In the short time since they’d met, this was the first time Mike had seen Julia look unsure. She walked into the conference room behind Maheem.
He took a seat between Tom and Al. She stood between the whiteboards and the conference table her eyes moving from one man to the next. Her eyes met Mike’s.
Before she could speak, Mike started. “I apologize if I offended you earlier. This valley brings back a lot of memories and stirs up one of the few emotions I possess anger.” Mike grinned crookedly at her. “At least, according to my ex-wife.” It was up to him to smooth things over with her and the rest of them if there was going to be a mission, if he decided to go at all. Which was crap. He was going even if there was only the barest hint the man responsible for Paul’s death would be in that valley.
“Tell us about what you have?”
She stood a little straighter, putting her hands in her pockets. “Thank you. I appreciate that.” She took a breath. “This mission means a lot to me as well.” She nodded at Mike. “I’ve worked on the data in these files for over a year now. I’ve poured my life into this and made a few enemies along the way, but I’m here now. The puzzle is almost complete. All that’s left is to take the information I’ve analyzed ad nauseam and find out what it all means.”
Her enthusiasm returned, damping out any other emotions.
“One of my strengths and why I have risen to the position I have is I am a relentless puzzle solver. When I first understood there was something different happening…”
“Something different?” Tom said.
“To me, every puzzle begins with data, but not all data is related to the puzzle. I’ve analyzed every scrap of intelligence and unsourced information I could find on Afghanistan since the Soviet occupation. Much of it is random and unrelated to anything else, or it is related to something but nothing that impacts the trend I uncovered. What I’ve discovered is a vast number of incidents that seem unrelated, but all have a common thread.” A marker appeared in her hand, and she began to write on one of the whiteboards. “One, the Soviet invasion.”
Mike lifted his hand. “Whoa, how does this have anything to do with our mission?”
“It’s coming,” Julia turned back to the table, then resumed her explanation marker, touching the board. “Two, the United States and the CIA were caught with their pants down and had to scramble to find smart, malleable Afghanis who were capable of receiving the type of training needed and could be relied on to help them take the fight to the Soviets.” She turned her head to the table. “Unfortunately, some of these recruits were more intelligent and less mailable than others.” She turned the marker, drawing the next numeral. “Three, the rise of the Taliban. Four, the Soviet withdrawal. Five, the assassination of Ahnad Shah Massoud. Six, consolidation of the Taliban as the dominant political power. Seven, increase in opium production and distribution in and from Afghanistan. And finally eight, 9/11.” She turned and walked to the table. “These eight things may all seem separate or, maybe, as one consequence leads to another. I believe there is a common thread that links them all. Not geopolitical powers influencing events through their proxies but one organization that somehow has the power to move events as they desire.”
Tom moved to lift his hand to ask a question.
“Wait, let me add a couple of more things.” The marker touched the board. “Osama Bin Ladin, the U.S. invasion, Pakistani political and religious unrest, again the increase in production and distribution of opium, and Afghani warlords seemingly working under one banner in more or less secret or the assassination of warlords not under that banner.” She turned to the table. “As you probably know, every one of these warlords is greedy and selfish, only looking out for his own well-being. But someone, somehow, has united them to work together under the same organization that I became aware of during my research. Unfortunately, no one other than the Director, Al, Bruce, and I believe this organization exists. And unfortunately, the deeper I dug, the more far-fetched it was for people to link seemingly different events to the whole.”
She sat in the last chair at the table. She tried to appear confident and assured of her conclusions, but Mike saw how much her hands shook.
She noticed his eyes on her hands and quickly put them under the table.
“It’s in the small, less seemingly connected events where my belief became stronger while everyone else in my department became less convinced. For example, Green on Blue events,” Her shoulders lifted. “Do you know what that is?”
Mike opened his mouth to answer.
“Of course you do.” She raised her eyebrows. “ I didn’t know at first. You probably know all about some of our Afghani allies shooting Americans. Anyway, they didn’t start immediately after the invasion they came later the most famous was an American Major General assassinated in an apparent Green on Blue attack. The findings determined the Afghani soldier who shot him and wounded fourteen others was unhappy he’d been denied leave, so he took it out on the UN officers who just happened to be on an inspection tour of that particular camp. This assassination piqued my interest because the explanation didn’t jive with the tightened security around the General, his staff, and the other officers. Was the General’s Personal Security Detachment, his PSD, so incompetent that a marginally trained disgruntled Afghani soldier gets off a perfect headshot and then had time to shoot fourteen other people before they could put him down? You guys.” She leaned into the table facing Tom and Mike, “You probably know a lot of these PSD guys. You all come from the same Special Ops background does it sound plausible?” She shrugged and continued the same energy. “Stranger things have happened, right? It could have been exactly as they said it was. But more importantly, it didn’t fit the pattern in Green on Blue incidents or the larger picture of incidents in Afghanistan. So I continued digging.”
