Gordon extended his hand. “Be seeing you, Mr. Wells.”
“John.”
“John. You get home, you tell those big boys my idea. About the wall.”
“Roger that. Watch your six, Specialist.”
“Always do.”
OUTSIDE, AFGHANISTAN. The air was crisp and cold, the sky thick with stars. White-capped mountains loomed over the hangars around them. Most Afghans didn’t live in those mountains. The fiercest fighting happened in the south, the scrublands of Kandahar and Helmand. But the Hindu Kush was as central to the
A wiry man in jeans and a light green windbreaker walked toward Wells. “John? I’m Pete Lautner. Good to meet you.” They shook. Lautner had close-cropped gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a coiled awareness of everything around him. Losing your wife and brother to a suicide bombing would have that effect, Wells thought.
“The same.”
“Ready for the beautiful Ariana Hotel? We’ve got a room with your name on it.”
Lautner led Wells to a black Suburban parked fifty yards away. The air base at Bagram had been built up since Wells’s last trip. Hangars and concrete bunkers stretched along the main runway.
“Wonder what we’ll do with it when we leave.”
“MOAB.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“You know daisy cutters?”
“Sure,” Wells said. Daisy cutters — officially called BLU-82s — had been the largest non-nuclear bombs ever built. Six tons of ammonium nitrate with a sprinkling of artificial flavors. The Pentagon had created them to cut through the jungles of Vietnam.
“Like those. But bigger. Nine tons of explosives, give or take.”
“The daisy cutter wasn’t big enough.”
“I guess not.”
“Wonder what the Air Force is compensating for.”
Lautner smiled. “Who said we’re leaving anyway?”
They stopped beside a four-seat helicopter, black, with a bubble canopy. The pilot stood a few feet away, cigarette in hand. He was Hispanic, with thick black hair. He was maybe twenty-six. Everyone in this war seemed to be younger than Wells. The pilot tossed aside his smoke, sending embers across the tarmac.
“One of these days you’ll hit some jet fuel and we’ll be screwed,” Lautner said.
“Stop, drop, and roll,” the pilot said. He extended a hand to Wells. “I’m Mike Hernandez.”
“John Wells.”
“Mike is the best,” Lautner said. “We can land Black Hawks at the Ariana, but these work better. And that glass is thicker than it looks. It’ll stop anything up to a.50 cal. And with the headphones, we can actually talk inside.”
“Good enough for you is good enough for me.”
“You will want to wear your Kevlar, though. And your Nomex.”
Wells pulled on his black fireproof gloves, strapped on his vest, climbed in, buckled up. Hernandez went through two minutes of clicking switches and consulting the computer screens in the center console. “Ready?” Without waiting for their agreement, Hernandez twisted back on the throttle until the helicopter vibrated with its power. He pulled back on the collective and they leaped into the night and rode low and fast onto the Shamali Plain.
Beneath them were the scars of three decades of war. Bomb craters pockmarked the earth. The houses that had survived were dark and shuttered against the world. Few Afghans had electric generators. Those who did rarely used them after dark. Noise and light attracted thieves. Faint plumes of smoke from the chimneys offered the only proof of life.
The helicopter swung south toward Kabul. Five miles away, headlights appeared below them, cresting a hill and speeding north. “Afghan police,” Lautner said. “This is probably the safest stretch of road in the whole country.”
“But we’re not driving.”
“Flying’s still safer. You’re a VIP, Mr. Wells. My ass if anything happens to you.”
“Generally I can feed and clothe myself. I do need a little help on the toilet.”
Lautner snorted, a half laugh. To the south, the yellow glow of Kabul appeared. “Brighter than I remember.” The embassies and aid groups have their own generators. “You don’t mind my asking, anything in particular you’re looking for on this trip?”
“Vinny asked me to come over, tell him what I thought. About the war and the station, both.”
“Is there a problem with the station?”
“You tell me.”
Lautner hesitated. “It’s tricky. Maybe a conversation we should have on the ground. So the director asked you himself.”
“Correct.”
“Rumor is that you and he don’t get along. Rumor is that’s why you quit.”
So the story of his struggle with Duto had spread all the way here. Wells didn’t see the percentage in denying the truth. “We don’t. But this is too important.”
“And you’re gonna be speaking to soldiers, too.”
“I’m set for a couple speeches in Kandahar. Honestly, I’m not sure they even know who I am. But it’s a decent excuse to hear what the frontline guys think.”
“Look, I’m glad to talk to you, and so’s everyone else. You know, there’s going to be specific programs and intel we can’t discuss. I hope you’re not offended, compartmentalized stuff that you’re not read in for.”
“I figured as much.” Though Wells hadn’t. He was here with Duto’s direct support. He was surprised Lautner was pushing back. He was glad now to have read the station’s files at Langley, and doubly glad that no one in Kabul knew.
“But in terms of questions about morale, how we’re putting the station back together—”
“Since Marburg—” As Wells said the word, Lautner’s lips tightened slightly, but he had no other reaction.
“Since Marburg. It’s been a struggle, but we’re getting traction. I don’t have to tell you it’s a very tough environment. Traditional rules of intel and counterintel don’t apply. There’s no ideology, no consistency. They’ll switch sides instantly for a better offer. Tough to build anything lasting. Especially since they know we won’t be here forever.”
“But we’ve got the money.”
“That we do.”
Lautner hadn’t lied, Wells thought. Instead he’d given Wells generalities about Afghanistan that had been true twenty years ago and would be equally true twenty years from now. Nothing about the station’s real problems. Lautner obviously saw him as an outsider, sent by Langley to second-guess. The attitude didn’t mean Lautner or anyone else was a mole. Quite the opposite. A mole would be more welcoming, Wells thought. He decided not to press Lautner any further, at least for now. Maybe Arango, the chief of station, would be more willing to talk.
Wells looked out the window toward Kabul. A quilt of shacks and mud houses and garbage mounds covered the land. During the civil war in the 1990s, refugee camps had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. Now the refugees didn’t want to go home. The camps had food and water and basic sanitation, all luxuries in rural Afghanistan.
The helicopter swooped left. For a few seconds it seemed to be flying almost sideways. If a double-rotor, forty-passenger Chinook was a bus, and a twelve-passenger Black Hawk was a sports car, this little chopper was a motorcycle. A racing bike, not an overpowered Ducati, but a Honda CBR600 with sticky tires that gripped the pavement.
