Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 3

On the other side of the world, Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter was not at all where he wanted to be. The officer had lied. For reenlisting, Carter had been promised a slot into Special Forces Assessment and Selection at Fort Bragg, and after passing that — and passing it as he knew he could — he’d be in the year-long Special Forces Qualification Course. And after passing that — and he knew he would — he’d be assigned to the Tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne) and then he should have ended up back here in Afghanistan. And in between graduating and deploying he’d have been paid the bonus that had been the entire purpose of reenlisting for SF in the first place.

It wasn’t that Carter didn’t want to be in a combat zone. This was his fourth tour, having already done one with the First Cav Division and the last two with the Ranger Battalion, but this assignment was bullshit. Besides the fact he hadn’t been given his Q-Course slot yet.

What was the point of being a soldier if you didn’t serve in combat? But as a Green Beret, not as a glorified taxi driver, carting about some burned-out, drunk-ass lieutenant colonel in a Humvee, visiting outposts manned by joint US — Afghan forces, filling out paperwork so some guy in Washington could brief some other guy in Washington so that they could dump all the real data anyway, and make up data to give to the people who made the decisions so they would make the decisions they had wanted to make in the first place.

At least that’s what Colonel Orlando had groused to Carter on the second day of their journeys together; after several sips from his CamelBak, which Carter knew held something other than water, since the colonel had the same smell Uncle Ray had back home in Parthenon. That’s Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666, the last three numbers a dark, unintentional joke by the United States Postal Service that so aptly applied to the place. Parthenon was just an intersection along crumbling Route 327, which ran from nowhere to nowhere. So people only got on it when they got lost looking for somewhere else. Or they came for the meth. Uncle Ray drank to stay off the meth, so it seemed a reasonable deal in Carter’s mind. To Carter, Colonel Orlando drank because he was doing a job that could get him killed, which in the long run mattered not in the least in the strategic picture. But pretty much everyone in the ’Stan was doing a job that could get them killed, and drinking in a combat zone wasn’t something Carter thought highly of, not that a staff sergeant got to tell a colonel that.

Carter drove cross-country, paralleling the dirt road ten meters to their right, sustaining the jolts and slams of the rough terrain in exchange for avoiding the possibility of an IED ripping their armored Humvee to shreds. Several times he came upon wadis too steep to negotiate and he’d go farther into the countryside searching for a way across. Orlando took these detours with a roll of his eyes and another sip from his CamelBak.

“Geez, son!” Orlando yelled as Carter slithered the vehicle down a particularly treacherous slope, then gunned it up the far side with teeth-rattling jolts. “We can get killed as easy rolling over as getting blown up.”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. He’d learned those long before the army. There was no such thing as No, sir. Not to Pads; his father had prepared Carter well for the army. Not intentionally.

Orlando checked his watch. “Frequency switch. Two-four-seven.”

Commo man. He’d been given the designation in the Ranger Battalion, even though his MOS, military occupation specialty, was 11B — infantry, the queen of battle. He’d been sent to all sorts of special schools for commo in the past year that he had never requested, but the one school he’d requested seemed further and further away. He switched the frequencies as the colonel called in to their next destination to let them know they were arriving and to kindly not shoot up the friendlies.

Carter was of average height and lean, whipcord thin, the result of a childhood of hard work, not much food, and constant tension. His face was all angles, but he had the deepest blue eyes, as if there were something gentle deep inside all that exterior hardness.

Carter spotted the brown walls of the next compound they were to inspect. Guard towers crowned each corner of the ancient outpost, the snout of a fifty-caliber machine gun poking over the top of each. Generations of soldiers had passed through the gate of the outpost. Americans. Taliban. Mujahedeen. Russians. British. And on through the extensive invasion roll of Afghanistan. Alexander the Great might have pissed on the place for all anyone knew.

The square facility had twenty-foot-high mud and stone walls, each forty yards long and narrowing from ten feet wide at the base to four at the top. Inside, as per every other compound they’d visited, were headquartered a dozen American military advisers and a contingent of Afghan soldiers. The size of that native contingent varied depending on how bad the local economy was: the worse the economy, the more signed up. Some even stayed more than a few weeks. Most left, went to the next region over, and signed up again, taking the enlistment bonus. At least they got what they were promised, Carter thought.

Like Vietnamization a generation before, Afghanization — or whatever they were calling it, the system of turning control of the country over to the locals to fight against locals — wasn’t going to work. The colonel knew it, his boss knew it, his boss’s boss knew it, they all knew it all the way to Washington, but the president was bringing the boys back, and one had to put a positive spin on it.

“I used to do real work,” the colonel groused as Carter finally pulled them onto the dirt track, making a beeline for the gates.

“Yes, sir.” I did, too.

The colonel shot him a look. “Son, you’ve got no idea of some of the real shit that goes on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know why you didn’t go to SFAS and got assigned to me?”

That got Carter’s attention. “I do not, sir.”

Colonel Orlando shook his head. “Forget it.” He laughed. “Nada would probably give very low odds on you.”

