The Greatest Game

by J A Heaton

  Daniel guessed the chief’s home was the biggest one, which wasn’t much nicer than what most people in D.C. would have considered a chicken coop.

  He soon realized what felt weird to him. Normally, he would have expected the men to be working outside, and they would have come to greet him. Instead, there were no men.

  An elderly man ambled to the doorway, wearing a thick coat filled with cotton that went down to his ankles. It was basically a wearable sleeping mat. The man’s eyes drooped, wearied by life. And Daniel didn’t blame him.

  “You’re on,” Rex said to Daniel.

  Daniel pressed the record button on his voice recorder and put it back in his pocket. Daniel approached the man as the soldiers spread out around them, checking for threats.

  “Assalomu Alaykum,” Daniel said with the common greeting. Daniel extended the two round loaves of bread towards the man, a sign that he was coming as a guest.

  The old man nodded his head slightly and muttered a similar reply. He took the bread.

  Daniel continued as best he could to speak in Dari. He apologized if his Tajiki was too strong.

  The village chief ignored Daniel’s apology. When Daniel asked for his name, he gave no answer.

  Daniel thanked him, took the time to remove his boots and leave them outside, and entered with Rex, who had done the same. Floor mats lay around the perimeter of the room, and a cloth covered the center of the room. There was no furniture and no windows. The man motioned for Daniel to sit. Daniel sat to the side, and the old man gave him a quizzical look.

  According to custom, as a guest, Daniel knew he should have sat farthest away from the door, and the old man should have insisted on such a seating arrangement to honor his guest. Notably, the old man made no such insistence. Instead, he placed the bread on the cloth and sat farthest from the door.

  Rex sat next to Daniel and muttered, “We’re vulnerable in here.”

  “We’ve got to play the game if we’re going to build this network,” Daniel replied.

  The man held out his hands and muttered a prayer. Daniel also held out his hands to show respect.

  A few years ago, the cloth on the floor would have displayed round loaves of bread and other seasonal fruits and vegetables for any guests. Of course, there would be tea. Today, there was only tea besides the bread Daniel gave as a gift.

  The man tilted the teapot to pour the drink into their version of teacups: tiny bowls. Daniel wasn’t surprised when he discovered the tea was cold. He guessed they made a hot pot in the morning, and that was all the fuel they could afford to expend.

  Daniel spent several minutes thanking the man for his hospitality and asking how his family was doing. His pleasantries were met with silence, and Daniel realized the man’s family had probably suffered much over the last several years, and so polite inquiries into his family’s wellbeing were painful.

  “Older brother,” Daniel said, addressing him respectfully, “we can help you in the winter. Fuel, blankets. At least to keep your little ones warm.”

  “But what will we do the next winter?” the man asked. “Or what will we do seven winters from now?”

  Daniel knew what the question implied. Was it more likely that the Americans or the Taliban would still be around in seven years?

  “We can offer much immediate help if you help us guests a tiny amount,” Daniel said.

  The man returned a hard stare.

  Daniel pulled out the photo of both Qaqramon and his brother, Aziz.

  “Do you know these men? If so, can you tell me where they are from, or where I could find them?”

  The old man answered after a quick glance at the photos.

  “No. I don’t know.”

  Daniel sensed there was no point in continuing with the man. He sensed not only resistance, but fear.

  “We’ll return soon with some things to help your family stay warm,” Daniel promised. “Maybe next week. See if you can remember anything about the men in the pictures.”

  The old man got up for Daniel and Rex to leave without saying a prayer. Daniel and Rex followed his lead and got up. Daniel left the two loaves of bread.

  “How did it go?” Rex asked as he laced up his boots, rightly assuming the old man didn’t know any English.

  “Not good,” Daniel said. “He didn’t seat us as he should have, and he didn’t want us to stay, and he didn’t pray when we got up to leave.”

  “We’ve never been invited in for tea,” Rex said, “so we’ve made some progress.”

  We need faster progress, Daniel decided.

