A Knife Edge (32 page)

“You got a bathroom somewhere nearby?”

When I returned ten minutes later, a couple of pounds lighter and with color splashed into my face by cold water, I explained away my sudden exit on a bad slice of bacon I'd eaten for breakfast. The truth was that I didn't exactly know whether I was going to be able to pull this off. Cummins's précis of the cur riculum had rattled me. There was a tap on the door behind me.

Cummins glanced past my shoulder. “Come on in, Uncle,” he said.

“Uncle” turned out to be an Army E-8 whose name, according to the patch on his chest, was Fester. Uncle Fester. Figured. Fester was short, dark, and built strong with narrow hips and broad, heavy shoulders that somehow became his head without bothering with a neck. His nose had been broken a couple of
times, and put back together with a few pieces missing. He looked the type who could lift a couple of times his body weight—a human flea. The major and the master sergeant appeared to get along well.

“OK, Sarge. This here's Major Vin Cooper. Be nice to him, like we discussed. He's yours for the duration. You might start by showing him where he'll be sleeping.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Y'all need anything, Major Cooper, just let me know.”

A bus ticket out came instantly to mind.

“Kindly change into your running gear, sir,” said Sergeant Fester as he led the way down the hall.

“I thought we were going to see where I'll be sleeping.”

“Yes, sir. But first, we run.”

So the guy wanted to run. Most likely that would be running Fort Bragg-style—over lots of hills and through leech-infested marshes. That was OK. I'd been to this place before, and I was ready for it this time. In fact, I was pretty sure I could show Uncle Fester here a little about running.

Five miles into what was to be ten miles of pure hell, I hated the sergeant as much as any person I'd ever met, on account of he made me run carrying a wounded pilot across my shoulders who very closely resembled a duffel bag full of sand. Every step was a lesson in pain and humility that brought tears to my eyes.

I
slept the restless sleep of a dead man fighting his way back to the light. I didn't dream, I just wrestled with my adrenal glands, coming half awake with a racing heartbeat and aching muscles, and then falling back into the pit, exhausted. I finally woke in the dark to a voice that said, “Let's go, Major.” It was Sergeant Fester. “We got us some running to do.”

The following three days were a blur of sweat, lactic acid burn, and a desire to drown Master Sergeant Fester. There was no room for talk in the schedule—just running, climbing, swimming, crawling, marching, and swearing.

On the morning of the fourth day, I was waiting for Fester in the dark, laced into the Nikes and ready to go. All the work done to regain some strength after the long stretch in rehab had been a big help. The investigation into the deaths of Tanaka and Wright had put me off my schedule, but now I was getting on top of things. I waited but Fester didn't show, so I went off on a run anyway—just for the hell of it.

I'd showered and just put on a clean ABU when the sergeant finally arrived, pulling up in a Humvee. I wasn't sure what he wanted. I pointed to myself and then at the door on the off chance he wanted me to get in. The sergeant gave a nod. Mystery solved.

“Where'd you get to this morning, Sarge?” I asked as I got inside. “Sleep in?”

No answer.

“You know, you make it damn hard for a guy to get a word in edgewise,” I said.

“You haven't had the breath to waste on talk, Major,” he replied. After a while, he said, “Yesterday in the pool. Saw you'd been wounded.”

“Afghanistan and Washington.”

“Washington?”

“Don't ever get between a congressman and his reelection contributors,” I said.

Fester gave me a look like he'd just whacked his thumb with a hammer. I realized he was smiling, something he didn't seem to do much of. “I also served in Washington.” He pulled up his shirt. There was a chunk out of his ribcage the size of my fist.

“You got that in D.C.?” I asked.

“No. Somalia. But I've done a tour of Washington.” The sergeant smiled again. Twice in one day. Maybe Fester was losing control.

“So, what's going on?” I asked when he'd regained a little composure. “You decided to go easy on me because I've stopped a few slugs?”

“No. You passed the physical. Now it's time for a change.”

“Passed?”

“You're on the edge when it comes to your age, sir. Major Cummins and I wanted to make sure you were up to the job.”

“What job?”

Fester shrugged.

I knew I wasn't going to get any further. Even if Cummins or Fester knew what job they were training me for, which I doubted, they'd never let me in on it. “So, where're we going?”

