The Shadow Patrol jw-6

by Alex Berenson

  “Code.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Ten minutes later, Shafer called back. “Where’s the code?”

  “Dragon? Stryker?”

  “You never heard of Strykers? Big armored trucks? Badly designed, lots of problems, but the Army bought them and by God it’s going to use them even if they get guys killed. Ring any bells?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “And guess what. The 7th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, also known as Task Force Dragon, is based east of beautiful Kandahar City in Zabul province at Forward Operating Base Jackson. About four thousand soldiers there. Now all you have to do is figure out which of them are big-time heroin smugglers. Don’t worry. I’m sure they have a big sign over their cots.”

  “Four thousand is better than a hundred thousand,” Wells said. “What about Daood?”

  “You’ve got ideas on where to find him, I’m open. But I suspect he’s up in the mountains with Amadullah, and I think you’d be pushing your luck to go back there.”

  “I can’t disagree.”

  “Plus, the way I read this note, Daood was trying to figure out who was running him just like we are.”

  “Stan?”

  “There’s no one with that first or last name at Kabul station. I checked. And doesn’t it strike you as awfully coincidental? Like, Afghani-stan?”

  “Nice.”

  “Nice. So I’ll put the NSA onto the new phone numbers and e-mail addresses you got. But I’m betting they won’t go anywhere. Anyway, soon as Miller comes out of the mountains and hears what happened in Dubai and Chicago, he’ll know we’re looking for him. He’ll know the game is almost over. I’ll bet he reaches out to us.” Shafer talked fast when he was excited, and he was talking fast now. “Even if he doesn’t, I’ll bet we find him pretty damn quick. We have his real name, his bank accounts. We know where he lives.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, I’m gonna look at that brigade. Check out its 15-6s and 32s and after-action reports in the files for its tour.” A 15-6 was a military record of an investigation into suspected criminal behavior by a soldier. An Article 32 report was similar, but used for serious crimes, the military counterpart of a grand jury indictment.

  “And I’m supposed to go to that base and start asking guys if they know about a massive heroin trafficking ring.”

  “You laugh, but I have an idea.” Shafer explained his plan.

  “That can’t work.”

  “You have anything better?”

  Wells was silent.

  “Then I suggest you get on it.”

  “Okay. But there’s one thing you’re going to need to send for me to have any shot at all. A secret weapon.”

  “What secret weapon?”

  Wells told him.

  “Not bad, John. Maybe you have learned a few things.”

  “Still. It’d be nice if we could find David Miller. I bet he can move us up the chain.”

  “My concern is that whoever’s running him is thinking the same.”

  Wells didn’t have to ask Shafer what he meant.

  18

  PAKTIKA PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN

  Roads in Afghanistan came in two categories: bad and worse. The fifty-mile track from Sharan to the Pakistani border belonged in the second group, less a road than a dashed line on a map, washed out and littered with stones big as beach balls.

  Down this uncertain path bounced a Ford Ranger, four doors, nearly new, a gift to Afghanistan from the American taxpayer. Amadullah Thuwani drove, David Miller beside him. Amadullah sat low and steered one-handed, fingers draped over the steering wheel. He reminded Miller of a South Side gangbanger. He just needed a Bulls cap tilted low on his forehead and a fat gold chain along with his Rolex. Fortunately, his driving style posed no danger. The Ranger was moving barely twenty miles an hour. Any faster and rocks would tear up the chassis.

  Without warning, Amadullah reached across the seat, pinched Miller’s cheek like an unfriendly grandfather. “You’re sure this is the way,” he said. They’d been driving for three hours and Amadullah’s patience looked to be wearing thin.

  “Of course.” Miller wasn’t. He wondered what Amadullah would do if they stumbled into an American convoy. As usual, Miller was the only one in the truck who didn’t have a weapon. Come to think of it, he was probably the only adult male in the whole province who didn’t have an AK within arm’s length.

  The road passed through a loose group of mud-walled compounds, and Miller saw the abandoned schoolhouse Stan had told him to look for. Against its wall, three empty oil barrels were stacked in a pyramid. Side by side means no meeting, Stan had said. Pyramid means keep coming.

