KBL

by John Weisman

  He drank tepid Pak tap water and zam-zam fruit milkshakes brought in from Abbottabad until his gut got used to them, which meant he wasn’t shitting twelve times in one day or one time in twelve.

  He practiced getting around on the padded furniture dolly—built from materials scrounged entirely in Pakistan—until it was second nature, worked on his Pashto until he was dreaming in the language, and radiated Pashtunwali from every pore. Then he ran himself through four weeks of painful, intense preparation until he knew his legend was firm, his cover secure, and his body ready for Show Time.

  And it was—all of it, every bit of pain, every ounce of energy expended—worth it.

  Worth it because this was going to be huge. Gargantuan. Broadway. Hollywood. The fricking Oscars.

  This time, it was Crankshaft. UBL.

  UBL. Usama. The ghost. The wraith. The Grail.

  And Charlie would have a hand in this show. Not a bit part, either, but a featured role.

  Covertly, of course. And anonymous. But still . . . featured.

  If, that is, he survived.

  2

  Abbottabad, Pakistan

  December 7, 2010, 0912 Hours Local Time

  Charlie Becker paused, checking the traffic, then pushed himself across Hospital Road, on the uneven edge between Abbottabad’s commercial district with its three hospitals, and, to the northeast, the sprawling military complex housing the campus many Paks called the West Point of Pakistan. It was a city that in some ways reminded Charlie of Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. Not that there was a bay, or boats. But the cities had just about equal populations, and military academies, with their hundreds of young cadets. And Abbottabad was, like Annapolis, a place where denizens from the nation’s capital could escape the heat. For those in D.C., it would be to spend summers or long weekends on the Chesapeake Bay. In Abbottabad’s case, they’d come from Islamabad for the cool breezes that blew off the mountains to the north and west.

  This morning the breezes were a lot more than cool. He’d completed roughly one-eighth of the route he took every day, sitting in front of the mosques or cadging lentils with chicken, tea, and sweet cakes from friendly store owners with whom he gossiped or traded stories.

  His circuit, which covered roughly five and a half kilometers—three-plus miles—varied from day to day. But it always covered 360 degrees. Its epicenter, more or less, was Valhalla Base, the CIA safe house he was watchdogging. One dog leg of Charlie’s route often took him through the neighborhood called Bilal Town, clear around the outer perimeter wall of the location the retired master sergeant thought of as GZ. Ground Zero. The irregularly shaped compound that Valhalla Base had been set up to monitor.

  The place was formidable. GZ sat surrounded on two sides by neatly plowed wheat fields. Other farmed plots held symmetrical rows of tomato plants, cauliflower, or cabbages.

  Charlie took special notice of the perimeter walls, around whose base wild cannabis plants sprouted here and there like weeds. The walls were fifteen, sixteen, even eighteen feet high in some places. Every linear foot was topped by coiled barbed wire. Above and to the side of GZ’s twin front gates a security camera had been installed.

  Unlike virtually every other house in the neighborhood, GZ had no visible balconies. Neither did it have, unlike most of the other residential compounds in Abbottabad—ompounds that were mostly owned by retired general staff officers, senior government bureaucrats, or former intelligence officials—any satellite TV or Internet dishes on the roofs of its two main and three smaller outbuildings. Nor was there the spaghetti tangle of telephone wires and electrical power cables that were common to houses even in many of Pakistan’s best neighborhoods.

  In fact, Charlie thought the place looked much more like a commercial structure, like the warehouses or small factories he’d grown accustomed to seeing in Iraq, than a luxury villa.

  But a villa it was. Owned by two brothers, Arshad and Tareq Khan. But Charlie knew their names were aliases. “Arshad” was the brother who lived on-site. He drove a red Suzuki SUV or a white Suzuki van and told anyone who asked that he’d made his fortune as a gold trader in the south.

  Mushtaq Sadiq, the gnarled, stooped farmer who grew tomatoes and cabbages on one of the plots adjacent to the compound, had told Charlie the previous week that Arshad and Tareq bought the land and built GZ five or six years ago, and more than a dozen people currently lived there. Mushtaq seemed to recall that they’d come from Charsadda. Charlie had nodded. He knew the city. It was on the North West Frontier, perhaps twenty miles northeast of Peshawar and sixty from the Khyber Pass. It was the location from which Tareq Khan had made a significant satellite phone call to GZ last July.

