“Uh-uh. Dead serious.”
“Serious, huh?” A big stripper smile, then a finger pointed at him in imitation of a pistol. She’d put her hand on his leg. “Well, let’s see your gun, big boy.”
“Wanna know something else? I’m a double agent.”
“You go both ways? I thought you might. That’s cool. I got a couple friends—”
“No!”
“Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I mean, not like that. I spy for the Chinese government. Treason.”
“Treason? What’s that?”
And the song would end.
Ugh. Forget it. One day, after he’d retired and Janice had died of cirrhosis and he was living someplace with no extradition treaty, he’d write his memoirs and name every name he could remember. Until then, he would keep his mouth shut. He closed his eyes and imagined Corvettes, a flotilla of shiny convertibles, until sleep took him.
11
THE BLACK HAWK’S ROTORS BEGAN TO SPIN, first slowly, then faster and faster. At rest, the twenty-six-foot blades drooped under their own bulk. But they stiffened as they accelerated. In seconds they disappeared into a relentless blur. Wells felt himself instinctively pull his head back, though he stood fifty feet from the helicopter. Those rotors could liquefy a skull.
Wells checked his watch. 1655. Five minutes to takeoff. Then the rotors slowed. Inside the cockpit, the pilots hunched over the Black Hawk’s instrument panel.
The blades dribbled to a stop, and the helicopter’s crew chief hopped onto the tarmac. With his green flight helmet and black goggles, he looked like the love child of a palmetto bug and a Green Bay Packers punter. “Warning light on the hydraulics,” he yelled. “Take a few minutes to check.” He scrambled back inside the cabin.
Any delay was bad news, Wells thought. They needed to be in the air soon to hit the campsite at dusk. Sweat prickled his chest, though he wore only a faded green T-shirt under his bulletproof vest. He reached for a bottle of water from the cooler at his feet and sucked it down in one long gulp.
Around him, men in Kevlar vests squatted over topo maps and double-checked their radios. A and B Companies of the 3rd Battalion. Twenty Special Forces soldiers in all. Two squads of the best-trained fighting men anywhere, about to head into the Hindu Kush.
Wells unholstered his pistol, checking that its slide was smooth and its magazine full. As he finished, he noticed Greg Hackett staring at the 9-millimeter Makarov. Hackett was the youngest member of B Company, a short man whose head seemed to rise directly out of his massive shoulders. He had a heavy brow and a thick nose, the face of a half-finished marble bust that a sculptor had decided not to finish.
“Mr. Wells, sir. Permission to ask a question.”
“If you promise to stop calling me sir, Hackett.”
“Yes, sir — I mean John.” Hackett looked at the pistol. “Is that the one you used?”
Wells didn’t know what Hackett meant, and then he did. “On Khadri, you mean.”
Hackett nodded. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the weapon.
“Since you ask. Yeah.” Wells handed the Makarov to Hackett. The sergeant cradled the pistol like a newborn.
“No need to fetishize it, Sergeant. It’s just a gun.”
Hackett handed the pistol back. “Can I ask one more question, sir? How does it feel to be back here?”
“Sergeant, don’t you have something to do?”
WELLS HAD COME TO AFGHANISTAN years before September 11, when most Americans had never heard of Osama bin Laden. He’d fought alongside Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas for almost a decade. He had even become a Muslim during those years. Eventually, the guerrillas had accepted him as a believer.
But Wells was happy to hunt his former allies today. He didn’t count himself as Muslim anymore. He couldn’t honestly say whether he believed in God after everything he’d seen. And even during the years when he had accepted Islam as the one true faith and prostrated himself to Allah five times daily, he had hated bin Laden’s nihilistic vision of the religion. The Taliban and Qaeda gloried in encouraging teenagers to become suicide bombers. They were unworthy of Islam.
And they were unworthy of Afghanistan. Afghans were tribal to a fault, splintered into narrow sects whose hatreds dated back centuries. The Taliban had taken advantage of Afghanistan’s internal fractures to impose a vicious dictatorship in the 1990s. Seemingly out of spite, they had undone what little progress Afghanistan had made during the twentieth century, destroying the country’s hospitals and schools. During the American invasion after September 11, the planners at the Pentagon joked that the United States would bomb Afghanistan up to the Stone Age.
The American attack had forced the Talibs out of power. Now Afghanistan was stumbling toward modernity and democracy. But the Taliban hadn’t gone away. The guerrillas were trying to turn tribal leaders against the United States and its allies. They had a real chance of succeeding, because in any crisis Afghans turned inward. Wells understood why they depended on themselves. For hundreds of years, outsiders had come and gone, most often leaving the country in worse shape than they found it in. But—
A hand on his shoulder interrupted his thoughts.
“Goggles!” Captain Steve Hughley, the commander of B Company, yelled.
Wells had been so busy figuring out Afghanistan’s future that he’d missed the Black Hawk starting up again. He tucked in his earplugs and pulled down his goggles as the helicopter’s rotors reached full speed, kicking up dust and pebbles from the tarmac.
“Ready?” Hughley yelled.
“Yeah!” Wells screamed back. His enthusiasm was real. He hadn’t flown in a Black Hawk since his days as a Ranger in the mid-nineties. He’d forgotten how magnificent these helicopters were up close. And how loud. Even with his earplugs in, he was nearly overwhelmed by the screech of the Black Hawk’s 1,800-horsepower turbines.
The ten-ton helicopter bounced slightly off the runway in its eagerness to take flight. The crew chief waved B Company forward. Down the tarmac, A Company was boarding its own bird. Wells pulled a windbreaker over his vest and grabbed his pack. Inside the cabin, he settled into his seat — designed to collapse to the floor of the cabin if the Black Hawk crashed — and clicked on his harness.
“Comfy?” The crew chief tugged the six-point harness tight and offered Wells headphones. Wells took them gratefully. Insulation was wasted weight for combat helicopters, so the Black Hawk wasn’t soundproofed. Inside the cabin, the roar of the turbines was overwhelming, a scrum of white noise that made conversation or even thinking nearly impossible.
The crew chief hooked in. When he and the gunner on the other side were set, the helicopter’s frame began to rattle as the turbines spun at peak power for takeoff. The Black Hawk burned three gallons of fuel a minute, so pilots didn’t waste time once the crew strapped in.
The copilot pulled back the Black Hawk’s collective and the helicopter rose effortlessly off the tarmac. Wells knew that the Black Hawk had the aerodynamics of a brick and would plummet if its engines failed. Yet the copter seemed to belong in the air. As soon as it took off, its frame stopped shaking and the scream of the turbines lessened. It banked right and kept climbing, leaving Bagram’s stubby huts behind.
WELLS LOOKED AROUND the Black Hawk’s cabin at B Company, an impressive group, even by Special Forces standards. Three of the soldiers spoke Pashto, a fourth Dari. Their sniper team had finished third in the Army’s shooting competition two years back. Hughley, the company captain, was one of the few black commanders in the Special Forces. He was six-three, with arms that seemed to be carved from oak. At West Point, he’d played defensive tackle. And somewhere along the way, he had picked up fluent Arabic. A few Saudis still lingered in the mountains, fighting alongside the Taliban, and at dinner the night before, Brett Gaffan, the company radioman and unofficial comedian, had told Wells how one Saudi they’d captured had refused to believe that Hughley spoke his language: