“Salaam aleikum,”
Wells said, opting for Arabic.
“Aleikum salaam.”
The man said something else to Wells. Wells knew Pashtun, and even a few words of Dari. But the tribes up here had their own dialects, and he’d never heard this
one.
“Saudia, Saudia,”
Wells said in Arabic. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Do you speak Arabic?”
“Arabiy! Arabiy!”
The man waved to the other tribesmen, who clustered around the Toyota. Another man, this one wearing sunglasses despite the gray clouds above, leaned over and yelled in Arabic, “We’re collecting a toll.”
“All right, my brother.” Wells had put a few hundred rupees in the glove compartment for just this reason. He reached for them.
“But first, what is your name?”
“Jalal.”
“And where are you headed, my brother Jalal?”
“Quetta.”
“Quetta, Quetta!”
The man couldn’t have seemed more excited if Wells had announced his next stop was Tokyo. “And what shall you do in Quetta?”
“I have gifts for our brothers fighting the jihad.”
The man translated to his fellow tribesmen, who roared their approval. A long, excited conversation followed. Finally the man said, “You must feast with us! And then target practice!”
Long as I’m not the target.
“You’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse.” Wells probably shouldn’t have made the joke—Jalal Haq wouldn’t have—but it escaped unremarked. Wells pulled the 4Runner off the road and spent the next hour eating goat with the tribesmen. The meat was tender and tasty, long strips with a sour yogurt sauce.
“Young goat,” the man in the sunglasses said.
“Young goat.”
The men lived in a village on the other side of the ridge. They weren’t Talibs, just Baluchi tribesmen who wanted nothing to do with any central government, whether in Islamabad or Kabul or Washington. After lunch, they led Wells through a ravine into a dry streambed. Three oil drums sat in a row two hundred meters away. The first was wrapped in the American flag, the second in the Pakistani flag, the third in the Israeli flag. The man in sunglasses unstrapped his AK and then shoved the rifle at Wells muzzle-first—not exactly safe firearm handling.
“As our guest, you go first,
Arabiya
.”
“You do this during the day? What about the police, the Army?”
“Do you see them? We don’t fear them. They fear us. Our only enemy is the American planes, and we know when they’re coming. We can hear them.”
Wells wasn’t so sure about that, but he didn’t argue the point.
The AK was nicked and worn, but Wells didn’t doubt it would work. A decade before in Afghanistan, Wells had seen a Talib drop an AK into a well that must have been a hundred feet deep. It rattled off the walls the whole way down and splashed loudly at the bottom. No matter. The Talib hustled up a boy who couldn’t have been more than six and told his father that he’d be riding the bucket down after it. The man tried to argue. The Talibs told him that if he didn’t shut up, they’d send him down the well, too, and not in the bucket. He shut up. In the event, the kid came back up with the rifle. Without bothering to strip the AK clean, or even dry it off, the Talib pointed it in the air and pulled the trigger. Sure enough, it worked.
Now Wells checked the rifle he’d just been given. Full. He had a moment’s fantasy of playing Rambo and taking out his hosts, but he reminded himself that these men had never fought the United States and weren’t exactly high-value targets. He settled for wasting the magazine on full auto, missing the flags wildly.
“You Arabs shoot like donkeys,” his new friend said.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES LATER,
the tribesmen sent Wells on his way. They didn’t even ask for a bribe. The rest of the trip was uneventful. The land opened into a high plateau, dry and arid, with only a few spindly trees to break the monotony. To the west, a dusty range of mountains rose along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The road improved as suddenly as it had worsened, opening into a four-lane divided highway that was empty of traffic. Wells arrived at Muslim Bagh in late afternoon and found a guesthouse. He prayed that night in a two-room mosque down the street.
In the morning, he rose before dawn. He showered and slicked back his hair and pulled on a blue
shalwar kameez
.
The town was still dark when the calls to prayer sounded. The center of Muslim Bagh had a limited electric grid, but the plains and hills around it were dark. Wells walked along the town’s dusty main street, looking for the busiest mosque. Only the most fervent believers would rise for the dawn call. They were the men he needed to find.
A pickup truck drove by, a Toyota, with two men in the front seat and two more standing in the bed of the truck. The two in back carried AKs, with bandoliers of copper-jacketed ammunition draped across their chests. A thick layer of grit covered the Toyota. These had to be men Wells wanted to see. The Thuwanis. Advertising their power, reminding villagers here that they and not the Pakistani police ruled this region. Wells raised a hand and the truck pulled over beside
him.
