by Young, Tom
The unbroken snow lay flawless across the mountainside, not marred by so much as a goat’s hoof. Even with the snowshoes, the powder came up nearly to Parson’s knees, making it impossible to see the smaller stones on the rough ground. He placed his feet carefully, trying not to fall. Eventually the incline grew so steep the snowshoes hindered more than helped. Parson untied them and stowed them across his pack. He struggled to keep up with the soldiers, and twice they stopped to wait for him.
Najib handled the navigation, and Parson noticed that the Afghan no longer checked his compass as he led. So he really did grow up around here, thought Parson. Maybe he walked these mountains as a hunter like me. If Najib knows the terrain the way Gold knows the culture, no wonder they hooked him up with Special Forces.
Parson twisted the cap from a bottle of water delivered in the airdrop. He drank in gulps, grateful for water that didn’t need chemicals to kill germs. It tasted clean and pure, but he couldn’t really enjoy it. He knew how much Gold probably needed water by now. Parson had three other bottles. He decided to save them for her. He kept the empty bottle, stuffed it with snow, capped it. He placed the bottle in the pocket of his parka.
The light began to fade, and Parson shivered with the drop in temperature. His new coat had a tiny thermometer dangling from the zipper tab. Eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. He made fists inside his gloves to warm his fingers. Snow spat intermittently, and a subtle shift of breeze touched his cheek. For a moment Parson thought the snow might stop. Then the wind rose and a snow squall enveloped the mountain. The whiteout cut visibility so fast it made Parson think of flying into a cloud bank at three hundred knots. Curtains of snow lashed his face so hard that he had to turn his head to breathe.
Najib, now a barely visible wraith, stopped and held up his hand, palm toward the men. The team halted. Najib found a ledge broad enough to pause for rest, and the troops set up their low-slung tents. A few of the soldiers stayed outside. They put on goggles, pulled white ponchos over themselves, and set up security in a triangle formation. The men seemed to vanish except for the thicket of M-4 barrels pointing outward into the gray and white nothingness.
Parson knew little of infantry tactics. He marveled at how the team could stop and, as if a single organism, form itself wordlessly into a stationary strongpoint, lethal and damn near invisible.
He followed Cantrell into one of the shelters. Cantrell snapped a new battery into his satphone and made a call. Parson listened to him report position and situation. When Cantrell finished, Parson took the phone and called Bagram AOC.
“I’m still among the living,” he told the duty officer, “Flash Two-Four Charlie.” Parson gave his coordinates and said the airdrop had worked.
“We got all kinds of pararescue guys standing by to pick you up,” said the duty officer. “Choppers on alert. We just need a break in the weather.”
“How’s the forecast?” Parson asked.
“No better. The weather shop is calling this a hundred-year blizzard. They expect at least four more days of this.”
Parson pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes.
“What’s your altimeter setting now?” he asked.
“Uh, two-seven-five-six.”
Parson had never seen barometric pressure that low. No wonder this squall hit like a fucking train. He wanted to ask to speak with the weather shop for more details, but he decided to end the call. No point using up batteries over what couldn’t be helped.
He unrolled his sleeping bag inside Cantrell’s tent. Kept on his boots and survival vest. He placed his pack at the foot of the sleeping bag and leaned his rifle across it. Unholstered the .45 and placed it beside him. He fell asleep immediately with his hand on the Colt.
PARSON WOKE TO A shove at his shoulder. He came to consciousness like rising from a frozen lake to crack through ice. His thoughts tumbled and he felt for the pistol.
“Easy, cowboy,” Cantrell said. “We’re moving out.”
“Good.”
Still dark, still snowing, though not so hard now. Maybe five more inches of powder had accumulated. Parson rolled up his sleeping bag, crawled outside, hoisted his rifle and pack. Took a drink of snow water from the bottle in his pocket. Swished the water in his mouth, spat it out.
The land around Parson lay in perfect blackness. No lamp, no sign of habitation. Like the first night on Earth, or maybe the last.
