Free The Secret Soldier by Alex Berenson Page B

said. “I sell people a good time. Nothing more or less. Pot, coke, they’re just like booze. Safer, probably. I don’t force my stuff on anybody, and I don’t hurt anybody. Unlike you.”
    Wells didn’t argue, just slapped the duct tape back on Ridge’s mouth. Though maybe the guy had a point. In his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Wells had seen a dozen men executed for dealing or using drugs. Mostly heroin, occasionally hashish. The youngest was a boy, no more than fourteen, only the slightest peach fuzz on his chin. He’d been caught smoking heroin by the Talib religious police. His family lacked the money to buy his freedom or his life.
    The incident had happened a decade ago, but it was etched into Wells’s mind as deeply as the first man he’d killed. The central square in Ghazni, a town southwest of Kabul. The boy’s father waited silently as the Talibs tied the boy to a wooden stake, pulling his arms tight to his body. Hundreds of men waited in a loose cluster. Wells stood on the fringes. The binding seemed to last hours, though it couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. The kid didn’t say a word. Maybe he was still high. Wells hoped so.
    He wanted to step in, raise a hand to stop the slaughter. The penalty might be legal under sharia, Muslim law, but Wells couldn’t believe that Allah or the Prophet would smile on this scene. But he stayed silent. He had spent years building his bonafides with the men around him, even fighting beside them in Chechnya, an ugly, brutal war where both sides committed atrocities every day. He couldn’t risk his mission to save a heroin addict. And he’d be ignored in any case. He held his tongue.
    The Talibs finished their binding. The leader of the religious police, a fat man with a beard that jutted off his chin, spoke to the boy too quietly for Wells to hear. A pickup truck drove up. The fat Talib opened the liftgate and stood aside as dozens of stones, baseballsized and larger, rolled out.
    The crowd moved forward, men pushing at one another, reaching down to grab the rocks. Wells had a vision of the last time he’d been bowling, in Missoula with friends on his sixteenth birthday, picking up a ball and squaring to toss it.
    Finally the boy seemed to understand what was happening. He pulled at the stake, but it held him fast. “Father, please,” he said. “Please, father. I won’t do it again. I promise—”
    The big Talib raised his arm and fired a long, flat stone at the boy, catching him in the side of the head. The boy screamed, and suddenly it seemed as if the air was full of rocks. The screaming grew louder, and then ended as a softball-sized stone smashed open the boy’s skull. His face went slack, and he collapsed against the stake.
    That was the Taliban policy on drugs. Zero tolerance. Yet heroin and hashish were everywhere. Men staggered glassy-eyed through Kabul, their mouths open, smiling to themselves even on the coldest days of winter. Once, in a hailstorm on the Shamali plain, north of Kabul, Wells had stepped inside an abandoned hut for shelter and found a half-dozen men huddled in a semicircle around a low flame, cooking a fat ball of opium. They turned and growled at him like hyenas at a kill. He raised his hands and backed away. Even at the time he’d thought, If the death penalty doesn’t stop this stuff, what will?
     
     
    NOW HE LOOKED DOWN to Ridge, who was pale, eyes closed, an unhealthy shine on his cheeks. “Ridge.”
    “What now?”
    “You want out, I’ll get you home. Get-out-of-jail-free card. No DEA or anything.”
    “You can do that?”
    Wells nodded.
    “Man,” Ridge said for the second time. “Who are you?”
    “I have friends.”
    “The original original gangster.”
    “You want it or not?”
    “Maybe.” He looked Wells over. “What, I’m supposed to say thanks? After you kidnapped me, bashed my head in? You’re a real humanitarian.” Ridge closed his eyes. Wells decided to do the