Gordon didn’t seem bothered. He was a head shorter than Wells and narrow shouldered, but he shouldered his pack easily, rolled his neck. “You look tired,
man.”
“Wishing I were twenty again, instead of twice that.”
“I’ll be twenty-one next month. Get to celebrate here. Woo
-
hoo.”
“Should be
fun.”
“I can’t believe that back home I’m not old enough to get a beer without sneaking around. When I get out of here, I’m going to Myrtle Beach with my boys, make up for lost time, drink until I can’t stand.”
The unspoken part of the sentence went,
If I’m still alive.
“Sounds like a plan.”
Gordon extended his hand. “Be seeing you, Mr. Wells.”
“John.”
“John. You get home, you tell those big boys my idea. About the wall.”
“Roger that. Watch your six, Specialist.”
“Always
do.”
* * *
OUTSIDE, AFGHANISTAN.
The air was crisp and cold, the sky thick with stars. White-capped mountains loomed over the hangars around them. Most Afghans didn’t live in those mountains. The fiercest fighting happened in the south, the scrublands of Kandahar and Helmand. But the Hindu Kush was as central to the
idea
of Afghanistan as the desert was to Saudi Arabia. Its peaks had defeated invaders for centuries. They could be occupied, but never truly conquered.
A wiry man in jeans and a light green windbreaker walked toward Wells. “John? I’m Pete Lautner. Good to meet you.” They shook. Lautner had close-cropped gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a coiled awareness of everything around him. Losing your wife and brother to a suicide bombing would have that effect, Wells thought.
“The same.”
“Ready for the beautiful Ariana Hotel? We’ve got a room with your name on
it.”
Lautner led Wells to a black Suburban parked fifty yards away. The air base at Bagram had been built up since Wells’s last trip. Hangars and concrete bunkers stretched along the main runway.
“Wonder what we’ll do with it when we leave.”
“MOAB.”
“Never heard of
’em.”
“You know daisy cutters?”
“Sure,” Wells said. Daisy cutters—officially called BLU-82s—had been the largest nonnuclear bombs ever built. Six tons of ammonium nitrate with a sprinkling of artificial flavors. The Pentagon had created them to cut through the jungles of Vietnam.
“Like those. But bigger. Nine tons of explosives, give or take.”
“The daisy cutter wasn’t big enough.”
“I guess
not.”
“Wonder what the Air Force is compensating
for.”
Lautner smiled. “Who said we’re leaving anyway?”
They stopped beside a four-seat helicopter, black, with a bubble canopy. The pilot stood a few feet away, cigarette in hand. He was Hispanic, with thick black hair. He was maybe twenty-six. Everyone in this war seemed to be younger than Wells. The pilot tossed aside his smoke, sending embers across the tarmac.
“One of these days you’ll hit some jet fuel and we’ll be screwed,” Lautner said.
“Stop, drop, and roll,” the pilot said. He extended a hand to Wells. “I’m Mike Hernandez.”
“John Wells.”
“Mike is the best,” Lautner said. “We can land Black Hawks at the Ariana, but these work better. And that glass is thicker than it looks. It’ll stop anything up to a .50 cal. And with the headphones, we can actually talk inside.”
“Good enough for you is good enough for
me.”
“You will want to wear your Kevlar, though. And your Nomex.”
Wells pulled on his black fireproof gloves, strapped on his vest, climbed in, buckled up. Hernandez went through two minutes of clicking switches and consulting the computer screens in the center console. “Ready?” Without waiting for their agreement, Hernandez twisted back on the throttle until the helicopter vibrated with its power. He pulled up on the collective and they leaped into the night and rode low and fast onto the Shamali Plain.
Beneath them were the scars of three decades of war. Bomb craters pockmarked the earth. The houses that had survived were dark and shuttered against the world. Few Afghans had electric generators. Those who did rarely used them after dark. Noise and light attracted thieves. Faint plumes of smoke from the chimneys offered the only proof of life.
The helicopter swung south toward Kabul. Five miles away, headlights appeared below them, cresting a hill and speeding north. “Afghan police,” Lautner said. “This is probably the safest stretch of road in the whole country.”
“But we’re not driving.”
“Flying’s still safer. You’re a VIP, Mr. Wells. My ass if anything happens to
you.”
