Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  Kris blinked. He counted to five, slowly, in his head. He held up his left hand. “Do you see this ring? It’s identical to the one on David’s hand. My husband’s hand. We are married.” He tapped their marriage license, laid out on the desk between him and the HR tech, repeatedly. “We’re married, legally.”

  “In Canada.” The tech sat back, sighing. “I’m not even supposed to try to help you. The law in the US is clear. The federal government does not recognize marriages between same sex partners. It’s not allowed. It doesn’t exist in the United States. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “I’m married. Crossing a border doesn’t invalidate that,” Kris snapped.

  “Mr. Caldera, it just can’t happen here. Gay marriage isn’t legal.”

  “So you’re saying I can’t get assigned to the same stations as my husband? Can’t put my husband on my health plan? Can’t file our taxes together? Can’t put him as my inheritor and designated spouse survivor?”

  The HR tech shook her head. “No. You can’t. Not until the law is changed. And…” She shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like that is going to happen anytime soon.” She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t fucking care about your sorrys!” Kris’s gaze fell on her diamond ring, glittering from her left hand. “You’re married?”

  “I am.”

  “To a man?”

  She nodded, once. Her expression closed down. Gates fell behind her eyes. She lifted her chin, staring at him.

  “How would you feel if you couldn’t call him your husband? If you were told your marriage wasn’t legal? That it didn’t exist?”

  “I wouldn’t have bothered getting married if I knew I couldn’t. I wouldn’t try to cause problems.” She laced her hands in her lap and glared. “I cannot help you, Mr. Caldera. In the eyes of the federal government and the CIA, your marriage isn’t valid and doesn’t exist. If the law changes, you can come back. Until then.”

  She held her hand out to her doorway.

  He ran into Dan after lunch, outside CTC. Dan looked worn and tired, thinner than before, pale.

  “Kris!” Dan beamed and wrapped him up, hugging him for a long moment. “I heard all about Iraq, what you did. Taking out Saqqaf. Amazing, as per usual.” He laughed, held onto Kris’s arms, as if he didn’t want to let go. “How are you?”

  “Good!” Kris waggled his left hand. “We did it. We ran away to Canada!”

  Dan’s jaw dropped as he stared at Kris’s ring. He froze. Blinked. Inhaled sharply. “You and David? You got married?”

  “We did!” Kris pulled a face. “Not that the CIA or the United States government are recognizing it, but I’m not giving up the fight.”

  Dan chuckled, the sound wan, thin. “You never do. But they’re going to have to give in to you. They don’t know what they’re facing.” He stared at Kris, slowly smiling. “David is a very, very lucky man, Kris. A very lucky man.”

  “I’m the lucky one.”

  “No. He is,” Dan said softly.

  “What’s been going on with you? You look like shit. Are they overworking you?”

  Dan snorted, half laughing and turning away. “Thanks. That’s what I’ve always wanted to hear from you.” He shook his head. “I was at Gitmo.” He shrugged. “After everything, though, I came back to headquarters. I’ve been working with George. In operations.”

  “Ooh, on management track.” Kris wagged his eyebrows. His voice turned serious. “How was Gitmo? I heard it was bad. Real bad. Lots of abuse, lots of crossing the line.”

  Dan sighed. He stared at the wall as his eyes narrowed. “It’s in the past now. It’s all over and done with.”

  “You okay? I mean, really okay?” Kris reached for his elbow and squeezed.

  Dan covered his hand with his own. “I’m all right.”

  “Seeing anyone?”

  “Nah. All the best guys are taken.” He winked.

  “We’ll find you someone, Dan. Someone wonderful, just like you.”

  Dan blushed. “I’m good. I’m really happy for you, Kris. I’m happy you’re happy. Keep in touch?”

  “Of course. You too!”

  At three in the afternoon, Kris barged into Director Edwards’s office, fired up and ready for a fight. He fumed, thoughts racing through his mind, a bitter diatribe against the CIA, against their policies, against the federal government, against DOMA, against George and the entire world that seemed pitted against him and David. He kept circling back to the same thing, over and over.