  Charlie had seen Arshad only once, driving past in his red Suzuki SUV, one of his wives veiled behind darkly tinted windows, a young son sans seatbelt in the front passenger seat. Charlie ballparked Arshad to be in his forties. Height? Unknown. Appearance? Neat. Clean-shaven except for the brushlike Pashtun mustache favored by many of his apparent class, which was no doubt upper.

  Verification? According to Arshad’s farmer neighbor Mushtaq, Arshad’s Pashto, the language of Pakistan’s northwest tribal regions, was upper-class perfect, the Pakistani equivalent of the Oxbridge accent of British prime ministers. “He speaks like he’s a Benazir Bhutto,” was the way Mushtaq snidely put it to Charlie. Arshad Khan’s real name—well, his war name, anyway—was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And al-Kuwaiti was one of two high-level couriers trusted by Usama Bin Laden.

  The younger brother, Tareq, had never appeared in the five and a half weeks since Charlie’s insertion.

  Charlie knew why, too: Tareq was out of town. In the Gulf. Taking messages from UBL to AQAP, which Charlie pronounced a-kwap and which stood for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Because Tareq Khan was UBL’s second trusted courier.

  Charlie knew all of this because even though Tareq Khan was pretty punctilious about maintaining operational security overseas, his cover had been blown about three years previously, despite the fact that he never communicated with Bin Laden except face to face. When Tareq Khan used cell phones—which was v-e-r-y infrequently—they were operated using a series of prepaid subscriber identity module, or SIM, cards that were bought for him by intermediaries at European locations where no one asked for their names.

  It was a SIM card that had led investigators to Tareq Khan, a Swiss-made card, manufactured by a company called Swisscom. He had used the prepaid SIM card in September 2005 to make a single, thirty-second call from Dublin to his villa in Abbottabad to check up on his youngest son, Khalid, who was sick with pneumonia.

  The call had been tracked by the British Government Communications Headquarters. Located in Cheltenham, GCHQ is the U.K. equivalent of America’s National Security Agency. And when Khan made the call, GCHQ was in crisis mode, recovering from the July 7, 2005, London bombings in which fifty-two people were killed and another seven hundred injured by four terrorists, of which three were of Pakistani origin and two had actually received training in bomb making from al-Qaeda in northwest Pakistan. In those days GCHQ was tracking virtually every phone call from England and Ireland to Pakistan. When it was discerned that Khan was using a Swisscom card, the agency put a big target on his back.

  Why? Because between 2001 and 2003, Swisscom SIM cards had been the favorite of many high-level al-Qaeda operatives, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known to his counterterrorist hunters as KSM. It was, in fact, a Swisscom SIM card that had been used initially to track and locate KSM in Karachi.

  By 2007 al-Qaeda operatives had largely abandoned Swisscom SIM cards. Too dangerous. But Tareq Khan used one anyway.

  Why had he done that?

  Charlie had no idea. Maybe Tareq thought that because the card had been bought before KSM was captured he would be safe. Maybe he was more concerned about his son than operational security. The why didn’t matter. Khan had made the brief call, and he’d been ID’d.
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  And happily ever after, thought Charlie Becker, he’d been tracked.

  By the Brits, by the Europeans, by the Saudis, and finally, by us.

  Then, five months ago, in July, Tareq Khan made two satellite telephone calls. One on the twentieth, from a phone in Kohat, northwest Pakistan. The second from Charsadda on the twenty-second.

  To a cell phone located at the villa in Abbottabad that Charlie called Ground Zero.

  They lasted less than twenty seconds each. But in both, Tareq used al mas, the Arabic for “the Diamond,” a known codeword for Bin Laden.

  It was Tareq Khan that Valhalla Base was hoping to eyeball. Because if he showed up at the villa, it was oh so likely he was coming to see UBL. Which is why, even though UBL was still the Invisible Man, Valhalla Base had been set up in early October.

  But now there were strangers in town. Not that there weren’t always lots of visitors. Abbottabad’s hotels played host to thousands of tourists and military families visiting their cadets. Scores of VIPs from Islamabad would come to the graduation ceremonies held every spring.

