Chapter 22
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
December, 2008
David tapped his toes against the footwell of his car, waiting. He wore a thick salwar kameez, heavy robes, and a flat Afghan wool cap. Still, he was chilled. A mass of humanity crowded on the Pakistan side of the border, waiting their turn to be waved into Afghanistan. Pakistani guards had their rifles pointed toward Afghanistan. The Afghanistan guards sat around a fire and drank tea.
Thoughts of Kris helped console him. They’d stayed up almost the entire night, completely unable to sleep. Talk of Hamid and the operation turned to talk of what could be. What would it mean if they really did get Bin Laden?
“Would it be over after that? For us, I mean?” David had held Kris’s hand, resting his chin on Kris’s chest. “Do you think we could walk away from this war? If he’s gone, maybe that would be the end for us?”
Kris had stroked his hair. “I think so,” he’d finally said. “We started this hunt for him. Seeking to end what he’d begun. Bring him to justice and make him answer for what he did. We’ve got everyone else. Zahawi. Saqqaf. If we can get Zawahiri and Bin Laden…” Kris gave him a tiny smile. “It would be nice to go home,” he’d whispered. “To our house. Live a quiet life.”
“What would you do?”
“Maybe stay at the CIA. Maybe not. Something that gives me as much time with you as possible. I’ve given the CIA a decade. I want to give you the rest of all my decades.”
David had kissed him, slowly. “I want to find peace,” he’d breathed. “I know my peace is inside of you. I want to spend the rest of my life just being with you.”
Their whispers turned to making love, languid and serene, until Kris came with a shout, practically crying as he trembled apart in David’s arms. David tumbled after him, trying to combine their souls, trying to crawl inside Kris’s body and fuse together, never to be parted.
They’d eaten breakfast before David had dressed and driven off. Kris kissed him through the driver’s window. “Be safe, my love,” Kris had whispered. “After this, we’re going home.”
“Home is where you are.” He’d blown a kiss as he drove off. The rest of the base had been humming, full preparations for Hamid’s arrival already underway. His job, in comparison, was simpler. Pick Hamid up. Drive him back.
Finally, at the border crossing, David spotted him.
Hamid was wrapped in thick robes, like David, against the Afghanistan winter. Snows were already on the mountains, and the Panjshir, far in the north, was frozen. Hamid picked his way through the crowd and slid into the back seat.
“As-salaam-alaikum,” David said, twisting around to get his first look at Hamid.
Hamid was exhausted, that much was obvious. Dirt clung to his robes, and his beard was disheveled. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes. His face was lean, far leaner than the photo Ahmad had shared from his case file. Two years of hard living in Pakistan could do that, though.
Hamid leaned back in the car and sighed. “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” he breathed. “Shukran.”
David passed him a soda and a bag of chips. “Please, eat. We won’t be long. But make yourself comfortable.”
Hamid accepted the chips and the soda with a smile. “Shukran, habibi,” he said, nodding.
The drive back to base was only thirty minutes, but David stretched it to an hour, taking switchbacks and parking on the side of the road to, ostensibly, check his tires or his radiator fluid. He watched for followers, observers, anyone trailing them. The road bled into and out of the mountains, along ridges and ravines. He passed donkeys and carts led by stubborn mules, refusing to walk another foot. He kept his eyes peeled, scanning the road and the ditches for new dirt or fresh rises in the mud, evidence of burying. The signs of an IED. He snaked into the dusty town that squatted between Camp Carson and the military base, Camp Seville.
All the while, Hamid crunched his chips in the back seat and stared out the window.
Farmland surrounded Camp Carson, fields that had been harvested and left fallow for winter. The irrigation ditches lining the field were low, the waters mostly mud and filled with blown trash from the village. As soon as he started down the straight dirt road that led to the main base gate, he flashed his headlights twice.
That was the signal. The Afghan guards at the base were to open the gates and leave their posts, head to the mess hall for tea and a break.
David watched the main gate rise and stay open.
He slowed as he neared and made his way through the twisting maze of concrete barriers and sandbags.
Ahead, he could see Kris, and Darren, and Ahmad. The analysts and interrogators, all standing in front of the command center, a double-wide cargo container converted into a state-of-the-art technical repository, but from the outside, looking like another nondescript, bland, meaningless building. The security team held their positions in a grid surrounding where he was to park the car. They were small dots at the end of a long stretch of gravel road, paralleling Camp Carson’s airfield.
Once we’re through, once we’ve got them, we can go home. Our part in this will be over. We’ve given our all. It’s time to go home. It’s time.
David kept his eyes on Kris, the love of his life. Home, and the promise of the rest of his days in Kris’s arms, safe and secure and wrapped up in love. Kris’s love was the closest he’d ever felt to the love of his father. Unconditional, all-consuming, all-encompassing love.