The team struck tents in silence. Najib and his sergeant major led again, and the men followed them uphill in a staggered column. Parson switched on his night-vision goggles. The falling snow glowed and swirled as if it were energized, minute shavings of a pulsar disintegrated and scattered to the ground.
Parson’s wrist hurt some, though not as bad as yesterday. His chest ached, from both the cracked ribs and the frigid air chilling his lungs. The cold seemed to overtake him from the inside out. His cheeks had no feeling. He held his hand over his face and exhaled, but his breath hardly warmed his skin at all.
As he climbed, he thought how the war and the storm had brought him to some primitive state. His multimillion-dollar airplane a pile of scrap. Satellite signals, laser beams, and microwave transmissions reporting his situation around the world, doing him damn little good. Injured and angry, wanting to kill the other tribe. Stripped to my core, he thought, maybe this is just how it is.
The slope grew steeper, and Parson had to pull himself up by the branches of scrub bushes that somehow clung to life on this god-awful rise. He dug through the snow for handholds, an effort that slowed him down and covered his arms in powder. When he grabbed the stems of a brushy evergreen, he noticed a sickening odor. Parson frowned and wiped his gloves on his coat.
“You have found a lipad,” Najib said. “Some of my people believe the plant keeps away evil spirits.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get,” Parson said.
To the east, a smudge of gray lightened the deep black. The grayness spread until Parson didn’t need NVGs to see the snow falling. The cloud ceiling still seemed so low he could touch it. But underneath, visibility had improved a bit overnight.
Up ahead, Najib crouched. Signaled by pressing his open hand toward the ground. The men flattened themselves into the snow. At first Parson wondered if Najib had seen the enemy, but the Afghan didn’t look alarmed. Parson realized they had reached the spine of the ridge. The troops didn’t want to be silhouetted atop the crest.
Parson crept forward and looked down the mountain. He saw only more mountain, more snow and boulders. But Najib seemed to focus on something. Parson pulled out binoculars and glassed the slope.
Perhaps a mile away, a stalk of smoke rose to join the clouds. If not for the smoke, Parson might have missed the village altogether. But on close inspection he made out what looked like facets in the distant snowfield. Flat surfaces of roofs, blanketed. No movement. No animals. Pallid mud walls. The place apparently drained of life and color, as if the village itself had bled to death.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The team watched the village for the better part of an hour. Nothing changed except that the smoke grew fainter until Parson could no longer distinguish it from the snow and mist, the fire having consumed whatever had fed it. He wondered if he’d find Gold, or what was left of Gold, in one of those dwellings.
Najib and Cantrell split the team into squads. They began approaching the village from four directions. Parson followed Najib’s squad as they doubled back down the slope for concealment. Then they crossed the ridgetop south of the village and stopped to watch again.
Nothing new from this angle. Najib walked along wearing the headset from his MBITR, with its tiny microphone suspended in front of his lips. Parson saw him whisper, “Negative.”
Snow continued to fall on snow. The flakes fell diagonally in such a way that Parson lost his sense of horizon. The effect left him a little dizzy, as if his internal gyros had failed. He stumbled, went down on one knee.
“Are you all right
?” Najib whispered.
Parson nodded. Najib offered a hand and helped pull him back to his feet. Scabs of packed snow stuck to the leg of his flight suit, then fell off.
As the team converged on the village, Parson saw nothing of the other three squads. Najib paused and told him, “Wait here.” Parson lay prone in the snow and scanned through his rifle scope.
Najib’s squad crept forward, and Parson finally saw two of the other elements take positions on either side of the mud-brick homes. Overwatch and security, Parson guessed, while the remaining squads entered the village. He thumbed his safety to the FIRE position, trained his scope on a door here, an alleyway there.
He saw Najib kneel under a small, wood-frame window, pull the pin on a grenade. Najib did not throw it, just seemed to listen. A soldier kicked in a door and tore in, pointing his rifle. Two other men right behind him, barrels aimed at opposite corners.
