The Shadow Mission

the mission we ran in Cameroon.”
My stomach drops. “Was it me?”
There’s a brief moment of relief when Kit shakes her head. But then my mother looks up, her face pinched with worry. She brings a hand up to rub her forehead and the hand is trembling, just a bit, as her gray eyes meet mine.
“It was Caitlin,” she says.

3
THE AIR UP HERE IN the northern hills of Pakistan is fresh and touched with scents of pine and herbs. It’s also pretty damned cold, especially when you’re at the open door of an airborne helicopter. I scan over the landscape below, green and vague through the night-vision contact lenses that are irritating my eyes. There’s certainly not much down there at 3 a.m. in the way of lights, or vehicles, or factories—but there could be people, hidden, watching. This particular region isn’t under the control of religious extremists anymore, but there’s no reason why insurgents and fighters might not still be living in the tiny hamlets and caves that dot the barren countryside. The cold grasps at me, eating into my bones, as Hala and I crouch at the door of our stealth copter. Caitlin lowers the aircraft, carefully, painstakingly, close enough to the rocky ground that we can both jump down and start running.
Our chopper is so quiet that we can barely hear the soft whirr of the blades whipping the air as Caitlin flies up and away from us. We’ve landed about a mile from Imran’s village so that we don’t attract attention, and we race over the rough landscape on foot, our pace steady, our feet hitting the ground together. We are late. Not by much, but we still have very little time left to mine Imran for information.
“Hey,” I say to Hala. “Shall we go a bit faster?”
All three of us are connected to each other for sound, so a whisper is all it takes to communicate.
She just nods but picks up speed.
“I didn’t think it would be this cold,” I add.
“Hmm.”
I decide not to bother with any more attempts at conversation. The fact is that even on a good day, Hala isn’t the world’s chattiest person—in her native Arabic, or in English. I’ve seen professional mime artists that have better small talk. Anyway, we’re nearly there. The village begins with a long straggle of homes built along the dirt track that passes for a main road.
“I’m a hundred yards due north of where I dropped you. Let me know when you’re five minutes out for pickup.”
Caitlin’s Kentucky drawl is so full and warm in my ear that it’s like she’s standing right next to me. The sound of her instruction, the knowledge that she’s back there, waiting, with her hand on the helicopter controls, ready to spirit us out of here, calms the rising tension I feel as we move toward our target.
As we run through the village, we circle past the main cluster of houses and huts—and then I see it. Hala follows my gaze to a patch of empty land that holds rows and rows of small clay pots. Each one is filled with oil and each one burns with a small, persistent flame. Flames of remembrance. We both slow down for just a moment, out of respect, watching those oil lamps cast their tiny sprays of light into the black night.
This is the place where the village school used to stand before the twenty-three young girls and two teachers inside it were killed. These gentle lights are a memorial, one for each death—but the flickering fires only remind me of the brutal arson attack that took those lives. I try not to, but I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like to be inside when the doors were nailed shut. Maybe those kids and teachers heard some hammering, but thought it was the last bits of building work, and just carried on with a math lesson. Maybe they ignored the soft slosh of kerosene on the outside walls and didn’t even hear the fizzing strikes of the matches that followed. Beside me, I feel Hala shudder.
A noise attracts our attention. Someone’s approaching through the solid black of the night, emerging from among the main cluster of homes. Hala and I step behind a wall and pull up the scarves that are swathed around our necks, masking our faces. We watch as a man pauses, looking around. Through my night lenses, his outline is clear, despite the black clothes he wears. He carries a long, thin knife in his hand and, by the stretched skin of his knuckles, I can tell that he’s grasping it hard. The darkness is too thick for him to see us, though he seems to sense us as we circle closer. But by the time he turns, my hand is on his knife, my foot has kicked up behind his knees, and he drops to the ground while I press his own blade hard against his throat. Hala is right behind me, ready to help, but I’ve got this.
“State your name,” I whisper.
“Mary Poppins,” he whispers back.
Really, I don’t know where Amber comes up with these code words. Maybe it livens up her desk job at Athena. I lower the knife away from the man’s throat and Hala shines a tiny LED flashlight into his face. It is the face we were expecting. His eyes widen as he takes us in. My guess is that he wasn’t expecting two young women to be the ones dropping in to help him take back his village. He rises to his feet, then shakes hands with both of us. It’s a polite gesture and somewhat rare in this part of the world where, sometimes, men don’t think it proper to touch a woman who isn’t their wife.
“Asif,” he whispers, giving us his real name.
We just nod mutely in return. Turning away, Asif leads us off into a tight alleyway between small wooden pens where goats and donkeys