by John Weisman
The question—and it was a question he could not answer—was Who was watching the watchers?
It was a serious issue. He certainly was drawing the Paks out. As of four days ago he had a permanent tail. They’d put gumshoes on him 24/7. The house he shared with Loner, Kent, and Gary was staked out. A shwarama vendor had suddenly appeared on C Street, right behind the American School, every day from seven until seven. In the evenings the vendor was relieved by a Mercedes that parked at the intersection of Street 2 and E Street. It was manned by two Paks, who sat and chain-smoked for twelve hours. Ty wondered where the poor guys were relieving themselves. They were probably pissing into bottles.
But he couldn’t figure out who was watching them.
And yet, wasn’t that what Stu Kapos had wanted? To learn ISI’s patterns, that’s what he’d said. To discover their vulnerabilities so CIA personnel could operate more efficiently in Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi, and Islamabad, where CIA maintained its bases and station.
But there was no sign of countersurveillance. None. Ty was sure of it. Because every Delta operator—and although he couldn’t confirm it, probably every other Tier One operative as well—went through an intensive course on countersurveillance and denied area operations run by CIA. So Ty knew what to look for. And he saw nothing. Not a hint. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
It occurred to him one evening, after a couple of beers with Mr. Wade, that no one was watching the watchers. That he was just out there, alone. They were running him around for no reason. They were running him because, well, he had no idea. None at all.
But that made no sense. There had to be a purpose for all this craziness. A reason HQ had pulled him off assignment and turned him into an ISI magnet.
1326 Hours
Ty checked his side mirror. The tuk-tuk was following him again, and now the motorbike had disappeared. He decided to pick up the pace. He gunned the Honda into a skiddy left turn across from the Markaz Mosque, fishtailed, then swung north. The third road was Lovers Lane. He took a quick left, then left again onto Birdwood, then left again onto a one-way street that targeted the driveway of the Royal Garden Hotel.
Glanced back. Shit. The tuk-tuk had stayed with him. He could make out the driver’s mustached face. The guy was holding a cell phone to his ear, steering with one hand. He was talking up a storm. Ty could see his lips jabbering.
He accelerated into the hotel’s horseshoe-shaped driveway. The tuk-tuk followed. Just ahead, a cab pulled out to pick up a fare under the portico.
Ty floored the Honda, jumped the curb and veered around the taxi, cutting it off, answering the blast of its horn with a friendly wave at the furious driver, who’d stalled out.
Ty kept going. He could still hear the driver cursing. He stuck his arm out the window and waved again as he serpentined around the hotel driveway. As he headed for the exit, he looked across the landscaped median.
The tuk-tuk was trying to reverse. Fat chance. Ty sped up, turned south on Birdwood Road, took his first left, went under the Jail Road overpass, then turned right onto the service road that ran alongside the multilane Jail Road.
It was time to end this stupidity. Just past the Mozang subway stop he’d merge into Ferozepur Road, cut through Quartaba Chowk junction onto Queen’s Road, and head north toward the consulate.
Home free. Screw ISI.
1328 Hours
He was stopped at the Quartaba Chowk intersection when the motorbike caught up to him. Ty was in the middle lane. The bike pulled alongside his right door, close enough to keep him from opening it. He could smell the engine exhaust. The driver was maybe late twenties, blue long-sleeve sport shirt, leather vest, jeans, and sandals. He kept his eyes straight ahead. The passenger was a kid in a plaid flannel shirt. Long greasy hair secured with a bandanna, jeans, and sandals. He smiled at Ty. It was a mocking, derisive, smartass smile.
Ty’s Delta Force instincts sounded an alarm. This was not right. Ty’s left hand stayed on the steering wheel. His right slid onto the butt of the Glock.
Simultaneously the kid tauntingly raised his shirt. Displaying the semiauto pistol stuck in his belt. The kid’s hand went crossdraw for the weapon just as the light changed.
The motorcycle shot ahead.
It cut off the Honda.
The kid swiveled, that smartass smile still on his face as he brought the gun up to take a shot.
Ty’s foot smashed down on the brake to keep the Honda steady. His hand brought the pistol up from under his thigh. He brought it up to eye level much faster than the kid, who was transitioning from a one- to a two-handed grip.
