The Shadow Patrol

The man translated to his fellow tribesmen, who roared their approval. A long, excited conversation followed. Finally the man said, “You must feast with us! And then target practice!”

Long as I’m not the target. “You’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse.” Wells probably shouldn’t have made the joke — Jalal Haq wouldn’t have — but it escaped unremarked. Wells pulled the 4Runner off the road and spent the next hour eating goat with the tribesmen. The meat was tender and tasty, long strips with a sour yogurt sauce.

“Young goat,” the man in the sunglasses said.

“Young goat.”

The men lived in a village on the other side of the ridge. They weren’t Talibs, just Baluchi tribesmen who wanted nothing to do with any central government, whether in Islamabad or Kabul or Washington. After lunch, they led Wells through a ravine into a dry streambed. Three oil drums sat in a row two hundred meters away. The first was wrapped in the American flag, the second in the Pakistani flag, the third in the Israeli flag. The man in sunglasses unstrapped his AK and then shoved the rifle at Wells muzzle-first — not exactly safe firearm handling.

“As our guest, you go first, Arabiya.”

“You do this during the day? What about the police, the Army?”

“Do you see them? We don’t fear them. They fear us. Our only enemy is the American planes, and we know when they’re coming. We can hear them.”

Wells wasn’t so sure about that, but he didn’t argue the point.

The AK was nicked and worn, but Wells didn’t doubt it would work. A decade before in Afghanistan, Wells had seen a Talib drop an AK into a well that must have been a hundred feet deep. It rattled off the walls the whole way down and splashed loudly at the bottom. No matter. The Talib hustled up a boy who couldn’t have been more than six and told his father that he’d be riding the bucket down after it. The man tried to argue. The Talibs told him that if he didn’t shut up, they’d send him down the well, too, and not in the bucket. He shut up. In the event, the kid came back up with the rifle. Without bothering to strip the AK clean, or even dry it off, the Talib pointed it in the air and pulled the trigger. Sure enough, it worked.

Now Wells checked the rifle he’d just been given. Full. He had a moment’s fantasy of playing Rambo and taking out his hosts, but he reminded himself that these men had never fought the United States and weren’t exactly high-value targets. He settled for wasting the magazine on full auto, missing the flags wildly.

“You Arabs shoot like donkeys,” his new friend said.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, the tribesmen sent Wells on his way. They didn’t even ask for a bribe. The rest of the trip was uneventful. The land opened into a high plateau, dry and arid, with only a few spindly trees to break the monotony. To the west, a dusty range of mountains rose along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The road improved as suddenly as it had worsened, opening into a four-lane divided highway that was empty of traffic. Wells arrived at Muslim Bagh in late afternoon and found a guesthouse. He prayed that night in a two-room mosque down the street.

In the morning, he rose before dawn. He showered and slicked back his hair and pulled on a blue shalwar kameez. The town was still dark when the calls to prayer sounded. The center of Muslim Bagh had a limited electric grid, but the plains and hills around it were dark. Wells walked along the town’s dusty main street, looking for the busiest mosque. Only the most fervent believers would rise for the dawn call. They were the men he needed to find.

A pickup truck drove by, a Toyota, with two men in the front seat and two more standing in the bed of the truck. The two in back carried AKs, with bandoliers of copper-jacketed ammunition draped across their chests. A thick layer of grit covered the Toyota. These had to be men Wells wanted to see. The Thuwanis. Advertising their power, reminding villagers here that they and not the Pakistani police ruled this region. Wells raised a hand and the truck pulled over beside him.

“My brothers,” he said in Arabic. “Salaam aleikum.” The men in back vaulted over the side of the cab and flanked him. Their rifles weren’t quite pointed at him, but they weren’t relaxed either. Without knowing how, Wells had angered them.

“Yes, yes, aleikum salaam,” the man closest to Wells said. His beard covered most of his face, but the exposed skin was discolored. Frostbite, possibly. December through March, deep snow covered the border mountains. “What do you want?” he said in Pashtun. “What are you doing here?”

Until he knew more about these men, Wells didn’t plan to let them know he spoke Pashtun. “I don’t understand,” he said in Arabic.

“I said, what do you want?” the frostbitten man said, in Arabic this time.

“Do you live here, my brothers?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for a place where I might find the men who live on both sides of the border.”

The man raised his weapon a notch. “Speak clearly. No riddles.”

The hostility confused Wells. Had these men made him as American? Had someone from the Saudi embassy betrayed him somehow? “My name is Jalal Haq. From Saudi Arabia. I’m looking for men who live in the hills around Muslim Bagh. Fierce Muslim warriors who have fought jihad for years.” Flattery never hurts. “They’re named the Thuwanis.”

The man nodded and leaned into the pickup’s cab for a whispered conversation with the men inside. He returned smiling, a hollow smile like a sinkhole in the forest of his beard. Wells would have preferred a frown. He’d made a mistake. Whoever these men were, they had no love for the Thuwanis.

The sinkhole closed as the frostbitten man’s smile became a sneer. “Tell me, Mr. Haq, you wish to join these fierce warriors?”

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Wells tried to sound meek. “I’ll find these men another way.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“What, brother?”

“We’re not brothers. I ask again, are you carrying a weapon?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll do what I tell you, Jalal Haq.” The Talib stepped back, pointed his AK at Wells’s chest. “And I’m telling you to get on your knees.” The sun had just emerged over the low hills to the east. It lit the Talib’s face, his ruined skin and hard black eyes. Wells didn’t doubt this man would kill him in the street. Without a weapon of his own, he was trapped.

He went to his knees.

“If he moves, shoot him,” the man said in Pashtun to the other Talib who’d come off the truck, a tall man who stood three steps back.

“Yes, Najibullah.”

The frostbitten one, Najibullah, stepped around Wells and reached into the bed of the pickup and grabbed a black hood.

And that was all Wells saw.

11

FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON

This was a week earlier. Coleman Young rested on his cot watching Terminator on his computer for the hundredth time. Arnold was shooting his way through the Los Angeles police station like the pumped-up badass he was. Across the barracks, Roman lay on his own cot, playing a driving game on his Sony PSP. Roman loved driving games, Young knew. He knew more about the guys in his platoon than he ever would have expected, and more than he wanted. Bunk with dudes for a year, eat with them, ride with them, burn through ten thousand rounds with them, and sooner or later their secrets came out. PFC Battis picked his nose and ate the snot when he thought nobody was watching. The whole platoon ragged him, but he couldn’t stop. Specialist Corlou had a big Z tattooed across his left pec: it stood for