Private L.A. (Private 6)

“Men, women, children, dogs, horses,” Carpenter said quietly. “You name it, they killed it if their demands weren’t met.”

“So Cobb kind of went Colonel Kurtz?” I asked.

“You could say he found his own way to the heart of darkness,” Carpenter agreed. “You could also say that he led a thirteen-month reign of terror that quite frankly worked.”

“How so?” Del Rio asked.

“The Taliban lost ground or died out everywhere Cobb’s team went,” Carpenter replied. “Poppy growers paid up or died too. And there was ample evidence that Cobb and his men amassed a small fortune in gold and black tar heroin that they managed to stash across the border in Pakistan.”

By late fall of 2004, the evidence of a secret JSOC team was overwhelming. Two senior CIA Special Activities Division, or SAD, operators were sent in to convince Cobb to come out of the hills and report his activities.

“We lost contact with both men, and they were and are presumed dead,” Carpenter said. “You two flew me into their area when the snow started thawing in the spring of oh-five.”

That sounded right, and I nodded.

Carpenter said it took him two weeks to find Cobb’s team, but he did, living in a box canyon deep in the mountains. He delivered an ultimatum. Cobb and his men could continue their lawless activities, be branded renegades, hunted, captured, court-martialed, and sent to Leavenworth for execution.

“Or?” Del Rio asked.

“Or they could leave the mountains with me, quietly, without anyone knowing,” Carpenter said.

“And in return?”

Carpenter cleared his throat. “They got immunity for their actions.”

“They took the deal?” Del Rio asked.

Carpenter nodded. “You two had crashed in the meantime, so you weren’t the ones to extract us. I brought Cobb’s team back to Kabul, where they were debriefed about their activities. The intelligence officers were horrified by what they learned. But Cobb and his men had immunity and no legal action could be taken. Illegal action was something else again.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Carpenter pinched the bridge of his nose. “The way I heard it, secretly and at the highest levels of the US military and intelligence apparatus, a decision was made to punish Cobb’s team, to turn them into pariahs.”

“How?”

“By making them what they had become in Afghanistan, a team of savages that no longer existed,” Carpenter said. “Literally over the course of two days, the records of all six men were permanently expunged from all government databases. Their money was seized, their bank accounts erased. Their pensions were nullified and evaporated. All credit lines vanished as well. Their next of kin were notified of their deaths in combat, given generous bulk death payments and weighted coffins to bury.

“Then Cobb and his men were flown back into the mountains north of Kandahar and dumped, weaponless, deep inside Taliban-controlled country. Until you sent that set of fingerprints to me, Cobb, Johnson, and the others had not been heard from since. Everyone had assumed they were long dead.”

PART FIVE

IN COUNTRY

Chapter 100

“ARE WE READY, Mr. Watson?” Cobb asked. He was dressed in the olive-green uniform of the L.A. Standard Demolition Company.

“We are ready, Mr. Cobb.”

Watson sat hunched over the wireless keyboard, signed into an anonymous e-mail site based in Peshawar, Pakistan. On the right-hand side of the screen, a thin rectangular box overlaid the e-mail site. Six dozen codes were stacked in the box. Watson knew every one of them by heart.

Cobb believed he was about to witness a virtuoso performance on Watson’s part, the result of almost two years of work, two years of hacking his way into dozens of federal and state computer systems, learning how their digital security worked. For two years Watson had planned the route the ten million would take out into the financial ether, breaking into pieces, moving through bank accounts and on again, splitting and transferring a total of six dozen times.

Cobb allowed himself a rare smile, knowing that while the feeble law enforcement people chased the ten million they’d demanded, Watson would be going the other way on the digital stream, after a whole lot more.

He looked around at Nickerson, Hernandez, Kelleher, men

who’d walked with him out of a war zone unarmed, men who’d killed with their bare hands, men who were disciplined enough to think long term and long range.