by David Poyer
“More excellent news,” she said.
“But a warning,” Abdulilah said, in his curiously dead English. “The terrorist acts recently committed in the Republic of Yemen represent a dangerous challenge for President Saleh. These groups intend to place us among the targeted areas under the pretext of fighting terror, which the whole world has agreed to fight. As is well-known, their ideals are alien to our Yemeni society. They contradict our deeply rooted and noble traditions and values.”
“We completely understand,” the DCM said.
“We are prepared to fight alongside other nations against lawlessness and terror. We will adopt a candid and frank discourse of wisdom and equilibrium in reacting to this phenomenon. The whole world needs to stand firm.”
“Will we have access to Al-Nashiri again?” Aisha put in, getting impatient with the boilerplate, the posturing, the pretending.
The DCM blinked.
“Unfortunately, the international terrorist Abu-Hamid Al-Nashiri is dead,” Abdulilah said. “Dying blindly in his wrong understanding of religion, in the absence of correct vision of the noble Islamic sharia based on dark and closed minds emanating from spitefulness. By his own hand, in his cell. Last night.”
“That is … unfortunate. He could have told us so much.” She looked past the two men, through the windshield, where Gamish stared steadily ahead, face stony.
So that was it. The Yemenis were on the side of the angels, had never dabbled in terror. And they’d all pretend that was how it was and look away and whistle if anyone said otherwise.
But the little man was still speaking. “However, I must convey a warning. We will accept outside support for our security apparatuses and further development of their technical capabilities. But it will not be overlooked again that foreign intelligence or police must not operate within the Arab Republic of Yemen. The security of our country must be based on our own sovereignty and our own police and independent judiciary.”
“We hear you and fully agree,” the DCM said, flicking a glance at Aisha. “Disciplinary measures are in hand against those who acted with an excess of zeal. Those lines will not be crossed again. We are merely guests in your land.”
“That is most welcome to hear. I must further warn my friends, however,” the minister went on. “President Saleh has worked very hard to foster a pluralistic, democratic society with full equality. But some have exploited these climates, the multiparty system, freedom of expression, to pursue evil goals which contradict peace and the supreme interest of the homeland. This is how the phenomenon of terrorism has been nurtured, and the president’s reputation distorted. A firm hand must be shown. A policy of national consolidation has been decided on. This is the answer to terror, and we will expect your president’s support in such actions, unpleasantly though they may be reported in the world press.”
“And he will have it,” the DCM said heartily. He held out a hand, and as the minister took it they turned as one to face a man crouching with a camera. At the instant the strobe flashed, Aisha lifted a fold of her head covering. Becoming a faceless one, whose dark eyes stared out at the camera, at the world, without expression, without comment, without opinion, forever a mystery and unknown.
14
Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan
DAN stepped off the helo into a once-familiar world of dust, jet exhaust, and windblown grit. The moon was an iridium sickle reaping a blue-black sky. Jagged mountains climbing like some fantasy-novel escarpment range on range against the stars.
He shielded his eyes, shivering, trying to get his bearings. The wind was freezing his eyelashes, and he’d been exposed to it for less than a minute. He had the three-color desert field jacket and gloves, but missed the enwrapping warmth of a Navy blue peacoat, or better yet, the long bridge coat. Those had kept him warm on the coldest winter mornings on Narragansett Bay, and much farther north.
But here, in a combat zone far from the sea, it was battle dress for everybody. Fortunately he’d kept his DCUs from Ashaara: desert tan boots, soft patrol cap, and the black-oxidized rank insignia. He’d debated bringing his nine-millimeter, but a pistol was more of an encumbrance than an advantage the way he usually had to travel, which was commercial as often as military.
