by Joshua Hood
“I’ll go,” Tarek said weakly from the corner. He’d seen enough and would do anything to get away from the grisly scene.
“All right, but be careful and take your time. Don’t fuck this up, we need this information.”
Tarek practically ran for the door. Decklin moaned for morphine from the chair and tried to raise his head.
Zeus ran over to the table and jabbed the needle into his arm before Mason could respond. The relief was almost instantaneous as the drug shot through his system.
The two Americans looked at each other while Zeus backed away.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Decklin slurred.
“You always had to be a hard-ass bastard, didn’t ya?” Mason lit a cigarette and moved around behind the man. Leaning down, he placed his hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “You always had something to prove, but there is something that I have to know.” Mason paused and took a deep drag before leaning in. “Was it worth it in the end?” he whispered.
Decklin looked down at his mangled body, and his shoulders shook with silent sobs. When he raised his head, Zeus could see the tears streaming from his eyes but was unable to hear his tiny reply.
Mason stood up behind him and gently pulled his old friend’s head softly over to his chest. He felt disgust welling up inside him past the rage that had fueled the interrogation. In the reflection of the camera’s lens he caught a brief flash of his hateful visage and almost recoiled in horror. Pushing the weakness away, he grabbed a handful of Decklin’s hair and jabbed a knife deep into the left side of his throat. Bright arterial spray shot from the wound as he dug the knife across the man’s windpipe.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
Jalalabad, Afghanistan
One of the “armchair commanders,” a major Renee had never seen before, came flying out of the operations office, his mouth twisted in anger as she and Kevin and Bones made their way toward the hangar.
“Is that a hot weapon?” he yelled as he marched across the tarmac, his finger pointing directly in Renee’s face.
“Yeah, we just got off a mission. Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?” she asked, stunned by his blatant aggression.
“I don’t give a shit about some ragheads outside the wire. What I care about is you securing that weapon.”
“Ragheads? Have you ever been outside the wire?” she demanded.
“That’s not the point—”
“Look,” she said, raising her rifle up to his face. “Do you see that smoke covering the horizon? Do you know what’s going on right now? An American drone killed President Karzai, and those ‘ragheads’ want blood, because assholes like you keep sticking your finger in their face. So unless you want to try and take my weapon away from me and unload it yourself, I suggest you stand the fuck down.”
She stood there staring hard at him as his mouth opened and closed a few times in disbelief. Renee guessed that most people allowed him to bully them with his rank, but she wasn’t about to take shit from a guy who had never fired a shot in anger. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything else, she walked through the hangar door and headed to the operations center. Swift still wasn’t back, but there was plenty of activity.
Men in a mixture of civilian and military dress were crammed into the operations center, and she knew right away that this wasn’t the place to address her team. Renee had been in Jbad long enough to recognize Tier 1 contractors when she saw them, and she wanted no part of what they were involved in.
Typically, these men were contracted by the CIA and the NSA to conduct operations illegal to the military. They were paid operatives who worked outside of military channels on operations never meant to see the light of day.
Renee motioned for her team to head back to their room, where they could talk in private.
Five minutes later they stood around the table in the privacy of their team room and Renee asked, “So, who is Master Sergeant Mason Kane?” She wanted to know now that she’d had time to cool down.
“From what I heard, he’s a guy who decided to grow a conscience at the wrong time,” Bones said from his place at the briefing table.
“Why is he labeled a terrorist?”
“That is the million-dollar question,” Kevin said as he opened his knife and began cleaning his fingernails.
“There was a team around here, about the time you went to Iraq. Guys called them the Ghost Squad,” Kevin chimed in. “Their colonel was handpicked by General Swift.”
“You mean the Anvil Program?”
“They had a lot of names. One of those urban-legend things,” Kevin said, looking up from his battlefield manicure.
“So, what do you know about him?” Renee was intrigued. “Joe Rumor” was the military’s unofficial information channel. The information usually came from a private who overheard a briefing and passed it to his friends.
She’d always found that there was a kernel of truth in every story, if you were patient enough to search for it. More often than not, the rumor mill was more accurate than an intel brief.
“I can only tell you what I’ve heard,” Bones said.
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“First time I heard about Mason Kane was in 2008. I was at Firebase Lilley, about four miles from the Pakistan border. The CIA was using the firebase to run counterterror ops into Pakistan. We received actionable intel that a high-value target was holed up in some compound across the border. He was using opium money to finance anyone willing to come across the border and hit coalition troops.
“We knew where he was but couldn’t get clearance to take him out. The CIA didn’t like that, so they made a call to some general named Nantz who was the liaison between the CIA and JSOC at the time. Long story short, Nantz sends one guy across the border to neutralize the HVT. Guess who it was?”
“Mason Kane?” Renee guessed.
“Yep. Two days later, the target’s head shows up in one of those foam coolers you buy at the gas station. The dude who brought it was the target’s bodyguard. Said he found his boss dead on the toilet, with a note telling him to take the head to the firebase or get ready to bury his family.”
