A Knife Edge

FORTY

Pakistan was closed to U.S. aircraft. Therefore, the C-17 ferrying me and five U.S. Army engineers into Kandahar, Afghanistan, had to take the long way round. Refueled in flight, we flew nonstop via Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. I spent most of the flight time grinding my teeth or filling a paper bag on my knees with yellow slime from my stomach. I finally got some fitful sleep but then the plane began its descent, a wild descending corkscrew. I braced myself against the fuselage and waited for the crash. There was a rumor circulating that the local Taliban operating around Kandahar had somehow managed to get their hands on a bunch of late-model Stingers. The C-17 twisted and writhed, either to avoid being shot down by the aforementioned rumor, or because the pilots were a couple of sadists.

A series of rapid explosions erupted, the vibration from them pulsing up through the floor and the fuselage. Keeping time with this, a strobing staccato of white light flickered through the sky outside, close to the aircraft. The pilots had banged off flares and chaff to confuse and divert inbound infrared and radar-guided missiles. Maybe the missile threat was genuine. Whatever, we were thrown around like kids on a fairground ride designed to make people sick. It succeeded. I threw up as usual, along with two of the engineers. With all this puking, I was starting to feel like a bulimic. I glanced at the loadmaster strapped in opposite to get some clues about the wild approach. He was yawning.

The aircraft felt like it was slipping sideways out of the sky as the flaps deployed and a rumble below my feet told me the landing gear was now hanging in the breeze. And then suddenly the aircraft pulled up and the turbines screamed and my earlobes almost kissed my shoulders under the weight of the G-forces driving me down into the seat. There was a massive thump as the tires smacked onto the runway. Thank Christ. Touchdown, Afghanistan.

It was sleeting out on the runway. The icy water stung my face, but I needed the wake-up. I turned my head into the wind and took the punishment for a full minute. Veils of rain and sleet hung below licorice-colored clouds lumbering in from the south. The familiar mass of Zaker Ghar Shomali, a hill away to the northwest, looked like a white roll of sugar. I'd only seen it once before when it was a drab gray-green, the color meat turns when left to the bluebottle flies too long. My hand ached. More snow was on the way. That wasn't so bad. Snow would bury the powdered rock that settled on everything here and blew into ferocious dust storms capable of stripping paint from steel.

I was processed through the APOD, the aerial port of debarkation — the military's version of immigration and arrivals. This was housed within the structure of Kandahar Airport, a series of high, sixties-style egg-shaped arches butted up against each other. The place reminded me of a Wild West wagon train set in a defensive circle, waiting for the Indians to attack, which, given what was going on in Afghanistan, was not an inappropriate metaphor. Neighboring Pakistan had turned its sociological clock back to around the time the Magna Carta was signed, and the Taliban and al Qaeda units were rubbing their hands together with glee because of it. According to various Web sites known to host prime-time decapitations, the coup in Islamabad was an omen from God that the struggle to make everyone's life small, mean, and miserable was destined to succeed.

The APOD was packed, the buildup anounced three months previously still going on. I hoisted my gear over my shoulder and walked over to a big-framed USAF sergeant who was seated behind a desk playing a computer keyboard like it was a baby grand. The group Nickelback was on the comeback trail and their latest track blared through the airport's speaker system. I came up beside the sergeant and saw that he was in the middle of some kind of shoot-'em-up game. “Oh, damn it!” he said when the leg of the character on screen got blown off. He glared up at me, annoyed, like it was my fault. “Sir…?”

I said, “Can you tell me where th—”

“Special Agent Cooper. You're in serious danger of looking like a soldier.”

It was a familiar voice behind me, though not one I'd have considered friendly.

“Hey,” I said, with not a hell of a lot of warmth.

It was Sergeant Butler and Corporal Dortmund. “If you're looking for the welcoming committee, boss, we're it. Good flight?” asked Butler.

“Nope.”

“We're out the front,” he said as he led the way through a swirling sea of brown, desert-patterned DDUs.

I followed.

“Nice to see you again, Mister Cooper,” he said over his shoulder.

“Really,” I said. The conversation had the easy flow of a glacier.

“You seen the dailies, by any chance?” Butler asked.

I wasn't sure what he was talking about. He straightened this out by handing me a folded copy of the Trib. One of the headlines sharing the front page said, Pakistan Announces Bomb Tests. Closes Borders.

“We've just had the word from SOCOM — they want us to pull our fingers out. There has been some movement at the facility. Intel is suggesting an imminent move.”

