“Look, if that bug you gave me works—”
“It works—”
“Then I’ll know where Francesca and Alders are hiding. And they won’t know I know. If that’s not a big enough edge, I’d better find a new line of work.”
“Modern dance instructor.”
Wells hung up, called Anne.
“John?”
“Hello, babe.”
“You’re wearing the Ray-Bans, aren’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“You’d only call me things like babe when you’re wearing them. Rocker John.”
“I’ve been called lots of things over the years, but I assure you Rocker John isn’t one.”
“Tell me you’re almost done over there.”
“I am. Honestly.”
“You gonna get the bad guy?”
“I always do.” Almost.
“Then we’ll live happily ever after. You and me and Tonka makes three. He told me how much he missed you this morning. Said you’re not a good owner, but you’re his favorite anyway.”
“Tell him I miss him, too. And you, Anne. Can’t wait to see you.”
“I love you, John. Whatever it is you’re doing, be careful.”
“I love you, too.” A word Wells had rarely used with Anne. A word that felt right today.
HE SPENT THE AFTERNOON getting his gear together. Then he had nothing to do but wait. He went back to his trailer and slept. No point in wasting energy he would need soon enough. He woke after sunset to a call from Shafer, who explained what had happened with Cunningham and Duto.
“So Duto knew about 71 all along,” Wells said.
“He swears he had no idea that the trail would go that way.”
“You believe him?”
“It doesn’t matter. Train’s way down the tracks.”
Shafer was right. They couldn’t stop chasing Francesca now. As usual, Duto had played them.
“One of these years, I’m going to pay him back.”
“Inshallah, my friend. Knock ’em dead.”
“I’ll do my best.”
IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN P.M. when his local phone rang. Young.
“Coleman.”
“Out of nowhere, Weston told us to be ready for an op in the next twenty-four hours. Motorcycle registration in the Arghandab.” Insurgents favored motorcycles, so the military was trying to track them with tamper-proof registration stickers. Never mind that the insurgents had an endless supply of cheap bikes. Registration offered a measurable benchmark for commanders to meet. The military loved measurable benchmarks.
“Where exactly?”
“He says we don’t have final orders yet. But the most likely spots are a couple roads that run from Highway 1 and up into the valley. Pretty near the base. Eighty to a hundred miles northeast of KAF. You know where I’m talking about?”
“More or less.”
“More or less does not promote confidence, sir.”
“When you know more, you call me. I promise I’ll be there.”
“That’s more like it.”
SO WESTON WAS GETTING his platoon off FOB Jackson. Which meant Francesca would be leaving KAF soon enough. Wells’s GPS was plugged into the feed from the transmitter on the pickup. Wells waited for it to ping.
And waited. The hours dragged. Midnight passed. One a.m. Maybe Francesca wouldn’t leave base until tomorrow. Or maybe Young was wrong. Maybe Francesca wasn’t part of this scheme after all. Two a.m. Wells tried to sleep, couldn’t.
At 2:30, the GPS beeped. A single blue dot indicated that Francesca’s pickup was ten miles outside of the airfield. He’d taken the bait. Wells knew where he was heading. North and east, deep into the Arghandab River Valley. Toward 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. Toward Coleman Young.
Part of Wells wanted to chase them immediately, but moving at this hour would be a mistake. Francesca and Alders couldn’t do anything until Young was off FOB Jackson. Best to let them get set in their sniper hole, then go after them.
Wells set his alarm for 5:30, before dawn. He closed his eyes and dreamed of a wave that started in the Hindu Kush and swept down and down, through the poppy fields, the empty Registan Desert, over the mountains in Pakistan, all the way to the sea.
SOON AS HE WOKE Wells checked the GPS. Something was wrong. Three transmissions—covering a ninety-minute period—showed motion northeast in chunks of thirty miles or so. The third transmission came in around four o’clock. But after that, the locator went silent. At least two more transmissions should have followed by now. If the pickup had stopped, the transmitter should have reported that, too. Wells called Shafer. “What’s going on?”
