The Towers (40 page)

Finally Dan picked up the phone. Provanzano's number didn't answer. Go over his head? It didn't take long to make that decision. He walked down the SCIF and caught a figure he recognized. General E. H. Salter. The Army one-star who ran the JOC. Template reported their results to him for transmission to Faulcon. And if what Provanzano had said about Salter's remembering him from Desert Storm was correct, Dan might even have a little traction.

“General, excuse me. Dan Lenson. From the Fusion Cell. Trying to track what's going on. Can you—”

The operations center commander looked him up and down. “I know who you are, Commander. And I remember what you did in Iraq. And that you're my Navy liaison too.”

“Yes, sir. I didn't mean—well, never mind.”

“What's going on is that we're waiting on a decision to launch this operation. You're CIRCE, correct?”

“Correct, sir. Out of TAG.”

“I don't know what that is. And I guess I don't need to, if it's Navy. Is the localization holding?”

“No, sir. It's been degenerating since midnight local. The longer we wait, I'm afraid, the worse it's going to get.”

The general swore, then added wearily, “I've got your output on my screen. Keep it coming.”

“Sir, if CENTCOM or the White House don't approve a ground force in the Shah-i-khot, we should at least do a strike.”

“An air strike? The weather's not exactly cooperating.”

“We have Tomahawk. I have a package laid on.”

Salter frowned. “My understanding was, the mountains gave you problems with the weapon's flight profile.”

“Uh, yes, sir, unfortunately that's correct. If they're down in one of those valleys. But we could use a Hellfire from one of the Predators. We have to hit this meeting.”

“No more missile strikes. That's what the previous president did. Anything he did, they're not going to approve.”

“Yes, sir, that came through loud and clear. But that clock's ticking. This meeting—if they're still having it—”

“My information is that it's been called off.”

Dan closed his eyes. That was why the localization was degenerating. “Where did that intel come from, sir? Did it get routed to Fusion?”

“I'll have to defer to someone else on that,” the JOC commander said. Salter looked as if he was about to throw something, but didn't. He grimaced up at the roof of the tent. From nowhere, Dan wondered if it was light outside or dark.

*   *   *

DAN
was back in the Fusion area, scrolling through reports from the interrogation facility, when Friedebacher stopped at his terminal. “Stand down,” he said.

“What's that, Pete?”

“They decided not to go. Canceled the mission.”

He felt cold and enraged and resigned. Because he'd seen it all happen before, and from both sides—the operating-force side and the West Wing side. He was all for civilian control. But there was a barrier between civilian and military as invisible yet as definite as that between water and air. Different mind-sets, cultures, attitudes toward risk. At its worst, an arrogance that assumed a man in a chair thousands of miles away knew better than the one confronting the enemy. “You're shitting me. After we had the troops loaded? Advance units in the air?”

“That's the way it goes.”

Dan jumped up, fists balled, and stalked out into the main area. Operators were shutting down their stations, getting up. A hum of angry voices. “What a balls-up,” someone said with a Scottish accent. Dan rubbed his face. The choice had been between using native allies, corseted with Special Forces, or the Tenth and Eighty-second. He'd heard reasonable arguments on both sides. But what possible justification could there be for scrubbing the operation altogether? Unless somebody didn't really want bin Laden caught.

No; that was paranoia talking. Maybe the special operators had him already and were just keeping it under wraps. But no such word had percolated up to the Working Group. They'd had him located. But now every time he looked at the screen, the polygon was bigger, the edges fuzzier.

“He's not there anymore,” Dan said. Accepting the inevitable, bitter as it was and disastrous as the downstream might be. “We missed our chance.”

Friedebacher had followed him. Dan added, “They're not meeting there. Or finished early. Now they're breaking up, retreating up into the White Mountains. Or over the border, into Pakistan.”

The marine shrugged. “Then we go into the mountains after 'em.”

“It would have been a lot easier, at Pajuar.”

“We'll get him,” Friedebacher said. “Take it easy. No way we're letting this bastard get away. Payback.”

