SPECIALIST ALLAN MOSER was sitting in a personnel tent prepping for a promotion board. After only two years in the Army, his performance had been so solid that he was up for early advancement to sergeant, or E-5. The board was in a couple of weeks, but he was already studying: He wanted to knock it out of the park.
The tent flap rippled and Sergeant Andrew Doyle appeared in the doorway.
“First Sergeant needs a couple of guys,” he said.
Moser sprang to his feet. “I’ll go.”
He didn’t need to know what for. He and 1SG Scott had bonded long before, when Scott saw Moser twisting up guys in hand-to-hand combat drills back at Fort Campbell.
“That’s my son, right there!” Scott had said, which cracked everybody up since Scott was as black as midnight and a guy couldn’t get much whiter than Moser.
Doyle, Moser, and another young soldier, PFC Curtis Frey, trooped off and found Scott, who dispatched all three men up to the coffeehouse.
Doyle, Dog Company’s armorer, was one of those guys with a knack for fixing things. He wore a mustache that his boyish face hadn’t quite grown into. Quiet and mild-tempered, he was a fantastic shot and could walk a 40-millimeter grenade through a mud-frame window from a thousand meters out.
“What’s at the coffeehouse?” Moser asked him as the three trudged uphill.
“The detainees are up there,” Doyle said. “The spies.”
Moser felt blood rush hot to his ears. The spies who killed Paul and Lieutenant Carwile…
Moser had known the spies were in custody, but not where. Now, he felt a certain satisfaction that for once he would be able to lay eyes on his enemy. In Kapisa Province, from which 2nd Platoon had just returned, the Taliban had seemed virtually invisible. As small arms fire showered in, bullets seemed to dart from the air itself, attackers melting like phantoms into the mountain brush.
In Moser’s second firefight, the first in which he’d fired his weapon, he hammered back so hard with his SAW6 that SSG Mike Anzalone had to pound on Moser’s leg from the TC seat, yelling, “Slow your rate of fire! Slow your rate of fire!”
But Moser had already shot away half a tree. A raft of branches crashed to earth, revealing a Taliban gunner literally hanging among those that remained, weapon still in hand. Moser fired again and sent his enemy to hell. (He later told his dad and grandpa, a World War II vet, about this kill, but not his mother. There were some things, he decided, that you just don’t tell Mom.)
Actually spotting a Taliban fighter was so rare that Moser had felt at times he was fighting ghosts. Now, tramping with Doyle and Frey up the dusty grade, Moser thought, Hell yeah! I want to see these motherfuckers!
At the top of the FOB, Doyle opened the coffeehouse and the two stepped inside. Moser let his eyes sweep the room, until they landed on Sammy.
What. The. Fuck?
Rage surged through Moser’s body. He could actually hear blood humming in his ears. Sammy had been with 2nd Platoon during Nomad, clearing houses in Jalrez. Acting like he was looking for bad guys, scanning for IEDs. And come to find out he’s a double agent? A piece-of-shit spy?
No wonder they’d taken two dozen wounded and now two KIA since landing in-country, Moser thought: This fucker and his fucking friends.
Moser flashed back to Bagram Airfield, a hundred grown men crying unashamed, the cavernous C-17 and the gentle thump of LT Carwile’s casket coming to rest in the belly of the plane—a horrible, final sound. His guts twisted in the grip of betrayal, buffered only by a slim satisfaction that Sammy and his friends had been caught. They were now EPWs, Enemy Prisoners of War.
Moser didn’t know what would happen to them—some kind of prison, maybe, like Guantanamo. But at least they were off the battlefield. At least they would pay for what they’d done to his brothers. Still, like gunmetal clouds in a fast-moving storm, Moser’s grief boiled into a black and visceral hatred. And the target of his hatred now had a face.
27 August 2008
Heads down and walking quickly, Hill and Scott crossed the dusty ground between the tactical operations center and their hooch, a one-room shoe box capped with a tin roof. The two men entered through one end of the shoe box and headed for their bunks at the back, where they sat opposite each other, faces grim. The lights were off, the room dim, but a relentless Afghan sun pried its way through seams in the walls, lighting up swarms of dust.
