Sniper Elite (24 page)

Crosswhite signaled for Naeem to be brought front and center. “Sergeant Major . . . this is Romeo.”

The crew chief raised the visor on his flight helmet and grinned in the Taliban leader's face. “Congratulations, Mr. Taliban. At this particular moment in time, you have the distinction of being the unluckiest man on the entire planet.”

Robert Pope stood in a dark room before a bank of high-resolution video monitors used for viewing the live feed from a CIA spy satellite locked in a geosynchronous orbit some two hundred miles above the earth's surface. He allowed his mind to drift as he watched the Black Hawk helicopter lift into the air. The battle of Waigal Village was apparently over, but it did not appear that the rescue team had located Sandra Brux, and the identity of their male prisoner remained to be seen. The call sign Romeo meant nothing to him. He patted a lone pair of technicians on their shoulders and turned for the door.

“Nice work, ladies. Make sure that video card disappears into the proper black hole, will you, please?”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave them a wink and slipped into the hallway. Pope wasn't
remotely worried that anyone would ever find out he had watched the unauthorized mission—from start to finish—without reporting it to the director of the CIA. He was at the very tip-top of the intelligence food chain. No one knew more about the systems than he did, and no one oversaw his work. The buck stopped with him in his private little corner of the world. Many of the computer programs he used these days were programs that he had custom written for his own personal use, secret programs running parallel to the authorized programs he was supposed to be using for the intelligence-gathering tasks he was charged with carrying out on behalf of the United States Government. As a result, if anyone ever did attempt to backtrack his activities, they would find nothing more than series after series of very boring, very legitimate, and routinely mundane intelligence exercises . . . all of them accurately dated, reviewed, and evaluated.

Pope's philosophy was very simple: Why stop at having one brilliant, exceedingly loyal young woman for a protégée when you could have two? This not only doubled the amount of work they could get done on his behalf; it doubled the amount time he could spend ignoring what he was supposed to be doing while researching the things that truly interested him. For instance, what was the Russian navy up to in the Sea of Okhotsk—and why had he been ordered to ignore it? Why were American oil prospectors poking around in regions of the African continent where there wasn't supposed to be any oil? And why was the Israeli Mossad suddenly so interested in spying on the Mexican government?

The answers to these sorts of questions might all end up being very benign by the time he puzzled them out, but Pope found the questions themselves much too intriguing to ignore. Similarly, once he had realized that elements of the American Special Forces community were preparing to go off the reservation in an attempt to rescue Sandra Brux—rather than sit idly by while Washington
considered the political angles—he had been far too fascinated by their audacity even to think about blowing the whistle. Still, he had warned the director of the possibility, even if only subtly.

He sat down at his desk and passed the time musing as he awaited the inevitable text message from the DDO. The NSA had certainly intercepted the clandestine mission's radio traffic, and by now an emergency action message would have been sent directly to the CIA station chief in Kabul, who would have then gotten into immediate contact with the chief of the Middle East bureau, who would have in turn made a direct call to the deputy director of Operations for the CIA—Cletus Webb.

Almost to the exact minute of Pope's estimated time, the iPhone resting on his desk began to buzz with the anticipated text message:
CONTACT ME AT HOME IMMEDIATELY
!

He picked up the landline and pressed the auto dial for Webb's house. He was often in his office until the wee hours of the morning, so there was no reason to worry about this raising any real suspicion. And he was well aware that most everyone regarded him as something of an eccentric anyhow—a perception he never hesitated to take advantage of.

Webb answered on the first ring. “Bob?”

“Yeah. What is it, Cletus? Is something wrong?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Webb said. “You haven't heard any chatter coming out of Afghanistan tonight?”

“I haven't been listening for any,” Pope said, yawning audibly. “Electronic eavesdropping isn't exactly in my job description.”

