THE DELTAS HAD COME in from Bagram a week before. They were good soldiers, tough and experienced. But the fact that they were here at all highlighted the problems the CIA was having in the new world. After rotating for six-plus years through Afghanistan, the Delta ops had picked up the language and looks to blend in. To survive.
Meanwhile, in Islamabad, too many of the CIA’s best and brightest were still stuck in the cold war model. They rarely left the Diplomatic Enclave. They told themselves they were cultivating sources inside the ISI and the army. But from what Maggs saw, they got played by their Paki counterparts as often as not. Fezcko, his old deputy chief of station, was the only senior operative who’d gotten outside the wire and put himself in harm’s way on a regular basis.
Maggs had to admit he missed Fezcko. He missed Nawiz Khan, too, wished Khan could have come on this mission. But a month before, in July, Khan had been sent to Lahore, on the India-Pakistan border. He’d called Maggs with the news. He didn’t have to explain the reason. He was being punished for the success of the raid where they’d caught bin Zari and Mohammed.
Khan had nearly managed to avoid the backlash. His team stayed loyal to him, sticking to the story he’d devised. Only four terrorists were in the house, and all were killed during the attack. No one mentioned bin Zari or Mohammed, much less the Americans involved in the raid.
The physical evidence at the house didn’t match the story. But the Islamabad police knew better than to get involved. Truck bombs were the ISI’s turf. But anyone at the ISI who knew that bin Zari had been at the house could hardly say so, since aiding the attack he’d been planning would have been the only way to know. Khan seemed to be on the verge of escaping punishment. Then he was told of the transfer.
“Sounds like you got off okay,” Maggs said.
“Not so much, my friend. I shan’t have my men with me,” Khan said in his British accent. “Down there I can’t trust anyone.”
Maggs heard cars and trucks in the background. He wondered where Khan was. Not his house, certainly. Khan would never call Maggs from his house. “Maybe you ought to take a trip,” Maggs said. “See the States. Visa won’t be a probem.”
“Generous but entirely unnecessary,” Khan said. “How’s your leg?”
“No more marathons, but not bad,” Maggs said. He’d been lucky. The bullet had missed bone and major nerves. His doctor had promised him that if he took his rehab seriously, he could expect a full recovery. Not that Maggs needed an excuse to exercise.
“And how’s George?”
“Good,” Maggs said. “I’ll make sure he knows where you are.”
“And our friends? Have you heard anything yet?”
“Not yet. Roaches go in, but they don’t come out.”
“Roaches?”
“I promise, I hear anything, I’ll let you know. It was a wild night, wasn’t it?”
“It most certainly was.”
“Be safe down there, Nawiz. You need help, you send a flag up the pole, I’ll rustle up the cavalry, come get your ass. International incident or no.”
“I believe you would. Salaam alekeim, my friend.”
“Alekeim salaam.”
FOR THE NEXT MONTH, Maggs waded through boring assignments, managing security for a congressional delegation, overseeing the installation of new cameras inside the CIA’s floor of the embassy, bringing in two new guards. And, of course, rehabbing his leg.
Then, in mid-August, Nick Ulrich, the chief of station, was called to Kuwait for an urgent meeting. Maggs wasn’t invited, but he heard through the grapevine that the other guests were the chiefs of station from Delhi and Kabul and two lieutenant generals from Centcom. An all-star cast.
Ulrich was gone a day. When he got back, their operational pace picked up markedly. For two days in a row, Bagram ran up Predators to take out weapons caches hidden in the North-West Frontier. On the third day, Indian security forces arrested four members of Ansar Muhammad, Jawaruddin bin Zari’s old group, at a house in Delhi. And Maggs wondered if bin Zari had been broken.
The answer came the next morning, just as he was settling at his desk for his second cup of coffee. Ulrich’s secretary buzzed him.
“COS wants to see you.”
“Of course.”
