A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  “Like I said, my cover was blown getting you out anyway, so I guess I can tell you.”

  He didn't get around to letting me in on his secret for a little while longer. We'd reached a treacherous part of the road cut into the side of an almost vertical granite face. We dismounted and walked the animals across. My traveling companion had to help me down. I couldn't move—my body had locked up solid.

  “As I was about to say, I am Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Wassad, at your service,” he said as we mounted up again with what I hoped was the most dangerous section behind us.

  “Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” I said through frozen lips burning with cold.

  “I was U.S. Army infantry, then U.S. Army intelligence, then CIA, then, hell, now I'm not sure what or who I am. Someone in a back room somewhere found out I had American-Afghan parents, could speak Pashtu and a fair smattering of Dari, worshipped in the Islamic faith, and did pretty well at West Point. Before I knew what was going on, I was given a whirlwind course in spycraft at Langley, then counterterror at Quantico, and rotated into Afghanistan.

  “Three months after that, I'm working deep cover as a schoolteacher in a town up north in the heart of the Pashtun region, saying all the right things about what a great idea jihad is. Two months later, I'm recruited by a remnant of the Taliban. I join the band, and go touring. Over the past six months we've played up and down the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking for action, but not too much action, because the people I'm with at least have the good sense not to go head-to-head with coalition forces. Hit-and-run stuff, mostly. I've done some bad things in the name of this mission… then you drop in and make life difficult.”

  “Why difficult?”

  “Because you arrive a couple of days before Bin Laden.”

  “What?” I was so surprised, even my donkey stopped.

  “Yeah, the unexpected guest I mentioned—the man himself.”

  “Jesus.” The donkey snorted and moved off.

  “He just walked into town out of nowhere—him and twenty other al Qaeda heavy hitters. I recognized a lot of them.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Don't you remember? He paid you a visit. He looked right into your face. You laughed at him.” He chuckled. “They didn't like that. They were going to cut your head off in the morning.”

  Christ, my memory was in serious sleep mode, but al-Wassad had just given it a massive jolt. I suddenly put the friendly face and the name together. I'd seen so many pictures of Bin Laden that he was intensely familiar, like a Hollywood or TV star is familiar. In my weakened, addled state, I'd thought I knew him like a buddy rather than as Osama Bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda, Emperor of Terror, Sultan of Slaughter, King of Killers, Monarch of Murderers, Serious Thorn in Three Presidential Asses, et cetera and so on.

  “So now,” Lieutenant al-Wassad continued, “I've got a stack of problems. The guy we've spent trillions looking for is having hot tea with the imam down the road, and I have no means of contacting anyone to tell them about it because, of course, I have no means of communicating with the outside world.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the batteries on the Ericsson R390 satellite phone would have run out six months ago. There's no means of charging them out here. And then there's the fact that I never deployed with one in the first place, because I'd have kept my head about five minutes if the Taliban had found me on it chatting to Washington. So, the only way to get word out is to do it in person, on foot. And then there's you. I can't just walk out of the place and leave you behind, because, pure and simple, they're gonna kill you at sunup.”

  “We need to get in contact with SOCOM,” I said. “And in a hurry.”

  “Yeah. Only two problems with that. One, we're going as fast as we can, and two, Bin Laden isn't going to hang around where we last saw him. When they trip over the dead guard, find you gone and me missing, and discover they're eight legs short in the transport department, they're going to smell a rat. And they're going to run.”

  “Hmm…” Of course al-Wassad was right, only, as far as I knew, this was the first time in many years someone other than those within Bin Laden's inner circle knew for certain, down to the square mile, where he was holed up. It was information one side would die to have, and the other would die to keep secret.

  We'd just about reached the valley floor, a deep gash in the surrounding walls of granite and basalt filled with new snow, tendrils of cloud, scree, and capillary-sized rivulets. I didn't know much about horses and donkeys, but I knew ours were tired and hungry. Soon we were going to ask them to carry us over a mountain and we couldn't afford to have them go lame on us.

