Lost Highway by Tom Fowler

Author:Tom Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Widening Gyre Media

20

Sara stared at the blinking cursor. She sat in a SCIF—a secure compartmented information facility—where cleared folks could access, store, and discuss top secret information. The Pentagon was full of them, and she’d probably been inside most. Her presence attracted attention, though. Sara was a senior official, and people like her usually sent a junior staffer to do most of the boring keyboard work. She waited for a few rubberneckers to clear out before she got down to work.

After a few minutes, only a Marine staff sergeant remained, and he was on the other side of the room. Four rows of cubicles flanked a central aisle. At the front of the SCIF, an unoccupied breakout room held a long table, a dozen chairs, and a bunch of video teleconferencing equipment. Sara entered the name Durrani and waited for results. They populated right away. She sifted through the results. Tyler didn’t give her anything else, so she needed to narrow data on her own. The most promising short summary belonged to Farzaad Durrani, identified as a former Taliban supporter who fled Afghanistan.

Sara clicked his name, and the various reports the military and intelligence community collected on Durrani downloaded. They’d amassed quite a bit. The man had been one of the principal backers of the Taliban’s initial rise to power, both in terms of money and ideology. Durrani hated women, which ran counter to traditional Afghan society. His mother had been educated and probably tried to teach him better. Sara saw communications where he explicitly supported the plan to attack and burn down schools for girls. Of all the crimes the Taliban committed, their crusade against women was the most insidious.

With his favored regime installed, Durrani amassed more wealth as an opium trader. When the military began cracking down on major Taliban backers, Durrani increased his security force and continued operating with abandon. His financial support increased. Maybe he figured it would make him a marked man, and he simply didn’t care. Or he thought his men and the Taliban would protect him. In reality, a bunch of Green Berets under the command of Colonel Leo Braxton destroyed Durrani’s compound, killed his men, freed his servants, and burned his drugs. The man himself managed to escape.

While the military lost track of him, various intelligence agencies kept him on their radar. Durrani fled to Turkey where some of his family lived. A flag went up about six months after his arrival, questioning his finances and wondering if he trafficked in persons. Later, the man came to the US, set himself up as a consultant in imports and exports, and managed to avoid the serious scrutiny of law enforcement.

While much of Durrani’s history remained classified, enough was freely available to allow a resourceful man like Tyler to pull much of it together. Sara went after known associates. Someone like Durrani would want ideological fealty. Many of the people in his network—alive or dead—also hailed from Afghanistan. A few came from Turkey. The outlier was Josef Mitrovic, a former Serbian soldier turned mercenary.

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