The Towers

by David Poyer

  “You feel capable of taking that on? Remember this is a NATO operation. Look at STANAG 2101. There’s a procedure and comms checklist.”

  “Yes, sir, I can handle that for you. Until you get someone senior.”

  * * *

  WALKING back through the screams of descending aircraft, the higher-pitched whines of A-10s taking off, Dan tried to decide where he should be during the daily ops cycle to juggle both of his hats—heading up the targeting cell, versus fulfilling the traditional four duties of an LNO—monitoring, advising, assisting, and what was the fourth? Oh, yeah, coordinating. He had to call USEUCOM and let them know he was warming the chair until whoever they were going to send got here. He had to go back to the fusion cell, make sure the tie-in was there with targeting, and see if there was any other way TAG could help.

  A huge earthmover beeped as it backed up. Halting to let it pass, he noticed a hollow rectangle of dirt being bermed up a few hundred yards to the side of the runway. Workers were stringing razor wire, guard towers were going up. The mover stopped, blasted black smoke from its stack, rattled forward again. He walked on.

  “Call for you,” said Henrickson when he came in. Dan looked at the note. Tent 65, SOF Compound.

  When he lifted the flap, he halted. The long canvas tunnel held folding tables with at least a dozen laptops, all occupied, strung together with bright blue Ethernet cable. The cable led to a comm package, antenna pointed at the peak of the tent. Everyone was talking at once. Off to the side, a man at a screen made a come-here gesture. Another, next to him, was shaking the handset of a scrambled phone, frowning.

  “Dan. We meet again. Let me send this and I’ll be right with you.”

  “Tony,” Dan said. Not without apprehension.

  His path and Charles Anthony Provanzano’s had crossed before. Most notably, in the Signal Mirror recon into Iraq, sent to find what they’d thought at the time was a quickie nuke mounted on an uprated SCUD. Just looking at him took Dan back to the Slammer. Provanzano, then a “civilian adviser” to CINCCENT, had visited the survivors at the Biocontainment Suite at Fort Detrick as Major Maureen Maddox had died slowly and horribly of a disease that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. Now he was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND sweatshirt just faded and torn enough to suggest authenticity.

  “Yeah,” Provanzano said. “Salter happened to mention you were here.”

  “Does he know me?”

  “Does he know you? Who do you think got you that medal?”

  “Which medal?”

  “The Congressional,” Provanzano muttered in a tone that said, I am exercising great patience; but I realize you are only a military man. “Anyway, one thing led to another. And I thought maybe we could do business.” Provanzano glanced at the other man, who was logging out of the phone. He locked it and put the key down his sweatshirt on a blue lanyard. “Dan, this is ‘Beanie’ Belote. Out of the bin Laden desk in DC, and the closest thing we’ve got to a Pashtun expert. Beanie, Dan Lenson, one of the sharper operators in the Navy.”

  Belote had massive arms and a bull neck. His black hair was rubber-banded back in a ponytail. He was in jeans and a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket. He and Dan exchanged wary nods. Dan turned back to Provanzano. “I’m not sure where you’re going with that, Tony. And I’ve got a briefing to get ready. So—”

  “I know about the briefing. Siddown.” The Agency man pointed at a folding chair and lifted a plastic cup in a toast. “You don’t drink, or I’d offer. But—do I understand right? You were actually in the Pentagon, when it was hit? Like to hear the story.”

  “It’s not a story,” Dan said. “Just a lot of innocent people, suddenly blown apart or burned to death. Not that complicated.”

  “I see … that anger’s good. If it doesn’t get in your way.”

  “It hasn’t before.”

  “I see what you mean. You’re a survivor. Dumb, but a survivor. I’ll give you that.”

  Dan hesitated, then let himself down into the chair. “Yeah, just a dumb squid. What’s on your mind, Tony?”

  “Just thought we’d catch up. We kept tabs on TAG. The Shkval, getting your hands on it—that was a dirty, dirty op. And I hear you had something to do with taking down Al-Maahdi, or whatever he called himself.”

  “The guy behind the Cosmopolite bombing?” Belote said, looking interested for the first time.

