Authors: David DeBatto
“A canyon I know in the Gila Wilderness,” Truitt said. “Near Silver City. I was going to surprise her.”
“Does she have any friends she might have contacted?”
“I just spoke to both of them and they haven’t heard from her,” Truitt said. “Her boss from the bar and a woman from church.”
“Did she have any enemies I should know about?” DeLuca asked.
“Why?” the other man asked. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m investigating her roommate’s disappearance,” DeLuca said. “I spoke to Theresa on the phone once, and then she called
me back. We were supposed to get together. She said she was going to be around. You gave Cheryl a copy of your book.”
“For her birthday,” Truitt said.
“How long had you known Cheryl?”
“Just for a few months. Maybe six months. Since she got transferred to Albuquerque.”
“How did she meet Theresa?”
“She saw a sign at the laundromat that Theresa put up, looking for a roommate,” Truitt said. “But they really hit it off.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?” DeLuca asked.
“She had friends,” Truitt said. “I don’t know if they were boyfriends. She’d go away for weekends. Either back to Colorado
Springs or to Arizona. She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about it.”
“About boyfriends?”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea why not?” DeLuca asked.
“Not really,” Truitt said. “When someone asks you to respect their privacy, you don’t say, ‘And why exactly is it that you
want me to respect your privacy?’ You just back off.”
“How about Theresa?” DeLuca said. “In my business, coincidence is something you learn not to believe in. Was there somebody
she might have been running from? I need to know, Josh.”
The younger man hesitated.
“Yeah, there was,” he said at last. “A guy named Leon Lev. He’d been saying she owed him money.”
“How much?”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Josh Truitt said.
“And that would be because… ?” DeLuca suspected he knew the answer.
“Lev was her pimp,” Truitt said. “The guy is… I was going to say evil, but I don’t want to sound like George Bush. She
moved here from El Paso to get away from him. I guess she thought if she came here, he’d leave her alone.”
“Where does he live?”
“Juarez,” DeLuca said. “You don’t want to go there, and you don’t want to meet him, trust me.”
“If I only met the people I wanted to meet,” DeLuca said, “I wouldn’t have anything to do. Hang tight and call me if you hear
from her. She’ll probably turn up on her own. There’s safety in numbers. It’s how we work. I’m sure she’ll call you. Nobody
stays underground for long.” DeLuca laughed. “I forgot who I’m talking to. You probably know people who stay underground for
months.”
“Beware ‘The Mole,’” Truitt said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s sort of an urban legend, except that it’s not,” Truitt said. “Cavers are notoriously secretive. Finding a new cave that
hasn’t been disturbed for ten or fifteen million years is like finding a new planet in the solar system. And the more beautiful
it is, the sooner it’s going to be turned into a tourist show cave with a McDonald’s in the entry chamber, so when we find
something, we keep it to ourselves, as long as we can, and we shun the guy who lets the word out. But if you do find a cave,
you get to tag it. Mark it, with your personal tag…”
“That’s not despoiling it? Leaving graffiti, after fifteen million years?”
“You don’t spray paint ‘Class of 2004’ in six-foot letters,” Truitt said. “You do it in a way that honors the cave, somewhere
inconspicuous, like signing a painting in the lower-right-hand corner. So The Mole is a guy who tags caves that nobody else
has ever heard of before, so people get all excited and rope to the bottom of a thousand-foot tube, and there’s his tag. People
say he lives underground. Or that he was born without eyes. He’s an albino who can’t expose himself to sunlight. It’s more
than just a story. I’ve seen the tags myself.”
DeLuca looked at him. Josh Truitt was babbling because he was scared.
“All I’m saying is that some people stay underground,” he said. “Theresa was afraid of Lev. She said she paid him the money
she owed him, but he kept claiming there was interest due. He’s a complete pig. And a true psychopath. If your bombs are as
smart as people say they are, one of them would have found Leon Lev a long time ago.”
DeLuca headed back to his hotel. He felt like he knew less now than he had when he woke up, but that wasn’t quite true. The
day had raised a thousand new questions, and he wasn’t going to have time to answer all of them by himself. He had a number
of calls to make, to Colleen MacKenzie and Dan Sykes and Julio Vasquez and Walter Ford and to Sami Jambazian, and maybe a
couple of other people he wanted to add to his team. Before he did that, he needed to talk to Colonel Oswald, and Phil LeDoux
too. Friend or not, DeLuca was angry. He was angry because it was becoming apparent to him that he’d been lied to. He wasn’t
going to do anything more until somebody told him what he was really looking for.
