Chapter 9
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
November 7, 2001
The war accelerated, moving at breakneck pace.
High on adrenaline after the first strike, Kris and David stayed up all night long, sitting in front of a small bonfire behind the control tower, talking down the shakes in their hands. David spoke softly as the fire burned low and the coals glowed, casting the hollows of his face into shadow.
“I’ve lost count of how many children’s bones I’ve seen. You’d think that would be something you’d remember. But… there are places in this world where hearts don’t beat. Where humanity is just… gone. I thought I’d never see that kind of hate again. But now, with New York, and here… It’s all coming back, isn’t it?”
Kris took his hand, lacing their fingers together. Side by side, they watched the coals turn to ash, hands clasped, heads resting against each other.
Should he ask? Should he squeeze David’s hand and ask what that was before, when they were rubbing camo paint over each other’s faces? What it meant that David slept with him every night, drawing him close and into his arms? What it meant that they were never far from each other anymore, always a hand’s reach away?
Would asking end it all?
Inertia was a powerful force. Kris didn’t want it to end. The hand-holding, the surrender into David’s arms, the warm breath on the back of his neck. Maybe it was just Afghanistan, the war, the cold. Maybe they were clinging to each other because they were alone in this craziness, untethered from reality, trying to navigate warlords and terrorists and battle plans from caves and concrete bunkers via a scratchy radio and a homemade satellite dish, as snow fell and froze their fingers and toes. Maybe nothing would leave the valley.
He should keep his mouth shut and soak it in, just be glad for the human connection. For the beating heart he’d found on the surface of Afghanistan, the dark side of the moon.
General Khan was overjoyed with the first laser-targeted strike. He arrived at dawn, just after prayers, effusive in his praise for both Kris and David. “We must have more, many more, of these strikes.”
Every day, Kris and David worked with the Shura Nazar to scout targets from Bagram’s control tower. At night, they slipped out under cover and crept close to the Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, painting each with lasers until Navy or Marine Corps fighter jets arrived and obliterated them in fury.
“They are no longer crowing about how weak the Americans are, how pitiful your attack is.” Khan held Kris’s hand, grinning ear to ear, after days of constant strikes around the airfield. “We will use Bagram as a secondary headquarters when we break through the Shomali.”
In the north, the Taliban tightened their grip on Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloquan. From the hills overlooking the two cities, they began shelling the outlying villages, civilians who supported Khan and the Shura Nazar, and who had escaped the wrath of the Taliban’s chokehold. General Hajimullah struggled to save his people and keep the pressure on the Taliban.
“We must have these bombs in the north,” Khan said one morning. “And more help. We must have more CIA assistance, Gul Bahar.”
After a week straight of clearing Taliban out from around Bagram, George ordered him and David to meet up with Hajimullah outside Mazar-e-Sharif.
“Kris, Langley has sent a second team for Mazar. They’re inserting tonight, and I want you and Haddad to show them the ropes. How to work with Hajimullah. The intricacies of the front line. Get up there, ASAP.”
Mazar-e-Sharif hugged a valley in between a gorge of mountains. The Taliban controlled a majority of the highlands and the city itself, and Hajimullah’s men were pushed back into the valley below, stuck like fish in a shooting barrel. They were a ragged army; most soldiers didn’t have socks or gloves, but they still fought in the snow as winter closed over Afghanistan.
Hajimullah’s men also fought on horseback. Ethnically Uzbeki, his men had been raised on horseback, like their Genghis Khan and their Mongol ancestors.
When the second CIA team scampered off their helicopter out of Uzbekistan, General Hajimullah had six Afghan horses waiting for them.
Afghan men were smaller than most Americans. Famine, lack of quality nutrition, not enough protein, and a host of other maladies had left the Afghan population more diminutive, leaner. Afghan horses, likewise, were smaller, more compact.
Smaller Afghans and smaller horses meant smaller saddles, made of wood and stiff leather and right angles. Kris fit easily into his, and he copied Hajimullah’s standing riding style, keeping out of the saddle as much as he could.
