* * *
THE NOTE WAS . . . PERFECT.
Like everything else Rashid had given them. She forwarded it to Cota without comment. Three minutes later, he walked into her office.
“We’ve got to get a tracker on him. One they won’t find even if they strip him down again.”
“The pills could be the best way. They won’t check those twice.”
“Or he can tell them that he needs to bring some medical equipment this time. Point is, we want options for him when we meet him, and that’s going to take a couple days. Let’s aim for next week. At Holux.” Holux was a small CIA base near the Pakistani border. Two dozen CIA officers and contractors lived there, mostly directing drone strikes.
“You want to meet him on our base?”
“At least ten people are gonna be at this thing, Marci—”
“Too many.”
“Let him drive over the border, leave his car in Jalalabad, and we’ll pick him up and sneak him
in.”
“Are you sure about this, Manny?”
“You don’t like it, you hand it off. I’m through debating. I reread the whole package, the walk-in, the surveillance in Amman, everything. And not just me. Both the Teds and Big Mike”—three of the top officers in the DO—“have looked it over. We agree. Marburg is clean. Marburg is gold.”
“I’m aware of the consensus.”
“You’re so worried about him, why’d you meet him one-on
-
one?”
“I had security across the hall.”
“We have a chance here to catch a guy we’ve been chasing a long time. End of story.”
Three e-mails later, she had set the meeting for Holux. As Cota had suggested, Rashid would cross into Afghanistan alone and meet a CIA pickup at Batawul, a village east of the camp.
* * *
BACK AT LANGLEY,
the geeks in the Division of Science and Technology worked on trackers. A transmitter hidden inside a pill would have to be a low-powered radio unit that could be monitored only at close range. The DST preferred to hide a satellite transponder inside a heart monitor. When Rashid delivered the monitor to al-Zawahiri, satellites would autolock on
him.
The night before the meeting, Holm couldn’t sleep. Around three a.m., she gave up, turned on a lamp. Her husband sat up, stretched his arms as if he’d been asleep, though she knew he hadn’t. “What if we’re wrong?”
“He’s already given us a bunch of guys. He’s proven himself.”
“I know I’m being irrational. Maybe it doesn’t make sense unless you’re a woman. But we’ve all had one of them. In college if you’re lucky, high school if you’re not. He’s older, picks you up at a bar. Doesn’t try to take you home that night. Gets your number, takes you to dinner, and he’s got a nice car. He’s so polite. Charming. Not like the stupid boys you know. You’re happy you dressed up for him. Then after dinner he takes you back to his place for a drink, and before you know it your skirt is off, and whether you want it or not, it’s happening. And when it’s done, he never calls again—”
“Did this happen to
you?”
“I told you we’ve all had one of them. The point is, that’s the feeling Marburg gives me. He’s too good. Do anything to get in our pants.”
“Make sure they pat him down tomorrow. Before he gets inside.”
“I asked Manny and he says no. We haven’t searched him before, we can’t start now. Especially since he told us how much he hated those guys stripping him down.”
They were silent. Finally she said, “You know I can’t walk away now. It’s too late. Anyway, Manny has me believing I’m crazy to worry about this. Tell me I’m crazy.”
“The craziest woman I’ve ever met. Why I love
you.”
She leaned over, kissed him. “Good night, sweetie.”
In the morning, she felt fine, chipper, even. She saw the truth. Marburg was not a double. He was her agent. He was about to give them Ayman al-Zawahiri. She showered and dressed and drank two big mugs of coffee and headed
out.
The day was clear and crisp. A breeze splashed in from the mountains. They saddled up and flew to Camp Holux on two Black Hawks. The team totaled ten officers in all, including Cota and his deputy, the two top officers in Afghanistan. The most junior guy in the group was Tom Lautner, her husband’s brother, on his first tour in Kabul. He had been assigned to help provide security. She liked having him there.
The base was spartan, brick outbuildings that the CIA had rented from a local farmer, ringed with sandbags and barbed wire and low concrete blast walls. A South African contractor managed security, hiring Nepalese Gurkhas for the guard tower and locals to patrol outside the wire. In the one-room brick building that served as the communications center, Holm hailed Ted Khan, the officer overseeing Rashid’s pickup, on an encrypted radio.
“Stinson One, this is Holux, do you copy?”