“Holy shit,” Renee said with a whistle.
“Like I said, it’s all rumor, but I ran across a guy I know who said that Mason ran into a bit of trouble about six months ago. Something happened on a mission they ran up north.”
“What happened?” she asked, intrigued by the story.
“People said he flipped out and murdered a bunch of civilians,” Bones answered. “Single-handedly got all the Special Forces kicked out of Wardak.”
“I remember hearing about that,” Renee said. “The rumor was that some Special Ops guy was cutting off hajji faces and wearing them around like masks.”
“Yep, that’s the one. Anyway, it was right around election time in Washington, and General Swift began taking a lot of heat. He was told to send a team to take a look, but what they really wanted was for us to sanitize the site before anyone could get a handle on the situation.”
“So what happened?”
“Hard to say, because Colonel Barnes sent Mason to Libya before anyone could talk to him, and right after that is when he left the reservation and got put on the kill list,” Bones said.
Renee rolled her eyes at the two men. They were like kids at camp telling ghost stories. “That’s pretty convenient. So no one actually saw anything?”
“Rico did. He got to the site before the rest of us, said someone had pulled all the bullets out of the bodies and collected all the spent brass. When he went out and talked to the locals, they all said the same thing. A white guy did it.”
“So?”
“So Mason’s not white. If you look at his army photo, the guy looks like a haj,” Kevin said.
“Well, then, it couldn’t have been him,” Renee said sarcastically.
“Who knows, but it didn’t matter anyways because Karzai got what he wanted. He used this to
say he couldn’t trust the generals anymore and started going straight to Washington, cut Swift and Nantz right out of the loop.”
“I don’t get it,” Renee said honestly.
“What’s to get?” Kevin asked. “We lost a major asset when they pulled the Anvil Program, and Karzai got free rein to do whatever the hell he wanted up in Wardak. Shit, it was all hands on deck when Mason went on the run. The DoD had us jumping through our asses trying to find him.”
“Yep, they said they had a fix on him in Pakistan, but by the time they sent people in, he was long gone,” Bones added.
“Probably never there in the first place.” Kevin spat his dip into a bottle while Bones nodded his head in agreement.
“When does Rico get back from the Pesh?” Renee asked.
Kevin’s prepaid cell phone rang, cutting off the conversation.
“Yeah? Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, closing the phone and getting to his feet. “Speaking of the devil, the gate guards won’t let Rico on base.”
“Again? This is getting old,” Bones said, sighing.
“Well, we might as well make it a field trip.”
Renee grabbed her sunglasses, clipped her pistol to her belt, and followed the two men out to the truck. It was a five-minute drive to the north gate, where two guard towers and a row of concrete barriers were the only things separating the American enclave from Afghanistan.
Kevin put the truck in park and hopped out, leaving Renee to watch from the front seat. Her gaze drifted over the green sandbags fluttering in the wind and the small mounds of dirt collected at the base of the plywood guard shack. A mass of dirty Afghanis pressed against the chain-link fence, yelling at the guards looking down on them. Rocks bounced off the thick bulletproof glass with sharp cracks, and a haggard sergeant fought to keep his soldiers from escalating the already tense situation.
She had tried so hard to make a difference, but she knew that everything good they had done was now ruined. One man had destroyed everything in the blink of an eye. Renee scanned the soiled robes and windburned faces of the locals until her eyes stopped on a gaunt man squatted down against the fence. He was staring at her through squinted eyes, and two soldiers stood over him with their M4s at the ready. The soldiers looked to be about nineteen or twenty, and one of them suddenly kicked dirt at a young Afghani shaking the fence with his hands. Some of the dirt landed on the man seated at his feet, and the soldiers smiled as a young Afghani suddenly grabbed hold of the fence.
“Fuck you, America,” he yelled as he shook the fence.
The soldier took the butt of his rifle and slammed it on the boy’s fingers with a fleshy thump.
“Get off the fence,” he yelled as the boy made a gun out of his fingers and pointed it at the man’s head.
“America die,” he yelled back.
Despite the chaos, the man seated on the ground continued staring at her until she looked uncomfortably away. There was something noble in his gaze and she found herself unwilling to challenge it. Kevin was showing his ID to the sergeant in charge, and the NCO pointed to the man she had just been looking at.
Renee looked back at the man—he was standing up now—and finally realized that it was Rico. When he got to his feet he looked at the soldier who was still yelling at the crowd and walked past without speaking. After walking through the gate, the sergeant handed him an AK-47 and offered a curt apology before turning back to the crowd.
He kept his eyes down as he walked to the truck and opened the back door. “What’s up?” he said in a mellow Southern California accent as he tossed his gear into the truck.
“Did they just kick dirt on you?” Renee asked, handing him a bottle of water.
“Yeah, it happens all the time. Kinda gives you a different perspective on shit, though,” he said, slamming the door and taking a long drink of water.
“Maybe if you’d call ahead, we could have a car waiting for you next time,” Kevin said as he put the truck in reverse and headed back to their building.
