Time Tunnel: The Towers Read online

  Looking out his window, Kyle saw a dozen commercial aircraft circling the airport to land. The congestion seemed unusual for an airport the size of Richmond. There were also a lot of planes on the tarmac. Something was wrong.

  Kyle’s flight awaited its turn to land. At 10:30, the plane’s tires squelched as the plane touched down. Kyle’s cell phone rang as the plane taxied to the terminal.

  “Hello?” Kyle answered.

  “Uh, hello? Is this Kyle?” replied a woman’s voice.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “My name is Jane Baum. You don’t know me. I have a message from Padma.”

  “Is she OK?” Kyle asked, alarmed.

  He heard the woman take a deep breath.

  “What is it? Tell me!” said Kyle.

  “She tried to call you. She couldn’t reach you,” began Jane. “She called random numbers until she got an answer. She wanted me to get a message to you.”

  “What message? What’s going on?” demanded Kyle.

  “She’s in the tower,” Jane said.

  “Yes—she works in the World Trade Center. What’s wrong?” demanded Kyle.

  “Oh my God! You don’t know,” the stranger said. She began to cry. “The towers are gone.”

  “What do you mean the towers are gone? Is this a prank? Because it’s not funny!” Kyle said, raising his voice. He felt a pang of fear. His heart began to race.

  Kyle noticed that many of the passengers were talking on their cell phones. Their expressions were blanched.

  Jane continued to cry and tried to explain. Her words were incomprehensible to Kyle. How could the towers be ‘gone’? It was impossible.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t talk,” Jane said, sobbing. “Padma told me to tell you this…”

  “…Beloved, I love you.”

  World Trade Center, North Tower

  New York, NY

  September 11, 2001

  08:45 hours

  Kyle frantically ran up the metal steps of a concrete stairwell—the final flights to the top floor of the North Tower. He glanced at his watch—8:45:45. With his knowledge of the future, Kyle understood that Padma was only 55 seconds away from disaster.

  He swung open the stairwell door onto the 110th floor. It was empty. He looked around anxiously for Padma. The plane would hit in 30 seconds. Bright morning light filled the floor through the tall windows.

  Kyle spotted Padma on the opposite side of the expansive floor, 70 yards away, her back to the floor-to-ceiling windows and a spectacular panoramic north-facing backdrop of Manhattan.

  When she saw Kyle, she smiled and waved, excited to see him. Relieved to have found Padma, Kyle waved back and ran toward her. As he crossed the sprawling floor, he saw a shape appear in the windows behind Padma. It was an approaching plane descending over the Hudson River from the north—American flight 11. The plane banked toward the tower. It was on a collision course!

  He shouted at Padma, trying to warn her. Too far away to hear him, Padma beamed her loving smile to Kyle, unaware of the danger. The building shuddered and rocked as the plane hit, somewhere below the floor they were standing on. Kyle was knocked off his feet. He struggled to regain his balance and stand. He had to save Padma! Ceiling light fixtures and tiles began to fall, obstructing his vision. Smoke filled the floor. Through the chaos, he caught glimpses of Padma, still standing on the far side of the floor.

  Suddenly, the floor beneath Padma’s feet collapsed as half of the tower sheared away. Kyle watched in horror as Padma fell and disappeared into the crashing debris. Kyle walked to the edge of the floor and looked down at the rubble piled into a smoking heap over a thousand feet below.

  Kyle opened his eyes. A man was shaking him.

  “Wake up dude,” the man said.

  Kyle sat up on a filthy mattress on the floor, his back against a cinderblock wall. He rubbed his eyes in the cold pitch dark.

  “Fuck,” Kyle said, groggy. “Did I do it again?”

  “Yeah,” replied the voice in the dark. “Another nightmare.”

  “Sorry,” Kyle said. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “No prob, bro,” replied the voice.

  Kyle checked his watch: 01:20 hours. He shook his head and sighed.