  I was about to suggest we stop, even if only just fifteen minutes to give them a rest, when there was sudden movement all around us. Our animals skittered and wheeled about, snorting and grunting, wild-eyed with fright. Men covered in snow with occasional splashes of tan and gray camouflage had popped up seemingly out of the ground, surrounding us. Their M4s were raised to their shoulders, trigger fingers twitching. I recognized the brown-and-tan flag patches on a couple of shoulders not covered in snow, on account of it was also my flag. Some advice I was once given in this part of the world popped into my head: “Either you dress like an American soldier, or you're a target.” We'd walked right into an ambush and, with the pakool caps and dark blue cloaks over the padded jackets and salwar kameez, we were probably looking a hell of a lot like a couple of bull's-eyes. One of the soldiers, a lieutenant whose face was blue with cold, shouted, “Odriga! Lasona jakra. Kanh zadi walm Aspai!” I did the rough translation in my head: “Stop or I'll shoot, loathsome smelly dog!”

  I did as I was told, and al-Wassad followed my lead. I said, loud and clear, “I am Special Agent Vin Cooper, a major in the United States Air Force. This man is a lieutenant in U.S. Army Intelligence.” One of the soldiers spurted a load of brown chewing-tobacco-stained saliva onto the snow at his feet.

  Those M4s didn't waver an inch.

  A lieutenant answered, “Yeah, and I'm Snow White and these are my seven dwarfs.” He suddenly pointed his weapon at the clouds and his dwarfs followed suit.

  “So which one's Dopey?” I asked.

  “That'd be Stephenson,” said one of the men with a snigger.

  “Shove it, dipshit,” came the reply.

  The men relaxed a little, though most still eyed al-Wassad and me with suspicion. The lieutenant removed a glove and searched in a thigh pocket. He pulled out a small pad. Checking it, he said, “You say your name was Vin Cooper?”

  “And still is,” I replied.

  “You look pretty beat up, sir,” he pointed out.

  “I'm not a morning person.”

  “You were involved in the raid on Phunal.”

  It wasn't a question. “I was, but I didn't quite make it. You guys Airborne?” I asked.

  Someone spat.

  “Rangers, sir. We were supposed to rendezvous with you and the SAS assault team. We've been out a few times looking to run into you guys, in case any of you survived. We've got a Global Hawk UAV up there working the border—picked you up coming across the pass.”

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “we have vital information and we need SOCOM to hear it. You packing comms?”

  “Latest and greatest, sir.”

  As he spoke, I heard the deep flat snarl and thrum of a large helo making its way through the hills.

  “That's our transport, Major. We're heading back to Bagram and a hot shower. And with respect, sir, you sure could use one.”

  * * *

  The helicopter banked sharply around a wall of blue ice clinging to a sheer granite face. We were so close I was pretty sure the rotor tips were going to raise sparks against the rock.

  Through my headphones came the voice of a colonel who was probably sitting in a nice warm room at Bagram Airbase. “You positively identified Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri?” He sounded like a man who'd just been told he'd won the lottery—thrilled on the one hand, di
sbelieving on the other.

  “Yes, sir,” said al-Wassad. “I can even give you his cell phone number.”

  “You what… ? Tell me this ain't no crank call, soldier.”

  “I've got a witness here, sir, a Special Agent with OSI—Major Vin Cooper.”

  I gave the lieutenant a reassuring thumbs-up.

  The colonel sounded like he was talking from a mouth occupied by a fat cigar. “You got who there with you?”

  “Special Agent Vin Cooper, sir.”

  Lieutenant al-Wassad gave the astonished colonel a quick overview.

  “Son, if you're right about this, they'll give you a ticker tape parade from LA to Times Square and name a street after you in every goddamn town in between. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Shee-it! You wanna give me those coordinates? Did you say you had Bin Laden's phone number?”

