by Tal Bauer
“First, we will eat.” Khan spread his hands to the feast Ghasi had laid out on the sheet in the yard. Boiled meat, dates, almonds, fresh yogurt, sliced tomatoes, fresh-baked flatbread, and watermelon. “Come. We will eat together.”
Kris heard George’s teeth grind, but they followed Khan to the blanket and crouched down, sitting on the faded, lumpy cushions. Khan invited his men to join them. He was relaxed, jovial on the surface, but Kris watched him watching George and Ryan with an intensity that rivaled a hawk’s.
No one accidentally became a general in the Shura Nazar. Khan was not a young man. He’d been a warrior his whole life. Out of the mix and pull of rival generals in the fractious and bitter conglomeration that was the Shura Nazar, how had Khan become the heir apparent to Massoud?
Kris leaned into Khan’s shoulder and asked.
Khan leaned back into Kris, smiling as he answered. He gestured wildly, great sweeps of his arms that matched how loudly and vibrantly he spoke. “After the assassination by those Bin Laden dogs, there was anarchy. Fazl was there.” He gestured to Fazl, sitting opposite George. “He was injured in the bomb blast.” Khan pointed to Fazl’s head, to the scabs and burns healing down his face and neck. “No one knew what to do. Everyone was frozen. Massoud had been their general for their entire lives. Almost like a father.” Khan’s expression pinched. “They needed leadership. Strength, like Massoud. I provided it.”
“General Khan arranged for the helicopter that evacuated General Massoud. We thought he might survive if he got to Dushanbe, but…” Fazl said in English, until his voice faltered. He looked down. One of the Shura Nazar soldiers wrapped an arm around him, squeezed his shoulders.
“I told them to say nothing. Not a word. We kept his death secret until I could radio all the commanders in the Shura Nazar. I told the other generals personally what had happened, and then asked for their pledge. I said we would avenge Massoud together. They wanted to be a part of that.”
Stunned, Kris turned to George, translating quickly. George stared back at him, silent. Without Khan, the entire Shura Nazar could have fallen into fractious infighting, blood feuds and rivalries that could have allowed the Taliban to seize the entirety of Afghanistan in a matter of days. If the Shura Nazar had turned inward, fighting each other, there would have been nothing to stand against the Taliban, or against Bin Laden.
“And, after what happened. The attacks in America.” Khan shrugged, switching to stilted English. “We knew the Americans would be coming.”
“We are glad for your assistance.” George smiled, full of teeth.
Khan’s gaze turned sharp. He set down his cup of tea. “So. Tell me. What is it the Americans want in Afghanistan?”
Fazl struggled to keep up with the translation as George launched into his pitch, eagerly pushing the CIA’s mission. They were there to establish a base of operations in the Panjshir, setting the stage for the US military’s invasion force. They were also there to beef up the Shura Nazar, so they and the US military could work together to topple and crush the Taliban—and Bin Laden.
“So when will you leave?” Khan interrupted George’s flood of words, his promises of support and cash, in his clipped, heavily accented English
“We’re staying until the job is complete and the Taliban are gone. Until Afghanistan is safe again, and no longer a haven for terrorism.”
Khan’s glare seemed etched in stone as Fazl finished his translation.
“We have a gift for you, in fact. A show of good faith.” George reached behind him. The double-wrapped plastic bag of $1 million rested in the dirt behind his back. He held it out to Khan. “One million dollars, General. To outfit your men. To buy weapons, ammunition, and clothing. Think of this as a down payment.”
Fazl spoke softly as he translated. He stared down at the blanket. Khan gazed right past the cash, past George’s outstretched hands. He acted as if it wasn’t even there, like George hadn’t even spoken.
The cash, and George, hung in the silence, waiting. And waiting.
Kris plucked the cash from George’s hands and set it down, off to his side. He ignored it, and George’s glare. “We plan on airlifting humanitarian aid to the valley as well, General,” he said smoothly in Dari.
