scopes and any other gear that might identify them as American. Tonight the Dragunov was down there, too. Alders carried a GPS that had been specially programmed with the Afghan road network. But the GPS had been hidden inside the casing for a cheap Nokia, a common brand in the Afghan countryside.
They were wearing what Special Operations guys called ballistic underwear, basically heavy-duty fire- resistant boxer briefs. The underwear was useful for snipers, who did a lot of crawling on stony ground. The military was considering giving it to every frontline soldier. Any IED big enough to take off arms and legs could blow off more sensitive areas, too. A little bit of extra protection was good for morale. Of course, any Afghan would know that the briefs weren’t local. But if a Talib got close enough to see his underwear, Francesca figured he’d be dead already. Or wishing he were.
Francesca followed a convoy of supply trucks toward Kandahar City. At Highway 1, the trucks swung west toward the city. Francesca turned right. Suddenly they were alone. Past midnight, the Afghan roads were deserted aside from military convoys. The Talibs had learned the effectiveness of American night-vision equipment and rarely tried ambushes after dark. Ordinary Afghans didn’t own cars and had little reason to risk nighttime travel. They locked themselves in their compounds and waited for the sun to set them free.
As the lights of Kandahar faded to specks in his mirrors, Francesca swung left off Highway 1, north on a narrow track that rose up a gentle hillside. After a few minutes, the Toyota crested a ridge and the Arghandab River Valley stretched out below. In the moonlight, it looked almost beautiful. During the day, the grape fields were brown and drab. Now they were black oceans marked by whispery, bare-branched almond trees. Farther north, the pomegranate groves near the river rose thick and lush. Insurgents launched ambushes from the groves, moving under them in fortified tunnels. But at this hour they were as peaceful as the Garden of Eden. Far past the river, the mountains of central Afghanistan soared, their snowcapped peaks glowing white.
“This land is your land, this land is my land,” Francesca burst out. “From California to the New York — sing it with me now—”
Alders punched him. Hard.
“Not nice. You know, Alders. You’re the only one left I can take.”
“Promise you’ll tell me when you decide I’m as bad as everybody else.”
“Yeah?”
“Give me a chance to get out of range of that Barrett.”
Francesca’s giggle echoed off through the cab of the truck. Even he could hear how crazy he sounded.
“What was Penn talking to you about?” Alders said.
Francesca told him.
“CIA? So we have something to take care of.”
“Thought I’d have to convince you.”
“All this time together, you still don’t know me. You think I didn’t guess where this might go?”
“Good, because I already talked to Weston.” Francesca walked Alders through his plan.
“This going to be today?”
“Think so. He’ll tell me soon as he’s sure.”
“You ready on the Dragunov?”
“A rifle’s a rifle.” Though Francesca wasn’t entirely sure. He’d been able to practice on it only once. The Dragunov fired a high-powered AK 7.62-millimeter round, a smaller bullet than the.50 cal. As a result, the Russian rifle was shorter, lighter, and easier to carry than his own. But it couldn’t match the Barrett’s range. The differences were typical of American and Russian engineering. American weapons designers put a premium on technical excellence while barely considering the practical problems soldiers might face in the field. The Russians built less capable systems that were easier to carry and use. Ultimately, though, Francesca figured that if he could get within five hundred meters, he’d be fine. The Talibs sure killed enough guys with Dragunovs.
AT THE BASE of the valley, Francesca turned right. They drove northeast on the narrow road connecting the villages along the Arghandab River. An IED would obliterate the Toyota, but Francesca wasn’t worried. The insurgents saved their bombs for American vehicles, not random farmers who happened to be foolish enough to be out after dark.
For ninety minutes, neither man spoke. The silence in the truck merged with the silence outside. A valley full of phantoms. The road had no signs, no gas stations, no restaurants to mark their path. For a while, Francesca wouldn’t have believed they were moving at all if not for their progress on the GPS. But finally it beeped. Alders squinted at the tiny screen. “Almost here. Maybe another hundred meters.”
