Page 68 of Whisper
When the dust cleared from their latest strike, David clambered down the sliding rocks with Ryan and Palmer, sifting through the craters. Obliterated rifles and shredded Arabic books littered the blasted rock face. Bodies smeared into the ground, the earth the color of a bruise.
He heard tinny Arabic mixed with static coming from a crimson patch of snow.
Digging through, David peeled a handheld radio out of the near-frozen clutch of a dead fighter. “We need water!Yallah, you must melt more snow. Hurry!”
Another voice answered. “Is the Sheikh all right?”
“Allahu Akbar,the Sheikh is fine.Bismillah.”
“Guys!” David held out the radio. “This radio is tuned to al-Qaeda’s frequency. And it’s unscrambled.”
They kept the al-Qaeda radio powered on at all times, patched a dedicated line into it so it would transmit down to Kris at base camp. As a giant gunship circled over Tora Bora, plugging the mountain full of thousands of rounds of hot lead, they listened to al-Qaeda fighters scream and run, scramble for hiding spots deep in the caves. They listened to the fighters declare a series of caves lost, trenches abandoned and move on, farther to the west. They heard the fighters call out for more food, send out scavenger parties for roots and twigs, leaves, anything at all that was edible.
And then, they heardhisvoice.
David recognized it immediately. He’d heard the voice before, in training, in briefings before the mission, in the Panjshir when Kris would play old recordings from the late ’90s, back when he was issuing fatwas and warnings and promises to strike.
Osama Bin Laden.
“My brothers, keep fighting,” Bin Laden said. “We will vanquish the Americans. They are weak, and their bombs cannot destroy us. When they come up these mountains, they will be cold and alone and afraid, and we will beat them. Fight, my brothers. Fight.”
Ryan called in an air strike with a Daisy Cutter, the same superweapon they had dropped on Mazar-e-Sharif, that had decimated the Taliban so completely. They waited, watching the skies, and counted the minutes until the giant bomb was pushed from the giant plane.
When it blew, the mountains themselves seemed to shake, shudder, and nearly collapse, trembling down to the center of the earth. Snow and ice toppled from the peaks and avalanches sloped downhill hundreds of miles away. All the air in the Tora Bora mountains seemed to suck inward, a giant, rushingwhoosh, pulling toward the center of the impact zone. Dirt and flame rose, shooting high into the air.
Everything that had been there before was now vaporized.
Frantic screams and shouts blurred over the radio. As the Arabic speaker, David had been charged with listening to every cry, every bitter curse, every desperate plea.
In the aftermath, he heard one voice shout. “The Sheikh’s trench, it was hit! It has been destroyed!The Sheikh, the Sheikh! Is he okay?”
Next to David, Ryan clenched dirt and snow beneath his hands, gloved fingers digging deep into the frozen earth. Palmer gripped his shoulder, not breathing, waiting on the words coming out of the radio like he needed them to breathe.
“Allahu Akbar, the Sheikh is alive!” another voice cried. “He was not in his trench when the bomb hit. He is alive! He is okay.”
As David shook his head, Ryan cursed, collapsing forward. His hands made fists in the ground, squeezing around mud and snow. Palmer turned his face away, glaring into the darkness of the mountain.
“We wish to negotiate a cease-fire, to prepare to surrender.”
Majid’s man held out his radio, identical to the al-Qaeda model David kept on him at all times, but tuned to a different frequency. Why Majid’s man had it, how long he’d had it, who he was communicating with, those were questions without answers.
“That’s al-Qaeda?”
“Nam,” Majid’s fighter answered. He’d spent time with the Arabs, with al-Qaeda, long enough to learn Arabic.
David’s teeth scraped, molars grinding. “I’ll relay the message.”
In Kabul, George blew his lid. David and Ryan almost heard his bellows in Tora Bora.
“No fucking cease-fire!” he hollered. “Fucking murderers don’t get cease-fires! DC and CENTCOM agree! Keep up the pressure! Keep fucking attacking!”
Kris, as always, was the voice of reason. “They might be using a cease-fire as a pretext for slipping away. Bin Laden would never surrender, especially not now. Not after his victory on nine-eleven. This is the beginning of the end times for them. This is their Armageddon. He won’t give that up.”
“No cease-fire,” George seethed. “I want you to keep killing those bastards.”
The tentative cease-fire lasted five hours, from the time Majid’s fighter relayed the message to the time George put his foot down. CENTCOM sent their fighters back into theater, dropping thousands of pounds of bombs onto al-Qaeda’s location.
When the fighters appeared overhead, their silhouettes perfectly outlined against the sky, Bin Laden’s voice boomed from the handheld radio. “The time is now!” he cried. “Arm yourselves! We destroy the infidels now!”
