Francesca seemed to have learned the same lessons. His dirty pickup was what Wells would have used if he’d needed to carry a sniper rifle. And like Wells, Francesca and Alders operated without uniforms, or backup to bail them out. A casual observer might not see much difference between Wells and Francesca.
But somewhere Francesca had lost himself, forgotten his purpose. Forgotten that anyone could pull a trigger, take a life. The act itself was simple. The
why
was what separated soldiers from serial killers. Wells hadn’t forgotten the why. So he hoped. He put his bag on the back of the bike, slipped the key into the ignition.
* * *
THE MORNING TRAFFIC
on Highway 1 was picking up as Wells headed east, shielding his eyes from the sun. The flatlands of southern Afghanistan turned cool in the mornings at this time of year. Wells shivered under his windbreaker as he followed Francesca’s trail north off Highway 1 and into the Arghandab Valley.
Even by Afghan standards, the valley was a backwater. A half dozen children swirled around a woman in an electric-blue burqa. A donkey dragged a cart inch by inch, whining with each step, as a gaunt man with skin the color and texture of leather clapped a switch across his haunches. Two Afghan soldiers leaned against a pickup truck, cigarettes in hand. One had painted the stock of his AK pink and covered the muzzle with rhinestones.
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Afghans on both sides of the insurgency had a strange fondness for tricking out their rifles. The soldiers eyed Wells as he passed, but didn’t bother to stop
him.
Wells reached the last point the transmitter had signaled just over two hours after leaving Kandahar. He pulled over and looked for any sign that Francesca and Alders had stopped nearby. Open fields lay north of the road, toward the river. To the south, a narrow cart track passed through a handful of farm compounds. Wells didn’t think the Toyota would fit on the track. Anyway, he could see a stream of smoke coming from one compound, and kids playing on the roof of another. Wells couldn’t imagine how Francesca and Alders would have hidden themselves in an occupied house. They had to be squatting someplace abandoned.
Wells rolled on. The landscape stayed the same for the next few miles. Compounds and the occasional grape hut sat south of the road. North, toward the river, the pomegranate groves thickened. Still, this part of the Arghandab was much less fertile than the land nearer Kandahar, the trees less dense.
The road passed through a village. To the south, several shops occupied a plaza, the Afghan version of a strip mall. At the far end was a garage big enough to hide the pickup. Wells stopped outside the plaza’s first store, walked in. Three men hunched over sewing machines, working long strips of white cotton. Posters taped to the concrete walls showed their offerings. The men barely acknowledged Wells. In these tiny villages, outsiders were suspect, especially if they weren’t Pashtun.
“Good morning.”
“Morning,” the man nearest Wells mumbled. One of his eyes was a deep, ugly red, the skin around it swollen and tender. Severe conjunctivitis. In the United States, a doctor would cure that infection with a few cents of medicine. Here, the man might go blind.
Wells leaned over his machine. “I see you do excellent work.” The man grunted and fed cloth through as the machine clucked. Time to get to the point. “I’m looking for two men who might have stopped here early this morning. Before sunrise.”
The man raised his head to stare with his weeping eye at Wells. The machines halted one by one until the shop was silent. “No one’s stopped here.”
“They were driving a Toyota, a pickup.” Wells reached into his pocket for a wad of afghanis. “Are you sure you haven’t seen them?”
“No one’s stopped here. And who are
you?”
Wells backed out. As he got back on the bike, the sewing resumed. He didn’t understand why the tailors had been so unfriendly. He put the bike in gear, rolled by the garage. A side door was open and he could see inside. Empty. They hadn’t stopped here. Wells pulled back onto the road.
Past the village, more dirt tracks ran south, though most petered out before the ridgeline. Just three roads in this part of the valley ran over the ridge and toward Highway 1. If what Young had said was right, the Strykers would be on one of those roads sometime today. But Wells needed more. He hoped Shafer was making progress on unearthing their official mission. To find them without the transmitter’s help, he had to pin down what they were doing. And he had to lock them down soon, so he could track them as they moved on Young. Only then would Wells have the proof he needed to take them out. Right now he had only circumstantial evidence. He had to catch them in the
act.
