C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN
Province of Nuristan
Eastern Afghanistan
0700 hours Afghanistan Time
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S
he was no diplomatâbut Karen Hunt was a spy, and good spies knew how to be diplomatic when they had to be. Peering out the flat, elongated window of the concrete command bunker, she rocked back and forth on her feet, arms folded against the chill of the thin mountain air. She nodded toward the tiny window where she could just catch a glimpse of the gray crags that towered over the little copse of concrete buildings, sandbag bunkers, and double ring of concertina wire that that made up Camp Bullwhip.
“I mean, seriously,” she said. “It's just like they told me it would be. This really is like living at the bottom of a Dixie cup.”
First Lieutenant Bryce Nelson, the camp's ranking officer, glanced up from a table where he stood poring over a weathered topographic map. He was gaunt faced and world worn for a man in his late twenties. “Like I said ...” He shook his head, then returned his attention to the map.
None of the soldiers wanted her here. They didn't trust spooksâwith good reason. Spooks sent them off into the mountains based on analysis and guesswork. Soldiers liked their truths more black and white. Camp Bullwhip was definitely on the shady gray edges of what could be considered a sane place to stick an American forward operating base.
Three of her first four days saw mortar attacks from across the silt-choked river that formed the northern boundary of the camp. An enemy sniper had set up shop on the fourth afternoon, zipping in potshots from the rocky crags above. The shooter hadn't killed anyone, but kept soldiers pinned down for forty-five minutes until a couple of F15s dropped enough ordnance on the mountain to kill two dozen snipers.
The attacks had been halfhearted at best. They were testing, Hunt thought, like remote probes, methodically checking out the remote base's defenses and troop response.
She'd left Kabul the week before in a Chinook helicopter with supplies and a reinforcement platoon of forty-two soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division. Once the athletic and youthful war fighters had climbed aboard and strapped themselves into his bird, the pilot had drawn a round of cheers when he'd announced he was honored to be flying an entire “can of American whoop-ass.”
From the moment she saw the isolated combat outpost she'd understood why soldiers who lived there felt their position was too exposed. It was twenty miles from the nearest support base and surrounded by high foothills in the shadow of the jagged Hindu Kush. It was only by dumb luckâand the Afghani insurgents' general inability to shoot straightâthat no one had been killed.
Lieutenant Nelson took a grease pencil from the sleeve pocket of his BDU shirt and made some notes on the laminated map. He was ready for patrol, dressed in full battle rattle except for his Kevlar helmet, which rested on the plastic folding table alongside the map.
“Our meeting with Mullah Muzari is when?” Hunt said, still gazing out the window. She was debating whether or not she should go ahead and put on her heavy flak vest to help ward off the bone-numbing chill. It had been cold in Kabul, but she found it almost impossible to get warm in the thin air of the mountains. Lieutenant Nelson, from Sweetgrass, Montana, seemed impervious to the cold. He kept the space heater at a low simmer when Karen felt a roaring boil should be the order of the day.
“Meeting is at oh-nine hundred,” Lt. Nelson said.
Karen yawned, rubbing her eyes with a hand grimy from a week at the remote outpost. “That's what?” She looked at the Seiko dive watch on her wrist. “Two hours from now? The village is only two clicks away.”
“It is,” the LT said, his boyish dimples withdrawing into the worry lines of his face. “But we'll need to do a sweep of the village before we sit down for our tea party. I'll have to post guards and send a patrol into the mountains above us to keep an eye out for snipers. That takes a little more time than just a stroll into town.”
Nelson was twenty-six, but the stress of a month in command of an indefensible base surrounded by mountains and crawling with
Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin
had chased the youthful sparkle from his brown eyes.
The HiG was an insurgent group that had formed decades earlier to repel the Soviets. They were violently opposed the U.S. occupation and though fierce competitors with the Taliban, they could at least agree on their visceral hatred of the Americans.
Hunt had been assigned to the outpost with one mission: to find out if there was a viable chance for peace with Mullah Muzari, an HiG commander who'd been on the U.S. government's capture or kill list since late 2006. He'd recently been making noises about wanting to negotiate. The folks at Army Intel and the CIA had put their big giant brains together and decided Hunt should fly in and see if he was for real.
Clean water was always at a premium and, like everyone on the base, Lieutenant Nelson looked as if he'd slept in his clothes for the past month. Hunt didn't want to think about how she looked. She wore desert camo and a matching ball cap to cover her short, easy-to-care-for brown hair. She wasn't actually in the military, but the uniform kept her from presenting a more appetizing target to any snipers in the mountain hidey-holes that overlooked the camp. As one of the Agency's few female paramilitary intelligence officers, Hunt kept herself fit to the extreme. One might see a man in her position with the beginnings of a middle-age spare tire, but Karen reasoned women in her line of work didn't need that kind of scrutiny. She had the look of a healthy farm girl accustomed to hard work in the outdoors and the oval pink cheeks of a Rubens painting. At nearly five-ten and a hundred thirty-five pounds, she was blessed with long legs that helped her run the mile in just over five minutes. She took pride in the fact that she'd been able to do more pull-ups than all but two of the men in her basic agent class at Camp Perry.
When she'd signed up for the CIA she'd done so with what she believed to be full knowledge of what she was getting herself into. Her father had been a well-respected case officer in the Clandestine Service. He'd dragged Karen and her mother all over Central Asia when the countries were still fresh and beautifully raw with their recent independence from the Soviet Union.
Life had been austere when they weren't at the family's stateside base in Boston. Foreign travel hadn't just meant adventure. It had been bare lightbulbs, toilet tissue that resembled flimsy wax paper, and rude housing. But, compared to the way the locals had it, the Hunt family had always lived like comparative royalty. As far as Karen knew, no one had ever shot at them and she'd only had to eat one goat's eye to keep from offending someone. As a Boston girl and world traveler, the one thing she'd never really gotten used to was the cold.
