The Shadow Patrol jw-6

by Alex Berenson

  FRANCESCA AND ALDERS had been operating in the mountains in the southeastern corner of Zabul province, just inside Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The United States had only a couple thousand troops in all of Zabul, part of the same Stryker brigade that included Tyler Weston. Most American forces were farther west in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which were more heavily populated and strategically important. The Taliban had taken advantage, making Zabul a major route for smuggling weapons and men from Pakistan.

  So Francesca and Alders had set up watch on a ratline, a trail the Talibs used to bring in weapons. They lived at Kandahar Air Field in a base within a base, a compound restricted to the Delta elite. Delta and Special Forces teams usually ran missions by helicopter, flying on modified Black Hawks that had nozzles for midair refueling jutting out of their front ends like steel straws. But Black Hawks attracted attention, and Francesca needed absolute camouflage to succeed. At his best, he killed quietly and precisely, and then disappeared. Take nothing but shots. Leave nothing but bodies.

  Instead of a Black Hawk, Francesca and Alders took a Toyota, with civilian Afghan plates, and joined the stream of civilian traffic leaving Kandahar. At Kharjoy, they left the highway and wended their way southeast on the one-lane tracks and dry riverbeds that passed for roads in Zabul. Ten miles before the border, the hills turned into mountains and got too steep for them to drive at all. They left the Toyota near an abandoned hut and humped up to the ridgeline of a nine-thousand-foot mountain that overwatched the trail. The mission was hugely risky. They had no backup. If the Talibs found them, they would have to call for a helicopter evacuation that would take hours. By then they’d probably be dead. Or, worse, captured.

  For a week, they lived rough. They ate bread and dried fruit and rationed their water and slept under the thorny bushes that offered the only cover around. But the mission turned out to be a bust. Maybe the Talibs had guessed that the route had been discovered. Maybe they’d used other trails this month. Either way, Francesca and Alders saw nothing but a couple of kids herding goats.

  But they had a second, unofficial reason for the mission. On the way into the mountains, they’d picked up a bag of tightly wrapped blue bundles from Lieutenant Weston at FOB Jackson. They’d hidden the bag along with their rifles and uniforms in a special compartment that was welded under the bed of the pickup.

  Now they were back on friendly territory. Francesca wanted a shower and contractor-cooked chow. Forward operating bases had the best food in the military. The giant headquarters bases like Kandahar focused on quantity. But the dining halls at the forward bases offered chicken, steak, ice cream, fresh vegetables, and unlimited Gatorade and PowerBars.

  “Starving,” Francesca said. “You?”

  “Sure.”

  Francesca and Alders didn’t need to talk much. They were close as husband and wife. Closer, maybe. Neither man’s marriage had survived this war. They had worked together as sniper and spotter for three years.

  On one calm day the previous summer, Francesca sighted, held his breath, gently squeezed the trigger on his rifle — a four-foot-long.50 caliber Barrett M107. Across a rock valley, a fat Afghan clutched his chest and dropped. He tried to stagger up and then lay down and didn’t move again. “Nine hundred yards,” Alders told him.

  “Always wanted to bust somebody at half a mile.”

  “Now you have.”

  Francesca would be bummed when this tour was finished. It was his third and last. Not his choice. The Army gave you only three. In the three tours, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he’d racked fifty-six kills, a good number, especially with the drones doing so much work these days. Maybe good was the wrong word. Francesca wondered whether all that killing had changed him. Course it had. Back home, civvies called guys like him serial killers. The more he pulled the trigger, the easier it came. He’d given up waiting for God or anyone else to punish him. He hadn’t been hit by lightning or gotten cancer or gone blind. He was in the best shape of his life. Plenty of money in the bank, and more coming. The Joes treated him like a minor god.

  He wasn’t too worried about payback in the next world either. He’d watched close through his scope for souls leaving the men he’d killed. Hadn’t seen a single one. Only the red mist, the cloud of blood and tissue that shrieked from the body when a bullet cut through. The afterlife was a fable for little boys and girls. Not real men like him.

  SO WHEN AN OLD FRIEND in Kabul reached out a few months before, told him about a scheme he had, Francesca said yes right away. “What about your spotter?” his friend had said. “He gonna be okay with this?”