“Probably they’ve stopped somewhere where the transmitter doesn’t have line-of-sight to the atmosphere. It’ll keep pinging every forty-five minutes until the signal goes through and it gets an answer.”
Wells thought of the metal firing platform he’d seen in the back of the pickup. If Francesca had set that up and it reached over the transmitter, it would block the signal. “If there’s metal in the way—”
“Metal’s not good. But it will keep trying.”
“Meantime I’m just supposed to guess where they holed up.”
“I’ll put some calls out, see if I can get a handle on what their official mission is.”
“You think the Deltas are going to tell you that after the way you left it with Cunningham?”
“You do your job, John. Let me do mine.”
Shafer hung up. Wells rose and showered. He pulled on a shalwar kameez and covered it with a brown windbreaker for the ride and packed a nylon bag with his kit. Everything he was carrying would pass for local, even the GPS and his binoculars. For weapons he had a knife strapped to his leg and three Russian RGO-78 grenades and his old Makarov and silencer. No AK. Even a short-stock would be impossible to hide. Anyway, a long-range gun battle with Francesca would be suicide. An AK had an effective range of maybe a hundred yards. Francesca could be lethal from ten times that distance. Wells would need to ambush him close in.
His new motorcycle was parked outside his trailer. He’d bought it the day before. It didn’t look like much, a Chinese-made Honda knockoff with an air-cooled 250cc engine and wire wheels. The word Hando was painted in white on its gas tank. No one would ever confuse it with a Ducati. Its speedometer went to two hundred kilometers an hour, but Wells figured the wheels would come off long before then. But Wells had looked it over closely before buying it. It was mechanically sound, and the tires and shocks were solid.
In any case, anonymity mattered more than performance. Anonymity translated into surprise, and Wells had learned over the years that tactical surprise beat firepower. Bar brawls or gunfights, the guy who hit first won. Maybe not always, but close enough. In Hollywood, fights went on and on and on. In the real world, they didn’t take long. Once a punch or kick or bullet knocked you down, going back on the attack was nearly impossible. You kept getting hit until the other guy stopped. Sometimes he didn’t stop until you were dead.
Francesca seemed to have learned the same lessons. His dirty pickup was what Wells would have used if he’d needed to carry a sniper rifle. And like Wells, Francesca and Alders operated without uniforms, or backup to bail them out. A casual observer might not see much difference between Wells and Francesca.
But somewhere Francesca had lost himself, forgotten his purpose. Forgotten that anyone could pull a trigger, take a life. The act itself was simple. The why was what separated soldiers from serial killers. Wells hadn’t forgotten the why. So he hoped. He put his bag on the back of the bike, slipped the key into the ignition.
THE MORNING TRAFFIC on Highway 1 was picking up as Wells headed east, shielding his eyes from the sun. The flatlands of southern Afghanistan turned cool in the mornings at this time of year. Wells shivered under his windbreaker as he followed Francesca’s trail north off Highway 1 and into the Arghandab Valley.
Even by Afghan stan
dards, the valley was a backwater. A half dozen children swirled around a woman in an electric-blue burqa. A donkey dragged a cart inch by inch, whining with each step, as a gaunt man with skin the color and texture of leather clapped a switch across his haunches. Two Afghan soldiers leaned against a pickup truck, cigarettes in hand. One had painted the stock of his AK pink and covered the muzzle with rhinestones. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Afghans on both sides of the insurgency had a strange fondness for tricking out their rifles. The soldiers eyed Wells as he passed, but didn’t bother to stop him.
Wells reached the last point the transmitter had signaled just over two hours after leaving Kandahar. He pulled over and looked for any sign that Francesca and Alders had stopped nearby. Open fields lay north of the road, toward the river. To the south, a narrow cart track passed through a handful of farm compounds. Wells didn’t think the Toyota would fit on the track. Anyway, he could see a stream of smoke coming from one compound, and kids playing on the roof of another. Wells couldn’t imagine how Francesca and Alders would have hidden themselves in an occupied house. They had to be squatting someplace abandoned.
Wells rolled on. The landscape stayed the same for the next few miles. Compounds and the occasional grape hut sat south of the road. North, toward the river, the pomegranate groves thickened. Still, this part of the Arghandab was much less fertile than the land nearer Kandahar, the trees less dense.
The road passed through a village. To the south, several shops occupied a plaza, the Afghan version of a strip mall. At the far end was a garage big enough to hide the pickup. Wells stopped outside the plaza’s first store, walked in. Three men hunched over sewing machines, working long strips of white cotton. Posters taped to the concrete walls showed their offerings. The men barely acknowledged Wells. In these tiny villages, outsiders were suspect, especially if they weren’t Pashtun.
“Good morning.”
“Morning,” the man nearest Wells mumbled. One of his eyes was a deep, ugly red, the skin around it swollen and tender. Severe conjunctivitis. In the United States, a doctor would cure that infection with a few cents of medicine. Here, the man might go blind.
Wells leaned over his machine. “I see you do excellent work.” The man grunted and fed cloth through as the machine clucked. Time to get to the point. “I’m looking for two men who might have stopped here early this morning. Before sunrise.”
The man raised his head to stare with his weeping eye at Wells. The machines halted one by one until the shop was silent. “No one’s stopped here.”
“They were driving a Toyota, a pickup.” Wells reached into his pocket for a wad of afghanis. “Are you sure you haven’t seen them?”
“No one’s stopped here. And who are you?”
Wells backed out. As he got back on the bike, the sewing resumed. He didn’t understand why the tailors had been so unfriendly. He put the bike in gear, rolled by the garage. A side door was open and he could see inside. Empty. They hadn’t stopped here. Wells pulled back onto the road.
Past the village, more dirt tracks ran south, though most petered out before the ridgeline. Just three roads in this part of the valley ran over the ridge and toward Highway 1. If what Young had said was right, the Strykers would be on one of those roads sometime today. But Wells needed more. He hoped Shafer was making progress on unearthing their official mission. To find them without the transmitter’s help, he had to pin down what they were doing. And he had to lock them down soon, so he could track them as they moved on Young. Only then would Wells have the proof he needed to take them out. Right now he had only circumstantial evidence. He had to catch them in the act.
Worst-case, if Wells couldn’t find them, he could try to cover Young directly as the Stryker platoon registered motorcycles. But Francesca would be expecting him. Finding and tracking Francesca as he moved on Young would give Wells his only real chance of beating Francesca’s firepower advantage.
AS HE STARTED TO RIDE AGAIN, his phone buzzed.
“Told you, let me do my job,” Shafer said. “Point one. That road you’re on has turned into an IED alley. Four soldiers and two British journos got creamed last week. That got noticed all the way up to RCS HQ.”
No wonder the locals were giving the fish eye to outsiders, Wells thought. They couldn’t stop the Taliban from planting bombs, but they were worried that more casualties would provoke a big American counterattack, the kind that flattened villages. “What’s point two?”
“Point two. Yesterday the drones at KAF, in fact all air support, was ordered away from a sector of the valley sixty kilometers long and thirty wide. Lockdown for five days. Reason given is Special Operations mission, otherwise unspecified. How much would you like to bet your friends are setting up, waiting for Red Team to plant another IED? Makes for great cover.”
“It’s even better than that. The mission gives them an excuse to be out here. The no-fly zone means that when they kill Young, the Strykers can’t hit back. They go back to their original nest, take out the IED cell, come home to Kandahar. Mission accomplished. They just need to put a few miles between where they’re supposed to be, the official post, and the Young kill.”
“Sounds right.”
“So I should be looking for a nest near the road, within a mile or so. Not on the ridgeline. An abandoned farmhouse, something like that. With room to hide the pickup.” Wells was thinking out loud now.
“I hear more, I’ll let you know.”
Wells hung up. Now he could focus on houses within a few hundred yards of the road, with an open field of fire. Plus the firing position had to be big enough to hide the Toyota. Only a few buildings could meet all those conditions.
