Ghost Watch

Kabul

Afghan Interior Minister Abdul al-Eqbal shared the delusion of all politicians who had well and truly reached their use-by date: that his position and power were preordained and that his people would love him no matter what shit he pulled, who he screwed over, or how he behaved.

Al-Eqbal was fat in a country of skin and bone. He was unpopular because he took bribes. And while this was a society where everyone took bribes, Abdul al-Eqbal was in a class of his own — he took baksheesh from one side and put his hand out to the other, then simply made himself scarce and let the parties slug it out or had the next layer of bureaucracy turn up with its hand out for a cut. Intelligence hadn’t confirmed it, but the word on the street was that al-Eqbal had stiffed the wrong crowd once too often and was now a high-priority target for the Taliban.

After the mess in Oak Ridge, I wanted the ugliest, most dangerous assignment the Air Force had to offer. I felt I deserved it. That turned out to be personal security operations in Afghanistan. The day I arrived in-country, I learned that volunteers were being sought to make up al-Eqbal’s detail. This was the highest risk assignment in the highest risk command. It sounded like the reason I was here, so I took the step forward. And that’s how I found myself in charge of a joint PSO unit racing in a three-vehicle convoy down a minor through-road on the outskirts of Kabul. At the time, we were on al-Eqbal’s turf. His people lived here; the ones who’d voted for him, supposedly. I could hear the guy wheezing and humming a local ditty as he leaned forward in his seat and watched the dung-colored homes flash by.

‘How’s it going back there? Anyone cold?’ asked Staff Sergeant Chip Meyers, occupying the front passenger seat and throwing the question over his shoulder.

Meyers was a fellow special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the OSI. He’d been a male model before joining up, his baby blues and six-pack gut selling underwear for Calvin Klein. I was told that he liked to date married women because dodging their husbands added to the excitement. Maybe one day he’d make a good relationship counselor. Apparently, death threats had chased him into the recruitment office.

It was thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit outside. Cool by anyone’s standards.

‘Sir?’ He turned around fully and pitched the question to the dignitary once more. ‘Cold?’

Al-Eqbal ignored him completely.

Meyers shrugged, turned to face the front, and resumed the eternal scan for roadside IEDs — improvised explosive devices. We were the only two Air Force guys in the bunch. The driver seated beside him was Army, a buck sergeant by the name of Rory Bellows, a skinny guy whose head darted around so much looking for threats that I thought he might have a nervous tic.

The team assembled for this unit was drawn from the OSI and the US Army. Up ahead in the lead vehicle were a couple of Army NCOs named Detmond and Stefanovic. They were both premature. Detmond was prematurely gray, Stefanovic prematurely bald. Stef was also short. He had to sit on a Humvee maintenance manual to see over the dash. Their driver, an Army specialist, was a stand-in I hadn’t worked with. The nametag on his battle uniform said ‘Mattock’.

Bringing up the rear were Sergeant First Class Reese Fallon, a six-foot-seven black guy who’d played power forward for Notre Dame, and driver Specialist Alicia Rogerson, a small-town librarian in her civilian days. I asked what a nice librarian like her was doing in a shithole like this and she told me that she liked to read thrillers and had decided to join up and write a few chapters of her own. She came across as perky, wide-eyed, and enthusiastic, all of which told me that her boots had been on the ground here maybe a week, tops.

‘Stop! Stop the car!’ al-Eqbal suddenly shouted. ‘I order you to stop.’

I jumped. ‘What’s the problem, sir?’

‘Do as I say and stop the car! I command it!’

We were here to keep the guy alive, and stopping in a place that hadn’t been surveyed because maybe the dignitary had to take a shit was not in the rulebook.

Al-Eqbal flicked the lock and opened the door while the vehicle was still moving. ‘Now!’ he demanded.

Jesus… I checked the window. The area consisted of run-down housing and some equally run-down businesses. A few cars were on the road. No one seemed to be paying us any mind.

I asked him again. ‘Why do you want to pull over, sir?’

‘I have cousin here. Best snuff in all of Kabul. I come here all the time. These are my people. No danger. Stop here, now!’