  “That’s it,” Miller said, nodding at the barrels. “We’re close.”

  Five minutes later, Amadullah stopped the Ranger beside a wash of scrubby pine trees. He lowered the windows and killed the engine.

  “Now we listen for mosquitoes,” Amadullah said, Talib slang for drones. “They won’t face us like men. They use this science instead.” In Amadullah’s mouth, science sounded like a curse. He spit out the window into the dust. Amadullah’s son Azim wandered off and took a long piss against a mud wall.

  They sat and listened. But the air was still. So was the land, no cars or trucks. Not even any donkey-drawn carts. The mountains in Paktika were shorter than the famous peaks of the Hindu Kush but equally unforgiving, crumbling hills with soil too rocky for farming.

  “You see my watch?” Amadullah raised his wrist to show the gold Rolex.

  “Are you giving it to me? That famous Pashtun hospitality?”

  “If I give it to you, you’ll wear it around your neck.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable.” Miller knew he should take what Amadullah dished out, but the boasting and threats had worn thin.

  “It was a Saudi who gave me this. Many years ago.”

  “Osama bin Laden?” The Talibs loved to brag about how they’d fought alongside bin Laden, especially now that he was dead and couldn’t contradict them. Osama would have had a million-man army if they were all telling the truth.

  “Not Osama. Though I did meet him once. Skinny and full of love for himself. No, this man, when he came here, I had just come back from Kandahar, a very good mission. We bombed Russian tanks, linked the explosives and set them off all at once. The whole road was on fire. Killed four tanks. Boom-boom-boom-boom! The wrecks stayed on Highway 1 for a month, and after that the Russians left us alone down there. Thanks be to Allah. Those T-72s had heavy armor all over, but underneath they didn’t. Stupid Russians.”

  “But the watch.”

  “Yes, the watch. So the Saudi came, and we had a feast. And they were calling me the lion of Zhari, that’s the western part of Kandahar province. And the Saudi, he said to me, ‘What can I do for you, lion? I want to be part of this jihad.’ And I said, ‘Give me your Rolex.’”

  Miller could imagine the look on the Saudi’s face. “Not what he was expecting.”

  “You know, I can’t even remember his name. Probably Abdul. All of the Saudis who came here were named Abdul or Saud or Faisal. The Saudis. They pretend they hate the princes, but they fall to one knee when one passes within ten kilometers.” Amadullah spit again into the dirt.

  “So he gave you the watch.”

  “Of course he did. He was far from home.”

  “What became of him?”

  “Only Allah knows. But I still have the watch. My second wife polishes it every week and it still works perfectly. Do you see what I’m telling you?”

  Miller saw. The visitors from Saudi Arabia and Russia and the United States came with their gifts. But sooner or later, they left the warriors in these mountains to their business. Amadullah had spent his whole life within a hundred miles of here. He didn’t have a passport or a bank account. He’d never seen a skyscraper or flown on an airplane. As far as Miller knew, he couldn’t even read or write. Yet he and his people could never be broken, no
t in this land. Killed, but not broken.

  Miller had forgotten most of his single semester at Harold Washington City College, but one class had stuck with him: Philosophy 101. At first he’d done the reading mainly to impress his teacher, this cute white girl from the University of Chicago. He never did work up the guts to ask her out. The U of C might have been on the South Side, but it was in a different universe from his. Anyway, a few weeks into the semester, he’d seen her boyfriend picking her up. But by then he was into the class, and he kept on reading.

  He wasn’t interested in Plato and the Greeks, debating the mysteries of existence, shadows on the cave wall. No, he liked the political philosophers, the ones who talked about power in the real world, where it came from, how to use it. Especially this English guy, Hobbes: the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. Amadullah surely felt the same. Or would have, if he’d ever heard of Hobbes.

  Miller wondered whether the watch’s backstory was bloodier than Amadullah had said, whether the Saudi who’d given it to him had been taken on a mission that didn’t have a way out.

  “A very nice watch,” Miller said aloud.

