The Hard Road

Chapter 33

-/-/-/-/-/-

All the Americans who knew Pashto had been wounded and were now in a medical transport helicopter, leaving Draco as the only one there who spoke the language. As the days progressed, he inevitably found himself in the same situation as before. The current warlord and local political leaders were allied with the Pakistanis, just not the ones the Taliban had been allied with. The Legion was acting as temporary liaison until Tanner arrived and properly bribed everybody off. As soon as they did, The Americans zoomed off to destroy some other place, leaving an empty compound under the watchful eye of the local warlord.

That afternoon, transport helicopters rumbled in with fresh orders to resume their primary mission of bribing off as many Iranian allied warlords as possible. Their arrival back on the border region found the locals extremely welcoming and polite. Even former Taliban sympathizers were careful to toe the line. Apparently, word had spread about their moonlight fueled missions. That was a major win, as his main objective was to quickly reestablish peaceful and orderly Afghan civil society which was sympathetic to the American war effort, but didn't need, or particularly even want their intervention.

Two weeks passed and he had become a master at shirking any sort of responsibility for meddling in old grudges, grazing disputes, blood feuds, betrothal squabbles, or routine mischief. He even pawned off all the greed and envy driven "selling out" happening between locals who heard they could earn a payout from The Americans. Draco dumped vetting concerns back into he hands of the local tribal elders, and only accepted someone for questioning if it came with the official assent of their council. It was a technique he learned from Voldemort himself - punish those who insist on wasting your time or are trying to profit off of their own jealousies.

Draco had never particularly concerned himself with Muggle culture or society, but greed surely surpassed cultural barriers. His men considered the place hide bound and mired in the past, but muggle culture didn't particularly interest him either way. Their problems were their problems. "Fixing" whatever it was that outsiders thought was "wrong" was a fool's errand for the same reason Granger never received anything but scorn for her endless windmill charging. As long as he had a say, Draco Malfoy would be leaving well enough alone.

Not long after, Kourosh was back with another "Friend" from the border region south of them. The word was that The Americans had their sights set on the Taliban encampment in the man's town, and they would very much like The Legion to get there first. Nobody in the place, except the Taliban outsiders wanted their whole city turned upside down and washed by a flood of American napalm.

The night was bright, with the three-quarter moon spread low across November's empty cotton and sunflower fields. Half a dozen horses waited with their riders on one side of the road while a silver Toyota SUV sat on the other. His men skirted the ditch around the hill behind them while Draco and two of his sergeants approached. The horsemen met them first. It was the local militia leader. Draco quirked his eyebrows and motioned at the truck. The man huffed out a laugh. "The full moon is four days away. He wants to make a deal."

The Americans weren't having much success turning Taliban leaders, mostly because they were so intent on killing them all. They were chomping at the bit for every one he could bring in, but he wasn't about to tell the man that. Draco sucked through his teeth, and said, "My men are getting restless. They want a change after a month of eating goats."

"He heard about Herat. He would sell his own mother to get out of here. I'm sure he would give you somebody good."

Draco blew out a bored sigh, and said, "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to hear what he has to say."

The man waved at the truck. Two men got out and ambled over, then invited him and his men to his house for dinner.

Inside the walled yard was a whole cow cooking over a bed of coals. The beast was split in half and trussed to a giant frame. The fat dripped and sizzled, filling the neighborhood with the rich scent of roast beef. Pots of potatoes, heaps of bread, bowls of sauces, and vegetables were spread across a long serving table. Four wide tables sat ready with plates, cups, and silverware. The men carefully smelled for even the slightest hint of poison or tainted food, but everything was fresh and good. The man welcomed them, but Kourosh's friend was right. He wanted to be gone. There was a rumor going around about The Legion sending an actual war criminal and murderer fresh out of maximum security prison into the war. Everyone decided that this was the sort of foolish rumor mongering the CIA was famous for. Like they always do, the leaders in Herat double crossed him. Suddenly, a pack of werewolves ravaged the government positions and hunted the Taliban like animals, killing every single one to the last man, and eating them.

