CHAPTER 22

two hours later

“So this DIA contact of yours—Theobald,” Whitney said, shifting the sat phone from her right ear to her left. “What exactly is his role in Pakistan?”

“As far as the world at large is concerned, he’s the in-country coordinator for IBC,” Lewis said, his voice as clear as if they were on the phone at NCTC instead of eight thousand miles apart. “IBC is a federally subsidized NGO designed to encourage entrepreneurship and small business development in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Really, it’s an evergreen NOC the Defense Intelligence Agency uses to maintain a supported presence in the region. Theobald oversees a small team tasked with running assets and collecting intelligence on arms dealing, intelligence sharing, and back-channel cooperation between the Taliban and sympathetic elements inside the Pakistani government. If what you’re theorizing is true, and the Taliban is somehow operating a UCAV out of the Kush, then Theobald might have confirming intelligence.”

“And what did he say?”

“Not much, until I told him your theory. Then he suddenly got real interested.”

“Why?”

A heavy pause hung on the line as Lewis seemed to choose his next words carefully. They were talking on a secure connection, so she wondered if he was apprehensive to share for other reasons.

“Well, he said he has an asset running scared. Apparently, the asset’s brother has recently gone missing in Mingora. They think he was murdered. The brother was in deep with local Tali and some al-Qaeda splinter group trafficking Chinese arms on the black market. Theobald was pretty tight-lipped about it. What he did say, Whit, is that he’s been monitoring the proliferation of Chinese weapons to terror groups in western Pakistan, and he sees a strong possible connection to the drone theory you’re pursuing.”

“What connection?”

“I can’t answer that,” Lewis said. “That’s a question you’ll need to ask him when he calls. I gave him your number.”

She looked down at the table, her eyes going back and forth between her trefoil knot sketch and the map with overlapping hundred-kilometer circles. Her gaze drifted east, from the cave in the Hindu Kush to an adjacent circle in Pakistan. Inside that circle was the city of Mingora, home to DIA agent Theobald’s operation and the asset fretting about his missing brother. She looked closely at the map, and at the single long runway at Saidu Sharif Airport across the Swat River and north of the city at the base of the mountains. A runway long enough to land a UCAV, with big enough hangars to hide a drone with a forty-five-foot wingspan.

“All right, I appreciate you making the connection,” she said. “Oh, and Reed?”

“Yeah?”

“Ixnay on the haring-say, okay? I’m playing this one close to the vest.”

“Of course, you know me,” he said, chuckling. “My mouth is a SCIF.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s it going down there, or over there, or wherever the hell they have you working?”

“It’s . . . different,” she said with a tight smile, leaving it at that. “Different, but good.”

“All right. Well, be careful, kid.”

“Always. And I owe you one.”

She ended the call and dropped the sat phone on the desk. She absently began tracing the infinite knot tattooed on the inside of her left wrist with her finger.

“I found the thread to untangle you, bitch,” she murmured.

“Who you talking to?” a voice said.

She started and looked up, dropping her left hand under the desk for some reason.

“Sorry,” Chunk said, grinning at her from the doorway. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

She considered what to tell him. He’d made it clear he was interested in actionable intelligence, but wild-goose chases were clearly off the table. Which criteria did this meet? Maybe she should wait until she’d had the call with Theobald to say anything about Mingora.

“Listen,” Chunk said, dropping into a chair beside her desk. “About before. We can’t operate the way we need to if we don’t trust each other, and while what I said is true, the way I said it was totally off base. I want you to know you can talk to me about anything, run shit by me, brainstorm together—whatever you need. You need to be able to speak your mind about stuff, and what I said before, or at least how I said it . . .”

Geez, he’s like my high school boyfriend trying to apologize after I caught him staring at Kimmy Knowles’s ass junior year.

“It’s all good, Chunk,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Sometimes I get too carried away with my part of the equation, and I lose sight of the forest through the trees. What you said was true. During an op, you’re the person best qualified to make decisions on the ground. Especially with respect to getting everyone home safely. I’m sorry for second-guessing you. The lives of your team come first.”

“Our team,” he corrected. “You’re just as much a part of this unit as Riker, Trip, or Saw. Maybe I haven’t done a good enough job making that clear, or at least, making you feel that way . . . and if not, then that’s on me. The Tier One is not a democracy, but it is a family. Everyone has a voice. Everyone gets to speak their mind, and that includes you. But . . .”

“You’re the boss?”

“Yeah, and I’m in charge for a reason. I didn’t get this billet by accident. Just like you didn’t get yours by accident either. I trust you to do your job; you have to trust me to do mine.”

“I don’t not trust you,” she said. “I just . . . oh, never mind.”

“Uh-uh,” he said, wagging a finger at her. “You don’t get to ‘never mind’ me. Spit it out.”

“On my first day, do you remember the thing you did to make an impression on me?”

Chunk grinned. “Sent a tattooed redneck to pick you up a half hour late in a Jeep with no doors to try to rattle your nerves?”

“No, after that.”

“Gave you a misogynistic nickname to see if you had the self-confidence and sense of humor to survive in this unit?”

“No, after that too . . .”

