Pashtun Page 18

  The Afghan costume hadn’t mattered with the guard, Nabil, and the boy. Without it, I would have had to abort or grease two pedestrians. It didn’t really take a master of disguise to fool anyone here, in a land united in its sameness; it only took the willingness to wear man jammies and smell like a homeless man living under a Manhattan bridge.

  The documents Dunne provided got us through two Coalition checkpoints with only a few shakes of the head and “fuckin’ spook” comments. Just beyond the second barricade, Humvees blocked the road. Beside the trucks, five Deltas were watching a Toyota pickup burn while scanning the flat horizon. We were on an open plain, and there was little place for snipers to hide. Still, the Rangers were grouped so the entire field of vision was covered.

  The truck was overturned, black smoke funneling from the tires. Orange flames waved in the firestorm and crackled like crushing tin foil. An occasional pop as something overheated and exploded from the pressure. The smell of a barbecue. Washington stopped the 6x6, unable to cross the ditches on each side of the road. We dismounted and walked closer to the scene.

  “What happened?” Washington asked the first soldier we approached.

  The shredded bodies of two men lay in the dirt several yards apart, surrounded by the Rangers. Smoke drifted from the part of the carcasses still intact. One man was missing most of his head, and the other had no arms. No turbans. No hair, even. Skulls and no eyebrows. Blackened blood sizzled on burnt skin like bubbling Vaseline turned the color of simmering charcoal.

  “Tried a detour,” the first soldier said with only a glance at us then focused back on the bodies. “Wasted ’em with an XM25 grenade launcher. Nowhere ta run, nowhere ta hide.”

  The soldier was just a boy. Younger than me and not long out of high school. He was slender and tall. Green eyes that danced in the reflection of the flames and a pimple on his cheek that needed to be squeezed. His camouflaged helmet was tight enough on his head that it looked like it was super-glued on.

  “You got any marshmallows?” another soldier asked. This one was about the same age, but stockier. Grease streaked his camo pants as if he’d been crawling under a Humvee. He poked the barrel of his H & K at the body below him, prodding it gently, like he was rearranging ashes.

  “Raghead rag-oo,” the Ranger beside him said.

  “Muj mush.” And the chorus began, while we all looked down at the burning remains.

  “Taliban tar-tar.”

  “Hadji burger.”

  “Mohammed mayonnaise.”

  “Al-Qaeda quesadilla.”

  “Bin Laden bagel.”

  “Turban toasties.”

  “Pashto pasta.”

  “Abdul Alfredo,” Washington chimed in.

  “Enough,” a soldier who must have been their lieutenant said. He was the oldest, but not the most hardened looking. “Bag ’em and tag ’em.”

  “What do we write on the tags. sir?” the pimpled one asked. “S’mores? Crispy critters?” He pointed to one of the dead hadji’s bare feet. “And they ain’t got no toes left to attach the tags on. I’m afraid if we try ta pin ’em to their chests, their lungs’ll cave in like a burnt chicken’s. No flesh left worth pokin’.”

  “Just toss ’em in the bags,” the lieutenant said. “It’ll get sorted later.” He turned away and walked back to the Humvees.

  The Rangers continued to stare down.

  “Broiled bad guys.”

  “Grilled gomers.”

  “Fire-roasted Fedayeen.”

  “Porkless barbecue.”

  “Jelly donuts.”

  “I said stow that shit,” the lieutenant said over his shoulder. “Move out. Now.”

  The Rangers dispersed, turning their heads away from the still-smoldering bodies. One headed to the Humvees, I presumed, to fetch the body bags.

  Washington and I went to the 6x6 and waited for them to clear the road.

  Inside the truck, I took off my helmet and tried to wipe the smoke from bloodshot eyes.

  “Do you think any one of those Rangers except the lieutenant was older than twenty?” I asked.

  “Maybe in dog years,” Washington said. “In terms of experience, they were old ones.” He stared straight ahead, a frown on his face. No more jokes.

  “The lieutenant didn’t look any older than you or me,” I said.

