State Of Honour

“Whatever. But I’m not leaving.”

“You disobeying a direct order from POTUS?”

“He’s at the top of the food chain. He don’t concern himself with cleaner fish.”

Crane raised his thick eyebrows. “Wow, you got some self-esteem issues there, Tom. You gonna sprout gills?”

Tom smiled, weakly.

“Seriously, you’ll get through this. You’re a nice guy, Tom. Go home.”

They batted the issue around for a further five minutes. Finally, Crane agreed to pass it by Deputy Director Houseman, who was staying behind to coordinate matters on the ground.

“Appreciate it,” Tom said.

Crane struggled to get his bulk out of the chair. “Interview rooms for midgets. Jesus. They’ll be ordering us to carry stepladders next so they can climb up and feel less intimated.”

“Technically they’re called dwarves. Back home they like to be called little people. And they are the same as you and me,” Tom said.

“I’m joking with ya. You know that, right?”

“Sure I do,” Tom said.

“I know they’re the same. They just come up to your goddamned waist.”

Tom rubbed his temple and sighed. Crane was smart, but he was a jerk, too. He glanced up. “So come on. How do you figure that guy on the roof disappeared?”

Crane was looking serious, his eyes narrowing. “He was evidence. I guess the Leopards had some plainclothes guys on the ground, who cleaned up before the Pakistani cops got there.”

“Yeah. Sure they did.”

“A conspiracy theorist, huh. Well, it won’t come as any surprise to you when I say that if the deputy director lets you stay, don’t trust anybody. You hear me, Tom?”

Tom thought for a moment. “That include you?”

13.

An hour later, Crane told Tom that he’d swung it, and that the old man had asked him to join them for an initial in thirty minutes’ time.

The secure conference room was thirty metres square, the massive windows obscured by gleaming Venetian blinds. Tom sat at a large pine table on one of the matching rattan-wicker chairs, his brown loafers resting on coral-blue tiles. Crane said that it had been swept for bugs ten minutes before. Behind the locked door, two Marines ensured that they wouldn’t be disturbed.

“The ISI are playing hard ball,” Houseman said, cradling a fist. “But we have no jurisdiction here. They won’t allow the FBI to investigate. Anyone else in the US intelligence community, either.”

“They’re in a difficult position,” Crane said. “If they’re seen to be too pro-West, they’ll play into the hands of the Pakistan Taliban. And they got enough on their plate with the Shia Leopards just now. On the other hand, if they alienate us, they won’t get what they want.” He pinched an ear lobe, looking a little smug.

“Which is exactly?” Tom asked.

“About ten US divisions heading into Tehran,” Houseman said.

“We should leave them to fight their own battles. The Pakistanis double-crossed us,” Crane said, his tone surly. “Goddamned lying sons of bitches who caused the deaths of thousands of US and coalition forces.”

Tom knew Crane was referring to bin Laden. If it weren’t for the Pakistanis, he would’ve been captured in Tora Bora back in 2001. A bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban lieutenants, too. After that, the ISI babysat thousands of insurgents in the Pakistan Tribal Areas. Then they just picked up where they’d left off. When bin Laden’s six-year holiday in Abbottabad was factored in, Tom was inclined to agree with Crane.

“That maybe, but I want to know what we’re going to do to find Lyric?” he asked, a little more bluntly than he’d intended.

“My money’s still on the Leopards,” said Crane. “Backed by the Iranians.”

“The ISI had to be involved,” Tom said. “The assault couldn’t have happened if they’d done what they said they would. The helicopter didn’t arrive on time. The snipers just disappeared. And it was too well organized.”

Houseman cleared his throat. “Listen, son. The Leopards have ex-military in their ranks. They were capable of it. The Iranians equip them with top weaponry. We ain’t dealing with farmers with AK-47s here. The building was razed to the ground by thermobaric charges.” He snatched up a bottle of water, took a frustrated pull.

Tom saw Crane staring at him.

“When a country is going down the tubes, people start to do all sorts of weird things. It could be as simple as rogue elements,” Crane said. “Or just plain corrupt ones. God knows it’s a national disease. Besides, the ISI are saying it was Shia traitors in their ranks. Shia cops, too. You remember when Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, got assassinated?”

Tom nodded.

“Then you’ll recall it was two of her own bodyguards. Peppered her with thirty rounds. Sikhs, who did it for revenge after the army stormed their temple and killed hundreds. Religion in these parts overrides any other affiliation.”

Tom studied Crane’s face. He guessed he’d been a handsome man once. But now his features looked tired, his eyes hooded, his mouth drooping at the sides.

