by Mike Bond
“It’s politically correct,” Jack said, “to put them down.”
“When people feel safe,” McPhee said, “they get arrogant and stupid.”
Sophie gave him a hard look. “We’re back to the Military Theory of Evolution, I see.”
“Yes, Maam,” McPhee smiled at her. “Show me a better one.”
For a moment the fog cleared and they could rooftops far below, tiny little boxes. “Those,” Jack said, “are the tops of other skyscrapers.”
“There’s a French guy climbs buildings like this,” McPhee said. “With no rope.”
“Just being out there and looking down,” Sophie shivered, “would kill me.”
The First Stone
OUT OF THE DARKNESS the telephone screamed. Jack grabbed and it clattered on the floor and he scrabbled round for it and pulled it up. He glanced at the bedside clock. 3:17.
“Jack,” the voice said, “it’s Levi.”
“Levi what the fuck?” He switched on a light. “What’re you calling at this...”
“You’ll know soon enough, but I’d rather you heard it from me.”
“For Chrissake what?”
“Al-Qaeda just blew up our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. I got the news twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh Jesus. How many killed?”
“Hundreds in Nairobi. Thousands wounded. In Dar es Salaam we’re not sure yet.”
“Oh sweet Jesus here we go again. What kind of bomb?”
“Truck bomb.”
“Can’t you guys ever learn?”
“Owen was there...”
“McPhee? Oh Christ no! Where? What’s happened to him? Tell me!”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“You bastards.” Tears were running down the inside of his throat. “You bastards!”
“We think there’s an Afghani connection. I’d like you to meet me over there soon as possible. We don’t have anyone else who knows the background, speaks the language.”
“You telling me it was our mujihadeen?”
Ackerman was silent a moment. “People linked to Bin Laden.”
Jack glanced at Sophie, who had sat up watching him. “I’ll try to catch the Concorde to London, then BA to Nairobi...”
“No. I’ll have a Gulfstream pick you up at La Guardia. He’ll have to refuel in Rabat. You can be in Kenya tonight. How soon can you leave?”
Jack checked the clock: 03:21. I’ll be at LaGuardia by four-thirty.”
“Oh dear God poor Owen,” Sophie sat beside him wiping away tears, one arm round his shoulder. “It never stops, does it? It never never stops.”
“I have to go back in for a while. I have to find out who did this.”
She looked away, biting a finger. “It won’t bring Owen back.” She cleared her throat. “You have two children...”
“If we don’t stop these bastards now –”
She stood, suddenly old. “I’ll help you pack.”
AHMAD KNELT BLINDFOLDED, wrists bound behind him. There seemed to be seven of them in a semicircle before him, Wahid in their middle. A kerosene lantern hissed overhead, its light slipping through a crack in the top of his blindfold.
“You understand,” Wahid said, “I can’t intercede.”
“We thank you,” a mullah said. “We share the sorrow you must feel to have such a brother. We appreciate the strength it takes, the purity of heart, to bring this to us.”
“Sadly, my brother would not let the young men go to the madrasah. He stole food and medicine our people needed, sold them and kept the money. Even when I gave him generously from my own meek resources he spent it not on the children but on himself.”
“You never gave me money, brother. I swear by God!”
Someone kicked Ahmad. “Don’t take God’s name!”
“And he forced those poor orphans,” Wahid continued, “on whom he preyed because they had no family to defend them – to go into the streets and beg and steal!”
“This is all lies,” Ahmad said. “I know I can’t reach you. You’ve gone too far.”
“And worse,” Wahid said, “he took into his house a teacher.”
“She cleaned the kitchen! She has no part in this –”
“Who twisted the minds of these defenseless girls by forcing them to read and write!”
“Forbidden to teach girls,” a new voice said. The senior mullah, he who declared the sentence. “Everyone knows this.”
“Even worse,” Wahid said patiently, “this woman is a whore.”
The room was silent. “She was raped years ago,” Ahmad said. “By your men.”
“You calumniate us all,” the senior mullah said mildly.