  Though Kyle was exhausted, he forced his eyes from closing. Sleep invited the recurring nightmare vision. Unable to find an exit in his waking mind, Padma visited Kyle in his dreams and died again every night. Unable to accept Padma’s death, Kyle crushed that darkness deep inside, where it festered, eating away at him from within. Every replay of Padma’s death seemed to etch the lines under Kyle’s eyes a little darker. Though Kyle was still a professional operator, his fellow commandos were worried about him. Even Delta commandos required sleep.

  Kyle knew his candle was burning at both ends. He didn’t care. They were close, very close, to killing Bin Laden. He only needed to last one, maybe two more days, and it would be over. After that, nothing mattered.

  He remained propped up against the wall, eyes open. Moonlight beams through glassless windows revealed the specter shapes of Kyle’s fellow Delta commandos, scattered on the floor of their makeshift base, trying to get back to sleep. In a few hours, they would be back in the Spīn Ghar Mountains and Bin Laden’s Tora Bora fortress.

  The simple cinderblock structure his Delta unit had commandeered had been a school before the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The Taliban had rapidly filled the vacuum left in the wake of the American’s departure after Operation Cyclone had forced out the Soviet Union out in 1989. Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s largest-ever covert operation, had been a spectacular success. Shoulder-launched Stinger missiles supplied to mujahedeen fighters had turned the tide against the Soviets, downing countless Soviet attack planes and helicopters and flipping an expected rout of the Afghan fighters into the Soviet’s Vietnam quagmire. The Soviet’s last man out of Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Boris V. Gromov, strode across the steel Friendship Bridge to Uzbekistan the morning of February 16, 1989. As he did, he was reminded of something Alexander the Great had said over 2,000 years earlier—that Afghanistan was “easy to march into. Hard to march out of.”

  Operation Cyclone was the fruit of an odd alliance, including U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson, CIA case officer Gust Avrakotos, and Houston socialite Joanne Herring. Herring was instrumental in ginning up support for military aid to the mujahedeen, encouraging Wilson to meet with Pakistani leadership and visit Afghan refugee camps within Pakistan, where he witnessed firsthand the atrocities committed by the Soviets on Afghan men, women, and children.

  Among the mujahedeen fighters aided by the Americans was a six foot, four inch, skinny young Saudi, named Osama Bin Laden. The son of a billionaire Saudi construction magnate, Bin Laden joined the mujahedeen in 1979, outraged at the injustices committed against the Afghan people by the Soviets.

  As Operation Cyclone wound down, Charlie Wilson foresaw the rise of militant fundamentalists in Afghanistan and argued for funding for modern infrastructure and education for the Afghanis. Congress ignored Wilson, America departed Afghanistan, and the Taliban filled the void, providing al Qaeda a safe harbor to construct the launch pad for the planes that blew through the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

  As Charlie Wilson said of the aftermath of Operation Cyclone: “…we fucked up the end game.”

  Now the Americans had returned to Afghanistan, this time to kill their former ally. When the Delta mission was announced, Kyle moved heaven and earth to land a spot in the unit. There were obstacles in his way. His fitness for duty was questioned, as his bride had been murdered only three months prior by the man he would be tasked with hunting. Also, his unit already had an officer and didn’t need a second—particularly on the forward deploy.

  Against protocol, Kyle took an enormous career risk and reached out to General Craig, the man who had presented him with his silver star for valor in Desert Storm. He asked the general for a favor—to get him into the game at Tora Bora. Kyle had g
ambled that his bride’s death in 9/11 might enable his superiors to excuse his end run. The gambit worked. Kyle was shipped off to Afghanistan, with the condition that he was to stay out of the way of his commanding officer, as well as his unit’s master sergeant.

  They were tantalizingly close to Bin Laden. Only days prior to the Deltas’ arrival, a CIA operative had picked a radio off the body of a dead al Qaeda fighter. The radio was tuned to the enemy’s frequency. Delta could now eavesdrop on al Qaeda to learn their condition and movements. The screams of the al Qaeda fighters over the airwaves in response to bomb drops called in by Delta enabled the commandos to gauge the accuracy of their airstrikes and fine-tune as needed.