“You'll see.”

Around half an hour later I was wearing a black jumpsuit—my watch and all loose articles stowed in a locker—and I was standing in an octagonal-shaped room. I could hear my breathing and my heart beating because, for one thing, the room was
heavily insulated for sound, and, for another, my ears had plugs in them. The place reeked of leather and sweat.

Five other people in the room were similarly dressed. Another five, the instructors, wore bright pumpkin-colored suits. Above us, in the ceiling, the seventeen blades of the 3500-horsepower Babcock fan began to rotate and an ominous vibration came up through the floor. Within minutes the room was filled with the roar of a column of air screaming toward those rotating blades at close to 150 miles an hour. Fester took a couple of steps forward and launched himself into the center of the Sergeant Maj. Santos Alfredo Matos Jr. Military Free Fall Simulator, otherwise known as the VWT—the vertical wind tower. Seeing it in action still made me gawk. Fester flew. The newcomers were openmouthed. The sergeant immediately assumed the classic high-arch position and maneuvered about the space by altering his body shape and using his hands and fingers to steer in the same way a bird uses the feathers on its wingtips. After a couple of minutes of demonstration free-falling, he exited the column of air, rolling on his back and letting the thick cushioning around the circumference take his fall.

He tapped me on the helmet. My turn. I did what I'd been briefed to do—took a step and dived out into midair above a wide mesh safety net, arms and legs spread-eagled. Unlike Fester, I kept going, the hurricane wind spitting me out the far side. I hit the padding like a fastball smacking into the sweet spot of a catcher's mitt. Nice bit of demonstration flying there, Streak, I told myself as I rolled off the padding.

I got back on my feet and adjusted the helmet a notch tighter. From across the chamber, Fester told me with hand signals to do it again, only with a little less this time. So I took a step and jumped. This time I managed to stay caught in the roaring column, my body arranged in the high-arch position as it had been trained to do so many years ago, the forces of gravity and wind resistance in balance.

The air pressure rushing past my mouth and nose made breathing difficult, just like in a real free fall. In fact, the overall
sensation was almost identical to falling through the air at terminal velocity, which is to say, it didn't feel like I was falling at all; more like lying on top of a few hundred fists pummeling away on the underside of my legs, body, and arms. I used my hands and fingertips to spin, and then altered my body position to rise and fall in the column. MFF—it was all coming back. I was having fun. Too much, apparently. Fester was gesturing at me to come on over. I noticed Major Cummins had made an appearance and was standing beside him, wearing the kind of scowl he might have worn if I'd just told him I was dating his daughter. He was in the process of biting off a fingernail which he then spat out. I landed a little less like a gooney bird in a storm the second time around. Cummins and Fester were already heading for the exit. Fester motioned at me to follow.

Outside the chamber where it wasn't so noisy, Major Cummins shouted, “We just got word from SOCOM. There's been a change of plan.”

C
ummins drove me to the strip and didn't spare the horses. An Air Force C-21 executive jet from the VIP squadron was keeping its fan blades warm. The loadmaster pulled me almost bodily into the plane and we were rolling before the hatch closed. Inside, I was shown to a leather, executive-style chair. Some senator had used the plane before me and the drinks cabinet was stocked. It appeared the senator and I had a mutual friend by the name of Glen Keith, and the two of us were so damn pleased to see each other I almost forgot I was flying until the loadmaster put the cork back in the bottle.

Less than half an hour later, I was on the ground at Andrews AFB, getting into a blue car with a driver. Forty-five minutes after that, I was being shown into a room at the Pentagon. If I were a home-delivered pizza, I'd still have been hot. The room was darkened—too dark for me to make out faces until my eyes adjusted. Up on a multitude of screens, various maps, intelligence reports, and satellite images of terrain and weather systems were being discussed. I was taken to a seat at the table and ignored by the shadows seated around it. I figured I was there to listen. The country I was here to listen about, according to all the intel up on screen, was Pakistan. Somehow, I wasn't so surprised. A woman I didn't recognize was in the middle of giving a briefing on the nuclear warheads sitting atop Pakistan's Ghauri
missile, which, I learned, was theoretically capable of hitting every major population city on the Indian subcontinent. An admiral asked a question about the Chagai region of Pakistan, where previous atomic devices had been tested.

