Alex Berenson - The Shadow Patrol

“Had to take us this way,” Penn said.

“It always this bad?”

“During the summer, guys wake up thinking they’ve crapped themselves.”

“A big thinker might wonder if that smell isn’t a metaphor for the war, the waste we’re leaving behind.”

“He might. I just leave the windows up and breathe through my mouth.”

“A wise man.” Wells turned back toward the center of the base.

“Thank you.”

“For turning?”

“For what you did.”

The words were so unexpected that for a moment Wells wondered if he’d misheard.

“If my guys were doing what you said… and you’re right, why else would they be up there… then they were cancers. And I failed as a leader. Failed them and myself. It was happening right in front of me. I didn’t see it. I let them get out of control.”

“You’re not a mind reader. And wars do strange things to the men who fight them.” At the end, when he’d closed his eyes and offered his neck to the knife, Francesca had smiled. He’d been relieved. Wells would swear to it. War is endless grief. “What will you tell your men, Major?”

“As little as I can.” Penn paused. “And are you planning to deal with the Strykers, too?”

“Yes.”

Penn seemed to want to ask Wells how, but he didn’t. Neither man spoke again until Wells stopped outside the Delta compound. Penn extended a hand. “Wish we could have met under different circumstances.”

“Me, too, Major. Maybe one day stateside we’ll have the chance.”

Penn opened his door, hesitated. “Do you think we can win over here?”

I don’t even know what that word means anymore. “I think you, me, everybody else, we’ll all do our jobs until somebody has a better idea.”

At that, Penn saluted and left.

“I TRIED TO CALL YOU, tell you where they’d be,” Young told him a few hours later. “But they shut down the coms that morning.” He explained that when a soldier was killed in action, the Army cut cell service as well as the sat phones at the Morale and Welfare rooms. The Pentagon didn’t want wives or parents hearing about casualties through the military grapevine before they were officially notified. A soldier in the brigade had stepped on an IED on the morning that Francesca and Alders had gone to the ridge, and so the phones had been cut.

“I have to ask, Coleman, how come you rode up there anyway, knowing I might not be there?”

“May as well lie on my back and spread my legs if I’m gonna stay home. That what you would do, Mr. Wells?”

“Death before dishonor.”

“I figured it would work out and it did. Saw Mickey Mouse up there with his throat cut. Still the lieutenant and the sergeant and Roman, though.”

“I’ll handle them.”

“Like that?”

“Not like that.”

“What then?”

“Roman’s the weakest of the three of them, I have that right?”

“Stupidest for sure. Spends most of his time on his PSP and he’s not even good at that.”

Stupid didn’t necessarily mean weak. Still, Wells figured Roman was his best bet. That night, as Roman walked back to his bunk from the showers, Wells stepped out from between two trailers, tapped him on the shoulder.

“Walk with me, Kevin.”

Roman’s eyes darted like tadpoles in a muddy pond. “Sir?”

“Walk with me. Now.” Roman’s shoulders slumped and he fell in beside Wells, who led him to the same maintenance lot where Rodriguez and Young had faced off. The maintenance guys were gone for the night. Wells walked Roman to a narrow aisle between a Stryker and a blast wall.

“You know who I am, Kevin?”

“The guy who talked to us last week. John Wells.”

“That’s right. Know why I’m here?”

“No, sir.”

Wells hit Roman, low and hard in the solar plexus, pivoting into it, getting all of his two hundred and ten pounds behind the punch. Roman’s stomach was a little bit soft and Wells connected solidly, more solidly than he’d intended. If he’d been holding a knife, he would have buried it to the hilt. As it was, he felt the contact up his arm and into his shoulder. Roman doubled over on his fist like a folding chair. Wells pulled his arm back and Roman put his hands on his knees and gasped.

Wells gave him a few seconds and then put his right hand under Roman’s shoulder and tugged him up and stepped close. Roman was still struggling for breath. His eyes jumped wildly before settling on Wells. “Tonight. You’re going to call CID, tell them about you and Rodriguez and Weston.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t tell me you don’t. And don’t tell me you can’t.”

“They’ll kill me. I swear they will.”

Wells put a hand under Roman’s chin and squeezed his throat. “Tyler and Nick won’t kill you. But I will. Here or back in the States. Like I killed Francesca. I’ll do you just like that.”

Francesca’s name did the trick. Wells had figured as much. Francesca was a Delta. A sniper. The baddest of the bad. And Wells had nearly taken his head off his neck. Roman pushed out his lips, though actual speech seemed beyond him.

“You don’t have to tell them what Tyler did to Ricky Fowler”—Wells figured the murder would come out quickly once the Army opened the investigation—“but you need to tell them about the drugs. CID’s got that twenty-four-hour hotline. You call it tonight, tell them you want to come in tomorrow to Kandahar. Tell them you had an attack of conscience. You know what that is, Roman?”

Roman shook his head.

“Didn’t think so. Now you tell me what you’re going to do.”

“I’ll call them tonight.”

Wells stepped back and hit Roman again in the stomach. Not as hard this time. Wells didn’t want to kill him. Even so, Roman doubled over and coughed, quick faint breaths, an old dog panting after a game of fetch. Wells flexed his knees to get low and hit him once more, a rising right that connected with the tip of Roman’s jaw, bone on bone. Wells grunted with the impact. A sweet pain filled his hand. Roman’s eyes rolled back. His head snapped up. Then gravity took over and he crashed to the hard-packed dirt. Wells watched for a couple seconds to be sure Roman was still breathing, hadn’t swallowed his tongue. Then Wells walked away, shaking out his hand. Truly he hadn’t felt so good in months.

AS SOON AS Wells passed Peter Lautner’s name to Shafer, a team of techs at Langley began checking every e-mail in their servers, every phone call, every trip, every expense report. They hoped to find evidence of a connection between Lautner and Francesca or Alders, or even better between Lautner and Amadullah. At first, they came up empty. In the two-plus years since his wife’s death, Lautner had been very careful, unusually careful, to keep his official CIA account free of anything personal.

But within twenty-four hours, even before Wells went to FOB Jackson, the techs scored a hit. Stored on the agency’s computers at Langley was an e-mail four years before to Lautner from Daniel.L.Francesca@us.army.mil. A few days later, Lautner had written Francesca back. He’d sent the e-mail not to Francesca’s military account but to another address, DLORFHK@gmail.com. It didn’t take much imagination to realize the account probably belonged to Francesca. With the NSA’s help, the CIA cracked the Gmail address and found three suspicious messages. Two were nothing more than short strings of numbers, possibly phone numbers, though they didn’t match any numbers in the NSA’s worldwide database. The third was yet another Gmail account, with the password attached. Shafer checked it, found it empty. Probably Francesca and Lautner had used it to send messages to each other. One man wrote a message, saved it as a draft e-mail. Once the other read it, he deleted the draft. That way, the message was never permanently stored anywhere, and never left a trail for the NSA to trace.