  The commandos could also eavesdrop on Bin Laden himself, referred to as the “The Sheikh” and “Father” by his followers on radio chatter. When Bin Laden’s distinctive manicured voice was heard exhorting his troops, American signal intelligence assets “SIGINT” instantly triangulated his position and dispatched bombs to the location for an explosive ovation. The Americans’ relentless bombing had pulverized the ancient Tora Bora fortress. Bin Laden’s al Qaeda forces were shredded. SIGINT told Kyle’s unit that they had advanced to within 100 meters of Bin Laden’s position the previous day. Kyle and his fellow commandos smelled blood. Today was going to be the day he avenged Padma’s death. He fully intended to ignore the “capture” part of his unit’s “capture or kill” orders. In a few hours, Bin Laden would die.

  Milawa Base Camp

  Tora Bora, Afghanistan

  December 12, 2001

  05:00 hours

  It was pitch dark and very cold on the rugged mountain ridge. Kyle Mason and his fellow Delta commandos surveyed the glowing phosphorescent green landscape through night vision goggles at the rocky perch that had been Osama Bin Laden’s home only hours earlier. Bin Laden’s Milawa Base Camp now lay shattered after days of ceaseless bombing by U.S. air forces. Now, Kyle’s two dozen-man Delta mission support unit had actually set foot on the terrorist’s doorstep, an entrance to a vast cave complex thousands of feet above sea level on the border of Pakistan. SIGINT told them they were close—within a hundred meters of Bin Laden.

  Kyle tugged the brown wool blanket wrapped around him a bit tighter to keep warm. In order to blend with the locals, he and his fellow commandos had abandoned their Army winter wear in favor of traditional mujahedeen dress, known as shalwar kameez—baggy drawstring pants, knee-length long-sleeved shirts, and a floppy wool hat called a pakul. They had also grown their hair and beards. While other Special Forces units maintained stricter military dress code, Delta was special. The objective was the mission. Whatever increased their odds of success was embraced, including wearing baggy pajama pants into battle. Some members of Delta even carried the AK-47 assault rifles favored by the mujahedeen, though Kyle preferred his trusty M-4 rifle, as well as his M-1911 sidearm. What the commandos lacked in Gortex in the cold mountain air, they made up for in armament. In addition to their precision firearms, their web vests were packed with explosive charges, ammo, and infrared targeting pointers to guide bomb drops.

  The fact that Delta had advanced so deep into al Qaeda’s mountain stronghold was near miraculous, given the obstacles placed squarely in its path by its own government. Washington had refused to commit large numbers of American troops to the hunt the mastermind of 9/11. Instead, Delta was ordered to cut deals with two rival Afghan warlords, effectively buying mujh mercenaries with shrink-wrapped brick loads of cash served up by the CIA. The two warlords, General Hazret Ali, and Haji Zaman were jockeying for position of top dog in the Nangarhar Province. Neither had any particular interest in the Americans’ mission to kill Bin Laden. Indeed, Bin Laden had become a revered figure in the region, in no small part thanks to the money he dispersed to locals from his personal fortune. Ali and Zaman’s interests were purely financial—how much money could they siphon off the Americans, and how much political influence would it buy them in their efforts to topple each other.

  Ali and Zaman’s ragged mercenary armies numbered some 2,500 men. The CIA estimated that between 1,500 and 3,000 al Qaeda fighters and allies were holed up in the mountain caves of Tora Bora.

  For the Delta commandos, working with the mujahedeen had been maddening. They had found the mujh to be nothing more than bands of lawless thugs for hire to the highest bidder. To the exasperation of the Deltas, the mujh fighters would advance on the enemy by day, then quit and go home at night, giving up the territory they had won during a day’s fighting. In the absence of a passionate cause to fight for—like ousting the Soviets from their homeland—they didn’t see the point of overnighting in harms’ way on the frigid mountains. The morning after the previous day’s fight, the mujahedeen would clock in and pay for the same real estate over and over again.

