The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [52]
He stood, grimaced, and shifted his weight to his good leg, before limping over to a map of Washington, D.C., with the network of active sewers superimposed in clear acetate. He peered at the maze of colored lines, sadly aware that the graphic represented only a fraction of the subterranean realm, with countless levels, forgotten tunnels, and flooded galleries. On the opposite side of the safe, pinned to a board, was a laminated wall map of the world. Like countless times before, his gaze drifted along the Tropic of Cancer to the Gulf of Oman and then north into Iran and South Khorasan and its mountains—home to goats and a race of people that clung to their land like lichen to rock. Tyler narrowed his eyes. He knew better than most about botched operations and homing beacons. Shepherd? Rather than guiding his flock, Tyler had driven them into a blind alley.
During the last Iranian war, Major Scott Marino—the young scion of a wealthy warrior’s dynasty, eager to show his worth—had recklessly scrambled three choppers on a dubious piece of intelligence. The ambivalent and choppy signal hinted at having spotted, at long last, the elusive mujahideen’s headquarters at the bottom of a gorge. The location didn’t make any sense and went against everything—admittedly little—they knew about their fabled chieftain, Mullah Akim.
There were several reasons why the information should have been filed instead of acted on. Theirs was just an outpost commissioned to gather intelligence and relay it to U.S. headquarters at Kabul, in friendly neighboring Afghanistan. Out of the five able chopper pilots on duty at the post, one had been shipped home in a black bag the previous day after taking a stroll in the countryside and meeting one of their own mines, stealthily sown months before by a passing aircraft and unrecorded. Another awaited extraction at their makeshift infirmary with large chunks missing from a leg, courtesy of an explosive shell that had almost downed his craft on an ill-fated inspection flight. But none of these petty details swayed Major Marino, already starry-eyed at the thought of a commendation-worthy action.
To the north of the camp, ink-black rivers cut plunging gorges toward Chah-e Mezrab. To the south, eleven-thousand-foot peaks rose in a ring above the valley, itself more than a mile high, with the town of Khvoshab and the Mahesh gorge roughly in the middle. Off went the crafts into the gorge and into a barrage of anything that could fly, from small-caliber artillery shells and rifle fire to the silly Chinese TIP missiles—little more than firecrackers but deadly when released in droves.
All three crafts took hits. Two exploded in midair. The third managed to wobble for a few miles before crashing into the barren russet ridges that folded one on the other in the wastes to the side of the gorge.
Miracles sometimes happened, and the pilot had already punched his harness release when the craft hit the rocks. The explosion hurled him a good thirty yards away from the wreck, where he landed in a heap of mangled flesh, a shattered leg, and a half dozen cracked ribs. The badly damaged pilot had the presence of mind to crawl into a cleft between rocks but passed out before he was able to activate his radio beacon.
When he regained consciousness, he could hear the cheering cries of local fighters picking over the wreck of his aircraft. He managed to crawl even deeper into the crevice. He was delirious, his torn body screaming for repairs, but he reached to a side pocket in his trousers and activated his radio