The Year of the Locust, page 33
Before Spencer had time to think any more about drugs or sex, the door opened and they turned to see one of the four high-ranking officers they had met on their arrival enter. A major general from Special Ops, introduced to them as their briefing officer, he was a muscular, powerful man with buzz-cut hair and a swagger in his step. It meant there was little to distinguish him from hundreds of other senior officers—not even his name tags. They had been removed. The strike cell had noticed it earlier but none of them had said anything—the braid and insignia were enough—and now, with him standing in the doorway, they leapt to their feet.
“At ease,” he said. “Two people are arriving from stateside—they are an hour away at the moment. As soon as they land, the briefing will start. Understood?”
“Sir,” the pilots said in unison, waiting for him to leave and then getting back to their beer and food. “Even more brass, I guess,” Mila said. “Like we need any—Have you ever seen so much?”
“Another few officers is fine,” Connor said. “It’s when the CIA turns up you know it’s gonna be a screwup.”
CHAPTER 41
Another day, another mission, I thought as I looked out the window of one more GreenEnergy jet and saw the mountains of the Hindu Kush—grim and ominous—on the horizon. I could not help thinking about what a blood-soaked landscape lay beneath me and I recalled what somebody famous wrote: “Afghanistan is where empires go to die.”
The British, the Soviets, and the United States had all chanced their hand at the gateway to India and, through it, the rest of South Asia, and they had all left defeated and diminished. The thought of so much wasted life and effort did little to lift my mood.
Twelve hours earlier, despite Falcon’s suggestion, I had called Rebecca just before I left Langley and told her about my imminent departure, and that had turned out to be an even more difficult conversation than I had anticipated. She felt, of course, that Falcon and I had planned the flight all along, and it was hard to convince her otherwise—after all, the organization I worked for was renowned for its subterfuge and cunning. My refusal to tell her my destination only amplified her concerns about the risk to my health.
“Am I missing something here—weren’t you just in intensive care?” she had said, her tone clearly indicating she was fighting hard not to lose her temper. “You’re still so weak you can barely walk, the rehab hasn’t even started, and you’re flying somewhere that probably ain’t the Maldives? When you were admitted to MedStar we missed something. We should have tested your mental health.”
“It’s my job, Rebecca—you know that. You think I’m going anywhere without medical support?”
“Put ’em on—the doctors,” she demanded, skeptical.
Thankfully, Falcon had organized for us to be accompanied by a doctor and two nurses, and I put the doctor on speaker. It was a woman, and doctor to doctor, she updated Rebecca on my condition and told her about the plan for the next three days. I could tell from Rebecca’s reaction she was relieved it was a short trip, and when the doctor told her that my fatigue and injuries meant it would be impossible for me to leave the room where I would be stationed, I realized that—quite inadvertently—she had swayed Rebecca into believing I would not be in any danger.
The doctor may not have completely won the battle but at least an armed truce was declared, and Rebecca asked to speak to me privately, gave me a shopping list of things to monitor about my health, and—finally, quietly—told me she loved me. Nevertheless, exhaustion had left me sapped by the time I boarded the flight and just as I began, at last, to drift into sleep, I was wide awake again—heart pounding—with a sense of imminent death. While it had happened several times since I had returned, I had not told anyone about the feeling of panic. It will pass, I told myself.
So, instead of resting, I sat and thought about the man at the vortex of everything, someone who knew what Bhopal really meant, the terrorist we were on our way to try to kill. And maybe I would not have said anything to Falcon about the colonel or my misgivings except that the pilot told us we were fifty minutes out from landing and the director, who had been sleeping a few rows in front of me, walked past on his way to take a shower.
“Get any sleep?” he asked.
“Not much,” I replied.
I guess the tone of my voice alerted him and he looked at me for long enough to show he knew that something was troubling me.
“He won’t be there, Falcon,” I said. “Kazinsky won’t be part of any convoy.”
“You’re wrong,” the director replied.
“I can see him standing on the beach,” I said. “One of the things I remember most—he had real command presence. But on the spit, I could see how he felt as I waved goodbye. He knew, Falcon—he knew if an American spy made it home, they were finished. He only had to think about what I had seen and what he had told me—yeah, he hoped I would be drowned by the shamal, but he couldn’t be certain of it and he would never know the truth. He had to assume the worst; he was a colonel in the Spetsnaz, he understood strategy and danger—he knew the moment I vanished into the gulf, I was an existential threat, and there was a good chance the Army was blown.”
“No,” Falcon replied. “The Army are only weeks away from a spectacular. They won’t run, not now. Would bin Laden, would al-Zawahiri, would any of them run? You’re giving Kazinsky more credit than he deserves. He’s like the rest of them—just another terrorist commander. We’ve seen dozens of them, haven’t we?”
“Not like him,” I replied, thinking about the first time I saw him riding toward me like Lawrence of Arabia. “Not like him—I was a prisoner long enough, I know him.”
“You don’t, Ridley,” Falcon said harshly. “We never know any of them. We can’t. There is no common ground on earth anymore—we’re a group of different tribes forced by circumstance to inhabit the same cave. That’s what has happened to the world—everything divided. ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’ ”
I looked at his careworn face. “God save us—poetry now, Falcon?” I said, smiling. “Yeats?”
