Pashtun

by Ron Lealos

  “They were mostly discussing last winter’s blizzards and hoping it didn’t get as bad this year,” I said. “One of ’em did use the name ‘Osama,’ and Thorsten thought that was enough to call in the drones.”

  No use denying anything. It wasn’t my voice on the recording talking to the Drones. I stared at Dunne, waiting to hear where, if anyplace, the questions were headed.

  I didn’t need to worry. The hot wash was minimal. Surprisingly, Dunne’s interrogation wasn’t up to the in-depth level common to his normal debriefings. I figured it was because there were too many other missions still on the board to bother with one that had already been accomplished. Now, all I had to do was deal with Thorsten.

  We were released after fifteen minutes and handed over our cameras and much of the wizard gear.

  As usual, the base was jumping like there was a war on. Jeeps dodged soldiers and news cameramen while sentries manned towers framed by distant mountain tops, everything engulfed in a background of piercing blue sky. Choppers offloaded tired grunts, ground crews waved their arms. Overhead, an unmanned Predator circled, sending back real-time data to base command and making sure the hostiles were asleep in their caves. In a far corner, the elephant cage sprouted stalks of antenna arrays surrounded by a circular chain-link fence, and an engineer was adjusting one of the dishes. Probably trying to tune in FOX News so the ops center would know what was really happening. Thorsten walked beside me toward the Green Beret tents, the last bit of a superior smile on his lips.

  “Let’s head to the gedunk and get us a treat after we stow our gear,” Thorsten said. “I’m jones’n for some a’ those red sprinkles on vanilla ice cream.”

  Cute. He thought he had my ass and all he had to do was twitch to make me quiver.

  “I don’t want ice cream,” I said. “And I’m not your bitch. What do you want?”

  The smile got bigger, and Thorsten turned toward me, doing a little shuffle with his desert boots.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Morgan,” he said. “With all that ed-u-ca-tion, you’re sure a dumb fuck. You are my bitch. And tonight, me and my buddies are gonna gang bang your ass.”

  Faking a stumble, I dropped to one knee, head down like I was about to faint.

  Thorsten bent over to help, a hand on my shoulder. He believed he was quicker and more accurate than me with his Ka-Bar, but the end of my knife was in his groin before he could finish asking “What’s the matter with you?” The blade was hidden by his baggy pants and my camo-fatigued arms. Our little waltz was unremarkable in a place like this, where incoming mortars weren’t cause for agitation unless they fell within fifty yards. I pressed just hard enough to cut through the fabric and touch skin.

  “Listen up, troop,” I hissed. “You know what I do for a living. You’ll be cold and dead with just a little drop of blood on your forehead in the morning. None of your buddies will hear a thing or know how it happened. You won’t be answerin’ reveille.”

  Thorsten tried to stand, but I pushed the tip until I knew it was drawing blood. He froze.

  One thing about all that training—I was good. Even if Thorsten outweighed me by forty pounds and was much stronger, I knew I could take him. Too many Special Forces muscle heads had tried before, grinning all the way until their faces hit the ground. And with a knife, no one was better. If I wanted, my next posting could be in the woods at Camp Perry, giving hand-to-hand instructions and doing tricks with a Ka-Bar.

  “That’s twice today you’ve threatened me, Morgan, “Thorsten said. “You’re gonna have to make good soon, or you’ll be the one in the body bag flyin’ home to momma.” But he didn’t move — just snarled like Saddam in his hidey hole.

  I held the pressure on the knife, wiggling it gently.

  “If I move this Ka-Bar even an inch,” I said, “you’ll need a sex change. I just want it clear where we stand. You told your story back at the ops center. Kinda’ hard ta go back now. They might wonder which one of your versions is the truth. You’ve got nuthin’ on me. That means we can still be friends. Doesn’t it, Thorsten?” Another wiggle.

  A jeep stopped next to us. Two soldiers, one with a medic armband, sat in the front.

  “Need any help?” the medic asked.

  I turned toward the jeep, leaving the knife right where it was. Thorsten didn’t look at them, a concerned grimace on his face.

