Page 30 of Whisper

Kris translated before Ryan could make any more demands.

“We have maps.” Khan motioned to his jeeps. Two young soldiers scurried away and jogged back with a stack of antique maps from the Soviet Union. Pencil marks had been drawn and erased and redrawn for years, the fluctuating lines of the front changing with each passing winter.

Like ghosts, Ghasi’s boys cleared the dishes from the sheet, and Khan spread his map over the ground. Ryan and George pulled out their own maps, printed by the CIA before they left Langley, and laid them alongside Khan’s. Khan’s was far more detailed.

Kris translated, reading off positions of Khan’s forces and the Taliban on the map and tracing the front lines that made the shape of a giant L across the northwest corner of Afghanistan, into Badakhshan Province and the Panjshir Valley. From east to west, crossing north of Kabul and bisecting Bagram Airfield to Jalalabad, and then shooting straight north to the Tajikistan border and into the mountains.

“Where are the Taliban?” Kris translated for Ryan.

“They are entrenched all along their front lines. Massive artillery formations. Antiaircraft battalions. And thousands of foreign fighters have been joining them since the strikes in New York.”

The words stuck in Kris’s throat as he translated.Strikes in New York. The American homeland, attacked. Americans dying inside their borders. Never before had that happened. Never, ever before. And he’d let it happen.

He forced himself back to the conversation, back to the Dari and English flying around him.

“What are your plans here, in our country? What is your timetable for destroying the Taliban? When will you bring in your bombs? How will you help the people here, who suffer the most under the Taliban? When will things get done? And when will you leave?”

Kris translated Khan’s questions carefully, holding George’s steady gaze.

George wasn’t pleased. “We have an immense amount to do, and only twenty-four hours each day to work with. Before anything happens, we need to scope out the lay of the land. Send out a team to recon Taliban positions. Identify exactly where the Shura Nazar forces are. Create a map of the battlefield. We can only do one thing at a time. We have to do this right.”

General Khan was scowling before Kris finished translating. “Right now, the Taliban and the Shura Nazar are at an impasse. Neither side is strong enough to break the other,aghaGeorge. But every day, thousands of fighters come to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda and to kill Americans, and anyone who helps the Americans.Mypeople.” Khan thumped his chest. “My people are the ones who have been fighting the Taliban for years. You say you need our help, but you refuse to help my people in return?”

Kris spoke in English to Ryan and George. “He’s pissed. We need to give him and his people something, and soon.”

“We just gave him a million bucks!” George frowned as Ryan scowled.

Kris smiled at Khan and bowed his head as he spoke in Dari. “We need to scout the terrain. Prepare for our forces, before they can arrive. To do that, we need vehicles.” He nodded to the rusted hulks of scrap that had brought them up the mountain. “We won’t take your trucks. You and your men need them. We will need to buy trucks. Will you find four trucks for us? We will purchase them at fair prices. And...” Kris grasped Khan’s hand as Khan’s frown darkened. “We will use these trucks to not only scout the lines, but deliver aid to your people. And as soon as we can, we will arrange for more food to be sent.”

Khan stroked his dark beard. He squeezed Kris’s hand, holding it on Kris’s knee. “This will help my people, yes. Four trucks will be expensive, though. They will cost fifteen thousand each.”

Fifteen thousand dollars for heaps of scrap. Kris smiled. “Alhamdulillah.”

“I will return tomorrow with your trucks,Gul Bahar.” Khan held Kris’s hand in the air, celebrating, and then released his grasp.

Ryan and George stared at him, their gazes hard enough to chisel stone.

Kris answered their unasked questions. “I bought us trucks. We need to get around. I also said we would deliver aid as we scouted the front lines.”

George kept his face neutral, a practiced skill. “What aid?” he asked carefully.

“We’re being fed by Ghasi every day. We can spare the MREs we brought until we schedule a humanitarian aid drop.”

Ryan leaned across George, eyes wide as he seemed ready to tear Kris a new asshole.

George held him back. “We’ll discuss this later.” He took a deep breath and smiled at Khan. He spoke to Kris. “See who speaks Russian. I want this joint intel cell set up ASAP. I need the people in it to speak Russian so I can communicate with them.”

Kris translated, turning away from George. The back of his neck burned. Why did George need to speak directly to the intel cell? He was the translator on the mission, wasn’t he?

“Several of my officers speak Russian,” Khan replied. “They were educated in Tashkent and Dushanbe and in Yekaterinburg. I will send them to you tomorrow.”

Kris relayed Khan’s words, then frowned at George. “George, we’re going to be limited to the top range of the weakest Russian speaker.” He left out his concerns that the weakest individual could be George himself. “I can translate Dari for the intel cell.”

“No, you can’t, Kris.” George gave him a thin, strained smile. “Because you’re going to scout the front lines.”

David watched the meeting from the compound’s entrance, manning the point position on the team. Palmer had spread out everyone, encircling Khan’s party and the CIA team, creating a security bubble for their people. Everyone on David’s team had their weapons in hand, fingers curled around the triggers. One wrong move, one hint of subterfuge, or an attack—

His gaze kept dragging to Kris, no matter how he tried to look away. Kris, speaking fluent Dari and connecting with Khan in all the right ways, as courteous and respectful as the suavest socialite in Benghazi or Beirut or Cairo. He knew the rhythms of the people, that was obvious. He knew how to move and breathe with Islam, how to live in the religion in a way that David only barely remembered. Kris had spoken Arabic to David like it sounded in David’s dreams, his earliest memories. David had thought he’d covered his accent, had made it purposefully bland, purposefully Gulf with faint hints of Egyptian. He'd thought wrong, if Kris could uncover him so completely from their first hello.