Brown took the microphone back. “I didn’t hear a thing,” he said. “I can tell you one thing, John. Nobody’s ever given a speech like that to this brigade before. Let’s give Mr. Wells a big round of applause.” And they
did.
* * *
WHEN WELLS GOT BACK
to his barracks, a dozen guys were waiting. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ve got two cases of Bud and two of Bud Light for those of you watching your girlish figures. There’s some ice cream and Cokes, too, from the DFAC. I’m just going to bring them out for everyone to share. I ask you to keep the beers to one per person, ’cause there’re so many folks who’d like
one.”
The beer didn’t last long, but somebody set up an iPod and a pair of speakers. Guys, and a few women, hung around and chatted and pretended they were anywhere but FOB Jackson. Nobody mentioned what Wells had said near the end of the speech. After about ninety minutes, the crowd thinned. As a morale raiser, the speech had worked pretty well. As a backdoor approach to an informant, it was looking like a bust. Wells would have to get potential targets from Shafer and go at them directly.
Then a guy Wells hadn’t seen before walked up. He was black and stocky. The sun had disappeared behind thick clouds, but he wore a floppy hat low on his head. He had the triple chevrons of a sergeant. His name tag read “Young.”
“Sergeant. I’m afraid we’re all out of beer.”
The guy leaned in. “I was thinking about what you said back during your speech.” The words slid out the side of his mouth, a low mumble. “About bad guys. Almost sounded like you had something in mind. Like a particular situation.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“I’d like to talk to you in private, Mr. Wells.”
20
LANGLEY
F
or two days, Tyler Weston and Nicholas Rodriguez had stared at Ellis Shafer. Their headshots were pinned to a corkboard in his office. Shafer had tried to amuse himself by drawing a handlebar mustache on Rodriguez and giving Weston a thought bubble that read “I love the smell of poppies in the morning.”
Still, their two-dimensional lips smirked at
him.
Assuming Coleman Young was telling Wells the truth, Rodriguez and Weston were drug traffickers and killers. Wells believed Young. And if Wells believed him, then so did Shafer.
But he couldn’t find the link. Weston and Rodriguez weren’t connected with anyone at the CIA, in the United States or Afghanistan. According to their personnel records, neither man had been to Kabul on this tour. Their platoon was based hundreds of miles from the Afghan capital.
Shafer did notice that Weston’s platoon had split from the rest of Bravo Company early in its tour. In theory, it provided extra protection for supply convoys on Highway 1. In reality, the trucks ran once or twice a week. On other days, the platoon was given scut jobs like guarding detainees. Basically, the unit operated on its own. As long as Weston’s guys did the work no one else wanted, his commanders wouldn’t bother him. Even Fowler’s death—which should have raised red flags because of Weston’s decision to send just seven men to investigate a potential enemy position—rated only a three-page after-action memo. Weston and Rodriguez couldn’t have asked for a better setup.
The personnel files for 3rd Platoon showed that Weston came from central Florida, near Orlando. He’d played second-string quarterback in high school and gotten good grades. He’d joined up after serving in the ROTC program at the University of Florida. In other words, he was indistinguishable from most junior officers, except for his family’s surprising criminal history. His father had served eleven months for insurance fraud in a minimum-security prison near Tallahassee. And his brother Jake had also been arrested as a juvenile. The court records were sealed, but the case had taken months to process, and the family had brought in a prominent defense lawyer to represent Jake. Nobody did that for a vandalism misdemeanor. Tyler Weston had seen more criminal behavior growing up than the average Army first lieutenant.
Rodriguez had his own problems. His file showed two arrests for gang fights. His criminal record should have disqualified him for military service. But he’d enlisted when the Iraq war was at its worst and the Army was missing its recruiting quotas. He scored in the ninety-third percentile on the intelligence test for new soldiers and was granted a waiver.
The only hint of a connection between Weston or Rodriguez and the agency was the fact that two case officers had gone to the University of Florida at the same time as Weston. But the U of F had forty thousand students. Shafer saw no evidence that the three had met one another. Plus the officers worked at Langley and had never been to Kabul. When Shafer surprised them with visits to their offices, both denied knowing Weston. He believed them.
