“She doesn’t speak English,” the leader of the group said. “That is Haman. She is my niece.” He’d introduced himself as Omar and went about introducing the rest of the group, though there was no way Zeke and Phoenix would remember all their names. They nodded and smiled as they shook hands with each man, but the names went in one ear and out the other. It was a problem both of the Americans shared; never being able to remember the names of people they met at parties or events. It was especially bothersome if it was a woman; not remembering a woman’s name presented the very real problem later on, like when they were trying to get a second date.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend,” Zeke offered.
“You didn’t,” he said. “She’s shy, especially with strangers.”
“I see.” Zeke took another bite of bread, tearing off a chunk with his teeth and then washing it down with some more of the hot tea.
“So, Ackbar and his men have been terrorizing this area for a while now, huh?” Phoenix asked.
“Yes,” said Omar. “He came into this region when the war began when the Americans came and started their attacks on the Taliban.”
“Sorry,” Phoenix said.
“Don’t be.” Omar shook off the apology. “The Taliban are murderers, thieves, and rapists. They are the bad guys, not you. Of course, there are Americans who do bad things, but for the most part, you all are a welcome blessing to this country.”
Zeke and Phoenix both wished they could take credit for that, but they had no role in taking out the Taliban.
Phoenix decided to change the subject to one he was curious about and had been since they first arrived in the village. “You speak excellent English, Omar. Did you go to school somewhere to learn that or did you just pick it up along the way?”
“I attended a school in Kabul that taught English. We had a teacher from Boston who stayed with us for three years before returning to America. He was a good teacher, although his accent was very different from yours.”
The two friends cackled.
“No kidding,” Zeke said. “They talk wicked funny up there.” He put on his best fake New England accent.
The man looked at him quizzically, cocking his head to the side for a moment. Then his lips creased into a broad smile. He beamed at Zeke. “Yes. That’s exactly how he talked. How did you do that?”
Zeke shrugged. “I have a thing with accents sometimes.”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Phoenix rolled his eyes. “Sometimes they’re not so good.”
“Hey, I don’t hear you chipping in over there, Sparky.”
Phoenix laughed. “Sorry. My talents lie elsewhere.”
“So,” Zeke returned to the subject at hand, “your teacher was from Boston, and that’s where you learned it. Did the rest of your men learn the language?”
Omar shook his head. “No, they only speak local languages and dialects. I can interpret everything for them, though, since I speak pretty close to fluent English.”
He really did. His words were heavily accented, though easy to understand. And his grammar was near perfect. That meant the teacher who taught Omar must have come from a decent enough institution himself.
Suddenly, a new voice cut into the conversation. It wasn’t anyone sitting around the fire. The voice was distant, crackled. Phoenix immediately realized what it was. The radio. He still had his radio. The voice coming from his right shoulder was Gary’s.
“Beta. Come in Beta. Do you copy?”
The men around the fire looked at him with sour expressions on their faces, curious as to who was speaking through their guest’s coat pocket.
“Sorry,” Phoenix said, standing up. He pulled down the zipper and peeled the collar to the side to grab the radio from the breast pocket where it was attached.
He turned and took a few steps away from the fire, before pressing the button and speaking. “Gary?” He threw all protocol and propriety out the window.
“Oh, thank goodness. You’re alive.” They were breaking all kinds of communications rules now and none of them seemed to care.
Zeke stood up and walked over to where his friend was standing by a large boulder.
“Yeah, we’re alive. But barely.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. We had a run-in with some terrorists on the mountain road.” Zeke leaned closer so he could hear better.
“We saw some of that on the surveillance footage, but it was difficult to see what was going on.”
“What was going on?” Zeke asked. “We were attacked; that’s what was going on.”
Phoenix held up one hand, signaling for his friend to stop talking. He wasn’t pressing the talk button so that Gary wouldn’t have heard anything anyway.
“They ambushed us,” Phoenix explained. “They blocked the road and then surrounded us. They were after whatever it was we were supposed to be taking to Zulu. Except, and this is where I have some questions for our friend, Jessica, the crates in our cargo bay…they were empty. You wouldn’t happen to know why all those huge boxes were empty, would you? I mean, here we are in the middle-of-nowhere Afghanistan on a very dangerous mountain road, covered in snow I might add, and when the guys were trying to avoid stop us and check our payload, they find there’s nothing in there but empty crates. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”
Phoenix tried to temper his anger, but it came out anyway. He wasn’t angry at Gary, at least he didn’t think he should be. Gary was just as much a newbie as he and Zeke with all this. Then again, it was possible he knew something.
“Yeah, apparently there’s more to this mission than any of us thought.”
“I want to talk to Jessica,” Zeke said, the rage bubbling in his tone. “She’s got some explaining to do.”
There was a pause in the communication and then Jessica’s voice cut through the radio. “Listen, you have to believe me, guys. I had no idea this was happening. I didn’t know what they were doing with you two.”
“What they were doing? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The men around the fire were looking at the two Americans with suspicious stares. There was nothing menacing about it. More of a curiosity.
