Black Site (30 page)

Twenty minutes later Kopelman returned. Apparently his language and cultural skills had passed muster, because he carried several items he’d obviously purchased at the market. Once inside the car he sighed. “Couldn’t find the driver of the rickshaw, which means we might have to walk out of here.” He fished through a canvas bag. “So, if worse comes to worst, I bought you this.”

He handed Kolt a powder blue garment made of thin silk.

“What the hell is—”

“It’s a burka. You might have to wear it before the day is done, so I hope you like the color.”

Raynor told himself there was no way he’d be donning a damned burka. Still, he tucked it inside his baggy trousers.

Kopelman had also bought some fruit, and together they ate grapes and pomegranate as they stared out the front windshield, through the dust and the glare of the afternoon sun, and waited for Jamal to reappear.

Minutes later Jamal Metziel stepped through the front gate of the warehouse and returned alone to his truck. The Opel was still boxed in by the rickshaw and the cart, so Bob could not just follow him out of town. He and Kolt had discussed trying to unhook the cart on their own and rolling it out of the way, but Bob had decided that this act would likely draw attention. Not angry or curious men. No, just as bad, it would attract men who would gather to help. The last thing either of these Americans wanted to see was a gaggle of armed local goons forming to assist them with their work, and then inviting them to a tea stand for pleasant conversation afterward.

If you were in Pashtunistan and you were not a Pashtun, Pashtunwali could get you killed in so many ways.

“What do we do?” asked Raynor.

“Screw it,” Bob said. “Pete Grauer can buy me a new car. I’m not sitting here all night. Let’s go.” Kopelman grabbed a few items from around the car: his sat phone, his laptop, a backpack to stow them in.

Kolt asked, “What about the guns?”

Bob reached down and grabbed one AK, then nodded at the other. He pulled the canvas satchel with the extra mags and slung it over his neck.

“Yeah, we definitely take the guns. I find out that Jamal turned on me, I’m sure as shit gonna put a few rounds in his chest before I check out.”

Shit,
thought Raynor. Bob had been so high on this contact a couple of days ago; now he was actually entertaining the possibility of killing him.

*   *   *

Jamal’s eyes widened when he saw the two men walking toward him in the street. Quickly he motioned them over to his truck. Both Americans climbed into the cab, and Jamal nervously looked up and down the street before climbing in himself. He drove east to a more secluded part of town. Several times Bob asked him what had happened and what he’d seen, but Jamal just muttered some little prayer over and over.

The kid was scared. Bob and Kolt both saw this, and they both worried silently that the kid might well be leading them into a trap.

After some more stern prodding from Bob, Jamal’s head cleared enough to explain. “My uncle and some of my cousins were there. We ate lunch together. Slowly they began to talk about the people who are renting the warehouse space now.”

“And?”

“And they are foreigners. From Yemen and Turkey.”

“Not from Germany?”

“Yes, the man from Germany was with them.”

“What else did you learn?”

“They have their own security there. Ten men or so. But my uncle took me out into the warehouse anyway to show me what was there. While my uncle spoke to the guards … I was able to take some pictures that you need to see.”

“Pictures of what, Jamal?”

“I … I do not know what they mean.”

“Okay, just relax.” Bob looked in the rearview mirror, and Kolt checked the passenger-side mirror. Both men were scanning for anyone following them. Bob continued speaking to Jamal in Pashto. “Pull into this parking lot here, and we’ll take a look at what you found.”

They stopped, and Jamal pulled his mobile phone from his salwar kameez. He started to fiddle with it, but Bob just took it from his hands. Bob had given him the Motorola device because of its high-resolution video and digital still camera, and he’d perfunctorily shown the young Afghan how to use it, but the American intelligence operative knew how to work the thing in his sleep.

Bob downloaded the pictures onto his laptop in only a few seconds. When he double-clicked on the file, he blinked his eyes hard, twice. Over his right shoulder Raynor muttered in confusion, “Uh … are you sure that’s what you just downloaded?”

Bob was not sure. He looked at the file on his Toughbook. Finally he said, “I … yeah, that’s what Jamal gave me.… Oh my God.”

