Brute Force

Book 6: Jericho Quinn Thriller

by Marc Cameron

Genres: Action & Adventure; Spy Thrillers; Military Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Suspense; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

Are these the last days of America? A thriller starring “a compelling, never-give-an-inch hero who will appeal to Jack Reacher fans” ( Booklist ). In the aftermath of a devastating biological attack, America stands on the brink of disaster. The President of the United States is controlled by terrorists. The Vice President, global mastermind Lee McKeon, is plotting his next move. And special agent Jericho Quinn is running for his life. Desperate to clear his name—and expose the conspirators in the White House—Quinn must race against time before McKeon can execute his evil plan. It begins with heightened security, mass surveillance, and the establishment of a brutal police state. It can only end in the takeover of America. The only thing standing between democracy and destruction is a man named Quinn…and one perfectly aimed bullet. From the New York Times -bestselling author of Tom Clancy Oath of Office, this heart-pounding thriller features “a formidable warrior readers will want to see more of” ( Publishers Weekly).

Release date: January 1, 2016

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 378

Sample

Jericho Quinn began to move an instant before the 150-grain bullet thumped into Khan’s head. Standing at the far end of the line of prisoners, he knew Thibodaux would pull the trigger at his signal. Quinn also knew the round from the big Marine’s FN SCAR 17 would travel fast enough that there would be no apparent gap between Khan’s death and the death of the young jihadist who stood across from him.

Quinn was a dark man. He’d never been one to carry extra pounds, but months of living as a fugitive had left him with deep hollows in his cheeks and a hungry look. At thirty-six, the first flecks of gray had invaded a full black beard and the temples of his shaggy hair. The copper complexion of his Apache grandmother and his fluency in Arabic made it easy for him to pass himself off as a Moroccan. In reality, he was an agent with the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations or OSI. At least he had been before he’d become a fugitive.

The young jihadist across from Quinn flinched at the sudden thud of the bullet that plowed through his commander’s skull.

Hands bound, Quinn stepped forward, sweeping his foot inside the kid’s left knee and grafting downward. This sudden pressure bent the leg and forced the jihadist into the beginnings of a spin. Hands together, Quinn grabbed the rifle, trapping the young militant’s fingers and snaking his own thumb into the trigger guard as he twisted the weapon in a tight arc. The hapless kid continued to spin until his back was to his compatriots, making him a convenient human shield.

Quinn stepped in as the jihadist fell, bringing the short Kalashnikov up, firing as the muzzle moved across his opponent’s chest, stitching him with at least three rounds. Flinching from the impact and the concussion of the muzzle blast just inches from his ear, the young man abandoned his grip on the rifle and tried to push away. Quinn let him fall, engaging the line of remaining terrorists with short bursts from the Kalashnikov.

Jacques Thibodaux, the United States Marine Corps gunnery sergeant posing as a Belgian security specialist, worked methodically from a hide in the rocks above camp. Issued to Marines in the Special Operations Command, the FN SCAR was a Belgian design, so it made sense that a Belgian soldier of fortune would have such a rifle. Thibodaux took out the leader and two others while Quinn saw to the rest. Roughly four seconds after Thibodaux’s first round had entered Khan’s head just beneath his nose, seven other terrorists lay dead on the glacier. The last surviving attacker, a twentysomething youth with a great swath of blood on his chest from the recent beheading, abandoned his weapon and fled, careening down the boulder-strewn glacier as fast as his legs could carry him. He was not much older than the boy bleeding to death at Quinn’s feet, but with a much fuller beard. Quinn recognized the fleeing man as Abu Khalifa, a Pakistani Taliban wanted in connection with the murder of thirty-three primary school children during a school massacre the month before. The young militant zigzagged on the loose gravel in an effort to keep from getting shot. It was a useless effort. If Marines were anything, they were expert riflemen. Had Thibodaux wanted to take him, Khalifa would have only died with sore ankles.

Lucy Jarrett sank to her knees, her shoulders wracked with sobs. The brothers from Wyoming worked to free themselves from the restraints while other climbers fell back to the gravel, blinking in amazement that they’d survived. Alberto Moretti rubbed a trembling hand across the stubble on his face. His mouth hung open as he stared at Quinn.

“You are not from Morocco, signore,” he whispered.

Quinn pulled his hands loose from the zip tie. “Yes,” he said. “I am not.”