“Generally I can feed and clothe myself. I do need a little help on the toilet.”
Lautner snorted, a half laugh. To the south, the yellow glow of Kabul appeared. “Brighter than I remember.” The embassies and aid groups have their own generators. “You don’t mind my asking, anything in particular you’re looking for on this trip?”
“Vinny asked me to come over, tell him what I thought. About the war and the station, both.”
“Is there a problem with the station?”
“You tell
me.”
Lautner hesitated. “It’s tricky. Maybe a conversation we should have on the ground. So the director asked you himself.”
“Correct.”
“Rumor is that you and he don’t get along. Rumor is that’s why you quit.”
So the story of his struggle with Duto had spread all the way here. Wells didn’t see the percentage in denying the truth. “We don’t. But this is too important.”
“And you’re gonna be speaking to soldiers,
too.”
“I’m set for a couple speeches in Kandahar. Honestly, I’m not sure they even know who I am. But it’s a decent excuse to hear what the frontline guys think.”
“Look, I’m glad to talk to you, and so’s everyone else. You know, there’s going to be specific programs and intel we can’t discuss. I hope you’re not offended, compartmentalized stuff that you’re not read in
for.”
“I figured as much.” Though Wells hadn’t. He was here with Duto’s direct support. He was surprised Lautner was pushing back. He was glad now to have read the station’s files at Langley, and doubly glad that no one in Kabul knew.
“But in terms of questions about morale, how we’re putting the station back together—”
“Since Marburg—” As Wells said the word, Lautner’s lips tightened slightly, but he had no other reaction.
“Since Marburg. It’s been a struggle, but we’re getting traction. I don’t have to tell you it’s a very tough environment. Traditional rules of intel and counterintel don’t apply. There’s no ideology, no consistency. They’ll switch sides instantly for a better offer. Tough to build anything lasting. Especially since they know we won’t be here forever.”
“But we’ve got the money.”
“That we
do.”
Lautner hadn’t lied, Wells thought. Instead he’d given Wells generalities about Afghanistan that had been true twenty years ago and would be equally true twenty years from now. Nothing about the station’s real problems. Lautner obviously saw him as an outsider, sent by Langley to second-guess. The attitude didn’t mean Lautner or anyone else was a mole. Quite the opposite. A mole would be more welcoming, Wells thought. He decided not to press Lautner any further, at least for now. Maybe Arango, the chief of station, would be more willing to talk.
Wells looked out the window toward Kabul. A quilt of shacks and mud houses and garbage mounds covered the land. During the civil war in the 1990s, refugee camps had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. Now the refugees didn’t want to go home. The camps had food and water and basic sanitation, all luxuries in rural Afghanistan.
The helicopter swooped left. For a few seconds it seemed to be flying almost sideways. If a double-rotor, forty-passenger Chinook was a bus, and a twelve-passenger Black Hawk was a sports car, this little chopper was a motorcycle. A racing bike, not an overpowered Ducati, but a Honda CBR600 with sticky tires that gripped the pavement.
A low hill loomed ahead, topped by a mound that looked at first like a funeral pyre. The sour stench of a garbage fire filled the cabin. The chopper hopped over the hill and down the back side and turned right, following a narrow two-lane road that headed toward the center of Kabul. They were no more than forty feet off the ground, so low that Wells could count potholes on the road beneath them. Each turn blended into the next. Even if someone had an RPG on them, hitting them would be impossible.
The pilot leaned forward in his seat, his helmet almost touching the canopy, his hands loose. “Looks like he could do this with his eyes closed,” Wells said.
“Mike’s got those nice video-game reflexes.”
Two minutes later, the helicopter approached the Ariana Hotel. “Home sweet home,” Lautner said. The hotel was unlit and painted dark gray so it would be a tougher target for RPGs. The concrete blast walls around it glowed under arc lamps. The combination turned the hotel into a devil’s flower, a black hole ringed by light.
The helicopter’s engines revved down abruptly. For a moment, they hung motionless. Then they descended gently and touched down in the very center of the painted white cross that marked the hotel’s landing zone. Hernandez nodded their thanks and went back to checking the chopper’s displays. Wells realized that he and Lautner were nothing but cargo to the kid, an excuse for him to play a real-life video game
.
Even so he was a great pilot.
