HE CALLED SHAFER. “Good to go.”
“I’ll call Cunningham tomorrow morning my time. Maybe ten a.m.”
“Seven-thirty p.m. here.”
“Look at you, doing the math. So you can expect that he’ll be on the phone to KAF pretty much the second he hangs up.”
“No chance he’ll cooperate?”
“I call him, back-channel him, tell him one of his guys may be a criminal target and I want his file. And I won’t say why, won’t show him any of the evidence. Plus I act like an asshole on top of it. He’s more likely to send a hit squad up here than help me.”
“All these years I thought being an asshole was your personality. Now it turns out it’s part of your cover.”
“Cute. Like talking to my wife. Anyway, figure Cunningham sounds the alarm to the Delta commander at Kandahar, I believe it’s a major named Penn. That guy tells Francesca. Who gets off base soon as he can come up with some legit operation that gets him pointed toward FOB Jackson.”
“You’re sure the Deltas won’t lock him down while they check this out on their own?”
“If I gave Cunningham something concrete, maybe. Not this way. They start kicking over rocks, they don’t know what they might find. Best not to look.”
“Speaking of things that hide under rocks, what about Duto? He know where we stand?”
“Not yet. I’ll talk to him after I set the hook with Cunningham. Don’t jump down my throat for asking, but do you have
“Look, if that bug you gave me works—”
“It works—”
“Then I’ll know where Francesca and Alders are hiding. And they won’t know I know. If that’s not a big enough edge, I’d better find a new line of work.”
“Modern dance instructor.”
Wells hung up, called Anne.
“John?”
“Hello, babe.”
“You’re wearing the Ray-Bans, aren’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“You’d only call me things like
“I’ve been called lots of things over the years, but I assure you Rocker John isn’t one.”
“Tell me you’re almost done over there.”
“I am. Honestly.”
“You gonna get the bad guy?”
“I always do.” Almost.
“Then we’ll live happily ever after. You and me and Tonka makes three. He told me how much he missed you this morning. Said you’re not a good owner, but you’re his favorite anyway.”
“Tell him I miss him, too. And you, Anne. Can’t wait to see you.”
“I love you, John. Whatever it is you’re doing, be careful.”
“I love you, too.” A word Wells had rarely used with Anne. A word that felt right today.
HE SPENT THE AFTERNOON getting his gear together. Then he had nothing to do but wait. He went back to his trailer and slept. No point in wasting energy he would need soon enough. He woke after sunset to a call from Shafer, who explained what had happened with Cunningham and Duto.
“So Duto knew about 71 all along,” Wells said.
“He swears he had no idea that the trail would go that way.”
“You believe him?”
“It doesn’t matter. Train’s way down the tracks.”
Shafer was right. They couldn’t stop chasing Francesca now. As usual, Duto had played them.
“One of these years, I’m going to pay him back.”
“
“I’ll do my best.”
IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN P.M. when his local phone rang. Young.
“Coleman.”
“Out of nowhere, Weston told us to be ready for an op in the next twenty-four hours. Motorcycle registration in the Arghandab.” Insurgents favored motorcycles, so the military was trying to track them with tamper-proof registration stickers. Never mind that the insurgents had an endless supply of cheap bikes. Registration offered a measurable benchmark for commanders to meet. The military loved measurable benchmarks.
“Where exactly?”
“He says we don’t have final orders yet. But the most likely spots are a couple roads that run from Highway 1 and up into the valley. Pretty near the base. Eighty to a hundred miles northeast of KAF. You know where I’m talking about?”
“More or less.”
“More or less does not promote confidence, sir.”
“When you know more, you call me. I promise I’ll be there.”
“That’s more like it.”
SO WESTON WAS GETTING his platoon off FOB Jackson. Which meant Francesca would be leaving KAF soon enough. Wells’s GPS was plugged into the feed from the transmitter on the pickup. Wells waited for it to ping.
And waited. The hours dragged. Midnight passed. One a.m. Maybe Francesca wouldn’t leave base until tomorrow. Or maybe Young was wrong. Maybe Francesca wasn’t part of this scheme after all. Two a.m. Wells tried to sleep, couldn’t.
At 2:30, the GPS beeped. A single blue dot indicated that Francesca’s pickup was ten miles outside of the airfield. He’d taken the bait. Wells knew where he was heading. North and east, deep into the Arghandab River Valley. Toward 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. Toward Coleman Young.
Part of Wells wanted to chase them immediately, but moving at this hour would be a mistake. Francesca and Alders couldn’t do anything until Young was off FOB Jackson. Best to let them get set in their sniper hole, then go after them.
Wells set his alarm for 5:30, before dawn. He closed his eyes and dreamed of a wave that started in the Hindu Kush and swept down and down, through the poppy fields, the empty Registan Desert, over the mountains in Pakistan, all the way to the sea.
SOON AS HE WOKE Wells checked the GPS. Something was wrong. Three transmissions — covering a ninety-minute period — showed motion northeast in chunks of thirty miles or so. The third transmission came in around four o’clock. But after that, the locator went silent. At least two more transmissions should have followed by now. If the pickup had stopped, the transmitter should have reported that, too. Wells called Shafer. “What’s going on?”
“Probably they’ve stopped somewhere where the transmitter doesn’t have line-of-sight to the atmosphere. It’ll keep pinging every forty-five minutes until the signal goes through and it gets an answer.”
Wells thought of the metal firing platform he’d seen in the back of the pickup. If Francesca had set that up and it reached over the transmitter, it would block the signal. “If there’s metal in the way—”
“Metal’s not good. But it will keep trying.”
“Meantime I’m just supposed to guess where they holed up.”
“I’ll put some calls out, see if I can get a handle on what their official mission is.”
“You think the Deltas are going to tell you that after the way you left it with Cunningham?”