Ty didn’t need two hands. He got a quick sight picture and double-tapped the kid through the windshield.
Oh, fuck, that was loud. Even with the window open, Ty’s head rang as if he’d been clubbed. He couldn’t hear anything.
He focused on the bike. The kid was down, two hits, upper center mass.
Ty put the Glock’s front sight between the driver’s shoulders and fired three more quick shots.
Now the driver went down, the bike toppling onto him.
Muzzle still on the threats, Ty reached across with his left hand and opened the Honda’s door. He exited the car, Glock in hand, his eyes moving left-right, right-left to ensure there were no more threats. No tuk-tuk with an AK-wielding driver. No backup team.
All clear. The tuk-tuk was nowhere to be seen. Incredibly, traffic was streaming around the downed bike and the Pakis on the ground.
Ty advanced on the shooter. The kid was still moving. Twitching. Gurgling. Neutralize the threat. Ty kicked the kid’s pistol away, then put two in his head, careful to shoot at a safe angle so his rounds wouldn’t ricochet off the pavement and come back at him.
The twitching stopped.
Suddenly there was a lot of blood. He had to report this. Had to call Wade. Had to call Loner, too. He lowered the Glock and with his left hand reached for the cell phone on his belt.
As he did so, the dead driver pushed the bike off his legs and struggled to his feet.
He turned toward Ty, screamed something in Pashto, then fled north.
Christ almighty. Ty’s eyes scanned the street. Now cars were stopping, the drivers looking at the scene. Pedestrians were watching, too. Some had cell phones to their ears. Some were taking pictures.
Ty realized the driver was still running. He was twelve, thirteen yards away. If he got much farther he’d be in among the knot of onlookers on the near side of the intersection. Unstoppable.
Ty stuffed the cell phone in his shirt pocket, got a two-handed grip on the Glock, took a good sight picture, and fired a triple-tap at the driver. Hit him right in the lung area.
The driver’s knees buckled and he fell facedown onto the pavement. Ty walked rapidly up to where he lay and shot him twice more in the back of the head. Second threat neutralized.
Reflexively, he ejected the almost-empty magazine from his pistol and dropped it into his trouser pocket while simultaneously feeling for the the spare, retrieving it and ramming it firmly into the Glock’s butt until it clicked securely in place.
He heard the distinctive “hee-haw hee-haw” of sirens in the distance. Holstered his pistol, felt his heart pounding as if he were about to have a heart attack. He lay two fingers across the inside of his left wrist. His pulse was going warp speed. Holy crap. I am so out of condition.
He forced himself back into alertness. Scanned—moving his whole head back and forth—and breathed so he wasn’t tunnel-visioning. Amazing, he thought, there were perhaps eighty, ninety people at the intersection, but not one of them had tried either to intervene or advance on him.
Yet.
He speed-dialed Loner’s phone, and when the AWG Soldier answered, Ty said, “SITREP China Lake.” SITREP was the situation report. China Lake was the codeword for the get-me-outta-here contingency plan the four men had created.
Ty continued: “Quartaba Chowk. Cops arriving.”
Loner: “You okay? You’re shouting.”
Ty: “
I’m fine. Two EKIAs. I’m fine. There’s a crowd.” He wondered if Loner could hear him, because he still could hardly hear himself. “Cops arriving. I’m okay.”
Loner: “On our way.”
“I’m okay.” Peripheral movement caused Ty to look up. A knot of Pakis was coming his way. Maybe a dozen men, maybe a few more, led by a pair of uniformed traffic wardens wielding batons. Ty ended the call. His last words: “I’m okay.”
Oh, crap. They didn’t look friendly. This is all going terribly wrong is what Ty was thinking. He knew he should jump in the Honda and drive pedal to metal to the consulate, straight over any Paki dumb enough to get in the way.
That’s what you did in places like Pakistan, or Egypt, or any other place where the cops did their interrogations with the help of electric cattle prods or pliers. That’s what he’d been taught to do. Haul your ass outta Dodge, Soldier, was how it had been phrased.
