Dead Man Switch

HE SAT THERE for forty-five minutes, wondering what the odds were that this gamble would work, that he might be about to meet the real power behind Kashani.

Finally, the door opened, and the bright light from the corridor blinded him for a moment. Kashani stepped in. “This way,” he told Hayes. “There’s someone you should see.”

Hayes followed Kashani and two guards toward the underground garage. He wondered if they were moving him again or if the leader was there, in a safe room. A guard pushed open a heavy steel door.

Hayes peered inside. There was no chief here, only two soldiers sitting against the wall bound hand and foot. They wore pakols—round-topped wool caps—and loose-fitting robes in the local style, but their gear was clearly American special operations’.

Under the glaring fluorescent light overhead, Hayes could see blood trailing from the ear of one of the men, and judging from the cuts on his cheek, Hayes guessed he’d been injured by a grenade frag at just outside of the lethal range.

“Who are they?” Hayes asked.

“Some of your American killers. We found them closing in on the house. Good tactics. We wouldn’t have seen them coming, but they triggered a slide of snow below the peak.”

“They came to kill you?”

“We think they came to kill you.”

Kashani took a handgun from a guard and entered the room. He kicked one man, knocking him over, then stepped on his neck, driving his face into the floor, and aimed the pistol at the back of his head.

Hayes followed him in, and the guards posted up in the corners.

“If you are what you say you are, surely you won’t mind,” Kashani said.

Hayes said nothing. He had expected a test of faith.

He recognized the American that Kashani was threatening with the gun, a man with a reddish-brown beard and a few minor cuts on his face. His name was Burke. Hayes had fought with him in Fallujah, back when Burke was a SEAL, a kid on his second deployment; he had trained him in house-to-house fighting, and Burke had gone on to Green—the special operations shorthand for the unit commonly known as SEAL Team Six.

“Hayes?” Burke said. “Jesus. It’s true. You son of a bitch.” Hayes knew that if he tried to stop Kashani, the Pakistani would kill them all.

Kashani put his finger on the trigger.

“Wait,” Hayes said. He stepped toward Kashani, who was smiling like a man who had called someone’s bluff. The guards lifted their rifles.

Hayes gestured for the pistol. “How does the saying go? It’s better that I kill my brother than a rival take him.” It was a tapa, a two-line Pashtun poem often sung by soldiers or grieving wives.

“I’ve heard it,” Kashani said. “Keep it in the family, you would say.”

Hayes nodded. “Let me take care of this.”

Kashani smiled and stepped back, then offered the pistol to Hayes. The guards kept their rifles at low ready, and Hayes traced the tendons standing tense along the backs of their hands.

Hayes stood over his former student. Burke arched back to look him in the eye as Hayes lined up the shot.

“I never believed what they said about you. Until now. Go ahead. You’ll burn for this.”

Once, things had been simple for Hayes. There were commanders and rules of engagement, opposing forces and friendlies. But now he was on his own, and he understood the terrible weight of choice, of his own calculations of the greater evil, of trading lives like coins.

“You don’t know me. What they put me through.” He cracked Burke in the mouth with the slide of the pistol and put his foot on his back.

He wrapped his finger around the trigger and brought the gun before him, facing away from Kashani.

He raised it, and pulled the trigger.

The light blew out with a pop and a rain of glass. The room went black. But in his mind, Hayes could still see where each man stood. Kim’s Game. He ducked to the left and aimed the pistol at the first guard.

Burke felt the hot glass scratch his neck as the lightbulb exploded, and he rolled onto his feet. The images came like strobes in the orange flash of Hayes’s firing pistol: one guard flinching back, struck by gunfire, then the other. Hayes sidestepped left to right, and six shots flared in the dark. Kashani spun with a pistol and shot. The muzzle flame reached out toward empty space and lit up Hayes behind him, his knife out.

The dark returned. A body hit the ground. A flashlight cut through the room, then came the cinching and popping of the cords as someone cut Burke’s hands free, drawing the knife a half inch from the skin on his wrist.

Hayes pulled the injured soldier’s arm over his shoulder and helped him up. He was dazed.

“Burke,” Hayes said. “Sorry about the jaw. I had to sell it. Are you good to walk?”

Burke fought back against the shock. “I think so,” he said.

“I’m here undercover. I was trying to find out who he was working for, who wants those names.”

Hayes aimed a flashlight that he’d pulled from one of the guards at the ceiling. “We’ve got to roll before they get backup.”

Hayes grabbed Sanders’s sniper rifle and rucksack, and Burke took his carbine. They exited into the garage. There were two Pinzgauer 6x6s parked along the back wall. A Swiss-built mountain truck, the Pinz was an ugly green box on six wheels that could climb a 100 percent slope. Hayes and Burke took the cockpit seats, and Sanders, conscious but still unsteady, got in the back.

Hayes gunned it up the ramp leading out of the underground garage. The vehicle rose high on its springs and was nearly airborne when it came off the ramp onto the long driveway.

Burke pointed to the passes to the east.

“We make it through there, and we’re out of the badlands.”

Hayes watched the mirrors while Burke cycled through the radio he’d pulled from the room.

“We could have killed you back there,” Burke said.

“You couldn’t have known. No one in the command knew I was here.”

Burke looked at the house. He didn’t see anyone coming.

“You have a QRF?” Hayes asked. A quick-reaction force: a team of soldiers ready to come in to back up the smaller special operations units.

“No. We have to get through the pass on our own,” Burke said. “There’s an extraction point ten kilometers out. But if we get there after twenty-one-hundred hours, we’re done. They won’t be back until tomorrow.”

