Abbottabad,
Pakistan
March 27, 2011, 1935 Hours Local
Time
Charlie Becker lay back on the pallet he used as a bed and massaged what was left of his legs. His whole body ached. But it was a a good ache. A Ranger ache. The kind of ache that told him he was alive and well and had used his body to its limits. A Darby Queen ache.
Ranger candidates spend ten days at Fort Benning’s Camp Darby, where, among other things, they get to run the obstacle/confidence course known as the Darby Queen. The Queen is twenty-four stages that test your fear of heights and challenge your balance, your upper-body strength, and your ability to keep going no matter how badly you’re being dinged. Tonight Charlie felt as if he’d done three circuits on the Darby Queen.
But the news was all good. His message, bursted half an hour previously, was that Abbottabad had gone back to being the sleepy little garrison town it always had been. There were no ISI gumshoes trolling. Arshad and Tareq Khan were both in residence.
But the main point of his message was that today he’d gotten a glance inside the gates of Ground Zero. He’d gone by the perimeter just after noon. From the smoke and the smell, they were burning trash behind the wire-topped wall.
As he rolled past, Charlie paused to watch half a dozen youngsters playing street soccer on the road that ran parallel to the compound wall. He’d just started up again when one of them sliced the ball over the wall. So he paused to see what would happen.
A couple of minutes later, the gate opened just a crack, an arm and a shoulder protruded, and the ball was dropped into the street.
And Charlie, on the opposite side of the road, saw something as the gate cracked open. He saw a strap diagonal across the sliver of chest of whoever had opened the gate. And the butt of an AK.
It was just a flash, but it was important. Yet another sign. There were no other villas in Abbottabad—at least among the ones Charlie had seen—where people came to the gate carrying assault rifles.
Was it proof of anything? Of course not. But Charlie also knew intelligence isn’t like, wow, here it is: everything. Intelligence is finding little pieces of a puzzle and sending them on to folks who understand how to put those pieces together—folks who know that they may not be working on one puzzle, but five or six or ten puzzles simultaneously.
So far as he knew, no one had ever seen anyone in the Khan compound who was armed. Now Charlie could report for certain that there was at least one AK-47 on the premises.
Did it prove that UBL was living there? Not exactly. It proved only that there was at least one person living in the villa who was wary enough to arm himself when he burned garbage. But it was . . . an info-bit. Something that might turn into an indicator.
Charlie blew out the kerosene lamp, covered himself with the lumpy pad that served as his blanket, and snuggled in for the night. He would sleep well. Today he had earned his pay.