by Tal Bauer
They caught up that night, sitting together on the roof. Dan had brought three bottles of wine, and he and Kris downed shitty chardonnay as they sat in lawn chairs and tried to breathe through their mouths, tried to not smell the fetid stench of Faisalabad.
“You blew the door open, Kris.” Dan held out his plastic cup of white wine for a toast. “You blew the door for all us gays open. Going to Afghanistan and kicking ass.”
Kris’s jaw dropped. “Us gays? Dan?”
“I entered the CIA before you. When it was still not allowed.”
It was only in 1996 that the law had changed, allowing homosexuals to legally possess security clearances. Prior to 1996, any gay man or woman was considered a liability, someone who could be blackmailed, someone untrustworthy. Someone not allowed into the hallowed halls of the national security establishment.
“I loved that you never played the bullshit games.” Dan smiled at him, his eyes bright. Glowing. “You never tried to hide. I wanted to help you. Wanted to see you succeed. And, Goddamn. Did you ever.”
“I just did my job.”
“You did a hell of a job. You’re a fantastic officer, Kris. And you’re paving the way for everyone after you. No one thinks twice anymore about us.”
“You going to come out?”
Dan winked at him over the rim of his cup. “If there was someone to come out for.”
Kris froze.
“I always wanted to ask you to dinner. Back in DC. I’ve always wanted to get to know you better.” He leaned forward, fiddling with his wine. “Maybe, after this is over, we could try? The Marriott in Islamabad isn’t the Capital Grille in DC, but…” Hope infused Dan’s words. “I just really want to spend some time with you.”
“Dan…” Kris squeezed his eyes closed, leaned forward. His head hung between his slumped shoulders. “Dan, I’m sorry. I’m seeing someone.”
Shock pushed Dan back. “Oh. I didn’t know. I thought you were single, in DC—”
“I was. It’s… new.”
“In Afghanistan?”
“It’s secret. We’re not out. We’re—” Kris fumbled for words, stumbling over his exhaustion and the wine.
“He’s military.” Dan nodded slowly. He stared into his wine. “I understand.” He sighed. “Whoever he is, he’s a lucky guy. But I hope we can still be friends.”
“I’d like that.”
The night before the raid, he and David lounged in a tepid bath surrounded by stubby candles. The safe house had sunken mosaic tubs in most bedrooms, playthings for the wealthy who had lived stratospheres above the rest of the city’s inhabitants. David rubbed his feet, massaged his legs, kissed his way up and down Kris’s body. They made love silently, Kris riding David as his hands traced David’s chest, his body, mapped the terrain of his lover. Candlelight flickered over their skin, threw shadows against the walls. Kris came with a muffled cry, his head thrown back, David’s hands clinging to him, his arms wrapped around his back. David’s lips kissed every inch of his chest.
Their teammates were on either side of the paper-thin walls. Kris could hear their laughter, their conversations, between his gasps, his muffled moans.
Who knew about them? George, for sure. Had he told Ryan? Ryan was still his deputy. Jim and Phillip were wrapped up in their own projects. Derek had stayed in Afghanistan. Jackson? Palmer’s team had to bunk together, and Jackson was David’s roommate.
David spent all his time in Kris’s room, though. What did Jackson think about his absent partner?
And Palmer? He’d seen them kissing back in Tora Bora.
David had become distant from his team since moving to Pakistan, moving with Kris and on the ground instead of holding surveillance and going on night raids with the others.
They weren’t supposed to be doing this. David’s entire career could come apart, shatter under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rules of the military.
Sleeping with a partner on an overseas mission happened, but it was generally filed under “ill advised” by the CIA and “disastrous” when it went all wrong.
It was illegal to be gay in Pakistan. Illegal to love another man. They were in Pakistan on diplomatic cover, but the bond between Pakistan and the United States was tenuous, a daily negotiation of threats and bluster. A scandal like this, which the Pakistanis could use to claim the US disrespected their culture, their laws, and flagrantly violated their beliefs, could tear their alliance apart.
