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mink coats. I’m sure Afghans can sneak up on each other and we smell bad to them, or at least distinctive, but it’s not something I’ve ever discussed with one of them. This guy didn’t smell.
    After three days of trading fire, we had finally shoved the Taliban from Deshu and a jittery exhaustion settled over us. I was in the market, inviting a sandal maker to tea so he could tell us where the caches of rifles and ammunition were buried, when we were interrupted. I turned quickly to face the Afghan, who had his hands out to show he wasn’t armed. He spoke Dari with a strange accent, asking to speak to me privately. I checked with the sandal man for his reaction; he backed away. Something was wrong. I answered in Dari and we moved away from the market to a residential part oftown where there had been heavy fighting. No one lived there at that moment. The residents and the fighters were gone: fled or dead. The bodies had been cleared out, but the damage wouldn’t be repaired for a long time. I stayed a step behind him and kept my weapon ready. Nobody showed any signs of knowing him, so he wasn’t local, which might explain the strange accent. I kept speaking to him in Dari, trying to get a fix. He turned down a small lane. No one else was in sight. I hesitated, and he looked back and told me, in Dari, to stay close. I answered in English: “Where the hell are we going?”
    He answered in Dari, saying I should come along and he didn’t understand English.
    “Yes, you do,” I said. “You speak Dari with a Texas accent.”
    “Arkansas,” he said. He walked over to a house where the door was still intact and I followed him inside. I recognized the place because just two days before I had helped clear it. The residents opened the door, bags in hand. They didn’t want a fight and they didn’t want the place wrecked.
    He made tea by boiling the leaves rather than steeping them. That was fine in some parts of Afghanistan, but he didn’t have any sugar or hard candies to go with it so it was going to be really bitter. He was showing off his native skills for me; I just wanted to see his face when he tasted the stuff. We sat on the cushions in the main room. “I’m Captain Derek Ballard, Second Marines, First Brigade. I’ve been seconded to the Counterintelligence and Humint Center at the Defense Intelligence Agency. We were told you speak Dari and Pashto.”
    “I’m learning.”
    “Tough languages, but you’re going to have to learn fast.”
    Captain Ballard was an earnest, serious little guy who got right to the point. I found it difficult to trust him. The Afghans never acted that way and never trusted anyone who did. He acted as if he were telling you everything, which probably was not true, and if it were, he was in a lot of trouble anyway. Captain Ballard laid out the mission: our weapons were ending up in the hands of the Taliban; intelligence had determined that they were disappearing after entering the country via the overland caravans from Karachi; everything was checked through customs properly.
    Something was going wrong after that.
    The captain would go to Torkham, the entry point on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, posing as a broker wanting to purchase weapons; I was to go to Karachi and get hired to ride along in a truck as a security man and attempt to find suspects among the drivers and other security people.
    “Aren’t they all suspects?” I said.
    “We have a name. Nawaz Mazari.”
    “Who are we after, Captain?”
    Captain Ballard frowned and his neck moved forward to emphasize his seriousness. He wasn’t an Afghan trader or anything like one anymore. He was an angry officer. It didn’t take much to strip him down. “You will travel with the caravan and ingratiate yourself with people you think might be involved in stealing arms from our supplies. When you cross the border at Torkham, you will find me and introduce me to these people. You’ll attempt to broker a deal. My cover is