Page 171 of Whisper
’Bu Adnan loved Allah, and loved his home, his people in the mountains, and he came to love Dawood, too.
At night, after ’Bu Adnan went to sleep, Dawood would gaze at the stars. He watched them fall, blazing through the night sky. This nameless mountain at the end of the world. He didn’t feel a part of the world anymore. He felt outside of it.
He stared at the moon, so full and huge he thought he could leap off the mountaintop and grab hold. Hang on to the moon as it circled the world, let go, and fall back to earth, right where Kris was.
If Kris was even alive.
It seemed ludicrous, a complete fantasy, that he lived on the same planet where he and Kris had waged a decade-long war. The United States had technological superiority over every inch of the globe. There wasn’t a speck of land they couldn’t see or control, he’d thought. How was this corner of the world possible? Where was he where he was outside of time, outside of the raging, endless war?
In all the vastness of the world, there truly were some untouched corners, it seemed.
If he just picked up a cell phone and made a call, said the right words, the NSA would sweep up his transmission. In days, after it was decoded, someone would know he was alive. They would know where he was.
But there were no cell phones here. Not on the mountain. There were no drones or satellites, no patrols passing by. No informants or human sources. No American presence at all. It was almost unnatural, strange. All of their technological superiority, all of their wizardry, and he couldn’t do a single thing to contact home. Not from where he was.
He was encased in silence, in pure, impenetrable silence. The hoarseness before a scream, the void of sound, the absence of American might.
Did he even want to go back? Back to the war? Back to confusion, and darkness, and a life separated from Allah? Did he want to go back to the pain? The constant grinding frustration, the way the world had rubbed him raw? Back toeverythinghe’d buried for decades?
Could he go back and find Kris dead and gone? There were some things he could not face, he knew, in the depth of his soul. He’d begged to trade his life for Kris’s. Was this exile merely Allah’s mercy, His way of sparing Dawood the agony of certainty?
Kris was, by all probabilities, dead.
He didn’t know what to do, what to think. So he stared at the stars and spoke to Kris, whispers that he imagined the moon would carry to wherever Kris was, living or dead.
My love, I stitched little Behroze’s arm today. He makes me think of what you must have been like as a child. Always impetuous, never listening. Always trying to have fun and go his own way. He will leave these mountains when he grows up. I can feel it.
I dreamed about you again. The same dream, the one I always have. Your smile. Your happiness. Ya rouhi, I hope you are happy. Somehow, somewhere. I pray to Allah that you are happy, with every one of my prayers. Your name is always on my lips. Your soul is always in my heart.
There is not a moment that passes where I do not think of you. You are the moon that rose in my darkness, ya rouhi. And I know that I will see you again, my love. I know it, in my soul.
The moon took his words silently every night. Somewhere, Kris was beneath that same moon. Alive or dead, in this life or the next. They saw the same moon every night, and he imagined it was their one connection, a tether that ran from his heart to Kris’s, circling around the moon.
Iwillsee you again.
Now
Chapter 26
Tallinn, Estonia
September 6
Kris rolled his neck as he settled into the last seat on the CIA’s unmarked Gulfstream jet. The others from the mission took seats up front, leaving a wide berth around his back row.
Just the way he liked it.
Up front, the three CIA officers held hostage by Russian president Dimitry Vasiliev during his war games with President McDonough were smiling and popping bottles of beer as they reclined in the front row seats. Banged up and bruised around the edges, they were no worse for wear. President Vasiliev had waited until President McDonough wasjustabout ready to invade before agreeing to release the officers in a pseudo prisoner exchange.
The US didn’t release any Russians back across the Koidula border crossing in Estonia.
A dark van filled with balaclava-wearing Russians had screeched to a stop on the Russian side of the bridge and shoved the three CIA officers out. On the other side, a company of Estonia’s infantry, a platoon of British Royal Marines, and a platoon of US Marines waited, a strong showing of NATO-aligned military.
Kris, and the rest of his team were there, too, matching the Russians, dressed in head-to-toe black.
He’d almost wished it had gone sideways, that he’d had a shot at the Russians. The exchange had been too simple, too easy. He itched for more.
When they landed in DC, he’d head to the gym, try to drum up a sparring partner. Sweat it out with some right hooks and roundhouses.