“Copy. Awaiting subject. Over.” Even on encrypted frequencies, Khan wasn’t chatty. Holm was glad he was handling the pickup. He was half Afghan, and though he’d grown up near Los Angeles, he spoke perfect Pashtun.
Cota’s sat phone buzzed. “Yes, sir . . . Soon as we hear, sir.” He clicked off. “Erie wishes us luck,” he said to Holm. Erie was the code name for the deputy director of operations, the agency’s second-highest officer.
“It’s not even five a.m. back there.”
“He’s calling from home. Putting that encrypted line to good
use.”
The radio crackled again a few minutes later. Holm reached for the handset but Cota grabbed it. “Firecracker here.” The code name for the chief of station.
“This is Stinson One. I have eyes on the subject. Umm, he’s wearing a jacket.”
“What kind of jacket?”
“A windbreaker type, not too puffy, but maybe loose enough to hide a vest. Request permission for a physical search.”
Do it,
Holm mouthed at Cota. He raised a finger to his lips.
“Does he seem nervous? Head down, shuffling his feet?”
“Negative. He’s looking around for me, checking his watch.”
“No search. Subject is friendly and we’re gonna treat him that way. If you think he’s wearing a vest, you’re authorized to take action. But don’t be wrong.”
“Roger that. We’ll bring him in, then.”
The radio clicked
off.
“Don’t say it,” Cota said.
“A windbreaker’s not his style. He’s never worn one before.”
“Come on. It’s thirty degrees. And I told Khan he was authorized to take action.”
“You also told him not to be wrong.”
“I think after today Marburg’s getting another case officer.”
They were all locked in, Holm saw. Cota was counting the promotions he’d get for running this op. The security guys would do what Cota said. She wanted to object, but it was too late.
Ten minutes later, Tom Lautner appeared. “They’re at the gate.”
* * *
THE OFFICERS FORMED
an impromptu welcoming party outside the communications center. The gate rolled open and Ted Khan piloted his rusty old Toyota pickup through the chicane of concrete barriers just inside. Holm waved, and from inside the Toyota, Rashid waved back.
The pickup stopped a hundred feet from the CIA officers. Khan stepped out as Holm walked toward the SUV’s passenger side. Lautner and other security officers followed, their pistols holstered. Cota had told them no rifles. Too intimidating.
The front passenger door opened. Rashid stepped out, careful to make sure his gown didn’t touch the pickup’s muddy side panels. “Doctor—”
He stepped toward her. “Miss Simmons,
salaam aleikum—
”
Before he finished the greeting, she knew. His face was even thinner than it had been in Karachi. But under his windbreaker, his body was thicker. Squarer. Whoever had built the vest had done a good job. It wasn’t obvious. If it had been obvious, Khan would have been sure, instead of just worried.
But it was there.
Rashid took another step toward her. His eyes opened wide. He smiled. She saw he wanted her to know. He wasn’t nervous either. He was ready. He was
looking forward
to this.
“Bomb!” Holm yelled. “Bomb!” No time to say anything else. She pushed Cota aside and down—
Behind her the security officers reached for their pistols—
They were all too late.
Ahmad Rashid, code name Marburg, reached under his sweater and pushed the detonator on his suicide vest. The seven pounds of Semtex strapped to his body blew. The blast wave tore Marci Holm into pieces so small that her remains could be identified only by her wedding ring. It ripped off the back of Manny Cota’s head. It killed seven other CIA officers, including Tom Lautner. Marci’s body partly protected him from the blast. He might have survived, but the overpressure wave caught him awkwardly and snapped his neck. Six other officers were seriously wounded, Ted Khan worst of all. The explosion blasted the 4Runner’s windshield into shards that cut up his eyes before he could blink. In a way he was lucky. He couldn’t see what had happened to his face.
* * *
EVEN BEFORE
the wounded were loaded onto medevac choppers for transport to Bagram and then Germany, the Critic-coded transmissions began.
EXPLOSION HOLUX . . . MULTIPLE KIA . . . MULTIPLE WIA . . . EMERGENCY TRANSPORT EN ROUTE . . . REPEAT EXPLOSION INSIDE WIRE HOLUX. PERIMETER SECURE NO FURTHER ATTACK. SUICIDE BOMB SUSPECTED. MARBURG ASSUMED RESPONSIBLE.
REPEAT MARBURG ASSUMED RESPONSIBLE.