Clearly, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I called up the lead vehicle on the radio and asked Stefanovic to pull over. The Land-cruiser’s brake lights came on, the tires scratched for traction in the grit and al-Eqbal was out the door. I leapt after him and headed him off, placing the flat of my Nomex-gloved hand on his chest. He looked at it as if it were vermin.

‘Sir,’ I told him. ‘I have a job to do. Please wait.’

He rolled huge brown eyeballs at Allah, while my mind ran through the six basic rules of PSO duty:

1. Under no circumstances leave your principals unaccompanied.

2. The majority of organized attacks are successful.

3. The bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all.

4. The bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.

5. The bodyguards usually die.

6. The scrotums of bodyguards tighten for a reason — don’t ignore it.

Okay, so number six wasn’t in the official manual, but it was underlined in red in the unofficial one. And mine was now tighter than the skin on a grape.

The detail exited the vehicles, leaving the drivers, Mattock, Bellows and Rogerson, behind. Standard operating procedure was to keep the motors running in case we had to leave in a hurry. Quickly, the rest of us formed the textbook five-man diamond pattern around al-Eqbal: Meyers in front, Stefanovic behind, Detmond and Fallon on each side, and me on the principal’s shoulder. Al-Eqbal pointed to where he wanted to go, which was thirty or so meters back down the street in the direction from which we’d just come.

Folks got out of our way, crossed the road, avoided eye contact. Nothing about this behavior was particularly odd. They were used to seeing armed US military personnel on the streets, but there’d been enough situations resulting in civilian deaths to make them nervous about being anywhere near us.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ I asked the principal.

Al-Eqbal indicated the Kabul version of a general store — a gray two-story structure with several stalls outside displaying newspapers and magazines, various hardware items (from lamps to auto-mechanics’ tools), as well as bottled drinks and tinned foods. Wood and Styrofoam boxes on the dirt beneath the stands contained assorted limp vegetables. Two young males loitered out front, just hanging around, smoking. One called out to someone inside the shop when they saw us coming, then both ran off and vanished down an alley a few doors down.

A middle-aged man emerged from the building. The concern on his face brightened into a grin when he saw al-Eqbal. I assumed he was his cousin because no one but family would be happy to see this guy. The two men embraced and kissed and talked rapid-fire Dari, too fast for me to follow, though I managed to catch fragments of the usual string of outrageous compliments. Our dignitary turned to go inside, but I signaled Meyers to perform a site survey and stepped in front of al-Eqbal, blocking his path again.

‘Sir, please allow us to search the building first.’

He swore in Dari — something about me being the spawn of a goatherd’s tepid urine — but he nevertheless stopped and waited.

I banked the insult to use on someone else one day, while his cousin smiled at me and shrugged, as if to say, ‘My cousin’s a politician — whadayagonnado?’

We stood on the dirt sidewalk, buffeted by grit, and waited. An icy wind blew the superfine Afghan dust that smelled of human shit and pack animals into our mouths and nostrils.

Meyers came back out as the troublesome fingers in my left hand, which had been broken and shot up on previous missions, stiffened into a cramp from the cold.

‘Clear, boss,’ he said.

‘What’s the layout?’

‘One main display room full of junk, two smaller ones behind it full of more junk. A back door — locked — looks like it opens onto a dirt alley. No enclosing walls there. Internal staircase leads to a second story. Old woman peeling spuds upstairs, ugly as a big toe. Three other rooms, all bedrooms. On the rooftop is a washing line and a TV satellite dish.’

The place appeared to be free from threat. Any location that’s been surveyed and cleared of unauthorized persons is technically secure, says the PSO handbook. But life experience was making me cautious. I moved to the side, allowing al-Eqbal to pass, and our diamond pattern was set to move into the confined space. The overall mission for this and almost every other PSO detail was running through my head: prevent assassination, injury, kidnapping, assignation, and, almost above all, safeguard the principal’s schedule. Dual problem right there, I reminded myself. We had us an assignation and it wasn’t on the damn schedule.

