Ghost Watch Read online

  It was thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit outside. Cool by anyone’s standards.

  ‘Sir?’ He turned around fully and pitched the question to the dignitary once more. ‘Cold?’

  Al-Eqbal ignored him completely.

  Meyers shrugged, turned to face the front, and resumed the eternal scan for roadside IEDs – improvised explosive devices. We were the only two Air Force guys in the bunch. The driver seated beside him was Army, a buck sergeant by the name of Rory Bellows, a skinny guy whose head darted around so much looking for threats that I thought he might have a nervous tic.

  The team assembled for this unit was drawn from the OSI and the US Army. Up ahead in the lead vehicle were a couple of Army NCOs named Detmond and Stefanovic. They were both premature. Detmond was prematurely gray, Stefanovic prematurely bald. Stef was also short. He had to sit on a Humvee maintenance manual to see over the dash. Their driver, an Army specialist, was a stand-in I hadn’t worked with. The nametag on his battle uniform said ‘Mattock’.

  Bringing up the rear were Sergeant First Class Reese Fallon, a six-foot-seven black guy who’d played power forward for Notre Dame, and driver Specialist Alicia Rogerson, a small-town librarian in her civilian days. I asked what a nice librarian like her was doing in a shithole like this and she told me that she liked to read thrillers and had decided to join up and write a few chapters of her own. She came across as perky, wide-eyed, and enthusiastic, all of which told me that her boots had been on the ground here maybe a week, tops.

  ‘Stop! Stop the car!’ al-Eqbal suddenly shouted. ‘I order you to stop.’

  I jumped. ‘What’s the problem, sir?’

  ‘Do as I say and stop the car! I command it!’

  We were here to keep the guy alive, and stopping in a place that hadn’t been surveyed because maybe the dignitary had to take a shit was not in the rulebook.

  Al-Eqbal flicked the lock and opened the door while the vehicle was still moving. ‘Now!’ he demanded.

  Jesus . . . I checked the window. The area consisted of run-down housing and some equally run-down businesses. A few cars were on the road. No one seemed to be paying us any mind.

  I asked him again. ‘Why do you want to pull over, sir?’

  ‘I have cousin here. Best snuff in all of Kabul. I come here all the time. These are my people. No danger. Stop here, now!’

  Clearly, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I called up the lead vehicle on the radio and asked Stefanovic to pull over. The Land-cruiser’s brake lights came on, the tires scratched for traction in the grit and al-Eqbal was out the door. I leapt after him and headed him off, placing the flat of my Nomex-gloved hand on his chest. He looked at it as if it were vermin.

  ‘Sir,’ I told him. ‘I have a job to do. Please wait.’

  He rolled huge brown eyeballs at Allah, while my mind ran through the six basic rules of PSO duty:

  1. Under no circumstances leave your principals unaccompanied.

  2. The majority of organized attacks are successful.

  3. The bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all.

  4. The bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.

  5. The bodyguards usually die.

  6. The scrotums of bodyguards tighten for a reason – don’t ignore it.

  Okay, so number six wasn’t in the official manual, but it was underlined in red in the unofficial one. And mine was now tighter than the skin on a grape.

  The detail exited the vehicles, leaving the drivers, Mattock, Bellows and Rogerson, behind. Standard operating procedure was to keep the motors running in case we had to leave in a hurry. Quickly, the rest of us formed the textbook five-man diamond pattern around al-Eqbal: Meyers in front, Stefanovic behind, Detmond and Fallon on each side, and me on the principal’s shoulder. Al-Eqbal pointed to where he wanted to go, which was thirty or so meters back down the street in the direction from which we’d just come.

  Folks got out of our way, crossed the road, avoided eye contact. Nothing about this behavior was particularly odd. They were used to seeing armed US military personnel on the streets, but there’d been enough situations resulting in civilian deaths to make them nervous about being anywhere near us.

  ‘Where are we going, sir?’ I asked the principal.