  “No thanks, doc,” I said. “Just a touch of altitude sickness. I’ll be alright in a minute.” I smiled.

  The medic gave a little wave, and they drove off.

  Thorsten still hadn’t moved.

  “Alright,” he said. “We’re straight. For now. I wasn’t gonna rat you out to the guppies anyway. I was gonna save it for all your mates who don’t wanna live with a traitor spoilin’ the party. Maybe we’ll get a chance to settle this for good later, Morgan.”

  Morgan. Not my real name. My real name was buried back in a file at Langley. I was the first and only since Vietnam to be given this handle. It was legend. No one after Frank Morgan had passed though CIA training with more distinction than me. It was expected I would live up to the celebrity of the most deadly assassin in the Company’s history. Of course assassin was a description never used. I was just another Company asset. Even if Frank Morgan’s tour ended under a cloud, no one had brought fear to the hootches of Vietnam like “gan con ran,” the Night Snake. The bounty on his head surpassed the budget of a battalion of NVA. No Viet Cong knew what he looked like. They only knew of his calling card: a cobra carved from shrapnel and available at trinket stands throughout ’Nam. I wasn’t into the theatrics of psychological warfare and hoped my legend never approached the Night Snake’s. But, at the moment, I didn’t mind any comparisons made between me and my namesake.

  The knife was back in its sheath before I stood up. A spot of red was growing on Thorsten’s crotch.

  “No,” I said. “If I hear even the slightest bit of talk about what went down today, you won’t have a chance for salvation. Best you forget.”

  Stalemate. I was one of the spooks even the most hardened Special Forces troops feared. Their training was well known and established, while we were always veiled in secrecy and magic, a reputation the Company had groomed from the early days. What they did know was this: anyone who crossed us was disappeared. Usually, in the night.

  Thorsten nodded with that crooked grin on his face, letting me know it wasn’t over. We walked toward our tents.

  As we approached his compound, Thorsten put his arm over my shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make the bones rub together.

  “After you get done stickin’ pins in dolls and sacrificin’ one a’ those mangy camp cats, come on over and join us real soldiers for a beer,” Thorsten said.

  The spooks, me included, didn’t bunk with the military. We had our own sector. Separate and divided by a cloud of mythology, we didn’t mix often unless it was orders. There weren’t that many of us, and the Army personnel rarely even dared to look in our direction, fearing some kind of spell would surely steal their souls. I was just a corn-fed Kansas boy, but I would never convince those outside our compound I was anything less than the anti-Christ.

  Twisting gently away from Thorsten’s grip, I walked away.

  We probably wouldn’t meet alive again. Not after last night.

  The stars winked in the clear night sky so close I thought I could reach out, take hold, and put them in my pocket. Below, one of the normal power outages. The dimmed light came from campfires and lanterns. Another post-midnight Bird ride. The cabin was in near-total darkness. This time, it was a CIA Bird and we were flying as silent as technology allowed.

  “Urgent,” I was told. And classified as too sensitive even for the Pentagon to know about this mission. The target was a local shopkeeper in Jalalabad. I was dressed in baggy trousers, a white Nehru collared shirt, a sleeveless jacket, and a turban. The three days of growth on my chin hopefully gave me enough cover to pass as a local in the dark. Insertion was in the suburbs
of the city, and I would have to make my way alone. Curfew would make this even more difficult, but I had done it several times. Before I killed the shopkeeper, Badam Chinar, I would persuade him to tell me who his Army contacts were. Intel said he was the ringleader of a Taliban cell supporting arms acquisition with the fruit of the poppy fields and marketing the heroin through US Army personnel. The reports were verified by numerous informants and convincing enough to set aside any doubts. Intel even had recordings of cell-phone messages discussing pricing with a man speaking American English in a northeastern drawl and using military speak.

  Ten minutes to drop off.

  Ten minutes to think.

