The Shadow Patrol jw-6

by Alex Berenson

  AT THE BASE of the valley, Francesca turned right. They drove northeast on the narrow road connecting the villages along the Arghandab River. An IED would obliterate the Toyota, but Francesca wasn’t worried. The insurgents saved their bombs for American vehicles, not random farmers who happened to be foolish enough to be out after dark.

  For ninety minutes, neither man spoke. The silence in the truck merged with the silence outside. A valley full of phantoms. The road had no signs, no gas stations, no restaurants to mark their path. For a while, Francesca wouldn’t have believed they were moving at all if not for their progress on the GPS. But finally it beeped. Alders squinted at the tiny screen. “Almost here. Maybe another hundred meters.”

  Sure enough, a few seconds later Francesca saw a dirt track hemmed by four-foot-high walls on either side. He turned right. Fifty meters in, he stopped, cut the pickup’s lights. Without a word Alders slipped out and knelt beside the pickup. Thirty seconds later, he slid back into the cab and handed Francesca a night-vision scope. Francesca slid the cylinder over his right eye, leaving his left uncovered.

  Through the eyepiece, the world looked green and black and oddly two-dimensional, like a 1950s television. In a world without electricity, night optics offered huge advantages. Soldiers could lock on insurgents who had no chance of finding them. But because the equipment blunted depth perception, most soldiers no longer wore full goggles. They favored scopes that covered one eye while leaving the other exposed. With practice, their brains learned to process the weirdly divergent information coming from each eye and create a complete picture.

  Francesca eased off the brake, rolled deeper into the silhouette world ahead. The grape hut was directly ahead, a long, narrow building, maybe fifteen feet high. It had narrow slits for windows, like a medieval fortress. Another hut had once stood nearby, but an explosion had destroyed it years before, nearly leveling it. The first hut had partly survived. Its southern wall had been shattered and was crumbling into the mud. But its north side, which faced the valley road, was intact.

  Francesca nosed the pickup through a cut in the wall near the hut. The Toyota’s tires sank into the dirt, but he downshifted and clicked on the four-wheel drive. On the southern side of the hut he found a jagged hole, maybe ten feet wide. “Home sweet home,” he said.

  He edged the pickup through the hole into the hut. He cut the engine. Inside the hut, the blackness was absolute. Without his eyepiece, Francesca would have been blind. With it, he saw that the hut held dozens of simple wooden racks. Farmers used them to dry grapes into raisins. The grapes had long since disappeared, leaving the racks, and a faint sweet odor, as the only evidence of the hut’s initial purpose.

  Francesca’s feet crunched over metal. He reached down, found brass casings and an 82-millimeter mortar tube. Francesca sniffed the tip of the tube. He didn’t smell gunpowder. The mortar hadn’t been used in years. He tossed it aside.

  The back of the Toyota appeared to be filled with junk: old bicycles, foam bedrolls, rusted steel rods and sheets, and a couple of blankets. None of the stuff would have attracted notice at a checkpoint. Francesca and Alders pulled it all out. They slid two of the rods into holes the size of quarters that had been drilled into the Toyota’s front bumper. They laid one end of a steel sheet over the rods. The rods and sheet had been machined to fit together as easily as LEGO blocks, with an equally satisfying click. The far end of the sheet lay atop the Toyota’s cab. The sheet was seven feet wide, six feet long, just big enough for Francesca and Alders to lie side by side with the Barrett between them, its muzzle poking out of one of the hut’s narrow slits. A firing platform.

  Once the platform was set, Francesca and Alders stretched the brown blankets over it and the truck. The Toyota was brown and covered with dirt and mud anyway. Inside the grape hut and under the blankets, it would be basically invisible, even during the day. Francesca climbed onto the platform. Alders reached down for the Barrett and lifted it to him, grunting at the weight of the rifle. Francesca pulled up the Barrett and snapped its legs into place. Alders handed him another camouflage net and he draped it over the Barrett’s muzzle to hide the steel.