Other potential trails also petered out. Bank records for Weston and Rodriguez showed no evidence of large deposits. Maybe they were buying gold with their drug profits, or hiding it in safe-deposit boxes. Most likely they hadn’t brought it back from Afghanistan yet. Cell records were another dead end. Neither man had used his American phone since arriving in Afghanistan. Their military e-mail accounts revealed only official communications, nothing personal. They were careful, and someone even more careful was helping them.
Shafer had also checked out Kevin Roman, the third guy Young accused of being involved. But Roman’s bank and e-mail records were as clean as the other two. Young had told Wells that Roman wasn’t much more than a lookout. Shafer believed him. His IQ was thirty points below Rodriguez’s and Weston’s, according to the Army’s tests. He was taking orders, not giving them.
Wells wanted to go at Weston and Rodriguez directly. But Young had blocked him. He was worried what might happen outside the wire.
You talk to them after you figure out who the Delta dude is,
he’d told Wells.
Not before.
Young had also said that no one could talk to people who knew Weston and Rodriguez back home. Doing so would risk tipping them off. So Shafer was stuck looking for clues in the electronic world.
Wells and Young were missing something else, too, maybe the most important piece. Motive. Shafer wanted to understand the
why
along with the
who
and
how
.
Money was a possibility, of course. But money rarely told the whole story.
* * *
SHAFER’S PHONE TRILLED.
Not a number he wanted to see, but he picked up anyway.
“Vinny. To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“So John’s at a forward base, I hear.”
“FOB Jackson,
yes.”
“And made a speech there.”
“Why are you pretending to be surprised by this?”
“I’ve had a complaint. About the speech. Reg told CENTCOM that Wells was encouraging insubordination.” Gregory “Reg” Nuton was the two-star general who commanded the tens of thousands of soldiers who occupied Kandahar and Zabul.
“He didn’t encourage anything. He talked about the war. At the end he made a coded plea to anyone who might know about the trafficking.” Shafer didn’t plan to tell Duto that Coleman Young had come forward. Not
yet.
“He gave out alcohol.”
“He had a couple cases of beer.”
Duto laughed, an unexpected sound. “All right. I did my duty. Some three-star at the Pentagon called to moan about this and I promised I’d make sure I’d make it clear the behavior was unacceptable. And now I have. Like we don’t have better things to do. Like a war to fight. From the way they’re whining, you would think that Wells showed up with a tanker truck of vodka and called for a mutiny.”
“No one ever got stars on his collar by taking chances.”
“That said, Wells is going to have to leave the base. Nuton is insisting.”
“He can’t. Not
yet.”
“I’ll buy you a couple days, but—are you close, Ellis?”
“Not sure. You leave in a week, right?”
“Six days.”
“Can you push it back?”
“Congressmen don’t like it when you mess with their schedules on short notice. Not without a good excuse. Which I don’t have. No, I’m going.”
Pride made men strange, Shafer thought. Duto was willing to put himself and his congressional paymasters at risk, simply to avoid admitting a problem. “Your call. But there’s something you should understand.”
“Do tell.”
“Whoever this guy is, he’s smart. And he’s gone to a lot of trouble to stay unfindable. I just have a feeling that it’s not about the drugs for him, or even about destroying our networks. I think he has something bigger in mind.”
“Spit it out, Ellis.”
“You going over there, it could be his chance. I’m not saying don’t go,
but—”
“Ellis. You don’t like me, true?”
“I can’t see the percentage in answering that question.”
“You can say it. We’re grown-ups, and I know it anyway.”
“Not particularly.”
“But have you ever known me to be a coward?”
Shafer didn’t need to answer. Duto was arrogant, power-hungry, and vain. But no one had ever accused him of being afraid, not physically anyway. As a case officer in Colombia, he’d been captured by leftist rebels, held for two months. In the pre-al-Qaeda days, the jungle rats were the agency’s worst nightmare. When a Special Forces team finally hit the camp and pulled him out, Duto had lost twenty-eight pounds and two teeth.
Normally, after that kind of ordeal, officers went to Langley for at least a year of recovery. Many never went back to the field. Duto? He took his wife and kids to Barbados for two weeks, stayed at a five-star hotel on the agency’s dime. Then he went back to Bogotá. A year later, he was station chief.
