Al-Eqbal was fat in a country of skin and bone. He was unpopular because he took bribes. And while this was a society where everyone took bribes, Abdul al-Eqbal was in a class of his own — he took baksheesh from one side and put his hand out to the other, then simply made himself scarce and let the parties slug it out or had the next layer of bureaucracy turn up with its hand out for a cut. Intelligence hadn’t confirmed it, but the word on the street was that al-Eqbal had stiffed the wrong crowd once too often and was now a high-priority target for the Taliban.
After the mess in Oak Ridge, I wanted the ugliest, most dangerous assignment the Air Force had to offer. I felt I deserved it. That turned out to be personal security operations in Afghanistan. The day I arrived in-country, I learned that volunteers were being sought to make up al-Eqbal’s detail. This was the highest risk assignment in the highest risk command. It sounded like the reason I was here, so I took the step forward. And that’s how I found myself in charge of a joint PSO unit racing in a three-vehicle convoy down a minor through-road on the outskirts of Kabul. At the time, we were on al-Eqbal’s turf. His people lived here; the ones who’d voted for him, supposedly. I could hear the guy wheezing and humming a local ditty as he leaned forward in his seat and watched the dung-colored homes flash by.
‘How’s it going back there? Anyone cold?’ asked Staff Sergeant Chip Meyers, occupying the front passenger seat and throwing the question over his shoulder.
Meyers was a fellow special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the OSI. He’d been a male model before joining up, his baby blues and six-pack gut selling underwear for Calvin Klein. I was told that he liked to date married women because dodging their husbands added to the excitement. Maybe one day he’d make a good relationship counselor. Apparently, death threats had chased him into the recruitment office.
It was thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit outside. Cool by anyone’s standards.
‘Sir?’ He turned around fully and pitched the question to the dignitary once more. ‘Cold?’
Al-Eqbal ignored him completely.
Meyers shrugged, turned to face the front, and resumed the eternal scan for roadside IEDs — improvised explosive devices. We were the only two Air Force guys in the bunch. The driver seated beside him was Army, a buck sergeant by the name of Rory Bellows, a skinny guy whose head darted around so much looking for threats that I thought he might have a nervous tic.
The team assembled for this unit was drawn from the OSI and the US Army. Up ahead in the lead vehicle were a couple of Army NCOs named Detmond and Stefanovic. They were both premature. Detmond was prematurely gray, Stefanovic prematurely bald. Stef was also short. He had to sit on a Humvee maintenance manual to see over the dash. Their driver, an Army specialist, was a stand-in I hadn’t worked with. The nametag on his battle uniform said ‘Mattock’.
Bringing up the rear were Sergeant First Class Reese Fallon, a six-foot-seven black guy who’d played power forward for Notre Dame, and driver Specialist Alicia Rogerson, a small-town librarian in her civilian days. I asked what a nice librarian like her was doing in a shithole like this and she told me that she liked to read thrillers and had decided to join up and write a few chapters of her own. She came across as perky, wide-eyed, and enthusiastic, all of which told me that her boots had been on the ground here maybe a week, tops.
‘Stop! Stop the car!’ al-Eqbal suddenly shouted. ‘I order you to stop.’
I jumped. ‘What’s the problem, sir?’
‘Do as I say and stop the car! I command it!’
We were here to keep the guy alive, and stopping in a place that hadn’t been surveyed because maybe the dignitary had to take a shit was not in the rulebook.
Al-Eqbal flicked the lock and opened the door while the vehicle was still moving. ‘Now!’ he demanded.
Jesus… I checked the window. The area consisted of run-down housing and some equally run-down businesses. A few cars were on the road. No one seemed to be paying us any mind.
I asked him again. ‘Why do you want to pull over, sir?’
‘I have cousin here. Best snuff in all of Kabul. I come here all the time. These are my people. No danger. Stop here, now!’
Clearly, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I called up the lead vehicle on the radio and asked Stefanovic to pull over. The Land-cruiser’s brake lights came on, the tires scratched for traction in the grit and al-Eqbal was out the door. I leapt after him and headed him off, placing the flat of my Nomex-gloved hand on his chest. He looked at it as if it were vermin.
‘Sir,’ I told him. ‘I have a job to do. Please wait.’
He rolled huge brown eyeballs at Allah, while my mind ran through the six basic rules of PSO duty:
1. Under no circumstances leave your principals unaccompanied.
2. The majority of organized attacks are successful.
3. The bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all.
4. The bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.
5. The bodyguards usually die.
6. The scrotums of bodyguards tighten for a reason — don’t ignore it.
Okay, so number six wasn’t in the official manual, but it was underlined in red in the unofficial one. And mine was now tighter than the skin on a grape.
The detail exited the vehicles, leaving the drivers, Mattock, Bellows and Rogerson, behind. Standard operating procedure was to keep the motors running in case we had to leave in a hurry. Quickly, the rest of us formed the textbook five-man diamond pattern around al-Eqbaclass="underline" Meyers in front, Stefanovic behind, Detmond and Fallon on each side, and me on the principal’s shoulder. Al-Eqbal pointed to where he wanted to go, which was thirty or so meters back down the street in the direction from which we’d just come.
Folks got out of our way, crossed the road, avoided eye contact. Nothing about this behavior was particularly odd. They were used to seeing armed US military personnel on the streets, but there’d been enough situations resulting in civilian deaths to make them nervous about being anywhere near us.
‘Where are we going, sir?’ I asked the principal.
Al-Eqbal indicated the Kabul version of a general store — a gray two-story structure with several stalls outside displaying newspapers and magazines, various hardware items (from lamps to auto-mechanics’ tools), as well as bottled drinks and tinned foods. Wood and Styrofoam boxes on the dirt beneath the stands contained assorted limp vegetables. Two young males loitered out front, just hanging around, smoking. One called out to someone inside the shop when they saw us coming, then both ran off and vanished down an alley a few doors down.
A middle-aged man emerged from the building. The concern on his face brightened into a grin when he saw al-Eqbal. I assumed he was his cousin because no one but family would be happy to see this guy. The two men embraced and kissed and talked rapid-fire Dari, too fast for me to follow, though I managed to catch fragments of the usual string of outrageous compliments. Our dignitary turned to go inside, but I signaled Meyers to perform a site survey and stepped in front of al-Eqbal, blocking his path again.
‘Sir, please allow us to search the building first.’
He swore in Dari — something about me being the spawn of a goatherd’s tepid urine — but he nevertheless stopped and waited.
I banked the insult to use on someone else one day, while his cousin smiled at me and shrugged, as if to say, ‘My cousin’s a politician — whadayagonnado?’
We stood on the dirt sidewalk, buffeted by grit, and waited. An icy wind blew the superfine Afghan dust that smelled of human shit and pack animals into our mouths and nostrils.
Meyers came back out as the troublesome fingers in my left hand, which had been broken and shot up on previous missions, stiffened into a cramp from the cold.