The Faithful Spy jw-1

  The Faithful Spy

  ( John Wells - 1 )

  Alex Berenson

  The Faithful Spy

  For the 1–5 Cav and the rest of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces serving with valor in a complex world

  — and in honor of Fakher Haider, who died for the truth

  God is on the side with the best artillery.

  Napoleon

  PROLOGUE

  Fall 2001

  Shamali Plain, north of Kabul, Afghanistan

  JOHN WELLS TIPPED his head to the sky, searching for a pair of F-15s circling slowly above in the darkness. Even during the day the American jets were difficult to spot. Now, with the sun hidden behind the mountains, they were all but invisible. Wells could only hope their pilots hadn’t seen him either, for the bombs on their wings could obliterate him and his men in an instant.

  From the cockpits of those jets, the war looked like a video game, Wells thought. Little gray men ran silently across computer screens an inch at a time until bombs landed with white blasts. The reality on the ground was messier, bones and blood replacing pixels. Wells’s mind slid to a Sunday morning many years before, his dad, a surgeon, the best cutter in western Montana, walking into the kitchen after a night in the operating room, washing his hands compulsively in the sink.

  “What happened, Dad?” Wells had said that morning. “Was it bad?”

  He was ten, old enough to know that he wasn’t supposed to ask those questions, but curiosity overcame him. Herbert turned off the sink and dried his hands, poured himself a cup of coffee, and fixed Wells with his weary blue eyes. Wells was about to apologize for overstepping his bounds when his father finally spoke, the answer not what Wells expected.

  “Everything depends which side of the shotgun you’re on,” Herbert said. And sipped his coffee, as if daring his son to press him further. Wells hadn’t understood then, but he did now. Truer words had never been said. He wondered what his father, two years gone, would think of the man he’d become. He had just started down his path when Herbert had passed on, and if his dad had had any thoughts on the matter he’d kept them to himself.

  “You’ve got the hands to be a surgeon, John,” Herbert said once when Wells was in college, but when Wells didn’t respond Herbert dropped the subject. His dad always told him that he’d have to make his own path, that the world was no place for weaklings. Wells supposed he’d learned that lesson too well. A killer, not a doctor, aiming to make wounds no surgeon could undo. Yet somehow he thought that Herbert would understand the need for men like him. Hoped, anyway.

  WELLS GAVE UP looking for the jets but kept his eyes raised. In this land without electricity the stars and moon glowed with a brightness he had grown to love. He silently named all the constellations he could remember, until a blast of wind filled his eyes with dust and pulled his attention to earth.

  Ahmed, his lieutenant, stepped across the firepit and stood beside him. “Cold,” Ahmed said quietly in Arabic.

  “Nam.” Yes.

  The wind had worsened by the day, an icy breeze sweeping down from the north with the promise of the bitter winter to come. Tonight the gusts were especially strong, kicking up ash from the fire Wells and his men had built, mocking their efforts to stay warm. Wells cinched his blanket around his shoulders and stepped closer to the men huddled around the low fire. He would have liked a stronger flame, but he could not risk the attention of the jets.

  “It will be a long winter.”

  “Yes,” Wells said.

  “Or perhaps a short one.” A grim smile crossed Ahmed’s face. “Perhaps we will be in paradise before spring.”

  “Maybe the sheikh will send us all on vacation,” Wells said, indulging himself in a rare joke. “Or a hajj,” the pilgrimage to Mecca that every devout Muslim was supposed to make at least once.

  At the mention of the hajj the sneer disappeared from Ahmed’s lips. “Inshallah, Jalal,” he said reverently. If God wills.

  “Inshallah,” Wells said. The Taliban and Qaeda guerrillas called him Jalal. He had taken the name years earlier, after he became the first westerner to graduate from the Qaeda camps near Kandahar. Fewer than a dozen men knew his real name. A few others called him Ameriki, the American, but not many would do so to his face. Many of the younger recruits, in fact, didn’t know he was American at all.