“When the girls got old enough,” Wahid said, “she sold them, night after night, in the back streets of Shari Kuhna...”
“She’s done nothing,” Ahmad said. “I am the cause of all.”
“She must be punished equally,” Wahid said. “She took my brother down to Hell.”
“The Devil snares men’s hearts,” the senior mullah said, “with women’s eyes.”
They led him blindfolded and bound into the Soccer Stadium. He kept tripping as they hit him with rifles to make him go faster. “The blindfold,” he said, “please remove it.”
“You’re better off not seeing,” one of the soldiers whispered, “what’s to come.”
“Ahmad!” Galaya said.
“Dearest! Where are you?”
“I can’t see. I’m tied here, to a pole.”
“I love you, dearest love –”
Hard metal smashed his mouth. “Don’t talk that way!” a man’s voice said.
The crowd grew silent. “Because he was my brother,” Wahid called out, “I shall cast the first stone.”
DOWNTOWN NAIROBI BLAZED with lights. The Gulfstream pilot banked over the Embassy, the shattered hull of a great building, another flattened beside it, the cranes and masses of people picking over the still-burning ruins under the arc lights.
Jack met Ackerman in the basement security room of the station chief’s villa in the suburbs north of Nairobi. “Why were there no Marine guards?” Jack yelled.
“It was a moderate-threat location,” the station chief said. “We had Kenyan guards.”
Jack stared at him. “You stupid fuck.”
“We’d been tracking some of these people.” Ackerman sat heavily. “But they left Kenya. One even moved to Texas. We thought we’d scared them off.”
“You don’t scare off these guys,” Jack shouted at him. “You kill them. When are you going to listen? When are you going to kill Bin Laden?”
“I didn’t fly you over here to take shots at me,” Ackerman rubbed his stump, turned to the station chief. “Clarence can you excuse us a few minutes?”
The station chief shut the door. Jack listened to his feet climbing the stairs.
“We’ve had a plan to hit Bin Laden in Afghanistan,” Ackerman said. “Clinton wants it. But Timothy and the other top guys in HO won’t back it. The Republicans are all over Clinton for this bimbo thing – he doesn’t have the power anymore.”
Jack paced, wanting to punch Ackerman, the wall. “So why was Owen here?”
“Doing a round of the African embassies, checking security. He was furious about the Kenyan guards. Wanted Marines.”
A week later Jack flew back to New York. The Kenyans had arrested several Muslims who’d fought in Afghanistan, low-level gofers. The top guys had vanished, and HO had no idea how to find them.
Not long ago in Windows on the World McPhee had asked Jack to find Wahid, help get Bin Laden. What if we’d got him? Would that have saved McPhee?
McPhee in Afghanistan hobbling broken-legged through the snow after Jack and Loxley had rescued him, then saving Jack after the battle of the stepping-stone bridge, then taking him from Ebnecina Hospital to Pakistan, after Sophie had saved him from the Spetsnaz and Hekmatyar’s fanatics. At Jack’s wedding telling him about El Salvador, then in the white Taurus in Washin
gton Square saying that soon the United States would start a war with Iraq.
“I’m lucky to have a friend like you,” Jack had said once. “For when the bullets start flying.”
“The bullets are always flying, man,” McPhee had answered. “That’s the point.”
Intel
“THE TALIBAN NEED US.” Timothy opened a desk drawer and took out a cigar box. “And we need them.”
“You asked me down here to say that?” Jack said. “We need them dead.”
“That’s not operative anymore. Not since Bush got here.”
“They shelter Bin Laden and we shelter them? While Bin Laden attacks us?”
“Think Machiavelli, Jack. The world isn’t always what we want.” Timothy took out a cigar. “You and Wahid al-Din, you’re still close?”
“Never were.”
From a drawer Timothy took out little gold scissors and cut off the cigar tip. “Just getting a little background.” He lit the cigar.
“Strange,” Jack said, “it’s against the law to import those, but you have them.”