Draco simply smiled, complimented the man for his hospitality, and said that the rumors were false.

There had simply been too many to eat them all.

The man stared for a minute, then slapped the table and burst out laughing.

-/-/-/-

The next morning brought transfer of the town's base command followed by the local political control. Draco and his men escorted three Taliban leaders on the long voyage back to Uzbekistan. Tanner met up with them in a small hamlet halfway there, and stayed in the leader's truck the rest of the way back.

As if it was some sort of early Christmas, the man also dumped a pile of administrative paperwork into Draco's lap. He spent the next two days bouncing along in a military truck while he reviewed and signed off on a month's worth of equipment requests, orders for supplies, troop transfers, and combat pay authorizations. Oliviera quirked a brown eyebrow, and huffed out a laugh. "Why in the hell would the Americans allow a French officer to sign off on their own paperwork?"

Draco shrugged, and then drawled, "Dawn of a bright, new era of Military Cooperation. You know, the whole brotherhood of man."

Oliviera snorted tea all over the seat. He slapped his knee as the laughter rolled out. "Oh, I'm sure the Americans will be happy once they find out."

The master sergeant shifted gears. "Rumor is, there hasn't been a viable plan to follow up the first invasion since we left. We're the only group that's made any progress."

Draco nodded. The Legion had secured the entire Afghan border region from Iran to Turkmenistan, while The Americans were still mostly stuck in two cities by Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Of course, the reason was clear enough. The Americans wanted to fight, and the one thing you could count on from Afghanistan was the willingness to fight anybody and everybody, friend or foe.

Oliviera continued. "They probably need a war criminal to get things back on track."

"I would have thought they had plenty of their own."

Oliviera chuffed out a gruff laugh. "You haven't dealt with The Americans much, have you?"

The once sleepy backwater base was now wrapped in miles of shiny razor wire and bristling with troops. Cargo airplanes and helicopters flew in and out, one after another while bulldozers and construction equipment zipped between them to make repairs. Three of the helicopter pads were brand new, while the fourth was completely blocked off while machines demolished all the old, rotten concrete and replaced it with new.

One row of metal airplane hangers was completely repainted while a crew blasted rust and peeling paint off of the second on the opposite side. Teams of men in white chemical suits tested and roped off areas behind the old work shops. Apparently, the soil was contaminated with all manner of hazardous muggle nasties like fuel and cleaning fluids as well as chemical and nuclear weapon residue.

Inside the combination headquarters and air control building, fresh paint and polished tile lined the place. The rickety cabinets had been replaced with new and were now full of American military memorabilia. Best of all, though, the brass soviet hammer and sickle emblem was still on the wall, but it now sported a hand written caption, in Russian, that read, "Busy passing the buck."

If they only knew...

It didn't take long and not only was he back doing all Tanner's paperwork, but he was also saddled with half a dozen watches and night recon duty with his men to sniff out some locals who were taking pot shots into the facility with mortars and rockets.

Now, though, the shoe was on the other foot, and he quickly passed the heaps of paperwork back to the senior American enlisted men who understood it and were actually responsible for it. They seemed a bit disappointed by how quickly he had caught on to the game.

The main problem they were having was simply coordinating the efforts of troops reporting through seventy-one different American commands. Draco kicked off six-AM staff meetings, of which Tanner attended the first ten minutes of the very first one. Everybody had to get on the same page and align the efforts. Each one of the senior enlisted men was responsible for presenting anything which needed cooperation. The first meeting took all the way till lunch. The runway repair fellows were fighting the flight controllers, who were fighting the refueling and maintenance crews, who were fighting the security watches, who were at loggerheads with all the special forces guys. And everybody was fighting over the mess hall and bathroom.

They had one common goal and one mission that had started with thousands of Americans dead when airplanes smashed through buildings barely two months prior. Each one was driving hard to meet deadlines and solve giant problems. Every one of them wanted progress in the same direction. Everything went up on the big chalk boards in the biggest classroom, and they started working together to sort the whole mess out.

