Black Site (28 page)

*   *   *

Although Kopelman made it sound easy, two Americans traveling to Darra Adam Khel was anything but. It was only a forty-minute drive south on the Peshawar–Kohat road, but distance was not the obstacle. Westerners, especially Americans, were not welcome in the winding, narrow village. The Pakistani government demanded that all foreign travelers there apply for and receive a day pass and hire a local guard and driver.

It was not simple kindness that drove these rules. No, it was simple economics.

Dead travelers, even foolish imbeciles who did not have the sense to avoid a town as lawless and uninviting as Darra Adam Khel, were bad for Pakistan’s already devastated tourist industry.

Bob knew he wasn’t getting down there in his World Benefactor truck with his WB credentials. No, he’d have to travel low-profile, taking his personal car, a filthy and dented Opel two-door that would arouse neither suspicion on the road nor suspicion in the town, and he and Raynor would have to have their pakol hats low and their game faces on.

It could be done—Kopelman had been through the Gun Village several times before in the black—but it would be a risk.

One way to both mitigate the risk and increase the chance for a positive haul of useful intelligence was for Bob to call up the useful Jamal Metziel and ask him if he would be willing to help. Jamal had spent years in the village, he had family living and working there, and as an Afghani Pashtun, he could go where he wanted to go with his head high and no risk of suspicion, unless he strayed too far into the realm of real spying.

Jamal tacitly agreed immediately—he wanted to help—but he relaxed and assented in full only when Bob assured him that even though Mister Racer would be tagging along, he would not be in charge of this mission.

The three men met late that evening at a Radiance safe house in the center of Peshawar. Kopelman explained to Raynor that he trusted Jamal, but not enough to give him his home address. The conversation was in Pashto, and Kolt knew this would keep him out of much of the planning, as his command of the language was not one-fifth of Bob’s, or one-tenth of Jamal’s. But Raynor understood, and he kept quiet. He did not know this town, these rules, the players in this game. On the singleton mission in the Tirah Valley he had felt in his element, even though he was surrounded by enemies. But here, in a city of hundreds of thousands, with checkpoints and papers and smugglers’ bazaars and villages filled with criminals and devoted wholly to the manufacture of guns … no, Kolt recognized that the two dudes who knew their way around, who knew how to keep their heads low, were the two dudes that needed to do the planning on this op.

So he kept quiet, concentrated as best he could on the discussion, and even refilled the chai cups of the two men while they talked and looked over road maps and a satellite map of the city.

Kolt did ask one question. “Can we get Pam Archer to fly the UAV over us while we’re there?”

Bob shook his head. “Nope. This is too far inside the border. The Predator can’t travel this deep without everybody knowing about it. You and me and Jamal? We are on our own.”

The plan for the next morning was finalized around midnight. Kopelman handed Jamal an encrypted walkie-talkie and sent the young man back to the garage where his truck was kept. Jamal would sleep there, in the cab, and then meet up with the two Americans the next morning just south of Peshawar.

Bob and Kolt returned to Kopelman’s home to attempt a few hours of nervous sleep.

THIRTY-THREE

The two Americans rose early in the morning. Bob brewed tea while Raynor dressed in his salwar kameez and did his best to thicken his beard with his fingertips. Together they drank in silence as the morning call to prayer was cried out by the muezzins from the minarets of the half-dozen mosques within earshot of Kopelman’s home, smack dab in the Old City of Peshawar.

Next they went out to the garage and stocked the Opel with a full case of bottled water and two full gas cans. Kolt checked the spare tire and the jack. Bob checked the oil.

A breakdown on the road to Darra Adam Khel for some reason that could have been avoided with a touch of preventive care would be an outrageous and unacceptable failure for the two well-trained operatives.

Murphy’s Law could not be eradicated, but with some effort, it could be mitigated.

Then Bob threw in three walkie-talkies, extra batteries, and his Hughes satellite phone. He slipped a key in a long metal footlocker on the floor of the garage. Once it was opened, he retrieved a wooden-stocked AK-47 and an AK-74, its wire stock folded tight against its body, dramatically shortening the length. For these weapons he grabbed two extra magazines, and all this he put on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Upon it all he tossed a patoo.

