by Wolf Riedel
Even though Norowz had been expecting it, the initial volley of RPGs caught him by surprise. Each gunner had brought five rockets. Only a very few riflemen accompanied the group, primarily to carry extra machine gun ammunition for the five 7.62 mm PKs that they had lugged up the mountain. Three of the RPG men had anti-tank rockets in hopes that one of them might be able to hit and penetrate one of the Canadians’ tanks. An outside chance at best considering the range and the slopes of the terrain. Inshallah it shall be achieved. Or not. Either way it would be the will of God.
Immediately that the first volley had fired, the single RPG gunner and his accompanying machine gun opened up on the sangar. Unlike the fire going down into the base below, this fire, Norowz could observe. Ordinarily Norowz would be forward controlling the firing line but this was a simple raid easily led by Rahim. More important to Norowz was retaining overall control of the withdrawal so that his force could pull out without unnecessary casualties.
The fire on the sangar was effective as there was no return fire from it. On the other hand bit by bit the weapons of the defenders of the main camp were coming into play. Machine guns from several distant strong points were starting to traverse the ridge. Ineffective fire from down below was also coming up the slope as he could tell by the tracer rounds skimming over the edge of the ridge and arcing into the distant sky before winking out.
Mortars were now being added into the mix. Most overshot the ridge undoubtedly being fired conservatively to avoid hitting the sangar or any similar outpost.
With great surprise Norowz was rocked back onto his buttocks by heavy bursts landing all around him amongst a buzz of flying stone splinters. His nearest aide let out a deep grunt as he was thrown sideways.
As quickly as they had come, the bursts stopped and moved along the slope seeking out the team that was engaging the sangar. Heavy machine gun, thought Norowz as he took stock. He could see several firing from a distant ridge almost in a direct line over the sangar.
Bad luck to be in the line of rounds that had clearly overshot the target that they had been aimed at. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. The coppery taste of a dribble of blood was trickling into his mouth. That made him notice the sting on his face from several places where rock fragments had cut deeply. Thankfully his eyes had been spared from any damage.
“Commander.” The voice was weak.
“Malik. Are you hit?” The boy was a fairly new member of his command team replacing a runner who had been killed the summer before. Young perhaps but conscientious almost to a fault, if such were possible.
“Just the arm I think, commander.”
“Can you walk?” Norowz heard the last of the RPGs volley fly away at the same time as the fire of their supporting machine guns slackened. The enemy’s fire, however, was building to a crescendo. The boom . . . boom . . . boom of the Canadian armored cars’ cannons started joining in. Above them a brilliant shower of burning orange sparks burst into a fireball every time one of the rounds hit.
Norowz felt the boy’s arm and noted an area soaked in blood. He took the man’s field dressing from his webbing, opened it and wrapped it tightly over where he suspected the wound was. Malik’s wincing led him to believe that he’d found the right spot.
“Time to go,” he directed to the remainder of his team. He trusted that, above him, Rahim had already issued the same order. He’d find out for sure once they were in the wadi that had been designated as the withdrawal route check point.
Dawn was still an hour away as Norowz and Tofan sat on a pile of carpets under a stick and brush awning attached to the side of a safe house well within town. Shielded from aerial surveillance they shared a pot of chai. Several glasses and small pots of milk and honey sat before them. Rahim, newly arrived, stood before them ready to debrief them on the attack.
“They are all back now, Commander,” he said.
“Casualties?” asked Norowz pouring Rahim a glass of the hot drink.
“Only two. One with a wound to the buttocks . . .”
Tofan let out a snort and asked sarcastically. “Did he have them up too high while shooting down at the enemy?”
“No. No. He was hit as we started walking back down from the mountain. A stray round from somewhere or other.” Rahim gave a shrug. Inshallah.
“The other?” from Norowz.
“A badly broken leg. Also from coming down the mountain. He lost his footing on the rocks and tumbled down the slope.” Another shrug. “They are both already with the doctors. I will give you a further report once we know how long they will be unable to fight.”
Norowz was pleased with the light casualties. Malik too had suffered only a minor flesh wound and should be back in action within the week.
“What about the attack?” asked Norowz. He was reluctant to ask. He should have been on the ridge itself tracking its progress and any other day he would have been but the effectiveness of this attack had never mattered much anyway. A safe withdrawal had been his primary objective and that is why he had asked about casualties first. By all criteria, his objectives had been met. Still, the effectiveness of the attack had mattered to Rahim and the man should be allowed to report as if it had mattered to Norowz as well.
“It went well, Commander,” he said with modest pride. “We had started three fires and there was at least one incident of a secondary explosion which the gunner credits to a hit on an armored car.” Rahim lowered his head a bit. “I’m not so sure. We definitely hit something that exploded, but it was not like a typical armored vehicle explosion. I would think it is more likely that it was some type of ready ammunition point. Maybe mortars or some rockets.”
This is why Norowz liked Rahim. The man understood the importance of accurate reports. He never embellished but limited his reports to facts.
