One Bullet Away

“There’s an ambulance casing us,” Rudy said. He stood and I noticed a drawing in his hand. He was sketching the airfield’s perimeter, recording azimuths and distances to landmarks so he could call in mortars or air strikes with precision. “It has a red crescent on the door, and the shades are always drawn. They come by every day, and a guy with a camera snaps pictures from behind the shades. ISI, probably.”

The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency had helped put the Taliban in power. We knew they were no friends of ours, but I was surprised to hear their surveillance was so bold. Officially, no American forces were operating in Pakistan at that time. When pressed, defense officials had acknowledged a small U.S. presence but stated that it was there only to provide logistical support or to launch search-and-rescue missions. We knew there was precious little difference between search-and-rescue and search-and-destroy.

“Do they watch you watching them?” Marine’s interest was piqued.

Rudy shook his head. “We try to stay cool about countersurveillance. Only two Marines up here at a time during the day, and we keep a low profile. The real work happens at night. We patrol out near the town, plant motion sensors, that kind of thing.” Recon’s mystique had grown out of clandestine missions like those.

To daytime observers, like the men in the ambulance, the air base would have looked nearly deserted. Most Americans slept in the cool shade of the hangar, and the Marine positions on the lines were well camouflaged. Members of the Pakistani air force puttered around on scooters, selling cold glass bottles of Coke.

At night, the charade stopped. A full day’s work was crammed into the frantic ten hours between sunset and sunrise. Aircraft landed at five-minute intervals, sometimes having flown nonstop all the way from the United States. Most of them were big cargo planes, carrying supplies for the war in Afghanistan. Jet fighters came and went, and so did Predator reconnaissance drones flown by the Air Force and the CIA. I was always unnerved to be walking down a taxiway and have the pilotless Predator roll past, eyeballing me with its movable cameras. Nighttime also brought more activity outside the airfield’s walls. Strings of red tracer fire reached into the sky, and explosions rocked the dark town. Pakistani officers invariably claimed that these were wedding celebrations and cars backfiring. But we were under no illusions — Pakistan’s support for the United States didn’t extend much below President Musharraf. Life at Jacobabad took on the tone of spy versus spy.

A week into our stay, on an otherwise indistinguishable drowsy afternoon, a man wearing a traditional Pakistani dishdasha knocked on the door of the building serving as our company headquarters.

“I must speak to the senior American present.”

Captain Whitmer was in a meeting, so I identified myself.

“Sir, there is a telephone call in our offices. Please come with me.” His speech was exceedingly formal and lightly accented. A slight bow of his head followed the request.

I went with him across the field to a building I had not yet entered. Whitewashed rocks lined the walkway, and a Pakistani flag was painted on the bed of stones surrounding a small sign announcing this as an operations center of the Pakistani air force. I knew the general story of the United States’ relationship with Pakistan’s air force. After paying the U.S. for twenty-eight F-16 fighters, it had received none of them following Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests. But I hadn’t realized the intensely personal effect this soured deal still had on Pakistanis.

Entering the dim ready room, I paused to let my eyes adjust from the sunlight outside. A dozen pilots in green flight suits lolled in chairs, smoking. Conversation stopped, and they stared at me. Taped to the walls were dozens of pictures of F-16s: flying, landing, taking off, flames shooting from afterburners. It looked like an eight-year-old boy’s bedroom. The hangars at Jacobabad had been built for the expected jets. Now they sat empty. These pilots had been trained and transferred here to fly them. Now they sat idle.

I picked up the phone, overly conscious that I personified my nation’s diplomatic bludgeoning. The line was dead. When I told my escort, he shrugged.

“What unit are you from?” This didn’t sound like idle curiosity.

“The U.S. Marines.”

“Which unit specifically? How many machine guns do you have?”

I pushed past him and back into the sunlight.