“I’m going. I’m counting on you and your boy to sort this out before I get there. If not, maybe the congressman and the senator and their aides will get a more honest view of the war than they bargained for.” Duto hung up. For the first time in a long while, Shafer felt something like respect for the
man.
* * *
SHAFER HAD BARELY CRADLED
the phone before it rang again.
“Ellis?” The voice belonged to Jennifer Exley, once Shafer’s deputy. A blue-eyed tornado, irrepressible and good-hearted and a brilliant analyst. She and Wells had nearly gotten married. Shafer supposed he’d loved her, too, in his own way. Though he’d never given his feelings the slightest space for fear they’d explode into the open and destroy his marriage. She was the steadiest member of their troika. But she’d quit years ago, after nearly dying in a botched assassination attempt on Wells. Now she was in exile. When they’d last talked, a few months before, she’d claimed to be at peace with the world. Raising her kids and getting on with her life. Shafer wasn’t so sure. Being on the inside, knowing the world’s secrets, left an itch that civilian life could never really scratch. Maybe Exley was different, but Shafer didn’t think
so.
“Jennifer.”
“Ellis. How are
you?”
“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Shafer winked at the photos of Weston and Rodriguez. They didn’t wink back.
“Lies both ways.”
“Not like I believe in human perfectibility or anything, but do we have to make the same mistakes over and over?”
“I believe we do.” She laughed her deep, throaty laugh. “And speaking of making the same mistakes, how’s John?”
Oh, my.
Just as Shafer had never entirely believed that Exley was through with spying, he’d never been certain that she and John wouldn’t get back together. They had connected with an almost electric force.
“In Afghanistan.”
“In the mountains?”
“Believe it or not, he’s at a base of ours. Though not necessarily safer.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s John. He went to see his son a few weeks ago and it didn’t work out and he was disappointed.”
“I’m glad he went. Anyway. He needed
to.”
“How are yours?”
“David’s looking at colleges. He applies next fall.”
The last time Shafer had seen Exley’s son, he’d been playing thirteen-and-under youth soccer.
“We’re all getting old. He have anywhere in mind?”
“Dartmouth, believe it or
not.”
“John can give him the tour.”
“They want him to play soccer. Though he’s thinking about UVA, too, and I have to admit I wouldn’t mind that.”
“You’d save a few bucks.”
“There’s that. Plus it’d be two hours to see him instead of
ten.”
“No doubt he views that as a disadvantage.”
“But I don’t think he’d get to play soccer at Virginia. They recruit from all over the world.”
“Be good for him. Teach him that disappointment starts early and never stops.”
“Life lessons from Ellis Shafer.”
“Not playing soccer would give him more time to get laid.”
“You’re talking about my little
boy.”
“I’ll bet if you check out his Facebook page, his Twitter feed, you’ll find plenty of evidence he’s all grown
up.”
“Precisely why I’ve resisted the urge so
far.”
And then Shafer realized he might have another way to find the connection between Weston and Rodriguez and the SF officer. He would need them to be a little bit gullible, and a little bit horny—but then, they’d been in Afghanistan for ten months. The horniness wouldn’t be a problem.
“Jenny. I have to
go.”
“Something come
up?”
Shafer could hear her disappointment. No doubt she’d love to know what he was working on, but she was too much of a pro to ask. “You could say that.”
“Knock ’em dead. Literally.”
“Come on by sometime for a cup of that famous Langley coffee.”
“Tell John to be safe, okay?”
“You want to tell him that, tell him yourself.” Though Shafer wasn’t sure that he wanted her to follow through. Sometimes the past was best left undisturbed.
“Bye, Ellis.”
He hung up, got to work.
21
EASTERN ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN
I
n rural Afghanistan, AK-47s were as cheap and easy to find as cell phones. The Pashtun family that didn’t own at least one rifle was poor indeed. American soldiers quietly tolerated the weapons. They’d learned the hard way that confiscating them caused unnecessary trouble.
But they treated Dragunov sniper rifles very differently. Dragunovs were costly and rare, and soldiers would detain anyone caught with one as an insurgent. Even Amadullah Thuwani didn’t have one. He ordered his clansmen to find one, and after two days a half nephew came back with a never-used Dragunov, still in its crate. The price was two thousand dollars. Amadullah grumbled and paid. He had no choice. He had to have it. Though not for himself.
