Chapter 17
Beholding a World Wonder
There were only seven wonders of the modern world and the Taj Mahal in Agra was one. I wondered aloud why a worldly guy like me didn’t make the cut. I suspected the other team members harbored no doubts so that was why they kept silent. We had gathered in the task force room for a skull session to plan our rescue of Zeenat. I’d rather face the bad guys any day than her father’s wrath. I didn’t want to end up as another feather or fetus in his cap.
We had diligently pored over the scant photo-intelligence for Agra and had Googled everything we could find in order to familiarize ourselves with our target. However, we still needed more details to fill in the many blanks in our picture puzzle.
I had Chester go out and buy all the latest tourist postcards and maps of Agra and the Taj. It would be a good training exercise and photo opportunity for him. We had arranged the cards into one huge montage on one of the office’s walls. We did so by cutting and pasting various views and angles together to make the Taj’s grounds whole. We had eliminated the extraneous shots of the elephant rides and monkey dancers from the vista since they didn’t add any real intelligence value to the overall picture.
Regardless, I would take them home for my scrapbook containing the many achievements and highlights of my long government career. However, I was still trying to fill-up the first page. The snapshots of my hospital delivery took up most of the space though. Like most people, I liked to start important things at their very beginning.
The Michelin road maps and the Fodor travel guide would be particularly useful in our planning. At a minimum, our game plan called for finding decent lodging and dining accommodations in Agra. We were very adept at properly prioritizing things in the department.
Sometimes those who served and protected used their imagination and ingenuity to overcome life’s daily care, feeding, and intelligence adversities.
Our tactical intelligence collage had come together nicely and I was proud of our handiwork. I gave Big Bird a gold star for his clever placing of the letters N, E, W, and S on the map for better guidance and direction. It was welcomed news in my opinion. Fortunately, we now understood which way was up. All we needed was a moral compass to follow in order to deliver us to our collective destinies. Yellow brick roads were hard to locate in India unless you trailed the numerous herds of sacred cattle aimlessly roaming the streets of the country.
Our cutting, gluing, and posting of the picture postcards would pay immediate benefits as well as provide a colorful wall covering for the room. We had to improvise because neither the embassy’s defense attaché nor the CIA station had any maps or photos of the area. They had come up empty-handed, a day late, and a dollar short to put things into better perspective.
They claimed it was not an optical oversight, or transparent intelligence failure, on their parts. They both asserted that the Taj Mahal was not on the U.S. hit-list for a preemptive nuclear strike, at least yet. Simply put, there was no intelligence requirement for such information for the Single Integrated Operating Plan—the U.S. global plan for all-out war. Actually, they were the ones who first suggested buying postcards from the street vendors. It turned out to be a brilliant, low-cost solution to our problem.
Sometimes those who served and protected had to be creative but pernicious souls to avoid being all over the map.
The Big Bird rolled in a TV set and DVD player and inserted a CD into the player. It was a History Channel documentary on the Taj Mahal provided by the embassy’s Cultural Affairs officer, a credible, reliable intelligence source in my opinion. The narrator was someone famous, but I couldn’t remember his name. He said the Taj was a mausoleum that was built under Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife, Mumatz Mahal.
It was built on a parcel of land to the south of the walled city of Agra. It took roughly twelve years to complete the tomb portion and another ten years to construct the mosque, minarets, and gateway to the grounds. The Taj complex was bounded by red sandstone walls on three sides with the Yamuna River facing the open side. Outside the walls were several additional mausoleums, including those of Shah Jahan’s other wives, and a larger tomb for Mumtaz’s favorite servant.
In 1631, Shah Jahan was grief stricken when Mumatz died during childbirth. The construction of the Taj began almost immediately following her death. Soon after the Taj was completed, the emperor was deposed by his son and put under house arrest at nearby Agra Fort. Upon Shah Jahan’s death, his son had him buried next to Mumatz in the Taj Mahal. What’s his name got in the last word before the credits rolled. I didn’t bother to search for his name since he was ancient history too.
According to our P-LINT intelligence, Kris Amar’s suit was on the Taj Mahal grounds somewhere in close proximity to the mosque at the far end of the complex. We had tracked his suit during the past 24 hours as it moved about Agra. However, it always returned to the Taj’s grounds. That must suit him, I thought. Regardless, I planned to take it, and him, to the cleaners.
Our D–day was tomorrow at high noon. It would be a Saturday; the busiest day of the week at the busiest time of the day. We would all go in mufti to conceal our identities and to better blend in with the local populace and tourists. We would disguise ourselves as Indians, but the American kind. We would pass ourselves off as kinsmen who were visiting their brethren from across the great, wide pond. This ploy would create instant credibility among the other natives. It would be a convincing, natural performance.
Our plan couldn’t fail or we’d end up as mounds of raw, ground-up meat, courtesy of blood thirsty Thugs. And I wasn't mincing my words one iota. Thank God none of us were called Chuck!
We would insinuate ourselves among the tour groups in order to locate Kris’s suit and Zeenat. I thought the plan had chutzpah and Americana written all over its native face. Speaking of faces, Big Bird and I would have to use shoe polish to darken our light countenances. I thought Chester would be fine without any makeup. It was the same with Kali since she would go as a black sheep member of the Blackfoot tribe. We would put on our game faces for our Uncle Sam. We could crack some white, Anglo-American jokes to better establish our credentials and rapport with the locals. I was pleased since we had a purpose and now a plan.
Sometimes those who served and protected liked to dress-up, and whoop it up, on weekends.
