by Tal Bauer
“Establishing communication with Bravo Base Camp,” Ryan said. “Time to light them up.”
The radio scratched, signal struggling to bounce back through the mountains to the crumbling shack where Kris and Jim were working. Majid had told Ryan it had once been a school for girls; the Taliban had destroyed it years ago.
And then Kris’s voice crackled across the line. “Team Bravo Forward, come in.”
David hissed. Kris’s voice, a physical ache, like his insides had been scooped out raw. He closed his eyes, holding his breath. Kris… What was happening at base camp? Was Kris safe? He could hold his own, but he and Jim were alone in the dangerous reaches of Afghanistan with nothing and no one around.
He wanted to be there, with Kris. And not just to protect him. He wanted to be at Kris’s side, through every moment. Kris seemed to have a part of him, like a kidney or a lung or his right hand, and David hadn’t even known he’d been missing something integral until he’d met the slender, shivering man with the spiky hair on the runway in Tashkent.
“Bravo Base, we have lasers painted on the al-Qaeda base at Milawa. We are ready for air strikes.” Ryan called out the coordinates, and Jackson turned the laser on, lighting up the center of the al-Qaeda camp.
“Bravo Forward, acknowledge. Will get online with CENTCOM and theater air support. Standby.”
Dead air filled the radio, whistles and pops and crackles. David clung to Kris’s last words, the sound of his voice.
“Bravo Forward, bombers on station in twenty minutes. Hold your position. I will patch the pilots through to you when they’re in range.”
Seventeen minutes later, the adrenaline-infused voice of the bomber pilot broke over the radio, calling out his vector and time to drop.
“So, Bin Laden is here?” the pilot asked.
“We believe so,” Ryan answered.
“For New York,” the pilot said. “Bombs away.”
They could see it, when it hit. The bombs fell like cars, like rotund VW Bugs, screaming from the sky and slamming into the camp. The mountains had been peaceful, serene, almost beguiling in their lassitude, if David didn’t think too much about how they crawled with men who wanted to murder every American on the planet. When the bombs fell, the air split, cracking like the earth’s crust had broken in half. Huge walls of dirt leaped into the sky. Buildings blasted apart, trees shredded into toothpicks. Mangled trucks and tanks flew in every direction. Even where they were, high above the camp, David and Jackson ducked down, taking cover.
“Fuck yeah,” Jackson cheered, rising up to watch the chaos below. Dozens of al-Qaeda soldiers had been blown apart and killed, parts of their camp destroyed, and the survivors moved in a daze. Some tried to help their fallen, their wounded. Others ran for cover. Leaders emerged, trying to rally their fighters to defend up and down the slopes around their camp. Fighters still alive in the lookout posts wildly fired down the mountain and into the air.
Blood spread through the snow in Milawa, pools of it. Screams rose, cries in Arabic, shouts and prayers and screams of fear and rage and anguish.
“Haddad, translation.”
Swallowing, David started translating the agonizing last words of their enemy.
They called in air strikes for almost sixty hours straight, obliterating the Milawa camp and the valley. Ryan kept them going, calling in air strikes every two hours until the valley was gone, wiped from the earth. They didn’t sleep until daytime on the third day, while Shirzai and Majid kept watch.
Broken bodies, blood-drenched snow, and upturned mountain lay scattered for miles. Craters dozens of feet deep swallowed all light, holes that seemed to reach for the center of the mountain.
By the third day, it was obvious.
“There’s nothing alive down there,” David radioed.
“Think we got them all?”
“No. We saw fighters escaping into the mountains. At night, between the strikes, they could have moved hundreds of fighters without our knowledge. OBL probably moved out that first night.”
“Which direction did they all head?”
“East. Toward Pakistan.”
Shirzai and Majid sent small teams of scouts forward while everyone recombined in the remains of the Milawa al-Qaeda camp. They clambered in and out of craters, pulling out debris, checking bodies.