“What's the schedule?” I asked as we pushed through a door and into the sleet. I wondered how Butler had managed to keep the tips of his hair so perfectly blond.

“This way, sir,” said Butler. The two SAS men made for a nearby Land Rover. I recognized the driver — Lance Corporal Wignall. When we arrived at the vehicle, Butler said, “The schedule is that we go tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?” A little fear escaped along with my words.

“Yep.”

Tomorrow night? Jesus! While I'd long since passed the point of no return, it still felt like I was in a car heading down a hill with the brake lines ripped out. Dortmund took my gear and threw it in the back.

“You first, Agent Cooper,” Butler said, as he opened the door for me. I climbed in and he followed. Dortmund took the seat beside Wignall. The Land Rover coughed into life and moved off slowly through the ice rink the parking lot had become. “We're ready,” Butler said, continuing where he'd left off. “We've got a good setup back at the safe house. We've got a scale model of the facility, we have the blueprints of the place, the transport squadron has given us the thumbs-up. The weather's not playing by the rules, and the report for tomorrow night looks iffy, but we knew that would always be the case at this time of the year, right?”

“ Uh-huh,” I said. The vehicle stank of diesel oil and sweat.

“We've been doing quite a bit of work with the Ski-Doos — got ‘em modified the way we want ‘em — and we've managed to pack in quite a few practice jumps with them. How about you, guv? If you don't mind me asking, when was the last time you jumped? I mean, you might have been Special Forces once, but you're a copper these days, right?”

The vehicle's windows fogged. I didn't wipe it away. There wasn't much to see — the snow shower had turned into a serious dump, and, besides, seen one parking lot crammed with U.S. Army light infantry vehicles, seen ‘em all.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

“Do what?”

“Mind you asking,” I said. “But, since you've asked, don't worry about me.” Yeah, ‘cause I'm doing enough of that for both of us. “I jumped up and down with excitement for days when this job came up.”

Butler smiled. “Have we got issues, Special Agent? You and me?”

“That depends on whether you killed Ruben Wright,” I said.

Butler shook his head. “I wondered whether those bollocks would come up … No, actually, I was sure they would. I told you already — I didn't kill Sergeant Wright. Got anything else on your mind, guv?”

“Nothing that can't wait. Where are we going?”

“Safe house,” said Butler, sitting back, wiping away at his window. Apparently, a sudden desire to do some sightseeing had overcome him.

I kept my eyes on the windshield framed between Wignall's and Dortmund's ears. The snowfall had ended. Snow in Kandahar was unusual. The city was in the southern part of the country, away from the high mountains. It sat in the middle of the farming belt, where the weather was a little less malevolent. Today, the more usual browns and tans of Kandahar were hidden beneath a layer of soft whiteness. The place reminded me of a Christmas card. The image was reinforced when we turned down a narrow street and Dortmund slowed to give three Afghan men leading donkeys a little room. I wondered if they were on their way to visit a newborn king. If so, they were late: Christmas was over. Maybe they were on their way home. None of the men looked at us, though one of the animals snorted, raised its tail, and dropped a couple of pounds of crap onto the ground. Or maybe it was myrrh. The men leading the donkeys were hunched over as they kicked through the freshly fallen snow, their bodies wrapped in tan capes and their heads wound up in light-colored turbans — protection from the elements.

Wignall accelerated through an open square. Across the far side was another Humvee. I could see American Army engineers building a snowman with a bunch of local kids. One of them pitched a snowball at an engineer. It exploded against his Kevlar. The guy returned fire. The battle escalated. Based on this evidence, I was prepared to believe we were winning at least a few hearts and minds, though the Afghans were a wily bunch, as they'd proved to every uninvited visitor since the days when an iron sword was state-of-the-art in military high-tech.

I received a thumbnail history of this country the last time I was here. It went something like this: Over the past couple of thousand years, after having a crack at it themselves, assorted kings, emperors, and generals usually put the job of subduing the Pashtun Afghans on the things-to-do list for their successors, just to give their next-in-line a lesson in humility. I'd witnessed the lesson myself on my last tour, and the fact that we were still here, years later, fighting the same people we were fighting back then, didn't bode well. And this time, the enemy had learned lessons from their buddies fighting the insurgency in Iraq. No way were they going to come and slug it out toe-to-toe with us like they did at Tora Bora. Not when it was so much fun to kill us slow. It's said the Pashtuns are only happy when they're at war. If this was true, they'd had something to keep them chuckling pretty much continuously since the time of Alexander the Great.

