by Alaric Hunt
“Well, it’s cheap,” Linney said. His smile was bright on his dark face.
“I can spring for quiet,” Guthrie said.
“That’s something I didn’t ask,” Linney said. “Who’s paying? I guess I thought Captain had some bread held back, to go with disability. But PIs ain’t cheap, are they?”
“Olsen makes friends easy,” Guthrie said.
The veteran’s eyes flicked over Vasquez. They ordered a round of grilled chicken on toast, home fries, pie, and coffee. The waitress had a fleecy mop of hair held back by a headband. She was tall, slim, and light-skinned. The café had heavy cream-colored ceramic coffee mugs that rested comfortably in a hand. Guthrie tipped a spoonful of ice into his coffee and stirred slowly, like a cow ringing a bell, before he drank.
“When did you get assigned to Alpha Strike?” Guthrie asked. “Ain’t that actually Task Force One one two seven?”
“Yeah. Been talking to Captain, huh?”
Guthrie shook his head. “I’m a detective. I know things.” The information was inside Olsen’s military record, some dry but informative reading.
“Right at the end of ’06, after the elections. I transferred down from the north, the toughest truck driver Afghanistan ever seen. I grew up fast then.”
“How’d you wind up in Alpha? Your stretch was TDY, right?”
“Yeah. Everybody was TDY in Alpha. CENTCOM does that shit over there, something they supposedly got from the Germans, moving people and attaching them like that. I ain’t seen no Euros doing it, though. They’re all alike, German or not—soft. They split when something pops off. Hop in the armored car and zoom!” Linney made a flying motion with one hand above the tabletop. “Me, I was a truck driver, fresh from the street. I was a G with a machine gun. Ain’t nobody happier than a G with a machine gun and plenty of bullets.” He laughed.
“Then they assigned you to Alpha because you wanted to shoot?”
“Say tricked me, and then you got it. I was a driver. The other guys in convoy wanted to push past roadblocks, or turn aside and let the escorts take it. They wanted to duck and run whenever some stray Pashie sent a ‘To whom it may concern’ via AK mail. Me, I’m strapped. I want to take a look, get some chop in. Then one time I chased some shooters, I chop, they chop, I chase some more. I pulled a piece of the convoy after me, with the LT screaming on the radio. That was crazy, but I winged one of them and followed the blood. I was lucky. He ditched his AK but failed a residue test. I wore a reprimand for ignoring the LT, but a guy from district went to bat for me. He said I had good instincts, the steadiness required of good infantry—he laid that on thick, before asking me if I wanted to go south.”
“You volunteered,” Guthrie said, and shook his head.
“You know it. Everybody’s a volunteer. You got enough gray on your head to know that. You volunteer, and then you don’t get to unvolunteer. That’s when I got educated on real gangster. Captain is a G, all business, and Alpha was all Gs. That business down south in Afghanistan is what the Euros don’t want no part of. There’s nothing but Pashies down south. Everybody else is just passing through. Up north, you got Hazaras, Turks, Tajiks, they just want to do their thing. Pashies? Their thing is fighting.”
The waitress came back and loaded the table, sneaking glances at Linney. The sandwiches had the sharp, hot smell of food that would keep Albert’s open for fifty years, unless some unlucky bastard choked on a cockroach. Guthrie snagged the catsup and poured a pool beside his fries.
“Good scenery at Albert’s, huh?” Guthrie asked after the tall waitress hurried away.
“She’s all right,” Linney said. “Kinda bright, but that’s okay.” He worked on his sandwich until it was almost ready to say good-bye. “Alpha wasn’t a regular unit—it was a task force. That’s the name, but most of them come and go. Alpha stayed around so long that CENTCOM ended up treating it like a regular unit. See, mostly a task force goes like this—a convoy is rolling out of Kabul, and it’s gotta go through Helmand, and they gotta have escorts—see, they got a task, and now they build a force. They pinch platoons off the units stationed around the depot, they’re tasked to the convoy commander, and they ride out and ride back. Down south, that can get ugly. Fifty trucks go out and maybe twenty make it through the ambush—or two.