  Near the end of his time in ’Nam, my namesake, Frank Morgan, had became disillusioned like so many in-country. Surprisingly, his post-tour questioning didn’t taint him with the spook management team, who cherished results over attitude. We were on the same career path. Being on a “need to know” basis didn’t keep information from filtering into my brain. Ultimately, I understood I was in Afghanistan to protect America’s ability to gas up at its leisure and continue to allow petroleum-industry executives on the golf courses of their private clubs. Somehow, on the path of discovery, I had realized heroin was in the mix.

  The foreign media had reported the connection between the puppet leader of Afghanistan and Unocal. As with other stories that tarnished industries so clearly enmeshed in the supposed security interests of the United States, the articles had a short shelf-life in America and were buried in the back pages. Not much was made of Taliban visits to Houston to negotiate a deal to complete a pipeline from the oil fields of the Caspian Sea, nor of the CIA escort of oil engineers to the region the pipeline would cross. Nor the naming by the Bush administration of another former Unocal advisor and Taliban cheerleader, Zalmay Khalilzad, as US envoy to Afghanistan. Oil interests needed a stable government to complete construction, so they orchestrated the ascension of a little-known Unocal consultant, Hamid Karzai, to the presidency of Afghanistan. In the Afghan war against the Russians, Karzai had been an asset of the CIA and in personal contact with the US President, George Bush. In past lives, Karzai had also been a Taliban supporter. After moving to the United States as a reward for his hard work on big oil’s behalf, he was even asked to be the Taliban ambassador to the United Nations. He refused, seeing a more lucrative path as a butt boy of the US administration and the oil industry. These were just a fraction of the facts roiling in my brain as I was sent out to secure the pipeline—a cause we’d spent billions of dollars on that we couldn’t abandon just because of a war or the atrocities committed against women and non-Taliban.

  While this picture was supported only by so-called hatemongers, government bashers, and traitors, I knew it to be the truth. There was no way the Company could keep this information from me as they justified another killing under the guise of “national security.” For a boy from the Republican stronghold of Kansas, believing he was fighting the good fight for all the right reasons, it took an incredible amount of data to convince me I had been deceived. And so had the American people. But I was stuck. And the Taliban were still evil. And heroin was reaching the arms of Americans by way of the Taliban and the US Army. So here I was.

  It was widely reported that Afghanistan was the producer of more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin. The warlords and Taliban who control the country make sure this situation continues. And its stability is maintained and assisted, often unknowingly, by the US military. Supply routes of raw opium and processed heroin use US-made and -improved roads to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Drug convoys are protected by US troops with the assistance, and at the request of, the Afghan military leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. The connections go on and on. The intrigues and high-level power plays are beyond me. Tonight, it’s my job to do just a little to slow the flow of smack reaching the shores of Manhattan.

  The short ride from the CIA-built Tora Bora military camp near Jalalabad ended in a compound on the outskirts of town. In the darkness, the tops of palm trees sagged in the stillness over the razor-wired walls. Rockets and mortars had blown holes in the sides of the buildings, and a man dressed in jeans and a t-shirt backlit by a muted lantern waved me toward an open door.

  The Bird didn’t hesitate and was airborne as I crossed the courtyard, sand and pebbles skittering off my back. The unmarked chopper was gone in seconds, the noise replaced by the barking of a neighborhood dog. Inside the door, I was led into a room filled with maps stuck to dried-mud walls and very little furniture. Only my greeter was present. No guards. They were hidden outside and patrolling the walls. This piece of real estate was one of the most hazardous on Earth, its existence well known. No one got within blocks without proper identification and the day’s password. This was the CIA base in Jalalabad, and my host was Finnen, an Irishman with more scars than skin. We’d collaborated several times, but a nod and a smile substituted for a hug. He was lean, and freckles dotted his face; his forehead creased as he examined a map of Kandahar. Finnen motioned me to a hard backed wooden chair.

  “Pikheyr, Morgan,” he said. Welcome. He was one of the few who had gone beyond “ho,” yes, and “ya,” no, in the local dialect. Or “mrakedal, raghead.” Die. I was fluent compared to Finnen’s limited Pashto vocabulary, though.

