Burning Sky
Page 13
The lead vehicle was driven by McQueen with Criminal as gunner.
The trail vehicle was driven by Narco.
Boy Scout had received the BOLO list just that morning with pictures of three sedans, two motorcycles, and a bicycle. Each had been placed on the Be On the Look Out list because they’d been seen lingering near various US positions in the Kabul base cluster. He was well aware of the dangers presented by vehicle borne improvised explosive devices or VBIEDs. Not only could one of the sedans have an engine packed with plastic explosives, but one of the motorcycles or bicycles could slip through congested traffic and slap an IED with adhesive or magnets to the side of one of their vehicles. Although their SUVs were armored, he wouldn’t want to test the vehicle’s structural integrity against the explosive power of an IED.
Each of the men and women of his team had more than a hundred hours of combat driving training, not to mention real world experience in either Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or both. But all the training in the world couldn’t defeat a terrorist intent on attacking a vehicle convoy, especially one locked in the dead-stop traffic of Massoud Circle.
Named after Ahmad Shah Massoud, known also as the Lion of Panjshir for his contributions in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the center of the circle was dominated by a tall monument with an immense blue ball atop it, around which vehicles vied for access to the six roads that ran from it. There were no vehicular lanes. There were no lines. Entry into the circle was on a first come, first served basis. Because almost all the cars were Corollas it became an ant farm, with identically sized vehicles vying for a position that would allow them to depart the circle on one of the connecting roads.
On this occasion they were deadlocked, his three-vehicle convoy pinned in by a herd of angry Corollas. Because of its geophysical relationship to the Green Zone and its locus for the road to Kabul International Airport, the circle was a place one was forced to transit, which was why every member of the TST had their head on a swivel, hyper-aware for anything that could possibly be a threat. They’d locked their bumpers so that no one could get between them and separate the convoy, and were eagerly inching forward as traffic tetrissed around the monument.
The problem started when the DIA employee sitting behind the front passenger seat began to lose it. About fifty and seriously overweight, the body armor so tight that it was probably cutting off blood flow, “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go,” rattled under his breath.
The other employee, a man half his age and weight, said, “Take it easy, man.”
But the big guy wasn’t listening. “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go,” he chanted, increasingly loud.
Lore turned in her seat. “Everything is fine,” she said in a voice that was the model of calm. “We do this every day and it’s not a thing.”
The big guy stared at Lore with bulging eyes, then bit back the chant. He glared fearfully out through the bulletproof glass on his door.
Suddenly the MBITR crackled to life.
“Five men working through the vehicles from our four o’clock,” said Narco.
Lore spun and Boy Scout turned. She had her 9mm drawn but kept beneath the level of the window.
“We see them,” Boy Scout said. “Do you clock any weapons?”
“Negative. But two are wearing man jammies, so they could be carrying.”
The men were walking through the traffic, staring into windows as if they were looking for something.
“McQueen, can you get us a way out of here?”
“Only if I push,” he said, meaning gun the engine and push the smaller cars out of his way, doing whatever damage was going to happen, his cement-filled metal bumper the modern equivalent of a battering ram.
“Hold off on the push,” Boy Scout said. To Lore, he added, “Watch them.”
“Pretty easy thing to do. They’re coming right at us,” she said.
“Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.” The man was now loud enough that everyone could hear it.
“You need to calm your friend,” Lore said without turning around, her attention fully on the five men coming towards them.
“Sam,” said the younger man. “Come on, Sam. Keep it cool.”
“Can’t. Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.”
The first of the five men was almost upon them. Two of the men had stopped at a car with its windows down and were reaching in. A man was fighting them as the men tried to pull things from his backseat.
Boy Scout had already clocked two ANA soldiers standing in the center of the circle, their AKs on their hips, watching the five men. Either the men had a working relationship with the soldiers, or the soldiers just didn’t care. Either way, it was evident that the men placed in the circle to keep the peace weren’t going to lift a finger. One of them lit a cigarette. The other looked away.
“Sam. Calm the fuck down,” the younger man urged.
Lore glanced into the back seat and the guy gave her a look like, I’m trying but he’s freaking out and I can’t stop him.
“Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.” Now he was almost yelling.
Just then one of the five men approached Lore’s window. He was a dark-skinned Afghan with a sparse, short beard. He grinned because he evidently thought that by showing his rotting teeth, Lore would let him in. He tapped his knuckles on the window and bent down to peer in.
“Go away,” she said, locking gazes with him.
But the man kept knocking.
She lifted the pistol so it was clearly visible, the barrel still pointing at the ground.
The man kept knocking.
She turned the working end of the pistol and aimed it at the man’s face.
But he merely grinned wider. He knew the score. He was as safe behind the bulletproof glass as she was inside the vehicle.
“Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.”
Boy Scout wondered why the man had even deployed. If he couldn’t take the stress of driving in Kabul, how was he going to react to being shot at?
Then things happened faster than he could stop them.
