The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “They broke Jawaruddin.”

  “Maybe,” Ulrich said. He was in his early fifties, with a full head of thick, brown hair, a bulbous nose, and a broad, almost stately, chin. He looked like he belonged on an English estate circa 1925, chasing foxes and shooting grouse. He was far from dumb, and Maggs figured he was good in meetings with the ISI and the Pak generals. But Maggs didn’t like him, and the feeling seemed to be mutual.

  “You want me to put a team together—”

  Ulrich raised a hand to cut him off. “Squad’s coming from Bagram tomorrow,” he said. “Deltas.”

  “Deltas?” Ulrich was notoriously turf-conscious. Yet losing this assignment didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he knew that the Deltas had a better shot at pulling off the job than his own agents. Maybe he didn’t think the laptop was important. Or maybe he’d been told the score and decided not to fight. Maggs couldn’t ask. Whatever he was thinking, Ulrich wasn’t the type to share.

  “Deltas,” Ulrich said. “Six. But they’ll be detached to us for the assignment.”

  “Right.” Maggs saw now. Technically, neither the Deltas nor any American military forces could operate in Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government. After all, the United States was at peace with Pakistan. Legally, anyway. But getting the approval of the Pakistani authorities for this job might be tough. We need to go up into the Swat and steal a laptop that proves you’re all terrorists. Not a problem, right?

  To get around the legalities, the Deltas would be “TR”—temporarily reassigned — and handed over to the CIA, which didn’t have to follow the military’s rules, for the operation. Maggs understood the logic. But he didn’t like it. He would be running six guys he didn’t know on a job that was based on intel he couldn’t verify.

  “Got it,” Maggs said. “And I’ll be in charge.”

  “Correct. We’re always talking about improving cooperation with the Pentagon. Now’s your chance.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  THE DELTAS ARRIVED the next day. The good news was that they were every bit as professional as Maggs expected. They understood that they wouldn’t have the usual military backup for this assignment. No air support or Black Hawks to come for them if things got messy. They would get in and out quietly, or not at all.

  The bad news was that they didn’t have any better read on the intel than Maggs did. They’d gotten their orders the same day as Ulrich and Maggs. Major James Armstrong, the squad’s leader, said the source wasn’t being held at Bagram.

  “You’d know,” Maggs said.

  “We’d know.”

  More proof that this tip had come from bin Zari, Maggs thought. But why were his interrogators so sure they could trust him? Maggs wished he could talk through his concerns with Armstrong. But bin Zari’s capture remained a closely held secret. Even in Islamabad, Maggs and Ulrich were the only CIA officers who knew. So Maggs shut his mouth and went ahead trying to figure a way into that house. He would have had an easier time if the agency had decent informers in Damghar. Or anywhere in the Swat. But the CIA’s only halfway trustworthy source in the entire valley, the deputy mayor of Mingora, had fled six months before. The Taliban had set a truck tire on fire outside his house and promised him that the next time his head would be inside it. The Talibs didn’t know the mayor was an informer. If they had, there would have been no warning at all. They just didn’t like him.

  As usual, Maggs and the Deltas were relying on technology to fill in the gaps. The NSA sent along a series of fifteen-centimeter-resolution satellite photos of Damghar Kalay, the target village, that showed the exact location of the house, as confirmed by the anonymous detainee. The building was squat, a single story high, forty feet long and thirty feet wide. Construction was typical for rural Pakistan, bricks poorly aligned and the rear wall bulging under the weight of the roof. A medium quake would take the whole house down. A small tractor sat in front, along with the remains of a pickup truck. A second satellite pass picked up a teenage boy and an older man standing beside the tractor, apparently trying to start it up.

  Ideally, the house would have been isolated, several hundred yards from the next building. They hadn’t been that lucky. The house lay on the southern side of a one-lane cart track that dead-ended at the open fields east of the village. Homes were scattered along the track, divided by low walls. The target was about one hundred twenty feet from its nearest neighbor, far enough that they could approach without being immediately noticed but close enough that a gunshot or even a shout would attract the attention of the neighbors, and eventually of the Taliban.