  “Probably a fresh cherry outta West Point. Had that stick-up-your-ass disease.”

  Men in suits and gray hair sending boys, and now girls, out to die. Kids who hadn’t seen much worse than a skinned knee from a bicycle accident watching while jelly-covered bodies disintegrated before their eyes. Buddies sent home legless from IEDs. Teenage medics crawling toward injured soldiers, holding intestines from falling out with their hands. The screams of wounded squad members pinned down by a sniper, helpless while they listened to someone they knew—a friend—slowly bleed to death in loud agony. The litany of monstrosities never seemed to slow. Boys and girls from cities and farms who were growing up on the horror, while the puppet masters called the cadence.

  In ’Nam, the anthem was “don’t mean nuthin’.” The phrase wasn’t used much in the rock pile, though. It was not up to date and didn’t capture the nuance of fighting terrorism—9/11 meant something to us. Chasing VC into tunnels didn’t, nor did the Domino Theory or Henry Kissinger’s lies. ’Nam vets used the words as a catch all, like when they witnessed a medic jam a fountain pen into a buddy’s neck to open a breathing channel from a sucking chest wound. There wasn’t much else to say to contain the insanity. What the ’Nam grunts really were trying to convey by saying “don’t mean nuthin’” was this: “It means everything. But I can’t express it in words that make any sense of the situation or describe the true horror.” Today, it was just a different place. But the story stayed the same.

  In both cases, we were eating the young. I was older than the Rangers at the cookout. And Washington. I cared, as did they, about protecting the nation and the world from radical Islam and suicide bombers. But . . . none of us knew if we were really doing that. Or if the CIA really did rule the world.

  Sometimes it felt like a video game and we had reached the deadly final level. There was no reason to doubt the commitment and patriotism of the Rangers or any other soldier in Afghanistan. No draft had forced them here. Still, I wondered if there were enough psychiatrists to treat soldiers who got their last growth spurt amid the blood and carnage of Afghanistan.

  Moving south again on Afghan Highway 1, Washington remained silent. We were losing altitude, and the plains were expanding, the mountains distant on both sides and lost in the haze. Even less to view here except camels carrying bundles of wood and the occasional Afghan or US Army patrol. We passed through a few small villages, not much more than mud huts, chickens, dogs, and Coca Cola signs. The river was long past, and the background was nearly a total brown.

  The truck held MREs and bottles of Dasani water. Neither of us had eaten. I opened a water and offered it to Washington.

  “You’ve been awfully quiet,” I said. “Would you like to talk? Share your innermost feelings?”

  “No,” Washington said. “And I’m not feelin’ vulnerable either.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But if you change your mind, I’m here for you.”

  “Dolly Parton?”

  “Wynona, I think.”

  “Speakin’ a Dolly. Did you hear she was havin’ back problems and had to cancel a few concerts? When she was asked about it, she said, pointin’ to her chest, ‘You’d have a back ache too if you had to carry around these puppies all day.’ Fine woman she is.”

  “No, I didn’t hear that. I was thinkin’ more about that wienie roast we witnessed. How those boys could look at all that seared flesh and sleep at night.”

  Washington sat straighter in his seat and finished the water, handing the empty back to me.

  “Once, in the Korengal, my squad was sent out to a village to deliver food supplies to a house that had become kind of an orphanage. At
least that was what we were told. Before, every time we passed, doin’ our hearts and minds thing, little girls would look out the windows and door. Not wave. Not smile. Just stare. Too many for even a Catholic family. I asked around and they said one a the warlords, Ahmad Shah, the dude who controlled the place, had set it up for girls who had their families wiped out by the fightin’. Some a the money we were handin’ out was supposedly helpin’ feed them.”

  He clenched both hands on the steering wheel hard enough for me to see the veins on his wrists become black worms.

  “We came in slow and unannounced. There’d been an ambush the day before a klick up the mountain. When we got there and went inside, two hadjis ran out the back door. We had a ‘no fire’ order in effect, so we couldn’t shoot ’em. Wish we would’a.” He shook his head. “Shit.”