He grinned back. “Yeah, I thought I’d slip it in. ‘The Second Coming’—one of the best. ‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world… innocence is drowned,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
“That’s us,” he continued, the smile gone. “Our government lacks all conviction.” He pointed at high-def images of the Army’s base open on my laptop. “And the terrorists are full of passionate intensity.” He held my gaze. “Kazinsky has the passion,” he said. “He’ll be in the convoy. You’ll see—we’ll find his body in the wreckage.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Inshallah.” If God wills it.
CHAPTER 42
Bagram was one of those landing strips where only a fool would have ignored the pilot’s instruction and not fastened their seat belt.
Located on a high-altitude plateau, it had always been a terrible place to land, and the wreckage of military aircraft lying beside its runways was a testament to its wild winter snowstorms and searing summer gales.
With a massive dust storm darkening the horizon, the Gulfstream came in low over the surrounding mountains, fought the treacherous downdrafts, and hit the runway so hard that the doctor and one of the nurses exclaimed in shock. It was a blistering summer day, and as I looked out the window, the hangars and endless rows of buildings were barely visible through the shimmering waves of heat.
Apart from a handful of people, nobody was aware that Falcon and I were even in-country, and there was no high-ranking officer or CIA station chief to greet us. Backlit against that eerie scene of red dust and snowcapped mountains, we made our way slowly—my crutches hindering us considerably—across the baking asphalt toward an SUV driven by a grunt who had been told to pick up two civilian contractors who would be arriving on a private jet.
I had only been to the base once before—on assignment early in my career to help interrogate several terrorists held at a black prison hidden in its most remote corner—and since that visit a decade ago, the huge base had been closed and reopened half a dozen times. Depending on who was in the White House and what they considered to be in America’s best strategic interests, US forces were regularly being wound down, surged, minimized, maximized, withdrawn completely, and then redeployed. As Falcon and I scrambled into the rear of the SUV, the base was in the midst of another massive buildup.
By any estimate our ride was a strange vehicle, fashioned for survival more than anything. Even after years of war, the base still came under rocket and mortar attack, with only the identity of the insurgents wielding the weapons changing—one year it was the Northern Alliance or the Taliban, then, a decade later, a reborn al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, or the Pashtun rebels—and the SUV, like most other vehicles, had to be heavily protected. But Bagram was part of a hugely expensive deployment, the budget was supposedly tight, and there wasn’t the money for transports like the SUV to be professionally armored at the factory. Instead, thick sheets of rusting scrap metal had been bolted and riveted to its frame. Known as “hillbilly armor,” the makeshift metal made the SUV look like something out of one of those postapocalyptic movies.
Sitting in the back of the vehicle, we made our way toward what people on the base called “downtown.” Little had changed over the years: it was still the only base in a combat zone where you encountered traffic jams. The place was a boomtown. The main drag featured crowded fast-food outlets—all the usual suspects—chain coffee shops with lines halfway down the dusty street, stores run by locals known as haji shops doing a roaring trade in everything from sunglasses to under-the-counter bongs, and rows of stalls selling some of the best Indian street food in the world. Without doubt, Bagram base was one of the liveliest and most exotic small towns I had ever visited—certainly the only one with regular incoming artillery fire.
At the end of the strip, we headed down a long and empty road toward a heavily armed checkpoint set in a high wall.
Topped by cameras and motion sensors, the wall enclosed the base’s most sensitive facilities, and five minutes later, having had our identity checked by half a dozen different methods, the SUV stopped in front of the command center for the missile attack. The sandstorm was still clinging to the horizon, thankfully turning away from the plateau but still managing to throw it into a strange half-night. Falcon took my arm to help me and I limped up to a door manned by two marine guards.
We took an elevator down three floors, walked along a brightly lit corridor, and entered a room lined with monitor screens, computers, a host of satellite feeds, and complex GPS data. Three workstations were set against a wall and each of them was a cocoon of even more technology: more computer screens, a keyboard, and a professional joystick that would have been at home in the cockpit of the most advanced fighter jet.
Sitting in the captain’s chairs in front of them, facing the major general who was serving as the briefing officer and four other generals, were the three missile pilots, waiting for the briefing to start.
CHAPTER 43
While the loading crew maneuvered forklifts, taking the unpacked missiles into the high-security hangar, and the unmarked Apache helicopters were being checked and rechecked, the three pilots sat in complete silence. The briefing was over but none of them moved—they remained sitting in their hard-backed chairs staring at the huge interactive screen in front of them. They were silent, in a state of shock.
It wasn’t because they had been shown the glittering white casings on the missiles—they had no knowledge of those at all; nor was it the fact that they would be piloting new-generation armaments and not the drones they had spent several years commanding. They were more than comfortable with their ability in that regard.
The explanation for their silence was on the screen—for the first time, they had seen the proposed destination of the missiles they would be piloting. The three of them had only just met but because they were so experienced, they knew exactly what the others were thinking: they were being asked to do the impossible.