  Al-Wassad reeled off map reference numbers while the chopper copilot showed me on a ground map display that the village I'd been held in was ten or so miles inside the Pakistan border. I wasn't sure what the Army would be able to do with the information, but, now that they had it, I was equally sure they wouldn't sit on their hands with it.

  The Black Hawk was old and noisy and shook like a jalopy in serious need of a wheel balancing. I glanced out the door at the walls of snow-laden granite flashing past. The old nerves were chained to a metaphorical ringbolt set in the wall with a bucket on the floor. Surviving the fall from the C-17 had given me a whole new perspective on flying.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Two weeks after I arrived back in Washington, I took the bandages off my hand. I removed them in the bathroom down the hall from the briefing room at the Pentagon. I didn't want anyone there thinking I was incapacitated in any way. I checked myself in the mirror. “You've still got it,” I said to my reflection as I straightened my tie, and indeed my face was looking less like a ruined piece of fruit with every passing day. If an attempt was going to be made to put things right, I didn't want to be sidelined. Butler and I, to use a euphemism I never liked much, needed closure.

  Apparently, this Pentagon briefing I'd been summoned to had followed two others with the President, the SecDef, the SecState, the Chief of Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the heads of CIA and the FBI, the British Ambassador, British military attachés, various military ops personnel, and so on. A course of action had been decided on and now, presumably, the talking was done. Everyone was in a hurry.

  I'd seen yesterday's Post, and a couple of reports on CNN revealed that a chunk of the detail was already in the public domain: A renegade British SAS soldier had apparently run amok and killed a number of his own countrymen, as well as U.S. personnel and Pakistanis. He'd also destroyed several millions of dollars' worth of C-17 aircraft. The press wanted to know why coalition forces were conducting operations inside Pakistan. Parallels were being drawn with the CIA operating in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. As yet, the media didn't know why all this had happened, but I was sure everyone in the briefing room knew they'd find out eventually. Someone somewhere would get sick of not being able to sleep or eat with the pressure of The Truth burrowing into them like a tick and would then breathe the clues to “the wrong person.” The trail would eventually lead back to the disaster at the Transamerica and Four Winds buildings in San Francisco, and forward to the reality that Pakistan intended to leave India a black smoking hole in the ground, and perhaps set off a global nuclear war in the process. In all of this, the murders of Hideo Tanaka and Ruben Wright wouldn't rate a mention.

  In the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Henry Howerton, Operation Warlord had been a cluster fuck of monumental proportions, rivaling the disastrous Tehran hostage crisis of three decades ago. Rumor had it the President was sitting in his office with the door locked, sucking his thumb.

  At the moment, though, the media was diverted from the investigative angle by the political fallout: The revolutionary Pakistani government was demanding an apology as well as financial compensation and reparations, and had moved every unit in its Army up to the border with India; the United Nations General Assembly was screaming about U.S. and British imperialism and laying blame for what appeared to be snowballing into a global catastrophe; the Russians and Chinese were exerting the usual pressure for loans and trade deals if a full censure in the UN Security Council was to be avoided.

  All this made me think back to the original JOPES where the political situation in Pakistan had already been likened to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Someone who got paid a lot more than I did should have read the signs and pulled way back, maybe taken a different approach.

  In the briefing, intelligence assessments held that Butler and Dortmund had snatched Boyle and simply driven off on the Ski-Doos—not to Afghanistan as planned, but to India. From there, the trail had gone cold. Why? Because, the experts believed, Butler was out scouting for a buyer for Boyle's secrets. No one in the briefing room asked what those secrets might have been—if you didn't already know, you weren't supposed to know. I wondered how many of the people sitting at that table actually did know about Boyle's meltdown bug.

  I figured that with twenty years in the military serving all around the world, Butler's little black book of contacts would be around the size of the Yellow Pages. General Howerton, along with everyone else in the loop, was no doubt hoping like hell Butler wouldn't find that buyer in the People's Republic of China. Or, for that matter, North Korea, Iran, or Syria.