And, for the first time, Kris had some measure of respect. Dan’s words haunted him, repeating in his mind on an echoing loop. His name was said with praise. People believed in him. Thought he could do something. That he wasn’t just a fag or a limp-wristed gay people put up with. His whole life, he’d been treated like half a man.
Until now.
But for how long? Should they stop? Should they just put it aside, focus on their mission? They were risking too much, with this.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t set David aside, couldn’t put him out of his mind. David had become linked to him, inextricably linked, like two stars orbiting each other. Words like “combat stress” and “adrenaline bonds” tried to nip at him from the darkness, but he pushed them back.
David was in his bones, in his blood. He set his heart by the moments he stole with David. He’d never let that go, not unless David was ripped from him. And even then—
David held him after they finished, cradling Kris close with his forehead pressed to Kris’s temple as they caught their breath. Sticky Pakistani heat clung to their sweaty skin. A limp ceiling fan circled overhead, lazy circles that moved stale air and the stench of sex. Could their teammates smell what they did? Could they smell David on Kris, like Kris always could?
Much later, Kris pulled the curtains back and stared out their bedroom window. He’d wrapped up in a silk robe, a gift David had bought for him during one of his undercover trips into Pakistan’s twisting cities. He’d bought Kris a small mountain of gifts since they’d arrived in-country. Silk shirts and linen suits, long robes, and the finest salwar kameezes. A gold necklace, a filigree of the Hand of Fatima, that he wore under everything, every day. Now that they weren’t in Afghanistan, they got to change their clothes every day, actually look decent again. David, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to make Kris’s wardrobe the finest in all of Pakistan. Kris reveled in David’s gifts, in the luxury. In the knowledge that every day, no matter where David was, Kris was on his mind.
David stood behind him, kissing his bare shoulder where the robe slipped down. The call to prayer sounded, the wail of a hundred muezzins across the city rising as one. There were no stars above Faisalabad, no moon in the sky. The stars were spread below, a blanket of lanterns and fires that turned the air to wood smoke and musk.
Across Faisalabad, somewhere in the darkness and the smoke, Abu Zahawi prayed.
His last prayers as a free man.
“In three hours, we leave the safe house in our breach teams. At zero one thirty, each breach team will stage outside their target location.” Kris pointed to the giant map on the wall, with each of the fourteen targets marked and surrounded by surveillance photos. “Pakistani police will meet you at each target.”
An FBI agent, from a team that had been flown in from DC overnight, interrupted. “Is ISI involved?”
“No. ISI has not been briefed.” Pakistan’s military intelligence, ISI, had been caught leaking information to al-Qaeda, both during the Afghan invasion and after. Kris kept them iced out of his entire operation. The FBI agent, jet-lagged and clinging to a mug of coffee, nodded.
“At exactly zero one fifty, each team will stage at the outer breach marker for each site. Your team leads have your specific coordinates for your site in their packet. At precisely zero two hundred, at all fourteen sites, we breach simultaneously. The order of entry is as follows: The Pakistani police enter first and subdue any resistance. They separate the women and children from the men. The FBI enters second and preserves the scene for evidence coll
ection. The CIA enters last.”
The FBI, appraised of Kris’s operation to catch Zahawi, had insisted on inserting into the takedown team. The September 11 attacks were considered an active criminal investigation in addition to being an intelligence failure and the new target of an independent Congressional oversight investigation. Jurisdiction was overlapping, and messy.
“I and my team—” Kris nodded to Dan, David, Ryan, Jackson, and Palmer. “—will accompany the breach team at Target X-Ray.” The last target on the list, the villa he and David had found with the windows closed and locked.
“You think Zahawi is at that location?”
“We think there’s something bad going on there, yes. It could be Zahawi. It could be another cell of al-Qaeda fighters. Whatever is going on, it’s bad news.” Kris, standing on a coffee table in the middle of the safe house’s living room, met everyone’s gaze. Nearly sixty people stared back at him. Listened to him give orders. “Any questions?”
0155 hours.
They were well into zero dark hundred, the dead of night when Special Forces loved to operate, when the CIA always made their moves. Kris breathed through his mouth, huddled against the privacy fence around Target X-Ray, behind David and in front of Dan. Ryan and Jackson brought up the rear of their breach team.
