by Tal Bauer
“A video was uploaded from this location to the internet minutes ago. A jihadist video. Who uploaded that video?” The team leader was right up in the owner’s face, barking questions.
“I-I-I do not know,” the owner stammered.
“A video was uploaded from this café fifteen minutes ago! An American hostage was shown on the video! Who uploaded the video?”
The owner trembled, shrinking in the face of the team leader’s fury. “Please…”
“Who uploaded the video? Who brought the video to you?”
Shaking, the owner whispered, “Farrohk.”
“Who the fuck is Farrohk?”
The owner’s eyes squeezed closed. “He is with al-Qaeda. They are here. They are everywhere. Please, my family—”
“Where is Farrohk in this village? Where is al-Qaeda? How many are there?”
“A dozen, maybe. They are in the mosque. The mosque! Please, please, my family! My son!”
The team leader turned away, calling back to Ryan. “Be advised, target is reported to be in the village mosque. Request permission to proceed to mosque.”
“Permission granted,” Ryan responded. On-screen, the team leader radioed for his men to rally around him and pull out of the shop.
“He’s probably going to be killed, you know,” Kris croaked. “The shop owner. For talking to us.”
Ryan didn’t answer. He didn’t blink. “Let’s get them intel on the mosque. How far are they from it?”
“Half a mile, sir.” One of the drone pilots pulled up his imagery, showing the mosque relative to the position of the team. Twists and turns and alleyways led to the mosque. “They have a decent amount of ground to cover.”
“And everyone knows we’re here,” Ryan growled. “Be advised, team leader, distance to target is point four miles. Route is urban. No civilian movement detected.” The village looked like a ghost town from the Old West. “Be prepared for resistance en route.”
“Acknowledged. Moving out.”
Syed Ishaq Mosque
Alizai, Afghanistan
Nine and a half Hours After the Blast
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” Farrohk, young, new to al-Qaeda, but a teen with great promise, hissed.
He’d run down from the roof, where he’d watched the helicopter hover of the internet café and spit out the team of black-clad soldiers. He’d watched them regroup and head for the mosque, twisting down the village’s dirt roads covered in chicken shit and feathers and ducking against mudbrick walls to check for fighters on the rooflines.
“Good,” Al Jabal crowed. “Let them come.”
Wires crawled up the walls of the mosque, snaking into and out of old plastique explosives. They’d been passed around the black market for a while, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and possibly across the border from Iran, too. But now they belonged to Al Jabal, and he had the perfect use for them.
IEDs and hidden bombs were too simple. The Americans were used to those by now. Blowing off legs wasn’t enough, not anymore. He needed something big, something bold, after the CIA had murdered Salim and Suleyman with their drones.
And he’d found it, in Hamid.
The plan was as beautiful as it was simple. Turn the American intelligence system against itself.
Hungry for intelligence, for spies to spill their secrets to their drones and their hidden telephone eavesdroppers, feeding false information to the Americans was stunningly simple. All it took was a conversation over the telephone, certain to be picked up, and then Hamid feeding the same information back to his spy handler in Jordan. The apostate kingdom, allied with the Great Satan, would immediately run, like a dog to its owner, to the Americans.
And Al Jabal, with Zawahiri, had supplied exactly the right bait. What the Americans craved, hungered for most of all. Revenge. The blood of the men who had wounded them, all those years ago.
The video was easy to film, almost like making a Hollywood movie. A scene from a spy movie. They’d joked, before and after, about how their part would look in the eventual movie to be made of their successes. The film of al-Qaeda winning the war.
They thought they’d be able to blow up a car with Hamid and the CIA spies inside of it. But when Hamid was invited to the CIA base, Al Jabal realized how much larger their dreams could grow.
They could strike at the heart of the CIA’s secret border base.
They could kill so many Americans.
They could kidnap one of the CIA spies who penetrated the border, the tribal territories, almost every day. A man who called himself Dawood, who played at being a farmer searching for day labor. A man who claimed to be a Muslim, but who was working for the Americans. And that made him a dog, a traitor, a kufir. Someone to be tried by the laws of Allah and executed.
Al Jabal turned back to his hostage. The dog was huddled on the ground, bleeding. He’d taken their beating silently, not once crying out. His blood coated their fists, their boots. Stained the floor and the walls. Dripped down the shahada inscribed on the wall. It was poetic, he thought. A kufir’s blood falling from the words of the Prophet.
There is no God but God.
Camp Carson
Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
Afghanistan
Nine and a half Hours After the Blast
It took ten minutes for the team to work their way to the mosque. Nothing moved in the village. Not a soul stirred. Even the wind seemed to still, the air. Time seemed to freeze.
Again, the team spread out to all four corners of the mosque, picking four different breach points. They waited, searching for fighters, for jihadis. Surely someone would fight back. Or had al-Qaeda already fled?
“Negative on anyone leaving the mosque since you’ve been on station,” Ryan said over the radio. “We have seen flickers of movement inside the windows. Definitely active presence inside the mosque.”
“We go in strong,” the team leader transmitted to his team. “Watch your partner. Stay alive, but don’t shoot any civilians.” He heard his team click back their affirmative. “Breach on my order.” He counted down, slowly.