The next day's meeting took two hours, and the third, only one as the giant gears of the world's largest military meshed. In the mean time, everybody got more work done, and the gordian knot in the sky above untangled.

The big invasion was presumably lurking just over the horizon, and it was destined for failure. If it took seventy-one different commands to run three hundred special forces troops, close air support, and the two thousand support personnel who kept the wheels turning, what would it take to put ten thousand on the ground? The only reason they got anything done now was seasoned, hard nosed master sergeants forcing cooperation all the way around. It didn't take a genius to realize that they would do a lot better if they pared the command infrastructure down to ten percent of what they had. The problem was that each group came from a different base in a different American state, and each one wanted their share in the war.

He was talking it over with Oliviera and and a lanky Rangers master sergeant when another American ambled in. The man was short and squarish, with a shiny bald head and a face that was lined and leathery. His English had a twangy drawl that reminded him of a mixture of Welsh and Irish. Unlike the Ranger, who used familiar Army jargon, this man spoke Navy. Like the others, he was grousing about too many moving pieces in the command to get anything done, but then came the surprise... "You know, we ought quit with all this pissing 'round and roll in my boys. One carrier group could drop five thousand grunts with humvee's, air support, refueling and SeaBees, everything. I could have them on the ground, soup to nuts, by next Tuesday."

The ranger clapped him on the shoulder. "Shit, Sam, you make it sound like The Marines are the best thing since sliced bread. You know the hundred and first could drop in and take anything in half the time, and the big red one would hold it."

"Ok, where? You got no fuel. You got no food. You're talking about activating and deploying two-dozen reserve batallions out of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, while the Air Force flies gas in from Missouri, Texas, and Michigan. Oh, and where are you going to get the combat engineers? A half-dozen more reserve battalions. I'll see you back here in two and a half years..."

"Ah, hell, We'll both be retired before they get their shit together."

The men traded banter and insults at each other and their respective branches while going over plans for the next towns to be brought into the fold, but Draco's mind zoomed forward. This was the one aspect that would be critical when moving out of relatively friendly areas to the next phase of the invasion, but he had no time to think about it. Nightfall was barely an hour away, and they had an assignment to root out unfriendlies taking pot shots at the base.

Moonrise came, bright as noonday over the dirt colored forward air base. Draco and his men hit the fence line at full gait, bounced once, and bounded right over without missing a single step. Searchlights flared and washed over the brown scrub on the town side, but they were already gone. They fanned out, keeping in pairs, sweeping the area, and sniffing out anything that didn't belong. Draco and two of his sergeants circled the base, throwing up some hasty tracing wards.

It didn't take long before two sets of headlights betrayed a pair of rickety, nineteen-eighties Nissan pickup trucks. They rattled down the long highway and veered off on the dirt far road south of the base. A long cloud of dust followed them as they bounced and fish tailed their way around to the east side opposite the main buildings. From their parking spot on the shoulder by the end of a field full of cotton stubble, they had a clear view of the control tower.

A quick radio check revealed that nobody else had seen anything, so the Draco and two others slinked from ditch to ditch and scurried through the field behind the men to take up a position perhaps ten meters away. They waited while the men milled around, argued in Arabic about ranges, and noted the guard movements. A cigarette lighter flared, followed by the fiery cherry embers and the acrid stink of cheap tobacco. The driver told the passenger that he was an idiot, but the passenger laughed and said nobody was even paying attention.

Seconds crept like hours as the men bickered, glassed the watch towers with binoculars, and finished their cigarettes. Soon, a worn Ak-47 military rifle followed one man out while the second hefted the round tube and oblong steel base of a mortar out of the bed. They clumped it down and fiddled with the elevation adjustment a bit before they took up positions. The first man lugged a shell off of the floorboards while the second shouldered his automatic rifle.

