The Mullah's Storm

by Young, Tom

  “You have done everything you could,” Najib said. “You are a good soldier.”

  “So is she.”

  “We have all lost someone,” Najib said. “We will lose more before this is over.”

  Yeah, thought Parson. Not if I can help it. He kneeled by Gold’s tracks, eyed where they vanished into the teeming snow. “I’m going after Sergeant Gold,” he said.

  “You’re nuts,” Cantrell said. “And we have our orders.”

  “You have orders,” Parson said. “You guys are a unit with a mission. I’m just a downed airman. I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  “If you don’t stay with us,” Cantrell said, “you will die. Period.”

  “I understand,” Najib said. “You love your comrades more than you hate your enemies.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Parson said.

  “Don’t encourage him,” Cantrell said.

  “I do not encourage,” Najib said. “I merely understand. Too many of my own friends are dead.”

  That’s why you understand, thought Parson. Good. You get it.

  Parson strode into one of the houses, swung off his pack, and dropped it on a table. He dug through the pack, taking inventory. Najib and Cantrell joined him inside.

  “Can you give me one or two MREs?” he asked.

  Najib pulled a meal pouch from his own pack, laid it in front of Parson. Cantrell shook his head.

  “I got more double-A batteries than I need,” Parson said. “Take some of these.” Clunked them onto the table.

  “Your rifle needs camouflage,” Najib said. He found a roll of white tape in one of his pockets. Picked up Parson’s M-40 and began spiraling the tape around the barrel, forend, and stock. When he finished, the tape did not cover the weapon entirely, but it broke up the outline so thoroughly that the rifle seemed to disappear against Najib’s snow camo anorak.

  “Oh, fuck it,” Cantrell said. “Listen to me. I can’t make you into an infantryman right now. Even if I could, this would still be insane. But remember you got nothing but stealth. Everything runs to your disadvantage except that.” Cantrell pointed at Parson, ignoring rank now, lecturing a trainee. “If you do make contact, do not get in a hurry. Take your time. Your only hope is a far ambush. At least you got the weapon for that.”

  Parson checked his magazines. All full, plenty of ammo. An extra battery for the Hook-112. Cantrell examined the radio. “Let’s stay in touch on 243,” he said.

  “You got it,” Parson said. “But the bad guys have at least one of our survival radios. We have to assume they hear us.”

  “Really?” Cantrell tapped his finger along the side of the radio. “We can use that. Tactical deception.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”

  “Too bad we can’t talk secure,” Parson said.

  “We can do the next best thing,” Cantrell said. “Start every call on 243. But if one of us says the word ‘delta,’ we’ll switch to 282.8.”

  “Slick,” Parson said. “They’ve been fucking with me over these radios. Good to get a little payback.”

  Cantrell spread out a topographical map. “You clear on where you’re starting from?” he asked.

  Parson examined the topo chart. It wasn’t marked in familiar lat/longs. Instead it used the Army’s military grid reference system. It took him a minute to do the math, but he found the valley that cradled this newly extinct village. He knew he couldn’t mark the map with a pen. That could give the bad guys information to use if he was captured. But he creased the chart with his thumbnail.

  “About here,” he said.

  “Close enough,” Cantrell said. “Take this map with you. We got others.”

  Parson leaned on the edge of the table and buckled on his snowshoes. Took his M-40 from Najib.

  “Thanks for what you did for me,” he said. “It would have been a bad morning if you hadn’t come along when you did.”

  Snow began to blow in through the open doorway. Settling on the floor, fine as dust. Parson took that as a bad omen. He’d heard old-time outdoorsmen say big flakes meant the snow would stop soon; tiny ones meant more accumulation. He’d never thought to ask the meteorology guys if there was any truth to that.

  Some of Najib’s men came inside. Parson guessed they had figured out what he was doing and they wanted a last look at the crazy infidel flyboy about to get himself killed.

  “God go with you,” Najib said.

