Alex Berenson - The Faithful Spy

JOHN WELLS TIPPED his head to the sky, searching for a pair of F-15s circling slowly above in the darkness. Even during the day the American jets were difficult to spot. Now, with the sun hidden behind the mountains, they were all but invisible. Wells could only hope their pilots hadn’t seen him either, for the bombs on their wings could obliterate him and his men in an instant.

From the cockpits of those jets, the war looked like a video game, Wells thought. Little gray men ran silently across computer screens an inch at a time until bombs landed with white blasts. The reality on the ground was messier, bones and blood replacing pixels. Wells’s mind slid to a Sunday morning many years before, his dad, a surgeon, the best cutter in western Montana, walking into the kitchen after a night in the operating room, washing his hands compulsively in the sink.

“What happened, Dad?” Wells had said that morning. “Was it bad?”

He was ten, old enough to know that he wasn’t supposed to ask those questions, but curiosity overcame him. Herbert turned off the sink and dried his hands, poured himself a cup of coffee, and fixed Wells with his weary blue eyes. Wells was about to apologize for overstepping his bounds when his father finally spoke, the answer not what Wells expected.

“Everything depends which side of the shotgun you’re on,” Herbert said. And sipped his coffee, as if daring his son to press him further. Wells hadn’t understood then, but he did now. Truer words had never been said. He wondered what his father, two years gone, would think of the man he’d become. He had just started down his path when Herbert had passed on, and if his dad had had any thoughts on the matter he’d kept them to himself.

“You’ve got the hands to be a surgeon, John,” Herbert said once when Wells was in college, but when Wells didn’t respond Herbert dropped the subject. His dad always told him that he’d have to make his own path, that the world was no place for weaklings. Wells supposed he’d learned that lesson too well. A killer, not a doctor, aiming to make wounds no surgeon could undo. Yet somehow he thought that Herbert would understand the need for men like him. Hoped, anyway.

WELLS GAVE UP looking for the jets but kept his eyes raised. In this land without electricity the stars and moon glowed with a brightness he had grown to love. He silently named all the constellations he could remember, until a blast of wind filled his eyes with dust and pulled his attention to earth.

Ahmed, his lieutenant, stepped across the firepit and stood beside him. “Cold,” Ahmed said quietly in Arabic.

“Nam.” Yes.

The wind had worsened by the day, an icy breeze sweeping down from the north with the promise of the bitter winter to come. Tonight the gusts were especially strong, kicking up ash from the fire Wells and his men had built, mocking their efforts to stay warm. Wells cinched his blanket around his shoulders and stepped closer to the men huddled around the low fire. He would have liked a stronger flame, but he could not risk the attention of the jets.

“It will be a long winter.”

“Yes,” Wells said.

“Or perhaps a short one.” A grim smile crossed Ahmed’s face. “Perhaps we will be in paradise before spring.”

“Maybe the sheikh will send us all on vacation,” Wells said, indulging himself in a rare joke. “Or a hajj,” the pilgrimage to Mecca that every devout Muslim was supposed to make at least once.

At the mention of the hajj the sneer disappeared from Ahmed’s lips. “ Inshallah, Jalal,” he said reverently. If God wills.

“Inshallah,” Wells said. The Taliban and Qaeda guerrillas called him Jalal. He had taken the name years earlier, after he became the first westerner to graduate from the Qaeda camps near Kandahar. Fewer than a dozen men knew his real name. A few others called him Ameriki, the American, but not many would do so to his face. Many of the younger recruits, in fact, didn’t know he was American at all.

And why would they? Wells asked himself. After years fighting jihad in Afghanistan and Chechnya, he spoke perfect Arabic and Pashtun. His beard was long, his hands callused. He rode a horse almost as well as the natives — no outsider could truly ride like an Afghan — and he played buzkashi, the rough polo game they loved, as hard as they did. He prayed with them. He had proven that he belonged here, with these men.

Or so Wells hoped. What bin Laden and the other senior Qaeda leaders really thought of him he did not know. He was not sure he ever would. Especially now, with his country at war with theirs. He could not truly prove himself except by dying for them, and that he did not plan to do.

Wells shivered again, from the inside this time. Enough second-guessing. He looked at his six men, their AKs slung over their shoulders, talking quietly in the darkness. Three were Afghan, three Arab; the pressure of war had brought the Taliban and Qaeda closer than ever before. Usually, they were chatty and loud, born storytellers. But Wells was not a talker on missions, and his soldiers respected that. They were friendly enough, and battle-hardened, and they followed his orders quickly and without question. A commander couldn’t ask for more. What would happen to them tonight was unfortunate, worse than unfortunate, but it couldn’t be helped.

To the south, a bright flash lit up the night. Then another, and another.

“They’ve started again,” Ahmed said. The Americans were bombing Kabul, the Afghan capital, thirty miles south. So far, they had ignored the Shamali Plain, the flat ground north of Kabul where the Taliban faced the Northern Alliance — the rebel Afghan army that since September 11 had become America’s new best friend.

Wells and his men had camped in a nameless village, really just a couple of huts, on a ridge overlooking the plain. They were protected by mountains to the north and west, and they had ridden horses in rather than driving the Toyota pickups favored by the Taliban. No one would bother them up here, and they could easily watch the plain below. And Wells had another reason for choosing this place, one he had not shared with his men. With any luck, there would be an American Special Forces unit in the next village north.

“Harder tonight,” Ahmed said, as the flashes continued.

“Nam.” Yes. Much harder. After a month of shadowboxing, the United States had opened up on Kabul. A bad sign for the Taliban, already reeling from the collapse of its defenses in the north. Supposedly impenetrable cities had fallen after a few days of American bombing.

But tonight the Taliban had a surprise for the Northern Alliance. Wells looked south, where a rutted road rose out of Kabul and onto the plain. There they were. Headlights, streaming north. A dozen vehicles in close convoy, a break, and a dozen more. Pickups with mounted.50-caliber machine guns in their beds. Five-ton troop transports holding twenty soldiers each. The moon rose in the sky and the headlights kept coming. Another dozen, and another. The Taliban were grouping to attack the Northern Alliance front line.