Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  Finally, David’s lips brushed Kris’s, a tentative kiss, so unlike their bruising clash at the base of Tora Bora. Their lips caught, stuck, clung together. David tasted him slowly, like Kris was made of honey and David was tasting his soul. Kris had had hundreds of first kisses in his life, from high school to college and beyond, hundreds of kisses at parties and before one-night stands, with men he’d wanted and men he didn’t care for. No one had ever kissed him with the tenderness of David’s touch, the intensity of his desire. Kris shivered, shook. His knees went limp.

  David caught him. Their bodies aligned in just the right way.

  “The ambassador used to live here,” Kris gasped. “His apartment is on the top floor.”

  They kissed their way up the stairs, bouncing from wall to wall, pushing each other back and molding their bodies as one. Hands cradled faces, jaws, wrapped around waists. At the top floor, they started stripping, shedding mud-spattered jackets and dusty sweaters. In two months, they’d never seen each other’s skin, had never seen beneath the contours of a thick sweater. Kris’s bare skin puckered as the cold air hit him, his thin chest contracting. David was there instantly, wrapping his arms around him, pressing his furred chest to Kris, a primal connection completed when David closed his lips over Kris’s again.

  Their bodies had changed. Kris had come to Afghanistan slender and waifish, his strength always of the lean variety. Weeks of mountaineering and combat missions had molded his upper body, given him strength where he’d never had any. David’s strength had ebbed thanks to the weeks in Tora Bora, the deprivation and harshness eating away at his reserves. Bruises and scars marred his skin from impact blasts, slides down the mountain, times when he’d had to duck for cover when al-Qaeda had fought back, sent their artillery raining down near David’s position. His body was a map of the war. Kris’s hands roamed, covering every mar, every battle, as if he could heal him with his touch alone.

  The ambassador’s apartment had been left unused since Dubs’s assassination. They kissed their way into a time capsule, a replica of the late ’70s, dust-covered and forgotten. The windows were slim, near the ceiling, only to let in light. No one could see as they shed the last of their clothes, boots, pants, and briefs. No one saw Kris pull David on top of him, into the ambassador’s bed. No one saw David slide onto Kris, cover him completely, begin to rock against him, like he wanted their atoms to merge, like he was trying to disappear within Kris’s being. Like he was the ocean, coming in for Kris’s shore.

  David lay between Kris’s legs, his head pillowed on Kris’s chest, ear over his heart. Kris’s hand stroked up and down David’s back. They’d made love until they’d thought they would die, until Kris had thought he’d combust, explode, become a star in the heavens.

  Outside, the sun had dropped beneath the mountains, and the last rays of light sent long shadows through the thin windows ringing the room. Kabul hummed beyond the empty embassy, car horns and wagon wheels and donkey snorts mixed with shouts in Dari and Pashto.

  “Does this come with us to Pakistan?” Kris whispered. “Or do we leave this here?”

  David’s shoulders tightened. He looked up, his beard scratching against Kris’s chest. Kris tried to lock down his emotions, shield his heart. Tried to throw up walls behind his eyes, just in case.

  “We both have experience loving and leaving, I think.” Kris tried to smile. He recognized in David the same love-them-and-leave-them style he’d had back in America. Ships passing in the night. The rush of combat. Adrenaline, close quarters. Too much had happened, too fast, and they needed to burn through it somehow. “If this is just what it is, I understand.”

  David’s chest rose and fell, his breath quickening. He pressed a kiss to Kris’s chest, over his heart, and spoke into his skin. “I don’t want to stop.”

  Relief was physical, the unclenching of Kris’s heart, the rush of giddy joy, the way he squeezed his fingers into David’s back, nails biting into his skin.

  Smiling, David slid up the bed, tangling his legs and arms around Kris. He tugged a blanket up with him, a dusty wool cover, and snuggled close. “I don’t ever want to stop this. Us.”

