SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

68 Kilometers west of Tazhong, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China.

0118 Hours Local Time.

Sam Phillips finally managed to open his left eye. It hurt like hell and the vision was blurred. But at least he could see. He’d passed out again. For how long he had no idea. But it was night again. He guesstimated the truck was moving at about twenty miles an hour. From the way his kidneys and ribs were being punished, they were driving on an unpaved road, or caravan track, or through a wadi. He and X-Man were finally free of the hog-tie nooses that had bound them, although they kept the cords around their necks and the ends buried between their feet.

They’d hunkered down on the truck bed during the fighting, flinching as rounds tore through the wood and canvas. He resumed chewing at the tape around Chris’s wrists only after the truck began rolling. Sam figured it had taken him an hour and a half, maybe more. After that, it was a matter of minutes until they’d loosened their remaining bonds. But they’d been careful to resecure a single strand of the thick tape around their wrists and ankles so they appeared to still be trussed.

As soon as Chris had freed him, Sam had asked the security man about Dick and Kaz.

X-Man’s bloodied face was grim. “No idea,” he whispered. “I never saw what happened to them. I hit the panic switch — God knows whether it transmitted or not — and then three guys yanked me out of the truck and beat the bejesus out of me. I passed out. Next thing I knew, you were trying to hump me awake.”

The two of them had gone over what they did know. And it wasn’t much.

First, the gunfight at dawn had been intense, even though it had lasted only a matter of minutes. Sam knew it had been intense because in the morning light he could make out dozens of bullet holes in the canvas over their heads. After the shooting stopped, there’d been a lot of shouting. Some of it had been in Uzbek, and so Sam had understood enough of it to grasp that whoever was in charge wanted everybody to haul butt quickly before the army showed up.

Within a short period of time — he didn’t know how much because the crystal display of Sam’s digital wrist-watch was smashed, and someone had taken X-Man’s — the truck they were in was slammed into gear, and they began bouncing across what Sam took to be the desert basin.

From the way the dawn had broken, he’d decided they were heading west. Sam listened to the sounds of the convoy as it ground through the high desert. If he was correct, he thought he’d identified the sounds of three trucks, maybe four. X-Man concurred. But they couldn’t be sure — and in any case however many trucks there were didn’t matter. Moreover, there was no way either of them was going to risk a peek through the canvas to find out.

He’d spent a long time as he lay there trying to reconstruct a map of the region in his mind’s eye. He was reasonably certain the bad guys would ultimately move northwest, heading for Afghanistan or Tajikistan. His reasoning was twofold. First, because the Afghan and Tajik borders were more porous than the Kazakh or Kyrgyz ones. Second, the mountain passes to Tajikistan had scores of unmarked, narrow roads that had been used by smugglers for decades. During his tour in Dushanbe, Sam had even been taken across into China — for a kilometer or so of bragging rights — on a precarious, rutted, cliffside smuggler’s road by Halil Abdullaev, the muktar of a small village on the Chinese border and one of Sam’s most productive Tajik agents.

He’d been certain they wouldn’t head south. The southern border — with India — was heavily fortified because of an ongoing Sino-Indian boundary dispute. And the Hindu Kush region that led to Pakistan was not hospitable to the IMU.

But Tajikistan was in a state of political flux, and the IMU, although weakened, still enjoyed support among the Muslim population. And northeast Afghanistan was still in a relative state of war. Remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban roamed more or less unhindered, shielded by the local tribes.

“Chris, Chris… “ Sam used his knees to shake the X-Man until he stirred.

The security man finally responded. “Christ, how long have we been passed out?”

“I don’t know. Hours.” Sam grunted as the truck bounced. “We can’t just stay here like this.”

X-Man whispered, “Sam, I don’t want to do anything precipitous until we know where Kaz and Dick are.”

“Agreed.” Sam swallowed hard. “God, I wish we had some water.” The two of them lay there for some minutes in silence. Then Sam said, “Thank God at least they don’t know who they got their hands on,” he whispered.

X-Man rolled over. “What do you mean, Sam?”

“Jeezus, X, think how much the IMU could get for us if they sold us to al-Qaeda. Or the Iranians.”

“Don’t even say that as a joke.”

Sam forced a wry expression. “Hell, at least the people who have us are moving in the right direction.”

X-Man snorted. “I was taught by the nuns always to be grateful for small blessings.”