* * *
SINCE PICKING UP
the surface-to-air missiles, Amadullah had stayed in Afghanistan. He was living now with his half brother Hamid in a village in Zabul so small it didn’t appear on maps. He’d trimmed his beard and taken off his Rolex, trying to stay anonymous. Still, he kept the cell phone Stan had given him. He knew he was taking a risk. The Americans could track the phone when it was on, and for all Amadullah knew, when it was off, too. But after seeing Stan kill Daood, Amadullah had decided to trust him. His lies, his venom, were aimed at other Americans. Why else had he killed Daood and given Amadullah these SA-24s? Amadullah had even brought his bomb-making cousin from Muslim Bagh to look over the missiles. They were real. Amadullah thought now that the drugs had been an excuse, a way for the CIA man to reach
him.
Three days after their meeting, Stan called and asked him to buy the Dragunov. “And what shall I do with this?”
“Bring it to Kharjoy on Saturday. At noon. On Highway 1. Park at the petrol station by the bazaar.”
“I know where Kharjoy
is.”
“Of course. Someone will meet
you.”
“How will I know
him?”
“He’ll know
you.”
“An American?”
But Stan was gone.
Amadullah had understood the Soviets. They were kaffirs
and unbelievers, brutal men. In the early years of their invasion, when they still believed that they could win with sheer force, they had bombed whole villages into dust. They had killed two of Amadullah’s brothers. Even now Amadullah hated the single star of the Red Army. But he’d understood what they wanted. They wanted the Afghans on one knee, serving the Kremlin. They had come from the north over the Amu Darya River and tried to break the Afghans. But Amadullah and his people had broken them instead. The Russians were hard, but the Afghans were harder. All the Soviet jets and tanks weren’t enough. Finally they turned tail and went home.
The Americans were different. They had come here to rid themselves of Osama bin Laden and the Arabs. Amadullah didn’t blame them. After all, the Arabs had attacked them in their own country. And the Arabs were troublemakers. Amadullah didn’t like them. The rich ones looked down on the Pashtuns. The poor ones made a competition of prayers, as if Allah cared how many verses of the Quran they knew. None of them respected these mountains.
So the Americans came and broke up the camps where the Arabs trained. They had even killed bin Laden. They’d taken a long time, but they’d killed him. But still they hadn’t left. Their soldiers were everywhere. Even the birds couldn’t escape their helicopters and their big white balloons filled with cameras that watched the whole world.
The Americans said they were friends. Maybe they believed their own words. They hired men by the thousand to dig ditches and clean fields. Their officers met village elders each week to drink tea and talk about building canals and schools. At first, Amadullah thought that the meetings were a trap and the Americans would arrest anyone who came to their bases. But no. The safe-conduct privilege was real. The Americans wanted to hear what the elders had to say. They didn’t rape and murder like the Russians either. Amadullah knew of a boy who had fallen down a well and broken his legs and arms. His brothers dragged him out and carried him to an American base near Kandahar City. The doctor there helped him, put him in a cast and gave him medicine. The boy’s brothers had been Talibs. But the doctor hadn’t cared.
So Amadullah couldn’t hate the Americans as he hated the Russians. Maybe they were telling the truth when they said they didn’t want to rule Afghanistan. Even so, he and his men would fight them as long as they stayed. They didn’t belong in his country any more than he belonged in America. No matter how hard they tried to prove they meant well, their very presence stirred up trouble. On patrols, they gave candy to children and made them disrespect their fathers. They brought Tajiks and Hazaras down to the Pashtun lands and gave them rifles and told them they were soldiers. Even worse, they caused problems between men and women. The Americans talked about giving rights to women, but the truth was the opposite. The women wanted the Americans gone most of all. They wanted to know why their husbands and fathers couldn’t stop soldiers from coming into their houses and looking at them, disrespecting them, humiliating them.
