Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton Page A

If the bad guys catch you across the border, they will use it to hit this place.”
    He seems most curious to know how I got here without getting attacked. “Did you see those antennas on all four corners of that pickup truck? Those are jammers. People around here bury antitank mines and then detonate them with cell phones or car-alarm-detonated triggers. They hire kids to sit at the side of the road and wait for Americans. They tried to kill Musharraf yesterday, and his jamming system was the only thing that saved him. Delta can’t figure how you got here in one piece. I am sure they are looking you up right now.” He smiles, then walks off.
    I head down to the main firebase. The once-friendly Afghan commander, Shah Alam, quickly approaches me with a tone of near-panic in his voice. “You came here to take pictures,” he says. “You have enough pictures, now please go.” He obviously has orders to get me off this hill and going in the opposite direction of Miram Shah. In a typical Afghan gesture, he then asks me to join them for lunch before leaving.
    The Contractor reappears as I am packing up to leave and inquires about my destination. I tell him I have been staying near Gardez with a man I call Haji, whom I had met a week earlier at a gathering of tribal elders. Haji is well known from his days as a mujahideen commander, and before that, a cross-border trucking czar, a former drug smuggler, and a supporter of the Taliban, back when they were better known for crushing warlords than supporting al-Qaeda. He has now retired but remains a man who can be called upon to resolve critical problems and defend the weak. Without hesitation, he had invited me to stay at his home for a week, on the condition that I not reveal its exact location or his full name. With no fear of overextending the elder’s endless hospitality, I invite the Contractor to join me at Haji’s.
    The opportunity to go through Taliban territory with a stranger obviously intrigues him. He is supposed to be heading back to Khost for some R & R, so the idea of taking a taxi instead of going in an OGA convoy has a bizarre appeal. He gets his battered mountaineering backpack and tosses it into the ancient white-and-yellow taxi. We start out on the drive, but first I insist we stop at a small market a few miles from the base. Sixty dollars turns my new American friend into a rough facsimile of a bearded farmer, complete with wool hat, waistcoats, and light blue salwar kameez tunic. Satisfied we both look like idiots—but Afghan-looking idiots—we take off.
    Despite his initial bluster, he is not used to being so exposed, so out in the open. As we come up on checkpoints, he drills me on how to evacuate the car from the same side, how to keep a pistol under my leg, and how the windshield will deflect rounds. As we head into the series of switchbacks that mark the start of the mountains, the Contractor starts to loosen up. We have a long time to talk on the ride, bouncing and rattling down the potholed dirt roads. He agrees to answer some questions about his work on the condition that I not reveal anything that might harm his mission and that neither he nor his home base be identified. I agree. His story fascinates me as I type it into my pocket computer.
    â€œWhat you were looking at was part of TF-11—‘JAYSOTUF,’ or Joint Special Operations Task Force [JSOTF]. There were some REMFs in there on a dog and pony, but the team also has a couple of shooters, usually three or four Delta, a vanilla twelve-man SF team, an Air Force CAST, a case officer, an OGA element, and about thirty or forty Afghans for weight. They are the tip of the spear out here—the hunter-killers in this part of the woods.
    â€œI am a contractor. The CIA has been using civilian contractors for decades—guys who are neither officially military, government, or intel. They started in Vietnam. They needed a deniable