Chapter 21
Camp Carson
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
Autumn 2008
Seven years after Kris had left Afghanistan, the country looked worse than it had before the invasion of 2001.
The Taliban had surged and faced off against US forces in pockets all around the country, controlling large swathes of territory and subjecting Afghan citizens to their same repressive fundamentalism mixed with tribalism. Women had gone back under the burqa, and girls were forbidden from going to school.
Bands of warlords had poured out of the lawless tribal areas, each snatching a section of the border region for their brutal gangs. They ran weapons and drugs, terrorized locals on both sides of the border, and stood against the United States, the struggling Afghan government, and Pakistan. Scattered border crossings straddled the main roads that passed between the two countries, but goat paths and footpaths crisscrossed the border, smuggling routes for anything and everything. And everyone.
Al-Qaeda, whose fighters and leaders had fled the firebombing of their homes and camps in late 2001, returned, staging a Hollywood-worthy comeback story in the mountainous border region and tribal belt.
As the United States poured men, money, and myopic attention into Iraq, al-Qaeda fighters regrouped, returned and resettled. New commanders were promoted, bloodthirsty and hungry to strike back for every moment following September 11, every death of their brothers and comrades.
Al-Qaeda, Kris wrote in his monthly summary cable to Langley, remains highly organized, highly motivated, and extremely capable of carrying out large-scale terror attacks within Afghanistan, Pakistan, and abroad. Their abilities at the present time meet or exceed their abilities from before 11 September 2001.
In so many ways, on so many levels, Iraq had derailed everything. National security. The hunt for Bin Laden. The destruction of al-Qaeda. The lives of thousands of American soldiers. The lives of hundreds of thousands, millions, of Iraqis, and so many more in the Middle East. The lives and hearts of a billion Muslims around the world.
Seven years after the invasion, and here he was, trying to pick up the broken pieces of Afghanistan and destroy al-Qaeda again. But this time the enemy was stronger, more enraged, and had seven years of experience striking back at the United States, the US military, and the CIA.
But Kris had new weapons, too. Back in 2001, drone warfare had been in its infancy. Only a handful had circled the skies over Afghanistan then. Now, hundreds of Predator drones swung in lazy orbits over the skies.
Director Edwards had given him the orders straight from the mouth of the new president: the gloves were off.
The drones were unleashed. Destroy their safe houses, their training camps, their communication networks, and their commanders, wherever you find them, as quickly as you can.
It was the evolution of the former vice president’s decree. Find them, stop them.
But now stopping them meant killing them, anywhere in the world.
If there was a chance that terrorists were planning the worst attack imaginable, then the US had to proceed like that was fact. All of the United States’ strategic and tactical decisions stemmed from the vice president’s orders, given shortly after September 11, 2001.
Kris fell asleep, finally, after staying up and reading the day’s collected phone intercepts from Langley, Kabul, and Pakistan. Every cell phone call in the region was vacuumed up and analyzed by an array of computer servers and then a horde of analysts at the NSA and CIA. Several names had repeatedly popped up around vague references to malls, football stadiums, and bus stops in America. Phrases that sounded like veiled conversations about practice runs and surveillance.
“Find them, Caldera,” Ryan had barked over the phone from Kabul. “And kill them.”
The two named men were several rungs down the ladder of al-Qaeda from Bin Laden, but they were big fish in the organization’s rising phoenix. Salim and Suleyman, both on the FBI and CIA’s Most Wanted list. Salim had been a part of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and had made his way back to Afghanistan to help with al-Qaeda’s post-September 11 savagery. After the fall of Afghanistan, Suleyman had been promoted up the ranks until he was in charge of all terror operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’d planned the assassination of the Pakistani prime minister and had organized a multi-year reign of carnage on both sides of the border. His largest attack was the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel.
For the past week, Kris had been following them with his drones until he finally found their headquarters, their safe house, deep in the tribal belt in an abandoned village. Only Salim was there, for the moment. Suleyman had disappeared. But he’d be back.
“Should we try to capture them? They’re in the senior al-Qaeda ranks. Don’t we want to interrogate them? Find out what they know about Bin Laden? Zawahiri?” Kris had pushed back against Ryan’s order. “These are the most senior members we’ve targeted. What if Suleyman is with Zawahiri now? Or Bin Laden?”
“Then you should have kept better eyes-on. Never have let him slip your Predators.” Ryan’s voice had been tight, barely controlled anger simmering beneath his words. “How would you try to capture these two, Caldera? Send Haddad in, guns blazing? An Arab John Wayne? We have no authority in the tribal belt. We don’t have the manpower to insert a strike force, render a target, and get them out of there. The costs are too high. Besides,” he said, his words going tight. “We don’t do that anymore. And how would you suggest we extract critical information from such a hardened al-Qaeda leader?”
“My track records speaks for itself, Ryan.”
“Find them. Eliminate them. Those are your orders.”
“Yes sir.”
Before sunrise, only hours after he’d fallen asleep, David’s arm thrown around his waist, the door to Kris’s quarters slid open. “Sir, we’ve got a hit on a target.”
He trudged down to the drone bay, a double-wide trailer behind a concrete wall fortified with sandbags, and slipped into the dim cavernous space. Monitors glowed in night vision green, infrared spectrum, cool blue and warm red. Soldiers and CIA operators manned a dozen joysticks before their monitors, flying the drones circling the region.
His deputy, a man named Darren, who had cut his teeth in Iraq as an Army intelligence captain before moving to the CIA, waved him over to the main monitor bank.
