Alex Berenson: The Midnight House

“You know our friends are optimists. And even if they don’t reach him, they know that whatever they do will get extra attention tomorrow.”

“Maybe they’ll have help to get through a checkpoint or two.” Fezcko didn’t have to specify that the help would be coming from inside the ISI. “Who else knows about this, Nawiz? ”

“Omar is the only one I’ve told.” Omar Gul, an assistant director in the ISI’s Counter-Terror Division. Sometimes known at Langley as the “Counting on Terror” Division. The CIA viewed Gul as the only reliable officer in the top ranks of the ISI, not least because he’d survived three assassination attempts in four years, the last of which had cost him his right eye.

Fezcko saw why Khan was so anxious to move. “You want to do this now. Get them out before the sun comes up. You and Omar are the only ones who know. Tomorrow, the next day, you come back on that truck, a big show. It’s empty, and you tell your buddies that the bad guys disappeared.”

Khan nodded.

“Then whatever we get from them, maybe even some names inside your shop, nobody knows but you.”

Another nod.

The plan was at least one step past risky. Maybe all the way to stupid. Renditions usually required approval from senior-level officials on both sides. Now Khan wanted to grab two men on the fly. They weren’t in some village on the North-West Frontier, either. They were five miles from the Pakistani parliament. If something went wrong, if they got caught tonight, the Pakistani government wouldn’t be able to ignore what had happened. Khan would go to jail. There would be anti-American riots.

If anyone but Khan had made the offer, Fezcko would have rejected it outright for fear of a trap. But he trusted Khan. And the deal was tempting. Anything they could do to clean up the ISI would be valuable.

“We don’t have a plane in country,” Fezcko said, trying to buy time. “Where will we keep them? ”

“Here.”

“No problem getting them out? ”

“Not if you get a jet in today to Faisalabad.” A city about 150 miles south of Islamabad.

Fezcko nodded at Maggs. They stepped to the other side of the room. “Thoughts? ” Fezcko murmured.

“Nothing you don’t know.”

“Too good to be true? Setup? ”

“Not from him. You know my rule.”

Maggs’s rule was that you couldn’t trust anyone in the ISI until he’d taken a bullet next to you. It was a good rule. And just like that, Fezcko decided. “All right,” he yelled over the generator to Khan. “We’re in. Let me see about that G-five.” And some authorization, he didn’t add. For this operation, winks and nods wouldn’t do. He wanted explicit approval, in writing.

Behind the building, he called Orton on his sat phone.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t be you,” Orton said.

“Am I interrupting you, Josh? Gotta pick up the kids from soccer practice? Maybe a manicure? ”

“Just tell me.”

Fezcko did.

“Tricky,” Orton said. “If the ISI isn’t going to know about it, we’re going to have to keep this one quiet. There’s only one place for them to go. And that takes special authorization. Have to call the Pentagon.”

“No excuses,” Fezcko said. “Yes or no.” He hung up.

WHILE THEY WAITED, they grabbed body armor and M-4s from the Nissan and suited up. Khan and his men did the same, though their own gear was less fancy, vests and AK-47s. When they were done, Khan’s squad packed into a windowless white van tucked behind the building and rolled off. Fezcko and Maggs and Leslie followed in the Nissan.

The Mitsubishi truck was easy to find, parked beside a Toyota 4Runner in front of a two-story concrete house in a district that mixed residential and light manufacturing. The house had a strangely Art Deco look, lime-green with a white roof. It belonged in Miami, not Islamabad, though Fezcko had seen similar color schemes in Pakistan before. Splashy paint jobs grabbed attention from cracked ceilings and leaky pipes. The house seemed deserted, no lights or movement inside. There were walls along the property lot but none in front.

They rolled by without slowing. To the west, the city petered out. A mile down, Khan’s van parked behind a tall brick warehouse. Khan stepped out, tapped a cigarette out of the flat silver case he carried. He lit up, dragged deeply, exhaled twin jets of smoke from his nostrils.

“You blow any harder you’ll have liftoff,” Maggs said.

“Let me guess,” Khan said. “Marines smoke three cigarettes at once. Because one at a time wouldn’t be manly enough.”

Fezcko laughed. “Now you’re getting it, Nawiz.”

“So that’s the place,” Maggs said.

Khan nodded.

“Anybody watching it?”

“My men installed a PTD”—a presence tracking device, also known as a bug—“on the truck in Peshawar. Two of my men are monitoring it.” Khan tilted his head toward the second floor of the warehouse, where a cigarette glowed behind a window. “The truck hasn’t moved since they arrived yesterday.”

“Who owns the house? ” Fezcko said.

“Property records show it belongs to a family that lives in Karachi. We don’t know if they’re connected or if they even know it’s being used.”

Khan unrolled an oversized map, a street-by-street grid of the district. The map’s corners rolled up, and Khan’s men grabbed bricks to weigh it down.

“High-tech,” Fezcko said.

“My Predators are in the shop.” Khan circled the target house in red Magic Marker, and for fifteen minutes he walked his squad and Fezcko through the raid. The plan was simple, based on simple assumptions: that the doors of the house wouldn’t be reinforced or booby-trapped, and that they would be facing at most four men inside. Khan’s squad would handle the main assault, breaking through the front door and firing gas grenades to flush out the men. Fezcko’s team would circle the house, wait for the jihadis to escape through the back door. If they didn’t come out in sixty seconds, Fezcko and Maggs would go in the back.

When Khan was done, Fezcko pulled him aside.

“Too many guesses, Nawiz. If this gets ugly, we’re underpowered. No radios. Layout’s a mystery. This is how you get hurt.”

Khan wrapped an arm around Fezcko’s shoulders, put his face to the American’s ear as if he planned to whisper a declaration of love eternal. “Are you walking, George? Taking your ball and going home? Tell me now so I don’t waste more time. We have to do this before the sun comes up. Go on back to Langley. Another American hero.”

In the cool night air, Fezcko felt himself flush. A cheap shot, sure, but there was truth behind it. His tour here was done. Khan’s would never be over. He pushed Khan off, less than a shove but more than a friendly tap, and walked away. The soft, brown mud of the parking lot sucked at his boots, and he tried not to wonder whether the soil was a metaphor for the quagmire of the endless war on terror. He stood behind a corner of the warehouse and called Langley. “Anything yet?”

“The good news is the plane’s in the air,” Orton said. “The bad news is that the DDO’s not happy. But I have a conditional okay.”

“Conditional on what? ”

“On your certifying that there’s imminent risk of attack.”

The message from Langley was clear: Right back atcha. You want to play cowboy, go ahead, but don’t expect us to cover your ass from eleven time zones away on an hour’s notice. “Can you say career ender? ” Fezcko mumbled into the night.

“What? ” Orton said.

“I said put it in writing. My name.”

“George—”

“Whatever you have to do. Do it.” Fezcko hung up, barely resisting the urge to smash the Iridium handset into the mud.