The Shadow Patrol

1

Growing up in the scrubland of west Texas, Ricky Fowler had done some stupid things. The usual nonsense, nothing the cops cared much about. Mailbox baseball. Spraying a 1 beside the 75 on speed-limit signs. A couple times, drunk, he shot firecrackers at bulls. Roman candles and such. He wasn’t proud of that little trick, but he never hit anything. The longhorns didn’t even notice.

But these Afghans, they took the cake on stupid. Yeah, they were tough fighters, tricky little bastards who could get by forever on tea and stale bread. But tough and smart were two different things. Guys in his platoon had a name for the nonsense they saw outside the wire every day: SATs. Stupid Afghan Tricks.

Like last month, on patrol, this dude sitting on a donkey so short the dude’s feet touched the ground. Plus the donkey’s sides were so loaded with sticks that it looked like it had a Christmas tree growing out of its butt. Even so the rider was grinning like he’d won the lottery, like, That’s right, suckers. I got a donkey, so I do not have to walk. How you like me now? Smiling with those big white choppers all the Afghans had, even though they’d never seen toothpaste in their lives. Maybe because they couldn’t afford to drink soda. Fowler didn’t know. Mystery number 101 about this country.

Fowler was an E-3, a private first class, in 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. The unit’s name didn’t make much sense. The Army didn’t have but four Stryker brigades. But Fowler had given up trying to figure out the military’s logic on names, or anything else.

For six months, 3rd Platoon had been more or less orphaned from the rest of its company, peeled off to provide extra support for the supply convoys that ran on Highway 1 from Kandahar to Kabul. The convoys ran only once or twice a week, so the rest of the time, they got thrown onto random jobs that other units in the brigade didn’t want. They set up roadblocks to register motorcycles. They guarded detained Afghans who were scheduled to be moved to the big jail at Kandahar. They didn’t have a defined area of responsibility, and they rarely saw their company captain, much less their battalion commanders. As far as Fowler could see, the battalion had more or less forgotten they existed.

At least they lived on the same base as the rest of Bravo, Forward Operating Base Jackson. Jackson was a pile of trailers and blast walls in Zabul province. Like its neighbor to the west, Kandahar province, Zabul was the ass end of Afghanistan. No mountains here. Western Zabul and Kandahar were a mix of low brown hills and desert. Its soil supported two crops: poppies and the Taliban. More opium grew in Kandahar and the next-door province of Helmand than in the rest of the world put together. Not that you’d know it. Southern Afghanistan was dirt-poor. Literally. The locals lived in mud-walled compounds, no electricity or plumbing, just a bunch of dusty kids and goats and sheep.

But here they were, 3rd Platoon, the Lost Boys of Bravo Company. Now they were going down to Hamza Ali, a speck of a village fifteen miles from their base, for a “strongman show.” Sounded to Fowler like they’d be seeing more Stupid Afghan Tricks.

The show itself was a perfect example of the kind of jobs the platoon always got. It was part of COIN, which stood for counterinsurgency warfare. COIN meant, get into the villages and show the locals how much you want to help them. Pretend to care while they yell at one another about who stole whose goat. Give them a few bucks to rebuild the walls that the Strykers knocked over. Help them build a real country. Back in Vietnam, it had been called “hearts and minds.”

Fowler bet that COIN looked good on the presentations the generals gave the president. In reality, far as he could see, the Afghans were as close to building a real country as the hamsters he’d had in first grade. They were happy enough to take the free food and blankets and radios that the Army gave them. Then they kept their mouths shut when the Talibs came by planting bombs. They knew that sooner or later Fowler and his buddies would pack up and go home, and the Talibs would settle every score.

The Afghans might be stupid, but they weren’t dumb.

Meanwhile, when the elders of Hamza Ali invited Colonel Sean Brown, the commander at FOB Jackson, to see a show at their school, he followed the COIN doctrine. He said yes quick as if they’d offered him fifty-yard-line Cowboys — Giants tickets. Not that Brown had any intention of going. He kicked the visit to his executive staff, who sent it all the way down to 3rd Platoon.

ON THIS MISSION — using the word mission loosely — the drive was the most dangerous part. A lottery, more or less. The Strykers were armored personnel carriers that carried eleven guys, two driving and nine in the hole. They were twenty-ton beasts, with tall wheels and inch-thick armor. They looked indestructible.

But they weren’t. The Taliban’s most lethal weapon was what the Army called IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, giant homemade land mines. A big enough IED, say one built out of an old artillery shell, could turn a Stryker’s passenger compartment into a nine-man oven. A Stryker from Jackson had gotten popped about three months back. The bomb was huge, two 155-millimeter shells, a thousand pounds of explosive. Six guys had died. The others had been taken to the Army’s burn center at Fort Bliss in San Antonio. Word was they didn’t have faces anymore.

The good news was that bombs that big were rare. The bad news was that riding in the Strykers still stank. They had no windows or side doors, just hatches on top and a ramp in back. Fowler understood the logic. Doors and windows were weak points. The Stryker was meant to be a vault on wheels. But the inside felt like a vault, too, a cramped hold stinking of fear-sweat, cut off from the world except for a little screen that ran black-and-white video from the camera on the hull. Once the back ramp closed, the guys inside couldn’t do anything but wait. Not for nothing did soldiers call the Strykers Kevlar coffins.

Some guys slept during rides. Not Fowler. Inevitably, he caught himself thinking of the idiotic cartoon Smurfs. In almost every episode, the Smurfs, those miserable blue nitwits, wound up on the run from the evil wizard and his cat. Along the way, they whined constantly to Papa Smurf: “How much farther, Papa Smurf?” “Not far now.” A few seconds later: “How about now? Much farther now, Papa Smurf?” “No, not too much.” And then: “What about now? Is it much—” Until finally Papa Smurf, that old coot, lost his temper and yelled, “Yes, it is!” It was, too. Much farther. But in the end the Smurfs got where they were go-ing. No cartoon IEDs ever blew their cartoon asses to cartoon heaven. Fowler figured that was why he found them comforting.

Today at least they were on a hard-packed road, only a few big rocks to bounce them around. Even so, the convoy never got out of second gear. Outside of Highway 1, travel on Afghan roads was excruciatingly slow. The lead Stryker was equipped with the equivalent of a minesweeping snowplow, a steel harness that pushed thick concrete wheels. The harness was attached to the Stryker’s front end, so the wheels rolled about a dozen feet ahead of the truck. They were supposed to set off bombs before the Stryker reached them.

But the wheels worked only on “pressure-plate” mines, those that had a simple fuse set off by the weight of a vehicle. Lately, the Taliban were using more “command-detonated” mines, which exploded when an insurgent set them off. So the driver of the lead Stryker stopped whenever he saw freshly dug dirt patches or suspicious pieces of roadside trash. The delays lasted anywhere from minutes to hours, if a mine was found. Meanwhile, the Strykers in the rest of the convoy idled. How much farther now?

TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING Forward Operating Base Jackson, the convoy reached Hamza Ali. On the monitor inside Fowler’s truck, low brick buildings replaced empty fields. “Dismount in two,” Sergeant First Class Nick Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man, said.

Sergeant Coleman Young — one of the lucky guys, the ones who slept — grinned at Fowler. Young was squat and muscular and as close to a friend as Fowler had in the platoon. “Been watching that screen for us? Worst TV in the world. You know watching it makes no difference as to whether we hit a bomb. You do know that, right?”

“You missed out today.” Fowler didn’t mind the ribbing. Not from Young.

“Yeah?”

“Two crazy Afghan chicks getting it on. Behind the burqa, you know.” Behind the burqa had become a catchphrase for 3rd Platoon. It meant everything and nothing.

The Stryker stopped. “Ramp down in fifteen,” Rodriguez said. “Blue”—American soldiers—“left and right, so keep those safeties on.”

Fowler made sure his Kevlar vest was tight and checked his rifle. He stretched his legs and wiggled his toes inside his boots three times, right, left, right, his end-of-ride ritual. The Stryker’s back ramp cranked down, kicking up gray-brown dust. One by one the men stepped out. “Back to reality,” Young said.

“This is reality?”

“I hope not.”

The school was newly built, two stories with real windows and a chimney pumping a stream of black smoke into the sky. “Hamza Ali Primary and Secondary School,” a sign read in English. “Funded by United States Agency for International Development.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Fowler said.

“Not my tax dollars. Fowler, even you must know you pay no taxes as a member of the military serving in a war zone. You keep all twenty-five grand this year.”

“Plus all the chow I can eat.”

“Lucky you.”

“Heads up,” Rodriguez shouted to the platoon. “Let’s go!”

Rodriguez directed eight guys to stand sentry. The rest followed him and Lieutenant Tyler Weston, the platoon commander, to a dirt field behind the school. The low sun stuck in their eyes and turned them into teardrop shadows.

Weston had taken off his Kevlar and was wearing only his uniform. Soldiers called the practice bucking. Officers bucked at these events to prove that they trusted their Afghan hosts. Fowler thought bucking was idiotic. But then, he wasn’t an officer, or much of a soldier either. He’d realized after a few weeks that he didn’t belong in the Army. He got rattled too easily. He wasn’t a coward, not exactly. He went outside the wire like everybody else. But he was scared a lot. The fear slowed him down. And being slow was dangerous. The guys who separated themselves from their fear, who moved fast and sure, those were the guys everybody leaned on. Fowler didn’t like Rodriguez, the platoon’s senior enlisted man. But he knew Rodriguez was a better soldier than he’d ever be. The Army had trained Fowler how to move, handle a radio, strip a rifle, but all the training in the world couldn’t strip the fear from his heart.

So Fowler thought, and not for the first time, as an Afghan man stepped forward and shouted, “Welcome, soldiers! Welcome, America!” He went on in Pashtun for a couple minutes, baka-baka-baka. The platoon didn’t have an interpreter along, so none of the soldiers knew what he was saying, but the Afghans seemed to like the speech. When he was finished, Weston and Rodriguez stepped forward, holding a black bag. Weston opened it, tossed out a half dozen soccer balls.

“The United States is pleased to present this gift to the schoolchildren of Hamza Ali,” Weston said. He chipped one of the balls toward the school’s back wall. Two boys took off after it.

“How is this nonsense winning a war for us,” Young said under his breath to Fowler. “Giving them soccer balls? While they kill us with IEDs. Killing me softly.” These last three words delivered falsetto.

“With his song.”

“Cracker boy knows the Fugees.”

“Cracker boy, that’s a compliment, ’cause I can roll.”

“Tell yourself that.”

“You think you’re cool because you know the Fugees, Coleman? Everybody knows the Fugees. My grandma knows the Fugees and she’s been dead five years.”

“I am the stupidest black man in the world, coming over here to fight this war. My uncle got two fingers blown off in Vietnam but at least he got drafted. What’s my excuse?”

Fowler was spared from answering when two men and a boy stepped out of the school’s back door. One man had thick black hair and wore a powder blue warm-up suit. The other carried a canvas bag and a sledgehammer. The boy was shirtless and wore nylon pants, canary yellow emblazoned with white racing stripes.

“A sledgehammer,” Young said. “Stupid Afghan Tricks. Oh, yes.”

Without warning, the boy sprinted toward them and launched himself into a cartwheel and then three backflips. The man in the tracksuit followed with flips of his own. He finished beside the boy, picked him up, casually threw him in the air. The boy landed cat-quick and danced in a low furious whirl, kicking out his legs, the fabric of his yellow pants catching the sun. When the boy finished, the man raised his hands and said, in English, “Please welcome to Parwan”—he tapped his chest—“and Khost.” He pointed to the boy. “Famous father-and-son acrobat. Please like show.”

“How about some applause,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. The soldiers clapped as Parwan unzipped his jacket, revealing a tight black T-shirt. Afghan men insisted on modesty for women but showed off their own bodies at any provocation, Fowler had noticed.

When the applause ended, the man and the boy walked to opposite sides of the field. They turned and faced each other like cowboys about to duel. Then they sprinted at each other. Just before they were about to collide, Parwan ducked low and his son jumped. He flipped over his father’s head and landed and spread his arms wide like an Olympic gymnast. Pure energy. Even Young clapped, though as a rule he was impossible to impress.

Parwan and Khost bowed to the crowd. The second man stepped forward and spun the sledgehammer over his head, an Afghan Thor. The hammer was handmade and brutal, a dull silver log flecked with red spots that hinted at a thousand atrocities. When he was finished showing off the hammer, he reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a board laced with nails.

Beside him, the boy leaned backward until his palms touched the ground. His head was upside down. His skinny stomach arched high into the air. The man lowered the board onto the boy’s naked belly — nails first. The crowd was silent now. The man picked a flat brick out of the bag and placed it atop the board. He knelt and held the board steady as Parwan picked up the hammer—

“Oh, no,” Fowler said involuntarily—

And brought it down onto the brick. Which snapped gunshot loud. The nails quivered. The boy’s stomach trembled. Parwan dropped the hammer, raised the two halves of the broken brick. The boy stood. A dozen crimson spots flecked his stomach, an instant case of chicken pox. Otherwise he didn’t seem hurt. He touched his fingers to his stomach and raised them to show their crimson tips and kissed them. Father and son stood side by side and bowed as the men in the audience roared their approval.

“How do you win a war against people who break bricks on their kids for fun?”

Fowler had no answer for that.

THEN THE SHOOTING STARTED.

A short burst of AK fire, five or six rounds, a soft popping from the northwest. Sound traveled easily in the air here. Not much ambient noise. Fowler figured the shots were a way off. The threat wasn’t immediate, if it was a threat at all. Fifteen seconds later a single shot followed. Then silence. Weston and Rodriguez murmured to each other. Rodriguez ducked his head to his shoulder, murmured into his radio. “We’re taking a walk,” he said to Fowler and the rest of 1st Squad. Fowler wished that they would let the Talibs come to them for once, instead of the other way around. But Rodriguez wasn’t asking his opinion.

Back at the Stryker, Rodriguez grabbed his backpack and then huddled up the squad — seven men in all, since 1st Squad’s driver and vehicle commander were staying in the village on sentry duty. “Lieutenant wants us to take a look-see for those shooters. Rest of the platoon’s staying here. It’s probably nothing, and he doesn’t want to mess up the show. What we know, there’s a bunch of houses about a klick northwest. A canal runs that way. We’ll go in dismounted. We’re fishing for them, they’re fishing for us. If there’s somebody out there, let’s take them out. Any questions?”

Rodriguez stepped up to Fowler, tugged on his Kevlar.

“No fear, Private. Say it.”

“No fear.”

Rodriguez looked over the men. “Huddle up and Hoo-ah!” The two syllables were the all-purpose Army cheer — the sound of soldiers coming together.

“Hoo-ah!”

“Hoo-ah!”

“Hoo-ah!” Even Fowler felt his spirits rise.

THEY WALKED THROUGH the village’s empty streets to the irrigation canal on the edge of town. Seven men. The tip of a sword that stretched halfway across the world. A hundred billion dollars a year to put them here, support them with drones and night-vision optics and ground-penetrating radar and every tool that the Pentagon’s procurement managers could imagine, the more expensive the better. Now they walked, as soldiers always had and always would. They turned northwest, walked on either side of the dry irrigation canal, eight feet wide and four feet deep. A gray hole in this gray land. Their footsteps left no trace on the hard ground. They walked slowly. They didn’t speak.

Rodriguez put four guys on the left side, three on the right. Fowler was second on the left, twenty yards behind the point. He didn’t like the approach. Mud-brick walls dotted the fields around them, low and irregular, along with scrubby bare-branched trees. If they were walking into an ambush, the hostiles would have cover and a clear field of fire. But Rodriguez was gung ho as a rule, and the platoon hadn’t sniffed a firefight in months. Fowler thought Rodriguez was probably hoping to engage.

They moved toward two shapeless clusters of huts, none more than ten feet high, protected by low walls. Donkeys and goats munched on garbage in a hand-built pen. No doubt everyone who lived here was related, a dozen families of kissing cousins.

Fowler kept his eyes up, looking for movement on the roofs. If any hostiles were hiding here, the ambush would start before 1st Squad got too close. For the most part, the Talibs used simple guerrilla tactics. They blew bombs at a distance and opened up with their AKs, trying to get American soldiers to chase them into fields of IEDs.

But the ambush didn’t come. The soldiers stepped closer, their boots scrabbling along the canal’s edge. On the left, one house had been painted bright blue. But sun and wind had bleached its paint until only a few snatches of color remained. All of Afghanistan felt drained of color to Fowler. Reduced to monochrome.

Rodriguez raised his left hand. The centipede of soldiers stopped. Rodriguez squatted low. Fowler followed his eyes toward a piece of metal that looked like the top of a soup can. He was trying to decide whether he was looking at a mine or a piece of trash. Finally, Rodriguez poked at the metal with the tip of his M-4. It flipped away harmlessly and skittered into the canal. Rodriguez stood, twirled his finger: Keep moving.

Two Afghans walked out of the hut that had once been blue. Both wore the shalwar kameez, the simple long tunic and pants that were standard for Afghan men. But one was wearing distinctly un-Afghan headgear, a black cowboy hat. “Halt,” Sergeant Kevin Roman, on point, shouted in English, lifting his M-4. The two men stopped, raised their hands. The squad closed around them, forming a loose semicircle around the men.

“Gentlemen,” Rodriguez said. “Why were you shooting?”

The men looked blankly at him.

“You have Taliban here?”

“Taliban? La, la.”

“Anybody speakee the English?” Rodriguez said. “Come on.” He turned toward the huts, where little boys and girls peeked at them. “Anybody home?” Rodriguez shouted. The kids disappeared. Fowler caught movement from a hut maybe fifty yards ahead and swung his rifle to cover. A man in a blue shalwar kameez stepped out, his hands high. “Hello!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot! Everything is okay.”

The man walked toward them. Waddled, really. He was heavy, with a wide, rolling gait. He reminded Fowler of an Afghan they’d seen a couple months ago at a checkpoint they’d run maybe thirty miles from here. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. Fowler stepped toward the guy, but Rodriguez shook his head. “I got this, Private.”

“I feel like I’ve seen this guy before, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, well, they look alike.” Rodriguez was right on that. The Pashtuns had dark brown skin and brown eyes and thick beards and big noses and hands and feet. When the guy got close, Fowler saw he had a nasty scar down the right side of his neck, like somebody had just missed getting his head on a platter. Fowler was sure he’d seen that scar before. Weird.

“You are looking for Taliban?” Scar said.

“Always, my man.”

“No Taliban here.”

“Who was shooting at us?”

The guy shook his head. Rodriguez adjusted the plug of dip in his mouth with his tongue and spit a stream of brown saliva at the canal. His dipping and his temper had earned him the nickname Volcano.

“We heard shots.”

“No shooting.”

“Liar. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Roman, come with me. I want to talk with this dude in private. In his compound. Fowler, Young, you stay here, keep an eye on the huts. B Team, you flare left, case we spook somebody out the side.”

“What about the right side?”

“Right side’s going to have to look after itself. Can’t do more with just seven guys.”

Fowler didn’t like the plan. They were looking at only a few huts, but even so, they could be walking into an ambush. The Taliban didn’t usually set up attacks inside villages, but there was a first time for everything.

“You steady, Private?” Rodriguez said.

Have to rub my face in it, don’t you, Sergeant? Every time. Can’t help yourself. An ugly thought flitted across Fowler’s mind, an idea he couldn’t have imagined having when this tour began. I hope somebody lights you up. Mine, ambush, whatever. I hope you die, Rodriguez.

“Like a rock.”

“Good.” Rodriguez walked toward the Afghan man in quick, confident steps. “Quicker you show us around, quicker we’re done.”

The other two Afghans tried to follow, but Young lifted his rifle fractionally and they stepped back. When Rodriguez and Roman were out of earshot, Fowler stepped toward Young.

“Coleman, I’m sure I’ve seen that guy before. At a checkpoint.”

“Like Rodriguez said, they all look alike.”

“They don’t all have a scar like that.”

“More than you think.”

“I can’t believe we’ve still got three months left. I can’t do it.”

“You can. You will. And come home a hero.”

“Hero.”

“That’s what they call us, isn’t it?”

A hundred yards ahead, the scarred man pulled open a gate. Rodriguez and Roman followed him inside. The way they were moving bothered Fowler. Rodriguez might be a dickwad, but he was a good soldier, always vigilant. Now he seemed relaxed. As if he were certain that nothing inside the gate would threaten. Fowler had the strange feeling that this patrol had been a sham, its only purpose to get Rodriguez to that compound. He watched the gate close and wondered why.

2

The house at the end of the flagstone driveway was wide and brick and faced west toward the Bitterroot Mountains. It had two chimneys and a three-car garage. It looked… in truth, it looked like a nice place to live. Like it had a den filled with books that had actually been read and a refrigerator stuffed with leafy green vegetables. John Wells hadn’t gotten inside and he was already feeling defensive.

Though the flagstone was a bit much.

Wells rolled up the driveway, which turned to asphalt beside the house. A thickly padded pillar supported a regulation-size basketball backboard. A teenage boy faced the hoop. He dribbled the ball between his hands like a three-card-monte dealer hiding an ace. He was maybe six-foot-two and, despite the cool fall air, wore only knee-length white shorts and a blue Boise State T-shirt. As Wells drove up the flagstone, the kid stepped back and launched a fadeaway jumper. It traced an easy arc and dropped through the net.

Wells parked his rental Kia a few feet from the boy and grabbed the bouquet of orchids and lilies he’d bought in downtown Missoula. He didn’t want to open the door, but after a couple seconds he forced himself out.

The boy kept dribbling, skittering the ball between his legs. He was still growing into his body. His chest was flat, but his calves and forearms were thick with muscle. He had Wells’s deep brown eyes and solid nose, and his hair was long and straight and pulled back in a ponytail. He launched another fadeaway jumper, this one just short. Wells collected the rebound.

“You must be Evan.” You must be my son. Though I’m more or less guessing, since I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.

“I must be.”

“I’m John.” Wells stepped in for a hug, but the boy took a quick half step back and extended a hand.

“Nice to meet you.” Evan spoke softly, his words clipped flat. No hint of emotion. He sounded like a state trooper talking to a driver he’d pulled over for speeding. Without affect, the psychiatrists said. Though not without effect. Wells watched his son watching him. He supposed he’d earned that voice.

“Practicing your jumper.”

“Actually working on my dunks.”

“Right.”

Evan cocked his head at the flowers. “Those for me? I’m more into roses as a rule.”

“Noted.”

Evan dribbled twice, threw up a fadeaway. This time the ball clanged off the front of the rim and bounced at Wells, who laid the flowers on the ground and corralled it.

“Coach tried to get me interested in ninth grade, but football was more my game,” Wells said. “Now I wish I’d listened to him. All those hits add up. I still feel some of them.” Though Wells was lying. He wouldn’t have traded football for anything. He’d loved the sport’s raw power, its velocity and contact. War without death.

He spun the basketball in his hands, dribbled once, flung up a jumper. The ball bounced off the back rim. Evan grabbed it and tucked it under his arm, an oddly adult gesture, as if he were in charge and Wells the teenager. His self-possession impressed Wells.

“You should probably tell my mom you’re here.”

“Sure.” Wells turned to the house as Heather — his ex-wife — opened the door. Her hair, once a light honey brown, was streaked with gray and cut short, just above her shoulders. She and Wells had divorced barely a year after Evan was born, when Wells left them to go undercover in Afghanistan and infiltrate al-Qaeda for the first time. These were the prehistoric days before September 11. Wells had seen Heather only once since. Now he crossed the driveway and the stairs and hugged her. She hesitated and then reached for him and stretched her arms around his back. She was tiny, half his size. “You look great,” he said.

“You lie.”

“Never.”

“Fairly often, I suspect. But come on in anyway.”

“What about…” Wells nodded at the side of the house, where Evan was once again shooting jumpers.

“Let him be. He’ll come in on his own once he sees us talking.”

SHE LED HIM THROUGH a house that was as handsome as Wells had imagined from the outside. The American dream alive and well in three dimensions. The pictures stung the most. Heather had remarried, a lawyer named Howard. They had two children, George and Victoria — Wells had looked up their names this morning. Family photos covered every wall. Victoria playing soccer. Evan spinning a basketball on his index finger. George standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. The five of them somewhere in Mexico or Central America, standing on a ruin, grinning.

Wells knew that the photos weren’t for him. They’d been up long before he arrived. But he couldn’t help feeling they were meant as an object lesson, a reminder of the life he’d traded away. Though he was probably fooling himself. Probably this life had never been open to him.

“They’re beautiful. All of them.”

“Thank you.”

“And they get along?”

“You know, they’re kids, they fight, but the fact that Evan has a different dad, that’s never part of it. At least as far as I know.”

“That’s great.” What about me? Wells wanted to ask. Does he ever ask about me? Even in his head, the question sounded impossibly self-centered.

