Protocol 15

Chapter 13

13

FROM SILENCE TO RUBBLE

Abbattabad, Pakistan. About 316 miles north of Islamabad. Population 916,000.

On a two-lane neighborhood road in Abbattabad, Pakistan, a man sat in a car. Scorching sunlight radiated through the windshield, cooking the dashboard. The car was a nondescript, white four-door with a dent in the left rear quarter panel and a c***k in the windshield that ran up the right side. The dinge of a year’s worth of road grime clung to the aging paint the way a shawl might drape a grandmother bracing against the wind.

A woman in a house across the way had taken notice of the car an hour earlier. After checking her front window for a third time and finding the car still there, she removed a broom from her closet, wrapped a hijab over her head, and stepped onto the porch. The car driver was preoccupied and took little notice. He sat staring in the opposite direction, across the street at an abandoned building that had stood shrouded by fourteen-foot walls and secrecy for several years. He didn’t avert his eyes from the structure, he just kept staring.

To the woman, he looked like he was lost in thought and couldn’t break free. She thought this quite odd.

The large compound was vacant, yet had been occupied in the not-so-recent past. During those years, no one in the neighborhood had known who actually lived there. But the secret had finally been revealed. Now that it was completely deserted, she wondered what all the fascination was about.

The compound had a checkered past. During the days of its use, it had many occupants, yet only one owner. At that time, there was no way any of the neighbors could have known who owned the building. The man was never seen, ever. Sometimes other men would come and go from the compound, or women would make their way to market, only to return and disappear behind the heavy steel gates. The cement walls that surrounded the compound were thick and smooth, with no footholds, and towered just higher than the ground floor of the structure. Now, however, the drab-colored walls sported more than just sand-colored paint. The top of one side showed signs from the damage caused that terrifying night of May 1, 2011.

The night seemed so long ago. But in reality, the shock of those events played tricks with the woman’s mind.

The weather had been even hotter than normal, and at about four in the morning she had awoken from a dream in which she had been in a car accident. The sound of shredding metal in the dream had been horrendous. Yet it was actually the sound of something happening at the compound across the street, etching itself into the nightmare. When the woman rose and peered out the front window, what she saw across the street made no sense. Hanging over the top of the smooth cement wall was what appeared to be the tail section of a helicopter. Not shaped like the ones she’d seen coming and going from the Pakistani Military Academy that sat just a mile away, but awkward in shape—it looked more enclosed. It was as though the rotor of the helicopter was built into the tail itself, instead of being mounted on the outside of it. When she saw a second helicopter of the same description fly close overhead, she knew something dreadful was happening.

As bizarre as the sights were, what struck her most was that she had not heard the sounds of either helicopter. No roaring engine, no thumping of rotors thrashing through the night air. It was as though they were silenced. And why would a helicopter try to land inside the walls of that compound in the first place? Did it crash? Was it some kind of new helicopter from the military academy and something went wrong?

It wasn’t until a few moments later that she heard loud popping sounds. They would stay etched in her memory forever, scratched into the fibers of her brain. The first sound was a boom that shook the glass windows. It was almost loud enough to pierce her eardrums. The other sounds were quieter, like firecrackers muffled to a whisper. Whatever was happening across the street had her wide-eyed and gripping the curtains.

The last sight she saw across the road before bolting into her five-year-old’s bedroom was a flash of light and several strange red dots, like those made by laser pointers, dancing their way across the outside of one of the compounds’ upper-floor windows. She grabbed her child in her arms, flipped his bed on its side, and huddled on the ground behind it, her body in between the child and what she only described as “something evil happening across the street.” When the night of terror was over, she silently thanked Allah that they were still alive.

As she refocused on the man in the parked car, she noticed a singular patch of white in his otherwise dark hair. He turned and looked straight at her, his eyes squinting in the bright sunlight. To her, the eyes carried the very essence of the word vengeance. A chill touched her spine near the base of her neck and rode across her shoulders on a shiver. There was something cold about the eyes; something dead.

He looked ahead, started his car, and drove away.

Had she known the driver was the most wanted terrorist in the world, Waseem Jarrah, she would have never made eye contact with him. She later described the stranger as having soulless eyes that seemed to revel in their own pain. Yet in them was painted a deep sense of satisfaction, as someone who had just found what he was looking for, and now knew exactly what to do.

As the car disappeared over the hill, it occurred to the woman that the compound, once the property of Osama bin Laden, was slated for demolition the very next day.

Jarrah looked in his rearview mirror at the woman staring at him as he drove away. A new chapter in his quest for retribution was in motion; retribution for the murder of his mentor.