by Tal Bauer
When David and Hamid approached the base, the Afghan guards would have to leave their posts. Preserving Hamid’s identity, his safety, was most important. The guards would leave the gates open, and David would drive Hamid through. David would be in charge of the car, so they wouldn’t have to worry about a car bomb. They could skip the car inspection, drive Hamid right up to Camp Carson’s command center.
Kris thought of David. What would David put into this plan? What would he suggest? How did the world look from Hamid’s eyes? He’d been undercover with al-Qaeda for two years, roughing it in the most inhospitable landscape on the planet. What would David recommend?
Hamid must be shown the utmost respect, he wrote. Hamid is to be treated as an honored guest.
“This is horseshit!” Carl, the leader of the SAD team assigned to Kris’s debrief, Operation Pendulum, shouted at Kris. “This is the stupidest fucking piece of garbage I’ve ever seen! Have you ever been in a war zone?”
“I’ve been in war zones for the past seven years straight!” Kris bellowed. “I’ve managed war zones! I managed the Saqqaf operation! I killed Saqqaf! Don’t fucking talk to me that way!”
“You want to bring an al-Qaeda agent onto our base without searching him? ‘Treat him like an honored guest’? This is bullshit! I’m not putting my men on the ground with this plan!”
“Yes, you are! This agent is undercover. He’s working for us. He came to us with this intelligence. He’s sacrificing a hell of a lot to help us with this. We can show him the smallest bit of respect, not treat him like a terrorist!”
“They’re all fucking terrorists!” Carl hollered. “Every fucking one of those towel-headed fuckers! They all want to kill you! Can’t you get that through your skull?” Carl snorted, shaking his head. “Or are you too concerned about how he’ll feel? Don’t want to get his feelings hurt?”
“You are way out of line,” Kris hissed. “The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims are not terrorists. Your attitude is exactly what keeps this war going.”
Carl held up his trigger finger and squeezed. “The war keeps going because I keep killing hajis.”
“Do you even fucking know that ‘haji’ is a term of respect? It’s for someone who’s made the pilgrimage. It’s a title of deep respect for the faithful.”
Carl spat. A thick wad of dip-tainted spit stained the dirt outside the command center.
“This is the plan. And I am in charge. Your men will provide operational support. Or I will ship your asses back to DC on the very next flight.”
“Not this plan.” Carl tossed the stapled sheets at Kris’s feet. They blew against Kris’s boots, skittered in the dust. “You want to make him think you’re about to suck his cock, fine, be my guest. He can think he’s about to get some sweet American ass all the way into the base. But as soon as he steps out of the car, my men are searching him.”
“You are not to treat him harshly. He is not a suspect, and not a terrorist. You have no idea of the intelligence that he has supplied!”
“He’s a fucking terrorist until I say he’s not!” Carl glared at Kris. “And there’s way too many fucking people on this op. This isn’t a Goddamn parade, or a zoo. No one is worth all this.”
“He is. You just don’t fucking know.” Kris snatched his plan, Top Secret, Eyes Only, before it blew way. “If you harm the asset in any way. Leave any bruises. Bend a single hair on his head. I will make your life hell, I swear to God.”
Carl laughed. “Seven years, you said? You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. You think everyone just wants peace and cupcakes. You just don’t get it. Every one of them wants to kill us.”
“Just do your job. And when it’s done, you’re gone. I want you off my base.”
“Suits me just fine. Camp Cocksucker isn’t for me anyway.”
Chapter 22
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
December, 2008
David tapped his toes against the footwell of his car, waiting. He wore a thick salwar kameez, heavy robes, and a flat Afghan wool cap. Still, he was chilled. A mass of humanity crowded on the Pakistan side of the border, waiting their turn to be waved into Afghanistan. Pakistani guards had their rifles pointed toward Afghanistan. The Afghanistan guards sat around a fire and drank tea.
Thoughts of Kris helped console him. They’d stayed up almost the entire night, completely unable to sleep. Talk of Hamid and the operation turned to talk of what could be. What would it mean if they really did get Bin Laden?