Al-Eqbal interrupted my thoughts. ‘I will go in alone,’ he commanded with a wave of his hand as if we were troublesome flies. ‘There is not enough room.’

I looked at the shop and he had a point. It was no Wal-Mart. ‘You can’t go in there without an escort.’

We stared at each other for a few moments before he sighed wearily and said, ‘One guard only. Young man, you are worrying too much, I think.’

‘We can only spare five minutes here, sir,’ I said.

The principal shook his head at me as if to say that I just didn’t get it.

‘Meyers, accompany our dignitary,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Meyers replied.

The book inside my head played like a bad song that wouldn’t go away:

1. Do not let the principal enter a doorway first.

2. In hallways, keep the principal in the center.

3. Keep the principal away from windows and alcoves and areas limiting escape and evasion.

The cousin put his arm around the principal’s shoulders. They walked toward the shop entrance, chatting, laughing. Meyers took up station ahead of them, scoping left and right. A pro.

I scanned the street. A yellow taxi, with a replacement fender and door panels that gave it a patchwork appearance, drove by slowly, blowing smoke. The driver leaned across the bench seat toward us, eternally hopeful for a fare. Fifty meters down the road, several middle-aged men having a conversation crossed from one side to the other. Nearby, the wind had picked up some dust and blew it into a corkscrew that was moving in our direction. More grit flew into my eyes. I opened them in time to see a woman in a dark blue burka that was billowing like a sail — the bottom hem flapping and whipping around her ankles — walk into the middle of the road, stop, turn around, and then retrace her steps. Two young men on pushbikes swerved to avoid her. A couple of blocks further down, a man pushing a wheel-cart pulled over to sell bunches of bananas.

The drivers reversed our vehicles and parked them in front of al-Eqbal’s cousin’s shop — one of a group of five with common walls. A narrow alley was at either end of the block. The buildings on the other side of the wide street were mostly unpainted gray concrete, two and three storys, with flat roofs, two windows per floor, no balconies. Some were homes; the living rooms of some functioned as shops, like al-Eqbal’s cousin’s. Over the roofs of these houses rose the imposing mass of TV Mountain. I’d been on its summit years ago when I first came to the ’Stan. The Taliban rocketed our position there, trying to dislodge me and several other special tactics officers while we called in air strikes on their fundamentalist asses. Looking down from the summit, the gray city seemed to wrap itself around the base like a blanket of clothes-dryer lint.

I spoke into the small boom mike, part of the system that allowed our team members to communicate with each other over short distances. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Meyers.

‘Settling in for the long haul, boss. They’re brewing tea,’ came his reply through my earpiece.

‘Tell Mr Big he’s got two minutes left.’

Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were all Army. They faced out, looking idly toward the mountain, waiting. Their M16s were pointed at the ground. Detmond lit a cigarette. With the principal out of the picture, so was their focus. Our drivers had the engines running. Gangsta crap thumped from an open window.

To pass the time, I asked Stefanovic, ‘So why did you volunteer for this?’

‘Who volunteered?’ he said. ‘I cleaned out my sergeant in a game of hold ’em. It was this or latrine duty. Happens again, I’ll take the crappers. You?’

‘Brain fart.’

‘You asked to do this shit?’ Fallon said. He glanced at me, seeing but not believing.

Detmond grunted.

‘Got a volunteer joke for you,’ I said to our little formation. ‘A guy walks into a bar with a pet alligator. He puts it up on the bar and says to the freaked-out patrons, “I’ll make you all a deal. I’ll put my dick in this here ’gator’s mouth and keep it there one minute. At the end of that time, the ’gator will open its mouth. If I still have my dick, all of you have to buy me a drink.”

‘Of course, the crowd agrees, so he drops his pants, puts his pecker in the ’gator’s mouth, and the room goes silent. At the end of one minute, he picks up a beer bottle and smacks the ’gator over the head with it. The ’gator opens its mouth and out comes the guy’s wang, unharmed. The crowd goes nuts and the free drinks flow. After a while, the guy stands on the bar and says, “I’ll make y’all another offer. I’ll pay a hundred bucks to anyone else willing to give it a try.”

