Combat Ops

THREE

The three prisoners were taken to a holding room. The CIA was sending a chopper down to transfer them to FOB Chapman in Khost, where some big shot from Kabul would come in to interrogate them. FOB Chapman was the CIA outpost where seven agents were killed years ago. I knew this time the bad guys would be strip-searched, x-rayed, and then have their every orifice and cavity probed.

Didn’t matter, though. I didn’t think they knew much. Zahed wasn’t fool enough to allow underlings to know his plans or whereabouts.

The girl was taken to our small hospital, and we could only speculate on what would happen to her after that. She was damaged goods, a disgrace and dishonor to her family, and they would, I knew, not want her back. A terrible thing, to be sure. She might be transported to one of the local orphanages and/or assisted by one of the dozens of aid groups in the country. She might even be arrested. I couldn’t think about her anymore, and I’d made it a point not to learn her name. Her plight fueled my hatred for the Taliban and the local Afghans. No one cared about her. No one…

I sent the rest of my team back to quarters. We’d debrief in the morning. I sat around Harruck’s desk, and he offered me a quick and covert shot of cheap scotch, saying we’d turn ourselves in later and receive our letters of reprimand.

Harruck was a dark-haired, blue-eyed poster boy who made you wonder why he’d joined the military. He resembled a corporate type who played golf on the weekends with clients. He was taking graduate courses online, trying to earn his master’s, and he kept on retainer two or three girlfriends back home in San Diego. Because he was so articulate and so damned smart, he’d been recruited to teach at the JFK School, and when he wasn’t overseas, he participated in our four-week-long unconventional warfare exercise, Robin Sage. The first time I met him, I was immediately impressed by his knowledge of our tactics, techniques, and procedures. His candor and sense of humor invited you into a conversation. Once there, you realized, Holy crap, this guy is for real: talented, intelligent, and handsome. If you weren’t jealous and didn’t hate him immediately, you wanted him on your team.

But those attributes did not make him famous around the Ghosts, no. He was, as far as I knew, the only Army officer who’d been offered his own Ghost unit and had turned down the offer.

Let me repeat that.

He’d become a Special Forces officer, had led an ODA team for a while, but when asked to join the Ghosts, he’d said no — and had even gone so far as to leave Special Forces and return to the regular Army to become a company commander.

We called it temporary insanity. Or alcoholism. Or some said cowardice: Pretty boy didn’t want to get a scratch on his smooth cheek.

I’d never asked him why he’d done this. I didn’t want to pry, but I was also afraid of the answer.

“I don’t know how much help you want with your gear,” Harruck said after we finished our drinks. “All your toys are classified, but I’ve got some guys that’ll take a look if you want.”

“That’s all right. I’ll have to ship a few units back and see what they say. Meanwhile, we’ll have to wait till they drop in replacements.”

“Any thoughts?”

“Taliban bought EMP weapons from China,” I said through a dark chuckle. “It’d make sense. We’re running a war on their money now. Wouldn’t they do everything they can to keep us spending? It worked when we did it to the Russians.”

“I hear that.”

“I’ve still got a half dozen more drones I can send up — if I can get some Cross-Coms. The disruption’s localized, so we’ll find out what they’re using. I’m curious to see who they’re playing with now.”

“What if it’s us?”

I snorted. “NSA? CIA? You think they’re in bed with Zahed? Well, if that’s true—”

“You sound tense.”

“I’m not good with setbacks, you know that. I figured we’d capture this guy tonight and get out.”

Harruck wriggled his brows. “Yeah, I mean he’s a fat bastard. He can’t even run.”

I smiled. Barely.

“You need to relax, Scott. You’re only here a few days. And the last time you were here, that didn’t last long, either. You’ve been lucky. It’s eight months for me now. Damn, eight months…”

“Still smiling?”

“To be honest with you — no.”

I shifted to the edge of my seat. “Are you kidding me?”

“This might sound a little hokey, but you know what? I came here to build a legacy.”

“A legacy?”

“Scott, you wouldn’t believe the pressure they’ve put on me. They think this whole war can be won if we secure Kandahar.”

“I hear you.”

“They’re calling it the center of gravity for the insurgency. That’s some serious rhetoric. But I can’t get the support I need. It’s all halfhearted. I’m going to walk out of here having done… nothing.”

“That’s not true.”

Harruck leaned back in his chair and pillowed his head in his hands. “I know what these people need. I know what my mission is. But I can’t do it alone.”

I averted my gaze. “Can I ask you something? Why did you do this to yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

I took a moment, stared at my empty glass.

“Another one?” he asked.

“No. Um, Simon, this isn’t any of my business, but you could’ve been a Ghost.”

“Aw, that’s old news. Don’t make me say something I’ll regret.”

I smiled weakly. “Me, too.”

I’d had no idea that Harruck was exercising tremendous reserve in that meeting, when, in fact, he’d probably wanted to leap out of his chair and throttle me.

Forward Operating Base Eisenhower lay on the northwest side of Senjaray. It was a rather sad-looking collection of Quonset huts and small, prefabricated buildings walled in by concrete and concertina wire. The main gate rose behind a meager guardhouse manned by two sentries, with more guards strung out along the perimeter. The usual machine gun emplacements along with a minefield on the southern approach helped give the Taliban pause. The juxtaposition between the ancient mud-brick town blending organically into the landscape and our rather crude complex was striking. We were foreigners making a modern and synthetic attempt to assimilate.

