by Young, Tom
Parson didn’t like the sound of that, but he was too tired and cold to ponder the mystery of hoofprints and food left behind. He dug into the basket, gathered a fistful of berries, and handed them to Gold.
“Might as well take off his gag and let him eat some of these,” Parson said. “I don’t have any more MREs.”
“If they’re bad, at least we’ll all get food poisoning together,” Gold said, chewing. She untied the gag and gave the mullah some fruit. He ate in silence.
“Keep an eye on him,” Parson said. “I’m going to look around.”
Back out on the walkway, he found it snowing harder. He noticed a lump in the snow on the stone path. He nudged the mass with his foot. The white powder fell away to reveal empty plastic packaging with English lettering: “Sony InfoLithium Camcorder Battery.”
Now he didn’t know what to think. Had GIs just been here? He knew Special Forces teams sometimes used horses in Afghanistan. What damned awful luck to miss them. He put his hand on his radio, thinking to ask AWACS about nearby friendlies, but he decided to explore first.
When he stepped into the next room, it smelled different, not the same mildew odor as the first two. A little foul, not strong. He played his light across the room. What he saw brought him to his knees.
Black blood covered most of the stone floor. Amid the pool of drying blood, a body. In an American flight suit. Headless.
Parson leaned forward and retched. He vomited what little he had in his stomach, bile and masticated fruit. He blinked his watering eyes and looked again. So much blood. He dropped his flashlight, and it clattered on the stones. Spittle drooled from his chin.
“Gold, get in here,” he called. The phlegm in his throat gave a rattle to his words. He spat and closed his eyes. Gold led the mullah down the walkway.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You better sit down,” he said. She kneeled beside him. He picked up his flashlight. “Look.”
Parson heard her inhale deeply and stifle a sob. He felt her hand on his back.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
The mullah began speaking.
“What’s he saying?” Parson asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What is that motherfucker saying?”
Gold sighed. “He says the soldiers of God have struck a blow for justice.”
“I’m going to strike a fucking blow,” Parson said. He jerked the chain from Gold’s hand and grabbed the mullah, dragged him outside, slammed him against the wall. The prisoner jabbered, grinning.
“He says if you shoot him, your CIA cannot question him,” Gold said.
Parson swung the back of his fist against the mullah’s face. Blood ran from the man’s nose, streamed into his beard.
“Tell him don’t worry. I won’t shoot him.”
Parson punched him in the stomach. The prisoner doubled over.
“Stop,” Gold said.
“Like I said, I won’t shoot him. That’s too good for this piece of shit.”
Parson opened a pocket on his survival vest, dug out a signal flare. He pulled off the plastic cap. He felt the raised rings on one end, a MK-124 night flare.
“What are you doing?” Gold asked.
Parson slid out the trigger tab at the end of the flare, arming it. He held the flare with his thumb on the slide lever. Pressed hard. The trigger made a loud crack, followed by the whoosh of igniting chemicals. A dagger of flame more than a foot long leaped from the flare, sparks arcing to the ground. Phosphorous drip-pings burned holes in the cobblestone. The flame so hot and white it hurt Parson’s eyes.
He took the mullah by the throat.
“I’m going to send you to hell in style,” he said.
Parson felt Gold’s rifle stock slam the side of his face. The blow knocked him to the ground. The flare skittered away, spinning in circles like a wayward comet. It burned for several more seconds, blackened stones, melted a swath in the snow. The flare finally sputtered out, smoke curling from its burned tip.
Parson felt his cheek and glared at Gold. He fought the urge to hit her back. The mullah stared wide-eyed, breathing hard, trembling. Gold locked the chain around her wrist again.
“You shouldn’t have stopped me,” Parson said.
“You know our mission, sir.”