One more mission. One more task. And then they’d go home.
When he was close enough, David saw Kris smile, his big, beaming smile, not his sly or snarky grin. The smile David saw most, or Kris only let slip when his emotions couldn’t be contained, couldn’t be suppressed. David grinned back.
The hardest part of the operation was over. Hamid was here.
For the first time, David actually believed it could really happen. They could get Bin Laden, or Zawahiri. They could end what they had begun together. They could go home, knowing they had finished what they’d promised they would.
David slowed, gravel crunching under his tires. The security team moved in slowly, weapons at the low and ready. He pulled to a stop, brakes on the ancient Afghan sedan squealing, metal shrieking against metal.
Behind him, the front gates were still up. The guards wouldn’t return until Hamid was safely inside the interrogation rooms off the command center.
“Driver, exit the vehicle,” Carl barked.
He slid out, leaving the driver’s door open, and walked away from the car. He wanted to go to Kris. Wanted to hold his hand. Wanted to be with him at this moment. The excitement, the rush that Kris must have felt for the past two weeks had finally hit him, too. Hamid fever.
This was it.
But Carl had ordered him to stand twenty feet behind the car after exiting, and he headed to his position, keeping an eye on Hamid and the front gates.
Everything had gone perfectly, according to Kris’s plan.
“Sir, exit the vehicle, slowly,” Carl barked again, this time to Hamid. He reached for the back door of the sedan and opened it for Hamid.
Hamid scooted across the bench seat and opened the opposite door.
Carl glowered. He waved to the two men on the other side of the car. They moved in, reaching for Hamid.
Hamid stepped away. “You said you would treat me well!” His head whipped around, searching. He spotted Ahmad. “You said I was a hero!”
Ahmad stepped forward, hands outstretched. “You are. Come, these are just precautions. We are friends, habibi.” He placed his hand on his heart.
“We don’t have time for this,” Carl growled. “We have to search him.”
“Hey, calm down—” Kris snapped.
“I will show you a true hero,” Hamid said. He reached into his robe—
“What the fuck is he doing?” Carl shouted. “What is he reaching for?”
“Drop your hand! Drop your hand!” Carl’s men shouted in unison. All four whipped their rifles up, fingers more than half-pressed on their triggers.
“Don’t shoot!” Ahmad bellowed! “Don’t!”
“La illaha illah Allah,” Hamid wailed.
David’s eyes flicked to Kris’s.
It was a trap. Hamid wasn’t their savior. They weren’t going home.
“No!” He shouted. He took one step, running for Kris. Kris was too close, far too close. He was inside the blast radius. “Kris—”
He never took a second step.
A burst of light blinded the world.
Hamid blew apart, his body disintegrating as the bomb he wore burst apart in every direction. A blast wave tore through the air, a bubble of flame and fury, ripping through the staging area. The car, the rusted old sedan, flipped over and over, a toy tumbling and sliding on the gravel until it came to a stop upside down, pinning what was left of Carl beneath the roof.
Carl’s team, the three others, were shredded in a scatterblast of ball bearings and nails, screws and broken glass, packed shrapnel that flew in every direction. A thousand plinks sounded, the rain of shrapnel slamming into the command center’s walls, at the same moment the thunderous boom of the detonation shook the earth, trembling the ground and the sky for two miles in every direction.
The blast wave slammed into the group waiting to receive Hamid. Eardrums burst and lungs collapsed, the impact equal to slamming a car into a brick wall at one hundred miles per hour. Everyone tumbled, blown off their feet and thrown through the air, landing in a skid of gravel and blood, tens of feet away from the blast.
Silence followed, for a moment.
Then, tiny chinks and clinks and plinks of debris hitting concrete and steel. Thunks, the larger pieces falling next. Hamid’s severed head, the only part of him to survive, fell to the ground and rolled, finally ending upside down in front of David.
David clawed forward, bloody fingers scraping through gravel as he struggled to breathe. Blood dripped from his lips, stained the rocks beneath his face. Fires raged, the car and two buildings and severed limbs burning. He could just see bodies through the heat haze, the shimmering air. Figures lying on the ground, unmoving.
“Kris—” he called, his voice choked. He coughed, his voice lost in blood pooling in the base of his throat. “Kris!” he called again, trying to drag himself forward.
Shouts rose… from behind him.
No. The gate.
It was still open.
David twisted, looking back. Men in dark clothes with black turbans covering their heads, wrapped around their faces, ran onto the base. Two trucks with a mounted machine gun in the bed screamed in behind them. Every man clutched a rifle.
They weren’t the cavalry coming to the rescue.
This was the second phase of the attack.
Al-Qaeda had planned this, everything.
