“So Abdullah — he’s sitting on the ground, see — he’s peeking over his shoulder, looking all scared. Captain’s like, ‘Calm down, dude. You’re not getting whacked.’ How do you say ‘whack’ in Arabic, Cap?”
“You don’t.” Hughley’s tone was deadpan.
“How ‘bout ’dude‘? They gotta have a word for ’dude,‘ right?”
“You believe the crap I have to listen to every day?” Hughley said to Wells.
“Anyway, this camel jockey, ‘scuse my French, starts looking around harder than Jeff Gordon on turn four, trying to see who’s really talking to him.” Here, Gaffan craned his neck from side to side, imitating the Saudi, before jamming a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “So Cap gives him some more mumbo jumbo.”
“Finish your dinner, Gaffan.” Hughley turned to Wells. “I told him it was no trick, I was the one talking.”
Gaffan dribbled a glass of lemonade into his mouth and swallowed mightily. “Then Abdullah says something back, and Cap nods at him and tells us to stand him up. Then it gets weird, ‘cause Abdullah gets real close to the captain, like he’s getting ready to give him a kiss.”
“He wasn’t that close.”
“All due respect, sir, he was. Wasn’t he?”
Nods around the table.
“And we’re all confused, wondering if we’re gonna be whacking Abdullah after all. And you know we try not to kill our captures, even though damn sure the other side ain’t showing us the same courtesy.”
More nods.
“But then we’re thinking, maybe Cap wants a kiss. Since he hasn’t seen his wife in six months, and the dude was kinda cute.”
“Now you’re scaring me,” Hughley said.
“Nah, he was cute. Wasn’t he?” Gaffan looked around the silent table. “I know y‘all thought so too, so don’t deny it. anybody?” Pause. “Okay, then. Let’s make like I never said that.”
“Too late,” said Danny Gonzalez, the company’s medic.
“Moving on. Then Cap starts singing—”
“Praying.” Hughley looked at Wells. “The first sura.”
“And Abdullah leans in close, making sure Cap’s really the one talking — How was his breath, by the way, sir?”
“Lemme put it this way, Sergeant. I wouldn’t have kissed him even if I did play on your team.”
“Sir. Uncalled for and untrue. I believe that’s harassment, sir. Anyway, he gets in real close.” Gaffan stood up and leaned so close that Wells could count his pores. “Looking up, because Cap’s maybe a foot taller than he is.”
“Sergeant, did you put Tabasco on your burger?” Wells said, getting a laugh from the table. “‘Cause it sure smells that way.”
Gaffan sat down. “Guess I’ll be brushing my teeth when dinner’s done,” he said sheepishly. “Anyway. Abdullah gets this scared look on his face, like, ‘Damn. It’s no joke. This black dude talks my language. Not only that, he talks it better than me.’ Looked like somebody stole his pet camel.” Gaffan stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated expression of sadness. Everyone at the table laughed now, Wells too, harder and harder, some pent-up emotion in him pouring out.
“The kicker is, ‘bout ten minutes later, old Abdullah starts blabbing to Cap and won’t shut up. True?”
Hughley nodded. “He was our best source last year.”
JOINED BY TWO APACHE ATTACK HELICOPTERS, the Black Hawks turned east, diving as they left the base. When they leveled off, they were just two hundred feet above the ground, low enough that Wells could see the dust kicked up by a rusty jalopy as it rolled down the two-lane road that angled away from the base. Staying low made them harder to hit with rocket-propelled grenades or surface-to-air missiles.
To the south, a road dead-ended at a massive garbage pile, a hundred-foot-tall monument to Afghanistan’s poverty. No fires were visible on the pile, but a haze of black smoke drifted from the trash. The stench of sewage filled the cabin as the Black Hawk flew through the smoke’s inky tendrils. Women and children trudged over the smoldering debris, looking for rags or scrap metal, anything they might trade for dinner.
In a field nearby, scrawny boys played soccer with a makeshift ball. Wells could see a breakaway develop even before the players did. A kid in a raggedy blue T-shirt cut past his defender, awaiting a pass from the midfield—
But before Wells could see what happened next, the game faded behind him. These Black Hawks cruised at 150 miles an hour. Wells decided to imagine that the kid had scored, in keeping with his newly optimistic outlook. Maybe he should write a self-help book. The power of positive thinking. And shooting first.
The fearsome mountains of the Hindu Kush jutted ahead of the helicopter. The peaks, capped with snow even in summer, stretched hundreds of miles to the northeast. Near Afghanistan’s border with China, they rose above 20,000 feet. Around here they were closer to 15,000 feet, still higher than any in the continental United States. The CIA and the Pentagon believed that bin Laden was hiding in the Kush or just south, in Pakistan’s Peshawar Province. But without solid intelligence, finding anyone in the Kush was impossible. The range was an endless maze of valleys and caves, among the most difficult places on earth to search. Snow fell by October. By December the dirt tracks that the Afghans optimistically called roads were impassable. The guerrillas holed up in tiny villages and waited for spring, knowing that even the best-equipped American units could not touch them. In the summer, the Talibs moved between the mountains and Kabul, planting bombs, hijacking supply trucks, and generally wreaking havoc.
And they were getting more dangerous. A month before, fifty Taliban had attacked a police station east of Kabul. When a rapid-reaction team from Bagram responded, a second band of guerrillas ambushed it. Eight American soldiers died.
Then mortar fire hit the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Blessing, an outpost near the Pakistani border. Six men died. Mortar attacks weren’t uncommon in Afghanistan, but attacks this accurate were. So two squads from camp had hiked into the mountains to talk to the villagers who lived north of the base. Everywhere they went, the soldiers offered gifts: medical supplies, pens and paper, and candy — Afghans loved Tic Tacs, for reasons no one could figure. The idea was to keep the locals friendly, or at least neutral, and get information about the source of the mortars. In most villages, the squads were met with tea, suspicious looks, and little else.
But in a nameless village twenty miles north of Camp Blessing, the soldiers got a surprise. Bashir Jan, the village’s headman, told them about a guerrilla outpost to the west. Besides fifty Taliban, the camp contained several “white fighters,” he said. And why had he given up this precious information? The guerrillas were stealing the village’s goats and refusing to pay, he said.
“The guys said he was furious,” Holmes told Wells. “Couldn’t have been madder if they’d taken one of his wives.”
“Never look a gift goat in the mouth,” Wells said.
Bashir’s report was the one that had spurred Exley to get the satellite photographs. Now the mercenaries, whoever they were, were about get a call from Companies A and B. Two companies from the 10th Mountain Division, including the unit that had first discovered the camp, would provide tactical support. The plan didn’t make the 10th Mountain happy. Their guys were the ones who’d died in the mortar attack, and they had developed the original intel. As far as they were concerned, they deserved the kill.