  Then Francesca settled back and slipped off his eyepiece. He put his eye to the Barrett’s infrared scope, which had far sharper resolution than his own. He found himself looking at an empty green world, the stillest of nights. No grapes had been grown in the fields around here for at least a year. Even the mice seemed to have disappeared.

  He was six feet off the ground, with an open view of the road to the north, no farmhouses or high walls for a mile east or west. The position was close to perfect, concealed and with a huge field of fire. These Talib bomb-planting cells usually had no more than four guys. If they set up the way he expected, Francesca could kill them all in under a minute.

  Sniper fire was confusing and terrifying, even for experienced infantry. Typical firefights happened at close range, distances no more than a football field. As a result, when an ambush began, soldiers instinctively assumed the enemy was close by. They needed several seconds to realize that they were under sniper attack. When they realized they didn’t have any way to counterattack, they typically dove and froze, trying to present as small a target as possible. But during a sniper attack, going to the ground was suicide. Francesca could put a round in a stationary target from a mile away. Unless perfect cover was available, the best solution was to scatter and regroup. Run. But by the time the Talibs figured that out, they’d be dead.

  Alders handed him a bottle of water and Francesca took a long slug.

  “How’s it look?”

  “Real good. Whyn’t you sack out? I’ll take first watch.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ll call it in, let them know we’re here.” Their sat phones worked everywhere in Afghanistan — everywhere in the world, in fact — and they were supposed to report when they arrived and every eight to twelve hours afterward. Francesca tried to stick to the schedule, mainly because the Delta commanders got nervous otherwise. When they got nervous, they were apt to do stupid things, like put up a rescue bird. He reached for the sat, made the call.

  He’d just hung up when his other phone vibrated. Afghan cellies. Amazing. He didn’t even know where the tower was. Probably somewhere on the ridge behind them. The caller identification showed a local phone. Had to be Weston.

  “You in position?” Yep. Weston.

  “We’re where we need to be.” Francesca didn’t appreciate this kid’s attitude. He’d considered taking Weston and Rodriguez out along with Young. In fact, he was still considering it.

  “Okay, I still haven’t heard whether it will be today or tomorrow. Should know soon.”

  “Call me when you do.” Francesca hung up. Put his eye to the rifle’s infrared scope. Listened to Alders snore gently on the ground below. And smiled as he watched the empty night.

  26

  The transmitter was two inches long, no wider around than a dime. Half the size of the eraserless pencils that miniature golfers used to count putts. Shafer had told Wells that the geeks called it an intermittent locator. As long as whatever it was attached to was moving, it reported its position every forty-five minutes to the military’s Iridium satellite network. Each transmission lasted only five milliseconds. Otherwise the bug stayed silent, offering no electronic evidence of its existence.

  If the transmitter stopped moving for more than forty-five minutes, it offered one final update on its location. Then it shut down. It broadcast so infrequently that it was basically undetectable. Plus it transmitted on a nonlinear cycle. Even Shafer couldn’t explain what that meant. But he promised Wells it would enable the bug to beat every electronic countermeasure in existence.

  Shafer had sent Wells three transmitters in three different colors. One gray, one brown, one black. They had no on/off switches or lights. They looked like plastic junk. He’d also included a handheld GPS that would track the transmitter. And a note. Be nice to them. You’d be surpr
ised what they cost. Wells never remembered Shafer worrying about budgets before. Either the transmitters were seriously expensive or the man was getting strange about money in his old age.

  DESPITE HIS ANGER, Stout had shown Wells where Francesca kept his pickup, a muddy parking lot near Kandahar’s giant PX. Aside from a razor-wire fence, the lot looked ordinary, full of pickups, SUVs, and Humvees. A small sign beside the front gate said “Reserved/TF86 Vehicles.”

  “TF86 doesn’t exist,” Stout said. “This lot is SF only. Everybody keeps trucks in here. The Canadians and Brits, too. It’s unlocked during the day, but there are always a couple of guards. They work for Sandton. That’s a private contractor that JSOC uses a lot. They look like they’re just hanging out, fiddling with a truck, but they’ll challenge you at the gate. At night, it’s locked down and alarmed. You need a key and a code to get in. And if you look at the gate, you’ll see the surveillance cams.”

