Page 54 of Whisper

The war accelerated, moving at breakneck pace.

High on adrenaline after the first strike, Kris and David stayed up all night long, sitting in front of a small bonfire behind the control tower, talking down the shakes in their hands. David spoke softly as the fire burned low and the coals glowed, casting the hollows of his face into shadow.

“I’ve lost count of how many children’s bones I’ve seen. You’d think that would be something you’d remember. But… there are places in this world where hearts don’t beat. Where humanity is just… gone. I thought I’d never see that kind of hate again. But now, with New York, and here… It’s all coming back, isn’t it?”

Kris took his hand, lacing their fingers together. Side by side, they watched the coals turn to ash, hands clasped, heads resting against each other.

Should he ask? Should he squeeze David’s hand and ask what that was before, when they were rubbing camo paint over each other’s faces? What it meant that David slept with him every night, drawing him close and into his arms? What it meant that they were never far from each other anymore, always a hand’s reach away?

Would asking end it all?

Inertia was a powerful force. Kris didn’t want it to end. The hand-holding, the surrender into David’s arms, the warm breath on the back of his neck. Maybe it was just Afghanistan, the war, the cold. Maybe they were clinging to each other because they were alone in this craziness, untethered from reality, trying to navigate warlords and terrorists and battle plans from caves and concrete bunkers via a scratchy radio and a homemade satellite dish, as snow fell and froze their fingers and toes. Maybe nothing would leave the valley.

He should keep his mouth shut and soak it in, just be glad for the human connection. For the beating heart he’d found on the surface of Afghanistan, the dark side of the moon.

General Khan was overjoyed with the first laser-targeted strike. He arrived at dawn, just after prayers, effusive in his praise for both Kris and David. “We must have more, many more, of these strikes.”

Every day, Kris and David worked with the Shura Nazar to scout targets from Bagram’s control tower. At night, they slipped out under cover and crept close to the Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, painting each with lasers until Navy or Marine Corps fighter jets arrived and obliterated them in fury.

“They are no longer crowing about how weak the Americans are, how pitiful your attack is.” Khan held Kris’s hand, grinning ear to ear, after days of constant strikes around the airfield. “We will use Bagram as a secondary headquarters when we break through the Shomali.”

In the north, the Taliban tightened their grip on Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloquan. From the hills overlooking the two cities, they began shelling the outlying villages, civilians who supported Khan and the Shura Nazar, and who had escaped the wrath of the Taliban’s chokehold. General Hajimullah struggled to save his people and keep the pressure on the Taliban.

“We must have these bombs in the north,” Khan said one morning. “And more help. We must have more CIA assistance,Gul Bahar.”

After a week straight of clearing Taliban out from around Bagram, George ordered him and David to meet up with Hajimullah outside Mazar-e-Sharif.

“Kris, Langley has sent a second team for Mazar. They’re inserting tonight, and I want you and Haddad to show them the ropes. How to work with Hajimullah. The intricacies of the front line. Get up there, ASAP.”

Mazar-e-Sharif hugged a valley in between a gorge of mountains. The Taliban controlled a majority of the highlands and the city itself, and Hajimullah’s men were pushed back into the valley below, stuck like fish in a shooting barrel. They were a ragged army; most soldiers didn’t have socks or gloves, but they still fought in the snow as winter closed over Afghanistan.

Hajimullah’s men also fought on horseback. Ethnically Uzbeki, his men had been raised on horseback, like their Genghis Khan and their Mongol ancestors.

When the second CIA team scampered off their helicopter out of Uzbekistan, General Hajimullah had six Afghan horses waiting for them.

Afghan men were smaller than most Americans. Famine, lack of quality nutrition, not enough protein, and a host of other maladies had left the Afghan population more diminutive, leaner. Afghan horses, likewise, were smaller, more compact.

Smaller Afghans and smaller horses meant smaller saddles, made of wood and stiff leather and right angles. Kris fit easily into his, and he copied Hajimullah’s standing riding style, keeping out of the saddle as much as he could.

The rest of the CIA team, by the end of the day’s ride to Hajimullah’s base camp, were nursing sore asses and bleeding thighs, skin rubbed raw from squeezing into the too-small saddles. David, too, limped when they arrived.

Hajimullah enjoyed the Americans’ discomfort like he’d feasted on fine Russian caviar. He laughed, barrel chest shaking, roars echoing off the mountains ringing his camp. “You Americans,” he cried. “So soft. If you stay here for one week, I will make Afghans out of you.”

With the promise of covering fire from the US fighter jets and a significant bombing campaign guided in by Kris and David, Hajimullah and his deputies formed a plan to capture Mazar-e-Sharif and cut off all Taliban escape attempts. The US would obliterate the Taliban in the hills, paving the way for the Shura Nazar to enter the city without fear of strikes from above.

Two days later, David and Kris huddled on a flinty shale slope in the White Mountains, casting lasers at Taliban targets pinpointed on maps and GPS. The Taliban had concentrated their forces, building into the mountain in the hope that they would be safe, shielded by the rocks.

They were so very, very wrong.

Kris relayed his conversation with an American B-2 stealth bomber coming in from the south at high altitude, flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. He could just make out the white contrails streaking the very top of the cornsilk sky, as if dragging stardust down from space. “Time to target, two minutes.” Everyone on the radio net heard him.

Far above in the bomber, someone was getting ready to deploy the Daisy Cutter. Non-nuclear and designed to instantly clear a landing zone in Vietnam, the bomb had found a second purpose destroying caves, bunkers, and deeply buried fighters in combat zones around the world.

“Weapon away!” Kris called.

Across the valley, the position he and David had painted disintegrated, disappearing in silence into a mushroom cloud that shot higher than the ice-covered peaks. A second later, aboomshook the earth, a thunderclap that rumbled Kris’s organs and pushed him physically down the mountain. He clung to David, both of them sliding on shale as the ground trembled and quaked.

“Second target commencing.” David shifted the laser to the next Taliban position as the first cloud continued to grow. Everything that had existed where the bomb landed—Taliban, weapons, tanks—was dust, blowing away.