Sirens rose across the base. In the distance, through the flames, David saw men racing for them, Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers.
They weren’t going to make it. Al-Qaeda was going to get to them first.
David tried to crawl, but his body was broken, his movements too slow. His ears rang, and blood kept dripping into his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. His leg wouldn’t move, and when he looked back, he saw white bone sticking out of his salwar kameez, ragged edges caught on the torn and blackened linen.
Moments, he had moments before the jihadis were on him. He could hear their shouts, their cries to Allah. The rev of the trucks’ engines. Gravel crunching beneath the tires and their boots.
A group of jihadis split off and ran for the nearest bodies. Carl’s teammates, and one of the analysts. They rolled them over, shoved their rifles in their faces. Fired.
David roared. He struggled, trying to scramble forward. Damn it, he was too far away from everyone else, too far from Kris.
More jihadis lined up and peppered the command center with shots, firing at the corrugated steel shipping container until the building looked like a cheese grater from the waist up. Everyone inside would have hit the deck as soon as the bomb went off, but al-Qaeda didn’t know that. Please, let everyone still be down, David prayed. Please, please.
Shots fired back at the jihadis from the Special Forces soldiers and CIA reinforcements tearing across the base. They were close enough now to fight back, taking cover in the maze of buildings and shipping containers that dotted the base at the end of the runway. The jihadis’ trucks braked hard and unleashed their rifles at the reinforcements, a hail of bullets that shredded the air, the buildings. Shell casings dropped, clattering and bouncing across the gravel. A dozen rolled in front of David’s face.
“Retreat!” David heard the jihadis cry in Arabic. “Fall back!”
“Find him! Find the one!”
Fighters swarmed over the bodies nearest them, but they were pushed back by more gunfire. David tried to keep crawling, keep getting clear, but he was too exposed. Any moment, they would be on him—
This isn’t how I want to go. This isn’t how I wanted to die. Allah, would you be so cruel as to show me what my Paradise would be with Kris and then snatch it away from me? Would you be so cruel, again?
He gasped, tears and blood mixing on his cheeks, smearing on his lips.
Better me than Kris. Allah, spare Kris. Keep him alive. Let him live until he’s one hundred and twenty, until he’s had a long, glorious life. I’ll trade my life for his. In shaa Allah. In shaa Allah.
Hands grabbed his ankles, flipped him over. Pain, pure, agonizing pain, split his soul in two as his broken leg twisted, wrenched against his torn skin. He roared.
They grabbed at his clothes, his head. Forced him to look up, into a half dozen jihadi faces. “It’s him, it’s him!” three of them cried together. “Allahu Akbar! It’s him!”
Tires squealed, the trucks starting to scream away. The jihadis grabbed him by the arms and legs and ran beside the truck, passing him up to a group of men in the truck bed. He felt weightless, torn apart, every ounce of pain he’d ever felt in his whole life concentrated in his leg, in his severed bone. Bullets flew past him in both directions, the jihadis and the base soldiers firing at once. Bullets hit the truck, shredding the metal. Three jihadis fell as he was tossed in.
“Go! Go!” The fighters slammed on the roof of the truck. “We have him!”
Engines wailing, the two trucks roared past the base gate, rear guns firing on the soldiers who tried to pursue, to chase. David watched the base’s main gate pass overhead in a blur, the hazy blue sky smear into gray, and a jihadi stare down into his face before darkness poured in and his entire world went black.
Everything was too slow, like Kris was stuck in a dream.
Flames shivered in slow motion, enough that he could see every curve and arch of the fire. Someone screamed in his face. He could make out every rounded shape of their words, their letters. See each of the fillings in their teeth. A dull roar had replaced all sound, the inside of a bell that had been rung once and had taken over the world.
He couldn’t draw a single breath. His lips moved, gasping for air. The world snapped, racing from too slow to too fast, a dose of adrenaline coursing through his body, his mind, with hyper clarity and a rush of reality.
Finally, he dragged in a breath and shot up. Hands pushed him back down to the gravel. “Do not move! Do not move, sir! You’ve been injured! We’re getting you medically evac’d now!”
“David—” He pushed at the man, a soldier, a Special Forces medic trying to check him over. He rolled to the side, trying to escape. Looked across the gravel.
Twelve bodies lay motionless on the ground, some mangled so badly they looked like they’d been through a meat grinder or had dropped from an airplane without a parachute. Medics worked on two people, motionless and drenched in ruby blood. Kris watched one shake his head and sit back, wiping at his forehead.
The gravel yard, where they had paced and waited for Hamid and David to arrive, sharing jokes to cut the tension, was gone. Blasted earth, flames, and blood-soaked gravel were all that remained. Bullet casings, a thousand of them. Shards of glass and nails that rose like spikes.
