Page 152 of Whisper

“Half a mile, sir.” One of the drone pilots pulled up his imagery, showing the mosque relative to the position of the team. Twists and turns and alleyways led to the mosque. “They have a decent amount of ground to cover.”

“And everyone knows we’re here,” Ryan growled. “Be advised, team leader, distance to target is point four miles. Route is urban. No civilian movement detected.” The village looked like a ghost town from the Old West. “Be prepared for resistance en route.”

“Acknowledged. Moving out.”

Syed Ishaq Mosque

Alizai, Afghanistan

Nine and a half Hours After the Blast

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” Farrohk, young, new to al-Qaeda, but a teen with great promise, hissed.

He’d run down from the roof, where he’d watched the helicopter hover of the internet café and spit out the team of black-clad soldiers. He’d watched them regroup and head for the mosque, twisting down the village’s dirt roads covered in chicken shit and feathers and ducking against mudbrick walls to check for fighters on the rooflines.

“Good,” Al Jabal crowed. “Let them come.”

Wires crawled up the walls of the mosque, snaking into and out of old plastique explosives. They’d been passed around the black market for a while, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and possibly across the border from Iran, too. But now they belonged to Al Jabal, and he had the perfect use for them.

IEDs and hidden bombs were too simple. The Americans were used to those by now. Blowing off legs wasn’t enough, not anymore. He needed something big, something bold, after the CIA had murdered Salim and Suleyman with their drones.

And he’d found it, in Hamid.

The plan was as beautiful as it was simple. Turn the American intelligence system against itself.

Hungry for intelligence, for spies to spill their secrets to their drones and their hidden telephone eavesdroppers, feeding false information to the Americans was stunningly simple. All it took was a conversation over the telephone, certain to be picked up, and then Hamid feeding the same information back to his spy handler in Jordan. The apostate kingdom, allied with the Great Satan, would immediately run, like a dog to its owner, to the Americans.

And Al Jabal, with Zawahiri, had supplied exactly the right bait. What the Americans craved, hungered for most of all. Revenge. The blood of the men who had wounded them, all those years ago.

The video was easy to film, almost like making a Hollywood movie. A scene from a spy movie. They’d joked, before and after, about how their part would look in the eventual movie to be made of their successes. The film of al-Qaeda winning the war.

They thought they’d be able to blow up a car with Hamid and the CIA spies inside of it. But when Hamid was invited to the CIA base, Al Jabal realized how much larger their dreams could grow.

They could strike at the heart of the CIA’s secret border base.

They could kill so many Americans.

They could kidnap one of the CIA spies who penetrated the border, the tribal territories, almost every day. A man who called himself Dawood, who played at being a farmer searching for day labor. A man who claimed to be a Muslim, but who was working for the Americans. And that made him a dog, a traitor, akufir. Someone to be tried by the laws of Allah and executed.

Al Jabal turned back to his hostage. The dog was huddled on the ground, bleeding. He’d taken their beating silently, not once crying out. His blood coated their fists, their boots. Stained the floor and the walls. Dripped down theshahadainscribed on the wall. It was poetic, he thought. Akufir’sblood falling from the words of the Prophet.

There is no God but God.

Camp Carson

Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

Afghanistan

Nine and a half Hours After the Blast

It took ten minutes for the team to work their way to the mosque. Nothing moved in the village. Not a soul stirred. Even the wind seemed to still, the air. Time seemed to freeze.

Again, the team spread out to all four corners of the mosque, picking four different breach points. They waited, searching for fighters, for jihadis. Surely someone would fight back. Or had al-Qaeda already fled?

“Negative on anyone leaving the mosque since you’ve been on station,” Ryan said over the radio. “We have seen flickers of movement inside the windows. Definitely active presence inside the mosque.”

“We go in strong,” the team leader transmitted to his team. “Watch your partner. Stay alive, but don’t shoot any civilians.” He heard his team click back their affirmative. “Breach on my order.” He counted down, slowly.