  And why would they? Wells asked himself. After years fighting jihad in Afghanistan and Chechnya, he spoke perfect Arabic and Pashtun. His beard was long, his hands callused. He rode a horse almost as well as the natives — no outsider could truly ride like an Afghan — and he played buzkashi, the rough polo game they loved, as hard as they did. He prayed with them. He had proven that he belonged here, with these men.

  Or so Wells hoped. What bin Laden and the other senior Qaeda leaders really thought of him he did not know. He was not sure he ever would. Especially now, with his country at war with theirs. He could not truly prove himself except by dying for them, and that he did not plan to do.

  Wells shivered again, from the inside this time. Enough second-guessing. He looked at his six men, their AKs slung over their shoulders, talking quietly in the darkness. Three were Afghan, three Arab; the pressure of war had brought the Taliban and Qaeda closer than ever before. Usually, they were chatty and loud, born storytellers. But Wells was not a talker on missions, and his soldiers respected that. They were friendly enough, and battle-hardened, and they followed his orders quickly and without question. A commander couldn’t ask for more. What would happen to them tonight was unfortunate, worse than unfortunate, but it couldn’t be helped.

  To the south, a bright flash lit up the night. Then another, and another.

  “They’ve started again,” Ahmed said. The Americans were bombing Kabul, the Afghan capital, thirty miles south. So far, they had ignored the Shamali Plain, the flat ground north of Kabul where the Taliban faced the Northern Alliance — the rebel Afghan army that since September 11 had become America’s new best friend.

  Wells and his men had camped in a nameless village, really just a couple of huts, on a ridge overlooking the plain. They were protected by mountains to the north and west, and they had ridden horses in rather than driving the Toyota pickups favored by the Taliban. No one would bother them up here, and they could easily watch the plain below. And Wells had another reason for choosing this place, one he had not shared with his men. With any luck, there would be an American Special Forces unit in the next village north.

  “Harder tonight,” Ahmed said, as the flashes continued.

  “Nam.” Yes. Much harder. After a month of shadowboxing, the United States had opened up on Kabul. A bad sign for the Taliban, already reeling from the collapse of its defenses in the north. Supposedly impenetrable cities had fallen after a few days of American bombing.

  But tonight the Taliban had a surprise for the Northern Alliance. Wells looked south, where a rutted road rose out of Kabul and onto the plain. There they were. Headlights, streaming north. A dozen vehicles in close convoy, a break, and a dozen more. Pickups with mounted.50-caliber machine guns in their beds. Five-ton troop transports holding twenty soldiers each. The moon rose in the sky and the headlights kept coming. Another dozen, and another. The Taliban were grouping to attack the Northern Alliance front line.

  The trucks cut their lights as they approached the line. Wells pulled out his night-vision binoculars — his only luxury, taken off an unlucky Russian major in Chechnya — and scanned the valley below. Hundreds of trucks had massed. Maybe three thousand soldiers in all, Afghan and Arab. Here to defend Kabul from the infidels who wanted to let women show their faces in public. If the Talibs broke through the Northern Alliance’s front line, they might be able to retake muc
h of what they had lost. Wells’s unit had been sent to look for signs that the Alliance had learned of the attack. So far, he saw no defensive preparations.

  Wells handed Ahmed the binoculars. “It is true, then?”

  “Nam. We attack tonight.”

  “Can we win?”

  A month ago Ahmed’s question would have been unthinkable. The American bombing had hurt the confidence of the Taliban more than Wells had realized.

  “Of course,” he said. “Inshallah.” In truth, Wells admired the plan’s boldness. The Taliban would take the fight to the enemy rather than waiting to die in their bunkers. But the massed Talib soldiers would be a ripe target for the jets overhead. To succeed, the Taliban troops would need to punch through the Northern Alliance front lines quickly. Then Talib and Alliance soldiers would be mixed in close combat. The Americans would be unable to bomb without destroying their allies as well as their enemies.