  Daniel extended his hand to shake the old man’s hand before leaving. The old man reluctantly accepted it.

  Daniel grasped the man’s hand and said, “You know who Qaqramon is. You know he’s an evil man. Do what is right in God’s eyes and tell me something.”

  Continuing to hold Daniel’s hand, the old man replied, “I know nothing. But the disabled man behind the animals might know something.” He briefly nodded his head towards the side of his house.

  “Thank you,” Daniel said and released the handshake.

  The old man is keeping himself safe, but he is trying to help. Some progress, Daniel thought to himself.

  “A disabled man might be our key,” Daniel said to Rex as they walked away from the house towards their Humvees. The patrol was warily gazing about the empty village for threats.

  “Heading home soon,” Rex called to the driver.

  “I’m impressed, Doc,” Rex said.

  Daniel wasn’t so sure. Stepping around shallow puddles and livestock excrement, Daniel felt uneasy about the interaction. He did not blame the village chief for fearing the Taliban even though they had lost Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul.

  Rex hopped back into the Humvee, and their armed escorts took one more look around, M4 rifles at the ready before they started to get back into the vehicle.

  “Hold on a moment,” Daniel told the others as he went to find the disabled man beside the house.

  A thin man watched them from a footpath between the village chief’s house and the neighboring animal pens. The man gave an uneasy smile, revealing yellow and crooked teeth. He looked away.

  Daniel guessed he had cerebral palsy and was between twenty and thirty years old. Like most Afghans, he had had a difficult life that would have aged him quickly. Cerebral palsy only made life more difficult.

  The type of man who can see everything, but everybody ignores him and assumes he’s too stupid to understand, Daniel thought to himself. He could be the perfect source.

  Daniel walked towards the man. Daniel placed his hand on his chest as he walked, and then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered him one. The man looked down and shook his head slightly.

  “Take one,” Daniel insisted.

  The man pretended not to hear him.

  “Take one,” Daniel repeated himself.

  Same reaction.

  “Don’t offend a guest,” Daniel said with a hint of humor.

  This worked, and the man reached his hand out towards the cigarette. He gave a quick smile, again exposing his rotting teeth, and then he grabbed for the whole pack of cigarettes.

  “All of them, my friend?” Daniel asked with a joking tone of incredulity. The man responded with a smile.

  “Are you not a generous American?” the man said.

  Daniel smiled and released the pack into his hands.

  Information on Taliban movements for cigarettes? A good deal, Daniel thought to himself.

  A yell came from the lead lookout vehicle. “I’ve got movement on the hillside. Looks like we might see some action.” Daniel heard the men on the two patrol vehicles click their weapons to the ready.

  But Daniel pretended he hadn’t heard them and pulled out the photo of Qaqramon and showed it to him.

  “I need to see Qaqramon,” Daniel said.

  The man looked at the photo. His eyes lit up with a flash of recognition.

  “Hurry up,” Rex
called out impatiently from the patrol vehicle. “We’re about to kick some ass, and you don’t want to be caught out there with your pants down.”

  Daniel looked back towards the village chief’s house, expecting to see him there to wish them farewell. Instead, the ramshackle wooden door was closed.

  Daniel turned back to the man with cerebral palsy to ask again about the photo, but he had backed away and was hurrying down the footpath between the house and animal pens.

  “Hold it!” a soldier from the nearest patrol vehicle yelled out.

  The crack of gunfire split through the air.

  The twenty meters between Daniel and the patrol vehicle seemed like a chasm, and Daniel realized he was exposed. He had to get to the patrol vehicle and get out of there.

  The US Army patrolmen in the front vehicle concentrated their firepower forward, but Daniel wondered if they could see the attackers. A few more shots came from the front but off to the side. The American soldiers responded in kind.

  Rex released a few shots in the direction of the enemy, and then he raced back towards Daniel.

  Rex fell to the ground as gunshots from the side blocked his way to Daniel, but Rex quickly regained his feet and hurried towards Daniel.