In the days to come, the dimensions of the catastrophe would become evident. A less important station would have been temporarily shut. Not Kabul. Not for a month or a week or even a day. Not with the Taliban spreading and the Afghan government too corrupt to function. Not with al-Qaeda regrouping over the border in Pakistan. Even before Manny Cota was buried in Georgia, Duto and his deputies on the seventh floor at Langley were deciding who would replace him. Duto himself flew to Kabul to rally his officers.
“We’ve lost a battle,” he said. “A terrible battle. The war goes
on.”
PART ONE
1
FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON,
ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN
PRESENT DAY
G
rowing up in the scrubland of west Texas, Ricky Fowler had done some stupid things. The usual nonsense, nothing the cops cared much about. Mailbox baseball. Spraying a 1 beside the 75 on speed-limit signs. A couple times, drunk, he shot firecrackers at bulls. Roman candles and such. He wasn’t proud of that little trick, but he never hit anything. The longhorns didn’t even notice.
But these Afghans, they took the cake on stupid. Yeah, they were tough fighters, tricky little bastards who could get by forever on tea and stale bread. But tough and smart were two different things. Guys in his platoon had a name for the nonsense they saw outside the wire every day:
SATs.
Stupid Afghan Tricks.
Like last month, on patrol, this dude sitting on a donkey so short the dude’s feet touched the ground. Plus the donkey’s sides were so loaded with sticks that it looked like it had a Christmas tree growing out of its butt. Even so the rider was grinning like he’d won the lottery, like,
That’s right, suckers. I got a donkey, so I do not have to walk. How you like me now?
Smiling with those big white choppers all the Afghans had, even though they’d never seen toothpaste in their lives. Maybe because they couldn’t afford to drink soda. Fowler didn’t know. Mystery number 101 about this country.
Fowler was an E-3, a private first class, in 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. The unit’s name didn’t make much sense. The Army didn’t have but four Stryker brigades. But Fowler had given up trying to figure out the military’s logic on names, or anything else.
For six months, 3rd Platoon had been more or less orphaned from the rest of its company, peeled off to provide extra support for the supply convoys that ran on Highway 1 from Kandahar to Kabul. The convoys ran only once or twice a week, so the rest of the time, they got thrown onto random jobs that other units in the brigade didn’t want. They set up roadblocks to register motorcycles. They guarded detained Afghans who were scheduled to be moved to the big jail at Kandahar. They didn’t have a defined area of responsibility, and they rarely saw their company captain, much less their battalion commanders. As far as Fowler could see, the battalion had more or less forgotten they existed.
At least they lived on the same base as the rest of Bravo, Forward Operating Base Jackson. Jackson was a pile of trailers and blast walls in Zabul province. Like its neighbor to the west, Kandahar province, Zabul was the ass end of Afghanistan. No mountains here. Western Zabul and Kandahar were a mix of low brown hills and desert. Its soil supported two crops: poppies and the Taliban. More opium grew in Kandahar and the next-door province of Helmand than in the rest of the
world
put together. Not that you’d know it. Southern Afghanistan was dirt-poor. Literally. The locals lived in mud-walled compounds, no electricity or plumbing, just a bunch of dusty kids and goats and sheep.
But here they were, 3rd Platoon, the Lost Boys of Bravo Company. Now they were going down to Hamza Ali, a speck of a village fifteen miles from their base, for a “strongman show.” Sounded to Fowler like they’d be seeing more Stupid Afghan Tricks.
The show itself was a perfect example of the kind of jobs the platoon always got. It was part of COIN, which stood for counterinsurgency warfare. COIN meant, get into the villages and show the locals how much you want to help them. Pretend to care while they yell at one another about who stole whose goat. Give them a few bucks to rebuild the walls that the Strykers knocked over. Help them build a real country. Back in Vietnam, it had been called “hearts and minds.”
Fowler bet that COIN looked good on the presentations the generals gave the president. In reality, far as he could see, the Afghans were as close to building a real country as the hamsters he’d had in first grade. They were happy enough to take the free food and blankets and radios that the Army gave them. Then they kept their mouths shut when the Talibs came by planting bombs. They knew that sooner or later Fowler and his buddies would pack up and go home, and the Talibs would settle every score.
The Afghans might be stupid
,
but they weren’t
dumb
.
Meanwhile, when the elders of Hamza Ali invited Colonel Sean Brown, the commander at FOB Jackson, to see a show at their school, he followed the COIN doctrine. He said yes quick as if they’d offered him fifty-yard-line Cowboys–Giants tickets. Not that Brown had any intention of going. He kicked the visit to his executive staff, who sent it all the way down to 3rd Platoon.