His body armor tried to pull his shoulders off. The thick ceramic plates weighed at least forty pounds each. He felt tugged toward the ground, like he should just tip forward, let gravity do its thing. His backpack full of gear counterbalanced the weight, just barely.
Zero one fifty-six. At thirteen other sites, breach teams were waiting, following Kris’s plan to the letter. There was no room for error in this. No room for one team to strike early, give a target time to make a phone call or start screaming—or worse, shooting. In Faisalabad in the middle of the night, only the dogs were out. The city was silent, five million people locked in their houses. Unless something went wrong.
Zero one fifty-eight. The check came down the line. All good? David reached behind him, tapped the side of Kris’s leg. All good. He sent the signal back, tapping Dan. Heard Dan reach for Ryan. Then it came back, two taps from Dan on his thigh. All good. He reached forward for David. David intercepted his hand. Squeezed. Kris squeezed back.
Zero one fifty-nine. They’d synchronized their watches to the second. He watched them count down.
Three. Two. One.
Pakistani police at the head of the breach team blew open the lock on the privacy fence and wrenched the heavy metal gate open. Boots slapped concrete and dirt, thundering toward the front door. Kris heard echoes of booms across Faisalabad, bouncing through the warren of the tangled city. He followed behind, running with David and stacking at the fence line as the Pakistanis prepared to break down the front door. Shouts rose inside the villa. Lights flicked on inside the third floor.
Clang. The Pakistani police officer who’d swung the battering ram stumbled backward. Another rushed forward, grabbing the battering ram and trying again. Clang. “It’s reinforced!” he shouted. “They reinforced the door with steel!”
Slap slap slap. Dirt shot up from the ground, geysers from bullets slamming into the dust at their feet. Glass shattered, rained down on their heads. Dark muzzles, the bores of AK-47s, poked out of the upstairs windows.
“Take cover!” David grabbed Kris and hauled him around the side of the house, away from the windows and the shooters above. Ryan and Dan retreated behind the privacy fence.
“Grenade!” one of the police officers shouted. Glass shattered. A thud as the grenade bounced and rolled inside the house. Frantic Arabic, shouts that rose in pitch, until—
Boom.
Scrambling, David poked back around the corner, looking down the barrel of his rifle. The shooters in the upper windows were gone. Police officers were going through a ground-level window into a smoke-filled hallway.
“Open this door! Open this fucking door!” Two FBI agents banged on the front door, their backs flat to the wall. They’d been trapped on the other side of the gunfire from above, totally exposed.
The front door burst out of its frame, kicked open by the largest police officer on the team. Cursing, the FBI agents ran inside. “Hands up! Hands up!”
“They have to say it in Arabic,” Kris growled. “Did they forget?”
“We gotta get in there.” David nodded to the front door. “I’ll cover you.”
Kris ran, David following in his footsteps, his rifle trained on the empty third-floor windows. Whoever had been shooting at them was gone. For now.
Dan, Ryan, and Jackson met them at the door. Shouts barreled through the house. Flashlight beams crisscrossed the smoke. The FBI agents were stuck in the front room, hollering at someone to put their hands up.
Shouting, again, in Arabic. This time, from outside. Kris turned. “The roof. They’re on the roof!”
David and Jackson flattened themselves to the villa’s wall, looking up their rifle scopes at the roofline.
Scuffling, above. Frantic Arabic flew back and forth. Two—no, three voices.
Kris followed David, holding his weapon up, keeping it steady on the roofline. Dan covered him, moving close. Ryan slipped away from the villa’s walls, sliding into the courtyard.
“Hnak hu alan! Ha hu! Ha hu!” There he is now! There he is! There he is!
“Shit!” Bullets peppered the courtyard, the dirt at Ryan’s feet. He ran for the shadows, ducked behind a pillar for cover. The shooter on the roof chased him to the edge.