The burst in from all sides, two teams shattering windows and tumbling in, snaking left and right. The front and rear teams demolished the doors and dove in, weapons up and ready to fire, shouting at the top of their lungs.
“Allahu Akbar!” Gunshots rang out. Bullets whizzed past their heads.
They ducked, diving behind walls and crawling on the floor. The mosque wasn’t large. A main floor space for the male congregants, and a balcony for the women, with a rickety wooden staircase. Windows were the only source of light. A minbar rose at the rear wall for the imam to pray, to teach from. A cutout next to it led to another room.
“Eight hostiles.”
“Three on the balcony.”
“Three on the main floor.”
“No eyes on the other two.”
The team called out targets as bullets popped and snapped, cracking into the walls and whizzing through the air. The jihadis seemed to spray bullets in their direction, long bursts of automatic gunfire.
They took their time, zeroing on each fighter before popping off three quick shots.
“One down.”
“One down.” A body dropped from the balcony above, hitting the mosque floor like a dropped watermelon.
Across the mosque, a fighter raced for the doorway behind the minbar. Shots followed his footsteps, chasing him, but he ducked into the darkness and skittered away.
They tried to follow. More shots rang out, chipping at the mudbrick beside their heads and pinning them back in place.
“They’re here! They’re inside the mosque!” Farrohk, breathless, slid to a stop in front of Al Jabal.
“Good. You know what to do.” Al Jabal passed Farrohk his rifle and held out a videotape. Farrohk took the tape and nodded. “Bismillah.”
“Allahu Akbar, brother,” Al Jabal grinned. He pointed to the bloody lump on the ground. “Now, help me move him.”
“Do you smell that?”
Kris’s heart seized.
“Smoke. Something’s burning.” The soldier coughed. “Fuck, it stinks.”
He tried to drag in another breath, tried to keep standing. Everything inside of him wanted to collapse, wanted to scream and wail and jump into the monitor, leap into the fight and run to David. Fight with his bare hands, run through the bullets, tear apart the mosque until he found David. Bring him back.
“The smoke is coming from the back room.”
“We have to get back there, now.”
“Fuck this,” the team leader growled. “Grenade!” He tossed a grenade toward the last of the fighters, clustered together behind the minbar. The team ducked, and seconds later, the minbar exploded in a burst of light and sound, wood and brick flying through the air. Debris pelted the team, bursts of hail battering the command center over the radio. Kris flinched.
The gunshots had ceased. Silence filled the mosque.
The team rose. On-screen, black, thick smoke hung in the air, crawling up the walls and undulating along the ceiling. “We’ve got thick, dark smoke,” the team leader called. “It reeks. Something terrible is burning.”
No. No, no, no, no. Kris’s thoughts devolved to one word. A litany, a prayer, over and over. No. No. No.
Slowly, the team moved through the mosque, coughing with each step. The video feed grew darker, hazier. Obscured.
“Moving to the rear room now.”
Footsteps, in the smoke. Gunshots. Cursing.
“Allahu Akbar!” More gunshots, and a man rushing toward the team, in the center of the video feed.
“Fuck!” the team fired back, striking the jihadi in the center of the chest, peppering him with shot after shot. He staggered, a puppet dancing on strings, and collapsed.
“Sir!” The camera shot to one of the soldiers, standing near a billowing cloud of smoke emanating from the trunk of a car. Someone had driven a small hatchback into the mosque and parked it. A tarp covered the front, and part of the mosque’s broken wall. A hidden access point.
The team leader crept toward the car, toward the smoke.
No, no, no, no, no. Burning tears cascaded down Kris’s cheeks, fell from the ends of his eyelashes. His heart was a black hole, sucking all of his hope into a terrible darkness. His wedding ring weighed a thousand pounds. David’s lips lingered on the back of his neck, on his shoulder, a ghost kiss, a prelude, a prophecy. No, no, no, no, no.
The camera attached to the team leader’s helmet angled down. A hand swept through the black smoke. White-hot flames rose from a fire raging inside the trunk. The ends of rockets, of dynamite, poked out of the conflagration.
And, a hand. A foot. Blackened and burned. But, recognizable.
A human body.
“Sir! The place is rigged to blow! We have to get out!” The panicked voice of another team member broke over the radio. The camera jerked away, the team leader panning the walls. Finding the wire. Tracing them to the explosives.
“Everybody out, now, now!”
“No!” Kris shrieked. “You have to get David! You have to save him! Pull him out! Pull him out!”
“Evac, now, move!” Boots running. The smoke fading. “Go! Now!”
“No! No!” Kris screamed. “Go back! Get David! Get him!”
Ryan’s arms grabbed him, held him in a bear hold from behind. “Kris, he’s gone. He’s already—”
“Sir—”
A rumble began, and then a burst of light erupted over the screen.
The radio went dead.
Chapter 23
Kabul, Afghanistan
Four Days After the Blast
A void in the shape of David’s smile hovered in the center of Kris.
The act of breathing took too much effort. Inhaling, letting his cells fill with life-giving oxygen, was agonizing. The pain of living, the anguish of carrying on.
