It was not what he expected, but war seldom is what anyone expects.
The US military had tried to come up with something rather like flares for heat-seeking missiles, but dropping dozens of radio beacons with the broad range of radio transmissions and sufficient power to confuse the new shoulder launched rockets was incredibly expensive. Perhaps the contractors and military officials had lied, as was often the case when testing results with captured launchers. The military chose to use them for the first time defending the valley.
The beacons didn’t work, and the missiles were hideously effective in bringing down all but the most remote sensing aircraft far, far out of range. Helicopters were really easy shooting.
It’s not there were so many attacking forces, but more than the US could mass at that point, given too many had already been moved to the border with Iran. So with aircraft littering the battlefield, and a few coming down in the city itself, there was chaos.
But it was not chaotic in the same way in every place. Where Krumm had holed up, pretty much in the center of the enclave, the advancing Taliban simply didn’t show much interest. Krumm discerned, without being directly told, there was an understanding between the community leaders and the Taliban. Not friendship, but respect.
The Taliban agents in the community knew about the bunker, but if they knew about Krumm, nobody felt the need to act on it. So he sat in the bowels of the shopping district, resting quietly in the living quarters of the bike shop owner. He passed some of the time chatting with the old man through his daughter.
The old man seemed certain the Taliban would not be looking for Krumm. Aside from short-termed operational security, there really was nothing to hide. Their strategy was too obvious, and their movements were hardly secret. Unlike the tribal long-range guerrilla raids, the US military had seen this coming. But they ended up powerless to stop it. And Krumm was not a combatant, nor particularly sympathetic to any cause. He did his work and minded his own business, reaching out to the community around him. He never put himself in a position to know much.
Slowly it dawned on him any attempt to report what little he knew would hardly offer more than weak confirmation of what the US intelligence services already knew. A part of him suspected his contact was aware of this. So why the PGP key? Maybe it was just a way to make him feel comfortable. Still, what would he say that mattered?
Eventually he decided that in itself was what mattered.
All the business about strict operational security was baloney, when the Taliban had no trouble dropping that listening device into the bunker after it was swept, and was put into use. Krumm doubted they had really picked up anything not already known to them some other way. Maybe it was just there to shake things up and warn them? Was it all a game, some sort of theatrical production? For whose benefit?
Krumm had to stop all the spinning thoughts. He sat far into the night, for over a week, and tried to turn off his Western analytical logic. Instead, he just hummed or sang softly to himself, and gave his attention to things which really mattered to him. He had long ago come to the place where he was happy to die if it came upon him. In the long run, no matter what he knew, there was precious little he could do. Instead, he focused on the few things he knew were in his reach.
For the time being, the ruckus in the city had died down, as the sort of social controls typical of the Taliban were reasserted across the entire city. That made sense. The Taliban were not so hostile to foreigners as to Western decadence. Krumm found himself entirely sympathetic to that part. He was a stranger in the US more than he was here. While Islam as a religion was still useless to him, as a social milieu it made good sense. Of all the many places his computer work had taken him across the world, this was as close to biblical law as any place he had seen. Yes, sometimes entirely too strict, and often legalistic in a petty way. Yet, it was a valid effort to be just as God had revealed it, if erring to the side of excess.
That was it.
His co-workers symbolized as a whole everything wrong with Western culture. Shallow, hedonistic, willing to violate their own consciences for the sake of their skins, and he knew the soldiers tended to be worse. The Taliban weren’t fighting the Americans and allies; they were fighting what they saw as sin. They were the activists, the soldiers who pushed too hard and too far, and communities such as this one kept their own order as much to keep the Taliban at arm’s length as it was religion. They had no real debate about what was moral in itself, only how to keep things that way. Krumm confirmed it when he asked about the Morality Police — they had used their canes so seldom, it was almost a joke. It was more symbolic of their office than of their behavior.
Finally, he knew what he would write to the man whose name he still did not know, the military intelligence agent. He composed it carefully, thoughtfully, over a couple of days. Then he waited until night time when the broadband connections worked best. At around 2AM, he connected to his server in the US, and quickly sent a page of coded text.
He started with the situation as he knew it, describing the relations the community had with the Taliban. He referred briefly to the Taliban claims this whole thing was about Israel and oil, then opined it was essentially correct. The last paragraph was this:
In the long run, we cannot win. They aren’t interested in holding control in their hands, nor some kind of loyalty to their leaders, but to a law code they don’t pretend they own, but owns them. They are right, and we are wrong, and God is on their side, if only provisionally. We may well come up with a defense against the missiles, but it won’t matter. We are too corrupt, and cannot buy enough bodies to fill the gaps in all the places where some insane political process keeps demanding they fight. When our men are exhausted, their old men, women and children will carry on, because they defend something bigger than themselves. Sure, they have plenty of greed and petty hedonism in their population, but it’s not the same. Where the Taliban are strongest they are supported by the bulk of the people. They have nothing left to lose.
He concluded with a few words noting he had no idea what he would do next, because there was plenty to occupy him. Khan had stirred some interest in the mosque over Krumm. Again, not to convert him, but to pick his brain for an understanding they had never seen from Westerners.
It was almost another week before Krumm could get a working connection to his server. He quickly found the message he expected, and copied it to a plain text file, then downloaded it. The connection died again a short time later. He read the copy from his laptop:
You confirm my own thinking. Your message goes into my report, but I doubt more than a few will get it. I’m drawing close to my own exit lane, and you’ve helped me. Thanks. We might meet again.
Maybe, just for once, “military intelligence” was not its own oxymoron.
Thus ends the tale of Outrigger.