His expression shifted from playful to serious. “Made you stop at the Operation Crusader memorial so you would understand the stakes of what it is we do and the cold reality of the enemy we face?”

“Yeah, and in case you couldn’t tell at the time, that resonated with me, probably more than you realize. And do you know why?”

“Because you have your own demons?”

She nodded. “I know I’m young and I haven’t been in the counter-terror community as long as the rest of you have, but I’ve been an analyst at NCTC for five years. I’ve worked a lot of cases, and two years ago I royally fucked up. I failed to properly assess the data, and as a result, innocent people died. If I had done my job properly, then a unit like this would have been tasked and the attack could have been stopped. But I failed to follow the thread. I failed to connect the puzzle pieces, and that’s something I have to live with for the rest of my life.” She sighed and looked down at the trefoil knot tattoo. “It’s the reason I accepted this job in the first place—because feeding my theories and conclusions into the giant bureaucratic machine wasn’t good enough anymore. I figured the more links of the chain I could remove between me and the decision makers authorizing direct action, the better chance I had of saving lives. And then last night happened . . . I’m watching you on the screen, swarmed by an enemy force we did not contemplate, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, I just killed them. I walked them into another Operation Crusader. What the hell have I done?’ ”

Mortified at the naked admission, she shuddered and looked away from him.

He placed his bear paw of a hand on her shoulder. “This might surprise you, but when I was on that mountain getting ambushed by Taliban fighters, do you want to know the one thought that never crossed my mind?”

She nodded.

“The one thought that never crossed my mind was, ‘This is Whitney Watts’s fault.’ In fact, I don’t know if that would have entered my conscious if you hadn’t said it.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said. “Yes, we’re chasing your thread, as you call it, but we planned the op together. This is the exact point I was trying to make before. We all have a stake. We all have a voice. I wasn’t assaulting that cave because you had a hunch. I was assaulting it because you put together a compelling case and leadership agreed. If in hindsight it turned out to be a bad call, then we made the bad call collectively. That’s the beauty of the Tier One. Neither of us was satisfied working in silos—you at CIA and then NCTC, me at Team Four. Now we have the integration of intelligence and operations, and we’re just figuring out how to manage the friction that comes from that. It’s gonna take some time, but I think we’re on the right track.”

“Me too,” she said, finally meeting his gaze again.

“All right,” he said giving her shoulder a squeeze, then releasing it. “Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk drones and Taliban. When I wandered in here, I interrupted something . . . where are you with all this? What are all these sketches and circles on the map?”

She tapped her finger on the circle in Pakistan, east of the Hindu Kush.

“I think we need to go to Mingora.” She bit her lip. Could they even do that? Could they send a SEAL Team into Pakistan without permission? They’d likely have to run it through not just JSOC, but the Pentagon and maybe even the White House. It would take days—maybe even weeks. They didn’t have the time. Regardless, she explained to Chunk the theory that she and Yi had come up with, then what she had learned from Lewis about Theobald and his asset.

“All right,” Chunk said, not questioning her, not telling her she was crazy. In fact, he was rubbing his hands together as if he were already relishing the upcoming op. “Pick this guy’s brain when he calls, then put together a short brief for Bowman and the team. Think you can have something together by fourteen hundred?”

“Okay, but wouldn’t we have to notify the Pakistani government that we were coming? I mean, sending a SEAL Team into Pakistan is a big friggin’ deal, international relations wise.”

The inscrutable look on his face prompted a new and dreadful thought. She swallowed hard. “Unless you’re planning on sending me alone to meet this guy?”

Just the mere prospect of traveling into Pakistan on her own made her stomach turn to acid. I’m an analyst, for God’s sake, not a field agent.

Chunk flashed her that grin again, and in that moment she found it less irritating and possibly, maybe, slightly endearing.

“You’re with the Tier One now, Watts. Captain Bowman has the Vice President on speed dial, remember? If you need to go to Pakistan, then by God, you’re going to Pakistan.” He headed for the door, but at the threshold he turned and said, “Oh, but don’t think you can get rid of us that easy. No way in hell I’m letting you have a boondoggle in Pakistan without me and the boys.” He grinned again and shot her a two-finger salute that became a thumbs-up. “Hooyah, Intel.”

And with that he was gone.

Did he just call me Intel?

Shaking her head, she dialed Yi’s number and put the phone to her ear.

“Hey, Whitney? What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“Working out. Have you seen the gym here? It’s almost as nice as the one back at MacDill.”

“No, I haven’t. Remember, I don’t do exercise . . . Anyway, I need you back over here, Michelle. I’ve got something, and we need to put a brief together for the team.”

“On my way.” And the phone clicked off.

She looked at the map with the overlapping circles.

Then she stared at the satellite phone beside her laptop, almost willing it to ring. When it did, her eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“Watts,” she answered, annoyed to hear the nerves in her voice.

“Ms. Watts, this is Bobby Theobald. Sounds like we might both be chasing the same boogeyman. We definitely need to talk. If we can meet in person we can share what we’ve both got and pool our resources, though it was a little unclear to me just what your resources are. How soon can you be in Mingora?”