by Ron Lealos
Movement on a far hill. Within seconds, the profiles of five men, walking slowly across the horizon. Sky framing their steps behind the rocks. Flowing pants, sleeveless orders, and fleece-lined jackets, beards, turbans, and AK74Ms. Two of the men had Soviet-made RGD5 grenades on criss-crossed bandoleers strapped to their chests. A black-and-white spotted dog loped along in front of the men. As they came down the rocky hillside, their grayness blended with the terrain. It was only the change in the shadows that allowed us to track them. They were early.
The old woman looked up, staring at the men, and covered her face with a black shawl. Still running in the gravel, the boys hadn’t noticed the arrivals. “Stana,” she barked. Inside. “Ak-nun.” Now. The boys stopped, stood still, and followed the old woman’s gaze to the approaching men. No further hesitation. They moved toward a tent near the baked mud hut, opened the flaps, and disappeared.
A nudge from Thorsten. I followed his stare a hundred meters left of the descending men. Coming over the ridge, six more in identical uniforms. Just as well-armed and cautiously moving. Something had to be important. Men like them rarely moved about during daylight. They would be easy targets for any soldiers from a dozen countries keeping peace in a land that had never lost a war.
Within minutes, they were exchanging bear hugs and cheek kisses in the open area in front of the hut, Kalashnikovs dangling from shoulder straps. Our headsets were filled with “khudai de mal sha.” May God be with you.
Not even the ever-present vultures were circling overhead. The sheep had stopped grazing. A silent messenger must have told every living thing in this kill zone that violence was near. The dog nestled against the wall of the hut, panting shallowly and watching. Nothing but the men moved. The constant, low howl of the mountain wind through the valley ended, and the only noise came from the hissing under our earplugs. It was deathly silent.
The turbaned men went into the hut; one man stayed outside with his AK, scanning the hillsides. We switched from the parabolics to the ASB1200 listening-device receivers. Thorsten wouldn’t know what he was hearing, only alert to the name “Osama.”
The voices were clear, and I heard them easily. They spoke quietly of lost comrades and past campaigns. Soldier’s stories. Mostly, talk was about their glorious victory over the Russian heathens. Much of it I understood, but there were words beyond my Pashto vocabulary. Even if anything came out of their mouths that would give the intel guys a boner, I knew I wasn’t going to pass it on, especially now that a young man had made his way down the mountainside, leading a flock of sheep thin enough to hear their ribs creak. He bowed to the guard and went inside the tent.
Thorsten kept glancing at me, a question on his face. He wanted to know if it was time to phone home. Or if we should just crawl up and lob a few M67 grenades into the hut, followed by a shitstorm from the Heckler & Koch G36 semi-automatics. I kept shaking my head, acting as if nothing worthy of an execution was being said.
Even this high in the lower Safed Koh Mountains, the rising sun made it uncomfortable to lay out in the open while covered by a camo blanket. Behind, and much higher, the land was filled with pine, larch, and yew. Here, it was even more barren than the Mojave. Not even bushes. The earth only grew rocks in these parts. Earthquakes regularly hit the area, but we weren’t in danger of being crushed by falling building material. Only boulders. The smell of burning meat came from a cooking fire, the smoke disappearing in the breeze as soon as it escaped the tent’s vent. The dry chalky scent of the earth coated my nostrils and made me want to sneeze. Thorsten was getting itchy; he was a bigger problem than the ants that had found their way into my crotch.
The military feasted on men like Thorsten. Men who found killing a suspected enemy to be as carefree as snuffing a dog. While there were others like me, wondering whether Hamid Karzai’s job with Unocal—before being named puppet President of Afghanistan—had anything to do with our lying in the dust, rocks poking into our balls, ready to waste more threats to the oil supply. Sometimes, a few of us would get together for a bull session. Now that the Pentagon seemed to be run by an arm of the Church of Pat Robertson, these gatherings felt more like those of Jews secretly huddling in Nazi Germany. I was only invited to the séance because Snyder heard me question a Captain about his command to “waste a few ragheads today. And keep it off CNN.” I was only a guest among grunts. Since my first landing at the base, a hundred years ago, I had become someone the CIA wouldn’t want talking to the media—or defending the motherland and its greed for a full fuel tank with a load of smack in the arm.
