Clear by Fire (22 page)

“Rico did. He got to the site before the rest of us, said someone had pulled all the bullets out of the bodies and collected all the spent brass. When he went out and talked to the locals, they all said the same thing. A white guy did it.”

“So?”

“So Mason’s not white. If you look at his army photo, the guy looks like a haj,” Kevin said.

“Well, then, it couldn’t have been him,” Renee said sarcastically.

“Who knows, but it didn’t matter anyways because Karzai got what he wanted. He used this to say he couldn’t trust the generals anymore and started going straight to Washington, cut Swift and Nantz right out of the loop.”

“I don’t get it,” Renee said honestly.

“What’s to get?” Kevin asked. “We lost a major asset when they pulled the Anvil Program, and Karzai got free rein to do whatever the hell he wanted up in Wardak. Shit, it was all hands on deck when Mason went on the run. The DoD had us jumping through our asses trying to find him.”

“Yep, they said they had a fix on him in Pakistan, but by the time they sent people in, he was long gone,” Bones added.

“Probably never there in the first place.” Kevin spat his dip into a bottle while Bones nodded his head in agreement.

“When does Rico get back from the Pesh?” Renee asked.

Kevin’s prepaid cell phone rang, cutting off the conversation.

“Yeah? Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, closing the phone and getting to his feet. “Speaking of the devil, the gate guards won’t let Rico on base.”

“Again? This is getting old,” Bones said, sighing.

“Well, we might as well make it a field trip.”

Renee grabbed her sunglasses, clipped her pistol to her belt, and followed the two men out to the truck. It was a five-minute drive to the north gate, where two guard towers and a row of concrete barriers were the only things separating the American enclave from Afghanistan.

Kevin put the truck in park and hopped out, leaving Renee to watch from the front seat. Her gaze drifted over the green sandbags fluttering in the wind and the small mounds of dirt collected at the base of the plywood guard shack. A mass of dirty Afghanis pressed against the chain-link fence, yelling at the guards looking down on them. Rocks bounced off the thick bulletproof glass with sharp cracks, and a haggard sergeant fought to keep his soldiers from escalating the already tense situation.

She had tried so hard to make a difference, but she knew that everything good they had done was now ruined. One man had destroyed everything in the blink of an eye. Renee scanned the soiled robes and windburned faces of the locals until her eyes stopped on a gaunt man squatted down against the fence. He was staring at her through squinted eyes, and two soldiers stood over him with their M4s at the ready. The soldiers looked to be about nineteen or twenty, and one of them suddenly kicked dirt at a young Afghani shaking the fence with his hands. Some of the dirt landed on the man seated at his feet, and the soldiers smiled as a young Afghani suddenly grabbed hold of the fence.

“Fuck you, America,” he yelled as he shook the fence.

The soldier took the butt of his rifle and slammed it on the boy’s fingers with a fleshy thump.

“Get off the fence,” he yelled as the boy made a gun out of his fingers and pointed it at the man’s head.

“America die,” he yelled back.

Despite the chaos, the man seated on the ground continued staring at her until she looked uncomfortably away. There was something noble in his gaze and she found herself unwilling to challenge it. Kevin was showing his ID to the sergeant in charge, and the NCO pointed to the man she had just been looking at.

Renee looked back at the man—he was standing up now—and finally realized that it was Rico. When he got to his feet he looked at the soldier who was still yelling at the crowd and walked past without speaking. After walking through the gate, the sergeant handed him an AK-47 and offered a curt apology before turning back to the crowd.

He kept his eyes down as he walked to the truck and opened the back door. “What’s up?” he said in a mellow Southern California accent as he tossed his gear into the truck.

“Did they just kick dirt on you?” Renee asked, handing him a bottle of water.

“Yeah, it happens all the time. Kinda gives you a different perspective on shit, though,” he said, slamming the door and taking a long drink of water.

“Maybe if you’d call ahead, we could have a car waiting for you next time,” Kevin said as he put the truck in reverse and headed back to their building.

“Whatever, bro.”

“So, whatcha got for us?”