Worst-case, if Wells couldn’t find them, he could try to cover Young directly as the Stryker platoon registered motorcycles. But Francesca would be expecting him. Finding and tracking Francesca as he moved on Young would give Wells his only real chance of beating Francesca’s firepower advantage.
* * *
AS HE STARTED TO RIDE AGAIN,
his phone buzzed.
“Told you, let me do my job,” Shafer said. “Point one. That road you’re on has turned into an IED alley. Four soldiers and two British journos got creamed last week. That got noticed all the way up to RCS
HQ.”
No wonder the locals were giving the fish eye to outsiders, Wells thought. They couldn’t stop the Taliban from planting bombs, but they were worried that more casualties would provoke a big American counterattack, the kind that flattened villages. “What’s point
two?”
“Point two. Yesterday the drones at KAF, in fact all air support, was ordered away from a sector of the valley sixty kilometers long and thirty wide. Lockdown for five days. Reason given is Special Operations mission, otherwise unspecified. How much would you like to bet your friends are setting up, waiting for Red Team to plant another IED? Makes for great cover.”
“It’s even better than that. The mission gives them an excuse to be out here. The no-fly zone means that when they kill Young, the Strykers can’t hit back. They go back to their original nest, take out the IED cell, come home to Kandahar. Mission accomplished. They just need to put a few miles between where they’re supposed to be, the official post, and the Young kill.”
“Sounds right.”
“So I should be looking for a nest near the road, within a mile or so. Not on the ridgeline. An abandoned farmhouse, something like that. With room to hide the pickup.” Wells was thinking out loud
now.
“I hear more, I’ll let you know.”
Wells hung up. Now he could focus on houses within a few hundred yards of the road, with an open field of fire. Plus the firing position had to be big enough to hide the Toyota. Only a few buildings could meet all those conditions.
Still, he had a lot of ground to cover. Francesca and Alders would have reached the nest between four a.m., the time of the locator’s final transmission, and 4:45, when it should have reported again. Even if they had needed ten minutes to hide the pickup and put the firing platform together, they could have driven for thirty-five minutes, enough time to get as much as twenty miles east of the final location the transmitter had recorded.
Wells headed east, watching both sides of the road. For a few minutes, the valley became more densely populated. Compounds and villages tumbled together, the Arghandab’s version of suburban sprawl, unlikely ground for a sniper’s hole. Then the land opened up again. And Wells came on a good spot for a nest, a damaged grape hut with an unobstructed view of the road. The hut’s narrow windows made for good firing ports, and a dirt track led directly past it. Wells couldn’t risk taking the track. But he knew that in Francesca’s position he would have chosen the hut, or a place just like
it.
* * *
WELLS RODE
until
the hut disappeared. He’d take his chances in one-on-one combat with anyone. But snipers were different. He felt as if he’d appeared at dawn for a duel and found himself holding a slingshot instead of a pistol. A half mile was a long way. Ten New York City blocks. Nine football fields. From a half mile, Wells couldn’t even see his enemy’s face without binoculars, good ones. Yet an experienced sniper like Francesca had a good chance of putting a bullet in a target’s chest from the same distance.
Wells pulled the bike over at a primitive gas station, the first he’d seen in fifty miles. Again he called Shafer. “I need a visual, a satellite pass.” Wells gave the coordinates. “It’s a grape hut, a big one. ASAP.”
“Really. You don’t want to wait a few days.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“This guy’s got you a little bit spooked, doesn’t
he?”
Wells didn’t answer.
“All right. You know it’s past midnight here, but I’ll make it happen as fast as I can. Could be anywhere from fifteen minutes to six hours, depending on what we have overhead. I’ll call you when I know.”
Wells propped the motorcycle on its kickstand, reached into his bag for a bottle of water. He drank deeply. A couple kids stared until he waved them on. In these villages, any stranger was conspicuous. He couldn’t stay in one place too long, but he didn’t want to ride farther from the grape hut. Thirty minutes later, Shafer called.
“You must be living right. NRO had a Keyhole passing Kabul. The overnight targeting officer is an easily impressed sort. He ran a quick series.”
“And?”
“I can’t see them firsthand because he won’t send them to my Gmail account. NRO’s funny that way. And the shots aren’t great because they couldn’t get the KH directly over, they had to angle, and the roof is mostly covered. But he swears he can see a pickup truck inside.”