  Washington’s eyes went down, and he closed them for a second before he looked back to the pavement. “The girls were naked and lined up against the wall. Not one of ’em could’a been over twelve, the marryin’ age in those parts. Two a the girls, neither of ’em older than eight, were on their backs on a filthy rug in the corner. Both were bleedin’ from their hairless privates and had fresh bruises on their faces and chests. We called for a medic and gave ’em the shirts off our backs to cover up.”

  He spit out the window and then turned his face forward to the road.

  “Most of my men couldn’t stay inside. After the first few minutes, Withers, a young grunt from Arkansas, said, ‘Looks like the hadjis got loose in the chicken coop.’ I hit him in the jaw with the butt of my H & K and knocked him clean out the door.”

  He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and sighed.

  “Ya’ know, Morgan, Withers was one a my best men. Fearless, even the few times we were pinned down. Always carried hard candy in his pocket to give to the kids. Helped old hajib’ed women with their loads. Even worked with some of ’em plantin’ a rock flower garden. He didn’t mean nuthin’. He was hurtin’ bad and just trying ta cope with it all, like the rest of us. I was too angry at the time. Wanted to hit someone, and I thought Withers gave me the excuse. We all get carried away by words. They’re just words, not what’s in your heart.” Washington blinked twice rapidly and then closed his eyes again for a few seconds. “Withers got killed by a sniper couple’a weeks later. First one shot in the ambush. Only two of us made it.”

  Nothing to say. I was quiet and didn’t do anything stupid like pat him soothingly on the thigh. I’d asked for it, and now I had another atrocity story to file away for the darkness.

  Silence again. I decided to pass the time by mentally drafting another message to mom.

  Hi, mom. Only have a few minutes. Your last email sounded like everyone was doing well. That’s great. Here, still stuck in my calculator. I even see numbers in my dreams. Funny how the number two has been in the picture so often recently. I’ve been kind of self-absorbed lately so yesterday I visited an orphanage for Afghan war victims who’ve been shipped over here for rehabilitation. Made friends with two of the cutest little girls. They’re both around eight and still don’t smile much. I can’t get them off my mind. I hope it’s better for them in America. The only weird thing was the two Afghan men who were talking to the girls when I got there. They literally ran out like there was a fox in the hen house or a fire. Strange. Well, gotta get back to work. Two important projects to finish. Give my love to everyone.

  The sun was dropping behind the southernmost part of the Hindu Kush. We were within a few klicks of Qalat, around one hundred miles northeast of Kandahar, close to the rendezvous point. C-130J transport planes rumbled overhead, dropping to the airbase from the flights out of Kabul to the north or circling to unload steel and construction supplies for the pipeline from Europe. Busy time just before dark, when flying became much more dangerous. In flat terrain, the night offered more places to hide with one of the remaining CIA-supplied Strela 2 surface-to-air rockets or the Stingers used to shoot down the Russian Hind helicopter gunships, weapons that had almost defeated the Afghans by themselves in the 1980s.

  Since we were on the main north-south thoroughfare in Afghanistan, the highway had been comparatively safe, and we had passed our last Coalition checkpoint a half-hour ago. Safety didn’t mean Washington hadn’t taken note of any object or broken down pickup on the side of the road. We were in a country where the IED technology perfected in Iran and field trialed in Iraq was used more frequently. The new shape-charged copper filled IEDs could penetrate a tank like a surgeon’s scalpel on flesh. No need for the old ball-bearing type, the latest technology provided a more focused stream of armor-piercing hot metal, able to break through the strongest layers of steel. Bodies were a barrier as meaningless as the wind.

  Washington pulled the 6x6 over and applied the parking brake, leaving the diesel engine rattling.

  “Need ta piss,” he said. “And we got a few hours to wait. Made good time.”

  I opened my door and followed him ditchside.

  “We can’t hang around here too long,” Washington said, shaking himself dry. “A lone 6x6’ll draw attention from hadji eyes we can’t see.”