‘A hush falls over the crowd.

‘“C’mon,” says the guy. “Aren’t there no damn volunteers out there?”

‘A lone hand slowly rises over everyone’s heads. It’s a young blond woman.

‘“I’ll do it,” she says, “but only if you don’t hit me on the head with no beer bottle.”’

Fallon’s attention wandered off.

Detmond grunted.

‘My mother’s blond,’ said Stefanovic flatly.

I cleared my throat and told them to keep up the good work, then moved away to check the cousin’s front door.

No one was coming out. I was getting impatient. Loitering on the streets of Kabul with a Stars and Stripes patch on your shoulder was only slightly less moronic than sticking a fork in a wall socket. Besides, his five minutes were definitely up.

‘Meyers…’ I said into the mike.

‘He’s telling me he wants another five minutes,’ came the reply.

‘He can’t have them,’ I said, but I knew this guy would take them whether I agreed or not.

I turned in time to see a girl of no more than fourteen years old, dressed in black and wearing a pink scarf over her head, run into the building adjoining the cousin’s. She was bent over with her arms wrapped around her belly as if she were pregnant, and left the front door open behind her.

I was about to say something about this into the mike when a deafening explosion turned the world into a giant dust ball. It punched me backward through the air and I slammed into the house ten feet behind. Dust clogged my nose and eyes and my lungs were clenched, closed tight.

Could.

Not.

Breathe.

I pawed the dirt from my face and saw a massive white, black, and gray cloud boiling into the sky. Below it, two of our Landcruisers were tipped on their sides. My men were down. Something released in my chest, and I sucked down a lungful of powdered building, which brought on a coughing fit. When I pulled out of it, I could see through watering eyes that al-Eqbal’s cousin’s house was gone, along with the neighbor’s, heading skyward in the expanding gray and black mushroom cloud. Jesus… Meyers would be in that cloud somewhere. I wanted to move, stand up at least, but everything was in slo-mo. Rog-erson’s Landcruiser was parked outside the spot where the neighbor’s house used to be. I could see her profile. Something about it was wrong. Oh, shit… her face… she didn’t have one.

My body didn’t want to work. I managed somehow to pull myself up on one knee, and thanked the K-pot on my head and the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor for taking most of the wall’s impact. I could see that Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were flat on the ground, with only sluggish movement from all three. They were closer to the blast than I had been, and harder hit. Detmond was wounded, a red stain advancing down the gray-green pixels of his Army battle uniform toward his elbow. He managed to sit up but was almost immediately hit square in the chest by an invisible force that knocked him down onto his back. Shit, we were being fired on! Fallon and Stefanovic struggled to their feet and dragged Detmond behind the second of the scuttled Landcruisers — my Landcruiser, the one Bellows was driving. Where was Bellows? I couldn’t see him; Mattock either. All three drivers — dead?

The situation would head from fucked up to fucking fucked up if someone didn’t do something fucking quick. Static burst into my earpiece.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

Static.

I was about to tear out the earpiece when I heard a voice croak, ‘Cooper…’

The voice was familiar, but my hearing wasn’t so good. ‘Meyers?’ I asked.

‘Legs… broken.’

Yeah, it was Meyers. Definitely someone who wasn’t able to do something fucking quick or any other way. But, shit, he was alive.

‘I’ll come to you. Don’t move.’

I heard him cackle. ‘Move…?’

Bullet holes appeared in the bodywork of the Landcruisers. It occurred to me that while Fallon, Detmond and Stefanovic were getting pounded, I wasn’t attracting any inbound fire, which meant that whoever had us pinned down was not aware of my position. There was no planned kill zone, where the fire was coming in from all angles, cutting off our escape. So, either the attack was impromptu or we were up against the remedial arm of the Taliban.

I was in the only blind spot for the shooters — directly below them. I looked up. Sure enough, rifle barrels poked out from both second-story windows above me, as well as one from a window on the third floor. I counted a total of five protruding barrels.

‘Stefanovic,’ I shouted into the mike. ‘How’s Detmond? Check on Mattock and Bellows.’

