by Jack Du Brul
“First off, I want to say thanks. I know it’s more money in your pockets, but Book said you all volunteered for this mission without really knowing the risks. And neither do I. With any luck it’ll be nothing more than a quiet day in the countryside with us back home in time for supper. On the other hand we could be heading into an area crawling with insurgents or drug smugglers. The satellite pictures I’ve seen only show an area of canyons and valleys that are so steep the bottoms are in shadow for all but an hour a day.” He looked to Sykes. “Have you gotten any intel on the region?”
“We’ve asked around,” Booker replied. “It’s pretty remote even by Afghan standards, but it is close enough to the Pak border that there could be smugglers—and those bastards have a hell of a lot more fight in them than the Taliban because they’re better paid. That said, no one has anything solid going on down there. I even reached out to my contact in the Company. She said everything appears quiet. The Tali’s spring offensive is still a few weeks away, and it’s still a little early to catch them moving supplies into position.”
“So what’s the plan?” Mercer asked.
“Nothing’s changed since yesterday. We’ll chopper in to as close as we can, then hoof it the rest of the way. You do whatever you need to do while we cover your sorry ass, and then it’s hot feet back to the LZ and we bug out. The only pucker factor is Ahmad, that’s our pilot, is going to need to dust off and refuel in Khost, so that leaves us on our own for the better part of three hours.”
“And what about you?” the operator nicknamed Sleep asked Mercer. He was African American like Booker but spoke with a deep southern accent. “What are you doing here exactly? Book says you’re a geologist.”
Mercer nodded. “A few days ago a friend of mine was killed over a mineral sample that was discovered in our target area. I have no idea how long ago or what the sample was. I don’t even know if there’s any left there, so I guess we can consider this a fact-finding mission.”
“If my read of history is right,” Grump said, spitting some tobacco juice into a soda can, “the Vietnam War started with fact-finding missions.”
“Don’t worry,” Book told his men. “To the best of my knowledge Mercer has never actually started a war. Right?”
Before Mercer could reply, the earth jolted under them enough to rattle the bottles on the bar and send peppery dust raining from the building’s exposed rafters. The men looked around and then down at the ground. Concerned but not alarmed.
Mercer finally had to ask, “What was that?”
“IED,” Sneeze told him. He was a slender man with dark hair and a beard who could easily pass as a native. “Sounds about two miles away and fairly large. More likely a truck bomb than a suicide vest.”
Seconds later the sound of sirens penetrated the warehouse’s thick brick walls.
“The Taliban is letting the government know that they’re coming soon,” Sneeze went on. “And once they take over, the opposition will swing into action with the exact same tactics. No one can rule this country, because the lines drawn on their hundred-year-old colonial maps don’t mean squat. The idea that there really is a nation of Afghanistan is as much a myth as saying there are such places as Shangri-la or Atlantis.”
A boy of about twelve dressed in traditional clothes came in from another room. He was pushing a trolley cart that looked like it had been stolen from a hotel. On it were stainless serving dishes, a stack of cheap china plates, and cutlery.
“Ah, good,” Book said. “On that happy note, dinner is served. Mercer, this is Hamid’s son, Farzam. Farzam is our batman when he’s not in school, and his mother is our cook. The best in Kabul, right, Farzam?”
“I am that, Mr. Book,” the boy said in what was obviously a routine they did often.
“I was talking about your momma.”
“Her as well.” The boy grinned and settled the cart next to the bar.
There wasn’t much conversation with the meal. The men lined up cafeteria style, served themselves from the rice and goat bowls, and then sat to shovel food into their mouths the way railroad workers used to feed coal into locomotives. Afterward they drifted to their individual rooms, basically cubicles made of plywood with hinged doors that maintained a level of privacy.
“You good, sleepwise, for tomorrow?” Booker asked Mercer when his men had gone.
“Good enough for the trip there and back, but I pity the poor SOB sitting next to me on my flights the next day—unless he’s deaf or otherwise immune to snoring.”
“Fine. I’ll wake you at zero-five-thirty for breakfast and kit up. We head for the chopper at six and hope to be in the air no later than six thirty.” Booker reached behind his back and removed a sleek black pistol. He popped the magazine from the butt and racked the slide to eject the round already jacked into the chamber. He thumbed the brass shell back into the mag and rammed it into place once again before handing it over to Mercer, grip first and the barrel angled away. “We never let principals carry weapons on protection detail because ten times out of ten they’re civilians here doing charity work or part of some rebuilding effort and don’t know a Beretta from a hole in the ground.” He heaved himself off the couch. “You, on the other hand…Just don’t shoot any of my boys.”
13
The sun was not yet up when they left the compound. They drove in a large SUV that sloshed on its suspension whenever they went around a curve, telling Mercer the Suburban was heavily armored. Hamid was behind the wheel with Book in the passenger seat. The three other shooters, Mercer, and all their gear were jammed into the back.
“We would have picked you up from the airport in this beast,” Booker explained, “but another team was using it to ferry a couple of Silicon Valley types who are here trying to persuade people who’ve just stopped living in caves that they now need 4G Wi-Fi.”