“No,” Kris breathed. “No, no, no…” He struggled against the medic’s hold again, trying to sit up. “David! Where is David? Where the fuck is David?”
The medic fought him, grabbing his hands and arms and forcing him back to the ground. “Do not move, sir!” he bellowed. “You have a serious internal injury! Do not move!”
“How many are dead?” Kris screamed. “How many?”
“Everyone but you, sir.”
“No!” Kris bellowed. “No!”
“And one was taken. Al-Qaeda penetrated the base and took a hostage.”
The medic strapped him to a board and loaded him into a helicopter forty-five seconds later. As they rose over the base, Kris saw another two choppers taking off from the airfield and circling the base, searching the perimeter, the roads. Have to find the hostage, Kris thought. Have to find him. Who? Who did they take? David—
His thoughts were interrupted by the slip of meds into his veins, the medic pumping his IV bag full of sedatives. The last thing he saw was a helicopter sprinting away from the base, following the dirt road past the fallow farmland and rising over the village.
He woke briefly in the US Army hospital at Camp Seville as the surgeon was calling out orders to the surgical team. “The patient has a nicked artery and a collapsed lung, along with broken ribs. We stabilize the bleeding, treat the lung, package the ribs. Secondary team, you work on removing shrapnel embedded in the dermis. Any human body parts, bones, teeth, skin, that you pull out as shrapnel, save for identification and packaging for the mortuary team. I can see he’s got someone’s shattered bone splinters embedded in his thigh. All right, let’s begin.”
A tear slid from his eye as the nurse pumped his IV bag full of sedatives again. David, where are you? Are you alive? Please, be alive. Please, please, be alive.
Washington DC
One Hour After the Blast
Director Edwards looked up as a tentative knock sounded on his doorjamb.
No one in the CIA knocked like that unless it was bad fucking news.
George hovered in the doorway, looking like he was five years old and his puppy had just died. His hands wrung together. “Director,” he started. He looked away. Swallowed. “Director, there’s been an incident. He licked his lips. “At Camp Carson.”
“The Hamid op? Caldera?”
George nodded. “Sir, thirteen officers are dead. And al-Qaeda stormed the base. They took a hostage.”
“Fuck.” Rage bloomed within Edwards, a nuclear reaction of despair and fury. “Find out everything. I have to call the president.”
Camp Seville
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
Eight Hours After the Blast
Kris woke to a steady beeping.
Bandages covered his chest, tight enough that he could barely breathe. He felt a pull in his abdomen, constriction in his chest. He pushed at the bandages and saw a line of stitches running from his belly button to his sternum. More bandages wrapped around his thigh, his arms. One arm was in a sling. An IV line stuck into the back of his hand.
Where the fuck was he?
Where the fuck was David?
Please, be alive. Please, please be alive.
He tore at the IV line and flung the needle over the side of his bed. Ripped the EKG monitors from his chest. The machine’s steady beeping stopped, input not detected. He forced himself to the side of the bed, his arms and legs shaking.
Step by slow step, he pushed himself to the end of the line of beds, filled with silent, unmoving bodies wrapped in bandages and casts. Most were missing limbs, legs or arms or both. The ward could have been a morgue. He clutched his belly, his ribs, and kept walking.
An Army nurse spotted him and ran to his side. “Sir, you cannot be out of bed.”
“How long have I been here?” he asked the man, a young kid probably no older than nineteen.
“You have to get back to bed, sir. You’ve been in surgery for four hours, recovering for only another four. You need to rest.”
“Fuck you,” Kris spat at the young soldier. “I need to get back to Camp Carson.” Eight hours since the attack. Eight hours since the blast.
“Sir, you were seriously injured and you need to let your body heal.” The soldier tried to push Kris back toward his bed, as if he were an invalid.
“Fuck you!” Kris shouted. His lungs seized, burned. Tears stung his eyes. “I am checking out and I am going back to Camp Carson! I am the base commander, and I will not sit here while one of our own has been kidnapped! Get me the fuck out of here, now!”
He pulled rank and threw his weight around. He was the base commander. He wasn’t going to be forced back into a hospital bed.
Finally, he was released, and one of the base ambulance helos ferried him back over the village to Camp Carson.
“Carson is on lockdown,” the pilot shouted at him over the rotors. “Only one helo is cleared for landing. From Kabul.”
Fucking Ryan. “I don’t care what you have to do, you get me on that base.”
The pilot spent twenty minutes talking to Carson’s landing officer, but finally, he touched down on the airfield. As they came in for landing, Kris saw the devastation, the destruction, the crater in the ground filled with blood-soaked gravel, the bullet-shredded command center. The flipped and burned car David had driven back to base.
David, my God, where are you?