  Parson hoisted his pack, tightened the straps, and headed out into the storm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Parson followed the tracks through welts of drifted snow. The footprints wended up a slight rise where birch trees stood with white trunks like the bleached ribs of some giant dead thing. He came to a spot where the tracks narrowed close together, three sets of large prints around a set of small ones. Snow tossed and stomped. No blood. Some minor struggle, Parson guessed. Maybe she kicked one of them in the balls.

  The tracks continued more or less straight across a cut where mist seemed to have rolled down the mountains and collected. Visibility dropped to near zero. The fog and fine snowflakes filtered the daylight so that it seemed late dusk, though Parson’s watch read just after two in the afternoon. He had reset his watch from Greenwich Mean Time to local Afghanistan time. The luminous dial glowed like a distant moon until he covered it again with his parka sleeve.

  Parson stopped and looked around. The mist hid all terrain features. He saw nothing but snow at his feet and the swirling ice fog. The village and the special ops team were about four miles behind him now.

  A chill came over him and he trembled slightly, more shudder than shiver. He thought how he’d never get more alone than this. Never farther from home. At least he knew what to do. Better to lose comfort than purpose.

  He opened his lensatic compass and took a bearing. The tracks were leading roughly two-three-zero, though he could see only about four steps ahead. Why southwest? Parson wondered where they were taking her. Were they fleeing aimlessly? Probably not. He hoped not. It would do no good to find them all frozen to death.

  Parson followed the trail one step at a time, wanting better visibility, not getting it. He saw what looked like a heavy bank of mist ahead of him. As he took more steps, the thing grew solid. The wall of a mud-brick hut.

  Parson froze. Waited for a shot.

  You stupid motherfucker, he thought. At least they can’t see through this shit any better than you can.

  He wanted to drop to the ground. But now movement could give him away. He held his breath, held his rifle. Thumbed the safety and the click sounded like a thunderclap.

  No noise, no movement ahead. Maybe if he saw the enemy he could make a snap shot. Bring up the M-40 like shouldering a shotgun to take a pheasant on the rise. And you better make it good, he thought. If you miss and have to chamber another round with this bolt action, those bastards will be on full auto. Mow your ass right down.

  He waited eternal seconds, minutes. No sign of bad guys except the footprints. Parson eased himself down on one knee. No sign of anybody. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, drew the Colt. He pulled back the hammer and held the .45 in both hands, ignoring the pain in his wrist. Then he moved up to the wall.

  The tracks diverged there, some going left around the house, some going right. Parson listened closely, heard nothing. He went to the left, poised to fire.

  The tracks continued along that side of the mud-brick home. Or that side of the ruin, actually. Parson saw that the roof had been blown off, along with chunks of the wall. Snow covered the rubble inside.

  The footprints led to an adjoining house. It, too, had been blown open. One wall leaned as if it were about to fall. Parson aimed the pistol through a doorway, swept the room with the barrel. He had enough daylight to see because that roof was gone, too. Nothing inside.

  In all there were five destroyed dwellings, long abandoned. The footprints came together on the other side and contin
ued along the rise. He supposed the insurgents had hoped for something intact enough to provide shelter, and they’d found the place wanting.

  He took cover behind a collapsed doorway, just in case. He surveyed his surroundings and saw his breath condense and float away into the mist. So what did these poor folks do to deserve the Taliban blowing them away? he wondered. Bastards. Parson guessed that whatever horror had happened here, it was a while ago. He found no bodies, no animals, no object of value.

  He noticed three holes in one wall. A partial roof sheltered that wall from snow, so he saw the punctures clearly, each about the size of his fist, and angled as if the rounds came from above.

  It took a moment for Parson to realign his thinking. So this wasn’t their doing but ours. An air strike. Those holes looked about right for the thirty-millimeter nose cannon on an A-10. It fired rounds made of depleted uranium, designed to punch through a tank. Likely wiped out whatever and whoever was here.

  So maybe this was a Taliban hideout as far back as 2001. Or maybe not. Parson knew of close-air-support missions that had saved coalition troops and ripped up terrorists, but he also knew of some god-awful fuckups that had blown away civilians. The fighter jocks liked to brag that they could thread a needle with their precision targeting, but that didn’t help if you threaded the wrong needle.

