

  They were crouched on the right side of the open gate, out of the dim illumination from inside.

  Pete put a hand on Mac’s arm. “This is crazy. He’s not going to let himself be cornered down there.”

  “He’s found another way out,” McGarvey said. “In his mind, it was his brother I killed in the tunnels, and he wants to re-create the scenario.”

  “The other two gates are blocked.”

  “Then he’s gone ahead and stuck a quarter kilo of Semtex on one of them.”

  “Or he’s stuck a few kilos of it on the ceiling just at the bottom, and like saps, we go inside, and he pulls the trigger.”

  In his head McGarvey was down there again, fifteen years ago in the total darkness. Kurshin had been a driven man, insane with so much hate that all could think about was lashing back at the only man in his career who’d bested him. He’d been willing to give his life if it was the only way he could kill McGarvey, and he had almost succeeded.

  But the Russian at the casino was a different breed. He was moved more by ambition than revenge. He was Spetsnaz trained and tough, but he was young and inexperienced. It was why he’d not been promoted to field officer.

  “You’re right. Now go,” he said, and he ducked inside.

  * * *

  Kurshin, waiting below the crest of the hill about thirty meters away at the edge of the first rows of olive trees, watched through a night-vision monocular as McGarvey went into the crypt. The woman said something to him but then looked around frantically as if she were trying to decide whether to follow him inside or run away.

  Suddenly, she turned and sprinted along the ruins of the castle wall back toward the gatehouse, beyond which was the parking lot where they’d left their rental Fusion.

  He pocketed the scope and entered four sixes on his cell phone, his thumbed poised over the Send icon on the screen.

  In his experience, when it came down to a matter of life or death, loyalty and almost always love lost out to survival. It was simple in his mind. If you had to choose a partner or your own life, you had to choose the latter. Die and it was over. But live and you could find another lover.

  He waited another full five seconds to make certain that McGarvey, no matter how cautious he might be, had reached the bottom of the stairs, and then he pushed Send.

  A flash of light in the stairwell was followed a moment later by the explosion, and a vast plume of dust and some rock debris blew up out of the doorway.

  He shut down his phone and pulled the Austrian-made 9mm Steyr autoloader he’d found at Martine’s out of his belt. He headed after the woman to finish the night’s work before he returned to London, where he would write a complete report for Moscow. It was one that he was certain Putin would hear about and would like.

  * * *

  When the muffled boom of the explosion blasted out of the tunnel entrance, Pete barely missed a step. She’d expected the crypt had been wired, and unless the Russian had set the trigger on a motion detector or even a trip wire at the head of the stairs, it meant he had to be somewhere near from where he could see Mac going through the gate.

  Reaching the caretaker’s house, she ducked inside, stepped over the body, and went to the window. She figured that Kallinger wouldn’t be too far behind her, and if she had a shot, she would take it. But she lingered in that position just long enough to check outside before she moved into the deeper shadows in a corner.

  * * *

  Kurshin was certain that the woman would go directly to their car in the parking lot, but he was only surprised for a moment when she went into the caretaker’s house instead.

  Still just inside the line of olive trees, he held up for just a moment. She knew he was here somewhere, and she would be watching for him through the front window.

  He sprinted to the left, well out of sight on anyone watching from the front of the house, and made his way in under a half minute to the rear door, which was unlocked, as luck would have it.

  Making absolutely no noise, he slipped inside and headed across the tiny kitchen to the front room.

  But she wasn’t at the window. For a moment, he thought that she might have seen him heading around the house and had run for her car, after all, but then he detected a slight movement in the darkness, and he switched aim, intending to bracket the corner. No way she would survive this night.

  “Fire and you’re a dead man,” McGarvey said from less than eighteen inches behind.

  Kurshin spun lightly on his heel, ducking left and batting McGarvey’s gun hand aside, while bringing his own pistol around.

  He pulled off one shot, but McGarvey had ducked out of the line of fire.

  The instep of McGarvey’s foot smashed into Kurshin’s left knee, and a lightning bolt of agony crashed through his lower body as he staggered backward.

  He managed to bring his pistol up, but the old man was on him again, shoving his hand to the left, the shot plowing harmlessly into the ceiling.

  Kurshin stepped back another step, but McGarvey was relentlessly on him, this time snatching the pistol out of his hand and tossing it aside.

  Instead of trying to get away, Kurshin suddenly leaned forward, grabbing McGarvey’s gun hand and forcing it to the left while smashing his other fist with every ounce of his strength into the American’s face.

