Operation Dark Heart (5 page)

In fact, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld had already declared in May 2003 that major combat activity in Afghanistan was over. He said during a visit to Kabul with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai that we’d moved to “a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities.” Most of the country, he said, “is secure.”

** ********** ** *********** *** **** ** *********** ***** *********** **** ** ****** ** ******* ** **** ***** ******* *** ****** *** **** ******* **** ** **** ******* ** ********* ** ***** ********* ** ****** Even so, working on a clandestine computerized operation is different from actually being there. While I had done dangerous things my entire professional life, going into a war zone was a new experience for me.

I wasn’t really scared. There was more of a feeling of emptiness. I was working to be very Zen about the whole thing; I had opened my mind to the new possibilities. No preconceived notions. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

On the flight into Kabul, I ran back the tapes of my exit. I was still pissed off that Operating Base Alpha had been shut down because of the Iraq war, and I was sure my closing speech at the ceremony to case the colors of the unit did not win me any points with DIA leadership.

Then there was the sad and strange departure from Baltimore-Washington International Airport. My now ex-fiancée Rina and I had broken up just before we were supposed to get married—and I mean
just
before. Her family was driving up from Virginia Beach for the ceremony, and my best man, Lt. Col. Jim Brady, was at the house Rina and I owned when things came undone. Despite the drama and the stress, Rina had agreed to maintain my power of attorney and to take care of my bills while I was gone. She’d driven me to BWI for the flight out and actually came into the terminal with me. No matter what, we had started out as friends, and we were both determined to remain friends.

* *** ** *** **** **** *** ** *** ***** ***** ******* ******* ******* ** ** **** ******** ************ ******** ******** ****** ****** ************ ******* ** ***** ******* ********** ********* * *** ****** ******** ******* * **** ******** ******** * ****** ***** *** * ********* ** *** * ******* ****** *** ******** ** ***** ** ** **** ********* ***** ******** *** ******** *** * ***** ****** ******** ****** **** ******* *** *** **** **** ** ****** ** ****** ******** *** ** ****** ** ********** **** **** ****** ** ******** ** ******** **** ****** *** * **** ***** ********** *** ** *** ********** ** ******* *** ** ******* *** ******* ** ** ********* **** *****

Rina helped me move my gear into the Military Airlift Command (MAC) terminal. We had agreed to sell the house when I got back, and we were clearly going in different directions, but we weren’t bitter or even particularly angry at each other. We’d been through that. There was real sadness in our last kiss.

**** * ******* ******** ** **** ***** ******** ******* ****** **** ******* *** ****** ***** *** *********

After a charter flight to the U.S. base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, I boarded the C-130 headed to Bagram Air Base after what felt like thirty nanoseconds on the ground. It was actually twelve hours, but there wasn’t much in Manas to hang around for anyway.

I did run into spooks going elsewhere. I could tell by their bags. We all had exactly the same blue baggage, issued by DIA. Here we are, supposed to be undercover, and the DIA gives us all the same bags. Dumb. I made a note to myself: Never accept “official government issue” clandestine gear.

As I lugged the bags through Manas, I glanced down at my luggage tags, where I’d scrawled ***** ***** ******** *** ** *********** ********* *********** *** ******* The blue ink was partially smeared.

****** ** ***** ** *** ***** ********* ***** *** ****** **** *** ** ** ******** ********** ******** ** *** **** ** ********* *** *** ****** **** **** **** *** *** **** *** *** **** ******* ** *** ********* ******* * *** *** *** ***************** *** **** *** **** * ***** ********* ** **** ** ****************** *** *** **** ***** ** *** *** ******** *** **** ******** ** ******* ******* ********** *** ***** ** **** ***** ** **** **** ** ** ******** ****** ** ********* *** **** ** ******* ***** ********* * ***** **** *** ****** ****** ******** *** **** **** ******** ** *** ****** ****** *** ***** **** **** **** ******* **** ***** *******