Jacques Thibodaux trotted into camp a moment later. The massive Marine carried the desert-tan FN SCAR rifle in one hand and a small black satellite phone in the other. He looked sideways at Quinn. “Are you whole, Chair Force?” he asked, his Cajun accent palpable in even a few words.

Quinn tossed the zip tie on the ground and rubbed his wrists to get back the circulation. “I’m good.”

Thibodaux whistled under his breath, looking at the body count. “I’d have sore feet if I kicked as much ass as you.”

Quinn ducked into the cook tent to retrieve a small backpack, which he slung over his shoulders. He eyed the diminishing dot that was Abu Khalifa.

Thibodaux fished a black patch from the pocket of his pants. “Glad that’s over,” he said. “I was gettin’ tired of pretending to see out of my bad eye.” Broad shoulders and muscular arms filled a navy-blue commando sweater. Close-cropped hair and an impossibly square jaw gave no doubt that he was a military man. The black patch only added to the intensity of the gaze from his good eye.

“Miiiitzica!” Moretti gasped in the Sicilian equivalent of pleeease. All this new information, fresh on the heels of nearly being murdered, had knocked the man for a loop. “And you are not from Belgium?”

Thibodaux gave the astonished Italian a shrug. “I ain’t never even been there, cher,” he said. “Shit!” The Cajun gave a sheepish grin and passed the satellite phone to Quinn. “I about forgot. The boss wants to talk to you.”

Quinn took the phone, looking at the screen while he adjusted the tilt of the antenna to get a better signal. A cold wind from the glacier blew against his face.

“Hello?”

“News?” Winfield Palmer asked. The national security advisor to the former president was not the sort of man to exchange pleasantries. Driven to find those responsible for the assassination of his friend and former boss, he had no time for anything but information that moved the investigation forward. The fact that he was in hiding from the current administration—and harboring the director of the CIA, who was also a fugitive—only added to his curt demeanor. The simple stress of knowing that you only had a few moments, even on a secure line, before the NSA or some other government agency unraveled the code on your call, was enough to give lesser men a heart attack. The satellite phone functioned as a portable version of an STE or Secure Terminal Equipment, scrambling the signal with a morphing code that had to be keyed into each separate handset in order to decipher it. Speakers could use plain talk for a time, but at the end of the day it was still government encryption. Some NSA nerd would eventually find a way to hack the program if they stayed on the line too long.

Quinn’s eyes flicked from the bodies of the dead terrorists and down the valley to the fleeing survivor. “Things got a little wild here for a few minutes. We do have one Abu Khalifa in our sights, so that’s something. I’m hoping he should lead us to something more solid.”

“Let the Pakistanis worry about Khalifa,” Palmer said. “There’s been a development.”

Quinn was normally unflappable, but he perked up at that particular word, especially since it made Palmer blow off a high-value target like Abu Khalifa. Developments were never a good thing where Win Palmer was concerned. Good things didn’t develop. They fell off the radar. Situations that were likely to get Quinn killed qualified as developments.

“The boys we transferred from Gitmo are in the wind,” Palmer said, referring to the Fengs, Uyghur prisoners the new US President had turned over to Pakistan. It was just one more way the POTUS found to try to stir up a war with China, who insisted they had the moral right to try the Uyghur prisoners as terrorists for bombing a passenger train in Xinjiang Province. President Hartman Drake had been beating the war drum for months—and the escape of these terrorists was likely to push the Chinese President over the ledge.

“All three escaped?” Quinn asked.

“Just the brothers,” Palmer said. “Evidently the cousin died shortly after they arrived in Pakistan. But two of them are bad enough.”

“When was the escape?”

“Last night,” Palmer said. “From Dera Ismail Khan.”

“You’d think they’d learn,” Quinn mused, remembering the Taliban attack on the same prison in 2013. “Any idea which way they’re heading?”

“Mariposa is working on that problem for us,” Palmer said, sniffing like he had a cold. “She’ll come up with something soon.”

Quinn couldn’t help but smile at Palmer’s code name for Emiko Miyagi—Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly. Thibodaux had scoffed when he heard it, saying she was more like “One of those Japanese hornets-of-the-terrible-stinging-death.”

Not much over five feet tall, every inch of her was what Thibodaux called badassery and bitchitude, but Quinn respected her as the warrior that she was. Both men had learned the hard way that fighting Miyagi was like doing battle against a chainsaw.

“Roger that,” Quinn said. If there was something to be found, he knew Emiko would find it.