Heather put Wells’s flowers in a glass pitcher and they sat at a marble-topped island in the kitchen. She didn’t ask whether he wanted anything to drink or eat, a reminder that he wasn’t truly welcome.

“Howard’s not around? Or the kids?”

“At the mall. And then a movie. I think something in three-D.”

“I’d like to meet them.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“Give me a little credit.”

“I know you, that’s all.”

Her certainty nettled Wells. “What do you know?”

“You’re very goal-oriented, John. ‘Must reconnect with son.’” Heather delivered that last sentence in a mock Terminator voice. “‘Building family ties, very important. Highest priority.’”

Wells nearly flared up, said something like, Still bitter after all these years. But he hadn’t come this far to argue. “I don’t even think of you as an ex anymore, Heather. We’ve been apart so much longer than we were together.”

“Another way of saying you only called to see Evan.”

“It’s another way of saying I hope we can be friends.”

“Sure, John. Friends.” She nodded at the absurdity of the idea. “I want you to know I don’t regret anything about us anymore, John. You gave me that boy and that’s plenty.”

“Why’d you let me come, then?”

“Wasn’t my choice. When you called, I asked Evan what he wanted, and he wanted to see you. And he’s old enough to decide for himself.” She plucked out an orchid from the bouquet, twirled it in her fingertips so its delicate scent bloomed. “So how’s D.C.?”

“I haven’t been there in months. Like I told you, I quit—”

“Officially. But that doesn’t mean anything, right? And especially not for you.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” Wells said, thinking about his last mission. Even though he’d been working privately, he’d used the CIA. And vice versa. “It adds a level of complexity. But anyway I’m mostly up in New Hampshire these days.”

“With the new girlfriend.”

“Her name’s Anne. And yes.”

“She’s a cop, you said?”

“Correct.”

“You going to make an honest woman of her?”

“She doesn’t need me to make her an honest woman.”

“Same old John. You must be bored. You always loved playing on the front lines of history.”

Wells couldn’t tell whether she was being ironic. “That’s not how it feels.”

“No?”

“It feels like I’m putting my finger in a dike.”

“John Wells, the little Dutch boy.”

“More like a plumber. With a very specialized skill set.”

Evan walked into the kitchen, basketball under his arm.

“Hi, Mom.” He gave Wells a big fake grin. “Hi, Dad.”

“Take a shower and lose the stink,” Heather said. “And not just how you smell. John came a long way to see you.”

“Good for him.”

“And no girl showers today. Keep it short.”

“I thought you wanted me to get clean.”

“No need to wear out the plumbing. John probably gets himself clean in twenty-two seconds with a Brillo pad.”

“I’m in the field, I find a clean patch of stone and strip down and just scrape myself across it,” Wells said.

“And he waxes. Less hair to get dirty.”

“Every inch. Little-known Special Forces trick.”

“You two are gross,” Evan said. He backed out of the kitchen.

“Thank you for that,” Wells said, after Evan’s footsteps had disappeared upstairs.

“For what?”

“Getting him to smile. He may have agreed to this, but it doesn’t look like he’s aching to bond.”

“You need to understand, John. All you can hope for at this point is to be a friend. Someone maybe he’ll call if he’s back east. And that’s the absolute best.”

“I get it.”

“What were you expecting, John? You’d sail in and five minutes later everything would be cool?”

“I told you I get it.”

Upstairs, a shower kicked on. While they waited, Heather filled him in on Evan’s life, his difficulties with AP Biology, his love of basketball, his dream college — the University of California at San Diego. “I don’t know if he has the grades for it.”

“What about girls?” Wells said.

“Nothing serious. These kids don’t really date. They text one another and sneak over to one another’s houses and we can’t do much about it unless we want to lock him in his bedroom all the time. Which would only make it worse. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite either. Not like I was a nun in high school. So I told him to be careful, not to get anyone pregnant, and he looked at me like, ‘I’m not an idiot. I know.’”

Evan reappeared freshly scrubbed fifteen minutes later. “Ready, Pops?”

“Where to?”

“I figured you could take me into the backcountry, show me how to blow stuff up. Survival training. Make a man out of me, know what I’m saying?”

Wells looked at Heather. “Please tell me he’s joking.”

“Of course he’s joking.”

“Of course I’m joking. We’re going to this coffeehouse downtown. By the U. It’s kind of a cliché, but the coffee’s good.” Evan kissed his mother on the cheek. “You were right. He doesn’t have a great sense of humor.”

“I warned you.”

“I’m in the room,” Wells said. “I can hear you. Both of you.”

GRIZZLY COFFEE had overstuffed couches and grainy black-and-white photos of car accidents on the walls and a community corkboard with offers of rides to Seattle. The guy behind the counter had an ornate zombie tattooed across his right arm, its red-and-yellow eyes iridescent in the late-day sun.

Wells ordered a large coffee, skim milk. He was obscurely pleased to see Evan do the same. The tables in the back were empty.

“Here we are, father and son, together at last,” Evan said.

“I want to thank you for seeing me, Evan. From everything your mom’s said, you’re an amazing young man.”

“I’m here because I figured you wanted to give me the key to a secret bank account with, like, a hundred million dollars.”

“If I had it, it would be yours. I just thought maybe we could get to know each other.” As soon as Wells said the words, he wished he hadn’t. Get to know each other. Like this was a first date. A bad one, with no chemistry.

“I just threw up in my mouth.”

Wells sipped his coffee and waited for Evan to talk. To distract himself, he watched the barista make drinks, working the knobs and handles of the machines behind the counter as expertly as a nineteenth-century trainman running a steam engine.

“You’re just going to stare into space until I start talking,” Evan said after a few minutes.

“Waiting is one thing I’m good at.”

“Fine. You win. Ve have vays of making you talk. So let’s talk.”

“I just wanted to tell you face-to-face, I thought about you all these years. Wondered how you were, what your life was like.”

“You had a weird way of showing it. I know you were gone a long time. But you’ve been back five years now, more, and you never tried to see me.”

“Your mom didn’t want me to, and I respected her wishes.”

“Yeah. You seem like the kind of guy who does what other people tell you.”

“I look at you, I don’t see a stranger. I see how we’re connected. And I know how you’re feeling.”

“Of course you do, Dad. You know me so well—”

“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase it—”

“Can we stop talking now?”

Wells played what he hoped would be his winning card. “Is there anything you want to know about me? What I’ve been doing?”

“I know. You’ve been saving the world. Call of Duty: John Wells Edition. Only problem is, I don’t see how the world’s been saved. Looks like a mess to me.”

“Wait till you’re my age.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Wells was ready for this question, at least. He’d decided years before that Evan deserved the truth. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“More than one.”

“More than one. What kind of answer is that? More than ten?”

Wells hesitated. “Yes.”

“In self-defense?”

“That’s not really a yes-or-no question.”

“I think it is.”

“What if Chinese cops are chasing you, and if they catch you, they’ll turn you over to someone who’s going to kill you? So you shoot them even though they’re just doing their jobs? Or say it’s 2001, after September eleventh, and you’re undercover with some Talibs and you have to make contact with your side, the American side. But the only way to do that is to kill the guys you’re with. So you do.”

“How come you put it in the second person? You mean I. ‘So I do. I killed them.’”

“That’s right. I killed them.” He’d executed them, no warning. Men he’d known for years. Their skulls breaking and exposing the gray fruit inside.

“Doesn’t sound like self-defense.”

“It was necessary.” Wells leaned across the table, fighting the urge to grab his son by the shoulders. “Evan. I’ll tell you about what I’ve done. Everything I can, except the stuff that’s classified and might get you in trouble. But I’m not going to argue the morality. Some things you can’t understand unless you’ve been there.”

“That’s what guys like you always say. That nobody else gets it.”

“These people we fight, they target civilians. Innocents.” Wells was arguing now, contradicting what he’d said just a few seconds before, but he couldn’t help himself. “They strap bombs to kids your age, and blow themselves up in crowded markets.”

“When we fire missiles and blow up houses in Pakistan, what’s that?”

“I am telling you, I’ve seen this up close, and we make mistakes, but these guys are not our moral equivalents.” Wells wondered whether he should explain that he personally was certain that he’d saved more lives than he’d taken. But they weren’t talking about him. They were talking about Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Those long, inconclusive conflicts that ground to a close without parades or treaties. Wars where the United States had a hundred different goals and the enemy had none, except to send American soldiers home in body bags.

“Let me ask you something, then, Dad. Suppose I told you in two years, ‘Hey, I want to join the Army. Enlist.’ Would you be in favor of that?”

“Not as an enlisted man, no.”

“But—”

“Soldiers follow orders. If you’re concerned about the way we’re fighting, you’ve got to be giving those orders. Be an officer. That’s life. You wanted to go to West Point, get your butter bar”—the gold-colored bar that newly minted second lieutenants received—“I wouldn’t be against that.”

“But you quit. You left the agency.”

“Because I was disgusted with the politics inside Langley. But I’ll always believe that the United States has the right to defend itself.”

“Oh, so that’s what we’re doing?”

The contempt in Evan’s voice tore a hole in Wells’s stomach real as a slug. Suddenly, Wells knew that Evan had agreed to see him for one reason only. Evan despised him, or some funhouse vision of him, and wanted him to know. Wells wondered what Heather had told Evan. Or—

“Is this because I wasn’t around? Are you mad?”

“I have two real parents. I couldn’t miss you any less.”

“Listen.” Evan stiffened, and Wells knew he’d said exactly the wrong word. Then he repeated it. “Listen. You think you’re the only one wondering what we’re doing over there? Everybody who’s been there asks himself whether we’re doing any good.”

“But you keep doing it. They keep doing it.”

“Because those soldiers don’t have the luxury of second-guessing their orders. They do what they’re told, and when they’re outside the wire, they have to figure out who’s a civilian and who’s the enemy, and if they guess wrong they die—”

“They’re all volunteers. Right? They knew what they were getting into. Whatever we’re doing over there, they’re not bystanders. They’re morally responsible.”

“That makes them heroes, Evan. Not villains.”

“Just like you.”

Wells pushed himself back from the table. He’d pictured meeting his son a hundred times: hiking in Glacier National Park, rafting on the Colorado River, even driving to Seattle for a baseball game, an echo of the road trips he’d taken with his own father to Kansas City. He’d imagined Evan would want to hear the details of his missions, would ask him about being Muslim. Wells had converted during the long years he’d spent undercover, and he’d held on to the faith after coming back to the United States. He’d even wondered whether he might become something like an uncle who visited once a year. Ultimately, he’d imagined his son telling him, I want you to be part of my life.

But somehow he’d never imagined this particular disaster, this fierce, cool boy taking him apart as if they weren’t blood at all. The bitterest irony was that Evan’s dispassionate anger wasn’t far from Wells’s own casual cruelty. Wells didn’t doubt that, with the right training, Evan would be a Special Forces — caliber soldier. He had the reflexes and the size. Though this might not be the moment to mention that career path.

“Evan. You’re a strong young man, you’re politically engaged—”

“Don’t patronize me—”

“I’m not. But you think I’m a war criminal—”

“I didn’t say that—”

“Close enough. And if not me, a lot of guys I know. And that’s so far from the truth that I’m going to lose my temper soon, and I don’t want that. You’ve got to be able to separate the war from the men who fight.”

“The war is the men who fight.”

“Let me take you home, and in a few years, when you have more perspective, we can try again. If you want.”

“I’m never gonna change my mind.”

“People your age always say that.”

“Let’s go.”

WELLS WOULD HAVE LIKED to ask Evan about basketball, or girls, or his classes, all the everyday details of life as a teenager. Surely high school hadn’t changed, even if kids flirted now in 140-character bursts instead of whispered phone calls. But they’d left that conversation behind. They drove in silence. When they arrived, Heather waited on the front steps. Evan opened his door before the car had stopped. Wells sat in the car and watched him go. He’d lost his relationship with his only child without ever having one. Neat trick. After Evan disappeared, Wells stepped out of the car.

“Smart kid.”

“He is that.”

“Doesn’t like the war much. Or me.”

She turned up her hands.

“You could have warned me.”

“I wasn’t sure it would go that way and I didn’t want to jinx it. I’m sorry.”

“I like him, you know. Politically aware, intelligent — he’ll run for something one day. Something important. And win.”

“I hope so.”

“At least I don’t have to worry that he misses me. He made that clear.”

“Would you rather he did? He felt some terrible lack in his life?”

She shoots, she scores. “Maybe I’ll try again in a few years. Meantime, if you or he want to reach me—”

She stood, hugged him. “Good-bye, John.”

WELLS DROVE. He’d booked a hotel for two nights, but now he just wanted to roll on 90, let its long twin lanes carry him east. He’d grown up in Hamilton, south of Missoula, and he’d planned to visit the graveyard where his parents were buried. He’d have to wait for another trip to pay those respects.

He wasn’t angry with his son for questioning the necessity of war. Blind faith in your leaders will get you killed, Bruce Springsteen had said. But Wells could take only the coldest comfort in his pride. He’d lost any chance to connect with the boy. If Evan thought of him at all, it would be as a sperm donor, the man who’d contributed half his DNA and then disappeared.

Wells closed his eyes and counted silently to ten. When he opened them, the wide prairie on either side of the highway hadn’t changed. Time to face the truth, leave his son behind.

AND THEN HIS CELL RANG. A blocked number.

“John. You up in the woods, scaring the bears?” Ellis Shafer, his old boss at the agency. He was scheduled to retire in the spring. But Wells figured Shafer would work out a deal to stay. He claimed to have a happy life outside the agency, but he was in no hurry to get to it. Just like Wells. At this moment, Wells knew he’d buy whatever Shafer was selling.

“Montana. Visiting Evan.”

“Sojourning.”

“Is this call about the size of your vocabulary?”

“Master Duto has something for you. A mission, should you choose to accept it.”

Wells was silent.

“Before you say no—”

“I didn’t say no.”

“Must have gone badly out there.”

Wells didn’t answer.

“John?”

“I realize you enjoy demonstrating your cleverness at every opportunity, Ellis, but now is not a good time.”

“Duto wants you to go to Afghanistan.”

“He forget I don’t work for him anymore?”

“He thinks there’s a problem in Kabul, and I think he’s right.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The kind better discussed in person.”

Sure as night was dark, Duto had an angle here. Angles, more likely. “What’s my excuse?”

“Officially, you’ll be there on a morale mission. Also — and this will be shared privately with senior guys — you’ll be making an overall assessment of the war. Nothing in writing, just impressions that you’ll present when you get home. You go over, spend a couple days at Kabul station. Have dinner with COS”—an acronym that sounded like an old-school rapper but in reality stood for chief of station—“then visit a couple bases, meet the Joes. Talk to whoever you like.”

“Pretty good cover.”

“Yes. Come to Langley, and Duto and I will fill you in on the rest.”

Wells wondered what Evan would make of this offer. No doubt he’d dismiss it as macho crap, a pointless exercise.

“Great,” Wells said. “I’m in.”

3

In the village, five minutes ticked by. The sun lost itself behind a cloud. Young pulled open a pouch on his Kevlar vest, extracted a pack of Newports.

“You have to smoke Newports, Coleman? I can almost see you on a billboard wearing one of those Day-Glo orange suits. Right above an ad with Billy Dee Williams sipping from a quart bottle.”

Young took a deep drag, blew the smoke in Fowler’s direction. “Menthol tastes good. Plus you people don’t smoke them, so I don’t have to share.”

“You people.”

“White people. You’re the one who went there.”

“Lemme try one.”

“A white person?”

“Come on.”

Young tucked away the pack. Fowler surveyed the empty village.

“What are they doing?”

“Don’t know. And not guessing.”

“Where’s B Team?”

“Lighting up, probably. And nothing menthol. Nothing that comes in a pack.”

Fowler was embarrassed he hadn’t realized. Of course. The three soldiers on the B fire team had turned into hash smokers the last couple months. Along with half the rest of the platoon.

“What are we doing here, Coleman?”

“You’re tripping over your own damn feet. I’m trying to stay alive. Get home.”

“No, what are we doing here? Right now.”

“Maybe Rodriguez found himself a kebab stand.”

“Kebabs.”

“Or tacos. I don’t know and I don’t care. You’re so curious, go check it out for yourself.”

Just that quick, Fowler decided he was tired of being scared. “You know what? I think I will.”

“You find any kebabs, let me know.”

THE STREET WAS FILLED with the random junk that was everywhere in Afghanistan, shreds of plastic and canvas, the stuff even the goats couldn’t eat. No metal, though. Metal was valuable. The Afghans salvaged it.

The village looked as dismal up close as it had from a distance. In richer areas, Afghans lived in compounds hidden by ten-foot mud-straw walls. Here the walls were barely waist-high, exposing the battered homes behind them. The air was sweet and greasy, with a bitter tang underneath. A mix of wood smoke, cooking oil, and sewage.

Fowler heard the voices of women and children hiding in the houses. The words faded as he moved closer, picked up again once he passed. They couldn’t see him and still they treated him like a leper. As if even their voices were a gift he didn’t deserve. He wanted to hate them. But then, they hadn’t asked him to come here. He reached the house where the Afghan had led Rodriguez and Roman. This was the fanciest place in town, the tallest midget, with seven-foot walls and a filigreed gate. He peeked through the filigree—

And a single shot cracked behind him. Fowler flattened himself against the wall, checked left and right. Chickens squawked wildly. Behind him, Young tossed away his cigarette and scanned the empty fields that lay between them and the rest of the platoon. Fowler wondered whether the Talibs had lured them out here to cut them off, trap them.

But nothing happened. Terror and boredom, the twin poles of infantry duty. The chickens chattered away. Fowler took advantage of their noise to pull open the gate. He slipped inside, two quick sliding steps.

The yard was empty aside from a rusty Weber gas grill, which didn’t make sense, and a brand-new ATV, which kinda did. A diesel engine, probably an electrical generator, hummed somewhere in back. Electricity and an ATV. By local standards, whoever owned this place was living large. Fowler eased the gate shut and waited for someone to open the door, walk out of the house. But no one did.

Fowler stepped forward, then hesitated, holding his left leg off the ground with the exaggerated care of Inspector Clouseau. He could explain everything he’d done so far. He could say he’d come up for orders. But if he sneaked up to the house to see what Rodriguez was doing inside… Spying on a sergeant was definitely a no-no.

But maybe he wasn’t spying at all. Maybe they needed him. Maybe the Talibs had captured Rodriguez and Roman. Fowler imagined them tied back-to-back. They looked up in awe as Fowler picked off the insurgents one by one, with the practiced double taps of a Special Forces lifer. Fowler saluted them casually: No need to thank me. Just doing my job. The vision was ridiculous. Still, it spurred him. He crossed the yard, pressed himself against the house.

And heard a voice. A woman. Moaning quietly. Had he stumbled on a brothel? Impossible. The Afghans stoned women to death just for talking to men. Fowler inched along the side of the house to a window covered by a wrought-iron grille. He lowered himself to his knees, peeked in—

And found himself watching porn. The video was playing on a television propped against the back wall. Rodriguez and Roman had come here to watch porn? Fowler didn’t get it. Then he looked around the room and—

Everything made sense. Roman sat against the wall, a glass pipe in one hand, lighter in the other. He flicked the lighter to the pipe and sucked, greedy as a newborn. He exhaled a gray cloud and rubbed his stomach happily. “Good smoke,” he said to the ceiling. “Steep and deep.”

Rodriguez ignored the commentary. He stood next to a wooden table as the Afghan with the scar put two plastic-wrapped bricks on a digital scale. “Two point zero exactly. Sixteen kilos total.”

Rodriguez pulled a Ka-Bar, a knife, off his belt. He carefully sliced the plastic around one of the bricks. “What is that?” the Afghan said.

“Testing, one, two, three.” Rodriguez pulled a pouch from his backpack. “Soon as this powder in here turns green, we’re ready to go.”

“I promise you, it’s good.”

“From the factory to you,” Roman said. “Buy direct and save.”

Rodriguez stepped to the television and kicked over the DVD player hooked to it, stopping the show. “Stand post at the front door, Roman. Lemme finish, get us out of here. We wasted too much time already.”

“Sir, respectfully point out that I am stoned to the gills and not at full combat readiness—”

Rodriguez snapped the pipe from Roman’s hand. “Now. Before I jam this down your throat.”

Fowler picked up his helmet, pushed himself up, inched along the wall. Then he heard Roman’s gear rattling inside the house and his composure broke. He ran for the gate.

Back on the street, he closed the gate as smoothly as he could. He checked over his shoulder. The house’s front door was just opening. Fowler squared his shoulders and walked back to Coleman Young. He didn’t look back. He was proud of himself for that much anyway.

“I miss anything?” Young said.

“No kebabs. The door was closed and I couldn’t decide whether to knock. I stood there until I felt stupid and left.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Huh. What happened to your pants?”

Fowler looked down. His knees were covered with a dark brown splotch that stank of diesel. He must have knelt in a puddle without realizing. It was the porn’s fault. The porn had distracted him. He wiped madly at the stain and succeeded only in covering his hands with a greasy film. Might as well be wearing a sign that said “I’ve been spying on you, Sergeant.”

“It was a drug deal. A big one. They had a scale.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Kilos. It’s true.”

Young grabbed Fowler’s Kevlar, pulled him close. “I don’t care if it’s true. I don’t want to hear it.”

“What do I do, Coleman?”

“You keep your mouth shut, Private.” Young pushed Fowler back so hard that he nearly fell on his butt. “Be cool. They coming now.”

Fowler turned. Rodriguez and Roman walked toward him. The Afghan in the blue robe was gone. Probably still in the house, watching porn. A real good Muslim. Dealing smack to the infidels.

Roman grinned at them, pointed a finger pistol at Fowler. Fowler’s mouth went dry. If he didn’t calm down, he feared he might cry. “I’m not built for this, Sergeant,” he muttered.

“It’s all right, Ricky. Nothing’s gonna happen now. I’ll watch your back and we’ll talk later. Back at the FOB.” Young tapped out two Newports, handed one to Fowler. Fowler wiped his mouth, lit up, puffed away.

“Tastes like an air freshener.”

“Good for you. Makes your lungs all minty. Smile and salute.”

B Team rounded the corner as Rodriguez reached them. His backpack sat snug on his shoulders, Fowler saw. All that extra weight. “Anything to report?”

“That one shot,” Young said. “Nothing else.”

“All right. We’re done here then. Got a couple names. Probably junk but Weston’ll like it. He can give it to the G-2.” The battalion intelligence officer.

“They’ll give him a pat on the head and a present with a big red bow.”

“When Daddy’s happy, everybody’s happy.” Rodriguez poked at Fowler’s knees with the muzzle of his carbine. “What happened there, Private?”

“Sir. Figured I’d look over the left side of the villa. Fell in a puddle of diesel. I think it was diesel, anyway, sir. Smells like it.”

“Excellent soldiering. We get home, I’m signing you up for the Very Special Forces, where everybody’s a winner.”

“I think of myself as a very special soldier, sir.”

“Yes, you are. You see anything over there around the corner? Besides the puddle?”

Fowler held Rodriguez’s eyes. “Goats, Sergeant. Nothing but goats.”

“All right then. For showing that initiative, I’m giving you point on the way back, Private. Look alive. Do me proud.”

“Yes, sir.”

THEY SHUFFLED BACK toward Hamza Ali. For once, Fowler wasn’t worried about mines. He couldn’t stop thinking about the scale, those plastic-wrapped bricks. He’d seen drugs before. Heck, he’d grown up two hours from the Mexican border. He’d smoked pot like everyone else in the universe.

But buying heroin by the kilo was a different game. Fowler couldn’t figure what Rodriguez was doing with the stuff. He wasn’t selling it on base, that was for sure. And where did he get the money for it? Fowler didn’t know what a kilo of heroin cost, but even here at the source it had to be a couple thousand bucks.

Next question: Did everybody know what was going on? Was Fowler the only sucker in the squad? Young hadn’t seemed surprised. Although Young always acted so cool. No, if everybody knew, Rodriguez wouldn’t have bothered to hide the deal. So Fowler had a choice: keep his mouth shut, ride out the last couple months. Or go to the CID — the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division — which had offices at the big base at Kandahar. But if the CID officers came poking around, Rodriguez would probably guess that Fowler had snitched.

Maybe Young would have the answer. Fowler was almost embarrassed to be leaning so hard on Young, who was barely two years older than him. But Young got along with everybody. He had that black-guy way of being cool without working at it.

The squad was stretched out, moving slowly, half-assed. Fowler slowed down to let them catch up. Rodriguez was directly behind him, Roman on the other side of the canal. Fowler was glad that Young was watching.

