by David Poyer
“Going to get some sleep?”
“Maybe.”
“That Air Force imagery’s still coming through without coordinates. Oh, and—forgot to tell you. The last watch, Donnie said there was somebody here asking all kinds of questions about CIRCE. About the algorithm for the reasoning framework, mainly. No-neck type. Ponytail. Looks like what’s his name, the governor from Minnesota—”
“The who?”
“The guy, the guy—he was in the first Predator movie—”
“Jesse Ventura?” Shit; Henrickson meant Beanie Belote. “Good casting, Monty. What did Donnie tell them?”
“He said not much, but you know Donnie. Even if he did, no way they’d understand him. Unless they were down as far in the bits and bytes as he is. I had to loan him some of my socks. He didn’t bring any.”
“Just make sure he gets a shower once a week,” Dan told Monty. “Okay, I’m going over to the JIF. Getting some funny reports out of the interrogators.”
“Go to your tent. Get your head down. Anyway, we aren’t on the access list over there.”
“Supposed to be. See if we are now.” He heaved up and out of the chair, then stood swaying like an old dog, forgetting what he’d planned to do next.
“Go on, get out of here,” Monty said, and Dan lurched down the canvas tunnel into the main intel section. Turned left, through another fifty meters of field tables and the smells of fuel-fired heaters and canvas, pushed the flap aside, and stuck his head out.
Into night. He blinked, having thought it was still day. Running on Zulu time, he’d lost track. But the hazy sky was keyholed with stars. Bitter cold wind polished his teeth with talclike dust. Lights coruscated along the perimeter, reaching out hundreds of yards into the plain. Beyond them lay the mountains, a black invisibility that cut off the stars. He felt the grade rise under his boots, and a moment later was on asphalt.
Where was he going? Oh, yeah. The JIF.
The Russians had laid the field out north to south, with no crosswind strips. Engines howled as helos lowered themselves like spiders on silken threads. Lights glared as techs root-canaled an engine from an A-10. To the east, flat scrub was etched with half-erased defensive berms and eroded bomb dumps. The main road was a half mile west of the airstrip, with taxiways leading to aprons and revetments and huge hangars whose windows were broken, steel rusting, flaking concrete pockmarked with bullet craters. The Russian buildings hulked even from hundreds of yards away. The Coalition forces had set up within and among these hangars, with acres of GP tenting and stacks of containers and sandbags and Cyclone fencing and concertina everywhere. Every installation and nationality had fenced itself off from the rest.
Something huge descended from the night and floated above the strip. Rubber shrieked. He left the road and empty brass tinkled beneath his boots. He shivered and reoriented and headed for the salmon-tinted glows that made the Joint Interrogation Facility distinctive for hundreds of yards. He didn’t like walking in the dark. The mine-clearance teams had been over the area, but there was always a chance they’d missed one. Halfway there he corrected course, and the massive walls towered above him like a socialist cathedral. Shouting rose above the drone of generators, the shriek and howl of engines from the strip.
A column of men swayed under brilliant light. Their heads were covered with what looked like grain bags. Their hands were locked behind them. Marines walked alongside, bayonets fixed. Dan approached by a graveled walkway lit with generator-driven floods. Two marines with riot guns checked his ID, then bumped it against an access list. “I should’ve just been added,” Dan said.
“He’s on it. Lenson, Daniel V.… No weapons inside the JIF, Commander. Check ’em at the booth.”
“Not armed.” He lifted his arms, watching as the new arrivals began filing through a gauntlet of men and concertina.
The senior guard grinned like a violin’s fretboard. “Stand by a sec, Commander. You mind, sir? Just till we get the Bobs outa sight.”
The column had halted inside the concertina, out of sight from the rest of the base, but in the glare Dan could see the process from where he stood. Large marines with black plastic trash bags cut into makeshift jerkins and pulled over their battle dress yanked the first man from the line and rodeo-wrestled him to the ground. The prisoner screamed as knives flashed. They sliced away clothes until he crouched naked in the shivering air.