  “Real gold. Swiss-made.”

  “I’m sold.”

  They fell silent. Miller found himself intensely conscious of the ticking of the Rolex. Finally, Amadullah muttered, “Enough.” He shoved a plug of tobacco into his mouth and started up the Ranger. The road rose slowly, following a dry streambed around the flank of a brown mountain, an unpoetic stretch of land, a place to grind through. Behind the mountain, the road forked.

  “Left or right?”

  “Right.” The marker was reflective tape stuck low on a lightning-scarred tree.

  The right fork turned back into the mountain, rising in the shadow of a ridgeline. The pines here were sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds and stood thicker. The road dead-ended at a man-made clearing, the trees cut to stumps. At the far edge, two horses stood riderless, a mare and a gelding, both saddled and tied to a tree. They stamped their hooves and whinnied as the Ranger rolled in. Miller relaxed a little. He’d brought them to the right place.

  The CIA officer who called himself Stan had done an extraordinary job of winning Amadullah’s trust, Miller thought. A year before, the United States had created a most-wanted list of forty-seven Taliban commanders, including Amadullah. Thirteen of those men were now dead, and seven more captured. Even so, Amadullah had agreed to leave the safety of Muslim Bagh and come to Afghanistan to meet Stan. He was taking an enormous chance. The Americans could have a company of Special Forces operatives waiting.

  But Miller understood why Amadullah was taking the risk. Miller had delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to Amadullah, money Amadullah could use to control his tribe and build a private army. When the Americans left Afghanistan, Amadullah would be ready to govern a province, maybe even bribe his way into a cabinet position. Then Stan had cemented his relationship with Amadullah by tipping him about the Special Forces raid. Amadullah had told Miller earlier today that Stan had been right, that helicopters had raided the farm a few days after their meeting.

  Amadullah slung a short-stock AK over his shoulder. “You’ve never been here before,” he said to Miller.

  “All I know is that we’re supposed to follow the path.”

  “Then let’s follow it. Find this man I’ve come to see.”

  “Father,” Azim said. “Let me come, too, guard you.”

  “You think I need to be guarded from him?”

  Amadullah walked over to the taller horse, the gelding, and mounted him in a single smooth leap that belied his size. Miller put a hand on the mare’s flank. She was skinny and swaybacked, white except for the gray blaze on her chest. She turned her head, fluttered her big lips at him. She seemed friendly enough, but Miller hesitated. He’d never ridden before. The South Side of Chicago wasn’t exactly horse country.

  “Come on,” Amadullah said.

  Miller awkwardly stepped into the stirrup and swung himself over the saddle. The horse swayed. For an unpleasant moment, he thought he might fall. Then he jammed his left foot into the other stirrup and grabbed the reins.

  “Not too hard,” Amadullah said. “She knows what to do if you’ll let her.” He turned his horse up the trail. Miller followed. The path rose in short switchbacks. The forest was thicker than Miller expected, and crusty branches whipped at his legs. He ducked low, leaning over the mare’s back. To his surprise, he found the ride relaxing. The mare moved at a steady walk and didn’t seem to mind carrying him. Miller looked for a trap, broken branches or footprints made by men waiting to capture Amadullah. But the trees appeared undisturbed.

  “Your friend planned this meeting well,” Amadullah said. “Even if I wanted to take him, I couldn’t.”

  Amadullah was right, Miller realized. The path could be followed only in single file. No doubt it circled around the mountain and reached another clearing where Stan had hidden his own vehicle.

  After twenty minutes, they crossed a notch in the ridge, emerging on the mountain’s north face. The trees stopped suddenly. Patches of snow were scattered in the shadows of the boulders above them. The trail passed through a rock slide, squeezed between two house-size boulders, and opened onto a stretch of flat rock.

  And there he was. The CIA officer who called himself Stan. Miller had expected a big guy, a military type. But Stan was skinny. He wore an olive green North Face jacket and a 9-millimeter Glock strapped to his hip, but no armor or sunglasses or beard. At first, he didn’t look like a soldier. More like a lawyer. But his eyes gave him away. They were blue and hard and flat, the eyes of a man who had been shown no mercy and would show none. In Miller’s experience, white folk rarely had those eyes. He wondered where Stan had gotten his.

