by Ron Lealos
“Your fine words remind me of last night,” Finnen said. “I was staggerin’ to my bunk, blessed after many cans of Bud, and I felt somethin’ runnin’ down my leg. All I could think ta do was stop and pray ta the Lord. What I said to Himself was, ‘Please, Lord, let it be blood.”
Washington was enjoying the show. His belief system must have been in shambles. None of the rumored human sacrifices, spell-casting rituals, acts of bestiality, global intrigues, blood drinking, or extraordinary rendition were taking place. Nothing but the ramblings of a computer-obsessed spy, a slobbering drunk, and a star-crossed wannabe savior. We were human, not vampires, after all. He snickered.
“Y’all is certainly fucked up,” he said. “Thought I needed to go the circus to see clowns. But it ain’t been in town ’til now.”
As though he hadn’t heard a word, Dunne was recharged after his email fix and continued without missing a beat.
“Now we get to the murky part,” Dunne said. “Much of what I said was summed up in the Michael Moore movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, as a conspiracy by President Bush, Hamid Karzai, the Taliban, Haliburton, and big oil to get the pipeline built with security supplied by the Coalition in case a local warlord isn’t getting a big enough cut. Moore’s theory has been debunked by numerous experts paid for by Republicans, and no Western oil company has claimed any interest in proceeding. Nonetheless, transports filled with steel piping are landing every day on a new runway built by Army engineers south of Qalat. Under the guise of ‘road construction,’ shovels and earth movers are digging a three-meter-deep trench that’s already fifty klicks long. The pipe-laying crews are right behind. Not many journalists are visiting the area, except a recent feature article writer from the Washington Post who is now working in Missoula, Montana. And the one that got smoked by an RPG. The sector’s been designated ‘off limits’ for being too dangerous for tourists. And Michael Moore. Of course, the Company is fully aware of the project.”
He sat back and put his hands behind his head. “I’m trying to decipher how heroin fits in. It’s no black op that I’m aware of.” The blinking started again. “Could be way above my pay-grade level, but I don’t think so. I can understand the logistics. Those transports deadheading to Germany have more than enough room for the whole year’s poppy crop from the entire country. Lots of people would have to be getting paid off. It’s giving me a headache. I think Morgan and Washington are my only aspirin. All the right passes are in the 6x6’s glove box. I’ll expect answers when you two get back,” Dunne said, looking at me and then at Washington. “I’ll do as much research as I can here without getting anyone suspicious, while Finnen can give me a hand if he doesn’t drown himself in Bud. He’s gonna be busy later.”
We were his 0530. The next appointment was waiting. He sat up, shook out his hands, and started typing again.
“Take off,” he said. “I’ve got work to do and people to see. Finnen, go get some chow.”
Dismissed. The three of us walked out of the tent and headed in different directions. Before Finnen could get too far away, I said, “Remember what I said, Finnen. Give Khkulay some space.”
Finnen continued on his way to the mess tent, looking over his shoulder.
“Been thinkin’ about that,” he said. “You’re right. She needs to find her true path. Just get home safely, lad.” He waved. “Cheers.”
He couldn’t have surprised me more if he spontaneously combusted.
The road to Qalat was the main north-south highway from Kabul to Kandahar, turning west, then north, and ending in Herat. We didn’t want to travel through Kabul’s traffic and hordes of watchers, so we used the only shortcut available that would connect us to pavement without being exposed in the country’s capital. Driving out of the base just after daybreak, Washington steered us down the Valley of the Kunar on a surface that would be marked 4 Wheel Drive Only in the states, but a vast improvement over yesterday’s trail into the foothills. On our left, the Khyber Pass to Pakistan through the Himalayas. On the right, the Hindu Kush.
Leaving the relative green of Jalalabad, we were soon in the tan of the valley, the vista broken by scrub trees, bushes, and piles of jagged stone. White-capped peaks towered on both sides across the uneven plains. Thirty kilometers southeast, and we would stop this back-crippling leg and be on asphalt.
Within a few klicks of Jalalabad, vehicles and people disappeared, leaving mostly goats and a few mud huts. Men seemed to be on the porch, smoking cigarettes at every hovel, not waving a greeting and glaring at us with chalky eyes. Jeeps and Army trucks passed occasionally in a veil of dust, soldiers unsmiling and staring at the sides of the road, trying to spot any hint of IEDs. A few burned out pickup hulks tried to sprout weeds, but there wasn’t enough water beyond a few meters from the trickle in the river bed. It was another crackling-clear day in Afghanistan and, this low, it was easier to breathe. We were at five thousand feet and would soon drop below three thousand.
