by Mike Bond
Suley stood. “After my parents died...You were my father... everything.”
“Go. I’ll protect you.”
He waited till the sound of Suley’s sandals vanished then scrambled away. After he’d gone perhaps fifty yards came the staccato rip of rifles, voices yelling. Ducking low, sandals slithering on snow, Wahid ran for the knoll on the ridge.
“WOULDN’T DROP HIS GUN,” Corwin said.
Jack watched life drain from the young man’s eyes. “It’s not Wahid.”
“Who then?”
“Looks familiar.”
“After a while,” Engle said, “they all look familiar.”
“Fire team wedge,” Ray called, “twenty yard spread. I’ll stay on those tracks, Corwin and Engle on my left, Jack on my right. Remember, we can’t kill Wahid.”
They went up through the new snow, Jack thinking how Leo’s words had saved him. Ahead were the sandal prints of one person. “Tracks,” he called. “One set, northeast at two o’clock. I’m checking them out.”
These tracks were a man moving fast, and beside them the marks of a rifle butt used as a cane, no, the fool was shoving it muzzle-down into the muddy snow in his haste to get away. Jack ran after him over the ridge, no cover now, not caring.
“Jack!” Ray yelled. “Don’t kill him!”
Wahid saw him, scrambled for the cliff edge. He had nowhere to go and turned aiming at Jack. The gun didn’t fire; Jack walked up to him and slapped it away. Wahid stepped back, his foot slid over the ledge and he fell, grabbed the grassy edge. “Please, Jyek, please – I can help you –”
The huge deep canyon sucked Jack’s breath away. He thought of Gus dropping through cold darkness, Loxley slipping from the cliff, Sophie and Leo and Sarah in the falling tower.
“You and I, blood brothers,” Wahid begged. “Please – I’ll tell you about Bin Laden –”
With the muzzle Jack pried Wahid’s left hand off the ledge. “Where is he?”
“Running to Pakistan. Help!” Wahid grabbed the muzzle with both hands, his weight skidding Jack toward the edge. “I’ll take you –”
Jack dug his heels into the ledge. “You stoned Ahmad to death.”
“God makes us do mad things –”
“God’s no excuse.” Jack slid the rifle sling down his arm. “Anybody can use that.”
Ray ran up behind them. “Jack!” Ray yelled. “We need him!”
“Help!” Wahid called to Ray. “Help me!”
“Goddammit Jack!” Ray reached past him and yanked Wahid up. With his other hand he pulled Jack back. “Let’s cuff this bastard and take him down to Jorm.”
The new sun had dimmed, Jack saw, a blizzard coming. “I’m done with killing.”
“Crap.” Ray threw Wahid down and zip-cuffed him. “The killing’s just begun.”
“I’LL JAIL YOU for this!” Brigadier General Clyde Szymanski yelled. “Your mission was find Wahid, not terrify him.” Szymanski chomped his cigar stub. Like a baby’s pacifier, Jack thought. These book generals had watched too many Patton movies, not fought any wars. They thought all you had to do was chew a cigar and act tough.
“So you bring him in hog-tied like a goddamn PW!” Szymanski waved his arms, “and Chrissake what’d you threaten him for?”
Jack waited for two F-18s to thunder over. “To find out where Bin Laden is.”
“BL’s my AO, not yours.” Szymanski spit cigar juice into a metal wastebasket. “You better pray Wahid stays healthy and happy. Cause if he don’t, you go down with him.”
“Looking for a second star, are you?” Jack yanked out a chair and sat. “With just a few hundred SF guys we’ve taken half of Afghanistan, and now Kabul. When the Soviets couldn’t do it with a million men in ten years. More than your regular Army could with ten divisions.”
Szymanski ignored him. “Wahid’s a senior warlord, a guy we can depend on.”
“He’s going to traffic opium and build Islamic fundamentalism behind your back!”
“Shit!” Szymanski snickered. “My job’s winning, not babysitting.”
“We can force cultural change. Like MacArthur in Japan.”
“You heard President Bush. We’re not into nation building. The White House says we stick with this Wahid guy.”
“When I first knew Wahid he used to shit in the river then go downstream to drink.”
