Page 69 of Whisper

As the sun dipped beyond the western peaks, flames rose from the mountains, bomb after bomb after bomb exploding in the caves of Tora Bora.

Late at night, David heard Bin Laden’s voice again. Bin Laden sounded tired, worn down. Weak.

He radioed Kris at base. “Are you hearing this?”

“I am.”

Bin Laden, his voice weary, spoke slowly. “My brothers, our prayers were not answered. Thetakfiriapostates did not come to our aid, and instead sided with the infidels. They will pay for their crimes against the faith, my brothers. We will rise again, after this battle.” Bin Laden broke off, and static squealed, wailed. “My brothers, I am sorry for leading you into the mountains.”

They kept bombing all night long, and all the next day.

The day after, the radio sounded again with Bin Laden’s voice, but this time, it was a prerecorded sermon, extolling the wickedness of America and proclaiming a fatwa against the Great Satan. It was the sermon he’d used when he had first declared war on the United States, on Friday, August 23, 1996, and when the collision course between Osama Bin Laden, David Haddad, and Kris Caldera had begun.

In the following days, disheartened and gravely wounded al-Qaeda fighters were captured fleeing Tora Bora. Some barely clung to life, nursing ragged field amputations that had long gone septic. Others cursed Bin Laden with every breath, accusing him of abandoning them and the battle. Some fighters, when surrounded by Majid’s or Shirzai’s soldiers, or Palmer and his men, would pull a grenade from beneath their robes and detonate it against their chest, screaming“Allahu Akbar!”with their last breath. David was spattered in blood and brains and splinters of bone, digging into his frostbitten cheeks, the exposed skin on his arms.

By December 17, 2001, the battle was over.

Over a thousand fighters had gone into the mountains with Bin Laden. Four hundred bodies had been recovered, and fifty-five prisoners were taken, a mixture of surrenders and the capture of those too wounded to flee. Hundreds had escaped, vanishing, melting away into the mountains, into the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And Bin Laden wasgone.

David came down from the mountains on December 20, with Ryan, Palmer, and the rest of his team. Through it all, they hadn’t lost a man, but Kris had relayed the murder of a CIA officer in the north of Afghanistan while they were in the mountains.

Majid’s fighters had walked away as soon as the al-Qaeda fighters had, and Palmer had been the first to question whether they’d been al-Qaeda’s allies all along. Had they just been slowing the Americans down? Redirecting them in the wildness of Tora Bora, a mountain range so hopelessly complex, they never would have managed without guides?

Ryan was sullen the entire journey down, through the frigid ranges back to Milawa, and then in the bouncing, rusted-out jeep Shirzai’s men sent. They drove down the one road in Tora Bora, the road from Milawa camp to Jalalabad that Bin Laden had built in the early ’90s, in silence.

At the end of the road, waiting outside of their shattered base camp, was Kris.

For David, the world finally began to spin again.

Chapter 12

Kabul, Afghanistan

December 23, 2001

“To the finest men I have ever served with.”

George raised a bottle of Russian Baltika beer, Number 7, and held it high. “I am honored by every single thing you gentlemen did. Every moment you spent here on the ground. Every ounce of blood, sweat, and determination you gave. Everything you did was heroes’ work.” He pumped his bottle as his chin wavered. “We will get him. I swear it. We will get Bin Laden. Not today. But we will.”

In the corner of the command center at the CIA station in Kabul, in the same old Taliban guesthouse, Ryan turned away, hiding his face in the shadows. Kris watched him blink fast, wipe his nose. Sniff hard as his jaw muscles clenched and held.

At Kris’s side, David leaned into him, their bodies touching from shoulders to ankles. One of David’s arms wound around Kris, his hand disappearing beneath Kris’s sweater, palm against the skin at the small of his back. His thumb ghosted over the baby-fine hairs on Kris’s skin, hairs he hadn’t known he had until David strummed them, made him shiver. Made his bones melt.

He’d wanted to fling himself into David’s arms when he’d seen their jeep bounce down the mountain, sliding and shaking on flinty shale and the jeep’s broken shocks. They were more mud monsters and frozen swamp creatures than men when they’d arrived, covered in dirt like they’d burrowed through the mountain. David’s burnished skin, rich like bronze, had seemed ghostly, a deathly pale, and Kris had wiped his hand down David’s cheek, ostensibly to clean the dust away. He’d just wanted to feel David’s warmth, his presence, to know that he was alive.

Beneath his palm, David had trembled, a grenade shivering before it exploded. He hadn’t said anything, but Kris saw the supernovas in his gaze, the burn of his soul blasting through the tattered remnants of his control.

David, like Ryan, like Palmer, like the rest of them, had come back defeated. Wounded. Empty.

Jim had arranged for transport straight back to Kabul, from their base camp through Jalalabad and back though Nangarhar Province. In the weeks they’d been in the mountains, Jalalabad had turned from a war-ravaged ghost town to a vibrant trading city, full of honking cars, rickshaws, bicycles, and people moving in every direction. After staring at the bleak moonscape of Tora Bora, the explosion of life, of color, of humanity, was almost too overwhelming. David had hidden his face, tucking his head sideways against Kris’s shoulder, and they’d hidden the clasp of their hands between their thighs for the entire drive.

Kabul had changed as well. As vibrant as Jalalabad had become, Kabul was a hundred timesmore. More people, more color, more traffic, more horns, more life. More women in hijab, fewer burqas. More children playing games and flying kites. The movie theater, shuttered under the Taliban, had reopened, and lines stretched for hours.

George had met them at the CIA station and had promptly ordered Palmer and his men to continue driving to Bagram, to the new Army’s Unified Command Center. They needed to be debriefed and seen by medical, and the Army insisted on doing it their way. Kris almost hadn’t let go of David, and their fingers had clung to each other until their arms would have pulled apart if they’d held on any longer.

“Don’t worry, Kris,” George had murmured. “They’re coming back. We’ve got a new mission coming up.”