The Shadow Patrol

Francesca and Alders didn’t need to talk much. They were close as husband and wife. Closer, maybe. Neither man’s marriage had survived this war. They had worked together as sniper and spotter for three years.

On one calm day the previous summer, Francesca sighted, held his breath, gently squeezed the trigger on his rifle — a four-foot-long.50 caliber Barrett M107. Across a rock valley, a fat Afghan clutched his chest and dropped. He tried to stagger up and then lay down and didn’t move again. “Nine hundred yards,” Alders told him.

“Always wanted to bust somebody at half a mile.”

“Now you have.”

Francesca would be bummed when this tour was finished. It was his third and last. Not his choice. The Army gave you only three. In the three tours, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he’d racked fifty-six kills, a good number, especially with the drones doing so much work these days. Maybe good was the wrong word. Francesca wondered whether all that killing had changed him. Course it had. Back home, civvies called guys like him serial killers. The more he pulled the trigger, the easier it came. He’d given up waiting for God or anyone else to punish him. He hadn’t been hit by lightning or gotten cancer or gone blind. He was in the best shape of his life. Plenty of money in the bank, and more coming. The Joes treated him like a minor god.

He wasn’t too worried about payback in the next world either. He’d watched close through his scope for souls leaving the men he’d killed. Hadn’t seen a single one. Only the red mist, the cloud of blood and tissue that shrieked from the body when a bullet cut through. The afterlife was a fable for little boys and girls. Not real men like him.

SO WHEN AN OLD FRIEND in Kabul reached out a few months before, told him about a scheme he had, Francesca said yes right away. “What about your spotter?” his friend had said. “He gonna be okay with this?”

“He does what I tell him.”

“That simple.”

“He knows the difference between shooting and spotting.”

Sure enough, Alders agreed. Working out the pickups was the tricky part. At first his friend wanted him to pick the stuff up himself. But the Talibs hated snipers. Francesca couldn’t risk meeting them directly.

Instead he reached out to Tyler Weston, a platoon leader he knew in Zabul. Tyler’s brother had been a good friend of Francesca’s, back in the day. Weston bought in quick once Francesca explained, quicker than Francesca had expected. He got it. He saw how everybody was getting rich over here. The companies, the contractors, the locals. Only the Joes got the shaft. This deal was a way to get them a piece of the money they’d been missing. He and Alders split ten grand a kilo, two-thirds for him, one-third for Alders. More than a million dollars already. Francesca had parked his share in a bank in Germany while he figured what to do with it.

INSIDE THE BASE, Francesca called Kandahar, explained they’d hit a rut on the way back from the mountains. “Blew the right front tire. We got the spare on. But it put a leak in the left, too. And maybe some damage to the axle.”

“Where are you now?”

“FOB Moqor. We’ll be stuck here tonight. Mechanics say they don’t have time to check the axle until the morning.”

“All right. But do me a favor. Get back by tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir.”

Francesca turned into a giant parking lot filled with armored trucks and pickups. Thousands of vehicles were parked on this base. No one would notice, much less check, a random pickup truck. He found a spot and hopped out. He and Alders took off the right front tire and replaced it with the spare and tossed the tire a couple hundred yards away.

“Let’s eat. Where’s the chow hall, Alders?”

“How’m I know that?” Alders had grown up on the side of a mountain in eastern Kentucky. He had a hillbilly accent that made him seem a lot stupider than he was. “Thought you could smell it.”

They walked past a grove of Porta-Potties and a line of blast walls that hid a dozen steel trailers. Francesca guessed they were home to the base’s midlevel officers. Lieutenants and captains usually bunked in pairs. Majors and above lived alone. The Army was extraordinarily hierarchical, although it made exceptions for Special Forces guys. In a low-intensity war like this one, the regular Joes often had to hold their fire for fear of killing civilians. Francesca didn’t have that problem. He killed more Talibs in a year than the average forty-man infantry platoon. So the Army put up with him. Even so, he knew regular officers viewed guys like him as a necessary evil. Their casual refusal to wear uniforms or salute discouraged regular soldiers from following orders.

“Want to go over there, ask for directions?”

“You know what I want?”

“What you always want. A nice cold Dr Pepper.”

“Read my mind. A nice cold Dr Pepper. Wouldn’t mind a shot of Jim Beam right next to it, but I guess that ain’t happening.”

“Funny, isn’t it. We can’t get a drink, but we got a million bucks of junk back there—”

“Junk in the trunk.”

“Had to go there. You ever think about trying it?”

“Nope,” Alders said firmly. “It’s just Oxycontin without a prescription. Half my cousins are addicted to Oxy and they lie around on their asses doing nothing ’cept talking about how high they are. From what I can see they can’t even get out of bed. Don’t look that great to me. You ever done meth?”

“Only the greenies.” One secret of the Special Forces was that a lot of guys had stashes of amphetamines tucked away. All the training in the world couldn’t prep you for two hours of sleep a night. A little chemical help went a long way.

“Yeah, meth is that times ten. The greenies give you energy, keep you up, but being on meth changes your whole attitude. You feel like you could lift a car. Unstoppable. You find some chick on it, too? You gonna tear each other up. If I’m going to get high, I want to feel high.”

“That’s the longest speech you’ve ever given me.”

“You asked, man.”

“So I did.”

They found the mess hall, and Francesca ate plates of crab legs and barbecued chicken and drank two Fantas. He wanted a third, but the mess hall regulations said two. These tiny rules had somehow kept a hold on him. Maybe following them helped him pass as normal, instead of the Shadow he was. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. He’d read that somewhere growing up. Take care of the Fantas, and the kills will take care of themselves.

He laughed a little.

“What?” Alders said.

“Nothing.”

“That creeps me out.”

“What?”

“That laugh. That high-pitched crazy-man laugh. Hee-hee-hee. You been doing it a lot. And every time I ask you what you’re thinking about, you say, ‘Nothing.’”

“Just thinking.”

“Three tours is enough,” Alders said.

Francesca got himself two slices of Oreo pie. Alders had ice cream. The conversations eddied and flowed around them, but none of the other soldiers talked to them. Everyone knew enough to leave them alone. The mess hall had a television that played the Armed Forces Network, a mix of live sports and shows like House. During the commercial breaks, the channel played military public-service announcements instead of the usual back-home ads. The announcements were targeted at rear-echelon administrative types at bases in Europe. Tips for dealing with sexual harassment, that kind of thing. They had less than nothing to do with the reality of the war over here. Lately, Francesca could hardly watch them. He wanted to shoot everyone in them, especially the whiny chicks who didn’t like being told their asses looked good.