I heard a voice in my ear, but it was muffled, woolen.

‘Get on the radio, and get us some air support!’ I yelled. A response came back, but I couldn’t make it out.

Stefanovic had crawled out of sight behind the second Landcruiser, presumably on the hunt for a working radio. I went through a weapons and ammo check to steady my nerves and get some perspective: one Colt M4 carbine; four mags — one hundred and twenty rounds; one Sig Sauer P228 with two mags, one round up the spout; one Ka-bar. No grenades — shit!

The front door beside me was closed and probably locked. My back close to the wall, I moved over to an alley on the left. At the corner of the building I momentarily put down my rifle, pulled the Sig and took it off safety. I popped my head and the Sig around the corner simultaneously. Movement. Two rounds later, a Taliban fighter with an AK-47 found himself haggling with all the other dead martyrs over whose turn it was to get with the virgins.

I holstered the Sig, picked up the M4, shouldered it, and made my way down the alley. I put my fingertips against the brickwork and felt the vibrations. The AK-47s inside the house were spraying away with such exuberance that the percussion was vibrating through the wall. My hearing cleared with a ‘pop’, and what I heard was Stef and Fallon returning fire, the M16 making an altogether different sound than the AK’s.

I followed the Sig around the next corner and came into another alley out back, overlooked by a row of tightly packed dwellings. Men and boys were peering around corners for several blocks up and down the narrow road, eager to catch the action; a good gunfight in these parts being the equivalent of a game of football. One of the boys waved at me from an alcove. I waved back and he flipped me the bird — rooting for the home team, obviously. Maybe he had a big blow-up hand somewhere with ‘Osama’ printed on it.

Pushbikes were scattered behind the rear entrance. The gunmen had cycled to work. The Sig went back in its holster. The M4’s thirty-round mag and short barrel made it the ideal weapon for cleaning house. I flicked the selector to three-shot burst to conserve ammo, took it off safety, and crept inside. It was dark. I stopped against the wall, tried to get my breathing under control and gave my eyes a few seconds to adapt to the available light. There was a room both to the left and right off the short hallway. I checked them and they were clear, so I moved forward into the main room on the ground floor. Also clear. Retracing my steps, I closed the back door — there was no lock — then found the stairs against the wall and crept up the single steep flight to the first floor. It ended on a small landing; the rest of the floor was divided into two rooms, gunfire banging away from my left and right. I cased both rooms quickly. Room on the left had one shooter. Room on the right had two. The floors in both were littered with spent casings and magazines.

The Taliban fighter in the left-hand room was old — mid-fifties — and dressed in black. Pops was making so much noise that he didn’t realize I was behind him until the Ka-bar took out his windpipe and partially severed his spinal cord. Blood went everywhere. I gently laid him down among all his brass trash as he gurgled and shook, then I took his AK and replaced the mag with a fresh one from a satchel sitting on a broken chair. There was no food in the bag, suggesting that this gig was unplanned — good to know. Propped against the wall behind the door were an M16A2 and a bag full of mags. I picked up the rifle. It was brand new, still with that showroom shine. The serial numbers on its receiver had been ground off. Where does a Taliban fighter get one of these? I hooked the weapon over my shoulder and took the satchel with the mags.

Had I killed Pops with the M4, everyone would know that Uncle Sam was making home deliveries. To head off any concern, I fired a couple of bursts from the guy’s AK out the window to reassure his buddies that the old man was still on the job. Then I dropped the weapon and walked across the landing into the room on the right. The door was wide open. Both targets, also dressed in Taliban black, were in their late teens or early twenties. They had their backs to me, firing on full auto on the crippled Landcruisers, wasting ammo, washing my buddies in lead. From the sound of it, one of the targets was firing an M16.

Then a couple of rounds tore into the ceiling above my head. Gray powder drifted down, dusting my shoulders. My guys across the street were zeroing in.

‘Yo, fellas,’ I called out, raising my voice above the din. ‘S’up?’

