KBL (3 page)

He smiled “Good morning, brother” through broken, stained teeth at Waseem, the tearoom proprietor, and accepted gratefully the tiny cup of sweet, dark, steaming brew that Waseem offered him whenever he showed up, sometimes in the morning, sometimes later.

Waseem rubbed his balding head. He admired the beggar. After all, the beggar was mujahidin—he was even aptly named Shahid—a fighter who had lost both his legs and most of four of his fingers when the detested Americans had hit his Waziristan compound with a missile from one of their armed Predator unmanned aerial vehicles that killed Muslims without regard to their guilt or innocence.

Shahid had come to Abbottabad a little over a month ago. From Peshawar, he’d said, and before that Waziristan. On his way to Islamabad. It wasn’t far. Maybe he’d get there someday, God willing, to collect the money he was owed by the government, those Westernized thieves.

Judging from the rough Urdu-tinged accent, Waseem figured the beggar was originally from up north, the rugged, harsh mountains close to the Afghan border. Someplace like Drosh or Chitral. Places the government—Waseem considered the president and most of the government bureaucrats in Islamabad to be puppets of the detested Americans—was afraid to go.

They grew them tough up there in the northwest. Thin-air Jihadis who could carry sixty, seventy kilos on their backs all day, humping up and down the passes like mountain sheep. God’s warriors, who extracted a good price from the Infidels. And sometimes paid one, too.

“A sweet, Brother Shahid?” Waseem always asked. You didn’t want to offend someone who’d put his life on the line defending Islam against evildoers.

The beggar set down the two lengths of wood he used to push the padded furniture dolly on which he traveled. “God bless you, Brother Waseem.”

“And you, Brother Shahid.” Waseem excused himself and returned almost immediately with a pastry dripping honey sitting on a small rectangle of thin waxed tissue. He stood there in his shirtsleeves, pulled a well-used handkerchief out of his rear pocket, and wiped his forehead as if it were summer as he watched the beggar stuff the treat into his mouth with ruined finger stubs, then wipe his lips with a ragged tunic sleeve.

“Are you well?”

The beggar shrugged and sipped tea. “As well I can be, thanks to God.” He emptied the cup and, using both hands, offered it back to Waseem. The beggar looked around conspiratorially. “There were strangers here yesterday. I saw them by the Bibi Amna Mosque.”

“Yes,” Waseem nodded. “Four of them in Army uniforms. Captains. From Islamabad, I think.” He paused. “Visiting the Military Academy, from the look of them.”

“God be praised.” The beggar picked up his sticks. “I always wanted to go to military school.” He tapped his rag-wrapped stumps with one of them. “But God had other uses for me.”

“God be praised.”

The beggar sighed. “God be praised.” And then he swiveled, pushed off, and foot by foot wheeled himself down the street to the corner by the Iqbal Market, where he sat for an hour, sometimes more, his back up against the wall, his wooden bowl in front of him, collecting alms—and intelligence.

It was the strangers who’d snagged the beggar’s tripwire. Made him more than slightly nervous.

They were Pashto-speakers. Accents? Islamabad, the beggar thought. Maybe. Nah—better than maybe. But officers visiting the Pakistan Military Academy? No fricking way. These guys didn’t walk or talk like soldiers. They were Intel professionals. They reeked ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. And it was well known to the beggar that significant elements of ISI were sympathetic to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Moreover, operating under military cover was a common ISI tactic. In 2008 and 2009, some of the top-tier
International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) units in Afghanistan, units that hunted for HVTs—high-value targets, in militaryspeak—operated with Pakistani “military observers” embedded.

Except the embeds hadn’t been military. They’d been ISI officers in uniform, and they reported back to Islamabad on the HVT hunters’ sources, methods, and tactics.

And guess what? Shortly thereafter, HVTs in Afghanistan began to change their tactics and methods. And shortly after
that
, not a few of the sources who had led American forces to those HVTs were abducted, tortured, and murdered.

More to the point, the beggar had eyeballed these guys, and they’d been
looking
. Surveiling. Eliciting. Searching for an anomaly in this garrison city of thirty-five thousand souls.

Hunting for something specific.

And the beggar, whose Infidel name was Charlie Becker and whose legs and fingers had been blown off on Father’s Day 2004 by an al-Qaeda in Iraq suicide bomber just outside the city of Mahmudiya, and who currently occupied a GS-15, Step 10, slot at SAD, the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, knew exactly what anomaly yesterday’s strangers had been seeking.

They were looking for a CIA safe house. A safe house that had been set up just about two months ago. A safe house that had been rented from an unsuspecting owner by false-flag recruited, anti-American Pakistanis who thought they were working for the Haqqani Network, a violent Afghani militia based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, where they ran training camps for foreign terrorists.

In point of fact, however, the hoodwinked Paks had rented the property on behalf of their—and the Haqqanis’—sworn enemy: America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

Which then filled it with several million dollars’ worth of high-tech eavesdropping and communications equipment, which was covertly, painstakingly, meticulously shipped in and set up, piece by piece by piece.