What I saw of the Taliban and their insanity—not the visions of 9/11 or the threat of court marshal—kept me going out on these ops every day. As the noose tightened again, especially in the south, girls were killed for going to school. Teachers and anyone hinting at intellectual or artistic pursuits were being murdered. If you weren’t part of the Taliban tribe, it was better to stay behind mud walls. If you were female, to go out was tempting death.
While I didn’t want to kill anymore just so Aunt Margaret could drive her old Cadillac to Wal-mart, something had to be done to stop the evil of the Taliban. And their bloody brothers, the al-Qaeda. But I couldn’t kill any more innocents, especially in a land where guilt was easy to prove when the judge’s sentence had already been given. Picking a guilty party in this death dance was nearly impossible for me.
I tightened my earplugs and listened to the sucking sounds that come from men passing a hookah and the slurps of Kahva green tea.
Nothing more sinister than the gathering of a clan. A heavily armed one. “Hawaa,” weather, was the most used word after “Allah.” This reunion could have been in front of the fireplace back in Kansas, chatting about the latest blizzard, if it weren’t for the Kalashnikovs. In Millard, they were Smith & Wessons.
Beside me, Thorsten was becoming more anxious. Could be the Dexedrine he swallowed for performance enhancement, aggravated by the urge to put another notch on his Heckler & Koch. The medics handed the little tablets out like white M&Ms and called them “go-pills,” the opposite of the red “no-go pills” that let sleep come when the nightmares kept you awake, but that never stopped the daymares. In a lecture back at Camp Perry, a suit from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), explained: “In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a twenty-first century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance across the whole range of potential US military employments.” So, boys, go out and butcher. You’ll rule the world without feeling tired or losing focus. Back at base, we’ll keep the dreams away with better sleep through chemistry.
Thorsten’s twitches could’ve also been a product of blood lust, the mantra of “kill” lingering from his days of bayoneting turbaned dummies at boot camp. The cocktail of uppers and brainwashing made him the perfect mindless killer. No conscience to weight his stoned soul. No hesitation when a target of opportunity was available. No self-doubt to cloud a murderous perspective. He stared at me, a vein in his neck pulsing to the beat of a mind aching to waste a few al-Qaeda.
“You fuckin’ ready yet?” Thorsten asked. “Or you gonna let ’em call a camel and ride on outta here, candyass?” He jabbed me in the shoulder with the butt of his H & K.
Just then, one of the voices from inside the mud hut, loudly said “Osama.” Thorsten’s head snapped toward the hovel, dislodging his ear-piece. Osama was one of the few words or names from Arabic or Pashto he knew, other than “Khra oghaya,” go fuck a donkey. That greeting was used often when he strolled though a village and legless beggars, victims of Russian land mines, held out their hands.
“You hear that?” he asked. “Time to call in the Drones.” He reached for the transmit button on his FS 5000 radio.
I grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“Not yet,” I said. “Lots of Osamas here. Could be an uncle.” I gripped harder as Thorsten tried to pull his fingers away. “Let me listen a little long
er.”
“Fuck you, Morgan,” he said. “You know these hadjis are plannin’ to grease somebody. And I ain’t gonna let ’em.” He jerked his hand free, trying again to get to his transmitter.
The silenced .22 Hush Puppy was on the rocks close to me. It was never far away. Early on in-country, I’d learned the value of quiet rather than the use of overwhelming weapons superiority to perform my job. An M67 grenade or a burst from an H & K wasn’t quiet. All the Indians in the vicinity immediately knew my location. The soft phhuuuppp of the Hush Puppy didn’t even wake the babies. I pushed the muzzle into Thorsten’s side.
“Not just yet, pardner,” I said. “I’d hate to have to leave you bleedin’ for the locals. They like to slowly cut off body parts before layin’ you out for the vultures.” I shoved the pistol harder. “Just be patient. Besides, as the Fobbits say, ‘I’m in command.’”