  To get a glimpse inside the house, the agency sent up a Predator equipped with thermal scopes. The scan — taken just before dawn, when the air was coolest and the heat gradients greatest — revealed at least five people asleep in the house, including three children. An exact count was impossible, because the house’s interior walls deflected heat in ways that couldn’t be precisely modeled.

  The next day, two Deltas took a Jeep to Mingora and then Derai and Damghar for visual recon. They came back that night with mixed news. The house itself was easy enough to find. But as part of their creeping takeover, the Talibs had just imposed a midnight-to-dawn curfew on the roads around Mingora.

  The curfew further limited their options. They knew they might need as much as an hour of quiet in the house to find the laptop. They’d planned an early-morning raid, figuring on catching the family in its deepest sleep, getting into the house and silencing them before they could react. Even without the curfew, the play was dicey. Anyone awake would see their vehicles. Now it seemed impossible.

  They turned Maggs’s office into a war room, satellite photographs and thermal imagery on every wall. They spent a day and most of a night puzzling over the photos, considering and rejecting various plans. They debated buying Toyota pickups and black turbans and going in dressed as Taliban before deciding that the risk they’d run into real Talibs was too high. Besides, they had no way of knowing whether the family in the house was sympathetic to the Talibs, the government, or neither.

  They considered taking rafts up the river, or driving up and rafting down. Aside from the fact that rafts were obvious, slow, and couldn’t be defended, the plan was foolproof. “Let’s bring a keg and make it a picnic,” Armstrong said.

  At one point Armstrong suggested, more than half seriously, that they helicopter in a couple of platoons of Rangers, take over the house, shoot anyone who got close, and helicopter out when they were done.

  “Great idea. What do we tell the Pak army when they discover we started a war in the Swat? ” Maggs said.

  “Assuming they notice? We don’t tell them jack.”

  “And when they bring in their own jets to chase us down?”

  “They won’t even fight the Talibs. You think they’re going to mess with us?”

  Maggs had to admit the plan had a certain simplicity. “Too bad we’re not at war with them,” he said. “It would make things so much easier.”

  BUT THEY WEREN’T, and they didn’t want to go in hot, not into a house that had kids and women and most likely no Talibs at all inside. For a while, Maggs thought the mission might be impossible under the parameters they’d set.

  Then he had an idea. It made him queasy. It could easily backfire. But it was the best hope, maybe the only hope, of getting inside the house without civilian casualties.

  So he told Armstrong.

  “That stuff works? For real?”

  “Honestly, I’ve never used it myself,” Maggs said. “But I know we’ve tested it, and we say it works. And the Russians used it.”

  Armstrong nodded. “That’s right. I remember. Killed a bunch of folks with it, too.”

  “That they did.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “Sure is. Unethical. Possibly immoral, too. Got a better idea?”

  * * *

  WHEN MAGGS WENT TO ULRICH, Ulrich shook his head. “This is what you have for me? After four days?”


  “Sir. I’ll be glad to walk you through the options we considered and rejected.” And if you’d ever been on a mission, you might have some idea what I’m talking about.

  “You believe this is your best bet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Major Armstrong agrees.”

  “You’re welcome to ask him yourself.”

  Ulrich ran a hand through his thick black hair. “Nothing in writing,” he said finally. “If I have to sign for the stuff, I will, but nothing about what it’s for. And if it goes wrong up there, you don’t hang around. No matter what. Civ casualties, whatever.”

  “Chivalrous, sir.”

  “Don’t piss me off, Maggs.”

  The equipment arrived the next day. Via diplomatic courier, naturally. No FedEx for this package. The questions they’d gotten from the engineers and scientists at Langley were entirely technical, about the size and layout of the target. The hypothetical and nonexistent target. Maggs had the distinct feeling nobody back home wanted to know what they were doing.

