The Home Front

by Margaret Vandenburg

  He and Colonel Trumble talked several times a day now, but neither one of them ever mentioned Todd’s predicament. The task at hand precluded digressions of any kind, with the notable exception of the colonel’s irrepressible wisecracks. A special communications system had been installed in the trailer, a hotline connecting Todd with a network of undisclosed agencies under the jurisdiction of an undisclosed command. The big mission, or the BM as Colonel Trumble liked to call it, was so top secret even Todd wasn’t privy to the target’s identity. The level of surveillance suggested it was one of al Qaeda’s top brass, hiding in plain sight. A less likely safe house was inconceivable, given the compound’s central location. Hunters in the squad likened it to a duck blind.

  “This is one big piece of shit, I can tell you that,” Colonel Trumble said.

  “Yes, Sir,” Todd said.

  “It’s time to pull the plug, if you ask me.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “The way I see it, we have two options. Flush first, or just wipe him out.”

  “Sir?”

  “Send in the SEALs, or just bomb the hell out of the place. What do you think?”

  “Your call, Sir.”

  “I wish.”

  The fact that Colonel Trumble could get away with this kind of gutter talk was a testament to his stature. He was like General Grant, boozing his way through the war with impunity as long as he kicked Lee’s ass. The colonel’s scatological humor put Todd in an awkward position. He couldn’t really respond in kind the way he did when they were hobnobbing in person. Every word they uttered was being recorded and monitored by a network of military and intelligence agencies, including the Pentagon, the CIA, possibly even the White House. Once in a while Todd thought he heard muffled laughter on the line, presumably one of the masterminds of the BM. Apparently, you could laugh all you liked at the top of the pecking order. No doubt Colonel Trumble consulted with them, but only after Todd signed off. He called them Roto-Rooter Men, the counterterrorism strategists responsible for flushing out the al Qaeda pipeline.

  “A shit this big can plug up the works, if you’re not careful.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Anything new on your end, Barron?”

  “A suspicious number of early morning deliveries. I’m not convinced the baker is just a baker.”

  “Awfully damn skinny for a baker, that’s for sure.”

  “This is the second time this week he’s delivered a big cake box, along with the usual order of naan. When I say big I mean really big. Nobody eats that much cake.”

  “Unless there’s more people in that compound than meets the eye.”

  “Unless there’s more in those boxes than meets the eye.”

  “How big is big?”

  “Big enough to disguise several cartridges of ammunition. Maybe even grenades.”

  “Any corroborating evidence? Or are you boys just making shit up because you’re bored?”

  “This particular bakery seems to have an awful lot of employees, especially since it’s basically a mom and pop shop. We’re monitoring it 24/7.”

  Todd’s drone squad was responsible for providing realtime video feeds documenting traffic in and out of the compound. The hotline was reserved for reporting anomalies in the daily routine of its inhabitants. There was one main house, a bland two-story box with balconies, and two outbuildings, which could have accommodated up to twenty people, if need be. A lot of space was being wasted, or not, depending on whether anyone was hiding behind closed doors. Not that it was an inordinately large compound. It basically looked like the homes of other wealthy people living nearby. The grounds were surrounded by a twelve-foot concrete wall laced with barbed wire, neither more nor less heavily fortified than neighboring properties. These were standard precautions in Abbottabad, no more out of the way than locking your door in Las Vegas. The primary and quite possibly only residents appeared to be a couple in their late fifties, along with a battery of domestic servants. The husband, who had an office downtown, made his money trading credit derivatives. The wife was either an invalid, agoraphobic, or just too devout to venture into public. Four out of their five grown children lived locally and visited regularly. The fifth and eldest flew in from Karachi for religious holidays. Three were married and one was pregnant, praise Allah. Late fifties was a decidedly advanced age to become grandparents in Abbottabad.

