He licked his dry lips and took another step, moving in the direction of the light.
Four tentative steps later he was sure that there was light down there. He could see the faint outlines of rocks rising from the floor or hanging like fangs from the ceiling.
Eight more steps and he could see his own hands. A sharp cry burst from between his clenched teeth. He was covered with blood.
Was it his blood?
Finn stopped and touched his chest, his stomach, his limbs.
If he was hurt, then where was the wound?
If he wasn’t hurt . . . ?
“God,” he breathed, and the word sounded too loud in the dark tunnel. It echoed badly and took on different meanings as it ricocheted past him.
He took a few more steps, and now the light began peeling the shadows back in layers. The palette of the moment changed from black to brown. The color of the desert, except for the sheer walls of gray rock. However, in that light, he could see that the blood was the brightest of reds. A garish scarlet from a cheap paint box.
He tried wiping his hands on his thighs and on the walls, needing to clear his skin. To clean his hands. He spat on the stubborn spots.
He got a little of it off.
Not much.
And that made him want to move faster. He stumbled forward, falling into a clumsy run, his boots barely lifting from the ground. He left smudged and elongated footprints in the sand behind him.
His breath came in ragged gasps as if he was running uphill.
At the end of each inhalation, there was a little squeak of a sound. Almost a whimper.
“Stop it stop it stop it,” he told himself, but his voice lacked conviction.
The light was stronger just around the bend ahead. He could smell the air, too. Clean air. Not the stale air of the tunnel. There was wind, too, whispering past the mouth of this motherfucking tunnel.
His stumbling run turned into a sprint as he bolted for the light.
He burst from the mouth of the cave, a smile carving its way onto his filthy face, a sob breaking in his chest as he flung off the last of the shadows.
He stopped and leaned against a boulder to catch his breath. There was movement to his left and Finn spun, drawing his pistol, raising it, pointing it.
A boy stood there, his face turned away. He wore a loose kameez over shalwar—the loose pajama-like trousers—with a kaffiyeh wound around his head and simple pair of dusty kabuli sandals. His clothes were streaked with dust but the only bloodstain on them was an oddly shaped splash of red over his heart. It looked like a desert rose.
“Boy . . . ,” said Finn in Pashto.
The child did not respond, did not seem to hear.
Finn said it again in Dari.
The boy stiffened and suddenly began running away. As he did so, he pressed the wrappings of his kaffiyeh to his face as if trying to conceal his features. Finn tried to run after him, but he was too weak and dizzy. He snaked out a hand and caught one trailing edge of the kaffiyeh and pulled. It jerked the boy almost to a stop and made him half-turn—and that revealed more of the boy’s face.
Only it was not the face of a boy.
It was the face of an ancient woman. Withered beyond belief, scarred, ugly, almost bestial. Her skin was a livid red, almost the color of blood, and her nose was caked with clay. She opened her mouth to hiss at him, and Finn saw that instead of teeth she had a pair of razor-sharp tusks. The woman spat at him and tore the cloth from his hands. Then she spun and ran as lithely and quickly as a young, athletic child.
Finn could never hope to keep up.
He stumbled along and finally ran down to a sloppy stop, bent over, hands on his knees, panting, confused and terrified and sure that he was losing his mind. Minutes dragged past and the world around him seemed to steady itself down to become nothing more than mountains and sand and a hot wind.
Finn pushed himself erect and began walking along the path that led through the old town square, looking for answers, for the thread of sanity he’d lost. Looking for the sight of the ambush. Looking for his men.
He found nothing for a long time, and he was beginning to think that there was nothing to find. That he was irretrievably lost out here. Or that he was mad and imagining all of this as he lay dying somewhere. He gave up trying to make sense of it. He summoned what strength he had and began to run in the only direction that promised any hope of an answer—back the way he’d come.
But the day was not done with Sergeant Finn O’Leary.
He took five steps, but each one was slower and less steady than the last. His final step was broken and he realized that he was falling. Not onto his face again, but down hard onto his knees. His body weight collapsed as the air flew from his lungs in shock and defeat. Finn knelt there, slumped like a despairing supplicant. His hands hung slack at the ends of his arms, palms up, fingers curled like the legs of some pale, dead spider.
Spit glistened on the rim of his lower lip and as his unblinking eyes took in the things that lay tangled in the dust, the drool broke over the edge of his lip and ran in a crooked line down his chin.
Tears burned into his eyes and they fell, too, cutting like acid down his cheeks.
He looked at the things that lay scattered around the clearing that had once been a town square.
Red things.
Ragged things.
Torn and broken. Defiled and discarded.
Three of them, lying in broken humps that did not add up to the orderly shapes of men. There were too many bad angles. There were parts that should have been connected and stubbornly, stupidly were not.
Bear was the closest.
Or at least Finn thought it was Bear.
But his eyes . . .
His eyes were gone. The flesh around the holes burned to blackened leather. Smoke curled upward from each socket, but the smoke seemed to glow as if fires still burned inside the dead man’s skull.
It was the same with the others. They lay on their backs, faces pointed to the sky. Fiery smoke rose from their eye sockets.
