“They broke Jawaruddin.”
“Maybe,” Ulrich said. He was in his early fifties, with a full head of thick, brown hair, a bulbous nose, and a broad, almost stately, chin. He looked like he belonged on an English estate circa 1925, chasing foxes and shooting grouse. He was far from dumb, and Maggs figured he was good in meetings with the ISI and the Pak generals. But Maggs didn’t like him, and the feeling seemed to be mutual.
“You want me to put a team together—”
Ulrich raised a hand to cut him off. “Squad’s coming from Bagram tomorrow,” he said. “Deltas.”
“Deltas?” Ulrich was notoriously turf-conscious. Yet losing this assignment didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he knew that the Deltas had a better shot at pulling off the job than his own agents. Maybe he didn’t think the laptop was important. Or maybe he’d been told the score and decided not to fight. Maggs couldn’t ask. Whatever he was thinking, Ulrich wasn’t the type to share.
“Deltas,” Ulrich said. “Six. But they’ll be detached to us for the assignment.”
“Right.” Maggs saw now. Technically, neither the Deltas nor any American military forces could operate in Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government. After all, the United States was at peace with Pakistan. Legally, anyway. But getting the approval of the Pakistani authorities for this job might be tough.
To get around the legalities, the Deltas would be “TR”—temporarily reassigned — and handed over to the CIA, which didn’t have to follow the military’s rules, for the operation. Maggs understood the logic. But he didn’t like it. He would be running six guys he didn’t know on a job that was based on intel he couldn’t verify.
“Got it,” Maggs said. “And I’ll be in charge.”
“Correct. We’re always talking about improving cooperation with the Pentagon. Now’s your chance.”
“Thanks, boss.”
THE DELTAS ARRIVED the next day. The good news was that they were every bit as professional as Maggs expected. They understood that they wouldn’t have the usual military backup for this assignment. No air support or Black Hawks to come for them if things got messy. They would get in and out quietly, or not at all.
The bad news was that they didn’t have any better read on the intel than Maggs did. They’d gotten their orders the same day as Ulrich and Maggs. Major James Armstrong, the squad’s leader, said the source wasn’t being held at Bagram.
“You’d know,” Maggs said.
“We’d know.”
More proof that this tip had come from bin Zari, Maggs thought. But why were his interrogators so sure they could trust him? Maggs wished he could talk through his concerns with Armstrong. But bin Zari’s capture remained a closely held secret. Even in Islamabad, Maggs and Ulrich were the only CIA officers who knew. So Maggs shut his mouth and went ahead trying to figure a way into that house. He would have had an easier time if the agency had decent informers in Damghar. Or anywhere in the Swat. But the CIA’s only halfway trustworthy source in the entire valley, the deputy mayor of Mingora, had fled six months before. The Taliban had set a truck tire on fire outside his house and promised him that the next time his head would be inside it. The Talibs didn’t know the mayor was an informer. If they had, there would have been no warning at all. They just didn’t like him.
As usual, Maggs and the Deltas were relying on technology to fill in the gaps. The NSA sent along a series of fifteen-centimeter-resolution satellite photos of Damghar Kalay, the target village, that showed the exact location of the house, as confirmed by the anonymous detainee. The building was squat, a single story high, forty feet long and thirty feet wide. Construction was typical for rural Pakistan, bricks poorly aligned and the rear wall bulging under the weight of the roof. A medium quake would take the whole house down. A small tractor sat in front, along with the remains of a pickup truck. A second satellite pass picked up a teenage boy and an older man standing beside the tractor, apparently trying to start it up.
Ideally, the house would have been isolated, several hundred yards from the next building. They hadn’t been that lucky. The house lay on the southern side of a one-lane cart track that dead-ended at the open fields east of the village. Homes were scattered along the track, divided by low walls. The target was about one hundred twenty feet from its nearest neighbor, far enough that they could approach without being immediately noticed but close enough that a gunshot or even a shout would attract the attention of the neighbors, and eventually of the Taliban.
To get a glimpse inside the house, the agency sent up a Predator equipped with thermal scopes. The scan — taken just before dawn, when the air was coolest and the heat gradients greatest — revealed at least five people asleep in the house, including three children. An exact count was impossible, because the house’s interior walls deflected heat in ways that couldn’t be precisely modeled.
The next day, two Deltas took a Jeep to Mingora and then Derai and Damghar for visual recon. They came back that night with mixed news. The house itself was easy enough to find. But as part of their creeping takeover, the Talibs had just imposed a midnight-to-dawn curfew on the roads around Mingora.
The curfew further limited their options. They knew they might need as much as an hour of quiet in the house to find the laptop. They’d planned an early-morning raid, figuring on catching the family in its deepest sleep, getting into the house and silencing them before they could react. Even without the curfew, the play was dicey. Anyone awake would see their vehicles. Now it seemed impossible.
They turned Maggs’s office into a war room, satellite photographs and thermal imagery on every wall. They spent a day and most of a night puzzling over the photos, considering and rejecting various plans. They debated buying Toyota pickups and black turbans and going in dressed as Taliban before deciding that the risk they’d run into real Talibs was too high. Besides, they had no way of knowing whether the family in the house was sympathetic to the Talibs, the government, or neither.
They considered taking rafts up the river, or driving up and rafting down. Aside from the fact that rafts were obvious, slow, and couldn’t be defended, the plan was foolproof. “Let’s bring a keg and make it a picnic,” Armstrong said.
At one point Armstrong suggested, more than half seriously, that they helicopter in a couple of platoons of Rangers, take over the house, shoot anyone who got close, and helicopter out when they were done.
“Great idea. What do we tell the Pak army when they discover we started a war in the Swat? ” Maggs said.
“Assuming they notice? We don’t tell them jack.”
“And when they bring in their own jets to chase us down?”
“They won’t even fight the Talibs. You think they’re going to mess with us?”
Maggs had to admit the plan had a certain simplicity. “Too bad we’re not at war with them,” he said. “It would make things so much easier.”
BUT THEY WEREN’T, and they didn’t want to go in hot, not into a house that had kids and women and most likely no Talibs at all inside. For a while, Maggs thought the mission might be impossible under the parameters they’d set.
Then he had an idea. It made him queasy. It could easily backfire. But it was the best hope, maybe the only hope, of getting inside the house without civilian casualties.
So he told Armstrong.
“That stuff works? For real?”
“Honestly, I’ve never used it myself,” Maggs said. “But I know we’ve tested it, and we say it works. And the Russians used it.”
Armstrong nodded. “That’s right. I remember. Killed a bunch of folks with it, too.”
“That they did.”
“It’s illegal.”
“Sure is. Unethical. Possibly immoral, too. Got a better idea?”
WHEN MAGGS WENT TO ULRICH, Ulrich shook his head. “This is what you have for me? After four days?”