Would he find David in the morgue? Or on the internet, a paraded captive of al-Qaeda? Which was worse? David, David, my love.
He forced the pain, the anguish away, and stumbled as fast as he could to the command center. CIA officers huddled outside, numb shock on their frozen faces. Others walked the destruction, taking photos, writing notes.
The investigation had already begun.
Kris badged into the command center. He threw open the door, grimacing—
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Ryan blocked his path. “Get the fuck out of here, Caldera.”
“No.” He gritted his teeth. “I am the base commander here—”
“Not anymore you’re not!”
“We have a man out there! And I am not leaving until we get him back!”
“Do you even know who it is?”
Kris shook his head. Tears built, white-hot, in his eyes.
“It’s Haddad. The jihadis searched for him, specifically took him.”
He gasped, fell forward. Dizziness turned his world upside down, and he clung to a chairback to stay upright. Tears cascaded down his cheeks, Niagara Falls erupting from his eyes. “What do we know?” he whispered.
“You are not a part of this investigation—”
“Don’t you dare try and shut me out of this—”
“You failed to properly secure the Hamid operation, you failed to properly vet the source, and you failed to protect the lives of people under your command—”
“Don’t you dare pin this all on me! You signed off on the operation!”
“You are through on this base, and in the CIA!”
“I’m fucking going to get David back!” Kris shrieked. “Do not push me out of this! That is my husband out there! My husband, kidnapped! We don’t have time for this! We have to get him back, before they—” His voice stopped, unable to say the words. His brain skittered forward though, finishing the thought. Before they murder him.
Ryan’s chest heaved. He glared at Kris, pure fury burning Kris from the inside out. Fine, hate him. Blame him. Kris didn’t care.
A hundred pairs of eyes in the command center stared him down, all the men and women who had been inside when the blast happened, when the bullets flew. Did they all blame him too? Broken monitors lay in a heap in the corner, full of bullet holes. Lights hung from their mounts on the ceiling, swaying and dark. He’d allowed the base to be attacked, to be breached. He’d let everyone’s lives to be put at risk.
But he only cared about one life. David’s.
“What is the status of the search?” He spoke through clenched teeth, his body trembling.
Silence.
“What is the status of the search?” he repeated.
Ryan looked like he was chewing glass, like he’d rather murder Kris than speak to him. “We lost the vehicles that penetrated the base. We think they did a car swap under concealment in the village and then drove Haddad away in a secondary vehicle.”
The village around Camp Carson was a warren of mud huts, alleys, and bazaars, perfect to get lost in.
“Have you tracked all cars entering and exiting the village since the attack?”
“Drone pilots were unable to follow all vehicles in the immediate aftermath.” Ryan’s jaw clenched. “The chaos here was overwhelming, and in an absence of leadership, the base’s operations faltered.”
Kris felt the rebuke like a slap against his soul. “What leads do you have?”
“Nothing.”
Panic clawed at Kris’s heart. “Have you sent out the drones? Are you scouring the border crossings? What’s coming through over intercepts, over traffic? Any celebrations, any coded transmissions? What do you mean you have nothing?”
“Caldera, get out of here. You’re not helping. You’re through. Leave, now.”
“Don’t you dare try—”
“Sir.” One of the intercept analysts, three rows of computer monitors away, stood. “Sir, something has been posted to the internet.”
“Put it up on the monitors,” Kris and Ryan said in unison. Ryan glowered at him.
“Start a trace of the upload link. Where is this coming from?” Kris continued.
On the center monitor, a video appeared. Al-Qaeda’s new operations specialist, who had taken over for Suleyman, a man named Al Jabal, sat next to a bound and bloodied David.
“My fellow Muslims, rejoice!” Al Jabal began in Arabic. “We have launched a great strike against the Imperialists, against the Great Satan! The infidels, they believed they could turn one of our brothers against us. But we tell you, a true brother will never turn against his fellow Muslims. Our brother’s conscience would not allow him to fall prey to the Great Satan’s promises. He would not spy on his brothers for the infidels!”
Kris’s heart, what was left of it, sank. David, you were right. He watched David sway on the video, tried to will his downturned head to look up. David, look into the camera. Show me you’re all right. Show me you’re alive, that you’re fighting. Come on, my love.
“The American devils strike with their missiles and destroy lives in Pakistan, in Afghanistan!” Al Jabal cried. “But now, we have struck you in the heart of your CIA spy nests, your home in Afghanistan. Now, you will taste the blood of your family as your home is destroyed.”
He went on, praising Hamid for being a martyr and a true fighter of the faith, promising eternal glory to him and his family.
Kris wanted to puke. Bile rose in his throat, burning the back of his tongue.
