Seal Team Six Hunt the Wolf(50)
Nine and a half hours later, when they changed planes in Doha, Crocker read a text message from Mancini. “Preliminary tests DO NOT link Malie. More results pending. Headed to KP.”
He leaned over and showed it to Akil, who had just come back from the men’s room. “Take a look at this.”
Beads of water still clung to his chin. “You’re right this time. Good for you.”
In the air again, the SEAL assault team leader closed his eyes and dreamt that he was being chased by a pack of wolves through dark, unnamed streets. Sweating through his pale blue polo shirt, he opened his eyes and, blinking, realized he was somewhere over the Indian Sea in an aluminum cylinder with two hundred or so people he didn’t know. The air tasted sour.
He was keenly aware of the space between himself and his fellow passengers. Each of them lived in the bubble of their own experiences, beliefs, circumstances, wants, and needs.
Akil, with his big head leaning on the headrest and his eyes closed, stood out. He was the only one of many Middle Eastern men on the flight dressed casually, in jeans and a black T-shirt. And he was fit. Crocker had noticed other travelers looking at Akil askance.
“No man is an island,” a poet had written. Still, people acted as if they were islands and defended them like wild dogs. To extend oneself and try to cross over from one island to the next was to invite hostility and conflict. Which explained why the Western ideal of personal freedom challenged those who clung to the strict boundaries of dogma. In the state of Virginia, which Crocker called home, you could believe anything you wanted to, dress according to your personal tastes, say whatever you felt like saying, worship the deity of your choice.
He considered personal freedom to be a key ingredient to human progress. And it was a desire that he believed all human beings harbored somewhere in their hearts. To those who wanted to impose a uniform set of beliefs, Western-style freedom—with its invitation to individualism and experimentation—was a loaded gun. A threat.
Crocker liked to compare his team to the Greek three hundred—the free Spartans who chose to fight to the death to resist hundreds of thousands of invading Persians in 480 BC. It was a story that had inspired Crocker his entire adult life. A small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects at Thermopylae who advanced under the lash. The Western idea of freedom was proved stronger than the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy.
Things hadn’t changed that much. Maybe weapons and methods were more sophisticated today, but the war still raged.
Like the day before, at the farm.
Crocker counted his bodies, then added them to the tally. Another two or three in Panama, a half dozen in Iraq, one in Paraguay, six or seven, maybe eight, outside Kandahar in eastern Afghanistan, another two on the Guatemalan border. All men who made the world more dangerous, who threatened the right of free people to live the way they wanted.
The twenty or so lives he’d taken had never caused him to lose a minute of sleep. But, looking out the Airbus window, Crocker wondered if maybe he’d paid a karmic price. Because sometimes he sensed a dark place in his soul.
Maybe one day I’ll face a reckoning and will be punished, he said to himself.
He couldn’t worry about that now. He’d chosen to be one of America’s elite warriors. And as such, he’d proudly and steadfastly fend off and defeat the wolves.
Karachi airport was a confusing, smelly, noisy mess of anxious bodies trying to get from one place to the next. The two Americans hired an expediter—in this case a short Pakistani man named Ahmed—who helped them navigate immigration and customs.
On the way out they passed two strutting Pak security guards with bristling, shining mustaches. Behind them followed lower-ranked guards pulling along a young man with long blond hair and his wrists chained together who was shouting curses in German. A smuggler or drug courier, probably. Crocker imagined that he’d be screaming even louder when the Pakistanis got him behind doors.
The scene outside was equally chaotic. Even though it was late at night, almost 11 p.m. local time, the conjoining streets presented an incredible tangle of cars, people, bicycles, and honking horns. Crocker was reminded that Karachi was a city of over eighteen million, and the primary banking, trade, and business center of Pakistan. A large proportion of its inhabitants were refugees—Muhajirs and Punjabis from India, Biharis and Bengalis from Bangladesh, Pashtuns from Afghanistan, and Rohingya from Burma.
“This way, boss!”
Akil pointed to a blue Mercedes taxi. Inside, he instructed the Sikh driver to deliver them to the port as quickly as possible. They took off at breakneck speed, retracing the path they’d taken the night they went after Abu Rasul Zaman—the Shahrah-e-Faisal Boulevard to Napier Mole Bridge. Judging from the number and prominence of billboards advertising Bollywood movies, that form of popular entertainment had managed to bridge the venomous rivalry between India and Pakistan.