Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  “No, I’d really like a full-body massage instead.” Her smile was now a grin and, turning, she disappeared back into her work area on the other side of the SCIF.

  Once my breath returned to my lungs, I thought, Man, this is going to be interesting.

  8

  TO THE FRONT

  WHOA. I had made a personal commitment to focus only on the mission. I had to think about this.

  I have always been careful and respectful of women in uniform to whom I was attracted, and I had a strong professional admiration for Kate—she was tougher than most of the 10th Mountain troops I had seen, but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was hot, too.

  I did not know what, if anything, I would do about Kate’s overture—and there were complications. I was still getting over the breakup with Rina. I had heard from mutual friends that she was dating, but it’s not easy to stop caring about someone.

  There also was the additional complication of something called General Order No. 1. It outlined a number of prohibited activities and standards of conduct for U.S. troops and civilians working for the military in Afghanistan, including the possession of alcohol, pornography, gambling, and sexual relations between personnel not married to each other.

  Not that the brass had enforced it in any substantial way. It was treated more like a stern warning to frighten troops. It was well known that the troops had gotten smart about hiding their extracurricular activities. I had been told by several friends about finding troops “doing it” in cramped spaces like the small bomb shelters around our tent living area and Porta-Johns.

  Yeah, Porta-Johns.

  Shortly after our solidification of victory in Afghanistan in 2002 when large numbers of our troops started rolling in, General Order No. 1 was created by senior officers who didn’t have a clue on how to lead troops. They had no sense of military tradition—especially army history—and of what worked and didn’t work in the army during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. They had this idea that we had to create “warrior monks” within the ranks of the military. Great. It wasn’t good enough that these young kids had signed up to put their lives on the line for their country. Now they were expected to take a vow of celibacy.

  If the kids serving in the military had wanted to be monks, I’m sure they would have found their way to the nearest monastery by now.

  So I took every opportunity I could to ignore General Order No. 1. It was wrong at every level, and while I’d be careful with Kate (discretion being the better part of valor), if any opportunity presented itself, I would look forward to taking advantage of it.

  Before any opportunity presented itself, Tim Loudermilk announced at the LTC morning standup that Special Forces had rolled up a guy ******** ** ** * **** ******** ******* * ******** ******** ******** during a raid in ****** the previous night. ****** lay in a valley about 60 miles south of Kabul. It was the capital of the Patkia province and was once a stronghold of the Taliban—and considered to be on the front line of this unconventional war.

  The detainee was being held at the Forward Operating Base just outside the city.

  CJSOTF intel guys had visited the LTC and passed a series of messages they had received from their A Team ** ******* The capture of an ostensible ******* had put a cramp in their style. They needed help from the LTC to determine, among other things, who he really was * **** *******.

  Shortly after the stand-up, **** ********, the senior FBI agent assigned to the LTC, came over. He had received the stack of messages and already read through them.

  “Aren’t you from *********” he asked, his head cocked forward slightly as he faced me, his 6'4" frame too tall for the tent.

  “Yep,” I said. “Lived in ******** ******** for fourteen years.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Well, according to the ******** ******* we got from this guy, he’s from ***********.”

  That’s where I lived. Rina and I had bought the house there in 2001. “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said John. “According to the information we have, he’s from …” He named a community in ***********.

  I stared at him. This was getting spooky. “I live within a mile of it.”

  John showed me a copy of the guy’s ******** ******** Arash Ghaffari. Mustached, narrow face, dark eyes, looked to be in his mid- or late-thirties.

  “Is this real?” I asked.

  John nodded. “We got confirmation from ** *** that this is a valid driver’s license.”

  “Has he told them what he is doing here?”

  “Yeah,” John said with a tinge of disbelief in his voice, “he said he was here as a tourist to visit his family.”

  Tourist? Here? We looked at each other, each thinking of the unsavory possibilities. Was he a terrorist over here for training? Part of a sleeper cell? What could he be planning? Several of the September 11 attackers had ******** ******** ********. Who shows up in a freakin’ combat zone to be a tourist?