“We figured they did that because of the Guard units. If they sent a Guard unit, and every fucker in Missouri got his balls blowed off on the same day, that would be a nightmare for CENTCOM. Captain was a genius at convoy, and that’s part of what ended up screwing him—and Alpha—into being treated like a regular unit. When Captain rode convoy, the trucks went through, but then if we were sitting around on stand-down, they would pinch us like regulars, probably hoping it would rub off. Not without Captain.
“Mostly we did sweeps, nets, response. Alpha was active. I figured part of it out pretty fast, even if they tricked me in the beginning with that ‘good soldier’ shit. They push everybody to pick up Pash. That makes it easier, when you know what they’re saying, right? And you can give ’em orders, go here or there, stop, whatever. By the time I went south, I had some handfuls of words and phrases, and an intelligence LT pushing me to learn more. Down south, I saw it for what it was. If you sling good Pash, you get stopped. So I shut up quick.”
“You mean stop-lossed?” Guthrie asked around a bite of sandwich.
“Yeah, exactly. Captain had good Pash, the best I ever heard except for Slip. Slip could sing that shit. That was crazy. But that almost got Captain. He was gone except for the stop, and then he almost got wasted. He should’ve been back here, chilling.”
They ate until most of the meal was gone. Vasquez looked around the square dining room and caught the stares aimed at their table. Guthrie was the only white person in Albert’s Café. Seen through the big glass window at the front, the sporadic traffic on 177th Street seemed to indicate a sleeping city, instead of an early summer evening in the Bronx that had pumped the café full of people.
“Alpha was active. Most of the regular units are passive, like artillery parks, firebases, depots, airstrips, whatever. If AQT—another name for the Taliban—touches anything, the active units drop on it. Like, snipers gathered up on a depot, an active unit cleans them out. CENTCOM liked to run shit off the carriers or airstrips and just have it waiting up there. Then it would drop down like a big splat of bird shit on anything that caught their attention.” Linney frowned. “Sounds good, right?
“Sometimes we chased snipers,” Linney continued. “Sometimes we dropped bombs on them. One or two Pashies with AKs get rained on with a flight of A-eighteens. Hoo-ya! So maybe not as many firefights as you’d think. Captain didn’t drop the whole hand on everything. You missed plenty of action if your number wasn’t up. Captain paid attention like that. Maybe we spent a lot of time up when we were netting something. That could be bad on the nerves.”
The dark veteran shrugged. He sipped some cold coffee and tried the apple pie. “The Pashies’ll kill you in a second. They’re full of crazy ideas. You could be doing something that ain’t had nothing to do with them, and then they’re saying your shadow fell across the udder of their goat. Thirty minutes later, the fucker’s crouching behind a rock, shooting at you. Checkpoint, sitting in an OP, anything could get a shot took at you. And they were worse on each other. Damn, they liked to fight, and they never stopped keeping score. We weren’t out there watching all of the time. When we weren’t, playtime! That’s what started the really dumb shit.”
“How’s that?”
“In the beginning they thought they’d stamped out the Taliban. How dumb was that? They could’ve turned off the lights and pretended there wasn’t no cockroaches about as easy. To me, all the Pashies is Taliban. They got one set of clothes for when you’re looking, and another for when you’re not around, AK included as a free accessory. You leave somewhere, everything’s cool, then come back in the morning and find a row of headless bodies lined up in an orchard, with flies poured on them like syrup.
With the heads gone, or the faces beaten in, you don’t know if they were the ones you talked with the day before or not—unless you talk to them again that day. Which ones are the good guys? That’s the shit that put the brass to thinking we should try to watch them all the time.
“The knock was they was doing that because they ain’t felt they could trust us to be there and back them up, so they went back to the Taliban. That was stupid. They went back to the Taliban because they hated us. That’s common sense. You don’t roll with Gs if you hate Gs—you cross to the other side of the bridge. The brass wanted a better explanation than that, like they couldn’t believe anybody could really have a problem with the good ol’ US of A. So the supergenius bright idea that would fix everything was tying units to the villages—embedment. That’s when Afghanistan turned weird.”
