the inside. A lantern lit the passage at each ladder, and
we encountered no resistance. I grew more at ease—
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295
Until at the end of the next passage we spotted a man
coming up a ladder.
Hila fired at him first, the kickback of the pistol star-
tling her. She hit him in the shoulder with the first
round, but the second went over his head and ricocheted
off the wall.
I put two rounds in his chest, and he fell backward
off the ladder. I ran over there, checked below. No other
movement. Thankfully, he’d been alone.
It wasn’t until I started back that I felt the pain in my
arm and stopped, directed a second light down, and saw
that I’d been hit, probably from that ricocheting round.
She saw it, too, and started crying and pointing to
herself, as if to say, It’s my fault.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just caught me a little. See? In
and out?”
I reached into my back pocket, where I kept a small
plastic bag filled with antiseptic wipes and bandages. I
handed the kit to her. “Fix me up. Quick,” I said.
She nodded and got to work, applying the antiseptic
and the bandage. The wound looked worse than it was, but
it still hurt like a mother. When she was finished, I thanked
her and she grabbed me by the other arm. “This way.”
We climbed down the next ladder and found our-
selves in a concrete drainage pipe that left me hunched
over. The pipe ran straight away for as far as I could see,
and I guessed that it led all the way under the village
wall and into Sangsar proper. I still couldn’t receive any
satellite signals on the Cross-Com, so I just took it off
and shoved it in my hip pocket.
296 GH OS T RE CON
The pipe was littered with rocks and lined with a fine
layer of sand, but there was certainly no water, so although
I’d described it as a drainage pipe, its primary use was
clear: smuggling. There were both boot and tire tracks in
the sand. They’d brought wheelbarrows into the pipe or
other wheeled carts to move their opium back and forth.
I had to get word of this passage back to higher, in
the event I didn’t make it back. I’d thought bombing
the tunnels we’d found would help stop the attacks on
Senjaray, but we’d barely put a dent in Zahed’s clandes-
tine highway. But this pipe, this could be the main
artery, I thought.
We were losing our breath, and as we picked up the
pace and continued on for meter after meter, I repeat-
edly glanced over my shoulder to watch the light drift
away and the darkness consume the rest of the shaft.
“Are we getting closer?” I asked her.
She looked at me. “Close?”
“Zahed is here?” I asked.
“Soon,” she said.
T WENTY-EIGHT
While we had been considering a major offensive against
the Taliban, they had, unsurprisingly, been thinking
about the same thing. And unbeknownst to us, they had
planned to launch their attack only a few hours after I’d
taken my team into the mountains. Call that ironic and
interesting timing.
What gave them pause, however, was our placement
of the Bradleys in the defile and the firing of that flare.
My simple diversion had changed the enemy’s entire
battle plan. We later learned that they thought we’d
been tipped off, and that had sent Zahed into a state of
panic. From what we could gather, he launched a half-
hearted offensive, committing only about half of his
298 GH OS T RE CON
troops to the fight, while pulling the rest back to Sang-
sar to help ensure his escape.
But I was unaware of those facts as Hila took me
through the concrete pipe. Had I known that Sangsar
would be swarming with at least two, maybe three hun-
dred of Zahed’s best trained fighters, I might’ve given
the decision more thought.
But I was blithely unaware.
And Hila had assured me that the fat man kept only
two or three guards around him at all times.
Not three hundred.
Far ahead, my light finally picked out the edge of the
pipe, which led directly into another tunnel, one only
about three meters long.
The air was filled by other scents I couldn’t quite dis-
cern: incense, cooked meat, burning candles, some-
thing. And then I paused, glanced back at Hila. “Here?”
She raised an index finger, and her gaze turned up.
I nodded. The concrete pipe had led to a tunnel that
I believed emptied into a basement.
With a gesture for her to remain behind me, I shifted
farther into the tunnel, reached the edge, then hunkered
down and slowly lifted my penlight.
“Whoa . . .” The word escaped my lips before I could
stop it.
We were in a basement all right, a huge one. Fifteen-
foot-high concrete walls rose around the perimeter, and I
estimated the depth at more than one hundred feet. The
place had been converted into a subterranean warehouse,
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299
with long rows of opium bricks, crates of ammunition
and guns, and more MREs, along with dozens and
dozens of wooden boxes whose contents were a mystery.
I shifted to one box and opened it to find a bag
labeled in English: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I
snorted. Fertilizer for making bombs.
At the back of the basement rose a wooden staircase
leading up to a door half open, flickering light wedging
through the crack. When I looked back, Hila was right
behind me. She hadn’t held back like I’d asked.
I glanced up at the wooden planks and ceiling, listened
as people shifted and creaked overhead. Hila’s breathing
grew louder. I leaned down, grabbed her wrist, and led
her along a row of opium bricks, then crouched down at
the back.
“Zahed is up there?”
She nodded.
I thought of the Predator, of somehow getting a signal
off to that controller, getting him to bomb the whole place
while we escaped back through the drainage pipe. Simple.
Clean. The only problem was I couldn’t confirm that the
fat man was up there. I wanted to see him for myself.
“Is it a house up there?”
“Yes. He stays in a big room.”
“All right.” I didn’t think I could get more out of her,
and she wanted to come with me.
“No,” I told her. “You stay here, be quiet, and wait
for me . . . okay?”
She looked about to cry.
300 GH OS T RE CON
“Please . . .”
“Okay.”
As I stole away, shifting quickly from row to row of
crates and opium bricks, I asked myself, What the hell am
I doing?
The door at the top of the staircase creaked open, and
two Taliban fighters came charging down the stairs with a
purpose. I tucked myself deeper into the crates and just
watched them jog through the basement and head straight
into the tunnel. I looked far down the row at Hila, hidden
between two crates now. She’d heard them but she didn’t