There he was. A kid, maybe eighteen. Running.
“Come on!” I shouted to the private.
Off to my left, Shilmani and Burki were already on their way off, but the truck stopped. Shilmani bailed out and started after us.
The private, whose name I’d already forgotten, and I charged down the street after the wiry guy, who sprinted like a triathlete. We reached the next intersection, glanced around at all the laundry spanning the alleyways, and the kid was gone.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the private.
“Yeah. Call it in.”
As the private got on his radio, I walked back toward Shilmani, who threw his hands in the air and yelled, “It won’t be a big attack now. It’ll be this. Every day. Day after day. Until they wear you down.”
“I get it,” I answered. “But I’m pretty tough. We’re tough. They don’t torch one Hummer and expect me to go home. No way, pal.”
“This is not the war you expected. This will never be the war you expected.” He spun on his heel and jogged back toward Burki and the truck, now sagging under the weight of water jugs.
We left the alley and returned to the small crowd watching our truck burn. That was two Hummers I’d lost since coming to Senjaray. I was cursed.
The private told me at least three other patrols had also been attacked in a coordinated effort by Taliban residing inside the village. Shilmani was, of course, right. We’d be harassed and terrorized, even as we tried to help.
I was in my quarters, reviewing all the data Army intelligence had gathered from the aforementioned Predator drones, when Harruck arrived. He stood in the doorway with the XO at his shoulder.
“Next time you head into town, I’ll need you with a more heavily armed escort,” he said tersely.
“Next time I’ll ride my bike. Then again, they might try to blow that up, too.”
“Well, there it is, Scott. Before you got here, my patrols were attacked two, maybe three times at the most. Now it’s begun.”
“You know, I actually considered what you said — putting the word out to Zahed. But I can’t even find a way to do that.”
“You can’t stop trying.”
“I want to meet with Kundi and the provincial governor — what the hell’s his name again?”
“You mean the district governor. Naimut Gul,” he said. “And they call the meeting a shura. And there’s no reason for you to meet with either of them. I’m taking care of all that, and within the next week I’ll have a document signed by all twelve elders.”
“You going to get Zahed to sign it, too?”
He just glared at me. “I assume you spoke to Bronco?”
“You think I wouldn’t?”
Harruck grinned weakly. “He’s no help. I’ve already tried. His buddies in Kandahar handle our prisoners, and that’s about the extent of it. I think they’re working on something with the opium trade that goes way over Zahed’s head.”
“Have you tried tailing him?”
“Who? Bronco? I don’t have the resources.”
“I do. Maybe I’m not your biggest problem here, Simon. Maybe he is…”
“The agency’s got its own agenda, no doubt. I even heard a rumor about the NSA having field agents out here, but I think my mission is too damned simple to be on their radar.”
“You never know…”
I spent about a week laying low and examining imagery from the drones, trying to pick out Zahed among the thousands of people living in his village. Twice, I’d thought I’d seen him in the bazaar, but I couldn’t be sure. A half dozen Army intelligence analysts back home were doing the same thing, but I always thought a guy behind a desk somewhere in Virginia might not notice the same things as a grunt in the sand.
My Ghosts continued to pose as regular Army and help with defenses along the defile leading down into Senjaray. Harruck’s patrols were harassed by gunfire a few more times, but no one was hurt, and the attackers, after firing a few rounds, fled before they could be caught. I contended that teenagers sympathetic to the Taliban were to blame.
Anderson, along with the Army Corps of Engineers and a half dozen other aid groups, began moving in building materials and breaking ground for the school and the police station, which would be constructed directly north of the defile so that locals could best defend them from attack.
Our replacement Cross-Coms arrived, but I was hesitant to have the guys use them until we pinpointed the source of the disruption.
I assigned Ramirez and Beasley to maintain surveillance on Bronco, who’d been spending a lot of time with landowner Kundi, water man Burki, and a few more of the elders from Senjaray and the other towns in the district.
Bronco hadn’t gone over to Sangsar, as I suspected he would. Ramirez told me that the engineers had assessed the damage we’d caused to the bridge and estimated it would take four to six months to complete repairs. We wouldn’t be in country long enough to see that happen, I assured him.
One night I took a four-man team into the mountains to run some long-range surveillance via Cypher drone and make another attempt to lure out the Taliban and their disruption devices. Nolan flew the drone in low enough for them to have heard and seen it, but there was no response.
“Ghost Lead, this is Jenkins. Suggest we move in past the wall, over.”
The guys were trying to goad me into a close recon of the village, but they always did that. They’d grown restless and longed for the sound of gunfire. They didn’t need good intel or just cause — just a clear night and full magazines. I was supposed to think responsibly.
“Negative. Hold position.”
“You’re not listening to Harruck, are you?” Ramirez whispered to me from his position at my elbow.
“No reason to swat the hornets yet,” I said.
“I don’t know, boss. Something’s gotta give.”
I glanced over at him; he was right.
The next morning, Marcus Brown woke me from a sound sleep. There was trouble out in the old poppy field where the Army engineers had proposed to drill the next well.
Kundi was there, causing a big ruckus, as were Harruck, Anderson, and a half dozen other engineers and construction supervisors.
Brown and I drove out there, and Harruck pulled me aside and told me I “wasn’t involved.”
“That’s fine. So I’ll just watch. And listen,” I told him, my tone making it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere.
“So what’s the bottom line?” one of the Army engineers asked Kundi.
“That’s it,” said Kundi, who was waving his hand over the broad area within which the drilling would occur. About fifty yards to the south lay the base of the foothills — a mottled brown moonscape of pockmarks and stones rising up toward orange-colored peaks. “You cannot put the well here. Over there, on the other side of the field, yes.”
“But we’ll have to drill a lot deeper over there,” said the engineer.
Kundi shook his head.
“Why not? Is this some kind of sacred ground?”
Kundi frowned and looked over to Burki, who in turn cast a quizzical glance at Shilmani, whom they’d obviously brought along to translate. He did, and Kundi nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. God is here!”
I turned to Brown. “You know what God wants? He wants ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors all over this area.”
Brown nodded. “Hallelujah.”
A couple of days later, Harruck caught up with me in the mess hall and wanted an explanation for my request to have a team go out into the field with radar units and metal detectors. I’d had to put in those requests through regular Army channels, Gordon had told me, so Harruck’s interference came as little surprise.