* * *
ON THIS MISSION
—using the word
mission
loosely—the drive was the most dangerous part. A lottery, more or less. The Strykers were armored personnel carriers that carried eleven guys, two driving and nine in the hole. They were twenty-ton beasts, with tall wheels and inch-thick armor. They looked indestructible.
But they weren’t. The Taliban’s most lethal weapon was what the Army called IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, giant homemade land mines. A big enough IED, say one built out of an old artillery shell, could turn a Stryker’s passenger compartment into a nine-man oven. A Stryker from Jackson had gotten popped about three months back. The bomb was huge, two 155-millimeter shells, a thousand pounds of explosive. Six guys had died. The others had been taken to the Army’s burn center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Word was they didn’t have faces anymore.
The good news was that bombs that big were rare. The bad news was that riding in the Strykers still stank. They had no windows or side doors, just hatches on top and a ramp in back. Fowler understood the logic. Doors and windows were weak points. The Stryker was meant to be a vault on wheels. But the inside felt like a vault, too, a cramped hold stinking of fear-sweat, cut off from the world except for a little screen that ran black-and-white video from the camera on the hull. Once the back ramp closed, the guys inside couldn’t do anything but wait. Not for nothing did soldiers call the Strykers Kevlar coffins.
Some guys slept during rides. Not Fowler. Inevitably, he caught himself thinking of the idiotic cartoon Smurfs. In almost every episode, the Smurfs, those miserable blue nitwits, wound up on the run from the evil wizard and his cat. Along the way, they whined constantly to Papa Smurf: “How much farther, Papa Smurf?”
“Not far now.” A few seconds later: “How about now? Much farther now, Papa Smurf?”
“No, not too much.” And then: “What about now? Is it much—” Until finally Papa Smurf, that old coot, lost his temper and yelled, “Yes, it is!” It was, too. Much farther. But in the end the Smurfs got where they were going. No cartoon IEDs ever blew their cartoon asses to cartoon heaven. Fowler figured that was why he found them comforting.
Today at least they were on a hard-packed road, only a few big rocks to bounce them around. Even so, the convoy never got out of second gear. Outside of Highway 1, travel on Afghan roads was excruciatingly slow. The lead Stryker was equipped with the equivalent of a minesweeping snowplow, a steel harness that pushed thick concrete wheels. The harness was attached to the Stryker’s front end, so the wheels rolled about a dozen feet ahead of the truck. They were supposed to set off bombs before the Stryker reached them.
But the wheels worked only on “pressure-plate” mines, those that had a simple fuse set off by the weight of a vehicle. Lately, the Taliban were using more “command-detonated” mines, which exploded when an insurgent set them off. So the driver of the lead Stryker stopped whenever he saw freshly dug dirt patches or suspicious pieces of roadside trash. The delays lasted anywhere from minutes to hours, if a mine was found. Meanwhile, the Strykers in the rest of the convoy idled.
How much farther
now?
* * *
TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING
Forward Operating Base Jackson, the convoy reached Hamza Ali. On the monitor inside Fowler’s truck, low brick buildings replaced empty fields. “Dismount in two,” Sergeant First Class Nick Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man, said.
Sergeant Coleman Young—one of the lucky guys, the ones who slept—grinned at Fowler. Young was squat and muscular and as close to a friend as Fowler had in the platoon. “Been watching that screen for us? Worst TV in the world. You know watching it makes no difference as to whether we hit a bomb. You do know that, right?”
“You missed out today.” Fowler didn’t mind the ribbing. Not from Young.
“Yeah?”
“Two crazy Afghan chicks getting it on. Behind the burqa, you know.”
Behind the burqa
had become a catchphrase for 3rd Platoon. It meant everything and nothing.
The Stryker stopped. “Ramp down in fifteen,” Rodriguez said. “Blue”—American soldiers—“left and right, so keep those safeties
on.”
Fowler made sure his Kevlar vest was tight and checked his rifle. He stretched his legs and wiggled his toes inside his boots three times,
right, left, right
, his end-of-ride ritual. The Stryker’s back ramp cranked down, kicking up gray-brown dust. One by one the men stepped out. “Back to reality,” Young said.
“This is reality?”
“I hope
not.”