  If he was good enough to find the United States’ enemies, why wasn’t he good enough to be recognized by the CIA or the federal government? Why was his marriage such an abhorrent thing? Was the government that tortured detainees, that had enabled the decisions that allowed Abu Ghraib to happen, actually going to say his love was worse?

  Fuck that.

  He stormed in, fire in his wake. If he could have killed a man with the force of his glare, headquarters would have been littered with corpses. “Director—”

  “Ahh, Mr. Caldera.” Director Edwards smiled and nodded to the leather club chairs across from his desk. George sat in one, scowling. “Please, join us.”

  “Sir, first of all, I have to say—”

  “You got what you wanted, Caldera,” George interrupted. He held up a manila folder. “It’s all in here. Your orders to Afghanistan. And his.”

  Director Edwards smiled again. “Please take a seat, Mr. Caldera. We need to go over the details of your assignment.”

  Slowly, he sat, taking the folder from George and perusing the orders. He and David were assigned to the mission. David was to be one of the senior security specialists, and he was being given command of a remote CIA base in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

  The orders were addressed to Ryan. He’d be reporting directly to him, in Kabul. Kris couldn’t hold back his snort, his eye-roll.

  George sighed, comically loudly.

  There was a handwritten note, signed by George, at the bottom of the orders. *Assign CALDERA and HADDAD joint living space. CALDERA and HADDAD in committed civil partnership, attested to the CIA on this day.

  Conspicuously absent was the word married.

  It was a start, though. More than what he had that morning, less than what he wanted. Way, way less.

  There’d be time to fight for more. He’d chip away at this, until he and David were recognized. Until their marriage was recognized.

  With the grace of a princess, he closed the folder and nodded to the director. “This is acceptable,” he said. “Barely acceptable.”

  Director Edwards asked for the folder and countersigned George’s note. “We’ll get these sent to Kabul station right away. Now, let’s talk about your mission.”

  Chapter 21

  Camp Carson

  Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

  Afghanistan

  Autumn 2008

  Seven years after Kris had left Afghanistan, the country looked worse than it had before the invasion of 2001.

  The Taliban had surged and faced off against US forces in pockets all around the country, controlling large swathes of territory and subjecting Afghan citizens to their same repressive fundamentalism mixed with tribalism. Women had gone back under the burqa, and girls were forbidden from going to school.

  Bands of warlords had poured out of the lawless tribal areas, each snatching a section of the border region for their brutal gangs. They ran weapons and drugs, terrorized locals on both sides of the border, and stood against the United States, the struggling Afghan government, and Pakistan. Scattered border crossings straddled the main roads that passed between the two countries, but goat paths and footpaths crisscrossed the border, smuggling routes for anything and everything. And everyone.

  Al-Qaeda, whose fighters and leaders had fled the firebombing of their homes and camps in late 2001, returned, staging a Hollywood-worthy comeback story in the mountainous border region and tribal belt.

  As the United States poured me
n, money, and myopic attention into Iraq, al-Qaeda fighters regrouped, returned and resettled. New commanders were promoted, bloodthirsty and hungry to strike back for every moment following September 11, every death of their brothers and comrades.

  Al-Qaeda, Kris wrote in his monthly summary cable to Langley, remains highly organized, highly motivated, and extremely capable of carrying out large-scale terror attacks within Afghanistan, Pakistan, and abroad. Their abilities at the present time meet or exceed their abilities from before 11 September 2001.

  In so many ways, on so many levels, Iraq had derailed everything. National security. The hunt for Bin Laden. The destruction of al-Qaeda. The lives of thousands of American soldiers. The lives of hundreds of thousands, millions, of Iraqis, and so many more in the Middle East. The lives and hearts of a billion Muslims around the world.