  But these visitors were different. Waseem had seen four men. It hadn’t taken Charlie even a full day to identify four teams. They were working separately, but they were all doing the same thing. They were combing the area around the military school and the residential neighborhoods just to the school’s north and east, where Abbottabad’s biggest villas were situated.

  “Combing” was inaccurate; they were executing pattern searches. They divided their areas of operation into quadrants, and each team moved through each quadrant in exactly the same way. They went north to south, then south to north; east to west, then west to east. They drove, and they searched on foot.

  Charlie knew exactly what they were doing. They were looking for anomalies. They were looking for things and people that didn’t belong. And they were doing it relentlessly.

  December 7, 2010, 1114 Hours

  Charlie saw the Mercedes pull over by the Kabul Café, across four chaotic lanes of traffic shoehorned into the two-lane street redolent with exhaust fumes. He’d stationed himself next to a stand that made the fruit milkshakes known locally as zam-zams, to which he’d treat himself if his bowl was filled with enough paisa, anna, and occasional rupee coins to afford a splurge. Charlie lived on what Shahid made begging—nothing more.

  He was on the second leg of his journey now, slowly working his way behind Valhalla Base. This was the base’s E&E (evasion and escape) route because it led away from the military academy and Abbottabad’s commercial center.

  It had been a long morning. Charlie’s arms and shoulders burned like hell and his stumps throbbed. It was almost lunchtime. He looked forward to chicken and lentil stew, another three hours on the streets, evening prayers, then making his way back to his room, where he would burst the day’s report to Valhalla, which would carom it on to Langley.

  The car’s occupants caught his eye. Shit. It was a fifth surveillance team. There were four of them in the coffee-colored Mercedes diesel sedan, windows rolled down.

  The sedan was parked, and no one in it moved. Silently Charlie counted. Thirty, sixty, ninety seconds. Still nothing. The occupants weren’t even talking. Instead, they were eyeballing, examining, giving the whole street scene a three-sixty.

  The driver, round-faced with a thin mustache, wore a captain’s uniform. So did the guy riding shotgun, a big man with full facial hair. Then the rear door opened and a prissy-looking major got out. He straightened his uniform and inspected his trouser creases. Then he scanned the traffic, found a hole, and headed in Charlie’s direction.

  The momentary break in the traffic let Charlie catch a quick profile of the fourth passenger, a civilian sitting behind the driver, who had just turned to watch the major’s progress. And was staring at Charlie. Staring hard.

  Instantly Charlie became afraid.

  Very afraid.

  Oh, my God. Charlie’s world went dark for a millisecond. He sensed the major coming in his direction, stopping traffic with his hands.

  And then, all of Charlie’s survival skills, the ones he spent all that time at Bagram honing, kicked in.

  Charlie forced himself to avert his eyes. Looked down at the few coins in his bowl. Then looked up, away from the Mercedes, smiling wanly, hand outstretched. “Something for a disabled brother, Major? Just a coin or two for a brother crippled by the Infidels?”

  All the time thinking, Jeezus H—I know the guy in the car. But that’s impossible. Where the hell would I have—

  Guantánamo. Guantánamo, Guantánamo, Guantánamo.

  Light-complexioned. Thick, dark, curly hair under an Afghan qarakul. Broad, flattened nose that looked like he’d spent time in the ring. Full, Jihadi beard.

  Saif.

  Saif Hadi al Iraqi.

  Charlie’s mind raced.

  Real name: Nasser Abdulrazaq Abdulbaqi. Former major in Saddam’s army. Fought in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. Joined al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. Starting in 2003, he coordinated al-Qaeda in Iraq’s activities. The cocksucker was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s boss. Personally beheaded maybe twenty, thirty people Charlie knew about, including four Americans. By 2004, when Charlie was working in Iraq for CIA, he’d heard the name Saif Hadi al Iraqi and knew he had blood all over his hands.

  The SOB was picked up in Pakistan in 2006 and ended up at Gitmo. Deported to Yemen in December 2009, thanks to the blankety-blanking current attorney general of the United States, who spent most of his time trying to indict CIA officers for doing their jobs but turned terrorists loose so they could kill more Americans.