This time, though, had been military transport all the way. The vast machine was grinding its gears from peacetime to wartime, and for most of his flights he hadn’t even had to present orders, just sign the manifest and go. From Prince Georges County he’d endured four levels of outbriefing and inbriefing, DC to McDill. Then twenty-eight hours of travel, finishing with a harrowing helicopter flight from Tajikistan over the Pamirs in the dark. Some over Taliban-held territory, so when they weren’t passing oxygen masks back and forth and fighting unconsciousness from hypoxia, the ramp and side doors had been open so the machine gunners could report launch signatures or fire back. They’d shared the canvas-and-aluminum buckets with ten others, mostly Special Forces, along with pallets of ammunition.
Someone bumped into him. “Damn, it’s dark,” said Monty Henrickson. Dan grunted. He’d asked for the little operations analyst, and TAG had released him, subject, of course, to his volunteering—you couldn’t issue overseas orders to civilians as easily as you could to military. They’d dragooned the rest of TAG Bravo to pack enough gear to serve as Tomahawk targeters, if they could get upload capability. “Any idea where we’re going, boss?”
“Uh, not really.”
Blinding lights came on, illuminating the strip like a night game at Yankee Stadium. Dan shaded his gaze, blinking into dust and ominous moving shapes. “Over here. Over here. Everybody from that last chopper in from Dushanbe,” a bullhorn announced as a fuel truck rumbled toward them.
They ended up with a sergeant who seemed to know who they were and where they were intended to be. He told them the base had only been secured for a few days. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance had been fighting over it for two years; at times the opposing forces had held opposite ends of the ten-thousand-foot main strip, exchanging fire over bomb-canted concrete slabs. The Alliance and the Tenth Mountain held it now, though the enemy was still active in the direction of Kabul.
“Tenth and Eighty-second Airborne,” the noncom amended, as someone in Dan’s group protested. “You-all want to stay inside the wire, okay? The Alliance commander’s set up in the terminal, but I don’t think even he’s real clear on which Afghans are ours and which ones are still rooting for the bad guys.”
“We’ve got two pallets of expensive gear,” Dan told him. “I don’t want to leave that unguarded.”
“I’ll stay with it, Commander,” Monty said.
“You don’t need to,” said the sergeant. “Just tag it and come back in the morning. It’s not goin’ anywhere. See those strobes? That’s the EOD guys. Unexploded ordnance. Stay clear of those, and watch for the yellow tapes.”
“It’s okay,” Henrickson said. “I’ll stay.”
Dan didn’t like leaving him out here alone, but someone had to watch the gray metal boxes. “I’ll find out where we’re supposed to be, where we can stow all this shit, and come back,” he told the analyst. “Find someplace you can stay warm, at least. Here, take my jacket.”
Without it the air was even more biting. Dan’s hands were going numb; his knees were so cold he was stumbling. The sergeant led them along paths he could only now and then make out, past Humvees and Toyota gun trucks and shattered pieces of concrete with rusty rebar sticking out of them. He flailed at himself with both arms, trying to stimulate some circulation. Drumming gensets powered stand-mounted lights that illuminated mountains of supplies and troops furiously erecting tents on ground snorting front-end loaders had just backed away from after scraping it level. The wreckage of a MiG lay gutted like a dead carp in the lee of a bombed, abandoned hangar with stars shining through the roof. The dark air smelled of burning and dust, old shit and diesel exhaust. They threaded between unfamiliar hulks that he only at length identified as abandoned and wreck
ed tanks.
At last the sergeant swung open a flimsy, creaking gate of barbed wire coiled around two-by-fours and identified himself to a sentry. They emerged into an open space of shouting, running men and snapping, billowing canvas. Except for the lack of elephants, it looked as if a circus were setting up.
“This’ll be the JOC. The Joint Operations Center,” the sergeant said. Dan looked around. Chaotic was a gentle word for it. “They’re not quite ready for prime time yet. Go find a bunk. Try over there by the red lights. Come back in the morning and we’ll have things better organized.”
Dan took the hint and dragged his duffel to a GP Medium, snagging a bunk walled in by palletloads of MREs in brown cardboard. There was a drop light, a heater but no fuel, and the inside of the tent was the same temperature as the outside. He was walking across the compound in search of a piss pit when a far-off thud caught his attention.