“Salim left his hideout in the middle of the night. We followed him as he drove out to a remote village in the mountains where he picked up a man he seemed to know well. They got into his vehicle and returned to his hideout. These are the images we captured of the second man.”
Kris flipped through angled shots of the mystery man. About six foot, slender, robed. A turban obscured his face from most of the images. “How do we know it’s not Salim’s father? Or his uncle? Or his wife’s uncle’s brother’s best friend?”
“It’s not his father, and it’s not his uncle.” Darren, who seemed to tolerate Kris only enough to complete their mission, ignored his third question. “We believe this is Suleyman and that they are together in Salim’s safe house now.”
“You want to strike.”
“Yes sir.” Darren loved “taking out the trash”, as he called it.
But each strike came with consequences. Find them, kill them was almost too easy with drones. Too far removed from the impact, it became far too easy to become a push-button jockey. Innocent civilians had been caught in the crossfire, or had been targeted mistakenly. There was innocent blood on the drone program’s hands, but since that blood was hundreds, if not thousands of miles away, no one in the US seemed to mind.
Kris did.
“Tell me the full history of this safe house. How many civilians have entered and exited? Who has come and gone in the past twenty-four, forty-eight, and seventy-two hours? What civilians live in the proximity of the target location?”
Darren and the drone operator ran through the evidence, pulling up images and logs to substantiate the comings and goings of everyone into and out of the safe house. As far as they had seen, it had only ever been Salim, with phone intercepts providing the intel that Suleyman visited occasionally. The safe house was in an abandoned village, far from civilians. Unusual, in the practices of al-Qaeda. They liked to surround themselves with civilians, situate themselves in the worst possible target zones. Make a strike against them a morally objectionable call and an impossible order.
But not this time.
“Are there any women or children in the compound? Does Salim have a wife? Kids?”
“Salim’s wife and kids live in Peshawar.”
“How confident are you that it's Suleyman with him?”
“Eighty percent, sir.”
He held life and death in his hands every day. Kris imagined his decisions like rocks being thrown into a pond, ripples from every decision expanding, striking other decisions, other lives and beings in the pond and the world. Consequence, for every action, every single thing, sometimes beyond the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, where no one could see. Sometimes the ripples seemed to stretch forward and backward in time, even. Here he was in Afghanistan, seven years after September 11. And September 11 had been decades after the CIA’s support to the mujahedeen, decades after Ambassador Dubs’s assassination. Ripples expanding, ever outward.
What would this strike create? What consequences?
“Proceed with your strike.” He nodded to Darren. “Use every Hellfire. Let’s be certain.”
Let it never be said that he, a gay man, shied away from ordering a rain of death and destruction. If there was one snide comment others could fling at him, it was not that he was weak, or had a soft stomach.
The drone pilot pivoted his joystick, changing the Predator’s orbit until he was lined up for his strike. On-screen, the safe house filled the center of the monitor, black-and-white images in the pre-dawn glow. They’re just beginning to pray.
The pilot fired, counted down. “Three… two… one… Impact.”
A giant mushroom cloud appeared, non-nuclear, but skyrocketing debris and dust and shattered lives into the air.
It took hours for the cloud to dissipate. The drone stayed in orbit the entire time, recording the crater that had replaced the safe house and the removal of two burned and mangled bodies from the rubble. In the intercept bay, Kris flagged anything discussing the deaths of any al-Qaeda commanders be brought to him immediately.
Several hours later, a runner brought him the intercept: Salim and Suleyman were declared dead.
Al-Qaeda vowed revenge.
Kris longed for his and David’s Virginia home, nestled in the woods, surrounded by nature and peace.
Home in Afghanistan was Camp Carson, a dusty, windswept base of concrete sprawl and HESCO barriers, sandbags and concertina wire, trailers and humming generators. The base perched on a plateau just north of Tora Bora. It was close to where he had manned the radios while David and Ryan and the others plunged into the mountains, shadowing Bin Laden’s footsteps, so long ago. Now, instead of the bare emptiness and desolation from before, the base was a fortress guarded by helicopter gunships, massive perimeter fencing, and armed guards in towers, watching everything.
The land was the very definition of austere. Dry desert, devoid of life, stretched for miles, until the plateau bumped into the White Mountains and the slopes of Tora Bora changed to craggy woods and scattered ferns. Even from a distance, the scars and craters of the battle in 2001 were visible, pockmarks on the land, empty of life.
Beyond Tora Bora, Pakistan stretched into the horizon. The border separating the two countries was impossible to see, a line in the dust without marking, without signposts or fences. The peaks seemed to hover in the haze, scarred with sunlight, as if trying to escape the earth into the sky. In the afternoons, when the light burned onto the dead lands, the desiccated, war-ravaged earth, Kris thought the place looked a little like Hell would after the fires burned themselves out. Afghanistan still seemed that far away from the rest of the world.
Life on base wasn’t terrible. He and David shared quarters, a privilege only given to married CIA officers. They had a cramped double bed shoved in the same size space as a single officer’s quarters, one nightstand, one desk that wobbled whenever it was looked at, and a fluorescent light strip with a dangling orange extension cord.
Compared to being separated from David, it was paradise.
They shared a bathroom with two other officers. The base had a gym crammed full with exercise equipment, donated by every fitness manufacturer in the States. The food was good, and the mess hall served a rotating selection of American favorites. Lobster and crab legs even showed up on the menu. There was nothing as strange to Kris as eating lobster with David by the light of their flashlight at two in the morning, their version of a date in Afghanistan.
A CIA-run lounge served beer and wine, a luxury that the rest of the soldiers in Afghanistan couldn’t taste. Football, basketball, and baseball games were beamed live into the base via satellite.