The rest of the CIA team, by the end of the day’s ride to Hajimullah’s base camp, were nursing sore asses and bleeding thighs, skin rubbed raw from squeezing into the too-small saddles. David, too, limped when they arrived.
Hajimullah enjoyed the Americans’ discomfort like he’d feasted on fine Russian caviar. He laughed, barrel chest shaking, roars echoing off the mountains ringing his camp. “You Americans,” he cried. “So soft. If you stay here for one week, I will make Afghans out of you.”
With the promise of covering fire from the US fighter jets and a significant bombing campaign guided in by Kris and David, Hajimullah and his deputies formed a plan to capture Mazar-e-Sharif and cut off all Taliban escape attempts. The US would obliterate the Taliban in the hills, paving the way for the Shura Nazar to enter the city without fear of strikes from above.
Two days later, David and Kris huddled on a flinty shale slope in the White Mountains, casting lasers at Taliban targets pinpointed on maps and GPS. The Taliban had concentrated their forces, building into the mountain in the hope that they would be safe, shielded by the rocks.
They were so very, very wrong.
Kris relayed his conversation with an American B-2 stealth bomber coming in from the south at high altitude, flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. He could just make out the white contrails streaking the very top of the cornsilk sky, as if dragging stardust down from space. “Time to target, two minutes.” Everyone on the radio net heard him.
Far above in the bomber, someone was getting ready to deploy the Daisy Cutter. Non-nuclear and designed to instantly clear a landing zone in Vietnam, the bomb had found a second purpose destroying caves, bunkers, and deeply buried fighters in combat zones around the world.
“Weapon away!” Kris called.
Across the valley, the position he and David had painted disintegrated, disappearing in silence into a mushroom cloud that shot higher than the ice-covered peaks. A second later, a boom shook the earth, a thunderclap that rumbled Kris’s organs and pushed him physically down the mountain. He clung to David, both of them sliding on shale as the ground trembled and quaked.
“Second target commencing.” David shifted the laser to the next Taliban position as the first cloud continued to grow. Everything that had existed where the bomb landed—Taliban, weapons, tanks—was dust, blowing away.
After three Daisy Cutters, Hajimullah, his horseback fighters, and the CIA team charged. Kris watched from above through his binos. Taliban survivors, stunned by the blast, crawled toward their weapons, bleeding from everywhere—their eyes, their ears, their mouths. Wailing, they tried to fight, firing wildly and without aim at the charging Shura Nazar.
Hajimullah’s men rode them down.
Outside Mazar-e-Sharif, Hajimullah roared over the radio, broadcasting to the Taliban, “I have the Americans!” he shouted. “They brought their death ray! Surrender, or you will die!”
The remaining Taliban fell over themselves to be the first to surrender.
November 10, Hajimullah entered Mazar-e-Sharif on horseback. David followed Kris into the city on horseback, finally used to the cramped, stiff saddle. They watched as Hajimullah marched his fighters to the Blue Mosque, the holiest mosque in Afghanistan and a place of pilgrimage.
“Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, is buried there.” David breathed in slowly, staring wide-eyed at the mosque. “It’s a holy site in Islam.”
“Do you want to go in?”
David flinched, squirming down the left side of his body. “I don’t think I can,” he whispered.
Kris sidestepped his horse until he was alongside David’s. Their horses snorted, nipping at each other’s faces. Afghans flooded past them, following Hajimullah to the mosque, cheering and celebrating. Out of sight, he squeezed David’s hand, laced their fingers together.
Kris’s radio chirped. “Jammer Three, Jammer One. Come in.”
George, calling from headquarters in the Panjshir. The signal was weak, scratchy over a dozen repeaters and mangled towers. “Go ahead Jammer One.”
“Great job with Mazar. General Khan wants you both at the Shomali front, ASAP.”