Houseman banged the bottle on the table, as if he wanted Tom to stop staring. Clenching his jaw muscles, the old man said, “Up until the generals took over here, the Pakistanis were talking about declaring war on us if we attacked the Iranians. That gives you a hint at how complicated this area of the world is. They were buddies; now the Pakistanis regard Iran as an existential threat.”

“I don’t get it,” Tom said.

“You obviously ain’t heard of the Iran-Pak gas pipeline,” Crane said. “The Pakistanis have an ongoing energy crisis. They figured sidling up to the Iranians would go a long way to fixing that. The thing is now, the new Sunni regime here wouldn’t let an Iranian pipeline cross their land if their lives depended on it.”

“I thought the Iranians wanted to invade Balochistan to get their hands on natural gas,” Tom said.

“You’re right. They’ve got the resources to find and extract it. The Pakistanis don’t. All their efforts are focused on national security.”

“And so what now?” Tom asked, pursing his lips, feeling a little out of his depth.

“There are no contingency plans for such a kidnapping,” Crane said. “Not on foreign soil that ain’t fully cooperative. That’s the risk, and Lyric knew it.” He sat back in his chair, began riding it, as appeared to be his habit.

Tom bristled. “What are you saying?”

Crane ignored him. “The flight to Kabul leaves in twenty minutes. Get what you need.”

“Wait a second. Lyric is very likely to be right here in Islamabad. And we’re leaving?”

“POTUS has ordered the closure of the embassy in forty-eight hours,” Houseman said. “You come to Kabul with us or you go home.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Tom said. “But why Kabul?”

“The flight time is thirty-five minutes,” Houseman said. “We still got a fully operational set-up there. Otherwise we’d be flying back to the States and doing this from a computer screen at Langley. Now get outta here before I change my mind.”

Reluctantly, Tom stood up and strode over to the door. They hadn’t said anything explicitly, but he guessed the real meeting would begin as soon as he reached the corridor outside.

14.

“You okay?” Houseman said to Crane after Tom had left.

“I guess.”

“Anyone knows what she’s going through, it’s you, Dan.”

“Yeah,” Crane said, his mind going back.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year.

The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home.

He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street.

They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then.

The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips.

Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites.

The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra.

“Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?”

He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him.

By the time they freed him, he was a different man.

15.

The Ariana Hotel was in the Diplomatic Quarter, Kabul, near the US Embassy and the Presidential Palace. But it hadn’t been open to the public for well over a decade. The former hotel still housed the headquarters of the CIA in Afghanistan. The compound and the roads around it were some of the most heavily protected in the capital, following a day-long siege by insurgents in September 2011. Crane had grinned and had told Tom that to the average Afghan, the quarter was as inaccessible as a Playboy Bunny.

“It’s still off-limits to the local cops,” he said as they rode past a checkpoint with huge cement bollards in an adapted Land Cruiser. “For how long, who the hell knows these days?”

The boxlike, cream-coloured structure looked run-down. Tom saw more than three dozen armed guards on the perimeter, together with mobile rocket launchers. Two IAV Strykers, eight-wheeled, armoured fighting vehicles fitted with M2 .50-cal machine guns, were parked either side of the main gate.

“You’re not taking any chances, that’s for sure,” he said.

“Yeah, but looks are deceiving.”

“The Taliban breach this?” Tom asked.

“Green on blue nightmares. You can’t trust anyone in an Afghan uniform. And on the streets it’s worse than ever. We’ve lost a total of fifty-two core collectors since the military pulled out; fifteen in the last month alone. We stopped making that official a year back. You know, Tom, more people are killed coming down off a mountain than ascending it. Leaving an occupied country ain’t no different. They held off for a while there. To encourage us, I figure. But now they want as many dead as possible. I give it maybe three years before even what’s left of us are gone for good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I think.”

“You still got your gun on you?”

“Yeah. You want me to hand it in?” Tom asked.

“You’re a special agent, ain’t ya? You just keep it close. A SIG?”

“Standard-issue.”

“I favour the Kimber Eclipse Custom II,” Crane said, easing the handgun out of his shoulder holster and weighing it in his hand. “Now that barrel alone is five inches, but it’s a .45 ACP and is fitted with these here low-profile night-sights,” he went on, fingering the back of the gun where the sights were mounted in rounded dovetails. “And it’s only a four-pound trigger pull. I got it in 10mm, too, and that’ll take a man’s head clean off.”

“A good piece,” Tom said. “But mine allows an easy draw.”