Kris commuted from his trailer quarters to the command center every day, a walk of three minutes. David, more days than not, dressed in traditional Afghan clothes and slipped out, driving a series of loops and switchbacks and changing cars and bicycles and even picking up a donkey, all to avoid being tracked. He, and sometimes others with him, would wander the border regions, crisscrossing into Pakistan and back into Afghanistan, scouting for tracks, hidden weapons, signs of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He’d joined the CIA’s ultra-secretive counterterrorist pursuit teams, hunting on the ground to collect intelligence, and to capture or kill the CIA’s most wanted.
They formed opposite sides of the spear. Kris with his drones, David with his clandestine infiltration on the ground. David sparred with shadows and ghosts, always looking over his shoulder, ever mindful of being discovered. Kris battled politics and whispers, a dizzying array of mixed priorities, and constant pressure from every part of the government. The Department of Defense, NATO Command in Kabul, Special Operations Command, and Ryan, each pulled Kris in different directions, wanting different operations, different actions.
The CIA base was host to Special Forces and Delta operators, military royalty who were never told no, never questioned. Already against the CIA in principle and mocking them behind their back for being clowns, push-button jockeys, and children who hid on their bases, the Special Forces soldiers recoiled hard when they were told Kris was the new commander of the remote field base.
More than once, Kris heard soldiers mockingly refer to Camp Carson as Camp Cocklover. Or to himself as Major Fag. The Special Forces, notoriously tight-knit and cultish, excluded David from their fraternity with a pathological virulence.
Darren, his deputy, had come from the Special Forces world, and he straddled the gulf between the CIA and the military. Darren showed up and he did his job, and he never acted anything less than professional to Kris’s face, but his best friends were the loudest of the operators who sneered and joked in the mess hall.
After Salim and Suleyman’s deaths, Kris’s eavesdropping nets spread wide across the northwestern Pakistan frontier, stretching from the Afghanistan border with Central Asia to almost the heart of Pakistan. The world’s best and most sophisticated technology pointed at the globe’s most backwater and underdeveloped regions. Drones hovered over every ancient village, every dirt path, every huddle of goats. Computers at the NSA and at Langley hummed, ripping through trunk phone lines, scanning bytes of data passing over the internet, and poring through captured phone conversations vacuumed up by the technology of the most powerful nation on earth.
It was awe-inspiring, how much power they wielded.
The hunt for al-Qaeda’s senior leadership usually progressed at a fixed pace. The computers chewed data. Analysts reviewed intelligence. Kris directed their gazes and analysis, focused his team to zero in on certain areas, expand other lines of intelligence gathering. He was in charge of both the drone program and the human intelligence program, managing an army of informants from Pakistan and Afghanistan who traded bits of information, sightings, and rumors for handouts of cash and parcels of food.
But everything came to a screeching halt with one word, vacuumed up over a war-ravaged Pakistan province infested with al-Qaeda and Taliban warlords in the heart of a brittle no-man’s-land of terrorism and virulent anti-Western hatred.
Nawawiun.
Nuclear.
The flash cable came in from Langley: al-Qaeda intercepts in Waziristan Province had captured the phone conversation of two senior commanders debating the Islamic merits of using nuclear devices. The original intercept, translated Arabic, was beneath the summary. Kris read it four times.
Nawawiun. Nuclear.
Kris’s phone blew up seconds later, Ryan phoning from Kabul at the same time an analyst from Langley tried to get through. He answered Ryan.
“Have you seen the newest cable?”
“I have it in my hands.”
“This is a fucking nightmare. If al-Qaeda gets their hands on a nuke, that’s a fucking disaster. It’s what they’ve always wanted. Always.”
“Where could they have gotten one, though?”
“Pakistan. Old Soviet weapons that have gotten misplaced. There are more than a few very plausible options for how they could have gotten their hands on a nuclear device.”
“We haven’t authenticated this report beyond just a single intercept. We need to know more.”
“You’re telling me.” Ryan snorted. “You need to get your people out there, now. You’re the most forward base, and this threat is coming from your territory.”
“I’ll redirect my people. See what we can find out from our sources on the ground. I can move more drones over Waziristan, but the DOD is going to start complaining about the reallocation.”
“I’ll handle DOD. You just find out what’s going on in Waziristan, before al-Qaeda detonates a nuke and we’re looking at the real Apocalypse.”
The intel came in like an ocean wave, crashing against Camp Carson.
Another intercept, a few days later: three al-Qaeda members talking about a Shura council meeting they had attended where the topic of debate was whether using nawawiun devices was Islamic. Was such a device considered something lawful in the eyes of Allah? Or were nuclear devices harmful to creation, to Allah’s will?
Shura council meetings were called when al-Qaeda decision-makers needed to find consensus on an action and needed Islamic cover for their choices in combat. Bin Laden had called such a meeting to discuss the September 11 attacks. The Shura had ultimately rejected his proposal, saying the attacks were un-Islamic.
Bin Laden proceeded anyway.
Saqqaf, in Iraq, hadn’t bothered with a Shura council. He’d forged ahead, dedicated to his own death cult, his bloodthirsty, apocalyptic vision of jihad as a cleansing fire of wrath that would sweep the world. Only a scattered handful of extreme imams had ever signed on to Saqqaf’s vision of Islam. Every major and established religious authority across multiple sects of the faith had denounced him.
What did it mean that a new Shura council was debating the use of nawawiun devices? Shura councils were not called for high-minded ideas or what-if scenarios; they were the faithful’s most devout form of democracy: what did the people think of a leader’s proposed action, and how did such actions line up with Allah’s will for humanity?