But he wasn’t a Soldier anymore. He was a civilian, even with his diplomatic status. And he had to document what had happened. And so, instead of burning rubber, he stood there and shot one-two-three-four-five-six frames of the scene and the bodies and the downed motorbike with his cell phone camera.
He was sending them to Loner as the first police car screeched to a stop behind him, and he turned to see the cops coming at him full-tilt-boogie, weapons drawn and screaming instructions he couldn’t understand.
10
Abbottabad, Pakistan
February 1, 2011, 0917 Hours Local Time
The news spread through Pakistan like a wildfire. All about the nest of spies at the American Consulate in Lahore and the CIA cockroach who had killed two innocent Pakistanis out of pure racist spite. And the three other American dung beetles who had killed a third brother—run him down in cold blood—as they raced in their Land Cruiser Prado to the scene to rescue the first cockroach. And how the Pakistani authorities had stood up to the Americans and were holding the American assassin in jail even though the other three had made it to the consulate and had been illegally secreted out of the country. And how all over the country tens of thousands of Pakistanis in cities, towns, and villages north, south, east, and west had demonstrated their righteous hatred for the United States, a nation of dogs, cockroaches, and vermin. Demonstrated even in Abbottabad, where the hand-lettered signs read “Stone the American CIA cockroach to death” and “Amerika, Nation of Murderers.”
Even Waseem the tearoom owner had closed his business long enough to join in the previous day’s protest. He couldn’t help but chortle to the beggar about the arrest of the American double murderer and how it had caused the United States great embarrassment throughout the Muslim world. It was a sure sign of things to come.
“Thus will the Infidels be brought down,” he said as he offered Charlie Becker a second sweet cake to go with his tea.
“God bless you, brother.” Charlie took the cake and stuffed half of it in his mouth. It had been a cold night, and Charlie’s entire body ached. His stumps, especially, were sore. And he had a rash on his ass from sitting all day on the fricking dolly.
It was on days like this he missed his legs—even the prosthetic ones. He’d lost his ability to step over things on the street that he now had to muscle his dolly around. The simple act of taking a leak was a cumbersome, drawn-out process. And there was the constant, gnawing, dull sense of . . . loss.
Then Charlie thought, What crap! Okay, he’d lost his legs. He knew Soldiers and Marines who’d lost more—their lives. He might have been killed in that tunnel. Never seen his grandchild. Never gone back to work. Never had the chance to give something back for all that America had given him.
Charlie considered his time as a Soldier a paid fellowship. He got to travel. He got to learn languages. He got to meet interesting individuals. And of course he got to break things and kill people. All in all a great life.
And his legs? Yeah, he missed them.
And yes, today was one of those days he would gladly have given his left nut for some Aleve. But he was a beggar. And beggars, he knew, couldn’t be choosers. Or possess over-the-counter American pain relievers.
Besides, he was a Ranger. And Rangers Drive On sans complaints. In fact, during his rehab, Charlie had often worn a baseball cap to his physical therapy sessions that read “NO SNIVELING.”
Words to live by.
And so Charlie fed his sugar jones instead of his pain jones. And was okay with that.
“God is great, Brother Shahid,” Waseem told Charlie as he watched the beggar chew. “He works in mysterious ways to protect us, even if it requires sacrifice.”
“He does indeed, brother,” Charlie replied. He displayed his ruined hands. “Sacrifice is what he requires of us, and sacrifice is what we willingly provide.”
“We willingly provide because God is great, brother,” Waseem sing-songed.
God is indeed great, Charlie Becker thought—but maybe, so is Langley. Charlie couldn’t be sure, but he guessed that CIA had something to do with the fact that over the past two and a half weeks, the ISI surveillance teams had been withdrawn from Abbottabad.
Gossip at the mosques had it that the detested Americans were engaging in provocative activities in the Frontier provinces. That they’d been seen in Miram Shah and Shawa and near Peshawar, too, selecting targets for the unmanned but armed Predator drones that killed from above. But ever since the murdering assassin had been caught, there hadn’t been a single drone attack anywhere in Pakistan. Allahu Akbar. God is great!
