talked fast when he was excited, and he was talking fast now. “Even if he doesn’t, I’ll bet we find him pretty damn quick. We have his real name, his bank accounts. We know where he lives.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, I’m gonna look at that brigade. Check out its 15-6s and 32s and after-action reports in the files for its tour.” A 15-6 was a military record of an investigation into suspected criminal behavior by a soldier. An Article 32 report was similar, but used for serious crimes, the military counterpart of a grand jury indictment.
“And I’m supposed to go to that base and start asking guys if they know about a massive heroin trafficking ring.”
“You laugh, but I have an idea.” Shafer explained his plan.
“That can’t work.”
“You have anything better?”
Wells was silent.
“Then I suggest you get on it.”
“Okay. But there’s one thing you’re going to need to send for me to have any shot at all. A secret weapon.”
“What secret weapon?”
Wells told him.
“Not bad, John. Maybe you have learned a few things.”
“Still. It’d be nice if we could find David Miller. I bet he can move us up the chain.”
“My concern is that whoever’s running him is thinking the same.”
Wells didn’t have to ask Shafer what he meant.
18
Roads in Afghanistan came in two categories: bad and worse. The fifty-mile track from Sharan to the Pakistani border belonged in the second group, less a road than a dashed line on a map, washed out and littered with stones big as beach balls.
Down this uncertain path bounced a Ford Ranger, four doors, nearly new, a gift to Afghanistan from the American taxpayer. Amadullah Thuwani drove, David Miller beside him. Amadullah sat low and steered one-handed, fingers draped over the steering wheel. He reminded Miller of a South Side gangbanger. He just needed a Bulls cap tilted low on his forehead and a fat gold chain along with his Rolex. Fortunately, his driving style posed no danger. The Ranger was moving barely twenty miles an hour. Any faster and rocks would tear up the chassis.
Without warning, Amadullah reached across the seat, pinched Miller’s cheek like an unfriendly grandfather. “You’re sure this is the way,” he said. They’d been driving for three hours and Amadullah’s patience looked to be wearing thin.
“Of course.” Miller wasn’t. He wondered what Amadullah would do if they stumbled into an American convoy. As usual, Miller was the only one in the truck who didn’t have a weapon. Come to think of it, he was probably the only adult male in the whole province who didn’t have an AK within arm’s length.
The road passed through a loose group of mud-walled compounds, and Miller saw the abandoned schoolhouse Stan had told him to look for. Against its wall, three empty oil barrels were stacked in a pyramid.
“That’s it,” Miller said, nodding at the barrels. “We’re close.”
Five minutes later, Amadullah stopped the Ranger beside a wash of scrubby pine trees. He lowered the windows and killed the engine.
“Now we listen for mosquitoes,” Amadullah said, Talib slang for drones. “They won’t face us like men. They use this science instead.” In Amadullah’s mouth,
They sat and listened. But the air was still. So was the land, no cars or trucks. Not even any donkey-drawn carts. The mountains in Paktika were shorter than the famous peaks of the Hindu Kush but equally unforgiving, crumbling hills with soil too rocky for farming.
“You see my watch?” Amadullah raised his wrist to show the gold Rolex.
“Are you giving it to me? That famous Pashtun hospitality?”
“If I give it to you, you’ll wear it around your neck.”
“Sounds uncomfortable.” Miller knew he should take what Amadullah dished out, but the boasting and threats had worn thin.
“It was a Saudi who gave me this. Many years ago.”
“Osama bin Laden?” The Talibs loved to brag about how they’d fought alongside bin Laden, especially now that he was dead and couldn’t contradict them. Osama would have had a million-man army if they were all telling the truth.
“Not Osama. Though I did meet him once. Skinny and full of love for himself. No, this man, when he came here, I had just come back from Kandahar, a very good mission. We bombed Russian tanks, linked the explosives and set them off all at once. The whole road was on fire. Killed four tanks. Boom-boom-boom-
“But the watch.”
“Yes, the watch. So the Saudi came, and we had a feast. And they were calling me the lion of Zhari, that’s the western part of Kandahar province. And the Saudi, he said to me, ‘What can I do for you, lion? I want to be part of this jihad.’ And I said, ‘Give me your Rolex.’”
Miller could imagine the look on the Saudi’s face. “Not what he was expecting.”
“You know, I can’t even remember his name. Probably Abdul. All of the Saudis who came here were named Abdul or Saud or Faisal. The Saudis. They pretend they hate the princes, but they fall to one knee when one passes within ten kilometers.” Amadullah spit again into the dirt.
“So he gave you the watch.”
“Of course he did. He was far from home.”
“What became of him?”
“Only Allah knows. But I still have the watch. My second wife polishes it every week and it still works perfectly. Do you see what I’m telling you?”
Miller saw. The visitors from Saudi Arabia and Russia and the United States came with their gifts. But sooner or later, they left the warriors in these mountains to their business. Amadullah had spent his whole life within a hundred miles of here. He didn’t have a passport or a bank account. He’d never seen a skyscraper or flown on an airplane. As far as Miller knew, he couldn’t even read or write. Yet he and his people could never be broken, not in this land. Killed, but not broken.
Miller had forgotten most of his single semester at Harold Washington City College, but one class had stuck with him: Philosophy 101. At first he’d done the reading mainly to impress his teacher, this cute white girl from the University of Chicago. He never did work up the guts to ask her out. The U of C might have been on the South Side, but it was in a different universe from his. Anyway, a few weeks into the semester, he’d seen her boyfriend picking her up. But by then he was into the class, and he kept on reading.
He wasn’t interested in Plato and the Greeks, debating the mysteries of existence, shadows on the cave wall. No, he liked the political philosophers, the ones who talked about power in the real world, where it came from, how to use it. Especially this English guy, Hobbes:
Miller wondered whether the watch’s backstory was bloodier than Amadullah had said, whether the Saudi who’d given it to him had been taken on a mission that didn’t have a way out.
“A very nice watch,” Miller said aloud.