  Seven years after the invasion, and here he was, trying to pick up the broken pieces of Afghanistan and destroy al-Qaeda again. But this time the enemy was stronger, more enraged, and had seven years of experience striking back at the United States, the US military, and the CIA.

  But Kris had new weapons, too. Back in 2001, drone warfare had been in its infancy. Only a handful had circled the skies over Afghanistan then. Now, hundreds of Predator drones swung in lazy orbits over the skies.

  Director Edwards had given him the orders straight from the mouth of the new president: the gloves were off.

  The drones were unleashed. Destroy their safe houses, their training camps, their communication networks, and their commanders, wherever you find them, as quickly as you can.

  It was the evolution of the former vice president’s decree. Find them, stop them.

  But now stopping them meant killing them, anywhere in the world.

  If there was a chance that terrorists were planning the worst attack imaginable, then the US had to proceed like that was fact. All of the United States’ strategic and tactical decisions stemmed from the vice president’s orders, given shortly after September 11, 2001.

  Kris fell asleep, finally, after staying up and reading the day’s collected phone intercepts from Langley, Kabul, and Pakistan. Every cell phone call in the region was vacuumed up and analyzed by an array of computer servers and then a horde of analysts at the NSA and CIA. Several names had repeatedly popped up around vague references to malls, football stadiums, and bus stops in America. Phrases that sounded like veiled conversations about practice runs and surveillance.

  “Find them, Caldera,” Ryan had barked over the phone from Kabul. “And kill them.”

  The two named men were several rungs down the ladder of al-Qaeda from Bin Laden, but they were big fish in the organization’s rising phoenix. Salim and Suleyman, both on the FBI and CIA’s Most Wanted list. Salim had been a part of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and had made his way back to Afghanistan to help with al-Qaeda’s post-September 11 savagery. After the fall of Afghanistan, Suleyman had been promoted up the ranks until he was in charge of all terror operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’d planned the assassination of the Pakistani prime minister and had organized a multi-year reign of carnage on both sides of the border. His largest attack was the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel.

  For the past week, Kris had been following them with his drones until he finally found their headquarters, their safe house, deep in the tribal belt in an abandoned village. Only Salim was there, for the moment. Suleyman had disappeared. But he’d be back.

  “Should we try to capture them? They’re in the senior al-Qaeda ranks. Don’t we want to interrogate them? Find out what they know about Bin Laden? Zawahiri?” Kris had pushed back against Ryan’s order. “These are the most senior members we’ve targeted. What if Suleyman is with Zawahiri now? Or Bin Laden?”

  “Then you should have kept better eyes-on. Never have let him slip your Predators.” Ryan’s voice had been tight, barely controlled anger simmering beneath his words. “How would you try to capture these two, Caldera? Send Haddad in, guns blazing? An Arab John Wayne? We have no authority in the tribal belt. We don’t have the manpower to insert a strike force, render a target, and get them out of there. The costs are too high. Besides,” he said, his words going tight. “We don’t do that anymore. And how would you suggest we extract critical information from such a hardened al-Qaeda leader?”

  “My track records speaks for itself, Ryan.”

  “Find them. Eliminate them. Those are your orders.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Before sunrise, only hours after he’d fallen asleep, David’s arm thrown around his waist, the door to Kris’s quarters slid open. “Sir, we’ve got a hit on a target.”

  He trudged down to the drone bay, a double-wide trailer behind a concrete wall fortified with sandbags, and slipped into the dim cavernous space. Monitors glowed in night vision green, infrared spectrum, cool blue and warm red. Soldiers and CIA operators manned a dozen joysticks before their monitors, flying the drones circling the region.

  His deputy, a man named Darren, who had cut his teeth in Iraq as an Army intelligence captain before moving to the CIA, waved him over to the main monitor bank.

  “Salim left his hideout in the middle of the night. We followed him as he drove out to a remote village in the mountains where he picked up a man he seemed to know well. They got into his vehicle and returned to his hideout. These are the images we captured of the second man.”

