Private L.A. (Private 6)

“We get it,” I replied. “Far as I’m concerned, you were some mirage I once hallucinated in Afghanistan.”

Del Rio nodded. “You’ve got our word.”

Carpenter sighed, slouched in the recliner, and for the next hour and a half, and on past sunrise, told us a story that we never would have believed if Del Rio and I hadn’t been in Afghanistan ourselves during the crazy times after the invasion, after Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora cave system, during the beginnings of the neo-Taliban counterinsurgency, long before the surge.

Carpenter said the fingerprints belonged to Clive Johnson, Master Sergeant Clive Johnson, who’d served in the Rangers and then with several Joint Special Operations Command teams, which drew elite warriors from all four branches of the military.

“It was early 2003, and the forces we’d committed to Afghanistan were being drawn down, sent to stage up in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq,” Carpenter said. “There was a lot of dissension in the ranks, especially among spec ops who’d been in country since November 2001, right from the beginning.”

I remembered. “They felt they were being undercut, forgotten.”

Carpenter nodded. “They were being given all sorts of conflicting signals regarding the rules of engagement, when you could shoot, who you could shoot, that kind of thing.”

Del Rio nodded. “All sorts of good men died because of that. Hell, that was still going on two years later when SEAL Team Ten turned into the lone survivor because they wouldn’t kill the kid who betrayed them to the Taliban.”

Carpenter nodded. “That was just the worst of it.”

But back in 2003, frustration among the special forces hit another, earlier high point. These elite soldiers were asking themselves whether they were in Afghanistan to fight and beat the Taliban, or merely to offer Al Qaeda easy access to walking, talking American targets. Indeed, those questions echoed high into the US chain of command in Kabul.

“An army general who shall remain nameless decided that enough was enough,” Carpenter said. “He decided on his own to detach a new secret JSOC team out of Kandahar. Their job was simple: to disrupt the trade in raw opium and black tar heroin that was funding the Taliban insurgency in the mountains along the Pakistani border. By any means necessary.”

“Johnson was a member of that JSOC team?” Del Rio asked.

“Handpicked by the marine recon commander the general chose to lead the secret team.”

Carpenter got a tablet computer from a backpack I hadn’t noticed and called up a grainy snapshot of a man in his early forties. The left side of his face was covered in scars, and he gave off the distinct impression that he could eat broken glass and like it.

“Meet Lee Cobb, one bad dude,” Carpenter said, looking old again. “He got the scars in the first Gulf War. Land mine. Shook it off, healed up, went right back at it. Remember when you took me on that night drop-off, spring of oh-four?”

“Snowstorm?” I asked. “Zabul province?”

“That’s the one,” Carpenter said. “West of Qalat.”

I remembered it. Brutal terrain. Hard-core Taliban country.

Thinking back on how stranger than normal Carpenter had seemed that night, I said, “You were going to meet up with Cobb and his team?”

“More like try to stop them before they committed any more atrocities,” Carpenter said in a hollow voice.

Chapter 99

FROM EARLY MARCH 2003 through April 2006, while the world’s attention was largely focused on the invasion of Iraq, the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the rise of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Cobb’s team ran ad hoc missions in some of the most dangerous country in Afghanistan.

“At first, Cobb and his men stuck to the general’s playbook,” Carpenter said. “They worked to break up networks developing between poppy growers and Taliban fighters demanding tribute from the heroin manufacturers. In return for security, the growers paid the Taliban, who used the cash to fund their war.”

“At first?” Del Rio said.

“At first,” Carpenter replied. “Spring of 2004, things slipped off the rails while Cobb and his men were on a mission north-west of Tarin Kot. The general had a heart attack and died, having destroyed virtually all records regarding the secret JSOC team. They were, shall we say, left to their own devices.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“They became a ghost team,” Carpenter said. “They didn’t exist. So they were never extracted. Left out there, in country.”

“Until you went in after them?” Del Rio asked.

“I was the third to try to bring them in,” Carpenter said.

He said that in the summer of 2004, US Defense intelligence began getting reports of a rogue unit operating in the rugged massif north of Kandahar. Cobb and his men were said to be turning the tables on the Taliban, demanding their own tribute from the poppy growers and executing anyone or anything suspected of supporting Al Qaeda and the insurgency.