  The same attackers from the side forced Daniel to take cover behind a dilapidated fence built out of rock, mud, and uneven slats of wood. Now Daniel was several meters farther away from the patrol vehicle.

  He spotted men in black rushing towards him through the same alley through which the man with cerebral palsy had left.

  Daniel’s military training and his father’s advice kicked into full gear.

  He reached for his pistol and relished the familiar grip of the Glock General Jones had given him. From his knee, Daniel emptied the whole magazine into the alley, knocking down attackers.

  But more were coming.

  Rex arrived at Daniel’s side, and with his M4 poured its firepower down the pathway. The narrow alley the Taliban had intended as an entryway for a sneak attack became a kill zone.

  Daniel didn’t need Rex to tell them they had to get to those vehicles and get out of there. Daniel ran in a straight line, and Rex intermittently fired off shots to the side. The fire from the frontal assault and the side died down. The attackers had lost their element of surprise, and their comrades were lying dead or injured in the alley.

  Daniel stopped when he heard Rex yell out in pain behind him.

  Daniel turned and ran back towards Rex. The machine gun on top of the patrol vehicle roared back to life, providing Daniel the cover he needed. Daniel dragged Rex by his armpits to the vehicle and tossed him in. Daniel jumped in after him.

  “Go! Go!” the driver yelled over the radio. Their patrol vehicle followed the lead vehicle out of the village at high speed. As they drove away, gunfire chased them.

  “Not bad with the Glock. For a linguist,” Rex joked, breathing heavily. He nodded towards the expended gun in Daniel’s holster. Daniel finally remembered to turn off his voice recorder.

  But then Daniel saw the blood from Rex’s injury.

  Daniel searched Rex frantically to find the wound as the patrol vehicles hurried back to the base at Mazar-i-Sharif.

  While Daniel and Rex were under fire, another attack took place in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, unknown to them.

  The butcher sold one kilogram of meat that morning, and those selling root vegetables had not fared much better. One poor and elderly woman had squatted down on the ground across from the butcher shop. She had nothing to live for in her life, and although she would have begged in better times, now she no longer bothered. Not even the most pious had a devalued Afghani banknote to spare for her. Besides, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to spend that worthless money to buy a root vegetable. Somebody was bound to rob her. Probably a hooligan who was less desperate than her for money, but more able-bodied. The source had left the bazaar not long after she had called off the meeting. Many others had left as well, but those who had remained were not so fortunate.

  Unlike the attack in the village, this attack lasted a fraction of a second, and it unfolded like this.

  A flash of light alerted the elderly man sitting near the entryway of his hotel at the bazaar, diagonally across from the butcher shop. By the time the signal went from his eyes through his optic nerve into his brain so that he instinctively turned his head, it was already too late for him. He was close enough to the blast that the heat, which exceeded 3000°F, although that had dissipated slightly by the time the heat reached him, nearly incinerated him. But the shock also created such extreme pressure it crushed his internal organs, rendering all of them useless inside of his torso. If that alone was not enough to kill the hotelkeeper, the fragmented car parts shooting through the air lacerated his soft tissues so deeply that he would’ve died from those injuries as well. But it wasn’t just the parts of the car that were sent flying from the explosion. It was also the rusty nails and other assorted pieces of metal that had been placed inside the bomb. Had any of those failed to kill the man, then when he was thrown from his tiny writing desk where he previously recorded his hotel guests, the deceleration when he smashed into the opposite wall also would have killed him.

  The elderly man had been killed four times over, at least, by the car bomb that had been parked at the bazaar. The remaining metal frame of the car was burning, tossed to the side of the small crater that was left in the hard-packed dirt road. Though it was not to be the largest bomb ever detonated in Mazar-i-Sharif, and certainly not in Afghanistan, it had precisely the intended impact. For although the Taliban would be happy to have a collaborator like the hotel man killed, and they would not have cared about the brave residents who were out shopping for what meager things they could scrape up, they were hoping to destroy one thing. They wanted the butcher shop obliterated, and they wanted to send a message. Like the old man at the hotel, the man in the butcher shop died several times over. He was much closer to the explosion, and so he was not able to register what was happening before his end came. The only point in which the bomb failed was that the source, because she had called off the meeting, avoided her own four-fold death.