As he approached Noshaq Pass, in the Hindu Kush mountain range, on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Army counterintelligence
agent Sergeant Frank Pickett was growing frustrated. They were at sixteen thousand feet, working their way northeast across
the Qadzi Deh glacier, and he needed to make a phone call. He’d given the battery to his SATphone to Amal, Ali Abu-Muhammed’s
chief lieutenant, for safekeeping, but Amal didn’t know that the phone, developed by DARPA, had a second battery and was still
usable. Pickett had been feigning altitude sickness as an excuse to lag behind, but Amal had stayed with him. Posing as a
Russian arms dealer, Pickett had been working in the FATA along the Durand line for six months, selling SAM-7s and SAM-7As
to Pashtun
maliks
in Khost and Bajorr and Miran Shah, each weapon he sold encoded with a concealed DARPA-installed GPS transponder, but the
missiles were armed—he would have lost credibility had the test firings been less than effective. As a result, he’d gained
access to a Talibani named Abdul Sahibzada who offered to introduce him to a Waziri chieftain who might be interested in buying
antiaircraft weapons. That offer proved to have been a ruse. Instead, Pickett had been taken to meet Abu-Muhammed, currently
considered second or third in command of Al Qaeda forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and someone believed to
meet regularly with Osama Bin Laden. Pickett had worked for a month to win Abu-Muhammed’s trust, brokering minor arms deals
elsewhere, and it now looked like his hard work had paid off. He had reason to believe, based on what he’d learned at the
campfire the night before, eavesdropping on people who were unaware that he was as fluent in Arabic as he was in Russian,
that he was being taken to Razmak to meet with Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden himself. It was information he wanted
to pass along to U.S. Central Command in Kabul, but unless he could shake Amal somehow, he wouldn’t be able to.
“You catch up with the others,” he told Amal in Russian. Amal had been a student in Moscow. His Russian was poor, but he was
the only one who spoke it, which was why he’d been assigned to accompany the man he believed to be a Russian arms dealer.
“I will wait,” Amal said. “It is good.”
There were a dozen Talibani and Al Qaeda soldiers traveling in the group, accompanied by eight regular Pakistani army troops
from the Balochistan regiment with Pashtun loyalities, the group’s supplies carried by mules also bearing perhaps half a ton
of raw opium in burlap saddlebags flung across their backs. Pickett had little doubt that IMINT was following the caravan’s
progress via satellite, the images from their body heat registering clearly to any infrared camera against the cold backdrop
of the glacier, but knowing where they were wouldn’t matter unless CENTCOM also knew what they were doing.
Pickett was considering how the presence of Pakistani troops precluded calling in an airstrike when he saw, up ahead, a flash
of light, and then a second, joined by the sound of men firing their rifles, but at what? He looked up, as did Amal, listening
for the drone of airplanes overhead. He heard nothing. He understood that Predators and G-Hawks could fly in virtual silence,
but they fired missiles, and he hadn’t seen or heard any explosions. Ahead, he saw a third flash of light, then a fourth,
and with each flash, the sound of rifles firing abated. Amal sent tracer rounds into the sky, firing blindly and running ahead
to join the others. Pickett saw a lone mule racing across the glacier, and then it, too, disappeared in a flash of light.
A hundred yards in front of him, Amal stopped and fired his weapon into the sky two more times. Then he was gone.
When he reached the spot where Amal had stood, Frank Pickett saw only a perfectly round hole in the ice, burned down into
the glacier as far as the beam from his flashlight could reach.
He ran ahead until he arrived at the place where the caravan had been. There, he found a single backpack, a
kaffiyeh,
and the hindquarters of a mule that appeared to have been sawed in half, as well as a half dozen deep holes in the ice identical
to the one where Amal had disappeared, each hole perfectly round and perhaps twenty feet across. Pickett had seen similarly
round potholes worn into solid rock by eons of erosion, but nothing he understood could explain how such holes could appear
instantaneously.
It took him a minute to gather his wits, and then he turned on his satellite phone and called in to CENTCOM, giving his name
and identification code.