David slid out of the shadows and squeezed his trigger. Three bullets spat into the night, catching the first man on the roof in the shoulder and jaw. He tumbled forward, limp, spilling over the edge. He hit the ground like a broken doll, headfirst. Kris looked away, flinching.
He’d remember that sound as long as he lived.
“Qafz! Qafz!” Jump! Jump!
Two men scurried across the roof, heading for the edge. David, Jackson, and Kris stepped over the broken body in the courtyard and followed the sounds. Behind the house, the closest neighbors were nine feet away, across a sewage-filled alley. An improbable jump, but not impossible. Not with adrenaline coursing through the men’s veins.
They heard feet slapping against concrete, gaining speed. Heard a man approach the edge. Saw him leap.
David and Jackson fired together, two shots. Both tore through the jumper. Shrieking, he fell to the ground, bones in his legs cracking on impact. He wailed, screams loud enough to wake the dead, knives that sliced through Kris’s eardrums.
Using the distraction to cover his attempt, the last man jumped right after his friend.
Kris saw him. He raised his weapon. Fired.
His shots caught the jumper in his hip and his stomach. He lurched, tumbled, and fell, slamming into the top of the privacy fence before sliding to the ground.
Inside the house, the frantic shouts from the FBI had subsided. Kris heard boots running up and down the stairs, heard calls of “Clear” from within. Heard more boots on the roof, and shouts of “Police!”
“Friendlies!” David bellowed. “Friendlies, down below!”
“We heard gunshots. What do have?” One of the FBI agents poked his head over the roof’s edge. He blanched when he saw the first man from the roof spread in a wet mess across the courtyard.
“Three jumpers. All down.” David and Jackson had formed a loose perimeter, keeping all three bodies in sight.
Kris called up, “Zahawi in there?”
“No. Is he one of them?”
“We’re checking.” Kris and Dan ignored the first body. There wasn’t anything left to ID. He didn’t have the right coloring for Abu Zahawi, either. The man who’d tumbled was Pakistani. Zahawi was Palestinian, fair skinned and slender according to the passport photo they were working with.
The second jumper was still shrieking. Blood pooled beneath one of his broken legs. White bone stuck out of his torn pants. Strips of skin clung to the jagged ends of his shattered femur. Dan
shined a light into his face.
“Not him.” Kris waved to David. “This one needs a medic. He’s going to bleed out.”
As David kneeled next to the broken-legged man and opened his medkit, they moved on to the third jumper. Heavyset with a round belly, thick legs, and wild, springy hair, almost to his shoulders, he was clean-shaven, almost as smooth as Kris. Blood smeared across him, from the shots in his belly and his impact with the fence, his slide to the ground. Pools of ruby liquid formed beneath him, soaking the dirt. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t move. Still, they kept their distance.
“This can’t be him.” Dan frowned.
“His jawline looks similar…” Kris reached for the man, turned his head left and right. The man groaned. “I think it’s him. I think it’s Zahawi.”
“How do we know for sure?”
Kris turned the man’s head to the side again and held it still. “Take a picture of his ear. Everyone’s ear is unique. Just like a fingerprint.”
Dan arched an eyebrow at him, but snapped the photo. Kris pulled out his field laptop from his backpack and plugged in the camera. Downloaded the image, and sent it via satellite link to Islamabad. “We’ll know in a minute.”
Sirens blasted across Faisalabad, Pakistani police coming out in force. Rickshaw ambulances followed behind the police. David, through with putting a tourniquet on the broken-legged man, jogged over to Kris. “I thought this one was dead.”
“Not yet.” Kris grabbed his medical kit from his backpack and pulled out a wad of field dressings and gauze bandages. He pressed them into the man’s bullet wounds, over his stomach and his thigh. Blood saturated the dressings, soaking through almost instantly. “We need to keep him alive. This is Zahawi. I’m certain of it.”
His sat phone rang. Dan reached for it. David grabbed it first. “Hello?”
“Where’s Caldera?” George barked.
“Holding pressure on a wounded al-Qaeda man.”
“If it’s the same man whose ear he just sent, then he’d better do everything he can to keep him breathing. That is Abu Zahawi. And we need him. Alive.”