colonel though his uniform had no badges at all. Like credit was all Jackson should care about, and Fahd and Voss didn’t matter at all. Jackson hated losing one of his own. Two, depending on how you thought about it.
But when he crashed out on his cot the morning after the raid, the sun already up and the heat rising, Jackson had to admit that he was proud of his company. All these TF 121 guys running around and it was the Mad Dogs who scored. He would make sure his men understood what they had done, even if they weren’t allowed to talk about it. Missions like this were the reason they had shipped off to this hellhole. They had disrupted al Qaeda, taken the fight to the terrorists instead of the other way around.
Jackson folded his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Amped up as he was, he knew he needed to sleep. He was supposed to brief a couple of one-stars on the raid tomorrow. Not bad for a twenty-nine-year-old captain. I just hope intel knows what to do with this guy we caught, Jackson thought, as he finally drifted to sleep. And I hope it’s not too late.
7
BROWN-SKINNED MEN with cheap mesh caps and hungry eyes stood in clusters in the giant parking lot. Though the sun had risen only an hour before, already the air was hot and sticky, and the men moved slowly, conserving their energy for the long day ahead. But their apparent lethargy was deceiving. When a pickup truck turned into the lot, the men swarmed it in seconds.
A red-faced man in a short-sleeved shirt leaned out of the truck, pushing back the crowd. “Chill, wetbacks.” The men grumbled but gave ground. The man in the truck held up four fingers. “Four guys. All day,” he said. “Eighty bucks each. Anybody speak English?”
John Wells shouldered through the crowd. “I do.”
“You,” the man said. “Up front.” He pointed to three other laborers. “You. You. You. In back.”
As the other men trudged away, Wells hustled into the pickup, a red Chevy crew cab with commercial plates and a white-painted slogan: LEE’S LANDSCAPING: BEAUTIFYING ATLANTA SINCE1965. “What’s your name?” the guy said.
“Jesse.”
“I’m Dale. You speak Spanish?”
“Little bit,” Wells said.
“Keep these guys in line, you get an extra twenty.”
Dale laughed. “
The truck nosed out of the lot and onto the Buford Highway, Route 13, a crowded six-lane road that ran from Atlanta to the northeastern suburbs of Chamblee and Doraville. Wells hadn’t known what to expect from Atlanta when he’d arrived in April. Outside of his brief stint in the army, he had never spent time in the South. He had vague visions of Scarlett O’Hara and Martin Luther King. Atlanta had surprised him. The city was bigger than he expected, blending into suburbs that sprawled over the low Georgia hills for miles in every direction. And it was not just black and white, as he had pictured, but filled with Hispanics and Asians and even a few Arabs.
Especially here, the Buford Highway, a melange of strip malls with signs in Vietnamese and Japanese and languages Wells had never seen. Taquerias and Korean saunas and the First Intercontinental Bank—“Tu Banco Local”—sat beside a Comfort Inn and Waffle House, relics of a more familiar America. A mile north was the Buford Farmers Market, which despite its bucolic name catered to Central American immigrants, selling oxtails and bulls’ testicles wrapped in plastic for $2.99 a pound.
The locals called Chamblee “Chambodia,” but that term hardly captured its variety. The Buford Highway was post-American America, the United States at its ugly, tacky best, accepting — if not quite welcoming — immigrants of every color, Wells thought. More practically, it was a good place to hide. Anybody who wanted to work could make a living here, and the landlords didn’t fuss over renting to people whose papers weren’t quite in order. They welcomed anyone who paid on time and kept quiet, like Wells.
So for four months he had lived in a furnished one-bedroom apartment just off the highway. Every morning he took his place among the Guatemalans and Nicaraguans waiting for work at the parking lot. At first they had suspected him of being an immigration agent or a cop and refused to talk to him, but lately they had loosened up a bit. They still didn’t really like him; he got picked for more than his share of jobs because he was white and spoke English.
But Wells figured he knew how to be an outsider. Another fake name, another new identity, another endless wait for orders. He sometimes wondered what guys like Dale the landscaper would do if he told them who he really was. Laugh, probably—“That’s funny”—and tell him to get back to work.
THEY HEADED WEST on I-285, the ring road that surrounds Atlanta, leaving the grit of Doraville behind as they passed the giant Perimeter Mall, a shopping center the size of a small city. Even now Wells couldn’t get used to the casual wealth of America, the gleaming opulence of cars and office buildings. At exit 24, Sandy Springs, they turned off 285, and a few minutes later Dale swung onto a culde-sac with four newly built homes that grandly proclaimed itself HIDDEN HILLTOP LANE: A PRIVATE DRIVE. A truck full of saplings awaited them, along with a teenager wearing a Jeff Gordon cap.
“Kyle,” Dale said to the kid.
“Wassup, Dale.” They exchanged a complex, fluid handshake.
“Got you some Mexicans,” Dale said. “This here’s John. He speaks Spanish — he’ll tell ’em what to do.”
Wells’s heart thumped. How could Dale possibly know his real name?
“Jesse,” Wells said.
“Whatever,” Dale said. “Long as you can dig a hole.”
Wells could only shake his head. This cracker had just given him his biggest scare in months.
Dale pointed at the trees in the truck. “Kyle’ll show you where to put them,” he said. “Make sure you get the roots in deep.”
THEY STOPPED FOR lunch around noon, hiding from the sun by the side of the house. The Guatemalans unwrapped homemade tamales and bottles of warm beer; Wells pulled out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, his secret vice. He munched on a greasy, salty drumstick and rolled his tired shoulders, trying to stay loose. He had sweated through his shirt, but he didn’t mind the work. Months of digging and hammering had given him back the muscles that had disappeared in the North-West Frontier.
Wells tilted the bucket of chicken toward the Guatemalans. “You want?”
One of the men reached toward the bucket, then stopped.
“It’s okay,” Wells said. “Really.”
The guy took a drumstick.
“Jesse.”
“You work every day.”
“But you white.”
“Looks that way,” Wells said. The beginnings of a smile formed on Eduardo’s face, then disappeared.
“And you no
“No.”
Eduardo looked puzzled as he tried to understand why a