  Meanwhile, the Deltas flew in a workstation from Bagram that used satellite photos to create a three-dimensional model of Damghar, the target village. The building images were schematic, but they were accurately placed and sized, giving the team a chance to practice driving through intersections that otherwise would be nothing more than lines on a map. Chris Snyder, who as team medic had the unpleasant job of using the equipment from Langley, ran through a half-dozen dry runs with it, the last three in complete darkness, before pronouncing himself satisfied.

  “We really gonna do this?” Armstrong said on their second day of practice.

  “Guess so,” Maggs said.

  “It’s crazy, you know that, right,” Armstrong said. It wasn’t a question. “There’s tough and there’s dumb, and we’re on the wrong side of that line.”

  “We don’t have to. We can tell Ulrich no.”

  “The civvy risk is too high.”

  “We don’t even know what’s on the laptop. If there is a laptop.”

  Armstrong shook his head. “We’re going, aren’t we?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we best go sooner, not later. Only getting worse up there. Matter of time before they start blocking roads.”

  “I was thinking the same,” Maggs said. “We go tonight. Supposed to be overcast, medium rain. Good for us. It’ll keep people inside, off the roofs.”

  “It doesn’t look good when we get there, I reserve the right to pull out.”

  “That’s the smartest thing anybody’s said this week.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, they loaded the AKs and grenades and Glocks in the trunk of the Nissan. They put the special equipment into the black bag and the bag and the bicycle into the van. Then they rolled.

  By air, only eighty miles separated Islamabad and Mingora. But the drive between the cities was a four-hour dogleg through a wall of mountains, west toward Peshawar and then northeast on the grandly named N-95, a winding two-lane road cut from mountain walls.

  On the way up, they got stuck behind an old school bus whose white-and-green paint couldn’t quite conceal the yellow underneath. Farmers and villagers crowded four abreast on the seats, as children stood on their laps, poking their faces out of the windows. Every inch of the roof was covered with battered trunks and green plastic buckets and tiny wire cages filled with squawking chickens. The bus edged up the side of the mountain, pouring diesel smoke, and the more Armstrong honked, the slower it went.

  Finally Armstrong gunned the van’s engine and swerved around the bus, which promptly accelerated. As the van reached the bus’s midpoint, a pickup truck rounded the blind curve in front of them. In the backseat, Maggs’s stomach churned. Watching the pickup come at them was like seeing a bullet in slow motion, the road’s geography shrinking second by second.

  “Armstrong.”

  Armstrong laid into the horn.

  The pickup truck slowed but didn’t stop. The bus inched left. And somehow they fit three abreast on the two-lane road. As the pickup disappeared behind them they came around the corner — and saw that the road widened, creating a perfect passing lane.

  “Wasn’t even close,” Armstrong said.

  “Try to save some luck for the mission.”

  THE SUN DISAPPEARED BEHIND the dusty brown mountains as they made their way down the pass. In the distance they heard the evening calls to prayer being called, mournful sighs that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  As night descended, the rain started. They passed a pickup truck of Talib militants, who looked at them curiously but didn’t try to stop them. An hour later, they reached the concrete bridge that ran across the Swat and connected Mingora with Derai. They were halfway across when Armstrong slowed the van.

  “Is that—” he said. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Oh, man,” said the Delta in the passenger seat, Snyder.

  At the north end of the bridge, a headless body dangled upside down from a steel pole. Rain dripped off the corpse’s arms and shoulders. Its brown skin had been torn to ribbons. Its stomach was distended, swollen like a balloon in the summer heat. Above it, a sign proclaimed “Infidel Whoremonger Thief”in Arabic and Pashto.

  “They really are in charge up here, aren’t they?” Maggs said.

  “And they don’t like thieves much,” Armstrong said.

  “They do that to a thief, wonder what they’d have in store for us,” Snyder said.

  “Probably best not to find out.”

  THEY PASSED THROUGH TOWN, passed the old man and the white cat and the bombed-out police station. They made the turn onto the road that dead-ended in Damghar Kalay. Halfway down, the Mitsubishi cut its lights and pulled over. The Nissan followed.