Parson knew he’d let emotion overcome his reason, but he was too angry to admit it out loud. It felt as if a primal fury hidden dormant within him, something ancient, had been awakened by these murdering camel jockeys and their religion of blood. If they got to him so much that he lost his professionalism, then he’d lost everything. He looked into the distance and watched the snow shower, rubbed his bruised face. He felt as if he’d failed some test. Or that Gold had kept him from failing it. But he hadn’t asked for any of this.
He rose up on his knees. His flak jacket and survival vest felt heavier than ever. Parson leaned forward, placed a hand on the wall to steady himself, then raised himself to his feet and reentered the room.
The sight brought bile to his throat again. He saw no identifying patches or name tag on the flight suit, only Velcro where patches would normally go. That was standard procedure; crews usually sanitized their uniforms before combat missions.
Parson stepped inside slowly, and he felt congealed blood sticking to his snowshoes. Despite the lack of insignia, he thought he knew who this was. He tried to pick up the body’s right wrist, but rigor mortis had frozen it in place.
He pushed back the sleeve and aimed his light onto the forearm. The tattoo read: “La Vida Loca.” Parson closed his eyes and squeezed the lifeless wrist.
“I should have stayed with you guys,” he whispered.
He let go of the wrist and smoothed down the sleeve, then backed out of the room. He sat on the cobblestones, cradled the AK-47.
The mullah kneeled on the walkway. Wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve. Looked away when Parson met his eyes. So I wiped that smirk off your face, thought Parson. You feel fear just like the rest of us.
Parson opened a pouch on his survival vest and took out his GPS receiver. He pressed the ON button with a trembling, gloved thumb, then waited for the receiver to initialize. The device found its artificial stars and displayed the caravansary’s latitude and longitude.
He placed the GPS on the stones beside him and opened another vest pocket to get to his radio. He put the PRC-90 on his lap, pulled off his gloves. Parson rolled the rotary switch on the radio. A click, but no static. He pressed the TRANSMIT button. Nothing.
He drew his knees to his chest, folded his arms, and put his head down. What else could go wrong? He looked up again and exhaled hard, once, twice, three times.
“Radio dead?” Gold asked.
“Leave me alone.”
Parson tugged off his gloves, dropped them beside him. He patted his vest pockets until he found his spare battery. He unscrewed the radio’s battery compartment, removed the dead battery, and threw it as hard as he could. The metal cylinder flipped end over end as it sailed over the courtyard and dropped into the snow with a whump. Parson slid the fresh battery into the radio and screwed the cap back into place. He rolled the switch again and the radio hummed to life.
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Charlie,” he called.
“Flash Two-Four Charlie, Bookshelf. Good to hear from you, buddy. You doing all right down there?”
“Negative. Stand by to copy some information.”
The radio hissed for a moment. “Flash Two-Four Charlie, go ahead.”
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Echo is dead. I found him in an old ruin. They cut off his head. The location of the body is as follows.”
Parson transmitted the coordinates, offset by a classified reference point.
Before the acknowledgment could come, a loud squeal blasted over the radio, the sound of one transmitter blocking another. Then foreign chatter. A taunting tone. Parson made out the word “Amrikan,” but nothing else except the sneer in the voice.
<
br /> “I bet that’s Nunez’s radio,” Parson said to Gold. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It’s not Pashto. It’s Arabic.”
Then not Taliban, but al Qaeda, thought Parson. “Do you think they understood what I just told AWACS?”
“Maybe. They do have English speakers.”
“We better move,” Parson said. “Now.” He cursed himself for blabbering so much information in the clear. The coordinates were coded, but if the bastards on the radio were the same ones who slaughtered Nunez, they knew exactly where he was talking about. It seemed to Parson things kept happening faster than his chilled and pain-racked brain could process.
“Do you think they’re close?” Gold asked.
“These radios are line of sight.”
He wondered if it was any use to run. If the enemy had horses, they could follow tracks in the snow and chase him down quickly. When the blizzard first started, he’d counted on falling snow to cover his tracks, but now the snow was too deep for that. He thought about the problem for a minute, looked down at his feet.
