Whisper Page 9

  The Afghan soldiers’ eyes lit up.

  “That is a good start,” Ghasi said carefully. “But General Khan will want to negotiate. The rest of the army need provisions. Food, winter clothes, ammunition. Weapons. Salaries.”

  “We will outfit the Shura Nazar. I promise.”

  Ghasi squinted. “I’ve heard American promises before.”

  American foreign policy, with all its warts and wrinkles.

  Kris held out his hand, palm up. “I’m here now, General. I keep promises.”

  Ghasi clasped his hand, shaking it gently. He smiled. “Gul Bahar, I have lived three of your lives. Your country makes and breaks promises as the sun rises and sets. You are here now, but for how long? How long until your promises start to break? I will never understand America. But…” He sighed. “You are here now. So we will see. General Khan will see you tomorrow.”

  Phillip and Warrick spent hours setting up the communications array, at least enough so that George and Ryan could send a message back to DC and to CENTCOM, confirming their arrival in-country.

  The first order of business, after contacting Langley, was to set up the signals intercept array. With the signals intercept, they could break into the Taliban’s radio frequencies and start listening in on their enemy. Back in the US, it would have been easy. In the Panjshir, working with a single generator and one helicopter’s worth of gear, it was a laborious process.

  Satellite dishes, from large to tiny, poked out from under camouflage netting on the roof of their headquarters, and a generator rumbled beside the dishes and antennae, next to a solar-powered battery backup.

  The nerve center looked like a computer repair shop had exploded. Bare light bulbs strung from electrical cords hanging on nails cast long shadows over everything. Empty crates became stools and tables, lining the walls around the main room.

  Kris finally found his pack, and Haddad, in one of the tiny curtained rooms as the sun was setting, throwing long lines of tawny light through the open patio doors at the front of the compound. The building had a musty scent, as if it had been locked up for too long, unused and unentered. George wanted the doors open, even though it was freezing.

  The rooms were cramped and square, with dusty rugs stretched across the floors, faded and worn, and nothing else. The air was cold, damp. The musty smell was stronger in the rooms.

  Haddad had emptied his ruck, and what looked like an entire pharmacy was spread out in the tiny room. Medicines, syringes, IV bags, lines, bandages, splints, surgical tools, and more. He had the same basic gear Kris had, a sixty-pound load, plus most of the medical gear for the team. How had he managed to pack all that?

  Kris toed a bucket of pool chlorine powder, something that came off the shelf at any Walmart store. “Chlorine? For pools?”

  “It will kill anything in the water. We can use it in the bathroom, too. Keep things sanitary. And for drinking. If we have to resort to using it, this will make the water safe to drink for us.”

  “I didn’t think it was that easy.”

  “Well, it will give us a bad stomach upset. The cure is only slightly better than the disease.” Haddad shrugged. “I’m going to set up a makeshift clinic down in one of the stables so everyone has access to what they need, whenever they need it.” He frowned at the rest of the gear he’d spread around—his ammo and spare batteries, night vision goggles and scopes, clothing and GPS and electronics. “Kind of a tight fit in here.”

  Kris’s stomach clenched. “I’ll… I’ll find somewhere else to crash. I just came to get this—” He hefted his ruck, holding his breath.

  “All the other rooms are full.” Haddad kept stacking medical supplies in his arms. He didn’t look at Kris.

  What had George said to Haddad? Had he warned Haddad away, told him to be careful of the gay one? Was all this gear, everywhere, Haddad’s way of saying he wouldn’t fit, he wasn’t welcome?

  Kris lifted his chin. Fine then. Add Haddad’s name to the list of people he would prove wrong. “I’ll figure something out. Thanks for bringing my ruck in, but I can handle it myself.”

  Haddad’s hand on his elbow stopped him. “It’s going to be a tight fit, but we’ll make it work.”

  Chapter 5

  Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan

  September 23, 2001

  Kris was in Lower Manhattan, at Church and Barclay Streets. The World Trade Center, the Twin Towers, soared above. He’d thought, once, that the buildings held up the stars, kept the blue of the sky above from crashing down on the city. They were the pillars of the world, fixtures in his life from when he was a toddler growing up on the Lower East Side.

