It took three hours for Jeff and his guys to clear the field, and they lined up ten dead Taliban in a row, their AKs, PKMs and RPGs piled beside them. A couple of Jeff’s indigenous “Indij” guys started taking pictures with their trashy cell phones, holding dead guys up by their hair. They needed the pictures for evidence and to match against the “most wanted” list. Still, the specter made Jeff turn away.
He looked back at his column of trucks. He could see three black body bags lying outside the lead Corolla—the car that had contained his Amniat scouts, some of his best friends and finest warriors. The medics were smoking cigarettes instead of working on his men, which meant Jeff had lost more friends.
Jeff’s body felt drained, like a fist unclenching. He would complete this last mission, and then he would leave Afghanistan and warfighting behind forever.
He had been in command of the column of fifteen trucks for three days, and road dust coated his face and the inside of his nose, dragging on every breath. For hours on end, for the last three days, his binoculars had come up and down searching for an ambush, like genuflecting to the gods of war.
Lift the binos. Scan the horizon. Scan big rocks. Scan all potential hiding places. Lower the binos. Check the position of his trucks. Repeat every ninety seconds, forty-five times an hour, five hundred times a day.
From the center of his head to the marrow of his bones, fatigue dogged him. A fighter could only stay hard for so long. For him, it had been twenty-eight years.
Driving for days had worn him down to a nub. The rocking motion of the truck and the chemical body odor from the men commingled with exhaust fumes, kicking his motion sickness into overdrive. Even so, seventy lives depended on him staying rock solid, and now men had died on his watch.
The distance to the Forward Operating Base wasn’t the problem. They could have made the drive in ninety minutes going balls out, but the province crawled with Taliban and Jeff’s column was anything but low profile: fifteen Toyota Tacomas, painted desert tan, each one of them with a Russian-made belt-fed machine gun bolted to the truck bed.
Jeff had ordered his Amniat scouts in the beat-up Corolla to range out every ten kilometers to reconnoiter the road ahead. Since the scout vehicle looked just like every other piece of junk in this desert, he had hoped the Taliban wouldn’t waste bullets on it. Three of Jeff’s best Indij fighters had been crammed into that little car.
For eight hours, the column had run with two overwatch trucks fanning out to the left and the right, up on the ridge tops, covering the column with their big fifty-caliber belt-fed machine guns. That meant a lot of stop-and-wait inaction as the overwatch trucks maneuvered into new positions. The column would drive a kilometer, wait fifteen minutes for overwatch to set up, then drive a kilometer more. The process yanked on the column like a ball and chain, but it had to be done. Without covering fire, they could find themselves on the death-eating side of an ambush.
War is work, Jeff had been telling himself, manual labor. It wasn’t just physically exhausting. It was the waiting that ground the soul down —constant stress and usually nothing to show for it. He knew he was an excellent warfighter, a manual laborer of death and destruction with an iron will. He could control the chaos like few men on earth, and it was this unwavering faith in his own competency that powered Jeff through long and tedious missions like this one.
Now, with the ambush sprung, the battle finished and several of his men dead, Jeff was no longer feeling that same bullet-proof self-confidence.
Wakiel walked over to Jeff, smoking a cigarette.
“I guess that was a bad place to get ahead of our security element,” Jeff said in English.
Wakiel knew Jeff well enough to understand and replied, “Khalash, Jeff.” It was Dari for “finished,” but today it meant “farewell.”
After this mission, Jeff headed home forever, back to the other world — the world that didn’t smell like the inside of an Afghani’s lower intestines, the world where he could stay clean, sleep in on a Sunday with his wife, and take in the fresh smell of his sons’ hair first thing in the morning.
The sweet-sour smell of shit wafted past his face, and Jeff searched for the offending stench, noticing a green, chunky glob on his boot. With nowhere to wipe it off, Jeff’s aggravation peaked, his only solace that he was leaving this endless parade of rot and ruin.
Jeff vowed to never again smell the guts of a man, to never again face the buzz of angry bullets, and to never again watch friends die violent deaths. Back in the real world of America, Jeff would put a net around his family and would tie it down tight. The demons of chaos and destruction would forever infest Afghanistan, but they would not follow him home. Whatever affection he had once had for the life of a soldier, it was over. Now he would make damned sure his family lived in peace.
“I am so sick of fighting death every day,” Jeff said, looking at his Afghani friend for the last time.
The Afghani barely understood his English, which was the only reason Jeff allowed himself to put words to his fatigue.
Wakiel nodded and returned to smoking his cigarette.
Bandar Sharak
Hormozgan Province, Iran
Present Day
In the end, Afshin Asadi would explode a dirty bomb over Saudi Arabian soil, not because of his religion or his politics, but because he couldn’t stand to leave a project unfinished.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the same place where he kept information on how to operate his microwave oven, Afshin knew he would go to paradise by sacrificing his life, if it came to that. He accepted the information without any particular interest.
Some might look at Afshin’s story and draw the conclusion he had been imprisoned by a cruel government, a regime that would enslave a mentally challenged, but genius young man to an ignorant religion. In their rush to repudiate Islam, they would miss the point.
Truth was, Afshin already lived in paradise, and his government was doing him a favor by confining him to a workshop with a prototype nuclear device. Every morning he awoke with a burning desire to move the project one step closer to completion, and every night he lay down deeply satisfied by the work he had completed. On any given day, he might have tested a candidate polystyrene as a suspension material, or machined a new trial shield panel. Each small step toward completion scratched an itch deep in his soul, and he went to sleep happy as a man could be—at least as a happy as an autistic man could be.
Five years previously, as Afshin studied at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, one of his professors had asked him to visit during office hours. When Afshin arrived at the meeting in his professor’s office—more a cubbyhole than an office—another man was wedged into a seat in the corner between piles of papers. The strange man wore a crumpled suit coat and a yellowing dress shirt. He was balding and peered over a pair of thick-framed glasses.
The stranger introduced himself, and Afshin failed to note his name, more interested in the big Western-made calculator poking out of the man’s shirt pocket. Calculator Man peppered Afshin with engineering and physics questions, beginning with simple ones and moving toward the more complex. Afshin answered plainly, without wondering for a single second about the purpose of the meeting.
More than a month later, the same man interrupted a Thermal Engineering lecture. The teacher’s aide pulled Afshin from class and Calculator Man showed him out the front door of the university to a waiting taxi. Afshin never saw the school, nor his family, again.