Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Bagram, Afghanistan

IN A METAL bunker at the edge of an abandoned airfield, a young woman in a figure-shrouding abaya sat in front of a military-grade laptop. Her desk was covered with spreadsheet printouts. Dozens of pages with hundreds of entries. Items, quantities, customers, prices. But at the moment, the image on the laptop had her full attention. And it was making her furious.

The young woman's name was Lial. She had no idea where she was born. She had no memory at all of her life before age five. All she knew about her genealogy was that she had inherited features that could pass for several nationalities, including Afghani.

Lial's black niqab was pulled back to expose her face. Her long black hair was bunched and clipped on top of her head. She leaned toward the screen and played the same grainy security-camera footage over and over again. It showed the top floor of a building in Chicago exploding into smithereens.

When she rewound and played the detonation sequence in slo-mo, she could see the whitish glows that marked the placement of the charges. Precise and professional. She couldn't have done better herself. The news reports that followed were what bothered her. Enraged her. No bodies recovered. Which meant that the two targets were still alive.

A botched mission. Unforgivable.

"He should have sent me," Lial muttered to herself.

The door to the hut opened abruptly. A tall man appeared in the entrance. He wore a brown vest over a dark blue tunic. His head was covered in a turban. A bandolier of ammo draped diagonally from shoulder to hip. He held an automatic rifle in his hands.

Taliban.

"As-salamu alaikum," he said.

"Wa alaikum assalam," Lial replied.

In this part of the country, a woman without a proper head covering might be beaten or even shot. But Lial felt perfectly safe. She knew Ansar. They were colleagues. In fact, they'd attended the same school—on another continent, years ago. They'd been working together at this remote location for months, and they'd barely made a dent in the job.

Lial closed the laptop and replaced her head covering. She walked outside with her partner.

"The Chicago mission," she said. "It failed."

Both spoke flawless Pashto, but English was easier. And good practice. It was the language used by most of their customers.

"They escaped?" said Ansar. "Both of them?"

Lial nodded. "The charges were set correctly, but the monitoring was off. They lost track of the targets."

She walked with Ansar down a long stretch of pavement lined with thick concrete barriers. "Somebody will answer for it," said Ansar. "Anyway, it's not our problem." As they emerged from the end of the walkway, he looked out and spread his arms wide. " This is."

They had reached the edge of a pitted runway stained with thousands of black landing marks. Extending into the distance were rows of bulky mine-resistant trucks called MRAPs, along with SUVs, jeeps, and pickup trucks, some in white, others in desert camo. It looked like the world's most bizarre car dealership.

One side of the runway was filled with stacked cases of MREs. The other side was lined with the real moneymakers—metal cases of M4 carbines, antipersonnel mines, and Javelin missiles, gathered from abandoned FOBs all over Afghanistan.

Ansar was right. Lial knew that she needed to focus on the work in front of her. The logistics were daunting. The assignment was to feed the black market with the base's vast supply of equipment and weaponry—everything the Americans had carelessly left behind.