“My brothers,” he said in Arabic.
“Salaam aleikum.”
The men in back vaulted over the side of the cab and flanked him. Their rifles weren’t quite pointed at him, but they weren’t relaxed either. Without knowing how, Wells had angered them.
“Yes, yes,
aleikum salaam
,” the man closest to Wells said. His beard covered most of his face, but the exposed skin was discolored. Frostbite, possibly. December through March, deep snow covered the border mountains. “What do you want?” he said in Pashtun. “What are you doing here?”
Until he knew more about these men, Wells didn’t plan to let them know he spoke Pashtun. “I don’t understand,” he said in Arabic.
“I said, what do you want?” the frostbitten man said, in Arabic this time.
“Do you live here, my brothers?”
“What’s it to
you?”
“I’m looking for a place where I might find the men who live on both sides of the border.”
The man raised his weapon a notch. “Speak clearly. No riddles.”
The hostility confused Wells. Had these men made him as American? Had someone from the Saudi embassy betrayed him somehow? “My name is Jalal Haq. From Saudi Arabia. I’m looking for men who live in the hills around Muslim Bagh. Fierce Muslim warriors who have fought jihad for years.”
Flattery never hurts.
“They’re named the Thuwanis.”
The man nodded and leaned into the pickup’s cab for a whispered conversation with the men inside. He returned smiling, a hollow smile like a sinkhole in the forest of his beard. Wells would have preferred a frown. He’d made a mistake. Whoever these men were, they had no love for the Thuwanis.
The sinkhole closed as the frostbitten man’s smile became a sneer. “Tell me, Mr. Haq, you wish to join these fierce warriors?”
“I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Wells tried to sound meek. “I’ll find these men another
way.”
“Do you have a
gun?”
“What, brother?”
“We’re not brothers. I ask again, are you carrying a weapon?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll do what I tell you, Jalal Haq.” The Talib stepped back, pointed his AK at Wells’s chest. “And I’m telling you to get on your knees.” The sun had just emerged over the low hills to the east. It lit the Talib’s face, his ruined skin and hard black eyes. Wells didn’t doubt this man would kill him in the street. Without a weapon of his own, he was trapped.
He went to his knees.
“If he moves, shoot him,” the man said in Pashtun to the other Talib who’d come off the truck, a tall man who stood three steps back.
“Yes, Najibullah.”
The frostbitten one, Najibullah, stepped around Wells and reached into the bed of the pickup and grabbed a black hood.
And that was all Wells
saw.
11
FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON
T
his was a week earlier. Coleman Young rested on his cot watching
Terminator
on his computer for the hundredth time. Arnold was shooting his way through the Los Angeles police station like the pumped-up badass he was. Across the barracks, Roman lay on his own cot, playing a driving game on his Sony PSP. Roman loved driving games, Young knew. He knew more about the guys in his platoon than he ever would have expected, and more than he wanted. Bunk with dudes for a year, eat with them, ride with them, burn through ten thousand rounds with them, and sooner or later their secrets came out. PFC Battis picked his nose and ate the snot when he thought nobody was watching. The whole platoon ragged him, but he couldn’t stop. Specialist Corlou had a big
Z
tattooed across his left pec: it stood for something in Greek that translated into “He is risen,”
meaning Christ but also Corlou’s brother, a Marine who had died in Iraq five years ago. Sergeant Taz jerked off in his bed even if the lights were on and everybody was still awake. But Taz was the best around when the bad guys came to play.
“Wanna work out?” Roman said to Young across the barracks. Young ignored him. Roman had been looking for excuses to stick close to Young since the memorial. He wasn’t even crafty about
it.
Roman’s Roshan—his local cell phone—rang. He answered, listened. “Right. I got it.” His eyebrows puckered as he concentrated. “No, I got it.”
He had to be getting orders from Rodriguez, Young figured. Nothing else would make him think so hard.
“Who was that?” Young said.
“Nobody. Sure you don’t wanna go lift? Or grab chow?”
Suddenly, Young got it. Rodriguez must have told Roman to keep a close eye on Young for the next few minutes. The handoff must be happening right now. Young turned off
Terminator
.
“Yeah, let’s work out. Lemme just drop
one.”
“You sure?”
“Am I sure I have to take a dump?”
“I’ll go with
you.”