“We’re gonna have a little council with these Afghans. A whatta they call it, durga?”
“Jirga. They’re for show. Anything important’s worked out before.”
Szymanski stabbed his cigar at Jack. “You can translate.”
Jack nodded at a bullet hole in Szymanski’s window. “Who’s shooting at you?”
Szymanski followed his gaze. “That? That was before my time.”
“Wow!” Jack stopped at the door. “Close, huh?”
ONE BY ONE they filed into the circular room. Clan leaders, warlords, opium shippers, the mullahs and tribal chiefs who two weeks earlier had fought beside the Taliban. The air was seedy with chai, moth-eaten rugs, ashes, spices, and a toxic damp as if the floor had soaked up some of the blood saturating the soil of Afghanistan.
In a new orange-pink robe Wahid trotted in late and sat regally among them. He glanced steadily round, caught Jack’s eye and gave a slight smile.
They were all dressed in turbans or headscarves, long cloaks or pajama-like trousers, all bearded. Men in their thirties to seventies, many veterans of the jihad against the Soviets and the civil wars that followed. Some wanted peace. And some wanted more war.
“Good group,” Timothy said.
“They were losing,” Jack said. “So they’ve jumped on the horse that’s winning.”
“Tell ‘em we’re here to discuss the new Afghanistan,” Szymanski said, “decide who gets what.”
“Friends,” Jack said in Pashto, “when the Taliban came seven years ago they promised to unite the country, bring back the King, and heal the bitterness and separation of war.”
They watched him, many hostile, some leaning back, sarcastic. “Instead,” he continued, “they united the world against you. Brought in foreigners, people from Saudi Arabia who professed to love Afghanistan but have used you for their own ends –”
“You Americans did the same,” a Pashtùn chief said.
Szymanski leaned toward Jack. “What the Hell you sayin?”
“Osama’s a true believer,” a mullah said.
Jack turned on him. “Does a true believer bring down destruction on his friends?”
“You Americans were not the same?” the Pashtùn said.
“Keep it short, Jack,” Timothy whispered.
“But if God loved Osama,” another mullah said, “He wouldn’t have done this.”
“Dammit Jack what’re they sayin?” Szymanski snapped. “Tell them our war’s not with them Talibans. That we need strong folks to run this place.”
“And an interim government,” Timothy said, “run by someone not openly Taliban.”
“Like this Hamid Karzai guy,” Szymanski said.
“Afghanistan is desert and mountains and a few narrow valleys,” the second mullah said. “We can’t grow food for all our people. We must buy it. And for money we must grow opium.”
“We can send you food,” Jack told him. “For many years to come.”
“That’s slavery. We want to be independent. And we have just one thing to sell.”
“Tell them,” Szymanski interjected, “America doesn’t give a damn what Afghanistan does with its opium. We gotta pretend we care, but we won’t get in your way.”
“In return for?”
“Al-Qaeda.”
“That’s not so easy.” Wahid looked round. “It’s a big thing to give away.”
“The Eagle of the Hindu Kush is right,” the first mullah said.
“To give up Al-Qaeda,” Wahid raised a single finger, the way Jack had seen Bin Laden do in videos, “there is one other little thing –”
“Tell
them they can pick the government posts, the Ministries,” Timothy whispered.
“What other little thing?” Jack asked Wahid.
“I personally must lead the search for Bin Laden. With Zaman Ghamsharik and Hazret Ali. In return for ten million dollars.”
“You piece of shit,” Jack said in Pashto. “Last week you were begging me for your life.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Wahid continued in Pashto. “This General of the impossible name, and this other old man – Timothay? From now on I deal only with them.” He turned to Timothy, speaking English, “Because my beloved brother was teacher, for honor to his memory I like to be Minister to Education.”
Lieutenant Colonel Szymanski checked his watch. “Works for me.”
“He’ll use it to set up madrasahs,” Jack said.
“What the Hell’s that?”
“It’ll warp this whole country. All over again.”
“Enough talk,” Szymanski stood. “I’ve got a war to win.”
“Special Forces has already won it for you,” Jack said. “But it looks like you plan to lose it again.”