I shifted in my seat, unable to get comfortable. Pakistan was behaving like it had a hand full of aces, and letting everyone at the table know it. The new revolutionary government in Islamabad was cocky, dangerously so. I could feel the pace accelerating like a runaway steamroller.

I heard someone ask someone else by the name of Willard a question. I recognized the voice of the person asking as belonging to General Henry Howerton. I recognized the guy being asked the question when he stepped into the light bouncing off a screen. Willard F. Norman, Deputy Assistant Director, Directorate of Operations, CIA. He was slight, sedentary, and pear-shaped, with delicate hands that looked soft. Rumor had it he washed them a little too often. Norman looked like the kind of guy you wouldn't leave alone with your niece. His small, pale eyes were nervous. They flitted about the room like finches escaped from their cage. A thick clump of dyed brown hair above his left ear was combed over his skull and oiled enough to stick there no matter how hard the wind blew. I remembered he'd come up through CIA ranks, making a name for himself in HUMINT—spying, basically, though on whom and to what benefit were unknown and would most likely remain so for a long time to come. Whatever he'd done, it was enough to land him in a corner office at Langley.

Willard F. Norman's voice was high-pitched and, even if he sounded like a mouse caught in a trap, he spoke with the authority of someone who knew what he was talking about, even if he didn't—a surefire way to get ahead in some parts of D.C. “These are file photos of the town of Phunal, Pakistan,” he said. The monitors rolled through a series of pictures of an ancient town, built mostly from rock, mud brick, and dung, shot in the setting sun. Discovery Channel stuff. While I'd never been to Pakistan, I'd seen plenty of towns like this one just across the border in Afghanistan, perched on a knife edge between life and
death, settlements where the people had nothing in their lives except for war, a few goats, and a lot of religion. “It's roughly a hundred and fifty miles northwest of the city of Quetta, a Pashtun stronghold,” Norman said. “Phunal is of great interest to us because it's the town closest to a major nuclear weapons research facility. It's also rumored to be a local black-market weapons bazaar frequented by Taliban and al Qaeda forces bouncing in and out of Afghanistan. We think it's being run by former Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate people, the very same people who funneled weapons to the mujahidin fighting the Soviets back in the eighties.

“It's for these reasons that we've tried damn hard to keep assets on the ground there. With the recent political upheavals, that policy seems to have been an excellent piece of foresight. As you're all aware, since the coup, Pakistan is now the world's only fundamentalist Islamic nation equipped with atomic bombs and the missiles with which to deliver them. For once we find ourselves reasonably well prepared…”

My initial discomfort was turning into a full-blown case of the cold sweats. I was having a serious attack of the I-think-I'm-on-the-wrong-train syndrome. I didn't do this kind of shit anymore. Yet here I was, doing it. This was a JOPES, or in longhand, a joint operation and planning exercise. It was the kind of briefing I used to get back when I was an STO, jumping into the following day's headlines with lunatics like the late Sergeant Ruben Wright.

“Recently,” Norman said, “our sources took the following series of photos of a convoy stopped in Phunal.” He let the pictures do the talking. The file snaps were replaced by more recent shots. Falling snow had replaced the gold leaf beaten into the town by the late-afternoon sun in the previous snaps. The shots showed a column of military trucks pulled to a stop outside a cluster of buildings. Maybe it was a public john and a couple of the drivers had needed to stop to take a leak. The photos kept reeling off, two a second. It played like an MTV video clip, the action jumping forward in fast motion. The photos zoomed in
closer to pick out various individuals milling about the trucks. One of the men had walked a few yards away from the others. He wasn't dressed in military fatigues and parka as most of his comrades seemed to be. He was wearing the clothing of the local Pashtun—a flat-topped woolen cap called a
pakool,
and a kind of rough quilted jacket over his
salwar kameez
—the name given to the long shirt and baggy trousers worn by the men thereabouts. He removed the pakool to scratch his head and… I was suddenly looking at a very familiar pudding bowl. I blinked. Goddamn it! Professor Sean Boyle.