That was in an hour, and they wouldn’t survive if they were stuck here overnight. The notch in the mountains loomed closer and closer as Hayes fought the wheel. He looked through his side window. To call it a jeep track was generous; it was more like a goat path. It was so narrow, he couldn’t see road, just his side panel hanging over a ravine that dropped away two hundred feet.

The snow grew thicker as they rose toward the pass, and the Pinz smeared through the turns, kicking debris off the cliffs.

“Almost there, Sanders,” Burke said.

The pass opened high to their right as the path curved toward it. The black of the peak gave way to a blanket of stars to the north, but weather was moving in fast from the other direction. Sheets of white snow blew across Hayes’s sight lines like static.

Over the grind of the Pinz’s diesel, a deep rumble echoed through the pass. It loosed a curtain of snow high above them, and chunks of ice slammed into the side of the vehicle. Hayes forced the wheel toward the steep bank.

“Get out!” Hayes said.

“What?”

“Out! Now! Incoming!”

Only Hayes had identified the source of the noise, but it became clear a second later. A helicopter, banking hard, crossed the pass and disappeared behind the far peak.

“They’re circling back.”

It was a Bell Cobra, an older American-designed and -built attack helicopter with a 20-millimeter Gatling gun and a weapon pod on either side.

“We need to disperse and draw them in. Drop down the ridge ten or twenty feet. It’s our only shot.”

He grabbed the sniper rifle, opened his door. “Take the M4,” Hayes told Burke. The carbine had a 40-millimeter grenade-launcher attachment under the barrel. “Hit the tail rotor or the pilots through the side glass. Wait for it to come over us. If they use the Gatling guns only, we might survive.”

He left a blue light stick glowing in the cabin of the Pinz and climbed out. Burke and Sanders flailed down the snow on one side of the ridge. Hayes dropped six feet down the steep hill on the other and then cut wide across for cover. He dug in, the snow up to his waist, with a boulder between himself and the helo, then raised the rifle, snugged it hard against his cheek and shoulder, and took aim.

The chugging blades grew louder and louder. He watched the white snow blown by the rotor wash come at him like a band of storm clouds.

Hold…hold…hold.

The helicopter swept overhead, the rip of the Gatlings tearing the night in two as they shot up the Pinz. Hayes heard a low pock as Burke launched a grenade. The helo banked and flared to avoid it, and as it slowed, Hayes put one round, two, three, into the tail rotor. Fluid blew out in a spume, and from the other side of the ridge, Burke sent a hail of bullets through the Plexiglas into the cockpit.

It spun as it came over, out of control, losing precious altitude in that thin air. Hayes dove for cover. The ground shook, and he knew the helo was down.

He put his leg forward and postholed it in the deep snow. Another blast shook the hillside, and before he could even register relief at having taken the helicopter, the snow beneath his feet fell away. He dropped with it, clawed against it, but the whole hillside was liquid now, pouring into his mouth and down his shirt, tilting him over. The mountain peaks spun in his vision as he rag-dolled down, helpless.

High up, near the pass, a red light filled the night. A boom echoed along the range, but it was lost to him as blows came to his head and his body kept falling. He didn’t know how long he tumbled, but it seemed like forever. And then he hit, and he was buried in a bank of snow.

His hands shot to his face and he clawed away the powder. Snow can melt and refreeze around the face, asphyxiating the avalanche victim in what’s known as the mask of death. After he cleared the snow from around his head and shoulders, he started to dig himself out.

He hauled himself out of the bank, and after the dizziness passed, he was shocked to feel okay. His pack was six feet above him on the steep slope. The snow was too deep to walk in normally, so he crawled up, gaining only inches as he dragged the snow on top of him. He took time to pack down the powder and then tried to stand. His leg crumpled, and he fell to the side. He tested that leg again, putting weight on it, and it collapsed under him once more. Between the cold and the adrenaline, he felt no pain, only the queasy sense of his limb bending the wrong way. He’d torn something.

The driving snow scoured the exposed skin of his neck and cheek, becoming heavier and heavier until it was a whiteout. The flakes flew past him, down and to the left, a shimmering curtain so total that vertigo set in, and he couldn’t fight the feeling that he was flying up and away, as if the snow were still and his body was in motion.

He shut his eyes, and the wind closed around him; snow drifted to his chin, spilled down his collar, filled his ear.

His first movements only dug him in deeper, but then he climbed deliberately, raising himself with his good leg and driving his bad knee into the steep snow to brace himself for another step. Remaining calm was the only way to survive. When he reached the pack, he pulled off part of the frame and two nylon straps and splinted his knee as best as he could.

Hayes had spent a lot of time in the mountains, and every fifteen minutes or so the blood flushed his face and hands—the hunter’s response, an acquired physiological reflex to keep frostbite at bay.

He continued up the slope but knew he wasn’t going fast enough to warm himself. And as the minutes turned to hours, the cold moved from outside in. The shivering began, crescendoed into a violent tremble, rattling his teeth in his skull. His muscles numbed and tightened, refused to obey. And even his brain slowed down, the thoughts of survival running in frantic, confused loops.

He didn’t know how far he had traveled. The world was a white sphere. All he wanted was sleep. There was no ridge, no extraction point, no helicopter, only the fog of his breath turning into ice on his skin.

It didn’t make any sense to work so hard when he could just sit down. He stopped and stared into the blizzard. He hadn’t thought about how beautiful it was. He let his mind drift into the white.