“Listen.” Palmer’s voice was distant, as if he were mulling over some bit of news and deciding whether or not to share it with Quinn on the phone. “There’s a good chance these guys are heading back to China. I don’t have to tell you how important it is that you find them before they wreak enough havoc to convince the Middle Kingdom it’s time to have a go at World War III. . . .” Palmer broke into what sounded like a ragged tubercular cough.

“Are you doing okay, sir?” Quinn said. He’d never considered the idea that Winfield Palmer was subject to the ravages of disease that plagued normal human beings.

“I’m fine,” Palmer snapped, a little too quickly and sounding far from it. “Call me back when you know something. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you found these guys before they get out of Pakistan.”

He ended the call without another word.

Quinn folded the antenna and stood for a long moment, staring at the looming black pyramid of rock at the head of the valley.

“What?” Thibodaux shrugged, palms up, waiting to hear Palmer’s news.

“Grab your pack,” Quinn said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

Moretti stared down the glacier, still wearing his hand on top of his head like a hat. “I must call the authorities. . . let them know what has happened,” he muttered. “There are dead to tend at Concordia camp.”

Quinn touched the Italian’s arm. “I need you to wait a few hours before you call anyone,” he said.

“Wait?” Moretti turned to look at him, incredulous. “That murderer has a head start. If I wait, he will slip away.”

Quinn nodded down the trail, then looked back at Moretti. “We need to talk to him. To try and find out who’s behind this attack.” He shot a glance at Thibodaux. “Once the Pakistanis have him, he’s gone.”

Lucy Jarrett looked up from where she sat slumped on the ground with her head between her knees. Tears plastered her hair against swollen cheeks. She shook her head, in a deepening daze, her eyes narrow and accusing.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said with the clogged nose of someone who’d been crying for half a day. “If you knew they were going to attack, why weren’t you waiting at Concordia? You could have saved Klaus . . . and the others.”

Jacques gave a shake of his head, kneeling down in the rocks to lay a wide hand on the woman’s shoulder. It was nothing short of amazing that a man as large and intimidating as Jacques Thibodaux could somehow muffle the dangerous aspects of his nature and turn himself into a giant teddy bear. Quinn supposed having seven young sons had given the Marine plenty of training.

“I wish we would have, cheri,” Thibodaux said in a quiet voice Quinn knew was capable of uprooting trees. “But the information we had said these guys would attack when everyone had formed up here at base camp. We thought they had access to a helicopter, so we assumed they’d come directly here.”

Jarrett stared into the morning air, her breath forming a vapor cloud around her blank face. She said nothing, because there was nothing more to say. Death, especially the death of a friend, was impossible to process quickly. Quinn knew that all too well.

“I will give you two hours, signore,” Moretti said, hand on top of his head again. Hatred began to chase the stunned look from his eyes as he stared down the valley. “But that one killed my friends. He must not get away.”

“Oh,” Quinn whispered, his eyes falling to a sobbing Lucy Jarrett. “He won’t get away.”

He gave a quiet nod toward Thibodaux, letting him know it was time to move. Neither man would say it in front of anyone in the climbing party, but the massacre at Concordia was the least of their worries. No matter how much he wanted to follow Abu Khalifa all the way back to Jalalabad, Quinn’s first priority was find the Feng brothers, and with any luck avert a war with China.

Stepping away from the others, he opened the antenna on the secure satellite phone. To locate the Feng brothers, he’d need transport, and the quickest way to get that was to call a particular wing commander in the Pakistan Defense Force. The last time they’d seen each other, Quinn had knocked out the other man’s tooth.

Yaqub Feng lay on his stomach in the cramped belly of the swaying jingle bus, crammed between his brother and Jiàn Zu, the ratlike Chinese snakehead. Ehmet had taken the spot along the outside edge where he could press his face to the metal grating where he could see out and get some semblance of breathable air. Jiàn Zu had a similar position and view, but wedged in the middle, Yaqub could see only shadows and choked on the dust that sifted up through the cracks in the wooden floor.

A riot of sound and color on the outside, the brightly decorated bus looked like something out of a gypsy caravan. Lengths of dragging chain and countless tinkling bells hung along the bumpers and painted trim of the gaudy monstrosity that had a permit to take tourists across the border with China and up the Karakoram Highway as far as Karakul Lake. It was the perfect vehicle in which to hide in order to get out of Pakistan—for who in his right mind would hide in something that already drew so much attention?

“It would be much easier if we went out through Afghanistan,” Jiàn Zu said, sounding hollow, as if he’d been kicked in the groin.

