Victory Point - Ed Darack [48]
“Calm down, Bobby. I know. He’s an azz-hole,” Turner carefully enunciated. “But just give me the facts. This is important.”
“Right. My sorries.” Bobby then continued, “Shah and his three brothers, Muhummad Azam, Ruhola Amin, and Palawan, all sell opium and have illegal weapons throughout the area, and that supports Ahmad Shah’s fightings. And the people around here don’t like him, especially for murdering the man for his wife.”
“Bobby, ask L.C. where Shah is actually from, any other names he uses, and where he operates.”
“Right, sir.” The normally soft-spoken interpreter jumped back into the Pashto intel dump with L.C. “He is from the Dara-I-Nur, north of here, this means ‘the Valley of Light.’ This is the area that was the Kafirs’, but now enlightened. His full name is Ahmad Shah Dara-I-Nur, Ahmad Shah of the Valley of the Enlightened Ones.”
“Wow.” Turner shook his head, “Is he a Nuristani?” Westerfield’s gonna flip when he hears all this, he thought.
“No, not from Nuristan itself, but almost Nuristan. He looks Nuristani. Thin, light-colored eyes, and has an orange beard. He is midthirties-years-old. He speaks in the Pashto, the Dari, and the Pashai—he is a Pashai. He is the only person in this entire area to have really supported the Taliban. He is such an angry man, that is why. He went to seek Mullah Omar, and he fought for the Taliban, and then also the al-Qaeda.”
“And where does he do his attacks, his ambushes,” the second lieutenant asked, inciting a further spate of L.C.’s hand gesturing and pointing, speaking so fast that Turner, who knew a little Pashto, couldn’t pick out a single word.
“The Korangal. High in the Korangal, he has people up there who protect him, they hide weapons and supplies for him up there. It is the village of Chichal mostly, but also the lower village of Korangal, far up the valley. They are Pashai, too, and he pays them. He ambushes the Marines in the Korangal, and he sets off IEDs on the Pech Road against the Marines and the police. From the top of the Sawtalo Sar mountain he can see everything. He has a small team of about ten to twenty men with him who he directs during ambushes, using the ICOMs for communication, as he is often not part of the actual attack—but sometimes he is, and he always carries a PK machine gun. He also has phones, the Roshan cellular for when he is in the cities and the Thuraya satellite for when he is in the Korangal and on Sawtalo Sar, to talk to his contacts in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
“Pakistan? Does he ever go into Pakistan, and if so, where?” Turner leaned in, sipping tea with his left hand as he shook out his right from all the note taking.
“The Shamshatoo camp. By Peshawar. He lives there much of the time when he is not out here.”
“Bobby, has L.C. ever told this to anyone else from coalition forces?”
“No. He says that you are the first. And one more thing.” Bobby turned to listen to L.C. speak. “He says that Ahmad Shah is calling himself a Taliban commander, and intends to destroy the elections in September. He has hired people to watch the roads for him, build the remote bombs, and bring in rockets and mortars and guns and RPGs. He is very hungry for the power. He wants many people for his army, but he only has ten