Gray Genesis

by Alan McDermott

  ‘What was his reaction?’

  ‘Durden said he’s working on someone,’ Russell said. ‘His mole is well placed within al-Hussain’s network and above suspicion, but not high enough that he knows all of his movements. It’s a waiting game.’

  ‘Is he the one who gave us the latest intel?’ Gray asked.

  ‘No, that was a walk-in.’

  The rewards offered for information leading to the capture or death of the players on the JPEL had meant a steady stream of Afghans heading to the gates of the camp in search of easy pickings. But the outcome was almost always the same; in exchange for a wad of dollars, they gave Durden and his small team locations of the Taliban leadership. Ninety-five per cent of the tips proved to be worthless, and the others only led to the death or capture of minor figures.

  Gray wanted to rant, but it wasn’t the CO’s fault. Russell was under orders from CJSOTF to investigate all sightings, no matter how minor the likelihood of success. What pissed Gray off was that the US teams got to see real action while he and his mates were traipsing the mountains looking for ghosts.

  Gray and his team had been in the country for a little over two months, and they had yet to loose off a round in anger. All of their missions had led to nothing, though on a couple of occasions they’d arrived just too late to capture their targets. Bad intelligence and poor timing had conspired to deny them the action they craved.

  ‘Go get some rest,’ Russell said. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Durden later this morning, and I’m guessing he’ll offer us another opportunity to waste our time.’

  Gray offered a wry smile and left, knowing well that the CO was right. He decided to head for the mess tent, and on his way bumped into Sonny, Smart and Levine.

  ‘What’s the plan for tonight?’ Sonny asked Gray. ‘Martinis and Jacuzzi with the Spice Girls—or another night in the hills with our dicks in our hands?’

  ‘Sporty couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Even better,’ Levine chipped in. ‘No fighting over who gets two of them.’

  ‘It just isn’t a Jacuzzi party without Sporty,’ Gray said. ‘We’re going out again tonight.’

  ‘Better intel this time?’ Smart asked.

  ‘Probably not. JSOC is an American venture, so we should just think ourselves lucky we got invited and be grateful for any scraps they throw our way.’

  ‘Speaking of our colonial friends,’ Smart said, tapping Gray’s arm, ‘here comes Delta Farce.’

  Gray looked to his right to see John Balmer and his cohorts approaching.

  ‘Khaíre!’ the American smiled.

  ‘Do what now?’ Sonny said.

  ‘Khaíre. It’s Greek. From the ninth century BC. Thought you’d recognize it, what with you guys being ancient history and all that.’

  Gray looked at his men, confused.

  ‘Ah!’ Sonny exclaimed. ‘I think it’s meant to be a joke about us being around for so long, while Delta Farce are the new kids on the block.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Hank Lomax grinned.

  ‘New kids on the block?’ Levine said, his brow still furrowed. ‘Wasn’t one of them gay?’

  ‘At least one,’ Sonny said, looking at Balmer’s men. ‘Hard to tell which.’

  ‘Aw, the little one’s cranky.’ Balmer laughed. ‘Just got off a hard night of traffic control, have you?’

  ‘We spent the night in the mountains looking for Taliban,’ Smart told him. ‘What about you? An evening in your tent eating cheeseburgers and watching I Love Lucy re-runs?’

  ‘We were in a real firefight,’ Lomax said, ‘saving the 187th from an ass-kicking.’

  ‘An old man on a donkey stray too close, did he?’

  ‘Guys, knock it off,’ Gray said. ‘You’ll never win a pissing contest against huge dicks like these. Let’s go eat. I’m famished.’

  ‘Yeah, run along,’ Balmer said. ‘Tiny needs his nap.’

  ‘How about I shove this tiny fist down your fucking throat,’ Sonny snarled, but Smart grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away.

  ‘You have to learn to pick your moments,’ Smart said as he pushed him in the direction of the DFAC.

  ‘He’s right,’ Gray added. ‘Wait until there’s ten of them, then it’ll be a fair fight.’