“My business is in Kashgar,” Ehmet muttered, still studying the situation outside the truck through tiny holes in the metal flashing. “I already told you that. It will not take long.”

“In Pakistan,” Jiàn Zu said, “you are merely fugitives. In China you are human targets. Forgive me, but it seems foolish to walk straight into the mouth of the dragon when the Afghan border is as porous as a rusted bucket.”

Yaqub felt Ehmet’s body tense. He lifted his head enough to turn and face the center of the truck. The sight of dried blood caking the corners of his mouth was terrifying, even to Yaqub.

“Tell me, Jiàn Zu,” Ehmet whispered. “Did we accompany you out of Dera Ismail Khan prison, or did you accompany us?”

“I am with you,” the Chinese man said. “And happy to be so. But it would make it much easier to do my job if you told me your final destination.”

Ehmet’s face remained neutral, as if he was passing judgment. “You should concern yourself with our immediate destination—and that is Kashgar.”

“As you wish,” Jiàn Zu said. “I do have contacts there who will help us move about. When you are ready, I will make the necessary arrangements.”

Ehmet turned to peer out the grating again. “The guards are waving all the buses through, just as you told us they would.”

“Money and blood grease the gears of this world,” the snakehead said. “The drivers pay the guards well to let them pass unmolested.”

Brakes and springs squawked as the jingle truck lurched forward, sending up a cloud of dust through the floorboards that threatened to choke the three men.

Above them, wealthy passengers from Islamabad and other affluent cities snapped photographs and gasped at the vistas of the Pamir Mountains. These men and a small number of women, each with a respectable male escort, sipped tea and chatted nervously about caravan thieves on the old Silk Road, ignorant of the fact that three fugitives hid in the hollow floor just inches beneath their feet.

From the time the first explosion had rocked the prison, Yaqub had felt caught up in a terrible, unstoppable wave. Stunned at the loss of their leader, Ali Kadir’s men had ushered them quickly away from Dera Ismail Khan in an old Mercedes van, heading northeast along the Indus River. They had changed to a sedan in Rawalpindi, and then switched vehicles again in Abbottabad, this time to a large panel truck that carried a load of goats. Whatever the plan had been beyond that, it had died with Ali Kadir. In Abbottabad, the men seemed unsure of what to do next. Jiàn Zu had told them to go to Nagar where he said he had a contact. They reached the small village before daybreak.

Jiàn Zu had met with his contact, who’d shown them inside the jingle bus an hour before the first tourists arrived. It would be cramped to the point of crippling, he said, but under the present state of security in the country, drastic measures were a necessity. The bold and bloody escape had been a devastating blow to Pakistan in the court of public opinion—making the Feng brothers two of the most wanted men in the world.

Ehmet raised his head. “Do your contacts in Kashgar have food?” he said, loud enough to startle Yaqub, though there was no danger anyone above could hear him over the rattling jingle bus.

“Food?” Jiàn Zu stifled a cough amid the swirl of road dust.

“Yes, food.” Ehmet nodded. “I have had nothing to eat since I snacked on Afaz the Biter.”

Pakistan, 6:35 AM

Forty minutes after they trotted out of K2 base camp, Quinn and Thibodaux had cut Abu Khalifa’s lead to less than two hundred meters. Light from the rising sun crept down the mountains and across the valley floor, turning everything a brilliant gold.

“Chair Force,” the big Marine said, never missing an opportunity to razz Quinn for being in what he considered the taxi-driving branch of the military. “You remember those pre-deployment training iterations they give you where every scenario devolves into a critically catastrophic shitstorm of death?”

Quinn shrugged as he moved. His friend’s philosophical path was a wandering one. “I guess.”

“Well, I’m here to tell you,” Thibodaux said. “Every op I go on with you starts out that way.”

“And?” Quinn said, waiting for the rest.

The Cajun grinned, batting his good eye. “I just wanted to say thanks.” Chuckling despite the almost nonexistent air, he nodded down the trail toward their fleeing target. “I gotta tell you though, I am tired of this runnin’ shit. What say we go ahead and give this guy a big hand hug around his neck?”

Quinn smiled. Jacques was good for keeping things light, even amid the chaos of battle. It helped him keep his mind off his daughter. “Not sure what he’ll give us, but I hope we have a few minutes with him before we have to break off and go after the Feng brothers.”

“Roger that,” the big Cajun said, gulping for air, but powering through like a good Marine.

