The Shadow Patrol

“You do your job, John. Let me do mine.”

Shafer hung up. Wells rose and showered. He pulled on a shalwar kameez and covered it with a brown windbreaker for the ride and packed a nylon bag with his kit. Everything he was carrying would pass for local, even the GPS and his binoculars. For weapons he had a knife strapped to his leg and three Russian RGO-78 grenades and his old Makarov and silencer. No AK. Even a short-stock would be impossible to hide. Anyway, a long-range gun battle with Francesca would be suicide. An AK had an effective range of maybe a hundred yards. Francesca could be lethal from ten times that distance. Wells would need to ambush him close in.

His new motorcycle was parked outside his trailer. He’d bought it the day before. It didn’t look like much, a Chinese-made Honda knockoff with an air-cooled 250cc engine and wire wheels. The word Hando was painted in white on its gas tank. No one would ever confuse it with a Ducati. Its speedometer went to two hundred kilometers an hour, but Wells figured the wheels would come off long before then. But Wells had looked it over closely before buying it. It was mechanically sound, and the tires and shocks were solid.

In any case, anonymity mattered more than performance. Anonymity translated into surprise, and Wells had learned over the years that tactical surprise beat firepower. Bar brawls or gunfights, the guy who hit first won. Maybe not always, but close enough. In Hollywood, fights went on and on and on. In the real world, they didn’t take long. Once a punch or kick or bullet knocked you down, going back on the attack was nearly impossible. You kept getting hit until the other guy stopped. Sometimes he didn’t stop until you were dead.

Francesca seemed to have learned the same lessons. His dirty pickup was what Wells would have used if he’d needed to carry a sniper rifle. And like Wells, Francesca and Alders operated without uniforms, or backup to bail them out. A casual observer might not see much difference between Wells and Francesca.

But somewhere Francesca had lost himself, forgotten his purpose. Forgotten that anyone could pull a trigger, take a life. The act itself was simple. The why was what separated soldiers from serial killers. Wells hadn’t forgotten the why. So he hoped. He put his bag on the back of the bike, slipped the key into the ignition.

THE MORNING TRAFFIC on Highway 1 was picking up as Wells headed east, shielding his eyes from the sun. The flatlands of southern Afghanistan turned cool in the mornings at this time of year. Wells shivered under his windbreaker as he followed Francesca’s trail north off Highway 1 and into the Arghandab Valley.

Even by Afghan standards, the valley was a backwater. A half dozen children swirled around a woman in an electric-blue burqa. A donkey dragged a cart inch by inch, whining with each step, as a gaunt man with skin the color and texture of leather clapped a switch across his haunches. Two Afghan soldiers leaned against a pickup truck, cigarettes in hand. One had painted the stock of his AK pink and covered the muzzle with rhinestones. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Afghans on both sides of the insurgency had a strange fondness for tricking out their rifles. The soldiers eyed Wells as he passed, but didn’t bother to stop him.

Wells reached the last point the transmitter had signaled just over two hours after leaving Kandahar. He pulled over and looked for any sign that Francesca and Alders had stopped nearby. Open fields lay north of the road, toward the river. To the south, a narrow cart track passed through a handful of farm compounds. Wells didn’t think the Toyota would fit on the track. Anyway, he could see a stream of smoke coming from one compound, and kids playing on the roof of another. Wells couldn’t imagine how Francesca and Alders would have hidden themselves in an occupied house. They had to be squatting someplace abandoned.

Wells rolled on. The landscape stayed the same for the next few miles. Compounds and the occasional grape hut sat south of the road. North, toward the river, the pomegranate groves thickened. Still, this part of the Arghandab was much less fertile than the land nearer Kandahar, the trees less dense.

The road passed through a village. To the south, several shops occupied a plaza, the Afghan version of a strip mall. At the far end was a garage big enough to hide the pickup. Wells stopped outside the plaza’s first store, walked in. Three men hunched over sewing machines, working long strips of white cotton. Posters taped to the concrete walls showed their offerings. The men barely acknowledged Wells. In these tiny villages, outsiders were suspect, especially if they weren’t Pashtun.

“Good morning.”

“Morning,” the man nearest Wells mumbled. One of his eyes was a deep, ugly red, the skin around it swollen and tender. Severe conjunctivitis. In the United States, a doctor would cure that infection with a few cents of medicine. Here, the man might go blind.

Wells leaned over his machine. “I see you do excellent work.” The man grunted and fed cloth through as the machine clucked. Time to get to the point. “I’m looking for two men who might have stopped here early this morning. Before sunrise.”

The man raised his head to stare with his weeping eye at Wells. The machines halted one by one until the shop was silent. “No one’s stopped here.”

“They were driving a Toyota, a pickup.” Wells reached into his pocket for a wad of afghanis. “Are you sure you haven’t seen them?”

“No one’s stopped here. And who are you?”

Wells backed out. As he got back on the bike, the sewing resumed. He didn’t understand why the tailors had been so unfriendly. He put the bike in gear, rolled by the garage. A side door was open and he could see inside. Empty. They hadn’t stopped here. Wells pulled back onto the road.

Past the village, more dirt tracks ran south, though most petered out before the ridgeline. Just three roads in this part of the valley ran over the ridge and toward Highway 1. If what Young had said was right, the Strykers would be on one of those roads sometime today. But Wells needed more. He hoped Shafer was making progress on unearthing their official mission. To find them without the transmitter’s help, he had to pin down what they were doing. And he had to lock them down soon, so he could track them as they moved on Young. Only then would Wells have the proof he needed to take them out. Right now he had only circumstantial evidence. He had to catch them in the act.

Worst-case, if Wells couldn’t find them, he could try to cover Young directly as the Stryker platoon registered motorcycles. But Francesca would be expecting him. Finding and tracking Francesca as he moved on Young would give Wells his only real chance of beating Francesca’s firepower advantage.

AS HE STARTED TO RIDE AGAIN, his phone buzzed.

“Told you, let me do my job,” Shafer said. “Point one. That road you’re on has turned into an IED alley. Four soldiers and two British journos got creamed last week. That got noticed all the way up to RCS HQ.”

No wonder the locals were giving the fish eye to outsiders, Wells thought. They couldn’t stop the Taliban from planting bombs, but they were worried that more casualties would provoke a big American counterattack, the kind that flattened villages. “What’s point two?”

“Point two. Yesterday the drones at KAF, in fact all air support, was ordered away from a sector of the valley sixty kilometers long and thirty wide. Lockdown for five days. Reason given is Special Operations mission, otherwise unspecified. How much would you like to bet your friends are setting up, waiting for Red Team to plant another IED? Makes for great cover.”

“It’s even better than that. The mission gives them an excuse to be out here. The no-fly zone means that when they kill Young, the Strykers can’t hit back. They go back to their original nest, take out the IED cell, come home to Kandahar. Mission accomplished. They just need to put a few miles between where they’re supposed to be, the official post, and the Young kill.”

“Sounds right.”

“So I should be looking for a nest near the road, within a mile or so. Not on the ridgeline. An abandoned farmhouse, something like that. With room to hide the pickup.” Wells was thinking out loud now.

“I hear more, I’ll let you know.”

Wells hung up. Now he could focus on houses within a few hundred yards of the road, with an open field of fire. Plus the firing position had to be big enough to hide the Toyota. Only a few buildings could meet all those conditions.

Still, he had a lot of ground to cover. Francesca and Alders would have reached the nest between four a.m., the time of the locator’s final transmission, and 4:45, when it should have reported again. Even if they had needed