  The couple was either fronting a terrorist cell or they were the object of an egregious invasion of privacy. There was very little in their background indicating that they were more apt to harbor al Qaeda operatives than their neighbors, which begged the question of whether Pakistan was crawling with collaborators. Homeland Security advisers were divided on the subject. One camp felt that the escalation in surveillance, let alone drone strikes, had alienated the general public, fanning the fire of terrorism. The other, including most of the Joint Chiefs, insisted that Pakistanis had been dubious allies all along, well before drones invaded their airspace. Whether this kind of surveillance was ever really justified was another question entirely, one the intelligence community was singularly ill-equipped to answer. You might as well ask a watchdog why it barks. The more immediate problem—deciding whether this particular couple’s compound was a viable target—far exceeded the question of whether they were guilty as charged. What was really on trial was American foreign policy, which was completely irrelevant to Todd’s squad. They were trained to follow orders, not ask questions.

  Each of Todd’s pilots had been assigned to monitor very specific areas and activities. Brown and Farley’s sensors kept their eyes on the prize, never venturing beyond the confines of the compound. Once a visitor was buzzed through the electronic gate, they were added to a CIA list of suspected terrorists. Franklin and Kucher were responsible for surveilling their movements once they left the premises. Counter-terrorism agents, preferably turncoat Pakistanis, were recruited to follow them into places drone sensors couldn’t penetrate without recourse to X-ray technology, which was still in early stages of development. Double agents were particularly valuable, one of whom managed to land a job as the receptionist for the couple’s internist, whose frequent house calls corroborated the theory that the wife was, in fact, an invalid. A nurse practitioner by trade, the hope was that this agent would eventually be promoted, thereby gaining access to the compound in the event that the wife suffered a medical crisis requiring overnight surveillance. In the meantime, the doctor himself had dropped hints that he might be willing to leak information, provided the price was right. The noose was tightening around the compound.

  The Roto-Rooter Men were like chess masters mapping out moves. Every possible scenario was followed to its logical conclusion, generating thousands of contingency plans. The level of detail was staggering. The danger of such close scrutiny was not seeing the forest for the trees. To offset this threat, Poindexter’s drone hovered over the entire region, monitoring the activities of the town in general. An awful lot of traffic came in and out of Abbottabad. Every single license plate was plugged into a central intelligence database, a clearinghouse for all manner of suspicious vehicles. Compared to other cities with the same population profile, far fewer questionable cars and trucks showed up on the registry. This fact tended to raise rather than lower the odds that Abbottabad was harboring al Qaeda operatives. Assuming their transportation networks were capable of such high levels of organization, care was being taken to deflect attention away from the area. The plot thickened.

  One particular aspect of the BM blew Todd’s mind, and it wasn’t even classified information. Tucked in the Orash Valley in the Himalayan foothills, Abbottabad’s natural beauty made it a favorite home for retired military personnel. Never mind the fact that the Pakistan Military Academy was four miles away in Kakul. He couldn’t decide whether these factors made it more or less likely that al Qaeda muckety-mucks would choose this precise location to hole up, rather than some cozy little cave in the Karakoram Mountains. If the surveillance target was a
real target, he was getting cocky, either out of complacency or the conviction that retired army officers provided a safer haven than tribal hideouts, no matter how remote. Assuming the Pakistan military was complicit, the politics surrounding this particular targeted assassination were even more fraught than usual. Todd tried not to think about it. Washington was responsible for determining whether drone strikes were counterproductive, inciting the very resistance they were meant to quell. He was just in charge of pulling the trigger, not calling the shots.

  Todd spent most of his time floating from one virtual cockpit to another, trying to take in the big picture while simultaneously keeping track of relevant details. He had to force himself to check in on Franklin, Kucher, and Poindexter. Even though these three covered far more ground, providing wide-ranging points of interest, Todd gravitated to Brown and Farley’s monitors, which never strayed from the target. Something about the compound mesmerized him. It certainly wasn’t the architecture. The main building in particular was almost ugly, a white cube in need of a paint job, with nothing to recommend it but wraparound balconies. Privacy walls all but obscured the view, making it impossible to look out without standing up. The husband never appeared without a drink in his hand, usually scotch on the rocks. His wife almost never appeared at all. When she did, usually early in the morning, her hijab concealed her even more completely than the walls. If they knew they were being watched, they betrayed no signs of it. They never touched one another, at least not outside, but neither did their neighbors. Nothing whatever in their behavior set them apart, yet Todd was riveted.

