Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  He’d dreamed of adventure, of living overseas. Of making a difference.

  Graduation day, Kris got his assignment: Alec Station, CIA Headquarters. Counterterrorism Analyst for Afghanistan, attached to the al-Qaeda team.

  No adventure for him.

  For years, Alec Station had long been the dead end for analysts, officers, and operators, especially those who fostered what the CIA’s seventh floor, the executives, thought was an “obsession” with Islamic-based extremist ideology.

  But in 1998, the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were attacked, devastated by twin suicide truck bombings. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. After those bombings, Alec Station became the hottest outfit in the CIA.

  And they needed bodies. Officers fluent in Arabic in particular, with a good grasp of the culture, an eagerness to learn, and the ability to get up to speed with years and years of intelligence in a hurry.

  Kris reported to Alec Station in 1999. He was assigned to Afghanistan, the only analyst in the entire unit.

  In 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Yemen.

  After American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, CIA police herded everyone out of headquarters.

  The parking lots were crammed. Trucks led sedans over grass embankments and fields to side exits, pushing open gates that had long been chained shut. Kris inched forward in his clunker sedan, the best he could afford as a recent college graduate. To his left and right, drivers listened to their radios in horror, jaws slack, eyes vacant.

  He got as far as the George Washington Parkway before traffic ground to a halt and refused to move. Smoke from the Pentagon rose ahead, billowing black rising and rising into the perfect blue sky. His stomach twisted, yanked, knotting until he had to throw open his car door and puke on the highway.

  It’s a crematorium. Just like New York. It’s all a fucking crematorium.

  The first to turn around was a truck, one of the lifted ones all the former Army Special Forces operators seemed to drive. Tires screeching, it bounced over the center embankment and forged a path over the tree-filled median to the highway going back to CIA headquarters. Another truck followed. Then a car.

  Kris pulled his rusted sedan out of traffic and followed them.

  Hundreds of officers poured back into Langley.

  Names of potential suspects from CIA stations around the world flooded in, computers whirring and phones ringing off the hook. Names of people on watch lists, names passed along by foreign intelligence agencies, friendly and not-so-friendly alike. Names from each of the four flights, passengers and crew. Somewhere in those names were the hijackers, the murderers. They searched, poring through the lists.

  Every cell in Kris’s body fissured, fracturing and dissolving into a billion tiny pieces as he read the names off the flight manifests. The universe came to screeching halt as he came to two distinct names, halfway down the list:

  Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

  He felt like a marionette, a puppet with loose strings being manipulated by someone else. Someone else made him stand. Had him grab the printed pages with shaking hands. Something else made his feet move, carrying him to his boss’s office.

  His section chief sat at his desk with his head in his hands. The handset of his phone lay on the desktop. A circle of wetness smudged the desk beneath where he hung his head.

  “Sir?” Kris barely breathed. “The hijackers… We know who they are.”

  His boss looked up.

  Devastation poured off him, waves of anguish. Tears ran like rivers down his splotchy face, falling from red-rimmed eyes. “Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.”

  Kris nodded, as if his head wasn’t attached to his body. “Probably others with them,” he whispered. “Sir, we have files on these guys. We were watching them. The FBI, they asked—”

  His boss held up his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn’t stop the sob rising through him from breaking, cresting against the cold hard facts. His shoulders trembled, teeth clenched so hard Kris heard them squeak and grind. A cry broke out of him, the sound of a soul shattering.

  Grief wrenched into shame inside Kris. The weight of thousands of dead Americans pressed down on him, every one of their lives ended too soon. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. “Sir—”

  “Get out, Caldera. Just get out.”

  Kris worked until he fell asleep in the middle of a name trace, trying to follow the rabbit back to its hole. Once every plane in the skies over the US was grounded, they were able to connect the dots that had been blazing constellations, if only they could have seen them from just a different angle. The monitors were fixed on the news, endless shots of the empty New York skyline, the burning Pentagon, the smoking crater in Pennsylvania.

  Dan Wright, an analyst who worked a few desks down from him on Pakistani terrorism, woke him up with a cup of coffee. “You okay?”

  “How can any of us be okay?” Kris scrubbed his hands over his face, pressed his fingers into his eyelids.

  Dan sighed. He was a few years older than Kris and had entered the CIA in the mid-1990s. Ever since Kris had joined Alec Station, Dan had been his informal mentor. He’d just shown up one day, looking out for Kris. He’d never made a snide comment, or made fun of his paisley ascots. He’d been one of Kris’s few friends, a constant at his side. Someone he could go to for a smile.

  “People are saying we knew some of the hijackers?”

  “I saw the reports myself.” Vomit rose in Kris’s throat. He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe.

  Dan rested his hand on Kris’s back. “I’m sorry.”

  Kris shook his head. His vision was blurring, tears he’d held back for over twenty-four hours building within him like his body was a dam. At some point, he’d burst. “We should have—”

  Doors banging open cut off his words. Clint Williams, his boss’s boss, stormed in, followed by a dozen officers and deputy directors. He scanned the room, scowling.