The possibility that this nuclear threat was real, and imminent, shot higher.
Director Edwards held a conference call with Kris and Ryan, going over every minute detail of both intercepts. What did this word mean in Arabic, in all its permutations? What had human sources said in the past few days? Had there been anything to corroborate the reports?
David and another CIA SAD officer headed out to Waziristan for three days, posing as out-of-work farmers searching for any employment they could find. David came back filthy and covered in shit—he’d found a job making mudbricks out of fresh cow dung—but with ominous rumors and street chatter as well.
Something big was coming, the word on the street said. Something not even the Great Satan could withstand. Something not even they could stop.
Kris formally recommended Director Edwards ask to increase the threat level for the homeland. “This is the most serious threat al-Qaeda has presented since before September eleventh, Director. What they’re saying, how they’re acting. This is serious. Deadly serious.”
“Kris, if you think this is that serious, then I’ll take your recommendation straight to the president. Promise me, Kris. We’re going to find out what the hell is going on over there and stop whatever it is they’re planning.”
“I promise.” His vow, seven years old, echoed, a ripple extending forward through time. He would never let harm come to the homeland again, not because of him. Not because of what he did or didn’t do. “I swear.”
His phone rang in the middle of the night.
Kris was still awake, reading daily cables and reports from his analysts, trying to find a morsel of intel to exploit or expand on. David lay facedown on his lap, face burrowed into his belly. They’d made love and David had passed out, exhausted to the bone with his near-daily treks across the border and back.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, clattering across the cheap laminate and skittering away from his grasp.
The country code showed Jordan. He didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”
“Mr. Caldera.” The deep voice, sounding almost as tired and worn through as Kris felt, belonged to Ahmad, one of the Mukhabarat agents Jordan had sent to Iraq to help with the hunt for Saqqaf. “We need to talk.”
“What about?”
“I’m going to send you an email. It has a video clip attached. After you watch it, call me back.” Ahmad hung up.
Kris pursed his lips and waited. A minute later, his phone vibrated again, an incoming email. Watch this, the subject line read.
He clicked the video file.
It was grainy, the shadows too dark and the lights too bright. Men in robes and turbans moved around a crowded room, a mudbrick hut with open holes for windows. Rifles were propped against walls. The men sat on dusty carpets in a circle. The video zoomed out, panned slightly. Refocused. It was obviously shot from something small, something handheld. Something concealed. A bit of robe fell over the lens before being brushed away—
And revealing the aged face of al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Kris stopped breathing. His eyes widened, until he felt like his eyeballs would fall from his skull.
Zawahiri spoke, but the audio was distorted. Kris had to rewind and re-watch a half dozen times. “Brothers,” Zawahiri said. “The Sheikh, Allah bless him, sends his love. He has asked that we discuss a most urgent topic today. We must discuss the nuclear devices. Does Allah declare the nawawiun a proper weapon of war?”
The video cut out abruptly.
The Sheikh. Osama Bin Laden. Nawawiun, nuclear. The devices. Nawawiun devices. Nuclear devices. A new plan of Osama Bin Laden’s, and somehow, al-Qaeda had managed to get their hands on nuclear material.
Kris called Ahmad back. “How did you get this?”
“We have a mole. Someone we turned in Jordan and sent to Afghanistan. He’s worked his way up, and he emailed us that file a few days ago.”
“Tell me everything.”
“His name is Hamid, and the Jordanians picked him up when he was agitating for Saqqaf online. Posting in jihadist chat rooms and advocating violence against the West. Raising funds to send to Saqqaf. They traced his ISP and plucked him out of his Amman home. He wasn’t who you’d expect. Married, father to three boys. A doctor. He tried to volunteer to travel to Iraq to help as a doctor, but never took the final step.”
Kris led the top-level intelligence briefing from the command center at Camp Carson. On the main monitor in his secured conference room, George and Director Edwards, back at Langley, and Ryan in Kabul, each filled a corner of the screen. The president’s national security advisor and chief of staff were also on the call, scowling into the cameras from the Situation Room.
“Is he a coward?” Ryan glared across cyberspace. “Willing to talk the talk but not walk the walk?”
“He turned on his old jihadi brothers in Amman at the fingernail factory.” The grim nickname for Jordan’s intelligence headquarters. “He begged for the chance to make things right. The Jordanians told him the only way they’d wipe his record clean was for him to start working for them. They gave him a thousand bucks and told him to go to Afghanistan, pose as a doctor looking to support the jihad. They wanted him to identify threats against Jordan or any potential jihadist returnees to their country.”
“Sounds like a giant gamble.” Director Edwards frowned.
“They didn’t really care much whether he lived or died. If he bit the dust, they were out a thousand dollars. If he came through with intel, great. He fell off the map for two years, after he sent an email from Peshawar. Said he was linking up with some fighters and making his way into Afghanistan, but that he was going to be offline for some time. That people would be watching him. Said he’d be in contact when he could. After six months, the Jordanians closed his file and declared him dead. There were tons of drone strikes in that region. They assumed he’d been hit.”
“What the fuck has he been doing for two years in Afghanistan?” The chief of staff glowered at the camera, his dark eyes picking Kris apart, even from ten thousand miles away. “I don’t buy it. He disappears into the badlands, and then comes back with this video?”
“Our analysts have authenticated it.” Director Edwards spoke before Kris could.