Ulrich could have called, himself, but he wasn’t the type. Maggs walked down the hall, and Ulrich’s secretary waved him. Without getting up, Ulrich handed him a sheet of the blue paper used only for the most urgent messages.
“Came in this morning.”
TOP SECRET/SCI/CHARLIE BRAVO RED/COS C1 EYES ONLY
LAPTOP BURIED IN KITCHEN OF HOUSE IN DAMGHAR KALAY, SWAT VALLEY. PROVES SENIOR ISI OFFICIALS HAVE DIRECT LINKS TO PAK TERRORIST ATTACKS. ISI UNAWARE. TARGET BELIEVED UNGUARDED. CIVILIANS ONLY. LOC/ADDINTEL TO FOLLOW.
SOURCE: HUMINT (D)
R/C: 2/5
IAR
“LOC/ADDINTEL” stood for location/additional intelligence.
“HUMINT (D)” meant that the information had come from a human source, rather than an electronic intercept or another spy agency. “D” meant that the informant was a detainee.
“R” stood for the reliability of the source, “C” for corroboration. Both were scored on a scale of 1 to 5. In this case, the information was considered likely to be accurate even without independent confirmation.
And “IAR” meant immediate action required.
MAGGS HANDED BACK the cable. He had lots of questions. Why were the interrogators sure the laptop existed without independent corroboration? Had this come from bin Zari, or someone else? And why did the coding have a “Charlie Bravo” handle? Charlie Bravo meant that the note had come from Centcom through Bagram. But information from bin Zari should have run through Langley, not the military. After all, he and Fezcko were the ones who’d caught the guy.
“They broke Jawaruddin.”
“Maybe,” Ulrich said. He was in his early fifties, with a full head of thick, brown hair, a bulbous nose, and a broad, almost stately, chin. He looked like he belonged on an English estate circa 1925, chasing foxes and shooting grouse. He was far from dumb, and Maggs figured he was good in meetings with the ISI and the Pak generals. But Maggs didn’t like him, and the feeling seemed to be mutual.
“You want me to put a team together—”
Ulrich raised a hand to cut him off. “Squad’s coming from Bagram tomorrow,” he said. “Deltas.”
“Deltas?” Ulrich was notoriously turf-conscious. Yet losing this assignment didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he knew that the Deltas had a better shot at pulling off the job than his own agents. Maybe he didn’t think the laptop was important. Or maybe he’d been told the score and decided not to fight. Maggs couldn’t ask. Whatever he was thinking, Ulrich wasn’t the type to share.
“Deltas,” Ulrich said. “Six. But they’ll be detached to us for the assignment.”
“Right.” Maggs saw now. Technically, neither the Deltas nor any American military forces could operate in Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government. After all, the United States was at peace with Pakistan. Legally, anyway. But getting the approval of the Pakistani authorities for this job might be tough. We need to go up into the Swat and steal a laptop that proves you’re all terrorists. Not a problem, right?
To get around the legalities, the Deltas would be “TR”—temporarily reassigned—and handed over to the CIA, which didn’t have to follow the military’s rules, for the operation. Maggs understood the logic. But he didn’t like it. He would be running six guys he didn’t know on a job that was based on intel he couldn’t verify.
“Got it,” Maggs said. “And I’ll be in charge.”
“Correct. We’re always talking about improving cooperation with the Pentagon. Now’s your chance.”
“Thanks, boss.”
THE DELTAS ARRIVED the next day. The good news was that they were every bit as professional as Maggs expected. They understood that they wouldn’t have the usual military backup for this assignm
ent. No air support or Black Hawks to come for them if things got messy. They would get in and out quietly, or not at all.
The bad news was that they didn’t have any better read on the intel than Maggs did. They’d gotten their orders the same day as Ulrich and Maggs. Major James Armstrong, the squad’s leader, said the source wasn’t being held at Bagram.
“You’d know,” Maggs said.
“We’d know.”
