When the hour had nearly passed, Gold returned to command post and sat by the STU. The phone rang exactly on time, and Gold answered with her name and rank.
“It is I, my teacher,” Baitullah said.
“I didn’t know your office had a secure phone,” Gold said.
“Alas, it does not,” Baitullah said. “I am engaging the function now.”
“Same here,” Gold said. She pressed the SECURE button. The phone’s digital screen read GOING SECURE. The receiver hummed and buzzed like a fax machine answering, and Baitullah’s voice came back on the line.
“I am in the office of an army friend,” he said.
So Baitullah had to go to an army facility to find someone he trusted. The Afghan National Army hardly represented the military ideal, Gold knew, but the army was way ahead of the police in rooting out treason and bribery.
“That was a good idea,” she said. “Do you have news?”
“Only a bit. But perhaps it helps complete the puzzle.”
To Gold, it was a pleasure to hear Baitullah speak, to see him work. When he’d first joined the force, he could barely write his name. A frightened, uneducated kid. Then he’d lost his feet in the attack on the ANP training center. A life of disability and poverty seemed his fate. But now he sounded like a seasoned detective, not just drawing a government check and watching the clock, but actually trying to do the job.
“Any information will help,” Gold said.
“We have analyzed the videos released by Black Crescent and this Chaaku,” Baitullah said. He uttered the name with scorn, as if the word carried with it a bad taste. “The media experts believe there was no daylight in the room when the video was recorded—that all the lighting was artificial.”
“So they shot the videos at night,” Gold said, “or in a dark place.”
“Perhaps the latter,” Baitullah said. “The analysts also see clues in the masonry on the wall above and beneath the Black Crescent banner. The rough brickwork looks like construction the mujahideen used for bunkers in the 1980s.”
Gold felt a moment of satisfaction. She had helped teach this man to read, and his literacy had unlocked his talents. His evidence wasn’t conclusive, but it substantiated what Durrani had told her. Just maybe, she and Parson were looking in the right place.
When the MC-12 broke off and landed, a Reaper took its place. Parson still didn’t like the way Gold had made up her own mission to gather intel, but he had to admit one thing: The more information she got, the more horsepower he got with CENTCOM and the decision-makers above him. And now he had firepower, too. The Reaper carried four Hellfires and two GBU-12 Paveway laser-guided bombs. Parson could not give the order to shoot; it wasn’t exactly his firepower. But his assignment as an adviser put him in the midst of what was quickly becoming an offensive operation against a new terrorist threat. Not the usual day’s work for someone originally trained to fly cargo from point A to point B.
The Afghanistan war had a way of putting U.S. troops into positions outside their normal roles. Parson knew of young officers who found themselves with nation-building responsibilities—captains with budgets of two million dollars. Now it was his turn to face a new kind of challenge, to learn as he went along.
Gold watched with him as the Reaper circled the Kuh-e Qara Batur. The downlink included audio now—the interphone conversations of the pilot and sensor operator at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, and radio traffic between the pilot and a mission commander at Bagram, north of Kabul. Parson kept a satphone number for the mission commander, but he didn’t expect to need it. These guys had their procedures and rules of engagement, and Parson looked forward to seeing them do their stuff.
Killer drones had become controversial in some quarters back home, but not here where bullets were flying. The way Parson saw it, the only difference between a remotely piloted aircraft and a manned bomber was that you didn’t put a crew at risk. Those people who had a particular problem with drones maybe preferred to have a crew get shot at. To Parson, that said a lot about whose side they were on.
For hours, the Reaper’s sensor showed nothing but trees, rocks, and dirt. Parson and Gold went to dinner in the chow tent, walked back to the Air Operations Center in darkness. The drone had switched to infrared by then, the night imaging clear as day video.
Parson decided to turn in for the night. He zipped on his flight jacket. Plenty of other eyes would watch this feed, and he could catch up on his issues of Stars and Stripes. Maybe even catch up on his sleep.
That’s when he heard the voice of the mission commander, reedy on the little speaker:
“Got some signals intelligence that indicates your high-value target may be approaching.”
The stateside crew answered:
“Pilot copies.”
“Sensor copies.”
Parson took off his jacket, draped it over the back of his folding chair. No way he could leave now. On the screen, the lens zoomed out to a wider view.
“What’s this?” Gold asked.
“Showtime,” Parson said. “Could be, anyway. Maybe our boy got careless with a cell phone and told somebody where he was going.”
Gold took her seat beside Parson. She showed no anticipation, no elation at what might be about to happen. No doubt she disliked seeing people die no matter how much they deserved it. Parson knew she wasn’t squeamish; he’d seen her trip a trigger more than once. But she would not celebrate a death.
Parson wasn’t so circumspect. He didn’t like killing, either. But some people needed killing real bad. If not for General Order Number One, he’d crack a beer right now, dig his hand into a bowl of popcorn, and put up his feet to watch. Fuck these bastards.
The image on the screen zoomed in, zoomed out, slewed east and west, north and south. Nothing there. Just night in Afghanistan, with its centuries of ghosts. Beautiful and calm and silent, waiting for the next spasm of violence.
Several minutes ticked by, and Parson began to feel a little disappointed. Maybe they’d been wrong about their sigint. But eventually the mission commander came on the net again:
“Got a confirmation on your HVT. He’s in one of two pickup trucks heading roughly southwest to northeast on a dirt path.”
“Pilot copies. Sir, do we know which truck?”
“Negative. If I give you clearance to engage, it will apply to both vehicles.”
The video zoomed and panned, found the trucks.
“You’re starring in your own reality show now, you son of a bitch,” Parson said. Gold did not respond.
“Designate target,” the mission commander said.
“Pilot copies.”
“Sensor confirms.”
Parson slid his chair for a better angle. This was going to be good.
The Reaper crew began their prelaunch checklist. Parson didn’t know all their terminology, but as an aviator he understood enough to realize they were configuring weapons systems and running BITs—built-in tests—for last-minute function checks.
“Spin up a weapon for me, please,” the pilot said.
“Yes, sir,” the sensor operator said. They continued their checklist as the crosshairs tracked the first truck.
“AEA power.”
“On.”
“AEA BIT.”
“Passed.”
The vehicles labored uphill. Parson thought about the occupants. Smug sons of bitches, probably planning their next raid. Maybe thinking about cutting somebody’s head off on camera. With no idea they were on camera themselves.
“Weapon power.”
“On.”
“Weapon BIT.”
“Passed.”