Page 17 of The Fourth Option
Clorox leaned in to look at Walker, who nodded.
“Here’s a little friendly advice, fellas,” Clorox suggested. “Always be nice to the guy who has you sighted in through his high-powered scope.”
“Good tip,” Staub replied.
Walker drove the Rover past the compound’s vast motor pool of indigenous vehicles before parking at the low two-story operations building where the case officers met. It was originally built by the Soviets in the eighties, but the Agency had expanded it with several wings.
“Welcome back,” Leonard Fisk said, greeting them at the entrance. Though Fisk spent most of his time at Bagram or Langley, direct action operations were planned at Eagle Base. “Come on, I have us set up in a SCIF upstairs.” He pronounced the acronym asskiff,a sensitive compartmented information facility.
Fisk led them inside. After swiping their IDs at a locked door, they passed through an inner room they called Cortex, where raw ISR feeds were displayed on monitors bolted to the wall. A half dozen officers, technicians, and specialists sat glued to screens much like air traffic controllers in towers guiding and directing aircraft on the ground and in the skies. After clearing Cortex, they entered a stairwell and hustled to the second-floor SCIF.
The entire operations building was hardened against incoming and outgoing radio transmissions, but the mission planning center was so sensitive that it was, effectively, a SCIF within a SCIF. Walker and Staub secured their cell phones in a honeycomb of lockboxes before following Fisk through the windowless maze, eventually arriving in a six-seat conferenceroom filled with the detritus of CIA case officers on the hunt: binders, bulletin boards, Post-it notes, and photos of high-value targets. A sixty-inch Samsung flat-screen was affixed to the front wall.
Fisk plugged an HDMI cable into his laptop and began typing while Walker and Staub settled in.
“Movie?” Staub asked.
Fisk didn’t reply. After a few more keystrokes, the Samsung lit up with a PowerPoint presentation title screen, a blue background with the Agency seal in one corner and a single word across the center in fifty-point font: “BACKDRAFT.”
“Already seen it, Lenny,” Staub said. “Quite the cast.”
“Okay,” Fisk said. “I’m reading you both in on BACKDRAFT, a capture-kill op targeting leadership elements of HQN. Chris, you’ll have lead.”
HQN, the Haqqani Network, was a semiautonomous offshoot of the Taliban closely related to al-Qaeda.
“Which elements?” Walker asked.
Fisk punched a key on his laptop. The TV screen shifted to a series of surveillance photos of a man in his fifties. “This guy, Abdul Nasr, is on a little field trip to Lashkar Gah. He’s been HQN’s weapons supplier for the past year.”
“He’d be a big get for us,” Walker said.
“Indeed. We’ve been looking for him in Cairo, but we obtained new source reporting that he’s here, in Afghanistan. Further reporting indicates this house in Lashkar Gah, five hundred clicks southwest of us, is one of his safe houses.”
Fisk flipped the chart forward to reveal photos of a dull mud house that could be anywhere in Afghanistan. The pictures were oddly angled because they were taken covertly by an asset in Lashkar Gah, the distant, dusty capital of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.
“How do we know this is the house?” Walker asked.
“We’ll discuss that in a minute. But it was confirmed by a second source, here.”
“And by here, do you happen to mean something coming out of the Pit?” Staub asked, referring to Eagle Base’s interrogation and detention facility.
“Need to know,” Fisk said, using the intelligence colloquial for “I can’t answer that.”
Some case officers regarded the men from the CIA’s Special Activities Center as equal colleagues. Others, like Fisk, maintained a class distinction between the paramilitary knuckle-draggers and what some considered the more cerebral work of the case officers. Walker had detected the first signs of Fisk’s attitude when they had been training together at Camp Peary, the Virginia CIA training base better known as the Farm.
“And who’s source?” Walker asked
“Mongoose.”
Walker and Staub traded a glance.
Staub smiled. “Let me guess, Abdul Nasr wanted to deck out his vacation house in lovely Lashkar Gah and for that, he needed some new rugs.”
“Correct.”
“And the confirmation may or may not have come from some poor bastard in the Salt Pit.”
Fisk remained noncommittal.