  Beside him, but trying not to glance and confirm Washington’s white-man’s paranoia, I zipped up my camos.

  Just over a small rise in the dirt, the burnt-out, blackened hulk of a truck was growing rocks. Washington nodded toward it.

  “That’s what’s left of the Wall Street Journal reporter out here to investigate the new construction,” Washington said. “Somebody hit his truck with an RPG. Thorsten knew about it and laughed. We stopped in the same spot last time. Thorsten said it served the guy right for interfering with America’s dependency on oil. Didn’t believe that cracker could use words with more than two syllables, but he might’a been right.”

  “Not many hostiles out here,” I said. It had all the signs of a search-and-destroy mission with a specific target. Like anyone on the scent of the truth.

  “Let’s get closer to the pipeline,” I said. “The warlords’ve probably made it a ‘no fire’ zone. Don’t want to threaten their income.”

  “There’s a turn-off a few klicks away,” Washington said. “I’ll head to it, and we can park on the new road they punched in for construction. The rendezvous point isn’t far from there.”

  “You know how things’ll go down better than me,” I said. “Any new insights?”

  Washington went around the ram guard to his side of the truck, and I got in the passenger seat.

  “Now that the main objective is intel,” Washington said, taking off the parking brake, “I’ll follow your lead in the gathering end. My course on torture wasn’t nearly as long as yours, and I don’t have the hands-on experience. We just gotta make sure there’s no watchers and no screamin’. I’d hate to wake up the snakes.”

  “Remember, I’m just the slave. You’re the boss man. We’ll make the play on your signal.”

  “Keep that Hush Puppy oiled. Thanks for lendin’ me one. Don’t wanna use the H & Ks. Too messy. I’m feelin’ like a real spook now. No dog’s safe around me.”

  At the dirt road junction, we turned east. By now, the stars and a rising moon were the only illumination other than the truck’s headlights. We parked and I broke out the MREs. Washington liked the beef jerky, and I preferred the lasagna and apple sauce. We both were sure to eat the “specially designed for the military” power bars. It was going to be a long night, and we would need the energy. Just in case, I handed Washington a couple of the white pills Dunne made sure I carried every time I went out on a scavenger hunt. We chewed the caffeine-laced gum from the MREs after washing down the Dexedrine with Dasani. Finished, our eyes were open wide enough that the dim light was almost painful. Fully chemically activated, there was no way either of us would be able to take a nap.

  Sitting back in the 6x6 seat, trying not to jiggle too much, I thought about what Dunne had told us in the context of what I already knew. On a trip to Washington, DC, Hamid Karzai had been quoted recently a
s saying, “The rules are simple. Just come in and look for oil, and then we’ll see what we can do for you.” No doubt Karzai was in bed with the cartels and the US government. That meant the Company, even with Dunne’s denials and nervous tic. Exploiting land and people for oil was nothing new to the conglomerates, and they had always had allies in the White House and Pentagon under the guise of “national interest.” It was the drug part and my involvement that was puzzling.

  The Company had shown its skills as a major player in the export of both cocaine and smack. None of my instructors at Langley had bothered to deny the history, sidestepping the issue with the old and tired “operational goals were achieved in order to advance and protect national security” line. From the early days in Southeast Asia, the CIA had flown opium in its own planes operated by Tiger and Evergreen Airlines, helping to make the Burmese General, Khun Sa, one of the world’s richest men from his roost in the Golden Triangle. The excuse was eliciting the support of the Hmong and other hill tribes in the fight against North Vietnam through trade of their main money crop, opium. In Nicaragua, the justification was propping up the Contra rebels and overthrowing the government of its neighboring country, El Salvador, while the cocaine imported through Oliver North and his cronies became the basis for the crack epidemic still raging in the streets of America. Columbian narco-trafficers were protected to strengthen US mineral and oil rights in that South American country, even to the extent of shielding Pablo Escobar from capture until his behavior became too much of a media burden.