Kolt was surprised to see they’d be going into the town with all this incriminating gear. “Bob, if somebody searches the car, they are going to find the guns and the sat phone. Isn’t that going to raise suspicion?”

Kopelman looked at Racer for a long moment in the dim of the garage. “If somebody searches the car, they are going to find
you,
which is going to raise a shitload of suspicion, at which point the rifles may come in handy.”

Raynor nodded. He never complained about having access to a weapon when heading into danger, and he sure as hell was not about to start now.

They met with Jamal, as planned, just after 9 a.m., and with the yellow truck in the lead they headed south on the Kohat Road to Darra Adam Khel. Raynor mentioned he would have felt better with a night op, but Kopelman knew the area, and he knew that the little town was packed full during the day. The three of them walking around in plain sight would not be noticed nearly as easily as they might if they skulked around the closed-up shops and factories in the dead of night.

As they drove south Kopelman spoke a seemingly prepared statement to his younger colleague.

“Now listen up, Racer. You were sent on one reconnaissance mission this week, and you managed to kill six guys in the process. That’s not a recon. That’s an assault. We don’t need an assaulter today. I need a guy who can mind his manners and do what he’s told. Do you think you can play that role for a few hours while we poke around town?”

It was the same as ever with Raynor—he did not like being talked down to or second-guessed. “So if we run into Taliban hell-bent on killing us, I’d better just keep my cover while they lop off your head? That’s the plan?”

“We do this correctly, smart-ass, and nobody will know we’re there. The guns are a last resort, and
I
will make the call if they are necessary. Understood?”

“Shit happens, Bob. You think I went looking to get into a tussle with those Taliban?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I respect the work you paramilitary guys do at JSOC, but you characters are wound up a bit too tightly for my taste. I think sending in guys who’ve been trained to do nothing but fight just about ensures you’re going to get a fight. I didn’t want you on this mission in the first place. No offense.”

Kolt looked out the window and shrugged. He’d heard
that
before. “Why on earth would I take offense?” he muttered sarcastically.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Kopelman continued. “
I
wasn’t going up in those mountains with nothing but the word of an untested Pashtun agent, so I’m glad Pete found somebody dumb enough to do it.”

Before the mission Kopelman had gone to great lengths to assure Raynor that Jamal was a reliable source. Kolt just shook his head in disbelief at the new assessment he was hearing.

Kolt kept staring out the window. A long adobe wall ran along the right side of the street. When it ended he looked across a wide plain that ended where the mountains began to the west. Just two days earlier he and Jamal had run into the small squad of Taliban encamped in the creek bed running very near that ridgeline in the hazy distance.

Movement on his left got his attention. He turned to look at Kopelman, who had, with much rocking and shuffling from his large frame in the small car seat, managed to pull a metal flask from under his salwar kameez. As he drove with one hand he put the flask between his knees and unscrewed the metal cap with the other. He tossed the cap into the backseat and took a long swig on the flask. Instantly Raynor smelled whiskey in the tight car.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said in shock. It was nine thirty in the morning, they were mere minutes away from an extremely dangerous mission, and his lifeline home was swigging booze.

Bob winced like he’d done something wrong. “You’re right, kid. Where are my manners? Should have offered you the first pull.” He held the flask out to Kolt.

Raynor had not had a sip of alcohol in a month. He’d
wanted
his booze, had been almost crazy at first with the withdrawals, but the operation was too important.

Kolt turned away from the flask, and a second later he heard Kopelman swallow another long sip.

“Are you going to get drunk?” Kolt asked.

Bob just chuckled. “Boy, I’m 250 and my liver is about pickled. It’s gonna take a lot more than this flask to get me drunk. I’m just softening the nerves a bit. Helps with stress, makes me smoother when I need to be smooth. Relaxed when I need to not show fear. The Pashtuns can smell fear.”

Kolt kept his eyes on the back of Jamal’s truck up ahead through the dust of the Kohat road. He asked the older American, “Isn’t there a law that people in the private sector can’t work as spies?”