Hauled upright, he was jerked to the next station, where a medical team waited, and the gauntlet sucked in its next subject. The marines stuffed each prisoner’s stripped-off rags into steel barrels whose leaping flames added to the hellish feel. Farther along, still struggling, the captives were forcibly dressed in orange prison jumpsuits, then positioned before a vertical grid. A camera flashed. Then they were pushed into the cavernous maw of the hangar.
At first they all looked alike: slight, ragged men whose features when they emerged from the bags bore an identical expression of sheer terror. But as Dan watched, he began to see differences. All were bearded, except for those too young to grow them. But some were taller and lighter-skinned. None were exactly fat, but a few looked as if they’d grown up better nourished than the darker, squatter ones. He assumed he was seeing Arabs and Afghans, but reminded himself there were probably other nationalities and ethnicities as well. A few looked almost Asian.
The guard turned back to him and executed a crisp salute. Dan touched his watch cap in return. “Report to the check-in desk, Commander. Tell them who you want to see and what your business is. Have a nice day, sir.”
* * *
YVONNA Jones-Potter was his contact at the JIF. The Marines ran the Joint Interrogation Facility, but they didn’t interrogate. Jones-Potter’s office was curtained off by blankets. A coffeemaker grumbled in the corner. Jones-Potter was small and fortyish. She wore jeans and a heavy wool Pendleton shirt and a brown T-shirt as a snood. Only the tan desert boots told him she was probably Army. A parka hung from a nail. She gave him a tenth of a second’s glance from behind her field desk and asked what he wanted. Dan tried to ignore the screaming. As far as he could see, no one was being beaten, but the atmospherics were straight out of Schindler’s List.
He opened with “Saw your new shipment come in. So, who are these guys?”
“You tell me. They dump ’em on us, but we don’t have any idea who we’re getting. They come off that plane for in-processing, they come in clean.”
This seemed odd. “I mean, I know you don’t have clear identifications. But where they were captured, what they were carrying—”
She pulled off the T-shirt, revealing short blond hair. “I mean clean, Commander. There’s supposed to be a package with each man, his pocket litter, what he was carrying when he got picked up. If we get that at all, it comes in one duffel per shipment. We could find Osama’s Day-Timer for the next year, and we wouldn’t know which of these guys was his secretary.”
Dan considered his next question. “Is that … Army SOP?”
“No, it’s SPECOPS-to-JIF SOP. We’re not even regular straightlegs to them. Most of us are reserves.” Jones-Potter waved at the warren of makeshift offices behind her, heavy with plywood sheeting and hung blankets. “Forget I said that. All right?”
“Forgotten.”
“How can I help? You’re some kind of intel liaison, correct?”
“With the Joint Working Group.”
“I’m not sure where you’re taking us from.”
“I’m sorry? I don’t—”
She said patiently, “How are you getting our reports?”
“Oh. Off the Web, through CFLCC.” He pronounced it sea-flick, the ground component commander back in Kuwait. “But we’re only half a mile apart here, so instead of sending the request back up, I walked it over here. All right?” He waited, but aside from a wry face she didn’t object. “We need to set up some kind of briefing for your people. How you link to the Working Group, how we link to Task Force Hatchet. Make the flow of information explicit,
let you know what we need. Maybe even set up some of your interrogators to go out with the operators.” She still didn’t respond, so he went on, flipping open the folder he’d brought “We’ve been reading your reports. Especially from prisoners 343 and 347.”
“The leprechaun twins.”
“Excuse me?”
She sighed. “Some of the guards think they look like the Lucky Charms leprechaun. What’s your question?”
“I’d like to see them. Ask some questions about a meet location that’s come up. Also, if any of these new batch can tell us anything about OBL, any little detail, if they’ve ever laid eyes on him, we need you to shoot that to us direct. We can pass the word straight to a quick reaction force.”
“There’s a procedure for submitting our reports. They’re not worth much until they’re scrubbed down. Bumped against the standard protocols—”
“I understand that. What I’m saying is, it takes too fucking long! By the time we read your reports, they’re cold. The big fish keep swimming off. To get them, we have to be able to react in minutes.”
