injury.
Later that morning Balawi went to his room and tried on the suicide vest. He tightened the straps, and the weight of thirty pounds of explosive and metal cut into his thin shoulders. He put on his kameez shirt and gray patou, the shawl-like blanket that doubles as a cloak and mobile prayer mat, and walked back outside where his friend with the video camera was waiting beside a white hatchback. Balawi looked tired, he had aged visibly in nine months, and his face below his right eye still bore scars from the motorcycle crash.
Balawi sat in the driver’s seat as the camera rolled. He had decided that his martyr’s message should be in English, to ensure the widest audience if the video made its way to the Internet, and he chose lines intended to project a kind of cinematic, bad-guy toughness, as though he were a Hollywood mobster delivering an ultimatum.
“We will get you, CIA team.
Balawi raised his left hand to reveal what appeared to be a wrist-watch beneath his kameez sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator,” he said. But the tough-guy routine was falling short. Balawi seemed agitated and bitter, and he turned his head from the camera whenever he finished a thought. His eyes were red as he spit out his last words.
“This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner, and
With the final phrase his voice cracked, as though he were straining to fight back tears. Balawi looked away, and the image went dark.
14.
NO GOD BUT GOD
Dane Paresi rose early on December 30 and was instantly mindful of two things. One was the cold—twenty- three degrees at daybreak outside the Blackwater employees’ quarters, and not so balmy inside either. Another was food. Paresi’s Special Forces call sign was Jackal, a tribute to his legendary appetite and reputation for mooching from his comrades’ plates. He had developed a special fondness for the Khost mess hall, which he judged to be superior to most of the dozens of others he had sampled in Afghanistan. By this hour, just after 6:00 A.M., the pancakes would be flying off the griddle, and the aroma of greasy bacon and black coffee would be strong enough to grab an ex–Green Beret by the collar from half a block away.
There was a weightier matter as well, one that tugged at his thoughts as he dressed in the frigid room: The CIA’s prized informant was at last on his way to Khost. Paresi had dealt with scores of informants over his career, but never had he seen a case that could simultaneously kick up so much excitement and rancor. Plans for the agent’s debriefing had preoccupied the base’s senior staff for weeks, and tempers had boiled over. For his part, Paresi was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his supervisor back in Virginia and the CIA’s security chief at Khost, Scott Roberson. Roberson had independently reached the same conclusion about what he believed was the fundamental problem: too many people, standing too close to an agent who had been living undercover and, by definition, could not be trusted.
Normally, such disagreements would have been considered part of the natural order. In nearly twenty-seven years of army service, including nearly six years of Special Forces work in Afghanistan, Paresi had seen endless skirmishing over tactics. Soldiers clashed and sometimes got mad, but in the end the officers decided, and everyone did his job. Today was looking like another of those days, yet it wasn’t. Paresi couldn’t yet put a finger on what was different.
Paresi dressed quickly and dug around his hooch for his heavy coat and weapon. Space-wise, the room was just a notch above an army tent, but there were plywood walls for privacy and just enough room for his cot, clothes, and gear, along with the books and journals he brought along to pass the idle hours. The hallway outside his room led to a small lounge with a leather sofa where the contract workers could play cards, read, or just sit with their laptops to skim the headlines and check e-mail. The place smelled vaguely of dogs, a legacy of the many strays that wandered through the base and were sometimes adopted as pets. The newest of the Blackwater arrivals, a Navy SEAL named Jeremy Wise, had taken up with a white, lop-eared mongrel he named Charlie that slept in the guards’ quarters and liked chewing on the men’s beards when they sat on the sofa. Paresi hardly minded. He loved dogs and missed his, a black-and-white Boston terrier so earnestly loopy Paresi had given it the nickname Retard. Dogs reminded him of home, where he planned to be in February, putting Afghanistan and military work behind him for good.
Dane Paresi had spent his entire adult life saluting. He had wanted to be a soldier since childhood, when he played army in the woods around the Willamette veterans’ cemetery near his home in Portland, Oregon. He joined the army on the day after high school graduation, and he later became a paratrooper and served in the First Iraq War. He left the army briefly but was inevitably drawn back again, this time determined to join the army’s elite Special Forces. He sweated off thirty pounds in the grueling tryouts and training courses, but in 1995, at age thirty- two, he earned his Green Beret.
Not long afterward, while window-shopping at a strip mall near the base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he noticed a pretty brunette eating ice cream inside a Bath & Body Works store and wandered in to try to talk to her. The young woman initially recoiled from the bone-thin man in a Batman T-shirt, white socks, and ugly, oversize glasses—“birth control glasses,” she later called them. Her friends nearly phoned security, but within a few minutes the two were laughing and making plans to meet for coffee. The future Mindy Lou Paresi wrote her name and phone number in lipstick on a paper napkin. Eight months later they were married.
Life for the newlyweds was an unending series of separations during Dane Paresi’s overseas deployments; he served in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Philippines, among other hot spots. He happened to be home at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but both husband and wife instinctively knew that things were about to get worse.
“Got to go to work, babe,” he said.
Paresi shipped out to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. He returned home for a few weeks at a time to reconnect with Mindy Lou and the couple’s two daughters, Alexandra and Santina. He said little at home about his time overseas, except to complain about the sandstorms and lousy weather and, in private moments, about what he saw as the futility of the U.S. efforts to graft a Western-style democracy onto a corrupt, clannish society where two- thirds of adults cannot read. Mindy Lou learned about his Bronze Star commendation when her husband handed her the official letter from the Pentagon and said, “Read this.” It was the army’s official account of how Paresi had helped spring a trap on an al-Qaeda convoy that included one of the terrorist group’s senior commanders. Sixteen insurgents were killed and another was wounded in the 2002 operation.
Among his peers, Paresi was known for his unflappable calm and his Zen-like insistence on looking after small details. He stormed Taliban hideouts in the dead of night, and went on deep-cover assignments in Afghan garb, infiltrating villages infested with insurgents, sometimes with only one other American beside him.
“These were missions where you knew that no one was coming back for you,” said one comrade who fought beside Paresi. “You had to know that the other person was capable and would get you back, dead or alive. That was him. He never got excited, and you knew he always had your back.”
Afterward, back at camp, Paresi would find a quiet place to unwind, usually with a book and his pipe and a bottle of water. He never drank alcohol or talked loudly. When he was worried or troubled about something, he paced or found some way to busy himself.
He had just turned forty-five in the fall of 2008 and was in prime condition physically when the Defense Department informed him he was no longer needed. After twenty-six years of service he had been on track for making the rank of sergeant major, but instead of a promotion he received his separation papers. The army, flush with middle-aged master sergeants, gave him thirty days to clear out.
Paresi had dreamed of retiring in the mountains of western Oregon, fishing and growing old with Mindy Lou. But an army pension at his rank could not begin to pay the bills, so he started the search for his first civilian job.