When they got about three hundred meters outside Hamza Ali, Fowler saw clumps of men and boys walking toward him. The show at the school must have ended. Fowler had forgotten all about the Stupid Afghan Tricks. The kids made a game of jumping across the canal, their gowns ballooning around their legs. A boy kicked one of the soccer balls that the platoon had handed out, his steps as precise as Fowler’s mom dicing an onion, back home in the kitchen. Fowler wished he could be there now.

The boy popped the ball into the air and headed it to himself. Kids were kids everywhere. Fowler smiled. “Hey,” he yelled. Fowler pointed at himself. “Kick it here. Me.” The kid hesitated and then kicked a perfect curling strike that soared out of the canal toward him—

AND EXPLODED.

Fowler heard the shots after he saw the ball disintegrate. They came from the right side of the canal, away from the village, an AK magazine fired on full auto.

Fowler jumped into the canal for cover and spun to find the shooter. To his right, the rest of the squad followed. They were stretched in a line, rifles at the ready. The fields in front of them looked empty. Then Fowler saw the shooter. It was the Afghan with the scar, the one who’d sold the drugs to Rodriguez. He was a long way off, at least four hundred meters, and sneaking along a low wall perpendicular to the canal. He was doubled over like he had a bad case of the runs.

For once, Fowler wasn’t afraid. His training took over. He grabbed the rough stone at the edge of the canal and pulled himself up to get a clean shot. He didn’t squeeze too tight and he led the target. He thought he had the guy.

But he missed. The dude was just too far off and too low and too many walls were in the way. Fowler aimed again, tightened his finger on the trigger—

He never heard the shot that cut his spinal cord in half. Didn’t feel it either. The pain faded as quickly as it bloomed. The earth rushed up to him and caught his chin. He didn’t understand what had happened to him, couldn’t frame this new place he’d gone. This lost country.

Pure confusion. He stood up, but he didn’t. His legs didn’t work, or his arms. The dark trickled into his eyes and his brain got thirsty and he needed air. So he took a breath but nothing happened. He had to breathe. Breathing was easy. Everyone could breathe. But not Fowler. Then the fear, panic, a pure white panic that flared against the black, but the black came on, stronger and stronger, and the white shrank to a pinprick and then nothing at all and—

He died.

YOUNG WAS CLOSEST to Fowler and the first to realize what had happened, that he’d been shot from behind, from somewhere in the fields between the canal and Hamza Ali. Young ran to Fowler. The others followed. They pulled his body into the canal and set up a perimeter and screamed at the villagers to get back, back, back.

Rodriguez got on his radio, called Weston. The rest of the platoon arrived minutes later. But the shooter was gone by the time they reached the huts behind the canal that were the most likely firing point. None of the villagers had anything to say. No one had seen anything. And so the Lost Boys of Bravo Company could do nothing but carry Fowler’s corpse back to their $2 million Strykers.

The guys didn’t talk much on the ride back to FOB Jackson. When they did, they cursed Hamza Ali and the Taliban, and Fowler, too, for his bad luck. Everybody figured he’d died in a freak ambush. He was the kind of guy who worried so much that he attracted his own trouble. Bad karma. Coleman Young didn’t say a word. But as he sat on the bench next to the empty space where Fowler should have been, he wondered who had killed Fowler. Rodriguez and Roman couldn’t have. The shot had come from behind the squad. Which meant someone else in the platoon was involved.

Young went through the likely suspects in his mind. One name stood out. He wondered what he should do. If anything. Three months left on this tour. Coleman Young closed his eyes and thought of home.

4

The floors at CIA headquarters were not created equal.

Take the third floor of the New Headquarters Building, home to the unit once called the Directorate of Administration and now known as the Directorate of Support. On its public Web site, which existed mainly as a recruiting tool, the CIA did its best to make the DS sound exciting: “Our job is to ensure that all our mission elements have everything they need for success… while the support we provide may be invisible — the results certainly are not!”

Invisible indeed. The agency’s more glamorous divisions hardly noticed the DS’s existence. But the directorate’s employees soldiered on, administering health plans, making sure the agency wasn’t overcharged for printer paper, and approving the world’s strangest expense reports: Six vials cobra antivenom: $360. No one but DS employees ever went to the third floor of the NHB.

Which made it the perfect place for a sterile room.

BC1-3-114 had once been a supply closet. The evacuation plans that the DS so meticulously maintained still identified it as one. The only clue to its new use came from the keypad and thumb reader that opened its magnetic door lock. Inside, it held a steel desk, two battered chairs, a phone — and a computer that with the right passwords could access any agency database. Even ones that were supposed to be available only on much more important floors.

SHAFER HAD JUST EXPLAINED the setup to Wells, who was back at Langley for the first time in almost a year. He’d come directly from Montana, not even stopping in New Hampshire for a change of clothes.

“Doesn’t a room like this violate every rule of computer security ever created?”

“Every and ever are redundant, John. And have you been studying network architecture in your spare time?”

“Seriously, Ellis?”

“Seriously. First, you need passwords. Both on this end and for the database you’re accessing. Second, the mirroring software works only in this room. Third, and most important, nobody knows it’s here.”

“Who exactly is nobody?”

“Me, Vinny, a couple others. We installed it last year, and it’s been used only twice, in situations like this, when we want to get somebody up to speed quietly. This way, you can read every file from Kabul station and nobody will know.”

“I get it, Ellis.” Despite all Wells had done, Shafer still sometimes treated him like a quarterback who needed extra time in the video room.

“Okay, you get it.”

“What I don’t get is what I’m looking for.”

“Just read.”

THE CASE FILES from Kabul painted a bleak picture. The station was the ultimate hardship post. Officers left their families on another continent and risked kidnapping and assassination every day. Unlike the Army or Marines, the CIA was a civilian organization that couldn’t order its employees to take dangerous jobs. Most officers stayed a few months, just long enough to put an Afghan posting on their résumés.

Building real relationships with the tribal chiefs who ran Afghanistan took much longer. That work fell to a cadre of hard-core operatives who lived in Kabul for years. By mid-2009, their efforts were paying off. They were a long way from the leaders of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but they were moving up the ranks.

Then Marburg showed up.

The Marburg reports covered sixteen hundred pages and included scores of photographs, everything from the first surveillance shots of Rashid to the carnage at Camp Holux. A separate file contained the video from the Karachi hotel where Marci Holm had met Ahmad Rashid. The file ended with the eighty-nine-page after-action report from the agency’s internal investigation.

The report’s language was passive, but its meaning was clear. The agency blamed Manny Cota and Marci Holm for the disaster.

The recommendations continued for several pages. Some made sense, like limiting the size of meetings. Others were irrelevant, like the suggestion that all spies should be polygraphed. That idea might have sounded good at Langley, but it had nothing to do with the way case officers actually worked.

All in all, the report was what Wells expected. The agency had to hold someone responsible for this disaster, if only so that it could tell its political masters what it had learned from its mistakes. Holm and Cota couldn’t defend themselves, so they’d taken the blame. The nastiest line in the report was a throwaway, that Holm “found MARBURG personally charming.” The implication was obvious.

In the video from Karachi, Rashid had impressed Wells as smooth and convincing, right down to his supposed concerns about his family. Wells wasn’t sure that he would have known Rashid was a double. But he would have searched Rashid before letting him inside Holux. Pat-downs were a part of life these days. For whatever reason, Holm had let him through. Two-plus years later, Kabul station was still recovering.

Duto had appointed Jimmy Wultse to replace Cota as station chief just seventy-two hours after the bombing. The choice had seemed solid. Wultse, the chief for Tajikistan, knew Afghan politics intimately. Unfortunately, he also had a drinking problem. He’d managed it in Dushanbe, but the stress of Kabul turned him into a full-blown alcoholic. After four months, Duto ordered him back to the United States for rehab.

Duto’s next choice was Gordie King, an agency veteran who’d spent most of his career in South America. Wells understood the choice. King had a reputation as an old-school butt-kicker. Unfortunately, King didn’t speak Pashtun and disliked Afghanistan intensely. He rarely left his office when he was in Kabul. Making matters worse, he refused to choose a deputy.

Under King, the station slipped into crisis. Case officers cut their tours short and were not replaced. Senior officers in Afghanistan’s intelligence service began skipping their weekly meetings with the agency. Two top sources in eastern Afghanistan were assassinated. Fifteen months after Marburg, the CIA’s intelligence-gathering effort in Afghanistan existed mostly on paper. Its operations consisted of drone strikes and payoffs to supposedly friendly tribal chiefs.

In the medium term, the problems made little difference to the war. The soldiers and Marines in Kandahar and Helmand provinces didn’t need the CIA’s help to kill Taliban guerrillas. But in the long run, the CIA’s role was crucial. Military intelligence officers weren’t supposed to spy on the Afghan government or explore the relationships between the insurgents and Iran and Pakistan. Those jobs belonged to the CIA. But as the agency slipped, the Defense Intelligence Agency began recruiting its own sources in Kabul and all over Afghanistan.

Duto faced an unpleasant choice. Replacing King would mean admitting a big mistake, and Duto hated admitting mistakes. But he hated losing turf even more, especially since Afghanistan had always belonged to the CIA. The agency had helped battle the Soviets in the 1980s. After September 11, while the Pentagon dithered, CIA operatives helped push the Taliban from power.

And so Duto sent King home barely eleven months after naming him as station chief. In his place, Duto appointed Ron Arango, a solid officer who had served in Pakistan and Russia. As deputy, he chose Peter Lautner, who had been in Kabul for seven years. Lautner was known as especially aggressive. He had reason to be. He’d lost his wife and his brother to Marburg.

Under Arango and Lautner, the station seemed to be recovering. Lautner had rebuilt relationships with tribal leaders. Arango had taken five top Afghan intelligence officers to a counterinsurgency conference that was a thinly disguised bribe, an excuse for a vacation in Paris.

But despite the activity, the station was still foundering. Some of its recent intel had proven flat wrong. A month before, one of its best sources had reported that a senior Taliban commander wanted to defect. The “defection” was a hoax, leading to an ambush that killed an Afghan general. The station still didn’t know whether its source had lied or been used to pass along disinformation. Worst of all, the station had just lost another top agent, the deputy interior minister. A bomb hidden in a fuel tank had blown apart the minister’s armored 4Runner.

With all the problems, Wells wasn’t surprised that the station had largely been left out of the hunt for bin Laden. Langley and the Pentagon had directed the operation, with help from the NSA. Kabul had barely been involved.

SHAFER HAD OFFERED to let Wells stay in a spare bedroom while he waded through the reports. But Wells wanted to read the files without having Shafer quiz him like an annoying high school teacher. So Wells was staying a few miles from Langley in a Courtyard by Marriott. He liked Courtyards and Hilton Garden Inns and the other three-star hotels that sat on suburban feeder roads, bland, efficient boxes where every room was identical and no one noticed anyone. Every day he woke at six and worked out in the Marriott’s underwhelming gym for ninety minutes. He reached the agency by nine o’clock and read files for twelve hours, until his eyes burned. Then he headed back to the hotel.

Wells had converted to Islam more than a decade before, but in the last few months he’d hardly prayed at all. He wondered whether he’d ever regain his fervor. Perhaps he’d grown permanently weary of battling jihadis born into the religion he wanted to claim as his own. He kept his Quran on his bedside table, but he didn’t pray. Instead he watched baseball until he fell asleep, rooting for close games and miracle finishes, trading one faith for another.

After a week reading files, Wells had grown to sense the station’s different personalities. Arango, the chief of station, wrote in a businesslike, slightly bureaucratic tone. Lautner had an aggressive edge. Gabe Yergin, the number three, was hurried, almost sloppy, as though he were perpetually behind schedule, running between meetings.

By Friday night, Wells had nearly finished the files. His mouth was dry, his eyes scratchy from the closet’s stale air. Office work left him tired, but not in an honest, muscle-sore way. He wanted to put a pack on his back and hike for twenty-four hours straight. He looked up as the magnetic lock clicked open and Shafer stepped in.

“You look dazed.”

“I thought we were trying to reduce the amount of paperwork the stations generate.”

“That’s a work in progress. Plenty of memos going around about it, though.”

Wells laughed.

“You caught up?”

“Pretty much.”

“Duto wants to see you, talk about it.”

“He works this late?”

“You kidding? He’s got some fancy dinner tonight. With Travers and McTeague, I think.” Congressman Raymond Travers and Senator Hank McTeague were the chairmen of the House and Senate committees that oversaw the CIA. “Duto will tell them stories about Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, make them think they heard something that they couldn’t have read on Page Six.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Better him than us. Anyway, he’s coming by your hotel at ten tomorrow. I’ll be there, too. Try not to sleep late.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

WELLS STEPPED OUT of the Courtyard’s freshly mopped lobby at ten the next day, just as a black Chevy Tahoe rolled up the driveway. Inside the Tahoe, Duto and Shafer. Duto wore the weekend uniform of the powerful, gray windbreaker, blue shirt, pressed khakis. He was nearly sixty, and his hair had thinned since Wells had seen him. Otherwise he hadn’t changed. His handshake was firm. His smile was all lips and no eyes.

They rolled out, turned left toward D.C. Two identical black Tahoes followed.

“Subtle pickup,” Wells said. “You should just paint ‘CIA Taxi’ on the doors.”

Wells and Duto didn’t get along. Their mistrust wasn’t playful. It wasn’t a light banter that hid mutual affection. They simply disliked each other. Wells had quit the agency because of Duto. Yet they seemed to need each other. Several months before, the CIA had helped Wells on his mission to Saudi Arabia. Now it was Duto’s turn to ask for a favor.

“How are you, John?” Duto’s voice was quiet. Almost silky. Wells wondered whether Duto was taking vocal training. He had once been famous for his temper. But years as director had taught him restraint. Let others squabble. The ultimate decision belongs to me. No need to show my claws. Wells wanted Duto to go back to being a screamer, but so far Wells hadn’t managed to provoke him.

“Fine.”

“And Anne?”

“She’s fine, too.” Wells wondered whether Duto remembered her name or had been briefed. “Though my son seems to have decided I’m a war criminal. Never wants to see me again.”

“That’s too bad.” Duto didn’t exactly sound torn up.

“I’m sure he thinks even worse of you.”

“They have no idea what we do for them. What it takes to keep them safe.”

“We’re five miles from the Pentagon,” Shafer said. “Around here, most of them are us.”

“You know what I mean. Civilians.”

“They know exactly what we do,” Wells said. “That’s the problem.”

“We killed Osama. And no civilian casualties in the op. Not one. Ten years since nine/eleven and no real attacks on American soil. Not even jerks with AKs lighting up a mall. We’ve kept our people safe. Tell me that doesn’t count for something, John.”

They turned onto the Chain Bridge. Wells watched the Potomac rush by. Knowing he’d have to answer. Knowing Duto was right. “Okay. You win. You sound like you’re planning to run for something—”

A smile curled Duto’s mouth and then was gone, brief and shocking as lightning in a cloudless sky. Suddenly, the good suits and voice lessons and personality transplant made sense. Impossible, Wells almost said. You’re only fooling yourself.

Duto was more powerful than any senator or congressman. Only one elected office would be worth his effort. But the presidency was off-limits to anyone too deeply involved with the agency. The first George Bush was the only director ever to have won the presidency, and he’d served at Langley barely a year. Duto had spent most of his adult life at the CIA. His fingerprints were on the agency’s most controversial programs. His record couldn’t possibly bear public scrutiny.

But if his smile was any indication, Duto thought it might.

“Anyway,” Wells said. “Unless you want more awkward small talk—”

“You read the cables. What do you think? Operationally speaking.”

“You already know the answer. It’s a mess. Been one since Marburg. Wultse was a drunk, Gordie King was burned out. The new guys, Arango and Lautner, they look good, they’re saying the right things and maybe doing them, too, but they’ve been there awhile and so far they haven’t made progress. If Kabul ran half as well as Islamabad, we’d have won the war by now.”

“Can they? Make progress?”

“I’m not going to pass judgment from seven thousand miles away on guys I’ve never met.”

“So you’ll go see them then?”

“Vinny. What is it you’re not telling me?”

“Right now, Kabul’s our most important station. More than Moscow, Beijing, whatever. If I have to change it up again, I will. But that would be the fourth new chief since Marburg. And it’s not like I have great options. I don’t want to move anyone from Islamabad now that they’re getting traction. I don’t want to bring someone else in from outside the region unless I have to. I want an outside opinion and I know you’ll tell me what you think.”

Wells looked at Shafer. “Okay, I’ll ask you. What is it he’s not telling me?”

“That there might be a leak inside the station.”

“To the Taliban? Come on.”

“About a month ago, a source told one of our Pak officers about a rumor that, quote unquote, ‘A CIA officer is helping the Talib.’”

“That could mean anything.”

“I know. We asked him for more. He didn’t have it. He’s a good source, though. A Frontier Corps general.” The Frontier Corps was the Pakistan Army unit that guarded Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province.

“That’s all you have?”

“I know it’s thin—”

“It’s not thin. It’s nothing.”

“It isn’t all,” Duto said quietly. Wells and Shafer both swiveled toward Duto. Duto was smiling again. Shafer wasn’t. His mouth had opened a half inch, like an ATM machine about to spit cash. Apparently Duto hadn’t told Shafer about a second source either. “About ten days ago, I got a call from Mike Yancy.”

“Should I know that name?” Wells said.

“Deputy director of the Drug Enforcement Agency.”

“Their motto: A palace for every kingpin.”

“Thank you for that wit and wisdom, Ellis. So the DEA has offices in Kandahar and Helmand. They try to convince farmers to stop planting poppies, switch to food crops like wheat. It’s tough. You can imagine. Opium’s much more profitable.”

“Sure,” Wells said.

“Anyway, the DEA guys were in a village — and before you ask, Yancy didn’t say which one, told me he couldn’t — and this farmer takes them aside and says to them, ‘Why should I work with you when the CIA is buying opium?’ The DEA guys say, ‘No, that can’t be right.’ But he insists. Tells them that he knows that the CIA is working with the Talibs. But no specifics.”

“How would it work?” Wells said. “A CO goes outside the wire, comes back with a suitcase of junk? How does he make sure he doesn’t get blown to bits or kidnapped? And what does he do with the stuff then? Put it out at the Christmas party?”

“Yancy said his agents felt this farmer was credible. He talked to them alone, didn’t want anyone to hear.”

“Let me walk through this,” Shafer said. “A farmer in Kandahar whose name we don’t know told a DEA agent whose name we don’t know about a dirty CIA officer whose name we don’t know. Now you’re telling us. That’s a lot of telephone, don’t you think?”

Duto turned to Wells. “He’s right. It’s all smoke. Only we’re having an awful lot of trouble over there.”

“It’s Afghanistan, Vinny. And they’re rebuilding the station on the fly. In the middle of a war.”

“I’m going over in a month,” Duto said. “With Travers and McTeague. They’ve been asking me to go and I’ve been putting them off, but finally I had to say yes. So it’s set and I can’t change it, not without a really good excuse. I would like to introduce them to the fine men and women of Kabul station without wondering whether one of the people they’re meeting is working for the other side.”

“No wonder you’re taking time from your busy Saturday to beg John for help,” Shafer said.

“It would be a disaster. And not just for me. All I’m asking, you go over, see what you find.” Duto squeezed Wells’s shoulder. Another new move. His handlers must have told him that real politicians weren’t afraid to touch. Though Duto still needed to work on his technique. His grip was too strong. Like he was trying to tear Wells’s arm off. “Sniff it out. You don’t come up with anything, fine. Still be a good trip. The speeches you give to the Joes, those guys will be happy to see you.”

Wells removed Duto’s hand from his shoulder. Wells knew that, as director, Duto had broken more than a few laws. Yet for that very reason, Wells trusted Duto’s instinct about Kabul. Set a thief to catch a thief…. If Duto thought the station had been corrupted, he was probably right. Why he’d chosen to involve Wells was a question Wells would consider later.

“A poorly defined counterintelligence mission without official authority? Based on rumors from an anonymous Afghan farmer? Where do I sign?”

“Thank you, John.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Inshallah”—God willing—“I won’t find anything.”

5

The folding chairs were cheap and gray and lined up in tight rows. Before them, a framed photo of Ricky Fowler sat on a homemade plywood table. The picture had been taken at the beginning of the tour. Wearing his uniform, his floppy camouflage hat low on his head, Fowler smiled shyly. He seemed almost hopeful.

Wartime memorial ceremonies at combat bases followed a rigid formula. The dead couldn’t just be forgotten. Their buddies needed to say good-bye. But the ceremonies couldn’t be too long or mawkish. At home, the death of a healthy twenty-something was rare, an occasion for waterfalls of grief. In Afghanistan, healthy twenty-somethings died all the time. Fowler’s family and friends in Texas would have time to mourn. His platoon mates could not afford the luxuries of grief and depression. Not when they would be back outside the wire in a day or two.

So the Army focused funeral ceremonies on the fact that the fallen had died as soldiers. Fowler’s empty combat boots stood beside his photo. His rifle was placed behind the boots, muzzle down and stock up. His helmet and dog tags topped the rifle. The combination of boots, rifle, and helmet symbolized his corpse, which had already been sent back to the United States. They were as important as his body. They were the reason he’d died.

The chairs were set up in a quiet corner of the base, behind the brigade aid station. But life at FOB Jackson didn’t stop for a funeral. Behind a blast wall a hundred yards away, Stryker engines roared to life as another platoon got ready to go outside the wire. A pair of Kiowa helicopters circled low, their turbines thrumming. Meanwhile the soldiers of 3rd Platoon bowed their heads and sang the national anthem. Then Lieutenant Weston stepped behind the plywood podium and unfolded two sheets of paper.

“Private First Class Richard Edward Fowler. Ricky Fowler. All of you knew him. In a unit this size, after this many months together, we all know each other. He was a good kid. A good man. If it was hot, he’d share his CamelBak. For some reason he liked the Dallas Cowboys and I could never convince him he was a darn fool for that. He loved his mom and dad and he wasn’t afraid to tell them so. Every night you could find him at the MWR talking to them. I know we gave him grief for that, but it was the right thing to do. Day after he got killed, I called my folks and told them I loved them. I hadn’t said that to them for a long time. Too long. And I was thinking about Ricky when I did it.

“I’m not going to lie to you. We all know that Ricky wasn’t necessarily our top soldier. But the truth is that he improved a lot over the tour. Every day, he made himself stronger. A few weeks ago, I asked him to stand point on a motorcycle registration. You all know that’s a crummy job. Hot and dangerous and you’ve got to deal with a lot of hajjis pretending they don’t understand when they know exactly what you want. But someone has to do it. I think a few months ago, Ricky would have bitched about it. But I saw the soldier in him take over and he said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he went right up there for four hours and got it done, registered, like, fifty motorcycles. I was proud of him then for being a man, proud of the Army for making him one.

“In the movies, these stories have happy endings. This war is tough but we get through, and when we’re home, our families and wives and girlfriends put their arms around us. But Fowler didn’t get the happy ending. His trip ended too soon. We have three months left on this tour. We owe him the honor of keeping up the fight. Taking it to the guys who did this to him.”

Weston folded up his papers. It was a good speech, he thought. Better than Ricky Fowler deserved. The platoon’s soldiers looked up silently. Captain Mark Field, a logistics officer who served as the battalion’s chaplain, stepped forward to read a benediction and the Lord’s Prayer. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

Then Sergeant Rodriguez stood for the final act, roll call. One by one he read the names of the platoon’s soldiers. “Private Acosta—”

“Present.” Acosta stood.

“Specialist Alexander—”

“Present.”

Until Rodriguez reached Fowler’s name. “Private Fowler.” Silence. “Private Fowler.” Silence.

“Priv-ate Fow-ler!” Angry this time, almost desperate. Rodriguez let the silence hang, giving Fowler one last chance to return to his buddies. And when the truth of his absence could no longer be ignored—

“Sergeant Gentry—”

“Present.”

The man, gone. The platoon, alive.

When Rodriguez finished calling roll, Weston connected his iPod to speakers beside the podium and played the long, mournful notes of Taps. The soldiers of 3rd Platoon shuffled their feet and stared at the boots and rifle and helmet and waited. Finally the song ended and the men drifted away in ones and twos, murmuring to one another.

Weston turned to Rodriguez. “Thank you for that roll call, Sergeant. Well done.”

“Your speech, too, sir.”

“I’d like to speak to you in private.”

SOLDIERS CALLED the northeast corner of the base Zombieland. Here, maintenance units dumped vehicles that couldn’t be salvaged and garbage too toxic to burn. A blown-out Stryker and three Humvees sat together, their wheels missing. The vehicles were less than two years old, but already they looked prehistoric, their paint flecking off, bits of rust creeping in.

Weston peeked inside the trucks, making sure they were alone. Most soldiers considered Zombieland bad luck and avoided it, but some guys came here to smoke hash. “You know, a couple years, we’re gone, these’ll still be here,” Weston said. “Hajj kids playing jungle gym on them. We should get rid of ’em. They’re bad for morale.”

