A Knife Edge (41 page)

We climbed over a couple of low walls and left the black silhouette of the town behind, then climbed a steep hill through soft, knee-deep snow. I guessed we were well above 10,000 feet. I had a headache that reminded me of my heavy-drinking days, and my lungs were searing with effort. I couldn't get enough air into them, and what air I could get was frigid, which made my nose, throat, and mouth feel like they'd been sliced up with a straight razor. When I tried to stop to get my breath, which happened every half-dozen steps, my rescuer gave me a push. Eventually, the climb lessened and we dropped over the ridge into another valley. My hands and feet were again numb with cold, the shooter's gloves not providing a lot of protection against the elements and the snow having found its way inside the boots. I had questions for my savior and guide, but I was too cold and tired to ask them.

“Not much further,” said Mr. Mystery just when I was thinking that lying down in the snow would be better than going on. It gave me strength, but he lied about the further bit. I figured I was still in Pakistan. Wander around an Afghan village at night like this and we'd have stepped on land mines.

After an eternity of being dragged through the snow, we arrived at a cleft in the rock with hard-packed snow forming a roof over the top. I got the “Ssh” signal again. I kept still, thinking there might be more Arabs wandering around, when I heard a familiar snort.

“Here,” I heard the guy say.

He led the way through the cleft. I saw a big horse and a little horse with big ears—a donkey. The horse stamped a hoof and shook its head and snow went flying. The guy talked to each animal softly, and then pulled heavy blankets off each. The animals
were saddled and ready to go. Whoever this guy was, he'd done his homework. “Can you ride?” he asked me.

“Which side are the gears on?” I replied.

He turned the NVG on me.

“Just kidding.”

In fact, I'd only ridden once before. I'd been eighteen and a girl I wanted to get to know without her clothes on was into horses. I went away with her on a riding weekend. I had this fantasy that all the bouncing up and down in a saddle would make her eager for sex. It did, and she was, only not with me but with the guy from the stable. I went home empty-handed. The girl went home pregnant and never rode again. And neither had I. Until now. I took a tentative step toward the horse.

“ Uh-uh, buddy. The little one's yours,” he said as he gave the donkey a pat on its rump, which made its ears twitch. “It'll follow the horse.” He handed me a long stick. “If it decides it doesn't want to go forward, give it a jab like this.” He demonstrated, a stabbing motion down into the side of the beast's neck. I must have looked doubtful because he added, “Don't worry, you won't hurt it.”

I gave the animal a pat on its neck. The muscle there was like a sheet of hairy iron. My guide gave me a hand up and the animal took a step forward and twitched its ears at me.

We rode through the night in silence. Like the guy said, the donkey followed the horse. I just hoped the horse didn't step off the mountain. I gathered we were in a hurry, even though pursuit was looking less likely by the hour. It continued to snow till just before dawn, covering our tracks. When the low sky finally lightened to a slate gray, we were making our way down a ridge and into a valley. The mountain on the other side—slabs of ice and black rock—rose into the clouds and disappeared.

“Down there is the border with Afghanistan. Beyond is the pass we have to take,” said the man.

“You from New York City?” I asked.

“That obvious?” he replied.

“ Uh-huh. I'm from New Jersey,” I said, now with enough strength to exercise my curiosity.

“I know.”

“Is that why you hit me so hard?” I asked.

“No, I hit you hard so that I could come back another day and rescue your ass. And I didn't use a closed fist.”

“I don't remember the details.”

The animals beneath us picked their way down the slope the way Clare's kid, Manny, removed green things from his fried rice—with infinite care.

“How're you doing?” he asked.

“Good.” There was a bag of food attached to the saddle and I'd been eating my way through the contents—cheese, flat bread, and olives. My strength was coming back fast.

“Cool,” he said. “So, what were you doing? Did it have something to do with the raid on Phunal?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

“That's OK. You don't have to say.”

“What do you know about Phunal?”

“The night you were captured, we saw an explosion in the sky. It was close to the village we were occupying, so we investigated. We came across you while searching for the wreckage. You can find all kinds of useful things in plane wreckage. Anyway, we found you and located your gear. A lot of it was damaged. You must have come down hard.”