“I think Barnes has already crossed the border. There’s some bad shit going down in the tribal regions right now.”

“What do you mean?”

A few minutes later, the team was back around the table and Rico was digging a digital camera out of a dusty bag. He hit the power button and, after blowing the grit off the screen, tossed it to Kevin.

The digital images were graphic. The first picture was from inside a building. A dark crimson pool of blood was spread out on a rough wooden floor. There were black scorch patterns from grenades and the walls were chipped from shrapnel. The next shot was outside and showed heads stacked together to form a hideous pyramid reminiscent of Mesoamerican human sacrifices.

Quite a few of the shots had been taken on the move, which somehow made the images all the more grotesque. Grainy out-of-focus heads sat atop hand-carved spikes. Expressions of contorted misery were frozen on the faces and someone had taken the time to display them for everyone to see. The last shot showed a row of staked heads framed by snowcapped mountains. A lone woman was on her knees at the foot of a wooden stake with her head in her hands. Rico had gotten close enough to capture the woman’s grief as the severed head leered obscenely for the camera.

“How many heads were there altogether?” Bones asked as the slide show finally ended.

“I stopped counting at about two hundred and fifty, but every district center that I went to had at least fifteen to twenty.”

“Were they all confirmed Taliban?” Renee asked.

“I don’t know every Taliban fighter that lives in the area, you know, but I do know that every major commander or lieutenant there had his head cut off. Some of the warlords and a handful of the high-level drug bosses were among the dead. It was very systematic, like they had a list or some kind of intel. If that’s not bad enough, the people I talked to said white people did it.”

“As in American?” Kevin asked.

“That’s what they said. The people who live in these areas haven’t seen Americans like they do over here. You know, maybe a handful of raids have gone off in the area, but most of those were done at night. The average villager couldn’t pick out an American if you paid them. Whoever did this”—Rico pointed to the camera for emphasis—“is definitely not playing by any rules that I’ve heard about.”

“So what do we do now?” Kevin nudged Renee, who was wondering the same thing.

“Something’s not right here,” she began. “I mean, does anyone else think it’s strange that all roads seem to come back to Swift, and all of a sudden he gets called away? What do we know about General Nantz, and how in the hell does someone like Barnes plan the raid on Kamdesh without help?”

“Someone is helping him,” Kevin said, stating the obvious.

“I just don’t see Swift sanctioning a strike on an American FOB. Just doesn’t seem like his style,” Bones added.

“Maybe he didn’t go see Nantz of his own accord,” Renee said, thinking out loud. Like Bones, she was having a hard time seeing her boss as a traitor. “Either way, we have three targets right now and zero actionable intelligence. I have no idea who this Mason Kane is, or how he fits, but we know that there is a connection between Decklin, him, and Barnes.” Renee was trying to get a plan together.

“Rico, do you still have access to that CIA dude, what was his name?” Bones wanted to know.

“Smith, yeah, he still owes me a favor,” Rico said.

“Is he the one out of Bagram?” Bones asked.

“He was, but now he’s the station chief’s liaison. You know how rank has its privileges.”

“All right, guys, cut the shit. Rico, I want to know what the CIA isn’t telling us. Find out everything you can without making it too obvious. Kevin and I will focus on Mason. Bones and Tyler, that leaves getting a fix on Barnes up to you. We need to work quick on this.”

“We’re on it,” Bones said, and turned to walk away.

“Well, if you put it that way, I guess it’s time to go to work,” Rico said, getting to his feet.

“Hell yeah, let’s do this,” Tyler added.

“Hey, Rico, how about you shower first?” Renee said.

“You got it, boss.”

Kevin looked at Renee as the meeting broke up. He was about to say something when the phone on Renee’s hip vibrated. Holding up a finger to Kevin, she lifted the cell phone to her ear. “Yeah?”

“This is Captain Lane at the TOC. We just got a fax saying that Task Force 11 has located Mason Kane in Libya. I have no idea why they sent it to us, but apparently they are launching right now to grab him.”

“Any idea where they are taking him?”

“Well, the fax originated from a site somewhere in Chad, so I assume they will take him back there.”