  Al-Eqbal indicated the Kabul version of a general store – a gray two-story structure with several stalls outside displaying newspapers and magazines, various hardware items (from lamps to auto-mechanics’ tools), as well as bottled drinks and tinned foods. Wood and Styrofoam boxes on the dirt beneath the stands contained assorted limp vegetables. Two young males loitered out front, just hanging around, smoking. One called out to someone inside the shop when they saw us coming, then both ran off and vanished down an alley a few doors down.

  A middle-aged man emerged from the building. The concern on his face brightened into a grin when he saw al-Eqbal. I assumed he was his cousin because no one but family would be happy to see this guy. The two men embraced and kissed and talked rapid-fire Dari, too fast for me to follow, though I managed to catch fragments of the usual string of outrageous compliments. Our dignitary turned to go inside, but I signaled Meyers to perform a site survey and stepped in front of al-Eqbal, blocking his path again.

  ‘Sir, please allow us to search the building first.’

  He swore in Dari – something about me being the spawn of a goatherd’s tepid urine – but he nevertheless stopped and waited.

  I banked the insult to use on someone else one day, while his cousin smiled at me and shrugged, as if to say, ‘My cousin’s a politician – whadayagonnado?’

  We stood on the dirt sidewalk, buffeted by grit, and waited. An icy wind blew the superfine Afghan dust that smelled of human shit and pack animals into our mouths and nostrils.

  Meyers came back out as the troublesome fingers in my left hand, which had been broken and shot up on previous missions, stiffened into a cramp from the cold.

  ‘Clear, boss,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the layout?’

  ‘One main display room full of junk, two smaller ones behind it full of more junk. A back door – locked – looks like it opens onto a dirt alley. No enclosing walls there. Internal staircase leads to a second story. Old woman peeling spuds upstairs, ugly as a big toe. Three other rooms, all bedrooms. On the rooftop is a washing line and a TV satellite dish.’

  The place appeared to be free from threat. Any location that’s been surveyed and cleared of unauthorized persons is technically secure, says the PSO handbook. But life experience was making me cautious. I moved to the side, allowing al-Eqbal to pass, and our diamond pattern was set to move into the confined space. The overall mission for this and almost every other PSO detail was running through my head: prevent assassination, injury, kidnapping, assignation, and, almost above all, safeguard the principal’s schedule. Dual problem right there, I reminded myself. We had us an assignation and it wasn’t on the damn schedule.

  Al-Eqbal interrupted my thoughts. ‘I will go in alone,’ he commanded with a wave of his hand as if we were troublesome flies. ‘There is not enough room.’

  I looked at the shop and he had a point. It was no Wal-Mart. ‘You can’t go in there without an escort.’

  We stared at each other for a few moments before he sighed wearily and said, ‘One guard only. Young man, you are worrying too much, I think.’

  ‘We can only spare five minutes here, sir,’ I said.

  The principal shook his head at me as if to say that I just didn’t get it.

  ‘Meyers, accompany our dignitary,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Meyers replied.

  The book inside my head played like a bad song that wouldn’t go away:

  1. Do not let the principal enter a doorway first.

  2. In hallways, keep the principal in the center.

  3. Keep the principal away from windows and alcoves and areas limiting escape and evasion.

  The cousin put his arm around the princ
ipal’s shoulders. They walked toward the shop entrance, chatting, laughing. Meyers took up station ahead of them, scoping left and right. A pro.

  I scanned the street. A yellow taxi, with a replacement fender and door panels that gave it a patchwork appearance, drove by slowly, blowing smoke. The driver leaned across the bench seat toward us, eternally hopeful for a fare. Fifty meters down the road, several middle-aged men having a conversation crossed from one side to the other. Nearby, the wind had picked up some dust and blew it into a corkscrew that was moving in our direction. More grit flew into my eyes. I opened them in time to see a woman in a dark blue burka that was billowing like a sail – the bottom hem flapping and whipping around her ankles – walk into the middle of the road, stop, turn around, and then retrace her steps. Two young men on pushbikes swerved to avoid her. A couple of blocks further down, a man pushing a wheel-cart pulled over to sell bunches of bananas.