“You could say that,” I agreed.

“What did you do with your parachute? We looked everywhere for it.”

“I got hungry, so I ate it.”

“Come on, really… what'd you do with it?”

I told him what I thought happened, but he didn't believe me. He seemed to prefer to believe that I had, in fact, eaten the damn thing. Hell, I still had trouble swallowing the truth myself.

We traveled in silence, huddled into our blankets, trying to keep out the bitter cold. My body ached like it had never ached
before. I believed I could actually feel the bones beneath my skin and it felt like blades of frozen steel had scraped them. I huddled down low on the saddle and tried to get into the donkey's rhythm. I watched the animal's neck, the snow melting to ice and crusting its coarse hair, and tried not to think about the thousand or so feet of sheer drop to the valley below, just a couple of steps to my right.

Eventually, my animal came to a stop beside the horse. The guy turned toward me, steam coming from his mouth when he opened it. He said, “We heard a couple of days later, after we recovered you, that Phunal was attacked. It's some secret test base or something, right? A lot of people were killed. Some scientist was kidnapped. From the way it went down, sounded like coalition Special Forces at work. The feeling is, you were supposed to be one of them, but something went wrong with the plan. Allah's will. So, they were going to hand you over to the new revolutionary Pakistan government and make trouble for Washington. But then, as you know, we had an unexpected guest. But I suppose you're wondering what a nice boy from New York is doing in a place like this?”

“Yeah, had crossed my mind,” I said, but in truth I was thinking about Butler and Dortmund. They'd killed everyone on that plane. And then they had still followed through on the mission. Why? What the hell was going on?

“Like I said, my cover was blown getting you out anyway, so I guess I can tell you.”

He didn't get around to letting me in on his secret for a little while longer. We'd reached a treacherous part of the road cut into the side of an almost vertical granite face. We dismounted and walked the animals across. My traveling companion had to help me down. I couldn't move—my body had locked up solid.

“As I was about to say, I am Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Wassad, at your service,” he said as we mounted up again with what I hoped was the most dangerous section behind us.

“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” I said through frozen lips burning with cold.

“I was U.S. Army infantry, then U.S. Army intelligence, then CIA, then, hell, now I'm not sure what or who I am. Someone in a back room somewhere found out I had American-Afghan parents, could speak Pashtu and a fair smattering of Dari, worshipped in the Islamic faith, and did pretty well at West Point. Before I knew what was going on, I was given a whirlwind course in spycraft at Langley, then counterterror at Quantico, and rotated into Afghanistan.

“Three months after that, I'm working deep cover as a schoolteacher in a town up north in the heart of the Pashtun region, saying all the right things about what a great idea jihad is. Two months later, I'm recruited by a remnant of the Taliban. I join the band, and go touring. Over the past six months we've played up and down the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking for action, but not too much action, because the people I'm with at least have the good sense not to go head-to-head with coalition forces. Hit-and-run stuff, mostly. I've done some bad things in the name of this mission… then you drop in and make life difficult.”

“Why difficult?”

“Because you arrive a couple of days before Bin Laden.”

“What?” I was so surprised, even my donkey stopped.

“Yeah, the unexpected guest I mentioned—the man himself.”

“Jesus.” The donkey snorted and moved off.

“He just walked into town out of nowhere—him and twenty other al Qaeda heavy hitters. I recognized a lot of them.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Don't you remember? He paid you a visit. He looked right into your face. You laughed at him.” He chuckled. “They didn't like that. They were going to cut your head off in the morning.”

Christ, my memory was in serious sleep mode, but al-Wassad had just given it a massive jolt. I suddenly put the friendly face and the name together. I'd seen so many pictures of Bin Laden that he was intensely familiar, like a Hollywood or TV star is familiar. In my weakened, addled state, I'd thought I knew him like a buddy rather than as Osama Bin Laden, leader of al
Qaeda, Emperor of Terror, Sultan of Slaughter, King of Killers, Monarch of Murderers, Serious Thorn in Three Presidential Asses, et cetera and so on.