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Julia pointed at Tom and Mike. “You probably know that while we were there, the CIA and Military monitored cell and sat phone transmissions in Afghanistan. You also probably know they are only partially reliable or helpful. But, I ran all of the data on these transmissions, looking for commonality. Then I looked at all Green on Blue incidents, looking at cell and satellite phone transmissions. And all of a sudden I found one universal trend. In almost every high profile case, a call was made from the location of the shooting to one small inconsequential village.”
Julia paused.
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Tom said.
“After each Green on Blue, a call was made. Every single incoming call came to one of three individual phones in Kandahar. These phones were all located in the same building. The transmissions were short duration, and they spoke in a simple and short code. Shortly after they received a call, someone would then call another phone in the village of Nary.”
“Nary?” Tom sat up straight. He looked at Mike. “No freaking way.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Mike said. “We know it. Our firebase was only a couple of miles away. Nary sits on the border with Pakistan, with only a bridge over the Kunar River connecting the two countries. We’ve been there many times. It is one of the quietest places in Afghanistan. We had a pretty good relationship with the governor and the local police chief there. I wouldn’t say we trusted them a hundred percent, but we never had any issues with the people of Nary.”
“And we had a platoon of our Afghan National Army troops stationed there,” Tom added. “They kept their ears to the ground, listening for any sign of bad guys.”
“You have to believe me, and it might sound weak.” She shook her head in the affirmative. “All the dots connect.”
“Okay,” Mike leaned forward. Her confidence was contagious, and he would listen, but only if it meant he could go back to the Tal Baz and finish his business there. “What else?”
“Never once, that I’m aware of, has there ever been a cell or sat phone transmission into or out of Tal Bez valley. But, about a week before all US forces left Afghanistan, there was a short encrypted call made from that valley to a phone in the United Nations Headquarters in Kabul.” She leaned in farther. “This is when the fledgling idea of a traitor rose up.”
Mike and Tom looked at each other. Tom’s expression showed the same incredulous look he felt.
Julia pressed on, unconcerned by the skepticism she saw. “More dots began to connect. All attempts in the past by special operations and infantry units to go to the Tal Bez Valley or send assets there were always denied. Also, there was a no-fly zone around the perimeter of the Tal Bez Valley, no military aircraft were allowed anywhere near the valley. Someone powerful ensured nothing ever went to the Tal Bez, and it stayed under the radar. I believe politicians and generals in the Afghani forces were involved, but ultimately, someone in the UN had to be making this happen.
Mike shrugged, he wasn’t convinced, but it didn’t matter now.
“Next, over the past twenty-four months, opium distribution has changed in Afghanistan. You may not be aware of it, but most of the opium produced here is shipped overseas by container ship.” She lifted a finger. “But Afghanistan is landlocked, so those containers have to be trucked to ports in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan to reach their final destination. A year ago, the routes to those countries changed. I estimate about forty percent of those shipping containers are now routed through the Tal Baz Valley, then they are sent on their way to various ports.”
“I’m not a math major,” Tom said, “but that sounds like a lot of containers.”
“The opium trade in Afghanistan reaches worldwide distribution and is a nine billion dollar a year business.
Tom whistled. “Billion, with a B?”
She nodded. “So yes, that is a lot of trucks, and not a single report of a truck hijacked, molested, stolen, or stopped by the police or military, ours when we were there or theirs now, and every single one passes through the border unmolested.”
“You seem awfully sure about this,” Mike said.
“I am. There’s more in these files, a lot more. What I’ve given you only touches the surface.”
Mike stared at her, trying to gauge if she was onto something or if it was all smoke and mirrors. She moved around in her chair uncomfortably, but her eyes remained on him, waiting for any challenge. His eyes stayed on her, looking for any doubt. She stared back with the same determination he cast onto her. He blinked first.
“Okay, let’s make sure I’m clear,” Mike said. “Someone has unified the country’s warlords. It sounds like they’ve consolidated the opium trade, there was a traitor, maybe more than one for all we know, high up in the UN, and all of it is related to one man and what happened to my Team in the Tal Baz Valley.”
Julia shook her head up and down.
Mike looked at Tom.
“I’m game,” Tom said.
“Alright,” Mike said. “We’re ready to listen to everything you’ve got.” He wasn’t sure why the CIA was interested in getting Hotak, but did it really matter?
Julia smiled and reached for the topmost file of the stack. She turned it and opened it in front of them. The file was thick with papers and opened like a book. Exposed, one on each side, were two eight-by-ten pictures. Mike looked at the first.
The hair on his arms raised up.
The Afghani in the black and white photograph was much younger, but he knew the man in the picture was the man he wanted to kill. He shifted his eyes to the second picture and froze. Two Afghans were walking down the center of a dirt street with mud buildings to either side of them. One was his HVT, Hotak. They both carried AK-47s slung over their shoulders the smaller man smiled at something. If it weren’t for the contrast of the pickup truck next to them, Mike might have thought it was an average sized man walking next to a child. The last time he’d seen the giant Afghani in the picture, he was disappearing into a bamboo grove, firing his machine gun at Mike and his men.