Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Combat Ops (2 page)

 

 

 

 

 

“You think I’m guilty?” I ask her.

She smirks. “My opinion doesn’t matter.” “It does to me.”

“How do you expect me to formulate an opinion when I don’t know your story?”

I sigh through a curse.

My name is Captain Scott Mitchell, United States Army. I’m a member of a Special Forces group called the Ghosts. When I’m on the job, out on a mission, I don’t exist. I’d thought we operated with impunity.

But when I was ordered back home and confined to quarters, I realized everything had changed. The same organization that helped conceal my operations and erase all evidence of the people I’d killed had been forced to make an example of me. They had changed. I had changed. And we could never go back.

People don’t have to talk. They can invite you to kiss them . . . or even kill them with their eyes. Talk is cheap, but I’ve crawled through enough rat holes to learn that for some, life is even cheaper.

I had permission. I did what I had to do. They say I had a choice, but I didn’t. I have never done anything more difficult in my life.

And now they want me to pay for my sins.

I haven’t slept in two days. The growing humidity here at Fort Bragg makes it harder to breathe, and when I go to the window and run a finger across the glass, it comes up sweaty. The humidity is all I have to keep me company.

My father taught me that it’s easier to cut wood with the grain rather than against it, and I carried that simple metaphor into the Army. I promised myself to remain apolitical, do the missions, go with the grain, not because I was trying to cop out but because I just wanted to be a great soldier. I’d already seen what torn loyalties and jeal ousy could do to the warrior spirit, and I wanted to pro tect myself against that.

But for what? My life is now a blade caught in a heavy knot, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared out of my mind. I’m fourteen again, and Dad’s telling me that Mom just died, and I’m worried about how we’ll get along when she did so much—when she was the person who held our family together. When I think about going to prison, I lose my breath. It’s a panic attack, and all I can do is hide behind sarcasm and belligerence.

Blaisdell, who’s shaking her head at me now, showed up three hours late with some bullshit excuse about a deposition running long, and I told her to have a seat at my little kitchen table so we can talk about saving my life. She gave me a look. She’s a major with the JAG corps, probably about my age, thirty-six or so, with rect angular glasses that suggest bitch rather than scholar. I hate her.

Now she lifts her chin and grimaces. “Is that you?” “What do you mean?”

“That smell . . .”

I scratch at my beard, rake fingers through my crew cut. All right, I hadn’t bathed in a couple of days, either, and I’d been growing the beard for the past month.

“You want to wait while I take a shower?”

“Look, Captain, I’m doing this as a favor to Brown’s sister, but you can hire your own attorney.”

I shake my head. “Before I shipped back home, Brown told me about some of the other cases you did, maybe a little similar to mine.”

She sighs deeply. “Not similar. Not as many witnesses. Some reasonable doubt—the chance that maybe it was just an accident. Everything I’ve read in your case says this was hardly an accident.”

“No, it certainly wasn’t.”

“And you understand that you could lose everything and spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth?”

I stare back at her, unflinching. “You want a drink? I mean as in alcohol . . .”

“No. And you shouldn’t have one, either. Because if you want me to help you, I need to know everything. The narrative they gave me is their point of view. I need yours.”

“You don’t even know what unit I work for. They won’t tell you. They just say D Company, First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group. You ever hear of the Ghosts?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. They want plausible deniability.

Well, they got it, all right, and now I’m the fall guy.” “You’re not the fall guy. From what I read, no one 
forced you to do anything.”

I lower my voice. “I went to a briefing. They showed me a PowerPoint slide of the situation over there. It was supposed to illustrate the complexity of our mission. Somebody said the graph looked like a bowl of spaghetti, and guys were laughing. But you know what I was thinking? Nothing. I didn’t care.”

“Why’s that?”

“They gave me a mission, and I tried to put on the blinders. I went in, and I got the job done. Usually I never give a crap about the politics. I don’t feed the machine. I am the machine. But this . . . this wasn’t a mission. This isn’t a war. It’s an illusion of understand ing and control. They think they can color-code it, but they have no idea what’s going on out there. You need to stand in the dirt, look around, and realize that it’s just . . . I don’t even know what the hell it is . . .”

She purses her lips. And now she’s looking at me like I’m a stereotypical burned-out warrior with a new drink ing problem and personal hygiene challenges. Screw her.

“You don’t care what I think, do you?” I ask. “I’m here to defend you.”

I take a deep breath. “That sounds like an inconve nience.”

“Captain, I know where this is coming from, and I’ve seen it before. You’re angry and upset, but you’d best not forget that I’m all you’ve got right now.”

“I’ll ask you again, do you think I’m guilty?”

She dismisses my question with a wave. “Start at the beginning, and I need to record you.” She reaches into her fancy leather tote bag and produces a small tablet computer with attached camera that she places on the table. The camera automatically pivots toward me.

I make a face at the lens, then rise and head toward the kitchen counter, where my bottle of cheap scotch awaits. I pour myself a glass and return to the table. She’s scowling at me and checks her smartphone.

“Oh, I’m sorry if you don’t have the time for this,” I say, then sip my drink.

“Captain . . .”