“No, you won’t.” Young walked out of the barracks. He was probably making a mistake. In a minute or two, Roman would come looking for him. But Young thought of those stupid pink letters Fowler’s mom sent every week. He kept walking.
He turned left, toward the Porta-Potties, and checked over his shoulder. Sure enough, Roman was peeking out the front of the barracks. Young kept going until Roman couldn’t see him and then cut through the shower trailers and followed a blast wall north. The base was so big and so chopped up with walls and barracks that there were a hundred different ways to move across it, and a thousand different places to hide stuff.
But Young guessed that the handoff was happening at the junk pile at the northeast corner of the base, the area everybody called Zombieland. He kept his head down, didn’t break stride when a couple guys grunted hellos at him. He reached the big road that ran past the brigade aid station, where docs worked on guys whose wounds didn’t rate evacuations to the hospital at Kandahar.
He crossed the road and circled north past a rubber reservoir that held millions of gallons of water for the base’s showers and toilets. The thing looked like an overgrown water bed, forty feet square and three feet thick. Finally he came to a two-room concrete shelter marked “Casualty Holding Point”
in no-nonsense black letters. Young ducked into the shelter. It was empty and dark and had never been used. Fortunately, FOB Jackson had never faced a ground attack, only the occasional rocket. Young peeked through a firing hole. From here he could see along the flight line to the blast walls that marked the outer edge of Zombieland. Sure enough, Rodriguez leaned against the wall, alone, smoking. Watching to be sure nobody was headed his
way.
Five minutes passed. Then Rodriguez whistled and two men walked out of Zombieland. The front man carried a big backpack. Young didn’t recognize him. He was a couple hundred feet off, too far for Young to see his face clearly. He was tall and wore a uniform and had a black beard and non-reg boots. He had to be a Special Forces operator, maybe even a Delta. Nobody else could get away with the boots, much less the beard. And nobody else had the walk, the loose don’t-mess-with-me strut.
Tyler Weston followed. Young’s lieutenant. His platoon commander. Young had always suspected Weston of Fowler’s murder. He’d hoped he was wrong, but the truth was obvious. Weston ran the platoon. Of course he’d known about the deal. He’d probably been the one who’d actually pulled the trigger and killed Fowler.
The SF guy and Weston walked his way, Rodriguez following like a guard dog.
Man, oh, man.
Young leaned back, away from the firing hole. The shelter was unlit. Young didn’t think they could see him unless they stopped and looked directly inside. He hoped they’d get close enough for him to see the SF guy’s face clearly. But about a hundred feet from the shelter, the SF guy jumped into a pickup truck parked on the side of the road. The pickup rolled off. Weston and Rodriguez kept walking, past him, past the shelter. Young waited until he was sure they were gone and headed over to the DFAC for chow. Roman found him a few minutes later.
“Thought we were gonna work
out.”
“I changed my mind. Got hungry.”
“You should have told
me.”
Young ignored him, went back to his barbecued chicken. That night, he poked around Zombieland, looking for places Rodriguez and Weston might have hidden the stash. But nothing stood out in the piles of broken metal and plastic parts. Anyway, Young figured they’d given the stuff to the SF
guy.
He wanted to push on Roman. Roman was the weak link. Roman had started talking about how he was buying himself a farm when he got home. Finally, Sergeant Taz asked him how the heck he was going to buy a farm when he had two kids by different moms and he’d been so broke he filed bankruptcy three months before they deployed. Roman mumbled something about how he’d been saving his money. The next morning, Roman and Rodriguez went for a walk and after that Roman didn’t talk about buying a farm anymore.
Young figured that he’d wait until they were a couple days from going home and then try to bluff Roman into giving up the truth. It wasn’t a great plan, but he didn’t have anything better. And at least he wouldn’t be giving Weston and Rodriguez much chance to come back at
him.
* * *
A WEEK LATER,
Young was headed to the gym when he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Sergeant Young.” He turned to see Rodriguez.
“First Sergeant Rodriguez.”
“How you been, Coleman? Good workout?” Rodriguez clapped a hand around the meat of Young’s biceps and squeezed. “Damn, Sergeant. You got some guns on
you.”
“You like that, Rodriguez? Didn’t think you went that
way.”
“Take a walk with me, Coleman.”
Young followed Rodriguez to the big lot where Strykers that needed minor repairs were kept. The mechanics weren’t up yet. No one was within a hundred yards.
