Page 137 of Whisper

“Should we try to capture them? They’re in the senior al-Qaeda ranks. Don’t we want to interrogate them? Find out what they know about Bin Laden? Zawahiri?” Kris had pushed back against Ryan’s order. “These are the most senior members we’ve targeted. What if Suleyman is with Zawahiri now? Or Bin Laden?”

“Then you should have kept better eyes-on. Never have let him slip your Predators.” Ryan’s voice had been tight, barely controlled anger simmering beneath his words. “How would you try to capture these two, Caldera? Send Haddad in, guns blazing? An Arab John Wayne?We have no authority in the tribal belt. We don’t have the manpower to insert a strike force, render a target, and get them out of there. The costs are too high. Besides,” he said, his words going tight. “We don’t do that anymore. And how would you suggest we extract critical information from such a hardened al-Qaeda leader?”

“My track records speaks for itself, Ryan.”

“Find them. Eliminate them. Those are your orders.”

“Yes sir.”

Before sunrise, only hours after he’d fallen asleep, David’s arm thrown around his waist, the door to Kris’s quarters slid open. “Sir, we’ve got a hit on a target.”

He trudged down to the drone bay, a double-wide trailer behind a concrete wall fortified with sandbags, and slipped into the dim cavernous space. Monitors glowed in night vision green, infrared spectrum, cool blue and warm red. Soldiers and CIA operators manned a dozen joysticks before their monitors, flying the drones circling the region.

His deputy, a man named Darren, who had cut his teeth in Iraq as an Army intelligence captain before moving to the CIA, waved him over to the main monitor bank.

“Salim left his hideout in the middle of the night. We followed him as he drove out to a remote village in the mountains where he picked up a man he seemed to know well. They got into his vehicle and returned to his hideout. These are the images we captured of the second man.”

Kris flipped through angled shots of the mystery man. About six foot, slender, robed. A turban obscured his face from most of the images. “How do we know it’s not Salim’s father? Or his uncle? Or his wife’s uncle’s brother’s best friend?”

“It’s not his father, and it’s not his uncle.” Darren, who seemed to tolerate Kris only enough to complete their mission, ignored his third question. “We believe this is Suleyman and that they are together in Salim’s safe house now.”

“You want to strike.”

“Yes sir.” Darren loved “taking out the trash”, as he called it.

But each strike came with consequences.Find them, kill themwas almost too easy with drones. Too far removed from the impact, it became far too easy to become a push-button jockey. Innocent civilians had been caught in the crossfire, or had been targeted mistakenly. There was innocent blood on the drone program’s hands, but since that blood was hundreds, if not thousands of miles away, no one in the US seemed to mind.

Kris did.

“Tell me the full history of this safe house. How many civilians have entered and exited? Who has come and gone in the past twenty-four, forty-eight, and seventy-two hours? What civilians live in the proximity of the target location?”

Darren and the drone operator ran through the evidence, pulling up images and logs to substantiate the comings and goings of everyone into and out of the safe house. As far as they had seen, it had only ever been Salim, with phone intercepts providing the intel that Suleyman visited occasionally. The safe house was in an abandoned village, far from civilians. Unusual, in the practices of al-Qaeda. They liked to surround themselves with civilians, situate themselves in the worst possible target zones. Make a strike against them a morally objectionable call and an impossible order.

But not this time.

“Are there any women or children in the compound? Does Salim have a wife? Kids?”

“Salim’s wife and kids live in Peshawar.”

“How confident are you that it's Suleyman with him?”

“Eighty percent, sir.”

He held life and death in his hands every day. Kris imagined his decisions like rocks being thrown into a pond, ripples from every decision expanding, striking other decisions, other lives and beings in the pond and the world. Consequence, for every action, every single thing, sometimes beyond the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, where no one could see. Sometimes the ripples seemed to stretch forward and backward in time, even. Here he was in Afghanistan, seven years after September 11. And September 11 had been decades after the CIA’s support to the mujahedeen, decades after Ambassador Dubs’s assassination. Ripples expanding, ever outward.

What would this strike create? What consequences?

“Proceed with your strike.” He nodded to Darren. “Use every Hellfire. Let’s be certain.”

Let it never be said that he, a gay man, shied away from ordering a rain of death and destruction. If there was one snide comment others could fling at him, it was not that he was weak, or had a soft stomach.

The drone pilot pivoted his joystick, changing the Predator’s orbit until he was lined up for his strike. On-screen, the safe house filled the center of the monitor, black-and-white images in the pre-dawn glow.They’re just beginning to pray.

The pilot fired, counted down. “Three… two… one… Impact.”

A giant mushroom cloud appeared, non-nuclear, but skyrocketing debris and dust and shattered lives into the air.

It took hours for the cloud to dissipate. The drone stayed in orbit the entire time, recording the crater that had replaced the safe house and the removal of two burned and mangled bodies from the rubble. In the intercept bay, Kris flagged anything discussing the deaths of any al-Qaeda commanders be brought to him immediately.