“Because I’ll tell you what I think happened,” Phoenix said. “I feel like we got conned.” Zeke raised both eyebrows and looked at his friend, uncertain if he should be talking like that. He’d never seen Phoenix so pissed before, well not since college anyway. The two had gone through a couple of bad weeks due to a little practical joke Zeke played one day in the cafeteria. At lunch. At the height of busy time.
After grabbing his food from one of the lines, Zeke made his way into the eating area. He saw Phoenix sitting at a table near some pretty coeds. Phoenix waved, figuring his friend hadn’t seen him.
Zeke proceeded to wave back and asked, very loudly, “how’s that rash clearing up?”
Instantly, Phoenix turned beet red and lowered his arm. He sat back down in his seat and couldn’t bury himself deep enough as the giggling ensued all around him.
Zeke hadn’t thought anything of it until he sat down across from his friend and saw the anger in his eyes. For about two weeks, the two didn’t say much to each other, except for Zeke apologizing over and over again for embarrassing his friend. Still, he thought it was funny and didn’t understand what the big deal was. If their situations had been reversed, Zeke would’ve thought it was hilarious—or so he told himself.
That story still made him snort, all these years later and in a strange, foreign land.
Now, Zeke was seeing the same anger his friend had expressed that day in the cafeteria. He was absolutely furious.
“I understand,” Jessica said. “And I think you’re right.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Phoenix was nearly shouting now. “We were all…oh.” He caught himself. “You agree?”
“Yes. And you two weren’t the only ones that were duped. Gary and I were, too. They didn’t tell us anything about this. You guys were….” S
he caught herself. “This channel may not be secure,” she said. “We’ll tell you what’s going on when we get there. We need your location.”
“Location?” Phoenix asked. “I don’t know where we are. We were on the mountain and then ran down into the valley after the explosion took out the truck. We’re somewhere at the base of the mountain.”
“Okay,” she said. “We can work with that. We have the wreckage of the truck pinpointed. Once we find it, we can get down there to you. Are you safe? Do you need anything to eat, water, any supplies?”
“I could use a massage,” Zeke said, noticing his friend had pressed the radio button to respond.
Phoenix shook his head in derision. “No, we’re okay. The villagers in this place are taking good care of us. They’re allies, it seems. One of them speaks perfect English. They’ve given us food, tea, and a warm fire. We’ll be okay until you arrive.”
“Okay, well that’s good.” She sounded like she would take any small wins she could get at this point. “Stay where you are. I’ll have Gary try to locate this village. You said it was down the mountain in the valley?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Phoenix went back to being respectful, letting go of his anger for the moment. From the sound of it, there was going to be plenty of that to go around when they got back to base. “So, you’re sending a team to get us?” He tried not to sound too hopeful.
“No,” she said pointedly. “We are the team.”
“What? What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means Gary and I are on our way to get you. Major Paige doesn’t know about this, although I’d say by now he probably does.”
“Whoa,” Zeke chimed in. “They stole a military vehicle?”
“We procured transportation without notifying the Major. Let’s just say I had to pull a little rank.” That wasn’t necessarily the correct terminology. She didn’t have military rank, though she did have a measure of authority since she was there on the direct order of the GIC.
“We should be there within the hour, as long as this weather holds up. Hopefully, it won’t start snowing again, although the radar shows there is another front coming in from the west.”
“Great.”
“Stay put and we’ll be there soon.”
“And then what?”
“And then we get out of here.”
16
Achmed Naharajar watched as the single cargo truck rumbled down the snow-covered mountain road. He was sitting in one of his favorite lookout spots in the Hindu Kush mountains. He’d not been able to go farther into the range to see what else it had to offer in the way of vistas and scenery, but for the small portion of it he had seen, this was the best place to be.
He was situated between a couple of large boulders, high atop a mountain slope. The vantage point gave him a good view down onto the road and he could see almost a mile of it, which enabled him to detect new convoys or other vehicles from far away.
This one was a military truck.
It was well disguised, designed to look like a bus, but there was no mistaking what it really was. No buses he’d seen had wheels and tires like that, or that many axles. It was a truck that had been made to look like something else, which was enough to raise Achmed’s suspicions the second he saw it.
He raised his binoculars and looked into the cabin. Even from that distance, he could see there were only two occupants. You couldn’t make out much more detail than that, but he didn’t need to. This was clearly a military vehicle and it was transporting something important. Why else would the Americans go to such lengths to disguise a truck like this? They hadn’t done a very good job, though it could’ve been a school bus and he still would’ve been suspicious. Actually, that would’ve made him more suspicious.
He and his men had been told to watch this road for just such an anomaly. He’d been there for days, their camp just on the other side of the ridge above. It had been cold, inhospitable, and seven kinds of uncomfortable. His leader, Malar Ackbar, had told Achmed and his men that he believed the United States Army was up to something. They’d received a transmission regarding a critical shipment that would be heading through the mountains soon.