Whatever the truth of the matter with regard to Predator strikes (or the lack of them), Charlie was also hugely relieved, because for the past five days he’d seen no sign of ISI activity anywhere near Valhalla Base, an info-bit that he had burst-transmitted the previous afternoon. He knew—he’d received a coded message at the dead drop he checked when Valhalla Base pinged him to do so—that new equipment would be arriving soon, along with one or two new personnel. Given the current situation, there was a better-than-good chance that everything would be accomplished well under the ISI’s persistent radar blanket.
All in all, the news was good. Which made Charlie, who’d had twenty-six years as an Airborne Ranger, sixteen of them as a senior NCO, nervous. He had done Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Mogadishu, and Iraq and was entitled to wear combat jump wings, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V device, and three Purple Hearts, so he knew from experience that it was right after the good news arrived that the situation generally went south.
But for the moment, anyway, things were okay. Valhalla was safe; ISI and its bloodhound Saif Hadi al Iraqi were long gone. He’d had a nagging, seed-under-the-gum-line sensation for the past few days that something wasn’t quite right, as if his feng shui was out of balance. If indeed he’d ever had feng shui. But today that discomfort had blessedly evaporated. He’d even been given an extra treat. Charlie gave silent thanks for small blessings.
He stuffed the last of the sweet pastry into his mouth, handed the cup back to Waseem, and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “God be with you, brother.”
“And with you, Brother Shahid. May God grant you the blessing of watching an American die.”
That remark certainly changed Charlie’s mood. “He has already done that, my brother,” he responded grimly, for once telling the Pakistani an absolute unvarnished truth. “He has allowed me to watch Americans die more than once.”
11
Langley, Virginia
February 11, 2011, 0745 Hours Local Time
“Stu, get your coffee-swilling ass up here right now. This is a hell of a way to start the weekend.” Vince Mercaldi was pissed. He wasn’t a big man—perhaps five-ten and a half. He was beginning to resemble a pear in shape. And he wore suits that were more than slightly baggy, plain white or blue shirts with French cuffs, and ties that might as well have come from Sears. And the kind of 1970s aviator frame glasses that had been out of fashion for so long now that they were almost, almost back in style, eyeglasses that, sitting on
Vince’s prominent, rounded Sicilian nose, gave him the bug-eyed appearance of that bee in the Nazonex allergy medicine commercials.
But he was passionate. And eloquent. Indeed, Anthony Vincent Mercaldi had been known in the House of Representatives as a stem-winder when he took the floor. Lucky were those in the House Visitor’s Gallery when Call Me Vince, steamed about some matter or another or fulsome in praise for an issue or an individual, would enter the chamber and ask for floor time. He had what is known in the military as command voice, which was linked to an extensive vocabulary and combined with a trial lawyer’s ability to spellbind an audience using an articulate, contrapuntal mélange of drama, wit, and eloquence, sprinkled with occasional flourishes of menace or tenderness. He could play a jury like Joshua Bell played a fiddle.
That ability, combined with the fact that as a congressman he’d always felt it his duty to be responsive to his constituents, made him uniquely and forcefully persuasive, a quality he brought to his job as director of the CIA.
There had been much skepticism in the hallways at Langley when Vince’s appointment was first announced. The instant verdict from CIA’s 42,389 full-time employees (augmented by 30,000-plus contractors), was that Vince Mercaldi was an APP—another professional politician—a spineless puppet who would do the White House’s bidding.
Two politicians had previously been appointed CIA directors. George Herbert Walker Bush, who would go on to be the nation’s forty-first president and after whom the CIA headquarters would later be named, had served as director for just under a year. Previously, Bush had been a congressman, run for the Senate unsuccessfully, and served as ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of the Republican Party. When he was selected as director of central intelligence by President Gerald Ford he was the head of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People’s Republic of China—in effect, our first ambassador there, although without the title.
Bush assumed his role as DCI on January 30, 1976. Five months later, Francis Melloy, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and his economic counselor, Robert Waring, were kidnapped by terrorists and subsequently murdered. DCI Bush was summoned to the White House, where he briefed President Ford and his national security team on the incident. But instead of remaining in the Situation Room, where he could have gotten hours of face time with the president, Bush asked to be excused. “I need to be back in our operations center at Langley with my troops,” the World War II Navy pilot told the president.