A Nasty Piece of Work A Novel by Robert Littell

Author:Robert Littell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Noir, Suspense, Thriller
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2013-11-19T06:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

I’ll do Afghanistan now.

I’d been posted to the Company’s compound in Kabul, which was Langley’s bright idea of R and R after two months in the Pakistani-Afghan badlands. I’d been named acting deputy station chief, which sounds real important until you discover there were eight deputy station chiefs, each one with a bailiwick to preside over. As the station was thick with desk wallahs and thin on officers who’d spent serious time outside the Green Zone, I presided over field operations, which consisted, during my tour in Kabul, of forays into the maze of various medinas in search of Taliban and Hezb-e Islami operatives. Sometimes I’d tag along with the raiders to interrogate suspects myself—I understood enough pidgin Pashto to know when the government translator was leaving out juicy details. Other times I camped in the compound’s command bunker to coordinate operations from a distance. I’d sit on a wooden swivel chair, nursing a cold beer, my eyes on the bank of plasma screens showing, among other things, a Wall Street ticker tape, an old episode of Seinfeld, and the live feed from minicameras attached to the helmets of soldiers breaking down doors in a medina. I was presiding over one such foray that had reached the operational stage when my station chief—I’ll refer to him as Jack for the purposes of this narrative, since the real names of Company employees, mine included, are considered a state secret—suggested I ought to tailgate the Delta-Foxtrot team setting off at midnight to raid a remote village in the rugged ridges of the Hindu Kush in the hope of capturing the especially tall mujahid who’d taught English to Osama bin Laden. (We had the mujahid’s photograph on file, it’d been taken from a drone, we calculated his height from the time of day and the length of his shadow.) “If you’re on scene, you can begin interrogatin’ him from the get-go while he’s still disoriented,” Jack said. “If you elicit real-time information on the whereabouts of our friend Osama, radio it on in. I’ll have another team geared up and airborne in minutes.”

The Delta-Foxtrot people had a reputation for being pit bulls—the standing joke held that they could traverse more terrain on foot in a day than run-of-the-mill soldiers could cover in a jeep. Like most exaggerations, it contained a kernel of truth. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with them and told Jack as much. “You’re goin’ to seed sittin’ ’round these television screens,” he said. “God damn, Lemuel, put on your seven-league hiking boots if you need to but I want your ass out there.”

If you’ve never used night-vision goggles, don’t. The feeling of being trapped underwater is so intense you find yourself gasping for air when you first put them on. Two helicopters, flying without lights, deposited us on a flat two ridges downwind from the target, so we had a bit of a slog between us and the village. We scrambled up and down gullies, point gunmen out

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