  “He does what I tell him.”

  “That simple.”

  “He knows the difference between shooting and spotting.”

  Sure enough, Alders agreed. Working out the pickups was the tricky part. At first his friend wanted him to pick the stuff up himself. But the Talibs hated snipers. Francesca couldn’t risk meeting them directly.

  Instead he reached out to Tyler Weston, a platoon leader he knew in Zabul. Tyler’s brother had been a good friend of Francesca’s, back in the day. Weston bought in quick once Francesca explained, quicker than Francesca had expected. He got it. He saw how everybody was getting rich over here. The companies, the contractors, the locals. Only the Joes got the shaft. This deal was a way to get them a piece of the money they’d been missing. He and Alders split ten grand a kilo, two-thirds for him, one-third for Alders. More than a million dollars already. Francesca had parked his share in a bank in Germany while he figured what to do with it.

  INSIDE THE BASE, Francesca called Kandahar, explained they’d hit a rut on the way back from the mountains. “Blew the right front tire. We got the spare on. But it put a leak in the left, too. And maybe some damage to the axle.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “FOB Moqor. We’ll be stuck here tonight. Mechanics say they don’t have time to check the axle until the morning.”

  “All right. But do me a favor. Get back by tomorrow night.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Francesca turned into a giant parking lot filled with armored trucks and pickups. Thousands of vehicles were parked on this base. No one would notice, much less check, a random pickup truck. He found a spot and hopped out. He and Alders took off the right front tire and replaced it with the spare and tossed the tire a couple hundred yards away.

  “Let’s eat. Where’s the chow hall, Alders?”

  “How’m I know that?” Alders had grown up on the side of a mountain in eastern Kentucky. He had a hillbilly accent that made him seem a lot stupider than he was. “Thought you could smell it.”

  They walked past a grove of Porta-Potties and a line of blast walls that hid a dozen steel trailers. Francesca guessed they were home to the base’s midlevel officers. Lieutenants and captains usually bunked in pairs. Majors and above lived alone. The Army was extraordinarily hierarchical, although it made exceptions for Special Forces guys. In a low-intensity war like this one, the regular Joes often had to hold their fire for fear of killing civilians. Francesca didn’t have that problem. He killed more Talibs in a year than the average forty-man infantry platoon. So the Army put up with him. Even so, he knew regular officers viewed guys like him as a necessary evil. Their casual refusal to wear uniforms or salute discouraged regular soldiers from following orders.

  “Want to go over there, ask for directions?”

  “You know what I want?”

  “What you always want. A nice cold Dr Pepper.”

  “Read my mind. A nice cold Dr Pepper. Wouldn’t mind a shot of Jim Beam right next to it, but I guess that ain’t happening.”

  “Funny, isn’t it. We can’t get a drink, but we got a million bucks of junk back there—”

  “Junk in the trunk.”

  “Had to go there. You ever think about trying it?”

  “Nope,” Alders said firmly. “It’s just Oxycontin without a prescription. Half my cousins are addicted to Oxy and they lie arou
nd on their asses doing nothing ’cept talking about how high they are. From what I can see they can’t even get out of bed. Don’t look that great to me. You ever done meth?”

  “Only the greenies.” One secret of the Special Forces was that a lot of guys had stashes of amphetamines tucked away. All the training in the world couldn’t prep you for two hours of sleep a night. A little chemical help went a long way.

  “Yeah, meth is that times ten. The greenies give you energy, keep you up, but being on meth changes your whole attitude. You feel like you could lift a car. Unstoppable. You find some chick on it, too? You gonna tear each other up. If I’m going to get high, I want to feel high.”

  “That’s the longest speech you’ve ever given me.”

  “You asked, man.”

  “So I did.”

  They found the mess hall, and Francesca ate plates of crab legs and barbecued chicken and drank two Fantas. He wanted a third, but the mess hall regulations said two. These tiny rules had somehow kept a hold on him. Maybe following them helped him pass as normal, instead of the Shadow he was. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. He’d read that somewhere growing up. Take care of the Fantas, and the kills will take care of themselves.

  He laughed a little.

  “What?” Alders said.

  “Nothing.”

  “That creeps me out.”

  “What?”