“Would it be over after that? For us, I mean?” David had held Kris’s hand, resting his chin on Kris’s chest. “Do you think we could walk away from this war? If he’s gone, maybe that would be the end for us?”
Kris had stroked his hair. “I think so,” he’d finally said. “We started this hunt for him. Seeking to end what he’d begun. Bring him to justice and make him answer for what he did. We’ve got everyone else. Zahawi. Saqqaf. If we can get Zawahiri and Bin Laden…” Kris gave him a tiny smile. “It would be nice to go home,” he’d whispered. “To our house. Live a quiet life.”
“What would you do?”
“Maybe stay at the CIA. Maybe not. Something that gives me as much time with you as possible. I’ve given the CIA a decade. I want to give you the rest of all my decades.”
David had kissed him, slowly. “I want to find peace,” he’d breathed. “I know my peace is inside of you. I want to spend the rest of my life just being with you.”
Their whispers turned to making love, languid and serene, until Kris came with a shout, practically crying as he trembled apart in David’s arms. David tumbled after him, trying to combine their souls, trying to crawl inside Kris’s body and fuse together, never to be parted.
They’d eaten breakfast before David had dressed and driven off. Kris kissed him through the driver’s window. “Be safe, my love,” Kris had whispered. “After this, we’re going home.”
“Home is where you are.” He’d blown a kiss as he drove off. The rest of the base had been humming, full preparations for Hamid’s arrival already underway. His job, in comparison, was simpler. Pick Hamid up. Drive him back.
Finally, at the border crossing, David spotted him.
Hamid was wrapped in thick robes, like David, against the Afghanistan winter. Snows were already on the mountains, and the Panjshir, far in the north, was frozen. Hamid picked his way through the crowd and slid into the back seat.
“As-salaam-alaikum,” David said, twisting around to get his first look at Hamid.
Hamid was exhausted, that much was obvious. Dirt clung to his robes, and his beard was disheveled. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes. His face was lean, far leaner than the photo Ahmad had shared from his case file. Two years of hard living in Pakistan could do that, though.
Hamid leaned back in the car and sighed. “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” he breathed. “Shukran.”
David passed him a soda and a bag of chips. “Please, eat. We won’t be long. But make yourself comfortable.”
Hamid accepted the chips and the soda with a smile. “Shukran, habibi,” he said, nodding.
The drive back to base was only thirty minutes, but David stretched it to an hour, taking switchbacks and parking on the side of the road to, ostensibly, check his tires or his radiator fluid. He watched for followers, observers, anyone trailing them. The road bled into and out of the mountains, along ridges and ravines. He passed donkeys and carts led by stubborn mules, refusing to walk another foot. He kept his eyes peeled, scanning the road and the ditches for new dirt or fresh rises in the mud, evidence of burying. The signs of an IED. He snaked into the dusty town that squatted between Camp Carson and the military base, Camp Seville.
All the while, Hamid crunched his chips in the back seat and stared out the window.
Farmland surrounded Camp Carson, fields that had been harvested and left fallow for winter. The irrigation ditches lining the field were low, the waters mostly mud and filled with blown trash from the village.
As soon as he started down the straight dirt road that led to the main base gate, he flashed his headlights twice.
That was the signal. The Afghan guards at the base were to open the gates and leave their posts, head to the mess hall for tea and a break.
David watched the main gate rise and stay open.
He slowed as he neared and made his way through the twisting maze of concrete barriers and sandbags.
Ahead, he could see Kris, and Darren, and Ahmad. The analysts and interrogators, all standing in front of the command center, a double-wide cargo container converted into a state-of-the-art technical repository, but from the outside, looking like another nondescript, bland, meaningless building. The security team held their positions in a grid surrounding where he was to park the car. They were small dots at the end of a long stretch of gravel road, paralleling Camp Carson’s airfield.
Once we’re through, once we’ve got them, we can go home. Our part in this will be over. We’ve given our all. It’s time to go home. It’s time.
