Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Shahida talked after that. When she was done, he sat for a moment, digesting it all, then said, “Let me see if I get this straight. You’ve had an operation going on for couple of years when you’ve been running around stealing boys.”

“From their pimps,” Flowers pointed out. “From their brokers and, yeah, from their owners. You know Taliban kill some of these kids but not the men? Stone them to death, on account of how it’s the kid’s fault for being so irresistible to begin with.”

“There are brokers who go from village to village,” Driver said, “buy the boys and then sell them.”

John shook his head. “How is this even a thing?”

“Islamic law say no man can hold a woman’s hand in public. Even if you’re married, you can’t touch her,” Roni said, and John heard how careful she was to squelch the impatience in her tone. “But there’s no law against holding the hand of a pretty boy in public or putting an arm around the kid.”

“Kinda like showing off a prize poodle,” Flowers said.

“It’s also sanctioned by culture and custom, the male-on-male bit. Back in the 90s, popular mujahedeen commanders had entire harems of these boys. People say that’s one of the reasons the Taliban came to power—everyone was fed up with corruption. The problem is…it’s custom.” Driver spread his hands. “Supposed to be principally Pashtun, but you find it throughout the country.”

“There is old saying,” Shahida added. “Women are for making childrens, but boys are for making pleasure.”

“The boys grow out their hair. Put on makeup. They get all dolled up in bells and skirts and then they dance for these pervs at their parties. Except the ‘entertainment,’” Flowers said, inserting air quotes, “doesn’t stop with dancing. A boy can get loaned out for the night to the guy’s buddies and be expected to entertain all comers. And they really, really like the young ones.”

He felt sick just thinking about it. “What happens when the boys get older? When they get to their late teens, early twenties?”

“When they no pretty?” Shahida let go of a humorless exhalation. “Owner say bye-bye. Kick out onto streets. ”

“To do what?”

“John, you don’t need to be a shrink for this one,” Roni said, “What do you think happens to an abused kid with nowhere to go? Whose only skill is cross-dressing and dancing?”

She was right; he could see what happened well enough. “Okay, that’s bad, but…take a look, Roni. This whole country is falling apart.”

“And?” She let a beat slip past. “You’ll notice I’m waiting for the punch line.”

“How about, we can’t save everyone? How about we already have a job that involves a lot of saving of lives in a different way?” When she muttered and looked away, he snapped, “What?”

“Saving lives .” The way she said them, the words sounded almost obscene. “We put on Band-Aids. I draw little doodles on a kid’s bandage and then watch as that same kid and whoever’s decided that she’s the mother or he’s the father… I get to watch our troops march them right back out a couple hours later because either they don’t have the right papers or the adult who’s claiming to be a parent isn’t. This , helping Shahida bring these boys in for evacuation is doing a lot more.”

He couldn’t argue the point. “Why are you helping?” he asked Driver. “How did Shahida even know to come to you?”

Driver opened his mouth, but Shahida said, “This, you see? This is what mens do. You have question about me, you ask me. I right here.”

“Okay, fair enough.” He transferred his gaze to the woman. “So, I’m listening. How did you know to come to Driver?”

“I no come to him. He come me.”

“How’d he even know about you?”

Something shifted in Shahida’s posture: a tensing of her shoulders, the slight jog of her eyes toward Driver before they ticked back to hold his gaze. “I no go Driver. I go talk Mac.”

That , he thought, is a lie. There was more to this story. She and Driver had some sort of history. Lovers? Somehow, he thought that was unlikely. And what about Driver himself? Way back at DCC, Roni had said Driver was a Marine Raider—and yet here Driver was, with his men who had presumably all been Raiders, working with a guy from the CIA. Aloud, he said, “Tell me about Mac.”

“All peoples against Taliban know him,” she said, her tone shifting from forceful certainty to a kind of vagueness. “All peoples know Mac try help?—”

“If I may, ma’am?” Raising his hand, Driver softened the interruption with a grin. “Mac’s been in-country for a while, since before we got involved.”