  He had a feeling about the compound, just as he had formerly had a feeling about the old couple’s hotel. He couldn’t put his finger on it. There had been no real way to confirm that the hotel was just a hotel. Yet he had known it all along. This compound was like a seething volcano in comparison, biding its time until the next 9/11. Its inevitability was the true source of terror, much more so than the actual eruption, which would be over long before fallout finished spreading paranoia from sea to shining sea. This foreboding made it difficult for Todd to file prudent reports. The challenge was to avoid equally disastrous extremes in judgment, crying wolf on the one hand and underestimating the importance of suspicious anomalies on the other. Unusual amounts of garbage. Lights left on well after the couple went to bed. It didn’t help that Colonel Trumble was uncharacteristically trigger-happy. The pressure to provide incriminating evidence was relentless.

  “It’s time to shit or get off the pot,” Colonel Trumble said.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “The longer we fart around, the more likely the target will relocate.”

  “No chance of that, Sir. Not unless he can fit into a cake box.”

  Most of the intelligence gathered by Todd’s squad came from Brown. Nothing escaped his notice. Handwritten letters smoldering in the incinerator. A pair of shutters that never opened, even during family visits. He obviously understood that this wasn’t just another routine surveillance mission. The more the colonel pressured Todd, the more he relied on Brown’s infallible eye. They never talked about it, of course, not even when they went rock climbing. But they finally felt like they were really contributing, not sitting on the sidelines. At the same time, Todd wondered if he wasn’t kidding himself, hyping the importance of the BM in case he wound up staying in Nevada instead of deploying to Afghanistan. Given the timing of this top secret assignment, he was pretty sure the powers that be had already decided his fate. Even so, he was almost afraid to click on the e-mail when it finally showed up in his inbox.

  Per your request, your petition for deployment has been withdrawn. You are hereby authorized to maintain your current assignment at Creech AFB until further notice.

  He thought he was mentally prepared for any eventuality. In the event that he wasn’t, he could rely on his training to maintain his equilibrium, at least until his shift was over. The effort was exhausting.

  He wanted to call Rose with the news, but the colonel kept badgering him on the hotline. Even the heightened drama of the BM couldn’t eclipse a barrage of emotions ranging from relief to a nagging sense of guilt. He felt good about choosing his family over the thrill of another deployment. But doing the right thing at home seemed to preclude doing the right thing abroad. For all its alleged surgical precision, drone warfare posed ethical questions Todd still couldn’t answer. Putting your life on the line in combat seemed like the only surefire way to justify taking the lives of others, something soldiers understood as well as civilians back in the day when there was a clear distinction between the two. But now that the option of redeploying was no longer on the table, he needed to silence his qualms. A consummate professional, he compartmentalized reservations that jeopardized the success of the mission, trusting the mission itself wouldn’t spawn more terrorists than it killed.

  * * *

  Todd pulled into the driveway and started closing the windows. Then he opened them back up again. Something smelled way too good to be true. He assumed his neighbor Fred was barbecuing steaks. When Rose wasn’t around, Todd stationed himself next to the fence, breathing in the delicious smoke from Fred’s grill. It was a kind of olfactory voyeurism, innocent enough as long as nobody knew about it. He ran around back, half expecting to see Rose wielding a fire extinguisher, beating back the offending flames. Wonders will never cease. Sure enough, there was Rose. But she had tongs in her hand and she was barbecuing ribs and corn on the cob.

  “Hi Todd,” she said. “Hungry?”

