Operation Dark Heart (17 page)

He put his head down.

“We’re going to talk to you again in the morning. It’s time for all of us to take a break. We’ll have some food brought in to you.”

“I must leave for Kabul tomorrow if I am going to make my plane home.” He was pleading with us.

“Frankly, you aren’t going to make any plane unless it’s to Guantanamo,” I said.

We left, and John got back on the computer while I smoked a cigar. The time was 2100. The 10th Mountain guys were still pushing back the insurgents with aggressive combat patrols in the foothills of the nearby mountains in preparation for General Schoomaker’s visit. It seemed to work. There was only sporadic mortar and gunfire that night.

We were making progress, but running out of time. Clearly, if any info came back that Arash Ghaffari was associated with terrorists in the ****** ******, he was done, but it didn’t appear to be going in that direction.

Even so, we needed to know what, if anything, his cousin had been instructing him to do ****** ******. We needed more information on what was going down in Afghanistan with the ********* What was the ******* really for? What other associates did his cousin have? Who were the men who had been rolled up with Ali Ghaffari?

The next morning, we found all of the Special Forces guys—even our two intel contacts—were now clean shaven and in clean desert camo. John razzed the guys about how good they looked. John and I pressed Tim about flights back. He figured that after General Schoomaker arrived, there would be helicopters we could hop on and get a ride to Bagram. Time was ticking down.

John and I discussed our final approach with Ghaffari. We decided to ask the same set of questions as yesterday and see if we could inch forward with that method.

When we got in there, however, the plan didn’t work that way. Ghaffari looked awful. He was bleary-eyed and drawn. If he’d slept, it sure hadn’t been for very long.

“We need to continue talking about your cousin and all of his activities to the point where we feel comfortable you have given us everything you can on him,” I told him, presenting him with the stark choice we’d been laying out to him for the last two days. “You better make a choice between your life in ******* and your cousin because, right now, unless you give us all the information you have on him and his activities, you will be loyal to your cousin, but you will end up at Guantanamo. If that is your choice, we can stop this discussion right now.”

“No,” he said. His voice cracked. “I will give you everything I have—anything you want to know about my cousin. As God is my witness.”

“Tell us what your cousin was doing the night of the raid.”

He admitted that his cousin had been instructed by ******* ************ to conduct terrorist attacks against **** ******** ** ****** and create chaos for the U.S. Army and the ISAF in eastern Afghanistan. He told us that his cousin had been traveling between **** *** ******, reporting on **** ********** to ******* ************ back in ******. He gave us the names of the men who had gathered at the meeting.

By this admission, he was leaving himself open for death if his cousin ever found out. He had crossed the line. He had made his choice.

“What were the specific tasks your cousin gave them that night?” I asked.

“My cousin never shared with me the specific tasks or targets he was working on, but he had put together a number of groups to conduct terrorist attacks in eastern Afghanistan.”

Interesting. The Recon could follow up to track these cells down.

“What did your cousin ask you to do?” asked John.

“Nothing,” Ghaffari insisted. “He asked me to do nothing. I moved the ***** for him into Afghanistan … that was it.”

We believed him. At this point, he was pouring out his guts. I figured his cousin probably really did love him like a son, and was easing him into the family business.

“What happened to the ********” I asked.

He stopped for a moment. “You know my nephew was present at my cousins house?” he said.

“Yes, we do.” We really did, we were briefed by the Recon guys on how the raid went down.

“One of your ****** sergeants walked him out of the room,” he said, as if that explained it.

“So?” John and I were baffled.

“My cousin—he gave the money to him, and *he put it in his medical bag ***** *** ********* ** ** ********. Your ****** sergeant walked him out of the raid to keep him from harm.”

John and I rolled our eyes.

“Can you tell us where *he went?”

He said he didn’t know but gave us the names of associates in ****** where *he might have gone.

We moved back to his visit to ****** with his cousin, and he gave us a detailed accounting of his cousin activities there and the people whom he believed were ************ ****** who met with his cousin. He methodically worked his way through the details.

I moved in to solidify our gains. We had to get him to understand that if he wanted his life ** *** ****** ****** back, he had to do something to prove it.

“Are you willing to work against your cousin?” I asked.

He looked up at me as if he had just been asked to kill his best friend.

“You’ve got to make a choice right now,” I said.

“No, no, no, I understand,” he said. He had no fight left in him. “My life ** ******* is more important than my cousin, and I am willing to do whatever you need me to do.”

He was looking down with what appeared to be shame, then he took a deep breath and looked up at us with new determination.

*** *** **** ** ** *** *** **** * **** ** ****

He was now John’s cat. It would be his job to take this guy on as an asset since he would be back ** *** ****** ******, and it would then be a ******** *** *********** ****** John took over the questioning at that point, asking him a dozen questions, running through what we’d already asked him, and got clear and concise answers that were consistent with his previous ones. At the conclusion, John took a deep breath.

When John started the questioning, my thoughts were already gone. I had already started to think about our return to Bagram and getting back on the task of targeting the ******* in ********* This was good stuff but as far as I was concerned it was now history. We needed to keep moving forward, and I did not see a big threat to *********** here, so it was time to keep pressing on the bad guys.

We learned what we needed to know. It appeared that Arash Ghaffari was not part of a sleeper cell in the ****** ******, but he had a front-row seat on some nasty stuff in Afghanistan. He’d given us the intel we needed to determine that the Iranians were, indeed, getting involved in the war here and were relying on an intelligence agent—Ali Ghaffari—to do their dirty work. They had given him ******* to form terrorist cells and begin conducting operations against the ********* in Afghanistan. By getting to Ali Ghaffari early on, we were able to stop him in his tracks and to stop the Iranians—cut out the cancer before it had a chance to grow.

