The Night Letter

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

In the morning everyone was in the office. "I think my source is dead," Ted announced. "He doesn't answer his phone. He knew the operators' strike from two nights prior had been his trigger so he followed it closely but the details of an operation were not always immediately available. Later in the day he found out Dr. Faraz was in fact dead, leaving him with just one other asset in his stable.

Vanderpoel was reviewing the entire database to get caught up on all the information coming into the FOB. Most of the sources had photos and videos on their phones. The collectors sent them out for facial recognition analysis looking for any known targets. usually nothing came up. Sometimes they watched the videos just for fun. Vanderpoel seemed to watch more than the others.

"Are you a collector or an anthropologist?" Bowditch asked him once. "Have to know who they love, how they live; it's not necessary."

Vanderpoel kept on with his ethnographic studies. There was one phone that contained hundreds of photographs of young boys. They looked like school year book pictures but the source was not a teacher. It was an Afghan type of pornography, Vanderpoel thought. There were also photos and videos of suicide bombings. The bomber usually wore a vest of explosives and when it was detonated the head could be seen to pop off like a daisy off its stem. He once saw a post mission brief that included a picture of a suicide bomber's face that had been blown off - not the head, just the face and it was still recognizable as the person it had belonged to.

Funeral videos were also popular. They were usually accompanied by poorly produced soundtrack dirges featuring the incessant chanting of a high pitched male voice. After only a few minutes it gave Vanderpoel a headache and he had to turn the sound off. The most disturbing part of the funeral videos was they way they handled the bodies. The screaming families would stroke the dead man's beard, chafe his skin as if trying to revive him, sometimes even probe his wounds with their fingers. The body was often covered in little more than a flimsy white pall and the family would disturb it until the corpse was almost nude which somehow made it look even more pale and dead.

The funeral videos were the only time women made an appearance. It seemed perversely cruel to only expose women to the light of day to experience pain. There was one video of a Taliban tour de force through the center of the village. Both sides of the street were crowded with people to watch the parade but not one woman. Vanderpoel wondered what it would be like for a man to live almost his entire life without seeing a woman who was not a relative. But on deployment, they were not much better off than the benighted Pashtuns. Cindy was the only woman around and even she was not always there.

It was at such times he missed Lisa most desperately, as if someone were trying to take her from him. He even missed his mother and sisters but it all coalesced in his need for one woman, Lisa. It was much more intense because of the hopelessness of her physical presence. He wanted to call her again but he thought it was too soon after the last time he called her. Instead, he focused on his upcoming meeting with a one time source. It could be nothing but he was a village elder who claimed placement and access to Mullah Jan. He had called the hotline and they had invited him in. They went over the contact procedures very carefully over the phone. Vanderpoel was surprised how well he followed them. Some sources did as they pleased even after a dozen meetings.

When Safiq arrived at the FOB, Vanderpoel gave him a biographical questionnaire to fill out. Vanderpoel explained to him that if he or a close family member were involved in attacks upon Americans or human rights abuses that would probably end the relationship right there. The questionnaire was far more detailed than just how he knew members of the Tailban and how he could lead the Americans to find them. It asked about to his motivations for wanting to cooperate with the Americans and about his children and his family relationships. Safiq was a cautious enough man that he took his time with it. He thought it crude of them to expect him to fill out a form like this. Didn't they know Afghanis did not like to commit themselves to written records? He didn't care how careful they were with the information. Afghanis also kept their family life private and there were a lot of questions about his relatives here. Safiq weighed each answer judiciously. He told them about Roshina. No one could possibly hurt him with knowledge of such a simple, faithful creature. He told them about his second wife because he was proud of her. He had to stop and think how many daughters he had. He listed the son he had just had with his second wife because he was proud of that. He realized there was little he was not telling about himself as he thought of each family member and their associations and entanglements as well as his own. He could not think of family without thinking of the ones who were gone. Tajj would be a man now; he would have been expected to write his name on the form but there was nothing to write. He had to control his thoughts to keep from thinking about it, about the day it happened. He could not think about Tajj without thinking about his other son, Raham. Although he was still alive (he thought he was still alive; he could not know but somehow he felt that he was alive still, somewhere) thoughts of Raham lingered in the haze of the further reaches of his mind, further away than Tajj. Raham was like a picture that hangs on the wall for years and you are aware it is there but you never really look at it and it gathers dust. He held the point of the pen to the paper and hesitated to write the name there. He was not quite sure if it was because he did not feel like Raham's father anymore or if, out of long dormant feelings of protectiveness that he was deprived of expressing more directly, he did not want to involve Raham in any of this when there was so much he didn't know about where he was or what he was doing, so much that could run him afoul of the Americans. He placed the point of the pen against the paper again and decided firmly the Americans already knew enough about his family.

