He picked up the landline and pressed the auto dial for Webb’s house. He was often in his office until the wee hours of the morning, so there was no reason to worry about this raising any real suspicion. And he was well aware that most everyone regarded him as something of an eccentric anyhow — a perception he never hesitated to take advantage of.
Webb answered on the first ring. “Bob?”
“Yeah. What is it, Cletus? Is something wrong?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Webb said. “You haven’t heard any chatter coming out of Afghanistan tonight?”
“I haven’t been listening for any,” Pope said, yawning audibly. “Electronic eavesdropping isn’t exactly in my job description.”
“Well, that’s never stopped you before,” Webb muttered. “Listen, Bob, it sounds like elements of both DEVGRU and SOAR may have just carried out some kind of a joint rescue mission in the Waigal Valley. I’m calling to find out what you might know before I call Shroyer at home. I’ll need to brief him so he can call the president before the president hears about it from someone else.”
“Someone else, as in the NSA?”
“As in anybody, Bob. What can you tell me?”
“Well, Waigal is in the Nuristan Province,” Pope said. “North of Jalalabad. The people there tend to speak mostly Kalasha. I also seem to remember that—”
“Bob, are you telling me you know nothing about this operation — that your people are capable of pulling off an unauthorized rescue mission without anyone knowing anything about it until it’s over?”
In that moment, Pope noticed that he’d forgotten to tear the page from his desk blotter after the change of the month. He began to clear the desk so he could tear the page away without knocking anything over.
“Bob!”
“Yes? Oh — well, sure, it’s possible, Cletus. These people are in operation thousands of miles away. We can’t monitor every single move they make. They are highly trained adults, after all. At some point, we have to trust them to look after themselves… and I did warn you about the Uncertainty Principle. Who contacted you, by the way, the Mideast section chief?”
“No, Bob, it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Webb said. “General Couture called him directly from the ATO.” General Couture was the Supreme Commander of all US forces in Afghanistan. “He was apparently in the middle of his breakfast when he was informed that a clandestine operation had taken place within his theater of operations during the night and without anyone having had the common decency to mention it to him. He’s hopping mad.”
Pope chuckled. “Well, knowing Couture, I can imagine. I’ll look into this, Cletus, and get back to you. How’s that?”
Webb let out a dissatisfied sigh. “That’ll be fine, Bob. Call me the minute you have something you’re willing to share with the rest of us.”
“You bet.” Pope hung up the phone.
Having forgotten about the desk blotter, he stretched and yawned and rocked back in the leather chair, remembering himself as a young man, as a very green operative skylarking with Air America, a covert airlift operation run by SAD for the CIA from 1950 to 1976. It was during the final days of the Vietnam War that Pope had stumbled across his first big chip in the poker game of American intelligence gathering.
He and his CIA copilot were flying a battered C-130 full of top-secret files out of the US Airbase at Bien Hoa bound for the Philippines. They were over the jungle when the aircraft suffered a catastrophic engine failure. To this day, Pope still suspected sabotage, but there would never be any way to know for sure. They went down in the jungle, and the plane was torn to pieces. The copilot was killed, and Pope was left with a broken leg. The plane caught fire, and he barely managed to drag himself clear before it exploded.
There had been no time for a Mayday, and the plane had no transponder, so Pope believed he would either eventually die of exposure there in the jungle or be found and murdered by the Viet Cong operating in that area. When the sun came up the following day, he made himself a crutch from a dead tree limb and hobbled around the burned-out fuselage in a halfhearted attempt to find anything that might be useful to his survival.
All he found was a single diplomatic pouch full of classified documents that had flown from the cargo bay as the fuselage was torn apart. Having nothing better to do, he sat down against a tree and went through the pouch. Within the documents were the names of dozens of American CIA operatives and officers, both in Vietnam and back in the States, who had spent the Vietnam War growing rich off of Air America’s illicit drug trafficking operations.
An A-Team of American Green Berets found him the next day, but they were ambushed by the Viet Cong en route to the extraction zone. When the firefight was over, only Pope and a single Green Beret noncom remained alive. The Green Beret’s name was Master Sergeant Guy Shannon. He carried Pope on his back the last click to the extraction zone, where they were finally lifted from the ground by an Iroquois Huey in a cloud of purple smoke.
Over the next few years, Pope had used the information contained in those classified files to encourage loyal patrons among the CIA’s upper echelon, and over time, these patrons helped him collect the names of vulnerable people working in branches of government outside the CIA as well. By the time his hair finally began to turn gray, almost no one in DC had the courage to refuse him a favor, their natural assumption being that if he was asking them for something, he must have information on them as well.
Pope understood better than anyone that information — not money or guns — was the true source of power in the emerging world, and that information was to be guarded at all costs and never shared… except with a trusted and worthy few.
CHAPTER 33
Steelyard stalked into a room at the back of the hangar where Gil, Trigg, Forogh, and Lt. Commander Perez stood in a semicircle around Naeem, who now sat strapped to a steel armchair with a black bag over his head. The chief dropped his smoldering cigar onto the concrete and stepped on it with the heel of his boot.
“We have to do this fast,” he announced. “The second the Head Shed realizes who this prick is, they’ll send the MPs to take him away from us. Trigg, get me a box of garbage bags and fistful of nylon zip ties. Commander, you probably shouldn’t be here for this.”
Perez took a self-conscious glance at Gil before straightening his posture and putting out his chest. “It’s all right, Chief. I’ll stay.”
“You’re sure, sir? What I’m about to do is against the Geneva Conventions. Getting caught taking part in this type of interrogation could end your career.”
The very faintest of smiles crossed Perez’s face. “I know how much that would break all of your hearts, Chief… but I’ll stay.”
“Very well.” Steelyard gave Gil a nod, signaling for him to remove the black bag from Naeem’s head.
Naeem sat looking up at them, a defiant sneer on his bruised face. “Fuck you!” he said, still lisping because of the missing teeth.
Steelyard looked at Forogh. “Ask him where they took Sandra.”
Speaking in Pashto, Forogh asked Naeem where the American pilot had been taken.
Naeem smirked. “Fuck you.”
Long having recognized Naeem’s particular brand of contempt, Forogh said to him, “You’re Wahhabi, yes?”
Naeem stared back, his eyes glassing over with loathing.
Forogh looked at the others and shook his head. “He’s not going to tell us. He’s a Wahhabi fundamentalist. This is his chance to prove himself to Allah.”