“Once we knock over Cuba these’ll be available to everyone...”
“Once we knock over Cuba? When do you lead the troops up the beach?”
“Same old Jack.” Timothy tipped ash into a silver salver. “Wahid’s now in a leadership position in the Taliban. They have friends here – Kissinger, friends of George Bush. The story is that the Taliban are good for Afghanistan, that Bin Laden’s okay, we misunderstand him.” Timothy waited, puffed the cigar. “And now that Bush is in, hitting Bin Laden’s off the table.”
“I remember being here in Langley a few years ago, a meeting with you and Bernie, with State, NSA – that’s what Reagan was saying about Hezbollah.”
Timothy poured Oban into two glasses. “What we need, Jack – given your prominence in the oil business – is your help with these pipelines we want to run across Afghanistan.”
Jack set his glass untouched on a side table. “My help with the Taliban?”
“We’re not asking for full-time: we know you’re a busy man. Company to run. Fine wife and son, fine little daughter. How old, you say?”
“I didn’t say. Leo’s sixteen, Sarah’s seven.”
Timothy nodded as if he already knew. “Offices in the World Trade Center, mansion on Fire Island... Done well for yourself.”
Jack glanced round at the huge office, the Isfahan carpets, the neoimpressionists on the walls, the French antiques. “And Home Office has done well by you...”
“That’s the secret,” Timothy grinned over his cigar, “is it not?”
“The secret is that the Taliban’s protecting Bin Laden. And that you’re one of the guys who doesn’t dare to go in and get him.”
“Jack, it’s a new millennium. The oil and gas in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan may be more than all the Middle East – you know that. Unocal wants to build these two pipelines across Afghanistan to keep that oil and gas from passing through Russia or Iran. The gas to Pakistan, the crude to us. Otherwise we have to invade Iraq again, run the pipelines that way, down to Basra...”
“The Taliban are pathological –”
“So was Arafat! Think how many people he’s blown up. Now he’s got a Nobel Peace Prize for Christ’s sake!”
“He’s still a murderer. The Peace Prize is a joke – even Kissinger has one!” Jack leaned forward. “If we don’t get Bin Laden, far worse things are going to happen. To Hell with Bush – we have to show resolution, strength, justice – or in the Arab mind we’re doomed as easy targets –”
“Speaking of Kissinger, he’s lobbying for the Taliban now, pushing State to recognize them as Afghanistan’s legitimate government so they don’t get put on the list of terrorist nations, and so Unocal can get World Bank funding for their pipelines. They’ve got some ex-diplomats and Congressmen on their side. Speaking of Republicans, Jack, you could help us, we could help you –” He smiled “– and if you want a piece of these pipelines...”
“I don’t want a piece of your goddamn pipelines. And when Bin Laden hits a couple of airliners, or sets off suitcase bombs in US cities, SADMs? Or germ warfare? What then?”
“Get real, Jack.”
“How many Soviet suitcase bombs are unaccounted for? Out of a hundred thirty-two we know were made, eighty-four are missing. That’s eighty-four missing one-kiloton bombs that a man can carry on his back and set off anywhere he wants. Each one will take down a whole center city, contaminate it for millennia! And you don’t think there’s a problem?”
“You know that after seven or eight years the plutonium degrades –”
“That’s when they’re more fucking dangerous. And what if they’ve been recharged? They can go another decade and still be used! And the Palestinians and Chechnayans may already have some – and you don’t think there’s a problem?”
“President Bush is on top of this. He wants these pipelines. He feels, and Cheney and Rumsfeld agree, it’s safe to work with the Taliban.”
Jack set his glass on Timothy’s desk. “You tell Kissinger to shove his Taliban pipelines up his Machiavellian ass.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him that.” Timothy said sarcastically as he snuffed his Cuban cigar. “Levi wants to see you on the way out.”
“WE’VE GOT NEW INTEL,” Ackerman said, “something big’s coming down.”
“Not according to Timothy,” Jack said. “What kind of big?”