The man began pawing at the door handle. It was Boy Scout’s responsibility to lock everyone in the car. The backseats were supposed to have been child locked. But he was driving a brand-new vehicle and hadn’t yet set them up. So when the man pawed at the door handle a fifth time, the handle engaged and the door sprung open.
The Afghani man at Lore’s window immediately filled the space, reaching in and grabbing at the fat man, who was now shrieking.
Lore spun in her seat and pressed the tip of her pistol against the side of the intruder’s head at the same time that Boy Scout drew his pistol free from his chest rig and brought his right hand over and behind so the barrel of his pistol was on the intruder’s forehead.
“Push! Push! Push!” he commanded through coms.
He felt the jerk as Narco shoved them from behind.
The intruder’s eyes had gone wide and his face trembled. He raised his hands, then disappeared from view as the vehicles pressed through the crowd of stopped cars.
Lore reached back and slammed the door shut from the inside.
She glanced at Boy Scout. He knew what she wanted to say, but that wasn’t how they acted. If she wanted to bitch, she could do it later. For now, it was all professional. And she knew it.
Instead, she turned to the DIA men in the back seat. “Let’s not touch the door knobs again, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the younger man.
Their three-car train plowed through a dozen cars, pushing each of them out of the way until they ended up pointing every which way. Once clear, Boy Scout gunned the vehicle. A space opened between their SUVs and they raced down the road.
The older man had passed out.
“Is he alive?” Boy Scout asked, seeing this in the mirror.
The younger man nodded. “Yeah. And he pissed himself, too.” He blanched. “Sorry about that.”
Lore gave Boy Scout another look.
They’d have to clea
n that up later, too.
But they were safe. As he drove, the stress of the moment bled away with each kilometer between them and the circle, until finally he was calm again. He glanced back at the passed out DIA employee. He doubted they were going to make their meeting. The funny thing was, to get them back to their base, they’d have to go right back through Massoud Circle.
That incident seemed like it had happened decades ago, but it was really a little over seventeen months. This would make Boy Scout’s third rotation with virtually the same team. Although it wasn’t unheard of, it was a rarity to be able to work with the same people. Personnel turnover in a war zone could be dizzying. One moment you have a great working relationship with someone, the next they’ve redeployed and you have to learn the idiosyncrasies of another. That they were all contractors working for the same company was in their favor. HUMANTECH knew they worked well together and tried to keep them together because in the end, it was all about making the customer happy and in this case the customer was the United States government.
They’d hit Kabul three days ago. One day to set up their team room, get cars issued and cleared, and establish a routine, then two days of missions. Three full days and they were nowhere closer to figuring out the significance of the girl and the goat. Three full days and they still had a maddening feeling that they were missing something. Then there was the unexpected attention they’d been receiving. It was a small thing. In fact, it might not have even been a thing. At first, he’d thought he was making it all up in his head. But then Lore mentioned it too. Either his paranoia was catching, or they were receiving more attention than they deserved.
The eyes.
Everyone’s eyes.
They didn’t look away.
They didn’t look down.
Afghanistan was much like some of the more dangerous places in America, whether it be South Central Los Angeles or South Chicago. You didn’t meet someone else’s gaze. To do so was to challenge them… a challenge most often ending with a gunfight. The same went for Afghanistan. It was the mode de guerre. Women didn’t look at anyone except other women or children. Men looked at other men they knew but kept their attention away from those they didn’t. The only persons who truly had the freedom to stare openly were children, and then only because of the universal imprimatur of childhood curiosity.
Something had definitely changed in Kabul since their last rotation.
The TST found that it was impossible to pass unnoticed because it seemed that everyone was watching them. Not out of the corners of their eyes, but full out staring, as if they were the center of everyone’s attention. Wherever Boy Scout would drive, everyone was already looking in his direction as if they’d been expecting them. Even in Massoud Circle, the eyes of every driver and passenger followed them, watching their every move. The faces were impassive, but the eyes moved with them.
There’d been an ill-chosen moment in high school when Boy Scout had agreed to be in a Neil Simon play, the one that Jane Fonda and Robert Redford had made famous on the silver screen. Like most things he’d done in high school, he’d agreed to do it because of a girl. The idea of memorizing lines to be regurgitated in front of a crowd of five hundred fellow students hadn’t bothered him when he’d signed up to appear in Barefoot in the Park. It had never occurred to him that so much attention would bother him. But then lights, camera, action, and a few moments later he was stepping through a prop window as the Upper West Side letch, Victor Velasco, to the cheers and jeers of his fellow students in Phipps Auditorium. Instead of remembering his lines, he’d focused on the thousand eyes staring directly at him, pinning him to the stage, and he knew that such attention was absolutely the last thing he’d ever want. He hadn’t been afraid. Instead, he’d been immediately sick, his lines barely passing the fist-sized lump of vomit that had wedged in his throat.
He was brought back to that moment now because of the attention they’d been receiving in Kabul… a situation so eerie that he found himself not as vigilant as he should have been. The combined gazes of everyone he passed on the street weighed on him enough so that he found it difficult to watch what he was supposed to watch.
