Alex Berenson - The Shadow Patrol

“More or less.”

“More or less does not promote confidence, sir.”

“When you know more, you call me. I promise I’ll be there.”

“That’s more like it.”

SO WESTON WAS GETTING his platoon off FOB Jackson. Which meant Francesca would be leaving KAF soon enough. Wells’s GPS was plugged into the feed from the transmitter on the pickup. Wells waited for it to ping.

And waited. The hours dragged. Midnight passed. One a.m. Maybe Francesca wouldn’t leave base until tomorrow. Or maybe Young was wrong. Maybe Francesca wasn’t part of this scheme after all. Two a.m. Wells tried to sleep, couldn’t.

At 2:30, the GPS beeped. A single blue dot indicated that Francesca’s pickup was ten miles outside of the airfield. He’d taken the bait. Wells knew where he was heading. North and east, deep into the Arghandab River Valley. Toward 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Stryker Brigade. Toward Coleman Young.

Part of Wells wanted to chase them immediately, but moving at this hour would be a mistake. Francesca and Alders couldn’t do anything until Young was off FOB Jackson. Best to let them get set in their sniper hole, then go after them.

Wells set his alarm for 5:30, before dawn. He closed his eyes and dreamed of a wave that started in the Hindu Kush and swept down and down, through the poppy fields, the empty Registan Desert, over the mountains in Pakistan, all the way to the sea.

SOON AS HE WOKE Wells checked the GPS. Something was wrong. Three transmissions — covering a ninety-minute period — showed motion northeast in chunks of thirty miles or so. The third transmission came in around four o’clock. But after that, the locator went silent. At least two more transmissions should have followed by now. If the pickup had stopped, the transmitter should have reported that, too. Wells called Shafer. “What’s going on?”

“Probably they’ve stopped somewhere where the transmitter doesn’t have line-of-sight to the atmosphere. It’ll keep pinging every forty-five minutes until the signal goes through and it gets an answer.”

Wells thought of the metal firing platform he’d seen in the back of the pickup. If Francesca had set that up and it reached over the transmitter, it would block the signal. “If there’s metal in the way—”

“Metal’s not good. But it will keep trying.”

“Meantime I’m just supposed to guess where they holed up.”

“I’ll put some calls out, see if I can get a handle on what their official mission is.”

“You think the Deltas are going to tell you that after the way you left it with Cunningham?”

“You do your job, John. Let me do mine.”

Shafer hung up. Wells rose and showered. He pulled on a shalwar kameez and covered it with a brown windbreaker for the ride and packed a nylon bag with his kit. Everything he was carrying would pass for local, even the GPS and his binoculars. For weapons he had a knife strapped to his leg and three Russian RGO-78 grenades and his old Makarov and silencer. No AK. Even a short-stock would be impossible to hide. Anyway, a long-range gun battle with Francesca would be suicide. An AK had an effective range of maybe a hundred yards. Francesca could be lethal from ten times that distance. Wells would need to ambush him close in.

His new motorcycle was parked outside his trailer. He’d bought it the day before. It didn’t look like much, a Chinese-made Honda knockoff with an air-cooled 250cc engine and wire wheels. The word Hando was painted in white on its gas tank. No one would ever confuse it with a Ducati. Its speedometer went to two hundred kilometers an hour, but Wells figured the wheels would come off long before then. But Wells had looked it over closely before buying it. It was mechanically sound, and the tires and shocks were solid.

In any case, anonymity mattered more than performance. Anonymity translated into surprise, and Wells had learned over the years that tactical surprise beat firepower. Bar brawls or gunfights, the guy who hit first won. Maybe not always, but close enough. In Hollywood, fights went on and on and on. In the real world, they didn’t take long. Once a punch or kick or bullet knocked you down, going back on the attack was nearly impossible. You kept getting hit until the other guy stopped. Sometimes he didn’t stop until you were dead.

Francesca seemed to have learned the same lessons. His dirty pickup was what Wells would have used if he’d needed to carry a sniper rifle. And like Wells, Francesca and Alders operated without uniforms, or backup to bail them out. A casual observer might not see much difference between Wells and Francesca.

But somewhere Francesca had lost himself, forgotten his purpose. Forgotten that anyone could pull a trigger, take a life. The act itself was simple. The why was what separated soldiers from serial killers. Wells hadn’t forgotten the why. So he hoped. He put his bag on the back of the bike, slipped the key into the ignition.

THE MORNING TRAFFIC on Highway 1 was picking up as Wells headed east, shielding his eyes from the sun. The flatlands of southern Afghanistan turned cool in the mornings at this time of year. Wells shivered under his windbreaker as he followed Francesca’s trail north off Highway 1 and into the Arghandab Valley.

Even by Afghan standards, the valley was a backwater. A half dozen children swirled around a woman in an electric-blue burqa. A donkey dragged a cart inch by inch, whining with each step, as a gaunt man with skin the color and texture of leather clapped a switch across his haunches. Two Afghan soldiers leaned against a pickup truck, cigarettes in hand. One had painted the stock of his AK pink and covered the muzzle with rhinestones. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Afghans on both sides of the insurgency had a strange fondness for tricking out their rifles. The soldiers eyed Wells as he passed, but didn’t bother to stop him.

Wells reached the last point the transmitter had signaled just over two hours after leaving Kandahar. He pulled over and looked for any sign that Francesca and Alders had stopped nearby. Open fields lay north of the road, toward the river. To the south, a narrow cart track passed through a handful of farm compounds. Wells didn’t think the Toyota would fit on the track. Anyway, he could see a stream of smoke coming from one compound, and kids playing on the roof of another. Wells couldn’t imagine how Francesca and Alders would have hidden themselves in an occupied house. They had to be squatting someplace abandoned.

Wells rolled on. The landscape stayed the same for the next few miles. Compounds and the occasional grape hut sat south of the road. North, toward the river, the pomegranate groves thickened. Still, this part of the Arghandab was much less fertile than the land nearer Kandahar, the trees less dense.

The road passed through a village. To the south, several shops occupied a plaza, the Afghan version of a strip mall. At the far end was a garage big enough to hide the pickup. Wells stopped outside the plaza’s first store, walked in. Three men hunched over sewing machines, working long strips of white cotton. Posters taped to the concrete walls showed their offerings. The men barely acknowledged Wells. In these tiny villages, outsiders were suspect, especially if they weren’t Pashtun.

“Good morning.”

“Morning,” the man nearest Wells mumbled. One of his eyes was a deep, ugly red, the skin around it swollen and tender. Severe conjunctivitis. In the United States, a doctor would cure that infection with a few cents of medicine. Here, the man might go blind.

Wells leaned over his machine. “I see you do excellent work.” The man grunted and fed cloth through as the machine clucked. Time to get to the point. “I’m looking for two men who might have stopped here early this morning. Before sunrise.”