David went with Ryan, picking through the burned and shattered remnants of the warehouse, the training facility and barracks at the end of the camp. Military manuals on how to build bombs and IEDs. Close-quarters urban combat. Infantry tactics, weapons, evasion, and counter-interrogation tactics. Chemistry textbooks, including formulas for chemical weapons and poisons.
“Jesus,” Ryan breathed. “This is a Goddamn professional training system. They could have churned out thousands of fighters, all educated in how to fucking kill us.” He threw one of the manuals, hurling it into a patch of bloody snow.
David flipped through page after page of chemical formulas. The recipe for anthrax sat in his hands.
Printed fatwas blew on the ground. He grabbed one, read it. His eyes ground over an Arabic word, takfiri, over and over again. Takfiri, takfiri, takfiri.
Apostate.
His stomach squeezed, like a black hole had opened inside him and was sucking him away, belly button first.
Bin Laden’s body was not in the remains of Milawa’s camp.
It took three days, but the scouts found al-Qaeda’s deepest mountain hideout, stretching across three peaks.
Ryan and Kris got on the radio with George in Kabul, poring over the maps they each had, trying to triangulate Bin Laden’s specific position, and his next move.
“He’s going to try for the tribal belt in Pakistan. It’s as lawless as any place on the planet. He can disappear there.” Kris’s voice made David’s bones ache.
“How do we stop him from getting there?” Ryan, covered in dirt and buried in the mountain, relied on Kris and George to guide them all.
“We have to plug the passes. Pakistan says they’re staging thousands of soldiers in the mountains, blocking the routes from Afghanistan, but we’re not seeing it on the satellites. Langley says the back door to Pakistan is still open.” George sounded dog-tired, like he hadn’t slept in days.
“What about CENTCOM? Can’t they deploy Rangers into the mountains? Behind al-Qaeda?” Kris asked.
“I’ve got the request in. The military is running the show now. CENTCOM has been silent so far. I’ll push harder.”
“We can’t let him get away, George.” Ryan’s voice shook. David saw his knuckles go white around the radio, saw his arm tremble. “We can’t lose Bin Laden.”
Kris smiled down at David, sunlight wreathing his spiked hair, crinkles framing the pinch of his eyes. They were warm, basking in sunlight and lying in a field of green grass. Green, everywhere he looked, lush with life. The air was thick with humidity, a weight that filled every space between them, the inches between their lips and eyes and smiles. He was going to kiss Kris, finally, and Kris was happy. Smiling, laughing, deliriously happy that they were there, together, and David was about to kiss him. There wasn’t a shadow anywhere. Not a question or a doubt. He felt certainty like it was solid thing, an organ in his body that had been lost sometime, somewhere, but was back where it belonged, now.
Kris opened his mouth, and David waited for the sound of his voice, the sweet, lilting edge, teasing and powerful in one, a voice that could build or destroy. He wanted to hear his name fall from Kris’s lips, wanted to feel the way his soul shivered whenever Kris looked at him and spoke to him in just that way.
Hushed Arabic spilled from Kris, throaty and guttural. He frowned. It wasn’t right; that wasn’t what Kris sounded like. But it kept coming, harsh Arabic in whispers and hisses, a conversation in two parts that Kris was carrying on by himself.
“What about him?”
“He’s kufir. He doesn’t know anything.”
“He dies with the others?”
“Nam.”
Wrenching free of his dream was like falling to earth from space, a rush of flame and fear that ripped him back to reality. David’s eyes flew open, but he didn’t move.
Behind him, and behind a rocky outcropping on the western face of another icy peak in Tora Bora, two of Majid’s fighters, scouts who had slipped forward during the day, whispered beneath the slivered moon. David felt frost on his exposed cheeks, felt his lips crack. He listened.
“What did you tell them?”
“That the Americans were coming. They had to act fast.”
Roaring, David launched from his sleeping bag, flying to the two Afghan mercenaries. He tackled them both, pressing them into the frozen earth and grinding their cheeks into the dirt. “Who did you fucking speak to?”
Both men looked up at David, trembling. Their mouths moved, but no sound came out.