  McGarvey deflected the next blow with his free hand and with his bulk forced Kurshin back against the doorjamb. He began to slowly bring his pistol to bear, the last of Kurshin’s strength all but gone.

  “Why?” McGarvey demanded.

  He let his body go loose. “It was just business,” he said. “You have been a thorn in our side for a very long time. I was sent to take you out.”

  “Why not a long shot with a sniper rifle?”

  “Not very sporting.”

  “Then why Arlington? Why my wife’s gravestone?”

  “To get your attention,” Kurshin said.

  McGarvey said nothing.

  “Which it did,” Kurshin said, but something in the old man’s eyes suddenly made everything clear. “I give up. You may take me und
er arrest.”

  “You made a mistake at Arlington,” McGarvey said.

  Kurshin never heard or felt the shot to the middle of his forehead that killed him.

  Read on for a preview of

  THE FOURTH HORSEMAN

  DAVID HAGBERG

  Available in February 2016 from Tom Doherty Associates

  Order The Fourth Horseman now!

  A Forge Hardcover

  Copyright © 2016 by David Hagberg

  ONE

  At midnight a private Gulfstream biz jet that had just arrived from Paris touched down at the newly opened Gandhara International Airport near Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad. David Haaris, the only passenger, made a telephone call.

  He was a slightly built thirty-eight-year-old man wearing khaki trousers, an open-necked white shirt and a dark blue blazer. He had the long, delicate fingers of a concert pianist and a round, pleasant face, slightly dark, as if he’d been spending his weekends in the sun. His eyes were wide and jet black, and held intelligence and power that were immediately obvious to anyone meeting him for the first time. His voice was soft, cultured, with a hint of an upper-class British accent, and his vocabulary and grammar were almost always perfect. At the Pakistan Desk in the CIA his was the last word on proper usage.

  His call was answered on the first ring by a man speaking Punjabi, Haaris’s first language. “Yes.”

  “I’ve arrived.”

  “I’ll expect you in my office the moment you’re clear. Good luck.”

  “Are you looking for trouble?”

  “These are difficult times, my friend, as you well know. The Aiwan-e-Sadr came under attack just three hours ago. There is no telling what will happen next. So it is good that you are here, but take care.” The Aiwan was the residence and office of Pakistan’s president. It served the same purpose as the White House in Washington.

  “Have you sent a car?”

  “Yes. But keep a very low profile. Short of sending a military escort—which would just make matters worse—you will be on your own until you reach me.”

  “Perhaps I could order a screen of drones.”

  “Anything but.”

  “As you wish,” Haaris said, and he broke the connection, a slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. His cell phone conversation with Lieutenant General Hasan Rajput, who was the director of the Covert Action Division for Pakistan’s intelligence agency, was primarily for the benefit of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Technical Services Section in the CIA directorate where he worked. They were listening in.

  The pretty flight attendant, who’d been aboard since Andrews, came aft as he took the SIM card out of his phone and put it in his pocket. Her name was Gwen, and like Haaris she worked for the CIA.

  “The captain would like to know how long you expect to be on the ground, sir,” she said.

  “Probably no more than a few hours, luv. You might have him refuel in case we have to make a hasty retreat.”

  The young woman didn’t smile. “Should we be expecting trouble?”

  “Not out here at the airport. At least not for the short term.”

  Haaris glanced out the window as they taxied to a hangar used by the government for unofficial flights. The night was quiet, and he could almost smell the place even over the faint stink of jet fuel. A host of memories passed behind his eyes at the speed of light. Good times, some of them when he was a child in Lahore, but then horrible times after his parents died and his uncle brought him first to London to study in public school, then on to Eton and finally Sandhurst. He was a “rag head,” an “Islamic whore,” and in prep school the older boys used him in just that way.

  And so his hate had begun to build, centimeter by centimeter, like a slowly developing volcano rising out of the sea.

  He unbuckled and got up as the aircraft came to a complete halt, and he gave the attendant a smile. “I’m here to do a little back-burner diplomacy, see if I can’t point the right way for them to extract themselves from the mess they’re in.”

  Gwen nodded. She was a field officer and had been under fire in the hills of Afghanistan. “Good luck, then, sir.”

  Pakistan was a powder keg ready to explode at any moment. Nearly every embassy in Islamabad had been stripped to skeleton staffs, the ambassadors recalled. Attacks by the insurgents had been happening throughout the country for the past week. Haaris’s recommendation to the president’s security council three days earlier was to have its nuclear readiness teams put on high alert. It had been accomplished within twenty-four hours.

