Violence of Action Page 6

  “This is Danny Lannon,” she said, turning to look at Chunk. “Danny was with me at the Farm although we were in different tracks. We had to do the final exam drill together and it was a hot mess.”

  “Chunk,” he said and stuck out his hand. There were some tactical advantages to using a nickname.

  “Team guy?” Lannon said, clamping down with his own large weathered hand.

  “Yeah,” Chunk said. “You former Army?”

  “Marine.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Lannon turned to Watts.

  “So, you’re hanging out with some spooky task force now? How the hell did that happen? I thought you were at NCTC after . . . you know.”

  “I was,” she said, keeping it vague, “now, I’m doing something else.”

  “Something related to the mumbler we got in lockbox three, I assume?”

  “The mumbler?” she echoed, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” Lannon said, and gestured for them to follow him over to the circular desk where a female case officer looked them up and down and scowled.

  Lannon gestured with a finger at the center screen, where a camera streamed imagery of Hamza al-Saud. The man sat cross-legged on the floor, hands in his lap, and stared without blinking like a wax statue—except no statue could exude the absolute hatred in those eyes.

  “Some other ‘task force’ brought us this dude. He was involved in the attack on Kandahar, apparently, though the information given to us was sketchy, as usual. What we know is his name is Hamza and he led a new, upstart terror organization called al Qadar. Did you guys get the full brief?”

  “Actually—” Watts started to say, but Chunk cut her off.

  “We were fully read in by the task force guys on this one. And yeah, we get it. Sucks to be in charge of extracting information without much background. Sorry they did that to you, bro. We’re all supposed to be on the same team.”

  “Yeah, well, the deep dark task forces keep shit close to the vest, but I guess that’s for their own survival. Anyway, if you got all the gouge from the brief you’re all up to date, ’cause the mumbler doesn’t say much. Every session he just closes his eyes and mumbles scripture from the Quran, no matter what techniques we use. Enhanced interrogation is useless because he clams up completely under duress. Dude’s like a bear trap. Definitely a true believer. Sorry to be the broker of bad news but looks like you came all the way here for nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” Chunk said and gave the man his charming we’re-all-just-bros-here smile. “We’re here to take a crack at him.”

  Lannon looked irked. “Is that true, Whit?”

  “Yeah, Danny. Sorry.”

  “You know the shit we do here is actually pretty complicated and highly scientific, right? We don’t just beat the dude with a rolled-up phone book until he cries and confesses. Every single interaction, conversation, and intervention builds on the last. You jump in the middle of that and we get to start all over. This is, like, PhD level psychology program stuff. The dog collar shit doesn’t fly around here.”

  “We know, Danny, and we’re not here to take charge or burn down your house. But it sounds like you don’t think things are going anywhere. You said it yourself, he’s a bear trap, so it’s not like we can mess anything up, right? And if we do happen to shake something loose, all the better for everyone.”

  Lannon bristled. “Well, I doubt that. But I can’t let you in without authorization, Whitney.”

  “I have it here,” she said and handed him a letter giving them unfettered access to the detainee and ordering that the CIA staff abide by all their requests. The letter was signed by the DNI.

  “Damn, girl. Who did you say you were working for these days?”

  “I could tell you but then I’d have to . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah. Spare me the bullshit. I’ll still have to confirm.”

  “The exact same letter was sent to your admin on the high side,” Chunk said.

  Lannon looked over at the woman manning the terminal beside him and nodded. She tapped her keyboard to open their comms server. She scanned for and found the letter, and Chunk could practically see her blood boiling beneath the skin.

  “It’s here, but this is bullshit, Danny,” the woman said, spinning in her chair to look up at Chunk with venom in her eyes. “You gonna take al-Saud with you when you go? I can see by the look on your faces the answer to that question is no. So, what’s the plan—after you’re done fucking up our program, we get to clean up the mess and start over? Is that how this friggin’ works?”

