by Tal Bauer
They kept the al-Qaeda radio powered on at all times, patched a dedicated line into it so it would transmit down to Kris at base camp. As a giant gunship circled over Tora Bora, plugging the mountain full of thousands of rounds of hot lead, they listened to al-Qaeda fighters scream and run, scramble for hiding spots deep in the caves. They listened to the fighters declare a series of caves lost, trenches abandoned and move on, farther to the west. They heard the fighters call out for more food, send out scavenger parties for roots and twigs, leaves, anything at all that was edible.
And then, they heard his voice.
David recognized it immediately. He’d heard the voice before, in training, in briefings before the mission, in the Panjshir when Kris would play old recordings from the late ’90s, back when he was issuing fatwas and warnings and promises to strike.
Osama Bin Laden.
“My brothers, keep fighting,” Bin Laden said. “We will vanquish the Americans. They are weak, and their bombs cannot destroy us. When they come up these mountains, they will be cold and alone and afraid, and we will beat them. Fight, my brothers. Fight.”
Ryan called in an air strike with a Daisy Cutter, the same superweapon they had dropped on Mazar-e-Sharif, that had decimated the Taliban so completely. They waited, watching the skies, and counted the minutes until the giant bomb was pushed from the giant plane.
When it blew, the mountains themselves seemed to shake, shudder, and nearly collapse, trembling down to the center of the earth. Snow and ice toppled from the peaks and avalanches sloped downhill hundreds of miles away. All the air in the Tora Bora mountains seemed to suck inward, a giant, rushing whoosh, pulling toward the center of the impact zone. Dirt and flame rose, shooting high into the air.
Everything that had been there before was now vaporized.
Frantic screams and shouts blurred over the radio. As the Arabic speaker, David had been charged with listening to every cry, every bitter curse, every desperate plea.
In the aftermath, he heard one voice shout. “The Sheikh’s trench, it was hit! It has been destroyed! The Sheikh, the Sheikh! Is he okay?”
Next to David, Ryan clenched dirt and snow beneath his hands, gloved fingers digging deep into the frozen earth. Palmer gripped his shoulder, not breathing, waiting on the words coming out of the radio like he needed them to breathe.
“Allahu Akbar, the Sheikh is alive!” another voice cried. “He was not in his trench when the bomb hit. He is alive! He is okay.”
As David shook his head, Ryan cursed, collapsing forward. His hands made fists in the ground, squeezing around mud and snow. Palmer turned his face away, glaring into the darkness of the mountain.
“We wish to negotiate a cease-fire, to prepare to surrender.”
Majid’s man held out his radio, identical to the al-Qaeda model David kept on him at all times, but tuned to a different frequency. Why Majid’s man had it, how long he’d had it, who he was communicating with, those were questions without answers.
“That’s al-Qaeda?”
“Nam,” Majid’s fighter answered. He’d spent time with the Arabs, with al-Qaeda, long enough to learn Arabic.
David’s teeth scraped, molars grinding. “I’ll relay the message.”
In Kabul, George blew his lid. David and Ryan almost heard his bellows in Tora Bora.
“No fucking cease-fire!” he hollered. “Fucking murderers don’t get cease-fires! DC and CENTCOM agree! Keep up the pressure! Keep fucking attacking!”
Kris, as always, was the voice of reason. “They might be using a cease-fire as a pretext for slipping away. Bin Laden would never surrender, especially not now. Not after his victory on nine-eleven. This is the beginning of the end times for them. This is their Armageddon. He won’t give that up.”
“No cease-fire,” George seethed. “I want you to keep killing those bastards.”
The tentative cease-fire lasted five hours, from the time Majid’s fighter relayed the message to the time George put his foot down. CENTCOM sent their fighters back into theater, dropping thousands of pounds of bombs onto al-Qaeda’s location.
When the fighters appeared overhead, their silhouettes perfectly outlined against the sky, Bin Laden’s voice boomed from the handheld radio. “The time is now!” he cried. “Arm yourselves! We destroy the infidels now!”