Khan finally smiled. He reached for Kris’s hand. “Our people suffer. This feast is the nicest I have eaten in a year.” The soldiers next to him looked scrawny in their Russian camouflage, and they’d picked clean the meal Ghasi had prepared. Every dish was empty. “The people need help. Food, clothing, water.”
“We will provide that, and more.” George spoke as soon as Kris translated. “General, we also want to set up a joint intelligence cell. Share intelligence between the Shura Nazar and the CIA.”
“This intelligence will go both ways? You will share what you discover? Or will this just be my men giving you what you do not know?”
George faltered, hesitating after Kris relayed Khan’s words.
Kris jumped back in, before Ryan could blunder the conversation. He’d been blessedly silent thus far. “We will share our intelligence with you, General Khan. There is much we don’t know about Afghanistan, and we need your expertise to understand.”
“Gul Bahar, you seem to understand a great deal.” Khan’s hand landed on Kris’s knee, squeezing.
George stared at Khan’s hand. Kris could feel the weight of his gaze, the heavy judgment.
“Our first mission, General, is to create a clear and precise map of the battlefield.” Ryan leaned forward, around George. Kris sighed. Ryan just couldn’t stay silent. “We need to understand precisely where the front lines are. Yours, and the Taliban’s.”
Kris translated before Ryan could make any more demands.
“We have maps.” Khan motioned to his jeeps. Two young soldiers scurried away and jogged back with a stack of antique maps from the Soviet Union. Pencil marks had been drawn and erased and redrawn for years, the fluctuating lines of the front changing with each passing winter.
Like ghosts, Ghasi’s boys cleared the dishes from the sheet, and Khan spread his map over the ground. Ryan and George pulled out their own maps, printed by the CIA before they left Langley, and laid them alongside Khan’s. Khan’s was far more detailed.
Kris translated, reading off positions of Khan’s forces and the Taliban on the map and tracing the front lines that made the shape of a giant L across the northwest corner of Afghanistan, into Badakhshan Province and the Panjshir Valley. From east to west, crossing north of Kabul and bisecting Bagram Airfield to Jalalabad, and then shooting straight north to the Tajikistan border and into the mountains.
“Where are the Taliban?” Kris translated for Ryan.
“They are entrenched all along their front lines. Massive artillery formations. Antiaircraft battalions. And thousands of foreign fighters have been joining them since the strikes in New York.”
The words stuck in Kris’s throat as he translated. Strikes in New York. The American homeland, attacked. Americans dying inside their borders. Never before had that happened. Never, ever before. And he’d let it happen.
He forced himself back to the conversation, back to the Dari and English flying around him.
“What are your plans here, in our country? What is your timetable for destroying the Taliban? When will you bring in your bombs? How will you help the people here, who suffer the most under the Taliban? When will things get done? And when will you leave?”
Kris translated Khan’s questions carefully, holding George’s steady gaze.
George wasn’t pleased. “We have an immense amount to do, and only twenty-four hours each day to work with. Before anything happens, we need to scope out the lay of the land. Send out a team to recon Taliban positions. Identify exactly where the Shura Nazar forces are. Create a map of the battlefield. We can only do one thing at a time. We have to do this right.”
General Khan was scowling before Kris finished translating. “Right now, the Taliban and the Shura Nazar are at an impasse. N
either side is strong enough to break the other, agha George. But every day, thousands of fighters come to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda and to kill Americans, and anyone who helps the Americans. My people.” Khan thumped his chest. “My people are the ones who have been fighting the Taliban for years. You say you need our help, but you refuse to help my people in return?”
Kris spoke in English to Ryan and George. “He’s pissed. We need to give him and his people something, and soon.”
“We just gave him a million bucks!” George frowned as Ryan scowled.
Kris smiled at Khan and bowed his head as he spoke in Dari. “We need to scout the terrain. Prepare for our forces, before they can arrive. To do that, we need vehicles.” He nodded to the rusted hulks of scrap that had brought them up the mountain. “We won’t take your trucks. You and your men need them. We will need to buy trucks. Will you find four trucks for us? We will purchase them at fair prices. And...” Kris grasped Khan’s hand as Khan’s frown darkened. “We will use these trucks to not only scout the lines, but deliver aid to your people. And as soon as we can, we will arrange for more food to be sent.”