If the Americans would just leave,
then Amadullah and the other Pashtuns would make sure that al-Qaeda never came back to Afghanistan. Amadullah himself would slit the Arabs’ throats. He had fought his whole life. He wanted a few years of peace, a few years of living in a country that wasn’t just a battlefield for outsiders. But the Americans didn’t trust the Pashtuns to do that work. They didn’t understand. And so every day, more Americans died. Amadullah had no sympathy for them, no pity. He’d kill as many as he could. But still he couldn’t help but feel that the war was a waste.
Now he’d run across this strange CIA man. Amadullah thought the man must be mad, that something had happened to twist his reason. He supposed that one day he’d learn what. The mountains exposed every secret.
* * *
AMADULLAH DIDN’T WANT
to carry the Dragunov in his Ford. The Americans and Afghans sometimes put roadblocks on Highway 1. He stowed the crate in the back of Hamid’s old Nissan pickup and covered it with sacks of bricks and told Jaji to follow him in the Nissan. Jaji ran his hands through his thick black Pashtun hair and looked vaguely sulky at the order but didn’t dare disagree. In any case, the roadblocks were off that morning. They reached Kharjoy at eleven a.m. A cold rain had fallen the night before, but the swift autumn wind had moved the clouds away and left the sky bright and blue.
They parked near the petrol station and walked through the bazaar, stepping over the mud puddles the storm had left. Merchants and their boys sat under plastic tarpaulins outside one-room stores. They sold potatoes and pomegranates and flour, plus chips and batteries and brightly colored candy from China. These days they also had music and movies. Some merchants had gone back to selling pornography, too. During the Taliban’s time, a merchant caught selling regular movies was supposed to get twenty-five lashes. One selling the sex videos could get a hundred. Of course, plenty of the Talibs liked pornos. They would watch the DVDs they took from the merchants.
At the edge of the bazaar, Amadullah bought himself a Coke. As he did a patrol of American soldiers walked past. “Good morning,” a soldier said. He was young, like all of them, and broad in the shoulders and wearing the sunglasses that they favored and the heavy armored vest. A child who hoped that hiding his eyes would make him a man. He walked with a loose, proud gait, as if he believed he belonged here. Just as Stan had named Kharjoy for the meeting and then told Amadullah it was on Highway 1. As if Amadullah hadn’t lived here his whole life. As if he didn’t know every village and all the chiefs within a hundred miles.
Amadullah hated the soldier and felt a strange shame, too. Living in Pakistan had kept him safe. But it had also let him avert his eyes from these American boots everywhere on his soil.
Go. Leave my land.
The soldiers turned a corner and Amadullah poured the Coke into the muddy soil and threw away the
can.
Just past noon, a Toyota pickup with heavily tinted windows parked at the edge of the muddy lot. A man stepped out. He had light brown skin and wore a gray
shalwar kameez
and sandals. He looked like a northerner, though he didn’t have the almond-shaped eyes of many Tajiks. “Good day,” he said.
His Pashtun wasn’t as good as the other American’s. And he stood too tall, like the soldiers on the patrol. Not like the other American. John Wells, the CIA man had called him. That one carried himself with his pride hidden away and so he had fooled Amadullah.
“Good
day.”
“I understand you have something for
me.”
“Not here.” Amadullah nodded at the convoy parked a few hundred meters away.
“I know a place three or four kilos away. Protected. Safe.”
Amadullah nodded. The man went back to his Toyota. For the second time, Amadullah was opening himself to capture. But then, if the Americans had wanted to take him, they could have already.
A kilometer down, the American turned off Highway 1 and onto a dirt road bordered on both sides by mud walls covered with grapevines. Amadullah and Jaji followed. After ten minutes, they reached an abandoned cluster of farmhouses, a minivillage that had seen heavy fighting. Bomb craters pocked the earth. Bullet holes scarred the walls. The American parked in the shadow of a two-story farmhouse. Amadullah pulled alongside. The American stepped out and nodded for Amadullah to follow. Amadullah didn’t. He reached under the passenger seat for the pistol hidden there.
The American walked over to his window. “Where is
it?”
“What’s your name?”
“Shadow,” the man said.
Enough American arrogance.
“Your true name.”
The man’s eyes shifted to the Makarov in the passenger seat. “Frank.”