Lautner led Wells to a room on the fourth floor, in a part of the Ariana used by contractors rather than CIA employees, another none-too-subtle reminder that Wells was no longer part of the club. After the flight from Washington, Wells was happy just to have a bed. He fell asleep with his shirt and pants still on. He woke once, in the deepest part of the night. He didn’t know where he
was.
When he finally realized, he found himself strangely comforted.
7
MOQOR, GHAZNI PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN
T
he dented Toyota pickup crept down Highway 1, past the gray blast walls of Forward Operating Base Moqor, which stretched for a half mile along the road. The guys in the Toyota’s front seat looked Afghan. They were actually a Delta sniper team. Daniel Francesca, the sniper, drove. William Alders, his spotter, sat next to
him.
After a week outside the wire, Francesca and Alders were ready for a shower and a hot meal, but the traffic refused to cooperate. Despite being called a highway, the road was only two lanes wide. An accident outside the entrance to the base had snarled traffic, and they were stuck in a line of diesel-belching trucks.
On the opposite side of the road, Afghan boys waved bags of peanuts and candy at the truckers. After every sale, the boys brought the money to a fat man sitting in a rocking chair beside a closed gas station.
“How often you think one of them gets snatched?” Alders said.
“Snatching is unnecessary. I think the portly gentleman takes any reasonable offer.”
“Fresh six-year-olds. We will not be undersold.”
“Eat all you want. We’ll make more.”
“That was Fritos?”
“Doritos. Jay Leno.”
“Good old Jay.” Now the traffic was starting to flow and the kids were running into the road, playing chicken with the trucks. “This country.”
“This country.”
* * *
FIVE MINUTES LATER,
they reached the base’s entrance, which was really just an opening in the blast walls. Francesca turned inside, but stopped short of the concrete hut that served as the external checkpoint. Hescos, four-foot-tall wire-and-cloth baskets packed with dirt, ringed the hut. A machine gun sat on the roof, surrounded by layers of sandbags.
The outer checkpoint was the post most exposed to suicide bombers and thus the riskiest guard position. Here—as at most bases—the post was manned not by soldiers but by contractors, Nepalese Gurkhas. They were in Afghanistan for the money and nothing else. They spoke little English and even less Pashtun and knew exactly how much danger they faced.
So Francesca kept his hands high and his Common Access Card visible as he stepped out of the pickup. He knew the guards wouldn’t make him for American, not right away. He wore a gray
shalwar kameez
and had black hair and olive skin, thanks to his Sicilian ancestry. He couldn’t pass for Pashtun, of course. The Pashtuns looked like no one else, with their nut brown skin and giant hands. But he could easily have been from northern Afghanistan. Off base, looking local kept him alive. Here, not so much.
A Gurkha in a tan flak jacket stepped out of the hut, pointed an M-4 at Francesca’s chest. The man raised his left hand, palm out:
Stop.
“I’m American. Special Ops.” The Gurkha came forward, looked over the access card, the identification all soldiers carried. The guard motioned with his rifle at the pickup, where Alders sat in the front passenger seat, his hands flat on the dash. “He’s American,
too.”
The Gurkha disappeared into the hut with Francesca’s identification. He came back a few minutes later and waved them through.
“Home sweet home.”
* * *
FRANCESCA AND ALDERS
had been operating in the mountains in the southeastern corner of Zabul province, just inside Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The United States had only a couple thousand troops in all of Zabul, part of the same Stryker brigade that included Tyler Weston. Most American forces were farther west in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which were more heavily populated and strategically important. The Taliban had taken advantage, making Zabul a major route for smuggling weapons and men from Pakistan.
So Francesca and Alders had set up watch on a ratline, a trail the Talibs used to bring in weapons. They lived at Kandahar Airfield in a base within a base, a compound restricted to the Delta elite. Delta and Special Forces teams usually ran missions by helicopter, flying on modified Black Hawks that had nozzles for midair refueling jutting out of their front ends like steel straws. But Black Hawks attracted attention, and Francesca needed absolute camouflage to succeed. At his best, he killed quietly and precisely, and then disappeared.
Take nothing but shots. Leave nothing but bodies.