More proof that this tip had come from bin Zari, Maggs thought. But why were his interrogators so sure they could trust him? Maggs wished he could talk through his concerns with Armstrong. But bin Zari’s capture remained a closely held secret. Even in Islamabad, Maggs and Ulrich were the only CIA officers who knew. So Maggs shut his mouth and went ahead trying to figure a way into that house. He would have had an easier time if the agency had decent informers in Damghar. Or anywhere in the Swat. But the CIA’s only halfway trustworthy source in the entire valley, the deputy mayor of Mingora, had fled six months before. The Taliban had set a truck tire on fire outside his house and promised him that the next time his head would be inside it. The Talibs didn’t know the mayor was an informer. If they had, there would have been no warning at all. They just didn’t like him.
As usual, Maggs and the Deltas were relying on technology to fill in the gaps. The NSA sent along a series of fifteen-centimeter-resolution satellite photos of Damghar Kalay, the target village, that showed the exact location of the house, as confirmed by the anonymous detainee. The building was squat, a single story high, forty feet long and thirty feet wide. Construction was typical for rural Pakistan, bricks poorly aligned and the rear wall bulging under the weight of the roof. A medium quake would take the whole house down. A small tractor sat in front, along with the remains of a pickup truck. A second satellite pass picked up a teenage boy and an older man standing beside the tractor, apparently trying to start it up.
Ideally, the house would have been isolated, several hundred yards from the next building. They hadn’t been that lucky. The house lay on the southern side of a one-lane cart track that dead-ended at the open fields east of the village. Homes were scattered along the track, divided by low walls. The target was about one hundred twenty feet from its nearest neighbor, far enough that they could approach without being immediately noticed but close enough that a gunshot or even a shout would attract the attention of the neighbors, and eventually of the Taliban.
To get a glimpse inside the house, the agency sent up a Predator equipped with thermal scopes. The scan—taken just before dawn, when the air was coolest and the heat gradients greatest—revealed at least five people asleep in the house, including three children. An exact count was impossible, because the house’s interior walls deflected heat in ways that couldn’t be precisely modeled.
The next day, two Deltas took a Jeep to Mingora and then Derai and Damghar for visual recon. They came back that night with mixed news. The house itself was easy enough to find. But as part of their creeping takeover, the Talibs had just imposed a midnight-to-dawn curfew on the roads around Mingora.
The curfew further limited their options. They knew they might need as much as an hour of quiet in the house to find the laptop. They’d planned an early-morning raid, figuring on catching the family in its deepest sleep, getting into the house and silencing them before they could react. Even without the curfew, the play was dicey. Anyone awake would see their vehicles. Now it seemed impossible.
They turned Maggs’s office into a war room, satellite photographs and thermal imagery on every wall. They spent a day and most of a night puzzling over the photos, considering and rejecting various plans. They debated buying Toyota pickups and black turbans and going in dressed as Taliban before deciding that the risk they’d run into real Talibs was too high. Besides, they had no way of knowing whether the family in the house was sympathetic to the Talibs, the government, or neither.
They considered taking rafts up the river, or driving up and rafting down. Aside from the fact that rafts were obvious, slow, and couldn’t be defended, the plan was foolproof. “Let’s bring a keg and make it a picnic,” Armstrong said.
At one point Armstrong suggested, more than half seriously, that they helicopter in a couple of platoons of Rangers, take over the house, shoot anyone who got close, and helicopter out when they were done.
“Great idea. What do we tell the Pak army when they discover we started a war in the Swat? ” Maggs said.
“Assuming they notice? We don’t tell them jack.”
“And when they bring in their own jets to chase us down?”
“They won’t even fight the Talibs. You think they’re going to mess with us?”
Maggs had to admit the plan had a certain simplicity. “Too bad we’re not at war with them,” he said. “It would make things so much easier.”
BUT THEY WEREN’T,and they didn’t want to go in hot, not into a house that had kids and women and most likely no Talibs at all inside. For a while, Maggs thought the mission might be impossible under the parameters they’d set.