Khan stroked his dark beard. He squeezed Kris’s hand, holding it on Kris’s knee. “This will help my people, yes. Four trucks will be expensive, though. They will cost fifteen thousand each.”
Fifteen thousand dollars for heaps of scrap. Kris smiled. “Alhamdulillah.”
“I will return tomorrow with your trucks, Gul Bahar.” Khan held Kris’s hand in the air, celebrating, and then released his grasp.
Ryan and George stared at him, their gazes hard enough to chisel stone.
Kris answered their unasked questions. “I bought us trucks. We need to get around. I also said we would deliver aid as we scouted the front lines.”
George kept his face neutral, a practiced skill. “What aid?” he asked carefully.
“We’re being fed by Ghasi every day. We can spare the MREs we brought until we schedule a humanitarian aid drop.”
Ryan leaned across George, eyes wide as he seemed ready to tear Kris a new asshole.
George held him back. “We’ll discuss this later.” He took a deep breath and smiled at Khan. He spoke to Kris. “See who speaks Russian. I want this joint intel cell set up ASAP. I need the people in it to speak Russian so I can communicate with them.”
Kris translated, turning away from George. The back of his neck burned. Why did George need to speak directly to the intel cell? He was the translator on the mission, wasn’t he?
“Several of my officers speak Russian,” Khan replied. “They were educated in Tashkent and Dushanbe and in Yekaterinburg. I will send them to you tomorrow.”
Kris relayed Khan’s words, then frowned at George. “George, we’re going to be limited to the top range of the weakest Russian speaker.” He left out his concerns that the weakest individual could be George himself. “I can translate Dari for the intel cell.”
“No, you can’t, Kris.” George gave him a thin, strained smile. “Because you’re going to scout the front lines.”
David watched the meeting from the compound’s entrance, manning the point position on the team. Palmer had spread out everyone, encircling Khan’s party and the CIA team, creating a security bubble for their people. Everyone on David’s team had their weapons in hand, fingers curled around the triggers. One wrong move, one hint of subterfuge, or an attack—
His gaze kept dragging to Kris, no matter how he tried to look away. Kris, speaking fluent Dari and connecting with Khan in all the right ways, as courteous and respectful as the suavest socialite in Benghazi or Beirut or Cairo. He knew the rhythms of the people, that was obvious. He knew how to move and breathe with Islam, how to live in the religion in a way that David only barely remembered. Kris had spoken Arabic to David like it sounded in David’s dreams, his earliest memories. David had thought he’d covered his accent, had made it purposefully bland, purposefully Gulf with faint hints of Egyptian. He'd thought wrong, if Kris could uncover him so completely from their first hello.
But that was just one more thing to bury.
Sixteen hours, they’d been in Afghanistan. He’d kept his mind occupied from the moment they’d entered Afghan airspace. Running through the mission, over and over. What would happen when they landed, who would take the lead. Palmer’s orders, his mission plan. Their contingencies. Their contingencies’ contingencies.
Kris.
Palmer had told them all, before the CIA showed up, that they would have to take the lead in securing the CIA officers with whom they were partnering. They had to make sure none of them got shot, kidnapped, or executed. Who knew what the circumstances were on the ground? It was up to them to keep everyone alive, keep the mission going. So far, the situation seemed far better than their most dire predictions, back in Tashkent, had imagined.
But still, he’d kept close to Kris. Shielded him in the helo. Watched over him on the journey to the compound. Delayed and delayed, until there was only one choice left for a roommate and a sleeping room.
Kris was both the mission and a distraction, a man David was obligated to protect, to defend, and a man who called to him. He could feel his blood stirring, his body turning, waking in ways he’d forbidden, other than the briefest, most fleeting encounter.
That, and Kris, were distractions. But not just from their mission.