  The chair grunted with fatigue and old age when I sat. No weapons to stow, I took the turban off and sat it on a table filled with coffee mugs and a black-screened laptop.

  Finnen rested his Heckler & Koch against another chair and sat.

  “Would offer you a Guinness,” Finnen said, “but the delivery truck got roasted by an IED.”

  The room smelled like moldy sand, cigars, kerosene, and flame-broiled goat kebabs, a remnant from its former life as a kitchen hand. Smoke from the lantern cast shadows on the walls, the designs dancing gently in the slight breeze from the partially open door. The red eyes of a rat peeked from a small hole in the corner, but they quickly disappeared. Not the usual hangout for Company men. I leaned back, and the chair squealed.

  “Not thirsty,” I said. “How is this going down? Not a lot of night left.”

  The time for banter was always after the operation. Finnen was a professional and knew this, but his Irish blarney controlled his mouth.

  “You’d never be accused of talkin’ the teeth out of a saw, Morgan,” he said. “But what would I expect out of a pig but a grunt?” He slapped his hand on his jeans and cackled.

  I didn’t give him the pleasure of a grin; I just stared.

  “When you’re finished,” I said, “maybe we can get to it.”

  “Ah, Morgan,” Finnen said, “when Allah made time, he made plenty of it.” But he reached for a map on the table and scooted his chair closer. He pointed to a mark on the printout.

  “We’re here,” he said. “I’ll take you through the tunnel that’ll bring you out here.” He moved his finger. “Chinar lives there, behind his shop at 16 Angur Street.” Grape. “Whatever business you’ve got, I’m not supposed ta’ know. I’m just to give you directions. There’s lots of chatter on the Company frequency about this hadji. Care to give me an update?”

  I studied the map for a second and twisted to Finnen.

  “You’ll never plow a field by turnin’ it over in your mind,” I said.

  That got another hoot from Finnen.

  “Why I’ll be gawd damned,” he said. “You coulda’ just said no. Seems a touch of the Irish is slitherin’ into your soul. But never give cherries to a pig or advice to a fool, Morgan. Let’s get moving. It’s no use boilin’ your cabbage twice.”

  Finnen was too long between these mud walls, surrounded by hostiles and rock deserts with nobody to talk to, listening to coded messages and lies. It was too obvious he missed the shores of his ancestors, but I knew he was one of the best minders the Company had. We both stood, and he picked up his G36, letting it droop from his hand.

  “Follow me,” he said. “Keep your head down. There’s hardly enough room for a fairy.
”

  The turban was already wound, and I put it on my head, the .22 Hush Puppy snug against my waist, and followed the glow of Finnen’s lantern through a short door in the back of the now-dark room.

  We both had to stoop as we made our way through the tunnel. There were no intersecting shafts, and sometimes it was so narrow, the rough clay rubbed against my arms. No hieroglyphs decorated the walls. Only a few occasional Arabic words painted in white or scratched into the brown sides of the tunnel. The smell was musty. Old. The passageway had been dug a long time before Americans came to keep the peace. Mostly, we went in a straight line with a very few turns, the pitch slightly downward. No conversation. After five minutes, Finnen stopped at a metal ladder. He pointed up toward a wooden trap door with an iron ring attached in the middle.

  “Through there’ll take you into the courtyard of one the local mullahs on our payroll,” Finnen whispers. “He won’t be around. Go through the gate to your right, and you’ll be in a small olive garden. It’ll give you some protection. It’s always watched, and you’ll be clear ’til you make Zerghun Street.” Green. “You know the way from there. I’ll be waiting here in three hours. Don’t be late.” He stepped aside.

  I slid past and started to climb the ladder.

  From below, Finnen said, “May God protect you better than his only son.”

  I hoped he was right.

  Moonlight sliced between the branches of the olive trees and provided the only light in a town under a midnight curfew and a shortage of electricity. The dog still barked, but now the sound was much further away. A breeze, barely more than a breath, rustled the leaves above me. If there were watchers, they were well hidden. Shadows would be easy to follow. They were everywhere. I stayed in the dimmest areas and moved slowly toward Zerghun Street.