Rashid took another step toward her. His eyes opened wide. He smiled. She saw he wanted her to know. He wasn’t nervous either. He was ready. He was
“Bomb!” Holm yelled. “Bomb!” No time to say anything else. She pushed Cota aside and down—
Behind her the security officers reached for their pistols—
They were all too late.
Ahmad Rashid, code name Marburg, reached under his sweater and pushed the detonator on his suicide vest. The seven pounds of Semtex strapped to his body blew. The blast wave tore Marci Holm into pieces so small that her remains could be identified only by her wedding ring. It ripped off the back of Manny Cota’s head. It killed seven other CIA officers, including Tom Lautner. Marci’s body partly protected him from the blast. He might have survived, but the overpressure wave caught him awkwardly and snapped his neck. Six other officers were seriously wounded, Ted Khan worst of all. The explosion blasted the 4Runner’s windshield into shards that cut up his eyes before he could blink. In a way he was lucky. He couldn’t see what had happened to his face.
EVEN BEFORE the wounded were loaded onto medevac choppers for transport to Bagram and then Germany, the Critic-coded transmissions began.
In the days to come, the dimensions of the catastrophe would become evident. A less important station would have been temporarily shut. Not Kabul. Not for a month or a week or even a day. Not with the Taliban spreading and the Afghan government too corrupt to function. Not with al-Qaeda regrouping over the border in Pakistan. Even before Manny Cota was buried in Georgia, Duto and his deputies on the seventh floor at Langley were deciding who would replace him. Duto himself flew to Kabul to rally his officers.
“We’ve lost a battle,” he said. “A terrible battle. The war goes on.”
PART ONE
1
Growing up in the scrubland of west Texas, Ricky Fowler had done some stupid things. The usual nonsense, nothing the cops cared much about. Mailbox baseball. Spraying a 1 beside the 75 on speed- limit signs. A couple times, drunk, he shot firecrackers at bulls. Roman candles and such. He wasn’t proud of that little trick, but he never hit anything. The longhorns didn’t even notice.
But these Afghans, they took the cake on stupid. Yeah, they were tough fighters, tricky little bastards who could get by forever on tea and stale bread. But tough and smart were two different things. Guys in his platoon had a name for the nonsense they saw outside the wire every day:
Like last month, on patrol, this dude sitting on a donkey so short the dude’s feet touched the ground. Plus the donkey’s sides were so loaded with sticks that it looked like it had a Christmas tree growing out of its butt. Even so the rider was grinning like he’d won the lottery, like,
Fowler was an E-3, a private first class, in 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. The unit’s name didn’t make much sense. The Army didn’t have but four Stryker brigades. But Fowler had given up trying to figure out the military’s logic on names, or anything else.
For six months, 3rd Platoon had been more or less orphaned from the rest of its company, peeled off to provide extra support for the supply convoys that ran on Highway 1 from Kandahar to Kabul. The convoys ran only once or twice a week, so the rest of the time, they got thrown onto random jobs that other units in the brigade didn’t want. They set up roadblocks to register motorcycles. They guarded detained Afghans who were scheduled to be moved to the big jail at Kandahar. They didn’t have a defined area of responsibility, and they rarely saw their company captain, much less their battalion commanders. As far as Fowler could see, the battalion had more or less forgotten they existed.
At least they lived on the same base as the rest of Bravo, Forward Operating Base Jackson. Jackson was a pile of trailers and blast walls in Zabul province. Like its neighbor to the west, Kandahar province, Zabul was the ass end of Afghanistan. No mountains here. Western Zabul and Kandahar were a mix of low brown hills and desert. Its soil supported two crops: poppies and the Taliban. More opium grew in Kandahar and the next-door province of Helmand than in the rest of the
But here they were, 3rd Platoon, the Lost Boys of Bravo Company. Now they were going down to Hamza Ali, a speck of a village fifteen miles from their base, for a “strongman show.” Sounded to Fowler like they’d be seeing more Stupid Afghan Tricks.
The show itself was a perfect example of the kind of jobs the platoon always got. It was part of COIN, which stood for counterinsurgency warfare. COIN meant, get into the villages and show the locals how much you want to help them. Pretend to care while they yell at one another about who stole whose goat. Give them a few bucks to rebuild the walls that the Strykers knocked over. Help them build a real country. Back in Vietnam, it had been called “hearts and minds.”
Fowler bet that COIN looked good on the presentations the generals gave the president. In reality, far as he could see, the Afghans were as close to building a real country as the hamsters he’d had in first grade. They were happy enough to take the free food and blankets and radios that the Army gave them. Then they kept their mouths shut when the Talibs came by planting bombs. They knew that sooner or later Fowler and his buddies would pack up and go home, and the Talibs would settle every score.
The Afghans might be stupid, but they weren’t
Meanwhile, when the elders of Hamza Ali invited Colonel Sean Brown, the commander at FOB Jackson, to see a show at their school, he followed the COIN doctrine. He said yes quick as if they’d offered him fifty-yard-line Cowboys — Giants tickets. Not that Brown had any intention of going. He kicked the visit to his executive staff, who sent it all the way down to 3rd Platoon.
ON THIS MISSION — using the word
But they weren’t. The Taliban’s most lethal weapon was what the Army called IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, giant homemade land mines. A big enough IED, say one built out of an old artillery shell, could turn a Stryker’s passenger compartment into a nine-man oven. A Stryker from Jackson had gotten popped about three months back. The bomb was huge, two 155-millimeter shells, a thousand pounds of explosive. Six guys had died. The others had been taken to the Army’s burn center at Fort Bliss in San Antonio. Word was they didn’t have faces anymore.
The good news was that bombs that big were rare. The bad news was that riding in the Strykers still stank. They had no windows or side doors, just hatches on top and a ramp in back. Fowler understood the logic. Doors and windows were weak points. The Stryker was meant to be a vault on wheels. But the inside felt like a vault, too,