  “That laugh. That high-pitched crazy-man laugh. Hee-hee-hee. You been doing it a lot. And every time I ask you what you’re thinking about, you say, ‘Nothing.’”

  “Just thinking.”

  “Three tours is enough,” Alders said.

  Francesca got himself two slices of Oreo pie. Alders had ice cream. The conversations eddied and flowed around them, but none of the other soldiers talked to them. Everyone knew enough to leave them alone. The mess hall had a television that played the Armed Forces Network, a mix of live sports and shows like House. During the commercial breaks, the channel played military public-service announcements instead of the usual back-home ads. The announcements were targeted at rear-echelon administrative types at bases in Europe. Tips for dealing with sexual harassment, that kind of thing. They had less than nothing to do with the reality of the war over here. Lately, Francesca could hardly watch them. He wanted to shoot everyone in them, especially the whiny chicks who didn’t like being told their asses looked good. What you just said to me makes me uncomfortable, Sergeant. I suggest— Oh— Whomp. She doesn’t even get a hand up. Dead before she hits the floor. Two points.

  Francesca felt that high-pitched laugh rising in his throat and stifled it. When had he started thinking about shooting his fellow soldiers? “I guess it is,” he said aloud.

  “What?”

  “Enough. Three tours.”

  “I’m starting to think it’s too much.”

  Francesca laughed, for real this time.

  BACK AT THE PICKUP, Alders slid under the back bumper, opened the hidden compartment, came out with the dope and a thick plastic bag that held their uniforms and toiletries. “Showers?”

  “I don’t know,” Francesca said. “I think I smell pretty good.”

  “You smell like a wild animal.”

  Francesca had gotten into the habit of taking the hottest showers he could. Today, he turned the handle left until the water scalded his skin. He closed his eyes and smiled. Two minutes later, he stepped out, feeling almost human.

  He brushed his teeth and ran his hands through his black hair and looked himself over in the mirror. He was an okay-looking guy. His nose was a little bit of a bulb and his ears stuck out. Growing up in Orlando, fifteen minutes from Disney World, he’d inevitably been nicknamed “Mickey” in elementary school. He pulled on his camouflage, laced his boots. The pants and blouse looked clean and crisp. And even if they hadn’t… the tag on his left arm was all he needed: Special Forces. Anyone who had one of those didn’t have to wear a name tag or rank insignia.

  He packed the bricks of heroin into his pack and headed over to the airfield, a giant gravel square where the helicopters landed. Moqor was the next big base past FOB Jackson, more or less halfway between Kandahar and Kabul. But only a few helicopters were permanently stationed there. The Chinooks and other big passenger birds were mostly based at Bagram and Kandahar.

  Francesca stepped into the oversize wooden shack that housed the soldiers who ran the airfield. Inside, hundreds of heavily thumbed paperbacks testified to the countless hours of waiting for flights. When the wind and dust kicked up, helo rides got canceled. Slide it to the right, guys said. Meaning, block off another day on the calendar, because this one’s gone.

  “Got anything heading east today?” he said to the private behind the counter. The kid was so young he still had teenage acne, the pimply, oily kind.

  “There’s a Presidential”—a contractor helicopter—“to Kabul at seventeen hundred. Also the Canadians are running a Chinook to Kabul and then Bagram at 2030. Guessing you don’t have an AMR.” The letters stood for “air mobility request.” Having one meant a confirmed seat.

  “You are correct. Flying Space-A.” Space-A meant “space available,” the military equivalent of standby. Flying Space-A sometimes meant waiting for days. But Francesca much preferred it, because it left no record. Space-A requests were logged by hand on a paper chart. Once a flight landed safely, the records were tossed. He had flown all over Afghanistan on a Space-A basis and left no trail. Which made him feel more confident about the thirty-plus pounds of heroin in his pack.

  “They’re stuffed,” the private said. “Chinook looks a little better.”

  “I can wait for the Chinook. Long as I get out tonight.”

  “I’ll jump you to the top of the list. But I still can’t guarantee it.”

  Francesca put his elbows on the counter and leaned forward. “Can I trust you?” The kid’s breath was terrible. “I don’t want to say too much, but I have got to get to Bagram tonight. I got something in RC-East and it can’t wait. Way east. You see what I’m saying.” Francesca knew he was laying it on thick, implying he had a mission in Pakistan. He also knew he looked seriously high-speed with his beard and tags. He thought the private, who probably had never gotten outside the wire, would bite.