  The drivers reversed our vehicles and parked them in front of al-Eqbal’s cousin’s shop – one of a group of five with common walls. A narrow alley was at either end of the block. The buildings on the other side of the wide street were mostly unpainted gray concrete, two and three storys, with flat roofs, two windows per floor, no balconies. Some were homes; the living rooms of some functioned as shops, like al-Eqbal’s cousin’s. Over the roofs of these houses rose the imposing mass of TV Mountain. I’d been on its summit years ago when I first came to the ’Stan. The Taliban rocketed our position there, trying to dislodge me and several other special tactics officers while we called in air strikes on their fundamentalist asses. Looking down from the summit, the gray city seemed to wrap itself around the base like a blanket of clothes-dryer lint.

  I spoke into the small boom mike, part of the system that allowed our team members to communicate with each other over short distances. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Meyers.

  ‘Settling in for the long haul, boss. They’re brewing tea,’ came his reply through my earpiece.

  ‘Tell Mr Big he’s got two minutes left.’

  Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were all Army. They faced out, looking idly toward the mountain, waiting. Their M16s were pointed at the ground. Detmond lit a cigarette. With the principal out of the picture, so was their focus. Our drivers had the engines running. Gangsta crap thumped from an open window.

  To pass the time, I asked Stefanovic, ‘So why did you volunteer for this?’

  ‘Who volunteered?’ he said. ‘I cleaned out my sergeant in a game of hold ’em. It was this or latrine duty. Happens again, I’ll take the crappers. You?’

  ‘Brain fart.’

  ‘You asked to do this shit?’ Fallon said. He glanced at me, seeing but not believing.

  Detmond grunted.

  ‘Got a volunteer joke for you,’ I said to our little formation. ‘A guy walks into a bar with a pet alligator. He puts it up on the bar and says to the freaked-out patrons, “I’ll make you all a deal. I’ll put my dick in this here ’gator’s mouth and keep it there one minute. At the end of that time, the ’gator will open its mouth. If I still have my dick, all of you have to buy me a drink.”

  ‘Of course, the crowd agrees, so he drops his pants, puts his pecker in the ’gator’s mouth, and the room goes silent. At the end of one minute, he picks up a beer bottle and smacks the ’gator over the head with it. The ’gator opens its mouth and out comes the guy’s wang, unharmed. The crowd goes nuts and the free drinks flow. After a while, the guy stands on the bar and says, “I’ll make y’all another offer. I’ll pay a hundred bucks to anyone else willing to give it a try.”

  ‘A hush falls over the crowd.

  ‘“C’mon,” says the guy. “Aren’t there no damn volunteers out there?”

  ‘A lone hand slowly rises over everyone’s heads. It’s a young blond woman.

  ‘“I’ll do it,” she says, “but only if you don’t hit me on the head with no beer bottle.”’

  Fallon’s attention wandered off.

  Detmond grunted.

  ‘My mother’s blond,’ said Stefanovic flatly.

  I cleared my throat and told them to keep up the good work, then moved away to check the cousin’s front door.

  No one was coming out. I was getting impatient. Loitering on the streets of Kabul with a Stars and Stripes patch on your shoulder was only slightly less moronic than sticking a fork in a wall socket. Besides, his five minutes were definitely up.

  ‘Meyers . . .’ I said into the mike.

  ‘He’s telling me he wants another five minutes,’ came the reply.

  ‘He can’t have them,’ I said, but I knew this guy would take them whether I agreed or not.

  I turned in time to see a girl of no more than fourteen years old, dressed in black and wearing a pink scarf over her head, run into the building adjoining the cousin’s. She was bent over with her arms wrapped around her belly as if she were pregnant, and left the front door open behind her.

  I was about to say something about this into the mike when a deafening explosion turned the world into a giant dust ball. It punched me backward through the air and I slammed into the house ten feet behind. Dust clogged my nose and eyes and my lungs were clenched, closed tight.

  Could.

  Not.

  Breathe.

