A Knife Edge

FORTY-SEVEN

It was day or night, I wasn't sure which but I knew it had to be one or the other. I felt my shoulder being shaken. “Come on, wake up. Time to go.”

I wondered where this stranger was going and why he was telling me. It didn't occur to me to wonder who “he” was.

The owner of the voice shook me again and said, “Here, drink this.” I felt the pressure of a cup against my lips, and smelled heaven inside it. I tasted warm coffee, full of sugar. The flavor was exquisite, powerful. My shaking hands spilled some as I tried to get it all in my mouth, past my swollen lips, and I nearly wept. Next came a small chunk of soft cheese. He put the end of a bag in my mouth and cool, clean water flooded my throat. I coughed, hacked.

“Shhh…” said the man, putting a finger to his lips. He whispered, “Put a sock in it, buddy.”

Put a sock in it, buddy? That threw me. The words were said with what sounded like a broad New York accent. I was also thrown because this guy was one of the Afghans, one of the people who'd beaten the crap out of me when I hadn't given the right answers.

I heard the familiar light tinkle of key against stainless steel and my hands were released. The blood surged through my shoulders, down my arms, and out to my fingertips, which throbbed and burned and felt as if they would burst like a couple of balloons overfilled with water.

While I was trying to adjust to this sudden change in fortune, the guy fiddled around behind me, unwinding the end of the cable from whatever had secured my hands. He held up my handcuffs and set them on the floor beside me. “A souvenir,” he whispered.

I picked them up and pushed them into a thigh pocket. Smith & Wessons — the bastards had used my own handcuffs on me.

“I'm gonna take a look at your feet. OK?”

I nodded.

He checked them out. “I'm gonna put these on you.” He showed me a pair of old socks and boots that appeared to have been resoled countless times.

I nodded.

The socks and shoes went on and the sensation was strangely reassuring.

“Can you stand?”

Another nod.

He helped me to my feet. “You've been here nine days. They haven't tortured you. You should be OK.”

Haven't been tortured? Easy for you to say, pal, I thought. Nine days. It had felt like nine months. He threaded my hands through the sleeves of a thickly padded, coarse, knee-length coat, and then fastened the front buttons. The coat was far from tailored, but it was warm. I sagged against the wall while he wound a length of black wool around my head and face, and then a dirty blue wool cape around my shoulders.

“These are your gloves,” he said under his breath, holding them in front of my face. “Can you put them on?”

More nodding. The knuckles of my formerly dislocated fingers were swollen up like golf balls, but I could wiggle the digits and they didn't hurt as bad as they had a right to.

“Take this,” he said. “Feel free to use it if you have to. But use it quietly, OK?” He wiped the weapon on his cloak and handed it to me.

It was a knife, a long, thin, lethal knife, the edges modified — honed razor sharp. I knew this knife. I ran my gloved fingertip down the inscription on the blade, wiping away some of the crimson coagulated blood clogging the letters. There wasn't enough light by which to read the words, but I knew what they said: And the American Way. This was Ruben Wright's knife, the one Clare Selwyn and I both thought was lost close to where Ruben had died. Truth, Justice on the one side, And the American Way on the other. Ruben Wright's personal motto, the last line of the theme song from the original Superman TV show.

“Where'd you find this?” I asked.

“Same place we found you. Can you walk?”

This must have been what my fingers found when Butler and I had grappled in midair. “Who are you?” I asked, taking a couple of unsteady steps.

“A guy who's about to blow his cover. Come on — the window of opportunity's small. We get this wrong, we're both dead.”

He helped me to the front door. I slipped and almost fell. There was something on the ground, hidden in the night shadow from the flickering orange light of the hurricane lamp. It was one of the Arabs. His throat had been cut and his blood had leaked out, making a hell of a sticky, slippery mess. His clothes had been stripped off him and his feet were bare. We stepped over his sprawled legs, through the door, and into a densely black night. Snow was falling. It was utterly quiet, all sound absorbed by fat, ghostly flakes the size of flower petals drifting down from above.

My rescuer pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles from somewhere and put them on. “This way,” he said, nudging me in an uphill direction. We made our way up through what was a small village cut into a rock face that was close to vertical. Somewhere, a mutt barked halfheartedly, the sound muffled by the falling snow. I was lucky. Everything in the village was made of stone and mud brick and even the smallest sound would usually bounce around amplified in a place like this, especially in the thicker night air. Nevertheless, we stopped moving occasionally, my guide making the gesture of silence with his finger pressed against his lips. Once, I was pushed back against a wall and into a deep shadow as two men with AKs strolled past. They were both smoking. I knew from experience the glowing tips would register in the NVG's lenses like a pair of usher's flashlights.

