ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  The first Afghani was tall and slender, long-faced with a thin jaw. He flinched when Jack spoke Pashto, scanned him curiously. “We’re not Taliban.”

  “Where’s Osama?”

  Again the man started, surprised. “You don’t know?”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “Five days he’s gone – up this trail over the ridge to Pakistan.”

  “You lie.” Jack stepped back. “I’m sending you to Kabul prison –”

  “It’s true, Lord! It’s true! Haji Ghamsharik and Wahid al-Din and the others helped Al-Qaeda escape Tora Bora.”

  “How!”

  “They took mule trains and many trucks. It was going on for days, this escape. From Lalpur they took the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. The American planes never stopped them.”

  Jack stood on the rocky barren ridge with the December wind in his face, looking out on the far sawtooth peaks, as if this blue icy world was here to rend us, shred us, leave us for the gods. “Drive them to Jalalabad and drop them off.”

  “We’re supposed to bring them in, Jack.”

  “They’re just dumb shits got caught up in this. Like we did.”

  Ray sat on a rock, wiping grime, sweat, and gunpowder off his face. “Where’s fucking Bin Laden?”

  “Escaped.” Jack felt weary beyond any exhaustion he’d ever felt. “We paid the Afghanis ten million bucks to help us get Al-Qaeda, and they led them to Pakistan instead.”

  VI

  Baghdad

  Casablanca

  January 2003

  AWOMAN’S VOICE drove him from a dream of the raw hills of Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden had escaped. A crisp peremptory British voice. He rolled over on his blankets and clamped his hands over his ears.

  The voice neared, cheery and self-assured, Sergeant Weiss answering in monotone, “He doesn’t normally talk to people –”

  “He’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Jack!” Sergeant Weiss stood in the doorway, blocking the light. “This reporter here to see you. Says you’ll want to talk –”

  “I’m not here,” he whispered.

  “Oh yes you are!” she called. “I can hear you.” She came in and sat on his trunk, tugging up the knees of her camo pants and pulling her cap off her black coiling hair.

  He sat up, scratched at his whiskers, his breath sour. “What you want?”

  “Isabelle Palmeiri from The Independent.” She shook his hand with strong cool fingers. “I’m assigned to SAS command and a couple of them said come see you about Tora Bora –”

  He noticed a fly buzzing at the single window, trying to get out to die in Jalalabad’s frigid daylight. “I wasn’t there.”

  “Oh yes you were.” She glanced at Sergeant Weiss.

  “You can go, Sergeant,” Jack said.

  She flashed Jack a smile. “So, why’d you let Bin Laden get away?”

  He stared down at the dirt, counted three breaths. “That’s idiotic.”

  “Come on, it’s all over the base! The order came all the way down from Tommy Franks, didn’t it? But why?”

  He wanted to stand and scratch his balls – anything to drive her out. But she sat there calm and self-contained as he shuffled outside to piss in the back yard, tucked himself together, and came back in. “Lady you got the wrong guy.”

  “Listen, I know why you’re here. And why you want Bin Laden. I’m sorry but I do. What I don’t understand is why you’d take part in this disgusting roadshow – The Tora Bora Traveling Circus of Ex-Taliban Double-Crossers and Media Patsies – staged by no other than US Central Command... And a few insignificant Brits of course.”

  He sat on his bunk. “Go away.”

  She gripped his knee. “Not till you tell me why –”

  He noticed how the amber dawn splashed across her face, how her fiery voice lit the room, her smooth fast questions that were never off the mark and never let go, as if it was her right to be answered fully and honestly and any failure to do so a breach of faith. “Go away.”

  She circled back to her first questions like a wolf that has run the herd and now returns to the weakest animal. “So why did Centcom let Hazret Ali, Wahid al-Din, and Ghamsharik make the final attack on Al-Qaeda?”

  “To let the Afghanis take the lead? Show they’d rejected Al-Qaeda?”

  “But they’d been Taliban allies! And why were there only two Special Forces units in the whole area, and they were – excuse me, you were – held back and only did the painting?”

  His tongue was thick and tasted awful. He noticed his coffee cup sitting in a new coat of dust on the ammo crate beside his bunk. “I have to catch a flight to DC.”