Afghanistan, as a land, as a people, had been mythic, larger than life. During the run-up to the mission, Palmer and the rest of the operations staff had spoken in cold, clinical terms, briefing the team on the landscape, the environment, expected hostilities. He’d been awash in preparations, reeling, like everyone had been, and consumed with a sense of purpose.
Go. Do. Act. Revenge.
Purpose had drowned the hidden shadows that lingered in his soul, slid between his bones, caressed the spaces between his ribs. Twenty-one years ago, he’d fled Libya hand in hand with his mother. Fled the sand and the sun and the Arabic, the daily rhythms of Islam. The calls to prayer, and the way the sun slanted through the morning windows, bursting the prayer rugs he and his father kept side by side to vibrant, vivacious life. There were worn spots on their prayer rugs at the knees and where their foreheads hit the rug together. His father’s prayer rug, older, more used, had a bald spot where his forehead rested, five times every day, for the length of David’s memories.
Twenty-one years and twelve days. That was how long it had been since he’d thought of Islam, thought of his father. Thought of the words of the Quran, the prayers that used to slip over his lips in time with his father’s voice.
Memories lived in shadow, buried in his bones, pushed down so deep he was a smuggler of his own existence, his own past.
Until twelve days ago.
September 11.
To be Arab, to be Muslim, after September 11, especially in America, was to be full of questions. Confusion. Horror. Rage.
To have the words of the Quran inside of him, the rhythms of Islam in his soul, so long dead and buried he’d thought they’d atrophied and atomized into a billion pieces of sand and had blown away, was a slowly opening abyss.
“We’re going to go over there, and we’re going to kill all those towel-headed motherfuckers that think they can get away with this. We are going to avenge the deaths of our countrymen. Hoorah!”
Palmer’s commander, their unit colonel, had led them all in a raging speech shortly before they’d taken off for Tashkent. “We’re going to kill every one of them. Every single one.”
Twenty-one years ago, David had left it all behind. He wasn’t a Muslim. He wasn’t an Arab. Not anymore.
The muezzin’s call to isha prayer, the nightly prayer, after the sun had set and the stars unfurled above, their first night in Afghanistan, had struck his soul like lightning. His memories were a weathervane, a lightning rod. Images flickered in the dark as he lay in their new compound, surrounded by his team and with Kris sleeping two feet away.
Images of his father, praying, the night be
fore it happened. Their bodies moving as one, folding, bending, kneeling. In his mind, he wasn’t thirty-one, he was ten, suddenly, from the first note of the muezzin’s wail until sometime late in the night, when his soul was released and he floated back through space and time, back to the man he’d become.
Kris, with his fiery eyes, his flashing smile, sharp enough to cut, to hurt, was like an oasis in the Sahara. Take me from these memories, he thought in a small voice, his ten-year-old voice, whispered. I’m not Muslim. I’m not Libyan. I’m American. I’m here to do my job, serve my country. Complete my mission.
His gaze drifted back to Kris.
Twenty-one years ago and twelve days ago—simultaneously—his world had been ripped apart. Certainty became a chasm. Truths he’d stood on for years had vanished, leaving only questions. A boy after his after, and an Arab after September 11. As a child, he’d nurtured a love of silence, especially after. Stillness. The thought that if he didn’t move, didn’t change, nothing would happen. Nothing would move on from that moment. As a man, he charged ahead. The only way through was forward. The way back was lost, gone forever. Answers, if there were any, belonged to someone else.
But now a man had walked into his life, a slender young man, barbed and pointed and fighting tooth and nail. In Kris’s life, there were no questions. How could there be, when he was so vividly alive? A man like Kris, who lived life out loud but who had joined the CIA to work in secrets and silence, and who concealed nothing of himself except everything that mattered. Who was he?
Why did David want to crawl to him? Stay by his side until his heart stopped beating?
Like a wave trying to curl up the sandy shore, beating against the earth ceaselessly, always trying again, parts of David reached for Kris.
Foolish, his mind whispered. So foolish.
But he had questions. So many questions.