He couldn’t see. His eyes were unfocused, his mind’s eye fixed on the memory of a burned-black body in the bottom of a trunk, silhouetted through billowing smoke.
He didn’t know how he was still living. Wasn’t it impossible to live without a heart? How then was he still walking, still breathing? Shouldn’t the freedom of death come for him? Shouldn’t he be gone already? Shouldn’t he be waking in David’s arms, somewhere where they could finally be together?
Why was he still living? He didn’t want to be alive, not now, not after that. Not after seeing what lay beneath the smoke.
He deserved to die. He deserved to die a thousand times. All the thousands of lives lost on September 11. And more. Add in the loss of life in Iraq. The civilians killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And David.
He deserved to die for all of them, over and over again. Like Prometheus, he should be chained to a rock and devoured, day in and day out, for the foolish hubris of thinking he could change anything at all, make any difference in the world.
Everything he’d done, everything he’d tried to do, had only brought death. Death and ruin.
David…
He bowed his head. He couldn’t cry, not anymore. Every tear he’d ever cried in the length of his life had been wept already, spilled down his cheeks and into rivers that ran through his fingers. His wails had unset his broken ribs, his screams had made one of his bones puncture his lung. Ryan had to carry him out of the command center, restrain him, pin him against a wall as he shrieked like he’d been torn in two.
He had. Half his soul had just been ripped out of him.
Wherever you are, be happy. Be with your father. Find the peace you longed for in this world. I’m so sorry you met me. I’m sorry you loved me. I’m sorry I killed you.
“Caldera?” Somewhere, far away, someone was trying to speak to him. He heard the voice like it was coming from a dream, warbling and distant, like a megaphone underwater.
It had been four days since he’d seen through the smoke. Four days since the mosque had blown as the team was trying to escape, a remote detonator set off by someone on the outside. The drones hadn’t seen any cars speeding away from the village. Someone nearby, someone watching.
The rubble had buried the team for three hours, until a second QRF team dispatched from the base was able to dig through and extract the soldiers. Four were seriously injured. The Pakistanis were outraged, telling the world of the Americans’ violation of their borders and of the destruction of the mosque. No matter how many times they said it had been blown by al-Qaeda, the public believed the Americans had detonated it. Protests raged in front of the US Embassies in Islamabad and Kabul.
The last man the team had shot inside the mosque, in the room with the burning car, was a young man the locals had identified as Farrohk. He’d been shot twenty-one times, destroying a videotape he’d carried in his jacket, over his chest. The mosque falling down on him had crushed the tape further, destroying most of it. Portions were recovered, inches of film that could be restored and viewed.
David’s trial. His crimes against Islam, against Allah, read aloud by Al Jabal.
All in all, the recovered tape was a little under two minutes, but it was two minutes of the end of David’s life.
Kris watched it and puked, wailed.
Farrohk was probably supposed to take the video to be uploaded to the internet. He was probably supposed to escape, the analysts said. But since he hadn’t, and the Americans had recovered it, the tape would never see the light of day. David’s last moments wouldn’t be broadcast for all to see, for some to gloat over. His memory, at least, would find peace.
There would be no peace for Kris. Never, ever again.
“Caldera?” Again, the voice.
Ryan. Ryan was trying to talk to him. Kris focused, trying to draw back to the world. It was like plunging into a river, diving headlong from a cliff. Reality rushed at him, ice-cold and shocking.
Everything was real. Everything he feared was right there.
David was gone.
“Kris…” R
yan sighed and scrubbed both hands over his face. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
He’d been in Kabul for three days. Ryan had dragged him back to the CIA station and put him in the embassy hospital. After a day, he was discharged and put in embassy quarters. He’d been left, abandoned, since. Until Ryan’s summons to the CIA station, and to the station chief’s office.
Ryan spoke stiffly, chewing on his words. “I have to formally censure you for this. This… entire thing,” he sighed. “The Hamid operation has blown up in our faces. Congress has already started an inquiry. The director has launched his own internal investigation. Everything is pointing one direction.” He stared.
“It’s all my fault,” Kris breathed. “All of it.”
“They’re going to focus on the planning, the prep. How much you vetted Hamid. How much you knew and didn’t know, and how much you assumed.”
“You were there, Ryan,” Kris breathed. “We knew next to nothing.”
Ryan looked away.
“We all wanted it so badly,” he whispered again. “We were starving for this. Desperate for it to work. Everyone was. Not just me.”
David’s fears, his words of caution, came back to Kris. You were right. You were always right.
“I am relieving you of your command,” Ryan choked out. “And you’re being removed from the counterterrorism division. Immediately.”
“What?” Counterterrorism was everything he’d ever done. Everything he knew. He and David had dedicated their lives to the fight. David had been taken from him by the men he hunted. No, he had to stay. He had to continue the fight. Avenge David. At the end of the day, what else did he have left?
There was nothing else. No hope, no home, no love. His heart was gone, shredded, turned in on itself until it was a black hole. All he had left was vengeance. “CT is my life. It’s everything I do, everything I know!”
“Everything you know got fourteen people killed, and more seriously injured.”