Combat Ops

I take a deep breath. “That sounds like an inconvenience.”

“Captain, I know where this is coming from, and I’ve seen it before. You’re angry and upset, but you’d best not forget that I’m all you’ve got right now.”

“I’ll ask you again, do you think I’m guilty?”

She dismisses my question with a wave. “Start at the beginning, and I need to record you.” She reaches into her fancy leather tote bag and produces a small tablet computer with attached camera that she places on the table. The camera automatically pivots toward me.

I make a face at the lens, then rise and head toward the kitchen counter, where my bottle of cheap scotch awaits. I pour myself a glass and return to the table. She’s scowling at me and checks her smartphone.

“Oh, I’m sorry if you don’t have the time for this,” I say, then sip my drink.

“Captain…”

“You got any kids?”

She rolls her eyes. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

“I’m just asking you a question.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

I grin slightly. “How many?”

“I have two daughters.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Can we get on with this now? I assume you know about attorney-client privilege? Anything you share about the mission will remain classified, compartmentalized, and confidential, of course.”

I finish my scotch, exhale through the burn, then narrow my gaze. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I am not a murderer.”

ONE

My target’s name was Mullah Mohammed Zahed, the Taliban commander in the Zhari district just outside the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. His hometown, Sangsar, was located in a rural area along the Arghandab River. The Russians call that place “the heart of darkness.”

Zhari and its small towns were and still are a crucial gateway region to Kandahar and also a staging area for Taliban activity. Commanders often told us that if we could take Zhari, we’d control Kandahar. I’ve been in the military long enough to understand the disparity between wishful thinking and the will of a dedicated and ruthless insurgency.

But again, we didn’t care about the politics or the past or even superstitious Russians. I took my eight-man team to “the ’Stan,” as we call it, and invested in two days of recon using our airborne drones complemented by a local guy feeding us intel from a handful of his eight thousand neighbors. We picked up enough to justify a raid on a mud-brick compound we believed was Zahed’s command post.

“Ghost Lead, this is Ramirez. Jenkins and I are in position, over.”

“Roger that, buddy,” I responded. “Just hold till the others check in.”

I had positioned myself in the foothills, shielded by an outcropping so I could survey the maze of dust-caked structures through my Cross-Com. The combination monocle-earpiece fed me data from my teammates as well as from the drone and the satellite uplinks. The targeting computer could identify friend or foe on the battlefield, and at that moment, red outlines were appearing all over the grid like taillights in a traffic jam.

Prior to our operation, General Keating, commander of United States Special Operations Command (USSO- COM) in Tampa, Florida — the big kahuna for grunts like me — had been talking a lot about COIN, or counterinsurgency operations. Keating had expressed his concern that Special Forces in the area might’ve already exhausted their usefulness because the Army’s new philosophy was to protect the people and provide them with security and government services rather than venturing out to hunt down and eradicate the enemy. We were to win over the hearts and minds of the locals by improving their living conditions. Once we made them our allies, we could enlist their help in gathering human intelligence on our targets. In many cases, intel from those locals made all the difference.

Nevertheless, I remember Lieutenant Colonel Gordon, our Ghost Commander, having several four-letter words to describe how effective that campaign would be. As a Special Forces combatant, he believed, like I once did, that you needed to spend most of your time teaching the people how to fight so that after we left they could defend themselves. However, if their enemies were too great or too overwhelming, then we should go in there like surgeons and cut out the cancer.

Zahed, our commanders believed, was the cancer. What they hadn’t realized was how far the disease had spread.

“Ghost Lead, this is Treehorn. In position, over.”

Doug Treehorn was the sniper I’d brought along, much to the chagrin of Alicia Diaz, my regular operator. Alicia had done tours in Afghanistan before, and I’d had no qualms about taking her along, despite the challenges of being female in a nation where women were treated… let’s just say differently. That she had taken a fall and broken her ankle two weeks before being shipped out ruined my initial game plan.

Treehorn was good, but he was no Diaz.

The others reported in. We had the complex cordoned off, and with Less Than Lethal (LTL) rubber rounds to stun guards before we gassed them into unconsciousness, the plan was to neutralize Zahed’s force, then slip soundlessly inside the compound and capture the man himself. No blood spilled. Special Forces surgery. I mean, could we make it any more politically correct? We were going in there to take out a man whose soldiers routinely blew themselves up at the local bazaars, but we were trying our best not to hurt anyone.

Well, I’d told my guys that if push came to shove, we’d go live. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that, if only to meet the challenge. As I’d told the others before ascending the mountains, “This is not rocket science. And it ain’t over till the fat man sings.” Zahed was pushing three hundred pounds, according to intelligence photos and video, and we planned to make him sing all about Taliban operations in the region, including the smuggling of IEDs manufactured in Iraq and rumors about Chinese and North Korean electronic shipments into the country.

I know I’m making Zahed sound like a real scumbag, but at that time, things seemed pretty clear. But I hadn’t been there long enough, and I never thought for one second that we Ghosts and the rest of our military might be causing more damage than anyone else. We were there to help.

“All right, Ghosts, let’s move out.”

I issued a voice command so that my computer would patch me into the Cross-Com cameras of the others, and I watched as the guards fell like puppets. Thump. Down. And then my men, who wore masks themselves, hit the bad guys with quick shots from a new CS gas gun we were fielding. The gun issued a silent burst into an enemy’s face.

Ramirez crouched before the lock on the front gate while I rushed down from my position and joined him. It was a cool desert night. A couple of dogs barked in the distance. Laundry flapped like sails on long lines that spanned several nearby buildings. The faint scent of lamb that had been roasted on open fires was getting swallowed in the stench of the CS gas. I checked my heads-up display: two twenty A.M. local time. You always hit them in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping. Again, not rocket science.

Ramirez, our expert cat burglar, picked the lock with his tool kit and lifted his thumb in victory. I shifted into a courtyard as Treehorn whispered in my earpiece: “Two tangos. One to your right, up near that far building, the other to your left.”

“See them,” I said, the Cross-Com flashing with more signature red outlines that zoomed in on each guard. Like most Taliban, they wore long cotton shirts draped over their trousers and held to their waists with wide sashes. The requisite beards and turbans made it harder to distinguish among them, but they all had one thing in common: They wanted to kill you.

I lifted my rifle, about to stun the guy on the right, who stood near a doorway, his head hanging as though he were drifting off.

Ramirez had the guy on the left, the taller one.

Static filled my earpiece and the images being sent via laser from the monocle into my eye vanished.