  She resettled herself on his trunk. “I’ve had a chat with all your mates –”

  “I don’t have any mates.”

  Her eyes appraised him. “You did though, didn’t you? Have a mate –”

  “That’s nothing to do with this.”

  “I’m sorry but it’s the nub: you’re here to kill Bin Laden. So why are you covering up Tora Bora? Doesn’t it matter why we gave him and a thousand Al-Qaeda a free ticket out of Armageddon? When we had them pinned down? Don’t you need to know?”

  He whacked his boots together upside down to shake out scorpions, and slid them on. “And what’s all this talk,” she added, “about Bush wanting to invade Iraq?”

  He bent to lace a boot, grunted with the pain in his chest. “Nobody’s that stupid.”

  She stood. “If you were a Brit, and maybe you’d lost someone in 9/11, or lost a soldier here – wouldn’t you want to know?”

  He started shaking sand out of his clothes and throwing them into his duffle. She stopped at the door. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d mistake you for a lifer –”

  He listened to her soft footfalls fade. Bitch. Acting like she knows what’s right. As if there were an innate moral good that is universally understood and all actions should be measured against it.

  He stood, weary with sleepless days and nights, old injuries and new wounds, old and new sorrows, the nausea of bad water and worse food. He wanted to kneel on the floor and become innocent again but there was no way, so he shouldered his duffel and walked across the courtyard to the jeep waiting to take him to Kabul.

  She seemed to want Bin Laden as much as he did. Why?

  LANGLEY’S LAWNS WERE GRAY with frost, its attentive guards, trim walls and echoing corridors all making him feel even more hopeless.

  At Langley you got ahead Inside by making the right friends Outside. If you stayed close to Congressional Intelligence Committee members and fed them the right stuff and produced critical situation reports with the conclusions they wanted, you got ahead. But if you spoke the inconvenient truth you ended up in Rangoon or some godawful hole in Africa.

  The Agency had split between those who were trying to make a better America and a better world, and those who were trying to get ahead. And those who were looking out for Number One came out Number One, while the country lost.

  He rode with Ackerman in an unmarked Crown Vic to the White House. “Casablanca,” Ackerman called it: his little game. “Since long before 9/11,” Ackerman said, “even in Transition, all Bush has wanted is to invade Iraq. We’re going to take sixty percent of Iraq’s crude, the Brits twenty. Spain, Italy, and Poland all get their piece. We’ve offered France seven percent but they want nothing to do with it.”

  “They’re right.”

  “Wolfowitz and some other top guys want to hit Saudi first, the southern fields. But Bush won’t do anything against the Saudis.”

  They went through three sets of security to a wide office in the Executive Wing walled with modern art, Iranian rugs on the hardwood floor. “Our boy’s sure come up in the world,” Ackerman said.

  “You always said he would.”

  Timothy entered with files under his arm. “Gentlemen! How lovely to see you!”

  “Jack’s just in from Kabul,” Ackerman said. “What’s up?”

 
“Bin Laden.” Timothy slung his feet up on his desk. “We think he’s in Baghdad.”

  “Last year he was in Tora Bora,” Jack said. “But you let him get away.”

  “Always sounded to me like some South Pacific atoll, that place,” Timothy said mildly. “Hey, no proof he was there.”

  “You had intercepts,” Jack said. “Recorded his voice. You know he was there.”

  “So maybe, like General Franks says, he was killed in the bombing?” Timothy caught himself. “But that’s unlikely, for now we think he’s in Iraq.”

  “Why would he be there? He hates Saddam, considers him not religious enough. And Saddam wouldn’t dare piss us off.”

  Timothy’s nostrils flared. “There’s a lot you don’t understand.”

  “Like when I came back from Lebanon with the coordinates for the Hezbollah camp, and I couldn’t understand why you didn’t hit it?”

  “This reminds me of a bad marriage. Always digging up the past.” Timothy’s face showed new signs of age: chicken feet at the corners of his eyes, dark pouches under the lids, dewlaps of skin beneath the chin. “We’ve got on-the-ground intel,” he said, “Bin Laden’s in Baghdad.”