We climbed over a couple of low walls and left the black silhouette of the town behind, then climbed a steep hill through soft, knee-deep snow. I guessed we were well above 10,000 feet. I had a headache that reminded me of my heavy-drinking days, and my lungs were searing with effort. I couldn't get enough air into them, and what air I could get was frigid, which made my nose, throat, and mouth feel like they'd been sliced up with a straight razor. When I tried to stop to get my breath, which happened every half-dozen steps, my rescuer gave me a push. Eventually, the climb lessened and we dropped over the ridge into another valley. My hands and feet were again numb with cold, the shooter's gloves not providing a lot of protection against the elements and the snow having found its way inside the boots. I had questions for my savior and guide, but I was too cold and tired to ask them.

“Not much further,” said Mr. Mystery just when I was thinking that lying down in the snow would be better than going on. It gave me strength, but he lied about the further bit. I figured I was still in Pakistan. Wander around an Afghan village at night like this and we'd have stepped on land mines.

After an eternity of being dragged through the snow, we arrived at a cleft in the rock with hard-packed snow forming a roof over the top. I got the “Ssh” signal again. I kept still, thinking there might be more Arabs wandering around, when I heard a familiar snort.

“Here,” I heard the guy say.

He led the way through the cleft. I saw a big horse and a little horse with big ears — a donkey. The horse stamped a hoof and shook its head and snow went flying. The guy talked to each animal softly, and then pulled heavy blankets off each. The animals were saddled and ready to go. Whoever this guy was, he'd done his homework. “Can you ride?” he asked me.

“Which side are the gears on?” I replied.

He turned the NVG on me.

“Just kidding.”

In fact, I'd only ridden once before. I'd been eighteen and a girl I wanted to get to know without her clothes on was into horses. I went away with her on a riding weekend. I had this fantasy that all the bouncing up and down in a saddle would make her eager for sex. It did, and she was, only not with me but with the guy from the stable. I went home empty-handed. The girl went home pregnant and never rode again. And neither had I. Until now. I took a tentative step toward the horse.

“ Uh-uh, buddy. The little one's yours,” he said as he gave the donkey a pat on its rump, which made its ears twitch. “It'll follow the horse.” He handed me a long stick. “If it decides it doesn't want to go forward, give it a jab like this.” He demonstrated, a stabbing motion down into the side of the beast's neck. I must have looked doubtful because he added, “Don't worry, you won't hurt it.”

I gave the animal a pat on its neck. The muscle there was like a sheet of hairy iron. My guide gave me a hand up and the animal took a step forward and twitched its ears at me.

We rode through the night in silence. Like the guy said, the donkey followed the horse. I just hoped the horse didn't step off the mountain. I gathered we were in a hurry, even though pursuit was looking less likely by the hour. It continued to snow till just before dawn, covering our tracks. When the low sky finally lightened to a slate gray, we were making our way down a ridge and into a valley. The mountain on the other side — slabs of ice and black rock — rose into the clouds and disappeared.

“Down there is the border with Afghanistan. Beyond is the pass we have to take,” said the man.

“You from New York City?” I asked.

“That obvious?” he replied.

“ Uh-huh. I'm from New Jersey,” I said, now with enough strength to exercise my curiosity.

“I know.”

“Is that why you hit me so hard?” I asked.

“No, I hit you hard so that I could come back another day and rescue your ass. And I didn't use a closed fist.”

“I don't remember the details.”

The animals beneath us picked their way down the slope the way Clare's kid, Manny, removed green things from his fried rice — with infinite care.

“How're you doing?” he asked.

“Good.” There was a bag of food attached to the saddle and I'd been eating my way through the contents — cheese, flat bread, and olives. My strength was coming back fast.

“Cool,” he said. “So, what were you doing? Did it have something to do with the raid on Phunal?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

“That's OK. You don't have to say.”

“What do you know about Phunal?”

“The night you were captured, we saw an explosion in the sky. It was close to the village we were occupying, so we investigated. We came across you while searching for the wreckage. You can find all kinds of useful things in plane wreckage. Anyway, we found you and located your gear. A lot of it was damaged. You must have come down hard.”

“You could say that,” I agreed.

“What did you do with your parachute? We looked everywhere for it.”

“I got hungry, so I ate it.”

“Come on, really… what'd you do with it?”

I told him what I thought happened, but he didn't believe me. He seemed to prefer to believe that I had, in fact, eaten the damn thing. Hell, I still had trouble swallowing the truth myself.