“Payback,” Dan echoed bitterly. Trying to keep his hands from shaking, trying not to relive the terror of darkened corridors and flame and the rubbery give of body parts underfoot. “If he gets time to dig in up there, we may not be able to pry him out. Not without huge casualties.”

“We'll get him,” Friedebacher repeated. But doubt now seemed to haunt his voice as well.

 

19

DAN
got no sleep that night. All the reachback comms to the United States and CENTCOM and K2 and the Counterterrorism Center went down. Donnie Wenck went off to help the techs from the Eighty-sixth who were working on it. They got it up again after two frantic hours, but the backlog kept all three of them at the terminals streamlining inputs. There was muttering about hostile hacking, but Dan doubted Al Qaeda had expert programmers. He admitted to Monty he could be wrong, though.

When Template finally came back up, the picture kept shifting. Then a report from British signal intelligence reported an intercept for a source close to bin Laden, and suddenly CIRCE zoomed in, not only localizing but beginning to show a direction of motion. Doing what Dan always found so uncanny: predicting where the target would move, as if it knew his motives, fears, and yearnings better than did its human subject himself.

He stared at the screen, hearing the hinge of fate creak. When you ran CIRCE alone, the target individual was centered in a black screen, connected by lines of different hues to other individuals of interest. Each line vibrated at five cycles per second, tugging each node or point of intersection this way and that in a Brownian motion that made it seem almost alive. The subroutines confirmed it. The HVTs were moving north out of the Shah-i-khot, ascending into even more remote heights. Dan moved down the length of the tent asking for Predator imagery, hoping to get eyes on the mountain passes their quarry seemed headed toward. But weather had grounded all the drone flights. From the topo, it would be a hell of a place to fight. He went into the historical files then, looking for hide sites and locations the mujahideen had used during the Soviet War.

Wenck came back, grumbling about DISNs and PIX Firewalls, port switches and STEP sites. “Major problem?” Dan asked, but all he got back was something about the “tropo scatter.”

Wenck grumbled, “Everybody likes to buy all this off-the-shelf shit and they expect it to interface, but it never does and nobody ever asks why. They just throw more money at the contractors and wonder why it doesn't work.”

“I'll tell you what I wonder,” Dan said.

“What, sir?”

“Why General Leache is in Florida and the land forces component commander and all his staff are in Kuwait. Why the forward ground commander, the Tenth Mountain Division commander, has his headquarters back at K2, and the spec ops CO's here in Bagram.”

“It ain't like the Navy, sir.”

“Better or worse?”

“You need me, Commander? If you don't, I'm gonna get some sleep.”

As the tent walls breathed in and out with the wind, Dan contemplated the fact it worked at all. Both the comms and the command relationships were bewildering and time-wasting. Still, instant comms with home had its advantages. Since getting to Bagram, he'd done most of his work online, over a supersecure, dedicated digital system called Spartan Prime. Now he had a hard time believing he'd ever been able to accomplish anything with the Navy message system and secure STU-III calls. It all came in via super-high-frequency TACSAT, the military tactical satellites. Not only local intel, from the field and the JIF, but every day and nearly every hour he got synthesized information from analysts back at the Pentagon and CTC and even, occasionally, the FBI.

They had data services, collaborative-planning and mission-analysis tools, and all kinds of digitized command and control. But there were only still twenty-four numbers on a military clock. Beyond a certain point it was like trying to drink, not out of a fire hose, but out of Niagara Falls.

At 3:00 a.m. local he had his recommendations nailed down for the morning meeting, which he would present at, since both Provanzano and Belote were still out in the field. Sleep? He was dead on his feet, but the way his brain was buzzing, he'd just lie on his bunk and vibrate. He told Henrickson to hold the fort and went over to another tent to a guy who had a cell phone that would actually connect.

Outside, he blinked in the darkness, astonished there was still a universe outside the SCIF. As his eyes adapted, enormous, cold stars appeared. The Milky Way glowed like spilled bleach if you looked away from the runway lights. Some of those stars moved, planets that gradually grew brighter: more transports, lining up for approach. A streak of soundless light scratched the black, revealing brilliance beneath. He tensed, ready to drop: incoming mortar, rocket? Then realized it was only a shooting star.