Thorsten made a move for his Ka-Bar knife, his most trusted tool. I pressed the Hush Puppy until I felt Thorsten’s Kevlar vest firm against his ribs and he softly groaned. “Don’t think for a heartbeat you can get that Ka-Bar out quicker than it takes a .22 slug to reach your lungs,” I said.
Hatred. The look Thorsten gave me could have been reserved for the grunt who mailed Thorsten’s mother pictures of him holding a lifeless, bloody mujahedeen by his turban, grinning. Thorsten found that soldier and set fire to his bunk using a teaspoonful of C-4 and a remote detonator. While the grunt was in it.
“Don’t,” I said. “We’re not phonin’ for the Predators ’til we’ve got something solid. I’m not gonna have more dead kids’ eyes keepin’ me awake, even if I don’t care as much about the men in the hut. Those Hellfire missiles don’t discriminate by age.”
Not the time or place for this argument. And I knew Thorsten would make sure that, no matter whether these hadjis and their children were vaporized, my traitorous chickenshit attitudes were punished.
Stand-off. Thorsten continued to stare, knowing I was one glance away from his chance to transmit the “go” signal to the Drones. And he was absolutely sure I wouldn’t shoot him. He smiled. And reached for the call button.
“Echo 16,” he said into the mic. “This is Regestan 1. Confirm coordinates and begin descent. Out.”
We both knew the Drones were circling overhead, waiting for just those words to rain death from the safety of their cockpits. It was all in the ops plan. Thorsten was the radioman and designated to call in the airstrike. We had already taken pictures of those doomed hadjis earlier through the long-range lens of the LIVAR 400. Intel would certainly be able to match them up to blurred shots of other bad guys, adding to the body count of terrorists, even if this party was just a celebration of a cousin’s birthday.
“Roger, Regestan 1,” Echo 16 said. “Site 94. We’ll be there in 30. Keep your heads behind a rock. Out.”
Thirty seconds and the mud hut, tent, dogs, goats, women, children, and soon-to-be-designated-dead terrorists would be staining the high desert with their blood.
I jumped to my feet and screamed toward the hut, “Dzghelem. American alwateka. Dzghelem.” Run. American airplane. Run.
I could hear the Drones in the distance. I yelled again. The outside guard was pointing his Kalashnikov in my direction, trying to sight my profile in the darkness. The door opened, and armed men ran out, the guard pointing in my general area.
Thorsten pulled hard at my leg. “Get down,” he hissed. “Even if the hadjis don’t shoot you, the Hellfires’ll splatter your shit.”
The men below were all raising their rifles. The first bullet hit in the dirt ten yards to my right. The next was closer. Splinters of rock stung my arm, and I dropped to the ground.
The Drones arrived.
A whush and, a nanosecond later, the world turned orange.
The mountains were white-capped dragons in the moonlight, shadowed peaks threatening like columns of frozen gargoyles. Winds and high altitude made the Little Bird buck and dip as if we were on the Tilt-a-Whirl at the Millard County Fair. Orion was bright and clear, a perfect constellation for two hunters on a night ride back to base. It was cold, and I shivered in the back seat of the Bird, not knowing if I would be on the way to the nearest detention facility, a court martial on my docket. Probably not, though. Today, I was only “assigned” to Special Forces Afghanistan and not really a grunt. The people I worked for would rather shoot traitors than have any kind of public trial. Easy to arrange an “accident” in a country littered with Russian butterfly landmines disguised as pieces of candy and IEDs planted wherever infidel Americans traveled.
Thorsten was buckled in next to me, all the high-tech gear making his shoulder straps squeal with each dive of the chopper. We hadn’t spoken much since the Drones sanitized the hut. Not our job to pick through the rubble. That was the duty of intelligence forensics. But they made us hang around through most of the night. We were to bring home the proof these hadjis were truly worthy of evaporation. Make another dot on the computer-generated map, displaying where the bad guys had been terminated. Tell the Washington Post of another small victory against evil without civilian or coalition casualties.
I didn’t want any part of it. And Thorsten knew.