The Taliban collapsed, from Mazar-e-Sharif to Taloquan and all the towns in between. The Shura Nazar chased them down across the northern front.
Kris and David joined Khan on the Shomali Plain, and the last front line against the Taliban. Finally, they were reunited with Captain Palmer and the rest of David’s Special Forces team as they waited for the bombing to shift to the Shomali. Palmer greeted David with a handshake and a quick, backslapping hug. “Great job, Haddad. You hanging in there?”
“Yes, sir.”
Kris thought having Captain Palmer and the rest of the team back, surrounding David, would change things. Would change whatever they had fallen into. He expected David to shy away from him, shift his focus, turn to his team and forget whatever he’d made with Kris.
But the first night, David laid Kris’s sleeping bag right next to his in the middle of the team’s dug-in fighting position. As the stars came out, David’s arms wrapped around him and his face tucked into the back of Kris’s neck.
Other members of the team also huddled close together, spooning their sleeping bags in rows to share warmth. Maybe it was just that, just the cold and nothing more. Maybe everything was in Kris’s mind.
He felt the squeeze of David’s arms around his waist.
November 21 dawned a perfect morning, crisp and clear, edged with frost and the scent of snow, but covered by an endless blue sky, so clear Kris thought he could see the curvature of the earth that encapsulated Afghanistan. He and David were up at daybreak, used to the rhythms of the muezzin and morning prayers after being embedded in the Shura Nazar for weeks.
Khan drank tea with Kris, watching over the Shomali. “After Mazar-e-Sharif, after Taloquan, you promised the Shomali Plain would be next. That you would break the lines and I would lead my people into Kabul.”
In the distance, Kabul was a muddy smudge, a blur of brown and smog. “They’re coming, General. The bombers are on their way.”
They watched the fighters and the bombers fly in, streaks of contrails dragging behind triangles of black and grey and brown. They watched the sky ignite, saw the flash of bombs and heard the roar of the eruptions. The earth quaked, and the skies split, jets breaking the sound barrier after they’d dropped their ordnance and bugged out back to their bases and their carriers.
In the silence after the attacks, they could hear the echoing screams of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, burning, suffering, and dying in their foxholes.
As each bomb dropped, Shura Nazar fighters fired their rifles into the sky. Captain Palmer and his men watched the bombs drop through their scopes, confirming targets hit and destroyed and marking each on their maps.
Kris saw the reflection of the bombs, of the destruction, in the shine of David’s eyes. The backs of their hands brushed.
George’s call came midmorning. “Jammer Three, come in.”
“Go, Jammer One. What is it?”
“Kris, we just got word. It’s happening. The Taliban are completely collapsing. They’re evacuating Kabul. We’ve got to go, push hard, now.”
Khan heard every word. Kris hadn’t seen a man look so joyful, so ecstatic, ever in his life. “We move out, now!” He shouted up and down his lines and over the radio. His fighters took over, repeating his orders from foxhole to foxhole. Trucks zipped out from the rear, loaded with machine guns and fighters.
Khan rode at the head of his convoy. Dust spewed up from the Shomali, hundreds of tires and men storming across the dead and haunted plains.
Palmer and his team followed in two trucks. The massive convoy of Shura Nazar fighters rode in a single file toward Kabul. Kris rode in the back of Palmer’s truck, beside David, his scarf tied around his face, sunglasses on, trying to keep out the dust.
As they advanced, they came upon the craters of their bombs, large enough to destroy the entire width of the single road to Kabul. To either side, decades’ worth of mines were buried. Nervous drivers inched forward, trying to stick to the remnants of the road as much as possible and avoid certain death.
Mangled corpses littered the Plain, broken and bloody and fallen across torn black flags, half buried in shattered rock and dust. The Plain, so harsh and gray, desiccated and windblown, was wet with blood, the end of the Shomali’s drought.
Kris’s gaze swept the devastation, the death and destruction.
“Stop,” Khan called over the radio in Dari. “Everyone, stop. We must see to the dead.”