  But the towers were on fire, billowing flames and black smoke rising and rising, clouds like shadows blocking out the sun. Planes kept flying into the towers, endless numbers of planes turning over Manhattan, flying too low over the city. He heard the roar, felt the rumble in his bones from jet engines only feet above his head.

  He tried to scream, tried to bellow, but nothing came out. His voice was gone, and no matter how much he screamed, the jets kept flying, closer, closer, closer—

  He fell to his knees as a plane slammed into the South Tower, again. His knees hit dust, a powder that felt like the moon. He pitched forward, burying his face in the desolation, his fingers trying to grab something, anything in the dust.

  His hands closed around bone.

  Rearing back, Kris tried to crawl away. Bones surrounded him, everywhere. A leg bone, a thigh, next to a skull, staring at him with vacant eyes, resting cockeyed in the dust.

  The towers were gone, and so were the flames. All he could see, in every direction, was dust and bones. Bones, flung in every direction, a graveyard of bones, thousands and thousands of human beings. Ash fell from the sky, the remnants of the world, his world, coating his skin and choking his lungs.

  He couldn’t breathe. Ash clung to him, and dust. He screamed, trying to get the dust off. It was dust of the world, dust of the dead, dead he’d failed. The dust was trying to kill him, trying to turn him to dust as well. He wanted to give in, let them have him. He felt his soul begin to shatter.

  Shapes moved in the gloom. He tried to reach out, beg for help.

  Marwan al-Shehhi appeared, grinning, like in his passport photo. Khalid Al-Mihdhar followed, blank eyes staring Kris down.

  Mohamed Atta strode out of the gloom, behind al-Shehhi. His square jaw, his dark eyes. A permanent scowl etched on his face, lines across his skin made from hate and endless wrath. Black flags flapped in a hot wind, snapping and cracking like gunshots, like planes slamming into buildings.

  He had something in his hand.

  Kris tried to back away, tried to crawl away. He screamed, flinging dust and ash at the hijackers’ faces. “You did this!” he wailed. “You murdered everyone!”

  “No,” Atta said. He kept coming, rising over Kris, looming over him. He was as tall as the World Trade Center had been, as tall as the towers. His eyes were hollow, empty sockets, images of two planes slamming into the Twin Towers playing on repeat in the darkness where his eyeballs should have been. “You did this.”

  Atta’s arm fell, slashing at Kris, cutting him to pieces, shredding him with the box cutter he’d used to hijack American Airlines Flight 11—

  “Caldera. Caldera! Kris!”

  Shaking woke him, rough jerks that ripped him from his nightmare. He gasped. Frigid air filled his lungs. The cold stabbed his insides. He rolled over, coughing into the floor. He expected to see blood.

  Haddad hovered beside him. One hand squeezed Kris’s shoulder. Kris could barely see the outline of Haddad’s face. The world was dark, pitch black.

  “What time is it?”

  “Zero four hundred. Everyone is asleep.” Haddad ran his hand across Kris’s back, inside his sleeping bag. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m fine.” Kris pushed himself up. He was tangled in his sleeping bag, and his jacket and fleece pullover were twisted, straightjacket-like. The freezing night air
had slipped under his layers. His skin felt like a sheet of ice had frozen to him. He couldn’t stop shaking. Shivers or his nightmare, he couldn’t tell.

  He heard a zipper, the long line of Haddad’s sleeping bag opening. “Come with me.” Haddad held out his hand.

  Kris stumbled up, slithering out of his own sleeping bag and straightening his layers. He’d have to put on more clothes. Their stone headquarters did nothing to stop the chill. He wrapped his Gore-Tex jacket around him, burying his face in the turned-up collar.

  Haddad guided him out of their cramped room and through the nerve center. Laptops whirred, and the radio was set on a low, soft crackle. Snores rose from the other sleeping rooms, behind curtains. After days of travel, the team was finally sleeping, and sleeping hard.

  Haddad kept going, slipping out into the dead courtyard between their two buildings. Three Afghan soldiers huddled near a fire on the other side of the dirt patch, bundled in thick woolen blankets. They talked softly, AK-47s resting nearby. They were the night guards, keeping an eye on the team while they slept.