“Well, that's never stopped you before,” Webb muttered. “Listen, Bob, it sounds like elements of both DEVGRU and SOAR may have just carried out some kind of a joint rescue mission in the Waigal Valley. I'm calling to find out what you might know before I call Shroyer at home. I'll need to brief him so he can call the president before the president hears about it from someone else.”

“Someone else, as in the NSA?”

“As in anybody, Bob. What can you tell me?”

“Well, Waigal is in the Nuristan Province,” Pope said. “North of Jalalabad. The people there tend to speak mostly Kalasha. I also seem to remember that—”

“Bob, are you telling me you know
nothing
about this operation—that your people are capable of pulling off an unauthorized rescue mission without anyone knowing anything about it until it's over?”

In that moment, Pope noticed that he'd forgotten to tear the page from his desk blotter after the change of the month. He began to clear the desk so he could tear the page away without knocking anything over.

“Bob!”

“Yes? Oh—well, sure, it's possible, Cletus. These people are in operation thousands of miles away. We can't monitor every single move they make. They are highly trained adults, after all. At some point, we have to trust them to look after themselves . . . and I did warn you about the Uncertainty Principle. Who contacted you, by the way, the Mideast section chief?”

“No, Bob, it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Webb said. “General Couture called him directly from the ATO.” General Couture was the Supreme Commander of all US forces in Afghanistan. “He was apparently in the middle of his breakfast when he was informed that a clandestine operation had taken place within his theater of operations during the night and without anyone having had the common decency to mention it to him. He's hopping mad.”

Pope chuckled. “Well, knowing Couture, I can imagine. I'll look into this, Cletus, and get back to you. How's that?”

Webb let out a dissatisfied sigh. “That'll be fine, Bob. Call me the minute you have something you're willing to share with the rest of us.”

“You bet.” Pope hung up the phone.

Having forgotten about the desk blotter, he stretched and yawned and rocked back in the leather chair, remembering himself as a young man, as a very green operative skylarking with Air America, a covert airlift operation run by SAD for the CIA from 1950 to 1976. It was during the final days of the Vietnam War that Pope had stumbled across his first big chip in the poker game of American intelligence gathering.

He and his CIA copilot were flying a battered C-130 full of top-secret files out of the US Airbase at Bien Hoa bound for the Philippines. They were over the jungle when the aircraft suffered a catastrophic engine failure. To this day, Pope still suspected sabotage, but there would never be any way to know for sure. They went down in the jungle, and the plane was torn to pieces. The copilot was killed, and Pope was left with a broken leg. The plane caught fire, and he barely managed to drag himself clear before it exploded.

There had been no time for a Mayday, and the plane had no transponder, so Pope believed he would either eventually die of exposure there in the jungle or be found and murdered by the Viet Cong operating in that area. When the sun came up the following day, he made himself a crutch from a dead tree limb and hobbled around the burned-out fuselage in a halfhearted attempt to find anything that might be useful to his survival.

All he found was a single diplomatic pouch full of classified documents that had flown from the cargo bay as the fuselage was torn apart. Having nothing better to do, he sat down against a tree and went through the pouch. Within the documents were the names of dozens of American CIA operatives and officers, both in Vietnam and back in the States, who had spent the Vietnam War growing rich off of Air America's illicit drug trafficking operations.

An A-Team of American Green Berets found him the next day, but they were ambushed by the Viet Cong en route to the extraction zone. When the firefight was over, only Pope and a single Green
Beret noncom remained alive. The Green Beret's name was Master Sergeant Guy Shannon. He carried Pope on his back the last click to the extraction zone, where they were finally lifted from the ground by an Iroquois Huey in a cloud of purple smoke.

Over the next few years, Pope had used the information contained in those classified files to encourage loyal patrons among the CIA's upper echelon, and over time, these patrons helped him collect the names of vulnerable people working in branches of government outside the CIA as well. By the time his hair finally began to turn gray, almost no one in DC had the courage to refuse him a favor, their natural assumption being that if he was asking them for something, he must have information on them as well.