Washington concentrated on driving, after a while giving up swerving to avoid bumps. It was all one big pothole. He was reciting his continuous mantra of “fuckin’ shit, man” every time a hole caused our backs to fuse with our heads. If we took our helmets off, we’d certainly leave brain matter on the roof of the cab. While Washington swore, I thought.
Too many intangibles. My usual brief was to follow orders and a defined operational plan. The variables were accounted for and alternatives available in case of a glitch. Or disaster. This mission almost felt rogue, believing it was only Dunne and Finnen who really knew what we were up to. No communiqués to Langley or Northern Alliance headquarters that I knew about. No request for more intel from CIA Southwest Asia analysts admitted to by Dunne. And certainly no chance this time to call in the Drones. We were flying bare, and our targets weren’t Taliban.
Washington had described them as “white-bread civilians with no social skills” and that even Thorsten’s feeble attempts at conversation had met with silence, making me believe they might be from the Firm. Or some other intelligence agency, foreign most likely. Special Ops for sure. Then there was the Taliban. But there was a puppet master in play with deep pockets and a long reach to organize something as delicate and complex as this operation. When there was hundreds of millions to be made, there were lots of possibilities, and the worst case was that it involved my employers. As Finnen would say, “Ahh laddy, it’s all just melodrama. Ya can’t take it serious.”
It took nearly two hours to reach pavement. If it was Afghan Highway 1, there was no American point of reference. I’d been on better roads in the Kansas back country, and not ones requiring detours around camels, donkeys, and turbaned or veiled people clutching blankets on their heads stuffed with all their possessions. The military vehicles didn’t stop for anything in Indian country, leading to lots of animal corpses alongside the road. The humans had been buried or hauled off by wailing women.
When the ride smoothed, I took off my helmet and stroked the bumps on my head.
“What do you think were gettin’ into?” I asked Washington. He set his helmet in the space between the seats next to our H & Ks.
“Don’t rightly know, massuh,” he said. “I’s just the driver.”
“Detonate that shit, Washington. You’re a college graduate, and you never set foot in a ghetto. You played that card too many times. You’re not gonna get any white man’s guilt out of me.”
“In terms of the geo-political ramifications of our highly secretive mission and the controlling assets directing our movements, it is difficult for me to object-i-fy. I can speculate, but that and two bucks won’t get me a latte. All pays the same. And I ain’t got nowheres to cash the check.”
“If that means you’re not gonna guess, try anyway. Where do you think the men in the SUVs came from? You saw them.”
“As I said back in Gardez, when we was having such a friendly happy time, don’t really know.”
“Hypothesize.”
“They wasn’t wearin’ those mirrored sha
des you spooks like. You know, just like the ones you got on now. They weren’t talkin’, so it was tough to hear any accent unless I could pick it up from hand signs and grunts. They were dressed in zipped-up black leather coats and jeans. It was chilly in the night. Easy to spot the pistols bulgin’ under their arms. The license plates on the vehicles were Afghan, and I didn’t see no reason to remember ’em. They were in good shape. Probably some kind of ex-Special Forces. But that wasn’t a surprise. Real business-like. I figured them to be mercenaries.” He paused and scratched his ear. “Funny, now that I think of it. Their shoes. Clunky black mothers. Almost like they had steel toes. Not even Company spooks would be sportin’ things that ugly. My sense now, they were German. Kinda Doc Marten-ish, but with less style.” He rubbed his chin. “That’s all I gots.”
Something had been niggling at me about the possibility of a German connection. Just because I was only a low E-grade assassin didn’t mean I was a zombie. Dunne had helped plant the Kraut seed. We were trained to think and act, picking up signals from our environment and trusting our senses. There would be no way to know ’til tonight. But it was one of the first things I wanted clarified if I could somehow escape the Khkulay cloud and think with anything but the salvation hormone. I watched Washington’s huge hands guide the steering wheel.
“Good stuff,” I said. “I knew you could do it. Maybe you can join NYPD or CID when your tour’s up.”
“Sure,” Washington said. “Arrest crack heads and crackers. Not my thing.”
“Well, you look like a cop.”