Snow-covered peaks tore at the belly of the sky like fangs. Many of the world’s 8,000-meter giants surrounded the valley. The Gasherbrums, Broad Peak, and K2—the Mountain of Mountains—rose up around them, reminding the three tiny dots that were pursuers and pursued of how insignificant they truly were. It was no wonder this place was called the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods.

Quinn scanned the boulders ahead of the stumbling jihadist, searching for the hidden threats he knew were there. “See one, think two” was a philosophy that had kept him alive on countless occasions. There were few secrets in the tactical world anymore. The Internet was rife with training videos and war-fighting manuals that drew the veil of secrecy from even the most sacred of strategies. Posting a rear guard was far from a complicated procedure. Even a conscripted goatherd would remember to leave someone to watch his back trail. There was a high probability that the kill squad had left someone behind—and that someone was likely lurking in the shadows ahead, just waiting for Quinn and Thibodaux to enter his sight picture.

Hours of physical training left both Quinn and Thibodaux in excellent condition. They’d been living at the base camp long enough for their bodies to acclimatize, but prolonged jogging at 12,000 feet pushed them to their limits and slowed them to little more than a steady shuffle.

The valley narrowed ahead before spreading out along the river in a wide gravel bar, forming a little pass that made for a perfect choke point on their route. Going downhill, Quinn was able to keep the target in sight, but boulders the size of garage doors littered the riverbank, providing countless places for an ambush. Quinn took his eyes off the dangers ahead long enough to shoot a glance at Thibodaux. They were in the shadows, but the big man squinted his good eye as if he were staring into the sun. Like Quinn, he was watching Khalifa for some sort of reaction.

Quinn raised his fist the moment he saw the fleeing target’s head snap to the right. Something—or someone—in the rocks had caught his attention.

Puffs of dirt and debris rose from the ground and surrounding rocks a half second later, sending Quinn and Thibodaux diving for the cover of a car-sized boulder. The staccato crack of gunfire echoed across valley walls.

His back against the rough stone, Jacques held the rifle flat to his chest. “Sound’s bouncing all over these mountains,” he said. “Hard to get a fix on ’em.”

Quinn said nothing. He’d drawn his revolver the moment he’d seen the fleeing jihadi perk up. He wished for a rifle of his own, but posing as a cook made carrying a long gun impractical, so he made do with a rusty Colt revolver he’d traded for in Karachi. It came with half a box of relatively new .45 ACP ammo and two metal half-moon clips that held the rounds in the cylinder. Without his customary Kimber 10mm and a second Glock or Beretta, Quinn felt nearly naked with the six-shooter.

Thibodaux closed his good eye, listening intently as he pinpointed a shooter’s location, a hundred meters ahead in the boulders along the river. He swung the SCAR and pulled the trigger, silencing the would-be assassin with a well-placed shot. One down, a second shooter began to walk a series of bullets across the trail.

Thibodaux looked down at the Colt in Quinn’s hand and grimaced. “Tell you what, Chair Force, how about you let me do the heavy lifting on this one. I’m not convinced that blunderbuss won’t blow up in your hand and kill us both.”

“How many rounds you have?” Quinn asked, nodding to the SCAR.

The Marine patted the magazine that jutted from the rifle’s action. “Seven here,” he said. “And another mag of twenty in my pocket. But, I don’t reckon there are more than two or three bad guys up there.”

The whap of rotors combined with the high metallic whine of aircraft engines drowned out the sound of gunfire. A hundred feet off the deck, two Alouette III helicopters, olive drab and bearing the green-and-white dot of the Pakistan Air Force, flared to slow and hover as they moved down the trail on the other side of the ambushers and directly in front of the fleeing jihadi. Designed for the rigors of operations at extremely high altitudes, the Aérospatiale Alouette IIIs were a favorite of both the Pakistan and Indian Air forces.

Quinn shielded his eyes with a forearm trying to block the swirling gray cloud of glacial dust. The lead chopper inched forward a few yards at a time, searching the rocks like a hunter kicking the grass to flush a bird. A moment later, a rocket hissed from the cylindrical pod on the Alouette’s struts, slamming into the ambusher’s nest. The blast was close enough that bits of stone and dead jihadist rained down on Quinn and Thibodaux where they knelt behind their boulder. The choppers loitered over the area for another full minute, no doubt using a FLIR or Forward Looking Infrared scope to search for remaining threats.