  Wells looked. Two cameras, both watching the gate. He liked the setup. Hidden in plain sight. Though it didn’t help him any.

  Stout pointed to a beat-up Toyota pickup near the back of the lot, one of the rattier vehicles. “That’s Francesca’s. You can’t see it from here, but underneath there’s a compartment where they hide their rifles and unis.”

  “That’s definitely theirs? They never swap with the other squads?”

  “No. So that’s it. All I can tell you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re not welcome. And don’t ask me to get you inside the lot. In fact, don’t ask me about anything else, or for anything else.”

  They didn’t speak again until Stout dropped Wells back at the KBR trailer where he was holed up. Wells sat on his bunk and closed his eyes. He owed Shafer a call and he ought to be figuring his next move. But he was stuck on what Stout had said to him as they were driving. Which faith? Islam or America? He seemed to be failing both. His mind turned to the man in the hills outside Muslim Bagh. They’d prayed together. Then Wells had killed him. How could God view his words as anything but a mockery?

  Islam had helped Wells survive all those years in the North-West Frontier. But now he no longer could explain what he believed, or why. Was he clinging to his faith strictly to separate himself from the other Americans who were fighting this war? To prove to the men he killed that religion played no part in his quarrel with them? They certainly didn’t agree.

  Eventually Wells tired of asking himself questions without answers. He knelt and lowered his head to the floor and recited the first surah over and over. The prayer itself was a tonic. The Arabic soothed his lips, even if he no longer trusted himself to understand what it meant.

  IN THE MORNING he put on a regulation Army uniform complete with a colonel’s eagle on the chest. In the trailer’s mirror, he found he didn’t look like a colonel. Even in the Special Forces, colonels didn’t have beards like his. He pulled off the insignia. He slipped on his Red Sox cap and his Ray-Bans. A smile twitched his lips as he remembered the morning Anne had given him the sunglasses.

  He drove back to the lot Stout had shown him. Sure enough, two guys tinkered under the hood of a Ford Expedition near the front gate. One flagged Wells down. “Morning.”

  Wells stopped, lowered his window. “Morning.”

  “Haven’t seen you before. You certain you found the right lot?” The guy sounded South African to Wells. Lots of security contractors were.

  “Pretty much. Guys at Bengal sent me here to park. Problem?”

  The guy looked at Wells, his beard and shades and killer’s hands. “No problem. Welcome to KAF.”

  Wells parked three spots down from Francesca’s Toyota, positioning the Land Rover between the pickup and the guards. He looked around, didn’t see anyone else in the lot. He stepped over to the Toyota. Its bed was filled with metal rods and sheets that Wells guessed could be assembled into a firing platform. He pulled out the transmitters. The brown one more or less matched the Toyota’s paint. He peeled off the backing on two of its six sides, exposing an epoxy superglue. He pressed it in the corner of the bed behind the passenger seat. Once it stuck on, it was practically invisible. He would have put it on the undercarriage, but it needed a direct line of sight to the atmosphere.

  He slid back into the Land Rover and headed out. He didn’t want Francesca wondering why an unfamiliar vehicle was parked near the Toyota. As he passed the Expedition, he lowered his window. “Change of plans,” he said. “See you soon.”

  “Happy hunting,” the guard said.

  Wells saluted him casually, one pro to another.

  HE CALLED SHAFER. “Good to go.”

  “I’ll call Cunningham tomorrow morning my time. Maybe ten a.m.”

  “Seven-thirty p.m. here.”

  “Look at you, doing the math. So you can expect that he’ll be on the phone to KAF pretty much the second he hangs up.”

  “No chance he’ll cooperate?”

  “I call him, back-channel him, tell him one of his guys may be a criminal target and I want his file. And I won’t say why, won’t show him any of the evidence. Plus I act like an asshole on top of it. He’s more likely to send a hit squad up here than help me.”