  “I had no idea,” Kris said, turning to face David. He propped his head on one elbow. “I never thought you were gay. You confused me. But I never thought—”

  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is the law of the land. I can fight and die for America, but they can’t handle me loving another man.” David shrugged. He laced his fingers through Kris’s, stroked his thumb over Kris’s knuckles. “I’ve lived my life like a kaleidoscope. If you look at me one way, I’m the Army Special Forces soldier. Stern. Solid. American.” He chuckled. Kris grinned. “But I’m also Arab. Muslim, in some part of me.” He swallowed, squeezed Kris’s hand. “And… gay. Even though no other part of me can accept that. It feels like I’m different people all in one body, and I don’t know how to be everyone equally, or if I even can.”

  David pressed his forehead to Kris’s, turned those burning, starlight eyes into Kris’s soul. “When I am with you, I feel parts of myself come together. Parts I thought couldn’t ever mix. You make me want to be everything I am. For you.”

  Kris couldn’t breathe. “I’m… just—” He was just a kid, a skinny, brown Puerto Rican who had been underestimated his entire life. He was just a side-eyed snort, an afterthought, someone people consistently expected nothing from. Hadn’t George just proven that?

  How was he everything to David? When David had become everything to him?

  “You’re like a part of me I didn’t know was missing. Part of my mind, or my soul. Like you have the thoughts I haven’t thought yet, feelings I haven’t felt yet, waiting for me. Inside you. You feel like a part of me I’ve been craving.” David’s voice was a whisper, a breath.

  “David…” His vision swam. He couldn’t breathe. He cupped David’s cheek. Words wouldn’t come, not through his strangled throat.

  “Ever since we got here, things have been upside down. What’s right and wrong. According to the others, we’re here to kill all the Arabs, get revenge for what happened. But I’m Arab. And I’m not saying I condone or understand what the hijackers did, or anything about al-Qaeda, I don’t. Not at all. But I do understand… Arab pain. Muslim pain. Libya—” He hissed, and everything in him tightened. “I saw it in Somalia. And I see it here. There’s this collective pain, this ache, in the Muslim soul. And now I feel the world turning even more against us. Are we supposed to shoulder the collective guilt, the blame for nine-eleven, too? When the Muslim soul is already shattered?” He buried his face in Kris’s neck, shallow breaths warming Kris’s skin. Kris stroked his back, tangled his fingers in his dark hair.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” David whispered. “Now, after this?”

  Kris chewed on his lip. “This isn’t just a battle to capture Bin Laden, or to avenge the deaths from nine-eleven. Or to get rid of the Taliban to make a free Afghanistan and eliminate terrorist safe havens. Bin Laden spent years building the narrative for this attack. He’s framed his entire movement around one hadith from Abu Hurairah. ‘When you see the black banners coming from Khorasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice’.”

  David spoke the last half of the hadith with him. “‘For no power will be able to stop them, and they will reach Jerusalem, where they will erect their flags’.”

  “The Islamic end times, Armageddon, begins with the fighters coming out of Khorasan, after striking a fatal blow against their enemies. Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US was signed from ‘Hindu Kush, Khorasan, Afghanistan.’ He’s used the Khorasan hadith in all of his speeches, his videos, his recruitment. He believes, and the people who join him believe, that they are fulfilling the Islamic end times prophecies.” Kris stroked down David’s back, fingers dipping into the valley of his spine, mapping the bones of his vertebrae.

  David exhaled. “There’s too much pain. Too much Muslim pain.” He swallowed. “Are you going to sta
y in?”

  “I have to. The hijackers, their names were on my desk. And we should have known. With Bin Laden’s ’96 declaration of war and his fatwas. His three warnings, like the Quran prescribes, for declaring war. We should have put the dots together. I should have seen…” Kris chewed on his lip. “I bear some responsibility for what happened.”

  “Kris—”

  “I do. I knew Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were dangerous. I knew they wanted to hurt us. The embassies in Africa, the USS Cole. I just didn’t think… I never imagined they’d do what they did. I didn’t think it was possible.” He sighed, biting his lip and rolling it back and forth. “I need to spend the rest of my career making up for that. And always think about what is possible. What is coming next. I have to.” Kris scooted close to David, hitching one leg around David’s calf. “What about you?”