  The private’s eyes widened. He nodded once and backed away like a kid who’d walked in on his parents going at it. And Francesca got on the 2030, the last man on, when a half dozen guys got dumped. As he walked toward the Chinook, ducking the gravel caught in the backwash from its double rotors, Francesca smirked to himself. Too easy. He pressed his way into the Chinook, took the last seat on the bench, tucked his million-dollar bag between his legs. Better make sure it didn’t slide out the back.

  The engines whined and the chopper’s front end rose and then its rear end lurched up into the night. The Chinooks were so big that sometimes they gave the illusion that they were moving in pieces, like accordion buses, instead of all at once. Francesca couldn’t see much, but he didn’t need to. He’d killed people all over this damn country.

  He untied his boots and put in his earplugs and closed his eyes and let the Chinook’s vibrations put him to sleep. Strange but true, these rides were the only place he truly relaxed anymore.

  In Kabul, only a couple guys got off, so the copter stayed stuffed. Fifteen minutes later, the Chinook touched down at Zebra Ramp in Bagram. Francesca’s job was almost finished. Though this last bit was the trickiest.

  THE CHINOOK HAD LANDED north of the airport runway. The passenger and cargo jet terminals were on the south side. The runway was supposed to be impassible. Anyone connecting from a helicopter to a jet was supposed to leave the tarmac and reenter through the passenger terminal.

  But Francesca didn’t have that option. Bags at Bagram were examined before they were allowed on the tarmac. The screeners were mainly looking for explosives, but the plastic-wrapped bundles of heroin in his pack bore an uncanny resemblance to bricks of C-4. Francesca couldn’t p
ut the bag through an X-ray machine. Fortunately, he was on the tarmac already. He just needed to cross the runway to get to the passenger side.

  Francesca stepped out of the helicopter, looked around. Unlike civilian airports, Bagram never slept. Planes took off and landed twenty-four hours a day. Even now, close to midnight, the air was thick with jet fuel. As he watched, an F-18 pulled off the runway almost vertically and disappeared into the night. A minute later, a Reaper drone took its place on the runway, slowly gaining speed, finally rising from the earth. Compared to the F-18, the Reaper looked like a hobbyist’s creation, spindly wings and a long, narrow nose. Yet the Reaper was a far cheaper and more effective weapon.

  Around Francesca, the Chinook emptied like a clown car, passengers pouring out the back, glad to leave the noisy bird behind. They grabbed their bags and made their way toward the gate that separated the helicopter landing area from the rest of the base. Francesca lit up a cigarette, an excuse to wait on the tarmac.

  “You need a ride somewhere?” a white-haired guy in a General Dynamics jacket said.

  “Thanks. I’m good.” Francesca smoked until he was the last guy by the bird. When the cigarette was finished, he edged toward the gate. After a few steps, he bent over and tied his boots. The pilots were finishing their final postlanding checks. All the passengers were close to the gate. No one was within a hundred feet of him. No one was looking at him. Chinooks weren’t exactly loaded with classified technology. They’d been around forty years. And nobody cared too much where passengers went after a helicopter touched down.

  Francesca turned, walked purposefully away from the gate. Sure, somebody could have run back to ask him whether he was lost. But folks had rides waiting and didn’t want to be late. The Special Forces tags helped. He ducked behind a hangar and waited. A few minutes later, he heard the pilots joking with each other as they left. He waited fifteen minutes more. Now he was alone for sure.

  He headed for the gate, which had been closed and locked. An all-terrain vehicle was parked beside it. The mechanics rode them around the airfield. A lucky break. Even better, the key was in the ignition. Francesca rolled east along the outer taxiway, leaving the Chinook behind. He passed an enormous hangar filled with fighter jets. Mechanics stood by an A-10 Warthog, the ugliest and arguably most useful plane the Air Force had. The Warthogs flew low and slow and fired rounds the size of Coke cans. They could slice through tank armor or reduce a house to rubble. The mechanics looked over as if wondering who he was. He nodded, didn’t say anything, kept driving.