“You know what’s bad for morale, Lieutenant?”

“What’s that, First Sergeant?”

“Shooting your own fucking men.”

“You see an alternative? Or did you want him to come back here and narc?”

“I would have handled it.”

“How? Told him that buying smack by the kilo was the new COIN program? How did this even happen, Rodriguez? That pickup should take five minutes. Even if you’re testing the stuff. You guys get a circle jerk going?”

“All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he got some balls, decided to snoop. Improving as a soldier, Lieutenant? I had to bite my lip so I didn’t laugh when you said that. As a soldier, he sucked. Truth is the unit’s safer without him. Puta.”

“Rodriguez—”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Enough, Sergeant.”

“Don’t make like you care about him any more than I do, Lieutenant. You’re even colder than me, only you’re better at hiding it.”

“It’s not about whether I feel sorry for him, Sergeant. It’s a problem. Don’t you get it? A KIA means my after-action report gets read all the way up to brigade. Losing a man on a routine patrol looks bad. Worst case, somebody decides the whole thing sounds weird, sends a couple guys to ask the squad what really happened. Maybe even goes over to the village, starts trying to figure out how a shooter just vanished into thin air. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. You want that?”

“I’m not the one who shot him, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks for that insight. Long as nobody talks, we should be fine. I used an AK, so even if there’s an autopsy nothing’s going to show up.”

“Nobody’s going to talk. Not when we’re out there every day.”

“All right then.” Truth was that neither Fowler’s family nor anyone else had any reason to suspect what had happened. Guys died over here every day. A standard two-paragraph press release marked their deaths.

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Pfc. Richard Edward Fowler, 20, of Midland, Tex., died in Zabul province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 17th Regiment, 7th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Ft. Lewis-McChord, Tacoma, Wash.

Fowler’s hometown newspaper back in Texas would add a few paragraphs, throw in quotes from Fowler’s parents, maybe a buddy or two. Not a girlfriend. Fowler didn’t have one. The guy might even have died without breaking his cherry. Too bad for him. His friends would update his Facebook page for a few weeks. Then Ricky Fowler would be forgotten. One day his name would wind up on a memorial somewhere.

“You’re right,” Weston said. “Fowler shouldn’t be a problem. You sure nobody’s going to talk.”

“Coleman’s the only one who might, and I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“Good. What about the stuff?”

“I’m no chemist, but it looks good. When’s your high-speed buddy coming?”

Weston shrugged.

“Sooner we get rid of it, the better.”

“Agreed.”

“Kinda weird, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”

“What?”

“We’re partners now. Blood brothers. White boy from Florida and a gangbanger from Chula Vista. Might as well get each other’s names tattooed on our asses, because there’s no going back.”

Rodriguez was right, Weston realized. Together they’d committed crimes that could land them in jail for life. Whether they liked each other was irrelevant. “You sorry we did this, Rodriguez? Got involved in this shit?”

Rodriguez shook his head.

“Not even after this, you know, hiccup?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.”

COLEMAN YOUNG SAT on his bunk in the back left corner of 1st Squad’s hutch. He put in his earbuds and turned up his music. Didn’t help much, but at least it gave him a chance to think. The bunk above him, Fowler’s bunk, was empty now. His stuff had been inventoried and bundled into a green footlocker. Soon enough, Weston would come by with Fowler’s helmet and tags and boots. He’d wrap them up, put them in the footlocker. They’d ship it back to Texas, and Fowler would be gone for good.

Young opened the footlocker. Fowler didn’t have much in the way of personal effects: The Stand by Stephen King, DVDs of The Office, a cheap laptop, last year’s Cowboys cheerleaders calendar. And a packet of letters from his folks. Fowler had saved them neatly in a Ziploc bag. He’d been a mama’s boy, no doubt. The letters were written in a cheery red scrawl on sheets of pink paper. Fowler had told Young that his mom was a teacher. For sure she had teacher’s handwriting, that I believe in you, you can do better if you just apply yourself handwriting. Must have been fifty letters. Young didn’t think anybody could have that much to write about, much less Ricky Fowler’s moms from Nowhere, Texas, but the letters kept on coming. One had come yesterday. Posted weeks ago. Posted before Fowler died.

Before Fowler got murdered.

Maybe Fowler hadn’t been cut out for soldiering, but he’d been a decent enough guy. The whole thing put a knot in Young’s stomach. He didn’t believe for a second that Fowler’s death was a coincidence. He’d wondered for a while whether Rodriguez was buying drugs. But he’d figured on a few ounces of hash. What Fowler had said was kilos of heroin. Industrial-strength. Young was from Oak Cliff, a tough part of southwestern Dallas. He knew guys who dealt. But nothing like this. You had to be seriously connected even to think about that kind of weight. Otherwise the dudes on the other end took it from you and put a bullet in you so you didn’t come back on them.

Young was sure that Rodriguez wasn’t keeping the stuff at FOB Jackson for long. Too risky. Some of the minesweeping dogs around here had been drug sniffers back home before they got retrained. What was he doing with it? Had to be a bigger gang involved. Or maybe helo pilots. They could go from base to base easy enough.

Young wished he could bust Rodriguez, and whoever was working with him. But Young had nothing but smoke for evidence, and not the good kind. Sure, he could protect himself better than Fowler. But outside the wire, anything could happen. He didn’t know whether he could afford to have Rodriguez on his back.

He looked once more through the footlocker, Ricky Fowler’s sad legacy, and snapped its top closed. Coward, he whispered to himself. Maybe he was. But unless he could be sure that an investigation wouldn’t come back to bite him, he was keeping his mouth shut as tight as that locker.

6

The Globemaster was a four-engine Air Force jet built for carrying capacity, not for comfort. Two hundred fifty soldiers sat packed like a tin of well-armed sardines in rows five across and benches on either side.

Wells was on the right aisle eight rows back. He’d come to Afghanistan on a flight like this years before, but the mood had been different. Better, to be precise. Back then, the war had been younger. Wells had landed with a unit arriving at Bagram for the first time. On this flight, the soldiers were heading back from their two-week midtour leaves. The ones who’d had good trips home missed their families and friends already. The ones who hadn’t were upset they’d blown their shot at freedom. All of them knew that they wouldn’t be leaving again until their tours were finished.

Mostly they wanted to catch up on sleep. Before takeoff, the soldier next to Wells tapped three tiny white pills from a bottle of generic drugstore ibuprofen. He had a teenager’s mustache, wispy and brown, and a teenager’s faith in the power of chemically induced happiness.

“Ativan,” he said, when he noticed Wells looking. “Girlfriend get ’em to me. Knock you right out. You don’t even dream.” He offered Wells the bottle.

“No, thanks.”

“Your loss. Wake me when it’s over. And if I slobber on you, don’t be afraid to stick an elbow out.”

The soldier dry-swallowed the pills and closed his eyes as the engines spooled up. Ten minutes later, as they leveled off, he grunted, “What,” to no one and fell into a head-forward trance. Every so often, his thick pink tongue edged out of his mouth.

Wells closed his eyes. His years in Afghanistan and Pakistan had taught him patience, how to escape the world around him. As the jet winged east and the voices around him wound down, he thought about Anne.

They’d had mostly good months since his mission to Saudi Arabia. One night in late March, he’d made himself tell her what happened over there. They were walking their dog, Tonka, in the woods north of her house, first-growth New Hampshire forest that had never faced an ax. After months of cold, the night was unseasonably warm, shirtsleeve weather. Thick chunks of snow slid down the firs as the forest crackled awake from the winter. Wells spoke slowly, wanting to get every detail right. He even told Anne about the jihadi he’d shot in the back in Jeddah, probably the lowest moment in all his years in the field. She wrapped her arm in his and didn’t interrupt.

“Feels good to open your mouth, doesn’t it?” she said when he was finished. “And the world didn’t end.”

“I’m sticking you with something you don’t deserve.”

“I’m glad to have it.”

“Do you think I should go after them?”

“Saeed and Mansour?” The Saudi princes who had created the terrorist cell responsible for the mayhem Wells had tried to stop. They were near the top of the royal family, untouchable and living in luxury in Riyadh. “If you think you can get them and get away with it? Eight ball says yes.”

Wells hadn’t expected that answer. Anne worked as a cop in North Conway. She was even-keeled and not inclined to vengeance. Unlike him.

“What about the rule of law, all that good stuff?”

“Yes. All that. Under normal circumstances. This time, it’s you or nothing.”

They walked for a while, listening to branches crack under the snow.

“No one’s going to touch those guys for years,” Wells said eventually. “They’ve got too much protection. But eventually they’ll relax. Everyone does.”

She looked at him. “Almost everyone.”

THEY WENT HOME and made love, and life fell into the best kind of groove for a while. Wells spent his days volunteering at an animal shelter in Conway. The shelter workers put down any dogs judged as a threat. Wells worked with the ones who had escaped the first culling, dogs who let themselves be petted even as they pulled back their lips to show their big yellow teeth. He soothed them in a low, reassuring voice and knelt beside them in their pens, waiting for them to relax.

A lot of them couldn’t be saved. There was Nick, a black pit bull with cigarette burns cratered across his belly, docile with men but uncontrollable around women. Jimmy, a one-eyed German shepherd who cowered hopelessly in a corner of his cage. Rabbit, a slobbery husky who seemed ready for adoption until he attacked a pug, tearing off half her ear before Wells pulled him away. As much cruelty as Wells had seen, he couldn’t understand the sheer wickedness of people who tortured animals for sport.

Even so, working with the dogs soothed him. He saw that the most vicious were the most frightened. He learned to retreat from their attacks without even raising his voice. And he saved a few.

“I’m going soft in my old age,” he said to Anne one night, back from the shelter.

“I don’t think so.” She stretched her legs over his lap as they sat on the couch watching Jersey Shore. On-screen, orange-tinted women tore at one another’s shirts. An addiction to reality television might have been her greatest flaw. “We should go down there next summer,” she said, nodding at the television. “You could beat some sense into those morons.”

“Probably the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“Actually my ex reminds me of the Situation. My first husband. Though he’s considerably less charming than Sitch.”

“Which one is the Situation again?”

“Like you don’t know. And did you notice the hint I dropped? My first husband, John. Like maybe it’s time for a second.”

“Very subtle. I’m not sure I got it. Now that you’ve explained.” Wells turned off the television. “Would you believe me if I said I’m worried you might get hurt? I don’t mean emotionally either.”

“I’m a big girl. And a licensed peace officer in the state of New Hampshire.”

“I’ve always liked that expression.”

“Big girl?”

“Peace officer. Like you were hired by the city of peace. The opposite of a police officer is a criminal. So would the opposite of a peace officer be a war officer?”

“You’re avoiding the topic at hand, John.”

“Not avoiding it. Outrunning it with wit and wisdom.”

“You should know better than to rely on those.”

“And you know what happened to you-know-who.” Years before, Wells’s former fiancée, Jennifer Exley, had been wounded in an attempt on his life. “These guys, when they decide to come at you, they don’t care about collateral damage. Up here, it seems like a long way from that, but it’s not.”

Anne was silent. Wells stood, looked out the window. The warm months were almost gone. The easy months. The oaks and maples had shed their leaves and were waiting for winter.

“I believe you when you say you’re worried about my safety,” she said. “But it’s my choice, too.”

“Yes and no.”

“Sooner or later, the excuses won’t matter. Even if they’re true. Why don’t you go see Evan, at least? You’ve got a lot to sort out and that’s a good place to start.”

The next day, Wells called Heather, told her he wanted to see his son. A week after that, he headed west to Montana. Now the wheel had swung again, and he was on this jet, bound for the war zone where he’d spent half his adult life.

He wondered if the job — not necessarily this job, but the job — would cost him Anne. Experience said yes. It had cost him everyone else. Though she was still cutting him slack, for now. When Wells told her what Duto wanted, her first words were, “When do you go?”

He’d gone up from Washington to visit her for a night before flying out. In the morning she gave him a present, a neatly wrapped box about the size of a hardcover book. “Should I open it now or later?”

“Now. I want to be sure you’ll like it.”

“I’ll like it.”

In fact, Wells wasn’t very good at getting gifts. He was so self-contained that he wanted very little. Not that he insisted on living like a monk. He’d given away most of his money, but he still had plenty saved. And if he found something that he thought he would use, like a new motorcycle, he would buy it. But he had no interest in accumulating possessions for their own sake. Brand names and new clothes meant nothing to him. He didn’t want much, and what he wanted, he had.

In other words, buying presents for him was a nightmare.

Anne spun her finger, Stop stalling and open it. Inside, Wells found a pair of aviator sunglasses, gold Ray-Bans. “They’re vintage. That means they’re old.”

“They’re great. Thank you.” Wells put them on, went into the bathroom, and checked himself out. “Nice,” he said. “I look like the sidekick in an eighties action movie. The guy who gets killed a half hour in.”

“I think they’re very Dirty Harry. You really like them?”

“I do.” He came back into the bedroom and picked her up.

“They’re sexy.”

“You’re sexy.” He kissed her, chastely at first and then openmouthed. He laid her on the bed as Tonka grumbled and jumped off. She was wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants.

She smirked. “I want you to leave them on.”

“That’s kinda creepy.”

She ran her tongue across her upper lip, intentionally lewd. “Remember I’m from the generation that grew up with Internet porn.”

“I thought nice girls didn’t watch porn.”

“All girls watch porn.” She reached up, pulled him down onto the bed. “You’d better leave them on.”

He left them on.

THE JET EASED into a slow descent. Then the overhead lights kicked on and the speakers crackled. “Captain Hawes here. Beauty sleep’s over. We’re about a hundred miles from Bagram. Buckle up, stow your gear, turn off anything with a battery. Should be on the ground in about twenty-five minutes. Though if you send a few bucks to the cockpit, I could be convinced to stay up here longer.”

The soldier next to Wells jerked awake. He was a specialist, an E-4. On his sleeve he wore a big yellow patch with a dark black horse’s head — the insignia for the 1st Cavalry Division, the famous 1st Cav, whose history dated to 1921. “I miss anything?”

“Nope. You’re with First Cav?”

“Yeah, Second Battalion. You?”

“I was a Ranger once upon a time. A while back. Then I worked at Langley for a while.”

“Now you’re a contractor? You guys usually fly commercial.”

“I get off on leg cramps and the smell of ten thousand farts. How’s business?”

“Ever been to Afghanistan before?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know. The problem with these guys we’re fighting is they like it, you know. After all these years they got a jones for it and they won’t ever stop. How it feels anyway. Only good thing is they’re lousy tactically. They’re not scared, but they can’t shoot straight, and half the bombs they make don’t go off. Otherwise more of us would be coming home in bags.”

“People have been fighting over these mountains for a long time.”

“I got six months left in my tour, and a year after that on my contract, and then I’m done. I thought I wanted to be a lifer, but one round is gonna be it. Lucky me, I only signed a four-year bid, I’ll only be twenty-two when I get out, so I can still do something else.”

“And how’s morale?”

“The PR is not the best time to ask.”

“PR?”

“Parole Revoker. What we call these flights back from leave. That’s why you’re not hearing any hoo-ahs or singing or anything to get us chunked up. But, you know. Guys hang in. My sarge and loot aren’t too bad, so I can’t complain. And on my base, we live okay. Hot food, showers, laundry, free Internet at the MWR.” The Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Office.

“Not everybody’s got it so good.”

“Heck, no. The small outposts, firebases, it’s MREs, cold showers, no coms. They live like dogs. Every so often, you hear about a platoon that’s got real messed up.”

Not exactly what Wells was here to investigate, but he was intrigued. “Messed up how?”

“Drugs. Target practice on civvies. Ugliness. But it’s just rumors.”

“It always is. Till it’s real.”

“Anyway. I’m Howard Gordon. Specialist Gordon.” The guy extended a hand.

“John Wells.”

“John Wells. Why do I know that name?”

“I did something interesting once. A few years back.” Wells had been a celebrity after his first big mission. Since then, he’d kept his head down. Most civilians had forgotten him. Wells saw that the amnesia had spread to the military. At least the junior guys. Not that he minded. He didn’t have an ego. Anonymity worked to his advantage.

Okay, maybe he minded a little.

“That bomb — in New York—” Gordon said.

“Yeah. That was me.”

“You don’t mind my asking, what are you doing here?”

“Somebody asked me to come check things out.”

“You want my opinion?”

“Sure.”

“I say we bring in a pile of AKs, RPGs. They got plenty already, but let’s make sure everybody has one. And some bigger stuff, too. Then you know what we do?”

“Tell me.”

“Build a wall around the whole country, twenty feet high, concrete. Then we leave. We set up outside, watch the perimeter, make sure none of them get out. And we let ’em have at it. Because they will, man. If they don’t have us to kill they’ll just take turns popping each other. Like checkers, jump, jump, double jump, clearing out the board. Until there’s only one left. When we see that one guy, you know what we do?”

“Kill him?”

“Too easy. Let him have it. He earned it. He’s King Turd of Asscrackistan.”

“Asscrackistan.”

“Never heard anyone call it that?”

Wells shook his head.

“You will.”

THE JET CAME IN hard and fast and stopped quickly, tossing Wells forward in his seat. A drawn-out sigh rose from the soldiers, air leaking from a punctured tire, not a groan but not a cheer.

“Welcome home,” the captain said. Specialist Gordon raised twin middle fingers to the front of the cabin. Wells wished he had room to stretch. His hamstrings felt especially tight. Anne was pushing him to take up yoga. He might have to give in.

Gordon didn’t seem bothered. He was a head shorter than Wells and narrow shouldered, but he shouldered his pack easily, rolled his neck. “You look tired, man.”

“Wishing I were twenty again, instead of twice that.”

“I’ll be twenty-one next month. Get to celebrate here. Woo-hoo.”

“Should be fun.”

“I can’t believe that back home I’m not old enough to get a beer without sneaking around. When I get out of here, I’m going to Myrtle Beach with my boys, make up for lost time, drink until I can’t stand.”

The unspoken part of the sentence went, If I’m still alive. “Sounds like a plan.”

Gordon extended his hand. “Be seeing you, Mr. Wells.”

“John.”

“John. You get home, you tell those big boys my idea. About the wall.”

“Roger that. Watch your six, Specialist.”

“Always do.”

OUTSIDE, AFGHANISTAN. The air was crisp and cold, the sky thick with stars. White-capped mountains loomed over the hangars around them. Most Afghans didn’t live in those mountains. The fiercest fighting happened in the south, the scrublands of Kandahar and Helmand. But the Hindu Kush was as central to the idea of Afghanistan as the desert was to Saudi Arabia. Its peaks had defeated invaders for centuries. They could be occupied, but never truly conquered.

A wiry man in jeans and a light green windbreaker walked toward Wells. “John? I’m Pete Lautner. Good to meet you.” They shook. Lautner had close-cropped gray hair, piercing blue eyes, and a coiled awareness of everything around him. Losing your wife and brother to a suicide bombing would have that effect, Wells thought.

“The same.”

“Ready for the beautiful Ariana Hotel? We’ve got a room with your name on it.”

Lautner led Wells to a black Suburban parked fifty yards away. The air base at Bagram had been built up since Wells’s last trip. Hangars and concrete bunkers stretched along the main runway.

“Wonder what we’ll do with it when we leave.”

“MOAB.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“You know daisy cutters?”

“Sure,” Wells said. Daisy cutters — officially called BLU-82s — had been the largest non-nuclear bombs ever built. Six tons of ammonium nitrate with a sprinkling of artificial flavors. The Pentagon had created them to cut through the jungles of Vietnam.

“Like those. But bigger. Nine tons of explosives, give or take.”

“The daisy cutter wasn’t big enough.”

“I guess not.”

“Wonder what the Air Force is compensating for.”

Lautner smiled. “Who said we’re leaving anyway?”

They stopped beside a four-seat helicopter, black, with a bubble canopy. The pilot stood a few feet away, cigarette in hand. He was Hispanic, with thick black hair. He was maybe twenty-six. Everyone in this war seemed to be younger than Wells. The pilot tossed aside his smoke, sending embers across the tarmac.

“One of these days you’ll hit some jet fuel and we’ll be screwed,” Lautner said.

“Stop, drop, and roll,” the pilot said. He extended a hand to Wells. “I’m Mike Hernandez.”

“John Wells.”

“Mike is the best,” Lautner said. “We can land Black Hawks at the Ariana, but these work better. And that glass is thicker than it looks. It’ll stop anything up to a.50 cal. And with the headphones, we can actually talk inside.”

“Good enough for you is good enough for me.”

“You will want to wear your Kevlar, though. And your Nomex.”

Wells pulled on his black fireproof gloves, strapped on his vest, climbed in, buckled up. Hernandez went through two minutes of clicking switches and consulting the computer screens in the center console. “Ready?” Without waiting for their agreement, Hernandez twisted back on the throttle until the helicopter vibrated with its power. He pulled back on the collective and they leaped into the night and rode low and fast onto the Shamali Plain.

Beneath them were the scars of three decades of war. Bomb craters pockmarked the earth. The houses that had survived were dark and shuttered against the world. Few Afghans had electric generators. Those who did rarely used them after dark. Noise and light attracted thieves. Faint plumes of smoke from the chimneys offered the only proof of life.

The helicopter swung south toward Kabul. Five miles away, headlights appeared below them, cresting a hill and speeding north. “Afghan police,” Lautner said. “This is probably the safest stretch of road in the whole country.”

“But we’re not driving.”

“Flying’s still safer. You’re a VIP, Mr. Wells. My ass if anything happens to you.”

“Generally I can feed and clothe myself. I do need a little help on the toilet.”

Lautner snorted, a half laugh. To the south, the yellow glow of Kabul appeared. “Brighter than I remember.” The embassies and aid groups have their own generators. “You don’t mind my asking, anything in particular you’re looking for on this trip?”

“Vinny asked me to come over, tell him what I thought. About the war and the station, both.”

“Is there a problem with the station?”

“You tell me.”

Lautner hesitated. “It’s tricky. Maybe a conversation we should have on the ground. So the director asked you himself.”

“Correct.”

“Rumor is that you and he don’t get along. Rumor is that’s why you quit.”

So the story of his struggle with Duto had spread all the way here. Wells didn’t see the percentage in denying the truth. “We don’t. But this is too important.”

“And you’re gonna be speaking to soldiers, too.”

“I’m set for a couple speeches in Kandahar. Honestly, I’m not sure they even know who I am. But it’s a decent excuse to hear what the frontline guys think.”

“Look, I’m glad to talk to you, and so’s everyone else. You know, there’s going to be specific programs and intel we can’t discuss. I hope you’re not offended, compartmentalized stuff that you’re not read in for.”

“I figured as much.” Though Wells hadn’t. He was here with Duto’s direct support. He was surprised Lautner was pushing back. He was glad now to have read the station’s files at Langley, and doubly glad that no one in Kabul knew.

“But in terms of questions about morale, how we’re putting the station back together—”

“Since Marburg—” As Wells said the word, Lautner’s lips tightened slightly, but he had no other reaction.

“Since Marburg. It’s been a struggle, but we’re getting traction. I don’t have to tell you it’s a very tough environment. Traditional rules of intel and counterintel don’t apply. There’s no ideology, no consistency. They’ll switch sides instantly for a better offer. Tough to build anything lasting. Especially since they know we won’t be here forever.”

“But we’ve got the money.”

“That we do.”

Lautner hadn’t lied, Wells thought. Instead he’d given Wells generalities about Afghanistan that had been true twenty years ago and would be equally true twenty years from now. Nothing about the station’s real problems. Lautner obviously saw him as an outsider, sent by Langley to second-guess. The attitude didn’t mean Lautner or anyone else was a mole. Quite the opposite. A mole would be more welcoming, Wells thought. He decided not to press Lautner any further, at least for now. Maybe Arango, the chief of station, would be more willing to talk.

Wells looked out the window toward Kabul. A quilt of shacks and mud houses and garbage mounds covered the land. During the civil war in the 1990s, refugee camps had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. Now the refugees didn’t want to go home. The camps had food and water and basic sanitation, all luxuries in rural Afghanistan.

The helicopter swooped left. For a few seconds it seemed to be flying almost sideways. If a double-rotor, forty-passenger Chinook was a bus, and a twelve-passenger Black Hawk was a sports car, this little chopper was a motorcycle. A racing bike, not an overpowered Ducati, but a Honda CBR600 with sticky tires that gripped the pavement.

A low hill loomed ahead, topped by a mound that looked at first like a funeral pyre. The sour stench of a garbage fire filled the cabin. The chopper hopped over the hill and down the back side and turned right, following a narrow two-lane road that headed toward the center of Kabul. They were no more than forty feet off the ground, so low that Wells could count potholes on the road beneath them. Each turn blended into the next. Even if someone had an RPG on them, hitting them would be impossible.