“General… These are the Taliban. And al-Qaeda,” Kris radioed back.
“Leave al-Qaeda to rot. They are apostates, and no longer Muslim. But we will bury our Afghan dead. They are still our people.”
Khan’s men dragged the Taliban together, making piles of corpses. They covered them in rocks and stones, the Afghanistan tomb, and whispered prayers over their graves.
When they restarted, there was no resistance on their drive across the Plain.
Khan’s convoy roared up the hills, heading for Kabul.
In hours, they’d be in the capital. Washington had insisted, again, that Khan stop, not advance into the city. That the UN be allowed to fly in and take over. That Khan not get the victory he’d worked for, had struggled for, for decades, working with Massoud and now on his own.
Kris kept his mouth shut and watched the clouds billow behind Khan’s SUV.
Kabul was a city of dust and ghosts, of blue burqas whispering out of sight.
The city sprawled, dusty streets and cobbled-together buildings, mud huts and cinder block rows of houses lined with rusted steel fences topped with barbed wire. Some houses were empty, ransacked, belongings scattered into the streets. Bloodstains drenched the dust on street corners, but there were no bodies. No movement. No people.
Khan’s army stormed into the city, rolling down the streets in their trucks and tanks. The soldiers honked, cheering loudly, their entrance a celebration.
Kris, David, Palmer, and the rest of the team kept their heads on a swivel. The city was silent, far too silent.
Kris watched empty homes pass by, decrepit streets and blocks of stores and buildings that had burned to ash and the skeletal remains of rebar. The city felt heavy, the weight of thousands of unlived lives and decades of sorrow embedded into the foundation, down into the sewers and into the tangled and broken power lines overhead.
General Khan led his army to the steps of the Taliban’s intelligence headquarters, their former seat of power in Kabul and in Afghanistan. Burned papers blew in the wind. Doors banged, opening and closing on broken hinges.
Khan and his senior command staff exited their vehicles, rifles at the ready. Palmer ordered his men to form a security perimeter, but David stayed at Kris’s side, dogging his footsteps as he followed Khan into Taliban headquarters. Kris watched tears fill Khan’s eyes as he strode up the burned and shrapnel-scarred steps.
He’d done it.
“We came to liberate, not to conquer.”
General Khan issued his orders to the Shura Nazar as he instructed them to maintain peace and order in the capital. Checkpoints cropped up throughout Kabul. Hesitant civilians began poking their heads out from behind their gates. Slowly, men began to congregate on street corners, gazing at the Shura Nazar soldiers and the city with wide eyes, like they were seeing something brand-new, something they’d never seen before.
By afternoon, the bazaar was open again, chicken and goat roasting over open fires inside fifty-gallon metal drums, and limp vegetables and bruised fruit were hawked from every other stand. Kids gathered in clusters, hiding whenever the soldiers would try to say hello. Tangerine sunlight twirled with the smoke and haze over the capital and lapped the mountains ringing Kabul.
Kris and Palmer’s team watched everything from the Taliban’s former governmental guesthouse, their old living quarters. They were woefully outnumbered, the only seven Americans in the city.
“Any word from George?” David leaned against the open window opposite Kris, watching Kabul come alive on the street below.
“Not yet.”
George’s last message had been that he was on the move, breaking down in the Panjshir and taking a chopper to Bagram to set up a secondary headquarters closer to Kabul.
Greasy chicken and diesel fuel mixed with rapid Dari and Pashto, the laughter of children, and cheers that rose from groups of men. Women in burqas moved silently through the crowd.
“I thought they’d take the burqa off.” David frowned.
“They’re out without a chaperone. Before, they were imprisoned in their homes.” Kris nodded to a group of women meeting on a street corner, their burqa-covered hands clutching each other’s. He saw their burqas tremble, the fabric rustle. “It’s the first day. Let them feel safe first. Let them realize the religious police aren’t going to beat them this afternoon.”