The shooters glanced over their shoulders, eyes wide. The fighter with the M16 had an orange beard and large blue-green eyes, maybe a throwback to when Alexander the Great arrived here with his army to subdue the local population and get in a little R&R. I didn’t have to think about what to do. Both men got three rounds in the chest. The force of it pushed Ginger out the window, ass first. He fell in silence, already dead.

The shooter on the floor above me stopped firing. He knew something was up, probably when he saw his Islamic brother take the big step backward into the street below. He started calling to his friends. When no answer came, he began firing down through the floor. I made myself small against the wall and changed mags. Plaster, wood splinters, and lead rained down, which gave me some idea of his position. I fired upwards — single shots — emptied the mag, then waited for an answer. I stood on the spot for ten seconds or so, changed mags, listening, looking up. No one was walking around up there, and the shooting had stopped. Blood clogged the bullet holes in the ceiling and began dripping down onto the floor.

I climbed up to the second floor to confirm that only one fighter occupied it, and that he was now dead. I searched him quickly for the benefit of folks back at intelligence but found nothing of interest. I picked up his AK, released the mag, emptied the chamber, and swung it against the wall a couple of times, splintering the stock. Then I went back down to the other rooms, collected the M16, and put those AKs out of action for a while also.

Moving over to the window, I gave my people a whistle. Movement up the road attracted my attention. Shit, half a dozen armed, bearded men were running toward us, black robes flapping in the breeze. Three of them ducked into one of the houses thirty meters away. I lost sight of their friends. Time to go. I searched the corpses and their satchels but came up empty-handed. Sporadic firing was beginning again. Exactly how many more Taliban were in the area? It wouldn’t have been a good idea to hang around and conduct a census.

I took the steps down to the ground floor and contemplated my next decision — leave by the back door or by the front? I figured that my guys would put holes in any enemy fighters who were in full view; and maybe in me, too, if I wasn’t careful. The back door was still closed the way I’d left it, but I wasn’t confident about what might be waiting on the other side. So I moved to the front door and slipped the bolt. It was jammed. The wood was ancient and dried out. I took three steps back, and charged it with my shoulder just as the back door opened a few inches and three grenades rolled in. I hit the door and it splintered into matchsticks. Tangled up in rifle straps, I stumbled and planted my face in the road. And then, behind me, the building exploded in a howl of mudbrick chunks. A torrent of grenade fragments and glass shards warbled as they flew close overhead and landed with a musical tinkle between the Landcruisers and me. Gunfire came next as Taliban fighters charged through the suspect back door and reoccupied the remains of the house that their buddies had just died in.

I got to my feet, dove for the Landcruisers and scrambled behind them. I was relieved to see Mattock and Bellows hunkered down with Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond. They’d taken up firing positions behind the Landcruiser on its side, the one I’d occupied with al-Eqbal. Unfortunately, though, we were now being outflanked by enemy reinforcements and gunfire was coming in on us from a number of directions. It was only a matter of time before the Taliban closed all the angles and started picking us off. Now the assholes were firing on the fuel tanks, too. I smelled diesel. At least it wasn’t gasoline.

‘Radio?’ I yelled at Stefanovic.

He shook his head. ‘According to ops, nothing on the ground this sector.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ve got Apaches inbound, ETA fifteen minutes.’

We didn’t have fifteen minutes.

I took a few seconds to assess Detmond. He was lying on the ground behind the others, going into shock, and not entirely with us. His eyes were closed, but he was moving.

‘Wounded in the neck and just below his armpit — he’s lost a lot of blood,’ Fallon informed me, shouting into my ear.

In fact, the sergeant was lying in a pool of it. We had to get him out of there. He also looked dazed. The blast had deafened him.

Stefanovic’s hand and M4 were also sticky with blood. He was pale, the color having leached from his face.

‘Where’d you get hit?’ I yelled at him.

He turned slightly. I could see a large chunk of flesh had been chewed out of the back of his arm.

‘Need a compression bandage here!’ I shouted at Fallon.

We had two dead: Rogerson and al-Eqbal. Including myself, Stef, Fallon, Detmond, Mattock and Bellows, there were six of us left. Hang on, someone was missing. Oh, yeah…

‘Meyers is alive,’ I said. ‘Fallon, you’re with me. We’re going back in there to get him.’