  “I want to see it,” Jack said.

  “Can’t. Because we need you to go there, and if you’re compromised –”

  “Go there?”

  “As a former Afghani mujihadeen, to link up with Al-Qaeda, try to join Bin Laden –”

  “Timothy,” Jack laughed, “are you absolutely fucking nuts?”

  Timothy smiled primly as if complimented. “And we know Saddam’s working on nukes, germ agents, weapons of mass destruction. We have Intel from the Kurds, Chalabi...”

  “They’ll tell any lie to split up Iraq and take what they can get. Then they’ll start killing each other again –”

  Timothy looked at him curiously. “Those Soviet backpack nukes you’ve been so hot and bothered about? Apparently some are in Iraq – just another reason we need you to go there. Nobody else on our side has the languages, the experience. Christ, you’ve even done parachute drops with –”

  “W-54s? We destroyed all ours, long ago.”

  “The Soviets didn’t – what if Saddam gives them to Al-Qaeda?”

  THERE WAS NO ONE in the dark rain at the Vietnam Memorial. Why do I come here, Jack asked his father. You’re not here, your body’s rotted somewhere in the Vietnam mud. He thought of Johnson, Rusk, McNamara – their hunger that millions die for their ambition, their fear.

  What he hated was less them than something deep in the heart of man that had made Washington: the warheads in their silos, the Depleted Uranium bullets, the Sioux and Cheyenne prairies drenched in Indian blood, the rockets’ red glare with their ten thousand bomblets each, the surprised blond Russian kid beside the tank, Leo and the thirty thousand Russian dead, all this murder in God’s name, back through time.

  The long black tombstone snaked ahead of him, its names glistening in the rain of tears of all the loved and loving ones these men had left behind, the orphaned sons and daughters, the widowed wives and weeping parents, the broken-hearted brothers and sisters. Of the hundred billion tears of Indochina darkening its dark earth.

  What is exalted, the stone revealed, is evil. And the inalienable rights of man were just one more cover-up for raping, burning, stealing, and dismemberment.

  WMDs

  HE FLEW TO TAMPA for five days of briefings, and to learn how to locate each of his planned sources in Iraq.

  He was not pleased to find Brigadier General Szymanski in Tampa among the other book generals with pounds of tin on their chests. “You happy?” Jack said, “with Wahid’s success at Tora Bora?”

  “Hey we can’t hit a home run every time. We’re beatin terrarism, control most of Afghanistan – what more you want?”

  Jack laughed. “Anybody with smart bombs can kill a bunch of farmers.”

  Szymanski’s little eyes narrowed. “You think you can’t be touched? Because we need you, your languages – how you fit in with ragheads... Christ, you’re half raghead yourself.”

  I could kill you, Jack thought, with one move of my hand. “Sometimes I get so disgusted by people like you. By what I’m sworn to defend.”

  FROM TAMPA he flew a military transport to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, took a bus from Adana to Diyarbakir, then another to Simak near the Iraqi border. It was warm for February, and he sweated in his pleated coat, his five-day stubble itchy and unfamiliar.

  It was like leaving Beirut for the Beqaa, dressed in local clothes, dirty and unshaven, his target a man who had killed many Americans. Or like leaving France for the Sahara, looking for a man who blew up people in the subway.

  This time he carried no gun, only a Soviet Army combat knife strapped to his leg, the kind any Afghani mujihadeen might have. As in Lebanon he had no papers but a worn Afghanistan passport in the name of Ahmad al-Din, the photo a cheap Third World black-and-white taken at Langley.

  A timeworn Mercedes taxi took him two hours to Habur. That night he crossed the Iraqi border with a Kurdish man and woman and their three children on two mules heading to a village north of Zakhu. The man carried an old Mauser 98 and had a leather sack of bullets tied to his waist. Jack stayed two hundred yards behind them.

  They walked all night, the stars thick and deep. As he walked Jack went over in his mind the contacts he would make: Ibrahim the refinery manager, Professor Younous the atomic physicist, Colonel Nureddin Sama, and Imam Ghali. A sliver of moon rose like a red knife over the eastern hills then climbed cold and white into the sky.