  “Amadullah,” he said in Pashtun. “Meet Stan, the man with the plan.” Like he knew Stan. Like they were friends. Stan didn’t blink. Miller hoped he couldn’t speak Pashtun. Miller would have a better chance of continuing his unbroken winning streak in the life-versus-death sweepstakes if he could play translator, tweak the conversation to his advantage. He knew that he might never get off this mountain. Even so, he couldn’t help feeling weirdly privileged to be here. How often did Talib commanders and CIA operatives meet face-to-face?

  Amadullah slid off his horse and offered a hand to Stan. Miller waited for the trap to spring, for soldiers to jump from hidden positions. Instead, the American put his left hand on Amadullah’s arm and patted his own chest with his right hand to show his respect. “Tell him I’m glad he came,” Stan said to Miller in English. “I know it’s dangerous. For both of us. I’m glad he trusted me enough to come.”

  So he doesn’t know Pashtun. Good. Miller translated.

  “I wanted to see you with my own eyes,” Amadullah said.

  “Here I am, then. I wish I could have seen your country fifty years ago, when there wasn’t a war. When we could have met in your home and feasted like men instead of hiding here like beasts.”

  “I don’t know anything about you. Not even your name. You know my name and I don’t know yours.”

  “My name wouldn’t mean anything to you. I’m not famous like you.”

  “Still I need a name for you.”

  “Call me Stan, then.”

  Amadullah considered. “It will do. Tell me why you’ve done all this, at least. You’re a believer?”

  “A Muslim?” A gray smile crossed Stan’s face. “No.”

  “For money, then?”

  “The money’s nice, but not the main reason.”

  “Then why?”

  “I’m tired, that’s all.” Stan tipped his head up, directing his explanation to the heavens. “The agency I work for, it’s corrupt. My country, my government, this whole war, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. We tell you we’ve got the answers, but we don’t have anything at all. We lie to ourselves as much as everyone else. It’s time for us to leave here, leave you alone.”

  “What do you thin
k,” Amadullah said to Miller, when he’d finished translating. “Is he telling the truth?”

  Miller was surprised Amadullah had asked his opinion. “I don’t know why he’d lie. Maybe there’s more to it, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Did he say anything to you about it?”

  “I told you. He treats me as a courier. Nothing more.”

  “Ask him, then, why he’s brought us here.”

  Stan smiled, a real smile this time, when he heard the question. He led them to his horse, a thick-legged white stallion tied to a mulberry tree. A white wool blanket was draped over the horse’s flanks. Stan pulled off the blanket with a magician’s flourish, revealing twin boxes. They were about six feet long, a foot square, and covered with Cyrillic lettering.

  “You know these?”

  “SAMs,” Amadullah said in English. “Russian Stingers.”

  “A new model. SA-24s. The Russians started making them about three years ago. The Russian Army says these can take out a Black Hawk, and I think they’re right. Especially if I give them some help. You think you might have use for these, Amadullah?”

  Amadullah grinned.

  “Now I’m going to tell you something,” Stan said. “The director of the CIA is coming to Afghanistan soon. In only a few days. And American politicians, too. Important ones.”

  “You’re certain of this.”

  “Yes. I’ll have their flight schedule.”

  Amadullah tapped one of the steel boxes. “And what do you want for this?”

  “Nothing. It’s a gift.”

  “I don’t like that sort of gift. Not even stones are free, we Pashtuns say.”

  “All right, Amadullah. If you insist, you can give me something in return. Information. Tell me, have any Americans come to see you recently?”

  “Aside from this one, no.” Amadullah spit green spit at Miller’s feet.

  “Anyone else? Has anyone come to Balochistan? Not necessarily American.”

  Amadullah pursed his lips. “Almost two weeks ago, yes. But he was Saudi. He wanted to help fund the jihad. These men appear every so often. They never make any trouble. If they do, we send them home. One way or another.”