  Maggs pulled the bike and the black bag from the back of the van and tucked the bag into the wire basket attached to the bike’s handlebars. Snyder slipped a Glock with a silencer onto a specially made holster attached to his thigh, under his dark blue salwar kameez. He tucked in an earpiece and strapped a battery-sized transmitter to his chest, then taped a pea-sized microphone to his shoulder. “Copy?” he whispered.

  “Copy,” Armstrong said.

  Then, without even a “good luck” or a “vaya con Dios,” Snyder hopped onto the bike and rode toward the village a mile away.

  22

  GAITHERSBURG, MARYLAND

  One wood. Two iron. Pitching wedge. The totems of a civilization dedicated first and foremost to its own entertainment. The clubs rattled in the blue Callaway bag, protective covers atop their precious heads, as Jim D’Angelo walked down his driveway toward his Cadillac Escalade. D’Angelo was a golfer in the John Daly mode, a meaty man with a jiggly stomach and giant haunches.

  “You know, that’s a hybrid,” Shafer said. “He’s a real environmentalist.”

  “Hope it’s got a reinforced chassis,” Wells said. He and Shafer were watching the Escalade from a Pepco — Potomac Electric Power Company — van down the street.

  D’Angelo got into the Cadillac, put the clubs beside him in the passenger seat.

  “Cute,” Shafer said. “They get to ride up front.”

  “That’s a man who loves his golf clubs. We doing this here or fo llowing him?”

  “Here.”

  Wells rolled up, turned into D’Angelo’s driveway just as the Cadillac’s rear lights flickered on. D’Angelo honked, at first a quick beep and then a longer blast, as Wells and Shafer stepped out. D’Angelo lowered his window. “You guys got the wrong house—”

  As they neared the back of the Escalade, D’Angelo reached into his jacket for what Wells assumed was a phone. Retired NSA guys didn’t carry. At least Wells didn’t think they did. But D’Angelo wasn’t going into his jacket pocket. He was reaching higher across his body—

  “Jim!”he yelled. “We’re agency! CIA!”

  D’Angelo stepped out of the Cadillac, holding what looked to be a Glock.40. A lot of pistol. D’Angelo’s hands were shaking, but he was
so close he could hardly miss.

  “Lemme see the other guy, too,” D’Angelo said. “The shrimp.” Shafer was on the other side of the Escalade.

  “Least I’m not an elephant,” Shafer muttered. He moved beside Wells, hands high.

  “You have a weapon?”

  Wells: “Yes.”

  Shafer: “No.”

  “Take it out, put it down, slowly.”

  Wells did.

  “Now lie down, both of you.”

  “We were hoping to do this without making a scene,” Shafer said.

  “Little late.” D’Angelo hesitated, tucked his pistol into the waistband of his green golf pants. The Glock dented his tummy notably. “Shrimp, reach into your pocket, toss me your wallet.”

  Shafer did. D’Angelo flipped through it, dropped it on the driveway.

  “Ellis Shafer. What about you?”

  “John Wells.”

  “Lemme see.”

  Wells tossed his wallet to D’Angelo, who poked through it without comment and tossed it back. Wells was reminded of what Whitby had said about his reputation. Not so long ago, Wells was treated with respect, even deference, on those rare occasions when he used his real name outside the agency.

  But the shooting in Times Square had happened four years before, and — as Wells had asked — the agency had tried to keep his photos off the Internet and refused any and all interview requests. For the first few months, he’d received thousands. These days, he got only a few each month. His career hadn’t ended after Times Square, of course, but only a handful of senior officials at Langley and the White House knew what he’d done more recently. And the wheel of celebrity spun so fast these days that a couple of years out of the spotlight made a notable difference in name recognition. A subset of women — and a few men — viewed him almost as a purely imaginary figure, a living James Bond, a perfect projection for their fantasies. Anne had suffered from a mild version of that syndrome, though she’d shaken it quickly.