Maggs knelt down and saw the corner of a black plastic bundle peeking out of the edge of the hole they’d made.
“No more axes. Be a damn shame to put a hole in the hard drive.” Maggs and Task lay on the floor and pounded away, trying to enlarge the hole with hammer and chisel. The clank of steel on steel ricocheted through the kitchen. Maggs wondered if the neighbors would hear. No matter, because it was 11:20 already. One way or another, they were leaving soon.
Sweat poured down his face. He pulled off his mask, figuring the gas must have long since dissipated. He hammered away at a seam in the concrete, and the hole widened enough for him to slide his fingertips around the edges of the plastic. He tugged at it, wormed it forward inch by inch, no longer concerned it might be booby-trapped. This valley was its own trap. The bundle slid forward in his fingers, stopped, and then came free.
“Let’s go.”
Task began to pile the axes back into the bag, but Maggs grabbed his arm. “Forget it, Sergeant.”
IN THE LIVING ROOM, Maggs held up the bundle to Armstrong, who raised a fist in silent triumph. They stepped out the front door and piled into the Nissan and the van and rolled out. Through the village. Through Desai. Over the bridge. Onto the road that led out of the Swat Valley and over the mountains. With every mile, Maggs felt himself relax. They’d put their necks in the guillotine, and somehow the blade hadn’t dropped.
Then they rounded a corner to start the long climb southwest. And they hit the roadblock.
An extended-cab Toyota pickup sat astride the pavement two hundred yards ahead, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod in its bed. Three Talibs stood beside the gun, two more inside the cab. The militants apparently hadn’t been expecting to face anyone coming out of Mingora. The .50-cal—actually a Russian 12.7-millimeter TUV—was pointed up the road, away from the van. But as they rolled close, the Talibs swung it around until its muzzle faced them. A man jumped out of the pickup.
“Halt! ”
“Major—” Snyder said.
Armstrong stopped the van, raised his hands, looked straight at the Talib. “Nothing fancy here,” he murmured in English. “We’re just gonna take them out. Maggs. You’re going out the back with your AK. You’ve got to hit the guys on the .50. I’ll floor it, crash into the side of the truck.”
“Done,” Maggs said.
“You ready, Chris?”
“Yessir.”
SNYDER WASN’T AT ALL SURE he was ready. The TUV had a three-foot barrel and a range of nearly a mile. Up close, it had the power to vaporize skulls. And it was definitely up close. Snyder didn’t see how Maggs could get out the back and get a bead on the gunners before they took him and Armstrong out. He began to pray, silently, Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .
“Cool,” Armstrong said, his voice steady as a pilot warning of turbulence ahead.
Behind them, Maggs dropped the safety on his AK, unlocked the doors of the van.
THE TALIB RAN TOWARD THEM, his left hand raised, his right gripping his AK. From the back of the pickup, the gunner put a spotlight on them, its glare nearly blinding.
“Turn back!” the Talib yelled.
Armstrong eased off the gas, lowered his window. The van rolled forward. “Have mercy. We’re taking my father to Peshawar, the hospital!” he yelled in Pashto. “He’s very sick.”
The Talib stood in front of them, lowered his AK. “No exceptions to the curfew. Take him home.”
“Please. He won’t survive the night. He’s in the back. Talk to him. Inshallah, you’ll see.”
As Armstrong spoke, Maggs opened the back door and stepped into the road behind the van. Armstrong touched the gas and the van inched forward.
“I won’t tell you again. Turn around.”
Maggs stepped sideways and fired a three-shot burst at the gunner on the TUV. As he did, Armstrong floored the gas. The Mitsubishi leapt forward at the Talib in the road. He fired three shots, missing high, and then disappeared with a grunt under the van. The Mitsubishi thumped over him, front wheels and then back, and roared forward.
In the bed of the pickup, the gunner groaned and slumped forward just as he squeezed the trigger. The TUV’s burst missed high and wide. The Talib beside the gunner tried to push him aside, but Maggs laid out another burst. The rounds tore into the second man’s shoulder and knocked him into the bed of the pickup.