  From Bin Laden’s former mountain aerie, the commandos witnessed a glint of brilliant yellow sun cresting the horizon. Towering angled shapes slowly emerged from the pitch dark, as daylight fell on the spectacular snowcapped Spīn Ghar Mountains to the south. On the other side of the white peaks, mountain trails led from Tora Bora to bordering Pakistan.

  Both the Deltas and the CIA feared that when the Americans turned up the heat at Tora Bora, Bin Laden would simply walk out the backdoor to Pakistan via those mountain trails to the south. They knew that Bin Laden had become intimately familiar with the trails over his decades spent in the region. Kyle’s Delta commanding officer sent repeated urgent requests to CENTCOM to guard the Pakistani mountain trails. His first request was to deploy seven hundred Army Rangers to guard the backdoor trails. The request was denied. His second request was to mine the trails in order to halt an escape and enable sensors to track mine detonations to acquire al Qaeda targets. Again, request denied. Finally, exasperated, the CO proposed an audacious plan for his Delta unit to scale the towering White Mountains with bottled oxygen in order to guard the Pakistani passes themselves. Request denied. Kyle was astonished—mission critical requests from Delta unit commanders were not made lightly, and he had never before heard of one being refused.

  Though all soldiers were accustomed to idiotic orders from Washington, to Kyle, this course was pure insanity. Bin Laden was here. Why didn’t Washington commit thousands of professional American soldiers to kill the man that murdered thousands of innocent Americans in cold blood? Why instead deploy only a couple dozen special ops commandos and a band of untrained cutthroat mercenaries against an impregnable mountain fortress guarded by thousands of fanatics, committed to die for their “Father.” Why were America’s leaders refusing to guard Bin Laden’s backdoor exit to Pakistan. It was madness!

  Approximately one hundred meters down the ridge, the commandos could make out nearly 100 mujahedeen fighters—Haji Zaman’s men. Kyle’s unit carefully made their way along the rocky ridge to link up with them and press forward with the hunt for Bin Laden. The fighters were a motley crew, an assortment of ages ranging from teenagers to old men. All wore beards and the traditional baggy shalwar kameez with floppy pakul hats. Some wore vests, some coats. Most were wrapped in blankets to stave off the mountain cold. Their AK-47 assault rifles, the weapon of choice of peasant armies around the world, were carelessly handled. An acrid smell wafted from joints smoked by several of the younger fighters.

  The mujh commander, a middle-aged man with a dark beard, sat on a rock, smoking a cigarette. His AK-47 was propped against the rock. He watched the Americans warily as they approached.

  The master sergeant of Kyle’s mission support unit motioned for the commandos to halt. He walked toward the mujh commander with his interpreter to discuss the day’s plan to pursue Bin Laden. The master sergeant was a bruiser, code-named “Hammer.” Hammer was the archetype Special Forces master sergeant—big, muscular, and very tough, with endurance that could outlast any commando. He had zero tolerance for mistakes or bullshit and was not someone to be messed with.

  Through the interpreter, Hammer laid out the plan. While Hammer talked, the mujh commander s
tared at him, smoking his cigarette. When Hammer was done talking, he waited for the commander to respond.

  The commander was mute. He continued to stare at Hammer. After several awkward moments, he took another draw on his cigarette and looked away. As he exhaled, he told Hammer through the interpreter that his commander, Haji Zaman, had negotiated a surrender with al Qaeda, and that no one would be pursuing Bin Laden today.

  Hammer was stunned. Conditional surrender was never an option for al Qaeda. There were but two options on the table: unconditional surrender or death. He knew this was nothing more than a hoax to buy time for Bin Laden. The Deltas’ worst fears were being realized. The backdoor to Pakistan was wide open, and Haji Zaman was holding it for Bin Laden to glide through.

  “This is bullshit!” Hammer told the commander. “We’re going without you.” Hammer told the Delta’s to ruck up and prepare to go.

  As the commandos began to walk off the ridge, the mujh commander signaled to his fighters with a casual wave of his cigarette hand. The mujh fighters leveled their AK-47’s directly at the commandos.