“Interrogation takes time, Commander. And we only have two Arabists. Very few Dari or Pashtun speakers. We’ve got some assistance from the Northern Alliance, but their English isn’t that great.”
The phone rang and she answered it with terse sentences. Something about mug shots. She hung up.
“That means I can’t see them?” Dan asked.
Jones-Potter explained that since the Working Group had said those two detainees were of special interest, she was subjecting them to what she called “monstering.” “That probably sounds worse than it is. Basically the echo—the interrogator—stays in the booth with them for as long as he, or she, can stay awake. A marathon session. Usually they break. If they don’t, our chances go way down. Once they realize we’ve done all we’re allowed to, to them, the fear factor goes away.”
“Sleep deprivation?”
“It might look that way, but really, what’s ‘sleep deprivation’? Our interpretation of the Geneva guidelines: If the interrogator can stay up all night, so can the guy he’s interrogating. We’re not putting any strain on them beyond what our own troops are getting.”
Dan was no military lawyer, but that sounded fair. “Okay. So I can see them? Are they in the—in the interrogation room now?”
“We call them booths. One of them is. Yes, you may observe, but please don’t speak or interfere. Once you start a subject with one interrogator, there’s an emotional link. Trust is built. Or fear. Or both—depends on the subject what approach we take. But the more faces, the less impact. Some of these guys, the hard core, they’ve gotten formal training on resisting interrogation. So you can watch, but don’t speak. And I can let you talk to the interrogator, try to work out a balance between what you need right away and what he thinks he can get.”
Dan agreed, since it seemed to be the only way he’d be getting in. Jones-Potter nodded and picked up the phone.
* * *
WHEN he looked down on the center of the hangar, he stopped dead. Generator-driven spotlights purred around an open central bay. At their focus, where a boxing ring might be in a large auditorium, sat four fifty-foot-long wire cages like oversize dog runs. At one end hung a huge American flag with several of the spots focused on it. At the other, an enormous banner depicted the outlines of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the words 9/11: WE WILL NEVER FORGET. Within the wire men in saffron-colored jumpsuits sat or paced or reclined on blankets. Buckets in corners held brown liquid; a prisoner was squatting over one. Marines walked up and down between cages and looked down, carbines across their chests, from balconies. At one cage a man stood with his back to the gate; guards were shackling his wrists. At the far side of the hangar enormous rusting machines, stamping or welding equipment, had been shoved in a jumble back into the shadows. The whole setup reminded Dan of some gritty postapocalyptic film, maybe the Thunderdome in Mad Max. He could smell the shit and the generator exhaust from all the way up here.
The interrogation booths were a row of plywood-sided cubicles on the first floor. Following the sergeant Jones-Potter had detailed to escort him, Dan almost collided with a husky man in baggy carpenter jeans, a black Gore-Tex jacket, and a Cubs hat. His eyes were swollen almost shut, and he lurched clumsily to get around Dan. “Sir,” the sergeant said, “this’s the guy from the Working Group. Got questions about the Twins. CO sent him down to see you.”
The interrogator introduced himself as Dix, no last name. They shook hands. Dan said, “We read your reports, 343 and 347, right? Tenth picked them up outside Kandahar? Made any more progress?”
“They have cunyas—ALQ aliases, like street names back in the ’hood.”
“Arabs? Or Afghans?”
“These two, Afghans, but fairly high up. The one we’re got in the booth now, he’s something like a Taliban-ALQ liaison officer. Bin Laden doesn’t speak Pashtun. Or else speaks it badly. When he has to sit down with the locals, work out a deal for protection or some place to stay, he needs a translator.”
“I’d like to ask them some questions.”
Dix was shaking his head before Dan finished speaking. His eyelids sagged closed, then jerked open again. “These guys’ve just cracked. The window’s open, but it could slam shut. Tell me what you need. You can go back to the ICE and watch the interrogation on the screen. Or borrow a helmet and stand in the doorway, if you want, like you’re one of the guards. But don’t come in. What d’you want to know?”