  Sonny shrugged off Smart’s grip. ‘I’m sorry, but he just winds me up so much.’

  ‘Yeah—because you let him,’ Gray said. The problem was they had no release for the tension. Day after day they were wound up like springs, only for the mission to end in disappointment. What they needed was an outlet, a way to vent all the pent-up frustration. They had the makeshift gym and the rifle range, but nothing came close to actual combat.

  An idea sprang into Gray’s head, one that would relieve the tension and settle things once and for all between the two groups. He’d suggest it to Balmer the next time they met, but right now he needed chow and sleep.

  Chapter 5

  A small boy chased a young goat through a vast orchard that was just about ready to give up its crop of apricots. Abdul al-Hussain watched him with envy.

  When he’d been a nine-year-old—almost half a century ago—Abdul could never have imagined the decades of conflict that lay ahead. Back then, life had been so simple: the morning spent tending the crops and ensuring the irrigation system was well maintained, followed by lunch and free time to enjoy with his twin brother, Muhammed.

  They’d played soccer with a ball made from goat skin, and Abdul day-dreamed of one day representing his country as the national team’s goalkeeper. He would spend hours diving to his left and right, pretending to save a last-minute penalty that earned his nation the World Cup. But that dream, like so many others, had faded with time. Once he reached his teenage years, the football was long forgotten as his attention turned to Buzkashi.

  The game starts out with a headless goat carcass in the middle of the arena, and the objective is for players on horseback to get it to the scoring area. It had seemed such a simple concept when his father had first explained it to him, but after watching his first competition Abdul had recognised it for the brutal sport that it was.

  The next decade saw him become one of the youngest champions in history, but the sport took a back seat as he approached his thirtieth birthday. His bravery was required elsewhere; the Soviet Union had arrived in Afghanistan.

  Abdul was recruited by the Mujahideen, swapping his leather Buzkashi whip for a Kalashnikov AK-47. And over the next ten years Abdul had taken part in dozens of confrontations with the Soviet aggressors. At first, he and his compatriots had been heavily outnumbered and outgunned, until the US decided to intervene on the logistics front. The Mil MI-24 helicopter gunships that once gave the Soviets total air domination were no match for the Stinger missiles the Americans were shipping into the country, and what had once looked a one-sided affair on paper soon ground to a stalemate. The Soviets, having suffered many loses, started bombing from higher altitudes. This made accuracy more difficult but kept them out of range of the American-built surface-to-air missiles.

  The communists had been invited into the country by the new communist president, Babrak Karmal, but they never managed to occupy more than twenty per cent of it. Their troops numbered 125,000, but they were up against twice as many resistance fighters—mostly Afghans, though some were from neighbouring Arab countries.

  Abdul rose through the ranks to command more than three hundred men, and they would use guerrilla tactics to engage the enemy, hitting them hard before fleeing into the mountains. He had over seventy personal kills to his name by the time the last Soviet unit left Afghanistan in February 1989.

  He’d returned from his war efforts in the south to discover that his family home and crops in Kabul province had been completely destroyed as part of the Soviet scorched-earth policy, designed to deny resistance fighters shelter and food. His mother, father and twin brother had been victims of the aerial bombardment. The invaders were long gone, leaving him no outlet for his fury. It festered
inside him as he set about trying to rebuild his life.

  Abdul married a local girl twenty years his junior, and she quickly gave him a son. That child would eventually be joined by four siblings—three of whom were boys who would carry on the family name and inherit his precious farm. Only a small percentage of Afghanistan boasted arable land, meaning his orchards were lucrative and valuable.