Then he had an idea. It made him queasy. It could easily backfire. But it was the best hope, maybe the only hope, of getting inside the house without civilian casualties.
So he told Armstrong.
“That stuff works? For real?”
“Honestly, I’ve never used it myself,” Maggs said. “But I know we’ve tested it, and we say it works. And the Russians used it.”
Armstrong nodded. “That’s right. I remember. Killed a bunch of folks with it, too.”
“That they did.”
“It’s illegal.”
“Sure is. Unethical. Possibly immoral, too. Got a better idea?”
WHEN MAGGS WENT TO ULRICH,Ulrich shook his head. “This is what you have for me? After four days?”
“Sir. I’ll be glad to walk you through the options we considered and rejected.” And if you’d ever been on a mission, you might have some idea what I’m talking about.
“You believe this is your best bet.”
“Yes.”
“And Major Armstrong agrees.”
“You’re welcome to ask him yourself.”
Ulrich ran a hand through his thick black hair. “Nothing in writing,” he said finally. “If I have to sign for the stuff, I will, but nothing about what it’s for. And if it goes wrong up there, you don’t hang around. No matter what. Civ casualties, whatever.”
“Chivalrous, sir.”
“Don’t piss me off, Maggs.”
The equipment arrived the next day. Via diplomatic courier, naturally. No FedEx for this package. The questions they’d gotten from the engineers and scientists at Langley were entirely technical, about the size and layout of the target. The hypothetical and nonexistent target. Maggs had the distinct feeling nobody back home wanted to know what they were doing.
Meanwhile, the Deltas flew in a workstation from Bagram that used satellite photos to create a three-dimensional model of Damghar, the target village. The building images were schematic, but they were accurately placed and sized, giving the team a chance to practice driving through intersections that otherwise would be nothing more than lines on a map. Chris Snyder, who as team medic had the unpleasant job of using the equipment from Langley, ran through a half-dozen dry runs with it, the last three in complete darkness, before pronouncing himself satisfied.
“We really gonna do this?” Armstrong said on their second day of practice.
“Guess so,” Maggs said.
“It’s crazy, you know that, right,” Armstrong said. It wasn’t a question. “There’s tough and there’s dumb, and we’re on the wrong side of that line.”
“We don’t have to. We can tell Ulrich no.”
“The civvy risk is too high.”
“We don’t even know what’s on the laptop. If there is a laptop.”
Armstrong shook his head. “We’re going, aren’t we?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Then we best go sooner, not later. Only gett
ing worse up there. Matter of time before they start blocking roads.”
“I was thinking the same,” Maggs said. “We go tonight. Supposed to be overcast, medium rain. Good for us. It’ll keep people inside, off the roofs.”
“It doesn’t look good when we get there, I reserve the right to pull out.”
“That’s the smartest thing anybody’s said this week.”
TWO HOURS LATER, they loaded the AKs and grenades and Glocks in the trunk of the Nissan. They put the special equipment into the black bag and the bag and the bicycle into the van. Then they rolled.
By air, only eighty miles separated Islamabad and Mingora. But the drive between the cities was a four-hour dogleg through a wall of mountains, west toward Peshawar and then northeast on the grandly named N-95, a winding two-lane road cut from mountain walls.
On the way up, they got stuck behind an old school bus whose white-and-green paint couldn’t quite conceal the yellow underneath. Farmers and villagers crowded four abreast on the seats, as children stood on their laps, poking their faces out of the windows. Every inch of the roof was covered with battered trunks and green plastic buckets and tiny wire cages filled with squawking chickens. The bus edged up the side of the mountain, pouring diesel smoke, and the more Armstrong honked, the slower it went.
Finally Armstrong gunned the van’s engine and swerved around the bus, which promptly accelerated. As the van reached the bus’s midpoint, a pickup truck rounded the blind curve in front of them. In the backseat, Maggs’s stomach churned. Watching the pickup come at them was like seeing a bullet in slow motion, the road’s geography shrinking second by second.
The Midnight House Page 26