David kept his eyes on Kris, the love of his life. Home, and the promise of the rest of his days in Kris’s arms, safe and secure and wrapped up in love. Kris’s love was the closest he’d ever felt to the love of his father. Unconditional, all-consuming, all-encompassing love.
One more mission. One more task. And then they’d go home.
When he was close enough, David saw Kris smile, his big, beaming smile, not his sly or snarky grin. The smile David saw most, or Kris only let slip when his emotions couldn’t be contained, couldn’t be suppressed. David grinned back.
The hardest part of the operation was over. Hamid was here.
For the first time, David actually believed it could really happen. They could get Bin Laden, or Zawahiri. They could end what they had begun together. They could go home, knowing they had finished what they’d promised they would.
David slowed, gravel crunching under his tires. The security team moved in slowly, weapons at the low and ready. He pulled to a stop, brakes on the ancient Afghan sedan squealing, metal shrieking against metal.
Behind him, the front gates were still up. The guards wouldn’t return until Hamid was safely inside the interrogation rooms off the command center.
“Driver, exit the vehicle,” Carl barked.
He slid out, leaving the driver’s door open, and walked away from the car. He wanted to go to Kris. Wanted to hold his hand. Wanted to be with him at this moment. The excitement, the rush that Kris must have felt for the past two weeks had finally hit him, too. Hamid fever.
This was it.
But Carl had ordered him to stand twenty feet behind the car after exiting, and he headed to his position, keeping an eye on Hamid and the front gates.
Everything had gone perfectly, according to Kris’s plan.
“Sir, exit the vehicle, slowly,” Carl barked again, this time to Hamid. He reached for the back door of the sedan and opened it for Hamid.
Hamid scooted across the bench seat and opened the opposite door.
Carl glowered. He waved to the two men on the other side of the car. They moved in, reaching for Hamid.
Hamid stepped away. “You said you would treat me well!” His head whipped around, searching. He spotted Ahmad. “You said I was a hero!”
Ahmad stepped forward, hands outstretched. “You are. Come, these are just precautions. We are friends, habibi.” He placed his hand on his heart.
“We don’t have time for this,” Carl growled. “We have to search him.”
“Hey, calm down—” Kris snapped.
“I will show you a true hero,” Hamid said. He reached into his robe—
“What the fuck is he doing?” Carl shouted. “What is he reaching for?”
“Drop your hand! Drop your hand!” Carl’s men shouted in unison. All four whipped their rifles up, fingers more than half-pressed on their triggers.
“Don’t shoot!” Ahmad bellowed! “Don’t!”
“La illaha illah Allah,” Hamid wailed.
David’s eyes flicked to Kris’s.
It was a trap. Hamid wasn’t their savior. They weren’t going home.
“No!” He shouted. He took one step, running for Kris. Kris was too close, far too close. He was inside the blast radius. “Kris—”
He never took a second step.
A burst of light blinded the world.
Hamid blew apart, his body disintegrating as the bomb he wore burst apart in every direction. A blast wave tore through the air, a bubble of flame and fury, ripping through the staging area. The car, the rusted old sedan, flipped over and over, a toy tumbling and sliding on the gravel until it came to a stop upside down, pinning what was left of Carl beneath the roof.
Carl’s team, the three others, were shredded in a scatterblast of ball bearings and nails, screws and broken glass, packed shrapnel that flew in every direction. A thousand plinks sounded, the rain of shrapnel slamming into the command center’s walls, at the same moment the thunderous boom of the detonation shook the earth, trembling the ground and the sky for two miles in every direction.
The blast wave slammed into the group waiting to receive Hamid. Eardrums burst and lungs collapsed, the impact equal to slamming a car into a brick wall at one hundred miles per hour. Everyone tumbled, blown off their feet and thrown through the air, landing in a skid of gravel and blood, tens of feet away from the blast.
Silence followed, for a moment.
Then, tiny chinks and clinks and plinks of debris hitting concrete and steel. Thunks, the larger pieces falling next. Hamid’s severed head, the only part of him to survive, fell to the ground and rolled, finally ending upside down in front of David.
