Joby Warrick - The Triple Agent

The car turned left again to travel along the edge of the runway, past the tanker trucks, the dun-colored armored troop carriers, and an odd-looking green helicopter that stood idle on the tarmac, its main rotor blades drooping slightly like the wings of some giant prehistoric bird at rest. To the right were more high walls and barbed wire, and beyond them, the metal roofs of buildings Balawi could not yet see.

Balawi sank back into his seat. For days he had pondered what this moment would be like. In his writings he had imagined the djinn—devils—and their whispered doubts nudging him back from the edge.

“Are you going to perform jihad and get yourself killed, and let your wife remarry and your children become orphans?

“To whom are you leaving your pretty wife? Who will be dutiful to your frail mother?

“How can you abandon your wonderful work?”

There was an opening in the wall, and Arghawan steered the Subaru through a second open checkpoint and then turned left through a third. Balawi was now inside a fortified compound with walls of stacked HESCO barriers ten feet high and topped with razor wire. On the side of the compound opposite from the gate were five newly constructed buildings with metal roofs and a few smaller ones. The next-to-last building in the row had a wide awning. Balawi could see a large cluster of people scattered in a line in front of it. Behind him, the gate to the inner compound was pulled shut.

Arghawan stopped the vehicle in the middle of a gravel lot in front of the building, parallel to the awning but several car lengths away from it. From his spot in the backseat behind the driver, Balawi could finally see the line of people waiting to meet him. There were at least a dozen, including some women. Now he spotted Ali bin Zeid, wearing a camouflage hat and standing next to a larger man in jeans and a baseball cap. The two were at the end of the column of welcomers, but farther to the side and close enough that Balawi could see bin Zeid smiling at him.

Balawi was staring blankly at the group when the car door opened and he was suddenly face-to-face with a bear of a man with a close-cropped beard and piercing blue eyes. One gloved hand reached for Balawi, and the other clutched an assault rifle, its barrel pointed down. Balawi froze. Then, slowly, he began backing away, pushing himself along the seat’s edge away from the figure with the gun.

Balawi squeezed the door handle on the opposite side and climbed out of the car, swinging his injured leg onto the gravel lot, and then the good one. Painfully he pulled himself erect, leaning on his metal crutch for support. He was dimly aware of bin Zeid calling out to him, but he would not look up.

When will my words taste my blood?

Balawi began walking in a slow-motion hobble as his right hand felt for the detonator.

Just at the brink, the djinn would pose the most awful questions , he had written.

“Who will take care of your little child? And your elderly father?”

Men were shouting at him now, agitated, guns drawn.

“It is said in the Hadith that he who says, ‘There is no God but God alone and praise be to Him,’ he is protected by God from Satan on that day,” Balawi had written. “On the day of the martyrdom-seeking operation, the enemy of God will not reach you.”

Now Balawi mouthed the words softly in Arabic. “La ilaha illa Allah!” There is no god but God .

Men were shouting loudly now, yelling about his hand, but still Balawi walked. He could hear his own voice growing more distinct.

“La ilaha illa Allah!”

Balawi’s path was now blocked. He looked up to see that he was surrounded on two sides by men with guns drawn. The bearded man who had opened the car door had circled around him and was shouting at him from his left, and two other heavily armed officers stood directly in front of Balawi, trapping him against the car with no way forward or back. One of the men, blond and younger than the others, was crouching as though preparing to lunge.

Balawi turned slightly, finger locked on the detonator, and looked across the top of the car. The smiles had vanished, and bin Zeid was starting to move toward him. As he did, the tall man beside him grabbed his shoulder to pull him back.

Balawi closed his eyes. His finger made the slightest twitch.

Khost, Afghanistan—December 30, 2009

In a fraction of a second, Humam al-Balawi disappeared in a flash of unimaginable brightness. The detonator caps sent a pulse of energy through the bars of C4 explosive until they ignited with a force powerful enough to snap steel girders. The heat at the center of the explosion soared briefly to more than four thousand degrees before the molecules themselves were hurled outward on a blast wave traveling at fifteen thousand feet per second.

The wave lifted the car off the ground and slammed into humans like a wall of concrete, blowing out eardrums and collapsing lungs. The three security men closest to the bomber were flung backward, with Dane Paresi thrown against a truck dozens of feet away. A great thunderclap shook the compound, followed by the crunch of hundreds of steel ball bearings ripping through glass, metal, and flesh.

The hail of fragments caused the most grievous damage to human tissue. The car’s driver and the five officers with an unobstructed view of the bomber—the three security guards, Darren LaBonte, and Ali bin Zeid—were killed outright. The eleven others standing on the far side of the Subaru were cut down by tiny steel missiles that passed over and under the car and sometimes through it. Shrapnel pierced the compound’s metal gate more than two hundred feet away.

All were hit, though the degree of bodily damage was random. Jennifer Matthews fell with grievous wounds, while a man standing near her was largely spared. Elizabeth Hanson, seemingly unharmed, staggered to her feet and ran between two buildings before collapsing to the ground.

The explosion shook buildings at the far end of the base, a half mile distant, and reverberated against the mountains through which Balawi had just passed. Then there was silence, broken only by the thud of falling debris.

Balawi’s head, blown skyward at the instant of detonation, bounced against the side of a building and landed in the gravel lot. It was the only recognizable piece of him that remained.

Among the witnesses to the explosion was a CIA medical officer who had been summoned to the Balawi meeting to tend to the agent’s leg and other ailments. Knocked briefly unconscious by the blast wave, he recovered to find himself surrounded by carnage and debris.

Though injured himself, he began crawling from body to body, surveying wounds, feeling for pulses, and screaming for assistance. He quickly stumbled upon Jennifer Matthews, moaning and apparently partially conscious with gaping wounds on her neck and one of her legs. Nearby, Elizabeth Hanson, bleeding from a small chest wound, lay motionless on the ground.

More help arrived within seconds as army Special Forces officers, some of them with advanced training in battlefield trauma, sprinted from buildings across the compound at the sound of the explosion, rifles and medical kits at the ready. Their snap assessment was dire in the extreme. The blast victims were so scattered and debris covered that it took minutes to find them all. Six were clearly dead, including the driver, and multiple victims had sustained life-threatening injuries, including penetrating head wounds. The CIA medic checked the badly wounded again as the soldiers applied field dressings and tourniquets. Without immediate surgery, five would die within minutes, he concluded. Matthews and Hanson were among them.