She'd joined the Marine Corps for a short stint, training at Parris Island and moving into the Lioness Program before being redrafted by the Agency because of her father's connections. The fact that she spoke, at least to some degree, all of the major languages of Afghanistan convinced someone in the government that they should send her back to college and stick her in the CIA.
Nelson stooped over the map, resting both hands on the table. His voice brought her back from thoughts of her past. “It takes time to get this shit set up, you know.”
Hunt held up both hands. “Understood, LT. Relax. The enemy's outside the wire. Not in here. I'm just asking questions, that's all.”
“I know... .” His voice was a tight whisper. “My colonel says he's in contact with Mullah Muzari and that Mullah Muzari says things will soon be under control. And then some goatherd feeds me intel that it's Mullah Muzari's guys that are lobbing lead at us every day... .”
She suddenly felt sorry for the harried lieutenant. “I hear you,” Hunt said, walking toward the window to get a clearer look outside. Something didn't look right. “When I send in my report I'll stress that it's not working with Muzari. You do what you need to... .”
Hunt's voice trailed off as she watched a young boy of nine or ten approach the front gate at the near end of the American-built wooden vehicle bridge across the Bandagesh River. It was the only way in through the maze of sandbags, ten-foot fencing, and razor wire that surrounded the five-acre base. Lt. Nelson moved to stand beside her.
Both watched in shocked surprise as the two soldiers standing post left their fortified checkpoint and walked to the gate for a chat with the child.
“No, no, no ... what in the hell are they doing?” Nelson moaned under his breath. He reached for a radio on the table behind him.
Hunt stared in disbelief that two highly trained men, both veterans of countless violent contacts with the enemy, opened the only fortification between the base and the hostile surroundings.
“Are they really going to let him in?” Instinctive dread pressed at her gut.
Nelson let fly a flurry of curses. “That's exactly what they're doing... .” He craned his neck out the bunker window.
It wasn't uncommon for insurgents to use kids to play on the sentiments of American soldiers who were far from family and younger siblingsâlull them into a false sense of security. Surely these men knew that.
“Foster!” Nelson barked across the radio. “Get that gate down on the double.”
“It's okay, LT,” Specialist Foster's voice came back in a wash of static. “You're not gonna believe it, but this kid speaks English. Says his name's Kennyâ”
“Impossible!” Hunt snatched up a pair of binoculars from the map table. The boy loitered at the gate, preventing the soldiers from closing it without bringing the heavy steel beams down on top of his head. He wore faded blue jeans and some kind of ball cap with a logo on it she couldn't read. A red, white, and blue Pepsi T-shirt was just visible under a black fleece jacket. Streaked blond hair caught the heavy rays of afternoon sun over the sawtooth western slopes of the Hindu Kush. The boy certainly had American features, but Hunt knew such a thing was impossible. Even without the binoculars, she could make out the look of detachment on the kid's faceâalmost, but not quite, a smileâas if he'd just won a game but didn't want to let on.
Lieutenant Nelson found a fresh string of curses as he swept his M4 off a rack near the door. He headed toward the gate at a trot.
Hunt fell in beside him, wishing she had a rifle instead of her puny nine-millimeter handgun.
“Shut the damned gate!” Nelson screamed into the radio as he moved.
“Seriously, Lieutenant,” Foster came back again, almost giggling. “This kid speaks English better than Nguyen. Can you believe this shit? He says he's fromâ”
They'd made it to within twenty meters of the gate when Foster suddenly pitched forward, his head exploding like a blossoming red flower. Chunks of him flew into his partner and the boy. The crack of sustained rifle fire followed an instant later, drawn flat on the thin mountain air.
Specialist Kevin Nguyen, the second gate guard, had just handed the kid a chocolate bar when the shooting started. He scooped the boy up in both arms and ran for cover behind the gate bunker as withering incoming fire began to pour from the mountains. On the American side, fifty-caliber Brownings opened up with a reassuring clatter from each of the three raised sentry posts, sending a fusillade of lead and glowing tracer rounds back toward the surrounding mountains.
Gray puffs of dust kicked up as bullets struck the ground around Hunt's feet. She crouched, doubling her speed to sprint for the relative safety of the concrete guardhouse. Nelson moved backwards, methodically picking off attackers with his M4 as they swarmed the half open gate.
Hunt made it to the guard shack and slid behind a concrete Jersey barrier, pistol clutched in her hand. She landed beside Specialist Nguyen, who now lay on his side, firing his rifle with one hand while he shielded the little boy who called himself Kenny. Hunt rolled up on her shoulder to watch in horror as a stream of insurgents in black turbans materialized from every mountain shadow. Pouring through the gate, the screaming Afghans engaged surprised pockets of soldiers, caught flat-footed in the attack.
Less than thirty feet away, an HiG fighter so young he was yet unable to grow more than a few sparse whiskers on his pointed chin, stood in the full open and pressed an RPG to his shoulder, aiming for the guardhouse. The look of jubilance on his face was unmistakable as he chanted the hollow, breathy “Allahu Akbar!” of a holy warrior.
Hunt shot him twice in the chest with her pistol as he pulled the trigger. He slumped and the RPG hissed past, missing the intended target but skittering along the rocks to blow the tires off a Humvee behind them.
Still firing, Lt. Nelson dove behind the concrete barrier to land beside Hunt with a heavy grunt.
“Anybody hit?” he said, his eyes still referencing the EoTech holographic sight of his M4.
“We're doin' just fine, LT,” Nguyen snapped back, between well-placed shots from his rifle. An enemy fighter fell almost every time he fired.