Ten days ago . . .
Finn had no breath left for screaming.
All he could do was lie there in the darkness of what had once been a market stall and was now a wind-blasted cave. He was curled like a beaten dog, bleeding, sweating, his pants soaked with piss and heavy with shit, his mouth cracked with a paste made from snot and tears.
Blowflies had found him, and Finn could hear their buzzing wings and feel their threadlike legs as they walked over his face.
In the darkness around him, the laughter was still there.
Less, though. It only came once in a while.
It wasn’t as loud.
It was a softer sound. Softer, but somehow worse than anything he’d heard before.
This laughter was different.
It was sneaky.
It was as if something big and hungry crouched just above him where he couldn’t see. Sat there, waiting for something to happen, and delighted at the prospect.
It was an ugly laugh.
Finn realized at some point that it was also female. But there was nothing about it that fit his definition of feminine. It was earthy and raw, and oddly sexual in a way that made Finn feel ashamed.
“I’m going nuts,” he told himself. “Jesus, I’ve finally fucking lost it.”
The words tumbled out of his mouth and fell into the darkness.
The breath whispered across the unprotected upper curve of his lip, and against all possible sense or reason, Finn felt himself grow suddenly hard. His cock swelled and pressed against the fabric of his soiled pants.
Then the voice murmured again.
“What will you give me for what you want? What bargain will you make?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Finn lied. His voice broke in the middle and the rest of the sentence came out in weak little chunks.
The woman—if it was a woman—laughed her ugly laugh.
“You know,” she said. The tips of fingernails caressed the edge of his throat, running along the line of his throbbing artery. “You know what you’ve lost.”
“No.”
“Yes. You know what has been taken, and you want it back.”
“No.”
“It’s a gift,” she said. “You are the enemy of my enemy, but you are not my friend.”
“We didn’t do anything to you. We didn’t hurt you or—”
“You are in our town. Men like you have been coming to our towns—here and elsewhere—to take what is ours. Our sacred relics. The images of us that people—a precious, precious few—still worship.”
“Relics? Who cares about relics, for Christ’s sake? We’re trying to stop terrorists from killing innocent people. Your people, too. My team . . . we came to protect everyone and everything from the Taliban. We don’t want to take anything.”
A subtle touch of fingernails on his cheek.
“Everyone wants to take something.”
“No.”
“Everyone wants something. Everyone wants to barter and trade.”
“All I want are my men, damn it. That’s why we came here. Please . . . believe me. That’s the only reason we came to this goddamn place.”
“This is our home. No one comes here unless they want to make a deal. To get back what has been lost.”
“Get back . . . ?” His voice trailed off.
“Yes,” she said, “I can smell your desire. You do want to make a deal. You want what I have.”
“Then give them back!” he shouted.
Soft, soft laughter. “They belong to me now. To us. To the sisters of the desert wind, to the lilitu. They shed blood in our streets, on our ground. Your men are ours by right. Body and soul, flesh and blood. And we will use them. Oh yes. You say that they are soldiers come to fight? Then fight they will. They will be our knights, our champions.”
“No. It’s not fair. It’s those Taliban fucks who are your enemy. If anyone’s stealing your stuff, it’s them. My men killed them. They’re heroes.”
“They will be heroes. Our heroes.”
“No. You had no right to take them.”
“As I said . . . they became ours when they drew blood on our streets.”
“You bitch, that’s not fair!”
The unseen woman made soft shushing sounds, the way a mother would soothe a hysterical child. “Listen now. Listen. We are cruel, but we are not dishonest. We repay our debts.” There was a long pause, then she spoke again, her fetid breath moist on his cheek. “We took from you because we claim the right to do so, and that is fair. But you are here, in our market stall, and you beg for something we have that you want. That is as it should be, for it is in keeping with this place. And so we will barter honestly with you.”
“What are you talking about? Barter for what?”
“You know.”
“No . . . this doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh, yes,” she cooed. “You want something returned. Restored. Brought back.”
“Yes, but—”
“But we must have something in return. Something to replace it. This for that. Something of value for us, and something you value for you.”
“Please,” he said, and even he didn’t know if it was an entreaty or an acknowledgment that the dickering could begin.
“What will you give me for what you want?” she asked.
Finn began to cry.
4
ECHO TEAM
The pilot’s voice crackled in my ear jack.
“Coming up on it.”
Bunny pulled the door open and I peered out at the shattered gray landscape.
“Oh, what fun to be back,” muttered Bunny.
He’d done a couple of tours each in Iraq and Afghanistan with Force Recon before he was scouted for the DMS. Whenever he mentions Afghanistan, it’s by the name “that fucking place.” Iraq is “that other fucking place.”
Not a lot of love.
But I knew the other side. Bunny had bonded pretty heavily with a bunch of villagers. Even one or two who worked in the opium fields. Most of them weren’t bad guys, and for the most part, they’d have been happy if the Taliban were all eaten by rats. But the Taliban provided work. Granted, sometimes it was forced labor, but there was a paycheck, and for a lot of these villagers that was the only paycheck they’d seen in years. Bunny, like a lot of soldiers, didn’t heap blame on the blameless. He just hated the goddamn country.
Can’t blame him.
I was out of the Army Rangers when 9/11 changed the world. I was a street cop with the Baltimore PD, working on getting my detective’s shield. However, since taking charge of Echo Team, I’ve been here three times. Short missions, but when you do what we do, short is long enough. Top and Bunny were with me for two of those road trips, and I did one solo gig that still gives me nightmares.
I tapped my earbud to get Bug on the line. He was back in the DMS main headquarters at the Hangar on Floyd Bennett Field, but he was wired into a network of surveillance databanks, so he was on tap to give us real-time intel.
“We’re two klicks out,” I said. “Status update?”
“Same as before, Cowboy,” he said, using my combat call sign. Bunny was Green Giant, Top was Sergeant Rock. “One strong signal and three intermittent beeps.”
“What about hostiles? Who’s making trouble in the neighborhood?”
Bug snorted. “Thermal scans show a lot of heat up there. You have a couple of villages in the lowlands and a shitload of four-legged critters. A bunch of two-legged signatures, too, but no one’s flashing me their Junior Terrorist Club badge. CIA says that the locals are heavily infiltrated by the Taliban, so don’t take chances.”
“Not a chance,” I said.
The pilot slowed the helo and we spent a little time doing visual recon as he made a careful circle of our landing zone. Bunny had the minigun locked and loaded in case somebody stuck an AK barrel out of a cave mouth. He was sweating and his eyes looked jumpy. An RPG could come out of nowhere and it would probably hit us. We all
knew it.
From the air you could hardly tell this had ever been a town. Bug’s intel said that over the last ten thousand years this town had been occupied by dozens of different groups, ranging from the Achaemenid Empire to the Sassanids. However as we circled we could pick out some eroded ruins, cave mouths that had been chiseled out to form orderly doors and windows, and a rough symmetry to some of the humped hills where buildings might have been hiding under a thousand years of sand and dirt.
“Looks calm,” I said, giving that the irony it deserved.
The pilot brought the helo down to just above the deck. One of the chopper’s crew took over for Bunny as we all clipped ourselves onto fast-ropes.
“Eyes open,” I said. “Top, me, and Bunny. Nobody fires unless you have eyes on a hostile. I’d rather not start something until there’s something to start.”
“Hooah,” they said, which is the Ranger equivalent of everything from “copy that” to “fuck yeah.”
Then we were out.
We stepped into the late-afternoon air and rappelled down the ropes, pushed by the rotor wash, eyes trying to take in absolutely everything, guns ready, fingers laid tight along the curved steel of our trigger guards.
Top hit first and moved away from the bird, tracking in a full circle with his M14, eyes hard and face as calm as if he was sitting in a lawn chair. Top is always the scariest when he looks calm.
I hit the ground a second later and then Bunny was on the deck. We broke apart and took cover behind tumbled rocks as the helo lifted away from us. It took away the noise, the blown-up dust, and the rotor wash—which gave us back our sense of hearing and a chance at stealth—but it took with it the hellfire missiles and minigun, and any hope of an immediate withdraw if this was a trap.
The sun was a white hole in the sky and it threw weird black shadows over the landscape. We waited in the relative safety of cover, not knowing if we were being observed or if gun barrels were being aimed at us from any of the countless cave mouths that pocked the entire mountain range. The fact that no one was shooting at the moment was not a source of comfort. They could have been waiting for the helo to be totally out of range, or they could have been calculating our size, probable designation, and overall value as targets. Hell, we might even have lucked into finding cover that didn’t offer any of the bad guys a clean shot, which meant that as soon as we broke cover, they might make their move.
In these situations, you really discover what being afraid means and what paranoia means. It’s that way because you know damn well that anyone out there might be a hostile, might be armed, might be strapped to explosives, might be waiting for the exact moment when it bests suits them to end everything that defines you.
But you can’t hide forever, either.
I hand-signaled to my guys, then I broke and ran for a standing rock fifty yards up the valley, heading into the ruined old town. I did all the zigging and zagging the trainers drill into you.
No one shot at me.
I hit the wall, crouched, and turned in time to see Top duck and dodge his way across. Then Bunny.
I tapped my earbud.
“We’re on the ground, Bug. Give us a route.”
I pulled up my tactical computer and watched a circuitous route appear that wound us through the west end of the valley and up into the shallows of the foothills beyond the town limits. The colossal mountains in Afghanistan are riddled with tunnels, caves, shafts, and deadfalls. The consistent and pervasive irregularity of the rock made it difficult for the eye to latch on to specific landmarks, and even Bug’s topographical maps didn’t quite jibe with the terrain. We’d have to do this like a treasure map: fifty feet this way, twenty that way, in through there and out through here.
And so we did.
We got exactly one kilometer before they started shooting at us.
5
RATTLESNAKE TEAM
Nine days ago . . .
The woman’s voice was gone.
Her touch was gone, though Finn could feel the cold echo of it on the flesh of his throat.
The feeling of being in the presence of something whose very nature defined overwhelming sickness was gone.
