Chapter Eighteen
Kabul, Afghanistan
Two Months Before U.S. Withdrawal
AFTER THE SOVIET occupation, before the Taliban swept through like a sandstorm, the Ariana Hotel had been the closest thing Kabul had to a Western outpost.
Ten stories of brown masonry, it looked more like a college dorm than a hotel, but in a city where the power grid was a suggestion and plumbing a luxury, the Ariana had become a beacon for diplomats, journalists, and spooks after the Soviet withdrawal.
When the Taliban rolled in with black flags and Kalashnikovs in 1996, the Ariana had been seized within hours. They turned it into their de facto seat of government. The bar was shuttered. The satellite dishes ripped down. The pool filled with sand.
After 9/11, the reversal was swift and surgical.
American Special Forces, working with Northern Alliance fighters, retook the city in weeks, and the Ariana was among the first objectives, with Taliban ministers slipping out the back as U.S.
operators breached the front. Within days, the building was rebranded as the “U.S. Embassy Annex,” a name that meant nothing and everything.
In reality, it became a CIA base of operations.
The Agency wasted no time. They set up a bar in the basement, an unofficial morale booster in a dry country.
They called it the Tali-Bar, a dark joke in a war full of them.
General Order Number One of the United States Central Command forbade alcohol for U.S.
troops, but the CIA didn’t answer to CENTCOM. The alcohol flowed freely.
Walker found Fisk in the back corner, nursing a drink under the dim glow of a bare bulb.
The walls were lined with graffiti, messages left by those passing through over the past twenty years of misadventure, including Kipling’s warning from “The Young British Soldier.” A Soviet RPG launcher was suspended from the ceiling, a scorched fragment of the Twin Towers bolted to the wall near a framed photo of the CIA team killed at Camp Chapman.
“What are you drinking?” Walker asked.
“Manhattan,” Fisk said, though his glass was nearly empty.
“Want another?”
“Better not.”
Walker ordered a Foster’s oilcan-style beer and poured it into a frosted mug. The bar was loud with operators, contractors, and case officers blowing off steam. In the next room, pool balls cracked and laughter echoed through the haze of Cuban smoke.
Fisk drained the last of his drink. “I’m headed back to Langley. Orders came through. Gave up my quarters yesterday. Can’t say I’m going to miss that container.”
Walker wasn’t surprised. Fisk would be reassigned to a desk, maybe a liaison role. Something cleaner.
“Where you headed?”
Fisk gave a tight smile, his cheeks ruddy from the bourbon. “Need to know.”
Even after serving together, Fisk maintained the divide between his job as a case officer and Walker’s as a Ground Branch paramilitary officer. Different tribes in the same war.
“We’ve got a gap coming,” Fisk said, perhaps realizing he’d sounded like a dick. “I’m recommending you take over handling duties for Mongoose.”
Walker raised an eyebrow.
He had been the one running brush passes in the bazaar, keeping eyes on the source, making sure Mongoose had not been burned. Fisk approved extra surveillance, but Walker and Staub had been doing the legwork.
“Mongoose is still viable,” Fisk said. “Langley wants to keep him in play.”
“I thought his deal was a year.”
“It was. We extended the timeframe. That’s how it works.”
Walker leaned back. “Mongoose is jumpy. After all the Haqqani pricks he’s given us, they’ve got to be putting things together. If I tell him you’re out, he might bolt.”
“Bolt. Please. Where would he go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll just go dark.”
“Then don’t tell him. Give him what he needs to hear.”
“Come on, Lenny.”
“Relax, Chris. Mongoose will get his payout. It’s in the files.”
Fisk lit a cigarette, exhaling toward the ceiling, the smoke wrapping around the RPG launcher above.
“I didn’t smoke before this place,” he said. “Now look at me.”
“We all leave here with something,” Walker replied.
Fisk reached into his pocket and slid a folded scrap of paper across the table. “That’s the case file number for Mongoose. You can access it from the SCIF at Eagle Base. Keep tabs from there.”
“If something goes sideways?”
“Mongoose is compartmentalized. He’s run out of headquarters now. Use that cryptonym. They’ll help.”
Walker tucked the paper into his shirt pocket. “That it?”
Fisk stood and offered his hand. “That’s it. See you around, Chris. I should roll. I’m out in a few hours.”
Walker shook his hand, then watched Fisk disappear into the smoke and noise of the Tali-Bar.