“Now, we will try this kufir, this false Muslim, this apostate who works for the Great Satan,” Al Jabal said, grabbing David’s hair. He wrenched David’s head back, and Kris saw, finally, his bruised and bloody face. He gasped, his hands flying up, covering his mouth.
David had been beaten to within an inch of his life. He was practically unrecognizable.
But Kris would always know, always, David’s soul.
“We will try this apostate for his crimes against the ummah, against Allah, and when his sentence is passed, we will carry out his execution for the ummah to witness. By Allah, the ummah will taste the blood of the apostate!”
“No!” Kris screamed. He turned away from the video, turned his back on it, tried to block out the sound. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ryan give the kill signal to the analyst.
“Any information on the upload?” Ryan growled. “Where did that video come from?”
“Still searching, sir,” the analyst called. She and a dozen others were working furiously at the network, trawling trunk lines and diving into ISPs, hunting for the source of the upload.
“Sir, I think I found something. An internet café outside Alizai.” The analyst pulled up satellite footage of the village, a settlement of homes and bazaars and weapons markets just across the border, through the mountains.
Ryan’s jaw worked, muscles bulging out in time to his furious clenches. “We cannot let a CIA officer be slaughtered by al-Qaeda. We have to get him back.” He started barking orders as Kris clung to the chair back, desperate to stay standing. “I want two teams ready to go at the airfield in five minutes. Give me everything you have on Alizai. Satellite footage. Drone coverage. Intercepts. Who operates out of there? Who had been identified as working there? What safe houses are in the village? Get me drones overhead covering all angles of the village. Let’s move!”
The command center burst into action all around Kris. He sank into the chair, clutching his ribs, head in his hands, as the image of David’s beaten face burned itself into the backs of his eyelids.
“ETA to Alizai, eight minutes.”
Ryan passed Kris a headset. On-screen, the Special Forces quick reaction force was locked and loaded in the belly of their chopper and heading for the border. Kris felt the roar and rumble of the helos pass directly over the command center. A thousand bullet holes in the steel walls made the whoosh and grumble of the rotors echo, as if the helo were inside his bones or carving him up as he stood before it.
Alizai wasn’t far over the border. North by north east, near Parachinar, the lawless city of the northwest frontier, and the White Mountains, the infamous Tora Bora. Once, he’d worried David would die in Tora Bora. But David had lived, at least in 2001. Was he destined to die there still? Was fate a cruel, cruel mistress?
Or was this, all of this, from the very first moment, all Kris’s fault?
Ryan kept up a steady conversation with the QRF team as Kris struggled to stand. Every breath felt like fire ripping through him. His legs shook. His hands were clammy, cold, and sliding off the back of the metal folding chair he clung to. He could feel each heartbeat, each thundering boom, from the back of his eyes to the soles of his feet.
“Alizai in sight. ETA to DZ, two minutes.”
“We need the identity of the uploader or the delivery man, whoever brought that video message to the café.” Ryan crossed his arms and glared at the screen. Live video feed from the soldiers streamed back via satellite, grainy and glitching out in places. “Make this fast, gentlemen. We have exactly no time, and we have no cover for this op.”
They saw the helo move into a hover over a squat building with a bright-colored sign hanging from its roof. Ropes being tossed over the side, and soldiers looking over the edge, calling out good to go.
The soldiers slid down the ropes quickly, hitting the dusty ground in the center of a wind tunnel on all sides of the internet café and setting up a perimeter in two seconds.
Civilians scattered, racing away from the chopper and the soldiers, clad all in black and swooping out of the sky. In moments, the street was deserted.
“Breaching now.” The team leader’s video feed showed him and his soldiers stacking beside the front door. Two deep breaths, and then they burst in.
“Down, down, down! Everybody down!”
“Hands in the air! Hands in the air!”
“Do not move!”
Shouts, screams. The guttural bellow of the soldiers, the high-pitched, frantic cry of civilians. There were young men in the shop, a handful of teenagers.
“Where is the owner? Where is the owner?”
Meekly, one man raised his timid hand. He was middle-aged and slender. He wore a dark blue turban and had a long beard. The beard made Kris curse. Was he possibly Taliban? Or al-Qaeda? The Americans didn’t have many sympathizers in the tribal territories on either side of the border. Would he help them at all?
“A video was uploaded from this location to the internet minutes ago. A jihadist video. Who uploaded that video?” The team leader was right up in the owner’s face, barking questions.
“I-I-I do not know,” the owner stammered.
“A video was uploaded from this café fifteen minutes ago! An American hostage was shown on the video! Who uploaded the video?”
The owner trembled, shrinking in the face of the team leader’s fury. “Please…”
“Who uploaded the video? Who brought the video to you?”
Shaking, the owner whispered, “Farrohk.”
“Who the fuck is Farrohk?”
