Private L.A. Read online

  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.

  “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.

  “Ready, gentlemen?”

  They nodded. He glanced at the clock: 9:40 a.m.

  “Our time is now,” Cobb said. “Send it, Mr. Watson.”

  Chapter 101

  “AND WE’RE SUPPOSED to believe the secondhand word of one man, some CIA spook we can’t interrogate for ourselves?” cried Sheriff Cammarata after I explained to the mayor, Chief Fescoe, and Special Agent Christine Townsend who was behind the No Prisoners murder and extortion scheme.

  “You can believe what you want,” I snapped. “But those prints belong to Johnson. And I believe Cobb and the rest of his team are going to be on the receiving end of ten million dollars in about ten minutes or so, whenever you get the text, Your Honor.”

  “Show them the picture,” Mo-bot urged.

  Mo-bot stood in the background with several middle-aged women who, by their attire, looked more prepared for a yoga retreat than an extortion payoff.

  I nodded, smiled at the ladies from Cal Poly, as Mo-bot had been referring to them, and then typed in a command on a laptop.

  On the screen at the end of the conference room, up popped a grainy picture shot on a foggy spring day in the Afghan highlands. A group of battle-hardened men stood in the melting snow.

  “That’s them,” I said. “Cobb’s far left, then Clive Johnson, Peter Kelleher, Jesus Hernandez, Denton Nickerson, and Albert Watson, who our source says is something of a genius when it comes to weapons and computers.”

  Everyone in the room studied the picture. Cobb and his men looked either stoic or harshly amused. You’d never know they’d committed atrocities and enriched themselves in the months before Carpenter took the photograph.

  “This is what time frame?” Mayor Wills asked.

  “April 2005, Your Honor,” I said. “They’ll look quite a bit older now.”

  “But what do we do with this?” Cammarata demanded. “Can we put it out there when we have no way of corroborating that this is real, that these men are the ones doing the killing?”

  “I see what you’re saying, Sheriff,” I said. “But we’re not getting any other files on these men. Other than burial records in their hometowns, they’re gone.”

  “How did they survive?” Fescoe asked. “How did they get here?”

  “We talked about that,” I said. “Our source’s theory is that they walked out of Afghanistan along the same trails the Taliban used to bring in supplies from Pakistan. Somehow they got to their stash of gold and black tar heroin, made their way to Peshawar or some other lawless place, and bought the necessary documents. Beyond that, we have no clue.”

  The mayor’s cell phone buzzed. She stiffened, looked at it, breathed hard, said, “We’ve got ten minutes, an account number, password, and routing code.”

  “Okay, ladies,” Mo-bot said. “You’re up.”

  Chapter 102

  DRS. ESTHER GOLDBERG, Lauren Hollings, and Katherine Clarkson—the ladies of Cal Poly—were all cutting-edge computer scientists. They went quickly to their laptops, gave them instructions, and within seconds the photograph of Cobb’s team disappeared and the screen split into thirds.

  The center third showed a secure website inside the California State Treasurer’s Office. The right third displayed the Google Earth macrosatellite view of the globe. The left third of the screen featured a live feed of the face of Carlton Watts, the current treasurer of the State of California.

  “Are we ready?” Watts asked.

  “We are, Carlton,” Mayor Wills said, handing Esther Goldberg her cell phone so she could read the codes and routing instructions.

  Goldberg quickly entered the information into the secure website, hit ENTER.

  A moment later, Watts nodded. “Request is here.” He hesitated, appearing worried. “You’re sure this tracking thingamajob will attach on the way out?”

  “As sure as I am that Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect,” Goldberg said coolly.

  “You tell ’em, girl,” Mo-bot muttered.

  “On your say, then,” Watts said. “I’m entering my password and the transfer authorization codes.”

  We heard the clacking of his keyboard, then the snap of a return.

  The center screen hesitated, jumped. Below the California State emblem, and along with an icon that looked like a slender green tube, the figure $10,000,000 appeared. The tube began to drain of green, and in less than three seconds it was gone. On the screen to the right, Google Earth zoomed in on California, showed a line from Sacramento to Los Angeles.

  “Got it,” said Lauren Hollings, staring at her screen. “File and metadata are moving through our tracking software. Ticks embedding. Almost ready to transfer onto that bank account.”

  “I’ve already got a jump on that, tracked it through the bank identification code on the SWIFT network,” said Katherine Clarkson. “The money’s heading to Banco Delta Asia Ltd in Macau.”