Walker sat at a hardwired terminal in the SCIF at Eagle Base, the glow of the screen casting shadows across his face. He had already pulled the Mongoose case file, what little of it was not redacted.
Redacted. Such bullshit. Walker put it out of his head, thinking instead of Mongoose.
The next time Walker met Naji, the first question would be about the visas.
Walker would lie if he had to, that was part of the job, but he didn’t want to.
He would do as instructed and contact the counterterror center at HQS. Maybe he could get the visa expedited.
The door hissed open. Staub entered, fresh from a briefing, still wearing the chalky white gypsum of the compound on his boots.
He kept his voice low. “The meeting I just came from? You are not going to fucking believe it.”
Walker didn’t look up. “What’s up?”
Staub leaned in, even though the SCIF was hardened against every known form of surveillance, analog, digital, or otherwise.
“The chief read me into a new SAP,” he said, pronouncing the acronym like the stuff of pine trees, short for special access program. “We’re planning to shut this place down.”
Walker looked at Staub. “Define shut down.”
“Evac,” Staub whispered. “It’s not just the military like we thought. Extraction routes. Safe houses. Contingency plans for certain assets. The kind of thing you do when you’re pulling stakes.”
Walker’s stomach tightened. “A full withdrawal?”
“The chief called it a contingency, but yeah, and it already has a code name, ‘Sable Wind.’ He wants the plan finalized in under two weeks.”
Walker sat back. The quiet in the SCIF. The empty cubicles. The silence before the storm.
“No Agency presence?”
“Doesn’t look that way. We all thought we’d keep a small footprint here if we stuck to the political drawdown timetable, but it looks like everyone is pulling chocks, to include us.”
“When do we leave?”
“Nothing official, but unofficially, we’re out of here in a month. Maybe less.”
“You get a list of asset evacuees?”
“Eyes-only file. Chief said it’s in the system. I can pull it from here.”
Walker slid his chair aside. “Well, here’s the system. Let’s see the list.”
Staub logged in. It took five minutes of multifactor authentication, biometric scan, and rotating encryption keys appropriate for SAP-level access. Finally, a list populated the screen. No names. Just six-digit identifiers. Roughly a hundred of them.
“Just numbers,” Staub muttered.
Walker leaned in. His eyes scanned the list, looking for the cryptonym Fisk had given him that represented Naji. He walked through the first three digits of all the lines.
“They’re leaving Mongoose behind,” he said. “Those fuckers.”
“That can’t be right. After everything he’s given us?”
Walker pulled a folded slip of paper from his shirt pocket, double-checking the alphanumeric string. He held it up to the screen. “This is Mongoose. He’s not on here.”
Staub reviewed the list and cursed under his breath. “That’s low. Even for Langley. Why would they leave him behind? A mistake?”
Walker’s voice was flat. “I don’t know, but if we leave him, he’s as good as dead, and so is his family.”
“The chief said to keep all assets in place, but maybe we can find a way to get him out sooner,” Staub said.
“We could ask him to get some intel in Pakistan, tell him to take his family, something like that.”
Staub looked at him. “You’re talking about a black extract. Off the books.”
“Maybe we just give him a little help to make it to the other side of the border.” Walker gestured to the screen.
“No one at Langley is going to notice that he’s gone anywhere.
They’re not tracking him and with a withdrawal coming things are going to get fast and loose.
I saw it when we left Iraq. We can take advantage of that. ”
“Taliban might be watching to see who moves. They are going to note a change in our posture, no way around that. If they want to know who turned, they will be watching for people and families trying to get out before we leave.”
“Then we protect him.”
“Fuck, for all we know, Langley sold him out,” Staub said.
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know, some backroom deal? Whether intentional or an inadvertent oversight, I’d say Naji is cooked.”
“He’s our responsibility.”
Staub exhaled slowly. “You want to whisk Naji and his family out of here. No Agency support. No air cover. No backup. Just us.”
“Tertia optio,” Walker said, invoking the Latin phrase for “third option,” the motto of the covert Special Activities Division of the CIA. The first option was diplomacy. The second was war. They were the third.
“I think your math is off,” Staub said. “The system has failed and we are on our own, which makes us—you and me—Quarta optio, the fourth option.”
Walker stared at the screen, then back at his friend.
“We owe Naji,” he said.
“You make this shit personal and bad things happen,” Staub responded.
“Think of it as a favor, then.”
“To you? I’m really racking them up.”
“Not to me. To Naji.”