  “The same. Dan, you might be interested to know: his buddy, the little fat one, hasn’t been seen since the Saudis took him into custody. We doubt he’s going to be involved in any more bombings.”

  “Should I say thanks?”

  “If you want to.”

  Belote said, “I don’t know you, buddy, but there’s no reason to take that tone. We’re all on the same side, right?”

  “Are we?”

  Provanzano said, uncapping a small white tube, “Yeah, we are. And never more so than now. An attack on the continental United States. We have to work together on this one.” He put the tube into a nostril and sniffed; then did the other one. When he saw Dan looking, he held it up. “Vicks. Helps, with all this dust in the air. Want a hit?”

  “We might not have had to ‘work together’ if you and the FBI had shared files.” Dan tried to keep the accusatory tone out of his voice, but wasn’t succeeding. “The ‘Bin Laden Desk’ might have figured out something was funny. Arabs taking flying lessons, but not bothering to learn how to land.”

  Belote said, “Believe me, buddy, you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. We had a local team following bin Laden for three years. If during that time anyone had given us the green light—”

  “Uh-huh.” Dan removed his hands from the sides of the metal chair, which were unpleasantly sticky, as if someone who’d just eaten a Bit-O-Honey had last grasped them. Wiped his palms on his uniform trou as the civilian went on.

  “Point being, since 9/11 the rules have changed. The review committees, we can’t do this, can’t say that—ancient history. We need people in the field who know the field. We gutted our expertise during the de Bari years. Which reminds me, you hear the joke? Jimmy Carter, Dick Nixon, and Bob de Bari are on the Titanic—”

  “I heard it,” Dan said. “Look, you’ve got your responsibilities, I’ve got mine. And mine just got a lot heavier.”

  “They’re the same responsibilities.” Provanzano set the cup aside. Looked at the inhaler again, but didn’t pick it up. Dan smelled scotch and eucalyptus oil.

  “Since he’s here”—Dan nodded at Belote—“I assume this is about bin Laden. Is it? About him? Which seems to me to be the highest-priority tasking for all of us.”

  “It’d be nice,” Belote said. “See that box?”

  A large, heavy-looking, drab plastic crate with locking latches sat in the corner of the tent. “What about it?”

  “Want to know what’s in it?”

  Dan suppressed a sigh. “Okay.”

  “Dry ice. For shipping bin Laden’s head back. That’s our orders: Get the head.”

  Dan dredged for a response, but none came.

  “But even when we do, that won’t be the end. This’ll be a long war. Now. I want to hear about this localization program. The one you got Al-Maahdi with.”

  “You mean CIRCE,” Dan said.

  “We’ve got something like it,” Belote said. “But not as far along as yours, apparently. You started with what, a submarine program?”

  “Antisubmarine,” Dan said.

  Provanzano called up a file on his notebook. Read off the screen, “‘CIRCE: a Navy-developed stochastic modeling agent reasoning framework. Developed from an off-the-shelf circle-of-contacts product. Originally intended to integrate multiple near-chaotic inputs in a littoral environment to locate quiet submarines. Now a multiagent model that integrates comms, intel, social and spatial relations to predict both location and strategies of a unitary actor.’ Accurate?”

  “Close enough.”

  “W
ho’s your contractor?”

  Dan said reluctantly, “We brewed it up in-house. With a local company. You probably haven’t heard of them. They’re not Beltway players.”

  Belote dove for the plywood floor. Dan went down a fraction of a second behind him; Provanzano and the others in the tent dropped next. The crack was like the sky wrenching open. The tent rocked; dust sifted out of the fabric and made the air suddenly choking. A second explosion, even closer, jarred splintered wood into his cheek. He pressed himself into it, eyes closed. Waiting for the third and last detonation that would end them all.

  Lying next to him, Provanzano just kept talking. Through the blasts, and the clatter of a machine gun from the perimeter. “Like I said: the gloves are off. We want bin Laden. We’ll do anything necessary to get him. Any caveats?”

  “No argument here.”

  “Good, because you’re on board. With us. With CIRCE. To find him.”