“You got any kids?”

She rolls her eyes. “We’re not here to talk about me.” “I’m just asking you a question.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

I grin slightly. “How many?” “I have two daughters.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Can we get on with this now? I assume you know about attorney-client privilege? Anything you share about the mission will remain classified, compartmen talized, and confidential, of course.”

I finish my scotch, exhale through the burn, then narrow my gaze. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I am
not
a murderer.”

My target’s name was Mullah Mohammed Zahed, the Taliban commander in the Zhari district just outside the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. His home town, Sangsar, was located in a rural area along the Arghandab River. The Russians call that place “the heart of darkness.”

Zhari and its small towns were and still are a crucial gateway region to Kandahar and also a staging area for Taliban activity. Commanders often told us that if we could take Zhari, we’d control Kandahar. I’ve been in the military long enough to understand the disparity between wishful thinking and the will of a dedicated and ruthless insurgency.

But again, we didn’t care about the politics or the 
past or even superstitious Russians. I took my eight-man team to “the ’Stan,” as we call it, and invested in two days of recon using our airborne drones complemented by a local guy feeding us intel from a handful of his eight thousand neighbors. We picked up enough to jus tify a raid on a mud-brick compound we believed was Zahed’s command post.

“Ghost Lead, this is Ramirez. Jenkins and I are in position, over.”

“Roger that, buddy,” I responded. “Just hold till the others check in.”

I had positioned myself in the foothills, shielded by an outcropping so I could survey the maze of dust-caked structures through my Cross-Com. The combination monocle-earpiece fed me data from my teammates as well as from the drone and the satellite uplinks. The tar geting computer could identify friend or foe on the bat tlefield, and at that moment, red outlines were appearing all over the grid like taillights in a traffic jam.

Prior to our operation, General Keating, commander of United States Special Operations Command (USSO COM) in Tampa, Florida—the big kahuna for grunts like me—had been talking a lot about COIN, or counterin surgency operations. Keating had expressed his concern that Special Forces in the area might’ve already exhausted their usefulness because the Army’s new phi losophy was to protect the people and provide them with security and government services rather than ven turing out to hunt down and eradicate the enemy. We were to win over the hearts and minds of the locals by 
improving their living conditions. Once we made them our allies, we could enlist their help in gathering human intelligence on our targets. In many cases, intel from those locals made all the difference.

Nevertheless, I remember Lieutenant Colonel Gor don, our Ghost Commander, having several four-letter words to describe how effective that campaign would be. As a Special Forces combatant, he believed, like I once did, that you needed to spend most of your time teaching the people how to fight so that after we left they could defend themselves. However, if their enemies were too great or too overwhelming, then we should go in there like surgeons and cut out the cancer.

Zahed, our commanders believed, was the cancer. What they hadn’t realized was how far the disease had spread.

“Ghost Lead, this is Treehorn. In position, over.” Doug Treehorn was the sniper I’d brought along,

much to the chagrin of Alicia Diaz, my regular operator. Alicia had done tours in Afghanistan before, and I’d had no qualms about taking her along, despite the chal lenges of being female in a nation where women were treated . . . let’s just say
differently
. That she had taken a fall and broken her ankle two weeks before being shipped out ruined my initial game plan.

Treehorn was good, but he was no Diaz.

The others reported in. We had the complex cordoned off, and with Less Than Lethal (LTL) rubber rounds to stun guards before we gassed them into unconscious ness, the plan was to neutralize Zahed’s force, then slip 
soundlessly inside the compound and capture the man himself. No blood spilled. Special Forces surgery. I mean, could we make it any more politically correct? We were going in there to take out a man whose soldiers routinely blew themselves up at the local bazaars, but we were try ing our best not to hurt anyone.

Well, I’d told my guys that if push came to shove, we’d go live. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that, if only to meet the challenge. As I’d told the others before ascend ing the mountains, “This is not rocket science. And it ain’t over till the fat man sings.” Zahed was pushing three hundred pounds, according to intelligence photos and video, and we planned to make him sing all about Taliban operations in the region, including the smuggling of IEDs manufactured in Iraq and rumors about Chinese and North Korean electronic shipments into the country. I know I’m making Zahed sound like a real scumbag, but at that time, things seemed pretty clear. But I hadn’t been there long enough, and I never thought for one second that we Ghosts and the rest of our military might be causing more damage than anyone else. We were

there to help.

“All right, Ghosts, let’s move out.”

I issued a voice command so that my computer would patch me into the Cross-Com cameras of the others, and I watched as the guards fell like puppets.
Thump
. Down. And then my men, who wore masks themselves, hit the bad guys with quick shots from a new CS gas gun we were fielding. The gun issued a silent burst into an ene my’s face.

Ramirez crouched before the lock on the front gate while I rushed down from my position and joined him. It was a cool desert night. A couple of dogs barked in the distance. Laundry flapped like sails on long lines that spanned several nearby buildings. The faint scent of lamb that had been roasted on open fires was getting swallowed in the stench of the CS gas. I checked my heads-up display: two twenty
A.M.
local time. You always hit them in the middle of the night while they’re sleep ing. Again, not rocket science.