The school was newly built, two stories with real windows and a chimney pumping a stream of black smoke into the sky. “Hamza Ali Primary and Secondary School,” a sign read in English. “Funded by United States Agency for International Development.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” Fowler said.
“Not
my
tax dollars. Fowler, even you must know you pay no taxes as a member of the military serving in a war zone. You keep all twenty-five grand this year.”
“Plus all the chow I can
eat.”
“Lucky
you.”
“Heads up,” Rodriguez shouted to the platoon. “Let’s go!”
Rodriguez directed eight guys to stand sentry. The rest followed him and Lieutenant Tyler Weston, the platoon commander, to a dirt field behind the school. The low sun stuck in their eyes and turned them into teardrop shadows.
Weston had taken off his Kevlar and was wearing only his uniform. Soldiers called the practice
bucking
.
Officers bucked at these events to prove that they trusted their Afghan hosts.
Fowler thought bucking was idiotic. But then, he wasn’t an officer, or much of a soldier either. He’d realized after a few weeks that he didn’t belong in the Army. He got rattled too easily. He wasn’t a coward, not exactly. He went outside the wire like everybody else. But he was scared a lot. The fear slowed him down. And being slow was dangerous. The guys who separated themselves from their fear, who moved fast and sure, those were the guys everybody leaned on. Fowler didn’t like Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man. But he knew Rodriguez was a better soldier than he’d ever be. The Army had trained Fowler how to move, handle a radio, strip a rifle, but all the training in the world couldn’t strip the fear from his heart.
So Fowler thought, and not for the first time, as an Afghan man stepped forward and shouted, “Welcome, soldiers! Welcome, America!” He went on in Pashtun for a couple minutes,
baka-baka-baka
.
The platoon didn’t have an interpreter along, so none of the soldiers knew what he was saying, but the Afghans seemed to like the speech. When he was finished, Weston and Rodriguez stepped forward, holding a black bag. Weston opened it, tossed out a half dozen soccer balls.
“The United States is pleased to present this gift to the schoolchildren of Hamza Ali,” Weston said. He chipped one of the balls toward the school’s back wall. Two boys took off after
it.
“How is this nonsense winning a
war
for us,” Young said under his breath to Fowler. “Giving them soccer balls? While they kill us with IEDs. Killing me
softly
.” These last three words delivered falsetto.
“With his song.”
“Cracker boy knows the Fugees.”
“Cracker boy, that’s a compliment, ’cause I can roll.”
“Tell yourself that.”
“You think you’re cool because you know the Fugees, Coleman?
Everybody knows the Fugees. My grandma knows the Fugees and she’s been dead five years.”
“I am the stupidest black man in the world, coming over here to fight this war. My uncle got two fingers blown off in Vietnam but at least he got drafted. What’s my excuse?”
Fowler was spared from answering when two men and a boy stepped out of the school’s back door. One man had thick black hair and wore a powder blue warm-up suit. The other carried a canvas bag and a sledgehammer. The boy was shirtless and wore nylon pants, canary yellow emblazoned with white racing stripes.
“A sledgehammer,” Young said. “Stupid Afghan Tricks. Oh,
yes
.”
Without warning, the boy sprinted toward them and launched himself into a cartwheel and then three backflips. The man in the tracksuit followed with flips of his own. He finished beside the boy, picked him up, casually threw him in the air. The boy landed cat-quick and danced in a low furious whirl, kicking out his legs, the fabric of his yellow pants catching the sun. When the boy finished, the man raised his hands and said, in English, “Please welcome to Parwan”—he tapped his chest—“and Khost.” He pointed to the boy. “Famous father-and-son acrobat. Please like show.”
“How about some applause,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. The soldiers clapped as Parwan unzipped his jacket, revealing a tight black T-shirt. Afghan men insisted on modesty for women but showed off their own bodies at any provocation, Fowler had noticed.
When the applause ended, the man and the boy walked to opposite sides of the field. They turned and faced each other like cowboys about to duel. Then they sprinted at each other. Just before they were about to collide, Parwan ducked low and his son jumped. He flipped over his father’s head and landed and spread his arms wide like an Olympic gymnast. Pure energy. Even Young clapped, though as a rule he was impossible to impress.
Parwan and Khost bowed to the crowd. The second man stepped forward and spun the sledgehammer over his head, an Afghan Thor. The hammer was handmade and brutal, a dull silver log flecked with red spots that hinted at a thousand atrocities. When he was finished showing off the hammer, he reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a board laced with nails.