  I pawed the dirt from my face and saw a massive white, black, and gray cloud boiling into the sky. Below it, two of our Landcruisers were tipped on their sides. My men were down. Something released in my chest, and I sucked down a lungful of powdered building, which brought on a coughing fit. When I pulled out of it, I could see through watering eyes that al-Eqbal’s cousin’s house was gone, along with the neighbor’s, heading skyward in the expanding gray and black mushroom cloud. Jesus . . . Meyers would be in that cloud somewhere. I wanted to move, stand up at least, but everything was in slo-mo. Rog-erson’s Landcruiser was parked outside the spot where the neighbor’s house used to be. I could see her profile. Something about it was wrong. Oh, shit . . . her face . . . she didn’t have one.

  My body didn’t want to work. I managed somehow to pull myself up on one knee, and thanked the K-pot on my head and the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor for taking most of the wall’s impact. I could see that Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were flat on the ground, with only sluggish movement from all three. They were closer to the blast than I had been, and harder hit. Detmond was wounded, a red stain advancing down the gray-green pixels of his Army battle uniform toward his elbow. He managed to sit up but was almost immediately hit square in the chest by an invisible force that knocked him down onto his back. Shit, we were being fired on! Fallon and Stefanovic struggled to their feet and dragged Detmond behind the second of the scuttled Landcruisers – my Landcruiser, the one Bellows was driving. Where was Bellows? I couldn’t see him; Mattock either. All three drivers – dead?

  The situation would head from fucked up to fucking fucked up if someone didn’t do something fucking quick. Static burst into my earpiece.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

  Static.

  I was about to tear out the earpiece when I heard a voice croak, ‘Cooper . . .’

  The voice was familiar, but my hearing wasn’t so good. ‘Meyers?’ I asked.

  ‘Legs . . . broken.’

  Yeah, it was Meyers. Definitely someone who wasn’t able to do something fucking quick or any other way. But, shit, he was alive.

  ‘I’ll come to you. Don’t move.’

  I heard him cackle. ‘Move . . .?’

  Bullet holes appeared in the bodywork of the Landcruisers. It occurred to me that while Fallon, Detmond and Stefanovic were getting pounded, I wasn’t attracting any inbound fire, which meant that whoever had us pinned down was not aware of my position. There was no planned kill zone, where the fire was coming in from all angles, cutting off our escape. So, either the attack was impromptu or we were up against the remedial arm of the Taliban.

  I was in the only blind spot for the shooters – directly below them. I looked up. Sur
e enough, rifle barrels poked out from both second-story windows above me, as well as one from a window on the third floor. I counted a total of five protruding barrels.

  ‘Stefanovic,’ I shouted into the mike. ‘How’s Detmond? Check on Mattock and Bellows.’

  I heard a voice in my ear, but it was muffled, woolen.

  ‘Get on the radio, and get us some air support!’ I yelled. A response came back, but I couldn’t make it out.

  Stefanovic had crawled out of sight behind the second Landcruiser, presumably on the hunt for a working radio. I went through a weapons and ammo check to steady my nerves and get some perspective: one Colt M4 carbine; four mags – one hundred and twenty rounds; one Sig Sauer P228 with two mags, one round up the spout; one Ka-bar. No grenades – shit!

  The front door beside me was closed and probably locked. My back close to the wall, I moved over to an alley on the left. At the corner of the building I momentarily put down my rifle, pulled the Sig and took it off safety. I popped my head and the Sig around the corner simultaneously. Movement. Two rounds later, a Taliban fighter with an AK-47 found himself haggling with all the other dead martyrs over whose turn it was to get with the virgins.

  I holstered the Sig, picked up the M4, shouldered it, and made my way down the alley. I put my fingertips against the brickwork and felt the vibrations. The AK-47s inside the house were spraying away with such exuberance that the percussion was vibrating through the wall. My hearing cleared with a ‘pop’, and what I heard was Stef and Fallon returning fire, the M16 making an altogether different sound than the AK’s.

  I followed the Sig around the next corner and came into another alley out back, overlooked by a row of tightly packed dwellings. Men and boys were peering around corners for several blocks up and down the narrow road, eager to catch the action; a good gunfight in these parts being the equivalent of a game of football. One of the boys waved at me from an alcove. I waved back and he flipped me the bird – rooting for the home team, obviously. Maybe he had a big blow-up hand somewhere with ‘Osama’ printed on it.