Operation Dark Heart by Anthony Shaffer

had been a wild trip into Kabul from Bagram. Along the patched blacktop of the “new” Russian Road as it was called—one sorry excuse for a roadway that was barely two lanes wide—we roared into Kabul in a Toyota 4 × 4 at up to 100 miles per hour, airborne over the many bumps and bouncing over the potholes as we passed other U.S. and ISAF convoys of heavy military vehicles. Because we were in a soft-skinned vehicle, we were more vulnerable to grenades, RPGs, and IEDs than they were, and so we had to build survivability into our movements with speed and maneuverability.
    To make ourselves an even tougher target, our driver, Sgt. Julie Tate, zigzagged down the road. She passed vans packed with people (some of whom were even hanging off the sides and clinging to the top), camels loaded down with all the worldly possessions of the nomadic tribes that roamed the Afghan mountains, military convoys, bicycles, herds of sheep—you name it. Shouting over the loud music she was playing and the road noise, she told me to watch for newly patched pavement—a sign of a possible IED. We also had to stay off the shoulders. There was a danger of IEDs, of course, but also, farmers often picked up unexploded ordnance from their fields (they were skilled at it), such as land mines left over from the Soviet occupation and unexploded cluster bombs from the Soviets and the Americans, and dropped them by the sides of the road. There, a fully loaded vehicle, like ours, could set them off.
    “Don’t worry, sir,” Julie yelled. “I won’t let you die.”
    I looked at her as we weaved down the road, the landscape flashing past. “Oh, that is very reassuring.”
    Much of the terrain between Bagram and Kabul was barren desert, a valley with a few settlements and compounds along the way. I could also see the occasional smoke-belching brick factory. Parts of it reminded me of Arizona: small rises, dry river beds, all manner of shallow ravines between the soaring mountain ranges. Brackish dust devils, tall as tornadoes, slowly waltzed across the valley in front of the far range of mountains. Harsh country, I thought, but with a subtle beauty.
    The Russians had built the road in the 1980s after they got tired of getting blown up going through the villages connecting Bagram to Kabul to the east. The older route to the east was still open. It was shorter, but even more dangerous than this one.
    We sped by Afghan army checkpoints—forlorn cement buildings in the middle of nowhere with the Afghan flag flying and a bed outside. Sometimes the road had speed bumps in front of the checkpoints, which we sailed over. Later, when I commanded convoys, I always told my drivers that if they didn’t get airborne during the trip to and from Kabul, then they weren’t driving fast enough.
    As the landscape got more desolate, the foot traffic thinned out, but we occasionally saw people walking along the shoulder. Out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. God knows how they didn’t get blown up by landmines. Maybe they did and we just hadn’t seen it.
    Dave had approached me the day I had arrived about conducting convoys with ***** ******* ************** an Army unit that does intelligence collection to support ***** ********* ****** mission. I used to work next to the chief of ***** ** ****** before I came to Afghanistan, so I was familiar with ******* operations. Its people go out and collect intelligence that isn’t available through ******** ********* means, **** *********** ********* ****** ***** ******* *** ** *** You can only get so much from far-off technical devices and if you need to be closer in to get information, you also need people—to take photographs, for example, ** ** ***** *********************** ******* *** **** ******** ****. That’s what ***** ***** ** **** in close. As far as I was concerned, they were the unsung heroes of the intelligence community. Small in number, but creative and adaptive. In Bagram, ***** only had a few people—at