  If this was, in fact, what Butler had done, I wondered when it was that he'd decided to abduct Boyle and sell the guy and his technology to the highest bidder. Perhaps when someone told him how valuable Boyle was. I could think of only one person who would have spilled those beans. Giving Butler an added push toward this insanity might have been the conclusion that it was only a matter of time before he was nailed for Ruben's murder. To hide, he would need a lot of money. The motto of his own SAS regiment was “Who dares wins.” If the intelligence assessments were true, as operations went, the one he'd conducted on his own behalf to get rich quick was as big and as daring as they came.

  There was in all of this gloom, though, at least one bit of sparkling news, and the media was all over it—the story of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone that had hit a group of al Qaeda terrorists fleeing from a village on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. One of the men believed killed was Bin Laden's right-hand man, al-Zawahiri. Bin Laden was missed in the attack, but al-Zawahiri was a major scalp, and the administration would take whatever it could get. At least the rumor about Bin Laden lying low and maybe running a curry take out somewhere in London had been dispelled.

  The hope that all the talking had been done was an example of wishful thinking on my part. I sat at the table for two hours listening to speculation and rebuff. Nothing concrete was decided on because no one knew where Butler and Boyle had gone. It was a waiting game. But at least with Butler out of Pakistan, the threat of all-out war with nuclear weapons had receded, though Islamabad had announced that the first test in its renewed program would be the detonation of a bomb with a very large yield. India threatened to do the same.

  As far as locating Butler and company went, the CIA's Willard F. Norman reassured General Howerton and the SecDef in his peculiarly squeaky voice that everything possible in terms of stones not being left unturned was being done. There was a little more speculation about motives and the mental states of both Boyle and Butler. I was also questioned about my captivity and, of course, about Bin Laden and my impression and observations of the man. My impression was that he had a kind face and warm eyes. My observation was that I wished I'd somehow managed to get the guy's autograph—it would fetch a fortune on eBay. I thought it wise to keep these impressions and observations to myself. Instead I told them all I could remember was that his fingers smelled of horse shit. The briefing was called to an end, and I went home.

  * * *

  In and around my apartment block, a couple of things o
f interest had happened in my absence. Kim's 38th Parallel had reopened to again do battle with Summer Love for take-out supremacy. The vegan joint, though, was hitting below the belt. Stuffed in my letterbox was the usual flyer promising that no animal products were used in its cuisine, either as ingredients or in the cooking process. Admirable though that was, I bet it all tasted like warmed up papier-mâché. And, besides, I like eating animal. I figure if you weren't supposed to, they wouldn't be made of meat. I turned the flyer over. On the flip side, it was personally signed by Summer—the woman with the mop and the sensational, though hairy, legs—with the invitation to give her a call. Her cell number was included plus a coupon for a veggie burger. Summer was going all out. I stuck it on the fridge.

  Meanwhile, inside said fridge, the resident mold had invited over quite a few buddies. I announced the party was over with the aid of a brush and a spray that made me feel like my sinuses were bleeding. In the middle of this cheery domesticity, the phone rang. “Vin Cooper,” I said.

  “Agent Cooper, there's a car with a driver headed your way. It'll get to you in ten. Don't keep it waiting.” Dial tone. General Howerton. Man of few words. I glanced at my watch and wondered what had happened in the three hours since I was last at the Pentagon.

  FORTY-NINE

  It was a different room this time, smaller and better lit, though it, too, was buried somewhere within the Pentagon's lower bowel area, a region I seemed to be spending an increasing amount of time in. Howerton was at the head of the table, CIA Deputy Assistant Director, Directorate of Operations, Willard F. Norman beside him. Opposite Norman sat the white-haired staff judge advocate, the general with the lined face who'd provided the legal thumbs-down on the original mission to Phunal. Beside him was Brigadier General James Wynngate, my CO at OSI, and beside him the British SAS Major First-Name-Nigel.