“How’d they do?” Mercer asked as they raced through the predawn darkness, their headlamps the only light visible except for the setting moon.
“They’re still alive,” Book said. “That’s all I care about.”
It sounded like a flippant comment, but Sykes was speaking from the heart. The successful completion of the mission was all that interested him.
It was dark out, and cold—two factors that sapped the spirits and eroded will, and yet as they rocketed through the deserted streets, Mercer felt confidence surging through him. The truck smelled of the inevitable spices from their headquarters, and of gun oil from their assault rifles, but there was another scent in the vehicle. It was the musk or the pheromone that bonded parties of hunters since humanity’s days on the plains of ancient Africa. It was what gave them the courage to face enemies armed with tooth and claw and speed and stealth. Prey that was larger than them, better able to defend itself. Prey that was not prey at all, and yet those proto-humans with their sticks and rudimentary language not only eked out their existence on the grassy plains but thrived to eventually inhabit every corner of the globe.
At the most basic level the men in the truck were no different from the primitive hunters. Their weapons were better, their language more refined, but they were imbued with that same antediluvian courage that left them buoyed of spirit and eager to face whatever challenge may come.
The chopper was hangared at the far end of the international airport, well away from the commercial airliners and the meager aircraft of the fledgling Afghan Air Force that used the airport. The Mi-2 had been rolled free of the building and into the brightening sky. It was so utilitarian and boxy it reminded Mercer of a panel van with a tail stalk and rotor blades, and a huge forehead bulge that was its two turbine engines.
The pilot was already in the front seat busy with preflight checks, while another Afghan waited by the open cargo door to help the passengers load their gear. Booker’s men didn’t bother with hard cases for their weapons but carried them in the open. Mercer had no idea what bureaucratic nightmare had to be negotiated for this to happen, but there were a couple of soldiers nea
rby and Sykes approached them with a handful of the Marlboro cigarette packs Mercer had brought into the country. He suspected that this was just simple wheel greasing and not the true bribery that let Gen-D Systems operate as its own army. The soldiers immediately lit up their cigarettes, standing under a bright No Smoking sign written in Pashtu as well as English and in symbols so basic a child could understand them.
Sykes introduced Mercer to the pilot, Ahmad, and then the two talked about the latest weather report for their intended route. Rain was a possibility, which neither pilot nor team leader liked, but it would only hamper their operation, not force its cancellation. They discussed the fuel situation, and Ahmad reassured Book that he had a reserve supply waiting in the city of Khost.
“All right,” Sykes said and his voice boomed. “Let’s mount up.”
The men wore a patchwork of Western gear hidden under Afghan clothing that was surprisingly comfortable and warm. Mercer carried about thirty pounds of equipment. Some was for technical mountaineering: Mammut Duodess climbing ropes, rock bolts, and a sling of carabiners and belay clamps. The rest was extra ammunition magazines for the team’s M-4A1 assault rifles and some geology tools he had pilfered from Gen-D’s motor pool workshop. The claw part of the hammer would work as a pick, but he had doubts about the tensile strength of a two-foot pry bar he’d borrowed. The Beretta 92 9mm pistol Book had loaned him was strapped to his thigh in a low holster that made him feel a little like a gunslinger out of an old Western.
They settled into the chopper as the old turbines wailed into life, one after the other. The engines bogged down when Ahmad engaged the transmission to start the big rotors turning overhead. Yet in minutes the entire chopper was bucking and shaking like a washing machine about to tear itself apart. The sensation wasn’t unknown to Mercer. This was an older helicopter, after all, but it seemed to take forever before the blades were beating the air with sufficient speed to haul the ungainly machine into the air.
Like a rickety elevator, the Mil struggled and wheezed and made all sorts of terrifying sounds as it climbed into the dawn. The sun was just beginning to paint the mountain peaks that dominate the skyline to the north and south of the capital city. The snowy crests flashed impossible shades of gold and red when struck by the pure light of such an unpolluted place, and for a moment Mercer could forget the poverty and dinginess of the city sprawled below them.
Only Ahmad and Sykes next to him had headphones, and the Mi-2 was too loud to hold anything short of screaming matches, so Mercer settled in for the two-hour flight toward the tribal regions spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border. In all of recorded history it was one of the few places in the world that could boast it had never been fully conquered.
As they cleared the city, he was reminded of Buzz Aldrin’s line about the moon being “magnificent desolation.” The same could be said of Afghanistan. There was little below them but rock and valley, hilltop and hardscrabble villages scraping by on the edge of fields that were more gravel lot than life-sustaining grove. It was too early in the spring for anything to be in bloom, so the landscape was a patchwork of earth tones that bled and ran into each other in a drab mosaic that stretched to the silvery mountains in the distance. As well traveled as he was, even Mercer had a hard time recalling such a harsh and unforgiving land.
They thundered on. Two of Sykes’s men slept, or at least had their eyes closed. Another scanned the ground to their right, while Booker in the left front seat watched for anything suspicious coming at them from that direction. They were safe enough at altitude and speed from an RPG, and not even the Taliban had any working Stinger missiles left over from the post–Soviet invasion days, but years of being immersed in combat zones made the men rightly cautious.
