All the Ways We Kill and Die by Brian Castner
Author:Brian Castner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-01-18T16:00:00+00:00
PART IV
HUNT AND KILL
“Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”
—General George Washington, 1776
11 ♦ THE BLACK HOLE
IN A REMOTE PORTION OF Afghanistan north of Kabul, where the mountains ease to hills and the hills to lush irrigated fields covering a broad valley, in a tiny village set among the silty channels of the Kunduz River, a pair of Blackhawk helicopters landed near a walled compound and, against odds, a tall thin young woman from West Virginia named Sarah Soliman got out.
A helmet and body armor hung loosely about her, but beneath she wore a stylish button-down and smart business slacks. She claimed no uniform, carried no gun, lacked all the tactical accoutrements the modern soldier found fashionable, and her distinctive long red hair, so bright and authentic one startled upon first glimpse, was sensibly tied back against the rotor wash. With the confidence of a frequent flier she hopped from the side of the bird, one chunky heel on the ground at a time, and with long steps crossed the LZ of dried mud to where a man from the local ODA team was waiting for her.
He was all contrast: unwashed, M4, baggy camo pants, boots, beard. In a spotter’s scope they would make quite a matched pair. They greeted each other with comfortable familiarity and hand gestures, few words being possible under the buffet of the blades. At his feet sat six small clear bags filled with blackened junk. He pointed at the bags, hefted one, indicated a white paper report inside each, helped her carry the parcels back to the helicopter, and loaded them on the center jump seat where they would not be lost. The woman reboarded. The man turned his back and returned to his rack in the compound.
The helos never turned off their engines. In a minute they were off, six bags of IED evidence, six bags of hard-core forensics, six bags of pressure plates and fingerprints and distinctive wire snips and hairs, permanently sequestered from the conventional reporting channels and hand-delivered to the central depths of one of the fiercest black holes in Afghanistan.
WHEN SOLIMAN ARRIVED back at Bagram, she delivered the six bags to Zac Crush at SOCOM’s IED exploitation fusion cell. Though they worked for the main SOCOM (Special Operations Command) task force in Afghanistan—in the J2, the intelligence hub for activities as varied as hunter-killer takedowns and local police training—Soliman and Crush were not EOD technicians or spooks or Special Forces. They weren’t even in the military. They were contractors. Soliman is a biometrics engineer. Crush is an intel analyst in Identity Operations, SOCOM’s term for figuring out who people are.
Biometrics is the science of measuring and cataloguing unique human signatures, and it is not a new idea. In the late nineteenth century, French police began tabulating the lengths of forearms and feet and jawlines. At the
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