White Plague (17 page)

In the next shot he was in Afghanistan, judging from the dun-colored desert and the rows of trucks in the rear.

Joe asked the translator, “What does the writing say?”

“It’s his name. Rana Amir Khan.”

“Why is he in this book?” said Eddie.

“I’m calling the director,” said Joe.

Joe went out on deck, and powered up the sat phone. Sometimes the gizmos worked like magic. Sometimes, in seconds, your voice bounced off a sat and came down in Washington, and when you talked to the director’s secretary, her precancerous smoker’s voice came through as well as if she stood a foot away, shouting into a megaphone.

“The director is in a meeting, Major.”

“Get him out, now.”

Rana Amir Khan turned out to be, records said, the oldest son of Pakistani immigrants living in Mankato, Minnesota, Joe knew by the time he was back in Kandahar. Rana had graduated with straight B’s from high school, then joined the Army Reserve, and was almost immediately sent overseas. When his tour was up, he was sent there again.

Under “religion” in his application, he’d checked “Moslem.”

“Plenty of fine U.S. soldiers are Moslems,” Eddie said.

“Their pictures are not in the ledger,” Joe replied.

They left the ship/lab in flames and brought back the prisoners. By the time they reached Kandahar, the director was back on the line, having read the riot act to his contacts at the National Security Agency. Emergency search warrants had been acquired. Army investigators headed toward Corporal Rana’s parents’ home, and were trying to locate Rana through the computer systems. It should have been simple.

“There seems to be a snag,” the director said.

That night the prisoners confirmed that whatever had been manufactured on the ship had been trucked off. Neither man knew the destination. They’d not talked originally to the Yemeni translator, they said, not because they were uncooperative, but because they couldn’t understand his accent and they were terrified of being shot.

“We loaded oil drums,” they told interrogators. “Then the Pakistani doctor went home. We were told to keep people away until someone came for us. That was two weeks ago.”

At midnight the director forwarded to Joe a disturbing series of e-mails from Corporal Rana Amir Khan to a sister, the early ones, from the beginning of his deployment, happy and chatty, although complaining about being sent overseas, instead of attending college, the reason he’d joined the Reserves. Then, over time, the cheery quality degenerated. It started when other men in his platoon nicknamed Rana “Raghead.”

“I laugh with them, but it infuriates me,” the corporal wrote. “I’m as good an American as they are. I do not think they are really joking.”

Months later, with the teasing worse, Rana Khan learned that his best friend was being discharged twenty-four hours before he would have been eligible for college tuition aid.

“The Army did this on purpose,” Rana wrote. “They don’t mind getting us killed. But they mind paying our tuition if we don’t get killed. I think those bean counters prefer us to die, to save a few bucks.”

He grew more bitter. Days turned to months. Rana felt trapped. He stopped referring to other soldiers as friends. He turned to religion for solace, quoting the Koran, but stopped going to the Army imam, as his hatred grew overt. By 2012, when the news broke that several Marines had burned Korans, and that a staff sergeant named Robert Bale had massacred seventeen innocent civilians, half of them children, in a small village near Rana’s base, the e-mails were unrecognizable as belonging to the same man who’d typed messages two years before.

“Afghanistan is hell and we are the demons,” his last e-mail said two months ago. “I won’t be writing for a while. I’m on a special mission. Don’t worry. Much love.”

Joe asked the director if Rana was on a special mission.

“Not for us,” the director said. “Find him, fast.”

“SNAFU, motto of the U.S. Army,” Eddie snapped twenty-seven hours later. “Situation normal, all fucked up.”

It had taken that long to pin down Rana’s location, thanks to errors up and down the line, started when some half-illiterate or bored clerk had punched in a two-digit mistake in Rana’s computer file, “6” instead of “4” on the social security number, “l” instead of “r” on the name.

“We have no Corporal Lana Khan stationed in all of Afghanistan,” a captain in personnel assured Joe.

The mistakes followed their search like an electronic leprechaun. There was no soldier named “Rane” stationed at the air base at Nimruz, they were told.

“Not Rane. Rana.”

“Ah! Well, there’s a Sergeant ‘Hanna’ Khan at a supply depot near Kabul. And a Lieutenant Mohammed Rana from Orange County just shipped back to the States after a tour in Iraq.”

“He’s a corporal, for Christ’s sake.”

“Ohhhh! Yes! Why didn’t you say so! A Corporal Rana Khan is stationed seventeen miles from a base near an old lake in—”

“My God, he was sitting half an hour from where we started out,” Eddie said, eyeing a clock on the wall, as if it were the timing device on a bomb.

They flew back to Kunar Province, to the base, shared by Army and Marines, where the Army colonel in charge told them that yes, Rana was assigned there, but no, he was not actually on base at that moment. “He’s on his way back with a joint Army/Marine humanitarian mission to a refugee camp near the lake.”

Joe and Eddie standing in an air-conditioned prefab Quonset hut, asking what humanitarian mission is that?

“Hearts and minds, gentlemen. Win their hearts and minds and the province follows, that’s what I say.”

“What mission, Colonel?”