I wasn't too familiar with Kandahar. I'd been here before, but only in transit on the way to someplace else. The town was an important transport hub in support of our effort here, and so a lot of attention had been paid to making the place as secure as possible. Occasionally, though, shoot-and-scoot squads still sent rockets or mortar rounds in from the surrounding countryside, or an improvised explosive device blew the lid off a light armored vehicle, or charbroiled a Humvee, just to keep us on our toes.

Wignall slowed again to pass men herding a few donkeys and camels across the street and into a wide square that stank of unwashed animal and dung fires.

A few homes and business were lit by electric lights but most burned oil or kerosene or wax for light. The temperature was hovering around the freezing point and there weren't a lot of people out. I figured most were indoors, hugging their stoves.

Wignall took a sudden left turn. We dived through a small dark lane and into a largish courtyard. A tent was pitched in the corner of the open space, taking up one third of it. “Be it ever so ‘umble,” said Dortmund with a smile after the vehicle squealed to a stop.

“Billy, grab the Special Agent's kit,” ordered Butler as he got out. I did likewise.

Damian Mortensen appeared from behind the Land Rover. He gave me a nod by way of hello.

“I'll show you around,” Butler told me. “Norris is the only one of our lads not here. He's inside. The other people wandering around are CIA and NSA. They're here to make sure we've got intel hot off the sats.”

I looked for and found security cameras watching all entry points and common walls. I noted a number of claymore mines hung up high on the walls with command detonation wires taped together and snaking off toward one of the buildings. Maybe they were expecting a visit from unfriendlies — maybe from the GAO.

Knowing the CIA's paranoia, there were probably also motion sensors buried inside and out, as well as other external cameras. The devices were small, and hidden or disguised. But our enemies weren't fools. Hidden cameras or not, we'd just driven into this place in a Land Rover. We might as well have been preceded by elephants on their hind legs playing trumpets. “Safe house?” I inquired.

Butler cleared his throat and spat onto the snow. “The neighbors are all on our payroll.”

I followed the SAS men across the courtyard. Beneath a small shelter with a corrugated-iron roof sat a couple of Honda generators, one of them purring softly. Corporal Dortmund lifted the tent flap. The floor was raised and made from interlocking metal planks. Inside, parked against the far wall, was a compact fork-lift, welding gear beside it, and a bench with a small lathe and drill press. Trooper Brent Norris was sawing the barrel off a Remington 870 pump. He looked up and gave a nod, which I returned. Painted white and strapped down onto pallets were three Ski-Doos. An M249 squad automatic weapon was mounted on the back of each. Two of the machines were equipped with trailers.

“They're getting picked up shortly,” said Butler. “Ever driven one?”

I shook my head. The only thing I'd ridden in the snow was an inner tube.

“How about a motorbike?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Same deal, only easier. Select forward, twist the throttle grip, and go,” said Butler.

Next stop was a large room with a fireplace. A gas heater filled the room with orange warmth. The walls were covered by maps, floor plans, and photos — some taken on the ground, some from altitude. The subject matter was limited to the facility. Various lines of entry and egress were drawn on the plans, then duplicated on the photos. Radio frequencies and call signs were printed on sheets of paper and hung on the wall. Set up on a large table in the center of the room was a model of the facility. The roofs of various structures within it had been removed so that the squad knew where to find stairwells and elevators.

“I'm thinking you shouldn't take part in the assault phase, Cooper. We haven't worked together and there isn't time for you to learn our tactics and methods. We wouldn't want any accidents now, would we?”

That depends who has them, I thought. I reminded myself that very few special-ops missions went like clockwork, and there was no reason to assume this one would be an exception to that general rule — especially given the truncated planning and rushed schedule.

“We're going to leave you with a Ski-Doo and all nonessential gear half a mile from the facility, at this point here,” Butler said, landing an index finger on a cross already marked on an aerial recon photo, “and rendezvous with you once we have Warlord under control.”

“Warlord?” I asked.

“Yeah, Professor Boyle — Warlord is Washington's code name for the target. We'll go through the specifics of the op later. We've got another rehearsal planned tonight, with a follow-up in the morning.”

“ Uh-huh,” I said. Sean Boyle, Warlord? An impressive title for a murdering dweeb with stupid hair.

“C'mon, I'll show you where you can throw your kit,” said Butler. “You're sharing with one of the CIA guys.”

“That would be me.”

Another voice I recognized. I glanced at the open door where my least favorite spook was leaning on his crutches. We could crack open a case of Bud and call it a reunion.