by Samuel Fort
Chapter 2 - Afghanistan
Back at his office, Ben Mitchell withdrew a beer from the mini-fridge and plopped down in front of his computer, still in a state of shock. He had been paid ten million dollars in advance for a day’s work, with the promise that the tablets he would be inspecting contained the oldest writing system ever discovered. Swallowing his pride, he had agreed to meet Lilian at her mansion at eight in the morning the following day.
A millionaire. He was a millionaire.
He held his beer in the air and tipped the neck of the bottle in the direction of a photograph on the wall. It was a photograph of him in his Marine dress blues, taken many years ago. A grin on his face, he said, “You’ve come a long way, Corporal Mitchell!”
He had been born just over three decades earlier in Boduska, Colorado, the only child of a tractor parts salesman and a substitute teacher. His father had died of a heart attack when Ben was fourteen years old and his mother had killed herself his senior year by driving drunk off a bridge into river a few miles north of town. There was talk of putting him into the custody of the State since he had no known surviving family, but he turned eighteen before a decision could be made and so he finished school living alone in his deceased parents’ dilapidated two-bedroom home.
A week before he graduated he learned that his mother had been seven months behind in making the house payments and that the bank was going to foreclose. With no particular hopes or aspirations and no money, he did what many poor young men in the area did - he joined the military. It was early in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were running full throttle and the military was begging for volunteers. He had ended up in the Marines for the simple reason that when he had visited the Armed Forced Recruiting offices in Boduska’s only strip mall, it was lunchtime, and the only recruiter who had remained at his post was the Marine recruiter.
Prior to going to boot camp he took the ASVAB and was told he had an aptitude for languages that was off the charts. In fact, the results were so unbelievable that the Department of Defense assumed the results were incorrectly tabulated. The Marines tasked him take the DLAB, or Defense Language Aptitude Battery examination, and when he did the results were even more incredible. He’d aced it, which was technically impossible.
In subsequent interviews with befuddled Marine officers Ben explained that he had always had a knack for languages. He had learned to speak a variety of languages, albeit at the elementary level, by simply watching foreign movies with subtitles. This included German, Hindi, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Italian. The Marines verified this by interviewing him with native speakers from their own ranks. Checking his records they saw that the boy had no formal training on any of the languages he spoke.
The new Marine was promptly assigned the MOS of 2671, or Cryptologic Linguist, Middle East, and was instructed to report the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California to attend a forty-seven week long Pashto-Afghan language class. After that he spent a year in various cryptology courses around the United States, learning to identify, use, and break codes used by foreign governments and militaries in Southwest Asia.
After almost two years of training - his enlistment was for six years - he finally touched down at Kandahar Airfield, usually referred to by its one-syllable nickname, ‘kaf,’ where he spent five months rotating between combat duties in Pashtun tribal areas, diplomatic translator assignments for the State Department, and intelligence analysis missions for the Department of Defense.
But a bad thing had happened about nine months into his tour. He and an Army soldier he had befriended were tasked to serve as translators for some intelligence officials that had flown in from the United States to attend a high level meeting with various tribal leaders in Kabul. The soldier was Eddie Forbes, a Dari linguist from Brooklyn. The plan was for them to fly fixed wings to Bagram Airfield from Kandahar and then continue on to Camp Phoenix, in Kabul, by rotary, but bad weather grounded flights out of Bagram. It was apparently impossible to reschedule the meeting for diplomatic reasons, so the U.S. officials had elected to chance a ground movement.
The convoy to Kabul consisted of five up-armored GMC Suburbans operated by a private security company, with the two officials in the second vehicle, Eddie in the third, and Ben in the fourth. The use of private security firms for non-combat related ground movements was standard protocol, freeing military vehicles and personnel for combat missions. Most of the private security personnel were highly competent former military types who had spent a good portion of their careers “outside the wire.”
Unfortunately, soon after the convoy left KAF, two semi-trailers carrying munitions collided on the main rain road to Kabul, closing it. That was the road they had planned to take since the Afghan National Army and Coalition regularly patrolled it and swept it for roadside bombs. Against the team leader’s objections, the suit in charge directed that an alternate route through a nearby village be used.
That’s where the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED, had ended the young Marine’s military career. The convoy had entered the village along narrow gravel road and was forced to stop when it encountered a dead end not shown on any maps or the GPS display. The Suburban’s drivers were struggling to turn their vehicles around on a road that was hardly wide enough to accommodate them while villagers, donkeys and goats swarmed around them.
As the drivers cursed, Ben saw a junky white Toyota, riding low to the ground, zipping toward the convoy from a side street. He had barked a warning, but it was too late. They were sitting ducks. The VBIED detonated between the second and third vehicles, turning them into modern art. The driver of Ben’s vehicle instinctively slammed on the brakes and turned his steering wheel violently, sending his Suburban careening into a concrete ditch.