“You wanna hold it?”

“I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself,” Crane said, holstering it. He took out a slim cigar from his jacket pocket, lit it with a gold lighter. “You smoke, Tom?”

Tom shook his head. He looked at Crane. He took a long pull on the cigar before puffing little smoke rings out of the open window. He was a strange kind of guy.

16.

Twenty minutes later, Tom was feeling frustrated that nothing positive seemed to be happening. He found himself at another intelligence briefing in another secure conference room, although the security had been ratcheted up several notches. He’d had to show a laminated badge to a Marine outside the shockproof door, who’d checked his name off on a clipboard list, and had noticed that the plaster had been replaced by lead-lined walls to eradicate the threat from electronic listening devices.

Crane and Deputy Director Houseman were present, together with half a dozen CIA analysts, a couple of high-ranking US Army officers, and a lieutenant in the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, called Mark Sawyer. He was a troop commander in B Squadron, a six-foot blond with a boyish nose and neat little ears, eyes the colour of cornflower.

B Squadron contained seventy-five operators split into three troops, which were in turn made up of teams of five. It was stationed at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The Delta Force squadrons, together with SEAL Team 6, made up the direct action and reconnaissance element of the tier-one Special Missions Unit of the US Armed Forces. Sawyer’s troop was on standby on the off chance something happened in the next day or two. They’d been training Afghan Special Forces as part of the US commitment to assisting the country’s security services following the official withdrawal, which Tom felt was the only piece of good luck that had happened so far.

Like the façade, the interior of the Ariana wasn’t exactly five star, but it had modern facilities and was clean. Apart from the flat-screens and the ubiquitous blue tiles, the basement conference room had a large moulded-plastic table and chairs. It was lit by fluorescent strips, which had added a clinical aspect to what had started as a frosty meeting. Tom knew it was the way when different departments with ultimately competing budgets had to get something done together, the continuing US debt crisis just making that dynamic more acute. But gradually everyone put aside their differences and concentrated on the clear-cut task of getting the secretary home safely, although they had nothing material to go on as yet.

After they had decided that gathering intel from Pakistani assets and sources was their best bet, the door opened and a young Special Forces officer with red hair came into the room without knocking, his face flush with excitement.

“You better have a real interesting thing to say, captain,” a broken-nosed colonel said.

“I’m sorry, sir. But we’ve located Lyric,” he said, his arms barely able to refrain from punching the air.

“The GPS,” the colonel said, excitedly.

Everyone in the room now knew what Tom had always known. Apart from the tracking devices hidden in her specially made jewellery – her necklace and ring – she’d agreed to have one implanted under the skin of her upper left arm. But due to its sensitive location, it wasn’t large or sophisticated enough to prevent jamming.

“Yeah, our techs designed them,” Crane said, preferring to lean against the beige wall rather than sit at the table. “But don’t hold your breath.”

“Where is she, son?” Houseman asked.

“Upper Kurram Valley, sir. We lost the signal for a while there, but, hell, we’ve found her now.”

“Federally Administered Pakistan Tribal Area. A stronghold of the Leopards,” Crane said, soberly. “It’s picture postcard. Northern Af-Pak border country. Less than a hundred and fifty klicks away, which means it’s easily accessible by stealth helos. The two major tribes are the Bangash and the Turi. In Upper Kurram, the Bangash are Shia. The Turi are all Shia. They’ve both sent alotta young men to join the Leopards.”

The assembled men nodded, all tacitly accepting that Crane was the expert in such things.

Tom held back from saying that they had to act fast. It was as obvious to everyone concerned as saying a diet of fries and pizzas wasn’t a great idea if you wanted to lose weight. So he kept quiet and did his best to fade into the background, hoping that his presence would be accepted, even though in truth he had no right being here, at least as far as the president was concerned.

He watched Houseman report to the POTUS on a secure video link. After the input of more than a dozen people, including the Director of the CIA – who everyone knew was actually coordinating matters at Langley – a process that took forty-five minutes, the president decided that the National Security Council would consider a rescue plan.

The chances of finding bin Laden in the compound in Abbottabad had been estimated to be forty per cent when a similar sounding had been taken. The chances of getting the secretary out alive were deemed to be half that at best. But no lines of communication had been established, and every minute that passed meant the chances of getting her out alive were diminishing. There really wasn’t any other option, despite the odds.

Houseman turned to Crane. “Go along with Lieutenant Sawyer. He’ll liaise with JSOC. Give ’em the benefit of your local knowledge. I want a plan ready to go in two hours.”