I was as perplexed as they were—I had no idea how the missiles were going to evade the Iranian air defenses and destroy the convoy, and while I had looked a question at Falcon several times during the briefing, he had studiously avoided giving any answer.
“It’ll be the surfer, he’ll be the one that’ll start asking the questions,” Falcon said softly. “He’s a smart kid.”
A few moments later, Connor stood up and asked the briefing officer for permission to speak. Appropriately deferential to a major general—even one without a name tag—he said that on the flight to Kabul he had read dozens of reports on drone flights in the north of Afghanistan. “Those missions stretched all the way from the border of Pakistan to the frontiers with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan,” he said quietly. “A lot of those flights reached the edge of Iran.
“Every time they did, Iranian air defense locked on and tracked them until they turned away,” he continued. “The Iranians didn’t miss one, not in the past five years, no matter how low and fast the pilots were flying or how good they were.”
“You’re right,” the major general replied. “Iran has a state-of-the-art surveillance and defense system supplied by the Russians. It can pick up anything a hundred miles this side of the border—so yeah, it’s very good indeed. Go on…”
“And even if the Iranian system missed it, sir,” Connor continued, “or the men and women controlling it were napping, the Pakistanis have four tripods at a forward listening post that sweep the entire region. That system was supplied by the US and according to the reports, it doesn’t give anything a pass. I’m no expert, but I figure they’d tip off the Iranians about any incursion just to win credit with them.”
The major general laughed. “I’m sure they would,” he said.
“To be honest, General, we’ll do our best,” Connor said before looking at Spencer and Mila; they both nodded. “But I can’t see any way we can get a missile through an electronic wall.”
“I understand,” the major general said, more reasonably than any of the three pilots had expected. “What about the vehicles, though?” He pressed a button on a remote control for the interactive screen, bringing up satellite images of various vehicles on the move: Toyota pickups—of course—Nissan Patrols, modified Land Rovers, and other four-wheel drives. “Can you hit any one of ’em?” he asked. “No margin for error. Are you certain?”
Connor, Mila, and Spencer nodded—they had done exactly that hundreds of times, either in reality, on the simulator, or on dummy runs.
The major general may have been satisfied but Falcon wasn’t, and he picked up his own remote. “Even here, in Zahedan?” he asked.
As the images changed on the screen, I leaned forward and just managed to hear Connor mutter to his comrades. “Like I said—once the suits arrive it’s trouble.”
I couldn’t tell if Falcon had heard or not but two of the generals definitely did: they both had to suppress their laughter.
Images of the sprawling city appeared on the screen; until then Zahedan had just been a name and a dot on the map. After looking at image after image: “I don’t think it would be a problem. We’ve been in worse places,” Connor said.
Falcon nodded and brought up a specially created CGI video showing various vehicles weaving through the town’s crowded streets and then climbing a hillside laced with narrow alleys, old earth-colored houses, and a stark white mosque. “What if the vehicles are traveling at speed down narrow, crowded alleys?” Falcon asked. “You’re confident you can do that with absolute precision?”
All three pilots nodded.
“With no civilian casualties and especially no damage to the mosque?” Falcon said, pressing.
“Yes,” Connor replied. “Using sushi bombs, it’s what we’ve been trained for.”
“Okay,” Falcon replied, hitting the remote and turning off the screen. “You let the suit worry about penetrating the Iranian air defenses, and you can worry about the targets.”
CHAPTER 44
“Now it starts,” Falcon said, keeping his voice composed, but not even a man as skilled at concealment as he was could hide the undercurrent of anxiety. We had left the briefing room and were walking slowly into the high-security hangar adjoining the supply warehouse.
Despite the arid and windswept environment, the yawning space was spotlessly clean, and while there was room under its roof for fifty helicopters, only the two unmarked Apaches were currently occupying it. They had been moved inside for secrecy’s sake, and now specialist technicians were stripping plastic dustcovers from the four missiles, ready to fit them to the firing rails under the choppers’ bellies.
I stared at the missiles—white and stark and all a-sparkle as their billions of tiny tiles acted like the facets of countless diamonds under the high-intensity electric light. And while I had never seen them before, or anything like them, I knew then that I was standing on the threshold, that in some way it was a watershed moment.
I looked at Falcon—his face was inscrutable and to this day I do not know if it was the first time he had seen them or not. Certainly, though, he understood the implications. “Welcome to the future,” he said.
“Twelve hundred years ago, there was a Chinese alchemist,” he continued, his eyes fixed on the weapons. I had no idea where he was going, but I was happy to let him run. “The alchemist was trying to create the mythical elixir of life, so he combined three elements into what he believed was a remarkable medicinal compound. In a way he was right—it was remarkable, just not medicinal.” He smiled, but there was no humor in it—more in sorrow, I thought. “What the alchemist had done, completely by accident, was invent the first chemical explosive. Within a few decades, bows and arrows had been abandoned, clubs and spears forgotten—all replaced by bombs or projectiles fired from some tube or other. The compound he had created was gunpowder, and warfare would never be the same. There was no turning back for humanity either; overnight the world had become a different place.”