  “Guys, I get it,” Chunk said, “I do, but I’m just following orders.”

  “Fine,” Lannon said but he folded his arms across his chest. “But Whitney, you of all people, I would think would get how messed up this is.”

  “Sorry, Danny,” she said and reached to touch his arm but pulled back before making contact. Chunk wondered suddenly if they had been more than colleagues for a time. “I really am, but it is what it is.”

  “Fine. It’s not like I can say no,” Lannon said, pouting.

  Watts glanced at Chunk and he nodded.

  “Um, our next ask is really gonna piss you off . . .” she added with a sigh. “We need cameras and mics off while we’re in there.”

  “Oh, come on!” the woman at the desk barked, popping to her feet. “What the hell, guys? You jack our program and then we don’t even get the benefit of any intel you might actually collect? What was all that ‘on the same team’ bullshit, Mister Navy Frogman?” Her hands were on her hips now, her muscled arms making the two sleeves of tats jump in the strange light, her right hand just forward of her pistol, a Sig Sauer P229 he noticed.

  “Look, we’ll share one hundred percent of whatever we uncover, I promise you that, but it has to be off-camera,” Chunk said.

  “Then why do you need the cameras and sound off?” Lannon asked.

  “Because we may be required to discuss details that are classified TS/SCI. Come on, Danny, you know you can trust me,” Watts said, with pleading eyes to the man Chunk now suspected might be a former lover.

  Lannon stared at her for a long hard moment then, with a snort, said to his colleague, “Jen, shut down eyes and ears in interrogation room one.”

  “I’d rather do this in al-Saud’s cell,” Chunk said. “Is that possible?”

  Lannon turned on him with more ire than he expected. “Well, your little fucking courtesy card from the DNI says anything’s possible. No weapons in the room, so you can leave your shit here at the desk, and I’ll take you down. Jen, shut down cell three.”

  “Danny, we can’t just—”

  “Shut it down.”

  Jen glared at Chunk, mumbled something, and then flopped in her seat and shut off the camera and mike in the cell where al-Saud continued to stare like a statue at them until the image disappeared.

  Chunk slipped an arm out from his jacket and pulled the Sig MPX Copperhead over his head and placed it on the edge of the round workstation, then pulled his Sig P226 from the holster on his hip and set it beside the machine pistol. Watts set her more compact Sig P365 beside his weapons.

  “This way,” Lannon grumbled, and they followed him down the long dark corridor to the right, angling away from the identical hallway going off at a forty-five-degree angle, completing the Star Wars look. Now all they needed was a Wookie, but they’d left Riker outside in the pickup truck. The corridor had six detention cells on each side of the hall, which meant a dozen possible detainees for this block, but he doubted they were all occupied. Chunk wondered just how many terrorist prisoners had been disappeared down this dark bunny hole in Tajikistan over the years.

  They stopped at the middle room on the left, a windowless black door in the black wall, and Lannon pressed his hand onto a biometric reader beside the door.

  “If he attacks you, do not do some frogman judo shit and kill the guy. That would be an ass load of paperwork for me. And don’t”—Lannon paused and looked over at Watts—“let him touch her.”

  She gave Lannon a tight smile back and then looked at Chunk with an expression he’d only seen once before, when he was teaching her to shoot on the range at MacDill . . . unconditional trust.

  He looked from Watts to Lannon. “You have my word.”

  The CIA man tapped in his access code, the lock clicked, and the door slid open. Chunk stepped through the gap into the dank and foul-smelling room—the source of the stench apparently the toilet in the corner.

  “The smell ain’t because of us withholding sanitation privileges,” Lannon said, somewhat defensively from behind. “This asshole just refuses to flush.”

  The terrorist remained seated, his expression a mask, but his eyes bored into Chunk with both recognition and rage.

  “Shoma . . .” Hamza al-Saud growled.

  “We’ll take it from here, brother,” Chunk said with a backward glance at Lannon.