“What are you talking about, sir? Who is Nada?”

The colonel didn’t respond.

“I needed that bonus, sir, for getting through SFAS. My family needed it.” Pads would have smacked him for speaking up like that, but Carter was hot, tired, and bored.

The colonel shrugged. “Shit happens. Things never turn out like you think they’re going to, Sergeant. You would do well to remember that.”

The wooden gates swung open on rusty hinges. Just before he drove through, Carter felt the hair on the back of his neck tingle. Just like it used to before Pads came in, stoked out of his mind on the meth, swinging whatever was handiest. Carter had always tried to stand in the way, but it was Dee — as the oldest — who always took the worst of it.

Carter looked over his shoulder at the dusty landscape behind them but didn’t see anything to warrant the feeling. Then they were through, the gates shutting closed.

Waiting for them was a captain sporting the Green Beret that Carter had so desperately wanted. Behind the captain stood two dozen new Afghan recruits in the semblance of a formation, most of them picking their noses or spitting, whatever bored men did when forced to stand somewhere they really didn’t want to be.

Carter stopped the Humvee and got out. The captain saluted Orlando and began to walk him around, giving the spiel given a hundred times by captains to colonels, which was everything was working just great. Most of the SF team was out on patrol with a bunch of the Afghan recruits, so only a handful of Afghan soldiers were maintaining security.

Carter leaned against the front grille of the Humvee, feeling the heat from the engine matching the heat from the sun overhead. He still couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. He scanned the walls. A single Afghan lounged in each tower, supposedly manning the fifty cal, except they were nervously looking inside the compound rather than out.

That wasn’t right. The veins in his neck pulsed as his heart surged. He readied his M-4 rifle.

“Allahu Akbar!”

Carter wheeled, bringing up his M-4. An Afghan soldier came dashing out of a dark doorway and was running toward Colonel Orlando and the captain and the recruits behind them. The pockets of his combat vest bulged with explosives, and he was crisscrossed with wires, a Christmas tree festooned with C-4 instead of lights. He had his right hand up in the air and a clacker in his hand, a dead man’s switch that would ignite the explosives as soon as he let it go. He was already close enough to take most of the recruits, Orlando, and the captain out if he set it off.

Carter had the armored Humvee between him and the bomber. The sergeant dropped the weapon on its sling and sprinted around the protection, faster than the Afghan, faster than he’d ever run in his life. He wrapped his arms around the bomber, one hand clamping down on the Afghan’s hand and the dead man’s switch.

The two tumbled to the ground, Carter on top. His hand was steel on the Afghan’s own and the dead man’s switch, and he pressed his other forearm across the man’s neck. The bomber was staring up at him, eyes losing focus as Carter choked him out.

When the bomber was unconscious, Carter carefully peeled the man’s fingers from the clacker, keeping it depressed. He unscrewed the firing wire before tossing it aside. Then he stood, drawing his pistol, and pointed it down at the bomber, finger curling around the trigger.

“Easy, son.” Colonel Orlando placed his hand over Carter’s gun.

The Green Beret captain knelt next to the bomber. The Afghan recruits were nowhere to be seen. The guard towers were unmanned.

“Might as well put a round in him, sir,” Carter said. “Once a man commits to that, he’s gone over.”

Orlando smiled as Carter holstered his pistol. “Once a man commits, he commits. Why didn’t you just take the cover of the Humvee?”

Carter shrugged as if the question made no sense. “Wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, sir.”

The bomber blinked into consciousness and, surprisingly, the captain helped him to his feet.

Carter whipped his pistol back out.

“Easy,” Orlando said once more. “He’s on our side.”

Carter blinked. “What?”

“A test, son, a test.”

“I could have killed him.”

“I disabled your M-4,” Orlando said, “but not your pistol. Which is why I had to stop you.”

“You disabled my weapon in a combat zone?” Carter’s face was red with anger.

“Don’t worry,” Orlando said. “The SF team from here has a perimeter set up around us and everyone in here was vetted. You were perfectly safe. One of the parts of the test was to see whether you would try to shoot him with your rifle — in which case you were making a dumb decision and killing a bunch of other people — or if you’d simply save your ass by using the Humvee as a shield, in which case you were making a smart but self-centered decision. You picked door number three. Very few people pick that door.”

Orlando reached into a pocket on his combat vest and pulled out a satellite phone. There was only one number it was programmed to call.

It was answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” the vaguely Russian voice answered.

“He passed, Ms. Jones,” Orlando said.

“I’ll have transportation waiting at Bagram. You get him there. You stay with him the whole way until you get him to the Ranch.”

“Got it.”

There was a moment of silence. “Good work, Orlando.”

“Thanks, Ms. Jones.” And I’m fine too, you bitch, Orlando thought but didn’t say as he turned the phone off. A vein was bulging in Carter’s neck and Orlando knew he was going to have one angry man next to him for a journey around the world. A man to whom he could explain nothing.