The owner’s eyes squeezed closed. “He is with al-Qaeda. They are here. They are everywhere. Please, my family—”
“Where is Farrohk in this village? Where is al-Qaeda? How many are there?”
“A dozen, maybe. They are in the mosque. The mosque! Please, please, my family! My son!”
The team leader turned away, calling back to Ryan. “Be advised, target is reported to be in the village mosque. Request permission to proceed to mosque.”
“Permission granted,” Ryan responded. On-screen, the team leader radioed for his men to rally around him and pull out of the shop.
“He’s probably going to be killed, you know,” Kris croaked. “The shop owner. For talking to us.”
Ryan didn’t answer. He didn’t blink. “Let’s get them intel on the mosque. How far are they from it?”
“Half a mile, sir.” One of the drone pilots pulled up his imagery, showing the mosque relative to the position of the team. Twists and turns and alleyways led to the mosque. “They have a decent amount of ground to cover.”
“And everyone knows we’re here,” Ryan growled. “Be advised, team leader, distance to target is point four miles. Route is urban. No civilian movement detected.” The village looked like a ghost town from the Old West. “Be prepared for resistance en route.”
“Acknowledged. Moving out.”
Syed Ishaq Mosque
Alizai, Afghanistan
Nine and a half Hours After the Blast
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” Farrohk, young, new to al-Qaeda, but a teen with great promise, hissed.
He’d run down from the roof, where he’d watched the helicopter hover of the internet café and spit out the team of black-clad soldiers. He’d watched them regroup and head for the mosque, twisting down the village’s dirt roads covered in chicken shit and feathers and ducking against mudbrick walls to check for fighters on the rooflines.
“Good,” Al Jabal crowed. “Let them come.”
Wires crawled up the walls of the mosque, snaking into and out of old plastique explosives. They’d been passed around the black market for a while, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and possibly across the border from Iran, too. But now they belonged to Al Jabal, and he had the perfect use for them.
IEDs and hidden bombs were too simple. The Americans were used to those by now. Blowing off legs wasn’t enough, not anymore. He needed something big, something bold, after the CIA had murdered Salim and Suleyman with their drones.
And he’d found it, in Hamid.
The plan was as beautiful as it was simple. Turn the American intelligence system against itself.
Hungry for intelligence, for spies to spill their secrets to their drones and their hidden telephone eavesdroppers, feeding false information to the Americans was stunningly simple. All it took was a conversation over the telephone, certain to be picked up, and then Hamid feeding the same information back to his spy handler in Jordan. The apostate kingdom, allied with the Great Satan, would immediately run, like a dog to its owner, to the Americans.
And Al Jabal, with Zawahiri, had supplied exactly the right bait. What the Americans craved, hungered for most of all. Revenge. The blood of the men who had wounded them, all those years ago.
The video was easy to film, almost like making a Hollywood movie. A scene from a spy movie. They’d joked, before and after, about how their part would look in the eventual movie to be made of their successes. The film of al-Qaeda winning the war.
They thought they’d be able to blow up a car with Hamid and the CIA spies inside of it. But when Hamid was invited to the CIA base, Al Jabal realized how much larger their dreams could grow.
They could strike at the heart of the CIA’s secret border base.
They could kill so many Americans.
They could kidnap one of the CIA spies who penetrated the border, the tribal territories, almost every day. A man who called himself Dawood, who played at being a farmer searching for day labor. A man who claimed to be a Muslim, but who was working for the Americans. And that made him a dog, a traitor, a kufir. Someone to be tried by the laws of Allah and executed.
Al Jabal turned back to his hostage. The dog was huddled on the ground, bleeding. He’d taken their beating silently, not once crying out. His blood coated their fists, their boots. Stained the floor and the walls. Dripped down the shahada inscribed on the wall. It was poetic, he thought. A kufir’s blood falling from the words of the Prophet.
There is no God but God.
Camp Carson
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
Nine and a half Hours After the Blast
It took ten minutes for the team to work their way to the mosque. Nothing moved in the village. Not a soul stirred. Even the wind seemed to still, the air. Time seemed to freeze.
Again, the team spread out to all four corners of the mosque, picking four different breach points. They waited, searching for fighters, for jihadis. Surely someone would fight back. Or had al-Qaeda already fled?
“Negative on anyone leaving the mosque since you’ve been on station,” Ryan said over the radio. “We have seen flickers of movement inside the windows. Definitely active presence inside the mosque.”
“We go in strong,” the team leader transmitted to his team. “Watch your partner. Stay alive, but don’t shoot any civilians.” He heard his team click back their affirmative. “Breach on my order.” He counted down, slowly.