  The Taliban troops below broke into company-sized groups, readying themselves to move forward.

  They never had the chance.

  The bombs began falling almost as soon as the last truck of soldiers reached the front line. Blasts tore through the night, exploding white and red on the plain below Wells like upside-down fireworks. Sharp cracks and long heavy thumps came randomly, three or four in quick succession followed by long pauses. Their force shook the huts where Wells and his men stood, and one blast lit the night with a huge red fireball.

  “Must have been an ammunition truck,” Wells said, half to himself, half to Ahmed.

  THE BARRAGE SEEMED to last for hours, but when it ended and Wells checked his watch he found that only forty minutes had passed. He raised his binoculars to examine the plain below. Fires licked the wrecked bodies of pickups and five-ton trucks. Men lay scattered across the hard ground. The Americans had been waiting all along, and the Talibs had driven into the trap. Which meant that a Special Forces unit was hidden nearby, directing the bombardment. Just as Wells had hoped.

  His men were silent now, shocked by what they had seen. Below, the Talibs were trying to regroup, but now the Northern Alliance had opened up with machine guns and mortars. And another round of bombing was surely coming. Without surprise, the Taliban had no chance.

  Wells lowered the binoculars. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Back?” Ahmed said.

  Wells shook his head and pointed north, over the folds of the ridge. “Americans are up there aiming the bombs.” Ahmed looked surprised but said nothing. Wells had been right before, and in any case as commander he could do what he liked.

  They saddled up and rode north in the darkness. Unlike the spectacular mountains of northern Afghanistan, the Shamali ridge was stunted and uneven, low hills of crumbling stone and dirt. They traveled in single file at a steady trot, led by Hamid, their best horseman. Beneath them the bombs fell again. A few headlights were already moving south toward Kabul, the Taliban’s attack fading before it even began.

  “Slow,” Wells said, as his squad neared the crest of a hill north of their encampment. He was sure the American unit had picked a position similar to the one he had chosen. Wells and his men came over the hill and stopped. Ahead, the ground dipped, then rose again. Wells looked through his binoculars. There they were, a half dozen men standing beside a cluster of mud huts, peering down at the Taliban front lines. They could be villagers, roused by the bombing…but they weren’t. They were American. The proof was in the pickup half-hidden behind a hut.

  The truck meant that the SF guys would have a SAW — a light machine gun — or maybe a.50-caliber, a bigger weapon than anything his men carried. But Wells and his squad would have surprise on their side. Wells waved his men forward, warning them to be quiet. They were excited now, excited at the chance to attack Americans. And Wells, though he hated to admit it, was excited too.

  U.S.S. Starker, Atlantic Ocean

  The ride out had been smooth, but Jennifer Exley felt her stomach clench as the helicopter landed and she stepped onto the gray metal deck of the Starker, fifty miles east of Norfolk, Virginia. In international waters, of course, so its precious cargo would remain outside the jurisdiction of American courts.

  An old navy amphibious assault ship, the Starker was now a brig, a floating jail. Today the vessel held just one prisoner, Tim Keifer, a.k.a. Mohammed Faisal, a twenty-two-year-old American who’d been captured fighting for the Taliban near Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Fighting for the Taliban against the United States. Exley was still trying to get her mind around that one.

  The capture of John Walker Lindh, the other American Taliban, had been broadcast worldwide. But Keifer’s detention had stayed quiet. President Bush had signed an order declaring Keifer an “enemy combatant” and suspending his rights, including his access to American courts. Now Keifer was literally floating in a steel limbo, a place where U.S. laws did not apply. Exley wasn’t sure she liked that decision, but maybe this wasn’t the time to worry about little things like the Bill of Rights. The ship twisted beneath her, and she yelped as she lost her footing on the slick metal deck. Her guide, a friendly young ensign, reached out a hand and steadied her.

  “You okay, Ms. Exley?”

  “Fine.”

