There’s not a breath of air in the back of the truck. The sun beats down on it with furious intensity. Turning the insides into a kiln.
The CIA station chief has flagged too. Hell, he’s not even smoking. Just hunched morosely in a director-style fold-up chair with his head in his hands. Asleep? His bald head prickles with sweat. Faithful Jahanghir continues to peer through a periscope arrangement. Waiting for who knows what.
Ackerman leans back. ‘Bill. It’s not that I’m not enjoying myself. It’s been a blast, really has . . . but what happens now?’
His voice grumbles through his clenched fists. ‘Leave a guy to die in frigging peace.’
She can’t think of a retort. Too flaked out.
The CIA file on General Ali Mahmood Khan lies within reach, so Ackerman crosses her legs to sit down on the floor. A bottle of water on her lap.
She flicks through the pages. There’s a sequence of CIA cables stamped TOP SECRET. She skim-reads each of Lamayette’s reports back to Langley and realises she’s reading the case against General Khan.
It boils down to straightforward embezzlement. The Defense Department had run a programme with the Pakistan military called the Coalition Support Funds. Worth just over a billion US dollars annually since late 2001, CSF is designed to put some backbone into the Pakistan armed forces. Pay them to take on the al-Qaeda and Taliban-style radicals that are hopscotching back and forth across the lawless mountains that separate eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.
By working his contacts within the Islamabad embassy and the Pakistan military, Lamayette had uncovered a funding hole of staggering proportions. (An alleged hole, Langley kept pointing out in reply cables.) In the tribal areas of Pakistan there had been almost no military activity for several years now after former president Musharraf signed what would prove to be an unworkable peace treaty with tribal elders. Ackerman remembers hearing President Hannah encouraging a new version of that same plan, saying, We must be brave enough to give peace a chance.
However . . . Lamayette’s analysis showed that even though the Pakistan military had been stood down, the invoices kept coming. Reimbursements for supplies, wear and tear on equipment, transport, fuel and logistical costs, per diems for soldiers from the lowliest private all the way up to theatre commanders. In a separate tranche of funding, the US was also paying for the construction of new garrisons and army posts in the tribal areas, complete with barbed wire and bunker material.
Yet. According to Lamayette’s cables, none of this was happening: no army manoeuvres, no garrison-building. Nothing. (‘Allegedly none of this has happened,’ a CIA finance officer had corrected. No. Not Allegedly, You Incompetent Halfwit, Lamayette had reply-cabled, breaking a thousand rules on government communications and mutual respect for fellow officers.)
To prove his point, Lamayette’s reply included coordinates for a dozen garrisons in and around the tribal areas that Islamabad had invoiced Washington for, and which just did not exist. On the from-above satellite shots there was some activity on the ground, but from-the-ground photos and video referencing the exact same GPS coordinates showed nothing more than some land cleared, brush cut back and a lot of camouflage netting. A modern-day Potemkin village.
And the person in charge of the Pakistan Army in the tribal areas through this whole period? . . . General Ali Mahmood Khan. The total amount invoiced over thirty months of make-work: $247 million.
So that’s what this is all about. A quarter of a billion dollars. In Pakistan. In General Khan’s hands. Wow.
It pains her to think further. The only thing skipping through her mind is that age-old warning she’d learnt on her first deployment: ‘You’ll never buy the loyalty of a Pashtun. But they’re pretty straightforward to rent.’
A quarter of a billion dollars bought a lot of leasehold . . .
Her brain too frazzled to unravel any more of this ghastly tack, she flicks on through the file. Looking at the black-and-white pictures of Khan’s family.
Eldest son Hamza does indeed look like a tortured wretch. Rake thin and an arrogantly sneering gaze. Someone happy to pay for soothing advice. Shafiq too is everything Bill described, plump and furtive. Wholly unattractive in a grubby, porcine fashion. She could see him as an elaborately bejewelled eunuch in the court of Caesar, a paid motor-mouth.
She closes her eyes. Concentrates on the little bursts of red at the edges of her vision. Breathes out . . .
Dammit.
Why is Hamza not here?
Dammit! Where are you, Hamza?