“How can I help you, Agent Pickett?” the lieutenant he spoke with asked.
“What do you mean, how can you help me? You can start by telling me what just happened,” Pickett said.
“What just happened where, exactly?” the lieutenant asked.
“Right here,” Pickett said. “36° 26.03' north and 71° 53.84' east. Just now.”
“One minute,” the lieutenant said, coming back a few moments later.
“Not quite sure what you’re referring to, Pickett,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve got nothing on our screens. Agent Pickett?
Are you still with me? Pickett?”
But Pickett was gone, and where he stood, a final hole. By the time Central Command in Kabul was able to scramble a pair of
Warthogs the next morning to overfly and surveil the site at 36° 26.03'N and 71° 53.84'E, the previously symmetrical round
holes had been carved and blended into the glacial landscape and there was nothing to be seen, save for a lone mule, six miles
away and still shaking. When the SOCOM was able to put men on the ground, flying in a Pavehawk HH-60 stripped of all excess
weight to allow it to fly at that altitude, they found evidence that suggested a party of men had fallen into a bergschrund
that had evidently been concealed by a snow bridge that collapsed—such was the danger of traveling on glaciers. The body of
Sergeant Frank Pickett of Army counterintelligence was written in the report as unrecoverable, along with a recommendation
that he be given a Bronze Star for valor, posthumous.
IT ONLY SOURED DELUCA’S MOOD FURTHER when Colonel Oswald told him he couldn’t answer his questions because he was asking about
a Special Access Program and he wasn’t read on. DeLuca had called on his encrypted satellite phone. “There’s a reason why
we compartmentalize, Agent DeLuca,” Oswald said. “Your job is to find the girl, and find the disks, period. I know you CI
guys think there isn’t a door in the world you can’t walk through, and if LeDoux tells me I’m out of line here, then I’ll
be first in line for a crow sandwich, but right now, that’s how it’s going to be.”
DeLuca had to wonder how far a crow would fit up a colonel’s ass. Why was it that so often, joint commands meant so many majors
and colonels and generals seeing who could be a bigger prick?
He bought a ticket on the next commercial flight to Washington and was at the Pentagon by 0800 hours the following morning.
He’d left a message on Phillip LeDoux’s voice mail because he didn’t want to disturb his private hours with his new wife,
but apparently LeDoux had taken a break from his connubial bliss long enough to collect his messages. DeLuca had said he was
flying in for a briefing at the general’s earliest convenience, with or without Oswald in attendance. It was evident by the
look on Oswald’s face that LeDoux had chewed him out.
“Agent DeLuca,” Oswald said, returning DeLuca’s less-than-snappy salute. “The general will be with us in a minute. He’s meeting
us in briefing room six. Let’s take a walk, during which I’ll try to describe for you how delicious the crow omelet I had
for breakfast was, chased with a slice of humble pie. There is apparently much about CI I don’t understand, nor did I appreciate
that Team Red is itself Special Access. General LeDoux explained to me how you were formed as CI special ops. This whole intelligence
shake-up has got me a bit confused, and I don’t think I’m the only one. At any rate, I hadn’t been briefed, and that’s no
excuse, but I apologize. I’m not just a full bird—I’m an old bird, too.”
“No apology necessary, sir,” DeLuca said, impressed by the colonel’s contrition. The halls of the Pentagon were full of people,
scurrying to and fro, including an admiral in a wheelchair who had to be ninety years old. They passed a barbershop, a gift
shop, a copy center, and a post office. “I’m sure I probably struck something of an inappropriately strident tone myself.”
“General LeDoux warned me,” Oswald said. “And I do like people to speak frankly.”
“Just because I’m curious, what did he say about me?” DeLuca asked.
“He said you could be an asshole,” Oswald said. “A stubborn asshole, but that there wasn’t anybody he’d rather share a foxhole
or a dive bar with.”
“The general is evidently going soft,” DeLuca said. “He used to call me a dickhead.”
LeDoux explained that he had a funeral he had to go to later that morning for a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
who’d passed away at Bethesda. The conference room was a long narrow windowless room with wood panels up to the chair rail
and tan walls decorated with framed pictures of various vintage airplanes. There were glasses of water on the table and notepads
with pencils next to them for whoever wanted to take notes.