It was followed by two more, but he was sprinting, looking for a trench, hole, any sort of cover. The best he could do was a wall of sandbags around a wrecked revetment. He pasted himself against the cold, gritty sand leaking from shrapnel-punctured bags as the shells came down like broken-off chunks of the moon and lurched across the compound in flashes of yellow light and jolts like safes falling from the top of the Empire State. He wrapped his arms over his head, waiting for the next blast. Instead a distant clatter of small-arms fire grew. It crested, then tapered off.
It waxed again, until a series of deeper booms echoed off the hills. When they faded, the firing spluttered to an uncertain pause. The whistle of the wind was once again the loudest sound. Around him forms uncoiled from the ground like snakes suddenly given the gift of uprightness. “Just probing the east sector,” somebody murmured, and the words threaded the dark with the swift wings of scuttlebutt.
* * *
THE next morning he snapped awake at 0500 and washed up from plastic bottles at a mountain of bottled water. The used paper towels went into a flaming drum. The wind was stiff with dust, and everyone in line was hacking and spitting. Some had cloths tied over their mouths, which might not be a bad idea. He was walking back toward where he’d left Henrickson when he smelled something good. He joined the line and got a tray for himself and one for Monty and carried them and precariously balanced fiberglass mugs of coffee back to the strip.
Henrickson was awake, sitting on the gear. With Dan’s jacket on over his parka he looked like a kid in his father’s clothing. “Thanks for watching it,” Dan told him, feeling guilty all over again at leaving him there. But really, it hadn’t been so great in the tent, either. “Get any sleep?”
“A little.” Henrickson got half the coffee down in the first swallow. “Slept in the cab of one of those fuel trucks most of the night. Kept the heater running. It was nice and warm.”
A C-130 trundled down out of the sky as they hailed a passing truck of Air Force construction troops and got the cases lifted into the bed.
The truck groaned past a tan-painted, aluminum-sheeting-roofed, bullet-pocked terminal building, through conex boxes and tents and windblown plastic and twisted, rusting trusses and wire and ancient garbage and discarded snowplow blades and more broken concrete. At the far end of a cracked apron dozens of wrecked aircraft lay canted two and three deep like plastic models stamped on and thrown aside by a violent and petulant child. A small team of troops in unfamiliar camo were slowly passing mine detectors across the ground, passersby skirting the yellow tape fluttering around them.
Sitting in the bed of the truck, Dan lifted his eyes to the walled horizon. The nearer mountains were pointed like young women’s breasts and dotted with puffs of dry-looking brush. In the other direction they rose more steeply, furrowed, eroded, the morning light picking out the slanting striations of ancient sea bottoms. The farthest were gray as granite, snow-topped and precipitous and utterly remote. But the ruddy morning light on them was tremblingly delicate, and clouds streamed slowly through their lofty passes.
The view was so breathtaking he could almost forgive them for being so dangerous in the dark, in a heavily loaded, altitude-limited helicopter. Three Thunderbolts crouched on the canted, bomb-pocked slabs of the main strip, heat eddying behind running engines. By day the base looked even more makeshift, overgrown and wrecked and bombed, as if thirty years of war had washed back and forth over it, leaving fresh layers of junk and debris with each receding wave.
As of course it had. Only twentysome miles from Kabul, Bagram had been the staging point for the Russian troop insertion. Airborne and Spetsnaz had been based here, and close air support flown up to the last days of the occupation. Which had begun, Dan was uncomfortably aware, after the domestic communist government had tried to jail extremist mullahs, educate girls, and attempt to repeal some of the rawer practices of Afghani Islam. The country outside the capital had reacted violently, and the United States had funneled arms and funds to a growing insurgency, never considering the long-term consequences—as usual.
Now NATO was going to try, where the British and Soviets had failed. Stepping, it appeared, in the very same bootprints. Hulks of tanks and personnel carriers still littered the base. They were gradually getting towed to a junkyard to one side of the runway to join the litter of burned-out fuselages, broken wings, and defective engines that seemed to grow up alongside any Russian airstrip.
