Then out came a metal chest carried by two soldiers, and the rest of the technicians busied themselves wrapping plastic around a particular rock about the size of a car tire.
The Haqqani mission leader had seen enough: whatever this rock was, it was worth a very big commitment of American and allied resources. If the Americans wanted this particular rock that badly, then it must be worth something to a tribe that made its living off extortion, terror, opium, and hostage-taking.
Rifle and machine-gun fire opened up in the night, arcing toward the SEALs, killing one instantly and wounding another.
Rocket-propelled grenades flew, trailing sparks and smoke, and slammed into one of the two parked helicopters.
The SEALs began an orderly, disciplined withdrawal, but the technicians either dropped to the ground or fled for the helicopter.
Now it was a melee, a firefight, with Haqqanis shooting down and SEALs shooting at targets they couldn’t really see. It was quickly clear that the SEALs could not hope to hold on, and they withdrew by stages to the surviving helicopter, two of their number struggling to drag the heavy chest and its rock cargo.
The drone found a target and sent a rocket into the dark rocks, blowing one of the Haqqanis apart and injuring another.
The helicopter was hovering now, just a foot off the ground as the men with the chest covered the last, desperate few yards. And then a sharpshooter’s bullet took off the side of one man’s face. He fell, and a fellow SEAL jumped down from the helicopter, threw the wounded man over his shoulder, and slung him into the helicopter door as an RPG round barely missed, pelting the beating rotors with noisy shrapnel, sending sparks flying.
The SEALs’ helicopter rose, turned, and roared away.
The chest, and the rock it contained, remained behind.
The Haqqani leader knew he had minutes, maybe just seconds, before the jets blasted the area and annihilated every living thing. He sent three of his best men at a run to seize the chest.
Sure enough, the F-16s fired their missiles and the little dell exploded in fire and smoke.
But by then the chest was in the entrance to a shallow cave, and the Haqqani battle chief was frowning down at what looked like nothing but a rock.
He had lost three men, leaving three widows and five orphans. And it began to occur to him that if this really was just a rock, he was going to have some explaining to do.
CHAPTER 7
An Unhappy Guinea Pig
; THERE WAS A quick stop at Dekka’s apartment to grab a few things and her black-and-white cat, Edith Windsor (“E” for short). With the FBI man Carlson watching, Dekka threw a few shirts, some underwear, and socks into a duffel bag. The cat went into a plastic cat carrier.
“Anything else?” Carlson asked.
Dekka stood in the center of her living room. The tiny kitchen was separated only by a counter. The bedroom door stood open and Dekka wondered if she should make the bed before leaving. There was a sense of permanence about this departure, not necessarily as if she’d never see the apartment again, but rather as if this were the closing scene of the last four years of her life.
Only now did Dekka see that those last four years had been a dream, unreal, somehow. The FAYZ was real. This life, this depressing apartment, her crappy job, the stack of unpayable bills on the coffee table, her barely there social life with her dull friends, her nearly nonexistent love life, all of it a gray, badly lit, poorly photographed home movie that no one wanted to watch, least of all her.
And what was next for her?
“Back to the FAYZ,” she muttered.
“Didn’t hear you, what?” Agent Carlson asked.
Dekka shook her head. “One more thing.” She took her framed picture of Brianna, the one Brianna’s parents had given her, wrapped it in T-shirts, and packed it away in her bag.
Dekka and her cat were sent off in a convoy of black SUVs to the south, down the 101 through the brightly lit streets of San Francisco, down the Pacific Coast Highway, past Monterey and Carmel. They left the PCH and headed east along ever-narrower roads into rugged, wooded hills, with night closing in all around. They reached a high chain-link gate with a guardhouse and three uniformed security types with machine pistols slung. Their IDs were checked, flashlights blinding Dekka as she produced her driver’s license.
Once they were through the gate, the road paving was dramatically better, smooth as butter. It curved up and east, up and east until they crested a hill and Dekka saw what might have been an isolated high school or a minimum-security prison: half a dozen two-story buildings painted tan and marked with stenciled numbers. Stadium lights turned the whole place eerily bright.
“It’s a Defense Department facility,” Tom Peaks narrated. “They used to do research on radiation back in the fifties when it was built. It has an official designation, but everyone calls it Hidden Valley Ranch, you know, like the salad dressing. Or just the Ranch.”
“It’s not Defense Department anymore,” Dekka said. “Those weren’t military police, they were private security.”
Peaks nodded and smiled, as if he was the proud teacher of a student who’d said something clever in class. “Very good. Yes, it is no longer technically DoD. It’s now run by Homeland Security, specifically HSTF-Sixty-Six, a designation you may hear from time to time. But don’t worry, it is all very secure and very well guarded—fences, electronic sensors, cameras. And those guards may be contract help, but they’re all former MPs or other ex-military. You’ll be quite safe.”