by Tal Bauer
“Careful, Gul Bahar. We trade fire here often.” Khan guided Kris and David into the bunker, a former Soviet military office. The broken windows were blocked with sandbags, only narrow firing slits open at the very tops. Soldiers peered through binoculars at Taliban positions. One soldier passed his binos to Khan.
“They are watching us. Wondering who you are and what you are doing. They will be attacking this afternoon.”
As Khan spoke, the dull thump of a mortar round launching from the Taliban’s line rumbled. It whistled, flying low, and hit the top of their bunker. The walls shook, dust and sand falling from the ceiling. David grabbed Kris with both hands.
“Do not worry. The roof, it is reinforced. We are hit many times. We will patch the damage tonight.”
They slipped out of the bunker and back to the truck. Khan’s driver wound through the remnants of buildings, rotten metal and twisted frames collapsed in on themselves. Destroyed aircraft decayed on the tarmac and in front of hangars, tires long gone flat, frames dented, metal missing, wings torn off. But each wreck was still in a neat line, famous Soviet military discipline still on display, even in an abandoned base at the end of the world.
They idled for a moment at the edge of a long runway, hidden behind a hangar. “You both should duck,” Khan said.
His driver floored it, whipping around the hangar and hauling down the runway. The engine roared, and David pushed Kris down across the back seat, covering him with his body. Kris felt David’s breath against his cheek, felt his fingers dig into Kris’s arms. Bullets pinged off the runway, snapping like firecrackers. One shattered the rear glass.
“The Taliban hold the village in the hills above the base!” Khan shouted. “They can fire on this runway from there. Unfortunately, this is the only way we can drive to the control tower! You will have to take out that village with your lasers!”
Finally, they pulled behind two bunkers, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, and parked in the shadow of the tower. The upper radar dish, the overhang, and the antennae were gone; only the observation deck remained. There was no door on the tower. It had been destroyed long ago. A spiral stairway went up to the observation deck and more bullet holes ringed the inside of the tower. The tower had seen a hell of a fight.
Inside, Shura Nazar forces had telescopes set up for targeting and range finding. Maps covered the floor, marked up with Taliban posts and positions.
Khan introduced Kris and David, and the Shura Nazar fighters eagerly looked at David’s pack once Khan explained what they were there for.
“You can destroy them from here?”
“Between the scope, the coordinates, and the laser, yes. We definitely can.” Kris smiled.
Kris had spoken too soon.
George called on the satellite phone that evening. “Targets on deck for the night are situated around Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e-Sharif. They want to pound al-Qaeda strongholds and loosen up the Taliban around Mazar for Hajimullah’s forces.”
“We’ve got a village infested with Taliban. They’re picking off Khan’s men at the airport. We’ve got the coordinates mapped and a laser on them as we speak.”
“CENTCOM is refusing to release a fighter for your targets unless you can triple guarantee that there are no civilians in the village. We’re not flattening a village of women and children at the start of the war.”
“Khan assures us the Taliban have moved all civilians out. It’s only fighters.”
“Not good enough. They need visual confirmation before they’ll approve the mission.”
Kris saw David shake his head. His eyes pinched, concern warring with determination. Sneaking behind enemy lines, infiltrating enemy positions? That was David’s bread and butter. He and his Special Forces team were trained to do just that.
But David was alone, with only Shura Nazar forces to back him up.
Alone, except for Kris.
“We’ll have visual confirmation tonight, George. Tell CENTCOM to have their fighters ready.”
“Are you sure?”
David squatted on a pile of crumbled cinder blocks in front of Kris, holding a compact of camo paint. Half of Kris’s face was darkened, the shading breaking up the lines of his humanity, enough to blend in with the darkness.
“Very sure.”
Sighing, David painted a long streak of black over his nose, across his cheek. He wouldn’t look Kris in the eye. “Kris—”
“Out of everyone, you have never doubted me. Not once. Are you doubting me now?”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it?”