“There was a massive response from the enemy. We received much fire from direct fire weapons as well as some mortars and artillery although not much. They seemed to be pulling their punches because of the ANA and ANP positions on the ridge. The response was also fast. We were fairly quick with our fire but their return fire was already fairly massive before we pulled out.”
“The ANA and ANP?” asked Tofan.
“The army ones were actually shooting quite a bit, but erratically. The positions that we had identified previously as police ones were mostly quiet.”
Norowz nodded. “That was expected in both cases.”
“Anything else?”
Rahim shook his head. “My people will all be back to their farms and houses and the weapons back in their caches before dawn.” He stood. “Thank you for giving us this opportunity.”
Norowz lifted his right hand slightly acknowledging the thanks and Rahim turned and walked away out of the compound.
“He’s a good leader,” said Tofan.
“He is that. I put him well into our middle tier.”
Tofan nodded. For some time now Norowz and he had broken the Taliban—not the rabble of criminals and opportunists who took advantage of and sometimes donned the mantle of Taliban—but the real Taliban, into three tiers. At the bottom were the uneducated and unemployed whose poverty made them join for the adventure and the food and the companionship. In the middle were those who believed that there were political injustices within Afghanistan; that the government principally served itself and its cronies and not the people as a whole. Finally, at the top there was a core of fanatics who developed and spread an extremist interpretation of Islam. An extremism that was fostered and paid for by the Saudis and whose rhetoric and funding was used to indoctrinate and buy the lowest tier fighters.
Norowz and he had spent many nights discussing the dilemma of how to separate the second and third tiers from the top tier. Their discussions had left them nothing but pessimistic. There were no other reasonable or reliable sources of funding beyond drugs and Saudi gold. Without that, one was left with choosing either the extremist philosophy or siding with the corrupt and incompetent government
. Their discussions were drawing them to the inevitable conclusion that there simply was no middle ground where Kandahar could live in peace.
“So where do we go from here, Commander?”
Norowz shook his head sadly. “Tofan. If I knew the answer to that then the road to that place would be a simple one to choose.”
CHAPTER 19
James West Army Reserve Center, Lakeland, Florida
Friday 09 Mar 07 1320 hrs EST
Sal was precariously balancing on a chair replacing a fluorescent tube in his ceiling light fixture as Mark poked his head in the door.
“Don’t we have people who do that?” Mark asked.
Sal looked over his shoulder as he continued to guide the contact pins of the tube into the fixture.
“Thing crapped out two weeks ago,” he replied. “Been waiting ever since. Decided to take the bull by the horns and bought my own at Walmart during lunch.”
The pins snapped into place and the tube fluttered into life before settling on a blue-white glow. Next to it, the other one glowed a softer pale orange glow.
“Crap,” said Sal. “Wouldn’t you know it’s a different light.”
“Light’s light,” said Mark.
Sal pointed to the fixture’s two by four acrylic panel leaning against the desk.
“Pass that up will ya?” he asked. “It’ll bother me. I’ll be looking at that for months now with one tube white and one orange and it’ll bug me.”
Mark knew that it would. Small details, more particularly small inconsistencies bothered Sal. It was one of the characteristics that made him a great investigator.
Sal slid the panel into place and jumped down off the chair giving its seat a cursory swipe to clean it before placing it back in front of his desk. Mark pointedly sat in the other chair.
“Any luck this morning?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Sal replied. “Actually, yeah. I tracked through the phone records that Tyron sent down to us from Ocala. There’s a funny cycle there. You see one number with calls in and out for about three weeks then that number disappears and another takes it place. Pretty much like clockwork the phone changes. Calls are all about the same length; just a couple of minutes each.”
“Any pattern within the cycles?” asked Mark.
“Nah. Fairly random but around five to eight each cycle. My guess it’s the same guy with a burner phone.”
“And this is on the Lewis’s home phone?”
“Nah. Jim Lewis had a TracFone but he’s had it for over a year. The thing was bought at a Target for cash and there have been a number of pre-paid minutes added to the phone around every ninety days.”
“Too much to hope for that any of those were done with a credit card belonging to someone other than Lewis?”
“Yup. The phone cards were bought at either a Target or a Publix in Ocala and each time for cash. The cards indicate what store and what time they were activated but my guess is that if we went to the stores to track their security cameras then—assuming they still have the tapes—all we’d get to see is Lewis.”
“Yeah but call the stores anyway to see if they still have anything for those days and get them to protect them.” Might as well close the loop on this if we can. “What about the money? Anything new?”
“Nah. I’ve kinda run into a dead end,” said Sam. “It’s a hundred percent clear that he’s getting more cash than he and his wife earned in the aggregate . . .”
Mark raised his eyebrows.
“What? Aggregate?” Sal feigned a look of righteous indignation. “Hey, I know big words too. Anyway I’ve followed up with some of the suppliers and their records indicate that there were more transactions than Lewis’s records indicate. They’re going to do a full search and send me what they’ve got.”