Still, this didn’t make him a target. At least a sentence to some remote CIA outpost far from this war would mean I wouldn’t have to creep up on more victims in the night. Or snuff Thorsten while he slept on his cot to keep him from spreading the news his teammate had gone over to the turban side.
Inside the concertina wire of the compound, Thorsten led me toward the Special Forces de-briefing tent like this was the Inquisition. He was the judge. Me, the already-condemned heretic. The verdict was completely in the hands of Thorsten. Bad guys had been blown to oblivion, and the mission’s success had surely been designated “achieved by command.”
Early morning sunlight crept over the Salang Mountains, soon to warm the brown rocks of the desert plain below. Choppers, in from night ops, rotors turning in the breeze, were wheeled into the mechanic’s area for servicing. Uniformed grunts walked toward the mess tent, rubbing sleep from their eyes. As always, white-backed vultures circled overhead, awaiting delivery of delicacies to the base dump. The crystalline air smelled of diesel, jet fuel, grease, and pancakes. A dry wind sucked moisture out of anything liquid that dared exist in this arid land. And I trailed behind my escort, wondering if it was the last time for a long while I would be walking without handcuffs, if I was upright at all.
Inside the debriefing tent, light from computers and desk lamps cast shadows on the dark-green walls. Hatless men hunkered over screens and sipped from coffee mugs; no one paid us any attention. Thorsten sat at one end of a portable conference table, his helmet on the floor next to him. He stripped off the rest of his gear and gently created a pile. It was SOP to immediately report here after a mission, but no one seemed in any hurry to begin the interrogation. I sat two chairs away from Thorsten, not bothering to remove my helmet or anything else. The closest soldier other than him was ten yards away.
“Don’t worry, spook,” Thorsten whispered. “All I’m gonna tell ’em is we smoked a nest of al-Qaeda, just like we were ordered. But, you owe me, cowboy. And I got a little somethin’ I need help with. You’re gonna be mine ’til I set you free.” He grinned. “Alright with you?”
Not much of a decision. For now. I nodded my head.
“You do have a brain, Morgan,” Thorsten said. “I was havin’ my doubts. We’ll rap later.”
Two men moved toward us, one with Captain’s bars, the other in civilian clothes. The one with tan slacks and a white Oxford shirt was Dunne, a hydraulic engineer in Afghanistan to help the locals with water-supply issues. At least, that’s what his papers read. Reality was CIA sector chief for Central and Southern Afghanistan and the spook that had sent me out with Thorsten. War in Afghanistan had brought an unparalleled cooperative spirit between the Company and the military. They used each other like petroleum giants joined together to fight the terror of electric f
uel cells. CIA operatives did much of the up-close wet work and groomed Afghan assets. If the mission called for more firepower or an operative needed assistance, the Army was recruited.
No cuddling. No foreplay.
“What did you hear out there?” Dunne asked, standing across the table, a clipboard in his hands. Dunne’s hair was even shorter than the Captain’s beside him. The sector chief was fit and filled his button-down as if he’d spent many of his forty-plus years in the Langley weight room. It was hard for the Company potbellies to get respect from Army robots; Dunne’s physique was part of what brought him this delicate assignment whoring with the military.
Unless I hacked into the Company network, something well beyond my level of computerese, intel on superiors like Dunne was limited to gossip among the ghosts of the spook world. There was little making the camp rounds about Dunne except the extent of his professional focus and lack of a sense of humor. My interactions with the station head were limited and strictly on purpose. Geo-political discussions were rare, and I knew very little about Dunne’s history. The topic was primarily who needed killing and how it would be accomplished. While I understood he was doing his job, something about the cold secretiveness of his responses bothered me.
This camp sector was Special Operations Group. None of the cripples in the regular Army were allowed to bring down the testosterone level. Only, and reluctantly, quasi-civilians like me and Dunne. Thorsten was part of the tribe of brotherly killers trained to be the Army’s assassins, and he drew waves of congratulations from any of his soul mates who walked by. He ignored Dunne’s question and leaned back in his chair, an “I just killed me a wild Injun” grin on his face.