  Plus, he’d been rolled up with his cousin, Ali Ghaffari, whom the local Special Forces team had been monitoring for a while. A doctor who’d left Afghanistan during the Soviet takeover and settled in Iran, Ali Ghaffari had returned ** ****** with his family during the U.S. war with the Taliban. Intel collected by the A Team indicated that Ali Ghaffari had recently traveled to Iran and brought back the equivalent of ******* ** ****** to cook up trouble for us infidels. Typically, the cash would be used to buy weapons and material for IEDs, obtain support equipment such as satellite phones, vehicles, etc. The let’s-kill-the-Americans gear.

  That money would go a long way toward hurting a lot of troops, and it had disappeared during the raid. Special Forces had rolled up Ali Ghaffari in his compound with five other men We didn’t know who they were or what they were up to, and what the hell was **** doing meddling in Afghanistan? The Iranians had secretly backed anti-Taliban forces during the time the Taliban had controlled Afghanistan. True, Hekmatyar had spent some of the Taliban years in exile in Iran. But the whole thing was just weird, and we had to get to the bottom of it—fast.

  We believed there was the possibility of a larger plot. Maybe Ali Ghaffari had recruited his cousin for some long-term terrorist plan to be hatched back in the good ole ****** ****** ** ********

  Arash wasn’t talking, John said. “He claims he doesn’t know anything and just wants to go home. The Special Forces told him that ain’t gonna happen, but he’s been separated from the other prisoners and they’re treating him as if he is a **** *******. They’re asking for guidance on what to do.”

  I went to talk to Rich, told him what was going on, and then headed out on some other work, my brain still ringing alarm bells over a guy from my neck of the woods showing up with someone who was clearly a terrorist enabler in Afghanistan. The whole thing stunk.

  Tim and John found me later that morning. “We’re sending John out to interrogate him and we want you to go with him.”

  “OK,” I said, trying to imagine why they’d want me to go. “What exactly are you thinking?”

  “You’re from ***********, so you’ll be able to determine if he’s really from there,” John said. “We especially want to see if he’s planning something in that area.”

  “That’s kind of a concern for me, too,” I said.

  “We’ll fly out on the Ring helicopter,” said Tim. “It’s supposed to leave right before midnight.”

  The Ring helicopter was the U.S. military flying bus system in Afghanistan. The destinations were always the same, but the routes and times the helicopters flew along them varied for operational security reasons. There had been some losses, both combat and mechanical failure. It wasn’t exactly a “safe” method of travel, but what was I expecting in Afghanistan? Greyhound?

  Shortly before midnight, we headed for the flight line hangar with our kit. I had picked only essential items to bring with me. I didn’t even take a sleeping bag. Instead, I took the ubiquitous poncho liner that every solider learned to use as a makeshift (a
nd very portable) sleeping bag. I didn’t know if I was going out for an overnight jaunt or a weeklong visit. That would be up to Mr. Arash Ghaffari.

  While we waited for the mission briefing, I talked to a North Carolina National Guard aviator who looked and sounded like Dr. Phil in a flight suit. He would be flying cover for the mission in an Apache. All army helicopter flights required two to four attack helicopters as escorts because of frequent attacks on helicopters with small arms and some SA-7 surface-to-air missiles.

  As we were talking in the mountain darkness, a sudden gust of wind came up, and I ended up with a mouthful of dust. By now, I’d gotten used to this during conversations. It was like particles of sandpaper suddenly settling between your teeth as you were talking. Even as my mind churned around the mystery of our alleged American citizen, we talked about more pleasant things. The National Guardsman was from Williamsburg, Virginia, and he and his family owned some hotels throughout the Eastern Seaboard. He was here to put his time in and was looking forward to going home he told me. Weren’t we all?

