Shadow of the Dragon

50

Hollywood depictions of military vs. CIA bad blood notwithstanding, Captain Alan Brock, team leader ODA-0312, actually got along well with Roy Grant, his counterpart from that Other Governmental Agency.

Stationed at Camp Vance, a stone’s throw from Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan, Brock and his men made up a U.S. Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, commonly called an A-team. The four-numeral ODA designator, 0312, signified Brock’s team was 0–10th Special Forces Group, 3–3rd Battalion, 1—first company in 3rd Battalion (A Company), 2—second team in the company, in this case, mountaineers and horse soldiers.

ODA-0312.

It was Grant who’d spun up this mission — less than an hour earlier, bursting into Brock’s team room with a contagious air of secret urgency. The guy knew how to get a team excited — without telling them a damn thing. All he’d said to this point was that they were going to “recon up the Wakhan” riffing on the rhyme as he said the words.

Since the Global War on Terror began, cable programs had made much of the notion that Afghanistan was this unconquerable graveyard where every army that set boots on its plains came to grief. Pundits observed that the Soviets became hopelessly embroiled. The British Empire had failed to conquer. Even Alexander the Great had failed.

Brock knew it wasn’t all that simple. Alexander’s Greeks had ruled the area for something like two hundred years — not too shabby, as empires go. The Russkies pulled up stakes and left for a number of reasons, chief among them because of the kickass work that CIA had done arming and advising the mujahideen (though U.S. forces would eventually fight these men’s sons and grandsons). The British Empire of the nineteenth century had suffered some horrific defeats in Afghanistan, but in the end they’d gotten exactly what they wanted, a thin strip of land to separate British India from the Russian Empire in Turkmenistan — the Wakhan Corridor, roughly two hundred and twenty miles long and forty miles wide, wedged between the high Pamirs to the north and the Karakoram Mountains to the south, and terminating at the border with China. The area was so far removed from the rest of Afghanistan that many of the tribes who lived there didn’t even know there was a war on. A portion of the ancient Silk Road, the far-flung paths and trails through the high Pamirs, was still used by the occasional opium smuggler — though there were much easier routes into and out of China than trudging over impossibly high mountain passes in a place locals called the Roof of the World. The battalion S2 had intel on some recent Chinese patrols in the corridor with the Afghan Border Police. The ABP brass denied it, but border guys were hanging way out there by themselves — and the Chi-Comms could be awfully persuasive if they showed up in force and wanted to “help hunt terrorists.”

Brock had inserted into the Wakhan half a dozen times, for recon and training with Afghan forces. It was a wild place — beautiful, and, like much of Afghanistan, something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

Now Roy Grant wanted to go on recon for some yet-to-be-explained reason. He was worried about leaks, he said. Moles. He’d brief them on the chopper, he’d said, but pack for a three-day mission.

If it had been anyone else, Captain Brock might have nailed him to the wall until he gave up more than that, but Roy Grant was different. Instead of BDUs or the khaki tacticool pants and polo shirt many of the SAC/SOG guys wore under their rifle plates on missions, Grant had on tan shalwar kameez, the traditional baggy trousers and thigh-length shirt of Afghanistan. Brock and his men sometimes dressed the part as well, when the mission called for it, but generally preferred good old American load-bearing gear. Besides, it was difficult to truly fit in unless you skipped a shower or two and carried around a shitstick like the locals. Brock preferred toilet paper, but Grant went native, the whole shebang, stick and all. You couldn’t blame him. The dude was by himself enough that he needed to blend in to the fabric of Afghanistan. At first, Brock thought it would be unpleasant to ride next to a dude like that on a chopper, but the whole country smelled like woodsmoke and a sewer fire, so he didn’t really notice. Grant spoke fluent Pashto and worked outside the wire enough that the dark beard and local dress had become part of his persona. From a distance, the only way to tell him apart from a local was his propensity to carry around a cup of coffee from the Green Beans on Bagram.

The two men could have been brothers. Both were tall, runner-fit, with workman’s hands and dark, grizzly-bear beards like many of the guys at Camp Vance. As OGA spooks went, Grant was a good shit. Brock wasn’t even sure if that was the guy’s name. He looked like a Roy Grant, but then, this was headquarters for Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, or CJSOTF — home for both white operations and the more secretive black ops — hence the highest percentage of beards per acre than on any other U.S. military base on the planet.

Brock’s five-year-old son had recently told him via Skype that he looked like a caveman. Brock had agreed and said he wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of velociraptors came stampeding over the desolate mountains beyond the base. The brainy little shit had set his dad straight about “humans and dinosaurs not living during same period.”

Brock missed that kid — but if he had to be away from home, this was the place.

When op tempo was high, Camp Vance was crawling with U.S. Special Forces A-teams like Brock’s, along with Marine Recon, Air Force combat controllers, Navy Special Warfare DEVGRU, Delta Force, Task Force Orange surveillance operators, air ops guys from 160th SOAR, operators with British Special Boat Service and, of course, the spooks from CIA Special Activities Center/Special Operations Group. The atmosphere was often like a reunion when the SAC/SOG came in from training. More often than not, the Agency recruited its fresh meat from among the active duty ranks operating at Camp Vance.

Half the guys there could have been named Roy Grant.

At the moment, Captain Brock and his six-person split-A, or half his Alpha team, were dressed in full battle rattle, gunned up and ready to go in the back of a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, piloted by two of the Task Force Brown guys from the 160th. Brock had flown with these two before and trusted them to put them where they needed to be, and, more important, to come back and get them when the work was done. The other half of the split, led by Brock’s second-in-command, Warrant Officer Morales, was aboard an identical chopper. Morales had the team sergeant with him. Peplow, the 18F — intelligence sergeant — acted as Brock’s second in Morales’s absence. Once they were on the ground, the team could merge back into one, or remain split — depending on what Grant had in store. Sergeant Peplow had noted when they boarded that both choppers were wearing stub-wing tanks, indicating a mission likely greater than the Black Hawk’s combat range of around three hundred and seventy miles.

Four of Brock’s five men carried M4 rifles with EOTech sights, six thirty-round magazines, SIG Sauer M17 nine-millimeters, four pistol magazines, thermite grenades, radios, PVS-14 night-vision goggles, ear pros, assorted knives, chemical light signaling spinners, food and water, blood chits, medical pouches, and, among other gear, next-generation poncho liners that helped hide their heat signature. Morales called it the “woobie of invisibility.” Townsend, the weapons sergeant, carried the same basic loadout, but instead of an M4, he carried an FN SCAR-H in 7.62 NATO.

Captain Brock waited for Grant to get buckled in, then tapped his headset. “Okay. Let’s have it.”

Grant gave him a thumbs-up.

“We’re heading toward the Wakhjir Pass.”

“To China?”

“In that general direction,” Grant said. “Two MQ-9s started that way…” He checked his G-Shock. “Twenty-one minutes ago.”

Peplow, the 18F, cocked his head. “The Chinese have troops stationed at a Tajik base less than twelve clicks south of the border. They’ll spot the Reapers and us, even if we fly nap of the earth, scraping our gear on the valley floor…”

“Maybe,” Grant said. “Maybe not. We’ll be in Afghan airspace, and the Afghans are on board with our trip, being a rescue mission and all.”

Brock gave the CIA officer a wary side-eye. “A rescue mission?” He shook his head and settled back in his seat. “You should have led with that.”

The pilot in command, an Army warrant officer named Avery, half turned from the right seat. The engines were already whining, and he spoke over the intercom, doing one last safety check with his crew chief.

All good in back and gauges in the green up front, he lifted off.

“As rescue missions go,” Grant said, “this one is… unique.”