by JC Ryan
Dialect, or the words that Trevor chose to use as opposed to the way he pronounced them, was a bit trickier. Rex took note of the many words Trevor abbreviated, and in some cases, he could guess or observe what they meant. ‘Brekkie’ for breakfast was easy. ‘Arvo’ for afternoon was a stretch, but Rex was able to understand it in context. Other words, like ‘bogan’, he had to ask to have translated. There was simply no way to relate it to American words conveying the same concept.
So, it was a vocabulary study as much as a study of accents.
He couldn’t wait to try it out and see if his accent passed muster. Knowing the vocabulary wasn’t up to speed yet, he still tried on the accent after only a couple of days with Trevor.
“So, mate when I come to visit you in Aussie one day can we go grab some feesh and cheeps in Seedney?”
“Sweet as, may’! Yer learnin’ ta spike tha leengo.”
Rex just looked at Trevor, bewildered. He hadn’t realized Trevor normally tried to match his American accent. He had only a vague idea what Trevor had just said. Clearly, he had more work to do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kabul, Afghanistan, June 2013
THE NEXT DAY was Friday, considered by the dominant Muslim sect as a day of rest. Rex put on his man-jammies and attended a sermon in a mosque he’d known previously as a breeding ground for Taliban recruits. He kept his ears tuned for the subtle references to jihad as he listened to the sermon and followed the conventions required of a devout Muslim. He endured a few questioning looks, as he appeared old enough to be married, yet didn’t have a longer beard.
He’d begun to grow his on the day he first heard of his assignment. Now, barely a week later, it was heavy but not long. He ignored the curious glances, though, counting on the natural reticence of strangers to question another. He’d pass soon enough. For now, he would let them surmise what they wished.
The expedition proved fruitless, though. No one discussed anything of interest within his hearing. Maybe it was his lack of a proper beard, or maybe it was because they didn’t know him. He’d wait until the beard issue was corrected before venturing out on such an errand again. He returned to the compound, frustrated by having to wait until his driver was available, and by his lack of progress. The waiting, always the waiting.
Frank must have shot his mouth off about Rex’s legendary skills in hand-to-hand combat and his illustrious takedown of the arrogant DI during basic training in the Marines. Rex was unaware of the buzz going on until Trevor asked him for his version of the event. Rex saw no harm in telling his friend but did so in his typical bullet point style. Frank’s and Rex’s versions didn’t conflict, and now the men would have no rest until they saw Rex in action. And to Frank’s utter dismay, everyone pointed to him to get in the ring with Rex for the demonstration.
Frank very reluctantly agreed, partly to save face in front of his subordinates, and partly because he did want to find out how good Rex really was. He fancied himself having become an accomplished close combat fighter since Marine basic. But he only formally agreed after extracting a promise from Rex that they’d do each other no permanent damage.
“Frank, I’m insulted,” Rex said, grinning. “You’re my friend. If I’d known I was friends with such a momma’s boy, I’d have worn a skirt.”
“If I’d known you were a cross-dresser, I wouldn’t have let you kiss me on the first date,” Frank threw back at him.
“Ladies, a little decorum, please,” Trevor added. “Digger’s only three years old. He doesn’t need to hear this.”
One of the other operatives overheard the banter and spread the word that the boss was about to kick a Delta Force guy’s butt, and soon the rest gathered around for the entertainment. Now Frank had no other choice. He agreed to the match, with Trevor acting as the referee. “Demo mode only, mates,” Trevor cautioned. He’d seen Rex in action, and though he trusted him not to kill Frank outright, he wasn’t so certain about maiming.
Rex grinned. “Of course.”
Rex and Frank squared off in the meager shade of the Russian olive tree Digger had climbed yesterday. The thought distracted Rex for a second, and Frank took advantage of it, barreling in with his shoulder dropped to take Rex in the solar plexus and flip him over his back. At the last moment, it looked as if Rex was going to step aside. But stepping aside turned out to be him being in one place one second, and another place half a second later. He grabbed Frank by one flailing arm and kept him from tumbling onto his face from his own momentum.
