Operation Dark Heart (18 page)

He finished puking, calmly closed the bag, and put it back in his cargo pocket.… Cryin’ shame. He’d ruined a perfectly good bag of beef jerky.

The mountain ranges were connected by long stretches of open desert—stark, empty, completely lifeless rolling dry mud baked to a light tan. By my count, we passed five separate mountain ranges. About 5 miles out, when we reached the John Wayne Pass at the last mountain range before Bagram, our Apache escort faded back and entered a separate approach pattern to Bagram.

After having run through my mental “things to do” list, my thoughts turned to Kate. I had some planning to do for her, too.

10

IMPROVISED RAID

SO much for plans. A short time after my return from ******, I was holding a gun in the lobby of Afghanistan’s Post Telephone and Telegraph Company (PTT), while a little old lady chattered away in Pashtu on one side of me and an ominous crowd of men gathered on the other. If we didn’t get out of here within a couple of minutes, it was going to get very, very ugly.

I took another glance at the growing group of men and tried to look as if I were actually listening to the old lady, while I carefully moved the selector switch on my M-4 from
SAFE
all the way to
AUTO
. Why the hell were John and Lisa taking so long?

This episode had started with a fairly innocuous request from ***** Sgt. Lisa Werman, who came up to me after one of the morning stand-ups shortly after I got back from *******

*** *** **** ***** **** *** ****** *********** *************** **** ***** **** ****** * ********* ***** *** ***** **** ***** ****** * **** **** ******* **** *** Can you come over to my office and take a look at it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let me finish a couple of things and I’ll be over.”

I’d acquired a reputation as kind of a tech head. I’m not sure it was deserved, but I was willing to give it a try. The phone had been captured off a bad guy killed in Khowst. ****** *** ****** ** **** ** ****** The phone might hold key information on his network of associates. There was a big problem, though: Lisa and her folks couldn’t break in to it.

I headed over to the ***** office in the BCP (Bagram Collection Point), or prison—a handmade sign by one of the troops over the entrance proclaimed it to be
HOTEL CALIFORNIA
. Frankly, I had been avoiding the place. There were problems over how prisoners were being interrogated. Suspicious deaths had been reported, and there were ongoing investigations. I wanted nothing to do with it. Despite my reputation as a troublemaker, I really don’t go looking for trouble, and as long as I was operations chief for our HUMINT projects in Afghanistan, my people were not going to do anything that would remotely show up on the radar as improper or illegal without good reason. No matter what, I did not allow abuse.

The BCP was an old hangar converted for the task—large, dark, and foreboding. Painted the typical Bagram tan outside, its windows were painted black. I turned in my weapon, was issued a badge, and went inside for the first time. Inside, the PUCs (persons under control) wore what looked like bright orange scrubs. A few shuffled by me, being taken, blindfolded and shackled, to interrogation rooms located off a walkway that ran along the wall above the first floor. There was constant noise—banging against cell bars by prisoners, yelling by guards, which had the effect, by design or happenstance, of never allowing the detainees to feel at ease.

The ***** office was on the second floor in a secure area off the walkway. It wasn’t much bigger than the area where I worked in the 180 HUMINT tent and was crowded with enough technological equipment to put a man on Mars. Computers, a few radios, wires, antennas, a digital camera with a giant telephoto lens, *** *************** *** ***** **** **** ****** **** ********* ******** ******** ************ **** ***** ******** ***** ****** **** ********* *** ***** ***** ** **** ** *** ******** were crammed onto the desk. It looked more like a high-tech workshop than an office.

“What’s up?” I asked Lisa, a petite brunette with a spunky attitude—kinda like Katie Couric in combat. Lisa had been unable to unlock the captured phone. It was a blue Nokia, fairly typical for the era, but Lisa said there seemed to be some kind of *********** ******** ** code that wouldn’t let us unlock the phone *** *****

She handed it to me. “You see?” she said. “We get a signal, but I can’t even make a call.”

I turned it over in my hand. “What options do we have?” I asked her.

“Well, we could send it back to Washington ** *********, but the value of the info would be degraded by the time they got to it,” she said.

“Do you want to stop by the new GSM (Group Spécial Mobile—the most popular standard for cell phones) store right next to that Internet café in Kabul?” I asked. “We can see if they can get into it.”

“Sure,” she said. “Great idea. That’s a brand-new telecommunications provider. They’re selling phones to the Afghans like hotcakes.”

“Which is interesting,” I said, “since most Afghans don’t make more than $300 a year.”

“They’re pretty much dirt cheap,” said Lisa, “and the plans are better than those in the United States. When is the next convoy going to Kabul?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

The next day, we performed our typical 80 to 100-mile-per-hour run from Bagram into Kabul without incident, and the FBI vehicle didn’t even blow a tire as it was apt to do every hundred miles or so. We brought with us five 10th Mountain troops, mostly tactical intel types who never get out of the wire, so they could shop at the weekly ISAF bazaar.

We took the phone to one of the commercial telephone ventures popping up in Afghanistan that we figured might be compatible to their network. The idea being to see if they could open it for us. We had John with us and another guy from the FBI, along with a translator. With the FBI providing security outside, Lisa, Dave, and I took the phone into the vendor to have him take a look at it. The rest of the troops set up a secure perimeter around the parked vehicles outside.

The vendor was polite, but openly skeptical about his ability to do anything with a phone from another network. After hooking it up to a computer, he fiddled around for a few minutes but soon gave up, shaking his head. “No, I cannot open it,” he said in passable English.

“What’s going on?” said John as we emerged from the store.