The pilot leaned forward in his seat, his helmet almost touching the canopy, his hands loose. “Looks like he could do this with his eyes closed,” Wells said.

“Mike’s got those nice video-game reflexes.”

Two minutes later, the helicopter approached the Ariana Hotel. “Home sweet home,” Lautner said. The hotel was unlit and painted dark gray so it would be a tougher target for RPGs. The concrete blast walls around it glowed under arc lamps. The combination turned the hotel into a devil’s flower, a black hole ringed by light.

The helicopter’s engines revved down abruptly. For a moment, they hung motionless. Then they descended gently and touched down in the very center of the painted white cross that marked the hotel’s landing zone. Hernandez nodded to their thanks and went back to checking the chopper’s displays. Wells realized that he and Lautner were nothing but cargo to the kid, an excuse for him to play a real-life video game. Even so he was a great pilot.

Lautner led Wells to a room on the fourth floor, in a part of the Ariana used by contractors rather than CIA employees, another none-too-subtle reminder that Wells was no longer part of the club. After the flight from Washington, Wells was happy just to have a bed. He fell asleep with his shirt and pants still on. He woke once, in the deepest part of the night. He didn’t know where he was.

When he finally realized, he found himself strangely comforted.

7

The dented Toyota pickup crept down Highway 1, past the gray blast walls of Forward Operating Base Moqor, which stretched for a half mile along the road. The guys in the Toyota’s front seat looked Afghan. They were actually a Delta sniper team. Daniel Francesca, the sniper, drove. William Alders, his spotter, sat next to him.

After a week outside the wire, Francesca and Alders were ready for a shower and a hot meal, but the traffic refused to cooperate. Despite being called a highway, the road was only two lanes wide. An accident outside the entrance to the base had snarled traffic, and they were stuck in a line of diesel-belching trucks.

On the opposite side of the road, Afghan boys waved bags of peanuts and candy at the truckers. After every sale, the boys brought the money to a fat man sitting in a rocking chair beside a closed gas station.

“How often you think one of them gets snatched?” Alders said.

“Snatching is unnecessary. I think the portly gentleman takes any reasonable offer.”

“Fresh six-year-olds. We will not be undersold.”

“Eat all you want. We’ll make more.”

“That was Fritos?”

“Doritos. Jay Leno.”

“Good old Jay.” Now the traffic was starting to flow and the kids were running into the road, playing chicken with the trucks. “This country.”

“This country.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER, they reached the base’s entrance, which was really just an opening in the blast walls. Francesca turned inside, but stopped short of the concrete hut that served as the external checkpoint. Hescos, four-foot-tall wire-and-cloth baskets packed with dirt, ringed the hut. A machine gun sat on the roof, surrounded by layers of sandbags.

The outer checkpoint was the post most exposed to suicide bombers and thus the riskiest guard position. Here — as at most bases — the post was manned not by soldiers but by contractors, Nepalese Gurkhas. They were in Afghanistan for the money and nothing else. They spoke little English and even less Pashtun and knew exactly how much danger they faced.

So Francesca kept his hands high and his Common Access Card visible as he stepped out of the pickup. He knew the guards wouldn’t make him for American, not right away. He wore a gray shalwar kameez and had black hair and olive skin, thanks to his Sicilian ancestry. He couldn’t pass for Pashtun, of course. The Pashtuns looked like no one else, with their nut brown skin and giant hands. But he could easily have been from northern Afghanistan. Off base, looking local kept him alive. Here, not so much.

A Gurkha in a tan flak jacket stepped out of the hut, pointed an M-4 at Francesca’s chest. The man raised his left hand, palm out: Stop.

“I’m American. Special Ops.” The Gurkha came forward, looked over the access card, the identification all soldiers carried. The guard motioned with his rifle at the pickup, where Alders sat in the front passenger seat, his hands flat on the dash. “He’s American, too.”

The Gurkha disappeared into the hut with Francesca’s identification. He came back a few minutes later and waved them through.

“Home sweet home.”

FRANCESCA AND ALDERS had been operating in the mountains in the southeastern corner of Zabul province, just inside Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The United States had only a couple thousand troops in all of Zabul, part of the same Stryker brigade that included Tyler Weston. Most American forces were farther west in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which were more heavily populated and strategically important. The Taliban had taken advantage, making Zabul a major route for smuggling weapons and men from Pakistan.

So Francesca and Alders had set up watch on a ratline, a trail the Talibs used to bring in weapons. They lived at Kandahar Air Field in a base within a base, a compound restricted to the Delta elite. Delta and Special Forces teams usually ran missions by helicopter, flying on modified Black Hawks that had nozzles for midair refueling jutting out of their front ends like steel straws. But Black Hawks attracted attention, and Francesca needed absolute camouflage to succeed. At his best, he killed quietly and precisely, and then disappeared. Take nothing but shots. Leave nothing but bodies.

Instead of a Black Hawk, Francesca and Alders took a Toyota, with civilian Afghan plates, and joined the stream of civilian traffic leaving Kandahar. At Kharjoy, they left the highway and wended their way southeast on the one-lane tracks and dry riverbeds that passed for roads in Zabul. Ten miles before the border, the hills turned into mountains and got too steep for them to drive at all. They left the Toyota near an abandoned hut and humped up to the ridgeline of a nine-thousand-foot mountain that overwatched the trail. The mission was hugely risky. They had no backup. If the Talibs found them, they would have to call for a helicopter evacuation that would take hours. By then they’d probably be dead. Or, worse, captured.

For a week, they lived rough. They ate bread and dried fruit and rationed their water and slept under the thorny bushes that offered the only cover around. But the mission turned out to be a bust. Maybe the Talibs had guessed that the route had been discovered. Maybe they’d used other trails this month. Either way, Francesca and Alders saw nothing but a couple of kids herding goats.

But they had a second, unofficial reason for the mission. On the way into the mountains, they’d picked up a bag of tightly wrapped blue bundles from Lieutenant Weston at FOB Jackson. They’d hidden the bag along with their rifles and uniforms in a special compartment that was welded under the bed of the pickup.

Now they were back on friendly territory. Francesca wanted a shower and contractor-cooked chow. Forward operating bases had the best food in the military. The giant headquarters bases like Kandahar focused on quantity. But the dining halls at the forward bases offered chicken, steak, ice cream, fresh vegetables, and unlimited Gatorade and PowerBars.

“Starving,” Francesca said. “You?”

“Sure.”

Francesca and Alders didn’t need to talk much. They were close as husband and wife. Closer, maybe. Neither man’s marriage had survived this war. They had worked together as sniper and spotter for three years.

On one calm day the previous summer, Francesca sighted, held his breath, gently squeezed the trigger on his rifle — a four-foot-long.50 caliber Barrett M107. Across a rock valley, a fat Afghan clutched his chest and dropped. He tried to stagger up and then lay down and didn’t move again. “Nine hundred yards,” Alders told him.

“Always wanted to bust somebody at half a mile.”

“Now you have.”

Francesca would be bummed when this tour was finished. It was his third and last. Not his choice. The Army gave you only three. In the three tours, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he’d racked fifty-six kills, a good number, especially with the drones doing so much work these days. Maybe good was the wrong word. Francesca wondered whether all that killing had changed him. Course it had. Back home, civvies called guys like him serial killers. The more he pulled the trigger, the easier it came. He’d given up waiting for God or anyone else to punish him. He hadn’t been hit by lightning or gotten cancer or gone blind. He was in the best shape of his life. Plenty of money in the bank, and more coming. The Joes treated him like a minor god.

He wasn’t too worried about payback in the next world either. He’d watched close through his scope for souls leaving the men he’d killed. Hadn’t seen a single one. Only the red mist, the cloud of blood and tissue that shrieked from the body when a bullet cut through. The afterlife was a fable for little boys and girls. Not real men like him.

SO WHEN AN OLD FRIEND in Kabul reached out a few months before, told him about a scheme he had, Francesca said yes right away. “What about your spotter?” his friend had said. “He gonna be okay with this?”

“He does what I tell him.”

“That simple.”

“He knows the difference between shooting and spotting.”

Sure enough, Alders agreed. Working out the pickups was the tricky part. At first his friend wanted him to pick the stuff up himself. But the Talibs hated snipers. Francesca couldn’t risk meeting them directly.

Instead he reached out to Tyler Weston, a platoon leader he knew in Zabul. Tyler’s brother had been a good friend of Francesca’s, back in the day. Weston bought in quick once Francesca explained, quicker than Francesca had expected. He got it. He saw how everybody was getting rich over here. The companies, the contractors, the locals. Only the Joes got the shaft. This deal was a way to get them a piece of the money they’d been missing. He and Alders split ten grand a kilo, two-thirds for him, one-third for Alders. More than a million dollars already. Francesca had parked his share in a bank in Germany while he figured what to do with it.

INSIDE THE BASE, Francesca called Kandahar, explained they’d hit a rut on the way back from the mountains. “Blew the right front tire. We got the spare on. But it put a leak in the left, too. And maybe some damage to the axle.”

“Where are you now?”

“FOB Moqor. We’ll be stuck here tonight. Mechanics say they don’t have time to check the axle until the morning.”

“All right. But do me a favor. Get back by tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir.”

Francesca turned into a giant parking lot filled with armored trucks and pickups. Thousands of vehicles were parked on this base. No one would notice, much less check, a random pickup truck. He found a spot and hopped out. He and Alders took off the right front tire and replaced it with the spare and tossed the tire a couple hundred yards away.

“Let’s eat. Where’s the chow hall, Alders?”

“How’m I know that?” Alders had grown up on the side of a mountain in eastern Kentucky. He had a hillbilly accent that made him seem a lot stupider than he was. “Thought you could smell it.”

They walked past a grove of Porta-Potties and a line of blast walls that hid a dozen steel trailers. Francesca guessed they were home to the base’s midlevel officers. Lieutenants and captains usually bunked in pairs. Majors and above lived alone. The Army was extraordinarily hierarchical, although it made exceptions for Special Forces guys. In a low-intensity war like this one, the regular Joes often had to hold their fire for fear of killing civilians. Francesca didn’t have that problem. He killed more Talibs in a year than the average forty-man infantry platoon. So the Army put up with him. Even so, he knew regular officers viewed guys like him as a necessary evil. Their casual refusal to wear uniforms or salute discouraged regular soldiers from following orders.

“Want to go over there, ask for directions?”

“You know what I want?”

“What you always want. A nice cold Dr Pepper.”

“Read my mind. A nice cold Dr Pepper. Wouldn’t mind a shot of Jim Beam right next to it, but I guess that ain’t happening.”

“Funny, isn’t it. We can’t get a drink, but we got a million bucks of junk back there—”

“Junk in the trunk.”

“Had to go there. You ever think about trying it?”

“Nope,” Alders said firmly. “It’s just Oxycontin without a prescription. Half my cousins are addicted to Oxy and they lie around on their asses doing nothing ’cept talking about how high they are. From what I can see they can’t even get out of bed. Don’t look that great to me. You ever done meth?”

“Only the greenies.” One secret of the Special Forces was that a lot of guys had stashes of amphetamines tucked away. All the training in the world couldn’t prep you for two hours of sleep a night. A little chemical help went a long way.

“Yeah, meth is that times ten. The greenies give you energy, keep you up, but being on meth changes your whole attitude. You feel like you could lift a car. Unstoppable. You find some chick on it, too? You gonna tear each other up. If I’m going to get high, I want to feel high.”

“That’s the longest speech you’ve ever given me.”

“You asked, man.”

“So I did.”

They found the mess hall, and Francesca ate plates of crab legs and barbecued chicken and drank two Fantas. He wanted a third, but the mess hall regulations said two. These tiny rules had somehow kept a hold on him. Maybe following them helped him pass as normal, instead of the Shadow he was. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. He’d read that somewhere growing up. Take care of the Fantas, and the kills will take care of themselves.

He laughed a little.

“What?” Alders said.

“Nothing.”

“That creeps me out.”

“What?”

“That laugh. That high-pitched crazy-man laugh. Hee-hee-hee. You been doing it a lot. And every time I ask you what you’re thinking about, you say, ‘Nothing.’”

“Just thinking.”

“Three tours is enough,” Alders said.

Francesca got himself two slices of Oreo pie. Alders had ice cream. The conversations eddied and flowed around them, but none of the other soldiers talked to them. Everyone knew enough to leave them alone. The mess hall had a television that played the Armed Forces Network, a mix of live sports and shows like House. During the commercial breaks, the channel played military public-service announcements instead of the usual back-home ads. The announcements were targeted at rear-echelon administrative types at bases in Europe. Tips for dealing with sexual harassment, that kind of thing. They had less than nothing to do with the reality of the war over here. Lately, Francesca could hardly watch them. He wanted to shoot everyone in them, especially the whiny chicks who didn’t like being told their asses looked good. What you just said to me makes me uncomfortable, Sergeant. I suggest— Oh— Whomp. She doesn’t even get a hand up. Dead before she hits the floor. Two points.

Francesca felt that high-pitched laugh rising in his throat and stifled it. When had he started thinking about shooting his fellow soldiers? “I guess it is,” he said aloud.

“What?”

“Enough. Three tours.”

“I’m starting to think it’s too much.”

Francesca laughed, for real this time.

BACK AT THE PICKUP, Alders slid under the back bumper, opened the hidden compartment, came out with the dope and a thick plastic bag that held their uniforms and toiletries. “Showers?”

“I don’t know,” Francesca said. “I think I smell pretty good.”

“You smell like a wild animal.”

Francesca had gotten into the habit of taking the hottest showers he could. Today, he turned the handle left until the water scalded his skin. He closed his eyes and smiled. Two minutes later, he stepped out, feeling almost human.

He brushed his teeth and ran his hands through his black hair and looked himself over in the mirror. He was an okay-looking guy. His nose was a little bit of a bulb and his ears stuck out. Growing up in Orlando, fifteen minutes from Disney World, he’d inevitably been nicknamed “Mickey” in elementary school. He pulled on his camouflage, laced his boots. The pants and blouse looked clean and crisp. And even if they hadn’t… the tag on his left arm was all he needed: Special Forces. Anyone who had one of those didn’t have to wear a name tag or rank insignia.

He packed the bricks of heroin into his pack and headed over to the airfield, a giant gravel square where the helicopters landed. Moqor was the next big base past FOB Jackson, more or less halfway between Kandahar and Kabul. But only a few helicopters were permanently stationed there. The Chinooks and other big passenger birds were mostly based at Bagram and Kandahar.

Francesca stepped into the oversize wooden shack that housed the soldiers who ran the airfield. Inside, hundreds of heavily thumbed paperbacks testified to the countless hours of waiting for flights. When the wind and dust kicked up, helo rides got canceled. Slide it to the right, guys said. Meaning, block off another day on the calendar, because this one’s gone.

“Got anything heading east today?” he said to the private behind the counter. The kid was so young he still had teenage acne, the pimply, oily kind.

“There’s a Presidential”—a contractor helicopter—“to Kabul at seventeen hundred. Also the Canadians are running a Chinook to Kabul and then Bagram at 2030. Guessing you don’t have an AMR.” The letters stood for “air mobility request.” Having one meant a confirmed seat.

“You are correct. Flying Space-A.” Space-A meant “space available,” the military equivalent of standby. Flying Space-A sometimes meant waiting for days. But Francesca much preferred it, because it left no record. Space-A requests were logged by hand on a paper chart. Once a flight landed safely, the records were tossed. He had flown all over Afghanistan on a Space-A basis and left no trail. Which made him feel more confident about the thirty-plus pounds of heroin in his pack.

“They’re stuffed,” the private said. “Chinook looks a little better.”

“I can wait for the Chinook. Long as I get out tonight.”

“I’ll jump you to the top of the list. But I still can’t guarantee it.”

Francesca put his elbows on the counter and leaned forward. “Can I trust you?” The kid’s breath was terrible. “I don’t want to say too much, but I have got to get to Bagram tonight. I got something in RC-East and it can’t wait. Way east. You see what I’m saying.” Francesca knew he was laying it on thick, implying he had a mission in Pakistan. He also knew he looked seriously high-speed with his beard and tags. He thought the private, who probably had never gotten outside the wire, would bite.

The private’s eyes widened. He nodded once and backed away like a kid who’d walked in on his parents going at it. And Francesca got on the 2030, the last man on, when a half dozen guys got dumped. As he walked toward the Chinook, ducking the gravel caught in the backwash from its double rotors, Francesca smirked to himself. Too easy. He pressed his way into the Chinook, took the last seat on the bench, tucked his million-dollar bag between his legs. Better make sure it didn’t slide out the back.

The engines whined and the chopper’s front end rose and then its rear end lurched up into the night. The Chinooks were so big that sometimes they gave the illusion that they were moving in pieces, like accordion buses, instead of all at once. Francesca couldn’t see much, but he didn’t need to. He’d killed people all over this damn country.

He untied his boots and put in his earplugs and closed his eyes and let the Chinook’s vibrations put him to sleep. Strange but true, these rides were the only place he truly relaxed anymore.

In Kabul, only a couple guys got off, so the copter stayed stuffed. Fifteen minutes later, the Chinook touched down at Zebra Ramp in Bagram. Francesca’s job was almost finished. Though this last bit was the trickiest.

THE CHINOOK HAD LANDED north of the airport runway. The passenger and cargo jet terminals were on the south side. The runway was supposed to be impassible. Anyone connecting from a helicopter to a jet was supposed to leave the tarmac and reenter through the passenger terminal.

But Francesca didn’t have that option. Bags at Bagram were examined before they were allowed on the tarmac. The screeners were mainly looking for explosives, but the plastic-wrapped bundles of heroin in his pack bore an uncanny resemblance to bricks of C-4. Francesca couldn’t put the bag through an X-ray machine. Fortunately, he was on the tarmac already. He just needed to cross the runway to get to the passenger side.

Francesca stepped out of the helicopter, looked around. Unlike civilian airports, Bagram never slept. Planes took off and landed twenty-four hours a day. Even now, close to midnight, the air was thick with jet fuel. As he watched, an F-18 pulled off the runway almost vertically and disappeared into the night. A minute later, a Reaper drone took its place on the runway, slowly gaining speed, finally rising from the earth. Compared to the F-18, the Reaper looked like a hobbyist’s creation, spindly wings and a long, narrow nose. Yet the Reaper was a far cheaper and more effective weapon.

Around Francesca, the Chinook emptied like a clown car, passengers pouring out the back, glad to leave the noisy bird behind. They grabbed their bags and made their way toward the gate that separated the helicopter landing area from the rest of the base. Francesca lit up a cigarette, an excuse to wait on the tarmac.

“You need a ride somewhere?” a white-haired guy in a General Dynamics jacket said.

“Thanks. I’m good.” Francesca smoked until he was the last guy by the bird. When the cigarette was finished, he edged toward the gate. After a few steps, he bent over and tied his boots. The pilots were finishing their final postlanding checks. All the passengers were close to the gate. No one was within a hundred feet of him. No one was looking at him. Chinooks weren’t exactly loaded with classified technology. They’d been around forty years. And nobody cared too much where passengers went after a helicopter touched down.

Francesca turned, walked purposefully away from the gate. Sure, somebody could have run back to ask him whether he was lost. But folks had rides waiting and didn’t want to be late. The Special Forces tags helped. He ducked behind a hangar and waited. A few minutes later, he heard the pilots joking with each other as they left. He waited fifteen minutes more. Now he was alone for sure.

He headed for the gate, which had been closed and locked. An all-terrain vehicle was parked beside it. The mechanics rode them around the airfield. A lucky break. Even better, the key was in the ignition. Francesca rolled east along the outer taxiway, leaving the Chinook behind. He passed an enormous hangar filled with fighter jets. Mechanics stood by an A-10 Warthog, the ugliest and arguably most useful plane the Air Force had. The Warthogs flew low and slow and fired rounds the size of Coke cans. They could slice through tank armor or reduce a house to rubble. The mechanics looked over as if wondering who he was. He nodded, didn’t say anything, kept driving.

Finally, Francesca reached the northeastern edge of the runway, where dozens of old Russian Mi-8 helicopters slept in a fenced-off pen, as if to prevent them from contaminating American choppers and jets. Contractors flew the Mi-8s, which were rickety and slow but famously indestructible. The finicky turbines that powered American helicopters needed clean fuel or they seized up in midair. Mi-8s ran on practically anything.

At the edge of the tarmac, Francesca turned south and steered the ATV to the end of the runway. “No Trespassing. Emergency Vehicles Only,” a sign warned. To his east, a fence blocked the end of the runway from the perimeter road that circled the base. This far over, planes would be hundreds of feet above him on takeoff. A C-130 lumbered overhead, giving him some cover, as he headed across the runway to the southern taxiway.

Now he just needed to find the big jet to Frankfurt. One left every night, usually around two a.m., filled with soldiers heading home for their leaves. The departure time seemed lousy, but it got guys to Frankfurt in time for morning connections to the United States.

Unlike big civilian airports, Bagram didn’t have jetways. To board, guys walked out a fenced area at the back of the terminal and across the tarmac and up a mobile staircase and into the jet. Francesca planned to park the ATV near the terminal. When the guys left the terminal to board, he’d join the line. In the darkness, he would be just another soldier. No one would notice him or question his presence.

Before he got to the stairs, he’d find a cargo handler and ask whether he could stow his bag in the hold, because it was so big and heavy. The handler, most likely a contractor, would take the bag and give him a gate check. Francesca would put it in his pocket and walk back into the terminal and disappear. Tomorrow he’d catch a Space-A back to Moqor. No one would ever know he’d been here. What happened to the bag in Frankfurt wasn’t his concern. He had never asked, but he imagined someone on ramp duty there would pick it up.

HE DIDN’T REGISTER the headlights until they were almost on him. An SUV had edged onto the taxiway, blocked his path. Now he saw the black letters on the side: Military Police. He wondered whether he’d popped up on the ground radar the controllers used to track the taxiway, or if the stop was just bad luck.

No matter. The military police at Bagram were basically crossing guards. He’d make sure they saw he was Delta, be on his way. The cop on the passenger side got out, put a flashlight on him. Francesca raised a hand to shield himself from the glare and started to stand. The cop put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t move. What’s your name?”

“Chief Warrant Officer Daniel Francesca.”

“You come over the runway just now?”

“The far edge over there, Officer. I thought I was okay. I’m sorry.”

“Bet you are. Did you see the sign?”

“Sign?”

“The big sign that says emergency vehicles only. No trespassing. That sign. Did you see it?”

This guy was a real hard-ass. Francesca felt his anger rising. Another jet soared into the night. He cooled himself down, waited until it passed.

“Like I said, I’m sorry. Even us bug-eaters make mistakes. I’m supposed to be going to Frankfurt tonight, start my leave, and my ride was delayed and I didn’t think I would make it.”

The cop moved his flashlight to Francesca’s backpack. “What’s in the bag?”

“The usual.”

“I’m going to need to see it.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

The cop’s hand was on his holster now. “What did you say?”

“I said, sure, Officer.”

Francesca knew what was going to happen. He should have been looking for a way out, but he wasn’t. The knife on his leg would do fine. He’d never killed anyone with a knife. He was looking forward to it. Military, civilian, friend, enemy, he didn’t care anymore. Let’s do this. He felt his pulse beating down to his fingertips. He had the sensation whenever he put a target in his sights.

He tossed the bag on the ground. The cop bent down for it. Francesca dropped his hand toward his knife—

AND THE TAHOE HONKED, long and loud.

The officer wagged a finger at Francesca, Don’t move, and hurried back to the Tahoe. The two cops had a short conversation, and then the first walked back to him. “Your lucky day. A Gator”—an armored vehicle—“just pancaked two joggers. Even stupider than you, running at night. We got called to find witnesses. I told my partner you’re full of it, you don’t belong out here and I want to take you in, but I got outvoted. So good-bye and get lost.”

The cop hustled back to the Tahoe. It rolled off, lights flashing. Francesca watched it disappear. He touched the gas, headed the four-wheeler toward the passenger terminal. The cop was right. His lucky day. Even if he had killed both officers cleanly and ditched the bag, he’d have left a trail. His fellow passengers on the Chinook would have remembered that he hadn’t left with them. The mechanics had seen him on the cart. The military investigators would have pulled the Space-A files at Moqor from the trash and his name would jump out.

So, as he steered along the south taxiway, Francesca knew he should have been relieved. Instead, as his pulse slowed and the electricity in his fingertips faded, he felt nothing but disappointment.

8

Wells rode in the front passenger seat of a crew-cab pickup in the shark-tooth mountains east of Jalalabad. The man beside him had a long black beard, a Talib beard. Wells had a beard, too, dyed blue. He wondered whether he was a prisoner. But the other man ignored him. In the distance explosions thumped hollowly. The pickup came over a rise and Wells saw an M1 tank blocking the road. Its turret swung toward them. The pickup’s driver grinned at Wells. Are you ready? He gunned the engine—

And Wells opened his eyes and found himself at the Ariana. The explosions were knocks on his door. “John? It’s Gabe Yergin.” The station’s operations chief, its third in command. “Wondered if you wanted lunch.”