Still, he had a lot of ground to cover. Francesca and Alders would have reached the nest between four a.m., the time of the locator’s final transmission, and 4:45, when it should have reported again. Even if they had needed ten minutes to hide the pickup and put the firing platform together, they could have driven for thirty-five minutes, enough time to get as much as twenty miles east of the final location the transmitter had recorded.
Wells headed east, watching both sides of the road. For a few minutes, the valley became more densely populated. Compounds and villages tumbled together, the Arghandab’s version of suburban sprawl, unlikely ground for a sniper’s hole. Then the land opened up again. And Wells came on a good spot for a nest, a damaged grape hut with an unobstructed view of the road. The hut’s narrow windows made for good firing ports, and a dirt track led directly past it. Wells couldn’t risk taking the track. But he knew that in Francesca’s position he would have chosen the hut, or a place just like it.
WELLS RODE until the hut disappeared. He’d take his chances in one-on-one combat with anyone. But snipers were different. He felt as if he’d appeared at dawn for a duel and found himself holding a slingshot instead of a pistol. A half mile was a long way. Ten New York City blocks. Nine football fields. From a half mile, Wells couldn’t even see his enemy’s face without binoculars, good ones. Yet an experienced sniper like Francesca had a good chance of putting a bullet in a target’s chest from the same distance.
Wells pulled the bike over at a primitive gas station, the first he’d seen in fifty miles. Again he called Shafer. “I need a visual, a satellite pass.” Wells gave the coordinates. “It’s a grape hut, a big one. ASAP.”
“Really. You don’t want to wait a few days.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“This guy’s got you a little bit spooked, doesn’t he?”
Wells didn’t answer.
“All right. You know it’s past midnight here, but I’ll make it happen as fast as I can. Could be anywhere from fifteen minutes to six hours, depending on what we have overhead. I’ll call you when I know.”
Wells propped the motorcycle on its kickstand, reached into his bag for a bottle of water. He drank deeply. A couple kids stared until he waved them on. In these villages, any stranger was conspicuous. He couldn’t stay in one place too long, but he
didn’t want to ride farther from the grape hut. Thirty minutes later, Shafer called.
“You must be living right. NRO had a Keyhole passing Kabul. The overnight targeting officer is an easily impressed sort. He ran a quick series.”
“And?”
“I can’t see them firsthand because he won’t send them to my Gmail account. NRO’s funny that way. And the shots aren’t great because they couldn’t get the KH directly over, they had to angle, and the roof is mostly covered. But he swears he can see a pickup truck inside.”
“What about people?”
“He said he didn’t see anyone, but that I shouldn’t read much into that because the imagery is so dirty. No need to thank me, John—”
One of the kids was wandering close again, giving Wells an excuse to hang up. What next? Finding Francesca was only half the battle. Young hadn’t called yet. So Wells didn’t know where the Strykers were running their motorcycle registration. Until Wells knew exactly, he couldn’t position himself to intercept Francesca. Why wasn’t Young calling?
His first instinct was to leave the valley floor, head south into the hills, find a promontory where he could overwatch the grape hut. But the Arghandab’s geography was trickier than it first seemed. The hills were a smaller version of the Bitterroot Range in Montana, where Wells had grown up. They rose as much as twenty-five hundred feet above the valley floor. Gullies and draws cut deep into their sides. Once he got into them, moving east to west across them would be very difficult. Maybe impossible. The GPS could tell him where he was, but not where he needed to go. He needed a good map for that, and he didn’t have one. He would also have to ditch the motorcycle, which was his only major tactical advantage. Worse, he wouldn’t have cell service once he left the valley floor, so Young would have no way of reaching him. No.
He had two other alternatives. He could sit where he was, wait for Young to call. Or he could take the high-risk option, set up on one of the three north–south tracks that went over the ridge. But if he chose wrong, he would be stuck ten or more miles away from the ambush, with no easy way to get to the right spot. He couldn’t justify taking a one-in-three gamble that could leave him badly out of position. Playing linebacker growing up, he’d never liked the guys who went for the big pick instead of batting the ball away. When they were right, they got the glory, but when they were wrong, they gave up a touchdown and the whole team paid.
The Shadow Patrol Page 30