You know what has been taken, and you want it back. That’s what the woman said.
Yes. He knew.
What will you give me for what you want?
What indeed.
God . . . what had he told her?
How had he answered that horrible question?
There was a rustle and he spun around. Bear had turned his face toward Finn.
Finn stared in horror, trying to understand this. Was it rigor mortis? Was the heat from the fire shortening the tendons in Bear’s neck? Was . . .
Jazzman and Cheech Wizard turned their heads, too.
All three of his men stared at Finn with eyes that were nothing but fire and smoke. With the eyes of hell.
All Finn could do was scream. It was the only reasonable response to this. It was the only choice left to him.
6
ECHO TEAM
The shooter was so close that I heard him racking the bolt a split second before the shots started banging their way through the day. That little bit of warning saved my ass, because as soon as I heard it, I threw myself off the path and behind a heap of fallen rock. The bullets hammered a line along the ground where I’d been standing. I saw that much as I scurried like a lizard into the smallest crevice I could find. The impact points walked up the path a yard from my nose.
I realized that it was only a single shooter and started to breathe a sigh of relief.
Then I heard other guns open up from back the way I’d come.
I heard someone yell: “It’s more of them! Kill the unholy! Allahu akbar!”
We’d walked into a nice trap, but then I heard Top and Bunny open up with their M14s set on rock ’n’ roll and immediately the valley was filled with thunder. There were some yells amid the thunder. Screams of pain and curses in Pashto.
I had my own worries.
I rolled sideways and peered around the corner of the rock and saw a man firing an AK-47. He stood
with one foot braced on the boulder he must have been hiding behind. His clothes were streaked with blood and dirt, and his eyes were completely wild. His turban was in disarray and the ends of it flapped in the hot wind. He burned through an entire magazine, shooting the whole landscape around me, and all the time he screeched prayers to Allah. Calling me a demon. Begging for protection from Allah.
The bullets ricocheted all over the damn place. One plucked at my sleeve, which made me yank my arm in tighter and utter another in a long string of promises to Jesus I knew I’d later renege on. I meant them right then, though.
When he stopped to reload, I leaned out with my Beretta in both hands and put three rounds into his chest. He fell back and the AK dropped onto its stock, stood for a moment, and then fell over with a clatter.
Dangerous guy, but a stupid guy.
Now a dead guy.
I got to my feet and ran in a low, fast crouch across the path and knelt by the man I’d killed—and then did a double take as I looked at him. He was a mess. When I’d seen the bloodstains on his clothes, I’d thought that it was somebody else’s blood. Survivors get like that after a battle, and we had to presume that these guys were the ones who ambushed Rattlesnake Team. But this guy’s clothes were torn, and when I poked around I could see long lacerations—days old—that were festering with pus and crawling with maggots. This guy was more than half dead before I shot him. He had to have been in agony and probably out of his mind with fever.
The wounds were a mix. Long slashes in parallel lines that looked like they might have been done by a rake. Or a set of claws. A big hunting cat might leave marks like that. But there were also burns in weird segmented sections around his face and throat.
I had no idea what could have caused marks like that.
The gunfire abruptly stopped.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Echo Team. Give me a sitrep.”
“All clear, boss,” said Bunny. “Three up, three down.”
He was right. As I rounded a shoulder of the mountain, I saw Bunny standing over three bodies while Top knelt between two of them. He used the tip of a knife to lift sections of torn, bloodstained clothing, then glanced up at me as I approached.
“Looks like Rattlesnake Team had some fun with these jokers before we got here,” said Bunny, nodding to the bodies, which were all as torn as that of the man I’d killed.
Top nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.
“My guy, too. Cuts and burns.”
None of us said what all of us were thinking. Those marks might have been the result of some prolonged torture. I knew Finn pretty well, and his boys. They were rough and they were hardasses, but I was sure I’d have pegged them as guys who couldn’t do this.
On the other hand, I’d been wrong before.
I tapped my earbud for the command channel. “Cowboy to Bug.”
It took a few seconds before I got anything but static.
Then, “Cowboy? Jeez, man, what happened?”
“What do you mean what happened? We just got ambushed by four Taliban shooters. I thought you said this valley was empty.”
“I think we have a satellite malfunction. And sat phone is acting funky, too. NASA tells us it’s sunspots.”
“Fuck NASA.”
“Thermals tell me no one but Echo, then a whole bunch—thirty or forty—then no one at all. It’s weird.”
“Go bang the thermals with a hammer then, goddamn it. We nearly got our dicks handed to us.”
“It’s in space, Cowboy,” he complained. “Only so much we can do. Shit, wait, the board just lit up again. Counting six—no, ten—jeez, fourteen signals coming to you from the west. Satellite’s only giving us grainy crap, but it looks like three vehicles. Jeez, Cowboy, you’ve got a Taliban team zeroing your twenty.” He read the map coordinates. “Four klicks out and coming fast.”
“Swell.”