  Dan considered it between explosions. He’d always steered clear of the intel side. Not even sure in his own mind why, but he’d avoided it. The table above them jumped, and a computer slammed down onto the deck and bounced. The lights went out to the shrill, insistent peeping of backup power supplies. The burnt-matches smell of explosives seeped through the canvas, and above him two rips magically appeared. “Getting serious,” Belote said. Looking at him, Dan saw he was grinning.

  “I’ve got two assignments already. Targeting and Navy liaison.”

  “By tomorrow, you’ll be one of us orcs,” Provenzano said.

  “Not volunteering.”

  “Nobody asked you to.”

  “Put up or shut up, buddy boy,” said the stocky agent. “You don’t think we did our job, got the towers blown up? Okay, show us how it’s done. Here’s a clue. ‘The sheikh speaks from the Place of Kings.’ Chew on that for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Provanzano said. “Raw intel. What do you make of it?”

  “Not much,” Dan said. The firing outside had stopped. He sat up warily, ready to dive again. Around the tent the others rose, dusting off uniforms and jeans, cursing as they examined their screens. “The sheikh—that’s bin Laden?”

  “Who can be sure? That’s the richness of the puzzle, Dan. The frustrating richness of the puzzle. Thousands of pieces. Millions. The picture depends on how they’re arranged. But there’s never only one picture. That’s the problem, you see.”

  Dan ran his hands over his face, feeling stubble and grit. “I don’t know anything about intel.”

  “Hell, who does? Welcome to the Rabbit Hole,” Provanzano said, and slapped him heartily on the back.

  IV

  Black Dust

  15

  Thirty-Six Miles South of Kandahar

  TEDDY lay shivering, wishing he’d brought more fleece-lined gear. During the night the ground sucked the heat right out. He’d eaten all the carbs he’d brought, fuel for the furnace, and was unashamedly cupped into the other guys in the hide—Tatie and Two Scoops and Knobby Swager, all Echo One—just like, he thought, faggots after a hot night’s humping. But he was still shivering.

  Long before dawn, and sleep wouldn’t come, just jagged, uneasy dreams between midnight and two. Now it was past three by the tritium glow of his watch. Still no sign of light, but the sun couldn’t be far away.

  He unlocked his pelvis from Tatie’s angular butt, half-rolled, and set an eye to the big scope. The lens was shielded so it wouldn’t sparkle, even when the sun shone into it. The camo sheet draped over them was the same light tan as the dusty desert sand. He let a handful trickle through his fingers. The stuff was fine as powder, though there were bigger grains too, brown and white, even the occasional pebble. Beneath that skin of sand was more rock; after that, he suspected, rock all the way down, gradually disintegrating and then carried away by the endless wind.

  They’d spent the last four days perched on a ridge that came up about fifteen feet out of the desert like the fin of a shark. “A sand shark, ha ha,” Tatie had whispered before Teddy had shut him up with a glance. Didn’t get them much elevation, but it was all there was. For many miles around the sand plain stretched to the horizon, interrupted only very seldom, here and there, by slight humps. The lone and level sand stretched far away. He frowned, trying to remember where he’d gotten that from. Every gust picked the powder up and blew it along the ground into their faces. They had goggles but the plastic lenses quickly fogged with millions of minuscule scratches. Meanwhile it was so friggin’ cold they had to melt ice off the scope every morning, and everything metal was coated with a rime of frost.

  The airstrip lay half a mile north, a good distance but there hadn’t been any cover closer in. The plan was to insert a SEAL overwatch before the Marines arrived to make sure no bad guys used the area or left anything behind. Like mines. They could’ve planted them earlier, of course, but looking at how remote the place was, Teddy thought it unlikely. The briefer had said the strip had been built by a wealthy Arab, who’d used it for hunting trips. Teddy couldn’t imagine what the fuck he’d hunted; in two days and two nights out here glassing by sun and starlight, they hadn’t seen anything bigger than some kind of groundhog that only came out at night and once, far off, a line of small wolves trotting from nowhere to nowhere. The only human beings had been nomads trudging past miles away, images shimmering in the big scope. They scuffed along with blankets pulled over their faces, trailing a thin rime of dust, a ludicrously tiny and overburdened burro slogging along with them, occasionally getting flicked with a stick by one of the kids.