“Well, we had some extra turkey after Thanksgiving, and cranberry sauce, and we figured, donate it, with the usual fuel. Corporal Khan is a driver bringing in the food, hauling back the used oil drums.”

Joe leaned forward, his heart quickening at the words “oil drums.” In his mind, he heard the prisoner back in Kandahar saying, “We loaded oil drums on trucks.”

The colonel was a small, hard-looking man, crew cut, with pale blue eyes and sunken cheeks. His accent was Boston. His family, pictured on his desk, seemed to be sitting in stands at a high school football game. His pride in the humanitarian mission was evident. He explained, “They use generators at their hospital. If we don’t send fuel, they run out mid-month. The Army gives us more diesel than we can use.” He was interrupted by his phone.

“Ah! The convoy is a few miles off, coming back now.”

They ran for the base entrance and reached it in time to see the dust thrown up by the approaching convoy . . . Humvees in front and back, as armed escorts; nine tarp-topped cargo trucks in between.

“Tell them to stop where they are, pull over,” Joe told the guard. He still hoped that the drums would be empty, and Rana would be just one more pissed-off but professional soldier. But he didn’t think that would be the case.

The lead Humvee was a mile off. Three minutes away at the crawly twenty miles an hour they moved.

“I said stop them!”

“Sir, there have been ambushes . . . It’s a bad idea to stop in the open. Sir, I need to check with the captain.”

“There isn’t time!”

There was a delay in reaching the captain.

Plus, Joe, a visiting Marine major, had no authority to order an Army guard what to do.

The “front gate” was actually just an opening in the Hesco barriers and concentric rolls of concertina wire surrounding the base; the sandbag guard post housed two, and there was a .50-caliber M2 machine gun there. Entering vehicles had to thread a zigzag maze of concrete-filled oil drum bomb barriers. After passing through a second checkpoint, and searched, they could proceed into the thousand-acre base, which housed two thousand troops, tents, prefabs, warehouses, and gym.

A stiff wind blew at the base from the direction in which the convoy was approaching.

The guard told Joe, still holding for the captain, “You’d think the wind would let up, but it don’t.”

Joe, looking around, fixed on the M2. It was to be used against truck or car bombers, if one was coming, and you knew it, which was, he knew, rarely the case.

Joe walked into the post, to get close to the M2 on its tripod. Neither guard tried to stop him.

The trucks were now a half mile from the base.

The guard reached the captain finally and, after receiving orders, was on his radio telling the trucks to pull over. Almost instantly, all Humvees and all the trucks except one did exactly that.

The truck that had not pulled over passed by the pulled-over vehicles, and kept heading for the front gate.

In his binoculars, Joe had a view of the driver for an instant, through the windshield. It was Rana Khan. There was a passenger, but the passenger was slumped in his seat. The other passengers would be in back, with the oil drums.

“Shoot,” he said.

The gate guards seemed confused.

A voice on the unit radio, Khan, said, over static, “I’ve got a wounded man here.”

“Fire,” Joe repeated. At least neither guard was trying to stop him.

The voice said, “Code one! Code one! He needs medical attention.”

“Sir, there are Marines on that truck, too,” a guard explained, as if this would make Joe countermand the order.

Joe grabbed the man’s radio. “Pull over or we will fire!”

Suddenly Khan began chanting, “There is no God except Allah the generous and patient. There is no God except Allah the Almighty and all-wise . . .”

The truck, a hundred yards away, accelerated.

“Oh, Allah, pardon my sins . . .”

Joe shouted for the guards to run. The wind was coming sideways. He knew that even a drop of sarin on the skin could start the reaction.

He held the twin grips on the M2 and fired, heard the heavy BANGBANGBANG of the weapon and felt the recoil in his shoulders and arms. The guards were scattering. The oncoming windshield shattered but the truck was armored. Joe swung the muzzle and tracked the truck and kept firing.

Khan sang, “Allah be merciful and . . .”

The truck exploded.

One second it was hurtling toward them, the next
a thousand hot pieces of steel blew out and up
and scattered in a mushroom pattern over the desert floor.
There came a rain of machine parts on the spot
where the guards had stood. The truck had been two
hundred feet from the gate. There must have been explosives
in there. The wind was like artillery. Someone screamed at
the men running toward the wreckage, to help, but Joe
screamed at them to get away.

He’d been so preoccupied with the shooting that he’d not seen the goatherd, fifty yards from the explosion—side of the road, man and flock, and the man was suddenly engulfed by a cloud, his hand going to his throat, a man on his knees, animals falling sideways, a man convulsing like an epileptic, while the skinny goat legs waved and went still. The truth sinking in to the Army guys.

“Holy shit, sir. What . . . what’s the cloud . . . what’s . . .”

And Joe, on his knees, knowing he’d just killed eight innocent Marines, not just Rana Khan, answered, “Sarin.”

That part was hushed up. The guards were sworn to secrecy, threatened with prison if they talked. No one wanted the other troops or the American public to know how close the attack had come to success, or that a U.S. soldier had facilitated it. No one, the director explained, wanted Congress to restart the debate about pulling out. The Pakistani professor who made the sarin had been “dealt with.” Corporal Khan’s parents got a letter saying their son died “in an accident.” So let’s put it to rest.