Mercer continued to push fluids into his body as they flew higher into the mountains. Altitude sickness was a real concern. He’d never really been struck by it in the past, but he would be pushing himself hard over the next twelve or so hours without giving his body the proper amount of time to acclimate. As a precaution, he popped a few Tylenol, knowing headache was usually the first symptom. Their overwatch sniper, Sleep, saw him do this and flashed a diver’s “okay” sign. Mercer responded in kind, and the shooter tucked his cap farther over his dark brow and nodded off again.
Ninety minutes later, Mercer felt Booker Sykes tapping him on the shoulder. He turned in his rear-facing jump seat and stretched his upper body into the cockpit. “What’s up?”
“We’re nearing your coordinates,” Book called over the beat of the rotor and scream of the turbines. “Thought you should see what we’re flying over to get a better picture than those satellite shots.”
Mercer nodded, preoccupied by worry. There was a danger to this mission he had considered from the moment Sherman Smithson rattled off the longitude and latitude coordinates for what Michael Dillman had claimed was the location where he had discovered Sample 681. The danger was that Dillman could have been dozens, or even hundreds of miles off target. Since the minerals were obviously collected long before modern navigation aids like GPS, Dillman was working with a sextant, a chronometer that might not have been calibrated in weeks or months, and making best-guess estimates of a slew of other factors in determining his location.
Dillman had dutifully written out the coordinates for the sample’s origin to a very precise degree, one that Mercer could pinpoint decades later on a satellite photograph as a tight valley that looked like it petered out into the side of a mountain. However, that didn’t mean the written coordinates marked the actual spot where the man had found Sample 681. Mercer had to hope Dillman was accurate enough to get them close, so that his own knowledge of geology and geography could lead them to where X really marked the spot.
The ground below the speeding chopper was a crosshatch of canyons and ridges that had no discernible pattern. It was all chaos but with monotony of color. Rather than brown, like around Kabul, here the world was shades of gray, from nearly black to almost white. It was ugly terrain, and one that he didn’t relish having to march across because the shortest distance in terrain such as this was never a straight line. It also didn’t help that the promising dawn they had left in Kabul was now a leaden sky that seemed to hover scant feet over their heads.
Booker split his attention between the panorama unfolding beneath them and a handheld GPS device that he’d programmed with their destination. Mercer had eyes only for the topography, while behind him in the cabin, Sleep, Grump, and Sneeze watched out for any movement that could betray a Taliban position. Occasionally, Mercer could see Sykes mouthing orders to Ahmad to correct their flight path.
A minute later, Book made an emphatic gesture pointing his thumb down, and Mercer could read his lips as he said to the pilot, “Hover here.”
Mercer studied the ground for anything that looked familiar. At first all the arêtes and gorges and talus slopes looked the same, and then the landscape resolved itself to the images he’d studied earlier. This was where Dillman claimed he’d found the mysterious mineral he’d called a lightning stone, which Herbert Hoover later classified numerically for his collection. As with the satellite pictures, nothing about this location struck Mercer as being geologically significant. It looked like every other godforsaken part of this country, bleak, desolate, totally uninviting and uninhabitable.
Prospects didn’t improve when Sykes handed him a pair of military-grade binoculars. Ahmad kept the Mil in constant motion so they didn’t become an easy target, but Mercer had no trouble studying the ground and for five minutes he peered intently at everything but saw nothing.
“Give me a five-mile perimeter,” he yelled at Book. Sykes nodded and relayed his order to the Afghan pilot. As had been discussed earlier, they only had fifteen minutes’ flying time before Ahmad would need to off-load their extra weight in order to make it to Khost and refuel.
They spiraled out away from the exact coordinates Michael Dillman had provided. Mercer had known not to expect a big glaring sign that adv
ertised an excavation of some sort, but the farther they flew from Dillman’s purported spot, the fewer were their chances of actually finding anything. In searches, one either looked at one locale precisely or combed a massive area; there really wasn’t much by way of middle ground.
He kept the binocs snug to his eyes as the chopper circled the rugged massif, intent on catching every detail he could in the few minutes remaining. Each ridge and hillside looked identical. There were no individual reference points, nothing distinctive to help orient the search. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, so he wouldn’t know it if he actually saw it. There was little of interest at all, and yet that in itself might be what he sought. It was maddening, and he started to think this whole trip had been a colossal waste of time.
He decided they should head back to the coordinates, land, and hope for the best. He was reaching to tap Book on the shoulder to tell him, when he saw something that caught his attention. It was a crease in the side of a mountain at the head of a narrow canyon. The only way it was recognizable would be by standing at its base or high above as they were now.
He pointed it out to Sykes. “See the top of that one mountain covered in snow that looks like an octopus’s tentacles? Look below that and to the right. That narrow valley. What does it look like to you where those two rounded parts of the mountain meet?”
Sykes used the verbal waypoints to spot the anomaly. He grinned wolfishly. “Looks like a butt crack.”
“Remember what I told you Dillman wrote? The sample came from the anus of the world. Bet you a case of whiskey there’s a cave where those two lobes of the hill come together.”