They asked about his profession. The question sounded so definite to him. He was going to write farmer but he thought that sounded too earthy and crude. He thought a moment and wrote, "land owner".

There was a section that asked about his motivation for talking to the Americans. He knew if he wrote "money" they would be suspicious of everything he had to say and he knew if he wrote anything other than money they would think he was trying to cover up his greed for money. Instead he wrote "revenge." He thought it was broad enough to somewhat true and something foreigners would believe about an Afghani. He also thought it was true enough, given his rage over what had happened to the doctor.

Vanderpoel took the form and passed it to the translator. The translator was a big man who looked like a wrestler and was as wide as the door. He said his name was Khan. "Hazarra," Safiq thought when he saw him. His face was so broad and fleshy but his features so small that almost no thoughts or emotions could be read there; the perfect face for a translator. There was a platter of food, mostly dates and pistachios, the very ones that may have been there since Vanderpoel's last assignment in Kandahar, that none of the collectors would touch and most of them were embarrassed to offer to their sources. Vanderpoel offered Safiq some of the food he brought from home and a cigarette. The got through the mad minute to determine if Safiq had been followed. They chatted about general things. Safiq was enjoying the conversation, the recounting of past wars and victories, some of them his own. He smiled a lot, a warm smile. He was missing two r three teeth but, like grey hair and wrinkles, it was a sign of age and experience, perhaps wisdom. Rapport established, they moved on to placement and access.

"I know many Taliban. Many of them live in my village and I know everything that goes on in my village; their comings and goings, where they stay in Pakistan, where they cross, when they are here and when they are there. Most of them have already returned from there; we are well into the spring."

"Do you know Abdur Agha?"

"Yes, he is plotting an attack on the prison to free some of his comrades there. I can tell you about that. And I know others. Why did you start with him?"

"Can you lead us to Wali Ziaur Wazir?"

"Yes. He operates out of a qalat in....... Go higher."

"Mullah Osmani?"

"Higher."

"Akhtar Abdul Ehsan?"

"I have never heard of him. He is a Kandahar Taliban?" He asked. It was a test. He wasn't supposed to have heard of him. "I can find all these men for you if that is all you want. I know how they travel; I know where they stay. But I think you are aiming your sights too low. I expected more ambition. Mullah Jan is the biggest Taliban around and I can lead you right to him if it is Mullah Jan you are looking for. I can tell you the day and the hour and the location of where he will be. I only have to put word out that I want to see him and then I can tell you where we are meeting. Then he is yours."

"How do you know Mullah Jan and what is your motivation for talking to us? It says here revenge; revenge for what?"

"We are all but close rivals. I never understood Mullah Jan's resentment of me but I am sure it is real. I am an elder; I represent the old way; we are dying out but I am not giving up without a fight. Mullah Jan is what you would call a commander or a warlord. It is all politics with them. I'm not sure what those are; it is all new to us, just since the war. It is all politics. That is where their power comes from and the resent the elders for trying to resist that. Mullah Jan was an elder, too but he wanted more than that; he got corrupted."

Vanderpoel was familiar with Afghani exaggeration. He had heard similar claims from other sources that usually went nowhere. It wasn't always the fault of the source. Without reliable SIGINT, Safiq's information would get little attention. Right now, Safiq was a one time source with mysterious motivations. But he thought they were off to a good start if even half of his information proved true. Vanderpoel told him to see what he could do with dropping a pin on Mullah Jan and the other objectives but also gave him some easier tasks, including ops testing, to see if his credibility would hold.