Startled, she glances around nervously. Not certain if she’d spoken those words out loud, or just thought them. How embarrassing. By the light of the cabin’s two bulbs she sees Lamayette still immobile, and Jahanghir still craning with his shiny tubular eyepiece.
But something has changed. And she’s too rational and self-aware to walk away. For the first time, this State Department officer has crossed the line. She believes. That’s right: Believes Lamayette. Wants him more than anything else in the world to be right.
Good Lord, Kirsten, she chides herself, is this Stockholm Syndrome? Too much time with your captors; Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army . . .
No. It’s not. Just plain old-fashioned fear, she realises. And the knowledge of what these ancient people are capable of. Washington had paid out the money, but the money was never spent. Yet the money must have gone somewhere. And it was Lamayette’s assertion that until they knew where the money was, how to sequester it somehow, it was too risky to take out General Khan. To do that was to invite major retribution . . .
It makes so much sense. Pashtun, like the general, live for their vengeance, in whatever shape or form they can take it.
She has her hands clasped together. Imploring. Praying for the first time since the night of her seventeenth birthday: Oh God. Please deliver Hamza to us.
Please.
Operation Macchar, twenty hours to go
By the Swat River
Malakand District
Two and a half hours by truck north of Peshawar
A hiss of airbrakes, whooping and shouting, and the tow truck has reversed into place. It’s past nine in the evening. It’s eighteen hours since Tickle and the Ford Expedition were exploded, and fifteen hours since they started surveillance on the madrasa, hoping for sight of General Khan’s son Hamza.
A posse of scruffy foot soldiers from the madrasa have come for another nose around, this time with flashlights. Getting in a steam over some detail of tow-truck etiquette, flapping their arms, clutching their Kalashnikovs.
Already, thick, looped chains are fastened under the Bedford’s sheared-off axle. The venerable truck, hiding Bill Lamayette, Kirsten Ackerman and Jahanghir, is nearly ready to be winched up high.
And in their secret cabin inside, the feelings range through stir crazy, exhausted, washed out, bereft. Still no sign of Hamza . . .
Jahanghir’s tinny little radio makes clear that the Lamayette death story continues to lead all the Pakistan radio bulletins. The BBC and Voice of America had led with ‘uncorroborated’ reports of the CIA bureau chief’s violent demise. Vengeful versions of his assassination pulse regularly over the SMS text network with gleeful elaborations, how his severed head went bouncing off like a golf ball down the Khyber Road . . . all well and good, except that by Lamayette’s calculations his ‘corpse’ should be almost in Germany by now. Once there, it would take no more than half an hour to work out this was no human body. Surely Washington would deliberately leak that information, if only to try to spike the guns of those claiming to have got one over on the CIA. That would be the moment Lamayette’s ruse would be blown. Postscript: he’d probably be heading for jail, certainly out of a job. This would be a first even in the Agency’s long history of employing complicated head-strong individuals.
So. Time is close to run-out on this caper and the next words are a big surprise, cutting through his anguish. ‘I want to stay with you, Bill.’
&n
bsp; Jahanghir’s eyes, still glued to his surveillance eyepiece, widen with pleasure. As I said it would be, so it is . . . Gently bobbing his head in appreciation of her tender feelings for his boss.
‘Listen, sweets . . .’ Lamayette doesn’t even look at her, he’s putting handfuls of detachable box magazines for his AK74 into a double gymbag slung around his neck. ‘The best thing you can do is sit your tush in the embassy in Islamabad. If we get a hit, I need someone there . . . I need someone to get in front of Ambassador Zoh. Someone batting for our side. It’s the only way to get Zoh on the big phone to the president . . .’
‘But Bill . . . what are you going to do?’
Outside, there’s a sudden definite jump in the intensity of chatter. An ululation. Someone coming. Ackerman strains to hear the Pashto cries. Sounds of excitement, not danger. Jahanghir is bent over his periscope, swivelling to the left and right, tracking. The tension spikes through his long, muscled back. Like an electric charge.
He pulls back from the lens piece. Wipes his hand across his eyes. Looks again.
When he turns to face them, there is a beaming smile across his mouth. Unrestrained joy . . . ‘Hamza’s car. Range Rover.’ He mops a line of sweat from his top lip. ‘Very definitely, Mr Bill.’