Rodriguez was short and broad shouldered and cocky. He stood close to Young, making sure Young could feel him. Trying to back Young up. Typical Mexican crap, Young thought. He’d dealt with plenty of them in south Dallas. Dealing with them didn’t mean he liked them.
“What’s up, First Sergeant?”
“Wanted to be sure you were okay, Coleman. I know you and Ricky were good friends.”
“Yeah? You seen us holding hands, First Sergeant?” Young knew he should keep his mouth shut. But Rodriguez had been under his skin even before Ricky got juiced.
“You saying you weren’t friends.”
“Friends, sure.”
“So it’s only natural to be depressed.”
“Let me ask you something, First Sergeant.” Rodriguez liked to be in charge. Giving it back was the way to play him. Young wondered whether he should speak up about the SF guy he’d seen, decided to keep that bit to himself for now. “It strike you as odd, what happened to Ricky?”
“Odd like
how?”
“Like once he got hit, the enemy disengaged right away. Almost like he was the only target.”
“I think the shooter figured he got lucky, decided not to push. Dropped his gun and ran, knowing we couldn’t touch
him.”
You and Weston would tell CID that exact story if I went to them,
Young thought.
All I got on my side is the word of a dead
man.
“The lieutenant and I are worried about you. We feel you’ve withdrawn from the rest of the platoon.” Rodriguez put a hand on Young’s shoulder. Young brushed it
off.
“I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself.”
“That’s your choice.”
“I think it’s safer for everyone.”
“Could be. Anyway, the lieutenant and I, we were thinking if you wanted to get out of here, chill at KAF for a couple weeks, get your head on straight, we’d get that. Maybe even finish out the tour over there. You know we got barely two months left.”
So Weston and Rodriguez wanted him gone. They didn’t know what he knew, what he’d guessed, what Fowler had told him. They didn’t know what he might have told his family or his buddies in other units. They figured that trying to take him out might be tricky. It wouldn’t look good if another soldier in the platoon went down in some suspicious way. So they were offering him a deal. KAF, Kandahar Airfield. Young was more likely to get shot back home in Oak Cliff than at KAF. He’d be more or less certain to finish his tour in one piece.
Too bad I’m not looking to run.
Young stepped close to Rodriguez, chest-to-chest, so Rodriguez had to tilt his head up to make eye contact.
“I appreciate that, Sergeant. That’s a generous offer. Thoughtful. But I’ll pass.”
“All right.”
“And know this, too. Ricky wasn’t much of a soldier.” Young stared at Rodriguez until the first sergeant nodded. “Me, I take care of myself. I’ll engage and destroy any threat outside the wire. Any threat.”
Rodriguez didn’t say a word, and they stood looking at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, Young got tired of the staring contest and put his hands on Rodriguez’s shoulders and shoved, shoved hard—
And Rodriguez stumbled back and landed on his ass on the Stryker gravel. He muttered something under his breath that Young couldn’t hear. He popped up like he was on springs and took a half step toward Young.
“You’re gonna regret that, Sergeant.”
“Am I now? Whyn’t you show
me?”
But Rodriguez stepped back and smiled. “I don’t have to. Somebody else will.”
“Listen to me, Rodriguez. Soon as I get back to my bunk I’m gonna write my brother and my best friend some thoughts I been having. I’m going to put them letters in envelopes. I’m gonna write on the outside, ‘Only open if I die,’
and
then I’m gonna mail them
off.”
“Yeah? Good luck with that.”
“Wanna know what it’s gonna say? Just your names, you and the lieutenant, and a note that says, ‘These two did me. Whatever the Army tells you, don’t believe it. And you come back on them.’ And I can promise you that they will.”
“Never seen you scared before, Coleman. Telling fairy tales about how your best friend’s gonna come at me. How’s he even know where I live? He a detective or something? And then he’s hunting me down? Please.”
“I got letters to write, Rodriguez.” Young turned away.
“You go ahead.”
Young went back to the hutch and wrote his letters. For all the good they’d do. He might just have gotten himself killed this morning and he couldn’t see how to get clean. He had no evidence against Weston and Rodriguez. And not only did he not know the name of the SF operator he’d seen with them, he hadn’t even gotten a clear look at the guy’s face.
Nothing else to do, so Young went to breakfast. It was still early, and he was one of the first inside. He loaded up with eggs and hash browns. Normally he was careful about what he ate. Today he didn’t care. He grabbed a couple of Cokes and found a seat by himself in a quiet corner and leaned his head over his plate and did something he hadn’t done in years. He said grace.