We traveled in silence, huddled into our blankets, trying to keep out the bitter cold. My body ached like it had never ached before. I believed I could actually feel the bones beneath my skin and it felt like blades of frozen steel had scraped them. I huddled down low on the saddle and tried to get into the donkey's rhythm. I watched the animal's neck, the snow melting to ice and crusting its coarse hair, and tried not to think about the thousand or so feet of sheer drop to the valley below, just a couple of steps to my right.

Eventually, my animal came to a stop beside the horse. The guy turned toward me, steam coming from his mouth when he opened it. He said, “We heard a couple of days later, after we recovered you, that Phunal was attacked. It's some secret test base or something, right? A lot of people were killed. Some scientist was kidnapped. From the way it went down, sounded like coalition Special Forces at work. The feeling is, you were supposed to be one of them, but something went wrong with the plan. Allah's will. So, they were going to hand you over to the new revolutionary Pakistan government and make trouble for Washington. But then, as you know, we had an unexpected guest. But I suppose you're wondering what a nice boy from New York is doing in a place like this?”

“Yeah, had crossed my mind,” I said, but in truth I was thinking about Butler and Dortmund. They'd killed everyone on that plane. And then they had still followed through on the mission. Why? What the hell was going on?

“Like I said, my cover was blown getting you out anyway, so I guess I can tell you.”

He didn't get around to letting me in on his secret for a little while longer. We'd reached a treacherous part of the road cut into the side of an almost vertical granite face. We dismounted and walked the animals across. My traveling companion had to help me down. I couldn't move — my body had locked up solid.

“As I was about to say, I am Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Wassad, at your service,” he said as we mounted up again with what I hoped was the most dangerous section behind us.

“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” I said through frozen lips burning with cold.

“I was U.S. Army infantry, then U.S. Army intelligence, then CIA, then, hell, now I'm not sure what or who I am. Someone in a back room somewhere found out I had American-Afghan parents, could speak Pashtu and a fair smattering of Dari, worshipped in the Islamic faith, and did pretty well at West Point. Before I knew what was going on, I was given a whirlwind course in spycraft at Langley, then counterterror at Quantico, and rotated into Afghanistan.

“Three months after that, I'm working deep cover as a schoolteacher in a town up north in the heart of the Pashtun region, saying all the right things about what a great idea jihad is. Two months later, I'm recruited by a remnant of the Taliban. I join the band, and go touring. Over the past six months we've played up and down the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking for action, but not too much action, because the people I'm with at least have the good sense not to go head-to-head with coalition forces. Hit-and-run stuff, mostly. I've done some bad things in the name of this mission… then you drop in and make life difficult.”

“Why difficult?”

“Because you arrive a couple of days before Bin Laden.”

“What?” I was so surprised, even my donkey stopped.

“Yeah, the unexpected guest I mentioned — the man himself.”

“Jesus.” The donkey snorted and moved off.

“He just walked into town out of nowhere — him and twenty other al Qaeda heavy hitters. I recognized a lot of them.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Don't you remember? He paid you a visit. He looked right into your face. You laughed at him.” He chuckled. “They didn't like that. They were going to cut your head off in the morning.”

Christ, my memory was in serious sleep mode, but al-Wassad had just given it a massive jolt. I suddenly put the friendly face and the name together. I'd seen so many pictures of Bin Laden that he was intensely familiar, like a Hollywood or TV star is familiar. In my weakened, addled state, I'd thought I knew him like a buddy rather than as Osama Bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda, Emperor of Terror, Sultan of Slaughter, King of Killers, Monarch of Murderers, Serious Thorn in Three Presidential Asses, et cetera and so on.

“So now,” Lieutenant al-Wassad continued, “I've got a stack of problems. The guy we've spent trillions looking for is having hot tea with the imam down the road, and I have no means of contacting anyone to tell them about it because, of course, I have no means of communicating with the outside world.”

“Why not?”

“Because the batteries on the Ericsson R390 satellite phone would have run out six months ago. There's no means of charging them out here. And then there's the fact that I never deployed with one in the first place, because I'd have kept my head about five minutes if the Taliban had found me on it chatting to Washington. So, the only way to get word out is to do it in person, on foot. And then there's you. I can't just walk out of the place and leave you behind, because, pure and simple, they're gonna kill you at sunup.”

“We need to get in contact with SOCOM,” I said. “And in a hurry.”

“Yeah. Only two problems with that. One, we're going as fast as we can, and two, Bin Laden isn't going to hang around where we last saw him. When they trip over the dead guard, find you gone and me missing, and discover they're eight legs short in the transport department, they're going to smell a rat. And they're going to run.”

“Hmm…” Of course al-Wassad was right, only, as far as I knew, this was the first time in many years someone other than those within Bin Laden's inner circle knew for certain, down to the square mile, where he was holed up. It was information one side would die to have, and the other would die to keep secret.