“Hey!” he yelped, but it wasn’t at me. “Cowboy, be advised, RFID tracking chips for Cheech Wizard, Jazzman, and Bear have come back online. Intermittent but . . . no, the signals are strong. Four klicks to the southwest. Looks like they’re on an intercept course with the Taliban, all three.”
“What about Finn?”
But the line dissolved into static.
We looked at each other. Top had the coordinates up on his computer and he pointed the way. Straight down the valley we were in. There was a sluggish breeze coming from that direction, and as he listened, we thought we heard thunder. Way off in the distance.
We all knew it wasn’t thunder.
“Rattlesnake,” said Bunny.
And then we were running.
7
RATTLESNAKE TEAM
Six days ago . . .
Finn didn’t remember walking away.
He didn’t remember much of anything.
All he knew was that when his mind started becoming aware of things, there were no bodies on the ground. No cave. No voices. He was miles and miles from where he’d deployed with his team.
His team.
Cheech Wizard. Bear. Jazzman.
This morning, they had been so full of life. Big, covered in the scars they’d earned fighting genuine threats to the world. Men who had saved the world. The actual world.
Now . . .
He closed his eyes—his real eyes and his inner eye—in hopes of shutting out the image of those things that had been scattered across the valley floor. Those impossible things with their impossible eyes.
Things that could not have been his men.
His friends.
They call it being “brothers in arms,” but it went so much deeper than that. He and those men were brothers, more so than if they’d been born of the same mother.
Brothers.
Finn loved them more than anyone he’d ever known. More than his wife. More than his two kids back home. More than his actual brother, who was a fat accountant in Des Moines and would never have believed what Finn did for a living. Did for his country, for the world.
Bear, Jazzman, and Cheech Wizard understood.
Bitter tears filled his eyes.
The kind of love a soldier has for his battlefield brothers can’t really be defined. Maybe “love” is the wrong word. Maybe there’s too much romance and bullshit hanging off that word, and there’s none of that here. It’s not about that kind of shit. This was a fundamental thing; it went down to the DNA. Down to the soul.
Finn knew that if he could have dialed the clock back, he would have done anything in his power to keep from failing his men. He’d have done anything—any damn thing in the world—to save them.
To spare them.
To take their place.
He blinked his eyes clear and stared at the landscape. There were people on the road. A man and two boys leading a string of goats. Beyond them was an old truck, wheezing along the road away from him, and with dull astonishment, Finn realized that it must have passed him while he was walking.
Finn stopped and stared at it. Far beyond the truck was a cluster of huts, and beyond that . . .
A town.
A hot wind blew past him and he held a hand up to shield his eyes. Buried deep inside the wind was a voice.
Her voice.
What will you give me for what you want?
8
ECHO TEAM
Guys like Bunny, Top, and me, we live in a landscape of war. Our lives are defined by it. As a result, we are almost always in a high-alert state. It’s a bitch, it wears at you after a while, but it is what’s required of us and we know that we have the option of turning in our badges and hanging up our guns.
As if.
We ran straight along the valley for two klicks, then split and began climbing the slopes on either side, running from one cover position to the next. We had no idea if the Taliban had scouts or spotters out here and we didn’t want to find out the wrong way.
With every step, the noise sounded less like thunder and more like what it was. Heavy-caliber weapons. G
renades.
As we passed the three-kilometer mark, the sound of the battle suddenly changed.
Fewer gunshots.
More screams.
And soon, all screams.
We poured it on for another half klick and then slowed to a predatory crawl, weapons ready, minds and hearts ready.
The screams continued.
Then the last scream dwindled down to a wet gurgle and faded.
Black towers of oil smoke curled up over the lip of the ridge directly ahead of us. And there, strewn among the rocks, I saw sunlight glinting on brass.
I signaled that I was going ahead and that Bunny and Top should cover me.
The path climbed a short hill that was shaded by the shattered remains of a fig tree whose trunks had been comprehensively chewed apart by gunfire. I ran to the trunk, crouched momentarily behind it, then went over the rise.
And stopped.
The scene below was a tableau in a museum of hell.
Two of the three trucks were burning. From the driver’s window of the lead vehicle, a charred arm protruded, the fingers slowly curling into a fist as heat contracted the tendons.
Men lay everywhere, like islands in a lake of blood. Blood was everywhere. On the ground, on the surrounding boulders, even splashed high on the walls.
Fourteen of them.
The ground was littered with thousands of shell casings and spent magazines. All of the magazines were the banana clips of the AK-47. As I moved down the far side of the ridge, I bent and picked up a shell casing. It was a 7.62 round. From their guns. I didn’t see any shell casings from M14s or M16s.
Nothing moved except smoke wandering on a sluggish breeze.
I heard Top and Bunny coming up on either side of me, fifty yards out. I held my fist up to signal them to stop and hold.
Letting my gun barrel lead, I moved forward, walking among the corpses, looking for signs of life, finding only death.
Then I heard a sound behind the rear truck. I froze, then hand-signaled my guys to move in fast and wide so we could circle the truck from two positions. I ran forward on cat feet, and as I reached the back of the truck I yelled, “Freeze!”
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 26