The Way Home (25 page)

While his response gave her a measure of relief, she was not convinced. “How long will this investigation take?”

“It depends on a lot of things. But it will be done as rapidly as possible.”

She nodded. “When will you be back in Emarat?”

“You’ll understand that’s not information I can share.”

Clearly, he still did not trust her. And she did understand, as she was still deciding if she could trust this man to do what he said he would do. “It is my understanding your patrol arrives here every five days. We, too, have our ways of gathering information, Lieutenant Court,” she added when he gave her a look. “Just as the Taliban will also know of your coming and going, since you are clearly not conducting a secretive mission.”

He nodded, conceding the point to her.

“Would it be correct to assume I could make contact five days from now?”

“Possibly sooner if your story checks out.”

“There is more Jeffery has done to assure you that he is alive.”

“More?”

“Do you have a map of the area?”

He nodded.

“May I see it?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he dug a map out of a satchel.

“Here is my village.” She pointed it out for him when he spread it out on a small folding table. “It is a three-hour drive by car from here. Jeffery assures me there are surveillance drones in constant flight over the area. Direct them here, to my village. Jeffery left a message on the roof of my father’s house to prove he is alive and there.”

When he looked up from the map, he was frowning. “What kind of message?”

“This I do not know. He said the American military would understand and recognize it.”

The lieutenant, while still skeptical, was clearly interested. “Let’s say the blood and hair follicles confirm they’re recent samples belonging to Sergeant Albert. How do you propose we extract him without implicating you and your father?”

“Jeffery is now in hiding in a safe place away from my village. When you return here after confirming that I am telling the truth, I will provide directions to where you can find him.”

“This could all be an elaborate trap,” he said thoughtfully.

“The proof I provided will confirm that Jeffery is alive. He needs medical care, Lieutenant. He needs to return home. I urge you to bear that in mind. I urge you to hurry. We cannot keep his presence a secret much longer. I am also fearful that in an effort to protect my father and me, he will attempt to find
his way to you on his own. In his physical condition, he will be captured. And then he will be dead.”

R
ABIA WAITED FIVE
days. Each evening, she dressed in black and carefully made her way through the streets to the edge of the village. Heart pounding, she would search the flat, barren landscape for signs of the U.S. patrol.

Lieutenant Court and his men did not return.

She expanded her search of the perimeter of the village then, scouring the entire area every night, thinking they might have set up camp somewhere else. One night, she encountered a Taliban patrol. Thank Allah, she heard them before they saw her.

She dropped to the ground, lay as still as the earth, and listened as they passed within twenty yards of where she hid in the open with only the dark as cover.

As frightened as she had been, she still came back every night for five more nights.

The Americans did not return.

She did not know how that could be. The blood and hair—they had to find a match. Jeffery’s letter. The message he had left on the roof.

Finally, her father made her accept the truth. They had not believed her. They were not coming back.

J
EFF LAY ON
the roof, his refuge, and attempted to deal with the disappointment and despair. Beside him, Rabia lay in troubled silence. It had been more than a week since she’d returned from Emarat, tears in her eyes because she feared she’d failed him.

He stared at the night sky. She didn’t understand. He was
the one who had failed. He’d let her risk her life for him, and because of his guilt, he’d died a thousand times alone in that cave, waiting, certain something had happened to her. Certain she lay dying or dead somewhere with a Taliban bullet in her head.

He’d been half out of his mind with fear for her when she finally came back to him. That’s when he made up his mind. No matter what happened, she had to leave here—or he did.

“You need to go,” he said again, as he’d said every day since she’d returned. “How can I convince you? You and your father need to go to Kabul. You have relatives there who will take you in. You have a life there as a teacher. You have rights there that you’ll never have if you stay here with me.”

“And what of you. Jeffery? If I go, what happens to you?”

How did he tell her that he no longer cared what happened to him? How did he tell her that the patrol had been his last chance?

“They’ll come for me,” he said, not believing it but wanting to convince her that he did. “They’ll put it all together, and they’ll come. And they’ll come here. That’s why you have to leave.”

He still couldn’t figure out what had happened. Had the lieutenant simply written off her story as fantasy? Had he thought she was trying to lead them into a trap?

In the end, it didn’t matter. They hadn’t come. They weren’t going to come.

And he was done. Done putting her at risk. Done hiding out like a coward.

The Taliban would not give up searching for him, and because of that, Rabia would always be in danger—unless he could persuade her to leave.

“Let us not talk of this tonight,” she whispered, and snuggled closer. “Let us be together. The world and war do not exist in these moments when we are together this way.”

When she bared herself to him like this—heart, body, soul—it was so easy to let himself be lulled by her soft words, her soft lips, her giving flesh. But when it was over and she slept, exhausted and sweet beside him, the guilt beat at him like a fist.