Wells dragged himself up, saw a bloodshot-eyed zombie in the mirror. Getting too old for this. That thought came to him more and more. “I’ll come by your office.”

“Sure.”

The station’s senior officers worked on the second floor. A thick-necked guard buzzed Wells into a corridor whose walls were lined with high-res satellite maps of Kabul and Kandahar — as well as the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar. Proof, not that any was needed, that this war didn’t stop at the border.

“Here.” Yergin poked his head from a doorway like a groundhog checking for his shadow. He was thirty-five going on fifty, a small man with a deep widow’s peak and puffy black circles under his eyes. Even after he sat beside Wells on the couch, he seemed to be in motion. He rocked forward, drumming his fingers against his jeans. He produced a pack of Marlboros from his jacket, lit up, dragged deep. The nicotine worked its magic immediately. Yergin relaxed, sat back against the cushions.

“Let me guess,” Wells said. “You didn’t smoke until you got here.”

“Been smoking since college. Every six months or so I quit, but it never takes. Hasn’t anyone ever told you? There’s something very satisfying in meeting an addiction over and over. You like the posters?” Posters for Transformers and The Godfather hung behind Yergin’s desk.

“Sure.”

“The Godfather, best movie ever made.”

“And Transformers?”

“I could tell you it’s a metaphor for the way we can never trust the Afghans, they’re always changing. Truth is, it’s an excuse to put up a picture of Megan Fox.”

“I’m sure the women in the office love that.”

“You’d be surprised. So Vinny sent you.”

“So much for small talk, huh?”

“My ADD can’t tolerate it.”

“The director wants my take on how it’s going.”

“We must be doing a terrible job.”

“Finger-pointing isn’t my style. I’m trying to help. But I promise you this about Duto: If he thinks you guys are in trouble and that the problems could come back at him, he’ll make sure he’s insulated. If that means ending your career in the ugliest possible way, he will. So if there’s an issue, it’s talk to me now or talk to somebody else later. Maybe under oath.”

The speech left plenty of questions unanswered, but it seemed to satisfy Yergin. “First off, understand the strategic situation’s a mess. We’re playing Whac-A-Mole here. First we had our guys in the east, and the south went to hell. Now we’ve moved everybody south, and the east is going to hell. And by the way, the south isn’t great either. This quote-unquote government we’re working with, it’s beyond corrupt. Everything’s for sale. You want to be a cop? That’s a bribe. Five to ten grand, depending on the district.”

“Ten thousand Afghanis?” That was four hundred dollars.

“Ten thousand American dollars. To become a patrolman. You want to be a district-level police chief? Twenty, thirty thousand. At the national level, the cabinet jobs are a quarter million and up.”

“That seems crazy.”

“You have to remember, this country has African-level poverty. Average income is six hundred dollars a year. Total economy, maybe twenty billion. We come in, we’re spending a hundred billion a year. Think about that. Five times the Afghan GDP. And the locals make sure they get their share.”

“How so?”

“Three main buckets. The military spends billions on base construction, supply convoys, local guards. Second, we fund reconstruction projects, roads, dams, schools, et cetera. Third, we give direct subsidies to the Afghan government to pay for their army, police, judges, toilet paper for all I know. Combine the buckets, probably close to twenty billion.”

“The money we funnel in is equal to the rest of their economy put together.”

“Correct. So the Afghans, they can keep living on two dollars a day, or they can get onto our gravy train. If they have to pay bribes to do it, they will. And lots of this money sneaks back into the Taliban’s pockets. The contractors we hire to deliver fuel, they bribe the Taliban not to attack them.”

“We’re paying for both sides of the war.”

“More or less.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“It is what it is.”

“What would you do if you were in charge?”

“I’d pull out. But barring that, I don’t have a good answer.”

“So the war’s a mess,” Wells said. “What about the station? Marburg knocked you guys down for a while.”

“Knocked us down? Marburg lit us on fire and threw us off a cliff. Seeing those coffins at Bagram was as bad as watching my parents get buried. Nine dead. And it was so avoidable. Marci and Manny wanted al-Zawahiri so bad they didn’t pat Marburg down. Basic blocking and tackling. Not that we talk about it.”

“Because of Peter?”

Yergin’s eyebrows lifted so high they nearly fused with his widow’s peak. “I didn’t say that. But yes. Hard to believe, but our deputy chief doesn’t want to hear about how his wife got herself and his brother killed. And since then, you know the history.”

“The outlines, sure.”

“Jim Wultse turned out to be a grade-A boozer. I remember walking into his office once around noon, seeing him spike his coffee. Nice silver flask, had a dragon inscribed on it. His hand shook when he saw me, and whatever he was pouring wound up on his desk. He looked down like, ‘Sweet manna of heaven, I’ve lost you.’ If I wasn’t there, I swear he would have started licking the wood.”

“That bad?”

“No joke. I thought I was watching an after-school special on the dangers of alcoholism. And when Wultse left, Gordie King came and we were excited for about two minutes. Thought he was going to kick ass and take names. But he just didn’t have the stones anymore. He hated Kabul. Refused to live here. This is where the war is. It’s not moving to Switzerland.”

“You lost more than a year.”

“It was brutal. We covered for it. Getting bin Laden took a lot of heat off. We didn’t have much to do with that — it came out of Pakistan and then the CTC took over. But it had a halo effect, made everybody look good. Plus we kept running the drones, and that’s basically a military op. Runs off tactical intel. So we blasted lots of low- and midlevel guys. A lot of the intel for those hits comes direct from the insurgents, by the way. They use the drones to settle scores with one another, and we let them.”

“What about civilian casualties?”

“We’re careful. We see kids around, anything like that, we won’t shoot. And the optics these things carry are amazing. You ever seen them?”

“Not really.”

“You should. You know how in the movies they show the bad guys’ faces and you see every pore crystal clear? It’s even better than that.”

“Too bad you can’t read their minds.”

“Too bad. So yeah, even in the worst days, we blew up a bunch of guys carrying guns over the border, that kind of thing. But they’re totally replaceable. There’s an infinite supply of them.”

“We kill their drones with our drones.”

Yergin laughed wheezily. He sounded like a flooded lawn mower engine trying to start. “More or less. And that’s not what we’re here for.”

“What are you here for?”

“You know full well.”

“I want to know how you see the job.”

“If we’re doing it right, we’re getting into the top of the government, assessing who’s trustworthy. Figuring out which Talib commanders we can buy off and which we can’t. Offering an independent view of how the war is going, so the White House isn’t relying only on the military.”

“And finding al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar.”

“Ron and Pete haven’t emphasized that as a goal. And I agree. The logic is that (a) they’re probably in Pakistan and it’s Islamabad’s job, and (b) al-Qaeda doesn’t have much to do with the insurgency here.”

“Makes sense.”

“Glad you approve. Can I have my promotion now?”

Wells smiled. More and more, Yergin reminded Wells of Shafer. He probably wasn’t as cynical, not yet. Give him thirty years.

“So how many officers do you have?”

“We’re close to full strength now. Six hundred in country.”

“Six hundred?”

“But you have to remember, only a few are case officers. More than two hundred handle security. Then we have the coms and IT guys, logistics and administrative — just keeping this hotel running is a massive job — and the guys at the airfields, handling the drones. Fewer than forty ever get outside the wire to talk to the locals. Of those, most are working with Afghan security and intelligence forces. If you’re looking at guys recruiting sources on the ground, it’s maybe a dozen.”

“The few and the proud.”

“But unavoidable. The security situation is impossible. Only the very best officers can work outside the wire without getting popped, and even then only for short stretches.”

“You oversee them.”

“Correct. There’re few enough of them that they can all report directly to me.”

“Do you report to Lautner or Arango or both?”

“Mainly Peter. Arango’s more of an administrator.”

“And Peter? What’s he like?”

“He’s—”

A KNOCK INTERRUPTED HIM. Lautner walked in.

“Like I was about to tell you, Peter’s the best boss anyone could have.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Lautner said to Wells. “I think a Predator just went down outside Jalalabad.”

Wells didn’t want to get paranoid, but he wondered why Lautner had shown up at the very moment Wells asked about him. Was he sending Wells a message: I’m watching you? Probably not. Probably Lautner’s appearance was pure coincidence. Wells hated coincidence. “Drones go down a lot?” Wells said.

“Not too often,” Yergin said. “Main thing is to blow it up before the Afghans can get their hands on it.”

“I can come back,” Wells said.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll finish up with you fast, and then if you have more questions, find me.”

“Another day in paradise,” Lautner said. “Carry on, Captain.” He saluted Wells and turned and walked out.

“I get the feeling he doesn’t like me much,” Wells said.

“He doesn’t like the fact you’re looking over our shoulders. Neither do I. I hide it better.”

“So you and he and Arango took over a little more than a year ago.”

“About that. For a while, things went really well. Recently, not so much.”

“Vinny said you’ve lost some of your best agents.”

“Did he tell you what happened?”

“No.” Technically, Wells wasn’t lying. Duto hadn’t told him. Wells had read the reports himself, in the files.

“One of our best sources got hit by a truck bomb. Trust me when I tell you it was an occupational hazard. Not necessarily because anyone knew he was ours. Another source, he told us a Talib commander was ready to defect. It was pure smoke. And now he’s gone. Either he got caught and he’s about to get his head chopped off, or he was playing us all along.”

“So that’s two of your best sources gone.”

“Listen, we know the rumor, John.”

“What rumor?”

“You insist on acting like some jarhead with more muscle than brains and I’m not sure why. Rumor is, somebody back home thinks we’ve been penetrated.”

So much for keeping the mission secret. Wells was surprised that Yergin had revealed so soon that he knew the real reason Wells had come. Forcing the issue into the open put Wells on the defensive.

“Nobody seriously thinks that’s possible,” Wells said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Let me rephrase. I don’t seriously think that’s possible. How could the Taliban turn one of you? What could they offer?”

“Devil’s advocate, maybe they bought somebody. Money knows no ideology.”

“Suppose they came to you, Gabe. Would you trust them to pay? And the truth is, money’s not a good motivator for treason. Money is the icing on the cake.”

“And the cake is—”

“Ideology or blackmail.”

“What about Aldrich Ames?” The worst traitor in the CIA’s history. “He did it for money.”

“Money as ideology. Ames convinced himself it was nothing but a game on both sides and he should get paid while he could.”

“So there’s no mole, John? You’re just here for your health.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

Yergin lit a fresh cigarette with his silver-plated Zippo. He flicked the lighter into the air and snapped it shut one-handed. “What if there is?” He sucked down on the cigarette, obviously enjoying the moment. But when he exhaled, he said only, “Course not. We were dealt a bad hand, but all in all I think we’ve played it pretty good. Duto should leave us alone, let us do our jobs. Anything you want to ask me?”

Wells decided to press. “Suppose you’re wrong. Suppose we’re both wrong. Any obvious candidates? Anybody acting strange?”

“Everybody’s acting strange. We’re all stressed beyond belief.” As if to punctuate his words, the hollow drum of an IED sounded somewhere beyond the blast walls.

“Anybody find excuses to get outside the wire without backup?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean much. Somebody senior like me could easily get to Kandahar or a big FOB and then go from there.”

Wells felt Yergin was almost winking at him, hinting he was guilty. “I’d like to look over your entry and exit logs.”

“Sure.” Yergin looked at his watch. “I have to figure out this drone that went down. Talk to anybody you like.”

Wells stood to leave. And played his last card. “What about drugs?”

“What about them?”

“Do you monitor the trafficking networks?”

“Around the edges. We’re not the DEA.”

“But it’s a source of funding for the insurgency.”

“You can overstate its importance. The Taliban run cheap. I mean, they literally pay fifty dollars to these kids to plant IEDs. If the drug money disappeared tomorrow, they’d still have cash from the charities, Iran, the ISI. But sure, we try to watch it.”

“Who specifically?”

“Right now an analyst named Joanna Frey. She’s been here seven months, leaving next month.”

“Where’s her office?”

“On five. She’s quite nice.”

“I’ll try not to scare her.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

FREY WAS MAYBE FORTY-FIVE, with a corona of long gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She looked like a college librarian. She didn’t look like she belonged at the agency, much less in Kabul.

“Ms. Frey?”

“Joanna.” She waved him in. “Sit.”

“I’m John Wells.”

“Of course. We got an e-mail you’d be visiting. Said we should cooperate.”

Another curiously passive-aggressive move. Cooperate somehow implied that Wells was not to be trusted. “So your tour is almost done?”

“Next month.”

“Looking forward to getting out of here?”

“I am. I volunteered to come, but I’m ready to go. Sick of being cooped up.”

“What did you do at Langley?”

“Counternarcotics analysis. Mainly stats, estimates of coca planting and refining all over South America. Where the stuff went. How big the business was start to finish. Lots of looking at satellite imagery, reviewing seizure reports and cables from Colombia and Bolivia.”

“Big picture.”

“We were interested in the big traffickers, their relationships with the government, the police. A lot of ELINT.” Electronic intelligence could range from wiretaps to cell phone traces to bank transfers. “Though we had trouble getting the NSA’s help. If it’s not terrorism or WMD, it’s not a priority for them.”

“What about the DEA?”

“They didn’t always share. Didn’t view us as such a reliable partner. Thought we had different priorities.” Put another way, the CIA sometimes traded information with the same cartels the DEA was trying to break.

“So then you came here.”

“Yep. It’s similar to what I was doing back home. Only the politics are even more complicated. Understand, if we wanted, we could kill every poppy plant in Kandahar and Helmand. There’s no technical obstacle to spraying. This isn’t Colombia. No jungle canopy. But if we did that, two million Pashtuns would go to war with us.”

“Without opium, there’s no economy down there.”

“Correct. So the DEA mainly tries to interdict a couple of levels past local. It lets the farmers sell the poppies and get paid. But even then, it’s tricky. The Afghan police move a lot of heroin and opium. We’re not touching them. Then some of the tribes in the north, the friendly ones, are in the business, too. And it might be tricky if Congressman X starts complaining we’re in bed with known traffickers.”

“But what we don’t know—”

“Correct. When I came here, my predecessor told me my job was, quote, to give policymakers the overall trends in drug trafficking. Not to play detective. End quote. I suspect that on the second floor they may get intercepts that I don’t. Ones with names like Karzai in them. But I don’t ask. I keep my head down and do what I’m told. I’m just a little church mouse, even if I do keep a SIG Sauer in my nightstand back home.”

“You have a SIG in your nightstand?”

“A nice little nine. Fits right in my palm. Better safe than sorry. I used to lock it in the closet so I wouldn’t be tempted to shoot my philandering husband, but I live alone now.” Wells’s face must have revealed his disbelief. “I may look like an overage hippie who belongs in the Haight, but as far as I’m concerned the Second Amendment’s the one that pays for all the others. Out of my cold dead hands, mister.”

She was smiling, but she wasn’t joking. Wells liked her. And he thought that she’d give him straight answers if she had them.

“You’ll be glad to get home to your SIG.”

“Got that right.”

“Ever seen any intercepts about anyone from the agency buying dope from the Talibs?”

“No.”

“What about other coalition forces, the military or someone else?”

For the first time she hesitated. “Not really.”

Wells folded his hands together and waited.

“It’s like this. I don’t have to tell you the Pashtuns aren’t just one tribe. There’re really dozens of subgroups, every one controlling a different province or region or village. One that we watch is called the Thuwanis. They also move a lot of dope. Nasty bunch.”

SUDDENLY WELLS was in Kowt-e ’Ashrow, west of Kabul. The years were blurry, but he thought it was 2000. October, maybe. Somewhere far away, Bill Clinton was president. But in the Afghan hills, summer was over and winter was closer than it seemed. And a Talib named Alaa Thuwani had ordered two Shia prisoners to run through a minefield where rotting goat carcasses lay like the devil’s own mascots.

Thuwani told the Shia they had a choice. They could run through the field, which stretched about two hundred meters. Or he could shoot them in the back of the head. He promised that if they got through he’d set them free, let them go back to their homes in the north. They were small men, Wells remembered. One had a little belly that poked out of his gown. They didn’t argue.

Wells wasn’t with the Thuwanis. He’d been riding in a convoy of Talib guerrillas. When they heard about the prisoners, the fighters wanted to stop and see the show. The five-tons pulled off the road and everybody jumped off.

“IT WAS PRACTICALLY a party,” Wells said now, at the Ariana. “We just needed fireworks and a band.”

“What was?”

“I TELL YOU APOSTATES, go to Allah and beg for His mercy!” Thuwani fired his AK into the air. The Shia ran. The one with the potbelly got fifty yards before the ground exploded around him, clumps of dirt spraying high in the air. When the dust settled, he lay on the ground, moaning and begging. Thuwani shot a couple of rounds in the air from sheer joy. Then he and the other Talibs opened up with their AKs.

The other Shia didn’t zigzag or look down or back. He just ran straight through like he expected to levitate over the mines. And somehow he did. He crossed onto the path at the far edge of the field. He dropped to his knees and touched his head to the earth and shouted, “Hamdulillah!” Thanks be to God. Thuwani said something low and dark to the men around him. They laughed.

“Now come back!” Thuwani yelled. “Then I promise you’ll really be free.”

The Shia stood and looked across the field. “Back!” Thuwani yelled. Like the Shia was a misbehaving dog. The Shia ran hopelessly away toward a cluster of mud homes. Thuwani and his friends lowered their AKs and sprayed long bursts, one-handed on full auto. They shot so badly that for a few seconds Wells thought the guy might get away. But then one stepped back and took careful aim.

“THE THUWANIS,” Wells said. “Nasty. The chief’s a guy named Alaa.”

Frey looked puzzled at his knowledge, but she said only, “Alaa died a few years ago. Replaced by a guy named Amadullah. Cousin or half brother, I’m not sure. Anyway, we’ve been up and down on them.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we have a few phone numbers for them, and Amadullah’s canny. But some of the younger guys aren’t too smart. So we get a ping from them every so often. But I don’t want to overstate their importance, tell you their names come up a ton.”

“But they are Talibs. They’re connected to the central leadership.”

“Yes. And they move enough weight to be worth watching. Anyway, a couple months ago a wiretap transcript popped up with one of their old phones. A Pak cell one of Amadullah’s nephews uses. He was calling an Afghan cell and he told the guy on the other end, ‘Tell your men to have twenty packages at the house by the river in the red field. The infidels will pick them up. Tomorrow afternoon. The usual procedure.’ Now, a package usually means a kilo, so that would imply twenty kilos.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“It is. As for a river in the red field, that could be anywhere. They use simple codes for locations. River could mean mosque, red field could mean a specific village. Nothing complicated about it, we just don’t know what it means.”

“And what did the guy on the other side say?”

“Just, ‘The same Americans.’ The first guy said, ‘I think so, yes.’ I wondered if the translation was wrong, but translation from the NSA is pretty good, and anyway, American is an obvious word. Then they said good-bye and hung up. Nothing else. It seemed clear they’d done this before.”

“He said Americans.”

“That’s right.”

“And this was when?”

Frey pulled up a screen on her computer, paged through the wiretap database. “Ten weeks ago today. After I got it, I cross-checked to see if the number on the other end had ever come up. But it hadn’t. It was an AWCC phone, a burner.”

“AWCC?”

“Afghan Wireless. Almost all their phones are cash prepaid. Not too many credit cards here. So we had no idea who was on the other end. And the Paki cell never popped up again either.”

“And no one ever found Amadullah’s nephew.”

“No. Truth is I can’t even be sure he was the one making the call. Anyway, I’d never heard any reference like that before. I told my boss — that’s Julianna Craig, she’s in charge of all analysis for the station. She agreed it was interesting, told me to chase it.”

“So there was no interference.”

“The opposite. Julianna told me the guys on the second floor were interested.”

“Did she say who, specifically?”

“No.”

“Back to the call. Can you check the database, see how many times that Paki cell was used in the year leading up to it?”

After three quick clicks, she had the answer. “Five,” she said. “But never to that Afghan number. A couple of times to other Thuwanis, and I’m not sure about the rest.”

“And afterward it was never used again.”

“Correct.”

“One last thing. Can you print me a copy of the transcript?”

“That’s a real no-no.” But she clicked the screen, printed him a copy. It was barely a page long.

“Thanks.”

“Do me a favor. Burn it before you leave.”

“Will do.”

“And one day when we’re both back home, you can come over and teach me how to use that SIG.” She winked.

Wells edged out the door. “Your first impression is deceptive.”

“So they say.”

WELLS TUCKED THE TRANSCRIPT AWAY, went back to the second floor. He spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Arango, the chief of station, and Julianna Craig.

Craig confirmed Frey’s story about the wiretap. Lautner and Yergin had encouraged her to have Frey pursue it, she said. Arango was a Marylander from the Eastern Shore, polite, distant, and soft-spoken. He deflected Wells’s questions, swallowed them up in inspirational clichés that offered no hint of what he was thinking.

“So Gordie King left the station a shambles?”

“I wouldn’t say shambles. But we had to put up our sleeves and get to work and that’s what we did.”

“It must be difficult for Pete Lautner to work here after what happened.”

“I wasn’t here for Marburg, although of course I know what happened. Pete came highly recommended. He’s done fine work. I don’t think it’s my place to ask him how he feels about his family. We all have different ways of coping with grief.”

“Do you think Duto made a mistake sending me here?”

“I’d never second-guess the director. Of course I’ve instructed everyone to answer whatever questions you might have….”

And, finally: “Do you remember a wiretap that indicated U.S. military forces might be purchasing large amounts of heroin from the Taliban?”

Arango didn’t hesitate. As if he’d expected the question. Wells wondered whether Frey or Craig had tipped him. “Yes. Lautner mentioned it. This was a couple months ago. I asked him if the intercept had any actionable details. He said no. I told him to keep me informed.”

“So you had a particular interest in it?”

“I imagined it could be a sensitive issue for the military. I wanted to be sure that if it progressed further, I’d know, so I could inform the right people. But no, it wasn’t of particular interest. As far as I know, there’s been nothing since then.”

A sensitive issue. And Wells thought of a question he should have asked before.

“Did you ever pass the intercept to military intel? Or tell them about it?”

“I don’t believe so, no.”

“Or the DEA?”

“You can imagine how many intercepts this station sees in a month, Mr. Wells. Not to mention HUMINT and surveillance reports. This was vague, didn’t touch on our ongoing operations. As far as I can recall no one even suggested to me that we make it an action item.”

After ninety minutes of this thrust-and-parry, Wells begged off. You need anything, you let me know, Arango said, as Wells left.

I’ll be sure to do that.

BACK IN HIS ROOM, Wells lay on his bed and tried to make sense of everything he’d learned. He hadn’t expected the officers here to treat him like a hero. But their unconcealed hostility surprised him. He wouldn’t want to be first through the door with only Lautner or Arango behind him. The conversation with Yergin perplexed him, too.

In truth, Wells much preferred having a trail to chase. Instead he was looking for an enemy who might not even exist. So he did what he had done before at these moments. He called Shafer.

From outside, on the Ariana’s helipad. On his own sat phone. He wondered whether he should have left the compound entirely. The sun had set and the floodlights outside the blast walls were up. Diesel smoke smudged the stars. Wells hadn’t liked Kabul a decade ago and he didn’t like it now. During the civil war, the city was overrun more times than anyone could count. By 1999, half its houses were rubble. Amputee children begged on every corner, surrounding any Westerner foolish enough to have stayed. In the mountains Wells saw flashes of a gentler — and certainly more beautiful — Afghanistan. Never here.

Now NATO and Western donors had rebuilt the city. But the new offices and houses looked cheap and tacky. Billions of dollars in reconstruction money had been siphoned to bank accounts in Dubai and Lebanon. Why bother to rebuild it properly? the Afghans seemed to be asking. When you leave, we’ll just have to destroy it again.

Only the mosques had survived. Wells wondered when the calls to prayer would sound. He wanted to get into a mosque and tip his head to the floor and see whether his faith could find him. Behind these blast walls he felt divorced from Islam. On the flight over, he’d looked forward to coming back to Afghanistan. Now he saw that he hadn’t returned, not really. The Ariana wasn’t the United States, but it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was purgatory.

He called Shafer. “Ellis.”

“John. How’s it feel to be home?”

“Kabul was never home.”

“I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“They’ve all gone native, Ellis.” Wells explained what he’d found so far, finishing with the intercept. “It doesn’t add up. They said the right things about investigating it, but they didn’t, as far as I can tell.”

“You have it? Can you read it to me?”

Wells did. “There’s no unit name or number. No village or district. Not even a province. A hundred thousand suspects. How do we narrow that down?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you someone who does. Amadullah Thuwani.”

