The Shadow Patrol by Alex Berenson Read Free Book Online

Seven men. The tip of a sword that stretched halfway across the world. A hundred billion dollars a year to put them here, support them with drones and night-vision optics and ground-penetrating radar and every tool that the Pentagon’s procurement managers could imagine, the more expensive the better. Now they walked, as soldiers always had and always would. They turned northwest, walked on either side of the dry irrigation canal, eight feet wide and four feet deep. A gray hole in this gray land. Their footsteps left no trace on the hard ground. They walked slowly. They didn’t speak.
    Rodriguez put four guys on the left side, three on the right. Fowler was second on the left, twenty yards behind the point. He didn’t like the approach. Mud-brick walls dotted the fields around them, low and irregular, along with scrubby bare-branched trees. If they were walking into an ambush, the hostiles would have cover and a clear field of fire. But Rodriguez was gung ho as a rule, and the platoon hadn’t sniffed a firefight in months. Fowler thought Rodriguez was probably hoping to engage.
    They moved toward two shapeless clusters of huts, none more than ten feet high, protected by low walls. Donkeys and goats munched on garbage in a hand-built pen. No doubt everyone who lived here was related, a dozen families of kissing cousins.
    Fowler kept his eyes up, looking for movement on the roofs. If any hostiles were hiding here, the ambush would start before 1st Squad got too close. For the most part, the Talibs used simple guerrilla tactics. They blew bombs at a distance and opened up with their AKs, trying to get American soldiers to chase them into fields of IEDs.
    But the ambush didn’t come. The soldiers stepped closer, their boots scrabbling along the canal’s edge. On the left, one house had been painted bright blue. But sun and wind had bleached its paint until only a few snatches of color remained. All of Afghanistan felt drained of color to Fowler. Reduced to monochrome.
    Rodriguez raised his left hand. The centipede of soldiers stopped. Rodriguez squatted low. Fowler followed his eyes toward a piece of metal that looked like the top of a soup can. He was trying to decide whether he was looking at a mine or a piece of trash. Finally, Rodriguez poked at the metal with the tip of his M-4. It flipped away harmlessly and skittered into the canal. Rodriguez stood, twirled his finger:
Keep moving.
    Two Afghans walked out of the hut that had once been blue. Both wore the
shalwar kameez
,
the simple long tunic and pants that were standard for Afghan men. But one was wearing distinctly un-Afghan headgear, a black cowboy hat. “Halt,” Sergeant Kevin Roman, on point, shouted in English, lifting his M-4.
The two men stopped, raised their hands. The squad closed around them, forming a loose semicircle around themen.
    “Gentlemen,” Rodriguez said. “Why were you shooting?”
    The men looked blankly athim.
    “You have Taliban here?”
    “Taliban?
La,
la.
”
    “Anybody speakee the English?” Rodriguez said. “Come on.” He turned toward the huts, where little boys and girls peeked at them. “Anybody home?” Rodriguez shouted. The kids disappeared. Fowler caught movement from a hut maybe fifty yards ahead and swung his rifle to cover. A man in a blue
shalwar kameez
stepped out, his hands high. “Hello!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot! Everything is okay.”
    The man walked toward them. Waddled, really. He was heavy, with a wide, rolling gait. He reminded Fowler of an Afghan they’d seen a couple months ago at a checkpoint they’d run maybe thirty miles from here. But he didn’t seem to recognize them. Fowler stepped toward the guy, but Rodriguez shook his head. “I got this, Private.”
    “I feel like I’ve seen this guy before, Sergeant.”
    “Yeah, well, they look alike.” Rodriguez was right on that. The Pashtuns had dark brown skin and brown eyes and thick beards and big noses and hands and feet. When the guy got