  Haddad led him to the small fire ring, glowing with the last of the banked embers from their fire the night before. They’d all sat around the flames once Palmer and George had outlined their mission for the coming days. After the briefing, there hadn’t been much to do except think.

  Kris squatted, huddling with his hands in his armpits and trying to keep warm as Haddad turned the coals over, tossed more sticks on the fire, and blew on the embers. When the flames flickered to life, Haddad stepped back and moved to Kris’s side. He wrapped his arms around Kris, briskly rubbing up and down his back.

  The heat of the fire licked up Kris’s body, but it was Haddad’s warmth that seeped into his bones. He went limp, slumping into Haddad’s hold.

  “Better?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Kris shook his head. He couldn’t even think. His nightmares painted images for him, screamed at him when he slept. He couldn’t put the words together in his mind when he was awake. The attacks, and who was to blame—

  What would Haddad, this vanguard of American fury, of patriotic fervor, a literal superhero sent to avenge the deaths of thousands, think if he could see Kris’s nightmare? If he knew the truth?

  Haddad kept stroking up and down Kris’s back, his movements slowing, becoming softer. “You said you’re from New York.”

  Kris nodded.

  “The Bronx? Brooklyn?”

  “No need to be insulting.” Kris tried to smile. He couldn’t. “Manhattan. Lower East Side.”

  Haddad breathed in and out, slowly. “I’m sorry.”.

  “I haven’t been back since high school. I don’t know anyone—” His throat closed. “I don’t think I know anyone who was in the towers.”

  He thought back to his last year of school. Hadn’t Junior and Mateo wanted to be firemen one day? Hadn’t Celia said she was going to work in those towers, no matter what, even if she had to work as a cleaning lady or a food server in the McDonald’s? Mr. Birmingham had always told her to dream bigger, to imagine herself in one of the offices up there, a corner office, with a view of the glittering sky. Celia said she’d never be smart enough for that.

  But Kris hadn’t ever thought he’d be in Afghanistan, or have jumped out of a plane, or have joined the CIA.

  Sweet Jesus, who had he lost from his past? Celia was a mean bitch with a cruel streak, and she’d picked on him for years, taunting his eyeliner and the way he loosened his tie, his shell necklace and the shortest shorts he could get away with in the summer months.

  But she was smart, and she could have made it, could have had that corner office, and no one deserved that day.

  And he had—

  He was going to vomit.

  Kris shoved Haddad away, falling as he twisted, landing on his knees. His stomach flipped, turned itself inside out. Rancid vomit clawed its way up his throat, scalding his insides. Last night’s dinner, prepared by Ghasi’s teen Afghan boys, reappeared, weak broth.

  Haddad stroked his back again, his large hand making circles from Kris’s shoulders to his waist. He said nothing.

  Kris sat back, trying to block out the memories, the years he’d spent growing up in the shadows of the towers. Years of being a barrio kid, imagining climbing out of the barrio and the tenements and up to those glass-and-steel towers. Every kid on the block had pinned their hopes somewhere on those towers. Every kid had a dream of escaping up the towers like ladders into the sky, all the way to the stars, catch a plane and fly away, disappear to a new life. Once, he’d thought he could climb to the top, to where they disappeared into the clouds, and search for a new home, one where there were people like him and he wasn’t stared at for being brown, or gay, or young, or chided for having an attitude, or told he had to do better, had to be different. Somewhere, that world existed, he’d known it. He just had to find it.

  Haddad wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Kris slid on the dirt, boneless, and fell into Haddad’s arms and his chest, face-first.

  He let the smoke wash over him, tasted ash on his tongue. Memories played, an endless loop, his childhood under the shadows of the Twin Towers and the morning they came tumbling down. The fire crackled, flames sparking, snapping.

  All he could hear were screams.

  In the morning, Fazl, who stayed in the village with Ghasi and his family, walked over to the compound as the rest of the team was waking up. Groaning and huddling around the fire, everyone shared pots of hot water for their instant coffee and waited, sullen and tired, for Ghasi’s staff to cook breakfast.