Finally, David looked at him, really looked at him. David had applied his own camo paint first, streaks of brown and black across his face until just his eyes were visible in the dim light of the bunker, in the corner where they had set up their sleeping bags.
The air shivered, hovering around them, weighted with whatever David was about to say next. Expectancy was thick, pressing on Kris.
But David looked away, and in that moment, he closed up, rolling up the expectancy and his hesitation as he cleared his throat. The air in the bunker seemed to suck into David, vanishing with a pop. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” David said. He dabbed brown paint on his fingers and reached for Kris’s cheek.
“Neither of us will get hurt. We’re in this together.”
David nodded. Kris watched a barrier go up in his gaze, watched him shift, start piling up block after block within him, barricading the world away. He was going operational, putting himself into the mindset of the mission. Kris could feel him disappearing within, going deep into the center of himself.
Closing his eyes, Kris followed, tipping back and falling into his training. The mission plan, their objective, played over in his mind. Their route, how to get to the village. Time on station, and a rehearsal of their actions, their moves, step-by-step in his mind. His breathing leveled out, going flat, going even.
“Done.”
They waited until the dead of night. Other than a few fires lit by frozen Shura Nazar fighters, well off the front lines or buried in bunkers, there was no light after dark in Afghanistan. Certainly not at Bagram. Only the stars gleamed above, beneath a quarter moon.
Kris crept behind David, stepping exactly into his dusty footprints. They were on a grazing path that goats and horses had used before the fighting. To the left and right of the narrow dirt track, buried mines and unexploded ordnance littered the ground. Spent shell casings and dirty brass covered the dust, reflecting a glinty green in Kris’s NVGs.
Neither the Taliban or the Shura Nazar had night vision capabilities. Both sides were blind after dark. Kris and David were ghosts, slipping unseen into the Taliban’s village.
Fixed gun positions pointed down at the airport, manned by sleeping Taliban soldiers. Heavy machine guns, mortars, and larger artillery pieces were covered in rough camouflage. Broken homes, their mud roofs caved in and walls shattered, blown apart by years of bullets and bombs, squatted behind the guns. Soft Dari wound out of the wreckage, carried on the low light of banked fires.
They slid silently through the village, moving house to house, quiet as smoke. There, a group of soldiers slept. There, guards, huddled around the fire. Beyond, in a house set off the center of the village, what looked like a group of mullahs, the senior leaders of the fighters, sat together around a pile of orange coals. Radio antennae cluttered the roof of their hut, and weapons leaned against the side walls.
A convoy of trucks waited behind the village. Two Russian tanks lingered beyond the gun positions with fresh tracks in the dirt. Soon, they’d be firing on the airport with tank rounds.
No civilians. Not a hint of life, other than the infestation of fighters. Who had lived there before? Where had they been taken when the Taliban moved in?
David shifted, sliding around a mudbrick home, the last in the village. Its roof had caved in more than the others, and its walls had crumbled almost to the ground. Burn marks and soot l
icked up the sides of what remained. Crouching, David scanned the ground, peered inside. Kris followed, hovering beside him. Something must have caught David’s eye,
He spotted it a moment after David did.
Bones.
Chipped, brittle bones, burned and snapped in half. Small bones, the size of a child’s. The size of a young woman. Kris could pick out femurs and jawbones, ribs and shoulder blades. He tried to count them by twos. At least twelve—no, fourteen, eighteen—
Too many. Too many for this to be an accidental fire, a tragedy of fate.
If they sifted through the ash, they’d no doubt find a bar that had held the door closed, locked from the outside. They might find a grenade, or a canister of fuel.
David stayed down, kneeling beside the burned wall as he reached for a bone. It fit in the palm of his hand, gently curved. Once, it must have wrapped around the chest of a child, a young boy or girl’s rib.
Footsteps, coming out of the house where the mullahs had been. One of the leaders walked their way, toward the edge of the village, the darkness just beyond this house. He carried a rifle, but lazily, slung over his shoulder like a teenager would slough a backpack at school.