Disguises of Company agents were wide-ranging, responding to whatever was demanded to blend. Could be a tuxedo or a turban. In Afghanistan, I might as well have enlisted in the Army. The only variation was a sometimes-beard, pajamas, vest, and head covering. Otherwise, fatigues. With my ability to say sodar, rather than pig when someone slighted me, a few days without shaving, and the boring off-white Afghan male dress code easily copied even without a Salvation Army nearby, I could pass for a local if no one got too inquisitive. The Taliban couldn’t tell I was in the CIA. I looked like any of the other thousands of GIs fighting terrorism. It was only the American side that was rarely fooled.
Once, a few months ago and not long after my arrival on Afghan dirt, I was dispatched to Kabul. I’d put in a search on hotel.com. As was always the case, the message came up “No Rooms Available.” Or in any city in Afghanistan. I could get a cot at the CIA Hilton. Kabul was a lower circle of hell. Polluted, noisy, and high enough in altitude, it was impossible to get a breath of clean air. It was all filthy. The smell was donkey and human shit, mixed with truck exhaust. It seemed like every other building was a victim of a mortar round or under construction, with the workers scrambling on wooden or bamboo scaffolding. The colors, when there were any, were the nancy pastels like the pictures of houses in the Caribbean. Pinks and mauves. Otherwise, a uniform brown. Too many children begging, often with stumps for hands or legs, balls of pus in the corners of their eyes. Suicidal motorcyclists dodged in and out of the perpetually stalled traffic, barely missing carts and trucks decorated in psychedelic drawings.
There was nothing exotic about Kabul, unless you liked the sight of men carrying semi-automatic rifles on the street like they were briefcases in Manhattan. For this earlier mission, I came into town from the base before curfew in an old Citroen cab, wearing man jammies, beard, and green fez, Hush Puppy hidden under my vest and Ka-Bar strapped to my thigh. Not much night life. Most of the stores had rolled up and locked their metal doors. A few cafes and tea rooms were open, and the streets were much quieter than when I had come through in daylight. I was supposed to kill a man who had given us false intel, resulting in an ambush costing five American lives.
The driver was a part-time employee of the Company, and he was to drop me in a quiet part of the city, a few blocks from the commercial streets. No lamp posts glowed, and only the moon would light the way. This was a city where the streets had no names. The fire trucks had to wait for the smoke to find the address with the flames. Turning out his headlights before he entered the neighborhood, the man left me at a designated spot near the Mullah Mamood Mosque. I knew the way from there. The taxi would be back in two hours.
Passing unnumbered wooden doors that fronted directly on the street, I stayed on the shadowed side. No pedestrians about for now and the only sound dogs barking. The line of mud-and-stucco walls was a continuous, pitted roughness when I touched the surface. Within minutes, I was in sight of the door I needed to breach, identified from pictures I’d been shown before I left the Kabul CIA compound. The man, Fahim Nabil, was not a suspect. He had supplied mostly useless intel up to the time he sent a patrol to die. For his day job, he ran one of the hundreds of shops that sold pirated video and audio cassettes, something the Taliban had been unable to stop again in Kabul, unlike most everywhere else in the country. Nabil was guilty.
At least he lived in a standalone house, not one of the many apartment buildings in the city—high-rise housing was tough, not knowing when someone would step out a hallway door—or in the surrounding hills, where the homes blended into the rocks like windowed boulders. Whatever Nabil did, his lifestyle took more to support than he could make selling illegally copied tapes.
Standing in the shadows, I had been approached by two men. There was nowhere to hide. If my costume wasn’t Afghan enough, I’d have to shoot them. But I was dressed like the two making their way toward me and I hadn’t washed these clothes since I’d been in Jalalabad. Any scent of underarm deodorant or cologne would expose me as a foreigner, too. No bother—I wasn’t wearing any and couldn’t remember the last time I had. There wasn’t a spot closeby to hide the bodies. Murdering these two would be considered a glitch. They were probably already wondering what a lone man was doing lurking in the dark. They passed without even an “Allah Allah Akbar.” Spoken late-night conversation could be deadly in Afghanistan.
There was a chance Nabil had been important enough to the Taliban or al-Qaeda to warrant guards, but my minders didn’t think so, or I would have brought along backup. This way was simpler. I was an expert in silent entry. And just as quiet slipping out. The disguise would get me in. It was up to me what happened next. Afghan locks were not a challenge, and I had learned to scale walls even if there was razor wire or embedded glass on the top. I didn’t need to jump. The door opened soundlessly with a few twists of a Home Depot credit card.