  Gwen went forward, opened the door and lowered the stairs as a black Mercedes S500 pulled up and parked ten meters away, just forward of the port wingtip. She said something to Ed Lamont, the pilot, then stepped aside as Haaris came up the aisle.

  “I thought they’d send an armed escort,” Lamont said. He was a craggy ex–air force fighter pilot who’d flown missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A steady man.

  “We didn’t want to attract any attention,” Haaris said. “But I want you to refuel and stand by in case we have to get out in a hurry.”

  “What if the Pakis deny our flight plan?”

  “They won’t,” Haaris said, careful not to bridle at the derogatory term for a Pakistani.

  He stepped down onto the apron, the summer evening warm, the sky overcast, the air close. This far out from Islamabad the country could have been at peace, but the KH-14 satellite real-time images he he’d seen yesterday in the Dome at Langley showed a starkly different picture. Pakistan was on the verge of an all-out war, and the conflict promised to be much worse than any that had ever happened here. It’s why he’d been sent: to try to make the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, come to its senses and to work with the fundamentalists so that civil war could be avoided.

  But it was not the real reason he’d come.

  An old man wearing the traditional Pakistani long loose shirt over baggy trousers held open the Mercedes’ rear door.

  “Allah’s blessing be upon you, sir,” he said in Punjabi.

  Haaris answered in kind, and as soon he got in the car, the driver closed the door and went around to the front.

  They headed past several large maintenance hangars, the service doors closed. This side of the airport seemed to be deserted.

  “What’s the situation?” Haaris asked.

  “The highway has been closed, no one is allowed to pass.”

  “Does the government hold it?”

  “No, sir. It’s the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and they are murdering people trying to get out.”

  The group, once funded by the ISI, was allied with the Taliban. Their main purpose was to get their hands on at least one working nuke. The CIA considered them the main threat to Pakistan’s arsenal, which was for the most part spread around the country at air force and navy bases. So far security at the nuclear sites was holding. But it had long been rumored that some of the weapons had been moved to other locations, most often in unmarked vans or panel trucks, without armed escorts. And it was these weapons that had the Pentagon most worried.

  At this hour the KH-14 was twenty degrees below overhead to the east and so could not pick up images, even in the infrared from straight down. As well, no surveillance drones were scheduled for flybys out here until later the next morning, and then only if the trouble from inside the city spread to the airport.

  The driver made a leisurely turn to the right, along the west side of one of the hangars, and pulled up next to a battered old Fiat, its blue paint mostly faded or rusted away. Two men stood beside it, one of them about the same general build as Haaris and similarly dressed in khakis, a white open-necked shirt and a dark blue blazer. The other man was dressed much like the Mercedes’ driver. He held a pistol.

  Haaris got out, and the man with the pistol prodded the other man to get in the front seat next to the driver.

  “With God’s blessing,” Haaris said.

  “Fuck you,” the man in the blazer
said. His voice was slurred.

  As soon as the door was closed the Mercedes took off toward the main highway into the city.

  “I’m Lieutenant Jura,” the man said, putting away the gun. “Welcome to the Taliban. Your clothes and beard are in the backseat.”

  TWO

  ISI Lieutenant Usman Hafiz Khel presented his credentials to the senior enlisted man at Quetta Air Force Base Post One—the main gate—shortly after midnight. The base was midway between Islamabad to the north-east and Karachi to the southwest. At twenty-three he was young, but he knew how to follow orders. The directorate had been his home since he’d been recruited at the age of fourteen to attend a special technical school in Islamabad, followed by university and finally his commission.

  “May I ask the lieutenant the purpose of his visit at this hour?” the acne-scarred corporal technician demanded. It was the same rank as a master sergeant in the West. He’d joined the air force when Usman was nine.

  “I have orders to meet with Group Captain Paracha.” The GP was the commander of the top-secret nuclear storage depot here on base.

  “Not at this hour.”

  Usman was driving a Toyota SUV with civilian plates and no markings that had been waiting for him at the international airport. The windows were so darkly tinted that the interior of the car was all but invisible to anyone looking in. He’d been stopped at the barrier, and the sergeant along with an armed guard who stood to one side had come out to see who’d shown up. Security across the country was tight because of the troubles.

  “Call him.”

  “Impossible.”

  “He needs to know that I am here.”

  Another of the guards came to the door of the gatehouse. “A call for you, CT,” he said.

  “In a minute.”

  “Sir, it’s Paracha.”

  “Shoot the lieutenant if he moves,” the CT told the armed guard, and he turned on his heel and went into the guardhouse.