  “General Khan will be here to see you at noon.”

  They moved into high gear after that. George pulled Kris into his and Ryan’s room, where they had stashed George’s duffel of cash. Together, they counted out $1 million.

  “We’ll give this to him to show him we’re not fucking around. We’re here to do business.”

  “George, Afghans are very proud people. They won’t just take money from your hands.”

  “A million dollars? Yeah, he’ll take it.”

  Kris kept his mouth shut.

  Ghasi’s staff started preparing lunch immediately after the breakfast of fresh-baked bread and eggs from the chickens that roamed the village and the hillside wherever they wished. Young boys ran everywhere in the morning, collecting eggs from nests hidden in ditches and under scrub brushes and bringing them to Ghasi for an apple or a tomato. Just before noon, Ghasi spread out a large blanket on the dirt in the courtyard and scattered flat, faded cushions along the edges. A breeze flitted through the village, cutting and cold. Most of the team hovered around the fire, still blazing in the courtyard. Phillip and Jim stayed up in the nerve center, trying to crack the Taliban’s radio net.

  A cloud of gray dust moving up the valley’s single pocked road signaled the General’s arrival. Kris stood with George and Ryan, the official political delegation from the CIA. Technically, Ryan shouldn’t have been there, but he slid up on the other side of George, and Kris didn’t have the energy to fight.

  Haddad hovered behind the group, sitting on the steps leading to their headquarters building in front of an open patio door. He watched Kris, his face blank.

  General Khan brought a security detachment of Shura Nazar soldiers, about twenty men. They clambered out of the bullet-riddled trucks in the convoy and positioned themselves around the General’s Russian-made jeep. Palmer and his men stiffened, their hands reaching for the weapons strapped to their thighs.

  Khan gazed at the compound. He held both hands cupped to the sky over his head, his eyes closed, before striding across the dirt and passing through the front archway of the stables.

  He was shorter than nearly everyone on their team, but burly. Thick black hair spilled down his shoulders, beneath the flat-topped pakul, the woolen cap all Afghan men wore. He had a large, wiry beard, like a pirate from the days of old, and wore a Russian-made camou
flage uniform. He stared at everyone, eyeballing them each for a long moment.

  When his gaze landed on Kris, he broke into a wide smile.

  “You must be Gul Bahar.” He chuckled. “I see why the name stuck.” He spoke in Dari. Fazl, Khan’s translator, hung by his shoulder. “If you wore a turban, you’d be a beautiful Afghan boy.”

  George coughed, glancing sidelong at Kris. He knew just enough Farsi, the Iranian version of Dari, to parse out what Khan had said.

  Kris smiled. “As-salaam-alaikum, General Khan.” He pulled off his gloves and held out his hand, delicately. “Chutoor haste?”

  Khan took his hand, placing his own free hand over his heart. “Wa alaikum as-salaam, tashakor fazle khoda ast.” Thanks to God, I am good.

  Kris pressed his hand over his heart with a smile, then cupped Khan’s hands in both of his.

  “It has been some time since I was here,” Khan continued in Dari. He looked over Kris and George’s heads, to their headquarters. “This was where I last saw General Massoud. We dined together, in his house.” He pointed to the building they now lived in.

  “General Khan… We thank you for your honor. To stay in the General’s home.” Kris smiled, his breath shaky. “You honor us too much.”

  General Khan’s eyes narrowed. One corner of his mouth curled up, an almost smile. “We will see if the honor is worth it.”

  On the other side of George, Ryan cleared his throat. He didn’t speak a lick of Dari. He had no idea what was going on. His impatience was showing.

  “General, may I introduce you to agha George and agha Ryan?” Kris used the deferential title to delineate the authority of George and Ryan over him. “We are CIA officers, here to help the Shura Nazar.”

  George held out his gloved hand and pumped Khan’s once. Ryan followed suit with a firm handshake. Khan frowned. He stepped back.

  “General, we have much to discuss.” As George spoke, Fazl translated the English to Dari for Khan. Kris listened. “We need to coordinate with the Shura Nazar and prepare the battlefield for the US’s invasion—”