In the passenger seat, Snyder could only watch through the windshield as the van closed on the pickup. He had the distinct feeling that he wasn’t actually in the van, that he was watching a movie of the scene rather than living it. At moments like this, time was supposed to slow, he knew. He was supposed to remember the great moments in his life. Instead, a groaning feeling of unreality overwhelmed him—
The van rammed the pickup broadside and crumpled its passenger door, crushing the Talib in the passenger seat instantly. The impact tossed Snyder and Armstrong against their seat belts, which gave a few inches and then tightened and pulled them back. The van’s engine block was shoved backward, toward Snyder, as his seat popped forward, forcing his left leg up and out. The engine rammed Snyder’s leg and snapped his tibia and fibula as cleanly as wishbones.
As Snyder screamed, the driver of the pickup opened the door and ran through the brush, down the side of the hill, toward Mingora. Armstrong lifted his pistol and shot through the front windshield at him but didn’t get him.
Armstrong laid a hand on Snyder’s shoulder. “You okay.”
“I can’t move, Major. My leg.”
Armstrong looked down at Snyder’s leg, the ankle curled back under the calf in a pose even the best yoga instructor couldn’t have managed. Wounded Warrior Six. “We’ll get you out.”
“Yessir.”
Armstrong tried to pop his door open, but the frame of the Mitsubishi was bowed and the door wouldn’t come loose. He wriggled out the back of the van, the laptop in hand, as tendrils of smoke began to rise from the front of the Mitsubishi. Snyder shot out his window to get air. He hung his head out the side of the truck and coughed.
Maggs ran toward the pickup as the Talib in the bed of the truck came to his knees. The Talib’s AK had gotten caught behind him. He scrabbled for it as blood poured out of the shoulder. Then the Talib gave up and tentatively lifted his hands over his shoulders—
And as he did, Maggs fired a burst and he went down. No prisoners. Not here, not now.
THE NISSAN ROLLED UP and the four Deltas jumped out. Armstrong handed the laptop to Task, the driver, and waved him back into the car. “Task, get around the pickup. If something goes wrong here, you take this and go.” He turned to the other Deltas. “Snyder’s stuck. Leg’s broken. Got to get him out.”
The smoke was thicker now, but Armstrong crawled back into the van as the three Deltas tried to pry open the door. Before they could open it, Snyder screamed, a lungful of obscenities that echoed over the valley. Armstrong had him by the shoulders and was tugging him toward the back of the van. Maggs ran to the back of the van, and together he and Armstrong pulled Snyder out as flames rose from the front of the Mitsubishi. Armstrong and Snyder were coughing, and soot covered Snyder’s face.
“We got you,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong and Maggs and the Deltas carried Snyder to the Nissan, fifty feet past the pickup. Behind them, the van’s gas tank exploded. The van jumped six inches. When it landed, its windows were gone and yellow-orange flames rose from its body.
Armstrong nodded at the burning remains of the van. “We won’t be taking that home.”
“The pickup.”
“Let’s leave it in the road. Buy us some time. We’ll all ride with Task.”
“Gonna be as crowded as that bus.” Maggs looked at the valley below. Ten miles away, at the edge of Mingora, a convoy of cars streamed toward them in the dark. “I’m gonna fix that roadblock.”
As Armstrong and the other Deltas arranged Snyder in the Nissan, Maggs grabbed
a grenade and ran for the pickup. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned on the engine and backed up. Metal ground on metal as the pickup pulled away from the van, forming a metal L, that blocked the road completely.
Maggs stepped ten feet away and tossed a grenade inside the pickup and dove for the side of the road. He covered his hands from the twin explosions that followed as first the grenade and then the Toyota’s gas tank blew and the night turned white.
Thunder broke overhead, as if the skies were applauding. Maggs ran for the Nissan, a hundred feet ahead. When he got there, the trunk was open, holes shot through for air.
“Me or you,” Armstrong said, looking down at the trunk.
“Long as it’s not both of us. You’re taller. Stay in the car.” Maggs climbed in and settled himself, shoving aside an AK that was poking into his back. Armstrong slammed down the lid.