Draco's petrificus plowed deep into the men's chests. Magic crackled over them, locking their bodies in place. Streamers of drool leaked off his sergeant's silver jaws as the werewolf sniffed around the frozen men. The best part was knowing they saw the whole thing, the beast circling, sniffing, licking, tasting, while they were utterly stuck and unable to do anything. Next came the occulemency, boring deep into their thoughts, searching for faces, names, and networks. Last, the imperius. The glassy eyed men got into their trucks and bounced off, down the highway with Draco and two of his were-sergeants hanging back in a rusty, old farm truck they pinched outside a nearby barn.

Kilometers of pot-holed asphalt peeled away to the excruciatingly loud whine of the gearbox as they followed the highway west along the single swath of green winding through miles of brown, the rocky Kashkadarya river. Bald tires thumped and groaned as they passed half a dozen small hamlets of tightly clustered houses and walled farms built right on the side of the highway. Not a single light clicked on when the sergeant let off the gas and the truck farted out an endless stream of crackling backfires. His men were only worried about running their shitbox out of diesel as they chugged along. Luckily, the rusted heap with a single flickering headlight wobbling to and fro was completely invisible to the local population.

A few flickering lights marked a larger town ahead. Soon, brown scrub turned into endless rows of walled houses topped with red or rusty metal roofs and a few trees peeking above cement block. Scruffy shrubbery and parked cars revealed humanity. The men turned past an unlit gas station and down a dirt road full of the same houses. Three more turns brought them to a beige concrete wall sheeted with a scraggly mass of thorns and leaves of an old rose. Now was the time. Draco checked his charms and sent his captives to the entrance.

A single sliver of light escaped as the door banged it's chain. The men whispered their code and it closed, clicked, and barely started moving again when they burst in.

Four men had guns, but they were laying haphazardly across legs and in laps. They had been watching a football match until Draco and his werewolves tore the door man in half. The men's brown skin went ashen and their mouths dropped open. One bolted for the window while a second jumped up and swung his gun around, but it was too late. His sergeant batted it down like a toy and raked his claws straight down, peeling the man's chest open.

The whole ordeal only took a couple of seconds from kicking through the door till they had men laying face down on the floor. Draco absently nibbled until the larger of his sergeants huffed out a laugh. "It's a good thing you're already a war criminal."

"Why?"

The man waved at him. Somehow, in the fight, he had forgotten about tearing a man's arm off and was now crunching through the shoulder. He shrugged. "You want some?"

The werewolf nodded, so he twisted the forearm apart at the joint like a chicken wing and passed it over. One of the men on the floor shrieked and started screaming about werewolves eating his friend. Draco knelt and waved the stump at him, and drawled the words in crisp Arabic, "My men are hungry, would you prefer to be dinner?"

The man shook his head. Draco tapped a finger into the man's forehead, leaving it pocked with bloody fingerprints. "Then. Quit. Your. Damned. Yelling."

A quick interrogation revealed that their weapons cache was at a farm a few kilometers away.

Guns, a good fight, and running with the boys on the full moon brightened every fiber of his being. The only thing that could have made the night better was Natalia and her epic breasts. Once the thought entered his mind, he couldn't shake the way her scent dogged him.

Luckily, the "farm" wasn't far away, or the prisoners might have made for an early dinner. Like the house in town, they quickly scouted it. Sentries made quick meals, and the ten remaining men barely put up a fight. Inside the barns, though, was a smuggler's dream come true. Stacks of crates lined the floor, and they were full of old Soviet arms and ammunition. There were tank shells, mortar and rifle rounds, field artillery shells, as well as whole forklift pallets full of guns and single shot rocket propelled grenades. While the mountains of money flowing through Tanner were fine and good, this was the one thing the Americans still hadn't managed to get ahold of. It was exactly what he needed to secure the loyalty of his local warlords.

The Americans weren't getting it. They would probably just blow the whole thing up just to watch it burn while his local allies tried to fight off enemy using tanks devoid of ammunition. This was a perfect opportunity to commandeer it under the auspices of the French military. If Tanner had any problems with that, he could take it up with the Coalition Liaison.