As the sun dipped beyond the western peaks, flames rose from the mountains, bomb after bomb after bomb exploding in the caves of Tora Bora.
Late at night, David heard Bin Laden’s voice again. Bin Laden sounded tired, worn down. Weak.
He radioed Kris at base. “Are you hearing this?”
“I am.”
Bin Laden, his voice weary, spoke slowly. “My brothers, our prayers were not answered. The takfiri apostates did not come to our aid, and instead sided with the infidels. They will pay for their crimes against the faith, my brothers. We will rise again, after this battle.” Bin Laden broke off, and static squealed, wailed. “My brothers, I am sorry for leading you into the mountains.”
They kept bombing all night long, and all the next day.
The day after, the radio sounded again with Bin Laden’s voice, but this time, it was a prerecorded sermon, extolling the wickedness of America and proclaiming a fatwa against the Great Satan. It was the sermon he’d used when he had first declared war on the United States, on Friday, August 23, 1996, and when the collision course between Osama Bin Laden, David Haddad, and Kris Caldera had begun.
In the following days, disheartened and gravely wounded al-Qaeda fighters were captured fleeing Tora Bora. Some barely clung to life, nursing ragged field amputations that had long gone septic. Others cursed Bin Laden with every breath, accusing him of abandoning them and the battle. Some fighters, when surrounded by Majid’s or Shirzai’s soldiers, or Palmer and his men, would pull a grenade from beneath their robes and detonate it against their chest, screaming “Allahu Akbar!” with their last breath. David was spattered in blood and brains and splinters of bone, digging into his frostbitten cheeks, the exposed skin on his arms.
By December 17, 2001, the battle was over.
Over a thousand fighters had gone into the mountains with Bin Laden. Four hundred bodies had been recovered, and fifty-five prisoners were taken, a mixture of surrenders and the capture of those too wounded to flee. Hundreds had escaped, vanishing, melting away into the mountains, into the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And Bin Laden was gone.
David came down from the mountains on December 20, with Ryan, Palmer, and the rest of his team. Through it all, they hadn’t lost a man, but Kris had relayed the murder of a CIA officer in the north of Afghanistan while they were in the mountains.
Majid’s fighters had walked away as soon as the al-Qaeda fighters had, and Palmer had been the first to question whether they’d been al-Qaeda’s allies all along. Had they just been slowing the Americans down? Redirecting them in the wildness of Tora Bora, a mountain range so hopelessly complex, they never would have managed without guides?
Ryan was sullen the entire journey down, through the frigid ranges back to Milawa, and then in the bouncing, rusted-out jeep Shirzai’s men sent. They drove down the one road in Tora Bora, the road from Milawa camp to Jalalabad that Bin Laden had built in the early ’90s, in silence.
At the end of the road, waiting outside of their shattered base camp, was Kris.
For David, the world finally began to spin again.
Chapter 12
Kabul, Afghanistan
December 23, 2001
“To the finest men I have ever served with.”
George raised a bottle of Russian Baltika beer, Number 7, and held it high. “I am honored by every single thing you gentlemen did. Every moment you spent here on the ground. Every ounce of blood, sweat, and determination you gave. Everything you did was heroes’ work.” He pumped his bottle as his chin wavered. “We will get him. I swear it. We will get Bin Laden. Not today. But we will.”
In the corner of
the command center at the CIA station in Kabul, in the same old Taliban guesthouse, Ryan turned away, hiding his face in the shadows. Kris watched him blink fast, wipe his nose. Sniff hard as his jaw muscles clenched and held.
At Kris’s side, David leaned into him, their bodies touching from shoulders to ankles. One of David’s arms wound around Kris, his hand disappearing beneath Kris’s sweater, palm against the skin at the small of his back. His thumb ghosted over the baby-fine hairs on Kris’s skin, hairs he hadn’t known he had until David strummed them, made him shiver. Made his bones melt.