Kris ducked, his back to David’s, one hand on David’s thigh. Freeze. Beneath his touch, David went completely still.
He lifted his rifle, the folded stock pressed to his shoulder, sights tracking the mullah’s every footfall. They were in the darkness, in the shadows, completely blacked out. But if a star happened to shine on the lens of his NVGs, if a flicker of flame winked across their bodies, arced around their presence, the game was up. Kris’s finger half squeezed the trigger.
The mullah sighed as he faced the darkness, feet from Kris. He fumbled with his robes, eventually adjusting to relieve himself. They heard everything, the splash and spray, the mullah’s stream as it hit the dirt and then petered off. After, he muttered a quick word in Dari, prayers of the ultra-faithful following urination, and headed back.
David’s hand covered Kris’s, still on David’s thigh. He squeezed.
Time to go.
They didn’t speak until they were out of the village and back down the path, lying against the dirt berm beneath the Taliban’s gun positions. From where they lay, they could hear Taliban fighters speaking in Dari in their foxholes.
David pulled the laser targeting array out of his backpack. “Call it in,” he breathed in Kris’s ear. “I’ll hold the target.”
Kris skidded down the berm, to the very base. He was maybe sixty feet from the Taliban. He pressed his radio to his lips. “Eagle Eye, this is Jammer Three. Request priority strike on confirmed enemy position with senior Taliban leadership. Target is laser designated.”
Static whistled in his ear. He pressed on the earbud. “Jammer Three, confirm. Are civilians present?”
“Confirmed. No civilians present.”
Static. He waited.
“Jammer Three, two aircraft inbound. ETA, twenty minutes. Standby.”
He clicked his acknowledgement and crawled back, sliding in beside David. “Two inbound,” he mouthed along David’s ear. “Twenty minutes. Probably Navy.”
“Quick strike then,” David breathed. “They have to get back to the carrier before they bingo fuel.”
Kris nodded. He settled in to wait, leaning into David, almost on top of him. He felt the rise and fall of David’s back, each inhale and exhale. They were close enough that they only had to turn their heads and they would be speaking in each other’s ears.
The first whoosh, the deep scratch against the night sky that was the fighter honing in, screamed in above. Kris’s earbud whistled with an incoming radio transmission. “Jammer Three. Aircraft on deck. Patching to pilot now.”
A whine, and a new voice came on, a woman. “Laser target locked on,” she said. “Bombs away.”
“Now,” Kris breathed. He and David flicked off their NVGs, plunging the world into pitch black. Kris counted, barely breathing. David pushed his face against Kris’s, their cheeks pressed together.
They could hear the Taliban laughing at the sound of the jet, cursing the sky and the inept American fighters who had yet to hit them with their bombs.
A fireball bloomed, erupting with a crack and rolling thunder rising over the berm and enveloping the Taliban-occupied village. The shock wave followed, rushing wind like a slap, burning heat pushing him and David into the dirt. Debris rained, smashing down like hail. A shattered turret from one of the tanks landed straight up, embedded in the hillside, still smoking.
Broken bodies and screams split the night in every direction. An inferno raged, consuming everything blown apart by the strike.
“Jammer Three, R-T-B,” the pilot said. “Good luck.”
“Good strike,” Kris replied. He didn’t have to whisper, not anymore. Not with the screams of the Taliban loud enough to hear all the way in Kabul. “Finally.”
Chapter 9
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
November 7, 2001
The war accelerated, moving at breakneck pace.
High on adrenaline after the first strike, Kris and David stayed up all night long, sitting in front of a small bonfire behind the control tower, talking down the shakes in their hands. David spoke softly as the fire burned low and the coals glowed, casting the hollows of his face into shadow.
“I’ve lost count of how many children’s bones I’ve seen. You’d think that would be something you’d remember. But… there are places in this world where hearts don’t beat. Where humanity is just… gone. I thought I’d never see that kind of hate again. But now, with New York, and here… It’s all coming back, isn’t it?”