And yet the horror of it lingered.
The experience had sent creeper vines of atavistic dread deep into the vulnerable fabric of Finn’s soul and they had taken root, but the source—the unknown thing that had spoken to him—was gone.
She had wanted to barter with him.
Barter.
Finn had refused. Even here—whacked out with pain and out of his damn mind—he wouldn’t barter with some unknown and invisible thing whispering to him in a cave. Right? He demanded answers of his own fractured memory.
What will you give me for what you want?
That had been her question. Over and over again.
No, he’d told her. I won’t make any bargain.
That’s what he’d said. Right?
Right?
As he thought that, pain flared on his chest and he cried out.
Had the woman-thing cut him? No . . . it felt more like a burn. Had it been there before? Had she put it there?
Finn tried to pry open the memory of the last few minutes—hours, days?—to remember what he’d told her. Wanting his memories to be of nothing but ferocious denial.
But the hinges on the vault of his memory were rusted shut.
He needed to get the fuck out of there. Right. Fucking. Now.
With a growl and a sob and a surge of every muscle, Finn O’Leary tried once more to move his body . . . and this time he could. He rolled over without restriction.
Without pain.
It was so abrupt, so different than all the other times he’d tried to move, that it actually frightened him, and he froze there, turned halfway, waiting for a flare of pain or damage or wrongness.
The moment stretched and stretched . . . but nothing, externally or internally, tried to stop him.
The old market-stall cave was still as black as pitch, but Finn was able to roll all the way onto his chest without bumping into anything. He paused again, belly down on the cold rock. When everything up until now had been a heartbreak or a cruel trick, Finn expected only those things.
The darkness around him was as still as death.
No screams.
No echoes.
Just the irregular rasp of his own breathing.
He slowly placed his hands on the ground—aware that he could now actually feel his hands, and his arms. Everything felt normal. He lay like that for a moment, searching inside his body for the pain of injuries. For shrapnel cuts, for bullet wounds. For any of the damage he’d felt after the ambush.
But there was nothing to feel. Just a deep, abiding weariness that seemed to blow like a cold November wind through the empty chambers of his heart.
Finn took a slow, careful breath and then pushed against the ground. He expected it to be like jacking up a truck. It wasn’t. The hard muscles in his arms responded with more than enough strength to push his chest and stomach up from the rock. His upper body peeled away from the ground with no resistance at all.
He paused again, took another careful breath, and got to his knees. To his feet.
There was no trace of light in the tunnel, and that was weird, because there should have been some bounced light from around the curved bends. The channel simply wasn’t long enough to be this dark.
He ran a hand across his cheeks. He’d always had a heavy beard, and back in the world, he had to run an electric razor over his face twice a day. He’d shaved this morning. Now his cheeks were heavy with stubble. A day’s worth at least.
Shit.
Finn slid one foot along the ground, found no holes, then did the same with the other foot. Moving like someone doing tai chi. Moving in slow and silent motion, like a blind mime. Part of him thought that was funny and a weird little laugh bubbled from between his lips. But the laugh was ugly and strange and it scared him. You don’t want that kind of laugh com
ing from your own mouth.
The laugh hitched his chest, though, and that triggered a flare of pain. Surface pain. Something on his skin that he’d somehow not noticed. Or been too dazed to react to.
Finn stopped and plucked at the buttons of his shirt. His body armor was gone; his shirt was torn. Beneath it, his scrabbling fingers touched his skin and he hissed.
He’d been burned. Nothing else feels like a burn. But the weird thing was that this burn felt old. A day or two old. He gingerly probed at it and realized that it was big, and when he traced the outline of it the whole world seemed to go suddenly cold.
There was a wide, flat central burn with five thick lines running outward from it.
Put all that together and the shape became obvious.
A handprint.
Someone had branded him with a burn in the shape of a hand, fingers splayed.
God, he prayed, let it only be that. Evidence of torture, a rude gift from the Taliban.
Only that.
Only that.
Otherwise . . .
Finn had a vague, buried memory of the woman placing her hand on him. Whispering to him in the dark and touching him.
Right. Here.
Like she’d been marking him.
He reeled sideways until he crashed against the wall. She put her mark on me. Christ Jesus on the cross.
And then the realization of that wound tugged at a thread of memory stitched into his mind. With the memory came her voice.
We are agreed then. Here is my seal upon it.
“No way, you fucking bitch,” he said through gritted teeth. “I didn’t agree to nothing. You hear me? Nothing!”
Only the wind and the shadows and the rocks heard him.
Desperate to escape the cave, he shoved himself forward, staggering through the shadows with awkward steps. Expecting pain, expecting hands or worse to tear at him, but he didn’t trip, didn’t bump his head.
Five paces. Ten.
A dozen.
Then . . .
He had to blink several times to make sure that his eyes weren’t lying to him.
“Light,” he said aloud. The word “light” floated in the darkness and for a few terrible moments, he didn’t know if it was a lie or the truth. The light was a ghost of a thing. Only enough so that the shadows weren’t a uniform black, but rather pieces of a greater darkness.
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 25