“Whoa, did you see that?” one of the spectators yelled.
Rex didn’t hear him. Frank had indeed become a much better fighter since basic training. Frank used Rex’s hand on his arm as a fulcrum to swing himself around. He planted one foot and leapt with a flying kick. Rex whipped his arm up to block the kick, and Frank landed on his ass in the dirt of the yard. He tried to get up, but Rex dropped on top of him, straddling his chest and laughing.
“Say uncle,” Rex demanded.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Frank grumbled.
“Say uncle, loud enough for all to hear or I sit here until you do.”
“All right, uncle, for Pete’s sake,” Frank said.
Rex jumped off him and stood upright in the same smooth movement. He stuck out his hand and pulled Frank up.
“Who’s next?” he asked, looking around. Trevor had disappeared. “Where’d he go?” he asked the closest Phoenix agent.
“Said something about his dog needed dinner,” the man said, grinning. “But I know for a fact Digger eats dinner just before we do.”
Those of the Phoenix men who’d been standing to watch the fight melted away surreptitiously, while those who’d been sitting on the ground scrambled to their feet. Everyone had an excuse. Rex looked at Frank. “Buddy, where’d you get these creampuffs?”
Frank just shook his head. “Now I have to wonder if they all lied on their resumes.” He said it with a straight face, but when Rex broke into laughter, so did Frank. “I’m afraid you just demo’d yourself out of sparring partners for the duration,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kabul, July 2013
A MONTH AFTER arriving in Kabul, Rex was still frustrated by the slow pace of his investigations, but he had managed to gain some faith in his driver. The time issue was more of not being able to get to the poppy-growing areas by way of the major highway, formerly known as the Ring Road, which connected all the major cities and was relatively modern, though plagued with high traffic. Every time Rex located a suspicious area on the satellite photos and asked his driver to take him there, the answer was the Arabic equivalent of ‘you can’t get there from here’.
In reality, they could get there, but a trip of a hundred miles as the crow flies was a major logistical problem on the ground. First, they’d follow what Rex was sure must be nine million commercial trucks traveling bumper to bumper from Kabul in whichever direction they needed to go. At small turnoffs only a native could know, which led to the next village on the route, they’d immediately be transported in time to an era before anyone had ever heard of pavement. In addition, the rutted dirt roads were dangerous. Craters from previous explosions of IEDs marked places where someone had likely died, and Rex experienced a shot of adrenaline-fueled rage every time they passed one.
The driver seemed sanguine about it. “If an IED has my name on it, there is nothing I can do,” he’d say, when Rex wanted to scout the next few miles on foot to be sure the road was safe. Doing that, of course, slowed them down even more. Rex would have given just about anything for the old helicopter he’d flown out of Mexico, but his orders were clear. He couldn’t use any kind of transport that would raise suspicion in places where he’d be surveilling poppy growing or opium production. Trevor and Digger, with his ability to sniff out explosives, would have been helpful but would’ve blown his cover, as well.
There were other logistical problems, as well. His driver hadn’t remarked on his transformat
ion from scruffy American introduced to him by a military contractor to native Afghani, but Rex was on the lookout for him to have side conversations with the poppy growers that might give him away. The growers were leery of him at first, and he’d found it necessary to modify his cover story.
Prior to the war, the Taliban had banned poppy growing and opium production, and they backed up the ban with threats, forced eradication of the fields, and public beheadings. Though the ban hadn’t held after the deposition of the Taliban from government in 2002, the farmers were still suspicious of Afghanis offering to help them increase their production. Rex’s new and constantly itching beard had become a double-edged sword. To combat the suspicion, he claimed to have been educated in the US and to have come back to his native land to help build the economy. Some bought it, while others would require more persuasion.