Palmer and his men lay on every available horizontal surface in the guest room they’d been given. There were two single beds, a thin love seat, and a writing desk. They were trying to soak up all the sleep they could. It was amazing, how sloth-like Special Forces soldiers could be when at rest. As if they knew they had to capture every moment, stack it up like a savings account they could draw on in the future.
“I’ve got to call George. Let him know we’re in Kabul.” Kris rolled his neck.
“Think Washington is going to shit?”
“Probably. Which means I’m going to get it all.”
David squeezed his shoulder, then dragged his hand up, stroking up his neck until he cupped the back of Kris’s head. He said nothing, just stared into Kris’s eyes.
Six weeks they’d been at each other’s side, from the frigid cold of the mountains, the lonely nights of the front with only the dust and the stars and each other, to the frenetic chaos of combat, of air strikes, of decimating the Taliban all over Afghanistan. And now they were in Kabul, surrounded by David’s team and Kabulis learning how to live again.
Was there ever going to be time to talk about the way David looked at him? Kris had already hardened his heart to the possibility that there was nothing there. A passing moment in a life, a blip of human connection in the horrors of war. Warmth, physical, perhaps even emotional.
But not hunger. Not need. Not desire.
Not what Kris dreamed about, despite his ceaseless recriminations.
David took a breath. Opened his mouth. “I—”
Ring ring ring.
The shrill scream of the satellite phone Kris kept on him at all times, in the front of his thick jacket, ripped the evening apart. Soldiers groaned, rolling over to avoid the noise. David pulled back, dropped his hand.
“Shit. I’m sorry.” Kris fumbled in his jacket, finally found the phone. Groaned when he saw the caller ID. “It’s George.” He pressed to answer and cringed. “Caldera.”
“Kris! Are you in Kabul with Palmer’s team?”
“Yes, George.”
“Is everyone all right? No injuries?”
“No injuries.” He hesitated. “Khan wasn’t going to stop outside the city. He never even slowed down. And I wasn’t going to tell him he couldn’t win his war.”
“You did the right thing, Kris, going with him. Washington is screaming about it, but you did the right thing, and I’m telling Clint that. They are imagining a bloodbath in the city. Tell me what’s really going on.”
Kris almost couldn’t answer. He blinked. “Uh, the market is open. We’re in the old Taliban guesthouse overlooking one of the bazaars in the main square. Kids are outside. Women are out, talking together. Men are cheering. Khan stationed his soldiers at intersections to keep the peace. There were some reports of looting, but that was mostly Kabulis trying to destroy former Taliban homes.”
Wonder filled George’s voice. “My God, we did it. We took Kabul.”
“General Khan and the Shura Nazar took Kabul.”
“Our alliance took Kabul. Which wouldn’t have happened without you.”
Kris stayed quiet.
“We need to move into Kabul, ASAP. We need to search the Taliban and al-Qaeda facilities there, start interrogating prisoners the Shura Nazar have captured. Do you have a facility we can move into?”
“This guesthouse is huge. It could hold us all, and room for more.”
“Good, because Washington is already talking about sending in more teams to Kabul, to the north, and to the south.” There was a lot of work to be done in the south, near Kandahar, the ancestral home of the Taliban. Taliban and al-Qaeda forces were still rampant there. “Any word, any intel on Bin Laden?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll get the team ready to move out to Kabul. It will be good to get us all together again. See what you can do about setting up a headquarters there for us.” George paused. “And good job, Kris. Really, great work.”
George arrived with the rest of the team in a convoy of trucks, lugging all of their gear that had once been set up in the Panjshir, then moved to Bagram, and finally to Kabul. Derek had stayed behind at Bagram to coordinate incoming CIA and Special Forces teams from Pakistan and the Gulf. Kris got the okay from Khan to convert the guesthouse into the first CIA station in Afghanistan in over twenty years, since the closing of the US Embassy.