“Ah.” Not only had he read a couple books, he’d seen 12 Strong . If anyone ever made a movie about this withdrawal, he wanted Chris Hemsworth to play him. “A CIA money man? Tried getting warlords to cooperate with one another for cash?” When Driver nodded, John said to Shahida, “And that’s how you met him?”

She nodded. “My parents sell brother. Either he murdered or just die, I don’t know. I never see him again. But after—when I run away from family—I fight for all childrens be free.”

Meaning that Mac had given her money? That didn’t quite make sense, but he was too tired and strung out to keep up with this guessing game. “All right, so Mac offers to help and then…what do you do? Steal the kids and return them to their parents?”

“To peoples who sell to begin with?” Shahida shook her head. “Better we take chance getting childrens out of country.”

“Away from everything they know?”

“Away from peoples no take good care of them. We use old trade routes from China through Wakhan before. Long way on foot, but peoples there good to children. Hide them in families. Some stay. Others keep going, find other place to live.”

“One of the biggest problems right now, among a lot of others, is that they can’t go through China anymore,” Driver said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Uyghurs live at border,” Shahida said. “They Muslims, but China no like them. Want kill them. So we can no go that way.”

“Pakistan’s also a no-go,” Driver said. “Tajikistan’s just as hard. We had been moving kids out through a rescue foundation, but we’ve run out of time. The Taliban are moving into the Corridor. No one there to stop them.”

“And they weren’t there before?” he asked .

“The Pamirs are too far away, or they were,” Driver said. “It would’ve required too much manpower to go after Shahida and her operation. But now, with us Americans pulling out, that leaves the Taliban free to send troops into the Corridor.”

“What about your fighters?” he asked Shahida. “You weren’t just marching kids through the mountains with no protection.”

“Some childrens old enough to fight. Everyone else fighters gone. Poof.” Shahida spread her hands. “I no can ask them stay when they have family, peoples they need get out of country. What we no expect is bomb at Abbey Gate yesterday, and now you Americans speed up leave.”

“We are ?” He was surprised. “Last I heard is we suspend operations at midnight on the 30 th , break down our setups and then boogey on the 31 st , with the rest of the embassy and command personnel and the last battalion of Marines.” He bet the U.S. would simply repeat what they’d done at Bagram on July 1: turn off the lights and steal out in the wee hours of the morning and not a peep to anyone. “So who’s saying we’re not loading planes until the 30 th ?”

“Command,” Roni said.

“And how do you know?”

“Because Mac knows,” she said, evenly. “Command’s not saying anything out loud, not in public. A panic is the last thing we need, especially after today.”

She had a point. Any rumor like that could spark a stampede. Better to get the last refugee transport off the ground and then simply shut down operations.

“Okay, that’s bad,” he said, “but the shutdown’s only happening three days earlier.”

“Doesn’t sound like much,” Driver said, “but three days translates into a lot of people. You got C17s loaded with three hundred people at a time taking off every forty-five minutes. Shave operations off by even a couple days, and you’re talking thousands left behind. We were hustling the kids in a few at a time…”

He interrupted. “Alone?”

“No, Mac has…” Driver opted for vague. “People. Let’s call them escorts.”

“And then?”

“They get met when the planes land. They get places.” Driver scrubbed away further questions with the flat of a hand. “Above my pay grade. The point is that the bomb at Abbey Gate yesterday…everything’s on an accelerated timetable. We just don’t have the luxury of bringing them in piecemeal anymore. The kids we can save have to get in so they can be on that last plane tonight .”

“And this is what you’ve been doing all this time?” He thought of the many occasions he’d passed this hangar and seen no one around at all. “Hustling kids out of the country?” When Driver nodded, he asked, “How is it that you guys are involved with Mac in the first place?”

He watched the other men lob looks at one another, and then Meeks said, “Mac is protecting an investment.”

“From a misadventure,” Flowers put in.

“Which was?” he asked.

“Which is ,” Driver said before Flowers could respond, “a story for another day.”

Something touchy there. He slipped a sidelong glance at Roni, read the set of her jaw, her stillness. She knows. Driver’s told her the story behind the story, I bet. Which was what? Why were Driver and his men—all of them probably ex-Marine Raiders—involved at all, and why with a CIA guy like Mac? A clandestine unit in JSOC?