  “All these years I thought being an asshole was your personality. Now it turns out it’s part of your cover.”

  “Cute. Like talking to my wife. Anyway, figure Cunningham sounds the alarm to the Delta commander at Kandahar, I believe it’s a major named Penn. That guy tells Francesca. Who gets off base soon as he can come up with some legit operation that gets him pointed toward FOB Jackson.”

  “You’re sure the Deltas won’t lock him down while they check this out on their own?”

  “If I gave Cunningham something concrete, maybe. Not this way. They start kicking over rocks, they don’t know what they might find. Best not to look.”

  “Speaking of things that hide under rocks, what about Duto? He know where we stand?”

  “Not yet. I’ll talk to him after I set the hook with Cunningham. Don’t jump down my throat for asking, but do you have anyone backing you up over there? Gaffan’s buddy?”

  “Look, if that bug you gave me works—”

  “It works—”

  “Then I’ll know where Francesca and Alders are hiding. And they won’t know I know. If that’s not a big enough edge, I’d better find a new line of work.”

  “Modern dance instructor.”

  Wells hung up, called Anne.

  “John?”

  “Hello, babe.”

  “You’re wearing the Ray-Bans, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You’d only call me things like babe when you’re wearing them. Rocker John.”

  “I’ve been called lots of things over the years, but I assure you Rocker John isn’t one.”

  “Tell me you’re almost done over there.”

  “I am. Honestly.”

  “You gonna get the bad guy?”

  “I always do.” Almost.

  “Then we’ll live happily ever after. You and me and Tonka makes three. He told me how much he missed you this morning. Said you’re not a good owner, but you’re his favorite anyway.”

  “Tell him I miss him, too. And you, Anne. Can’t wait to see you.”

  “I love you, John. Whatever it is you’re doing, be careful.”

  “I love you, too.” A word Wells had rarely used with Anne. A word that felt right today.

  HE SPENT THE AFTERNOON getting his gear together. Then he had nothing to do but wait. He went back to his trailer and slept. No point in wasting energy he would need soon enough. He woke after sunset to a call from Shafer, who explained what had happened with Cunningham and Duto.

  “So Duto knew about 71 all along,” Wells said.

  “He swears he had no idea that the trail would go that way.”

  “You believe him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Train’s way down the tracks.”

  Shafer was right. They couldn’t stop chasing Franc
esca now. As usual, Duto had played them.

  “One of these years, I’m going to pay him back.”

  “Inshallah, my friend. Knock ’em dead.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN P.M. when his local phone rang. Young.

  “Coleman.”

  “Out of nowhere, Weston told us to be ready for an op in the next twenty-four hours. Motorcycle registration in the Arghandab.” Insurgents favored motorcycles, so the military was trying to track them with tamper-proof registration stickers. Never mind that the insurgents had an endless supply of cheap bikes. Registration offered a measurable benchmark for commanders to meet. The military loved measurable benchmarks.

  “Where exactly?”

  “He says we don’t have final orders yet. But the most likely spots are a couple roads that run from Highway 1 and up into the valley. Pretty near the base. Eighty to a hundred miles northeast of KAF. You know where I’m talking about?”

  “More or less.”

  “More or less does not promote confidence, sir.”

  “When you know more, you call me. I promise I’ll be there.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  SO WESTON WAS GETTING his platoon off FOB Jackson. Which meant Francesca would be leaving KAF soon enough. Wells’s GPS was plugged into the feed from the transmitter on the pickup. Wells waited for it to ping.

  And waited. The hours dragged. Midnight passed. One a.m. Maybe Francesca wouldn’t leave base until tomorrow. Or maybe Young was wrong. Maybe Francesca wasn’t part of this scheme after all. Two a.m. Wells tried to sleep, couldn’t.

  At 2:30, the GPS beeped. A single blue dot indicated that Francesca’s pickup was ten miles outside of the airfield. He’d taken the bait. Wells knew where he was heading. North and east, deep into the Arghandab River Valley. Toward 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. Toward Coleman Young.