“An attack. Here. We’re not sure what kind. We’ve told President Bush it’s an emergency, we just don’t know what it is. Not yet.”
“I thought he was in Texas. His six-week vacation...”
“Christ, he’s been on vacation since he got in the White House. Anyway, I flew our Al-Qaeda team down to Crawford last month, laid it on the table.”
“What kind of attack, Levi?”
“A multiple hijacking, that’s what we think. We want heightened security on all passenger flights, but Bush won’t do it.”
“Won’t do it?”
Ackerman shrugged. “He blew us off and went fishing.”
JACK CAUGHT the evening shuttle back to Newark. Ackerman’s Intel was more than upsetting... Timothy sucking up to the Taliban, Kissinger backing them at State, Bush protecting Bin Laden. How had things got so upside down?
He shaded the window with his palm trying to see the stars, remembering them thick as shattered crystal above the Panjshir heights, in the Sawtooths, in Tuamotu where the whales swam, high over the Alaska tundra. But all he could see was the arc lights of freeways and bridges, cities and suburbs overlapping in blazing spider webs. A whole system that would break down without oil.
To change the world you needed power. But you didn’t get power without evil. So to change the world you had to be evil. But if you were evil you liked the world the way it was.
The middle-aged elegant woman next to him in First Class glanced across at his copy of the Washington Post. “I can’t believe they’d do that,” she said.
He turned from the window. “Do what?”
“France – look at that story – they’re forbidding Muslim girls to wear the veil.”
He glanced down at the paper. The only good news he’d seen all week.
“Don’t they believe in freedom of religious expression?” she said.
He felt unutterably weary. “They’ve also forbidden the Muslim practice of genitally mutilating girls – you know about that?”
She looked at him primly. “I don’t believe so.”
“They cut off the clitoris and often the labia too. So the woman has no interest in sex. And if she doesn’t submit to her husband she gets beaten and thrown in the street. Or killed.”
She huffed, not believing him. He wanted desperately to make her understand, this well-meaning woman who had never been beaten for not wearing a veil or for speaking in the presence of men. “The French have always outlawed all religious manifestations in school,” he said. “The crucifix, the skull cap, veils �
� any of that crap.”
“I still think it’s wrong.” She turned away.
He felt depressed beyond measure. How do you defend a society that doesn’t see the dangers you’re protecting it from, sentimentally attached to what it believes is its own liberality and good-heartedness?
The standard dilemma for warriors throughout time. Maybe you’re supposed to just ignore the society you’re fighting for, just do your job. But that’s not my job any more.
In the taxi from Newark Airport into Manhattan he felt better, seeing the city’s incised diamond canyons, home and workplace of millions on a tiny isle, the most extraordinary single human achievement on earth. And his two beloved towers rising high above it, nexus of the world.
Fire Island
“HERE COMES THE SUN,” Jack hummed as he carried his double espresso onto the rooftop te race outside their bedroom and set his cup beside Sophie’s on the glass table. He kissed the top of her head, inhaling the fresh scent of her hair, smiled round at the soaring blue sky and the roofs of other buildings turning golden in the sunrise, stretched luxuriously and sat beside her, tugged aside her hair to kiss her cheek, slid a hand into the folds of her white terrycloth bathrobe and up her thigh.
“Stop that!” She slapped at him absent-mindedly, reading the Times.
He slid it higher. “I’ll never stop this.”
“Can you believe this story?” Sophie shook the paper fiercely. “This crazy terrorist he hijacks a plane in nineteen seventy-one and now, thirty years later, they find him! Living in plain sight in Mount Vernon! Under his own name! Don’t they even try to track them down, these people?” She shoved his hand away.
“That’s domestic, Honey. The Feebies.” He sipped his coffee, strong, bitter and delightful, glanced over her shoulder at the paper. Violence in the Middle East, a headline noted, Despite Plans to Talk.
“It never changes,” she nodded. “That headline.”
He slid his hand up her thigh again. “Tha’s why I don’ pay it no ‘tention no more,” a mimicked Southern accent.