  “I have another few years left on my second enlistment. Sounds like my unit is linking to the CIA. Happens, occasionally. I’d never been part of a CIA secondment before.” David stroked Kris’s leg, his palm circling Kris’s thigh. “I want to stay with you,” he said softly. “I’m afraid I’ll get lost in this war.” His eyes were black holes, and the burning edge of his soul peeked out, just barely. Like the shadow of a crescent moon, or a whisper against Kris’s skin.

  “I think the whole world is going to get lost in this war.”

  Chapter 13

  Islamabad, Pakistan

  March 29, 2002

  The web stretched across an entire wall in the CIA station. Spindly lines crisscrossed each other, tracing points back to the dead center.

  Someone had drawn a reticle around the photo in the center. A black marker sniper’s scope circled the black-and-white passport photo of a thin, young Saudi with a close-cropped beard and moustache, his hair hidden under a neat keffiyeh.

  Abu Zahawi.

  Langley said he was al-Qaeda’s third-highest officer, third in command after Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He’d been the external emir, the high commander, of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan before the invasion. The Khaldan camp was where the hijackers were trained, where Bin Laden regularly visited. Where all high ranking al-Qaeda operatives transited.

  They needed Zahawi.

  And they would have him. Tonight.

  In January, Kris, George, and the rest of their combined CIA-Special Forces team stepped out of a helicopter in Islamabad and started fighting the CIA’s next war.

  “We have a new position at the CIA,” Bill, Islamabad’s chief of station, had told them all during their first briefing. “Targeteer. These guys are going to be the most important people in the agency. They’re hunters. Anything and everything we get on a high-value target gets routed straight to their desks. The targeteers package all of that intel together. Make sense of it. And then they find our targets.” Bill thought fast and spoke fast, and his eyes peered around the room, dancing over each person on the team. “It’s part forensic psychology, part jigsaw puzzle, part sifting through haystacks, and part voodoo. You’ve got to be a cultural anthropologist, a translator, a psychologist, and a psychic. So. Who is going to be the targeteer on this team?”

  George hadn’t hesitated. “Kris Caldera. That’s made for him.”

  Bill’s stare had pierced Kris. He’d had a thick stack of folders on the table in front of him stuffed with CDs and DVDs, papers and photos. Bill had pushed it all toward Kris. “Here’s your first target. Abu Zahawi. He’s in Pakistan. And we have to find him.”

  He’s in Pakistan turned out to be the agency’s most popular line. Everyone was in Pakistan, from Bin Laden to the most minor al-Qaeda recruit, and they were supposed to find every last one of them. Pakistan was the size of Texas but had the population of the United States. Karachi was the fourth-largest city in the entire world. Finding anyone in the crushing mass of humanity, much less someone purposefully hiding, was a near impossible task.

  Zahawi’s name, and about a dozen phone numbers associated with him, kept coming up in documents and debris recovered in Afghanistan from destroyed al-Qaeda camps, captured fighters, and picked from the dead. From Marines and soldiers, combing through the remains of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, to Islamabad, hordes and hordes of information flowed.

  Not all of it was intelligent. There was just too much of it, too many bits and pieces and names and addresses scattered across thousands of leads.

  Kris nearly buckled.

  Palmer’s men hit the streets, going to Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi, trying to scour the cities with a small passport photo, searching for Zahawi like they could pick him from the millions and millions of people crowding the streets. David came back from each trip frustrated and filthy, and always exhausted.

  “I need more resources,” Kris told George at the end of January. “I can’t make a man appear with nothing but luck.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Give me an entire electronic net over Pakistan. Zero in on the numbers we have of known al-Qaeda agents. The phone numbers connected to Zahawi. If anyone calls those, who do they call after that, and then after that, and then after that. We need to build a web.”

  The invisible electronic net dropped. Calls were vacuumed up, scrubbed and searched for names and keywords. When calls to Zahawi’s known numbers didn’t connect, America’s digital eyes tracked the calls they made next, asking for instruction, and then again, and again. Everything went on the wall, a giant web of connections, of unrelated people trying to live in hiding, exposed by the pattern of their phone calls.