Mark contemplated that for a moment.
“Tell you what. See if you can get their records for similar sale patterns to other individuals in the region. With luck we might be able to link them up with Lewis.”
Sal nodded. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” He looked behind Mark to see an agent standing in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“Oversees call for the chief on line two.”
Mark stabbed his right index finger down onto the control panel of the Nortel telephone on his desk and punched Line 2 as he spoke into the hand set in his left hand.
“Chief Winters,” he said.
“Mark! It’s Dave.”
“Dave. I hope you weren’t staying up late especially to get back to me,” said Mark looking at his watch—thirteen thirty hours. “What bloody time is it out there anyway? Midnight?”
“Twenty-three hundred. Since when do you care about how much sleep I get?”
“Honestly, I really don’t give a shit one way or the other. I just wondered why you don’t call during your work day.”
“It’s better this way. I start the day late so I can deal with all the shit here during the hottest part of the day and then still have time to deal with you folks back home when you finally show up for work. It’s cooler working in the evenings too.”
“So what did you learn?”
“About what I expected. There’s no NCIS investigation into this Marines thing up there and we don’t have one going because no army guys were involved. All it is at this time is an Article 15-6 investigation coming out of SOCCENT.”
“Okay.”
“Same on your boys out in Zabul. We’ve got nothing open. There was an investigation a year and a half ago about excessive force during a door-kicking op on an MVT but in the end the investigator called it as being acceptable considering the nature of the op and the quality of the evidence.”
“Can you share that with Richter when he gets there?”
“Sure. . . . The only other thing is that I also talked to the head MP with the PRT up there. He’s got nothing concrete but is of the view that there’s something hinky down there but it’s above his pay grade.”
“We don’t have pay grades when it comes to hinky shit,” said Mark. “Hinky shit’s his job.”
“Well. I’m just sayin’ . . . Man says it’s not his job. He’s with the PRT and the special ops guys aren’t part of his bunch.”
“Long story short he’s got squat for us.”
“You got that right.”
“Okay,” said Mark. “Well, thanks for your help anyway.”
“Anytime Mark. Have a good one.”
“You too. Get some sleep.”
Mark put the handset back into the cradle just in time for the phone to ring.
“Winters.”
“Chief. It’s Alonso,” said the voice on the phone.
“Alonso Tejeda. My man,” said Mark. “What can I do for the Fifth Estate today?”
“Jeez. That’s a lot nicer than what I usually hear from your guys. Usually all I get is: What the fuck do you want?”
“Alonso? What the fuck do you want?”
“See. Now that’s more like what I’m used to.”
“Always happy to oblige.”
“Anyway Chief, I hear that the autopsy on the two girls is complete.”
Winters kept quiet.
“Well?” said the reporter.
“Well what? You made a statement. You didn’t ask a question.”
“Jeez. Chief. Give me a break. What is this, Jeopardy? Is it true that the autopsy is done?” he asked.
“What I can tell you is that the physical part of the autopsy has been conducted,” said Mark. “I can’t tell you if it’s done or not. You’d have to talk to the ME about that.”
“Yeah. I get it,” said Tejeda. “Let me ask you this. Is it true that only one of the two bodies found was one of the Lewis girls?”
Mark just about choked on his own spit and struggled to regain his composure before his delay in answering gave away the whole ball game.
“When I left the ME’s office, the DNA tests had just been sent out so there was no complete official confirmation one way or the other on identity. That’s
as far as I can go either on or off the record. You’ll need to wait for the official statement from the ME or the Ocala PD.”
“How about that one of the bodies has already been classified as an Afro-American female?”
“You’ve got my answer Mister Tejeda,” said Mark. “We have no further comment.”
Mark regretted the words immediately that they were out of his mouth. It was obvious that Tejeda had a source up in Ocala or in Leesburg. This was entirely too much detail for a wild-assed guess. No comment wasn’t going to cut it.
“When are you going with this?” Mark asked.
“It will hit the morning edition but we’ll probably have a teaser in the online edition tonight.”
“Have you spoken with Harris at Ocala Major Crimes about this?”
“Not yet.”
Mark ticked off one potential leak as closed. Alonso wouldn’t lie to him. Harris wasn’t the leak.
“You should,” Mark said. “It’s his case. You should really talk to him before you decide to run with this.”
Mark saw Sal walk past the door and quickly waved him in and covered the mouthpiece of the handset.
“Get Harris on the line right fucking now,” he said in a hushed voice.
Sal nodded and backed out.
“Look, Alonso,” said Mark turning his attention back to the phone. “I’ve got to go back to work. Unless you have anything else . . .”
“Nah. I just thought that you’d want to comment on this.”
“Have a good one Alonso.”
“You’ve got a leak, Wayne,” said Mark into the speaker of Sal’s desk phone. “I just spoke with Alonso Tejeda from the Tampa Trib and he’s about to run a story that one of the girls’ bodies has been identified as being black and the other as one of the Lewis girls.”