Sure enough, a few seconds later Francesca saw a dirt track hemmed by four-foot-high walls on either side. He turned right. Fifty meters in, he stopped, cut the pickup’s lights. Without a word Alders slipped out and knelt beside the pickup. Thirty seconds later, he slid back into the cab and handed Francesca a night-vision scope. Francesca slid the cylinder over his right eye, leaving his left uncovered.
Through the eyepiece, the world looked green and black and oddly two-dimensional, like a 1950s television. In a world without electricity, night optics offered huge advantages. Soldiers could lock on insurgents who had no chance of finding them. But because the equipment blunted depth perception, most soldiers no longer wore full goggles. They favored scopes that covered one eye while leaving the other exposed. With practice, their brains learned to process the weirdly divergent information coming from each eye and create a complete picture.
Francesca eased off the brake, rolled deeper into the silhouette world ahead. The grape hut was directly ahead, a long, narrow building, maybe fifteen feet high. It had narrow slits for windows, like a medieval fortress. Another hut had once stood nearby, but an explosion had destroyed it years before, nearly leveling it. The first hut had partly survived. Its southern wall had been shattered and was crumbling into the mud. But its north side, which faced the valley road, was intact.
Francesca nosed the pickup through a cut in the wall near the hut. The Toyota’s tires sank into the dirt, but he downshifted and clicked on the four-wheel drive. On the southern side of the hut he found a jagged hole, maybe ten feet wide. “Home sweet home,” he said.
He edged the pickup through the hole into the hut. He cut the engine. Inside the hut, the blackness was absolute. Without his eyepiece, Francesca would have been blind. With it, he saw that the hut held dozens of simple wooden racks. Farmers used them to dry grapes into raisins. The grapes had long since disappeared, leaving the racks, and a faint sweet odor, as the only evidence of the hut’s initial purpose.
Francesca’s feet crunched over metal. He reached down, found brass casings and an 82-millimeter mortar tube. Francesca sniffed the tip of the tube. He didn’t smell gunpowder. The mortar hadn’t been used in years. He tossed it aside.
The back of the Toyota appeared to be filled with junk: old bicycles, foam bedrolls, rusted steel rods and sheets, and a couple of blankets. None of the stuff would have attracted notice at a checkpoint. Francesca and Alders pulled it all out. They slid two of the rods into holes the size of quarters that had been drilled into the Toyota’s front bumper. They laid one end of a steel sheet over the rods. The rods and sheet had been machined to fit together as easily as LEGO blocks, with an equally satisfying click. The far end of the sheet lay atop the Toyota’s cab. The sheet was seven feet wide, six feet long, just big enough for Francesca and Alders to lie side by side with the Barrett between them, its muzzle poking out of one of the hut’s narrow slits. A firing platform.
Once the platform was set, Francesca and Alders stretched the brown blankets over it and the truck. The Toyota was brown and covered with dirt and mud anyway. Inside the grape hut and under the blankets, it would be basically invisible, even during the day. Francesca climbed onto the platform. Alders reached down for the Barrett and lifted it to him, grunting at the weight of the rifle. Francesca pulled up the Barrett and snapped its legs into place. Alders handed him another camouflage net and he draped it over the Barrett’s muzzle to hide the steel.
Then Francesca settled back and slipped off his eyepiece. He put his eye to the Barrett’s infrared scope, which had far sharper resolution than his own. He found himself looking at an empty green world, the stillest of nights. No grapes had been grown in the fields around here for at least a year. Even the mice seemed to have disappeared.
He was six feet off the ground, with an open view of the road to the north, no farmhouses or high walls for a mile east or west. The position was close to perfect, concealed and with a huge field of fire. These Talib bomb- planting cells usually had no more than four guys. If they set up the way he expected, Francesca could kill them all in under a minute.
Sniper fire was confusing and terrifying, even for experienced infantry. Typical firefights happened at close