  “Yep,” was all Lannon said and then the door slammed shut with a loud click of the magnetic lock.

  Chunk advanced on the terrorist, towering over the seated figure. After a few seconds, al-Saud stood, slowly and fluidly, so that they were face-to-face.

  “Shoma,” the man said again. You . . .

  Chunk didn’t flinch, just crossed his arms. “So you remember me.” He returned the man’s gaze with hatred of his own. “That’s right, I’m the guy that took down your operation and captured your jihadi ass.”

  Al-Saud said nothing.

  “I know you speak English,” Chunk said, walking in a tight circle around the man. He wanted to send a clear message about w
ho was predator and who was prey in this scenario. “We have signals intercepts of you talking on your mobile phone before the raid. So, you can drop the charade anytime.”

  The terrorist prince rattled off a defiant statement in Pashto. Chunk, who was by no means fluent in the dialect, translated it to something of the effect, “I am Allah’s servant. Whatever you do to me, he will revisit on your head a thousandfold.” But as he continued to circle the terrorist, something clicked and he realized that shoma was a Dari word, not Pashto . . .

  Interesting, he thought, that his first raw reaction when he saw me was in the native Afghan Dari but then after collecting himself he switched to a Pashtun dialect . . . Why? Is Pashto the dialect he’s “supposed” to be speaking? Something weird is going on here.

  “See,” he said, turning to Watts with a triumphant grin. “I told you. This guy isn’t Hamza al-Saud. Al-Saud is fluent in English, and this guy doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.”

  She arched an eyebrow, clearly confused by this non sequitur but prepared to go along for the ride anyway.

  “I understand everything you are saying,” the terrorist said in heavily accented English, crossing his arms over his green cotton shirt. “Allah wills that I do not engage with the Great Satan. I may have been pulled from the physical battlefield, but the spiritual war with the enemy of my God rages on. It does not matter where you keep this body. No matter the prison, I will witness your final destruction.”

  “Oh look, you found your tongue,” Chunk said, smiling for real this time. He was no professional interrogator, but he was starting to have fun and realized he’d already learned something they didn’t know before, possibly something of great importance. “Sit down, Hamza. My colleague has some questions for you.”

  Al-Saud did not move.

  Chunk balled his fists and got in the terrorist’s face.

  “The cameras are off, Hamza. What happens in the next fifteen minutes is off the record. Let’s say I break your jaw into a hundred pieces. Nobody will blame me, because I’m just going to tell them that you tripped and hit your face on the toilet over there. Do you really want to eat all your meals from a straw for the next six months?”

  Al-Saud looked at him, seemingly testing the validity of the threat.

  “Dude, I’m an operator, not an interrogator. You killed my friends. I want to hurt you. I wanna hurt you real bad . . . but I would like to be able to understand you and that’s a lot harder when you’re missing all your teeth.”

  “Please sit down, Mr. al-Saud,” Watts said, speaking for the first time. “My colleague is an angry man. Please just do as he says.”

  The jihadist looked at her, then after some internal calculus, slowly lowered himself onto the Army-style cot.

  “Thank you. Let’s start with your base of operations in Mingora where you orchestrated the drone attacks on US forces in Afghanistan,” she began, using a classic interrogation technique: begin with easy things, facts that the detainee accepted his captors already knew. Lead the prisoner on a little journey, get him complacent, and maybe something new would slip out.

  “You raided our operations center at the hangar at the Saidu Sharif Airport in Mingora. You murdered my men there, what else is there to say?” Hatred and anger flared in the man’s eyes as he said the words.

  Watts nodded, unfazed. “I want to know more about the site. I want to know more about how you were able to pirate a signal from the Pakistani satellite and—”

  “We want to know about the other site. The safe house in Kanju,” Chunk interrupted her. He was in total improv mode, but a voice whispered in his ear that there was something here. Something important worth digging for. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I led the assault myself. Before we hit the warehouse and killed your friends, we hit your secret safe house. Your business guy was there. He was still wearing his suit. He went for a gun, but he was no warrior and I shot him in the face.”