He woke Ryan and the whole camp, and Ryan called Majid to come for his men. The two were stripped of their weapons and boots and tied together, left under guard.
Majid, when he arrived, seemed unperturbed.
“My soldier heard your men say they talked to al-Qaeda. What the fuck is going on, Majid?” Ryan fumed.
“These men have family in al-Qaeda.” Majid shrugged. “It is their Pashtun responsibility to give their family a warning before we arrive.”
“More of the Pashtun tribal code bullshit?” Ryan seethed. “Did your men give away our position? Did your men tell al-Qaeda where we are?”
One corner of Majid’s mouth quirked up. “You have no idea how this place works, American. These men here were paid to dig the trenches al-Qaeda now sits in.” He pointed to his fighters. “And this? Where do you think I received this?” One finger traced the scab curving down his cheek, hairline to jaw. “Three weeks ago, I was huddled in a trench on the Shomali. Facing you.”
David watched Ryan’s face go bone white, lose all of its color. David’s heart flip-flopped, squeezed and squeezed until all of his blood was thundering into his muscles, until he was a trigger poised to fire.
“Why the fuck are you here?”
“For the moment, you are our allies. You are paying and paying well. The future has changed in Afghanistan. It makes sense to be here with you. For now.”
Ryan’s gaze flicked to Palmer’s, then to David’s. David could see Ryan’s thoughts, as if projected inside his skull through the windows of his eyes. Did they keep Majid and his men close, despite their connections to al-Qaeda and the Taliban? Or did they cut them loose, run the risk they’d turn right back to Bin Laden?
Breathing hard, Ryan pushed into Majid’s face, staring down the burly, war-ravaged fighter. Ryan, in his Gore-Tex jacket and combat boots, seemed out of place, comically so, against the mujahedeen fighter and the primal Tora Bora mountains. “You will lead us to Bin Laden. To his personal caves. At dawn. Do you understand me?”
Majid shrugged. “Da.”
Majid’s scouts led the way to Bin Laden’s caves with David’s rifle pointed at their back.
“There,” one said, pointing to slits cut into the snow-covered limestone. “His caves begin there. They go toward the sun.” He pointed west.
They peered up the mountain. Fighters huddled around fires in front of the slits, and more waited in trenches dug into the dirt and shale. The fighters were cold and bundled in robes and turbans. Weapons lay in stacks, everything from rifles to RPGs.
Ryan pulled out the radio and started calling in air strikes.
It was David’s turn on the radio. The snow kept falling, just enough to slow down air strikes, but not stop them entirely. They’d pushed forward, obliterating cave after cave, and were pushing al-Qaeda and Bin Laden deeper into the mountains.
It was bitterly cold every day, and only getting more so. December had rolled in, sometime between the constant air strikes and the never-ending snow. He dreamed about Kris and the warm field almost every night, the endless waves of green, every shade imaginable. Kris was always at the center, always smiling at him. Always happy. Always warm against his skin.
Hearing Kris’s voice through the radio was almost as torturous as it was cherished. “How’s it going down there?”
“Well, our secret is out. Base camp is now journalist HQ.”
“Shit.”
“Majid’s men have found a new source of revenue. He’s shuttling journalists out to the Milawa camp for a hundred bucks a drive.”
“Enterprising warlord.” David huffed, and clouds billowed in front of his face.
“Villagers are coming down with bodies, too. They’re trying to sell them to us.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s gotten crowded here. The journalists are camping outside our camp, and they’re now paying Shirzai’s men to keep the entire area secure. Jim and I try to stay out of sight. But it’s safer now. Which is good. How are you?”
“Cold.” There was so much David wanted to say. They were on a secure radio, impenetrable by al-Qaeda or any journalist, but every member of the team had an open earpiece and could listen in to whatever was being said. “We keep moving forward, but we’re only moving inch by inch. Any luck with CENTCOM? We getting Rangers to plug the rear?” What was the point of pushing Bin Laden toward Pakistan if no one was there to stop him?