Both he and Raynor stared at the screen, at a digital photo of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. The markings, the paint job, were just like on all the Black Hawks crisscrossing the skies back over the border in Afghanistan.

Behind it in the warehouse was another helicopter, a nearly identical Black Hawk.

“Jamal? These two choppers? They are in the warehouse back there?”

“Yes, Mister Bob.”

Bob addressed Racer now, incredulity in his voice: “How did you dumb Army fucks manage to lose two helicopters?”

Kolt shook his head, then considered the question seriously. “A Black Hawk is a Sikorsky UH-60. Sikorsky sells UH-60s to Egypt, the UAE, the Philippines, Brazil, and others. A couple of guys with the right equipment could take an Egyptian bird and paint it up like a U.S. bird in nothing flat.”

Kopelman nodded. “This is big. These two choppers can carry forty troops.”

“Forty bad guys.”

“Right. Think about it, Racer. If they find a way to get them over the border, they could land at a FOB or even a full-sized base. There would be confusion, but nobody is going to suspect they’re about to get nailed by AQ from inside the base. AQ can wipe out a lot of our guys with a pair of Black Hawks full of shooters.”

“I know. And then they can get access to a lot of equipment. A lot of weapons. These two Black Hawks could be a game changer in this fight.”

Jamal spoke for the first time. “My uncle … he does not like these people. But he likes his money. It is always so with my uncle. He said the two helicopters were not the only things in the warehouse, but trucks came and took the rest away already.”

“What else was there?” asked Bob. Kolt quickly asked Jamal to speak more slowly and clearly so he could follow the conversation.

“Crates of goods. He did not know what they were. Never saw inside. But he knew that they came from the German’s factory on the other side of Darra Adam Khel.”

“And it’s all gone now?”

“Yes. My uncle says the factory is no longer producing things. He met a local representative of the German there yesterday to get his payment, and there was only an empty factory floor full of sewing machines and metalworking machines, an upstairs office with a desk and a computer and a cot, this German man living and working there, and some armed foreigners guarding the place. It looks like it is about to close down completely.”

Kolt said to Bob in English, “We’re running out of time, Bob!”

Kopelman nodded, then asked Jamal, “Can your uncle get us into the factory?”

“No. He got his money. He has no business there now.”

Bob blew out a long sigh. “I’d
love
to get a look at that Kraut’s computer.”

Kolt looked at Jamal. “Your uncle said there were ten guards?”

The young Afghan nodded.

Kopelman raised a hand. “Don’t even think about it, Racer. You remember our talk about the definition of the word ‘reconnaissance,’ don’t you? You
aren’t
going into that factory.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

“We are going to pass all this on to Grauer so he can alert the Agency.” Kopelman wasn’t going to wait one second. He closed his laptop and powered up the sat phone. Then he sent Jamal over to a small market to buy himself a cup of tea to help him relax. As soon as the young Afghan climbed out of the car Kolt asked Bob, “Do you believe him?”

“I do. I can’t always tell when a Pashtun is lying, but I can tell when one is scared. He’s scared of us, scared we will think he is somehow involved because his uncle owns the factory. If he had ratted us out, he wouldn’t have shared that intel. I mean, what’s the point?”

Bob spent the next ten minutes on the phone with Grauer communicating from the Radiance Ops Center over the border in Jalalabad. After Bob stowed the phone, he looked back at Raynor in the backseat. “He’s going to inform Langley.”

“What about us?”

“We are getting out of here.”

Kolt was not satisfied. “Bob. Whatever these guys are going to do … they are going to do it soon. They can’t fly those choppers once the winter closes in. Plus, just keeping them on hand like that they run the risk of compromise.”

“I agree. Something nasty is about to go down, in days, not weeks.”

Kolt asked, “Where is the factory?”

“Not far, two klicks to the east of here. Why?”

“Can we drive by? Just to check it out.”

Bob strummed his fingers on his closed laptop. He nodded his head. “Okay. Can’t hurt. When Jamal gets back we’ll head over there before leaving town.” He looked back to Kolt. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Racer.”

“What’s that?”

“If I see a German dude out front on smoke break I’m jumping out of this cab and beating the shit out of him.”