  Al-Saud broke eye contact and picked a spot on the far wall to stare at, which Chunk took as a cue to keep probing.

  “We know all about him, the money laundering, the fundraising . . . but I want to know more about others there that night. We have their DNA samples, but we don’t know their names. Can you help me, or do we let our CIA friends take you on another journey of stress positions and let you pretend to be a fish again? Seems stupid to go through all that pain for a couple names. We already have their DNA . . .”

  “I will tell you nothing of the brave men who served Allah at my side. I will not disgrace their sacrifice by mentioning even their names in your presence. And I will not betray my mission. Your CIA friends have surely told you this already,” the terrorist said, raising his chin in pride. “You can break my face or murder me as you have my brothers, but it matters not. I will go to paradise, while you burn forever in the fires of hell.”

  Gotcha, you sneaky sonuvabitch.

  “We’re done here,” Chunk said, turning to Watts with a disappointed grimace. “We’ll have the CIA guys run a program on him for two weeks and come back . . . see if he’s more cooperative then.”

  “What?” Watts said, now unable to act her way through her shock. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope,” he said, pounding the door twice. He turned back to the prisoner. “You may think you’re invincible, Hamza, but you’re not. Everyone talks. I mean everyone.” He heard the door click open behind him but kept his eyes locked on the terrorist. “Ahmed Farouq cried like a baby and told us everything. So did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. You think you’ve won because you didn’t talk after listening to some rock and roll and having some water splashed on your face? You’ve only seen the tip of the enhanced interrogation iceberg. You’re in the level one program—level one of five. Faruq Ahmed broke at two. KSM, who was trained in AQ resistance tactics, broke at level three.”

  Chunk turned his back on al-Saud to face Lannon who was now standing in the door with his hands on his hips and a confused look on his face.

  “We’re taking this guy up to level two, bro,” he said with a wink at the CIA officer as he walked out of the cell. “I’ll sign the paperwork on the way out.”

  Watts followed him out and Lannon shut the cell door behind her.

  “What in the hell just happened?” she said, stopping him by the arm.

  “Yeah, seriously. You know we’re not gonna torture this asshole, right?” Lannon said.

  Chunk pulled a tin of Kodiak from his cargo pants pocket. “I know that, but he doesn’t. And even if you could, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because he can’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”

  “And why is that?” Lannon asked.

  “Because that shithead is not Hamza al-Saud,” Chunk said, turning to Watts with a grin.

  “Chunk, are you out of your mind? What are you talking about?”

  “You lost me too,” Lannon said. “JSOC processed him as Hamza al-Saud in the first place, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Hear me out,” Chunk said, setting off down the corridor and waving them to follow. “Something has bothered me about this guy for a while, but I could never quite put my finger on it until today when everything clicked into place. When he first saw me, he spoke in Dari.”

  “So what?” Watts said, striding to catch up to him.

  “Why Dari?” Chunk said.

  “Because he’s Afghan?”

  Chunk nodded. “Exactly. This guy is Afghan.”

  “I still don’t follow,” she said.

  “Our signals intercepts of Hamza al-Saud were him speaking Pashto and Arabic . . . this guy messed up. He slipped out of character for a second, and I busted his ass.”

  “Hold on a second,” Lannon pressed. “These groups in Pakistan and the border region of Afghanistan mix it up when it comes to jihad. It’s only the peace-loving ones who stick to their tribes.”

  Chunk stopped and thrust a finger back at al-Saud’s cell. “That guy is no Arab. Arabs don’t slip into Dari. He’s Afghan.”

  “No, no, don’t go there,” Lannon said, shaking his head. “We’ve always assumed al-Saud was a legend this guy created. He probably picked a Saudi surname for branding purposes. Al Qadar was born in Pakistan, not the Peninsula. Let’s not confuse the matter with Monday morning quarterbacking.”