He’d wanted to fling himself into David’s arms when he’d seen their jeep bounce down the mountain, sliding and shaking on flinty shale and the jeep’s broken shocks. They were more mud monsters and frozen swamp creatures than men when they’d arrived, covered in dirt like they’d burrowed through the mountain. David’s burnished skin, rich like bronze, had seemed ghostly, a deathly pale, and Kris had wiped his hand down David’s cheek, ostensibly to clean the dust away. He’d just wanted to feel David’s warmth, his presence, to know that he was alive.
Beneath his palm, David had trembled, a grenade shivering before it exploded. He hadn’t said anything, but Kris saw the supernovas in his gaze, the burn of his soul blasting through the tattered remnants of his control.
David, like Ryan, like Palmer, like the rest of them, had come back defeated. Wounded. Empty.
Jim had arranged for transport straight back to Kabul, from their base camp through Jalalabad and back though Nangarhar Province. In the weeks they’d been in the mountains, Jalalabad had turned from a war-ravaged ghost town to a vibrant trading city, full of honking cars, rickshaws, bicycles, and people moving in every direction. After staring at the bleak moonscape of Tora Bora, the explosion of life, of color, of humanity, was almost too overwhelming. David had hidden his face, tucking his head sideways against Kris’s shoulder, and they’d hidden the clasp of their hands between their thighs for the entire drive.
Kabul had changed as well. As vibrant as Jalalabad had become, Kabul was a hundred times more. More people, more color, more traffic, more horns, more life. More women in hijab, fewer burqas. More children playing games and flying kites. The movie theater, shuttered under the Taliban, had reopened, and lines stretched for hours.
George had met them at the CIA station and had promptly ordered Palmer and his men to continue driving to Bagram, to the new Army’s Unified Command Center. They needed to be debriefed and seen by medical, and the Army insisted on doing it their way. Kris almost hadn’t let go of David, and their fingers had clung to each other until their arms would have pulled apart if they’d held on any longer.
“Don’t worry, Kris,” George had murmured. “They’re coming back. We’ve got a new mission coming up.”
He’d taken a lukewarm shower and tossed and turned on his thin mattress all night, his thoughts consumed by David.
But, just after breakfast, as he was trying to coax resurrection out of a cup of shitty instant coffee, Palmer had led his men back into the CIA station. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said to George, who’d been sitting two seats down from Kris.
“Pull up a chair, gentleman. Dig in.”
Palmer’s team had torn into the breakfast the Afghan cooks had made. They’d eaten like they’d never seen food, shoveling breakfast into their mouths at world-hot-dog-eating-championship pacing.
David had come around the table and sat in the empty seat beside Kris.
He’d showered, and his cuts had been bandaged, and there were stitches above one eyebrow. Bruises along his cheeks and jaw. His knuckles were raw, his skin cracked from the cold. But his eyes still burned every time he looked at Kris. Need pulsated from him, like gravity, like the oceans’ tides, pulling Kris in.
George had called a meeting after breakfast, carting in a crate of beers and passing them out individually. “From Uzbekistan.” He’d grinned. “I heard this is the strongest Russian beer an American can drink. The rest of the brews are fermented engine oil.” Chuckles rose, halfhearted.
After he’d thanked them all and had extolled their heroics with hearty cheers, he led the team in the first round of drinks. George sputtered after his first sip, nearly choking on the thick, dark brew, far more robust than a Guinness or a black stout in the States. Palmer laughed and clapped him on the back.
“I told you we were going to find Bin Laden, and I meant that. We, the people in this room,” George said, nodding to each and every man, in his team and in Palmer’s. “And we have a new mission. We are the team charged with hunting down and capturing Bin Laden, wherever he is, no matter how long it takes. And we’ll capture every other high-value al-Qaeda leader, too.