9

David Miller was still alive.

Mere survival hardly qualified as an achievement for most people. But Miller was a heroin dealer and a sometime user, too. He was married to two women on two continents. He had been arrested in Chicago and Karachi, snitched for the DEA and the CIA. He had reason to be proud of his continued existence.

Now Miller was again putting his life on the line. He wished he had a choice in the matter. He was headed for a meeting with Amadullah Thuwani, the chief of a tribe of Pashtuns who lived on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Miller knew Amadullah’s reputation for mindless viciousness. For a generation, the Thuwanis had fought — against the Soviet Union, other Afghans, and now the United States. During the 1990s, they’d locked prisoners in steel shipping containers without food or water, then let the containers cook in the desert. These days their main income came from drug trafficking.

Miller figured the Thuwanis didn’t like him much either. His dad was a Pakistani from Karachi, but his mom was African-American. He’d grown up in Chicago. Like all Pashtuns, the Thuwanis were obsessed with bloodlines. They viewed his lineage as impure. But they dealt with him, because he helped them move a lot of heroin.

Miller’s birth name was Daood Maktani. His dad, Omar, had always wanted him to think of himself as Pakistani. Every summer, Omar packed Daood off to Karachi to stay with his grandparents. The trips backfired. Daood liked the First World comforts of the United States, air-conditioning, televisions, his own bedroom. He got sick in Karachi, nasty intestinal bugs that glued him to the toilet. He couldn’t wait to leave. The longer he spent in Pakistan, the more he considered himself American. A few months after he turned eighteen, he changed his name to show the world how he felt. Daood Maktani became David Miller.

Miller’s preference for the United States extended to its police. In January 2002, DEA agents busted down the door of his apartment and found six ounces of heroin wrapped neatly on the kitchen table. Miller expected to go down hard. He didn’t. He turned out to be triply lucky. He was lucky that the feds and not the Chicago cops had arrested him. A six-ounce haul was a good day’s work as far as the locals were concerned. They would have gladly sent him downstate for ten years. The feds had bigger ideas. They wanted to bust kingpins who trafficked by the ton. They saw Miller as nothing more than a way to move up the supply chain.

He was lucky, too, that he’d been using at the time they busted him. He convinced the DEA he was a college kid who’d turned into a junkie and then a dealer to finance his habit. Please. In reality he’d gone to Harold Washington City College for a semester before he figured out he could make a lot more money dealing. And he was no junkie. He got high on the weekends, coke when he was out late, H to chill. Never more than a couple times a month. He’d seen what the stuff could do if it got away from you. But the feds, they believed their own frying-pan hype. They believed that casual users didn’t exist. When he said he wanted to come clean, they lapped up his story.

Most of all, he was lucky to be a Muslim arrested after September 11. A nonpracticing Muslim, that is. About two weeks after his arrest, after he made clear to the DEA that he would cooperate, a CIA officer showed up for his interviews. I’m not DEA, he said. Not FBI either. He introduced himself as Mr. Blue. He was white, late forties, with pale skin and freckles and thinning red hair.

Blue didn’t say where he worked, but Miller understood. He sensed that the man wanted him to know without saying so. Blue was smarter than the DEA guys. He didn’t fall for Miller nearly as hard as they did. Miller could tell Blue was looking him over, deciding whether he was a true believer. He wasn’t. Miller drugged and drank and ate pork fried rice every chance he got.

Maybe six weeks after Miller got busted, Blue came to see him alone. He took Miller to a wood-paneled conference room instead of the usual windowless interview cell. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a bottle and two glasses.

“Courvoisier,” Miller said. “Nice.”

“Didn’t want to insult you with anything cheap.” Blue poured two generous glasses, pushed one at Miller. “Drink up. No cameras in here.”

Miller glanced at the clock on the wall. Eleven-thirty. Blue followed his eyes. “You know what they say. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Miller picked up the glass, sloshed around the golden liquid inside. If this was a test, he was happy to pass. He took a long swallow. Blue followed.

“Daood Maktani, you’re an infidel start to finish.”

“Am I under arrest for that, too?” The warmth of the cognac glowed inside Miller. He hadn’t had a drink since getting locked up. He’d missed the feeling. He finished the glass. Blue refilled it.

“Could you fake it?”

“It.”

“If I have to explain, I may have the wrong guy.”

Miller raised a hand in apology. “Those guys and I don’t exactly socialize, understand. I couldn’t even tell you where to look. You’d have to tell me.” But he was exaggerating a little bit. He knew the mosque behind the barbershop on South Marcy where the believers in his nabe hung out.

“But you’ve got the right pedigree. Spent summers over there growing up.”

“Mostly in the john,” Miller said before he could stop himself. The cognac had hit him hard. “The water over there, it’s nasty.”

“Focus, Daood—”

“My name’s David. And I’m telling you, you probably know more about Islam than me.”

“Best start reading up then. You speak Urdu and you’ve got a Paki passport, and if you grow yourself a beard I’ll bet they’ll be happy to have you in the local prayer group. You help me, I can help you. The place I work doesn’t give a rat’s ass how you pay your bills.”

“Help you how.”

“You want me to say it? Okay. I will.” The CIA officer took out a business card. It was blank. And light blue. He wrote a phone number and e-mail address on it and pushed it at Miller. “Find me some genuine jihadis, this is your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“You can do that?”

“You know, they’re still finding bits of bodies at Ground Zero. At this moment, guys like me, we have the full faith and credit of the United States government on our side. Six ounces of heroin doesn’t mean jack.”

Miller raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

TWO MONTHS LATER, the prosecutors sealed the charges and cut Miller loose with probation. He kept up his side of the bargain. He became a regular at underground mosques in Chicago. He wormed his way into prayer groups that fed money to Islamic charities that recruited suicide bombers for the war in Iraq. Meantime he kept on trafficking. The jihadis never complained. Like the CIA, they didn’t care where he made his money.

Miller earned enough chits at the agency over the years to get sprung from two federal drug indictments. His biggest slip came when he tried to avoid paying a three-thousand-dollar bribe to a police colonel in Karachi. He was arrested and stuck for two weeks in a nasty jail there before he bought his freedom for three times the initial asking price.

He didn’t make the same mistake again. He had a nice run, making a couple hundred grand a year shipping heroin from Pakistan to Chicago, mostly inside brass lamps and other trinkets. To launder the profits, he bought low-end apartments in Dubai with the cash. Then he hired a local property management company, a legit business, to rent them to the laborers building skyscrapers in the desert. The management company forwarded the rent to Miller’s Citibank account. Simple as that, Miller had cash he could legally spend in the United States. He even paid American taxes on the income, like any honest citizen.

A decade after that conversation in the conference room, Miller had houses and wives in Chicago and Dubai. He looked a little like Mal-colm X, six feet tall and dark skinned. His clothes were simple and expensive and suited him. He could honestly say he appealed to women of all ages, creeds, and colors. Life was good.

Then the bill came due. In a way he didn’t expect. He was sipping a glass of Heineken Light in a business-class lounge at Terminal 1 at Heathrow when his phone rang.

A blocked number. Miller didn’t like blocked numbers. He sent it to voice mail. A minute later, the phone rang again. This time the caller ID came up as Daood Maktani, his own long-lost name. Miller decided he’d better answer.

“David Miller.”

“Daood.”

“This is David.”

“Same difference.”

“Who is this?”

“Your new best friend.” And the man explained why he’d called.

“Tell me something,” Miller said when he was finished. “This thing you want, is it official or unofficial?”

“Both. But don’t you worry about that.”

“I guess I shouldn’t ask your name either.”

“You can call me Stan. As in Afghani-stan.”

Clever, Miller thought. “It’s impossible. The Thuwanis will never trust you. You’ve hit them too many times.”

“Enemies today, friends tomorrow. Like me and you. Anyway, I’ll have you on my side, making the introductions.”

“I don’t know them. They’re on a different planet. A much heavier planet.”

“Same solar system. You can get people to vouch for you. And I hear that lately they’ve been looking for a new connection. Their buyers got stung.”

Miller had heard the same rumor. He didn’t bother to ask where the man had gotten that information. “It’s impossible.”

“No is not an option here, David. Over the years, you’ve made a whole lot of people guests of the government. Don’t you think they’d like to know who’s responsible for their change of address?”

Miller hung up. His phone rang again. He hesitated, then clicked on.

“Let me explain something to you, Daood. Something you need to understand. Are you listening?”

The man waited. Miller had never felt so powerless, not even in that windowless cell in Karachi. There he’d known that eventually they’d ask him for money and he’d pay and they’d let him out. But the man talking to him didn’t want money, and Miller had no idea how to manage him. “Yes. I’m listening,” he finally said.

“Good. So, please understand, nobody at my shop likes you. We’ve dealt with you for a long time because that’s what we do: we deal with guys like you.”

“And I’ve worked with you. I’ve helped you—”

“That’s true. You have. But you got paid in full every time. You figured you were being smart, making sure that you didn’t leave anything on the table. But the truth is that’s straight ghetto logic. Short-term thinking. Problem with playing that way is that at a moment like this, when you really need help, somebody who can help you with me, you don’t have anyone. You don’t have any favors in the bank. Not even a primary officer. Because nobody trusts you. It’s all transactional. You see?”

Miller kept his mouth shut, but he knew the guy was right.

“I’ll take that as a yes. So now, you go to anybody with this, ask about some guy named Stan and the favor he wants, nobody’s gonna care. Especially since you don’t even know my name. But I know yours. And when the word gets back to me, and I promise it will, I’ll jam you so hard you’ll wish you were back in that hole in Karachi. You don’t think I can find you? I’ll tell you where you are right now. You’re in Heathrow, waiting for a flight to O’Hare. Three-thirty p.m. You’re in seat two-A. Business class.”

Miller looked around the lounge, half expecting the man to wave to him.

“I upgraded.”

“Congratulations.”

Knowing when he was beaten was one reason Miller had survived. “I’ll try to do what you want.”

“You’ll do more than try. I’ll be in touch.” Click.

Miller couldn’t see a way out. Unless he just left everything behind, took his hundred grand in emergency cash and ditched everything, including his women. Bought a ticket to Lahore or some other Pakistani slumhole and melted away. Turned himself into Daood Maktani. He didn’t think this guy Stan would bother to chase him. He’d find some other pawn to do his work. The problem was that Miller would have to stay in Pakistan if he ran. He’d have to keep his head down, since even if the agency wasn’t actively after him, it would probably give his name to the Pakistani police. It wouldn’t even have to give a reason, just say he was an American citizen on a watch list. Miller would wind up in a crummy two-room apartment, watching his money dwindle, cut off from everything and everyone.

No. He’d take his chances, play the game. He knew how to survive.

MILLER HAD NEVER VISITED Quetta before, but he knew the place from the moment he landed. Like Peshawar, three hundred miles northeast, Quetta was old, overgrown, dirty, and filled with secrets. The cities were twins, trading and commercial centers that sat on caravan routes between Russia, India, and Africa. Today, most goods traveled by jet or ship. But Quetta and Peshawar remained true to their history. In their bazaars and mosques and mansions, smugglers, jihadis, merchants, tribal chiefs, generals, diplomats, and spies drank tea together and practiced the art of lying for fun and profit. Truths might be told in Quetta, but never on purpose.

Arranging the meeting that Stan had requested took Miller a month, every favor he had in Pakistan, and eighteen thousand dollars in “friendship payments” spread among the lesser members of the Thuwani clan. But finally he was blindfolded and tossed into the back of a van and driven into the mountains outside Quetta. He didn’t know exactly where. Geography wasn’t his strong suit, even where he could see where he was going. He was dumped inside a concrete-walled compound where four guys with AKs watched him without much love.

Hours passed before Amadullah finally arrived. He was tall, with a thick black beard. He chewed the bright green tobacco that Pashtun men favored. Miller imagined that his teeth glowed green in the dark, like a monster in a sci-fi movie.

Amadullah didn’t bother with the usual Pashtun pleasantries, offers of tea or sweets. He extracted a wad of tobacco from a gold tin and pressed it into his mouth and said through fatted lips, “What is it you want?”

Miller was so tired of having to navigate Pashtunwali codes — the baffling and sometimes contradictory set of rules that governed life in the mountains — that he actually appreciated Amadullah’s lack of respect. Without further ado, he presented the offer. Which was met as he’d expected.

“The Americans wish us to sell them drugs?”

“This man and the ones who work for him, yes.”

“And who is he?”

“He’s a CIA officer named Stan.” Miller had figured that “Stan” wouldn’t want to be identified with the CIA. But Stan had insisted that Miller mention his connection with the agency. Miller didn’t know why.

“He must think we’re fools. What we bring, they’ll take it and capture us. I should cut out your tongue for wasting my time with this.”

“You won’t have to bring him anything. He’ll send soldiers to pick it up.”

“From here.”

“In Afghanistan. The soldiers will pay the usual price to your men and then I’ll pay, too, directly to your men here. So you get double.”

“Why would he do this? Pay so much.”

“He can bring the drugs directly to Europe. On a military plane.”

“Then he sells it himself?”

“Someone there buys it from him. I don’t know who.”

“And he can take as much as I produce.”

“At first just ten kilos, make sure the arrangement works. After that, more. Maybe twenty kilos a month.” To his surprise, Miller saw that Thuwani was interested.

Thuwani spit a long stream of green tobacco onto the ground. “You say that American soldiers will pick it up.”

“After you and I choose the locations. In Kandahar and Zabul. The soldiers come on patrol to a village. Your men meet them.”

“Always the same soldiers?”

“I don’t know, but I think so.”

Amadullah stood. His calf muscles were as big as grapefruits. For such a big man, he moved quickly. He leaned over Miller, tipped a thumb under Miller’s chin to push up his head, close enough for Miller to see the creases in his green teeth. “The price is six thousand dollars a kilo. Three thousand to my men and three thousand to me.”

“That’s too much.” Pure heroin cost twenty-five hundred a kilo or less in Afghanistan.

“That’s the price.”

Considering that a kilo of heroin sold for seventy-five thousand dollars in Europe, Miller figured that “Stan,” whoever he was, would be okay with the deal. Anyway, Miller didn’t have a lot of leverage. Not surrounded by guys with AKs.

“That’s the price, then. Ten kilos okay to start?”

“Very good.”

They sketched out the details of the transfer. “You are sure these soldiers can do this?” Amadullah said.

“Yes.” In truth, Miller didn’t know how Stan would arrange the pickups on the other end. But that wasn’t his problem.

“All right. Give me your mobile number. My men will tell you when they’re ready.” And — again without the usual pleasantries — Amadullah swept out.

THEY HADN’T MET face-to-face since then. Miller arranged the pickups with Amadullah’s nephews. They’d run five drops so far, roughly one every six weeks. In all, the soldiers had picked up about a hundred kilograms of pure heroin, worth six hundred thousand dollars to Amadullah and his men, $8 million to the gangs back home that bought by the kilo and cut the stuff for sale, and $40 million on the street.

The math went like this: a ten-dollar bag, a single dose, held about twenty-five milligrams of pure heroin. So a gram translated into forty dime bags. One kilo equaled a thousand grams. And a hundred kilograms meant four million dime bags. Figure twenty million hours of empty dreams for the lost souls putting needles into their arms.

Not bad, considering the stuff came out of the ground for free. Poppy plants hardly even needed watering. As every Afghan farmer knew, they were tougher than food crops like wheat.

Stan treated Miller as a conduit to Amadullah, nothing more. Miller didn’t know the names of the soldiers who picked up the stuff, though he had figured out that they had to be part of the Stryker brigade in eastern Kandahar and Zabul province. He knew that Stan was moving it to Germany, but he wasn’t sure how. Still, Miller couldn’t complain. He was making more money than he ever had. Stan paid him twenty-five hundred dollars a kilo. A quarter million dollars so far, for a few days of work. He was wondering whether the call at Heathrow hadn’t been a lucky break after all.

Then Stan called with a new request.

“You need to see our friend. Now.”

“I’m in London.”

“I don’t care. Get over there. E-mail me after you set the meet and I’ll tell you what I need.”

Stan’s tone brooked no argument. Miller hung up and booked his flights to Quetta and reached out to the Thuwanis. Fortunately, the successful deals had bought him goodwill. By the time he reached Quetta, Amadullah agreed to a meeting. Miller e-mailed Stan with the news.

Stan’s response came a few hours later. After he read it, Miller wanted to disappear. Until now, he’d convinced himself that Stan might be making these deals as part of a larger CIA mission he couldn’t see. Maybe they were connected to a trade with the Thuwanis to get Mullah Omar.

But now Stan wanted Miller to tell Amadullah that a Special Forces squad was going to raid a farm in Kandahar province where two of Amadullah’s nephews were hiding. Miller was no lawyer, but he figured that giving the enemy advance warning about an attack spelled treason. He wrote back, one word: Can’t.

His phone rang ten minutes later. “What’s the problem?”

“People get executed for this kinda thing.”

“You’re only seeing a piece of this. Trust me. It’s all right.”

“What about the guys going in? It all right with them?”

“It is.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Too late for that.”

“I do this and I’m done.”

A sigh on the other end of the line. “Daood. This isn’t some movie where you do one last deal and then get out. Let me know when you’ve set the meet.” Click.

Miller wished he could see a way out. But he didn’t.

NOW HE SAT in the backseat of a Toyota Crown wedged between two stinking Pashtuns. He wore Hugo Boss cologne and a black cashmere sweater and two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Diesel jeans. He was pissed off and in no mood to wear local threads. He wasn’t pretending to be one of them today. Anyway, they knew he wasn’t. Though they trusted him enough not to handcuff or blindfold him.

The road ran northeast out of Quetta toward Peshawar. After an hour, the Toyota pulled into a garage. The men led Miller down a spiral staircase and into a concrete tunnel so low that Miller had to duck his head. The tunnel opened into another garage, this one empty except for a Pakistani police van. One of the Thuwanis put on a police uniform. The others piled in the back with Miller.

The van’s cargo compartment had no windows, so Miller couldn’t see where they were headed. His companions talked of people he didn’t know, villages he’d never seen. They made no effort to include him in their conversation and he didn’t press.

Finally the van stopped. The back door opened. “Stay,” the men said to Miller. They stepped out. A minute later, to Miller’s surprise, Amadullah lumbered in. The door shut and the van rolled off.

“What is it you needed to tell me?”

Miller explained the raid. Amadullah rubbed his big brown hands down the sides of his face, like a primitive sculpture come to life. “When does this happen?” he asked when Miller finished.

“In the next few days. I can’t be sure exactly. But you should tell your nephews to leave. Or be ready to fight if they stay.”

Amadullah stroked his beard. Long, careful strokes, as if he were petting an ornery dog. The van drove slowly now, on rutted roads. “Why do you tell me this?”

“I do what I’m told. Stan said it would be valuable to you.”

“What does he want in return?”

“Nothing.”

“He tells me about an American operation and asks for nothing.”

Stan had once used the word cutout to describe Miller’s role in this operation. For the first time, Miller really understood what Stan meant. He was as disposable as construction paper that little kids used in art class. He wondered which parts of him would get cut out if Amadullah lost his temper.

“That’s what he says.”

“Does he think I’m a fool?”

“I do what I’m told,” Miller said again.

“Then I want to talk to him directly. Maybe he should come to Quetta. Tell him I promise he’ll be safe.” Amadullah smiled, but his eyes stayed cold.

“He said you would say that. He said he wants to talk to you, too. Give him a phone number and he’ll call you.”

Amadullah yelled, “Stop!” to the front of the van. He leaned over, latched a thick brown hand around Miller’s neck. “I give you my mobile and a missile blows up my house. Give me his phone number.”

“I don’t have it.” Amadullah’s rough fingers tightened around Miller’s neck. Miller smelled sweet tobacco and something else, a heavy perfume. “I swear to Allah.”

“If you’re smart you won’t mention Allah again. How do you reach him without his mobile?”

“We e-mail. When he wants to talk to me, he calls me. I’ve never called him.”

“Give me the e-mail address.”

Miller croaked out Stan’s address. He decided afterward that Stan had expected him to give up the e-mail all along — and had simply wanted to provoke Amadullah by telling Miller to ask for Amadullah’s phone number. Stan was a perverse dude. Without ever having met him, Miller was certain of that.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, the van stopped. Amadullah kicked Miller out. Literally. He put his big Pashtun sandals in Miller’s rear end and shoved him onto the road. Miller found himself outside a sweetshop in some lousy Paki village in Balochistan. He couldn’t even guess how far he was from Quetta, or how long he would need to get home.

Even so, he’d delivered the message, as he’d been told. He could add treason to his list of crimes. But he was still alive. For now.

10

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had deep connections to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani men worked in Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of thousands more visited Mecca every year for the Hajj, the sacred pilgrimage that all Muslims are supposed to perform at least once. Saudi charities built religious schools and mosques across Pakistan to spread Wahhabism, the conservative version of Islam practiced in the kingdom.

The Saudi embassy in Pakistan reflected the importance of the relationship. Set inside Islamabad’s diplomatic quarter, not far from the American embassy compound, the embassy was a handsome beige building, wide and solid. The kingdom’s green-and-white flag flapped from a half dozen poles around a fountain in the driveway. Hidden behind the embassy, a figure-eight-shaped pool allowed diplomats and their families to relax during Islamabad’s scorching summers.

To maintain security, the embassy had only two entrances. A small back gate was open only to employees and diplomats. Everyone else came through a guardhouse beside the front gate. The embassy opened to visitors at noon, but the line for entry formed hours before. Saudis were not known for their work ethic, and the kingdom’s bureaucracy meant that visas could require several visits. Now, at 11:30 a.m., six men stood outside the gatehouse, waiting for its windowless front door to open.

Wells was first in line. Patient and quiet. He wore a white dishdasha and ghutra—the long gown and headdress favored by Saudi men. The men around him, all Pakistani, chattered about how long they’d been waiting, about the earthquake that had ripped through Kashmir a week before, about whether Kuwaitis or Saudis were more likely to beat their servants. Life’s white noise. Wells had nothing to say, and said nothing.

A few minutes after noon, the guardhouse door opened. A Saudi soldier motioned Wells inside. He passed through an X-ray machine and down a corridor that ended in a steel door and Plexiglas window. A Saudi man in a suit sat behind the glass.

“Salaam aleikum. My name is Jalal Haq.” The alias tasted unfamiliar on Wells’s tongue.

“Aleikum salaam. Your business, please?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Naiz.”

“You will look up to the camera, please.” A security camera was mounted over the door. The security didn’t surprise Wells. Al-Qaeda hated Saudi Arabia as much as the United States.

Finally, the door clicked open. Inside, Wells found an office with cheap plastic chairs and a scratched wooden coffee table. The only reading material consisted of in-flight magazines from Saudi Arabian Airlines. The Saudis obviously preferred that visitors not be too comfortable. A narrow window at the back of the room offered a view of the fountain and the main embassy buildings.

A few minutes later, a black Land Rover with smoked-glass windows and diplomatic plates came down the drive and stopped outside the guardhouse. A tall Saudi in a tailored blue suit stepped out and walked into the office.

“Salaam aleikum, Mr. Haq. I’m Saeed Naiz. Please come with me.”

Wells followed Naiz to the Land Rover. A minute later, they’d left the embassy and were rolling through the manicured streets of the diplomatic quarter. They passed the military checkpoint that split the district from the rest of Islamabad. Finally, Naiz parked alongside a newly built two-story strip mall that included a bridal store and a flower shop. If the signs had been in English, the place could have passed for Los Angeles.

“I’m honored to meet you, Mr. Haq. I thought it best we speak outside the embassy. In the back, those are yours.” A briefcase and suitcase sat side by side in the backseat.

The briefcase was buttery black leather, slightly nicked. Inside, Wells found two envelopes. The first contained a Saudi passport and identification card, both in the name of Jalal Haq, both with Wells’s photograph. The second, a platinum AmEx card and two rubber bands of cash, ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, and twenty-five hundred in Saudi riyals. A BlackBerry. And a Quran, its green cover embossed with gold filigree.

“It was all the money I could get on such short notice. I hope it’s enough.”

“If it’s not, I’m doing something wrong.” Wells thumbed through the passport and found a proper Pakistani entry stamp. “It’s real?”

“It’s in our system. You could fly to Riyadh with it, no problem.” Naiz sounded almost offended.

“I hear Riyadh is nice this time of year.”

“Yes. The summer heat is done and it’s pleasant. Have you ever been?”

“Only Jeddah.” Wells looked over his identification card. It said he lived in Umm Khutut. “And where is Umm Khutut?”

“The northern Najd, the high desert. You’re the first son of the fourth wife of a tribal leader there.”

“First son, fourth wife. And my father, he’ll vouch for the story?” Though the odds that anyone would ask were extraordinarily slim. The men Wells planned to meet didn’t have spies inside Saudi Arabia.