Crane looked aghast. “That’s not enough time. Even if we’ve got UAVs sending back photos of the brand of toothpaste they prefer,” he said, referring to the unmanned aerial vehicles used for reconnaissance.

“I think we can do it in the timeframe, sir,” Sawyer said. He turned to Crane. “Two hours is standard prep for a mission.”

Tom saw Crane’s pale-blue eyes bore into the lieutenant.

“Yeah, for a kill or capture mission. Lyric’s life is at stake here,” he replied.

“We haven’t got time for a red team analysis, or for this. Get to it,” Houseman said.

Tom left with Crane and Sawyer, figuring everyone was still too preoccupied to care.

17.

In a similarly secure, adjacent room, Tom, Crane and Sawyer were hunched over a large stainless-steel table, doing final checks on the rescue site via the twenty printed satellite photos spread out before them. The site was an ochre-red fort abandoned by the Frontier Corps of the Pakistan Army three months previously, after it had been almost overrun by the Leopards, and all supply routes had been cut off. Black-and-white drone feeds were playing on laptops either side of the photos.

“I count at least thirty pax,” Sawyer said.

Tom frowned.

“That ain’t disrespectful,” Crane said to Tom. “It’s military speak for people.”

Sawyer looked quizzical.

“Tom’s sensitive about such things,” Crane said, turning to Sawyer. “He thought you were calling the locals Paks.”

Tom shook his head, thinking that Crane was baiting him deliberately, but let it go. He looked back at the photos. A few hundred metres beyond the fort there was a makeshift town, which all but surrounded it. A ragbag collection of awnings, thin sheets of battered-out metal containers, and mud and stone and wooden structures. Home to four thousand Shia refugees from ransacked and burnt-out towns and villages further south and east. Innocent civilians who’d escaped from the sectarian tyranny that was blighting the country. As a result, the helicopters couldn’t land far enough away to enable an approach on foot, which Sawyer favoured. There’d be no element of surprise, or the advantage of sneaking up on the fighters before they had a chance to arm themselves. So a creep in, creep out mission was out of the question. They’d have to go in shooting from the off.

Sawyer had spoken with the JSOC Commander already. If the plan was a goer, it had been agreed that two Black Hawks from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s Night Stalker Unit, stealth helicopters fixed with anti-radar cladding, which could fly as low as thirty metres and at a hundred and thirty miles per hour, would carry the Delta troop as the first wave of attack. An MH-47E/G, multi-mission Chinook with terrain avoidance radar would transport a platoon of Army Rangers from the 75th Ranger Regiment, a light-infantry-combat formation, which was part of the US Army Special Operations Command. The Rangers were carrying out weapons training for their Afghan counterparts alongside the Delta troop, most of whom were ex-Rangers themselves. They would secure the immediate perimeter. Despite the ban on armed drones, Reapers loaded with Hellfire missiles would protect the assaulters from above, backed up by a couple of adapted AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

A second Chinook would carry the civilians and double up as a flying ambulance for any wounded. Crane said he’d travel in the rear Chinook, together with a back-up interpreter and five CIA counterterrorist operatives whom he’d handpicked already. The entire search and rescue operation would be relayed in real time to Houseman, the Director of the CIA and the White House Situation Room via state-of-the-art surveillance equipment: a squadron of MQ-1C drones, infrared cameras secured outside and onboard the gunships, and robust video cameras fixed to the lead operators’ Kevlar helmets.

Tom had kept quiet about going along at this juncture, but he was desperate to be in on the action.

Crane scratched the back of his head. “I’m still not sure about it.”

“With respect, sir, this is special ops not covert ops,” Sawyer replied.

“You don’t say. There was me thinking we could dig tunnels under them and pop up wearing Halloween masks and then blame it on… Who? The freakin’ Chinese? Of course I’m aware it’s a special ops, I’m just saying I’m not sure about it.”

“If you would like to put forward an alternative, sir, I’d be happy to consider it with JSOC.”

“What, in about two minutes? It takes me longer than that to make sure I’ve shaken all the drops off when I take a leak these days,” Crane replied, stretching his back.

“He’s right,” Tom said to Crane.

“Is he, now? So you’re a trigger-happy Leopard and you see Sawyer here and his buddies arriving like the Seventh Cavalry. What are you gonna do, huh, feed the secretary grapes?” Crane gripped his forehead, clearly frustrated.

“They could move her any time. They could kill her any time. You want that on your conscience? Besides, JSOC know what they’re doing, so why don’t you ease up on the lieutenant here?” Tom said, feeling that Crane was being overly obstructive.