Like Bambi, Lamayette bounces excitedly to the wall space by his trusted driver, grabs up the lens. Jahanghir gives Ackerman a discreet wink and thumbs-up.
The CIA chief snatches a cigarette from behind his ear. It’s in his mouth by the time he pulls back from the periscope.
‘We need to buy some time here. Jahanghir. Get one of your cousins to let down a tyre. Front axle. Slow leak sort of a thing. Quick smart, old friend.’
Jahanghir’s smile reaches its apex. ‘Very good, Mr Bill.’
The Bedford and its tow truck are sitting to one side of the unpaved road that leads past the madrasa guardhouse down to a ford across a Swat river tributary. Hamza Khan’s supercharged V8 Range Rover Vogue just manages to squeeze past.
It’s a damned tight fit. Concern that the 4×4’s expensive grey bodywork may get scraped prompts Hamza to power down his darkened window, and poke his beakish nose into the light spilling from the back of the tow truck.
‘That’s the bastard,’ yips Lamayette, back at the lens, watching proceedings. Also noted, Hamza is travelling with a driver and five other bodyguards. All heavily armed.
The Range Rover slowly eases past the Bedford, the run-flat wheels crunching on the gravel. Ahead of them, a group of bandolier-wearing guards are making a big performance of escorting the car along the road and towards the madrasa. Big Man come to pay a visit.
Various cameras hidden within the superstructure of the CIA truck give a night-vision feed of Hamza’s procession grinding its way from the guardhouse towards the two-storey religious school. Easing uncomfortably along the approach road.
As Lamayette watches, the truck’s trapdoor opens and one of Jahanghir’s cousins fires off a quick update. The coast is clear. Let’s get to work . . .
Lamayette breaks open the aluminium carry-box of his CIA listening device, passing six curved panels to the cousin outside the trapdoor to click together into its parabola shape, like a vast wok. Jahanghir arranges the rest of the electronics. The listening device works up to five hundred yards. By their reckoning they would just be inside that envelope: the school being four hundred yards away and Pir Durbar’s small house a further fifty beyond that. Still within line of sight from the Bedford, but to the left of the madrasa, nearer the river and the glades of pine and olive trees. Inside Pir Durbar’s house, the walls and floors had been plastered with cow dung. No pictures, no ornaments. Just a homespun carpet, two lumpy cushions for visitors to sit on, and a low writing table.
Before resuming watch through the lens piece Lamayette pins up mugshots of the two people they want: Hamza, his angular features and disdainful far-away eyes, and Pir Durbar, the holy man.
It’s the first time Ackerman has a picture with which to make real her thoughts about the holy man. In the close-up he is standing in front of an old taxi, a marketplace somewhere, wearing a typical kurta top and dhoti, tied off like a lungi. Gandhi-style. He looks perhaps fifty and slightly built. His hair is short, almost crew-cut, but what staggers Ackerman is the flowing beard, a thick semicircle of white thatching extending from ear to ear like a primitive headdress. Also distinctive, the widest-frame glasses she’s ever seen. With a wood-effect fascia, as if to suggest that in this splendid isolation he had handcrafted them himself. Their ultra-thick lenses give his pupils a demonic out-of-this-world size.
Ackerman glances at the night-vision feed that’s now playing on the rigged-up monitor. Lamayette, working the lens, squeezes into close-up on Hamza and Pir Durbar embracing in the driveway of the school. A couple of assistants wait near by holding kerosene lamps. And behind them is an embankment of heavily watered lawn studded with a thousand small rocks that spell out in Arabic a Koranic verse: God admits those who believe and lead a righteous life into gardens with flowing streams. As for those who disbelieve, they live and eat like the animals eat, and end in the hellfire.
*
Lamayette sits cross-legged in the cabin watching the TV monitor; a locked-off wide shot of the school compound. Annoyed with himself yet again that he’d not mastered the Pashto language. Smoking. Flicking irritably at the ash-stains on his salwar kameez trousers. Thirty-two minutes of surveillance now. Into the red zone.
On top of the Bedford the curves of the parabolic dish continue to suck in the tiniest sound waves from the dimly lit hut, drawing them into the hypersensitive microphone.