Rex had mixed feelings about the effect of his mission on these impoverished farmers. If he was successful, their livelihood would be interrupted. He knew previous attempts to control or eradicate the trade had resulted in starvation for the poorest, often alleviated by selling their daughters. The entire Afghani economy was closely tied to opium production and would be in danger of collapsing. On the other hand, he had no qualms about denying terrorists their funding and saving Americans from the devastating effects of heroin addiction.
Besides, it wasn’t the farmers with whom he took issue. If the corrupt politicians, both here and at home, would stop being greedy for a moment… As if that would ever happen… there were other, more wholesome crops to grow. Saffron, for instance, brought twenty to thirty times the price of raw opium. But, because it was legal everywhere, it didn’t provide a mechanism for terrorists and politicians to take their cut.
Rex’s opinion was that the destruction of the trade would start at the other end of the chain – against the distribution routes that saw the heroin disseminated throughout the world.
The opium followed a long and convoluted route from Afghanistan. It began where Rex had begun searching, in the poppy fields in the southwest provinces of Afghanistan. He’d worked his way from the far west, near the Iranian border in Farah, to Kandahar. The crude form of opium transported in bulk took a different route. The chain of production was no mystery. Papaver somiferum grows easily in dry, warm climates. About three months after the seeds are planted, flowers bloom prolifically, and as the petals fall away they expose a seed pod. The immature seed pods are the source of the sap that the farmers harvest by slitting the pods vertically in parallel strokes.
Sap flows out of the strokes but becomes thick and dark as it’s allowed to dry a bit, forming a brownish-black gum that the farmers collect by scraping it. This labor-intensive work produces a crude form of opium, which the farmers bundle into bricks and wrap in leaves, or if they can get it, plastic. They then sell it to brokers, who are the next link in the chain. The brokers transport it to a morphine refinery, aka lab in Rex’s parlance, where it is further refined into a dryer substance that is easier to smuggle.
Once Rex had the trust of a few major growers in each region, he visited them often. His true purpose in the visits was to observe who purchased the raw product, and where their trucks transported it. Poppy fields were visible to satellite imagery. Labs, not so much. They were well-hidden. Following the transports to their destination was dicey for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the labs were often controlled by terrorist cells and the approaches booby-trapped for the unwary.
After a month in-country, Rex’s last few reports had basically said he had nothing to report. He’d identified a few crude labs that the farmers themselves ran. These usually consisted of a rickety shed equipped with oil drums where the raw product would be put through a chemical and filtering process to collect solid chunks of morphine base. These chunks would then again be compressed into bricks and wrapped, allowed to dry in the sun, and eventually be shipped to the heroin laboratories that were Rex’s real targets. Each of these small labs didn’t account for enough of the trade to be worth a military strike, so Rex was ordered to follow the trail to the big boys.
***
IN BETWEEN THE days-long surveillance trips, Rex would allow himself a day or two R&R at the Phoenix compound. There he could shower, replenish his system with plenty of good food, and relax his guard, but only a little of the latter. He’d begun to form a plan, his usual disdain for too much talking and not enough action rising to the surface of his mind. And this plan involved his good buddy Trevor, and Rex’s not-so-good buddy, Trevor’s sidekick, Digger.
As much as Rex feared and therefore disliked Digger, he had to admit the dog had mad skills that he could use. He remembered the terrorist who’d thought Digger was a demon, and he wondered if he could exploit that among the simple, rural farmers he’d met so far. If so, he could probably take out some of those labs he’d identified – the ones the powers that be had told him weren’t important – on his own with Trevor and Digger’s help. And no one, not even his CRC chain of command, the wiser.
The opium business was a seasonal thing, and the labs and storage facilities were brimming with stock right now. In a few months those stockpiles would be coursing through the veins of people on the streets of the cities of the western world. In 2012, in the US alone, more than sixteen thousand people died from opioid related overdoses. In Rex’s mind, the 2000 soldiers killed and many thousands more maimed in the twelve years of war, paled in significance to those numbers. The US was fighting the wrong war. The opportunity to do something about it was there, right now.