THE NEXT THREE HOURS were among the most unpleasant of Maggs’s life. The road twisted like a badly designed amusement park ride: Check out the new Nausea-Coaster. Rain poured into the trunk through the air holes, soaking him to the skin. And he had no way of knowing if the Talibs were closing. Though maybe not knowing was for the best. He’d find out when the shooting started.
But it never did. And finally, the car stopped and the lid popped open. He stretched his cramped legs but didn’t try to move. He shivered wildly. He hadn’t realized just how cold he was. In the distance he heard traffic, trucks passing.
“Enjoying yourself?” Armstrong said.
“Putting the black man in the trunk. Racism, pure and simple.”
“Believe me, it was no fun up front.”
“Where are we?”
“Five minutes from the Islamabad-Peshawar highway, my friend. We made it. Never even saw them. Roadblock worked. Nice job.” Armstrong reached a hand down. Maggs waved it off.
“I’m comfy. Wake me back at the embassy.”
“Come on, you gotta be freezing.”
“Let’s just get it done.” Maggs wasn’t sure why he was protesting. He only knew they’d have to drag him out of the trunk now.
THEY WERE BACK at the embassy before sunrise. Maggs knew he ought to sleep, but he was too jacked. They all were. Even Snyder, with his broken leg. And not just because of the insanity of what they’d just pulled off.
No, they all had the same question.
“What do you think?” Armstrong said, as he unwrapped the plastic that encased the laptop. It was an IBM ThinkPad, an X60. Maggs was no tech, but it looked undamaged to him. It even had its charger taped to the bottom.
“Really hot Paki porn,” Task said.
“They have hot porn?”
“No. That’s why it’s so special.”
“Horse porn.”
“Horse-dog porn.”
“A horse doing a dog? That’s just sick. Where do you get that, Task?”
Maggs plugged in the charger, reached for the on button, then stopped.
“What if there’s a virus on it, erases the hard drive as soon as we touch it?”
“If something goes wrong, we’ll turn it off, unplug it,” Armstrong said. “It can’t delete itself that fast.”
“You sure.”
“I’m sure.”
They should wait, Maggs thought. But they’d nearly died tonight for this lump of plastic. They’d earned the right to its secrets. He reached for the power button and they watched as the machine sprung to life.
24
Brant Murphy,” Shafer said. “Brant F. Murphy. Know what the F stands for?”
“I can guess.”
“This guy’s like a bad dream. Everywhere we turn.”
“Ellis. You said you don’t believe in big conspiracies.”
“I’m starting to.”
“Me, too.”
“Even when Duto put me under house arrest, back in the day, I understood. Didn’t like it, but I understood. He had his reasons. But this feels different. Not like some bureaucratic snafu. Tell me I’m wrong.”
And yet Wells felt a tingle of what could only be called excitement, the thrill of operating without a net, without the agency behind him. He remembered the months after he had first come back to the United States from Pakistan, when he’d broken out of CIA custody and gone to ground in Atlanta. He’d lived lonely and pure.
Shafer seemed to glimpse Wells’s enthusiasm. “The lady doth protest too much.”
They sat in Shafer’s kitchen, watching Tonka chase squirrels around the oak tree in the backyard. A fat gray squirrel dashed past up the tree and danced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, chittering down as the dog barked furiously back.
“I’ll get you a ladder,” Wells yelled.
“I know how she feels,” Shafer said. “Just hoping for a mistake.”
“Are we the squirrels or Tonka?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“I’m starting to miss the jihadis,” Wells said. “At least I know what they want. This I don’t understand at all. Did Murphy, Whitby, and Terreri really team up to kill everybody in 673?”
“We still need a motive. A couple of million dollars isn’t enough. Not split three ways. Not for this.”
“What if it was more? A lot more. Say 673 got onto something, some secret account for bin Laden that had fifty million dollars in it. A hundred. Pick whatever number you want. They take the money and then they kill the detainees. The whole squad’s in on it. The detainees have to die because if they ever get to Gitmo, they’re going to tell their lawyers about all this money. Murphy comes back here, gets D’Angelo to delete the names, so nobody ever knows the detainees even existed. The squad disbands, and somebody has an attack of conscience. Sends a note to the IG. Alleging torture and theft. And Murphy and Terreri don’t know who sent it. So, they decide to eliminate the rest of the squad. And Whitby, he’s happy with the intel they got, he doesn’t want to hear anything else.”