John and I were getting ready to leave when Arash stopped us. “Wait,” he said. “I feel very strongly that there is something I have to admit to you so that you understand that I am a good ********.”

John and I looked at each other as we stopped in our tracks. We had thought he had told us everything.

“I must admit to you something that is very, very important … to clear my honor.”

John and I just stared at him. What had we missed?

“I must admit that my wife and I had traveled to Iran before,” he said.

“Yeah, you told us that,” said John, puzzled.

“I did a terrible thing.” He was speaking rapidly, and John and I tensed. Shit. Maybe this was about nukes.

“In my religion, there are specific things one can do to help ensure his children are right in the eyes of God.”

Oh, boy, I thought, this was about to go into any number of directions—all of them very bad.

“Well, I’m not sure how to say this.” He looked up at John and me, seeking an affirming look—or something.

“Consummation of our child is very important in our faith,” he said, staring at us fixedly.

“OK …” John said. Where in the hell was this going?

“I must admit to you that in one of our trips to Iran, we visited a special mosque.”

“And …?” I said. What did this have to do with nukes or terrorists? We knew, of course, that terrorists used mosques as staging grounds. “We’re listening.”

“I must admit to you … I am so ashamed of this … my wife and I had sex in this mosque to conceive our son.”

Whoa … sex in a mosque—now that is ballsy!

“Was that it?” I said to him, still waiting for info of military value. Maybe I’d misunderstood.

“We conceived our child in a mosque in Iran.” Ghaffari looked back at us, surprised. “This isn’t important to you?”

The tension in the room evaporated. I was fighting hard not to break out laughing, and I glanced at John. He was, too.

“We’re
Americans
. We don’t care about things like that,” I told him.

Ghaffari looked disappointed. It was clear it meant a great deal to get that off his shoulders. He’d expected a bigger reaction from us.

“Don’t worry about it,” John said, “no big deal. You are good to go.”

As we left we recognized it for what it was: What it showed us was how much we’d broken this guy. No one admits having sex in a mosque to the U.S. government. To
Penthouse Forum
, maybe, but not to Uncle Sam.

With that, we were out of there.

John and I went to the Tactical Operations Center and gave them a detailed verbal dump of everything we’d learned. By now, the Recon intel guys had an inkling that the nephew had been involved in evacuating the ***** and there was a full-blown search under way for him ** ****** *** *** *********

They were confident they would chase down the nephew for the **** and go after any other remnants of Iranian activity in the area.

We told the Recon guys to let the guy loose. They gave him back his belongings and took him into ******, where he could get transportation to Kabul to catch his plane. It would be up to the *** ** ***** ** **** *** ** *********** *** *** *** ** ***** ** ****** ** *** ******* ** ***** ** **** ********* *** ****** **** *** ******* *** *******

We grabbed our kit, and the Special Forces drove us out in armored Humvees to the landing area.

Within minutes, we heard the
whoop-whoop-whoop
of a flight of Chinooks and watched them lumber in with an ever-present two-bird Apache escort.

We had finished just in time.

A huge backwash of dust hit our faces as the two Chinooks landed while the Apache orbited above looking for bad guys. General Schoomaker and his staff came off the 47 closest to us. He looked over at us, but knew better than to come over and talk to us. He knew undercover intelligence folks when he saw them.

The two Chinooks lumbered slowly into the air, whipping us with dust and debris as they clawed the clear blue sky for altitude.

Before the Chinooks were gone from the horizon, we could hear the
whop-whop-whop
of a single Air Force UH-60 Black Hawk with an Apache escort arriving over the same stretch of weathered asphalt road.

As it touched down, Tim shouted at us.

“This is the one we’re supposed to get on,” said Tim.

With my kit and a still aching knee from my bad exit from the Chinook three nights back, I moved toward the door of the now stationary Black Hawk.

As the door opened, out came Christiane Amanpour of CNN in a bright yellow nylon jacket, cameraman in tow.

She stopped and stared at us, clearly surprised but intrigued. She seemed on the verge of speaking to us, but I motioned to John and Tim, and we quickly moved past her without a word and onto the chopper.

I gave her a thin smile and helped the crew chief slide the door closed behind me.

Within two minutes we were back in the sky and rolling. A short Japanese journalist, whose Kevlar vest appeared ten sizes too big for him, sat to my immediate right and directly across from John. Tim and I sat against the starboard door and its window.

We flew near the nap of the earth back to Bagram, never rising higher than 2,000 feet above sea level but mostly staying below 1,000 feet. The terrain varied from scarred desert—areas pockmarked with craters from past artillery barrages—to jagged rifts of rocky mountain terrain in which the striations showed layer after layer of the Earth’s history now open to the sky. At times, the jagged mountains towered over the chopper. It was a roller-coaster ride.

Having been on similar types of flights years ago, I’d had the wisdom not to eat lunch before the flight. Tim had apparently not been so savvy. He had been grazing all morning on his supply of beef jerky and, on the flight, kept offering the bag to John and myself.

I never had taken any jerky from Tim to this point, and neither had John, but I think John was to the point that he was going to take a piece just to be polite. At that moment, the Black Hawk went into a swooping dive. I felt my stomach go up into my throat. Just as John started to reach for a piece of jerky, Tim pulled the bag away and forcefully replaced all the jerky he had eaten earlier in the day into the bag.