Tora Bora
BIN LADEN’S NEARNESS was a pestilential odor, the smell of a dead rat that infects a whole house.
But it seemed to Jack that what Szymanski and Timothy had said was insane. Why let Wahid, Ghamsharik and Ali take over the hunt for Bin Laden when they were his Taliban allies, his “Muslim brothers”? Was he, Jack, missing something? An agenda he didn’t know?
Somewhere a rooster was crowing. Gray December dawn was slinking like a jackal between the hovels and battered buildings of Jalalabad. MON 12-10, his watch said. 06:4326. As he watched it the 26 was 27, then 28, soon 35, then 50, and as it hit 60 changed to 06:4400 and the little seconds started climbing again. It seemed life was running out, with no gain.
No matter what he’d get Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden. With the United States or without it.
THE JALALABAD ROAD south to the junction of the Pachir-Gandemak roads was clogged with old Soviet Army trucks and Toyota pickups full of Afghani irregulars. Snow lay over the Spin Gar Mountains like new linen. To the east above the Tora Bora foothills the Pakistan border peaks were a white-capped wall, above them 15,600-foot Sikaram blazing in the sun.
“We’ve got Rangers in reserve,” Jack said, “why don’t we use them to cut off any retreat?” For a while the truck made too much noise to talk, so he scanned the mountains, looking for places where the Taliban might escape through the snow to Pakistan.
“According to Szymanski,” Corwin said, “the Pakis are putting troops on the other side of the ridge.” He pointed at Sikaram. “They’re supposed to interdict escape.”
“The Pakis?” Jack laughed. “The Taliban’s butthole buddies?” He lined up the GPS coordinates on the map. “There’s a road, looks like a gravel road – all the way from this village up ahead – what’s its name, Pachir? – from there across the border to Parachinar in Pakistan. What’s to stop them getting out that way?”
Corwin glanced up at the mountains. “Deep snow.”
“I don’t understand it,” Jack said. “Why let the Afghanis take over?”
“We’ll be there, painting the caves,” Corwin said finally. “Maybe our Afghanis’ll get the job done.”
“If you were AQ, what would you do?”
“Pull out, slide into Pakistan.”
“Doesn’t Tampa know that?”
“Tommy Franks does what he’s told.”
BOMBS BURST BLACKLY over the Tora Bora hills. The air smarted with cordite, burnt soil, and pine resin. They took positions with another SF team on a rocky ridge. Tora Bora rose above them across a steep valley with a dry streambed.
“We’ve been hitting them since yesterday,” the other SF team’s XO yelled over the rifle fire and crunch of high explosives. “Every time we let up they come out, spray some munitions and run back in. They’ve got a Zeus up there somewhere but we can’t see it.”
A bullet barked off the rock by Jack’s head and sang away. “Random shit,” the XO yelled, “but wise to keep your head down.”
Jack crawled forward to a warrant officer with a designator and a spotting scope sitting half-down on its tripod. “What you seeing?”
“So much dust,” the warrant officer said, "can’t see shit,” timing his words and keeping his mouth open between the bomb bursts. “Got two F-18s and a B-52 on deck.”
Jack lay flat to look through the scope. It brought the inferno up close, the boiling dirt and smoke in which great dark chunks were falling back to earth. Slowly he eased the scope back and forth, seeking human movement among the blazing pines and crumbling slope, catching glimpses of hillside as the fire and smoke blew this way and that.
“I caught the entrance to something, people running out,” Jack said. “Something burning.”
The warrant officer glanced through the scope. “I’ll light it up.” He called in the designation. “F-18 incoming,” he said. “Little present from Allah.”
Through the scope Jack could see people running in and out of the battered cave mouth, a few working their way uphill, then a great flash of white sucked them up into a blazing tornado spewing mountainside and trees and people and when it ceased the cave mouth was gone, the people, just the smoking hillside like the slope of a volcano.
“We keep this up,” the warrant officer said, “Allah’s gonna run outta virgins.”