They spent the first night setting up operations again. Jim and Phillip spent hours with the generator and the communications equipment. Ryan seemed to be in a thousand places at once, hauling gear, setting up workstations, poring over maps of the country and the capital. George had walked in with the satellite phone glued to his skull, given Kris a one-armed bear hug, and then spent the next six hours talking to everyone from Langley, to CENTCOM, to CIA station in Islamabad, and the White House.
Jim, Phillip, and George had seemed happy to see Kris, shaking his hand and smiling. Ryan studiously avoided him, even avoided looking at him. His eyes slid away whenever Kris neared.
By morning, after a solid night of work, the station was up and running. George called a break and gathered everyone—CIA officers and Special Forces teammates—together for breakfast.
Thirty people squeezed in, scooping fried eggs and strips of goat, yogurt, flatbreads, and apples onto their plates, and grabbing instant coffee. For the first time, since nine in the morning on September 11, everyone seemed content, and confident in their work, their mission. Laughter broke over the group, jokes flying back and forth. Smiles stretched everyone’s faces.
David’s smile, the way it crinkled his eyes, carved furrows into his face, made Kris’s bones weak. Out of everyone in the room, David burned the brightest, laughed the loudest, transfixed Kris in ways he couldn’t describe. He almost couldn’t breathe, watching David. The thin air of Kabul seemed too weak, too light, to contain all that David was. He was exhausted—they all were, worn through from six weeks of war—but there David was, hamming it up with his team.
Kris fled before breakfast was through. He couldn’t take it, couldn’t take David’s effect on his heart.
George found him a few hours later. “We’re going to head over to the US Embassy. Want to come?”
George, Kris, Jim, and Phillip hopped into one of the trucks they’d driven from Bagram. Ryan drove, and they wound their way through Kabul’s bustling streets to the boarded-up embassy.
The embassy had been locked up for fifteen years, closed and abandoned after the bloody civil war started tearing Afghanistan to shreds following Soviet withdrawal. Ryan cut the chains off the front door and broke through with an axe.
The seal of the United States lay under a thick carpet of dust, welcoming them into the gloom. Pictures of President Reagan and Vice President George Bush hung on the walls, and rotary telephones still sat on desks. Broken picture frames and glass covered the marble floors.
Kris stooped to pick up one photo, half buried in dirt and the dust of decay. President Jimmy Carter watched over a casket, his head bowed.
“Ambassador Dubs’s funeral.” George spoke over Kris’s shoulder. “He was murdered in Kabul. Kidnapped under suspicious circumstances, supposedly by terrorists. The Soviets forced their Afghan puppet government into a rescue mission, despite the US wanting to negotiate. Dubs was executed when the rescuers stormed their hideout. His death, and his kidnapping, was never fully explained. But his murder poisoned our relations with Afghanistan for decades. We withdrew completely.” George sighed. “He was murdered in February of ’79. By that autumn, the communist government of Afghanistan was in shambles, the country was in open revolt. In December, the Soviets invaded Kabul to prop up their communist allies. We, naturally, wanted to fight communism and avenge the death of our ambassador, and provided covert aid to the enemies of communism: the Muslim fundamentalists.”
“Bin Laden came to Afghanistan in 1980.” Kris felt his stomach turn, felt it knot. “All this—” He nodded to the photo, the time capsule of the embassy, perfectly preserving 1979. “—was part of why he set off down this path. He was so enraged by the Soviet invasion of Muslim lands, and the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. He was furious, lashing out. He wanted to fight the enemies of Islam, and we helped him. And then we dropped Bin Laden once the Soviets pulled out. And we became the enemies. It’s all a vicious cycle, isn’t it?”
“‘What a tangled web we weave…’” George smiled sadly. “But we’re not the arbiters of the world, Kris. We’re just here to gather intelligence. Our job is to see, to listen, and to know. It’s not up to us to shape the world.”