Kris was quiet. “CENTCOM is refusing to deploy Rangers behind Bin Laden. General Faulkner says the Pakistanis have it covered. Hold on.” The channel clicked, Kris switching to another frequency back at base. Dead air filled David’s ear, static and pops, whines and whistles.
Kris came back. “Be advised, fighters on station in two minutes.”
David relayed the message to his team, holding position with their lasers trained on another cave, another trench. There was always another cave, it seemed. Always another bolt-hole for al-Qaeda fighters to run to.
He was tired. Tired in a way he hadn’t been since he was a child leaving Libya, when he’d been exhausted of life and shattered from the inside out. Somalia and Mogadishu had made him weary, his first return to Africa since he was a boy and he’d been faced with, yet again, all the ways humans could tear into each other, hurt one another until the soul was raw.
The world spun differently once all the horrors men could inflict on other men were revealed. The colors changed, the sounds, the sights. He’d been changed, initiated into the world of terror and gut-wrenching truth when he was a boy.
Air tasted different when it was saturated with death.
He still felt the hands of ghosts on his shoulders. Muslim dead. African dead. The sound of his father’s voice, too, along with the hands. He couldn’t make out what his father was saying. It just added to the maddening pressure, like a push. A pull.
He was left to his thoughts in the quiet moments of the battlefield, between the bombs and the bullets, and when he tried to fall asleep. The backs of his eyelids were screens, replaying the days, the weeks, of violence, the onslaught of savagery he was a part of, the circle of life and death. Not just death, but terrible, agonizing death. Suffering.
Al-Qaeda was their enemy. Al-Qaeda fighters zeroed David in on their rifles, on their artillery, fired at him, tried to blow him off the mountain. They wanted him dead, like they wanted every American dead. They tried to kill him.
He, and his team, killed them first.
But who were they?
Men, Muslims, al-Qaeda.
He was two out of the three.
What had created the battlefield, had carved such hate into the faith he remembered his father teaching him in sun-strewn gardens, whose first precept was to submit and to love?
Whoever slays a soul, it is as though he slew all men. His father had taught him that verse from the Quran when he was four.
Every day, David counted new blood splatters in the snow and measured the depth of the craters by how many bodies were stacked within.
Was the world black and white, evil and good, horror and righteousness, or did Majid and his shifting loyalties understand the world better
than anyone else?
What about Khan and his quiet pleas for American aid, yet his certainty that he would be betrayed? Every Muslim in Afghanistan had stared at them the same way, from Khan to Majid, from the Taliban David spied through his binoculars to the Kabulis on the streets. That look of uncertainty, of wariness. Of expectant betrayal. Of hesitant, hidden hatred.
Was he too American to be Muslim now? Forever outside the rhythms of his youth, the faith of his father, once passed down to him? Twenty-one years he’d been away from his faith. Yet the whispers of prayers came back to him in dreams, the same dreams he had of Kris, bathed in sunlight and smiling down on him.
Kufir, a dark part of his mind hissed. Takfiri. Unbeliever. Apostate.
He wanted to burrow into Kris’s arms and ask questions David wouldn’t even whisper to himself, ask Kris all the whys and hows and whens. Let Kris explain the world until it made sense again. Listen to Kris’s sharp-edged voice until time ran out, until he found the answers, and found the end.
When the dust cleared from their latest strike, David clambered down the sliding rocks with Ryan and Palmer, sifting through the craters. Obliterated rifles and shredded Arabic books littered the blasted rock face. Bodies smeared into the ground, the earth the color of a bruise.
He heard tinny Arabic mixed with static coming from a crimson patch of snow.
Digging through, David peeled a handheld radio out of the near-frozen clutch of a dead fighter. “We need water! Yallah, you must melt more snow. Hurry!”
Another voice answered. “Is the Sheikh all right?”
“Allahu Akbar, the Sheikh is fine. Bismillah.”
“Guys!” David held out the radio. “This radio is tuned to al-Qaeda’s frequency. And it’s unscrambled.”