  He led her off the deck and down a brightly lit hallway. “Mohammed’s in the hospital,” the sailor said. “We try to be careful, but he keeps having accidents. Banging his head on doors, sh—” He remembered he was talking to a woman and caught himself, she saw. “Stuff like that.”

  How predictable, Exley thought. As long as they didn’t kill him.

  “I suppose the crew would rather just throw him overboard?”

  “We’d draw straws for the chance,” he said brightly. “Here we are.”

  She showed her CIA identification and special navy pass to the two sailors posted outside Keifer’s room. They eyed both carefully, then saluted her. The ensign pulled a thick metal key from his pocket and slid it into the heavy lock on the door. He pushed the door open slowly, and she stepped into the windowless room.

  “Take as much time as you like, ma’am,” the ensign said, closing the door behind her. “Mohammed’s not going anywhere.”

  Keifer lay on a narrow hospital cot, hands and legs shackled to the side of the frame, an intravenous drip flowing into his arm. His beard had been shaved roughly and his hair cropped close. A yellow bruise ringed his left eye. He was skinny and small and looked like a philosophy grad student or something equally useless. He wasn’t much of a flight risk, but just to be sure, a camera in the corner was trained on the bed, and two more sailors stood by the door. Either could have tossed Keifer into the Atlantic with one hand. For one tiny moment Exley felt sorry for him. Then she didn’t.

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Exley wouldn’t have spoken to Keifer. She was a handler, not an interrogator, and the CIA and DIA — the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld’s boys — had grilled Keifer for weeks. But after reading the transcripts of Keifer’s interrogations, Exley and Ellis Shafer, her boss, the section head for the Near East, decided she should talk to Keifer herself.

  Exley decided to be his mother. She was old enough, and he probably hadn’t seen a woman in a while. She walked to the bed and put her hand on his shoulder. His drugged eyes blinked open. He shrank back, his shoulders hunching, then relaxed a little as she smiled at him.

  “Tim. I’m Jen Exley.”

  He blinked and said nothing.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “What does it look like?”

  Unbelievable. This dumb kid still wanted to play tough. All hundred and forty pounds of him. Fortunately, the sodium pentothal and morphine running through his veins had softened him a little. Amnesty International might have objected, but they didn’t get a vote. Exley tried to arrange her face in sympathy rather than the contempt she felt. “Can I sit down?”

  He shrugged, rustling his cuffs against the bed. She pulled over a chair.

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No,
but I can get you one.” A little lie.

  “I want a lawyer,” Keifer said, his voice slurred. He closed his eyes and shook his head, slowly, metronomically, seeming to draw comfort from the motion. “They said no lawyer. I know my rights.”

  You’re gonna have to take that up with somebody a lot more senior than me, Exley thought.

  “I can help you,” she said. “But you have to help me.”

  Again he shook his head, sullenly this time. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me about the other American over there. Not John Walker Lindh. The third guy. The older one.”

  “I told you.”

  She touched his face, moved his head toward her, to give him a look at her blue eyes — her best feature, she’d always been told, even if crow’s-feet had settled around them.

  “Look at me, Tim. You told someone else. Not me.”

  She could see the fight leave his eyes as he, or the drugs in him, decided arguing wasn’t worth the trouble. “They called him Jalal. One or two guys said his real name was John.”

  “John?”

  “Maybe they had him confused with John Walker Lindh. I’m not even sure he was American. I never talked to him.”

  “Not once?” She hoped her voice didn’t reveal her disappointment.

  “No,” Keifer said. He closed his eyes. Again she waited. “The place was big. He was in and out.”

  “He was free to come and go?”

  “Seemed that way.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big guy. Tall. Had a beard like everybody else.”

  “Any distinguishing features?”

  “If there were, I didn’t see any. It wasn’t that kind of camp.”

  She leaned close to him and smiled. His breath smelled rank and acrid at the same time, like a rotten orange. They probably weren’t brushing his teeth much. “Can you remember anything else?”