Harruck knew he’d never get his job done by hiding behind the walls of the FOB, so nearly every day he went into the town to communicate with the people via TCAF interviews (we pronounced it “T-caff”), which stood for Tactical Conflict Assessment Framework. Harruck’s patrols were required to ask certain questions: What’s going on here? Do you have any problems? What can we get for you?

And he’d get the same answers over and over again: We need a new well, we want you to rebuild and open the school. We need a police station, more canals. And can you get us some electricity? The diesel power plant in Kandahar serviced about nine thousand families, but nothing had been provided for the towns like Senjaray.

The following week, Harruck’s patrols would ask the very same questions, get the same answers, and nothing would be done because Harruck couldn’t get what he needed. The reasons for that were complex, varied, and many.

Despite the cynicism creeping into his voice, I still trusted that he’d fly the flag high and struggle valiantly to complete his mission. He said that at any time the tide could turn and assets could be reallocated to him.

We Ghosts didn’t have the luxury of leaving the base. In fact, higher wanted us to protect our identities by remaining in quarters when we weren’t conducting night reconnaissance, so I told my boys we were ghosts and vampires while in country, but that didn’t last very long.

I finished up a quick conversation with General Keating via my satellite phone, and he gave me the usual: “We need Zahed in custody, and we need him talking to us about his connections to the north and the opium trade. It’s up to you, Mitchell.”

It was always up to me, and I had a love-hate relationship with that burden.

Keating’s trust in me was like a drug. Sometimes I felt like he was grooming me for his own job. I’d already turned down a promotion only because that would mean less time in the field, and I thought I was still too young to rotate to the rear. Scuttlebutt about the military restructuring was rampant, with talk of a new Joint Strike Force, and the general told me I needed to catch the wave. But I believed I could make a greater difference in the field.

I guess, even after all these years, I was still pretty naïve in that regard, probably because most of my missions had allowed me to turn the tide.

With the sun beating down on my neck with an almost heavy-metal pulse, I headed toward my quarters. Up ahead, Harruck was coming into the base, riding shotgun in a Hummer. He waved to me as the truck came under sudden and heavy gunfire.

Rounds ricocheted off the Hummer’s hood and quarter panels as I dove to the dirt, and the two guys on the fifties on the north side opened up on the foothills about a quarter kilometer away. But the fire wasn’t coming from there, I realized. It was from inside the FOB.

Three insurgents had somehow gotten past the wall and concertina wire and were firing from positions along the south side of one Quonset hut, which I recalled housed the mess hall.

Harruck and his men were climbing out of the Hummer when one of the insurgents shifted away from the hut and shouldered an RPG.

“Simon!” I hollered. “RPG! RPG!”

He and the two sergeants who’d been in the vehicle bolted toward me as behind them the rocket struck the Hummer and exploded, flames shooting into the sky, the boom reverberating off the huts and other buildings, whose doors were now swinging open, soldiers flooding outside.

I had my sidearm and was already squeezing off rounds at the RPG guy, but he slipped back behind the hut. At that point, reflexes took over. I was on my feet, catapulting across the yard. I rushed along the hut between the mess hall and the insurgents, reached the back, rounded the corner, and spotted all three of them — at exactly the same moment the machine gunners up in the nest did. I shot the closest guy, but only got him in the shoulder before the machine gunner shredded all three with one fluid sweep.

At that second, I remembered to breathe.

Up ahead came a faint click. Then the entire rear third of the mess hall burst apart, pieces of the hut hurtling into the sky as though lifted by the smoke and flames. The explosion knocked me onto my back, and for a few seconds there was only the muffled screams and the booming, over and over.

Something thudded onto my chest, and when I sat up, I saw it was a piece of the roof and accompanying insulation. And then it dawned on me that there’d been personnel in the mess, still coming out when the bomb had gone off. Wincing, I got up, staggered forward.

A gaping hole had been torn in the side of the mess, and at least a half dozen of Harruck’s people were lying on the ground, torn to pieces by the explosion as they’d been heading toward the door. Some had no faces, the blast having shredded cheeks and foreheads, skin peeling back and leaving only bone in its wake. I began coughing, my eyes burning through the smoke, as Harruck arrived with his sergeants.

“I’ll get my people out here to help!” I told him.

He nodded, gritted his teeth, and began cursing at the top of his lungs. I’d never seen him lose it like that.

The facts were clear. We Ghosts had brought this on the camp; the attack was payback for our raid the night before. Innocent soldiers had died because of what we’d done.

I felt the guilt, yes, but I never allowed it to eat at me. We had orders. We had to deal with the consequences of those orders. But seeing Harruck so cut up left me feeling much more than I wanted. Maybe that was the first sign.

My Ghosts were already outside our hut, all wearing pakols and shemaghs on their heads and wrapped around their faces to conceal their identities. I ordered them out to the perimeter to see what the hell was going on.

A roar and thundering collision out near the guard gate stole my attention. A flatbed truck had just plowed through the gatehouse and barreled onward to smash through the galvanized steel gates.

The guards there had backed off and were riddling the truck with rifle fire.

And it took Treehorn all of a second to shoulder his rifle and send two rounds into the head of that driver.

But as if on cue, the truck itself exploded in a swelling fireball that spread over the buildings and quarters beside it, setting fire to the rooftops as more flaming debris came in a hailstorm across the walkway between the huts.

We didn’t realize it then, but a hundred or more Taliban had set up positions along the mountains, and once they saw the truck explode, they set free a vicious wave of fire that had all of us in the dirt and crawling for cover as our machine gunners brought their barrels around… and the rat-tat-tat commenced.