Cabrillo rued the last cigar he’d smoked, while his lungs felt as if they were drawing on the metallic dregs of an exhausted scuba tank.

A deep baritone came through his earpiece, “They wrangling them goats or getting ready to have their way with them?”

Another voice chimed in, “Since the goats aren’t wearing burkas, at least these boys know what they’re getting.”

“Radio silence,” Cabrillo said. He wasn’t worried about his people losing operational awareness. What concerned him was that the next comment would come from his second-in-command here, Linda Ross. Knowing her sense of humor as he did, whatever she joked about was sure to make him laugh out loud.

One of the young shepherds finally set his wire-stock AK aside, and they got the animals into the truck. By the time the rear gate was closed, the kid had his weapon back over his shoulder. The engine fired with a burst of blue exhaust, and soon the vehicle was chugging anemically away from the mountaintop village. This was an al-Qaeda stronghold, and yet life in the rugged mountains went on. Crops had to be raised, animals grazed, and goods bought and sold. The dirty secret of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban was that while their followers were fanatics, they still needed to be paid. With the money long spent from last fall’s lucrative poppy harvest, traditional means of support were necessary to keep the fighters operational.

There were roughly two dozen buildings in the town. Six or so fronted the dirt road that led down to the valley below, while the others rose behind them on the hill, connected by little more than footpaths. All were made of stone that blended in with the bleak surroundings, with low flat roofs and few windows. The largest was a mosque with a minaret that looked ready to topple.

The few women Cabrillo and his team had seen all wore dark burkas while the men sported baggy pants under jackets called chapans and either turbans or flattened wool caps known as pakols.

“Juan.” Linda Ross’s voice had an elfin lilt that went with her pixielike appearance. “Check out the mosque.”

Careful so as not to draw attention, Cabrillo swung his binoculars a few arc degrees and zoomed in on the mosque’s door. Like the other three members of his team, he was dug into the side of the mountain, with a dirt-covered tarp over the foxhole. They were all invisible from just a few yards away.

He adjusted the focus. Three people were coming out of the mosque. The one with the long gray beard had to be the imam, while the other two were much younger. They walked flanking the man, their expressions solemn as they listened to whatever the holy man imparted to them.

Juan tightened the focus. Both of them had Asiatic features and no facial hair of any kind. Their clothing was out of place for this impoverished region. Their parkas, though of muted colors, were top quality, and they both wore new hiking boots. He looked closer at the smaller of the two. He’d studied that face for hours before beginning the operation, committing it to memory for this precise moment.

“Bingo,” he said softly over their secure communications equipment. “That’s Setiawan Bahar. Everyone keep an eye on him. We need to know where they’re putting him up.”

The odd trio wandered up behind the main road, walking slowly because the imam had a pronounced limp. Intel said he got that limp when Kandahar fell back in 2001. They eventually reached one of the indistinguishable houses. A bearded man greeted them. They spoke at the doorstep for a few minutes and then the homeowner invited the two boys, both Indonesian, into his home. The imam turned to head back to his mosque.

“Okay, we got it,” Juan said. “From now on all eyes on that house so we know he hasn’t left.”

Cabrillo received a quiet chorus of “Roger that.”

Then, against his own orders, Juan swept his binoculars back to the main road as a white Toyota sedan that probably had a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer swung into town. No sooner had it stopped than the four doors were thrown open and armed men leapt out. Their faces were buried behind the tails of their turbans. They brought their weapons to their shoulders as they circled around to the car’s trunk. One leaned forward and keyed open the lock. The door raised slowly on its hydraulics, and three of the gunmen leaned in with the barrels of their AKs.

Juan couldn’t see what was in the trunk, or most likely who, and waited expectantly as one of the fighters lowered his gun so it hung under his arm and reached into the trunk. He hauled a fifth man from where he’d been lying in a fetal position. Their prisoner wore what looked like standard American-issue BDUs. The boots looked military too. His mouth was gagged, and a blindfold had been cinched over his eyes. His hair was a little longer than Army regulation and blond. He was too weak to stand and collapsed into the dirt as soon as he was free from the car.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cabrillo muttered. He turned his binoculars back to the house where Setiawan Bahar was sequestered and told his people to turn their attention to what passed for the town’s square.

Eddie Seng said nothing, while Linda Ross gasped and Franklin Lincoln cursed.

“Have we heard anything about a captured soldier?” Seng then asked.

“No. Nothing,” Linda replied, her voice tightening as one of the Taliban kicked the captured soldier in the ribs.

In his basso voice, Linc said, “Could have happened in the thirty hours it took us to hump our butts into position. No reason Max would have passed on news like that to us.”

Without taking his eyes off the house, Cabrillo switched radio frequencies. “Oregon, Oregon, do you copy?”

From the port city of Karachi more than five hundred miles to the south came the immediate reply, “This is the Oregon. Hali here, Chairman.”

“Hali, has anything come over the transom since we started this op about an American or NATO soldier kidnapped in Afghanistan?”

“Nothing over the news wires and nothing from official channels, but as you know we’re a bit out of the Pentagon’s loop right now.”

Cabrillo knew that last fact all too well. A few months back, after spending nearly a decade enjoying high-level access to military intelligence through his old mentor at the CIA, Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s private security company, known as the Corporation and based on a tramp freighter called the Oregon, had become a pariah. They had pulled off an operation in Antarctica to thwart a joint Argentine/Chinese bid to annex and exploit a massive new oil field off the pristine coast of the southern continent. Fearing the geopolitical risks involved, the U.S. government had told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt the mission.

It didn’t matter that they had succeeded spectacularly. They were seen as rogue by the new president, and Overholt was ordered not to use the unique services the Corporation provided. Ever again. It had taken all of Langston’s considerable influence in the corridors of Washington to keep his job following that episode. He’d confessed privately to Juan that the president had chewed off so much of his butt he hadn’t been able to sit for a week.

And that is what brought Cabrillo and this small team here, to one of the few places on earth never to be occupied by a foreign army. Even Alexander the Great had the sense to avoid Waziristan and the rest of the Northern Tribal Regions. They were here because a wealthy Indonesian businessman, Gunawan Bahar, had a son who ran away to join the Taliban, in much the same way youths of a few generations ago back in the United States ran off to join the circus. Only difference was that young Setiawan hadn’t developed mentally past the age of seven, and the cousin who’d brought him here had told the recruiter in Jakarta that Seti wanted to be a martyr.