“What about people?”
“He said he didn’t see anyone, but that I shouldn’t read much into that because the imagery is so dirty. No need to thank me, John—”
One of the kids was wandering close again, giving Wells an excuse to hang up.
What next?
Finding Francesca was only half the battle. Young hadn’t called yet. So Wells didn’t know where the Strykers were running their motorcycle registration. Until Wells knew exactly, he couldn’t position himself to intercept Francesca. Why wasn’t Young calling?
His first instinct was to leave the valley floor, head south into the hills, find a promontory where he could overwatch the grape hut. But the Arghandab’s geography was trickier than it first seemed. The hills were a smaller version of the Bitterroot Range in Montana, where Wells had grown up. They rose as much as twenty-five hundred feet above the valley floor. Gullies and draws cut deep into their sides. Once he got into them, moving east to west across them would be very difficult. Maybe impossible. The GPS could tell him where he was, but not where he needed to go. He needed a good map for that, and he didn’t have one. He would also have to ditch the motorcycle, which was his only major tactical advantage. Worse, he wouldn’t have cell service once he left the valley floor, so Young would have no way of reaching him.
No.
He had two other alternatives. He could sit where he was, wait for Young to call. Or he could take the high-risk option, set up on one of the three north–south tracks that went over the ridge. But if he chose wrong, he would be stuck ten or more miles away from the ambush, with no easy way to get to the right spot. He couldn’t justify taking a one-in-three gamble that could leave him badly out of position. Playing linebacker growing up, he’d never liked the guys who went for the big pick instead of batting the ball away. When they were right, they got the glory, but when they were wrong, they gave up a touchdown and the whole team paid.
Then he realized. He took off his windbreaker and stuffed it in his bag. At the gas station, he filled up and bought two big stacks of wood. He bundled them on the backseat of the bike to hide his bag. He left his pistol and grenades inside the bag. He couldn’t risk Francesca spotting them through the scope.
He mounted up and headed west. Toward the grape
hut.
* * *
AT THE DIRT TRACK
nearest the hut, he swung left, south, bouncing over the ruts. He tried not to think about the fact that Francesca was surely tracking him from inside the hut. This close, the .50 caliber would blow through him and leave an exit wound the size of a softball. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about bleeding out. He’d die instantly.
But he had to trust that Francesca wouldn’t shoot a random farmer on a motorcycle. Francesca had no reason to believe that Wells could have tracked him here. And Wells could pass as local better than anyone.
Halfway to the hut, Wells still couldn’t see the pickup. He wondered whether Shafer or the NRO had made a mistake. Finally, maybe a hundred yards from the hut, he saw a blocky shape inside the narrow windows. The hut was a great position. Even this close, Wells wouldn’t have seen the truck if he hadn’t been looking. At a hundred feet, he saw the first hint of a sniper nest, camouflage netting around one of the slits. He still couldn’t see the muzzle of the rifle.
Just past the hut, Wells pulled over. He was safer here, on the south side, with the hut between him and the rifle. The .50 caliber was big and heavy and hard to maneuver. He put the motorcycle in neutral and dropped the kickstand, but left the engine running. He pushed aside the bundles of sticks so he could reach the bag and the pistol inside.
“Hello,” he yelled in Pashtun. “Uncle?”
No answer. Walking into the hut would be a mistake. If they were sure he’d seen the Toyota and the firing platform, they’d shoot him. But they wouldn’t do that unless they had to. They would think he lived nearby, and they wouldn’t want to get the locals upset. Instead, one of them should come out, challenge Wells, tell him to get lost.
But no one
did.
Wells switched off the engine. Waited. Nothing. No whispered voices in English or Pashtun. No movement inside the hut. No scrape of metal on clay as Francesca repositioned the Barrett. Wells unzipped the bag, grabbed his pistol. He stepped over the cut in the wall and into the compound. The hut’s mud walls were pebbled and uneven. Sprigs of weeds were growing in some of its slatted windows as nature began to reclaim its soil. Wells saw fresh tire tracks in the dirt. No doubt the Toyota had come this way. He looked close, saw two more sets of tracks atop the tire treads. They were narrower. Bicycle tires.