“Zawahiri hasn’t been seen since 2002. Not by anyone outside of al-Qaeda or from the West. There have been zero sightings. Getting him on video, like this, is huge. It just doesn’t happen. What has Hamid been doing for two years? Working his way up the ranks, most likely. Until he got something he knew we’d want. And don’t forget the reward for either Bin Laden or Zawahiri. Twenty-five million buys a whole new life,” Kris said.
“To be clear, the Jordanians have been running him, yes? No American intelligence officer has met this agent? There’s no American assessment of his reliability?” The national security advisor jumped in.
“No, sir. Not yet. The Jordanians have said they believe he’s reliable. Apparently before sending him to Afghanistan, his handler built a rapport with him. Made him see the light. Hamid was begging for a chance to redeem himself, they say.” Kris took a deep breath. “Our plan is to meet with Hamid personally. We do need to get an American assessment of his abilities, his access, and yes, his reliability. Ahmad, his Jordanian handler is flying out. We’re working on contacting Hamid and arranging a meeting time and location. We want forty-eight hours with him for a full debrief.”
“Is there a possibility that the video is a fake?”
“No, sir. The analysts at Langley authenticated it.”
“Could he have stumbled on old video?” the chief of staff asked. “Maybe it’s something that he found somewhere and is passing off as his own intelligence?”
Kris shook his head. “I highly doubt that. We have current intercepts that reference the conversation Zawahiri is having with his Shura council. Wherever this video comes from, it’s recent. Very recent. And it refers to a threat we have to take extremely seriously. Al-Qaeda may be in possession of a nuclear device, and they are currently debating how to use it.”
The chief of staff and national security advisor sat back. They glanced at each other, then at Director Edwards. “What’s the CIA’s recommendation if this Hamid ends up being legitimate?”
“We track him. We put an active tracker on him and follow him around the clock. He’ll give us a signal when he’s back with Zawahiri, or if he’s taken higher. He’s a doctor, and there aren’t many of them in al-Qaeda. Both Zawahiri and Bin Laden are in poor health. We’ve always wanted to pursue the health angle and try to insert some kind of medical personnel into the movement. This is exactly what we’ve wanted.” Director Edwards smiled at Kris, over the screen. “Bin Laden is hiding in a cave somewhere, marginalized. He’s a symbol. But Zawahiri is operational. When the next attack comes, it’s coming from him. This may be the big break we’ve all been dreaming of.”
“A real double agent inside al-Qaeda.” The chief of staff finally cracked a tiny smile. “Don’t put the champagne on ice just yet, but…” He nodded to them all. “Fucking well done.”
Ahmad arrived at Camp Carson two days later. He hugged Kris and shook David’s hand, both his eyebrows rising when he found out they were married and quartered together. “I didn’t realize, in Iraq—”
“We kept it quiet. But we’ve been together for years.”
Ahmad nodded. He smiled at them both. “To find happiness in these days is a great and beautiful thing. Alhamdulillah.”
Kris and David debriefed him, learning everything they could from him about Hamid. Exactly how had the Jordanians found him? Exactly how fast did he flip, once Ahmad had him inside the fingernail factory? They went around and around. Where had Hamid been for two years? He’d been a die-hard Saqqaf supporter? Had Ahmad and Hamid truly connected enough that Ahmad believed he was genuine? Was Hamid really willing to sell out his brothers, his heroes, for cold hard cash?
“Twenty-five million buys a new life. Many new lives. Is there something you wouldn’t do for that much money? Or does that much money buy your allegiances as well?”
“It doesn’t feel right. Not to me. He turned too quickly.”
“Zahawi turned during our first conversation at Site Green,” Kris pressed. “And how many supposedly hardened jihadis did we flip while hunting Saqqaf in Iraq?”
“And how many we didn’t. Low-level thugs who treated his movement like they were joining a street gang, who weren’t hardened believers in the cause, gave up the ideology. For them, the ideology was a justification for their violence, not the root cause.”
“It comes down to whether they can see the writing on the wall. Whether the jihadis can realize what’s in their best interest.” Ahmad shrugged. “Everyone breaks. Everyone talks. Some are just smarter than others. They talk faster.”
“Deep faith, hardened faith, is thicker than that. It doesn’t break, not that easily,” Davis said.
“You think Zahawi’s faith wasn’t strong?” Kris frowned.
“What’s Zahawi doing now?” David leaned back and crossed his arms. “He’s in Gitmo, and he’s the cell block leader for all the other al-Qaeda fighters there. He leads prayers. He says in every one of his tribunal meetings before the military judge that he is still anti-American. He still believes in the cause. He’s a true believer and he’s never changed from that. Giving up intelligence to us did not change his core beliefs, then or now. And—” David glared. “Torturing him didn’t help either.”
“Have you been checking up on Zahawi?” Ahmad looked at David like he’d grown a second head.
“I’ve seen men die for their faith.” David held Kris’s stare. “Deep, hard faith.”
A basketball stadium flashed in Kris’s mind, a swinging body. Like he’d seen it, like he’d been there. He closed his eyes.
“And we’ve all seen men turn greedy and give up everything they can for cold hard cash.” Ahmad lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the table toward David. “This guy wants the money. He wants a new life. Wouldn’t anyone want to get away from this hellhole?”
Hamid emailed Ahmad every few days now. After the video, it seemed that Hamid had reached some kind of level within the movement where he was trusted, where he was allowed to have his own cell phone and travel where he wanted, as he pleased.
On the frontier now, he wrote. Gathering medical supplies. Have not seen Zawahiri since the meeting. Two drone strikes yesterday. Many dead. I set three broken bones. We buried twelve bodies.