  But there’d been more here than a deserted airstrip. Beside it was a walled compound with locked gates that hadn’t been mentioned in the brief. They’d gone in over the wall the second night and reconned, walking single file on fresh blacktop. Offices, a repair shop, a big warehouse. No one around, the new buildings all empty. They broke into the warehouse. Not only was no one there, it looked as if no one ever had been, just a faint dusting of sand on new fresh concrete. A drug transshipment point? But he’d thought the Talibs had stamped out the trade, one reason why the Alliance had turned against them. Strange, and he’d squirted a full report back to Higher.

  Lying in the hide made him remember Ashaara. Far away on the Red Sea, but not all that different, although it had been hot, not cold, and the air thicker than this thin, high brew. His collarbone twinged. It had snapped when he’d plowed into a vertical rock face, at the end of the HALO drop.

  They’d buried the chutes, then humped to the site in the dark. He and Cooper and Kowacki and Donoghe had spent two days huddled in the foundations of a shattered, abandoned village. He still had a piece of broken porcelain he’d picked up there. Part of a bowl, with half a blue rabbit on it. They’d sweated absolutely motionless half-buried through the day and then the night again. Waiting was what SEALs did best. Absolutely motionless, blending with the sand, part of the wallpaper. The second night he’d crawled out to recon the firing point and barely made it back before sunrise. At which time some of the hostiles had come out to eyeball the meet site. They’d walked over them, right through the village. Looked right at him, once.

  But hadn’t seen them.

  And then the Target of Interest, the terrorist leader they called the Maahdi, hadn’t shown up where the source had said he would. Teddy and Coop’d had to crawl across nearly half a mile of open terrain. The drop had busted Teddy’s rifle scope and he had to get in close, close, to get a decent shot.

  Eight hundred yards, open sights, in a fishtailing wind, and he’d had his share of luck that day. The heavy, tapered, boat-tailed slug had plowed into the TI higher than he’d expected, skull instead of chest, and he’d watched the head blow apart into pink mist, not believing what he was seeing. But he’d take it, and he had loaded another round, to Cooper’s calm chant: “Shot two, center hit, TI down. Call the cleanup crew.”

  * * *

  THIS morning wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic, but that was okay. No drama was fine by Teddy O these days. He tur
ned his wrist outward. Coming up on H Hour.

  Recon gave you time to think. He’d gone over all the contingency plans. Walked through everything in his head. If they saw a truck column coming to occupy the airstrip. If some wandering goatherd stumbled over their site. His SOP was to duct-tape them, morphine them silly, and leave them where somebody ought to stumble across them in a few days. Or not; goatfuckers had to take their chances, along with everybody else.

  A finger scratched his back. He rolled over to where Two Scoops pointed. Pulled his goggles up and flicked the switch. The other SEAL made a serpentine movement with his hand.

  In the green prickling seethe of amplified infrared a snake writhed slowly across the ground. Maybe ten yards off. Teddy eyed it. For a moment it appeared to want to come their way. Its head lifted, a wedged blur in the unfocused green. A shadow of flickering tongue. Then it altered its angle and slowly undulated away, leaving a rippled pattern like the passage of a rubber raft through calm water.

  * * *

  FOUR o’clock. He rooted through his pack and came up with two packets of Taster’s Choice they’d broken out from the MREs, and found cream and sugar packs too. He tilted his head back and poured the bitter crystals into his mouth and followed it with the sugar, the powdered creamer, and a mouthful of water from his CamelBak. Pushed the gritty mass from side to side through his teeth by pushing alternately on his distended cheeks until it was half-dissolved. It wasn’t Starbucks. More like bad rest-stop machine coffee. He followed up with two big Motrins, then one of the whey-protein bars Stroud had shoved in their pockets as they moved out. It sounded disgusting and had a tree-hugger wrapping that put him off, but they weren’t that bad.

  He molded a Slim Jim around his gums to marinate and returned his attention to the scope. A slow scan revealed nothing changed. The black sky was still sequined with desert stars, but seeing the peaks vanishing-faint against it meant dawn was imminent. He shivered and pulled his jacket flaps up. He wasn’t coming out here again without fleece.