Everything came to a head on the morning of the fourth day. They had a mission to carry three members of the embassy econ council to the Afghan Ministry of Finance. From the very start, Boy Scout had felt something was off. The norm was for the TST to arrive and everyone be happy to see them. After all, they were the ones putting themselves in harm’s way. His appearance had always engendered smiles, handshakes, and even high fives on occasion. They were the hired beasts to keep the other beasts at bay.
But by the conspiratorial way the embassy folks stared at him then mumbled to each other, the TST’s appearance seemed anything but popular. By the looks in the eyes of the two men and one woman, it was plain that they weren’t even wanted. It was as if their existence was accepted with reservations. Sideways looks and heavy-lidded stares put a pall over the entire movement.
The TST employed their usual three-vehicle convoy. The embassy was packed in the center of the Green Zone and abutting Resolute Support (RS) HQ. Because of the sensitivity and its location, there were almost a dozen checkpoints to go through before they rolled into Massoud Circle. At each checkpoint, Boy Scout would glance in the rearview mirror and immediately lock gazes with his passengers. After a moment, they’d drop their gazes and lower their heads together, their conversation much like those of crows in the midst of a murder. Whatever they were saying, it was conveyed with the slow shaking of heads, conspiratorial glances his way, and whispered words, taking him once more back to high school where the cruel cool kids would talk amongst themselves about the others—and Boy Scout had always been an other.
Navigating Massoud Circle turned out a simpler task than most other times and they soon found themselves pulling into the Ministry of Finance compound. The guards at the compound gate checked their vehicular IDs, then the NATO identification plate on the dashboard. By rule, the TST never left a vehicle. Many of the other official travelers were made to disembark vehicles, allow for explosive sweeps, and forced to unload weapons at the various checkpoints in and around Kabul… but not the TST.
Never the TST.
Except this time.
An ANA soldier stood in front of the first vehicle with his AK47 at the ready. Several other ANA soldiers had formed a rough arc inside the compound, all facing him. An ANA major with a clipboard gestured for those in McQueen’s vehicle to disembark.
McQueen radioed from the first vehicle, where Narco sat beside him in the passenger’s seat.
“Boss, you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Roger,” Boy Scout acknowledged. “Remain fast.” He honked the horn to get the ANA major’s attention.
The man glanced in his direction, then proceeded to ignore him. He walked up and rapped his knuckles on McQueen’s window.
“For God’s sake, what’s taking so long?” asked one of their passengers.
Boy Scout glanced in the rearview mirror, but no one was looking at him. Instead, all three of them had their heads together once again. Finally, one glanced at him and sneered. It was the woman, her red-lipsticked lips pulling back until it seemed the corners touched her ears. He felt a cavity open in his stomach, reminded suddenly of a version of Caliban he’d seen in a horror movie version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This Caliban had pokey teeth that enabled him to suck the blood from dying children in a hospital. As long as he stared, the creepy grin remained, his eyes locked with the woman.
Then McQueen called. “Boss, he wants me to roll down the window.”
Boy Scout flicked his gaze to the SUV in front of him, then to the backseat, but the woman was no longer looking at him and her mouth was a thin flat line as the men whispered to her.
“This isn’t right,” Lore said from the passenger seat. “Criminal, watch our six. Whatever happens, we need a way to get out.”
They were closing the gate behind them.
Several ANA soldiers yelled for him to move, but he merely hung his arms over the steering wheel and grinned at them.
Classic Criminal.
Someone from the back seat hissed, “Will you just fucking open the door?”
But when Boy Scout looked, they were still huddled together. It wasn’t apparent who had spoken. It didn’t seem as if anyone had spoken.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
But they ignored him.
Part of their rules of engagement was to not let the client get under their skin. They were to remain professional at all times. “I said, excuse me. Did one of you just say something?”
The woman suddenly sat up, staring openly at him.
His full attention was on her lips as he waited for her to resume that blood-thirsty horror movie Caliban thing she’d been doing with her lips.
“Boss, this has gone to DEFCON one,” McQueen said, referring to the most serious nuclear readiness stance America could have—the brink of war.
Boy Scout glanced once again at the activity forward and saw that the ANA soldier in front of McQueen had locked and loaded his AK, had shouldered it, and was sighting down the barrel, preparing to fire. The other ANA soldiers in the arc had likewise pulled their weapons and brought them to bear. If they opened fire, the SUVs windows would hold enough for them to be able to back out if they were lucky, but this was all wrong. Why the confrontation? His and the other TSTs had been here hundreds of times, escorting various government entities intent on helping the ever-failing Afghan economy from total collapse. Why was the ANA suddenly antagonistic to them?
“We shouldn’t be here,” the woman said in a monotone.
“Excuse me?” Lore said, flipping through her movement orders. “We were to pick you up at the embassy and deliver you to the Ministry of Finance by eleven hundred hours. Current time hack is eleven oh four. We’d have been on time had it not been for the shenanigans—”