I picked up the name ******* from a **** ***** movie, *** ***** ** *** ***** ***** ****** ******** ******** * ********** ****** ******** who molds his company into a combat-ready fighting machine. ** * ******* ** ******* ** ***** *** ******* * *** ******** *** ********** ***** ***** ** *** ***** ******* ****** *** *** ** *** *** ******* ***** ******* ******** ** ** *** ********* ** *** ***** *** *** ***** ************** ***** *** **** ***** ****** ** ***** **** **** ******** ******* * *** **** ****** ** ***** ** ** **** ** ********* ****** **** ****** **** **** **** ***** *****

* *** ** ******* * *** **** *** ***** ******* ******** *** *** *** **** *** ** ***** * *** ***** ** ** *** *** ******* ******* ** *** **** **** ****** **** ****** *********** *** **** ** ** **** ** ******** **** **** ****** **** **** ***** ********* ** ******* **** ** **** ********* the unique chronicle, mostly in your head, which you maintain. Then you feel like Eleanor Rigby in that Beatles’s song who keeps “her face in a jar by the door.” We are taught that it’s best to keep everything as close as possible to the real you so you won’t trip yourself up.

My face prickled. I had grown a goatee at the recommendation of the folks who had already been to Afghanistan. Most men in Afghanistan wear beards, and facial hair can buy you time in a tense situation because you kind of blend in with the men there. The belief was that in that split second, as the bad guy tried to place you, you could escape. I’d never grown a beard before, so I wasn’t used to the facial hair. Even though I’d spent much of my time in the military in undercover operations, where I could have had a beard since I didn’t want to look like I worked for the government, I’d pretty much just gone with long hair. I had a ponytail during my years of running operations in support of DoD’s counterdrug mission. I kinda missed it.

I wasn’t expecting gunfire until we got to Bagram, but we got an early taste of it at a base in northern Afghanistan where we stopped to let some folks off before heading into Bagram. The back of the C-130 dropped down, and an air force enlisted guy on the ground drove up in an ATV and piled on some of their luggage. Small puffs of dust popped up around the ATV as he worked, but he coolly ignored it.

Somebody asked him if he was being shot at. “Yes, sir, they’re shooting at us,” he shouted over the roar of the propellers. As soon as those folks and their stuff were off, the pilot swung the plane around and we were outta there. No sense hanging around getting shot at, I guess he figured. I wasn’t going to argue.

We flew the nap of the earth, following the land’s contours for the next three hours into Bagram. We jerked and swayed in our seats as the plane skimmed over the mountainous Afghanistan terrain and miles and miles of desert.

To distract myself, I thought back to a conversation I’d had in May with Michael Hawk, my operations officer on Operating Base Alpha. In the process of closing it down, Michael had called me.

“They’ve been going through all your stuff since you’ve been in command,” he told me, referring to the DIA bureaucrats—specifically a weasel of a man named Phil. Michael told me they were reviewing my financial records, my telephone logs—ripping through everything I’d done. They were going to push the DIA Inspector General Jimral for an investigation. “Don’t worry about it,” I told Michael. “I may have taken some shortcuts, but I didn’t do anything wrong. I played it totally by the book. They can’t get me on anything.”

Michael gave a grim laugh. “C’mon, Tony. ‘Don’t worry about it?’ They’ll make something up if they don’t find anything.”

I put it out of my mind as I stared over my shoulder and out the porthole of the C-130. All I could see was tan desert and low mountains.

We’d come halfway around the world to deal with an enemy that cared about nothing but their narrow interpretation of God. They wanted to kill us simply because we did not think like they did. They could have continued to push the country even further backward in time had they had the sense to leave us alone. But they hadn’t, and so, after 9/11, we’d gone after them.

The plane banked hard, and I gripped my bag tighter so it wouldn’t slip away as we made our final turn to line up for landing on the Bagram Air Base runway. I could just make out the rows of CH-47s and Marine Corps Harrier AV-8 attack jets as we taxied to the terminal.

Tepid dishwater. That was my thought as I came out of the plane. Lukewarm, moist air, heavy with latent heat, with dirty brown drapes of dust that obscured the jagged mountains that surrounded Bagram for 360 degrees, literally making them shadows of their former selves. The dust just sat there, like a big damp blanket, waiting to be ripped away by the heat of the day. The kind of day that you’d just like to kick back, drive to the beach, and lay in the sun.

But no such luck. No beach here. Just a war.