  “Caldera?” he bellowed. “Kris Caldera?”

  He was led to the basement, through twisting, winding corridors he’d never seen before. One-ton blast-proof doors slammed shut behind him and the dozen officers escorting him.

  Williams brought him to a cavernous bunker that had been converted into a haphazard office. Long folding tables had been set up, lined with laptops, desktops, and printers. Cables fanned out in every direction, a spiderweb of internet and power cords. Fluorescent lights droned twenty feet overhead. Whiteboards had been wheeled in, scrawled with names and countries. Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen. Mohammed Atef. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Someone was trying to get a projector working. In the corners, men hunched over secured satellite phones, trying to hear through scratchy connections from across the planet.

  Williams went from officer to officer, checking in, trading a few words here and there, passing papers back and forth. He was a storm, a whirlwind of action, somehow keeping everything straight. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Listen up!” The bunker quieted instantly. “This is Kris Caldera. He’s the CTC analyst for Afghanistan. He knows the information you need!”

  A hundred pairs of eyeballs rolled toward him.

  “Use him! I want to know double what we know now by the end of the day, and double that by the next twelve hours, and double that by the next! Let’s get to work!”

  Seven people headed for him as soon as Williams left. “Caldera. What are the ramifications for the Northern Alliance following Massoud’s assassination?”

  “What are the Taliban’s defense armaments? What is their status of forces?”

  “How allied are the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Can the Taliban be persuaded to give up Bin Laden?”

  “General Khan of the Northern Alliance has taken command following Massoud’s assassination. What is your assessment of Khan?”

  He couldn’t breathe. No one had cared about Afghanistan before the attacks. He’d dived into Afghanistan intelligence, relishing the opportuni
ty to examine a culture that had been isolated from the world, try to understand a people who had resisted being conquered for ages. Afghanistan was smaller than Texas. Twenty million Afghans spoke over thirty languages, were made up of dozens of tribal groups. The British, the Soviets, and even Alexander the Great had been humiliated in the Afghan highlands. Even the Taliban didn’t control the entire country. The Northern Alliance, a festering association of fractious, infighting warlords, drug smugglers, and bitter rivals, fought the Taliban and each other for control of the country. The Afghan people were the ones who paid the price. They lived on less than a dollar a day and had the highest infant mortality rate in the world.

  He'd been the Afghanistan nerd, teaching himself Dari, the Afghan form of Farsi, in order to read month-old newspapers flown in from Islamabad station and watch grainy videotapes the Taliban put out, preaching their firebrand fundamentalism and their blend of tribalism mixed with the most repressive interpretation of seventh-century Sharia law. He’d watched stonings in soccer stadiums, men and women get their hands and feet severed. Had seen pictures of ribbons ripped from cassette tapes, flying in the wind. Music was banned in Afghanistan, and all tapes had been stripped, their long black lengths fluttering at the borders, a signal to all who crossed into Afghanistan. Here ye enter the seventh century. Here there be dragons. Except they weren’t dragons, they were men, and men were always far worse than any mythical monster.

  The Taliban weren’t religious scholars, and they weren’t scions of Islamic learning and philosophy. They were men who had grown weary of the banditry and the robbery and the rape, the wild savagery and butchery that had seized Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal and the civil war. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had rallied a group of villagers to enact revenge against a local warlord who had raped one of their village women. They’d hung him from the barrel of a tank. Their movement started as a means to bring order to the violent chaos of the country, and within two years, they controlled everything from Kabul to Kandahar, vigilante justice-seekers mixing Islam and tribalism that billowed into political control, control that was as repressive and violent as that which they sought to overthrow—just more organized.

  Everyone ignored Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sent their radicals there, offloading them from their own countries. The CIA and the State Department seemed happy to forget about Afghanistan as long as it was stable and the Russians were gone. Who cared about the world’s backwater, anyway?

  Sometimes, late at night, he thought the Afghanistan desk was a subtle snub. He still wasn’t allowed in the big leagues, apparently. Was it because he was gay? Because he wore tighter pants and spiked his hair instead of buzzing it like the other guys? Because he didn’t fit in with their fleece pullovers and their cargo pants and their ball caps?

  But now, everyone wanted him, was trying to pull him in every different direction. If only he could cut himself into parts and pieces. Everything he knew, everything he’d ever learned, was rising inside him. He’d gladly saw open his brain, let everyone flick through his memories like files, parse information out of the nooks and crannies of his gray matter.

  “Caldera, we don’t have current functional maps of Afghanistan. What we do have is stolen from the Soviets back in the Cold War, or from Pakistan and their ISI. Everything is incomplete. Can you fill in the gaps for us?”

  He squared his shoulders. “What day is it? What day is today?”

  Someone blinked at him. “September thirteenth.”

  He hadn’t been home in two days. He’d been sleeping under his desk, drinking coffee and eating whatever Dan brought him. “Okay.” He breathed out slowly. “Okay.”