Kris and Darren reviewed drone footage and found two strikes in a remote corner of Waziristan. The pilot, as per his orders, had lingered over the site as al-Qaeda had come for their wounded and dead. All in all, twelve graves had been dug.
“Ask him for a target. Tell him we want him to identify a target for us to strike. To prove his bona fides.”
Three days later, Hamid emailed, saying a group of Taliban would be traveling from Pakistan through the mountains to Asadabad, Afghanistan. They’d be traveling at night, in cars with no headlights.
Kris and Darren waited through the long hours of the night, until the drones hovering over Asadabad caught sight of a two-car convoy snaking down the potholed, gravelly Kunar road through the mountains down from Pakistan.
Kris gave the order to fire.
Twin explosions burned the night, and in the morning, the wreckage of the cars was pushed off the road by the villagers. Blackened scraps of metal tumbled down the flinty ravine and came apart in a cloud of black dust.
Hamid had proven himself, at least with the first tests. Kris felt the pressure of Langley, of Ryan, of Director Edwards, and even of the White House breathing down his neck. Find them, kill them was the mission, and he’d only had drones to work with for so long.
Now, Hamid had appeared like a gift from above. Find them… and use Hamid. Hamid could be an extension of Kris, inside al-Qaeda. Hamid could be his eyes and his ears, even his hands, if he got close enough. Hamid could be Kris’s weapons.
God, he hungered for Hamid’s access. They all did, from Kabul to Langley to DC. For what it meant. If Hamid was inside the inner circle of al-Qaeda, if he could get back to Zawahiri, they could make meaningful strikes against al-Qaeda. Hit them where it ached, like they’d hit the US. Where it hurt.
After seven years of frustrations, of failures, of devastation, and death, Kris needed a win. He needed something to check in the victory column. The ledger felt woefully imbalanced after seven years of his eyes seeing the worst of humanity crawl up from the darkness.
He could feel the desperation swimming in his veins. Clawing at his heart. Please, a win, please. He wanted to get the sons of bitches that had ripped apart the world on September 11, 2001. Do something to fix what had become of the world. Right some wrong, or at least provide the tiniest bit of recompense he could to the families of the three thousand souls who had died that day.
And he wanted to do this for David, too. Rip the men out of the world who had twisted and perverted David’s faith, his father’s faith, until David was certain Allah was dead. If they could just destroy this evil, crush it, eliminate it, maybe there’d be space for David’s faith to return. It was the closest he could get to David’s father, Kris felt. Resurrecting David’s father’s faith and freeing it from the darkness.
To get started, he had to get to Hamid.
Know everything Hamid knew.
And then unleash Hamid on al-Qaeda, weaponized by Kris’s own hands.
You have told the Americans about me, haven’t you?
Hamid’s next message came before Ahmad had a chance to explain.
I have, Ahmad wrote back. And you’ve made all of Jordan proud. Your king proud. Your nation, and the world, is inspired by you. The ummah will praise your name. The Americans all rejoice over you. And, habibi, you are the one they most wish to speak to you. Urgently. We must plan for your next moves. Keep you safe.
Hamid went radio silent for three days. Kris paced Camp Carson, from the command center to the runways to the helipads.
David found him at the helipads, walking the empty squares where the Blackhawks landed every evening. The ethereal dust haze hovered in the air, choking off the sky and settling over everything in a fine layer of grit. It felt like walking through ghosts, like some kind of otherworldly realm. The dust seemed heavy, the dust of shattered empires and millennia of history trapped within the borders of Afghanistan. The sun, trying to peak over the Tora Bora mountains, couldn’t push through the haze completely. Afghanistan was still on planet Earth, but the sun seemed farther away than it did back in DC.
“I’m not sure this guy is everything you want him to be,” David cautioned. “I think he’s pulling back because he can’t deliver. I think he’s been talking a big game with Ahmad and now it’s about to get real. And he’s not ready.”
“You think we’re being played?”
“He says the right things. Delivers the right intel. Seems to be in the know. But we don’t really know that for certain, do we? And we don’t know why he’s doing this.”
“We know the why. Twenty-five-million-dollar reward.”
“You know, I’ve always thought that reward was a silly amount.”
Kris’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
“Most people here don’t think that much money exists in the entire world. Twenty-five million dollars is make-believe money to them. Their entire lives can be lived on less than a hundred dollars.”
“Hamid is Jordanian. He’s Westernized. He for sure knows the value of twenty-five million.”
“We need to move slowly with Hamid. Carefully. Take our time understanding him.”
“No, no, no,” Kris sighed. Exasperation weighed down his words. “That’s exactly the opposite of what we need. We need to get inside his skull. Understand what he knows and what he can do for us. If he’s a con man, then we cut him loose. But we can’t just let this linger. What if he’s killed? Or worse?”
David took both his hands. Looked into his eyes. “What if this is a trap?”
“A trap?” Kris snorted. “So a mole that the Jordanians inserted two years ago is somehow conspiring with Zawahiri? And comes up with intelligence that matches multiple intercepts, all speaking to the same tactic? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would al-Qaeda, or Zawahiri, trust someone who had been sent to infiltrate them?”
“I don’t trust this guy’s change of heart. I don’t.”
“David, what’s more likely? A huge conspiracy, years in the making, using sophisticated tactics al-Qaeda has never used before, trusting someone who was sent to burn them, who Ahmad swears is legitimate, in an attempt to trap us? Or that Hamid has been dazzled by the potential reward and he wants to cash in on his little adventure?” He paced, his hands on his hips. “Look, if anything, I think he’s playing a scam for money. Trying to cash in on the CIA’s dime. That happens all the time. Could it be happening here? Sure.” Kris cringed. “But, Jesus, I hope not.”
