“Open it.”
Eddie, biomask on, reached for the tarnished handle. Inside were racks of empty test tubes, empty vacuum jars. Both other fridges were empty.
Joe frowned. “That clerk said they had oil drums, made ’em into bombs.”
There was a long wooden worktable, upon which a thick green ledger sat, except, when Joe opened it, it did not show rows of figures, but diagrams of oil drum bombs.
“Where are those oil drums now? What’s in ’em?”
“Maybe those prisoners will tell us, although they don’t exactly look like scientists. More like the dropouts hanging near the Taco Bell by my house, sniffing glue.”
But then came — after months of frustration — one of those dumb luck moments that happen. Admiral Yamamoto’s plane gets shot down after Americans break the Japanese war code. A Union soldier in the Civil War finds a discarded cigar box containing General Lee’s secret orders, and the North wins the battle of Antietam. Two U.S. majors in Afghanistan find a ledger in an old desk. Flipping pages, they see lists of chemicals in English.
Methylphosphonyl difluoride.
Isopropyl alcohol.
Isopropylamine.
Eddie looked at Joe. “Oh no.”
To bioexperts, those three chemicals were a signature.
Joe saw, in his head, aerial photos of the Kurdish city of Halabja, with bodies, about five thousand of them, dead in streets, squares, alleys, stadiums. Bloody Friday, the locals still called it. Nineteen eighty-eight, 150 miles north of Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein’s gas shells rained down on the civilian population. Ten thousand injured. And thousands more to die in the coming days from vomiting and diarrhea, shortness of breath, convulsions, paralysis, from a gas that had been developed originally as a German pesticide.
“Sarin,” said Joe.
It was three hundred times more toxic than cyanide. In even a mild form, released by terrorists in the Tokyo subway, it killed fourteen commuters in 1995. It was possibly the deadliest chemical weapon in existence, and Joe, staring at the ledger, belly hollow, said, “What else is in that book?”
The next page was about expenses, not sarin. Rice cost. Cheese cost, the Yemeni-born Marine translator said.
“One book for everything. Keep turning.”
“Whoa, call the porno squad,” said Eddie. “But tear out that top shot. Interesting position! Next!”
Next page showed a diagram of a big circle with jagged lines around it, maybe mountains, and arrows pointing from left to right, and little x’s in the circle, and little y’s inside the jagged lines. Men? Tents? Trucks? Planes?
“Who the hell is that?” Joe said at the next page.
This time they were eyeing four photos of a swarthy, handsome, dark-haired and uniformed U.S. Army corporal, and Arabic writing underneath. In two shots, the corporal stood before a small, neat, clapboard home, with Mideastern-looking parents, and a younger boy who looked like him, brother probably. The proud soldier back home.
In the next shot he was in Afghanistan, judging from the dun-colored desert and the rows of trucks in the rear.
Joe asked the translator, “What does the writing say?”
“It’s his name. Rana Amir Khan.”
“Why is he in this book?” said Eddie.
“I’m calling the director,” said Joe.
Joe went out on deck, and powered up the sat phone. Sometimes the gizmos worked like magic. Sometimes, in seconds, your voice bounced off a sat and came down in Washington, and when you talked to the director’s secretary, her precancerous smoker’s voice came through as well as if she stood a foot away, shouting into a megaphone.
“The director is in a meeting, Major.”
“Get him out, now.”
Rana Amir Khan turned out to be, records said, the oldest son of Pakistani immigrants living in Mankato, Minnesota, Joe knew by the time he was back in Kandahar. Rana had graduated with straight B’s from high school, then joined the Army Reserve, and was almost immediately sent overseas. When his tour was up, he was sent there again.
Under “religion” in his application, he’d checked “Moslem.”
“Plenty of fine U.S. soldiers are Moslems,” Eddie said.
“Their pictures are not in the ledger,” Joe replied.
They left the ship/lab in flames and brought back the prisoners. By the time they reached Kandahar, the director was back on the line, having read the riot act to his contacts at the National Security Agency. Emergency search warrants had been acquired. Army investigators headed toward Corporal Rana’s parents’ home, and were trying to locate Rana through the computer systems. It should have been simple.
“There seems to be a snag,” the director said.
That night the prisoners confirmed that whatever had been manufactured on the ship had been trucked off. Neither man knew the destination. They’d not talked originally to the Yemeni translator, they said, not because they were uncooperative, but because they couldn’t understand his accent and they were terrified of being shot.
“We loaded oil drums,” they told interrogators. “Then the Pakistani doctor went home. We were told to keep people away until someone came for us. That was two weeks ago.”
At midnight the director forwarded to Joe a disturbing series of e-mails from Corporal Rana Amir Khan to a sister, the early ones, from the beginning of his deployment, happy and chatty, although complaining about being sent overseas, instead of attending college, the reason he’d joined the Reserves. Then, over time, the cheery quality degenerated. It started when other men in his platoon nicknamed Rana “Raghead.”
“I laugh with them, but it infuriates me,” the corporal wrote. “I’m as good an American as they are. I do not think they are really joking.”
Months later, with the teasing worse, Rana Khan learned that his best friend was being discharged twenty-four hours before he would have been eligible for college tuition aid.
“The Army did this on purpose,” Rana wrote. “They don’t mind getting us killed. But they mind paying our tuition if we don’t get killed. I think those bean counters prefer us to die, to save a few bucks.”
He grew more bitter. Days turned to months. Rana felt trapped. He stopped referring to other soldiers as friends. He turned to religion for solace, quoting the Koran, but stopped going to the Army imam, as his hatred grew overt. By 2012, when the news broke that several Marines had burned Korans, and that a staff sergeant named Robert Bale had massacred seventeen innocent civilians, half of them children, in a small village near Rana’s base, the e-mails were unrecognizable as belonging to the same man who’d typed messages two years before.
“Afghanistan is hell and we are the demons,” his last e-mail said two months ago. “I won’t be writing for a while. I’m on a special mission. Don’t worry. Much love.”