“So now,” Lieutenant al-Wassad continued, “I've got a stack of problems. The guy we've spent trillions looking for is having hot tea with the imam down the road, and I have no means of contacting anyone to tell them about it because, of course, I have no means of communicating with the outside world.”

“Why not?”

“Because the batteries on the Ericsson R390 satellite phone would have run out six months ago. There's no means of charging them out here. And then there's the fact that I never deployed with one in the first place, because I'd have kept my head about five minutes if the Taliban had found me on it chatting to Washington. So, the only way to get word out is to do it in person, on foot. And then there's you. I can't just walk out of the place and leave you behind, because, pure and simple, they're gonna kill you at sunup.”

“We need to get in contact with SOCOM,” I said. “And in a hurry.”

“Yeah. Only two problems with that. One, we're going as fast as we can, and two, Bin Laden isn't going to hang around where we last saw him. When they trip over the dead guard, find you gone and me missing, and discover they're eight legs short in the transport department, they're going to smell a rat. And they're going to run.”

“Hmm…” Of course al-Wassad was right, only, as far as I knew, this was the first time in many years someone other than those within Bin Laden's inner circle knew for certain, down to the square mile, where he was holed up. It was information one side would die to have, and the other would die to keep secret.

We'd just about reached the valley floor, a deep gash in the surrounding walls of granite and basalt filled with new snow, tendrils of cloud, scree, and capillary-sized rivulets. I didn't know much about horses and donkeys, but I knew ours were tired and hungry. Soon we were going to ask them to carry us
over a mountain and we couldn't afford to have them go lame on us.

I was about to suggest we stop, even if only just fifteen minutes to give them a rest, when there was sudden movement all around us. Our animals skittered and wheeled about, snorting and grunting, wild-eyed with fright. Men covered in snow with occasional splashes of tan and gray camouflage had popped up seemingly out of the ground, surrounding us. Their M4s were raised to their shoulders, trigger fingers twitching. I recognized the brown-and-tan flag patches on a couple of shoulders not covered in snow, on account of it was also my flag. Some advice I was once given in this part of the world popped into my head:
“Either you dress like an American soldier, or you're a target.”
We'd walked right into an ambush and, with the
pakool
caps and dark blue cloaks over the padded jackets and salwar kameez, we were probably looking a hell of a lot like a couple of bull's-eyes. One of the soldiers, a lieutenant whose face was blue with cold, shouted,
“Odriga! Lasona jakra. Kanh zadi walm Aspai!”
I did the rough translation in my head:
“Stop or I'll shoot, loathsome smelly dog!”

I did as I was told, and al-Wassad followed my lead. I said, loud and clear, “I am Special Agent Vin Cooper, a major in the United States Air Force. This man is a lieutenant in U.S. Army Intelligence.” One of the soldiers spurted a load of brown chewing-tobacco-stained saliva onto the snow at his feet.

Those M4s didn't waver an inch.

A lieutenant answered, “Yeah, and I'm Snow White and these are my seven dwarfs.” He suddenly pointed his weapon at the clouds and his dwarfs followed suit.

“So which one's Dopey?” I asked.

“That'd be Stephenson,” said one of the men with a snigger.

“Shove it, dipshit,” came the reply.

The men relaxed a little, though most still eyed al-Wassad and me with suspicion. The lieutenant removed a glove and searched in a thigh pocket. He pulled out a small pad. Checking it, he said, “You say your name was Vin Cooper?”

“And still is,” I replied.

“You look pretty beat up, sir,” he pointed out.

“I'm not a morning person.”

“You were involved in the raid on Phunal.”

It wasn't a question. “I was, but I didn't quite make it. You guys Airborne?” I asked.

Someone spat.

“Rangers, sir. We were supposed to rendezvous with you and the SAS assault team. We've been out a few times looking to run into you guys, in case any of you survived. We've got a Global Hawk UAV up there working the border—picked you up coming across the pass.”

“Lieutenant,” I said, “we have vital information and we need SOCOM to hear it. You packing comms?”

“Latest and greatest, sir.”

As he spoke, I heard the deep flat snarl and thrum of a large helo making its way through the hills.