  It took four years to return the farm to its former glory, during which time the Mujahideen continued its fight against the communist government. Soviet puppet Mohammad Najibullah eventually resigned in 1992, but the civil war raged on. In 1994, the Taliban emerged as a military force, and were supported by Pakistan, who saw them as a way to secure trade routes to Central Asia and establish a government in Kabul friendly to its interests. Led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban sequestered power from the Mujahideen warlords whose corruption and despotism they despised. In 1996, the Taliban gained control of the Afghan government, and in Abdul’s opinion, their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law was just what the country needed if it were to survive. The lawlessness had gone on for too long, and someone had to take the reins and guide the people along the proper path. The sport that had turned him into a man—Buzkashi—was outlawed, but Abdul didn’t see it as a loss. A fragile peace had descended on the region, and he had entertained many Taliban leaders in his home, one of whom had been Mullah Omar himself. Abdul had been quick to pledge his allegiance. Because of his reputation as a Mujahideen fighter, al-Hussain was given a senior position in the region. He enforced the law harshly, and without exception.

  However, the events of September 11th, 2001, changed everything.

  Kabul fell to anti-Taliban forces, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence helped the Taliban militia who were in full retreat. Abdul and his family were offered the chance to be spirited out of the country on Pakistani cargo planes, but he wasn’t abandoning his country. Instead, he contacted ISI who gave him and his family new papers. He returned to Kabul province as Mukhtar Shah and sold his farm for a less than generous price. His time in the north was at an end, and he relocated to the south, close to the border with Pakistan. There, under his new name, he purchased a smaller holding and set about the pretence of being nothing more than a simple farmer.

  Now, nine years on from the first US and British troops landing on his soil, he was able to carry on his insurgent activities right under the noses of the occupying forces.

  The boy in the orchard gave up chasing the goat, and had scampered up a tree to pick one of the unripe apricots.

  ‘You’ll get stomach ache, Jamal,’ al-Hussain warned.

  The child looked over at him, noticing his presence for the first time. He bowed his head. ‘Sorry, father.’

  ‘In a few more days you can fill your belly, but for now you must be patient.’

  It was a virtue Abdul al-Hussain had been blessed with, for his was a waiting game. He knew never to attack the coalition forces until the moment was right and the conditions optimal. If this meant letting targets travel through his land unhindered, so be it.

  He also had to wait for the ISI-backed training camp near Quetta to produce able men for his needs. When the Taliban had formed in the mid-nineties they’d had their pick of seasoned Mujahideen veterans, but those days were long gone. Now he was left with a few battle-hardened men and had to rely on the youths from outlying villages to swell his ranks, and many of them had not yet come of age. The more promising ones had been sent to Pakistan for intense training, while the less-capable were used as cannon-fodder, sent on suicide missions in the name of their God.

  That was, until now.

  A member of the Afghan community in England had passed on news of the American woman of Afghan heritage. She was working in London for a US pharmaceutical company, developing a virus that would ensure pain-free births for all women. To Abdul, such a thing was an abomination. Allah himself had decided how much a woman should bear when bringing forth new life, but that wasn’t the part of her research that struck him. The woman had spoken of her frustration at not being able to reduce the side effects of the virus, and these had piqued his interest. He’d instructed the Afghan to find out more about the woman and her work, and word had reached him a month earlier that she would be travelling around the Middle East giving lectures about her discovery.

  One of the stops on her tour was Kabul.

  The more he’d heard from his man in England, the more it seemed like divine providence; Allah was blessing him with the means to defeat his enemies.

  Abdul’s wife brought food and tea to his table and then retreated inside. He picked at his Bulani, tearing off a piece of the filled bread, then dipped it in plain homemade yoghurt.

  The scientist, Miriam Dagher, had landed in Kabul earlier in the day. All he could do now was wait for news.

  It came as he was finishing the last mouthful of his dinner—via a burner cell he’d set up just for this occasion.

  ‘We have the package.’

  ‘You know where to deliver it,’ al-Hussain said.

  ‘I do. We’ll be there at three tomorrow, Inshallah.’

  God willing indeed.

  Al-Hussain ended the call and removed the battery and SIM card from the phone. He called his son over.

  ‘Take this to the market and—’

  ‘—drop it in the sewer. Yes, father.’