This was Valhalla Base, the safe house for which it was Charlie’s job to provide countersurveillance and thus protection.

Charlie Becker, a retired U.S. Army Airborne Ranger master sergeant, had spent just over five and a half years in rehab after what he called “the nasty Iraqi incident.” And since he had an innate talent for language, and since he had no intention of not working for a living or writing a tell-all book or getting by on a disability pension, and since he was someone who believed in the credo “Don’t get mad, don’t get even: get ahead,” he’d spent that time prepping his mind as well as his body, learning the languages his enemies spoke.

Learning to speak them like a native.

He was currently fluent in Urdu and Pashto, and his Arabic wasn’t bad either. Since January 2009 he’d spent most of his time down at Guantánamo working interrogations. He’d volunteered for Gitmo because it was the best way, he argued, to get his language skills where he wanted them. The best way, he harangued, to discuss Quranic law in Pashto and Urdu and get the damn phrases right. The best way, he knew right down to the marrow in his bones, to learn
how to pass
.

Charlie was no fool. He had discovered in Iraq that he could pass for Egyptian or Syrian. Until, that was, he opened his mouth. But now? Now he had all the tools.

And when he learned that CIA had got this . . .
thing
going in Abbottabad, he’d volunteered to play lonesome end and watch his comrades’ backs.

So he’d left his prostheses in his Special Activities Division locker, set up in Camp Alpha, the secure compound in a far corner of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The selfsame Camp Alpha compound that sat safely behind four layers of three-meter fence topped by concertina wire, patrolled by K-9 security teams, and backstopped with a sensor system that cost more than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett made in a year, plus bonuses, combined.

It was the compound where, inside a hangar with a shielded roof that couldn’t be seen by any loitering ISAF unmanned aerial vehicle or penetrated by Russkie or Chinese infrared or thermal-capable satellites, a hangar large enough to store three C-17 Globemaster-IIIs, the CIA was keeping some nasty little surprises for its most bodaciously, successfully reclusive HVTs.

Knowing what was going on inside that hangar and getting a peek at the items therein had been hugely motivational for Charlie Becker.

Which was why for six weeks he lived outside the hangar in the same clothes he was wearing now, with nothing but the cardboard shelter he’d constructed himself to shield him from the elements, and consuming the same seasoned lentil stew,
roti
flat bread, and sweet tea diet consumed by most poor Pakistanis. He bathed only occasionally, except for his stumps and hands, which he washed religiously before dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, and evening prayers, prayers he recited with the passion of the Salafist Jihadi into which he was metamorphosing.

He drank tepid Pak tap water and
zam-zam
fruit milkshakes brought in from Abbottabad until his gut got used to them, which meant he wasn’t shitting twelve times in one day or one time in twelve.

He practiced getting around on the padded furniture dolly—built from materials scrounged entirely in Pakistan—until it was second nature, worked on his Pashto until he was dreaming in the language, and radiated Pashtunwali from every pore. Then he ran himself through four weeks of painful, intense preparation until he knew his legend was firm, his cover secure, and his body ready for Show Time.

And it was—all of it, every bit of pain, every ounce of energy expended—worth it.

Worth it because this was going to be huge. Gargantuan. Broadway. Hollywood. The fricking Oscars.

This time, it was Crankshaft. UBL.

UBL. Usama. The ghost. The wraith. The Grail.

And Charlie would have a hand in this show. Not a bit part, either, but a featured role.

Covertly, of course. And anonymous. But still . . . featured.

If, that is, he survived.

2

Abbottabad, Pakistan
December 7, 2010, 0912 Hours Local Time

Charlie Becker paused, checking the traffic, then pushed himself across Hospital Road, on the uneven edge between Abbottabad’s commercial district with its three hospitals, and, to the northeast, the sprawling military complex housing the campus many Paks called the West Point of Pakistan. It was a city that in some ways reminded Charlie of Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. Not that there was a bay, or boats. But the cities had just about equal populations, and military academies, with their hundreds of young cadets. And Abbottabad was, like Annapolis, a place where denizens from the nation’s capital could escape the heat. For those in D.C., it would be to spend summers or long weekends on the Chesapeake Bay. In Abbottabad’s case, they’d come from Islamabad for the cool breezes that blew off the mountains to the north and west.

This morning the breezes were a lot more than cool. He’d completed roughly one-eighth of the route he took every day, sitting in front of the mosques or cadging lentils with chicken, tea, and sweet cakes from friendly store owners with whom he gossiped or traded stories.

His circuit, which covered roughly five and a half kilometers—three-plus miles—varied from day to day. But it always covered 360 degrees. Its epicenter, more or less, was Valhalla Base, the CIA safe house he was watchdogging. One dog leg of Charlie’s route often took him through the neighborhood called Bilal Town, clear around the outer perimeter wall of the location the retired master sergeant thought of as GZ. Ground Zero. The irregularly shaped compound that Valhalla Base had been set up to monitor.