  Kris flipped through angled shots of the mystery man. About six foot, slender, robed. A turban obscured his face from most of the images. “How do we know it’s not Salim’s father? Or his uncle? Or his wife’s uncle’s brother’s best friend?”

  “It’s not his father, and it’s not his uncle.” Darren, who seemed to tolerate Kris only enough to complete their mission, ignored his third question. “We believe this is Suleyman and that they are together in Salim’s safe house now.”

  “You want to strike.”

  “Yes sir.” Darren loved “taking out the trash”, as he called it.

  But each strike came with consequences. Find them, kill them was almost too easy with drones. Too far removed from the impact, it became far too easy to become a push-button jockey. Innocent civilians had been caught in the crossfire, or had been targeted mistakenly. There was innocent blood on the drone program’s hands, but since that blood was hundreds, if not thousands of miles away, no one in the US seemed to mind.

  Kris did.

  “Tell me the full history of this safe house. How many civilians have entered and exited? Who has come and gone in the past twenty-four, forty-eight, and seventy-two hours? What civilians live in the proximity of the target location?”

  Darren and the drone operator ran through the evidence, pulling up images and logs to substantiate the comings and goings of everyone into and out of the safe house. As far as they had seen, it had only ever been Salim, with phone intercepts providing the intel that Suleyman visited occasionally. The safe house was in an abandoned village, far from civilians. Unusual, in the practices of al-Qaeda. They liked to surround themselves with civilians, situate themselves in the worst possible target zones. Make a strike against them a morally objectionable call and an impossible order.

  But not this time.

  “Are there any women or children in the compound? Does Salim have a wife? Kids?”

  “Salim’s wife and kids live in Peshawar.”

  “How confident are you that it's Suleyman with him?”

  “Eighty percent, sir.”

  He held life and death in his hands every day. Kris imagined his decisions like rocks being thrown into a pond, ripples from every decision expanding, striking other decisions, other lives and beings in the pond and the world. Consequence, for every action, every single thing, sometimes beyond the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, where no one could see. Sometimes the ripples seemed to stretch forward and backward in time, even. Here he was in Afghanistan, seven years after September 11. And September 11 had been decades after the CIA’s suppor
t to the mujahedeen, decades after Ambassador Dubs’s assassination. Ripples expanding, ever outward.

  What would this strike create? What consequences?

  “Proceed with your strike.” He nodded to Darren. “Use every Hellfire. Let’s be certain.”

  Let it never be said that he, a gay man, shied away from ordering a rain of death and destruction. If there was one snide comment others could fling at him, it was not that he was weak, or had a soft stomach.

  The drone pilot pivoted his joystick, changing the Predator’s orbit until he was lined up for his strike. On-screen, the safe house filled the center of the monitor, black-and-white images in the pre-dawn glow. They’re just beginning to pray.

  The pilot fired, counted down. “Three… two… one… Impact.”

  A giant mushroom cloud appeared, non-nuclear, but skyrocketing debris and dust and shattered lives into the air.

  It took hours for the cloud to dissipate. The drone stayed in orbit the entire time, recording the crater that had replaced the safe house and the removal of two burned and mangled bodies from the rubble. In the intercept bay, Kris flagged anything discussing the deaths of any al-Qaeda commanders be brought to him immediately.

  Several hours later, a runner brought him the intercept: Salim and Suleyman were declared dead.

  Al-Qaeda vowed revenge.

  Kris longed for his and David’s Virginia home, nestled in the woods, surrounded by nature and peace.

  Home in Afghanistan was Camp Carson, a dusty, windswept base of concrete sprawl and HESCO barriers, sandbags and concertina wire, trailers and humming generators. The base perched on a plateau just north of Tora Bora. It was close to where he had manned the radios while David and Ryan and the others plunged into the mountains, shadowing Bin Laden’s footsteps, so long ago. Now, instead of the bare emptiness and desolation from before, the base was a fortress guarded by helicopter gunships, massive perimeter fencing, and armed guards in towers, watching everything.