We started to prepare in earnest while still staying in the task force room. I instructed Chester to go to the local market and bring back materials to make our costumes. As a newly-minted United States citizen, he should know his Western history well enough by now. While Chester was shopping, I provided metal hand-clickers to Kali and the Big Bird. I’d bought these trinkets from the street kids during my first visit to the Red Fort. I knew they’d come in handy and handily at some point. Each was shaped like a frog. We would each use these during the operation to securely communicate with each other. I was proud since this was tried and true DS tradecraft in action. Of course that meant it was cheap and of questionable utility.
We had simply improved on the Navajo code-talk by employing a wordless method of signaling. In the unlikely event someone broke our clicks and clacks; they still had to decipher their intonations and intuitions. It was foolproof and the NSA would be seriously envious of our technology.
Big Bird, Kali and I practiced our frog calls for the next half-hour or so to get the hang of it. I was never a confident public speaker so I had some difficulty at first. We pushed the frogs protruding bellies with relish and rapidity. The critters repeatedly spoke their clicks and clacks with vigor in return.
After a while, we all got pretty good at communicating in frog language. We even tried telling some off-color jokes to check its humor functionality. Unfortunately, things really didn’t click in this regard. However, I was convinced the devices would work well unless they outright croaked on us. One could never be totally confident with handmade, Indian amphibians.
There was one more piece of security gear I passed out to the team. It was a critical signaling device for emergencies only. It was a noisemaker that rolled out its paper tongue when blowing into its mouthpiece. It was perfect for our purposes, but again only to be used in emergency situations.
Chester returned with several large bags of supplies to create our costumes. The first task was to make our headdresses. He opened a bag containing chicken feathers and goose down. I reminded him that we were disguising ourselves as American Indians and not as throw pillows or ski jackets. Moreover, I worried that they might not be hypoallergenic. After all, there was a personal health issue to consider. Chester patiently explained that sales of hawk feathers, and those of similar birds of prey, were banned by the Indian government over concerns about their extinction. I told him that was also a concern for us and we should pray too. However, it looked like we had to go with what we had and needed to improvise once again. As if on cue, Big Bird ordered up boxes of plastic straws from the cafeteria and we went to work.
We attached the feathers to the straws with super-glue because we didn’t want to take any chances that we’d get blown-off by the bad guys. Moreover, the straws had to stick together like birds of a feather. The task was similar to putting together an artificial Christmas tree, but without the religiosity. Kali had it the easiest since she only had to make one straw feather as an Indian maiden. She’d simply stick it into her hair bun at the back of her head. I thought it looked like a bottlebrush, but I didn’t say anything for fear of hurting her feelings and getting cut off from sex. Discretion was the better part of valor when it came to matters of the head and heart.
Chester made three feathers and held them in place with a headband. With some war paint, he’d look like a brave buck. The Big Bird’s headgear was more elaborate since he had used six straws. He decided to wear two clumps of three feathers each at the back of his head. By separating them, he resembled a bull on a bad hair day. My headdress was the most dramatic since I was the chief of this tribe of misfits and it was only fitting. My magnificent war bonnet had twelve straws since they were cheaper that way. Moreover, I adamantly refused to go to this little costume party as a baker. I uniformly arranged the feathers around my head and looked at myself in a mirror and laughed. I resembled a lanky crown roast. However, our get-ups would be good enough to fool the bad guys if we stayed in costume, character, and on course.
Next came the body and foot wear—carefully mending it to our couture. It couldn’t be too over-the-top since that wouldn’t be convincing. We decided to stay with the basics; fur and skins, faux or otherwise. Kali chose to make a bearskin bodice out of a polyester, fake-fur rug. Indian carpets were world renowned for their beauty and craftsmanship. Big Bird opted for sheepskin and looked like a biblical figure from ancient Judea. Chester went with the buffalo robe look; water buffalo, but it was close enough to buffalo anyone. My choice was obvious—pigskin. I would drape it over me from snout to hoof. Kris Amar wouldn’t get near me for fear of going to Hell or whatever the Muslims called the place down-under. Fortunately, I would be wholly unclean and untouchable in his view and religion. That was terribly ironic given the fact that he was a Dalit who was expected to clean-up warm shit for a living. Jesus, what did that make me? I wondered. In any case, I planned to stay as non-kosher for the entire operation.
Appropriate footwear was necessary as a final touch to our American Indian outfits. We didn’t want to give ourselves away by being improperly shod since shoddiness was never permitted in the department. Everyone decided to wrap brown paper lunch bags around their feet to resemble moccasins. The booties were adorned with animistic, mystic, and magical signs drawn in bold, black Magic Marker pen. Realism and authenticity were essential ingredients to the success of our mission. In the department, as nitpickers, we’d been taught to pay close attention to the smallest details. “For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost...” as the saying patently begins. I didn’t understand what that bit of sophistry meant, but my black wingtips were now encased in paper sacks tied at my ankles. They were destined to kick some fundamentalist, Thug ass in Agra.
We looked at each other in full costume and were pleased with what we saw. It was an almost surreal and narcissistic experience. Kali looked particularly winsome. I think that meant hot in English, but I wasn’t sure since words could be so damn vague at times. Regardless, these tribesmen (and woman) were ready to hunt and gather. We were prepared to ride into the Indian sunset while listening to the steady rhythms of America the Beautiful. God help the Islamic cowboys who might cross our warpath.
Sometimes those who served and protected went forth to safeguard their mom’s warm apple pie from ravenous, sticky-fingered heathens.