“Mason Kane?” Renee guessed.
“Yep. Two days later, the target’s head shows up in one of those foam coolers you buy at the gas station. The dude who brought it was the target’s bodyguard. Said he found his boss dead on the toilet, with a note telling him to take the head to the firebase or get ready to bury his family.”
“Holy shit,” Renee said with a whistle.
“Like I said, it’s all rumor, but I ran across a guy I know who said that Mason ran into a bit of trouble about six months ago. Something happened on a mission they ran up north.”
“What happened?” she asked, intrigued by the story.
“People said he flipped out and murdered a bunch of civilians,” Bones answered. “Single-handedly got all the Special Forces kicked out of Wardak.”
“I remember hearing about that,” Renee said. “The rumor was that some Special Ops guy was cutting off hajji faces and wearing them around like masks.”
“Yep, that’s the one. Anyway, it was right around election time in Washington, and General Swift began taking a lot of heat. He was told to send a team to take a look, but what they really wanted was for us to sanitize the site before anyone could get a handle on the situation.”
“So what happened?”
“Hard to say, because Colonel Barnes sent Mason to Libya before anyone could talk to him, and right after that is when he left the reservation and got put on the kill list,” Bones said.
Renee rolled her eyes at the two men. They were like kids at camp telling ghost stories. “That’s pretty convenient. So no one actually saw anything?”
“Rico did. He got to the site before the rest of us, said someone had pulled all the bullets out of the bodies and collected all the spent brass. When he went out and talked to the locals, they all said the same thing. A white guy did it.”
“So?”
“So Mason’s not white. If you look at his army photo, the guy looks like a haj,” Kevin said.
“Well, then, it couldn’t have been him,” Renee said sarcastically.
“Who knows, but it didn’t matter anyways because Karzai got what he wanted. He used this to say he couldn’t trust the generals anymore and started going straight to Washington, cut Swift and Nantz right out of the loop.”
“I don’t get it,” Renee said honestly.
“What’s to get?” Kevin asked. “We lost a major asset when they pulled the Anvil Program, and Karzai got free rein to do whatever the hell he wanted up in Wardak. Shit, it was all hands on deck when Mason went on the run. The DoD had us jumping through our asses trying to find him.”
“Yep, they said they had a fix on him in Pakistan, but by the time they sent people in, he was long gone,” Bones added.
“Probably never there in the first place.” Kevin spat his dip into a bottle while Bones nodded his head in agreement.
“When does Rico get back from the Pesh?” Renee asked.
Kevin’s prepaid cell phone rang, cutting off the conversation.
“Yeah? Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, closing the phone and getting to his feet. “Speaking of the devil, the gate guards won’t let Rico on base.”
“Again? This is getting old,” Bones said, sighing.
“Well, we might as well make it a field trip.”
Renee grabbed her sunglasses, clipped her pistol to her belt, and followed the two men out to the truck. It was a five-minute drive to the north gate, where two guard towers and a row of concrete barriers were the only things separating the American enclave from Afghanistan.
Kevin put the truck in park and hopped out, leaving Renee to watch from the front seat. Her gaze drifted over the green sandbags fluttering in the wind and the small mounds of dirt collected at the base of the plywood guard shack. A mass of dirty Afghanis pressed against the chain-link fence, yelling at the guards looking down on them. Rocks bounced off the thick bulletproof glass with sharp cracks, and a haggard sergeant fought to keep his soldiers from escalating the already tense situation.
She had tried so hard to make a difference, but she knew that everything good they had done was now ruined. One man had destroyed everything in the blink of an eye. Renee scanned the soiled robes and windburned faces of the locals until her eyes stopped on a gaunt man squatted down against the fence. He was staring at her through squinted eyes, and two soldiers stood over him with their M4s at the ready. The soldiers looked to be about nineteen or twenty, and one of them suddenly kicked dirt at a young Afghani shaking the fence with his hands. Some of the dirt landed on the man seated at his feet, and the soldiers smiled as a young Afghani suddenly grabbed hold of the fence.
“Fuck you, America,” he yelled as he shook the fence.
The soldier took the butt of his rifle and slammed it on the boy’s fingers with a fleshy thump.
“Get off the fence,” he yelled as the boy made a gun out of his fingers and pointed it at the man’s head.
“America die,” he yelled back.
Despite the chaos, the man seated on the ground continued staring at her until she looked uncomfortably away. There was something noble in his gaze and she found herself unwilling to challenge it. Kevin was showing his ID to the sergeant in charge, and the NCO pointed to the man she had just been looking at.
Renee looked back at the man — he was standing up now — and finally realized that it was Rico. When he got to his feet he looked at the soldier who was still yelling at the crowd and walked past without speaking. After walking through the gate, the sergeant handed him an AK-47 and offered a curt apology before turning back to the crowd.
He kept his eyes down as he walked to the truck and opened the back door. “What’s up?” he said in a mellow Southern California accent as he tossed his gear into the truck.
“Did they just kick dirt on you?” Renee asked, handing him a bottle of water.
“Yeah, it happens all the time. Kinda gives you a different perspective on shit, though,” he said, slamming the door and taking a long drink of water.
“Maybe if you’d call ahead, we could have a car waiting for you next time,” Kevin said as he put the truck in reverse and headed back to their building.
“Whatever, bro.”
“So, whatcha got for us?”
“I think Barnes has already crossed the border. There’s some bad shit going down in the tribal regions right now.”
“What do you mean?”
A few minutes later, the team was back around the table and Rico was digging a digital camera out of a dusty bag. He hit the power button and, after blowing the grit off the screen, tossed it to Kevin.
The digital images were graphic. The first picture was from inside a building. A dark crimson pool of blood was spread out on a rough wooden floor. There were black scorch patterns from grenades and the walls were chipped from shrapnel. The next shot was outside and showed heads stacked together to form a hideous pyramid reminiscent of Mesoamerican human sacrifices.
Quite a few of the shots had been taken on the move, which somehow made the images all the more grotesque. Grainy out-of-focus heads sat atop hand-carved spikes. Expressions of contorted misery were frozen on the faces and someone had taken the time to display them for everyone to see. The last shot showed a row of staked heads framed by snowcapped mountains. A lone woman was on her knees at the foot of a wooden stake with her head in her hands. Rico had gotten close enough to capture the woman’s grief as the severed head leered obscenely for the camera.
“How many heads were there altogether?” Bones asked as the slide show finally ended.
“I stopped counting at about two hundred and fifty, but every district center that I went to had at least fifteen to twenty.”
“Were they all confirmed Taliban?” Renee asked.