Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,17

scene through her scope. To the untrained eye, it would be déjà vu all over again. Just another burning Afghan village strewn with bodies—no different than Sarabat, except that the men were still wearing their heads.

Her eye was far from untrained, though, and it immediately identified stark contrasts. The weapons used against Kot’eh had been far more powerful and destructive than the ubiquitous AK-47. There were gaping wounds in a number of the bodies that were undoubtedly caused by fifty-caliber sniper rounds, buildings displaying RPG damage, and three craters large and well placed enough that they suggested sophisticated light artillery.

The footprints of the offensive force ran the gamut from American and European military-issue boots to sole patterns she didn’t recognize—probably commercially available models favored by mercenaries. Even more interesting was that, if followed backward, most just suddenly appeared with two extraordinarily deep impressions. They’d been dropped, almost certainly at night, and then fanned out in an intricate pattern that suggested serious operators.

Again in contrast with Sarabat, the men in this village had fought. There was no question of that, just as there was no question that their efforts had been completely futile. She counted only three places where bloodstains didn’t have a corresponding corpse—attackers that had been wounded and evacuated.

The sun dipped onto the western plateau as she continued her search, finally finding what she was looking for near a charred fence: the body of Farhad Wahidi. They’d had a very tentative relationship, created over a number of years during occasional moments when the interests of the Taliban and CIA converged. She couldn’t say that she was sorry to see the fundamentalist son of a bitch dead, but it did make a productive conversation unlikely.

She pushed her sunglasses onto her headscarf and continued to search, staring at the ground as she traced ever-larger concentric circles through the scattered buildings. Occasionally, she’d stumble upon the long-strided tracks of a running Afghan headed toward the edge of the village, and she followed each one to an end that quickly began to feel inevitable: a body with a single, nicely centered round between the shoulder blades.

The light continued to flatten and obscure details that the wind would probably make permanent work of overnight. She was about to give up when she found one last set of footprints coming out of a corral full of blackened livestock. They were awkward at first, suggesting that their author had run crouched, using the panicked animals as cover. After about fifty meters, the stride lengthened and turned east toward boulder-strewn mountains glowing red in the distance.

Three pursuing tracks soon converged, but their configuration was calculated and their pace unhurried. This wasn’t a chase initiated in the heat of battle. No, they’d found the track just as she had and were now hunting the escapee like an animal.

Randi looked back at the rising moon. She knew from experience that it would provide plenty of light to track the men and that, in all likelihood, the one person who had the answers she was looking for wouldn’t live to see morning. If he wasn’t dead already.

Of course, setting out on a nighttime chase meant leaving the chopper. The very thought conjured another surge of adrenaline and the mental image of returning to find it stripped and up on blocks.

“Bad idea,” she said, pulling out her sat phone and dialing a number from memory.

A powerful encryption routine delayed the connection for a moment but then Fred Klein’s familiar voice came on.

“Did you find anything?”

“Your suspicious mercenary activity. Everyone here is dead.”

“So those villagers wipe out Sarabat under suspicious circumstances and then they themselves are wiped out by an unknown mercenary group.”

“Seems to me that someone helped them take out Sarabat and now they’re covering their tracks. The question is why? Who would care this much about a couple of little villages in the middle of nowhere?”

10

Prince George’s County, Maryland

USA

JON SMITH MOVED DELIBERATELY down the hallway, knowing he was being watched from multiple angles. It had been decorated with tasteful rugs and vases full of fresh flowers, but it would take more than the scent of gardenias to make it feel like anything other than what it was: a deadly shooting gallery designed to deal with anyone who might want to penetrate to the inner offices uninvited.

A former special forces operative appeared at the far end and Smith put a hand up—partially in greeting and partially to prove that it was empty. A brief nod was all he got before the