In his wisdom, Ackbar hadn’t believed the transmission entirely. There was no way they were that lucky. Someone was trying to trick them. Luckily, Ackbar had an extremely wealthy backer, one that helped them get reliable information when they needed it. They had a source on the inside, someone that was feeding them information about troop movements, weapons resupplies, and other essential shipments.
So far, the mole hadn’t let them down and every score had been bigger than the last. This time, the inside guy promised that this would be their most crucial interception to date. He wouldn’t elaborate as to what was on board the truck, but he spoke about it as though it was almost as powerful as obtaining a black-market nuclear weapon.
Achmed pulled up his radio and pressed the button. “You have the truck in sight?” he asked in Arabic.
“Yes, sir. We see it.”
“Set up the blockade. Don’t let them pass.”
“You want us to kill the men on board?”
“No,” Achmed said. “I need to speak with them first.”
“Very well.”
“I’ll be there soon. Don’t open the back until I arrive. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Achmed clipped the radio to his belt again and took one last look down at the truck as it rolled along the winding mountain road.
The plan was simple. About a half mile away, his men were setting up a roadblock of snow that would keep the truck from proceeding. It was easy enough, and it took less than twenty minutes with the help of some machinery. He knew that Malar Ackbar had done the same thing on the other road about twenty miles to the west. The plan was to divide their forces and block both roads just in case the information they received wasn’t accurate.
He hadn’t heard anything out of Ackbar in the last few hours, but at his most recent check, the boss was still there, waiting to pounce on any military truck that tried to foolishly pass through the mountains.
Satisfied that his men had the situation under control, Achmed picked up his rucksack, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and began the descent down the goat path through the snow and rocks toward the bend in the road.
He could already see the artificial snowdrift his men had constructed. Just behind it were two SUVs and two pickup trucks. If this delivery vehicle was carrying anything valuable, the pickups would be instrumental in getting the loot back to their main camp.
Achmed allowed himself to visualize the camp for a moment. It was a few miles to the east, in one of the valleys where the cold didn’t hit so hard. It was easily fifteen degrees warmer there and he longed to be back there in the cave and his warm bed. He never thought he’d long to be in a cave, but here he was, dreaming about it as though it was some kind of paradise.
They had tents and other things around the entrance to the cave. Keeping the area secure was, after all, imperative. If any of these infidels stumbled onto the location, they would assume it was a nomadic group of herders or something, not a group of militants bent on destroying everything the Western military was trying to do here. They kept their weapons close by but also hidden from view while in the camp. As long as any satellites or spy planes didn’t identify it as a terrorist training facility, they’d be fine.
Ackbar had recruited Achmed a few years ago, and the two became close friends almost immediately. Ackbar trusted him with more and more responsibility as time passed, and now Achmed was running his own unit. He had two dozen men under his command and the freedom to strike the enemy whenever he saw fit.
He’d come from nothing, a poor kid from Kabul with no direction and no purpose. Education wasn’t for him, at least not in the formal sense of the word. He had no desire to go to university and get a degree. He simply wanted to live free, and Ackbar’s corps provided that freedom for him. It also allowed him to fight for it
.
Turns out, he was a good fighter, a good warrior, and a brilliant strategist, which was something in short supply as far as they were concerned.
He came around a curve in the goat path and could see the roadblock in greater detail. He looked back to his right and noted the position of the cargo truck as it approached the blockade. The driver wouldn’t see it until it was too late. Achmed knew there were four of his best men waiting on the near side of the road, waiting to jump out and cut off any possible retreat.
He picked up the pace now, still careful to keep low and out of sight as he maneuvered down the mountain. His boots slipped a little in the snow, but he’d been doing this a long time. Achmed had lived in these mountains for the better part of two years, only getting out into civilization whenever necessary. He rarely went to the cities anymore, allowing some of the lower functionaries to handle pick-ups and deliveries. Going on supply runs wasn’t really his thing anymore. He was far above that.
This was his home now, the mountains and the wild terrain. The fresh cold air in winter and the warm, dry air in the summer filled not just his lungs, but his sense of being.
The truck gently applied its brakes as it came around the bend and the driver saw the wall of snow blocking their way. Achmed was nearly to the road as his men sprang from their positions and cut off the rear.
He stepped down onto the snow-covered pavement and marched toward the four men standing at the back of the truck. Four more popped up in front of the vehicle, emerging from the top of the snowbank.
They aimed their weapons into the cab of the truck and started shouting at the driver and the other occupant.
Achmed smiled. “Too easy,” he said to himself.
He strode up to the four men in the rear and watched as the driver climbed out of the cab first, then the passenger.
Both men had their hands up, reaching for the sky. They were wearing coats, pants, and boots, looking like they were locals, but Achmed knew better. These two were Americans; soldiers on a delivery mission. Now they were about to die.
“Hello,” Achmed said in his best English. He’d learned much of it in school, but polished his use of the language through conversations with Malar. He waved his hand at the driver and smiled behind his mask. “Where are you going?”
Operation Zulu Page 12