  In this night sortie, there were two CH-47s and two Apaches, and we went out to the flight line and sat down on the metal grates in the gusty wind next to the helos while the crews did their preflights and loaded pallets and cargo onto the aircraft. I later learned that the pallet next to me contained 2,000 pounds of C-4 high explosive.

  We had to attend a preflight safety briefing within the hangar. While we were waiting, we took seats on the gray folding chairs lined up in front of the screen. One of the aviation admin troops, a young sergeant, obviously intrigued by the looks of our three-man team (two of us in civilian clothes with beards and guns and the third in desert camo), came up to me.

  “You with public affairs?” he asked politely.

  “No,” I said.

  “Civil affairs?”

  “No,” I said.

  He tried again. “Special Forces?”

  “No,” I said. I paused for a moment and then said, “We’re not really here.”

  I’ve always wanted to use that line.

  He and I smiled—he finally got it.

  “Destination?” he asked with a grin.

  *********

  He walked away to put our names on the manifest and leave our unit affiliation blank.

  Once the crew was done with the loading and preflight, we hopped on the cavernous choppers.

  Truth be told, I’d always had a fear of flying in CH-47s. When I was a kid in high school in Portugal, I saw a photo of a crashed CH-47 and a headline that read 17 DIE IN CHINOOK ACCIDENT in the local Stars and Stripes. In the picture, you could see someone trying to get out, and that image always stuck with me. Then I sat down center cabin and thought about Alexander, and said a small prayer.

  As the rotors on the 47 started, we all put on ear protection; Tim and I put on eye protection as well to try to keep the grit out. The crew chief moved around the cabin checking all manner of hydraulics and gauges. He also served as one of the two gunners who manned the large frame openings near the front of the aircraft. The top part of the loading ramp at the rear of the aircraft also remained open—I’d never seen them closed—so it was breezy even before we were in flight.

  The other three aircraft, in turn, started their engines, and the flight began to taxi. There was an ethereal moment as the dust kicked up around our helicopter in the inky darkness of the taxiway and sparked as it hit the rotors. Fairy dust, John said. From the inside, it looked like a swirl of golden magical dust was picking up the aircraft and carrying us off into the blustery, dusty Afghan night.

  There was no light in the cabin and the two door gunners wore night-vision goggles. You could see the two glowing points over their eyes and nothing else as they moved around like ghosts hovering in the great pool of black that filled the cabin.

  We arrived at the ****** Forward Operating Base on or about 0200. The landing approach was fast—I could just make out the frame of the horizon coming closer, noting our rapid descent as we hit the LZ.

  As fast as we could, we cleared the chopper with our gear and moved to the vehicles close to the strip, which was nothing more than a stretch of asphalt road in an open desert field. I limped. In the inky darkness, I couldn’t make out where the ground was as we evacuated the chopper. With my heavy body armor, pack, and weapon, I had landed hard on one knee and twisted it as I came off the back of the deck. It hurt like hell.

  As the two Chinooks started to lift off into the night, we were pummeled by a searing blast of hot exhaust and dust.

  The choppers were going on to the last stop on the Ring. The trip down to Kabul and back to ****** would take them about an hour. That’s all the time we had to conduct the initial interrogation of Arash. Then we had to make a decision: stay and do an in-depth grilling, which meant being stuck in ******* and the end of civilization, until mission accomplished, or let the guy go and hop back on the 47 and return to Bagram. John and I agreed we’d make the call together after our initial contact. We had no real idea what we were going to find.

  We headed in armored Humvees for the heavily guarded fort that I later would see resembled a small castle in the light of day. ****** was a nasty neck of the woods. This had been, and remained, one of the areas most contested for control between us and the Taliban. Because of that, the fort was under sporadic mortar and rocket attacks from the enemy hidden in the hills.

