Operation Dark Heart (13 page)

We came up with a process to bluff him. I put out the word through the diplomatic, military, and intelligence channels that we knew he monitored that we were not backing down. The message was unequivocal:
We are not going to allow you to become president of Afghanistan. If you do this, you will die.
We had to make him blink. And if he didn’t blink? We were going to lose.

We went through demonstrations of force to remind him of the power of the U.S. military by putting out word to increase the physical presence of troops in Kabul with more troop convoys coming into the city. Moreover, to deliver the message in a distinctly more intimate fashion, we sent a B-1 bomber at full afterburner buzzing over his house—and I mean over his house—just about 50 feet above.

Message delivered. It was two days later that we knew, through intelligence and diplomatic channels, that Fahim had backed down.

We were kicking ass all over the place. On the battlefield, the Taliban were on the ropes. Wherever they were, we were. This was modern combat, where fewer than 800 men, with 400 or so newly minted ANA soldiers, using the best that modern technology had to offer, took on a force slightly larger than themselves—and dominated.

The one advantage that the Taliban did not have, which more than leveled the playing field for the purposes of Mountain Viper, was aviation. It turned mountain warfare into a game of deadly hopscotch that, with the right intelligence, allowed even a small force to move with vigor and determination that not even the Russians could match during their occupation.

We had solid intel on everything they did and we were able to blunt their all-out attack. They made the mistake of thinking they could take us on symmetrically—force on force—and bully their way back into power in Afghanistan. It failed abysmally. It was a huge miscalculation on their part.

Even so, like all good terrorist networks, they learned from it. It was a mistake they have not repeated since.

As Mountain Viper was winding down, Kate and I continued our cigar-smoking habit. One night, after we had our break for the evening, she hung around with me in the back of the tent I worked in at the SCIF. While chatting with me as I sat across from her, reviewing reports and e-mailing back to the States, she mentioned she had a sore leg.

During her intelligence training at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, she had sustained damage to her lower left Achilles, so severe that she couldn’t run. She’d had surgery on it, but it still wasn’t right. We spoke about the Huachuca Cannon run: a tough, two-and-a-half-mile dirt road that went straight up and down the mountains resembling those surrounding us at Bagram. I told her I’d torn a ligament in the same general area at Fort Huachuca while on the Cannon run.

“Well, it’s acting up,” she said. She was sitting on one of the desks, and she bent forward and dug at it. “I’m kind of having trouble walking.”

In situations like this, it was always prudent to be polite and respectful, but I figured, there would be medicinal purpose in offering a foot massage. You know, one soldier helping another soldier.

“How would you like a foot massage?” I asked. “I’m sure that would help”—knowing that any such act would still require some privacy … and it would take an effort to remove the boots.

She straightened up, looked at me with those big, brown eyes, and a slow smile filled her face. She stood up, still smiling.

“No, I’d really like a full-body massage instead.” Her smile was now a grin and, turning, she disappeared back into her work area on the other side of the SCIF.

Once my breath returned to my lungs, I thought,
Man, this is going to be interesting.

8

TO THE FRONT

WHOA. I had made a personal commitment to focus only on the mission. I had to think about this.

I have always been careful and respectful of women in uniform to whom I was attracted, and I had a strong professional admiration for Kate—she was tougher than most of the 10th Mountain troops I had seen, but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was hot, too.

I did not know what, if anything, I would do about Kate’s overture—and there were complications. I was still getting over the breakup with Rina. I had heard from mutual friends that she was dating, but it’s not easy to stop caring about someone.

There also was the additional complication of something called General Order No. 1. It outlined a number of prohibited activities and standards of conduct for U.S. troops and civilians working for the military in Afghanistan, including the possession of alcohol, pornography, gambling, and sexual relations between personnel not married to each other.

Not that the brass had enforced it in any substantial way. It was treated more like a stern warning to frighten troops. It was well known that the troops had gotten smart about hiding their extracurricular activities. I had been told by several friends about finding troops “doing it” in cramped spaces like the small bomb shelters around our tent living area and Porta-Johns.

Yeah, Porta-Johns.

Shortly after our solidification of victory in Afghanistan in 2002 when large numbers of our troops started rolling in, General Order No. 1 was created by senior officers who didn’t have a clue on how to lead troops. They had no sense of military tradition—especially army history—and of what worked and didn’t work in the army during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. They had this idea that we had to create “warrior monks” within the ranks of the military. Great. It wasn’t good enough that these young kids had signed up to put their lives on the line for their country. Now they were expected to take a vow of celibacy.

If the kids serving in the military had wanted to be monks, I’m sure they would have found their way to the nearest monastery by now.

So I took every opportunity I could to ignore General Order No. 1. It was wrong at every level, and while I’d be careful with Kate (discretion being the better part of valor), if any opportunity presented itself, I would look forward to taking advantage of it.

Before any opportunity presented itself, Tim Loudermilk announced at the LTC morning standup that Special Forces had rolled up a guy ******** ** ** * **** ******** ******* * ******** ******** ******** during a raid in ****** the previous night. ****** lay in a valley about 60 miles south of Kabul. It was the capital of the Patkia province and was once a stronghold of the Taliban—and considered to be on the front line of this unconventional war.

The detainee was being held at the Forward Operating Base just outside the city.

CJSOTF intel guys had visited the LTC and passed a series of messages they had received from their A Team ** ******* The capture of an ostensible ******* had put a cramp in their style. They needed help from the LTC to determine, among other things, who he really was * **** *******.

Shortly after the stand-up, **** ********, the senior FBI agent assigned to the LTC, came over. He had received the stack of messages and already read through them.