In all, Bagram was serving as home to more than 7,000 U.S. and multinational armed servicemen. Used by the Soviet military during its doomed occupation of Afghanistan, the Americans and multinational armed services took over Bagram after the crap was beaten out of it during the country’s civil war that raged after the Russians withdrew in 1989 and the fight waged by the United States and the Afghan Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban in 2001. We’d sunk a lot of change into fixing it up since then, but it still was no beauty. A beaten-up control tower. One patched runway. Smashed aircraft lying around. Hidden land mines. A number of newly erected structures on site but everything—and everybody—else were in tents.

As soon as I got off the plane into the 105-degree heat, my new boss, Bill Wilson, helped me load my luggage—two B-4 nylon bags full of military gear, two pelican cases, a field pack, body armor, and my bulletproof briefcase (Level IIA bulletproof inserts)—into the Toyota Tacoma (“surfs,” they were called here). He took me over to my new offices, located in the heavily guarded SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) in the Combined Joint Task Force 180 compound.

CJTF 180 was a hybrid organization, consisting of 18th Airborne Corps staff, with combat power provided by the Army 10th Mountain Division and 82nd Airborne Division, and some special operations (Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs) with some level of logistical backing from the 1st Corps Support Command.

Our facility was in a set of interconnected tents. The largest was the Joint Operations Center for CJTF 180. The SCIF—the most highly classified area—was attached to that.

The entire complex for CJTF 180 was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall—parts of it mud walls that had been on site and the rest constructed out of tall Hescos—wire mesh containers with heavy fabric liners filled with dirt and rocks similar to old-fashioned gabions. The entire wall was topped with triple concertina wire.

As we entered through the guarded entrance of the SCIF, we came into a large domed area, with huge mercury lights and dust dancing in their beams. There was a big, U-shaped conference table and various openings to other tents/offices off the main area.

The tents were insulated, air-conditioned, and heated, but still hot as hell in the summer and, I was to discover, damned cold in the winter. On windy days—which was most days in Bagram—the wind sucked and blew at the tent walls, flapping them with such force and volume that we often had to pause in meetings and wait for the gales to die down before resuming.

One of the first people we ran into was Lt. Gen. John Vines, commander of the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Vines had assumed command of the Afghanistan operation in May, although he had been in country for nine months as commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. He was leaving the SCIF after his daily morning situation brief when Bill introduced us. Vines grabbed my hand for a swift, firm shake.

“Good to meet you, ***** ********” he said. “Glad to have you here.” My first impression was of a direct, no-nonsense leader.

Inside the SCIF, I started to meet members of the team I would be fighting this war with, starting with Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Christenson, a Senior Naval Intelligence Officer in Afghanistan.

“Welcome aboard, shipmate,” he said, extending a hand. With satellites, bugs, receivers, antennas, and a bunch of other equipment ******* ************ *** ******** Dave and his people kept an ear out for the bad guys from the air and from the ground. Lean and compact, blond and blue-eyed, Dave was the resident “lib” who became—despite his politics—one of my closest allies.

Because Dave had the appropriate clearances and background, I was able to tell him I’d worked with *** on previous assignments, including a recent one in which ** *** *** was embedded in my unit to *** ***** ********* Dave looked impressed and said he wanted to learn more about that operation.

The human intelligence tent where I would be working had a kind of a submarine feel to it—long and narrow, with a plywood floor and computers slapped down on long tables along the perimeter. Dust was everywhere. Chairs were mostly the folding kind. Kind of primitive, I thought, but then this was a war zone. Just inside the entrance sat the 10th Mountain tactical human intelligence team. Bill introduced me all around, while I struggled to remember names. I was fighting fatigue and was still trying to get used to answering to the name of Tony.

They were all in uniform—a young-looking group. I got a quick handshake from everyone, but my attention was drawn briefly to the NCO in charge of the night shift. She reminded me of somebody I knew, or thought I had known. I searched my memory banks. That was it—she looked like Natalie Portman: high cheekbones, dark eyes, and the widest smile I’d ever seen. I glanced at her computer. There was a photo of her, smiling, hand in hand with a guy. She was wearing shorts.
Man,
I thought.
Gorgeous legs.