Kris took his hand, lacing their fingers together. Side by side, they watched the coals turn to ash, hands clasped, heads resting against each other.
Should he ask? Should he squeeze David’s hand and ask what that was before, when they were rubbing camo paint over each other’s faces? What it meant that David slept with him every night, drawing him close and into his arms? What it meant that they were never far from each other anymore, always a hand’s reach away?
Would asking end it all?
Inertia was a powerful force. Kris didn’t want it to end. The hand-holding, the surrender into David’s arms, the warm breath on the back of his neck. Maybe it was just Afghanistan, the war, the cold. Maybe they were clinging to each other because they were alone in this craziness, untethered from reality, trying to navigate warlords and terrorists and battle plans from caves and concrete bunkers via a scratchy radio and a homemade satellite dish, as snow fell and froze their fingers and toes. Maybe nothing would leave the valley.
He should keep his mouth shut and soak it in, just be glad for the human connection. For the beating heart he’d found on the surface of Afghanistan, the dark side of the moon.
General Khan was overjoyed with the first laser-targeted strike. He arrived at dawn, just after prayers, effusive in his praise for both Kris and David. “We must have more, many more, of these strikes.”
Every day, Kris and David worked with the Shura Nazar to scout targets from Bagram’s control tower. At night, they slipped out under cover and crept close to the Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, painting each with lasers until Navy or Marine Corps fighter jets arrived and obliterated them in fury.
“They are no longer crowing about how weak the Americans are, how pitiful your attack is.” Khan held Kris’s hand, grinning ear to ear, after days of constant strikes around the airfield. “We will use Bagram as a secondary headquarters when we break through the Shomali.”
In the north, the Taliban tightened their grip on Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloquan. From the hills overlooking the two cities, they began shelling the outlying villages, civilians who supported Khan and the Shura Nazar, and who had escaped the wrath of the Taliban’s chokehold. General Hajimullah struggled to save his people and keep the pressure on the Taliban.
“We must have these bombs in the north,” Khan said one morning. “An
d more help. We must have more CIA assistance, Gul Bahar.”
After a week straight of clearing Taliban out from around Bagram, George ordered him and David to meet up with Hajimullah outside Mazar-e-Sharif.
“Kris, Langley has sent a second team for Mazar. They’re inserting tonight, and I want you and Haddad to show them the ropes. How to work with Hajimullah. The intricacies of the front line. Get up there, ASAP.”
Mazar-e-Sharif hugged a valley in between a gorge of mountains. The Taliban controlled a majority of the highlands and the city itself, and Hajimullah’s men were pushed back into the valley below, stuck like fish in a shooting barrel. They were a ragged army; most soldiers didn’t have socks or gloves, but they still fought in the snow as winter closed over Afghanistan.
Hajimullah’s men also fought on horseback. Ethnically Uzbeki, his men had been raised on horseback, like their Genghis Khan and their Mongol ancestors.
When the second CIA team scampered off their helicopter out of Uzbekistan, General Hajimullah had six Afghan horses waiting for them.
Afghan men were smaller than most Americans. Famine, lack of quality nutrition, not enough protein, and a host of other maladies had left the Afghan population more diminutive, leaner. Afghan horses, likewise, were smaller, more compact.
Smaller Afghans and smaller horses meant smaller saddles, made of wood and stiff leather and right angles. Kris fit easily into his, and he copied Hajimullah’s standing riding style, keeping out of the saddle as much as he could.
The rest of the CIA team, by the end of the day’s ride to Hajimullah’s base camp, were nursing sore asses and bleeding thighs, skin rubbed raw from squeezing into the too-small saddles. David, too, limped when they arrived.
Hajimullah enjoyed the Americans’ discomfort like he’d feasted on fine Russian caviar. He laughed, barrel chest shaking, roars echoing off the mountains ringing his camp. “You Americans,” he cried. “So soft. If you stay here for one week, I will make Afghans out of you.”