Alex Berenson - The Shadow Patrol

“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.