“Get some rest!” Lisa shouted to me. “You’ll need it!”
I thought of our first flight together, from California to Colombia. Things seemed to have somehow come full circle. Once again I lay on a mattress made of scavenged life jackets, and once again my thoughts turned to Sophie’s betrayal.
Eventually, somehow, despite that gut-wrenching roller-coaster feeling, I fell asleep. When I woke we were high above Afghanistan.
Chapter 68
“Buckle up,” Lisa said. She had changed into a desert-camouflage uniform that said MARTINEZ and AIR FORCE. “Apparently the local Taliban have mortars, so ground control are requesting all incoming aircraft perform a tactical descent. Better known to the military cognoscenti as a death spiral.”
We strapped ourselves into uncomfortable metal chairs near one of the tiny portholes. From above, Logistics Staging Area Python, the largest military base in Afghanistan, looked like a child’s sandbox full of thousands of military toys. Dozens of helicopters littered the runways; fighter jets, cargo planes, and Predator drones perched in huge igloo-like hangars; rows of gunboats sat inexplicably on arid desert.
I grabbed the bare metal arms of my seat tightly as the Antonov nosed into what felt like a plummeting dive, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane dragged back to level only just in time to land, and we braked so hard that the samovar spilled tea over the barren metal hold.
“Welcome to The Stan,” Lisa said.
“Did you serve here?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Came here once on DEA work. Doesn’t matter. Big bases are pretty much all the same.”
“Like five-star hotels.”
She snorted. “Not exactly.”
I reached down to touch the faux ID card hanging from a lanyard on my chest, as if it was some kind of voodoo-magic mojo. Only it stood between me and instant imprisonment. Lisa got up to work the ramp. Jesse grinned at me, obviously surfing on the same wave of adrenalin that had swamped my mind.
“Well, Maverick,” he said, “once again, here we are.”
“I blame you.”
He nodded complacently. “You always do.”
Sunlight spilled into the hold. The landscape outside was as flat as a pounded pancake, baked mud and gravel and pavement, but with more trees than I had expected. Everything was pale, low-contrast, all colour drained away by the scorching sun. War-torn Afghanistan. If two weeks earlier I had been asked to make a list of all the places I never expected to find myself, it would have been way off the top of the page.
We walked down the ramp to the arrival tent, an forty-foot-square canvas edifice surrounded by sandbags, covered by camouflage netting, and full of bored-looking soldiers in folding chairs. I tried not to betray my tension as Lisa strutted up to the arrivals desk, our order papers in one hand, her ID card in the other. If things were going to go terribly wrong they would start right here and now. But according to LoTek, he had spent years hacking into the US military, he had full access to their ID systems; and according to Lisa, on a base as big as LSA Python, you were who your ID card said you were.
They were both right. As far as the soldiers knew, we were worthy of no particular attention: an Air Force lieutenant and two civilian contractors flown in by one of the private air-cargo companies that serviced the base, just three of the hundreds of people who arrived and departed every day. I started to breathe easier. After all the tension and buildup, this felt like a banal anticlimax. I devoutly hoped it stayed that way.
“OK,” Lisa said to Jesse, after we exited the tent again, “you got more prep to do than us. You know where you’re going? And where to turn up?”
He nodded casually.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” He looked at me. “Later.”
Our customary unceremonious farewell. I nodded. “Later.”
“C’mon,” Lisa said to me as he walked away, “Let’s hit the DFAC. If you’re going to do some kind of insane shit, at least do it with some food in your belly, I always say.”
“DFAC?”
“Dining Facility. Nearest one’s just down Pennsylvania Avenue.” She indicated a main road not far away, thick with Humvees, minibuses, weird armoured military vehicles adorned with.50 caliber machine guns, and huge construction vehicles carrying entire shipping containers with their scorpion-like arm. “Walking distance.”
By which she meant more than a mile. We passed vast segmented tents that looked like giant caterpillars, and whole suburbs of trailers surrounded by sandbags and walled by intermittent rows of concrete barriers. There were soldiers everywhere, on foot or waiting at bus stops. Most carried M-16s and wore helmet and armour despite the blistering sun. None paid us any attention.
The DFAC was a huge cafeteria tent in which sour-looking Sri Lankans served surprisingly good food to anyone with an ID card. I ate scrambled eggs and Frosted Flakes, feeling like a Cold War mole behind American lines, like at any moment someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me the game was up. Afterwards we walked to a shipping container transformed into a Starbucks clone named Green Beans, presumably because the day had henceforth been insufficiently surreal, and drank lattes. Only then did Lisa look at her watch and pronounce our mission ready to begin.
“You sure?” I asked sarcastically. “You don’t want to go shopping at the PX first?”
She gave me a look. “Let’s get going.”
Most people weren’t supposed to know that LSA Python numbered among its features a secret CIA prison. During the Bush administration it had been used to hold and interrogate victims of extraordinary rendition. It had been empty since, until Sophie’s arrest.
Chapter 69
The prison was surrounded by two massive, concentric 20-foot-high segmented concrete walls topped by concertina wire. Two sandbagged gun emplacements watched over its sole entrance. We took up positions on its opposite site, a safe distance away, near a field full of Porta-Potties lined up in neat rows, orienting ourselves by the GPS on the Android phones we had been given in Dubai. It was 10:20 AM. Four minutes to go before the roller coaster that my life had become finally began to plummet straight downwards. Trust Jesse and LoTek to pick a start time that looked like a power of two. I felt dizzy, my muscles twitched, my blood felt slow and thick in my veins. I forced myself to breathe deeply and try to relax.
A faint whine tickled at our eardrums. First one, then another, and then more, raking at our auditory nerves like a distant hornet’s nest, a dissonant and fluctuating chord. An all too familiar sound.
The whining drone that appeared low in the sky was crude and slow compared to the Russians’, and wobbled a little in the desert wind. It flew so low that we saw it only seconds before it dove down to the prison and exploded.
The flash was so bright I saw spots. Then, a fraction of a second later, the dense sound of the explosion rippled through the air: crump! We felt it more than heard it, and I shuddered involuntarily at this sudden violation of the unwritten contract that the fabric of the world must remain steady and inviolate.
Seconds later another drone appeared, plummeted, vanished into a flower of flame with another crump!, this one a little louder, followed by a distant cacophony of shouts. They in turn were drowned out by a howling siren.
We were far away from any soldiers, but we saw them react to the siren: in the distance, in every direction, they ran for safety, stopped their Humvees in the middle of the street and jumped out to rush for cover. The standard red-alert protocol for Taliban mortar attacks. We were counting on it.
The third drone opened up a huge hole in the outer wall. When the dust began to clear we could see, through the shimmering heat, the matching hole in the inner wall, and the featureless concrete block that was the prison proper. A crater full of zigzagging hairline fractures had opened in its side, but its integrity had not yet been compromised.