  Al-Hussain watched Jamal race off and wondered if his youngest would grow to live a similar life to his own. His eldest son, Omar, was gone; killed in a confrontation with US Special Forces a year earlier. His other two sons were already training in guerrilla tactics, awaiting their turn to face the enemy. It had been his wish that the fighting would be over by now, and the land returned to Taliban rule so that they could live out the remainder of their lives in peace. Sadly, there was no sign of the Western invaders withdrawing.

  If the Dagher woman’s claims were true, then her virus may just be the difference between defeat and victory. If Allah willed it to be the former, then perhaps he would live long enough to see his boys grow to be men and have children of their own.

  If not… then they would all follow Omar to the grave.

  Chapter 6

  After six hours in the sack, Gray felt somewhat refreshed. He put on his boots and, wearing just his shorts and a T-shirt, set off for a run around the base. He’d measured out a route that was roughly three-quarters of a mile in length, and tried to get in four circuits each day.

  A shade over twenty minutes later, he arrived back at the tent drenched in sweat. Carl Levine was preparing to hit the ablutions, while Sonny was sprawled out on his bunk fast asleep.

  ‘CO wants to see you for a briefing in forty minutes,’ Levine said. ‘You’re to report to the chaos in action suite.’

  If the briefing was to be held in the CIA block, it could only mean that Lance Durden had another dubious mission for them.

  Gray grabbed a towel. ‘Where’s Len?’

  ‘Taking a shower,’ Levine told him.

  ‘Okay. Wake sleeping ugly and tell him to get his shit together.’

  Gray jogged to the shower block, passing Smart on the way.

  ‘Briefing in forty,’ Smart said.

  ‘Yeah, Carl told me. Looks like we’re going out again.’

  ‘Any chance you could ask for a mission based on solid intel instead of greed and make-believe?’

  Normally, they received their orders direct from the CO, but now Gray would have the opportunity to question Durden on the source of the information.

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Gray spent five minutes under the cold water, then walked back to the tent and dressed. Fifteen minutes before the meeting was due to commence, he headed over to the American quarter and bought a coffee from one of the vendors.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the saggy-ass soldier!’ A powerful hand slapped Gray on the back, spilling some of his drink.

  ‘Balmer.’ Gray growled as he turned to face the Delta Force ma
ster sergeant.

  ‘The very same, old chap.’

  ‘You know, when you do an English accent you sound like Dick van Dyke, only without the van Dyke.’

  ‘Man, you’re funny. Shame you were born on the wrong side of the pond.’ Balmer ordered a drink and a large cookie from the stall owner. ‘So, what brings you to the fighting side of the base? Looking for some tips?’

  ‘I’m on my way to see Durden,’ Gray said, already bored by the banter. It was the same every time he met Balmer and his squad, and the jokes had long ago started to wear thin.

  Gray had met other members of Delta Force through the special forces exchange program, where the US troops would visit Credenhill to cross-train with the SAS. On those occasions the routine had always been the same: rib the yanks for a few hours, put in a few weeks of solid training, then a huge piss-up at the end. It had mostly been good-natured, but Balmer was taking their rivalry to the extreme.

  ‘If you’re hoping for a glory mission, forget it,’ Balmer said. ‘Durden bleeds the stars and stripes. If there’s a solid lead on a JPEL target, he’ll give it to us. You’ll be lucky to get a goose chase or suicide mission.’

  ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it. You guys were the best for a long time, but warfare evolves. You’re still good, but we’re the next generation.’

  Gray was tempted to cry bullshit, but he didn’t have time nor inclination to get into a protracted argument with Balmer. Nothing he said was going to change the man’s mindset, but actions spoke louder than words. He finished his coffee and threw the cup in the trash. ‘There’s only one real way to know who’s the best,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? What’s that?’

  ‘Your best man against mine.’

  A smile spread on Balmer’s face. ‘We might as well go for it right now.’

  ‘No, this weekend. I’ll find somewhere nice and secluded.’