  The firebase was divided into two separate compounds that were within tens of meters of each other. One was manned by a Reconnaissance (Recon) element and the other a small security element of the 10th Mountain—a reinforced company from what I could tell. When the 10th Mountain soldiers comingled with the Recon guys, it was easy to tell them apart. The Recon all had some manner of facial hair and mostly opted out of wearing the normal desert camo uniform. Instead, they tended to dress in a motley combination of desert camo pants, T-shirts, keffiyeh scarves, and civilian baseball caps (from some distant U.S. university, bait shop, or favorite NASCAR driver).

  The 10th Mountain had the short haircuts and the regulation uniforms. Their demeanor was stiffer and more formal—and tense. Their missions were very different. The Recon members were to engage the hearts and minds of the locals by day and do the rough work at night—recon missions, hitting suspect compounds, seizing weapons and explosives, trying to pluck out pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda. The 10th Mountain soldiers were “regular” army and fought using conventional small unit tactics. Their job was to provide security: counterbattery fire (to counter the Taliban shelling), combat power to ensure the base’s security, and to go after any bad guys who showed up in the area.

  In the darkness, I peered down at my Sunnto watch’s altimeter. We were at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. After the dust cleared, we were received by two ******* ****** guys who looked like a combination of the bearded mobster in the movie Goodfellas and Dennis Hopper’s crazed photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now. When we arrived at the Recon portion of the compound, I almost expected to find a fat bald guy slowly pouring water over his head in a cave. Marlon Brando at his best.

  While the Recon guys had continued to interrogate Arash Ghaffari throughout the day, they still did not have a good handle on what he was doing and planning. We knew little more than the fact that he was the cousin of an HVT, and we knew that terrorists tended to do things as families. They trust each other, blood being much thicker than water.

  “Has anything changed?” I asked the Recon intelligence guy.

  He shook his head. “He won’t talk to us.”

  We got a short briefing. Members of Ali Ghaffari’s family had been in the compound, among them, ***** ***** ********** ********* *** *** *** ********* **** *** *** **** ********* Six men had been captured and were being detained at ******* It didn’t appear that any of Arash’s immediate family members, like a wife or kids, were there. Aside from the mystery of what the hell, if anything, Arash and family members had been planning for Afghanistan and the ****** ****** was the pu
zzle of what had happened to the ******** Disbursed among the enemy, it could buy a lot of dangerous stuff. Arash Ghaffari had denied knowing anything about the ******* and said he had a plane ticket back ** *** ****** ****** in four days—which by now had slipped to three. He wanted to go back to his family.

  “You know, you’ve got about forty minutes until the helicopter gets back if you plan to leave tonight,” the ******* ****** Recon intelligence guy told us.

  Tim, John, and I looked at each other. “We’ll decide what to do after we see Ghaffari,” I said.

  Two members of the Recon led us to Arash Ghaffari. He was being held in a small office, the door to which was actually on the outside of the compound’s main walls. The rest of the prisoners, including Ali Ghaffari, were being held as detainees outside of the compound—bound with black covers over their heads—under a long wall that had an overhead shelter. Harsh conditions compared to his cousin, Arash.

  We entered the office where Arash Ghaffari was being detained, and one Special Forces guy flipped on the light switch while the other gave Ghaffari a shake. He had been sound asleep, and he sat bolt upright. His hands were bound in front of him with zip ties—similar to ties used to hold electrical cables together, only larger and more durable. He had one fastened around each wrist and then one looped through both of the wrist ties. He stared up at us from the mat on which he had been sleeping.

  He was very thin, dressed in typical gossamer fabric Afghan shirt, casual pants, and sandals. My impression was that he was very frightened. I guess I would be, too. He knew that this guy in camo, plus two grim-faced ones in civilian clothes, hadn’t just popped by to pay their respects. I can only imagine what he was thinking would happen next.

  The truth was, violence wasn’t on our agenda. John and I hadn’t talked about our approach in great detail. We needed to get a feel for the guy first, but we knew that neither of us had any intent to use “enhanced” techniques. In any case, Arash didn’t have to know this.