  As the dust settled throughout the whole bazaar, those who were not killed wandered about, trying to regain their senses. Survivors found their way home and helped others who were injured. But mostly they continued to trudge on, having become too accustomed to death and destruction. Everybody had already lost somebody to the Soviets or the Taliban, and so this car bomb presented nothing new.

  Less than an hour later, Daniel sat in the mess hall at the base in Mazar-i-Sharif, staring at the coffee in front of him, which had grown cold. He didn’t care how bad it tasted. He felt like he had to do something, and occasionally sipping on a cup of coffee and watching it steam until it stopped steaming seemed like the only thing he remotely felt like doing.

  It had happened fast. Rex had reassured him that it was nothing major, but Daniel watched him lose his coloring in his face so rapidly. He guessed it was internal bleeding. Rex was being operated on in the medical tent, and Daniel had been given no prognosis as to how Rex was doing. Evacuating him to the K2 base or the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan didn’t offer any better medical facilities. Besides, he would have had to have survived the flights to get there. And the flights to superior medical facilities, either in Saudi Arabia or Europe, were far too long to offer the benefits. The doctor felt his best chance was to stay and receive treatment in Mazar-i-Sharif. Once stabilized, they could get him someplace better if necessary. But that was if he stabilized.

  Daniel did a calculation in his head. It was very early in the morning in the United States, and so he didn’t want to try calling Jenny.

  Daniel couldn’t sit there any longer staring at his now cold coffee.

  Move ahead. I need to move ahead, Daniel thought to himself.

  But Daniel couldn’t stop the ambush from replaying in his head one more time. Had the village chief somehow sent a message to the Tali
ban when they arrived? Did the man with cerebral palsy who took the cigarettes know what was going to happen? And was Rex going to die because he rescued Daniel?

  It was all so messed up. The attack had taken place in a village with women and children trying to stay warm in their primitive kitchens mere meters away.

  Move on. Move ahead. What’s next? Daniel thought.

  Daniel had heard some others in the mess hall discussing an explosion in the city, and so he went to see if he could learn what that was about.

  Entering the command room, Daniel stood a step inside the entryway as soldiers sat at their communication stations, relaying information to General Jones. None of it made sense to Daniel, and he assumed it was all normal, everyday operations of a base in Afghanistan.

  General Jones gave Daniel a hard glare as he paused in his duties.

  Daniel opened his mouth to say something, but he felt lost, and nothing came out.

  “I heard about the explosion in the city,” Daniel said feebly. “I don’t know what I can do to help, but I need to keep busy.”

  “You a bomb expert or something, doc?” General Jones said with just enough humor to take off the sting. “I’m getting a report on the bomb soon. You can feel free to listen in if you want.”

  Daniel nodded, and Jones approached Daniel to speak more privately.

  “I heard what happened at the village,” Jones said. “I know you might feel responsible for Rex’s injury. I can’t promise he will pull through. I think he will, but I can’t promise that. But you need to promise me that you won’t blame yourself for Rex. It wasn’t your fault. It was the Taliban’s fault. It was Qaqramon’s fault. They take whatever is good and beautiful, and foul it all up. A marriage becomes an abusive husband who takes on another wife if he can afford it. These beautiful landscapes become killing fields and poppy fields. Children learn how to handle guns. We’re doing what it takes to make this place beautiful again. Things are going to get worse before they get better. But don’t blame yourself for Rex. Blame the Taliban. I wonder if you’ve hit a nerve in your investigation. Maybe you’re closer than you think. At most, you’ve only got six more days until Peters pulls the plug on this operation. If there’s a nuke out there, you need to find it, and you don’t have time to feel bad about Rex.”