“Yes, there is.” He gulped a little more whiskey and stowed the half-empty flask between his knees. “But there is a gray area, and that’s where I live. Atmospherics, they call it.”

“Environmental assessment is the term we use in the Unit.”

Kopelman nodded. “Yep. Same thing. Private citizens can report on atmospherics, the general feeling of the population, mood on the street, disposition of the police, general crap like that.”

“And that’s what you do for Radiance?”

“Officially, yes.”

“And unofficially?”

Kopelman laughed. The smell of whiskey, so recently something that comforted Raynor greatly, now made Kolt want to retch. “Unofficially? Unofficially, I pull overzealous American operators out of the badlands and do my best not to punch their lights out for going off mission and then asking too many questions.”

Raynor smiled.

“Among other duties, that is,” said Kopelman as he swigged from his flask yet again.

“How do you get booze into Pakistan?”

“It’s my front company.”

“I thought World Benefactors was your front company.”

“Right. The WB gig gets me into some places, but importing black-market booze from China gets me into other places.”

“Radiance owns a front company to smuggle liquor into Pakistan?”

Kopelman shrugged. “It helps me make and keep contacts with influential expats, journalists, foreign embassies, hotel employees, and other folks with their pulse on what’s going on. There’s power in the bottle, even here in the land of Allah.” He thought about what he had said. “
Especially
here in the land of Allah.”

Raynor just nodded. It made sense. Hell, it was brilliant. A legend that got him out into the refugee camps, around the Pashtuns, to gain intelligence from them. And then a secondary legend, the relief coordinator who also makes a few bucks smuggling in liquor, thereby granting him access to virtually all the non-Arabs in Peshawar. Like Berlin in the Cold War, Peshawar was ground zero in the War on Terror, or whatever the hell it was called these days.

Kolt respected this cagey ex-Agency dinosaur. He had to ask. “So, how the hell did you get canned?”

Kopelman answered by waving the flask in the air and then tugging on his long beard.

“Booze. Okay, I get that. What’s wrong with your beard?”

“They said I’d been in Pashtunistan for too long. I’d lost my objectivity.”

Kolt understood now. “The Agency doesn’t mind a drunk as much as it minds a case officer who’s gone native.”

Kopelman barked back. Obviously this subject struck a nerve with the old spy. “Yeah, well, it happens. They want you to fake it as good as a native, but don’t you dare go too far.” Kopelman shrugged. “I went too far, apparently.” Bob raised an aggressive finger toward Raynor. “Doesn’t mean I won’t kill those AQ bastards with my own hands. I’ve spent the past ten years targeting al Qaeda and Taliban with behind-the-lines legwork, not UAVs and piss-poor third-hand walk-in intel that’s more likely to result in a Hellfire landing on the dance floor of a wedding party than on a terrorist safe house. I’ve done a damn fine job for my country, and the heads at Langley said, ‘Yeah, but he likes whiskey
and
chai, he looks and smells and acts too much like one of them, so we can’t use him anymore.’”

“Pete respects you.”

Kopelman nodded thoughtfully. “Colonel Grauer gets it. He knows how to fight this war. Too bad his job is to protect the gear in the rear and hunt poppy farms from the air, and he’s not in charge, doing the kind of shit that needs to be done.”

Raynor agreed. Bob seemed a little loony to him, but most of the nonofficial-cover CIA operatives he’d met in his career seemed like they were teetering between worlds.

That was tough work, for which the Langley suits and Washington in general offered little thanks.

Kolt watched Kopelman finish off the flask and then toss it into the backseat. Quickly he swigged water from the bottle between the seats, rolled down his window, and spat it out on the road.

Just then a long burst of automatic-weapons fire from the road ahead drew both men’s attention.

Bob turned to Raynor. “We’re here.”

“Contact front,” said Kolt. He didn’t see the shooters, but he lifted his AK over the dashboard and—

Bob slapped the weapon back down. “Calm down, cowboy! This is Darra. They call this place the Gun Village for a reason. People come here to buy weapons, and the salesmen just walk them out in the street and let them dump a couple of mags into the surrounding hills.”