Hill closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and wiped both hands down across his face. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and locked eyes with Scott.
“Brother,” he said, “I think we’re fucked.”
Scott waited.
“I think we’re going to have to let these guys go,” Hill said.
The ninety-six-hour clock was ticking down fast. Since the NDS returned Kassiss and the Dalmar brothers to Airborne, they had been in custody for more than eighty hours; the other prisoners were heading into their third day.
Hill saw emotions flicker through Scott’s dark eyes. The first sergeant expelled a short, audible breath. A puff of disgust. “Larry try calling Battalion again?”
“Yeah.”
“Why won’t they take these assholes? We’ve shared the intel on them, the links to the Taliban, to Iran.”
“If we let them go, we’re gonna get hurt,” Hill said.
“There’s no doubt,” Scott said. “Just like Wanat.”
Four weeks earlier, a force of about two hundred Taliban fighters had overrun an American unit on a small OP near the east-central village of Wanat. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded, the worst U.S. loss since the war began.
Hill combed his brain for options. Between meetings, he had pulled LT Scheppler aside. He knew Kay had already approached Scheppler, but the Battalion’s Detainee OIC was still Hill’s best bet.
“Steve, we’re in a tough spot here, you know?” Hill had said quietly.
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“Dog Company has had every one of our detainees released by higher since we got here in the spring. All guys that we caught red-handed.”
“I know, sir.”
“What do you think will happen to these twelve—even if Battalion or Brigade comes to get them now?”
“They’ll release them,” Scheppler said.
Out of the horse’s mouth, as it were. Hill had looked the lieutenant in the eye. “You know this meets the definition of insanity, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Though Scheppler represented Battalion, he was willing to shoot straight with Hill, a line company commander. Hill respected him for that.
In the dusky light of the hooch, Hill scuffed at the floor with his boot. He wondered how it was possible that he was having trouble getting these prisoners transferred. Evidence on Dog Company’s previous captures had been solid; the evidence on these men was incontrovertible. Failed XXXXX exams, link analyses showing each prisoner’s network of contacts, their names coming up hot in databases tracked as high as the NSA.
What does it take to hold a prisoner in this war? Hill wondered.
The inertia was increasing the probability of one seriously bad option: releasing the infiltrators. Hill was beginning to realize that he might simply have to let them all walk out the front gate. And, according to ISAF’s 96-Hour Rule, Dog Company would actually have to give the spies money to see them on their way.
He let that idea wash up against the tally of the deployment. Dozens of firefights, roadside bombs, suicide attacks. Rockets falling on the FOB as regular as tropical rain. He thought of the mutilated American soldiers he and his men recovered in the Tangi Valley. Of sifting through their charred remains, and how he learned later that the locals had been selling their amputated fingers in the market as souvenirs.
Third Platoon was grieving at Bagram. Fourth was still banged up from tangling with those vehicle-borne suicide bombers. Second Platoon had just rotated down from Kapisa and was still acclimating to Wardak. First was carrying a lot of the workload, and they were exhausted.
Meanwhile, Taz’s XXXXXX sources were reporting whispers of the planned insurgent attack on a U.S. outpost, at least eighty fighters strong. He remembered again the briefing point from Dave. Another commander who had busted infiltrators had simply fired them—and then his base had fallen under retaliatory attack.
If Hill just kicked the spies off the FOB, would that mean the Taliban no longer had a reason not to attack Airborne?
Hill knew his men were nowhere near empty. Their courage and commitment had never been an issue. But he also knew he had changed as a commander, had become more cynical and more conservative. He thought about Maria Conlon’s message concerning Paul: The best way for Dog Company to honor him was to make sure the rest of the company made it home safe.
Hill raised his eyes to Scott’s. “If these detainees get through that wire, they’re going to come back with a vengeance. Can we live with that? Can we live with the outcome?”
The two men exchanged the answer with their eyes: No, they could not.