The Shadow Patrol

at a thousand atrocities. When he was finished showing off the hammer, he reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a board laced with nails.

Beside him, the boy leaned backward until his palms touched the ground. His head was upside down. His skinny stomach arched high into the air. The man lowered the board onto the boy’s naked belly — nails first. The crowd was silent now. The man picked a flat brick out of the bag and placed it atop the board. He knelt and held the board steady as Parwan picked up the hammer—

“Oh, no,” Fowler said involuntarily—

And brought it down onto the brick. Which snapped gunshot loud. The nails quivered. The boy’s stomach trembled. Parwan dropped the hammer, raised the two halves of the broken brick. The boy stood. A dozen crimson spots flecked his stomach, an instant case of chicken pox. Otherwise he didn’t seem hurt. He touched his fingers to his stomach and raised them to show their crimson tips and kissed them. Father and son stood side by side and bowed as the men in the audience roared their approval.

“How do you win a war against people who break bricks on their kids for fun?”

Fowler had no answer for that.

THEN THE SHOOTING STARTED.

A short burst of AK fire, five or six rounds, a soft popping from the northwest. Sound traveled easily in the air here. Not much ambient noise. Fowler figured the shots were a way off. The threat wasn’t immediate, if it was a threat at all. Fifteen seconds later a single shot followed. Then silence. Weston and Rodriguez murmured to each other. Rodriguez ducked his head to his shoulder, murmured into his radio. “We’re taking a walk,” he said to Fowler and the rest of 1st Squad. Fowler wished that they would let the Talibs come to them for once, instead of the other way around. But Rodriguez wasn’t asking his opinion.

Back at the Stryker, Rodriguez grabbed his backpack and then huddled up the squad — seven men in all, since 1st Squad’s driver and vehicle commander were staying in the village on sentry duty. “Lieutenant wants us to take a look-see for those shooters. Rest of the platoon’s staying here. It’s probably nothing, and he doesn’t want to mess up the show. What we know, there’s a bunch of houses about a klick northwest. A canal runs that way. We’ll go in dismounted. We’re fishing for them, they’re fishing for us. If there’s somebody out there, let’s take them out. Any questions?”

Rodriguez stepped up to Fowler, tugged on his Kevlar.

“No fear, Private. Say it.”

“No fear.”

Rodriguez looked over the men. “Huddle up and Hoo-ah!” The two syllables were the all-purpose Army cheer — the sound of soldiers coming together.

“Hoo-ah!”

“Hoo-ah!”

“Hoo-ah!” Even Fowler felt his spirits rise.

THEY WALKED THROUGH the village’s empty streets to the irrigation canal on the edge of town. Seven men. The tip of a sword that stretched halfway across the world. A hundred billion dollars a year to put them here, support them with drones and night-vision optics and ground-penetrating radar and every tool that the Pentagon’s procurement managers could imagine, the more expensive the better. Now they walked, as soldiers always had and always would. They turned northwest, walked on either side of the dry irrigation canal, eight feet wide and four feet deep. A gray hole in this gray land. Their footsteps left no trace on the hard ground. They walked slowly. They didn’t speak.

Rodriguez put four guys on the left side, three on the right. Fowler was second on the left, twenty yards behind the point. He didn’t like the approach. Mud-brick walls dotted the fields around them, low and irregular, along with scrubby bare-branched trees. If they were walking into an ambush, the hostiles would have cover and a clear field of fire. But Rodriguez was gung ho as a rule, and the platoon hadn’t sniffed a firefight in months. Fowler thought Rodriguez was probably hoping to engage.

They moved toward two shapeless clusters of huts, none more than ten feet high, protected by low walls. Donkeys and goats munched on garbage in a hand-built pen. No doubt everyone who lived here was related, a dozen families of kissing cousins.

Fowler kept his eyes up, looking for movement on the roofs. If any hostiles were hiding here, the ambush would start before 1st Squad got too close. For the most part, the Talibs used simple guerrilla tactics. They blew bombs at a distance and opened up with their AKs, trying to get American soldiers to chase them into fields of IEDs.

But the ambush didn’t come. The soldiers stepped closer, their boots scrabbling along the canal’s edge. On the left, one house had been painted bright blue. But sun and wind had bleached its paint until only a few snatches of color remained. All of Afghanistan felt drained of color to Fowler. Reduced to monochrome.

Rodriguez raised his left hand. The centipede of soldiers stopped. Rodriguez squatted low. Fowler followed his eyes toward a piece of metal that looked like the top of a soup can. He was trying to decide whether he was looking at a mine or a piece of trash. Finally, Rodriguez poked at the metal with the tip of his M-4. It flipped away harmlessly and skittered into the canal. Rodriguez stood, twirled his finger: Keep moving.

Two Afghans walked out of the hut that had once been blue. Both wore the shalwar kameez, the simple long tunic and pants that were standard for Afghan men. But one was wearing distinctly un-Afghan headgear, a black cowboy hat. “Halt,” Sergeant Kevin Roman, on point, shouted in English, lifting his M-4. The two men stopped, raised their hands. The squad closed around them, forming a loose semicircle around the men.

“Gentlemen,” Rodriguez said. “Why were you shooting?”

The men looked blankly at him.

“You have Taliban here?”

“Taliban? La, la.”

“Anybody speakee the English?” Rodriguez said. “Come on.” He turned toward the huts, where little boys and girls peeked at them. “Anybody home?” Rodriguez shouted. The kids disappeared. Fowler caught movement from a hut maybe fifty yards ahead and swung his rifle to cover. A man in a blue shalwar kameez stepped out, his hands high. “Hello!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot! Everything is okay.”

The man walked toward them. Waddled, really. He was heavy, with a wide, rolling gait. He reminded Fowler of an Afghan they’d seen a couple months ago at a checkpoint they’d run maybe thirty miles from here. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. Fowler stepped toward the guy, but Rodriguez shook his head. “I got this, Private.”

“I feel like I’ve seen this guy before, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, well, they look alike.” Rodriguez was right on that. The Pashtuns had dark brown skin and brown eyes and thick beards and big noses and hands and feet. When the guy got close, Fowler saw he had a nasty scar down the right side of his neck, like somebody had just missed getting his head on a platter. Fowler was sure he’d seen that scar before. Weird.

“You are looking for Taliban?” Scar said.

“Always, my man.”

“No Taliban here.”

“Who was shooting at us?”

The guy shook his head. Rodriguez adjusted the plug of dip in his mouth with his tongue and spit a stream of brown saliva at the canal. His dipping and his temper had earned him the nickname Volcano.

“We heard shots.”

“No shooting.”

“Liar. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Roman, come with me. I want to talk with this dude in private. In his compound. Fowler, Young, you stay here, keep an eye on the huts. B Team, you flare left, case we spook somebody out the side.”

“What about the right side?”

“Right side’s going to have to look after itself. Can’t do more with just seven guys.”