“That shit already sounds weird,” Vasquez muttered.
Linney nodded. “See, you a civilian, just like I was before I went over. A civilian got a whole different concept of reality—no offense—and these people do, too.” He pointed, taking in the customers in Albert’s before stopping his finger at Guthrie. “Maybe this old guy here has different ideas. I can’t put you in Afghanistan. If I show you a picture, it’s still like TV. You can’t smell it. A typical civilian don’t want nothing to do with that dirty shit there. A typical Pashie smells like ass, feet, goat shit, and gunpowder. What’s coming out of his mouth is unbelievable, baby. He’s carrying a chopper, and a sword to save bullets. He likes to save bullets. A typical GI wants a shower every day, a Game Boy, a skin mag, and as much food at one meal as a Pashie eats in a week. Pashies and GIs are like oil and water. Giving the Pashies a close look at a GI didn’t gain any respect. The brass wasn’t thinking.
“Notice, though, that I say ‘typical.’ Alpha Strike was different.” The veteran ate quickly for a minute, pausing to say, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He finished his pie and drank the dregs of his coffee. Vasquez was long finished. Guthrie dropped a fifty on the table before they went to the register.
Outside, the city was passing the point where the sidewalks were hotter than the sky and creeping slowly down toward stillness. Traffic pulsed around them as they turned the corner to reach the car. A skinny mutt, marked like a cross between a rottweiler and a Doberman, sniffed the rear tire of the old Ford, then hiked a leg.
“Sure, why not,” Guthrie muttered.
The veteran laughed. “Next time, you get some barking to go with it,” he said. “Enjoy your stay in the Bronx.” After he climbed into the backseat, he rolled both windows down.
“See, that’s what really changed for me,” Linney said. “I came back to the city with new eyes. Before Afghanistan, I thought this shit was hard. I came back and I could see it was just fronting. My Moms tried to educate me to reality, but I wasn’t interested in listening to her. Now? You know, that’s what made Alpha different—and Captain different. No fronting. He just did the shit.” He shrugged. He watched the street slide by for a minute, with the neon and streetlights standing out starkly against the darkness.
“Alpha got embedded in this little pile of shit called Khodzai. I couldn’t understand for a long time why shit was so fucked-up, everywhere we rolled on mission, because the shit worked great for us. We bulked up, broke a bunch of new guys in, had more downtime. That was the best time I had over there. I was on the inside, and it was smooth. The Pashies would line up at Captain’s door, straight respect. On top of that, they loved Slip. You could hardly tell him from a Pashie anyway, and if he put on pajamas, forget it. Slip settled in harder than the rest of us; we couldn’t cross over like that, but he just fit. We would ride him about it; then he would give us a ‘Don’t worry, brother’ on his way out the door. Slip ain’t talked much, unless he was clowning. Then he could spit with anybody I ever heard. But he got a girl. We all knew about her.”
Linney cut his eyes at the look Guthrie threw over the back of the old Ford’s bench seat. “Yeah, big-time no-no. Against the rules. That’s the only time I ever heard Captain use the voice on Slip. Fucker could freeze your blood, not even shout. Then Captain dropped it. That shit was major leverage. Everything was really smooth while that was going.
“Then it went down. That was in October ’08. The Pashies got a holiday, something about murdering goats. We got tapped—” The dark veteran frowned. “This shit is secret, right, Leavenworth secret. These fuckers are spooks. I ain’t told you this part, and if anybody asks you, you get to do your good-detective routine. The spooks are everywhere over there, supposedly looking for AQTs. The spooks tapped Alpha when they needed muscle for dirty work, to run a net or a sweep where they thought AQT was squatting. When Alpha bulked up, they wanted to tap us all the time.
“Anyway, the spooks drift in that October, and they want to squat on Khodzai. This’s our living room, and they’re saying AQT is eating from our table—or we’re eating from AQT’s table. Either way, the shit is disrespectful. Captain is hot, right off, because he never got along with the spooks. When he went looking for Taliban, he did it one man at a time. The spooks did their thing the other way—once they put an eyeball on a target, they called in birds to drop shit. Don’t matter about the splatter.”
