Life was good but tame these days. It was the curse of all operations officers to be put out to pasture at fifty, after almost thirty intense years of scheming on behalf of their country. Avrakotos was working on several moneymaking ventures, but nothing had come through yet and there really wasn’t much to do but see the sights and remember. A column in that day’s Wall Street Journal immediately caught his eye. Entitled “The Afghan Who Won the Cold War,” it was about an old friend of sorts, the legendary Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the writer claimed that “as much as Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan, Mr. Massoud broke the back of Soviet imperialism.” Avrakotos knew something about the columnist, Robert Kaplan. He was one of the more gifted writers on Afghanistan. A few months before he had somehow gotten Gust’s name and number and tried to get him to talk. But Avrakotos hates the press and hadn’t even made an effort to be nice when he said no.