The look on his face said, You’re shitting me…!

‘Stand by. I’m gonna check Rogerson’s vehicle first.’

Mattock and Bellows threw some rounds downrange at the enemy.

AK rounds buzzed around my head. I could almost see them. I was in the groove, juiced up on adrenalin. It wasn’t that I believed I couldn’t be killed; I just didn’t give a damn if I were.

The third vehicle was badly mauled, but at least it was still on its tires. I ditched the M16, crawled back to the vehicle and, staying low, opened the door. Specialist Rogerson was belted into the front seat, her hands clasped around the steering wheel at the ten-two position. I saw that she had beautiful nails; manicured, painted red. She wore a wedding ring. I reached in and released her belt and she slumped sideways across the bench seat. I tried not to think too much about her. The red lights burning on the instrument panel told me that the ignition was on — a good sign — but the motor had stalled. I hoped there was no disabling damage. If this thing wouldn’t start, we were screwed. Leaning in below the steering column, I twisted the ignition key off, and then twisted it on. Nothing. It was dead. Shit. Then I noticed the transmission was in drive. I banged it into park, pressed on the brake with my free hand, gave the key another twist and the motor hummed to life.

I backed out of the vehicle, sprinted to the others, and tapped Detmond on the shoulder.

‘Three minutes!’ I yelled, ‘Then you go!’

I motioned at Fallon to follow me and we ran at a crouch into the smoking dustbowl behind us. Meyers was in here somewhere, lying in the rubble. We found the old woman, her arm protruding from beneath a ton of broken masonry, then encountered a pile of bloody rags that looked like al-Eqbal’s — but no cousin, no girl, and no Meyers.

Fallon smelled burning American tobacco through the dust haze and followed the scent. The trail led us to Meyers, propped up against a wall beside a bicycle. The guy was pulling hard on a Marlboro, his boots turned at impossible angles on the ends of his shattered legs. The blast had happened minutes ago; he still had some time before his nerve endings started screaming. I hunkered down beside him and hunted through my medical pack for a shot of morphine to see him through.

‘I took a second quick scan out the back and al-Eqbal locked me out,’ he said drowsily. ‘What happened?’

I pictured the girl pregnant with C4 explosives running into the building next door. ‘No birth control in this place,’ I said. She’d probably run into al-Eqbal’s cousin’s building through an adjoining door that Meyers had missed.

He nodded, finding the crack about birth control perfectly reasonable, which told me he was also in shock. I found the morphine, administered it to his upper thigh, and then checked his limbs. Both femurs had compound fractures, and the wounds were messy. He would need a good surgeon to save them. I used his blood to paint an ‘M’ on his forehead. Fallon took the defensive position and swept the area while I did what I could to control the bleeding. Carrying him between us with those legs in such bad shape was not an option, and one of us would need to provide covering fire if required.

I handed his weapon to Fallon. Meyers was no lightweight; this was not going to be easy. I took one of his arms and pulled his torso over my shoulder.

‘Help me up,’ I grunted at Fallon.

I could hear the gun battle behind me in the street intensifying.

I managed to stand with Fallon’s assistance, squatting Meyers’ two-hundred-plus pounds in a fireman’s carry. I remembered doing this very exercise at Fort Benning, running a mile with some guy across my back who was pretending to be a wounded pilot. But that was a long time ago, when I was younger, flitter and stronger, and before several bullets fired at my ass over the years had torn me a new one.

‘Jesus,’ I groaned, ‘what the fuck do you weigh?’

Meyers was singing a Miller Lite commercial.

‘Gone to his happy place,’ suggested Fallon.

‘Bastard could’a taken us with him,’ I gasped, sucking oxygen and dust.

I staggered forward then centered the weight. Meyers grunted. The dust was settling. We had to get back to the Landcruiser before we were fully exposed to the Taliban’s fire. I managed to get through the rubble and come up behind the vehicle without tripping or breaking an ankle, and without being fired upon. I laid Meyers on the ground beside Stefanovic, who was up on one knee in the firing position. His condition was deteriorating fast as his blood leaked away, the bandage saturated. His eyelids were heavy, every blink a microsleep; he was having trouble keeping his weapon aimed anywhere but at the ground. Enemy fire was coming in hot and heavy. We couldn’t hold our position much longer. One Landcruiser, eight passengers, one of them dead.

