THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER CENTRAL AFGHANISTAN.
Glenn Harwich had pretty much kept to himself the entire flight, his only distraction being that short conversation with Gorman a few hours after leaving Frankfurt. But he could sense the eyes of the young GIs packing the sides of the army transport jet glancing in his direction, likely wondering what that bald-headed civilian was doing among troops that for the most part appeared to be on their first rotation.
Harwich could almost always pick out the rookies from the veterans. The veterans, like himself, wished to be left alone, unwilling to engage in a conversation that could lead to a friendship. Those veterans had likely already lost more than their fair share of friends, and the pain stemming from those losses—combined with their survivor’s guilt—had a way of stripping any desire to make new friends.
He frowned, finding it hard to believe he was actually back in this country—and at his own request.
But what choice did I have? he thought, accepting the bitter reality that he’d had to step away from his relatively easier assignment as deputy chief of the Paris station to come to this shithole—at least until he sorted this out.
He remembered the intercept from an Agency bot patrolling the ISPs in Islamabad. The image, and the short note—useless to anyone but those who had been in that clearing in the Sulaimans that cold September night in 1988—had been reason enough for him to make a priority call to the deputy director of operations at Langley.
“Are you shitting me, Glenn?” the DDO had blurted. “Is this why you woke me up in the middle of the night?”
“It has to be, sir, and we’re partly responsible.”
“Okay. Okay. What do you need?”
“A ride to KAF and a good enough reason for being there. This has to be kept need-to-fucking-know until we actually fucking know something.”
“Well, we won’t need to think too hard to find you a cover story, unfortunately.”
“What do you mean?”
“We just lost our team there to a misplaced Hellfire.”
“Jesus.”
“Not Jesus. NATO. Big screwup, and we need a guy there representing the Agency until we can work out a replacement plan.”
And less than twenty-four hours later Harwich found himself boarding a C-17 cargo headed to Kandahar Airfield, staring at the image on his phone that had started it all: an old Soviet ring.