Instead of a Black Hawk, Francesca and Alders took a Toyota, with civilian Afghan plates, and joined the stream of civilian traffic leaving Kandahar. At Kharjoy, they left the highway and wended their way southeast on the one-lane tracks and dry riverbeds that passed for roads in Zabul. Ten miles before the border, the hills turned into mountains and got too steep for them to drive at all. They left the Toyota near an abandoned hut and humped up to the ridgeline of a nine-thousand-foot mountain that overwatched the trail. The mission was hugely risky. They had no backup. If the Talibs found them, they would have to call for a helicopter evacuation that would take hours. By then they’d probably be dead. Or, worse, captured.
For a week, they lived rough. They ate bread and dried fruit and rationed their water and slept under the thorny bushes that offered the only cover around. But the mission turned out to be a bust. Maybe the Talibs had guessed that the route had been discovered. Maybe they’d used other trails this month. Either way, Francesca and Alders saw nothing but a couple of kids herding goats.
But they had a second, unofficial reason for the mission. On the way into the mountains, they’d picked up a bag of tightly wrapped blue bundles from Lieutenant Weston at FOB Jackson. They’d hidden the bag along with their rifles and uniforms in a special compartment that was welded under the bed of the pickup.
Now they were back on friendly territory. Francesca wanted a shower and contractor-cooked chow. Forward operating bases had the best food in the military. The giant headquarters bases like Kandahar focused on quantity. But the dining halls at the forward bases offered chicken, steak, ice cream, fresh vegetables, and unlimited Gatorade and PowerBars.
“Starving,” Francesca said. “You?”
“Sure.”
Francesca and Alders didn’t need to talk much. They were close as husband and wife. Closer, maybe. Neither man’s marriage had survived this war. They had worked together as sniper and spotter for three years.
On one calm day the previous summer, Francesca sighted, held his breath, gently squeezed the trigger on his rifle—a four-foot-long .50 caliber Barrett M107. Across a rock valley, a fat Afghan clutched his chest and dropped. He tried to stagger up and then lay down and didn’t move again. “Nine hundred yards,” Alders told
him.
“Always wanted to bust somebody at half a mile.”
“Now you have.”
Francesca would be bummed when this tour was finished. It was his third and last. Not his choice. The Army gave you only three. In the three tours, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he’d racked fifty-six kills, a good number, especially with the drones doing so much work these days. Maybe
good
was the wrong word. Francesca wondered whether all that killing had changed him. Course it had. Back home, civvies called guys like him serial killers. The more he pulled the trigger, the easier it came. He’d given up waiting for God or anyone else to punish him. He hadn’t been hit by lightning or gotten cancer or gone blind. He was in the best shape of his life. Plenty of money in the bank, and more coming. The Joes treated him like a minor
god.
He wasn’t too worried about payback in the next world either. He’d watched close through his scope for souls leaving the men he’d killed. Hadn’t seen a single one. Only the red mist, the cloud of blood and tissue that shrieked from the body when a bullet cut through. The afterlife was a fable for little boys and girls. Not real men like
him.
* * *
SO WHEN AN OLD FRIEND
in Kabul reached out a few months before, told him about a scheme he had, Francesca said yes right away. “What about your spotter?” his friend had said. “He gonna be okay with this?”
“He does what I tell
him.”
“That simple.”
“He knows the difference between shooting and spotting.”
Sure enough, Alders agreed. Working out the pickups was the tricky part. At first his friend wanted him to pick the stuff up himself. But the Talibs hated snipers. Francesca couldn’t risk meeting them directly.
Instead he reached out to Tyler Weston, a platoon leader he knew in Zabul. Tyler’s brother had been a good friend of Francesca’s, back in the day. Weston bought in quick once Francesca explained, quicker than Francesca had expected. He got it. He saw how everybody was getting rich over here. The companies, the contractors, the locals. Only the Joes got the shaft. This deal was a way to get them a piece of the money they’d been missing. He and Alders split ten grand a kilo, two-thirds for him, one-third for Alders. More than a million dollars already. Francesca had parked his share in a bank in Germany while he figured what to do with
it.
* * *
INSIDE THE BASE,
Francesca called Kandahar, explained they’d hit a rut on the way back from the mountains. “Blew the right front tire. We got the spare on. But it put a leak in the left, too. And maybe some damage to the axle.”
“Where are you
now?”