Not for the first time, Wells was struck by the enormous gap between the agency’s headquarters and its frontline operatives. The lords of the intelligence community sat in their offices at Langley and Liberty Crossing, pretending they were in charge. Until something went wrong. Then they told the prosecutors and the congressional investigators that they couldn’t be expected to know exactly what was happening on the front lines.
“Possible,” Shafer said. “But let me ask you. Why didn’t the letter mention a hundred-million-dollar bank account? Plenty of accusations in there. Why not that? And why cut Whitby in? For that matter, can you see this whole squad killing two prisoners in cold blood? Can you see Jerry Williams going for that? And one more thing. I don’t like Brant Murphy, either. But would he murder his own squad? Or anyone else.”
Wells tried to picture Murphy putting a bullet in someone. Even ordering a hit. And couldn’t.
“Or even Fred Whitby. It takes a certain disregard—a certain coldness—”
“I know, Ellis. Better than you.” Wells looked at Shafer. “Or not. I never have gotten the stories, what you did all those years running around Africa. And behind the Wall.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I think of you as this oldster whose socks don’t match, but you weren’t always.”
“I wasn’t,” Shafer said. “Maybe there’s another explanation for what happened. And it comes from something we keep forgetting.”
Wells waited.
“The Pakistani nuke depots. Massive coup. Unless Whitby and Duto are flat-out lying, we got it because of intel that 673 developed. Terreri and Murphy must have known it would get noticed at the highest levels. And that they would have to produce the prisoners who gave it up. But what if those prisoners were dead? Problem. Best solution, make the names disappear. Let the intel stand on its own.”
“So, in this scenario the prisoners weren’t killed pintentionally? ”
“Maybe they tried to escape, got shot. Maybe Jack Fisher interrogated them too hard and they died.”
“So, these detainees had the list
of all the nuclear weapons depots in Pakistan. Where they’re located, how they’re guarded.”
“I admit, that part doesn’t work. Crazy as the Paks are, I can’t see them giving that info to a terrorist.”
“Try this,” Wells said. “We kidnapped a Pak general. We got the info on the weapons depots from him, and we killed him accidentally on purpose and we made him disappear.”
“And the ISI went along with it? We killed one of their top guys and they didn’t care?”
“Maybe they didn’t know. They thought he defected.” Wells shook his head even before he finished. “It still doesn’t work.”
“Brant Murphy’s going to have to explain it for us.”
“We can’t get to him. We show up at CTC, he calls Whitby, Whitby calls Duto.”
“That’s half right, John. We can’t get to him at CTC.”
“You’re not saying we go back to Kings Park West.”
Shafer nodded. And Wells could only smile.
“Know what I like about you, Ellis? You’re as crazy as me.”
BUT GETTING TO MURPHY at home proved as hard as getting to him at work. After the murders of Jack Fisher and Mike Wyly, the agency had given Murphy a permanent protective detail. An unmarked van, two guards inside, sat in front of the house around the clock. An armor-plated Lincoln Town Car ferried him to and from Langley. When he had to drive on his own, he used an agency Suburban, also armor-plated. But he rarely went anywhere except the gym. And wherever he went, two guards always shadowed him.
Because Murphy’s guards were CIA officers, Wells and Shafer couldn’t use any of the agency’s unmarked vehicles. Instead, a friend of Shafer’s at the FBI let them borrow from the bureau’s surveillance fleet, which included everything from bank vans to FedEx trucks to a 1988 Jaguar XJS. They switched cars every day, sometimes twice a day.
They did have one advantage: Murphy wasn’t the only one in Kings Park West who’d bet on real estate. Every fourth house in the neighborhood seemed to be for sale, giving them a good excuse to drive around. They scheduled appointments to visit houses in the early evening, hoping to catch Murphy making a mistake, going for a run or out to dinner without his bodyguards.
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