  He was speechless. Someone must have abducted his wife, the New Age macrobiotic health nut. The alien chef masquerading as Rose was obviously amused by his reaction.

  “Could you take over here?” she asked. “I’ve got stuff on the stove.”

  Rose handed him the tongs and went inside, as though they were just another family barbecuing ribs and corn. Good thing grilling was like riding a bike. It had been awhile. Twenty-three and a half months to be exact, but who’s counting? Todd particularly enjoyed the symmetrical challenge of barbecuing ribs. You couldn’t just fire up the briquettes, line them up, and call it a day. The secret to savory, mouth-watering ribs was in the grid. Todd had developed a complex, kinetic configuration to guarantee that the outside rib joints cooked as much as the inside ones, just enough to make them fall off the bone. This required rotating each rib row, first clockwise then counterclockwise, keeping meticulous track of their relative proximity to the vortex of heat. The center of the grill was the sweet spot. In keeping with the gastronomical, if not existential, golden rule, too much of a good thing spoiled even the most perfectly marinated meats.

  Todd was almost embarrassed to admit how unspeakably happy he was at that moment. He felt like a king, a suburban monarch wielding his diadem tongs. To say that Rose’s vegan regime had emasculated him was ridiculous. Surely they had evolved beyond the Neanderthal habit of equating meat with masculinity. It was more about pleasure than gender. Pure pleasure. Rose had been punishing herself for something. For the past two years, all roads seemed to lead to the same something: Max’s diagnosis. Tofu was a form of penance, kombu a kind of flagellation of the gustatory senses. The long exculpatory fast was over. Max could be autistic without the entire family having to suffer for it.

  Maureen came tripping out the back door, laden with napkins and paper plates.

  “Hi Dad.”

  “Pretty exciting, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Dinner.”

  “We’re having chocolate cupcakes for dessert.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “With ice cream.”

  “When was the last time we had ice cream?”

  “I have it all the time. Over at Leslie’s.”

  Maureen sprawled across the picnic table, setting places from a prone position to avoid having to walk around its perimeter. The results were haphazard, at best. Todd never ceased to marvel at the profound difference between their two children, at polar opposite ends of
the spectrum spanning the meticulous to the messy. The fact that only one extreme was considered pathological seemed unfair. Half the time, Maureen’s chaotic habits drove him crazier than Max’s devotion to order.

  He rotated the ribs 120 degrees counterclockwise. The corn was cooked, so he shunted it off to the side to keep warm.

  “Tell your mother we’re almost finished out here,” Todd said.

  “We’re almost finished out here,” Maureen yelled. She trundled over to the hammock and climbed in.

  The screen door slammed and there was Rose, carrying a big bowl of macaroni salad. Todd was practically dizzy with anticipation. Rose continued to act like they were just like everyone else, a happy family enjoying a midweek barbecue. Then it occurred to Todd that they weren’t just acting anymore.

  “Maureen,” Rose said. “Tell Max dinner is ready.”

  “He won’t listen,” Maureen said from the hammock.

  “Then just bring him outside. The way Sasha taught you.”

  Todd arranged the ribs and corn on a platter. He opted for a kind of checkerboard pattern he thought Max might like. Rose slammed back in and out of the screen door carrying a bowl of potatoes and a pitcher of lemonade. Maureen negotiated the door more carefully, clutching one end of a jump rope with Max tagging along on the other. This way they could hold hands without actually touching, a level of intimacy Max could tolerate. She opened the screen with her foot and then eased it shut so it wouldn’t startle him. Todd had never seen her be so careful with anything, except maybe her toenail polish. They all sat down and started helping themselves, with the notable exception of Max. He stared at the round bowl filled with round, tan potatoes while Rose dished up his plate.

  Todd almost wept when he tasted his first bite of ribs. For real. He felt like he’d gotten his life back, something he realized only then he’d given up for lost. The ribs were slathered with barbecue sauce. The macaroni salad was slathered with mayonnaise. The corn was slathered with butter. Now this was what he called eating.