Chapter 98
CARPENTER LOOKED AT the floor for a long time, as if seeing something on the antiseptic film that coated the hospital tiles.
“Okay,” he said at last. “But none of this can become public. And none of this can ever be traced to me. If you attribute the information to me, well …”
“We get it,” I replied. “Far as I’m concerned, you were some mirage I once hallucinated in Afghanistan.”
Del Rio nodded. “You’ve got our word.”
Carpenter sighed, slouched in the recliner, and for the next hour and a half, and on past sunrise, told us a story that we never would have believed if Del Rio and I hadn’t been in Afghanistan ourselves during the crazy times after the invasion, after Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora cave system, during the beginnings of the neo-Taliban counterinsurgency, long before the surge.
Carpenter said the fingerprints belonged to Clive Johnson, Master Sergeant Clive Johnson, who’d served in the Rangers and then with several Joint Special Operations Command teams, which drew elite warriors from all four branches of the military.
“It was early 2003, and the forces we’d committed to Afghanistan were being drawn down, sent to stage up in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq,” Carpenter said. “There was a lot of dissension in the ranks, especially among spec ops who’d been in country since November 2001, right from the beginning.”
I remembered. “They felt they were being undercut, forgotten.”
Carpenter nodded. “They were being given all sorts of conflicting signals regarding the rules of engagement, when you could shoot, who you could shoot, that kind of thing.”
Del Rio nodded. “All sorts of good men died because of that. Hell, that was still going on two years later when SEAL Team Ten turned into the lone survivor because they wouldn’t kill the kid who betrayed them to the Taliban.”
Carpenter nodded. “That was just the worst of it.”
But back in 2003, frustration among the special forces hit another, earlier high point. These elite soldiers were asking themselves whether they were in Afghanistan to fight and beat the Taliban, or merely to offer Al Qaeda easy access to walking, talking American targets. Indeed, those questions echoed high into the US chain of command in Kabul.
“An army general who shall remain nameless decided that enough was enough,” Carpenter said. “He decided on his own to detach a new secret JSOC team out of Kandahar. Their job was simple: to disrupt the trade in raw opium and black tar heroin that was funding the Taliban insurgency in the mountains along the Pakistani border. By any means necessary.”
“Johnson was a member of that JSOC team?” Del Rio asked.
“Handpicked by the marine recon commander the general chose to lead the secret team.”
Carpenter got a tablet computer from a backpack I hadn’t noticed and called up a grainy snapshot of a man in his early forties. The left side of his face was covered in scars, and he gave off the distinct impression that he could eat broken glass and like it.
“Meet Lee Cobb, one bad dude,” Carpenter said, looking old again. “He got the scars in the first Gulf War. Land mine. Shook it off, healed up, went right back at it. Remember when you took me on that night drop-off, spring of oh-four?”
“Snowstorm?” I asked. “Zabul province?”
“That’s the one,” Carpenter said. “West of Qalat.”
I remembered it. Brutal terrain. Hard-core Taliban country.
Thinking back on how stranger than normal Carpenter had seemed that night, I said, “You were going to meet up with Cobb and his team?”
“More like try to stop them before they committed any more atrocities,” Carpenter said in a hollow voice.