“So no one else knows about this?”

“Looks that way.”

“Do me a favor and hold on to that information for a while. I’m heading to the flight line now. I need you to get me a flight.”

“Roger that.”

Renee felt her heart skip a beat as she hung up and jogged toward her room to grab her stuff. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for, and Renee knew that Mason might be the key to what was really going on. Now all she had to do was get to him before he was transferred out of the country.

S
ergeant First Class Harden stood at a window of the World Health Organization hospital in Pakistan and stared out at the marketplace below. A hot breeze brought up the rank smells of the unwashed and the charcoal smoke of the food vendors.

The
azan
, or Muslim call to prayer, drifted from a mosque’s loudspeaker. The muezzin’s amplified voice drifted over Peshawar’s cityscape in a rhythmic undulation that beckoned the faithful to worship.

It was ironic, he thought, that somewhere in the tribal regions, the last of the Taliban were listening to the same thing he was. Colonel Barnes’s squad had just spent four days sending these men a message in blood as they moved from district to district, killing anyone associated with the Taliban, and he knew that the squad only needed to push a little deeper into Pakistan’s violent tribal regions to completely destroy the last of their leadership.

It had been so easy to hack into the CIA and Pakistani Intelligence Service databases and take the information that they’d been collecting and storing for years. All the target data and operational information that he needed had been waiting for someone to use them, while the agencies that collected the data did nothing.

Drone strikes and limited military incursions into the area might placate their political masters, but while the generals sat on their
hands, America was losing the war. As a soldier, he saw the needless deaths for what they were, a betrayal, and while others may have been content to sit idly by and wait for the troops to be pulled out, he had chosen a much different path.

Harden heard someone coming up the hallway behind him. He turned to see Jones walking toward him, dressed like a World Health Organization volunteer. The WHO was unknowingly providing them with a base of operations and the perfect cover.

This was one of the most effective hospitals in the region. A massive earthquake that was followed by a polio outbreak had opened the insular city to myriad foreign aid workers who utilized the hospital and its compound as a base to distribute medicine and inoculations to the region.

“The boss wants to talk to you.” Jones had been working nonstop for the past two days, deciphering the data from the attack in Afghanistan. Harden hated computers and was glad that his teammate knew what he was doing.

“You almost done with your thing?” he asked as they walked down the hallway, through a narrow corridor, and out into one of the courtyards.

“Yeah, I’m just putting the final touches on it before I pass out for a few days.”

Harden slipped his sunglasses off the top of his head and over his eyes as they walked out into the open. He hated the desert sun and wondered why they never got to fight someplace nice and cold. If the Cold War had escalated, the upside would have been the fact that they would have gotten to fight in a place that had more than two seasons and a lot less sand.

“I hope it works better than that Y2K deal that had everyone freaking out.”

“What I’m working on is going to make that look like an annoying pop-up ad. Remember what happened the last time you doubted my Jedi skills?”

“Yeah, let’s not talk about it,” Harden said as Jones opened the door to the team room.

The team had chosen the most isolated location and claimed they needed it to safely store the camera equipment they were using for a documentary. People were always helpful when offered the chance to be on TV. However, the downside of their cover was conducting phony interviews with the staff. Harden had given that shit job to Hoyt because of his lackluster performance in Kamdesh.

The team secured the area by placing a small “shim” camera above the room’s only door. The monitor sat offset from the doorway and there was always a member of the team “pulling guard.” For added security a claymore mine was mounted directly into the door with the detonator stationed at the listening post.

The room had rows of olive-drab cots lining both sides. Industrial lighting hung from exposed rafters and gave the room an institutional feel. Every cot had a soldier assigned to it and his gear was stowed neatly at the foot of the aluminum frame. The canvas cots had been designed during the Vietnam era, and Harden hated them because they were a bitch to put together.

He’d been sleeping on cots like these for the last ten years of his life and he still cursed the design. Before he could sleep on it, he had to slide a metal bar through the end and stretch the canvas tight enough to lock the bar into the frame. No matter how many times he tried, he always ended up with bloody knuckles.