  “And there she goes,” said Goldberg.

  Up on the screen, Google Earth had retreated, showed the Pacific Rim, and another line speeding toward Macau. It was there in less than four seconds.

  Mayor Wills said, “Can we contact this bank?”

  “It’s not staying there,” said Goldberg. “They’re not that stupid.”

  Sure enough, fifteen seconds after the ten million arrived in Macau, two lines burst on the Google Earth map and began to arc away from each other.

  “Five million, five million,” Hollings said.

  The first five million landed in a bank in India; the second I couldn’t tell, but it looked near England.

  “The first is in the Bank of Rajasthan, New Delhi,” Clarkson announced. “Second in Conister Bank, Wigan, Isle of Man.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said Sheriff Cammarata. “It’s working.”

  “What did you expect?” Mo-bot asked with a slight sneer.

  Before Cammarata could reply, four lines burst from those locations, each heading out in one of the four cardinal directions. But when they had traveled only a short distance on Google Earth, they hesitated, stopped, blinked, and then disappeared.

  Chapter 103

  THERE WERE GASPS from the various law enforcement officials present.

  “Where’d it go?” Mayor Wills asked.

  “I don’t …” Goldberg began.

  “I knew it,” said Sheriff Cammarata, spitting the words like they were tobacco juice.

  People began to argue among themselves. State Treasurer Watts cried, “What’s going on down there?”

  “Your money’s gone bye-bye, Carlton!” the sheriff shouted.

  “It is not bye-bye!” Goldberg shouted emphatically. “They’re not stupid, they found the tick and stripped it.”

  “What?” Chief Fescoe said. “I thought—”

  “But the ladies from Cal Poly are smarter,” Mo-bot said. “Or actually, Dr. Hollings is smarter.”

  The youngest of the computer scientists beamed.

  “What are you talking about?” Cammarata demanded.

  “She thought of putting an easy-to-spot tick on the transfer, and another virtually impossible to spot,” Goldberg said with great satisfaction.

  Mo-bot poked me in the ribs with her index finger, whispered, “Told you they were good.”

  Hollings, meanwhile, had given her computer more instructions, and almost instantly the lines on the Google Earth screen ran on, dividing and moving, dividing and moving, until within no more than a minute the satellite view of Earth looked loosely strung in almost every direction. I was focusing on the dizzying complexity of the transfers, barely aware that the center third of the screen, the one still linked to the account within the California State Treasurer’s Office, was now blinking.

  “We’re out to sixty-four different accounts,” Goldberg announced. “And they appear to have stopped. We know where every dollar—”
r />   She stopped, stared up from her laptop screen toward the large one on the wall, her mouth gaping. “What’s going on?”

  The center screen showed one of those green tubes, then three, then ten. Beside each was the figure $15,000,000. They began to drain.

  “What’s happening?” I demanded.

  Mo-bot had lost all color. “Someone’s looting that account.”

  “What?” State Treasurer Watts yelled. On the live feed, he was frantically typing on his keyboard. “No. Goddammit! It won’t stop! What the fuck!”

  The tubes emptied. The screen blinked. The numbers went to zero.

  “Holy shit,” Goldberg said, her hands across her face.

  Watts looked like he’d been hit with a left hook.

  “How much did they get?” Mayor Wills asked in shock.

  Chapter 104

  “A HUNDRED AND fifty million!” Watson crowed, and slapped the table inside the garage in the City of Commerce.

  Cobb threw his hands in the air, then hugged Watson. Nickerson, Kelleher, and Hernandez were celebrating too, throwing high fives, doing little jigs of victory.

  “You are a goddamned genius, Mr. Watson!” Kelleher cried.

  “Thirty million apiece,” Nickerson laughed. “Thirty million untraceable.”

  “I’m seeing Venezuelan women on a beach,” Hernandez said, eyes closed, doing a slow dance.

  Watson beamed. “I’ll e-mail you the various accounts where your money will land.”

  “Gentlemen,” Cobb said. “Once again, I have to tell you what an honor it is to have served with you.”

  “Hoorah,” Nickerson said. “Hoo-fuckin’-rah.”

  Hernandez opened his eyes, stopped dancing, and said, “That mean we’re cool to go now?”

  “We still need to strip this place down, pack up,” Kelleher said.

  “We’re in no hurry,” Cobb said. “That money is far, far from here and they have absolutely no idea where we are, or who we are. We can be gone by eight, nine at the latest. In the meantime, anyone interested in lunch? I’m starving.”