Face-Off. Chris Karsten
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how it might have been with him. They’d treated each other with respect. If he hadn’t left for Karachi, they would have been married. She would have been a good wife, she would have been submissive, borne him children, not tried to silence him when he wanted to talk about politics.
But when he returned, it was in the company of the Uzbeks, and it was with them that he’d fled ahead of the choppers armed with machine guns and the aeroplanes loaded with bombs and ahead of the Jeeps and trucks of the Pakistani security forces, who were like clay in the hands of the American infidels, intent upon wiping out the Pashtun nation in Afghanistan and Waziristan.
Nasir had been her father’s choice, and she would not have gone against his wishes. She would have agreed to marry Nasir. It was the way it had always been; it was the way it would always be. She and Nasir were both born in Kanigoram, had played together, grown up together, and it had been a good life. Not easy, but good.
Now he was gone. And during her last visit home her mother had told her in the kitchen of Nasir’s heroic exploits against the infidels.
4.
On his way back from the strat session, cyber-warrior Danny Hatt remarked: “It’s going to be a long shift.”
“What does Jill say – are you coming over for the Steelers game on Sunday?” asked Frank. “It’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“Steelers? I thought it was the Giants.”
“Giants is the week after.”
“I’ll ask her – I don’t think she has anything planned, she didn’t mention going to her mother. Did you see yesterday’s Post?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “Called us cowards again.”
“Anonymous cowards,” said Danny.
“Fuck those liberals.”
“Coward” was becoming a popular handle. Danny Hatt had read about it in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and listened to the talking heads on TV: liberals and Muslim activists calling the UAV attacks on Taliban, al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia cowardly. Human rights activists calling the drone strikes illegal, calling it murder authorised by the White House – the president in the role of prosecutor, judge and executioner.
Danny, techno-savant in the CIA’s S&T directorate, with degrees in computer science and information technology, had been a student at the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, along with Frank. They’d completed a course in terrorism analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and had graduated together from the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program (PISAP), focusing on “movements and organisations that use religion for political purposes and use religious ideology to attempt to change the existing political, social, or economic order”.
On paper, Danny’s qualifications were good, though he’d never trained as a soldier or a fighter pilot. He’d never been deployed in battle. He’d been at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib for PISAP orientation, in Building 59 at Bagram, at Camps Delta, Echo, Iguana and X-ray at Guantánamo. He’d gone to them all, and come face to face with the enemy and his ideology.
Danny was thirty-five. He and Frank now manned an office at the George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence, an enormous complex on 258 acres of land on the riverbank in McLean, a suburb of Langley, Virginia. On the opposite side of the Potomac lay Washington DC, seat of American power.
At just after six in the morning, Danny and Frank were in the lift on their way down, having been on night shift for the past ten hours. They knew the end was nowhere in sight, that it would be at least another ten hours, but the adrenaline was pumping, as always when an operation had been given the green light.
The final strat session had begun at five and lasted an hour – topographical maps and satellite images against the walls, real-time video streaming from an unarmed RQ-170 Sentinel spotter drone five thousand metres above the target area.
It was early morning in Washington, three o’clock in the afternoon in South Waziristan, one of the lawless tribal areas in Pakistan. Just after midnight the go-ahead had been given by the director of the National Clandestine Service, or NCS, and finally by the new CIA director himself.
Morale was high, though it had been some time since the spectacularly successful CIA operations of 2011, beginning with the big one, Operation Neptune Spear in Abbottabad, and followed some months later by other high-profile targets. But Danny and Frank had not been at the helm of those Predators. They wished they had, especially the one that had finally silenced the big mouths of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, defectors from the American bosom that had nurtured them at Khashef in Yemen. The worst kind of treachery, Danny thought.
5.
The first impulse of a man on the run, Abel thought, was to create the greatest possible distance between himself and his pursuers in the shortest possible time. Fight or flight: that was how the primitive brain of man and beast worked. Even if your pursuer is just a young woman, attractive and slim, weighing no more than fifty-five kilograms (at a guess).
Abel had chosen a different option. He’d lay low, in the heart of the hunting ground, as it were, to allow his physical wounds and those of his bewildered spirit to heal. He needed a clear head for this hunting season, where he was the prey. He had to anticipate his pursuer’s ruses, with three countermoves at the ready like a good chess player.
His recuperation had taken six weeks, but he had not been idle during his confinement. The damage had been to his body and his spirit, not his mind, which was still sharp: he knew how to determine the positions and culminations of constellations, the magnitudes and declinations of stars. He knew Ptolemy’s mathematical and astronomical second-century treatises, as analysed and explained by later texts: the Almagest, about the movements of cosmic bodies; the Tetrabiblos, about the cycles of those heavenly bodies’ meteorological influences on the atmosphere; the Phaseis, Ptolemeus’ star calendar, about the appearance and disappearance of fixed stars during a solar year.
Abel was also an expert on authentic ethnic masks. He knew the symbolism and history of the masks of even the most obscure African tribes, could describe off the top of his head the masks worn by the Bwa and Nuna of Burkina Faso to exorcise evil spirits, those worn by the Dogon and Zackana of Mali in dance rituals to communicate with the spirits of the ancestors, the war masks of the Grebo of the Ivory Coast and the Ashanti of Ghana, the death masks of the Balubri and the nomadic Fulani of Guinea, the harvest festival masks of the Kwele of Cameroon, the masks the Lulua and Teke of the Congo dedicated to the soil and the animals of Africa.
Abel knew music too: specifically and exclusively Paganini’s violin compositions. All other music was painful to his ears, made him sweat and tremble. The cacophony of pop and rock, folk and jazz confused his spirit. He knew the M.S. numbers, names and keys (and opus numbers, where available) as published in Moretti and Sorrento’s thematic catalogue of all Niccolò Paganini’s compositions, even those the violin virtuoso composed for guitar. Abel’s firm favourite was the 24 Caprices, Op. 1, M.S. 25, renditions by various violinists, because Abel was particular about the artists who attempted the master’s compositions.
He also knew that a heavenly body had been named after the great composer: in 1978, Nikolay Stepanovich Chernykh, looking through a ZTSH telescope at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory near Nauchny, had discovered asteroid 2859 and named it after Paganini.
Yes, he was a connoisseur of African masks, Paganini and cosmology – and was, in fact, in the process of compiling a series of volumes of his personal astronomical observations and discoveries.
He believed he had an astute, orderly brain,