He shook his head. Above his pay grade, as usual. This administration seemed assured they’d succeed where so many others had failed. Who was he to doubt?
“This’s it, Commander. Want a hand getting your shit off the truck?”
“Yeah, yeah, thanks. Sorry to bother you.”
“That’s what we’re here for, Navy.”
The JOC had taken shape overnight out of GP tents and a section of hastily reroofed revetment-slash-hangar. Crews were still running cables even as headquarters staff ripped open boxes, snapped open folding tables, and began setting up computers and screens and cots for the watch sections. Dan stood back, letting the Army do its thing. Pondering, not for the first time, how organized human beings seemed to get at the prospect of destroying things. Something crunched under his boots. Looking down, he saw he was standing on a carpet of expended brass mixed with a box of nails that had broken open and been trodden into the dry dirt.
When he located what they said would be the targeting section, he and Henrickson moved in, taping up a ripped-off piece of cardboard box Magic Markered US NAVY TOMAHAWK CELL. This pulled in folks who’d been roaming the edges of the action, and by the time dark fell, Dan had a ATWCS version 3 crew set up with three chiefs and two lieutenants. He’d identified his intelligence flows and linked up with the briefing team, the S-3 and the S-2. He found a Navy Predator team and established a data link. Targeting from the drone to an in-flight Tomahawk, which was possible with the Block IIIs, would let them put a weapon on something as mobile as a vehicle convoy.
He also had his first assignment: to brief General E. H. Salter, USA, at 0800 the following day.
* * *
THE next morning Donnie Wenck arrived. Wenck was another TAG member Dan had worked with on previous missions, a Navy first-class OS whose aw-shucks demeanor and occasional spaciness disguised a mastery of arcane software fixes. Dan put him and Henrickson to work smoothing out the rough edges of uploading targeting information and at 0745 headed to the command tent, cargo pockets bulging with notes and printed-out references.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a one on one, but a command brief, and the brigadier wasn’t even there. It was good for an overview of the Joint Task Force setup, though. There were Spanish, Italians, Canadians, French, Germans, and British, along with the occasional bewildered-looking Afghan, and what Dan suspected were Ukrainians too.
Two things swiftly became plain. The first was that the campaign was going astonishingly fast. The Air Force briefers glowed. Precision-guided munitions had stripped the regime of air defenses; B-52 strikes had decimated their ground forces, which had made the mistake of concentrating
in trench lines in expectation of frontal attack. Alliance forces had taken nearly every major city and captured a third of the enemy’s senior personnel. The second was that as far NATO was concerned, this was a Special Forces war. In fact, he got the impression that aside from air support, few regular forces other than the Tenth Mountain and Eighty-second Airborne had been committed.
When the chief of staff nodded, Dan stood for a three-minute overview of what his cell could offer in the way of planning and coordinating multiship Tomahawk strikes. Several officers had questions, all positive, which marked a change from the way the elder service had looked at the missile years before, when he’d first tried to sell it as a deep-strike platform.
The chief of staff said they’d be back to him with a follow-on target package soon. “Meanwhile, I have another question. We don’t have a NAVFOR LNO assigned. We were promised one, but he’s not here yet. We’re still not sure we’re going to organize by functional component or by service, but we need capabilities and recommendations, and we need them now.”
The LNO was a liaison officer, linking the supporting component—in this case, the Navy—to the task force commander. A sticky assignment, if you didn’t have an exquisite sense of what was possible and what wasn’t, as well as an extensive network of people you could call up and ask no-shit questions of. “Uh, yes, sir,” Dan said, thinking fast about what he’d have to do to not fall on his face. C2 channels, staff coordination, getting some kind of written authority with Salter’s name on it—that would do to start with. The Navy air side was the area he’d have to get smart on fast. The USN was providing most of the air support for operations in the south.