We'd just about reached the valley floor, a deep gash in the surrounding walls of granite and basalt filled with new snow, tendrils of cloud, scree, and capillary-sized rivulets. I didn't know much about horses and donkeys, but I knew ours were tired and hungry. Soon we were going to ask them to carry us over a mountain and we couldn't afford to have them go lame on us.

I was about to suggest we stop, even if only just fifteen minutes to give them a rest, when there was sudden movement all around us. Our animals skittered and wheeled about, snorting and grunting, wild-eyed with fright. Men covered in snow with occasional splashes of tan and gray camouflage had popped up seemingly out of the ground, surrounding us. Their M4s were raised to their shoulders, trigger fingers twitching. I recognized the brown-and-tan flag patches on a couple of shoulders not covered in snow, on account of it was also my flag. Some advice I was once given in this part of the world popped into my head: “Either you dress like an American soldier, or you're a target.” We'd walked right into an ambush and, with the pakool caps and dark blue cloaks over the padded jackets and salwar kameez, we were probably looking a hell of a lot like a couple of bull's-eyes. One of the soldiers, a lieutenant whose face was blue with cold, shouted, “Odriga! Lasona jakra. Kanh zadi walm Aspai!” I did the rough translation in my head: “Stop or I'll shoot, loathsome smelly dog!”

I did as I was told, and al-Wassad followed my lead. I said, loud and clear, “I am Special Agent Vin Cooper, a major in the United States Air Force. This man is a lieutenant in U.S. Army Intelligence.” One of the soldiers spurted a load of brown chewing-tobacco-stained saliva onto the snow at his feet.

Those M4s didn't waver an inch.

A lieutenant answered, “Yeah, and I'm Snow White and these are my seven dwarfs.” He suddenly pointed his weapon at the clouds and his dwarfs followed suit.

“So which one's Dopey?” I asked.

“That'd be Stephenson,” said one of the men with a snigger.

“Shove it, dipshit,” came the reply.

The men relaxed a little, though most still eyed al-Wassad and me with suspicion. The lieutenant removed a glove and searched in a thigh pocket. He pulled out a small pad. Checking it, he said, “You say your name was Vin Cooper?”

“And still is,” I replied.

“You look pretty beat up, sir,” he pointed out.

“I'm not a morning person.”

“You were involved in the raid on Phunal.”

It wasn't a question. “I was, but I didn't quite make it. You guys Airborne?” I asked.

Someone spat.

“Rangers, sir. We were supposed to rendezvous with you and the SAS assault team. We've been out a few times looking to run into you guys, in case any of you survived. We've got a Global Hawk UAV up there working the border — picked you up coming across the pass.”

“Lieutenant,” I said, “we have vital information and we need SOCOM to hear it. You packing comms?”

“Latest and greatest, sir.”

As he spoke, I heard the deep flat snarl and thrum of a large helo making its way through the hills.

“That's our transport, Major. We're heading back to Bagram and a hot shower. And with respect, sir, you sure could use one.”

The helicopter banked sharply around a wall of blue ice clinging to a sheer granite face. We were so close I was pretty sure the rotor tips were going to raise sparks against the rock.

Through my headphones came the voice of a colonel who was probably sitting in a nice warm room at Bagram Airbase. “You positively identified Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri?” He sounded like a man who'd just been told he'd won the lottery — thrilled on the one hand, disbelieving on the other.

“Yes, sir,” said al-Wassad. “I can even give you his cell phone number.”

“You what…? Tell me this ain't no crank call, soldier.”

“I've got a witness here, sir, a Special Agent with OSI — Major Vin Cooper.”

I gave the lieutenant a reassuring thumbs-up.

The colonel sounded like he was talking from a mouth occupied by a fat cigar. “You got who there with you?”

“Special Agent Vin Cooper, sir.”

Lieutenant al-Wassad gave the astonished colonel a quick overview.

“Son, if you're right about this, they'll give you a ticker tape parade from LA to Times Square and name a street after you in every goddamn town in between. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Shee-it! You wanna give me those coordinates? Did you say you had Bin Laden's phone number?”

Al-Wassad reeled off map reference numbers while the chopper copilot showed me on a ground map display that the village I'd been held in was ten or so miles inside the Pakistan border. I wasn't sure what the Army would be able to do with the information, but, now that they had it, I was equally sure they wouldn't sit on their hands with it.

The Black Hawk was old and noisy and shook like a jalopy in serious need of a wheel balancing. I glanced out the door at the walls of snow-laden granite flashing past. The old nerves were chained to a metaphorical ringbolt set in the wall with a bucket on the floor. Surviving the fall from the C-17 had given me a whole new perspective on flying.