Page 138 of Whisper
Several hours later, a runner brought him the intercept: Salim and Suleyman were declared dead.
Al-Qaeda vowed revenge.
Kris longed for his and David’s Virginia home, nestled in the woods, surrounded by nature and peace.
Home in Afghanistan was Camp Carson, a dusty, windswept base of concrete sprawl and HESCO barriers, sandbags and concertina wire, trailers and humming generators. The base perched on a plateau just north of Tora Bora. It was close to where he had manned the radios while David and Ryan and the others plunged into the mountains, shadowing Bin Laden’s footsteps, so long ago. Now, instead of the bare emptiness and desolation from before, the base was a fortress guarded by helicopter gunships, massive perimeter fencing, and armed guards in towers, watching everything.
The land was the very definition of austere. Dry desert, devoid of life, stretched for miles, until the plateau bumped into the White Mountains and the slopes of Tora Bora changed to craggy woods and scattered ferns. Even from a distance, the scars and craters of the battle in 2001 were visible, pockmarks on the land, empty of life.
Beyond Tora Bora, Pakistan stretched into the horizon. The border separating the two countries was impossible to see, a line in the dust without marking, without signposts or fences. The peaks seemed to hover in the haze, scarred with sunlight, as if trying to escape the earth into the sky. In the afternoons, when the light burned onto the dead lands, the desiccated, war-ravaged earth, Kris thought the place looked a little like Hell would after the fires burned themselves out. Afghanistan still seemed that far away from the rest of the world.
Life on base wasn’t terrible. He and David shared quarters, a privilege only given to married CIA officers. They had a cramped double bed shoved in the same size space as a single officer’s quarters, one nightstand, one desk that wobbled whenever it was looked at, and a fluorescent light strip with a dangling orange extension cord.
Compared to being separated from David, it was paradise.
They shared a bathroom with two other officers. The base had a gym crammed full with exercise equipment, donated by every fitness manufacturer in the States. The food was good, and the mess hall served a rotating selection of American favorites. Lobster and crab legs even showed up on the menu. There was nothing as strange to Kris as eating lobster with David by the light of their flashlight at two in the morning, their version of a date in Afghanistan.
A CIA-run lounge served beer and wine, a luxury that the rest of the soldiers in Afghanistan couldn’t taste. Football, basketball, and baseball games were beamed live into the base via satellite.
Kris commuted from his trailer quarters to the command center every day, a walk of three minutes. David, more days than not, dressed in traditional Afghan clothes and slipped out, driving a series of loops and switchbacks and changing cars and bicycles and even picking up a donkey, all to avoid being tracked. He, and sometimes others with him, would wander the border regions, crisscrossing into Pakistan and back into Afghanistan, scouting for tracks, hidden weapons, signs of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He’d joined the CIA’s ultra-secretive counterterrorist pursuit teams, hunting on the ground to collect intelligence, and to capture or kill the CIA’s most wanted.
They formed opposite sides of the spear. Kris with his drones, David with his clandestine infiltration on the ground. David sparred with shadows and ghosts, always looking over his shoulder, ever mindful of being discovered. Kris battled politics and whispers, a dizzying array of mixed priorities, and constant pressure from every part of the government. The Department of Defense, NATO Command in Kabul, Special Operations Command, and Ryan, each pulled Kris in different directions, wanting different operations, different actions.
The CIA base was host to Special Forces and Delta operators, military royalty who werenevertoldno, never questioned. Already against the CIA in principle and mocking them behind their back for being clowns, push-button jockeys, and children who hid on their bases, the Special Forces soldiers recoiled hard when they were told Kris was the new commander of the remote field base.
More than once, Kris heard soldiers mockingly refer to Camp Carson as Camp Cocklover. Or to himself as Major Fag. The Special Forces, notoriously tight-knit and cultish, excluded David from their fraternity with a pathological virulence.
Darren, his deputy, had come from the Special Forces world, and he straddled the gulf between the CIA and the military. Darren showed up and he did his job, and he never acted anything less than professional to Kris’s face, but his best friends were the loudest of the operators who sneered and joked in the mess hall.
After Salim and Suleyman’s deaths, Kris’s eavesdropping nets spread wide across the northwestern Pakistan frontier, stretching from the Afghanistan border with Central Asia to almost the heart of Pakistan. The world’s best and most sophisticated technology pointed at the globe’s most backwater and underdeveloped regions. Drones hovered over every ancient village, every dirt path, every huddle of goats. Computers at the NSA and at Langley hummed, ripping through trunk phone lines, scanning bytes of data passing over the internet, and poring through captured phone conversations vacuumed up by the technology of the most powerful nation on earth.
It was awe-inspiring, how much power they wielded.
The hunt for al-Qaeda’s senior leadership usually progressed at a fixed pace. The computers chewed data. Analysts reviewed intelligence. Kris directed their gazes and analysis, focused his team to zero in on certain areas, expand other lines of intelligence gathering. He was in charge of both the drone program and the human intelligence program, managing an army of informants from Pakistan and Afghanistan who traded bits of information, sightings, and rumors for handouts of cash and parcels of food.
But everything came to a screeching halt with one word, vacuumed up over a war-ravaged Pakistan province infested with al-Qaeda and Taliban warlords in the heart of a brittle no-man’s-land of terrorism and virulent anti-Western hatred.
Nawawiun.
Nuclear.
The flash cable came in from Langley: al-Qaeda intercepts in Waziristan Province had captured the phone conversation of two senior commanders debating the Islamic merits of using nuclear devices. The original intercept, translated Arabic, was beneath the summary. Kris read it four times.
Nawawiun. Nuclear.
Kris’s phone blew up seconds later, Ryan phoning from Kabul at the same time an analyst from Langley tried to get through. He answered Ryan.
“Have you seen the newest cable?”
“I have it in my hands.”
“This is a fucking nightmare. If al-Qaeda gets their hands on a nuke, that’s a fucking disaster. It’s what they’ve always wanted. Always.”
“Where could they have gotten one, though?”
“Pakistan. Old Soviet weapons that have gotten misplaced. There are more than a few very plausible options for how they could have gotten their hands on a nuclear device.”
“We haven’t authenticated this report beyond just a single intercept. We need to know more.”