Pope understood better than anyone that information—not money or guns—was the true source of power in the emerging world, and that information was to be guarded at all costs and never shared . . . except with a trusted and worthy few.

Steelyard stalked into a room at the back of the hangar where Gil, Trigg, Forogh, and Lt. Commander Perez stood in a semicircle around Naeem, who now sat strapped to a steel armchair with a black bag over his head. The chief dropped his smoldering cigar onto the concrete and stepped on it with the heel of his boot.

“We have to do this fast,” he announced. “The second the Head Shed realizes who this prick is, they'll send the MPs to take him away from us. Trigg, get me a box of garbage bags and fistful of nylon zip ties. Commander, you probably shouldn't be here for this.”

Perez took a self-conscious glance at Gil before straightening his posture and putting out his chest. “It's all right, Chief. I'll stay.”

“You're sure, sir? What I'm about to do is against the Geneva
Conventions. Getting caught taking part in this type of interrogation could end your career.”

The very faintest of smiles crossed Perez's face. “I know how much that would break all of your hearts, Chief . . . but I'll stay.”

“Very well.” Steelyard gave Gil a nod, signaling for him to remove the black bag from Naeem's head.

Naeem sat looking up at them, a defiant sneer on his bruised face. “Fuck you!” he said, still lisping because of the missing teeth.

Steelyard looked at Forogh. “Ask him where they took Sandra.”

Speaking in Pashto, Forogh asked Naeem where the American pilot had been taken.

Naeem smirked. “Fuck you.”

Long having recognized Naeem's particular brand of contempt, Forogh said to him, “You're Wahhabi, yes?”

Naeem stared back, his eyes glassing over with loathing.

Forogh looked at the others and shook his head. “He's not going to tell us. He's a Wahhabi fundamentalist. This is his chance to prove himself to Allah.”

“Does he speak English?” Perez asked.

Forogh shook his head again. “Only enough to say, ‘fuck you.' ”

Steelyard snatched one of the black garbage bags from Trigg, saying, “That's all I needed to hear.” He slipped the bag over Naeem's head, smoothed the plastic over his face to remove the excess air, and looped a zip tie around the prisoner's neck, jerking it tight. “Tell him he'd better start talking pretty fast.”

Forogh told Naeem that if he didn't reveal where Sandra had been taken, the Americans would let him suffocate.

“Fuck you!” Naeem gasped, already beginning to struggle for air. Each time he tried to draw a breath, the plastic would suck into his mouth and he would blow it back out in a panicked gasp. He shook his head around in a furious attempt to locate a pocket of air within
the bag, but to no avail. Within a few seconds, he began to panic, screaming and jerking wildly at the restraints in an impotent attempt to free himself.

Gil gripped the back of the chair so Naeem could not rock it over onto the floor and attempt to tear the bag against the concrete.

“Tell them where the woman is.” Forogh urged him. “Tell them now, or you're going to die!”

A few moments later, Naeem lapsed into complete panic, like a man drowning in a pool, jerking madly around within his restricted scope of movement, arms and legs immobilized, repeatedly sucking the plastic in and out of his mouth, over and over again with increasing desperation. He began to grind his teeth against the plastic in a frantic, last-ditch effort to put a hole in it, but Steelyard boxed his ears between the rock-hard palms of his hands, dazing the shit out of him. Naeem swooned deliriously around in the chair. At last, his head lolled off to the side, and his body convulsed for a few horrible moments before growing still.

Steelyard tore a hole in the bag and jerked it down over Naeem's head so the unconscious, blue-complexioned man could begin to breathe again.

Perez looked a little green around the gills himself. “How many times does this usually take?” he asked nervously.

Steelyard met Gil's gaze. “This tough fucker might be able to fight for longer than we've got.”

Forogh stood watching them uncomfortably. This was his first such interrogation, and he was beginning to have misgivings.

“Can we move him someplace else?” Gil said.