Parson waited for the sputter of gunfire. It never came. The team kicked in more doors, rushed more rooms. Not one shot. Najib put the pin back in the grenade.
Cantrell appeared from behind a building, conferred with Najib, pointed. He pulled out a digital camera and took photos of something on the ground. Parson wondered what they could have found of intel value. His next thought made him grip the rifle so hard that it hurt his wrist. Was that Gold?
Najib motioned for him to move up. Parson rose from the snow and headed into the village at a jog, holding his weapon across his chest. The way the soldiers were standing, Parson knew that whatever had happened here was over. He trotted up to the troops, breathing hard.
At Cantrell’s feet lay four bodies nearly covered by snow. Najib kneeled and brushed the powder away from their faces. All Afghans. Eyes open. Blood drying and freezing. With a touch of his fingers, Najib closed each set of eyes.
“The Prophet said when the soul departs, the eyesight follows,” Najib said. He leaned on his shotgun, its stock to the ground. “May God curse the blasphemers who did this.” A shotgun shell dropped from his bandolier, and he rolled the shell in his fingers.
“Did you know them?” Parson asked.
“Distant relations.”
“There’s more,” Cantrell said.
Six bodies lay in a row outside one dwelling. They included a teenage girl. Other bodies in groups. Parson counted nineteen. Two dead men found alone at separate spots. Maybe those guys had gone down fighting, but the others had been executed. A horse, dead of multiple wounds spaced evenly across its body, apparently from a burst on full auto. No sign of an American woman.
“Looks like they killed the whole fucking village,” Cantrell said.
“What the hell for?” Parson asked. Cantrell shook his head.
Parson caught an odor of smoke and maybe kerosene. He discovered what looked like a muddy, black slag pile, the remains of a bonfire. In the ashes he found a charred blanket, blackened and wet like a discarded pelt. An unburned corner of a cardboard box. Plastic vials misshapen by heat or burned away to nothing but a fire-stained cap. A foil pouch with browned lettering, still readable: “Bacitracin Zinc Ointment EXP DEC11.” An Army-issue parka, eaten by flames and now sodden. Gray stains downwind where ash had mingled with snow.
He nudged the mess with his boot, felt something solid. Parson scraped soggy ash away from the hard thing and recognized it as a steel pallet. Stenciling on the edge: USAF PROPERTY.
Relief supplies. Parson had dropped several loads of them himself. Food, clothing, and medicine to help remote villages get through a winter of war. Those motherfuckers had torched it all.
“What do you make of this?” asked Parson.
“The Taliban forbids outside help,” Najib said. “I have seen them destroy supplies before. But it would take something more for them to murder the entire town.”
Cantrell took his pistol in one hand and a SureFire light in the other. “Search everything,” he called. “Watch for booby traps.”
The men entered the houses one by one. Parson heard thumps and crashes, but nothing to cause alarm. He checked out the tracks and hoofprints on the ground, wondering what story he could infer. It was mainly a jumble, snow churned and stomped into frozen ground, or mixed with mud and blood near the fire in a slurry that was starting to refreeze.
Cantrell emerged from a narrow cellar. “Captain Najib,” he called. “I think you better see this.”
Parson followed Najib down the steps. Cantrell trained his light into a corner. The beam revealed a boy about twelve years old, trembling, mouth open. Parson thought the child looked like a trapped animal, unable to fight or flee, waiting to be finished off.
“I found him under a tarp,” Cantrell said.
“Meh wirigah,” Najib said. He repeated the phrase, offered his hand. The boy took it and followed Najib up the stairs. The child blinked and stared at the soldiers.
“Check him out,” Cantrell called to his medic. “Open an MRE and see if he’ll eat anything.”
One of the soldiers produced a green blanket and draped it over the child’s shoulders. Black lettering across one of the blanket’s folds read: “U.S.” The men steered the boy through a doorway, out of sight from the carnage outside. The medic shined a light into his eyes, prodded his limbs and abdomen.