Dan held up the folder. “In one of your reports, 347 mentioned a meeting at a place called Pajuar. It’s not on our maps. It comes up one other time on the search engine, comm intercept a week ago. But still, no location. We need to know where it is, whether they’ve ever held a meeting there before, if he knows of another that’s scheduled. Who was there before; if there was another, who’d attend.”
Dix said he’d put the question, but it might take a while. Dan said that was fine. The echo went away and came back with two Cokes and took them into the booth. A moment later the guard opened the door. The sergeant escort handed Dan a helmet. He put it on, the Kevlar still warm, and stepped in.
The booth was claustrophobic, perhaps deliberately so. Six by eight, just enough room for a metal folding chair, a small table, another chair. The guard stood by the door, slung M4 pointed at the concrete floor. A TV camera was bolted above his head. Another man, Afghan by his dress, squatted on the floor. He wore a black balaclava, only his eyes showing. The walls were unpainted CDX with the manufacturer’s stamp still on it. Stapled to it, incongruous on the bare plywood, was a tourist poster: a tropical beach, palms, an azure sky, a long stretch of pure white sand leading away, sucking you in, and green mountains in the distance. No windows or fans, but the top of the booth was open, screened by chicken wire. The lights glared down, casting everything into either brilliant relief or deep shadow.
On the chair a small, hunched prisoner sat with one leg tucked under the other, gripping one shin. He had a wild, dark beard, long hair with streaks of silver, and bruises on his wrists and under red-rimmed, weary eyes. He had a button nose and thick eyebrows and red-apple cheeks and maybe he did look like a leprechaun, if you had a good imagination or were really tired. Dan smelled his rank metallic sweat and the plywood and some volatile chemical like paint thinner. The interrogator put a Coke on the table. After a moment the prisoner cracked the pop top and drank, not taking his eyes from his captor.
Dix started with questions about a supply route, apparently what they’d been talking about before Dan arrived. The translation took a while; the squatting Afghan turned the Engish into what Dan assumed was Pashtun. Then the response came, and that took a while too, and then they had to wait for translation. Dix patiently noted the answer on a steno pad. It seemed like a very deliberate process. The prisoner swung his foot and glanced at Dan, then away.
“All right,” Dix said. “Now, back to the meeting at Pajuar you told me about. First of all, where i
s Pajuar?”
The prisoner shook his head. He spoke briefly, not looking at the interrogator, but at the galvanized wire screen above them.
“He says, what is the use? He will answer no more questions.”
Dix took his time. His gaze stayed on the Afghan, who seemed not to want to meet his eyes. “Remind him, the outcome is up to him. We can turn him over to the Northern Alliance. They have a prison in Kabul. Translate that.”
The terp spoke for a while. When he stopped, Dix said, “It used to be a Talib prison. Maybe you remember it. Always used to be crowded. But it’s funny, we keep sending people there, and they never say they have too many.”
The prisoner didn’t react. Dix reached into his folder. Took out photographs and put them on the table. “What’re your kids going to do without you, Ahmed? You did want to see them again. Or you wouldn’t be carrying their pictures. You have a choice. We can send you to Kabul. Or”—Dix looked at the poster, and Dan suddenly understood—“we can send you to Cuba. To Guantánamo. You won’t see your family for a while. But eventually, after we sort out our friends from our enemies … it’s your choice, Ahmed.” Dix waited again for the translation, as the prisoner’s eyes reluctantly fastened on the poster.
“Will he be able to walk on the beach in Guantánamo?”
Dix shrugged. “If he is our friend, why not?”
A hesitant question. “In Cuba. Will he be shackled and caged?”
“He doesn’t bargain. This isn’t a souk. He’s either with us, or against us. This is what our president has said.”
The prisoner lifted his head. He closed his eyes, then sighed. Spoke, a flood of resigned speech.
“He will tell you what he knows,” the translator said. “More than that, he says, he cannot say.”
Dix asked about Pajuar again, and this time the prisoner grew animated. He used his hands to show directions, glancing at the translator occasionally. Everyone else waited patiently. Finally the answer came through, but it sounded complicated. Dix noted it all down and asked how long it would take to walk there from various villages in the valley.