‘Give me your smoke,’ I said to Stef, seeing the canisters hanging from his webbing. His wounded arm wouldn’t allow him the movement required to unhitch them. His eyes moved around, unable to focus. An incoming round whined off the road beside my hand, fragments of stone chips ripping through the fabric of the battle uniform around my wrist.

‘You’re a ghost,’ Stefanovic murmured, and he dragged his bloody fingers down my face, across my mouth.

I spat the copper taste of his blood out of my mouth and took his canisters.

‘Smoke,’ I said to Fallon.

He handed his over and I collected more from Detmond and Meyers.

‘Get everyone in the vehicle,’ I yelled.

I popped two canisters and threw them upwind. Ribbons of green and red smoke swirled and drifted down the road toward us. I ran to open the driver’s door of the third Landcruiser and verified that the engine was still running. Then I sprinted around to the back and opened the rear hatch. The enemy figured something was up and concentrated their fire on the upright vehicle, but the smoke was making their aim uncertain. A volley of AK rounds, sounding like a heavy-metal drum solo, punched new holes all over the roof of the Landcruiser shielding us.

I dashed back and hoisted Meyers across my shoulders once more. With Fallon shooting over us, we made it to the open rear hatch. I laid Meyers sideways across the width of the floor and hooked one of his arms around a rear seatbelt anchored to the car’s bodywork above his head. Detmond helped Stefanovic into the back seat; Bellows and Mattock provided covering fire. I ran back to the driver’s door. Fallon had climbed in and was struggling to prop Rogerson against the passenger door. There wasn’t enough room; at least, not for me.

I popped smoke, tossed it, then slammed the doors shut.

‘C’mon, Cooper!’ Fallon shouted. ‘Get in!’

‘Go!’ I said, smacking the roof with the flat of my hand.

The incoming fire was getting more accurate. Holes were gouged in the hood; the windscreen shattered. Fallon was about to argue but changed his mind. He jumped back behind the wheel, jammed it into drive, and stomped on the gas. The Toyota took off, wheels spinning in the packed dirt, the vehicle fishtailing into the smoke, drawing some of the fire and leaving a vortex of red and green swirls in its wake. Within seconds, my unit was out of range and out of danger.

I once more took up a position behind the second Landcruiser, the ground crimson with coagulating blood. I had my M4 and the captured M16s. I put a couple of them on single shot and fired them from the hip at the buildings occupied by the enemy. Changing mags, I did the same again. When those mags were spent, I threw more smoke and emptied another couple of mags, changing to three shot bursts, hoping the opposition might think there was more than one idiot left down here.

I put down the M16 with the others, crawled to the rear bumper, popped two canisters, the last of them, and threw them short. Bright red smoke swirled over my position, but mostly over the wrecked building behind me. A barrage of lead poured in, cutting me off from those M16s. I had to leave them, and crept through the smoke and the rubble of the destroyed building, back to where we’d found Meyers.

Still no sign of those damn Apaches. Time to boogie.

The choking, cloying dust and smoke stung my eyes as I ran crouched over. I came out into the open and movement stopped me. Two kids with AKs were creeping in my direction. I saw them before they saw me. The way they were moving, it was obvious that they were hoping to come up behind my position. I recognized them. They were the boys outside al-Eqbal’s cousin’s place when we rolled up. Maybe they were the ones who blew the whistle on our arrival to the Taliban. One of them looked right at me and his eyes widened. Terror filled his face. He pointed at me and screamed. His buddy did likewise, and they both turned around and ran, which was a relief. Killing kids, even ones that would happily plant me in the ground, was not something I wanted to have to answer to myself for.

I wondered what had spooked them.

With still no sign of the choppers, I followed through with my plan, hopped on the pushbike I had seen beside Meyers and pedaled back to the base.