Linney smiled, then shook his head before he continued. “If you kill somebody close to a Pashie, forget about him forever. He hates you, and he never forgets. Every chance he gets, he shoots at you. The bird shit, that’s American bird shit—everybody American did that. You could walk around Afghanistan and catch a suntan from the love and admiration. Captain was different. He killed fuckers one at a time. Alpha killed fuckers one at a time. The Pashies respected Captain because they saw how he worked. That took a long time to come around, but they saw it. So Captain didn’t get along with the spooks, probably because of that. He waved birds off, even pushed rifles into a hot zone to get an abort. The spooks didn’t like him neither, but they were scared to fuck with him.
“The spooks wanted to net and sift Khodzai. No matter how we handled it, there was gonna be hard feelings. We rolled on it and started, with the usual screaming, shaking fists, insults, like a circus, and then bird shit dropped right from the sky. They nailed the compound where a Pashie boss lived. The spooks were waiting on someone to squawk when the search started, triangulate, and drop shit. The net and sift was a trick to pull the squawk. I got that from a corporal that was standing there when Captain went off on the spooks. They made busy with an explanation while he threatened them.
“Slip freaked. His girl was in the compound the shit dropped on. Spooks were picking through the wreckage, pillar of smoke, haze, children crying. The Pashies were stunned, like they couldn’t believe we just done this to them. Captain detailed four troopers to keep Slip off the spooks until they could do their thing and split.” Linney’s hands drifted to a stop, coming down on the seat. “After that, it was over. What can you say? Takes one bad break.”
“So this guy Slip, his girl got killed?” Vasquez asked. Her eyes bored into Linney in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah. He was pissed. He hated everybody then—kind of like a Pashie. I guess stuff rubs off on you, huh?”
“What’s his name?”
“He had a weird name—sounded weird and spelled worse. One of those French names from down south, I think. Gagneau. Captain called him Sergeant, and the rest of us called him Slip.”
Vasquez was impatient. She almost blurted her question before he finished. “So you know when he came back?”
“Came back? Nah, the fucker got killed.”
Guthrie shook his head and laughed, then told her to drive up to the zoo. He knew a place by the park with good ice cream, and they had a little more time before they needed to drive to La Guardia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The detectives landed at Reagan National Airport late at night but never crossed the Potomac River to go to the capital. Fog covered the Virginia shoreline the next morning. As Guthrie drove to the first meeting, the suburban landscape
materialized from the fog in front of the nose of their rental car. Delta Marine Salvage and Supply wasn’t yet open when they eased into the cramped parking lot. They watched a pair of older men open up, waited fifteen minutes, then went inside.
An old warehouse served as the supply and service center, with sections of the wall that faced the Potomac ripped out and leading along breezeways to moorings on the river. Even with outside light, the interior was dim. The ceiling trusses looked like spiderwebs, hidden in the darkness behind shrouded droplights. Lines of shelves, tubs, and bins were toylike in the vast space. One of the old men watched them from behind the counter while they drifted along the dusty aisles, then returned to reading an unfolded newspaper. Every few minutes he slurped noisily at coffee to remind them he was waiting. The other old man turned wrenches on a manifold attached to a hanging motor, grumbling curses about rust and stupidity.
Guthrie and Vasquez dirtied their hands on old merchandise for a half hour before a tall old white man with a salt-and-pepper fade strode through the door. He wore a government-issue dark blue business suit cut to fit and polished shoes with a special license to repel dust. Closer, his face had enough age to make him a grandfather, but his hooked nose and cleft chin suited him. At a distance, a tapered build down from wide shoulders marked him for younger.
“Kid, you didn’t need to call the Rice brothers,” he said to Guthrie when he swallowed the smaller man up with a handshake and hearty hug. “You know I would’ve heard you through.”
“I got a sore throat from arguing with that roadblock you’re using for a secretary,” Guthrie said.