Everything after that was a blur. The truck lay diagonally on one side in the ditch. Ben had a vague recollection of knifing through his seatbelt and kicking the door above him open, his ears ringing and blood dripping into his eyes from his forehead. Some angry villagers had appeared and commenced pulling him from truck but he had yelled at them in Pashto and lashed out with his knife, slicing two men. They had dropped him only to start brutally kicking him. His rifle was still in the Suburban and he didn’t carry a pistol, so his only defense was his knife, which he began to swing and thrust angrily.
As the surviving security team members started firing warning shots at the mob, one of Ben’s attackers managed to get behind him and slammed a piece of pipe into the base of his neck. The Marine blacked out. When he regained consciousness minutes later, he saw a severed hand, minus a pinky, lying a few inches from his face in a pool of oil. It bore a stainless steel wedding ring with an engraved golden tribal band. It was Eddie Forbes’ ring.
A mangy brown and black dog appeared from out of nowhere and scooped the remains up in his mouth. The dog glared at Ben menacingly, Eddie’s hand in its mouth, and the Marine had screamed, and continued screaming, in pain and grief, until a member of the security detail from the trailing vehicle appeared and shot the dog and then pummeled the animal’s corpse until it was a lump of meat.
That had made Ben laugh, and the problem was he hadn’t stopped laughing for a long time, or crying, and everyone agreed he was pretty messed up and should be given a one-way ticket back to the States.
Four months later, the medical and psychological evaluations and the paperwork completed, Ben, honorably discharged, sat in a Denver motel watching a commercial about feminine hygiene products with a strawberry milkshake in one hand and a remote in the other.
A painful year of readjustment followed. He suffered long bouts of depression, was easily startled and more easily angered, and often woke from nightmares soaked in sweat. Worse, he found that the mental wall he had built in Afghanistan to insulate himself from the world remained pretty much intact back in the United States. The entire world seemed ‘out there,’ even when he was in it.
&
nbsp; He began to attend Veterans Administration counseling for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. The counseling was no magic bullet but the sessions did, at least, help him to readjust to life in the United States, and they reminded him of what normal people were like. While he was never able to completely restore the humanity he had lost overseas, he did learn how to pretend to be like everyone else. He found that if he did a good enough job of fooling others, he could lead a relatively normal life.
His counselor had encouraged him to find a new “mission,” and toward that end the former Marine had decided to finally tap his sizable college fund to pursue degrees in Near East Languages and Cuneiform studies. While his choice of majors would have seemed peculiar to most, especially for a former ‘jarhead,’ it was a no-brainer to Ben. He had always been interested in history, was familiar with the Middle East and Southwest Asia, had an aptitude for languages, and had been trained to break codes. What other field could make better use of his interests, talents, and experience?
The former linguist immersed himself in the study Assyriology, Hittitology, and Sumerology, but fostered a special passion for undeciphered writing systems, such as Proto-Elamite. He found that the decipherment of esoteric writing systems of extinct languages was very much like breaking military or diplomatic codes of living languages, something the former cryptologic linguist found instinctively appealing. He was the top student in every class he took.
Subsequent to obtaining his doctorate, Ben had accepted a teaching position at a midwestern university, but he soon tired of the rote lessons, the tedious staff meetings and the vanities of his peers. He took a chance and began to freelance, offering his epigraphy, language, and research talents to whoever would pay for them. Fortunately, it did not take him long to develop, through word of mouth and a few well-reviewed publications, a dependable client base of museums, academic institutions, governments, and wealthy artifacts collectors.
The money had not been, until today, anything to brag about, but that hadn’t really mattered. He was motivated by the challenge of deciphering the undecipherable and of being just one insight away from hearing the ancients speak to him. Though it hadn’t happened yet and probably never would, he secretly fostered the hope that someday one those ancients might provide him some key insight; some mind-blowing tidbit of knowledge that would shake the academic world to its core.
Ben smiled and shook his head. Ah, vanity.
He finished off his beer thinking about his new client, Lilian Stratton, a woman who seemed to have it all. She was not only rich but also extraordinarily good-looking and musically gifted. A handsome man, Ben had no problem finding companionship but he had yet to find an emotional match. He wondered if what happened in Afghanistan had made such a match impossible. He wondered, too, what type of men Lilian Stratton dated. The type that owned jets, he decided, and played polo, and went on weekend outings to Greek islands.
He found he was hungry. Scanning his many bookshelves, he decided upon four reference books, which he pulled and dumped into his leather satchel. Placing the Stratton photographs on top, he swung the strap over one shoulder and moved toward the door, pondering languages and cadaverous civilizations and polo.