Outside, Jahanghir has a pair of headphones and a notepad, scribbling down a rough translation of the chitchat between Pir Durbar and Hamza. Kirsten Ackerman stays within the cabin, but does the same thing. Different pair of headphones, different recording device. Both of them scrolling back and forth in case they miss something or need to double-check.
Two separate audio feeds. That’s the key.
The CIA station chief’s fear is that, in their enthusiasm, Jahanghir and Ackerman would contaminate one another if they worked in the same room, listened off the same source recording: confirmation bias, selective intelligence, the Noble Lie, call it what you will.
The trapdoor tilts up behind Lamayette. Jahanghir. Frowning and a little ragged. ‘Time to go, Mr Bill. The guards come from house. This tyre has been changed almost twenty minutes. Trouble if we stay.’
Lamayette’s vast shoulders and stomach sink. He’s right, of course: this was no place for an armed engagement. They’d be hopelessly outgunned and even if they prevailed, so what? It would simply alert Hamza, and they’d be stuck out in this vast Yankee-hating wildness, certainly with no friends for hundreds of miles.
So. Reluctantly he nods his assent. ‘Wait . . . tell me . . .’ and he screws up his face like he’s sucking a lemon, desperate not to hear bad news. ‘Anything?’
Jahanghir swallows hard on his Adam’s apple, distraught. ‘Bits and pieces, Mr Bill. I think, only little pieces. No smoky gun.’
Crap. He drums his head against the wall. ‘No smoking gun,’ he corrects, under his breath.
He turns to Ackerman, whose eyes are closed in tight concentration, one hand pressing the headphones tightly against her ear. She scribbles furiously, turning over a page, and as she does so, he catches her eye. Makes the universal finger-waggling signal that they’re packing up.
She shrugs unhappily. A look that says she too only has some inconsequential bits and pieces. It’s still . . . no smoking gun. And yes, she understands, they must leave.
Quick breakdown of the listening-device parabola, while Lamayette reminds himself to put on hold those heroic welcome-back plans. The ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan’s Financial District. He’d been working out a few delicious details in his head: President Hannah trotting behind his open-top limo wearing nothing but a dog collar, and Ambassador Zoh pole-dancing on the hood. Crap.
That would’ve been a hell of a show.
Fifteen minutes later and all three of them are leaning against the back wall of their cramped cabin, Lamayette in the middle. The day’s third, or was it fourth, great spike of adrenalin has eked away, leaving a terrible hangover, a hollow numbness in which their minds moon around listlessly. To make things gloomier, they can feel the Bedford being towed with its rear axle aloft, tilting the cabin almost forty-five degrees. Out of kilter with the floor, bumping into every pothole, it feels like the inside of a doomed spacecraft.
Jahanghir’s notes are in Pashto so mean nothing to Lamayette. Instead he’s holding Ackerman’s pad, deciphering the frantic scribbles by the glow of two precariously swinging drop-lights.
Lamayette heaves a great, shaking sigh from the depths of his stomach. Almost hoarse by now, his voice pleads, Let’s go over this one more time: ‘Fruits and frigging nuts. Hand-pounded rice . . . that’s like half of what they talk about.’
Silence. As the truck judders particularly badly, the icebox loosens, slides intermittently down the tilted floor towards them.
Ackerman has her head in her hands. Frustrated. ‘This holy man has a really big thing about roughage, bowel movements in general. I don’t know what more to say, Bill. Perhaps it’s just a straightforward health consultation . . .’
Jahanghir chips in. ‘Ms Kirsten is right: Hamza complaining very much about gas, sharp pains in stomach.’
‘I must be going mad, I can’t believe this . . .’ Lamayette feels as if a shiny metal band is being tightened around his skull. ‘Maybe this poopie-pants, Special K-stuff is code for something else.’
Like all CIA field operatives, Lamayette has taken basic coursework on matters alimentary: how to use a Bristol Stool Chart to get a chambermaid to help give the literal low-down on the health of some prime minister or president. He knows, for example, that a stool sample tested for a pathogen like Candida is a quick way to prove that somebody’s receiving treatment for cancer.
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