The plan involved revealing a little more of his mission than he wanted to Trevor, but he knew that Frank would have already assumed much of it from what he knew of the cover story. Rex would have been surprised if he hadn’t let some of it slip to his most trusted team members. They were a closed-mouth bunch and hadn’t ever let on what they knew, which he appreciated. But he had long believed in Ben Franklin’s declaration that ‘three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead’. Nevertheless, he reasoned that Trevor likely already knew or suspected what he was up to and saw him as a trustworthy person who he could recruit as a team member.
He approached the subject obliquely one day, using a news report that two more US soldiers had been killed in a multi-vehicle crash on the Kabul-Kandahar section of Highway One. One of the vehicles had been carrying a large load of morphine bricks, and the ensuing scramble to collect them had resulted in more deaths from the brawl than from the crash.
“What do you think about that?” Rex asked of no one in particular at the table at dinner that night. As he’d hoped, Trevor was one who answered that the buggers who trafficked in opium should all be lined up and shot summarily.
Later that night, he watched Trevor play Frisbee with Digger, and casually brought it up. “Did you mean that? That you’d like to see the opium traders shot?”
Trevor, who was usually the typical sunny-natured Aussie, turned a serious face toward him. “Ya can bet ya ass on that, mate. I’ll tell you something in confidence. My sister’s husband was addicted to heroin. A real bogan, but thank God it finally killed him. His habit bankrupted them buying that shit, and he knocked her about, too. If the heroin hadn’t killed him, I would have had to.”
Rex sat in silence for a few moments, respecting Trevor’s pain. He’d have had to turn in his man-card if he’d sympathized, vocally, and Trevor wouldn’t have appreciated it. Instead he let a few empathetic minutes pass in silence before he spoke again. “Ever thought about doing something about it? At the source?”
Trevor perked up. “I feel a rage coming on.” His teeth flashed white in the artificial light dimly lighting the compound. Digger was leaning against him, no doubt in response to the shift in his emotion.
“Rage?”
“Yes, mate, a party, a rage.”
“Shit, I wish you would use proper English words, sometimes, so I can understand what you’re saying.”
“Mate, you won’t understand
that either, American is a dialect of English, in case you’ve not noticed.”
Rex just laughed. There was no way he would outwit his Aussie friend. He took a breath and went for it. “I can’t tell you why, but I have an interest in taking out a few little opium refineries west of here. You and your d… uh, Digger would be a big help, if you’re game.
“Ace! Count me in. Digger and I’ve been waiting for a ripper of a rage for a while now.”
Rex shook his head, he kind of figured the ‘ripper’ Trevor was talking about had something to do with a good party. Whatever it meant, Rex understood that Trevor was keen to be part of it.
“But, unless you want Frank in on the game, it will have to wait until my next R&R days.”
“Let’s keep it between us. When are we talking?” Rex answered.
“I have three days off starting next Friday. That give you time to plan it?”
“Should. I’m back in the field tomorrow, and won’t be back until Thursday, but I’ll make sure I plan for Digger’s help only with commands I know he knows cold.”
“You’ve been paying attention, then?” Trevor needled him.
“Don’t tell him, but yes.”
“Mate, he’s sitting right here. He can hear you.”
“Okay, now you’re freaking me out. He doesn’t know what we’re saying.” Rex peered at Digger, still leaning on Trevor’s leg on the other side. The dog was pitch black, so Rex couldn’t see his expression, but he imagined the damn canine shifting his eyebrows and ears in the way dogs did when they were trying to make you think they could understand human speech.
“You’d be surprised,” Trevor said.
“If I have to hear one more word about how smart that dog… er, Digger is,” Rex began.
Digger barked, one short ‘ruff’, and then widened his mouth, letting his tongue hang out. It looked for all the world like a big grin. Trevor laughed, and after a couple of seconds, Rex joined in.