“But here we are, fighting a war.” Kris brushed the dust off Dubs’s funeral photo. He set it on the edge of the ambassador’s desk, propped up against the rotary telephone and next to an old cigarette ashtray. “And everything we’ve done here? What you just told me? We absolutely shape the world. We’ve made all of this, everything, happen.”
“Is that a bad thing? Would the world be better if it were more American?”
He thought of Khan by firelight, asking for American help yet convinced it would all end in betrayal, the same end to the same song replayed a thousand times in the Arab world. And of the Shomali, the dusty, blood-soaked drive to the capital. Corpses blown apart, mangled body parts strewn across cratered roads. The women whose hands had shaken under their burqas, walking outside unaccompanied for the first time. The thousands who had been murdered by the Taliban, and the village of bones he and David had found. The shape of a child’s rib bone in David’s palm.
“War is hell, George. No matter what.”
“Some things are worth fighting for.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
Footsteps echoed on the marble, drawing close. “War makes men.” Ryan, his hands propped on his hips, glared at Kris. “It defines a man. He’s at his most connected with himself. And of course this is worth fighting. There’s nothing more just and right than exterminating these murderers. They deserve everything that they get. And more.”
“Ryan, did you cut your way into the old CIA station?” George ignored Ryan’s outburst. The old CIA station was housed in the basement of the embassy, and it had been abandoned at the same time as the withdrawal.
“It’s empty. Some old cash in the safe, but they burned everything before pulling out.”
“Good. Then there’s nothing for us here. State will take over the embassy when they arrive.”
“We’re suddenly the most popular people on the planet.” George smiled ruefully at the team, back at their new station. “Everyone is coming to visit. CENTCOM is sending a huge deployment of humanitarian aid. We’re keeping the lead in the Bin Laden hunt. Islamabad station says their sources claim they have a credible lead on Bin Laden. We need to see if it pans out. If they’re right, we have to strike.
“Ryan, I want you and Jim to head east. You can’t go alone, though. East is al-Qaeda country. This morning, a group of armed fighters slaughtered a village where the men had decided to shave their Taliban-mandated beards. We may feel safe in Kabul now, but you step one toe to the east, and you’re in a world of hurt without the right kind of support.”
He turned to Kris. “What do you know about the eastern provinces? Are there any warlords affiliated with Khan that we can turn to? Whose loyalty we can buy?”
Kris blew out a long breath. “I’ll ask Khan for an introduction. You’re deep into Pashtunwali in those regions, though. No matter how much you pay, you’re going to run smack into their tribal code. If Bin Laden is hiding in the tribal areas, he’s going to rely on Pashtunwali to shield him, especially from infidels such as us.”
“We have to try. See what you can do.”
Kris nodded.
“And I want you to head to wherever the Shura Nazar are keeping their prisoners. They captured al-Qaeda training camps, bases, and fighters. I want them interrogated, as soon as possible. We need to know what they know. We need to dig up everything at the camps. Everything they were up to.”
“George, may I take Sergeant Haddad with me?”
“Can’t be without your little friend for even a day, can you?” Ryan grinned. Jim chuckled once, but sucked in a breath and shut down immediately after.
It had been seven hours since breakfast. Not that Kris was counting. “Medical care in the Shura Nazar is minimal at best. They’re not going to spare anything for captured al-Qaeda fighters. They didn’t even bury them on the Shomali. If we bring medical care, they might be more willing to talk.”
“Good thinking.” George nodded. “I’ll let Palmer know we need Haddad for this. Let’s get moving.”
He and David were guided to a bombed-out warehouse in a dark and destroyed sector of Kabul. Broken windows let in snow flurries and icy wind. It was too cold and dry for the snow to stick, and it felt like a thousand blades hitting his skin. The al-Qaeda fighters were kept in shipping containers with holes drilled in the sides. They stayed in the dark until pulled out by Shura Nazar guards for Kris to question.
Kris’s stomach turned as the first prisoner came to them. He had a shrapnel wound on his face, over his cheek and curling up to his forehead. Blood and pus matted his head. His face was swollen, his eyes glassy.