And why did it piss him off that she was in the loop, and he wasn’t?

“How many boys we talking about?” he asked.

“I bring today only Biri,” Shahida said. At the mention of his name, the dark-haired child pressed a little closer to Musa, who draped an arm around the boy’s shoulders and murmured something. “I do today only him because I think I have more time.”

“Which didn’t answer my question. How many are left?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“What?” His jaw unhinged. “You want to hustle twenty-seven boys through that mess out there at Abbey? How are you going to explain that? A field trip? I don’t see how you even get without shouting distance of the Taliban checkpoint. Things are going to be a hundred times tighter, security-wise, after today’s bombing.”

“Which is why we’re not using that gate,” Driver said. “It’s not the most direct line to where the boys are stashed anyway.”

“Direct line. You mean, from the airport or out of the city?”

“We bypass the city altogether.”

“How? There is only one way out that doesn’t cut through the city, and that’s north. There’s nothing but mountains.”

“Lot of things still left in the mountains, man,” Meeks said.

“Yeah,” Flowers agreed. “Like runaway boys.”

“We would bring them in through the north side of the base,” Davila said.

“Through North Gate?” Technically, Northeast Gate, but no one was arguing semantics. “How? That’s been closed for a couple weeks, just like East Gate and the main airport entrance. It’s also practically Joint Operations’ backyard and already overflowing.” That area, commandeered by the State Department as a final staging area before evacuation, was cordoned off for the refugees who’d passed through multiple checkpoints on the civilian side of the airport. “There have to be hundreds of people still waiting to be processed, some of whom have been standing out there for days. Plus, you got Russian Road on that side of the base.” The road’s real name was Tajikan and although most called it by the nickname, no one could say how that nickname came to be other than, perhaps, this being the route the Russians had taken to get the hell out of Kabul in 1989. “Too high a security risk. There’s not a chance you’re getting anyone through there unobserved.”

“Let me pose a counterfactual,” Driver said. “Like you said, thousands of refugees out there, right? But evacuating your ordinary Afghan civilian isn’t the mission. The mission is to evacuate U.S. personnel and U.S. citizens and Afghans who’ve been employed by the military or the government or who are relatives of U.S. citizens. Others, like the Brits and various embassies, are dealing with their citizens, their employees. With me so far?”

“Like I said,” John replied dryly, “I’m used to big words. What’s your point?”

“Just this: how do you get intelligence operatives out? Answer: secretly. Or, at the very least, not by the usual methods or ways. Now, you can go over mountains or trek the desert. Or you can have set up, in advance, a way in and out of the country by air. But you got to have a way in for people who you’d rather the Taliban not see.”

“You’re talking spooks like Mac.” A fact not many knew: the very first American KIA in the 2001 invasion was a CIA operative. “CIA personnel and informants.”

“This guy’s good,” Flowers said. “Clean up on Jeopardy. ”

“What are you, the comic relief?” John snarled.

“Relieves tension.” Flowers was unruffled. “I sense you are not amused.”

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” Meeks said.

“I would, if you’d only muzzle him,” John said. To Driver: “We were talking spooks.”

“All those alphabet soup organizations and from all over,” Driver said. “Not all are American. Everyone’s got their own operatives in-country. Many clandestine services have already picked up a boatload of Afghan nationals working for them. You can’t leave them in place. Besides the fact that they’ve got targets on their backs, they know too much. They can finger handlers; they could divulge sensitive information. You’re a smart guy; you get the picture.”

He did—and the conundrum was obvious to anyone who thought beyond the melee of this evacuation. In any war, there were intelligence operatives, from many different countries, operating in the shadows. There were paramilitary operatives and, he assumed, clandestine American soldiers. Dare had been just such an operative in Vietnam: an American Ranger; a sniper-assassin on his own in enemy territory. If not for a fortuitous radio call, his uncle might never have made it out of the jungle to catch one of the last helos out.

“So,” he asked, “how is the CIA getting them past the Taliban?”

“Easy,” Flower said. “Right under their noses.”