“Aren’t you from *********” he asked, his head cocked forward slightly as he faced me, his 6'4" frame too tall for the tent.

“Yep,” I said. “Lived in ******** ******** for fourteen years.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Well, according to the ******** ******* we got from this guy, he’s from ***********.”

That’s where I lived. Rina and I had bought the house there in 2001. “Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” said John. “According to the information we have, he’s from …” He named a community in ***********.

I stared at him. This was getting spooky. “I live within a mile of it.”

John showed me a copy of the guy’s ******** ******** Arash Ghaffari. Mustached, narrow face, dark eyes, looked to be in his mid- or late-thirties.

“Is this real?” I asked.

John nodded. “We got confirmation from ** *** that this is a valid driver’s license.”

“Has he told them what he is doing here?”

“Yeah,” John said with a tinge of disbelief in his voice, “he said he was here as a tourist to visit his family.”

Tourist? Here? We looked at each other, each thinking of the unsavory possibilities. Was he a terrorist over here for training? Part of a sleeper cell? What could he be planning? Several of the September 11 attackers had ******** ******** ********. Who shows up in a freakin’ combat zone to be a tourist?

Plus, he’d been rolled up with his cousin, Ali Ghaffari, whom the local Special Forces team had been monitoring for a while. A doctor who’d left Afghanistan during the Soviet takeover and settled in Iran, Ali Ghaffari had returned ** ****** with his family during the U.S. war with the Taliban. Intel collected by the A Team indicated that Ali Ghaffari had recently traveled to Iran and brought back the equivalent of ******* ** ****** to cook up trouble for us infidels. Typically, the cash would be used to buy weapons and material for IEDs, obtain support equipment such as satellite phones, vehicles, etc. The let’s-kill-the-Americans gear.

That money would go a long way toward hurting a lot of troops, and it had disappeared during the raid. Special Forces had rolled up Ali Ghaffari in his compound with five other men We didn’t know who they were or what they were up to, and what the hell was **** doing meddling in Afghanistan? The Iranians had secretly backed anti-Taliban forces during the time the Taliban had controlled Afghanistan. True, Hekmatyar had spent some of the Taliban years in exile in Iran. But the whole thing was just weird, and we had to get to the bottom of it—fast.

We believed there was the possibility of a larger plot. Maybe Ali Ghaffari had recruited his cousin for some long-term terrorist plan to be hatched back in the good ole ****** ****** ** ********

Arash wasn’t talking, John said. “He claims he doesn’t know anything and just wants to go home. The Special Forces told him that ain’t gonna happen, but he’s been separated from the other prisoners and they’re treating him as if he is a **** *******. They’re asking for guidance on what to do.”

I went to talk to Rich, told him what was going on, and then headed out on some other work, my brain still ringing alarm bells over a guy from my neck of the woods showing up with someone who was clearly a terrorist enabler in Afghanistan. The whole thing stunk.

Tim and John found me later that morning. “We’re sending John out to interrogate him and we want you to go with him.”

“OK,” I said, trying to imagine why they’d want me to go. “What exactly are you thinking?”

“You’re from ***********, so you’ll be able to determine if he’s really from there,” John said. “We especially want to see if he’s planning something in that area.”

“That’s kind of a concern for me, too,” I said.

“We’ll fly out on the Ring helicopter,” said Tim. “It’s supposed to leave right before midnight.”

The Ring helicopter was the U.S. military flying bus system in Afghanistan. The destinations were always the same, but the routes and times the helicopters flew along them varied for operational security reasons. There had been some losses, both combat and mechanical failure. It wasn’t exactly a “safe” method of travel, but what was I expecting in Afghanistan? Greyhound?

Shortly before midnight, we headed for the flight line hangar with our kit. I had picked only essential items to bring with me. I didn’t even take a sleeping bag. Instead, I took the ubiquitous poncho liner that every solider learned to use as a makeshift (and very portable) sleeping bag. I didn’t know if I was going out for an overnight jaunt or a weeklong visit. That would be up to Mr. Arash Ghaffari.

While we waited for the mission briefing, I talked to a North Carolina National Guard aviator who looked and sounded like Dr. Phil in a flight suit. He would be flying cover for the mission in an Apache. All army helicopter flights required two to four attack helicopters as escorts because of frequent attacks on helicopters with small arms and some SA-7 surface-to-air missiles.

As we were talking in the mountain darkness, a sudden gust of wind came up, and I ended up with a mouthful of dust. By now, I’d gotten used to this during conversations. It was like particles of sandpaper suddenly settling between your teeth as you were talking. Even as my mind churned around the mystery of our alleged American citizen, we talked about more pleasant things. The National Guardsman was from Williamsburg, Virginia, and he and his family owned some hotels throughout the Eastern Seaboard. He was here to put his time in and was looking forward to going home he told me. Weren’t we all?

In this night sortie, there were two CH-47s and two Apaches, and we went out to the flight line and sat down on the metal grates in the gusty wind next to the helos while the crews did their preflights and loaded pallets and cargo onto the aircraft. I later learned that the pallet next to me contained 2,000 pounds of C-4 high explosive.

We had to attend a preflight safety briefing within the hangar. While we were waiting, we took seats on the gray folding chairs lined up in front of the screen. One of the aviation admin troops, a young sergeant, obviously intrigued by the looks of our three-man team (two of us in civilian clothes with beards and guns and the third in desert camo), came up to me.

“You with public affairs?” he asked politely.

“No,” I said.

“Civil affairs?”

“No,” I said.

He tried again. “Special Forces?”