“He won’t be able to answer any questions. Not until he’s recovered,” David said softly.
“Offer him medical care. It’s what we can do.”
The man was Saudi, and he gratefully accepted David’s offer to clean and bandage his wounds. He sat stoically through it all, never once flinching. He seemed surprised when Kris revealed he and David were from the CIA. He claimed he had been studying the Quran in Afghanistan and had been caught in the war. That he was innocent.
“You were in Afghanistan studying the Quran?” Kris asked in Dari.
The Saudi frowned, confused. “What did you say?”
Kris switched to Arabic. “Why come to a Dari-speaking country to study an Arabic text?”
The Saudi said nothing.
Kris and David sent him back.
Word spread that the interrogators were giving medical aid. They had dozens of volunteers willing to speak, scores of young fighters lining up for David’s care.
Man after man repeated the same line: that they were in Afghanistan to study the Quran. That they had lost their passport. That they had never heard of Bin Laden.
There simply wasn’t any reason for Arabs, Chechens, Chinese Uighurs, Burmese Muslims, or Central Asian Islamists to be in Afghanistan other than as fighters. Certainly not hundreds of them studying the Quran in a language the Quran wasn’t even written in. How had all these students been so grievously wounded by bombs and bullets? Weren’t they supposed to be studying?
Al-Qaeda had prepped their people well, giving them the same line to use in detention. As long as no one broke, their answers were impenetrable, and without any actual hard evidence—impossible to come by in a warzone—their answers couldn’t be challenged.
David patched them as best he could and sent them back to their cells.
Kris kept questioning each fighter. He could recite their answers now, and he mouthed along with their protests as they delivered the same line again and again.
Until an older Yemeni sat before him.
“Why were you in Afghanistan?”
Silence. Kris frowned.
“I came to fight the infidels,” he said slowly. “The Americans. We knew they were coming for the Sheikh.”
“The Sheikh? Bin Laden?”
“Nam.” David had stitched together the Yemeni’s face, plucking out a bomb fragment. Stitches ran up his cheek, down his throat. He’d narrowly avoided death. Kris’s eyes kept drifting to the stitches, squiggly lines that moved when the man spoke, like he had two mouths, two voices.
“Where is the Sheikh now?”
“He is waiting for you. Where he killed the Soviet infidels. He will kill you, too.”
“George, Bin Laden is retreating to Tora Bora. Where he fought the Soviets in ’87 at Jaji. If we don’t stop him now, he can slip over the border to Pakistan through the mountains.”
“This lines up with our intelligence, too. We’ve got reports coming in from on the ground that Bin Laden was seen heading east to Jalalabad. Dining with tribal leaders. Praying at a mosque in Jalalabad with the Taliban governor there. He left in a convoy of trucks and jeeps that stretched a mile long, they say.” George pointed to the map Ryan had tacked to the wall of their station’s command center. Bin Laden’s sightings were pinned in a row, stretching east from Kabul toward the border with Pakistan. “There’s also a news report of a convoy of trucks passing through the village of Agram. Qurans in one hand, AK-47s in the other. Multiple nationalities.” George handed over an article from the Times. Some reporter had trekked all the way out to Jalalabad for the article.
“This reporter is lucky to not have been killed.”
“It matches what we’re getting from the sources on the ground.” George fingered the pins, moving east, and then south through the Agram village and Nangarhar Province. He kept going, and his finger ended up dead center on Tora Bora against the base of the Spin Ghar mountains straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. “Where are we on getting support from Khan to head east?”
Kris sighed. “Khan and Fazl have been dragging their feet. They’re content in Kabul. They want us to take care of the south, and the east, and al-Qaeda. They think their work is done.”
“We helped them get here.” George’s eyes flashed. “Kris, you have Khan’s ear. His trust. Use your relationship with him. Get us the support we need to go after Bin Laden, before he slips away!”