  After dawn they reached the outskirts of Zakhu. He paid five hundred dinars for a ride in the back of a truck to Mosul, and from there took the night bus to Baghdad.

  The clock on the Baghdad bus station wall said one thirty-seven, but when he looked a while later it had not changed. The room was full of people, the linoleum littered with paper tissues and scraps of food. A man beside Jack peeling a tangerine offered him a chunk. It was an insult to refuse but he did so anyway.

  When the darkness outside the grimy windows began to fade Jack crossed the road into a maze of streets he had memorized in Tampa, coming out on a wide boulevard.

  There was the smell of bread and fried food and strange spices on the air, the early clatter of cars and buses; the streetlights erratically flickered and died. He walked forty minutes north then turned west into a residential neighborhood with palm trees down the center of the road.

  It was the eleventh house on the left, white and low under a tile roof, in gardens of pink and white bougainvillea. He climbed the gate and sat on the lawn by the back door.

  Soon the house was stirring. Lights came on in the kitchen. A face looked out the window and a woman came and yelled at him. “No beggars here! Go away!”

  “I am here to prune the trees,” he said. “Please tell the master.”

  “Nothing I tell the master. He doesn’t need to hear about you. Go!”

  “I am here to prune the trees. Please tell the master.”

  A few minutes later a man came out. “This is not a good time,” he said in English.

  “It’s the only time. Where do I meet you?”

  “Walk on the far side of the boulevard toward Daura. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. A silver Toyota. Now go!” he said loudly in Arabic. “Before I call the police.”

  Jack was a mile down the boulevard when the silver Toyota pulled over. “Who are you?” the man snapped. “Why did you come?”

  “Things are happening fast, Ibrahim. I’m here to locate backpack nukes, chemical and biological munitions – weapons of mass destruction they’re calling them.”

  “Don’t joke! We can’t even make polyurethanes now. There isn’t enough food, steel, look at this road – we’re not even making asphalt! How can we make weapons?”

  “You’ve got feedstock –”

  “At Daura we’re down to forty thousand barrels a day. No cracker catalyst, naphtha, a thousand other things we need
for basic life. Where’s your Intel? Your satellites can look under our beds, can see what every general has for dinner, what page of Harry Potter Saddam finished last night – don’t tell me you don’t know we’re going back to the Stone Age!”

  “Your refinery’s a perfect place to make chemical weapons. Thousands of miles of pipelines, crude towers, reformers, hydrocrackers, huge steel tanks, laboratories, underground storage... That’s why the Israelis bombed you in ‘81 – remember...”

  “You think I don’t know if someone is making weapons in my refinery?”

  Jack watched the tawdry storefronts, dusty palms, noisy vehicles and discolored concrete buildings flit by. “So what do people think?”

  “Most Shiites and Kurds would like Saddam gone. But then they say what would come after? We’re not even a real country – we were cobbled together by the British. Without a strong dictator we’d explode. We know what happened to Yugoslavia – you bring in a little freedom and people use it to cut each other’s throats.”

  Ibrahim’s cell phone buzzed and he answered it driving one-handed. “Cut the run,” he said in Arabic. “Stop the number two crude line. Yes, shut down the vacuum unit.” He closed the phone and turned to Jack, still driving one-handed. “Every day a new pipeline break.”

  “Watch that bus!”

  “Our pipes are corroding, too much clay in the soil. You think in Iraq we can make new steel pipe? All we can make anymore is babies.”

  “Who would know about small nuclear weapons, old Soviet stuff?”

  “Are you crazy? Saddam wouldn’t dare...”

  “Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda? They here?”

  Ibrahim pulled over. “There’s more chance Bin Laden’s in New Jersey.”

  Jack opened the door. “I’ll tell the President.”

  “Please do. So if he wants he can bomb New Jersey. It’s a Democratic state, no?”

  AT A MARKET he bought jeans, a blue dress shirt, and sports jacket, changed, walked to the University Physics building and up to the third floor, and knocked at the second office on the right.

  “He’s not there,” called out a teenager in a Baltimore Orioles jacket, Walkman plugs in his ears, coming down the corridor with an armload of books.