“Which means we’re moving shop. Al-Qaeda isn’t in Afghanistan anymore, at least not in any real presence. They fled, or they’re trapped in Kandahar, which means the Marines are going to smoke them out. Most of the high-value leadership made it out of Afghanistan overland to Pakistan. They’re either hiding in the tribal areas, or they’ve made their way to Peshawar or Kashmir. So, we’re on the move. In two days, the entire team is moving to Islamabad station.” He took another sip of his beer, cringing as he swallowed. “The next two days are yours. I’m sorry we can’t give you a better Christmas vacation. But the Army has set up some facilities at Bagram for their soldiers. There’s the theater, showing Bollywood’s finest from a decade ago. And there’s plenty of beds, hot chow, and secured internet here. Sleep, eat, and call home.”
“Sounds great, sir.” Palmer held out his hand. George shook it. Jackson and Warrick were already cheering, talking about plans to eat until they puked and then sleep until they couldn’t physically sleep another minute. Jim and Phillip had their heads together, muttering about Bagram and the facilities there. Ryan stayed in the corner, his arms folded, staring at the ground.
David’s gaze met Kris’s.
Two days, all to themselves.
Visions tumbled through Kris’s mind, dreams he’d nurtured through the scant few minutes he’d slept at base camp, always clutching the radio close in case David or the team radioed in. Finally, after all this time, after everything. He could see his own eagerness reflected in David’s eyes.
“Kris, Sergeant Haddad.” George stopped in front of them as the rest of the team peeled away, off on their own adventures. “I… wanted to say something to you, Kris.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “I am very proud of you. You proved everyone wrong. Really rose above all of the challenges you faced.” He smiled and held out his hand.
Never let anyone else define your life, Kris. Never let anyone else define who you are. They will always get it wrong. David’s words came back, slamming into his skull like gongs being struck, like fireworks shooting off into the night sky.
“George, the only real challenge I faced here was you. And Ryan.” Kris felt that fire that had always burned in him reignite, felt the flames grow larger. Something had slipped, between the boy he’d been, who’d refused to hide, and the man he’d become, who had let other people set barriers for him. When had he given up? “The only thing I had to prove wrong was your prejudice. I knew what I was doing. I was confident in myself. I didn’t struggle with what I could do. No, George, I am proud of you for finally seeing that I was working my ass off, that I was doing everything I could. That I knew what I was talking about and really was put on the team to be the subject matter expert.”
George stared. His jaw hung open.
Kris put the cherry on top. “I’m proud of you for finally seeing the real me, George.”
“That’s… one way to put it,” George said slowly.
“It’s the right way to put it.”
George’s gaze darted to David. David stood beside Kris, silent and sentinel. He stared at George, daring him to disagree.
“I think I was right about one thing, at least,” George finally said, his voice low. He stared pointedly at them both, holding each of their gazes for a long moment.
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David straightened. Kris heard his vertebrae crack, felt his muscles tighten until they started to tremble.
“Which brings me to my next question.” He cleared his throat. “State wants to reopen the US Embassy in Kabul after the new year. They want someone to go through it first, get an assessment of the damage. I… was wondering if you two would be interested. It’s a big, empty building. Might take two days to go through.”
Kris’s head swam, like he’d been plunged into the ocean, tossed on waves after falling from a high cliff. George was… giving them space? Privacy? Calling them on their fledgling relationship, and, inexplicably, enabling it? In all of Kabul, in all of Afghanistan, was there any place he and David could possibly be together without any fear of discovery or of reprisal?
“We’d be happy to,” David rumbled. “We’ll start immediately.”
“Good.” George looked like he’d just shit his pants. “I expect you back here in two days.”
The doors to the embassy had barely shut behind them when David first pressed Kris against the wall.
David’s body surrounded him, covered him completely, devoured him. David pressed his forehead to Kris’s, lips hovering microns apart. Their breaths shook, tiny gasps keeping the last of their bodies separate.
“You want this?” David breathed. “You want me?”
Kris saw the spark of hesitation, of fear, in David’s eyes. He reached for David, his hands on David’s hips, pulling him closer, tighter, as if they could melt into each other’s bodies then and there. “I want you, David.”
David shuddered, his eyes squeezing shut as he drew in a breath, as he pressed into Kris. Had anyone wanted Kris before? Truly wanted him, like everything in David wanted him?