Quinn could see Khalifa through the dust, lying stunned on the gravel at the side of the trail, his uniform reduced to a pile of rags. The concussion had likely rendered him half deaf, but he was still alive.

Both Quinn and Thibodaux shielded their eyes as the Alouettes settled onto the gravel and the engine sounds whined down. A steady mountain wind pushed the dust away in a matter of moments, revealing a team of six extremely fit-looking men in maroon berets and camouflage battle dress. Each carried a Steyr AUG Bullpup rifle in his hands and a dour expression on his face.

“They don’t look too awful happy,” Jacques said, letting the butt of the rifle slide down to his boot toe, holding it by the barrel, but not giving it up completely. “Reckon they’re here to help us or shoot us in the beak?”

“We’re about to find out,” Quinn said. “See the guy standing out front?”

“He’s the one you told me went to the US Air Force Academy?” Thibodaux said. “The one with a mustache the size of a Kleenex box?”

“For a semester.” Quinn nodded. “We were roommates.”

“Friends then.” Thibodaux nodded.

“There was one little thing.” Quinn took a deep breath. “We had a little boxing match the last day of the semester.”

“Great,” Thibodaux groaned. “I guess I’ll understand it if they shoot us then.”

The apparent leader of the squad stood out front, arms folded across a narrow chest. A gleaming gold tooth peeked from behind a bushy black mustache that looked far too wide for his face. He’d always been thin, but the years since the academy—and likely the weight of command—had added depth to the hollows of his cheeks. Two men slung their rifles and stepped forward to grab the panting Abu Khalifa. One punched him in the belly, doubling him over in pain before the other cuffed his hands behind his back. The first soldier unslung his rifle and pointed it at Khalifa’s head while the other patted him down for weapons. When it was apparent that he didn’t have any, they kicked his feet out from under him to send him sprawling to the rocky ground with no means to catch himself. He landed with a thud and writhed on his side at the wing commander’s feet. The commander studied the jihadist for a moment from behind his big mustache, and then turned to peer at Quinn. There was a glint of mischief in his brown eyes. Hands clasped at the small of his back, he breathed deeply from the mountain air as if he owned the place.

And that was not far from wrong. A smile formed on the man’s face, just a hint at first, but by the time he reached Quinn, it had turned into a full-blown grin. The slender Pakistani embraced him in a full hug, grabbing both shoulders and then stepping back to give him a once-over.

“It has been too long,” the man said.

“It has.” Quinn smiled, glancing at Thibodaux.

“Jacques,” he said. “I’d like you to meet Wing Commander Mandeep Gola of the Pakistan Air Force.”

Thibodaux grinned, extending his hand. “I’ll bet you have some juicy stories to share.”

“Apart from the one of him nearly killing me in front of my parents?” Mandeep gave a deep belly laugh. He steered Quinn and Thibodaux out of earshot of his men. “As a matter of fact, I do know some interesting tales.” His words clicked with heavily punctuated Pakistani English. “But I am afraid we must save the best ones for another time. My superiors report that the escaped brothers have killed a small contingent of military police on the road between Gilgit and Chitral.”

Quinn nodded, picturing a map of Pakistan in his mind. “The Fengs were thought to have ties with al Qaeda cells operating out of some caves in Waziristan and even more across the border. You think they could be heading for Afghanistan?”

Mandeep smoothed his great mustache with a thumb and forefinger and sighed. “Many in my government believe just that. Or at least they say they believe so. But reports also say the security at Dera Ismail Khan prison was extremely tight. I have it on good authority that half the guard force had called in ill the night of the escape.” He shrugged. “It took the help of someone with power and connections to ensure their escape in the first place. I see no reason those same powerful and connected entities would not work to deceive everyone regarding their direction of travel.”

“Even killing their own guys,” Thibodaux muttered, disgusted, but not really surprised. “That’s messed up.”

“Indeed,” Gola said. “These killers have ties to Kashgar and my gut tells me that is the way they have gone.” He smiled at Quinn. “Do you still trust in your gut, the way you did at the Academy?”

“I do,” Quinn said. Even as a child growing up in Alaska, he’d learned that no matter what you called it, sixth sense, instinct, or a gut feeling—life offered subtle clues that only the subconscious could read. The Japanese called it haragei—art of the belly—and it was the foolish person that did not listen to it.

“There is a good chance that they have already crossed the Khunjareb into China,” Mandeep continued. “My government has set up a task force and the foreign ministry is working with Beijing for permission to send investigators into China.”

“Politician. . .