The Shadow Patrol

their position was overrun, a story that was true as far as it went.

Of course, the Deltas who helicoptered from Kandahar to retrieve the bodies knew that Francesca and Alders had been killed close to fifteen miles from their assigned position and weren’t carrying their Barrett. But the Deltas didn’t have to be told to keep their mouths shut. The less said the better. Some questions were best left unasked.

Wells crashed in a KBR trailer at Kandahar the night after he killed Francesca and Alders. The next morning he shaved his beard, the thick black clumps piling in the sink, nearly clogging the drain. He put on his cleanest shirt and borrowed a Hyundai from the KBR lot. When he gave his name to the gate guards at the Delta compound, he half expected that they’d put him on the ground and cuff him. The frontline guys might not have figured out exactly what had happened. But the major who commanded the unit knew of Shafer’s call to Cunningham. He had to suspect Wells was responsible for killing his guys.

Instead, the guards waved him in and asked him almost politely to wait in his car. A few minutes later, a black man about Wells’s age strode toward the gates. He had a square jaw and shoulders that hardly fit under his uniform. He slid into the front passenger seat and nodded to Wells.

“Steven Penn. I run this unit.”

“Major.”

“Let’s take a drive.”

Wells rolled through the gate and into the endless airfield traffic.

“You came here to tell me what happened?”

“As much as I can.”

“I want you to feel you can be straight with me.”

“I always get nervous when somebody says that.”

“I’ll put it this way, then. I’m not taping this. Why do you think we’re talking in your car and not my office?”

Wells decided Penn deserved the truth. “Francesca had a Dragunov. I don’t know where he got it, but it was practically new. They were set up on that ridge targeting a Stryker platoon. I found them, came up on them, killed them.”

“You killed them? Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

“Then you called your boss Shafer and told him to tell me where to find the bodies.”

“I didn’t want them to rot and I knew the Strykers would leave them.”

Penn squeezed his hands together. “Why would my men do that? Engage American soldiers?” Whatever anger or regret Penn felt, his voice was perfectly controlled, barely a whisper. Wells explained what Francesca and the Strykers had been doing. Penn listened in silence until Wells finished.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s why they were up there. One of the Stryker soldiers was talking to me. They were planning to take him out.”

“Any more of my men involved?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like a CIA officer was running them, running the ring.”

“Which is why you’re in on this. Why Shafer called Cunningham. Setting the hook.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us?”

“All we had was one enlisted man’s word and a couple pieces of circumstantial evidence.”

“And you didn’t think we’d want to hear about it anyway.”

“That’s right.” Though now that he’d met Penn, Wells thought he and Shafer had made a mistake. The Delta officer seemed like a problem solver, not a blame dodger. If Wells had come directly to him, they could have found a less dangerous way to smoke out Francesca and Alders.

“Was this about taking down Detachment 71? Some Langley power grab?”

“I don’t play those games.” Though Vinny Duto does. “This was, is, about a problem in the CIA. A mole working with the Talibs. The director asked me to find him and the investigation ran this way. To drug smuggling and then to your guys. Honestly, I didn’t expect that.”

“And have you found the mole?”

Wells nodded.

“Care to share?”

“I expect you’ll find out soon enough, but I’d rather not.”

They drove in silence toward the cluttered junkyards in the southwest corner of the base. The wind had turned southerly, bringing with it the stench of human waste. The tons of feces that Kandahar’s inhabitants generated every day had to go somewhere. Before being pumped into the fields outside the base, it was chemically treated at an artificial lagoon on the airfield’s west side.

“Had to take us this way,” Penn said.

“It always this bad?”

“During the summer, guys wake up thinking they’ve crapped themselves.”

“A big thinker might wonder if that smell isn’t a metaphor for the war, the waste we’re leaving behind.”

“He might. I just leave the windows up and breathe through my mouth.”

“A wise man.” Wells turned back toward the center of the base.

“Thank you.”

“For turning?”

“For what you did.”

The words were so unexpected that for a moment Wells wondered if he’d misheard.

“If my guys were doing what you said… and you’re right, why else would they be up there… then they were cancers. And I failed as a leader. Failed them and myself. It was happening right in front of me. I didn’t see it. I let them get out of control.”

“You’re not a mind reader. And wars do strange things to the men who fight them.” At the end, when he’d closed his eyes and offered his neck to the knife, Francesca had smiled. He’d been relieved. Wells would swear to it. War is endless grief. “What will you tell your men, Major?”

“As little as I can.” Penn paused. “And are you planning to deal with the Strykers, too?”

“Yes.”

Penn seemed to want to ask Wells how, but he didn’t. Neither man spoke again until Wells stopped outside the Delta compound. Penn extended a hand. “Wish we could have met under different circumstances.”

“Me, too, Major. Maybe one day stateside we’ll have the chance.”

Penn opened his door, hesitated. “Do you think we can win over here?”

I don’t even know what that word means anymore. “I think you, me, everybody else, we’ll all do our jobs until somebody has a better idea.”

At that, Penn saluted and left.

“I TRIED TO CALL YOU, tell you where they’d be,” Young told him a few hours later. “But they shut down the coms that morning.” He explained that when a soldier was killed in action, the Army cut cell service as well as the sat phones at the Morale and Welfare rooms. The Pentagon didn’t want wives or parents hearing about casualties through the military grapevine before they were officially notified. A soldier in the brigade had stepped on an IED on the morning that Francesca and Alders had gone to the ridge, and so the phones had been cut.

“I have to ask, Coleman, how come you rode up there anyway, knowing I might not be there?”

“May as well lie on my back and spread my legs if I’m gonna stay home. That what you would do, Mr. Wells?”

“Death before dishonor.”

“I figured it would work out and it did. Saw Mickey Mouse up there with his throat cut. Still the lieutenant and the sergeant and Roman, though.”

“I’ll handle them.”

“Like that?”