“FOB Moqor. We’ll be stuck here tonight. Mechanics say they don’t have time to check the axle until the morning.”
“All right. But do me a favor. Get back by tomorrow night.”
“Yes,
sir.”
Francesca turned into a giant parking lot filled with armored trucks and pickups. Thousands of vehicles were parked on this base. No one would notice, much less check, a random pickup truck. He found a spot and hopped out. He and Alders took off the right front tire and replaced it with the spare and tossed the tire a couple hundred yards away.
“Let’s eat. Where’s the chow hall, Alders?”
“How’m I know that?” Alders had grown up on the side of a mountain in eastern Kentucky. He had a hillbilly accent that made him seem a lot stupider than he was. “Thought you could smell
it.”
They walked past a grove of Porta-Potties and a line of blast walls that hid a dozen steel trailers. Francesca guessed they were home to the base’s midlevel officers. Lieutenants and captains usually bunked in pairs. Majors and above lived alone. The Army was extraordinarily hierarchical, although it made exceptions for Special Forces guys. In a low-intensity war like this one, the regular Joes often had to hold their fire for fear of killing civilians. Francesca didn’t have that problem. He killed more Talibs in a year than the average forty-man infantry platoon. So the Army put up with him. Even so, he knew regular officers viewed guys like him as a necessary evil. Their casual refusal to wear uniforms or salute discouraged regular soldiers from following orders.
“Want to go over there, ask for directions?”
“You know what I want?”
“What you always want. A nice cold Dr Pepper.”
“Read my mind. A nice cold Dr Pepper. Wouldn’t mind a shot of Jim Beam right next to it, but I guess that ain’t happening.”
“Funny, isn’t it. We can’t get a drink, but we got a million bucks of junk back there—”
“Junk in the trunk.”
“Had to go there. You ever think about trying
it?”
“Nope,” Alders said firmly. “It’s just Oxycontin without a prescription. Half my cousins are addicted to Oxy and they lie around on their asses doing nothing ’cept talking about how high they are. From what I can see they can’t even get out of bed. Don’t look that great to me. You ever done meth?”
“Only the greenies.” One secret of the Special Forces was that a lot of guys had stashes of amphetamines tucked away. All the training in the world couldn’t prep you for two hours of sleep a night. A little chemical help went a long
way.
“Yeah, meth is that times ten. The greenies give you energy, keep you up, but being on meth changes your whole attitude. You feel like you could lift a car. Unstoppable. You find some chick on it, too? You gonna tear each other up. If I’m going to get high, I want to feel
high
.”
“That’s the longest speech you’ve ever given
me.”
“You asked,
man.”
“So I
did.”
They found the mess hall, and Francesca ate plates of crab legs and barbecued chicken and drank two Fantas. He wanted a third, but the mess hall regulations said two. These tiny rules had somehow kept a hold on him. Maybe following them helped him pass as normal, instead of the Shadow he was. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. He’d read that somewhere growing up. Take care of the Fantas, and the kills will take care of themselves.
He laughed a little.
“What?” Alders said.
“Nothing.”
“That creeps me
out.”
“What?”
“That laugh. That high-pitched crazy-man laugh.
Hee-hee-hee.
You been doing it a lot. And every time I ask you what you’re thinking about, you say, ‘Nothing.’”
“Just thinking.”
“Three tours is enough,” Alders said.
Francesca got himself two slices of Oreo pie. Alders had ice cream. The conversations eddied and flowed around them, but none of the other soldiers talked to them. Everyone knew enough to leave them alone. The mess hall had a television that played the Armed Forces Network, a mix of live sports and shows like
House
. During the commercial breaks, the channel played military public-service announcements instead of the usual back-home ads. The announcements were targeted at rear-echelon administrative types at bases in Europe. Tips for dealing with sexual harassment, that kind of thing. They had less than nothing to do with the reality of the war over here. Lately, Francesca could hardly watch them. He wanted to shoot everyone in them, especially the whiny chicks who didn’t like being told their asses looked good.
What you just said to me makes me uncomfortable, Sergeant. I suggest— Oh—
Whomp. She doesn’t even get a hand up. Dead before she hits the floor. Two points.
Francesca felt that high-pitched laugh rising in his throat and stifled it. When had he started thinking about shooting his fellow soldiers? “I guess it is,” he said aloud.