“Let’s backtrack over our own trail coming in,” Parson said. “With these half-ass snowshoes, they can’t see which way the tracks go. We’ll veer off when I find a good place.”
Parson led the way out of the caravansary. The snow squeaked under his boots, and the makeshift snowshoes left wafflelike imprints. The tracks going in looked just like the tracks going out.
The sky hung low, gray as steel. In the quiet, with the enemy nearby, every sound seemed too loud—the crunch of snow, the clink of buckles and zippers, the rub of rifle slings. Parson listened closely for hoofbeats; he expected horsemen to thunder out of the fog at any moment and strike him down. He carried the AK at port arms. The faster I can get this rifle to my shoulder, he thought, the more of them I can take with me. What kind of war is this that I’m on the ground worried about the raghead cavalry?
Flakes fell large and thick, spiraled down like dying mayflies. The mullah’s breath came in labored wheezing, and the pack grew heavy across Parson’s shoulders. Parson glanced at Gold, who wore an aggrieved expression. She had more than enough reason to look frightened or worried, but this was something else. More like deep sorrow or profound disappointment.
Well, I gave her reason to be disappointed in me, Parson thought. She kept looking back at the mullah. Was she disappointed in him, too? What the hell did she expect?
A squadron of cliff swallows darted by, five or six little brown birds crisscrossing each other, their rapid wingbeats taking them away through the storm. Parson wished he could take flight and join their formation. But he could only place one foot in front of the other, in an old track if possible, wandering like a pilgrim on a quest for enlightenment, carrying the burden of all his sins.
CHAPTER SIX
They stood in open country now, the heavy fog their only cover. Parson had hoped for a stream to provide a good place to veer off their old trail, but he’d found nothing. So about two miles back they had started into unbroken snow, hoping to find a village, preferably abandoned. Parson hated the thought of another night in a snow cave.
The hands on his watch showed just after five in the afternoon. Not much daylight left. His expensive flier’s chronometer did him little good now, with its stopwatch function and digital window set to Zulu time. Hardly need a watch at all, Parson thought, when you’ve had an airplane blown out from under you.
He froze at the bleat of a goat.
“You hear that?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Gold said.
“What do you think?”
“Maybe I can get a villager to take us in.”
“Should we chance it?” Parson asked.
Gold shrugged. “Pashtunwali,” she said.
“What?”
“Tribal law. In their culture, if they take in travelers they have to protect them.”
“Even us?”
Gold turned her palms upward and raised her eyebrows. Not the answer Parson wanted, but he didn’t have a lot of options.
Parson clicked off his rifle’s safety, placed his finger directly on the trigger. If somebody came to my door looking like us, he thought, I sure as hell wouldn’t take them in, let alone feel any obligation. I do not understand these people.
He crept forward until he came to a stone wall about chest high. Beyond it, two goats fed from a trough, their fur a dirty cream color and matted. Their hooves had churned the ground to a foul slush of mud and manure. The smell reminded Parson of horse stables, but worse.
Beyond the goat paddock were three mud-brick dwellings adjoining each other. Not even a village, Parson guessed, but the compound of a single extended family that had probably scratched a living from this valley for generations. He remembered flying over many such compounds, sending sheep and goats scurrying and the women running inside. Parson always wondered why the women ran. In fear of bombs? To get a rocket launcher? Sometimes shoulder-fired missiles came up from these compounds, setting off the aircraft’s missile warning system and forcing the pilots to bank hard in evasive maneuvers.
“If they let us in,” Gold whispered, “lower your rifle, sir, and enter with your right foot first.”
Parson nodded and let Gold through the compound’s gate ahead of him. When he was sure the mullah wasn’t looking, he took a strobe light from his survival vest. He snapped the infrared lens into place and turned it on. With the naked eye, Parson did not see the IR strobe flashing, but the soft, steady clicks confirmed it was working. He placed the strobe on top of the rock wall, concealed by snow except for the lens. Insurance, Parson thought, or at least a grave marker.