  Parson took out the topographical map the snake-eaters had given him. He made a fold where he thought he was, though the chart showed no village. He didn’t expect the map to include every grouping of hovels. The newest American charts had terrain data gathered from space by radar, but not even NASA could track life at ground level in Afghanistan.

  He decided to check in with Cantrell. Parson tried to plug the earpiece into the Hook-112, but his fingers were so cold he missed the receptacle twice. He finally connected it and turned on the radio.

  “Razor One-Six,” he whispered. “Flash Two-Four Charlie, radio check.”

  “Flash Two-Four Charlie, Razor One-Six has you five by five. How me?”

  “Loud and clear. Flash Two-Four Charlie out.”

  So at least this much of the plan is working, he thought, but now those guys are just a source of information and maybe a relay for communications, at best. They had a mission, and they weren’t coming to get him if he screwed up. Parson switched off the radio and stood up.

  He followed the tracks downhill a while, then across an open plain where the snow got deeper. Each step an effort. Now and then he stopped, listened, watched. He didn’t want to repeat the mistake of blundering right up on something in the low visibility.

  The trail led downhill again. The grade eventually became steeper, and Parson began slipping. One of his snowshoes caught on a rock and he lost his balance. The heavy pack pulled him down, and he hit the ground rolling on his side, instinctively guarding the injured wrist. He found himself facedown in the snow. Now his chest hurt again from the ribs cracked days before by Marwan’s bullet.

  Sonofafuckingbitch, he thought. He picked himself up, at least grateful he hadn’t worsened the wrist injury. He checked the rifle. No apparent damage, scope lens still intact. He felt the cold powder inside his parka, inside his gloves. He shook out most of the snow, brushed himself off. Even colder now. Gotta keep moving, he thought, and that will warm you up.

  The tracks led back into sparse woods, a thin stand of larch. Parson examined the footprints for any hint of how Gold was doing, any suggestion of further struggle or resistance. He found nothing but one boot track in front of another.

  When he halted to listen again, he could not stop shivering. Could not feel his fingers. Parson kneeled and, with some effort, pulled off his gloves. Wet gloves. He hadn’t removed all the snow from when he’d fallen, and it had melted inside the flight gloves. No fucking wonder. He blew into his cupped hands, and when his fingers touched his lips it was like kissing ice.

  All right, he thought, gotta get these dry. I don’t have time for this shit. Gotta get to Gold. But what did Cantrell tell you? Take your time. She’s either dead or she’s not, and you will be soon if you make a mistake. Like getting frostbite.

  No choice now but to make a fire. At least the fog still hung low and thick enough to hide smoke. Parson had precious little options for fuel. He wished he’d thought of taking rags or something from the village before he parted ways with the Special Forces team.

  Parson broke a branch from one of the birch trees, cracked it again across his knee. Hurt his wrist some. Then he drew his boot knife and used it to peel birch bark. He decided to try making a Dakota fire hole, the stealthiest fire technique he knew. He would normally dig into the soil for that, but he had neither the tools nor the strength right now for digging into frozen earth. I’ll just have to try it in snow, he thought. If it melts and collapses, it melts and collapses.

  He dug a hole by a tree, using his hands. He hoped the tree branches overhead would help disperse any smoke that didn’t disappear into the fog. When he’d made a hole in the snow about two feet across, he put three hand-sized rocks at the bottom and piled the bark, then the twigs and branches. He dug another hole off to the side and connected it with the fire hole at an angle to create a vent.

  The cold-saturated twigs and branches gave him little confidence, so he decided to add something. He fumbled through his survival vest for a magnesium fire starter, a silver rectangle about the size of a cigarette lighter. He started to use his boot knife again, but decided he didn’t want to dull it. Instead he opened the blade on a multitool from his vest. He began to scrape shavings from the block of magnesium. His hands shook so violently he nearly cut himself. Any doubts he might have had about taking the time to build a fire left him now, because he was going into honest-to-God hypothermia.

