This program is covered under the National Security Act. You have a legal opinion that says so. The congressional leadership has signed off on it. End of story.”
“Did the Paks screw us? Is this their hit?”
“Don’t know yet, but it’s quite possible. This is what they do.”
“The president is nervous. He asked me a few hours ago in the Oval if this Karachi thing was going to blow up. I said no, sir. Hunker down. It will go away. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Totally right. It’s contained.”
“These crazy fuckers still want to kill us, don’t they? These Pakistanis and Waziris and whatever the hell else. Why do they hate us so much? We’re trying to give them money, for god’s sake. We’re trying to make them happy. What the hell is wrong with them?”
“I don’t know, sir. I keep asking my sources that. They keep giving me new names to contact. Eventually we’ll get it right. Money talks.”
Yazdi couldn’t disagree with the efficacy of cash. It was one of his life rules. But still, he wanted to understand why this mission had gone off the rails.
“How did the bad guys make your man? I thought he was super-deep cover and all that.”
“It was a lucky shot, probably. If there’s a hole, we’ll plug it, don’t worry. I’ve put someone reliable on it.”
“Not a SWAT team, for Christ’s sake. That’s all we need is a bunch of people snooping around.”
“Not a team, a discreet investigator. But you will have to turn off the CIA director, if he comes knocking. Because he’ll want to tell Congress, and then it’s out for sure, and we’re all screwed.”
“What else? I gotta go.”
“That’s it. Just keeping you informed. Not to worry. Tell the president we have it under control.”
“Reassurance from you guys, that will scare the shit out of him. You need to come back here and see me soon, and remind me what the fuck you’re doing. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir. I can come in the next week. I will send you a date and you tell me if it works.”
“One more thing, just so I don’t have nightmares. There’s no USG money here. Nothing that could bite us. It’s all clean.”
“Yes, sir. It’s self-contained financially, no government funds in or out. No paper trail, here or in D.C., all offshore.”
“Well, that’s something, at least. No more fuckups, please.”
“HUA, sir,” said Gertz. It was military-speak for “heard, understood, acknowledged.” But he was talking to himself. The chief of staff had scurried off to other business.
9
“Lund te char” is a pungent curse in the Punjabi dialect. It means, literally, “hop on my dick,” or as an American would say, “Fuck off.” That had been the CIA’s message to Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik with this business in Karachi, and he did not like it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed in public, but there is a special sting when a man’s honor is his most precious possession. So it particularly wounded the general that a previously unknown unit of American intelligence had sent an operative into his country, without authority, and then had gone to such trouble to conceal it.
It was an insult. The ISI chief had considered whether he should do something to hurt the Americans back. That would have been easy enough to arrange, for there were so many ways the Americans, tied down by their expeditionary wars and short of breath, depended on their Pakistani allies.
But General Malik was not a rash or vindictive man. And the more he considered the situation, the more it seemed to him that before seeking to punish the Americans, he needed to understand better what they were doing. He needed to understand, in particular, how this new intelligence unit was choosing its targets. And to do that, it was necessary to travel to the remote territory where the Karachi operation had been aimed. This was not a project he could delegate to one of his case officers, much less to one of the agents on the ISI’s string. For, in truth, he did not trust his colleagues on anything truly sensitive, especially involving the United States. So he made the phone calls himself, and sent messages by other channels, to be sure that the ground was prepared.
The general set off with his driver at first light one June morning in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He winced when the SUV passed beneath the illuminated portrait of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and below it the words of the founder’s invocation in 1947: unity, faith, discipline. How little Pakistan had of all three, after nearly sixty-five years, but the general was a hopeful man, and at least he could be disciplined.
They rolled along the Grand Trunk Road toward their first stop, the military air base just west of Peshawar. The trucks heading toward the Khyber Pass were decorated like the wagons of the Raj days: The drivers’ compartments were made of wood-intricately carved and then painted in rainbow colors and decorated with tiny mirrors and scarabs to ward off the jinns of the hills. In his younger days, the general had found these trucks colorful and charming, but today they seemed just another sign of his dear country’s backwardness. He closed his eyes and tried to understand the puzzle of what the Americans were doing.
The general wanted to travel light, with as small a footprint as possible. So he had requested a one-engine Mashaq trainer, rather than the fat Mi-17 cargo helicopter the air wing commander recommended. The pilot still hadn’t been told the destination when the DG-ISI arrived. General Malik waited until the little propeller had started to whirl and then put on his headset and spoke into the microphone:
“Do you know Wana garrison in South Waziristan?” he said. The pilot nodded. “Take me there.”
The young pilot gave the thumbs-up sign. He was from Gilgit in the north, with the light skin and high cheekbones of the mountains. He had flown the Wana route often enough since coming to Peshawar, usually to ferry officers of the Frontier Corps to their garrison deep in this most remote of the tribal areas. But he had never, in all his flying days, transported a three-star general. The air wing commander filed a hasty flight plan for them, and they were off.
The flight took nearly two hours. They bumped over the low mountain ranges south of Peshawar, toward Orakzai Agency and then south across the ancient princely states of Bannu and Tank, which had for centuries been way stations for caravans coming north from Karachi and the Arabian Sea. At Tank, the pilot banked west and steered the little plane into South Waziristan.
The landscape below was a dry corrugated wilderness: desolate mountains, jagged ridges mile after mile toward the Afghan border. Think of the rolling sea in a typhoon, but with the endless brutal waves formed of dirt and rock. The heat of summer shimmered off these trackless hills, producing a low haze that made it look all the more like the devil’s land. It was a place for snakes and scorpions, bugs and vermin. A humble goat would get lost amid these rocks, let alone a human being. The region might be impassable to outsiders; but it was a fortress home to the Wazir, Mehsud and Darwesh Khel tribesmen. Farming was all but impossible in these barren lands, so the natives since the beginning of time had been fierce hunters and brigands.
After the plane crested a last arid peak, almost at the Afghan frontier, a broad valley opened below, and in the middle of this flat ground, improbably neat, stood the town of Wana. Here was a small oasis of cultivation: There were apple orchards and wheat fields, and the fortlike compounds of the residents, each clan living behind high mud walls with gun towers at the four corners to protect them from their plundering neighbors.
Western philosophers might talk abstractly about the state of nature as a war of each against all; but here, it was the simple fact of life. The word “cousin” in Pashto had the same meaning as “enemy.”
At the edge of the town was an asphalt airstrip, baking in the sun. The small plane circled the outpost once at high altitude to scout the terrain, and then corkscrewed steeply down to the landing field. When the plane rolled to a stop, the pilot popped the hood. A wind was blowing, so that the heat radiated over the tarmac with the scorching ferocity of a convection oven.
A jeep was waiting to meet General Malik. He drove a half mile to a Pakistani military camp, where he changed out of his uniform into the traditional tribal costume of the Pashtuns, known as a shalwar khamiz, with loose cotton trousers and a long shirt. When he emerged from the dressing room, he looked to be a different man.
