The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

year. Don’t know why Clair lets it happen that way . . . all that turnover. Seems dumb to me. Never mind. Watcha gonna do out there, Milt?”

“What do you want me to do?” I threw his probe back at him.

“I want you to go out there and win. That’s what the President wants. He put it in writing. We’ve been screwin’ around long enough with this steady-as-she-goes approach. Zia’s always telling me to turn up the heat a little but not to let the pot boil over . . . you know, that kind of stuff.”

“That’s what he’s been telling everybody these days from what I hear, except the earful he gave Hatch.”

Casey rolled his eyes at the mention of Senator Hatch. He’d had enough of the so-called 4H Club—Senators Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Chic Hecht, and Gordon Humphrey—who, along with their staffers, had been demanding bolder CIA action in Afghanistan.

“Old Zia’s still pretty smart, and you want to listen to him when you get out there. Whenever you want him to do something that’s above your pay scale, tell him and General Akhtar I said I wanted it done. It’ll make a difference.”

“You really want to give me that kind of a blank check?” I said, leaning forward to make sure he meant it. “I’ll use it, you know.”

Casey had developed a close relationship with both Zia and his intelligence chief, General Akhtar. Zia had shrewdly calculated that Casey would stand with Pakistan as long as Reagan was in the White House, and Akhtar, also shrewdly, bought into any policy that Zia had embraced. That all three men clearly liked one another just added to the relationship. Allowing me to trade on that relationship was no small matter.

“You do whatever it takes to win out there. I want to win the whole thing. Afghanistan is only part of it. I’ll give you everything you’ll need. Fight’s finally done on the Stingers, and you got all the money you’ll need. A billion enough for ya?” The old man slipped into the mumbled half sentences that told me his mind was racing around some great vision that I had only a small part of.

“Yeah, a billion ought to do it,” I said.

“When are the Stingers going in?” he asked.

“They’re training some guys now. Ought to be deployed in early September.”

“What about the broadcasts?”

Clair had told me that Casey had been promoting a plan to broadcast propaganda into the Soviet Central Asian republics, an idea no one else thought was a good one. Casey was convinced that he could push the Soviets against the wall, but almost everyone else at Langley and in Foggy Bottom was convinced that if pushed too far, the Soviets might overreact and strike back at Pakistan. Clair had told me to watch for anything that looked as if it was going to spill over the Amu Dar’ya into the USSR. I’d taken that to mean anything on the ground or on the airwaves.

“I’m still reading in on that,” I said, choosing to dodge the question, “but everything’s pretty much on track as I understand it. When’re you planning to come out and check the traps?”

Casey peered over his glasses at me for a moment without answering. I could only guess where his thoughts were carrying him. I knew he liked nothing better than flying around in his VIP module, lashed inside a black C-141 and checking things out in the field, but I also knew that he was under growing attack from the Hill for his other pet project—the Central American Task Force, whose mission was to get the Sandinistas out of power in Nicaragua. “God, soon as I can—getting out of here right now is no easy task. Maybe before the end of the year.”

“I’ll scramble your eggs when you come.”

That brought a smile from Casey and the meeting to an end. “You go on out there and do what it takes, Milt,” he said. “Tell Akhtar and Zia that I’ll be out as soon as I can get away from here. And tell Zia I’m still watching his pot. I won’t let it boil over.”

Casey gripped my hand as I rose to leave his office. I didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time I’d see the old man.

   2   

Islamabad, Pakistan, August 1986

The summer monsoon was winding down in Pakistan’s Punjab province, leaving behind a rich, verdant haze over the capital city of Islamabad, whose tranquillity belied the existence of a brutal, earth-scorching war a little more than a hundred miles to the west. As I made my way through Islamabad’s light traffic to my office each morning, I was struck by the city’s extraordinary setting. To the west of the main government and diplomatic enclave lay the graceful slopes of the Margalla Hills, mere foothills, but rich in geological promise as they forced their way northward, twisting, pushing ever higher. In a stunningly beautiful stretch of Pakistan’s Northern Territories, they fused together with the great ranges that would become the towering Karakorums driving northward into China, the Himalayas stretching eastward across the rooftop of the world into India and Nepal, and the Hindu Kush, reaching skyward above the battles in neighboring Afghanistan. There were peaks topping twenty thousand feet that no one had even bothered to name.

Down country and closer to home was the sprawling city of Rawalpindi, its nineteenth-century army cantonment an ever so faintly glowing ember of the old British empire. In the past, it was the city of Kipling and serious-minded Englishmen in khaki serving the queen on the playing fields of Central Asia. If Islamabad was too sterile, too new and ordered, for an old South Asia hand, there was always the option of disappearing into the labyrinthine alleyways and roiling sea of humanity that was Rawalpindi a few miles to the east and escape backward in time. Kipling was gone, but other serious-minded men in khaki remained, still struggling with the modern variation