One more week. If he couldn’t persuade her to leave, he vowed on everything he had once been that he would sneak away and put as much distance between himself and Rabia as he could.

Let the Taliban do what they would to him.

He would not put her in danger any longer.

And he would no longer be less than a man.

Langley, Virginia, late October

T
   
he International Threat Analysis and
Prevention unit at Langley was Mike Brown’s baby. ITAP officially fell under the Department of Defense table of organization as contracted labor. Unofficially, the ITAP unit was a front for a covert rapid-response tactical team that DOD did not want on anyone’s radar, nationally or abroad.

Mike and his boys operated dark and lean—the way they all liked it. They also operated with complete impunity. That was the pro. The con was that with impunity came deniability. If they screwed up and an operation went south, DOD would not come storming in, showing U.S. military muscle and getting them out of their fix. They swam or sank on their own.

So when Brown got the call from DOD that morning and was told to set up the ITAP briefing room at thirteen hundred hours and to expect company, he’d known something big was about to go down.

“Listen up, gentlemen.” Brown addressed his team from behind
the podium at the front of the small room. Behind him, a map of Kandahar Province bordering Pakistan was projected on the wall from a laptop. The map had been requested by DOD. “Best behavior, OK? We’ve got big-leaguers on the way.”

“How big?” Peter Davis, ITAP’s operations manager, had arrived in his wheelchair, a tablet in his lap and a puzzled look on his face.

“You’ll know when I know,” Brown said, glancing at his go-to guys, Jamie Cooper and Bobbie Taggart. Both looked alert and curious, as did the team’s new recruits, Brett Carlyle, Enrique Santos, and Josh Waldrop, all former independent private securities specialists who had recently been brought into the fold.

“When’s this little powwow supposed to start?” Cooper asked, crossing an ankle over a knee, his foot going a hundred miles an hour, relaying that he was both excited and impatient.

Before Brown could respond, the door opened, and six members of DOD’s other “off the books” team walked in.

“Holy crap,” Taggart muttered when he saw them. “Did the red phone ring in the White House?”

Now that Nate Black and his team had shown up, Brown wondered the same thing. Calling together DOD’s two top covert and highly specialized tactical teams suggested a major development.

Nate Black, former U.S. Marine captain, former CEO of his independent contract firm Black Ops Inc., and now the Black team’s CO, was the ranking operator in the room. Nate shook Mike’s hand, then joined him at the podium.

“Not sure intros are necessary,” Mike said, “but let’s dot the Is and cross the Ts, shall we?”

“Oh, by all means, let’s.” Johnny Reed grinned as he sat
and gave the room in general a nod. “Top dog here, in case you didn’t remember. You can call me TD.”

“Just this one time, dial it down, OK, Reed?” Black nodded to the front row, and the rest of the team introduced themselves. In addition to Reed, Gabe Jones, Rafe Mendoza, Luke Coulter, and Joe Green nodded hellos.

“I’m going to cut right to the chase,” Black said, and passed out hard copies of an operations order—called an OPORD—to the members of both teams. “Everyone got a copy? Good. Read along with me, boys. Please hold your questions until I’m finished.”

Mike flipped open the document and followed the report while Black started reading aloud.

“Operation Aces High—Background Summary OPORD: In October this year, while conducting a routine patrol in Sperwan Ghundey, Panjwai, Kandahar, Afghanistan, an Air Force patrol operating out of recently established FOB (forward operating base) Shaker was approached by a female Afghan (Pashtun) subject on the outskirts of Emarat. Subject claimed that an American Special Forces sergeant had taken shelter with her family following his escape from enemy forces after being held hostage approximately three years. The subject provided correspondence stating it was written by the SF soldier, as well as physical evidence for verification.”

Black stopped and took a sip of water when Mike handed him a glass.

“Operational constraints precluded immediate authentication of said missing SF sergeant’s existence. Subsequent analysis of physical evidence, however, confirmed it did, in fact, belong to an American military service member believed to be KIA (killed in action) in February 2011, following hostile
action near Chamkani, Paktia Providence, Afghanistan, on the Pakistan side of the border. His body was never recovered.

“Despite repeated attempts to subsequently contact the female Afghan subject at a prearranged meeting place, contact failed. Two weeks ago, however, overflights of the area by drone assets revealed the letters ‘DOL’ and ‘JA’ formed on the roof of a dwelling in the village of Salawat as the woman had promised they would be. It could be surmised that ‘JA’ represents the initials of the missing team member, and ‘DOL’ could represent ‘De Oppresso Liber,” Army Special Forces credo. Note: one week later, the letters had been removed.”