“Ask him if this hurts,” the medic said. Najib translated and the boy shook his head, though tears rolled down his cheeks.
“Tsok?” Najib asked. “Kelah?”
The boy began speaking quickly, stopped and cried, spoke quickly again.
A soldier sliced open a pouch of carrot cake. The boy took one bite and swallowed, then held the pouch and cried. Crumbs on his tongue and his face. Najib spoke what sounded like soothing words, but Parson wondered what balm words could offer now.
“He says Taliban came with an English woman soldier,” Najib said. “The village elders did not want them. You see the result.”
“Ask him if the woman was hurt,” Parson said.
“He says she was alive when they took her away. He says some of the Taliban left with her.”
“You mean they split up?” Cantrell asked.
Najib questioned the boy again.
“He says there was a holy man on a horse, and most of the men left with him.”
“What about Marwan?” Parson asked.
“I am quite sure Marwan would remain with the mullah,” Najib said.
“Why would they separate Sergeant Gold?”
“Perhaps to move faster,” Najib said. “To make our job harder. Why matters little. They did it.”
“At least they haven’t killed her yet,” Cantrell said. “Maybe they want her for propaganda or ransom. Or worse.”
Parson stepped outside, started to slam the door. He caught himself. Don’t scare the boy, fool. He’s probably fucked up for life as it is. Parson held on to the top of the door, ran his other hand along his rifle sling. Seethed.
He walked out into the snow, examined the ground again. The torn-up snow through the village told him nothing. But beyond the fire he saw several sets of boot marks and one set of hoofprints leading off into the distance. That he saw the tracks at all meant they’d been made after the squall blew through. But lighter snow had begun to fill them so that they looked like puncture wounds starting to heal. He found fresh tracks where Cantrell’s squad had come in. Then another set going out, slightly obscured by new snow. Three, no four. Four people. No horse. One line of smaller tracks. Good. Whatever they’d done to her, she could still walk.
Parson showed the tracks to Cantrell. “Trail’s getting fainter by the minute,” Parson said. “If we get to her, maybe another team can track down the rest when the weather clears.”
Cantrell called to his comm sergeant, “Set up the Shadowfire. I need to talk to Task Force.”
The sergeant took off his pack. He unloaded a black metal frame and extended its legs and four antenna panels so that it resembled a giant spider. Connected a coaxial cable.
If they’re using all this secret squirr
el comm gear, Parson figured, they must be serious about what they think Marwan is up to.
Cantrell lifted a handset. “Bayonet,” he called, “Razor One-Six.” After a pause, he said, “Sir, we got a decision to make.” Cantrell described the massacre, the boy’s account, the two trails in the snow. “I understand, sir.”
Parson studied Cantrell’s face for hints. Cantrell nodded as he listened, glanced at Parson, looked out into the snowfall.
“We will, sir,” Cantrell said. He gripped the handset’s cord, closed his eyes as if hit with a migraine. “I’m sure it’s a hard call. We’ll keep you informed. Razor One-Six out.”
“Well?” Parson asked.
“They have crews on alert at Bagram to get Sergeant Gold as soon as the storm ends,” Cantrell said. “But the Task Force commander wants us to stay on Marwan and your detainee.”
“When the storm ends?” Parson said. “That could be days.”
“I don’t like it either, sir. But if those guys do what we think they’re trying to do, we could lose a lot of civilians.”
“So you’re saying Gold is expendable.”
Cantrell sighed, looked past Parson. “I wasn’t going to say it, sir, but that’s the word the colonel used.”
So they were just going to give her up. Parson had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but part of him was not surprised, given the stakes. In his military courses, he had learned about a set of regulations rarely used, or even read. In the clinical language of the Pentagon, they established a category of missions for which recovery of personnel is not a consideration. Well, he’d still consider it.
“Call ’em back,” Parson said. “I want to talk to that colonel.”
“There’s no point in that, Major,” Cantrell said.
Najib came outside. Cantrell told him about the Task Force’s instructions. Najib placed his hand on Parson’s shoulder.