David clawed forward, bloody fingers scraping through gravel as he struggled to breathe. Blood dripped from his lips, stained the rocks beneath his face. Fires raged, the car and two buildings and severed limbs burning. He could just see bodies through the heat haze, the shimmering air. Figures lying on the ground, unmoving.
“Kris—” he called, his voice choked. He coughed, his voice lost in blood pooling in the base of his throat. “Kris!” he called again, trying to drag himself forward.
Shouts rose… from behind him.
No. The gate.
It was still open.
David twisted, looking back. Men in dark clothes with black turbans covering their heads, wrapped around their faces, ran onto the base. Two trucks with a mounted machine gun in the bed screamed in behind them. Every man clutched a rifle.
They weren’t the cavalry coming to the rescue.
This was the second phase of the attack.
Al-Qaeda had planned this, everything.
Sirens rose across the base. In the distance, through the flames, David saw men racing for them, Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers.
They weren’t going to make it. Al-Qaeda was going to get to them first.
David tried to crawl, but his body was broken, his movements too slow. His ears rang, and blood kept dripping into his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. His leg wouldn’t move, and when he looked back, he saw white bone sticking out of his salwar kameez, ragged edges caught on the torn and blackened linen.
Moments, he had moments before the jihadis were on him. He could hear their shouts, their cries to Allah. The rev of the trucks’ engines. Gravel crunching beneath the tires and their boots.
A group of jihadis split off and ran for the nearest bodies. Carl’s teammates, and one of the analysts. They rolled them over, shoved their rifles in their faces. Fired.
David roared. He struggled, trying to scramble forward. Damn it, he was too far away from everyone else, too far from Kris.
More jihadis lined up and peppered the command center with shots, firing at the corrugated steel shipping container until the building looked like a cheese grater from the waist up. Everyone inside would have hit the deck as soon as the bomb went off, but al-Qaeda didn’t know that. Please, let everyone still be down, David prayed. Please, please.
Shots
fired back at the jihadis from the Special Forces soldiers and CIA reinforcements tearing across the base. They were close enough now to fight back, taking cover in the maze of buildings and shipping containers that dotted the base at the end of the runway. The jihadis’ trucks braked hard and unleashed their rifles at the reinforcements, a hail of bullets that shredded the air, the buildings. Shell casings dropped, clattering and bouncing across the gravel. A dozen rolled in front of David’s face.
“Retreat!” David heard the jihadis cry in Arabic. “Fall back!”
“Find him! Find the one!”
Fighters swarmed over the bodies nearest them, but they were pushed back by more gunfire. David tried to keep crawling, keep getting clear, but he was too exposed. Any moment, they would be on him—
This isn’t how I want to go. This isn’t how I wanted to die. Allah, would you be so cruel as to show me what my Paradise would be with Kris and then snatch it away from me? Would you be so cruel, again?
He gasped, tears and blood mixing on his cheeks, smearing on his lips.
Better me than Kris. Allah, spare Kris. Keep him alive. Let him live until he’s one hundred and twenty, until he’s had a long, glorious life. I’ll trade my life for his. In shaa Allah. In shaa Allah.
Hands grabbed his ankles, flipped him over. Pain, pure, agonizing pain, split his soul in two as his broken leg twisted, wrenched against his torn skin. He roared.
They grabbed at his clothes, his head. Forced him to look up, into a half dozen jihadi faces. “It’s him, it’s him!” three of them cried together. “Allahu Akbar! It’s him!”
Tires squealed, the trucks starting to scream away. The jihadis grabbed him by the arms and legs and ran beside the truck, passing him up to a group of men in the truck bed. He felt weightless, torn apart, every ounce of pain he’d ever felt in his whole life concentrated in his leg, in his severed bone. Bullets flew past him in both directions, the jihadis and the base soldiers firing at once. Bullets hit the truck, shredding the metal. Three jihadis fell as he was tossed in.