A low hill loomed ahead, topped by a mound that looked at first like a funeral pyre. The sour stench of a garbage fire filled the cabin. The chopper hopped over the hill and down the back side and turned right, following a narrow two-lane road that headed toward the center of Kabul. They were no more than forty feet off the ground, so low that Wells could count potholes on the road beneath them. Each turn blended into the next. Even if someone had an RPG on them, hitting them would be impossible.
The pilot leaned forward in his seat, his helmet almost touching the canopy, his hands loose. “Looks like he could do this with his eyes closed,” Wells said.
“Mike’s got those nice video-game reflexes.”
Two minutes later, the helicopter approached the Ariana Hotel. “Home sweet home,” Lautner said. The hotel was unlit and painted dark gray so it would be a tougher target for RPGs. The concrete blast walls around it glowed under arc lamps. The combination turned the hotel into a devil’s flower, a black hole ringed by light.
The helicopter’s engines revved down abruptly. For a moment, they hung motionless. Then they descended gently and touched down in the very center of the painted white cross that marked the hotel’s landing zone. Hernandez nodded to their thanks and went back to checking the chopper’s displays. Wells realized that he and Lautner were nothing but cargo to the kid, an excuse for him to play a real-life video game. Even so he was a great pilot.
Lautner led Wells to a room on the fourth floor, in a part of the Ariana used by contractors rather than CIA employees, another none-too-subtle reminder that Wells was no longer part of the club. After the flight from Washington, Wells was happy just to have a bed. He fell asleep with his shirt and pants still on. He woke once, in the deepest part of the night. He didn’t know where he was.
When he finally realized, he found himself strangely comforted.
7
The dented Toyota pickup crept down Highway 1, past the gray blast walls of Forward Operating Base Moqor, which stretched for a half mile along the road. The guys in the Toyota’s front seat looked Afghan. They were actually a Delta sniper team. Daniel Francesca, the sniper, drove. William Alders, his spotter, sat next to him.
After a week outside the wire, Francesca and Alders were ready for a shower and a hot meal, but the traffic refused to cooperate. Despite being called a highway, the road was only two lanes wide. An accident outside the entrance to the base had snarled traffic, and they were stuck in a line of diesel-belching trucks.
On the opposite side of the road, Afghan boys waved bags of peanuts and candy at the truckers. After every sale, the boys brought the money to a fat man sitting in a rocking chair beside a closed gas station.
“How often you think one of them gets snatched?” Alders said.
“Snatching is unnecessary. I think the portly gentleman takes any reasonable offer.”
“Fresh six-year-olds. We will not be undersold.”
“Eat all you want. We’ll make more.”
“That was Fritos?”
“Doritos. Jay Leno.”
“Good old Jay.” Now the traffic was starting to flow and the kids were running into the road, playing chicken with the trucks. “This country.”
“This country.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, they reached the base’s entrance, which was really just an opening in the blast walls. Francesca turned inside, but stopped short of the concrete hut that served as the external checkpoint. Hescos, four-foot-tall wire-and-cloth baskets packed with dirt, ringed the hut. A machine gun sat on the roof, surrounded by layers of sandbags.
The outer checkpoint was the post most exposed to suicide bombers and thus the riskiest guard position. Here — as at most bases — the post was manned not by soldiers but by contractors, Nepalese Gurkhas. They were in Afghanistan for the money and nothing else. They spoke little English and even less Pashtun and knew exactly how much danger they faced.
So Francesca kept his hands high and his Common Access Card visible as he stepped out of the pickup. He knew the guards wouldn’t make him for American, not right away. He wore a gray
A Gurkha in a tan flak jacket stepped out of the hut, pointed an M-4 at Francesca’s chest. The man raised his left hand, palm out:
“I’m American. Special Ops.” The Gurkha came forward, looked over the access card, the identification all soldiers carried. The guard motioned with his rifle at the pickup, where Alders sat in the front passenger seat, his hands flat on the dash. “He’s American, too.”
The Gurkha disappeared into the hut with Francesca’s identification. He came back a few minutes later and waved them through.
“Home sweet home.”
FRANCESCA AND ALDERS had been operating in the mountains in the southeastern corner of Zabul province, just inside Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The United States had only a couple thousand troops in all of Zabul, part of the same Stryker brigade that included Tyler Weston. Most American forces were farther west in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which were more heavily populated and strategically important. The Taliban had taken advantage, making Zabul a major route for smuggling weapons and men from Pakistan.
So Francesca and Alders had set up watch on a ratline, a trail the Talibs used to bring in weapons. They lived at Kandahar Air Field in a base within a base, a compound restricted to the Delta elite. Delta and Special Forces teams usually ran missions by helicopter, flying on modified Black Hawks that had nozzles for midair refueling jutting out of their front ends like steel straws. But Black Hawks attracted attention, and Francesca needed absolute camouflage to succeed. At his best, he killed quietly and precisely, and then disappeared.
Instead of a Black Hawk, Francesca and Alders took a Toyota, with civilian Afghan plates, and joined the stream of civilian traffic leaving Kandahar. At Kharjoy, they left the highway and wended their way southeast on the one-lane tracks and dry riverbeds that passed for roads in Zabul. Ten miles before the border, the hills turned into mountains and got too steep for them to drive at all. They left the Toyota near an abandoned hut and humped up to the ridgeline of a nine-thousand-foot mountain that overwatched the trail. The mission was hugely risky. They had no backup. If the Talibs found them, they would have to call for a helicopter evacuation that would take hours. By then they’d probably be dead. Or, worse, captured.
For a week, they lived rough. They ate bread and dried fruit and rationed their water and slept under the thorny bushes that offered the only cover around. But the mission turned out to be a bust. Maybe the Talibs had guessed that the route had been discovered. Maybe they’d used other trails this month. Either way, Francesca and Alders saw nothing but a couple of kids herding goats.
But they had a second, unofficial reason for the mission. On the way into the mountains, they’d picked up a bag of tightly wrapped blue bundles from Lieutenant Weston at FOB Jackson. They’d hidden the bag along with their rifles and uniforms in a special compartment that was welded under the bed of the pickup.
Now they were back on friendly territory. Francesca wanted a shower and contractor-cooked chow. Forward operating bases had the best food in the military. The giant headquarters bases like Kandahar focused on quantity. But the dining halls at the forward bases offered chicken, steak, ice cream, fresh vegetables, and unlimited Gatorade and PowerBars.
“Starving,” Francesca said. “You?”
“Sure.”