“Halt. Halt!”

A brilliant light dazzled him. He stopped dead, realizing he'd taken a wrong turn, was in a part of the compound he didn't know. A huge oval the size of a kids' wading pool loomed, mounted on some large vehicle. A trooper had an M4 trained on him. “Restricted area, sir,” he said.

“Got it. Sorry.”

*   *   *

“HELLO
?”

“Hey, hon. It's me. Finally got to a phone without a line in front of it.”

“Dan? You okay? You sound hoarse again. Where are you?”

“At the main base over here. I guess it's the dry air, all this dust.… How you doing?”

“They're starting the physical therapy. The scar tissue … it really hurts.”

Her voice dragged, a note he'd never before heard; resignation, weariness? It didn't sound like her. He thought savagely, things will never be the same for a lot of people. Because of the religious idiots we're here to kill. “Sure you're okay, honey?”

“Actually, I'm not. I saw it on the TV for the first time. Dad would turn it off. To not upset me. Or I would, because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stand it. But this time I left it on. All those people. Waving their shirts in the air, for help. But nobody could help them.…”

“It's all right. It's all—”

“And then they just … stepped out. Or tried to climb down, as if it wasn't a thousand feet. So they lost their grip. Then fell…”

Her voice had gone ragged, edged with torn steel. He felt helpless, exiled to the edge of the world when he should have been there helping her heal.

Her voice came stronger, infused with conscious will. “How about you? You're the one out there.” She snorted. “I'm just sitting at home.”

“We're making progress. The push is on. I'm hoping we'll have some good news in a few days.”

“About
him
? That'd be nice to hear.”

“How's Checkie? And Queekie?”

“I wish they wouldn't
hover,
but … I guess that's what parents have to do.”

“The hip? Is it healing? I hear bad things about broken hips.”

“Well, it's going to take time, Dan. And it does hurt. Sometimes a lot. But I can hobble around the house now. With a walker. I'm going in for some more work on my face next week.… You're not going into combat? Are you?”

“No, they've got the Eighty-second Airborne between me and whoever's out there. And lots of concertina. Mainly I'm trying to set up to get food and water up to some of the villages. Humanitarian assistance. Just like in an office, only in a tent.”

They caught up on acquaintances, then ran out of things to say. He wanted to ask what she was picking up from her circle of contacts, but long indoctrination about phone security kept him from asking. “Uh, what's the
Post
saying? Are they following us out here?”

“They say Kabul just fell. Sounds like it's going faster than anyone expected. All the Taliban are surrendering.”

“Kabul? We took Kabul last month. You mean Kandahar?”

“I guess so. Aren't a lot of them coming over to the ANA? Or are they just pretending to? Some of what I'm reading about this Karzai … he accepts a surrender, then the same guys who were fighting us turn around and suddenly they're our friends. Exactly the same people.”

Dan said, “Maybe we can do it the smart way this time. In quick, get bin Laden, set up a government, get out. Like we did in Haiti.”

“The longer we stay, the harder it's going to be to leave.”

Dan said he'd gotten the same vibe from the local militia leaders. “But we have to have them on our side. These mountains … if ALQ digs in and fights up there, it's going to cost. But this could be the end. The next couple of weeks. If we can pin him down and get a bomb on him or push a shooter in close enough. Maybe his own people will turn him in.”

“It'd be better to have a body.”

Objective as the old Blair. “Uh, right. They've already got a box of dry … never mind. You're right, we need a body. So, got any plans?”

“Just talking things over with Dad. We'll discuss it when you get home.”

A voice behind him. “Almost done, buddy? Other guys want to use that phone.”

“Wrapping up,” Dan said to the trooper. To Blair; “Gotta go, gotta get back on the stick. Can you pass to Nan I'm okay? I'll try to call her too, but connections are real limited.”