  Finally, they found Zahawi’s new numbers.

  Zahawi had fourteen new numbers tied to fourteen locations. Thirteen in Faisalabad, the third most populous city in Pakistan, and situated far from the Afghanistan border, south of Islamabad. One in Lahore, a city almost on the Indian border.

  They hit the streets again, winding through the tangled, twisted alleys and dirt roads. Faisalabad was a rough, dangerous, and hopelessly poor city. A never-ending sprawl of shacks, dump lots, and precarious slums. Children played in raw sewage. The stench of rot slipped under their clothes, into their noses, down their throats, gagging them all. Cars and rickshaws and bicycles and donkeys and camels crowded every inch of the roadways. Walkers glided in and out of traffic lanes and passed angry cabbies shouting in thirteen different languages.

  Most people living in Faisalabad lived on less than five dollars a day. And most were fierce adherents to a firebrand fundamentalist Islam, married to a violent rage. Life in Faisalabad was epically shitty. Why not desperately wish to turn to the past, to the golden days of Islam, when life was vibrant, peaceful, and Muslims were regarded as the enlightened intellectuals of the world? Why not crave that historical power again? Everything to blame in Faisalabad was the West’s fault, anyway. For putting them at the bottom of the world order.

  Going into Faisalabad meant working undercover. David and his team dressed in salwar kameezes, breezy tunics and linen pants. They’d kept their thick beards from Afghanistan. David blended in the best, with his bronze skin and his native Arabic, and he played the part of a foreign fighter working the streets. He was the point man for all of Kris’s operations.

  Kris watched David take to the mission like a fish to water, seamlessly blending into the passionate Islamic fundamentalism. Even in Faisalabad, David moved like he knew how to live in a city on the edge, under the thumb of oppression and desperate poverty. There was something there, something Kris wanted to ask about, but couldn’t. Not yet.

  Kris, slender, even with his added muscles from the war in Afghanistan, played the part of David’s wife. He donned a hijab and the head-to-toe abaya. He tied a niqab around his face, peered out of the narrow eye slit, and kept his body hidden from view under the sweep of black. His abaya collected filth from the streets as he swept over puddles of sewage, walked up and down dusty alleys. To add to the disguise, Kris lined his eyes with kohl, like the local women did.

  David couldn’t tear
his eyes away.

  Kris and David walked the streets as if they were married, scoping out all thirteen properties. They found squat mudbrick homes, small one-room huts with corrugated tin roofs, and shacks on the edge of slums. Hatred seethed from the slum, like a physical pulse.

  “We can’t take the entire slum. But there are al-Qaeda fighters in there, for sure.”

  “Zahawi is the target. We have to find him.”

  The last location was a large house, almost a villa, built of cinder blocks, three stories tall and surrounded by an eight-foot privacy fence. Every window was closed and shuttered. In the sweltering one-hundred-degree heat and humidity, that stood out like an electric sign in the sky, pointing straight down. All of Faisalabad had thrown open their doors and windows, trying to cool down with the limp, rotten breeze.

  All of Faisalabad, save for them.

  “Bad news in there.” David leaned into Kris.

  Sweat poured down Kris’s back. He was roasting, nearly passing out under the abaya. “No one keeps their windows closed. Not in this heat.”

  “Let’s get back to the safe house.”

  George had rented a safe house in Faisalabad, paying cash for a villa in the wealthy sector of town. The mansion had fourteen bedrooms, twelve sitting rooms, and a huge plot of land, surrounded by a giant fence that kept all curious onlookers far away. From the roof, they had satellite connections with seven different communications relays, from the CIA to the military. The team lived in the safe house and rotated surveillance on each of Zahawi’s locations.

  A backup team from Langley was sent in, too, to help share the load. They’d arrived while David and Kris were off in Faisalabad’s reaches, hunting for al-Qaeda.

  “Kris!” Dan Wright, Kris’s mentor at Langley, jogged to him when he and David returned to the safe house and wrapped Kris up in a hug, holding on for longer than Kris would have expected. “God, it’s good to see you again.”