Amadullah still thought he was lying, but
Frank
would have to do. He led Frank to the pickup, shoved aside the sacks of bricks. Jaji found a pry bar and popped open the Dragunov’s crate to reveal a hard-sided plastic case.
Inside, a sniper’s tool kit: the rifle, four ten-round magazines, an eight-power scope, a cleaning rod in three pieces, a cleaning kit, and pouches to hold it all. Plus a bayonet and a knife for close-in work. Unlike some of his nephews, Amadullah wasn’t a fanatic about weapons. As far as he was concerned, AKs worked fine. Still, the Dragunov was impressive. The center of its stock was cut out to save weight, and it had a long, low profile, with a skinny muzzle. It looked light and lethal.
Frank popped open the Dragunov’s bolt, pulled a tiny penlight from his pocket, and shone it down the barrel. The grooves etched inside nearly glowed.
“Chrome,” Frank said. “Very cool.” He closed the bolt, snapped on the scope, hefted the rifle to his shoulder, cocked his head, put his eye to the sight. “Nice and easy. Not a beast like the .50.” Frank was more relaxed now that he had the Dragunov in his hands, Amadullah saw. The Taliban had men like this, too, men who loved weapons. Usually they didn’t care much for people.
“Have you fired one before?”
“Once or twice. So you’re Amadullah Thuwani.”
“You know my name.”
“Of course. There’s a bounty on your head. Fifty thousand dollars.” Frank put down the Dragunov, snapped off the scope, as if to say,
Don’t worry. I won’t try to collect.
“Only fifty thousand.”
“If you want a higher price, you need to do more than nail a patrol or
two.”
“Now that your friend Stan has given me the missiles, perhaps I will.”
“The missiles?”
So you don’t know,
Amadullah thought
.
He shouldn’t have spoken. Stan had kept the secret from his own side. Now Amadullah wondered whether he could turn the mistake to his advantage by telling Frank more. He might have found a cheap way to stir up trouble.
Yes.
“I give you a Dragunov, he gives me SA-24s. A good trade, I think.”
“SA-24s. Russian SAMs.”
Amadullah nodded.
“What’s your target?”
Amadullah decided he’d said enough. He couldn’t be sure what Frank would do if he found out that the other American wanted to kill the head of the CIA. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but do you know the man called Omar al-Douzani?”
“The leader of the Douzani tribe.”
“He lives in Pakistan. South Waziristan. And travels in convoys, armored trucks. Sometimes with Pakistani military escorts. Your friend Stan told me that with these missiles I could destroy him from five kilometers away. Ten. And then our business can expand.”
“Stan gave you the missiles to use against Douzani?”
Sometimes the Americans needed everything said straight out. “Yes.”
“And where does the heroin come
in?”
“The powder opened the connection, gave us trust in each other. When Douzani is gone, his family will break. He has no sons anymore, only cousins and nephews.”
“They’ll all fight to control his tribe.”
“Yes. When that happens, some will come to me for help. I’ll choose which one to support, or maybe I’ll sit back and let them fight. Either way, I’ll feast on them. By the time the Douzanis are done with their war, you’ll need a truck for all the powder I can sell
you.”
As Amadullah spoke, he found himself believing his own story, the surest sign that Frank would believe him, too. It wasn’t even a lie, just a version of the truth that Allah hadn’t yet called into being. Frank stepped back and folded his arms. The Americans couldn’t hide their emotions. Amadullah could almost see what Frank was thinking:
Stan should have told me. He trusts this Pashtun, this
Talib
,
more than me.
Good. Let Stan and Frank try to untangle their own lies. While they wrestled, Amadullah would decide what to do with the missiles.
Amadullah leaned his bulky body over, picked up the Dragunov. “You still haven’t told me why you need
it.”
“I may have to clean up a mess.” Frank smiled, and Amadullah saw the anger in him, the real and true cruelty.
“This makes a good broom.”
* * *
FRANCESCA WATCHED
the Afghans drive off and stowed the crate in the secret compartment welded to the bottom of his pickup. At Highway 1 he turned left, southeast toward Kandahar.
Calibrate and recalibrate,
snipers learned.
Check and double-check before you pull that trigger. You have every advantage until you shoot, so take your time.
Now Francesca laid his hands on the wheel and tried to calibrate what Amadullah had told
him.