“I know the Arab mind. The Arab soul. Things don’t just go away. We’re desert people. And the desert is eternal, Kris. The past lives inside the present and shapes every single day. History, the past… These aren’t just academic concepts. The past never leaves someone. Never.”
“David—”
“You and me, we’re CIA. We’re American, as American as you can get, but even we’ve been disgusted by the past years. There are times I have been ashamed to show my face to Muslims, to my fellow Arabs, because of what we’ve done. If I feel that way, then how do others feel? Who’ve lived every day on the front lines of the disintegration of their world?”
“I didn’t know you felt like that,” Kris said softly.
David kept going. “Hamid spent more years cheering on Saqqaf than he’s been undercover.”
“You think he’s still sympathetic to the jihadis?”
“I just don’t trust him, Kris. And I don’t want you to get hurt. I know how badly you want this. Everyone on this base and back in DC, seems to have Hamid fever. Be careful.”
He smiled and rested his hand on David’s chest, over his heart. “You always watch out for me, my love.”
David covered his hand. “I always will. Forever.”
“And I you.” Kris kissed him, sweetly, a peck on the lips, even though they were out on the airfield and anyone and everyone could see them. “But this is going to work. I promise. We started this seven years ago and we’re going to finish it. Together.”
David smiled. He said nothing.
His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
Ahmad knocked on their door in the middle of the night. When Kris answered, he seemed morbidly fascinated by their shared quarters, by David sleeping facedown and shirtless in their bed and Kris in his sweatpants and tank top. He grinned so wide his face seemed to split in half.
“What’s up, Ahmad?” Kris shut their door firmly behind him.
Ahmad finally focused. “Hamid has emailed. He is willing to meet.”
“Excellent. What did he say? How soon can we meet him? What kind of travel is he able to do?”
Ahmad held up his hands. “He is cautious. He says not soon. And he says that he cannot travel far. We cannot fly him anywhere. He cannot go to Kabul.”
“Fuck.” Kris groaned and slumped against the wall. “You tell him we need to meet him immediately. Or the money is off the table.”
Ahmad’s eyebrows shot up.
“If he won’t come to Kabul, then we’ll have to meet him someplace in the middle.”
“Your base. Camp Carson. Meet there.” Ryan, on the video call, stared Kris down. “You’re right over the border from Pakistan. He can slip through and you can bring him on base for your debrief. He only has to travel an hour from the border.”
“Plus wherever he is in Pakistan.” Kris mulled Ryan’s suggestion over. “It’s a good idea. I’ll start putting everything together.”
“You make damn sure that you keep everyone safe.” Ryan glared, the grainy video connection somehow making his scowl even uglier. “I want your base locked down tight. All nonessential personnel cleared from your meeting location. And you make sure this guy is legit. I don’t want to end up with egg on our face in front of the White House. We have enough problems as it is. Looking like giant assholes who can be duped by some goat fucker isn’t the image rehab we’re going for.”
“Cute, Ryan. You always were the culturally sensitive, politically correct one. It’s nice to know your concerns are all about how you’ll look when this operation is reported up. I take it Kabul station has taken over running Hamid?”
“You report to me on this, Caldera. Everything goes through me, before it goes up. Understand?”
It took two weeks of back-and-forth negotiations with Hamid to get him to agree to come to Camp Carson. He refused at first, demanding to meet at Miranshah, a mean border town that sold drugs and weapons and everything else just across the mountains in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier. Kris refused and threatened to walk from their association. Hamid relented, but refused to stay at overnight. I only have seven hours I can be away from our camp, he said. Sunrise to sunset. And what will I tell my brothers?
David put together a local package of medicines and natural remedies, teas and creams, for Hamid to carry back to his camp. “He can say he was picking up medical supplies,” David said. “These come from Miranshah. It will all be legitimate.”
Finally, Hamid agreed. He would come in one week, for one day. How will you get me into your base? he asked. And how will you protect me? Spies are everywhere. I will not get my throat cut because you let one of the spies see who I am.
It all came down to Kris.
Seven years after September 11, after his failure to stop the attacks, here he was, asked to create a plan to train and equip an undercover agent in al-Qaeda, the best possible lead they had in finding and destroying Zawahiri and Bin Laden. He could practically taste victory, could almost feel the vindication, glorious, righteous fury singing in his blood.
But first, he had to get Hamid to Camp Carson. Debrief him. Equip him with a small mountain of tech and gear. And then release him, all in just under six hours.
Hamid could get to the border crossing, but he needed an escort across the border and to the base. Using any of the Afghan military or police was out of the question. Their ranks were infested with spies for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and blue-on-blue attacks, where an Afghan soldier would kill American forces on a joint operation, were on the rise. The Afghans, CENTCOM and Langley warned, were not to be trusted.
Sending Special Forces to meet Hamid was also out of the question. The muscle-bound, dip chewing, action hero stereotypes stood out in Afghanistan, a land of deprivation of privation. Most Afghans were skinny and small, short statured from childhoods of malnutrition. Special Forces soldiers came in big and bigger, and had the attitudes to match.
David. David had been crossing the border for a year now, weaving in and out of the northwestern frontier, in and out of the border towns and villages, crisscrossing farms and rivers and streams. He’d built a small network of human sources and he’d become a familiar face to the scattered communities. Here, he was Dawood, an itinerant farm hand, a laborer for hire. He could pose as a taxi driver and pick up Hamid from the border, bring him back to Camp Carson.
