I took a deep breath. “I have a mission.”
“I understand. But would you be willing to talk to Keating? Maybe just buy us some time?”
“That’s the one thing they’re telling me I don’t have.”
“Will you at least try?”
I shrugged, then turned to the door.
“Scott, I respect your opinion, and I’m going to need your help. Let’s do this together.”
I couldn’t answer, and I’m glad I didn’t.
“Nice to meet you… Scott,” said Anderson.
My grin was forced, and she knew it.
I returned to quarters and sat around with the rest of my men, who were cleaning weapons. Hume and Nolan were busy dissecting the Cross-Coms for any more clues and had speculated that high-energy radio frequencies were probably to blame. I told them to keep working on it and shared with everyone what Harruck planned to do.
“He’s just painting a bigger target on this town and pissing off the Taliban,” said Brown. “The local government’s corrupt. That’s a given. So these people have come to trust the Taliban, who’ve kept their word. Now we’re supposed to get them to trust us more by giving them more stuff, and we’re supposed to think that once we’ve bought their trust, they’ll help us capture the Taliban.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But what’s wrong with that picture?”
Treehorn started laughing. “The Taliban ain’t going to let that happen.”
“Harruck actually said we might have to work with them.”
“Are you serious?” asked Ramirez, who set down a magazine and turned his frown on me.
“See, Harruck knows that if we build the school and the rest of it, the Taliban will attack, so how do you get them off your back?”
“You take out their leader, disrupt their communications, and demoralize them,” said Matt Beasley, who’d been very quiet the past few days. I could now hear the frustration in his tone.
“That might work, Matt, and you can bet we’re going to try. But that’s not Harruck’s plan.”
Ramirez made the money sign with his fingers.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “They’ll try to cut a deal.”
“Well, then, what’re we supposed to do?” asked Ramirez. “Harruck’s offering a handshake while we’re putting guns to their heads.”
“Look, he can’t do that openly,” I said. “Imagine the headline. Bottom line is the taxpayers need an enemy they can believe in — just as much as a hero.”
“All this is making my brain explode,” said Treehorn. “I need a bullet and a target. I’m easy to please. The rest of it is bullshit.”
“Captain, I know Harruck’s your friend,” began Ramirez, “but we weren’t sent here to build a school. If this is a good old-fashioned militia training op, I can deal with that, too. But we can’t be tiptoeing around and still get our job done.”
“I know. And there’s no reason we should get caught up in all this. I want to go back out there tonight, gather more intel, and proceed on mission.”
“We’ve got the drones but still no way to talk to them,” said Hume. “Waiting on new gear. Could be a few more days.”
I cursed. “Then we’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Radios, binoculars, NVGs, it’s not like we didn’t train that way,” I said.
“You going to tell Harruck?” asked Treehorn.
“No choice. We still need company support. He wanted me to call Keating and delay our mission. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d rather get the job done and get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
“So just lie to him,” said Treehorn.
I thought about that.
And I wondered if maybe I was just being a selfish bastard, but my guys felt the same way, so I lied and told Harruck no go. Our mission remained unchanged. We needed to find and capture Zahed.
“Don’t you understand?” he asked me, raising his voice when I returned to his office later in the day. “This is eight months’ worth of work finally coming together, and you want to screw it up just to nail that fat bastard who’ll be replaced by his second in command! If we don’t reach some kind of an agreement, nothing will happen.”
“They didn’t send me here to debate the politics, Simon. They sent me to get a guy, and you can’t blame me for doing that. I understand your mission here. All I’m asking is that you understand mine. If I can capture Zahed and they get him to talk, he could turn the tide for us.”
“Okay, yeah, I get it now. I understand how you’re going to incite them and create an even more volatile situation, as evidenced by today’s attack. And at the same time that I’m trying to earn the locals’ trust, you’re pissing them off by hunting down one fool who in the grand scheme of things means nothing. He’s a local yokel. You’re making him sound like Bin Laden.”
I balled my hands into fists. “You’re assuming that I can’t demoralize them, that I can’t get the whole leadership party, that no matter what I do it’s going to be status quo over there.”
“That’s right, because that’s the way it’s been here. If we’re going to change anything, it has to be big and swift, and we need to do it together — if we leave them out, we’re doomed to fail.”
I couldn’t face him any more and looked to the door.
“Scott—”
I took a deep breath. “I understand now why you didn’t become a Ghost.”
“Don’t be this way.”
“Sorry, I’m not like you, Simon. I’m a soldier.”
“Wow, what the hell was that?”
I faced him and spoke slowly… for effect. “What I see here is us building another welfare state, socialism at its finest, but remember what Margaret Thatcher said: ‘Socialism only works until you run out of other people’s money.’ I’m not ready to negotiate with these bastards.”
“Captain,” he snapped. “I’ll be contacting the general. I’ll take this all the way up. There’s just too much at stake here. Nothing personal.”
“That’s fine. You won’t like the answer you get. We’re doing a recon tonight. I’ll need company support. I’ll expect you to provide it. Check the registry, Captain.”
SIX
Without our Cross-Coms, satellite uplinks and downlinks, and targeting computers, we were, for all intents and purposes, traditional old-school combatants relying on our scopes and skills. We did, however, have one nice toy well suited for Afghanistan: the XM-25, a laser-designated grenade launcher with smart rounds that did not require a link to our Cross-Coms. Matt Beasley had traded in his rifle for the XM-25, saying he predicted that he’d finally get a chance to field-test the weapon for himself. His prediction would come true, all right…
I couldn’t deny the fact that long-range recon from the mountains would gain us only a small portion of the big picture. We needed HUMINT — human intelligence— which could be gathered only by boots on the ground… spies walking among the enemy.
The guy I’d captured back in town was worthless. He wouldn’t talk, make a deal, nothing. Harruck handed him off to the CIA and wished him good riddance.
So at that point it was both necessary and logical that I try to recruit the only local guy I knew who was seemingly on my side.
I won’t say I fully trusted him — because I never did. But I figured the least I could do was ask. Maybe for the right price he’d be willing to walk into the valley of the shadow of death and bring me back Zahed’s location. The Ghosts gave me an allowance for such cases, and I planned on spending it. I had nothing to lose except the taxpayers’ money, and I worked for the government — so that was par for the course.