  He started talking, running through the recent history of the Northern Alliance, the loose, nefarious conglomeration of fighters arrayed against the Taliban. The CIA had given the Northern Alliance inconsistent support, helping them one week and pulling back the next. The Northern Alliance forces were arrayed across northern Afghanistan. The south was Taliban-controlled and heavily infiltrated by al-Qaeda.

  He spoke for hours, until his voice was hoarse, moving from group to group, laptop to laptop. He translated Farsi, Arabic, and Dari documents, secured satellite calls between officers and Northern Alliance commanders, and processed incoming cables from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Williams appeared and disappeared, working the room, talking to the men in charge of the hive of activity.

  Eventually, an officer in the operations side of the CIA led him to the far side of the bunker, to a darkened area where cots were set up with sleeping bags. People were hot racking, rolling in and out of shared cots as they needed. “Sleep,” he was told. “Get some rest and refresh yourself. We all need you.”

  He was asleep before his head hit the cot. Nightmares plagued him: fireballs erupting in front of him, burning people alive, but he was trapped and he couldn’t save them. Buildings collapsing, people leaping from the tops of skyscrapers that touched the stars, falling forever as he screamed and screamed.

  Williams shook him awake. “Get up. We’re going to see the president.”

  He stumbled out of the cot, almost falling on his face. Someone loaned him a fleece pullover with the CIA crest. He ditched his button-down and slid into it. The arms were too long, but it covered his unwashed stench, mostly. He shaved quickly and splashed water on his face, gargled some mouthwash, and met Williams at the east entrance.

  A full motorcade waited for them.

  “We’re going to the White House with the director. He’s in the next SUV.”

  “Geoff Thatcher? CIA Director?”

  “Yes. The president wants to know everything about Afghanistan. Thatcher said to bring the experts. That’s you.” Williams shifted, the dark leather seat creaking as the motorcade pulled away from Langley. “Kris, the president is getting ready to make a decision. We’re going to respond to these attacks, and we’re going to respond quickly. The CIA is going to do something we haven’t done since we were OSS, back in World War II. We’re going to go to war, and we’re going to lead this war. This is the last briefing before the president decides exactly what our response is going to be.”

  Kris sat, speechless. He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t a presidential briefer. He was just an analyst. A junior CIA officer.

  But who was ever ready for their world to be upended, for planes to fall out of the sky, for buildings to tumble like blocks, and for the weight of thousands of lives to hang around their neck? Failure tasted like ash, like flame, like dust that filled his teeth and gathered at the junctures of his bones. Shame was his shadow.

  He took a breath. “What do you need me to do, sir?”

  “The president is a talker. He thinks with his words. Goes with his gut. Thatcher is good at talking him through things, thinking out loud. With this president, the last in-person briefing will usually be the deciding factor. He’s going to be listening to what you say, to any answers you give, very, very closely.”

  “Who else will be there?”

  “The vice president and the national security advisor.”

  Kris nodded. His mind whirled. It didn’t get any higher than that.

  “Listen, the national security advisor and Thatcher don’t get along. She’s a tough nut to crack. She and Thatcher are like oil and vinegar. The VP thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He’ll go behind all our backs and double-check, triple-check everything we say. Don’t worry about talking to any of them. Speak directly to the president.”

  He could smell himself as they clambered out of the SUV at the secured entrance to the West Wing of the White House. Secret Service agents hustled them inside quickly, past a massive show of defensive force. Agents with snarling dogs, rifles, and heavy weaponry were on full display, ready to destroy any intruder who dared bend a blade of grass on the White House lawns.

  Kris tried to keep his arms down to hide his unwashed stench. He couldn’t do anything about the bags under his eyes, but hopefully the president wouldn’t remem
ber him as ‘the smelly one’. He hadn’t been home in three days.

  In the Oval Office, the president and vice president sat side by side in the spindly armchairs before the fireplace, with the national security advisor on the sofa next to the president. They stood, shook hands tersely, and beckoned Thatcher, Williams, and Kris to sit on the other sofa.

  “Break it down for us,” the president said, lacing his fingers together. His Texan drawl was deep, a sign of his stress. “What do we have today?”

  Director Thatcher spoke urgently, summarizing everything the CIA had learned in the last twelve hours. He’d been briefing the president three times a day or more since the attacks. Everything he shared, Kris had been a part of, working with the response team in the basement.

  While Thatcher spoke, the vice president stared at Kris, watching him closely. Kris stared back.

  The president pursed his lips as he frowned. “Musharraf in Pakistan has come around. He’s decided the Taliban aren’t worth committing political suicide over.”

  “Good. We’ll need their full cooperation. Border posts and frontier bases along the border with Afghanistan opened up to American forces, a rescinding of all ‘no-go’ areas in Pakistan, unrestricted access to Pakistani airspace and full, unimpeded landing rights at all air bases and airports.” Thatcher scrawled notes as he spoke.

  “State is working on it.” The national security advisor’s voice was clipped, perfunctory.