  Parson scattered the shavings all over the tinder, then made a concentrated pile of magnesium in the middle. Struck the sparking rod once, twice, three times. The shavings caught and flared up as intensely as a welding arc. Parson squinted and looked away.

  The flash from the magnesium ignited the birch bark like paper. Feathers of flame billowed up from the tinder. Occasionally a stray shard of magnesium would light off like a tracer round in a burning city. A firefight in a tiny holocaust.

  The wood smoke smelled good, but he worried how far the scent carried. He glanced above him. The smoke seemed to disappear into the branches and mist. The flames remained below the surface of the snow, invisible to anyone just yards away. Snowmelt trickled to the bottom of the fire hole and puddled and hissed around the rocks.

  He peeled off the soggy gloves and draped them on sticks over the fire. He held his hands in the heat, clenched and unclenched his fists. Parson’s fingers ached as the circulation returned. He checked them for waxy whiteness, the first sign of frostbite that would eventually turn black and dead. So far so good. They were all red and they hurt.

  A calculated risk occurred to him, and he decided to go ahead. He sat down, removed the snowshoes, unlaced his boots. Pulled off his boots and felt his socks, which were damp. Rolled off the black socks and hung them with the gloves. Pushed the empty boots near the fire.

  He cocked the .45 and placed it on his pack. Peered at his toes, and they looked all right. They ached, too, as they warmed.

  Parson ate some MRE crackers as he waited for the gloves and socks to dry. He grew sleepy and shook his head to fight it off.

  When everything had dried, he pulled on the stiff gloves and socks. The warmth felt good, but it reminded him of all the comforts denied him now. Parson laced up his boots and put on the snowshoes.

  He decided to check in with Cantrell again. Turned on the radio and inserted the earpiece.

  “Razor One-Six,” he called. “Flash Two-Four Charlie.”

  “Go ahead, Flash Two-Four Charlie.”

  “Just checking in. I’m proceeding as briefed.”

  “Copy that,” Cantrell said. A pause. “Change of plans for you. We are all to proceed to the LZ for extraction. A chopper will get us out of here when t
he weather clears. Proceed to landing zone Delta. Repeat, landing zone Delta.”

  What the hell is he talking about? Parson wondered. Then he remembered. He changed frequencies.

  “Flash Two-Four Charlie, you up on this freq?” Cantrell called.

  “Got you loud and clear,” Parson whispered. “Go ahead.”

  “We’re proceeding as briefed, too. If they heard that, maybe they’ll think we’re leaving. And if they stop running, we won’t have to chase those motherfuckers all over these mountains.”

  “Roger that,” Parson said. “Understood.”

  Smart son of a bitch, thought Parson. He pocketed the radio, lowered the hammer on his Colt, and holstered the weapon. He kicked snow into the fire hole until it smothered the embers. He pushed in more snow to hide the ashes. Closed up his pack and settled it across his shoulders. Picked up the rifle and moved on.

  The trail was getting harder to follow now. The snowfall continued filling in the tracks, and they were beginning to look more like depressions in the snow than bootprints. The tracks led across an open plateau smothered in mist. Parson crossed it slowly. Watching, listening. Fatigue and sleep deprivation started to set in again. Once when he stopped, kneeled, and closed his eyes to listen, he caught himself nodding off.

  Parson wanted to rest, but he feared he’d lose the trail altogether if he didn’t keep going. A few years ago he had tracked a wounded deer through freezing rain. As he followed the red drops and smears, he became tired and chilled, and he wished he’d never taken the shot. But he felt he owed it to the animal to finish it off. He’d pushed on as rain diluted the blood spoor. He found the buck, dead and cold, in the middle of a clearing.

  But I didn’t know from tired back then, he thought. I didn’t know cold or pain, either.

  The minute crystals came down hard and steady now, ticking against his parka. Parson wondered how this storm system could have gathered so much moisture. Apparently it had picked up half the Arabian Sea, frozen it, and dumped it on Afghanistan. With no upper air currents to move it anywhere except right on top of my ass, he thought.