The biggest challenges were finding the targets. No map of the bedroom assignments. And the dogs. They didn’t care about disguises or even my scent. There would never be a time in Afghanistan when I was someone the dogs recognized by sight or smell, so the costume wasn’t for them. I had already tossed a ball of hamburger laced with tranqs over the wall, keeping my oath I wasn’t gonna kill any more canines. I had waited a few minutes ’til the whimpering stopped. If the hounds weren’t sleeping, the Company nerds had produced an aerosol spray that, when inhaled, led to a restful nap. Better than the Hush Puppy—that was only a last resort. I had a container of the spray disguised as a lighter in my pocket. The spook techno-wizards called it Doggy Get Down, DGD for short.
Inside the dirt courtyard, the dog lay on his side next to a rattan bench, breathing rhythmically. Nothing much around but a few flower pots without flowers. The usual concrete fountain sans water in the middle of the space. Internal porch roofs around the sides, shading doors, and a tiled walkway. A couple windows looking into the courtyard. What I most focused on was identifying anything moving, which seemed to be only the dog’s ribs.
A sound. Snoring. Not the dog, it was coming from a small, dark alcove in the far corner. I edged my way along the wall in the darkness toward whomever or whatever was making the noise. A man, AK47 on his lap, sitting on a folding chair, asleep. The wheezing was rough, as if he had phlegm in his throat. I could have been dressed for a hectic trading session on Wall Street in my Brooks Brothers and bathed in Dior fragrance, and he wouldn’t have known. A relatively short b
eard rested on his chest, and his turban was crooked. No sandals. He was barefooted and was surely mixed up with Nabil—definitely not a professional in the sense of being a member of a highly trained security outfit. If so, he wouldn’t be asleep, and I would be dead. No innocent, but undeserving of execution tonight.
Slowly, I moved behind him. No need for the DGD. I used pressure at the base of the man’s neck where it met his right shoulder. Squeezing hard with my hand in just the right spot, he wouldn’t wake up before I was out in the street again. I grabbed the AK before he fell over and his rifle could clatter to the tile in the alcove. After emptying the ammunition, I put the rifle deeper into the recess and the bullet clip into my pocket.
I saw a door was at the end of the niche. The man was probably in this spot to protect this way in and to stay hidden in the shadows, and he had most likely depended on the dog to sound an intruder alert. I went to the door; the handle was curlicued wrought iron, and I softly pushed down on the lever and slid inside, leaving the door partly open.
The smell of tea and curry—common smells in Afghan living quarters. No lights or candles. Shapes hanging on the walls. Chairs in each corner and a mirror reflecting what little moonlight penetrated the dimness from the curtained window. I didn’t need to check the knot on my tie; I didn’t own one, and there was no one to impress or fool. A low table holding cups and glasses. Rugs on the floor and two people sleeping on big pillows. I moved to the gently breathing bodies. One was bigger than the other and had a beard. Nabil. Beside him, it was either a boy or a woman. Much smaller and no beard. The task now was to kill Nabil with as little disturbance as possible to the target’s sleep mate. Even a silenced bullet makes enough of a phuppp sound to waken someone cuddled beside the condemned.
I had bent down, Hush Puppy in one hand. The tip of the barrel was an inch away from Nabil’s head and aimed between his eyes with a slight upward angle so the subsonic hollow-point .22 round would bounce around in his brain and scrub it clean. The other hand was poised over Nabil’s partner’s mouth. No movement beyond breathing. I pulled the trigger on the Hush Puppy. Nabil’s head bounced on the pillow, and I clamped down hard on the innocent’s lips. No blood spurt. No thrashing. No protest. Beside Nabil, the young boy’s eyes snapped open, and he tried to sit up. I pushed him back down and showed him the silenced pistol, shaking my head back and forth and gently hissing ssshhh for him to stay quiet. No telling if there were more guards about or others sleeping in different rooms. The boy strained to turn his head toward Nabil. I didn’t let him. He jerked, kicked his legs, tried to get up. I applied more pressure to his face and put a knee on his thigh. “No zharra,” I whispered. No crying. I wanted to calm him without shooting. The boy settled and stared. I took my hand off his mouth and used the sleeper hold that had carried the guard to dream land. In minutes, I was down the street, waiting for the taxi.