  The idiot AG’d tossed Br’er Saif right back into the Briar Patch.

  Saif Hadi. By trade an al-Qaeda murderer and bomb maker.

  Saif Hadi, who’d helped train London’s lead 7/7 suicide bomber, Mohammed Sidique Khan, when Khan made a terror pilgrimage to Pakistan in 2003.

  Saif was the real fricking deal. A hard-core hater.

  Charlie had spent two weeks interrogating the guy. In Arabic, Waziri Pashto, and Urdu.

  Face to face.

  Nose to nose.

  Knows to knows. He knows me, I know him. He always had hate in his eyes. Always. Never gave an inch. Well, neither did I.

  But now: oh, shit.

  It was the one known unknown element of his Gitmo mission Charlie had worried about from the get-go. He understood that the al-Qaeda combatants he interrogated were spending just as much time studying him as he was studying them. Knew that most would ultimately return to work with the AQN, the al-Qaeda network, that if and when they were released from Gitmo, they’d spend their initial days, weeks, even months writing reports on every Infidel they’d met during their capture, incarceration, and interrogation. It was their job. To expand al-Qaeda’s intelligence files. To build dossiers on their captors and interrogators. So they could be targeted.

  Charlie’s mind was working at warp speed now, thinking, What the fuck does he know about me? I worked under alias. I was Mr. José at Gitmo. Puerto Rican.

  Even so: Can he ID me, despite the beard, despite the grime, despite everything?

  Charlie had practiced good op-sec, operational security, during his fifteen months at Gitmo. Alias, Tito Puente mustache, tinted glasses, nothing personal on his person. A sterile uniform with nada but an American flag. Plus, he’d always been sitting at the desk when they were brought in, escorted blindfolded by two Marines. No way to tell his height, or know about his legs.

  Besides, by the time Charlie began work at Camp X-Ray, he walked like everybody else. He could run five miles, stand all day, climb ladders, even dance. All it had taken was $575,000 or so worth of engineering and plastic surgery, and he was almost as good as new. Better than new. The new and improved bionic Becker.

  But had all that op-sec been good enough?

  Because here and now, Charlie was scared shitless.

  Did the sonofabitch ID my prosthetics? Did he memorize the scars on my face? Draw sketches of
my mangled hands for his handlers?

  And the most important question: Why is he here?

  Charlie knew that in intelligence work, there are no coincidences. Things never just happen. And so he knew Saif Hadi al Iraqi was in Abbottabad for a reason. Because ISI wanted him here. Why? To ID Gringos, of course. Infidel spies employed by the Great Satan. Saif had been at Gitmo, and before that, held in at least two black sites. He’d know people. Faces.

  And he was being paid to ID them for ISI. Our alleged allies in GWOT—the Global War on Terror. Except they weren’t our allies. Not really. Because if they were our allies and our friends, they wouldn’t hire people like Saif Hadi al Iraqi, who had almost as much blood on his hands as UBL. Who, in fact, knew UBL.

  No wonder they’d brought Saif to Abbottabad. Holy mother of God.

  The major ignored Charlie’s plea. Walked past him like he didn’t exist and up to the milkshake stand. Ordered four mango zam-zams. Charlie heard him speak. A southern accent, Karachi. Definitely not local.

  Charlie forced himself: Do not look at the Mercedes. Concentrate on being All Shahid All the Time.

  Live Shahid.

  Breathe Shahid.

  Reek of Shahidness.

  Charlie kept his face slightly angled downward, so as not to present a profile to the Mercedes across the road. Profiles can give you away faster at a distance.

  The major put money into the vendor’s palm, collected his change, secured his drinks in their cardboard holder, and then turned toward the street. As he passed Charlie he looked down. Charlie glanced up into the man’s dark eyes.

  The major scowled. “And where were you wounded?” He had a high, irritating voice. The voice of a bureaucrat.

  “Miram Shah, major. Missiles—near the girls school. They killed my son Muhammad.” Charlie spat. “They do not care if they kill our children.”

  “When?”

  “Last year. Winter.”

  The major nodded. Silent, as if thinking. His eyes narrowed. Then he peered at the Mercedes and spoke as if to himself. “The Americans are scum. They suck our blood. They defile our children. They spit on our traditions.”