The burst in from all sides, two teams shattering windows and tumbling in, snaking left and right. The front and rear teams demolished the doors and dove in, weapons up and ready to fire, shouting at the top of their lungs.
“Allahu Akbar!” Gunshots rang out. Bullets whizzed past their heads.
They ducked, diving behind walls and crawling on the floor. The mosque wasn’t large. A main floor space for the male congregants, and a balcony for the women, with a rickety wooden staircase. Windows were the only source of light. A minbar rose at the rear wall for the imam to pray, to teach from. A cutout next to it led to another room.
“Eight hostiles.”
“Three on the balcony.”
“Three on the main floor.”
“No eyes on the other two.”
The team called out targets as bullets popped and snapped, cracking into the walls and whizzing through the air. The jihadis seemed to spray bullets in their direction, long bursts of automatic gunfire.
They took their time, zeroing on each fighter before popping off three quick shots.
“One down.”
“One down.” A body dropped from the balcony above, hitting the mosque floor like a dropped watermelon.
Across the mosque, a fighter raced for the doorway behind the minbar. Shots followed his footsteps, chasing him, but he ducked into the darkness and skittered away.
They tried to follow. More shots rang out, chipping at the mudbrick beside their heads and pinning them back in place.
“They’re here! They’re inside the mosque!” Farrohk, breathless, slid to a stop in front of Al Jabal.
“Good. You know what to do.” Al Jabal passed Farrohk his rifle and held out a videotape. Farrohk took the tape and nodded. “Bismillah.”
“Allahu Akbar, brother,” Al Jabal grinned. He pointed to the bloody lump on the ground. “Now, help me move him.”
“Do you smell that?”
Kris’s heart seized.
“Smoke. Something’s burning.” The soldier coughed. “Fuck, it stinks.”
He tried to drag in another breath, tried to keep standing. Everything inside of him wanted to collapse, wanted to scream and wail and jump into the monitor, leap into the fight and run to David. Fight with his bare hands, run through the bullets, tear apart the mosque until he found David. Bring him back.
“The smoke is coming from the back room.”
“We have to get back there, now.”
“Fuck this,” the team leader growled. “Grenade!” He tossed a grenade toward the last of the fighters, clustered together behind the minbar. The team ducked, and seconds later, the minbar exploded in a burst of light and sound, wood and brick flying through the air. Debris pelted the team, bursts of hail battering the command center over the radio. Kris flinched.
The gunshots had ceased. Silence filled the mosque.
The team rose. On-screen, black, thick smoke hung in the air, crawling up the walls and undulating along the ceiling. “We’ve got thick, dark smoke,” the team leader called. “It reeks. Something terrible is burning.”
No. No, no, no, no. Kris’s thoughts devolved to one word. A litany, a prayer, over and over. No. No. No.
Slowly, the team moved through the mosque, coughing with each step. The video feed grew darker, hazier. Obscured.
“Moving to the rear room now.”
Footsteps, in the smoke. Gunshots. Cursing.
“Allahu Akbar!” More gunshots, and a man rushing toward the team, in the center of the video feed.
“Fuck!” the team fired back, striking the jihadi in the center of the chest, peppering him with shot after shot. He staggered, a puppet dancing on strings, and collapsed.
“Sir!” The camera shot to one of the soldiers, standing near a billowing cloud of smoke emanating from the trunk of a car. Someone had driven a small hatchback into the mosque and parked it. A tarp covered the front, and part of the mosque’s broken wall. A hidden access point.
The team leader crept toward the car, toward the smoke.
No, no, no, no, no. Burning tears cascaded down Kris’s cheeks, fell from the ends of his eyelashes. His heart was a black hole, sucking all of his hope into a terrible darkness. His wedding ring weighed a thousand pounds. David’s lips lingered on the back of his neck, on his shoulder, a ghost kiss, a prelude, a prophecy. No, no, no, no, no.
The camera attached to the team leader’s helmet angled down. A hand swept through the black smoke. White-hot flames rose from a fire raging inside the trunk. The ends of rockets, of dynamite, poked out of the conflagration.
And, a hand. A foot. Blackened and burned. But, recognizable.
A human body.
“Sir! The place is rigged to blow! We have to get out!” The panicked voice of another team member broke over the radio. The camera jerked away, the team leader panning the walls. Finding the wire. Tracing them to the explosives.
“Everybody out, now, now!”
“No!” Kris shrieked. “You have to get David! You have to save him! Pull him out! Pull him out!”
“Evac, now, move!” Boots running. The smoke fading. “Go! Now!”
“No! No!” Kris screamed. “Go back! Get David! Get him!”
Ryan’s arms grabbed him, held him in a bear hold from behind. “Kris, he’s gone. He’s already—”
“Sir—”
A rumble began, and then a burst of light erupted over the screen.
The radio went dead.