“Samira was the wife of a chief in a village about four kilometers from here.” Cella sighed. “She was pregnant with her third. He would help.”
“He might already be dead. Obviously, Marwat and Khalid were connected. Marwat knew about you and your clinic. Khalid must have tipped him off about me being here.”
“How?”
“Maybe they captured one of Daud’s people. Tortured him for information. Told him about you and I evacuating Daud to the clinic.”
“Would they have had the time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they had planned to take you out all along and it was a coincidence that Daud’s village was hit at the same time. I don’t know. But either way, if we’re being hunted, the first place they would look for us is any village that has a connection to you. And if they aren’t already there, there’s no point in leading them there. You’ve seen how they handle business in these parts.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Ditch this truck as soon as we can. If we can get to a phone, I can call somebody.”
“A phone? Are you joking? The CIA can’t afford to give you your own cell phone?”
“I have a sat phone. But I left it at Daud’s place. I fucked up.”
An hour later, they made their way into the flatlands where the temperature had warmed up enough to turn the snow to slush. Pearce was dark enough to pass for a local, especially with his beard and army field cap pulled over his head. Cella lay flat on the bench seat whenever traffic passed in the opposite direction, which was seldom and, thankfully, always civilian—and they were too afraid of the army to dare cast a glance into the windshield.
They parked the truck in a stand of trees off the road when they saw the first power lines. Pearce knew they would lead to a place requiring electricity. But it took them another two hours of walking until they came to a collection of walled houses, shops, and even a gas station. Cella covered her entire head and face with her knit scarf. She’d also had enough sense to grab a heavy woolen shawl back at the clinic and wrapped it around her shoulders and torso to hide her figure, hunching over a little as she walked to try to conceal her height. The place was a little larger than a village, but hardly a town, let alone a city. One of the shops advertised telephone services in both Pashto and English, so they made their way there.
They entered the shop without incident, and Cella asked for the telephone service since her Pashto was far better than Pearce’s. But the man behind the counter smiled beneath a pair of thick lenses and a bad comb-over and replied in faultless English that they were more than welcome to use the phone so long as they could pay. Pearce got the sense from the proprietor that he was sympathetic to Westerners, so he offered him a stashed one-ounce gold coin for both the phone service and his silence. The man’s smile only got bigger, and he swore secrecy.
Pearce reached a senior CIA field agent in Peshawar, a base of U.S. undercover operations since the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
“Can you sit tight where you are for two hours?” the agent asked.
Pearce asked the proprietor if he could accommodate them with a flash of two more gold coins and the keys to their abandoned truck. The shopkeeper nodded violently.
“Yeah, no problem. But don’t drag your feet, either.”
An hour and forty-five minutes later, Pearce and Cella were in an armored Chevy Suburban heading back to Peshawar. When they reached the CIA station, Cella was met by an Italian diplomat who choppered in from Islamabad as soon as her embassy had learned that a Paolini was in need of assistance. Before she left, Pearce asked for a private moment with Cella.
“I’m sorry about everything that happened. I feel responsible somehow.”
“It’s this stupid war. It’s crazy. It will kill you before it’s all over. You should leave. Come with me. Now.”
“Don’t tempt me. I’m probably due for a firing squad as it is.”
“You already have an Italian passport with your name on it. You’re my husband, remember?” She tried to charm him with a smile.
“If I can ever make it up to you—”
“You can. Stay alive. And come find me when this is all over.”
“It’s a deal.”
“And thank you for saving my life.” She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight, then leaned back and kissed him lightly on the mouth.
And with that, she left.
Pearce spent the next two days in Peshawar recovering from dehydration and fatigue before he was debriefed and reprimanded, first by the local station’s senior supervisor and then by his unit commander back in Kabul, who ordered him to report back immediately.
Pearce caught the next available Air Force transport flight from Peshawar to Kabul, where he submitted to another two hours of debriefing and another sharp reprimand before a brand-new bottle of Maker’s Mark was cracked open and the two men drank until midnight. Pearce stumbled out of the door with a thirty-day pass in his hip pocket and two big ideas in his head.
Pearce chased down the first big idea the next night, making his way to FOB Salerno in Khost, Afghanistan. He broke into the compound, searching for the private quarters of Colonel J. Armstrong, the unit commander of the airborne outfit responsible for the massacre of Daud’s village.
Pearce’s heavy boot smashed open the bathroom door, where he found the bull-necked officer on his commode with his BDUs around his ankles, savoring a Marlboro while relieving himself. Before the startled officer could react, Pearce shoved the colonel’s own vintage Colt M1911 .45 pistol against his forehead, widening the older man’s eyes with shock.
“Are you out of your mind, soldier?”
“There was a village on the map called Dogar until just a couple of days ago, when your unit burned it to the ground and killed about a hundred friends of mine. I’m going to kill you for that.”
“Then why are we talking?”
“Because I’m going to give you a choice. Tell me how much Khalid was paying you and then I’ll kill you fast and easy with a bullet to the brain. But if you lie to me, I’ll gut you and let you bleed to death in a puddle of your own excrement. Which will it be?”
“Khalid is one of our agents. I was paying him.”
“Why did you attack the village?”
“Khalid said Dogar was a Taliban stronghold, responsible for the gun trafficking in the area. Named a talib called Daud as the number one bandit.”
“You stupid fuck. Khalid is the talib shitting all over us up there. Dogar was on our side. Daud and I were hunting Khalid. That was all on the books months ago.”
“Who is ‘we,’ son?”
“CIA.”
“How the hell are we supposed to know what you spooks are doing down there? We’re Army.”
“Don’t you high-level pricks talk to each other before pulling this kind of shit?”
“As a matter of fact, we don’t. My people don’t talk to yours, and yours don’t talk to mine. Still too much territorial pissing going on between commands. The whole war effort’s turning into a goddamned goat rodeo.” The colonel gestured at his trousers. “You mind?”
Pearce stepped back but didn’t lower the gun. His instincts said the colonel wasn’t lying. Killing a man wasn’t an issue for him, but killing an innocent man was.
The colonel yanked up his pants. “I’m real sorry about your friends, son. Truly I am. And I would’ve put a gun to your head, too, if the shoe had been on the other foot. The only difference is, I would’ve pulled it without jawboning beforehand.”