“I warn you, this is graphic as hell.” Hagen pressed Play.
The first thing to appear on the screen was the terrified visage of Warrant Officer Sandra Brux. The shot pulled back to reveal that she was once again tied completely naked to a bed.
“Please don’t do this,” she said, begging someone off camera.
The shot panned around to show a smiling Aasif Kohistani sitting in a chair. “Greetings,” he said in English, “and may the blessings of Allah be upon you. American military forces have surrounded the Panjshir Valley, cutting us off from the outside world in an attempt to starve our women and children. This will not be tolerated.” He signaled the cameraman to train the camera on Sandra.
Kohistani spoke to her off camera. “Sandra, tell your president what you want him to do.”
Sandra was sobbing with fear and shame, unable to look at the lens as she spoke. “I want him to pull our troops back.”
“Why?”
“Because if he doesn’t, you’re—” She began to weep.
“Tell him!” Kohistani snapped.
“Because you’re going to cut off my fingers and toes.”
“And then what?”
“My feet and hands,” she said, sobbing even harder.
Kohistani said something in Pashto, and Ramesh stepped into the shot holding what looked like a pair of aviation snips. He took hold of Sandra’s left wrist.
“No!” Sandra screamed, fighting in vain against the leather straps they had used to secure her to the wooden frame of the bed. She balled her hand into a tight fist, but Ramesh easily pried her ring finger free and cut it off with the sheet-metal cutters. She shrieked in pain and horror as the blood began to gush from the stump of the knuckle.
Ramesh cut her hand loose from the strap and held it up to the camera so that it was plain to see the amputation had been not faked. He held up the severed finger in his other hand.
Sandra jerked her hand from his grasp and put the knuckle into her mouth, attempting to stanch the blood. A moment later, she turned to lean over the edge of the bed and began to vomit. The camera swung back around to Kohistani. He was no longer smiling.
“You did this, Mr. President, you and no one else! Pull your troops back, or every day this village remains surrounded, your woman will lose a finger. Do not attempt a rescue, or she will be killed instantly. You will wait patiently for our demands — or she will die!”
The shot then swung back around to show Sandra lying on the bed sobbing with her fist balled up tight against her breast, blood covering her chest and belly. The video came to an end and froze.
Hagen closed the laptop.
Webb plucked the earphones from his ears and moved back around to his side of the table, visibly shaken. “Has the president seen this?”
“Yes,” Hagen said. “He’s called a meeting for this afternoon with your boss and the Joint Chiefs.”
“He’s looking for advice?”
Hagen shook his head. “He’s already ordered our troops pulled completely away from the Panjshir Valley. The meeting is to ensure that no one inside of SOG acts without orders this time. He doesn’t want anyone to do anything to put Warrant Officer Brux into any greater danger than she’s already in.”
“Okay,” Webb said. “So what do you want from me? Shroyer isn’t going to have any trouble going along with that program.”
“I realize that,” Hagen said. “What I was hoping was that the two of us might be able to continue looking at the bigger picture.”
A shadow crossed Webb’s brow. “What bigger picture?”
“Well, it’s obvious what the HIK is looking to achieve here,” Hagen said. “They’re using Sandra to make the US look weak — and it’s going to work.”
“Of course they are,” Webb said, hunching his shoulders and letting them fall. “Have you told the president that?”
“Certainly, I’ve told him,” Hagen replied, “but… well… this has to stay between the two of us.”
“Okay.”
“The president’s having a very human reaction to this crisis. You might even say it’s traumatized him… he’s afraid it’s going to cost him the presidency.”
Webb sat back in the chair. “You call that a human reaction?”
Hagen seemed not to have heard him. “He’s been okay the past couple of weeks. The uproar over the rape video was pretty rough on him, but after he went on television to report that we’d captured the Taliban rapist, things began to settle down. This video, however, is going to have an even deeper impact than the first, and there’s virtually no way for us to get out in front of it. The president ordered that valley surrounded, and Sandra has been mutilated as a direct result of that order… at least that’s how the people are going to see it.”
“I’m sorry,” Webb said, now thinking Hagen must be some kind of a cold-blooded reptile, “but I don’t see how any of this involves you and me in any sort of private manner. This crisis is going to be handled at a higher pay grade than yours or mine.”
“I agree,” Hagen said, taking a drink from his latte. “But the president needs to change his thinking, and I can only influence him so far. If you can influence Shroyer to offer him the same advice that I’m offering him, we might be able to change his mind. I’m not kidding myself about our chances, but it’s worth a try.”
Webb was hard-pressed to hide his irritation. “What advice?”
“Full-scale assault into the Panjshir Valley. This is the perfect opportunity for us to annihilate hundreds of HIK fighters. They’ve made a grave tactical error in their reach for a strategic advantage here.”
“Yeah, well, Sandra’s presence in that valley fairly well trumps the error.”
“Only if we allow it to,” Hagen said, pressing hard now. “You have to think about this mathematically, Cletus. Sandra’s dead anyway. You know it, I know it — hell, even she knows it! Why let it be a total loss? If she has to die, why not let it be during a rescue attempt? And why not use that rescue attempt as an excuse to wipe out as many of the enemy as we possibly can? These are the crazy lunatics who are likely to take over Afghanistan after we leave. We can’t allow our humanity to cause us to lose sight of the bigger picture here.”
“What the hell is this bigger picture you keep talking about?”
“It’s very simple,” Hagen said. “If we smash that valley flat — along with everyone and everything in it — this will be the last time we ever have to worry about these crazy people using one of our women to humiliate the United States.”
CHAPTER 39
The mood around the base was pretty somber. News of Sandra’s finger amputation and the subsequent troop pullout from the Panjshir Valley had been a double whammy to most everyone’s moral. At least with Bazarak surrounded they had felt like something was being done for Sandra. Now, though, the overwhelming feeling was that she had been left behind, and that didn’t sit well with any of the American forces based in the Afghan Theater of Operations, much less her fellow Night Stalker pilots, the Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs — a number of whom had risked lengthy prison terms in the unauthorized rescue attempt.
There was little or no talk about another unauthorized mission. What little talk there was was nothing more than blowing off steam, and none of it took place in front of the officer corps. The president himself had made it very clear through General Couture that any unauthorized action of any kind would be punished to the full extent of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no one wanted to risk being charged with entering into the planning stages of such a mission.