“Whatever, bro.”
“So, whatcha got for us?”
“I think Barnes has already crossed the border. There’s some bad shit going down in the tribal regions right now.”
“What do you mean?”
A few minutes later, the team was back around the table and Rico was digging a digital camera out of a dusty bag. He hit the power button and, after blowing the grit off the screen, tossed it to Kevin.
The digital images were graphic. The first picture was from inside a building. A dark crimson pool of blood was spread out on a rough wooden floor. There were black scorch patterns from grenades and the walls were chipped from shrapnel. The next shot was outside and showed heads stacked together to form a hideous pyramid reminiscent of Mesoamerican human sacrifices.
Quite a few of the shots had been taken on the move, which somehow made the images all the more grotesque. Grainy out-of-focus heads sat atop hand-carved spikes. Expressions of contorted misery were frozen on the faces and someone had taken the time to display them for everyone to see. The last shot showed a row of staked heads framed by snowcapped mountains. A lone woman was on her knees at the foot of a wooden stake with her head in her hands. Rico had gotten close enough to capture the woman’s grief as the severed head leered obscenely for the camera.
“How many heads were there altogether?” Bones asked as the slide show finally ended.
“I stopped counting at about two hundred and fifty, but every district center that I went to had at least fifteen to twenty.”
“Were they all confirmed Taliban?” Renee asked.
“I don’t know every Taliban fighter that lives in the area, you know, but I do know that every major commander or lieutenant there had his head cut off. Some of the warlords and a handful of the high-level drug bosses were among the dead. It was very systematic, like they had a list or some kind of intel. If that’s not bad enough, the people I talked to said white people did it.”
“As in American?” Kevin asked.
“That’s what they said. The people who live in these areas haven’t seen Americans like they do over here. You know, maybe a handful of raids have gone off in the area, but most of those were done at night. The average villager couldn’t pick out an American if you paid them. Whoever did this”—Rico pointed to the camera for emphasis—“is definitely not playing by any rules that I’ve heard about.”
“So what do we do now?” Kevin nudged Renee, who was wondering the same thing.
“Something’s not right here,” she began. “I mean, does anyone else think it’s strange that all roads seem to come back to Swift, and all of a sudden he gets called away? What do we know about General Nantz, and how in the hell does someone like Barnes plan the raid on Kamdesh without help?”
“Someone is helping him,” Kevin said, stating the obvious.
“I just don’t see Swift sanctioning a strike on an American FOB. Just doesn’t seem like his style,” Bones added.
“Maybe he didn’t go see Nantz of his own accord,” Renee said, thinking out loud. Like Bones, she was having a hard time seeing her boss as a traitor. “Either way, we have three targets right now and zero actionable intelligence. I have no idea who this Mason Kane is, or how he fits, but we know that there is a connection between Decklin, him, and Barnes.” Renee was trying to get a plan together.
“Rico, do you still have access to that CIA dude, what was his name?” Bones wanted to know.
“Smith, yeah, he still owes me a favor,” Rico said.
“Is he the one out of Bagram?” Bones asked.
“He was, but now he’s the station chief’s liaison. You know how rank has its privileges.”
“All right, guys, cut the shit. Rico, I want to know what the CIA isn’t telling us. Find out everything you can without making it too obvious. Kevin and I will focus on Mason. Bones and Tyler, that leaves getting a fix on Barnes up to you. We need to work quick on this.”
“We’re on it,” Bones said, and t
urned to walk away.
“Well, if you put it that way, I guess it’s time to go to work,” Rico said, getting to his feet.
“Hell yeah, let’s do this,” Tyler added.
“Hey, Rico, how about you shower first?” Renee said.
“You got it, boss.”
Kevin looked at Renee as the meeting broke up. He was about to say something when the phone on Renee’s hip vibrated. Holding up a finger to Kevin, she lifted the cell phone to her ear. “Yeah?”
“This is Captain Lane at the TOC. We just got a fax saying that Task Force 11 has located Mason Kane in Libya. I have no idea why they sent it to us, but apparently they are launching right now to grab him.”
“Any idea where they are taking him?”
“Well, the fax originated from a site somewhere in Chad, so I assume they will take him back there.”
“So no one else knows about this?”
“Looks that way.”
“Do me a favor and hold on to that information for a while. I’m heading to the flight line now. I need you to get me a flight.”
“Roger that.”
Renee felt her heart skip a beat as she hung up and jogged toward her room to grab her stuff. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for, and Renee knew that Mason might be the key to what was really going on. Now all she had to do was get to him before he was transferred out of the country.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
Peshawar, Pakistan
Sergeant First Class Harden stood at a window of the World Health Organization hospital in Pakistan and stared out at the marketplace below. A hot breeze brought up the rank smells of the unwashed and the charcoal smoke of the food vendors.
The azan, or Muslim call to prayer, drifted from a mosque’s loudspeaker. The muezzin’s amplified voice drifted over Peshawar’s cityscape in a rhythmic undulation that beckoned the faithful to worship.