“Of course.”

“Thank you for all this.”

“There’s no need to thank me. I have a guess who you are,” the Saudi said, switching to English.

Wells didn’t bite. “Tell me something,” he said, staying with Arabic. “Do I sound Saudi?”

“Maybe to these Pakistani peasants. Not to me.”

Not the answer I hoped to hear, Wells thought.

“I have my own question. You’re going into the mountains?”

“Balochistan.” Balochistan was a Pakistani province that stretched for hundreds of miles along the Afghan border. Its biggest city, Quetta, was just 125 miles southeast of Kandahar.

“And, I am imagining now, you will tell the men you meet there that you are a wealthy Saudi and want to donate money to a good cause?” The cause being jihad.

“Something like that.”

“I won’t ask why you’re doing this, but is there someone in particular you want to meet? You understand, sometimes our charitable organizations ask me about aid recipients. Will the Americans mind if they give to this village or that madrassa? Will they wind up on any unpleasant lists that will make it hard for them to put their children in school in New York?”

“Are those donors hoping you’ll say yes or no?”

“Depends on the donor.”

Wells wondered whether getting Naiz’s advice was worth the risk of the potential double cross, and decided it was. “I’m looking for a man called Amadullah Thuwani. He’s the leader of a Pashtun tribe that lives on both sides of the border. He’s hiding near a town called Muslim Bagh. Maybe a hundred kilometers northeast of Quetta.”

“The Thuwanis, yes. They’re definitely on the American lists, not that you need me to tell you.”

“Has any donor ever asked about Amadullah?” Wells couldn’t afford to meet real Saudis on this trip. They would almost surely see through his con.

“No.” Naiz reached for the suitcase. “I’ll show you the clothes and shoes I brought. They’re authentic.”

“I trust you.” Wells didn’t plan to wear the clothes. No Saudi in Balochistan would advertise his presence so overtly. But they’d aid his cover if the Thuwanis checked his bags. “Thank you for all this.”

“One more thing.” Naiz opened his jacket, revealing a shoulder holster. “I have one for you if you like.”

“I’m hoping these men will be happy to see me. And even happier to see my money.”

“Go with God, then. When you come back to Islamabad, look me up.”

“I’ll do that, inshallah.”

WELLS HAD CONSIDERED several disguises to approach the Thuwanis. He could have gone in as a would-be jihadi from Lebanon hoping to join the fight in Afghanistan. Or a drug trafficker from London looking for new sources. He even wondered whether the tribe would accept an overture from an American reporter or photographer.

But those covers felt wrong. The Thuwanis were part of the Taliban, but they didn’t train foreign fighters, at least as far as the agency could tell. They were already selling all the heroin they could produce. And as for going in as a journalist… Wells could hardly trust the Thuwanis to keep their promises of safe passage. They’d kidnap him, and after they squeezed as much ransom as they could out of him, they’d make a souvenir of his head.

So Wells decided to present himself as a wealthy Saudi eager to support the Taliban. The Saudis had financed jihad for a generation, through the same charities that built schools and mosques. They bought weapons and gave money to the families of suicide bombers, so-called martyrdom payments.

Of course, Wells would have a tough time asking about heroin trafficking if he came in as a Saudi financier. But meeting the Thuwanis would give him a fix on where they lived — and get him cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses for the NSA to trace.

After his mission the previous year, Wells knew he could count on the Saudis for help. He called Amadullah’s half brother, Prince Miteb. The explanation took a few minutes, since Miteb was nearly ninety and half deaf, but eventually the prince understood. “It will be done.” Miteb coughed into the phone, the gasps of a man whose heart was nearly finished pumping. “Mr. John, if you have any other favors, I suggest you ask them now. I don’t expect to be alive much longer.”

“I pray you’re wrong.” And not just for you. For your country.

“Save your prayers for something else.” The sharpness in Miteb’s tone reminded Wells of Amadullah.

The next day, Wells was told to report to the embassy in Islamabad. Now he had his cover, and it was as real as could be. But having the right passport didn’t guarantee that Wells would convince Thuwanis to open their not-entirely-friendly arms to him. Wells was one-quarter Lebanese. He could pass for Jordanian or even Syrian. But most Saudis were a shade darker than he was, and — as Naiz had told him — his Arabic couldn’t fool a native Saudi. Wells didn’t doubt the Thuwanis had seen their share of Arab jihadis over the years. Wells would have to keep his story simple and tight and hope that greed blinded Amadullah.

The hard work was just beginning.

AT THE ISLAMABAD AIRPORT, Wells rented a 4Runner. He wanted to come across as wealthy, not gaudy. If he seemed too rich, the Thuwanis would suspect a trap, or simply fleece him. He headed to the highway that ran west toward Peshawar and called Shafer with the BlackBerry Naiz had given him.

“Nine-six-five area code,” Shafer said when he picked up. “I see the Saudis came through.”

“It’s nice to have friends.”

“Any idea how long you’ll be gone?”

“A week or two at most. More than that and you should send a search party.”

“Put your face on a goat milk carton.”

Wells laughed. “Did you tell Duto where I was going?” To make sure the mole couldn’t alert the Thuwanis he was coming, Wells had lied about his plans, claiming that he was going to Moscow to follow a lead.

“No. But he’s wondering. He reminded me that his trip with the congressman is only three weeks out. Did you want me to?”

“Let him wonder.”

Wells hung up, called Anne. “You may not hear from me for a couple days. I’m going into the hills.”

“The hills? Sounds relaxing.”

“Like a spa.”

“Next time you go on vacation, I’m coming.” She sounded resigned rather than angry. Resigned was worse.

“It’s a deal.”

“You’re lucky to have me.”

“Don’t I know it,” Wells said.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re trying to decide if you can put up with a lifetime of this, aren’t you?”

She didn’t bother to answer.

“If I told you I loved you, would it make any difference?”

“If you actually loved me, it would make a difference, John.”

She hung up. When he called back, she didn’t answer. So he made his way west. He tuned the 4Runner’s radio to an all-Arabic network, and as the miles rolled on he left himself behind. He became Jalal Haq, a middle-aged Saudi eager to support jihad any way he could. At Kohat, a cramped city on the edge of the mountains, he turned south. Tractors puttered along the side of the road, pulling carts loaded with sacks of cement. Sheep twirled on spits outside one-room restaurants, their dead eyes staring at the trucks rolling by.

The sun was low in the sky when Wells reached Dera Ismail Khan, halfway between Islamabad and Quetta. He would have to stop for the night. The roads in Balochistan weren’t safe to drive alone in darkness. Ahead, a highway sign advertised the “D.I. Khan Guesthouse for Muslim Men, Clean and Safe.” “Perfect,” Wells said aloud in Arabic.

His room at the guesthouse was simple and spare. Four thin walls, a single bed, a sink, a stand-up shower. The call to the Maghrib, the sunset prayer, sounded a few minutes later. Wells hurried down to the simple mosque attached to the guesthouse. He hadn’t prayed alongside other Muslims in more than a year.

The mosque had threadbare carpets and concrete walls stenciled thickly with Quranic verses. The men around Wells touched their foreheads to the floor as fervently as if they were in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. In this room, Wells remembered why he had become a Muslim, the power and simplicity of the faith. Jalal Haq belonged here, and Wells, too. As much as he belonged anywhere.

In the morning, he woke early, fueled up, and turned onto the N50, which connected Dera Ismail and Quetta. At first the road was smooth and straight. Then, in typical Pakistani fashion, it turned without warning into a potholed track barely one lane wide. The heavy trucks that dominated the highway hardly seemed to notice. They barreled along, creeping so close to Wells’s back bumper that their grilles filled his mirror like the faces of unsmiling gods. He had to edge off the road to let them by.

He came over a hill to find a tractor blocking the road, two men with AKs beside it. A dozen more men in shalwar kameez stood nearby, along with a firepit where a goat was roasting. The mood seemed festive rather than angry. But the roadblock was real and so were the AKs. Wells stopped and one of the tribesmen waddled over. He wore a long gown that might once have been white but was now stained with grease and what Wells hoped was goat blood.

“Salaam aleikum,” Wells said, opting for Arabic.

“Aleikum salaam.” The man said something else to Wells. Wells knew Pashtun, and even a few words of Dari. But the tribes up here had their own dialects, and he’d never heard this one.

“Saudia, Saudia,” Wells said in Arabic. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Do you speak Arabic?”

“Arabiy! Arabiy!” The man waved to the other tribesmen, who clustered around the Toyota. Another man, this one wearing sunglasses despite the gray clouds above, leaned over and yelled in Arabic, “We’re collecting a toll.”

“All right, my brother.” Wells had put a few hundred rupees in the glove compartment for just this reason. He reached for them.

“But first, what is your name?”

“Jalal.”

“And where are you headed, my brother Jalal?”

“Quetta.”

“Quetta, Quetta!” The man couldn’t have seemed more excited if Wells had announced his next stop was Tokyo. “And what shall you do in Quetta?”

“I have gifts for our brothers fighting the jihad.”

The man translated to his fellow tribesmen, who roared their approval. A long, excited conversation followed. Finally the man said, “You must feast with us! And then target practice!”

Long as I’m not the target. “You’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse.” Wells probably shouldn’t have made the joke — Jalal Haq wouldn’t have — but it escaped unremarked. Wells pulled the 4Runner off the road and spent the next hour eating goat with the tribesmen. The meat was tender and tasty, long strips with a sour yogurt sauce.

“Young goat,” the man in the sunglasses said.

“Young goat.”

The men lived in a village on the other side of the ridge. They weren’t Talibs, just Baluchi tribesmen who wanted nothing to do with any central government, whether in Islamabad or Kabul or Washington. After lunch, they led Wells through a ravine into a dry streambed. Three oil drums sat in a row two hundred meters away. The first was wrapped in the American flag, the second in the Pakistani flag, the third in the Israeli flag. The man in sunglasses unstrapped his AK and then shoved the rifle at Wells muzzle-first — not exactly safe firearm handling.

“As our guest, you go first, Arabiya.”

“You do this during the day? What about the police, the Army?”

“Do you see them? We don’t fear them. They fear us. Our only enemy is the American planes, and we know when they’re coming. We can hear them.”

Wells wasn’t so sure about that, but he didn’t argue the point.

The AK was nicked and worn, but Wells didn’t doubt it would work. A decade before in Afghanistan, Wells had seen a Talib drop an AK into a well that must have been a hundred feet deep. It rattled off the walls the whole way down and splashed loudly at the bottom. No matter. The Talib hustled up a boy who couldn’t have been more than six and told his father that he’d be riding the bucket down after it. The man tried to argue. The Talibs told him that if he didn’t shut up, they’d send him down the well, too, and not in the bucket. He shut up. In the event, the kid came back up with the rifle. Without bothering to strip the AK clean, or even dry it off, the Talib pointed it in the air and pulled the trigger. Sure enough, it worked.

Now Wells checked the rifle he’d just been given. Full. He had a moment’s fantasy of playing Rambo and taking out his hosts, but he reminded himself that these men had never fought the United States and weren’t exactly high-value targets. He settled for wasting the magazine on full auto, missing the flags wildly.

“You Arabs shoot like donkeys,” his new friend said.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, the tribesmen sent Wells on his way. They didn’t even ask for a bribe. The rest of the trip was uneventful. The land opened into a high plateau, dry and arid, with only a few spindly trees to break the monotony. To the west, a dusty range of mountains rose along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The road improved as suddenly as it had worsened, opening into a four-lane divided highway that was empty of traffic. Wells arrived at Muslim Bagh in late afternoon and found a guesthouse. He prayed that night in a two-room mosque down the street.

In the morning, he rose before dawn. He showered and slicked back his hair and pulled on a blue shalwar kameez. The town was still dark when the calls to prayer sounded. The center of Muslim Bagh had a limited electric grid, but the plains and hills around it were dark. Wells walked along the town’s dusty main street, looking for the busiest mosque. Only the most fervent believers would rise for the dawn call. They were the men he needed to find.

A pickup truck drove by, a Toyota, with two men in the front seat and two more standing in the bed of the truck. The two in back carried AKs, with bandoliers of copper-jacketed ammunition draped across their chests. A thick layer of grit covered the Toyota. These had to be men Wells wanted to see. The Thuwanis. Advertising their power, reminding villagers here that they and not the Pakistani police ruled this region. Wells raised a hand and the truck pulled over beside him.

“My brothers,” he said in Arabic. “Salaam aleikum.” The men in back vaulted over the side of the cab and flanked him. Their rifles weren’t quite pointed at him, but they weren’t relaxed either. Without knowing how, Wells had angered them.

“Yes, yes, aleikum salaam,” the man closest to Wells said. His beard covered most of his face, but the exposed skin was discolored. Frostbite, possibly. December through March, deep snow covered the border mountains. “What do you want?” he said in Pashtun. “What are you doing here?”

Until he knew more about these men, Wells didn’t plan to let them know he spoke Pashtun. “I don’t understand,” he said in Arabic.

“I said, what do you want?” the frostbitten man said, in Arabic this time.

“Do you live here, my brothers?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for a place where I might find the men who live on both sides of the border.”

The man raised his weapon a notch. “Speak clearly. No riddles.”

The hostility confused Wells. Had these men made him as American? Had someone from the Saudi embassy betrayed him somehow? “My name is Jalal Haq. From Saudi Arabia. I’m looking for men who live in the hills around Muslim Bagh. Fierce Muslim warriors who have fought jihad for years.” Flattery never hurts. “They’re named the Thuwanis.”

The man nodded and leaned into the pickup’s cab for a whispered conversation with the men inside. He returned smiling, a hollow smile like a sinkhole in the forest of his beard. Wells would have preferred a frown. He’d made a mistake. Whoever these men were, they had no love for the Thuwanis.

The sinkhole closed as the frostbitten man’s smile became a sneer. “Tell me, Mr. Haq, you wish to join these fierce warriors?”

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Wells tried to sound meek. “I’ll find these men another way.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“What, brother?”

“We’re not brothers. I ask again, are you carrying a weapon?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll do what I tell you, Jalal Haq.” The Talib stepped back, pointed his AK at Wells’s chest. “And I’m telling you to get on your knees.” The sun had just emerged over the low hills to the east. It lit the Talib’s face, his ruined skin and hard black eyes. Wells didn’t doubt this man would kill him in the street. Without a weapon of his own, he was trapped.

He went to his knees.

“If he moves, shoot him,” the man said in Pashtun to the other Talib who’d come off the truck, a tall man who stood three steps back.

“Yes, Najibullah.”

The frostbitten one, Najibullah, stepped around Wells and reached into the bed of the pickup and grabbed a black hood.

And that was all Wells saw.

11

This was a week earlier. Coleman Young rested on his cot watching Terminator on his computer for the hundredth time. Arnold was shooting his way through the Los Angeles police station like the pumped-up badass he was. Across the barracks, Roman lay on his own cot, playing a driving game on his Sony PSP. Roman loved driving games, Young knew. He knew more about the guys in his platoon than he ever would have expected, and more than he wanted. Bunk with dudes for a year, eat with them, ride with them, burn through ten thousand rounds with them, and sooner or later their secrets came out. PFC Battis picked his nose and ate the snot when he thought nobody was watching. The whole platoon ragged him, but he couldn’t stop. Specialist Corlou had a big Z tattooed across his left pec: it stood for something in Greek that translated into “He is risen,” meaning Christ but also Corlou’s brother, a Marine who had died in Iraq five years ago. Sergeant Taz jerked off in his bed even if the lights were on and everybody was still awake. But Taz was the best around when the bad guys came to play.

“Wanna work out?” Roman said to Young across the barracks. Young ignored him. Roman had been looking for excuses to stick close to Young since the memorial. He wasn’t even crafty about it.

Roman’s Roshan — his local cell phone — rang. He answered, listened. “Right. I got it.” His eyebrows puckered as he concentrated. “No, I got it.” He had to be getting orders from Rodriguez, Young figured. Nothing else would make him think so hard.

“Who was that?” Young said.

“Nobody. Sure you don’t wanna go lift? Or grab chow?”

Suddenly, Young got it. Rodriguez must have told Roman to keep a close eye on Young for the next few minutes. The handoff must be happening right now. Young turned off Terminator.

“Yeah, let’s work out. Lemme just drop one.”

“You sure?”

“Am I sure I have to take a dump?”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you won’t.” Young walked out of the barracks. He was probably making a mistake. In a minute or two, Roman would come looking for him. But Young thought of those stupid pink letters Fowler’s mom sent every week. He kept walking.

He turned left, toward the Porta-Potties, and checked over his shoulder. Sure enough, Roman was peeking out the front of the barracks. Young kept going until Roman couldn’t see him and then cut through the shower trailers and followed a blast wall north. The base was so big and so chopped up with walls and barracks that there were a hundred different ways to move across it, and a thousand different places to hide stuff.

But Young guessed that the handoff was happening at the junk pile at the northeast corner of the base, the area everybody called Zombieland. He kept his head down, didn’t break stride when a couple guys grunted hellos at him. He reached the big road that ran past the brigade aid station, where docs worked on guys whose wounds didn’t rate evacuations to the hospital at Kandahar.

He crossed the road and circled north past a rubber reservoir that held millions of gallons of water for the base’s showers and toilets. The thing looked like an overgrown water bed, forty feet square and three feet thick. Finally he came to a two-room concrete shelter marked “Casualty Holding Point” in no-nonsense black letters. Young ducked into the shelter. It was empty and dark and had never been used. Fortunately, FOB Jackson had never faced a ground attack, only the occasional rocket. Young peeked through a firing hole. From here he could see along the flight line to the blast walls that marked the outer edge of Zombieland. Sure enough, Rodriguez leaned against the wall, alone, smoking. Watching to be sure nobody was headed his way.

Five minutes passed. Then Rodriguez whistled and two men walked out of Zombieland. The front man carried a big backpack. Young didn’t recognize him. He was a couple hundred feet off, too far for Young to see his face clearly. He was tall and wore a uniform and had a black beard and non-reg boots. He had to be a Special Forces operator, maybe even a Delta. Nobody else could get away with the boots, much less the beard. And nobody else had the walk, the loose don’t-mess-with-me strut.

Tyler Weston followed. Young’s lieutenant. His platoon commander. Young had always suspected Weston of Fowler’s murder. He’d hoped he was wrong, but the truth was obvious. Weston ran the platoon. Of course he’d known about the deal. He’d probably been the one who’d actually pulled the trigger and killed Fowler.

The SF guy and Weston walked his way, Rodriguez following like a guard dog. Man, oh, man. Young leaned back, away from the firing hole. The shelter was unlit. Young didn’t think they could see him unless they stopped and looked directly inside. He hoped they’d get close enough for him to see the SF guy’s face clearly. But about a hundred feet from the shelter, the SF guy jumped into a pickup truck parked on the side of the road. The pickup rolled off. Weston and Rodriguez kept walking, past him, past the shelter. Young waited until he was sure they were gone and headed over to the DFAC for chow. Roman found him a few minutes later.

“Thought we were gonna work out.”

“I changed my mind. Got hungry.”

“You should have told me.”

Young ignored him, went back to his barbecued chicken. That night, he poked around Zombieland, looking for places Rodriguez and Weston might have hidden the stash. But nothing stood out in the piles of broken metal and plastic parts. Anyway, Young figured they’d given the stuff to the SF guy.

He wanted to push on Roman. Roman was the weak link. Roman had started talking about how he was buying himself a farm when he got home. Finally, Sergeant Taz asked him how the heck he was going to buy a farm when he had two kids by different moms and he’d been so broke he filed Chapter 11 three months before they deployed. Roman mumbled something about how he’d been saving his money. The next morning, Roman and Rodriguez went for a walk and after that Roman didn’t talk about buying a farm anymore.

Young figured that he’d wait until they were a couple days from going home and then try to bluff Roman into giving up the truth. It wasn’t a great plan, but he didn’t have anything better. And at least he wouldn’t be giving Weston and Rodriguez much chance to come back at him.

A WEEK LATER, Young was headed to the gym when he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Sergeant Young.” He turned to see Rodriguez.

“First Sergeant Rodriguez.”

“How you been, Coleman? Good workout?” Rodriguez clapped a hand around the meat of Young’s biceps and squeezed. “Damn, Sergeant. You got some guns on you.”

“You like that, Rodriguez? Didn’t think you went that way.”

“Take a walk with me, Coleman.”

Young followed Rodriguez to the big lot where Strykers that needed minor repairs were kept. The mechanics weren’t up yet. No one was within a hundred yards.

Rodriguez was short and broad shouldered and cocky. He stood close to Young, making sure Young could feel him. Trying to back Young up. Typical Mexican crap, Young thought. He’d dealt with plenty of them in south Dallas. Dealing with them didn’t mean he liked them.

“What’s up, First Sergeant?”

“Wanted to be sure you were okay, Coleman. I know you and Ricky were good friends.”

“Yeah? You seen us holding hands, First Sergeant?” Young knew he should keep his mouth shut. But Rodriguez had been under his skin even before Ricky got juiced.

“You saying you weren’t friends.”

“Friends, sure.”

“So it’s only natural to be depressed.”

“Let me ask you something, First Sergeant.” Rodriguez liked to be in charge. Giving it back was the way to play him. Young wondered whether he should speak up about the SF guy he’d seen, decided to keep that bit to himself for now. “It strike you as odd, what happened to Ricky?”

“Odd like how?”

“Like once he got hit, the enemy disengaged right away. Almost like he was the only target.”

“I think the shooter figured he got lucky, decided not to push. Dropped his gun and ran, knowing we couldn’t touch him.”

You and Weston would tell CID that exact story if I went to them, Young thought. All I got on my side is the word of a dead man.

“The lieutenant and I are worried about you. We feel you’ve withdrawn from the rest of the platoon.” Rodriguez put a hand on Young’s shoulder. Young brushed it off.

“I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself.”

“That’s your choice.”

“I think it’s safer for everyone.”

“Could be. Anyway, the lieutenant and I, we were thinking if you wanted to get out of here, chill at KAF for a couple weeks, get your head on straight, we’d get that. Maybe even finish out the tour over there. You know we got barely two months left.”

So Weston and Rodriguez wanted him gone. They didn’t know what he knew, what he’d guessed, what Fowler had told him. They didn’t know what he might have told his family or his buddies in other units. They figured that trying to take him out might be tricky. It wouldn’t look good if another soldier in the platoon went down in some suspicious way. So they were offering him a deal. KAF, Kandahar Air Field. Young was more likely to get shot back home in Oak Cliff than at KAF. He’d be more or less certain to finish his tour in one piece.

Too bad I’m not looking to run. Young stepped close to Rodriguez, chest-to-chest, so Rodriguez had to tilt his head up to make eye contact.

“I appreciate that, Sergeant. That’s a generous offer. Thoughtful. But I’ll pass.”

“All right.”

“And know this, too. Ricky wasn’t much of a soldier.” Young stared at Rodriguez until the first sergeant nodded. “Me, I take care of myself. I’ll engage and destroy any threat outside the wire. Any threat.”

Rodriguez didn’t say a word, and they stood looking at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, Young got tired of the staring contest and put his hands on Rodriguez’s shoulders and shoved, shoved hard—

And Rodriguez stumbled back and landed on his ass on the Stryker gravel. He muttered something under his breath that Young couldn’t hear. He popped up like he was on springs and took a half step toward Young.

“You’re gonna regret that, Sergeant.”

“Am I now? Whyn’t you show me?”

But Rodriguez stepped back and smiled. “I don’t have to. Somebody else will.”

“Listen to me, Rodriguez. Soon as I get back to my bunk I’m gonna write my brother and my best friend some thoughts I been having. I’m going to put them letters in envelopes. I’m gonna write on the outside, ‘Only open if I die,’ and then I’m gonna mail them off.”

“Yeah? Good luck with that.”

“Wanna know what it’s gonna say? Just your names, you and the lieutenant, and a note that says, ‘These two did me. Whatever the Army tells you, don’t believe it. And you come back on them.’ And I can promise you that they will.”

“Never seen you scared before, Coleman. Telling fairy tales about how your best friend’s gonna come at me. How’s he even know where I live? He a detective or something? And then he’s hunting me down? Please.”

“I got letters to write, Rodriguez.” Young turned away.

“You go ahead.”

Young went back to the hutch and wrote his letters. For all the good they’d do. He might just have gotten himself killed this morning and he couldn’t see how to get clean. He had no evidence against Weston and Rodriguez. And not only did he not know the name of the SF operator he’d seen with them, he hadn’t even gotten a clear look at the guy’s face.

Nothing else to do, so Young went to breakfast. It was still early, and he was one of the first inside. He loaded up with eggs and hash browns. Normally he was careful about what he ate. Today he didn’t care. He grabbed a couple of Cokes and found a seat by himself in a quiet corner and leaned his head over his plate and did something he hadn’t done in years. He said grace.