He followed Gold and the prisoner to the door of the first hut, stepped carefully around goat dung. Smoke rose from somewhere in the back of the dwelling, but Parson found no chimney or stovepipe. He unzipped a thigh pocket on his flight suit and pulled out his blood chit. The cloth chit, about the size of a handkerchief, bore a U.S. flag, along with a message in several languages: I am an American flier. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance. . . . A serial number adorned each corner of the chit. He handed it to Gold.
“Show them this if you think it will help,” he whispered.
“It might,” she said.
Gold knocked on a decaying, wooden door. A rope held it closed, looped through a hole where the knob might have been. The rope had rubbed smooth the edges of the hole, and lines of grain stood out in the planks, the softer wood between the grains beaten out by years of sleet and rain.
No answer. Gold knocked again. Parson moved back a half step to give himself plenty of room to bring up his weapon.
An eye appeared at a crack in the door. A male voice spoke from the inside, and Gold answered in Pashto. Parson listened to the conversation flowing back and forth. The way Gold held her M-4, he figured it wasn’t going well. It couldn’t help that she was a woman. But the rope slackened through the hole in the door, and the door opened a crack. Gold offered the blood chit, dangling it from two fingers. Something snatched it inside as if a rush of air had sucked it in.
A long pause. Then the rope came to life, running through the hole in the door like a cobra until the knotted end smacked against the wood.
The corners of Gold’s lips turned up almost imperceptibly. She shook her head and whispered, “I’ll be darned.” It was the nearest Parson had ever seen her come to smiling, swearing, or looking surprised.
“What?” Parson asked.
“They’re not Pashtuns. They’re Hazaras.”
“Is that good?”
“That’s very good.”
About damn time we had some luck, thought Parson. I don’t understand what’s going on here, but if she likes it, I like it.
The door groaned open, and a weathered, wrinkled man appeared before them. He stood about shoulder high to Parson, and he could have been forty or sixty. In his right hand he held an a
ncient bolt-action rifle. Parson recognized it as a British .303 Lee-Enfield. The man made a sweeping motion with his other hand, bade them to come in. He glared hard at the mullah and the mullah glared back. Parson didn’t need translation to decipher the hate.
As Parson’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw two other people in the room. A woman, presumably the wife, tended her cooking over a fireplace. The smoke had no vent but a narrow window. The wife wore a multicolored shawl over her head, not like any burka or abaya Parson had ever seen. She made no effort to cover her face.
In one corner, a teenage boy sat with a metal plate in his lap. He was breaking a piece of flat naan bread and feeding the crumbs to a mynah bird perched on the back of his chair.
This is damned weird, thought Parson. Even if they’re friendly, I’m glad I left that strobe outside. Wish Sergeant Gold would tell me what this is all about.
Gold and the man of the house continued talking. Parson didn’t understand it, but he did notice that Gold kept repeating herself and slowing down. So he understands Pashto, thought Parson, but it’s not his first language. No wonder that conversation through the door took so long and almost came to gunfire.
The boy held out his finger and the mynah hopped onto it. The teenager disappeared into an adjoining room. He came back with an armful of embroidered blankets and spread them across plank platforms along the wall. Except for the boards where he’d placed the blankets, the floor was dirt.
The boy gestured toward the blankets. Parson unslung his rifle and sat down near the fire.
“Thank you,” he said.
Gold and the prisoner also sat. Parson looked around for something to chain him to, but he saw nothing big and heavy enough. Guess we’ll have to keep him hitched either to Gold or me, he thought.
“So who are these people?” Parson asked.
“They’re Shia Muslims,” Gold explained. “The Hazaras had it pretty rough under the Taliban, who are Sunni, so there’s an awful lot of bad blood.”
“So these guys must like us.”
“Maybe.”
“Works for me.” If these people think we’re not their worst enemy, thought Parson, that’s all I need to know.