“He couldn’t get it open,” said Lisa.

“Is there anywhere else in Afghanistan where we could get help to break into the phone?” I asked Lisa.

“I think it’s part of an older GSM system run by the Afghanistan Telephone and Telegraph Company,” she said.

“The telecommunications center?” I asked.

She nodded. “That’s where I think we would find the help to break into this phone. Plus,” she said, “we might be able to download 100 percent of the entire country’s phone infrastructure—all of the technical data and all of the phone numbers in the system.” That would include the database containing the names and addresses of the phone users *** *********** ** *** **** ******* *** *** *********** *** ******* *** ********** *** *** ********** **** *** *** **** ***** **************

Basically, it would be the Rosetta Stone. It would give us the information we needed to better eavesdrop on the terrorists—** ****** ******** ******** ***** ****** **** **** ****** *** *** **** **** ******** A lot of people knew this information was there but it was difficult, politically and logistically, to get at, and the Afghans never would have volunteered it.

“Wow,” I said. “But that’s Indian territory.” I gave them the street location. “It’s the heart of where the bad guys are hanging out these days.” The Taliban were infiltrating the phone companies and putting their trusted personnel into jobs within the companies to protect their interests.

John shrugged. “I’ve been down there before. Doesn’t seem that bad to me.”

“Yeah, but you were not trying to steal something that is potentially important to the Taliban.”

Dave looked at John and me and said, “There is a bookstore that I’ve wanted to check out again.” Dave collected rare books and on missions he liked to visit the small bookshops scattered around the city and had used them as cover stops in the past. Despite the risks, he’d stopped by the bookshop next to the building.

“Oh, now
there’s
justification for us to go there,” I responded.

“Just what are we after?” asked John.

“We’re apparently after a ton of shit,” I said. “We want the data to break into this phone and, while we’re at it, we’d like to download all the data for every phone on the system. But we don’t know where this data is kept in this place.” I glanced over at Lisa, who kinda shrugged.

“So …?” said John.

“John, we don’t even have a floor plan for the building, and we can’t just walk in and take the place over.”

“So …?” repeated John.

I was getting a little exasperated. “We do not have enough folks to set up a perimeter, and we haven’t done a rehearsal.”

John was still undeterred. “Tony, we don’t need a rehearsal. We can just go in.”

Dave chimed in. “Yeah, and we could use my stopping at the book cart as cover.” Great. Now my navy friend had become an expert on clandestine operations.

“John, are you sure about this?” I asked. “I’ve already been warned about abusing you guys on these missions.” I had been reminded recently that the FBI’s job in country was debriefing and site exploitation to look for the possibility of attacks on U.S. soil. It wasn’t planning raids on Afghan organizations or conducting combat operations.

Through his beard, John broke into a wide grin. “I don’t know of any abuse going on here.”

I grinned, too. “All right. Dave, what are your thoughts?”

“Hey, shipmate, you’re the OIC of this mission,” Dave said. “It would help *** ****, but we don’t have a clear picture of what’s inside of that building if we go in.”

“How close is the bookstore to the telecommunications building?” I asked, in light of this apparent interagency willingness to take this mission on.

“It is a little book stand, actually, about 80 meters from the rear entrance of the building.”

“Do you know the basic layout of the building and can you diagram it for us?”

Dave thought for a moment and then drew a series of squares and lines on the dirty side window of my truck. “I know where the front is, and I think I know where the back is—here and here.”

“Now,” I asked Dave, “do we know for a fact that the technical room that we need to get access to is in this building?”

“Yeah,” said Dave. “We know from our intel that it’s in there.”

“It looks like a big building … do you really think the device that will unlock Lisa’s phone is in there?”

“Yep,” said Dave.

I called over Lisa, who had walked back and was leaning against Dave’s vehicle as she continued to examine the phone.

“Do you have your laptop with you?” I asked.

“It’s in the truck,” she said, gesturing toward the vehicle.

“If we get you access, do you have the right tools to be able to hook up your laptop and download what you need off the network?”

She looked at me like I was slightly unhinged.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. The tone in her voice was questioning.

“How long would it take you?”

She thought for a minute, still eyeing me like I was crazy. “Ten minutes.”

“You’re sure?” I asked. “Ten minutes.”

She corrected herself. “No, fifteen minutes.”

I turned to Dave. “Can you browse for books for fifteen minutes?”

“Easily,” came the answer.

“OK, John, you’re the raid expert here. What do we need to do to get in there and pull this off?”

Realization of what we were thinking about trying to pull off began to dawn on Lisa and she joined our planning circle. I saw her eyebrows go up and her eyes widen.

“This is the deal,” John said to us. “We’ll need to clear and hold a secure corridor in.” John drew a line along the path that Dave had put on the window. He continued, “And since we have limited radios, we’ll need to stay within visual distance of each other—kinda like bread crumbs to follow—each in sight of the other all the way into the interior.”

“Can you rapidly secure a path to get us safely into that building?” I asked John with some disbelief.

John turned to Dave. “What’s your estimate of the distance from the street to the room you need to access in the center?” he asked.

Dave thought for a moment and took a guess. “A hundred meters. Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

We only had six people for this mission: John, the other FBI guy, the translator, Dave, Lisa, and myself. We had far too few people to set up a secure perimeter, so the secure corridor idea had merit.

“There’s no way we can secure the route,” I said. “We’re going to have a hard time stringing ourselves out and having line of sight on each other.” I thought out loud. “We would be fifteen to twenty meters apart.” I looked around at our small band on the Afghan street. “Can we do that?”

“Yes,” said John immediately. “Or, I believe so.”