How many people should be at the meeting? Six hours wasn’t long. In Iraq, he and David had run informants and human sources as a two-man team while driving around. They traded off who drove while the other sat in the back seat with the informant, driving in circles through Baghdad or Mosul or Ramadi. Whoever was in the back seat led the interrogation, checking for weapons or hidden bombs before launching into questions.
Would that work here? Could he and David handle Hamid alone?
His pride and ego warred with his common sense. He needed his best people. The best analysts. Interrogators. Men and women who could dive deep into Hamid in a short time, turn his mind inside out. Study his body language. He needed the best al-Qaeda expert to corroborate Hamid’s information and extrapolate based on the new intelligence he was going to provide. Hamid was going to be bringing them a gold mine.
Technical agents from Islamabad and Kabul were flying in with their whiz-bang gadgets. Kris had been sent a suitcase of flip phones, identical to the cheap knockoffs found on the streets of Pakistan, that could take pictures and text them instantly via a hidden, embedded satellite link. The pictures also had geotags coded within the image, invisible to the naked eye. But once at Langley, analysts could identify exactly where on the vast, vast globe the picture had been taken.
Get a picture of Zawahiri. Or Bin Laden. Make him smile for the camera.
Ahmad, as the Jordanian Mukhabarat officer in charge of Hamid, had to be there, too.
At this point, if he did a vehicle meet, he’d need a school bus to keep everyone in, drive everyone around in circles outside Camp Carson.
No, keep the meeting on base. Everyone would be together, maximizing time, expertise, and equipment. Darren, his deputy, would take the al-Qaeda angle. Three interrogators and an analyst were being flown in from Langley. Ryan was sending his deputy. And a team of CIA SAD officers, former Special Forces, would provide security for the meeting, in case anything went wrong.
But nothing was going to go wrong. This was it. This was their big break. Hamid was coming to Camp Carson.
What then? Hamid was right about the spies. Afghan national police helped guard the base perimeter, but no one trusted them. More than one was most likely a spy for al-Qaeda. If they saw Hamid’s face, they would instantly report back to their commanders, and Hamid would be tortured and killed when he returned to his camp. And, they would lose their chance at getting Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
When David and Hamid approached the base, the Afghan guards would have to leave their posts. Preserving Hamid’s identity, his safety, was most important. The guards would leave the gates open, and David would drive Hamid through. David would be in charge of the car, so they wouldn’t have to worry about a car bomb. They could skip the car inspection, drive Hamid right up to Camp Carson’s command center.
Kris thought of David. What would David put into this plan? What would he suggest? How did the world look from Hamid’s eyes? He’d been undercover with al-Qaeda for two years, roughing it in the most inhospitable landscape on the planet. What would David recommend?
Hamid must be shown the utmost respect, he wrote. Hamid is to be treated as an honored guest.
“This is horseshit!” Carl, the leader of the SAD team assigned to Kris’s debrief, Operation Pendulum, shouted at Kris. “This is the stupidest fucking piece of garbage I’ve ever seen! Have you ever been in a war zone?”
“I’ve been in war zones for the past seven years straight!” Kris bellowed. “I’ve managed war zones! I managed the Saqqaf operation! I killed Saqqaf! Don’t fucking talk to me that way!”
“You want to bring an al-Qaeda agent onto our base without searching him? ‘Treat him like an honored guest’? This is bullshit! I’m not putting my men on the ground with this plan!”
“Yes, you are! This agent is undercover. He’s working for us. He came to us with this intelligence. He’s sacrificing a hell of a lot to help us with this. We can show him the smallest bit of respect, not treat him like a terrorist!”
“They’re all fucking terrorists!” Carl hollered. “Every fucking one of those towel-headed fuckers! They all want to kill you! Can’t you get that through your skull?” Carl snorted, shaking his head. “Or are you too concerned about how he’ll feel? Don’t want to get his feelings hurt?”
“You are way out of line,” Kris hissed. “The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims are not terrorists. Your attitude is exactly what keeps this war going.”
Carl held up his trigger finger and squeezed. “The war keeps going because I keep killing hajis.”
“Do you even fucking know that ‘haji’ is a term of respect? It’s for someone who’s made the pilgrimage. It’s a title of deep respect for the faithful.”
Carl spat. A thick wad of dip-tainted spit stained the dirt outside the command center.
“This is the plan. And I am in charge. Your men will provide operational support. Or I will ship your asses back to DC on the very next flight.”
“Not this plan.” Carl tossed the stapled sheets at Kris’s feet. They blew against Kris’s boots, skittered in the dust. “You want to make him think you’re about to suck his cock, fine, be my guest. He can think he’s about to get some sweet American ass all the way into the base. But as soon as he steps out of the car, my men are searching him.”
“You are not to treat him harshly. He is not a suspect, and not a terrorist. You have no idea of the intelligence that he has supplied!”
“He’s a fucking terrorist until I say he’s not!” Carl glared at Kris. “And there’s way too many fucking people on this op. This isn’t a Goddamn parade, or a zoo. No one is worth all this.”
“He is. You just don’t fucking know.” Kris snatched his plan, Top Secret, Eyes Only, before it blew way. “If you harm the asset in any way. Leave any bruises. Bend a single hair on his head. I will make your life hell, I swear to God.”
Carl laughed. “Seven years, you said? You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. You think everyone just wants peace and cupcakes. You just don’t get it. Every one of them wants to kill us.”
“Just do your job. And when it’s done, you’re gone. I want you off my base.”
“Suits me just fine. Camp Cocksucker isn’t for me anyway.”