Kolt nodded appreciatively. “No argument from me.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Minutes later Jamal was back behind the wheel and they were headed east, and once again the Hilux was stuck in a traffic jam. Cars, trucks, bicycles, rickshaws, donkey carts, donkeys without carts that had been packed with incredible amounts of bags, boxes, and other items. They crawled along with the rest of the traffic, and Bob began regretting his decision to take a look at Buchwald’s factory.

It was almost dark when they reached a wide intersection. Jamal motioned to a compound on the northwest corner. “That’s the place.” Jamal pointed to a nondescript single-story wall, behind which stood a two-story wood, metal, and sandstone structure. It was the size of a small grocery store, except for the fact it was multilevel.

Two malevolent-looking security guards stood out front. Another sat Indian-style on the roof.

Raynor had no doubt there would be more inside.

Kolt asked Jamal, “No chance you have an uncle that owns this place, too?” He asked it in English, and Bob translated.

Jamal just shook his head. The joke was lost on him.

They found themselves stuck in the intersection. A dispute between truck drivers in front of them delayed everyone in all four directions, first as the two vehicles honked back and forth at one another, and then as the men climbed down from their cabs and began arguing animatedly on the dusty street. Kolt and Bob used the delay to take in as much of the area as possible.

Bob spoke aloud in English as he looked out the grimy window of the car, giving voice to his observations of the compound. “It’s buttoned up pretty tight. Sheet metal fence. Gate wide enough for a semi to get in and out of. Looks like a satellite dish on the roof. Regular phone and electric wires running in and out.”

Kolt was not listening. Instead he had his eyes on the crowd. Dozens of men in salwar kameezes or more Western-style Pakistani dress strode up and down the sidewalks and crossed between narrow spaces between the vehicles on the street, hustling home as night fell. Women were in the crowd too, but they did not walk alone. All the women had male escorts with them, as was the custom here in Taliban-controlled Pashtunistan.

Kolt looked back quickly toward the factory, and he made a decision.

The truck moved forward as traffic rerouted itself around the protracted argument between the truck drivers.

Sixty seconds later they were again stuck in a jam. They’d moved forward only one hundred yards, and now they were a block past the factory. Kolt tapped Jamal on the shoulder. “How do I look?” The young driver turned back from the right-sided steering wheel. He stammered his response in surprise. Raynor had dressed himself head to toe in the blue burka Kopelman had bought earlier.

“You … you look like a woman,” Jamal said.

“Am I pretty?” Raynor joked.

Jamal just laughed nervously. Pashtun men did not act this way, did not joke like this.

Kopelman turned around in his seat to see what his man was doing. “What the hell is wrong with you? Quit screwing around!”

But Kolt turned serious now. Behind his mesh veil he said, “Bob, you know that any woman not accompanied by a man on the street is going to stand out like a sore thumb around here, right?”

“Absolutely. You wouldn’t make it thirty seconds on the street, so don’t even think—”

“Then you’d better tell Jamal to come with me.” Kolt opened the back door of the cab and climbed out in his burka. In his cloaked arms he held a simple bag with his Pashtun clothing.

“Racer!” Kopelman sounded at once terrified and furious, but he did manage to shout it in a whisper. Raynor stepped down to the pavement and began walking away from the truck as the sun set over the sandstone hills to the west.

Fifteen seconds later, Jamal caught up with him and walked stiffly beside. Kolt could almost hear the young man’s heartbeat.

They walked fifty yards, back in the direction of the factory, past dozens of other pedestrians and shopkeepers out in front of their stores. Raynor remained hunched over to take a few inches off his height, and from seeing women walking with men in the area, he knew to walk behind Jamal, even as he whispered directions to the young Afghan. “Straight ahead. No, let’s turn up this pathway with the steps.”

He could not see Jamal’s face in front of him, could barely make out a damned thing through the obscuring mesh of the burka face hole. But he imagined Jamal was probably in a state of panic.

They walked up stone-and-wooden steps and soon arrived at a part of the arcade that had closed for the evening. They were just one street over from Buchwald’s factory now, and the coast seemed to be clear. Raynor reached out and grabbed Jamal by the arm. “I want to walk around the factory, go around to the back, and then head back to the truck. Okay?”