WHEN THE OTHER TEAM was pulled back to Pachir, Jack stayed with Ray’s team on the ridge. The bombing had eased, just the occasional passage of a Spectre gunship lighting up the night. At dark all Hazret Ali’s mujahedin had vanished down the mountain and the SF team was alone. After midnight the dust and smoke cleared and stars blazed across the darkness. Jack dozed among the rocks next to Engle, who lay with his NVD scope and an M-40 sniper rifle waiting for the survivors to leave their holes in the mistaken assumption they couldn’t be seen in darkness.
Every time Engle’s sniper rifle roared, Jack jumped in his half-sleep, cradled his head in the rocks and tried to not think of the human life that had just been smashed apart. Before dawn he gave it up, sat up beside Engle in the chill wind, an MRE uneaten by his knee. Then Engle went to lie down and Jack took over the spotting scope and sniper rifle, scanning the tortured hillside, not expecting to see anything alive.
He was thinking of Bandit leading him through the blizzard in the Hindu Kush, standing over him that night on the stepping-stone bridge, when something white flitted across the scope.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes, peered again. The figure was tall, bent over, in a white headscarf that hung down the back of his black-checked robe, limping at a quick uneven pace up the trail on the far side of the dry wash, three men ahead of him and five behind. “That’s him,” Jack whispered, trying to keep the spotting scope on the fast-moving men. “Bin Laden.”
It was seven hundred fifty yards, maybe seven-eighty. Jack was shaking so hard he could barely aim, the fast-moving men dancing up and down in his scope. The men passed behind an outcrop, just the top of the tall man’s white headscarf floating above it. Jack locked onto the far side of the outcrop and slowly breathed out.
The first man cleared the outcrop, bending forward as the trail steepened. The second reappeared, the third. Jack took in a quick breath, slowed his pulse. The tall one cleared the outcrop. You coward, Jack told him, you weakling. You killer of children. He aimed eighteen inches ahead and three feet above him, squeezed the trigger.
The tall man dropped. The others ran to him, one raising his hands to the sky. Jack reloaded the rifle and fired at the downed man but missed. The other men pulled up the tall one’s body. He fired again hitting the outcrop. The men dropped the body and ran up the trail.
He turned the scope back to the tall one’s body. It hadn’t moved. “I just took down a tall skinny guy,” he radioed. “Might be someone we know.”
Engle ran up, half-awake, bent to look through the scope. “Who’d you get?”
“Tall guy, white headscarf, bunch of guys around him...”
“Corwin! Ray!” Engle yelled. “Get up here!”
With the others spread out on the ridge to cover him Jack ran downslope across the dry wash up the steep other side, trying not to hope, thinking he’d never seen an Afghani this tall and this man had been wearing Arab clothes.
The man lay on his back, a huge bloody hole in his side, one arm smashed and twisted, his blood pooling down the trail. Curly thick black-gray hair, silvery running shoes. Jack knelt and turned him over. The top of his body turned while the lower part did not.
A face locked in agony. A broken tooth, nose smashed by his fall, sunken cheeks, the foam of lung blood down the corner of a wide thin mouth. Not an Arab. Not Bin Laden.
Jack stood, dizzy. Around him the still-dark crags of Tora Bora rose blistered and smoky toward the Spin Gar peaks.
The Twin Towers fell in their aureoles of flame and smoke.
“Negative,” he radioed and went back downslope between the boulders and pines along the dry wash. He saw the gravel in the wash, the lichen on the boulders on the bank, a twisted willow stalk and bent grasses, and yet he saw nothing, was aware of seeing everything and nothing.
A dead old man lay up the hill. He had killed him. What had brought the old man to this place? Whom had he been trying to protect, or what injustice had he been trying to right?
Hearing the gravel crunch of the slope beneath his boots, winded from the climb but barely noticing it, he wondered why in his own life vengeance always took priority. The idea of justice. When someone or something is wronged you have to fix it. Vengeance nothing but a means to effect justice. But like life itself, the question of wrong was becoming such a mystery he could not comprehend it.
He crested the rise to Corwin and Engle holding their rifles on three Afghanis with hands on their heads. “They came in like this, no weapons,” Corwin said. “Can you talk to them?”
“Cuff them first.”
He sat on a rock catching his breath as the three men were flex-cuffed. Across the valley he could see the white spot of the dead man’s headscarf.