Or something like that.
Whatever I said never got out.
The tailgate of the truck was down and an Afghani was sprawled on the bed, arms and legs wide, eyes wide, chest torn wide. Three men were bent over the corpse. Their arms were crimson to the elbows. Their faces were smeared with blood. Pieces of raw meat hung from their teeth. They heard me and turned.
Their eyes . . .
God almighty, their eyes.
Where eyes should have been were holes torn into their faces and inside those holes . . .
Impossibly . . .
Fires burned inside of them.
Fires.
They froze there, lumps of red pressed to their mouths. Then they hissed at me, showing red teeth that had been filed to dagger points.
Somewhere, a million miles away, I heard Top and Bunny running, yelling.
The three men—if that word even makes sense anymore—dropped the red chunks of meat they held. They straightened. The biggest of them reached past the dead man to a wooden crate that had been smashed open and removed a piece of rock. Then I saw that it was a fragment of carved stone. The fleshy, rounded figure of a woman with a huge belly and breasts. The man pressed his bloody lips to the feet of the figure, then shoved it inside his jacket.
All three of them were staring at me with burning eyes.
In a voice as cold as death, the man with the statue said, “We return what was stolen. We honor the bargain.”
Then I felt myself falling backward with no memory of why I’d lost balance.
Someone was yelling my name. Top? Bunny?
I hit the ground hard on my ass and the shock snapped me out of my stupor. Bunny was right there, catching me under the armpits and hauling me to my feet. Top had his rifle out and was turning to cover the area.
But nothing moved.
There was nothing that could move.
It was the three of us and fourteen dead men.
Absolutely no one else.
“Boss!” yelled Bunny. “Yo, boss, what’s wrong?”
I pointed numbly at the dead man sprawled in the back of the truck. But when they looked all they saw was a corpse.
The world seemed to be falling off its hinges, and I was dangerously close to losing my shit. The three men—things, whatevers—were gone. I could not have imagined them. On the other hand, let’s face it . . . I couldn’t have seen them.
So . . . what the fuck?
Before I could organize my brain so that I could say something that made sense, we all heard a sound behind us. A cough, a soft grunt.
I pushed myself free of Bunny as we all whirled, weapons coming up.
A man knelt on the ground twenty feet behind us, in the midst of all that blood. He wore a cotton shirt in a rough local weave over faded camouflage pants, but the pattern was from the First Gulf War. He was drenched head to toe in blood.
The kneeling man looked down at the ground in front of him.
He slowly raised his head and stared at me with eyes that had grown huge and round with shock. Or maybe it was madness.
He looked at me for a few distorted seconds, then opened dried, cracked lips and said, “Joe . . . ?”
Sergeant Finn O’Leary fell face-forward onto the dirt, making no attempt to break his fall.
9
RATTLESNAKE TEAM
Four days ago . . .
The town was barely that—just a desperate cluster of a few tents, mud buildings, and the open mouth of a cave inside of which was the local bazaar.
Finn O’Leary barely remembered coming here. There were tattered memories of a goatherd and his wife taking him in, cleaning him, washing his body, forcing mutton stew down his throat. Praying over him. Or maybe near him; Finn couldn’t be sure.
When he could speak—sometime during the second day—Finn croaked, “Where am I?”
They told him. A place called Haykal. He’d never heard of it.
“My sons found you walking on the road,” said the father, then he hesitated. He was a stick of a man with light brown eyes filled with shadows. Living as a simple farmer in a country that hadn’t known peace in his lifetime probably aged him beyond his years. He said, “You were in a fight, yes? A battle?”
Finn didn’t ask how the man knew. Finn was aware enough to remember that his clothes had been covered in blood.
Even so, he didn’t answer. Soldiers don’t answer those questions, and the little farmer didn’t push it.
“You are not injured,” the farmer said.
“Yes,” said Finn, “I am.”
He opened his shirt to show this old man the hand-shaped burn on his chest.
The man did not look at it. He turned his head, closed his eyes, and began to pray very quickly and fervently.
Finn pulled his shirt closed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t quite understand what he was apologizing for.
Without turning to face him, the old man said, “The person you need to talk to is here.”
“What person? What are you talking about?”
“He is a black marketer,” said the man, still not looking at him. “A criminal. A bad man who has forgotten the name of God.”
Finn said nothing.
“His name is Aziz. He knows about such things.” The old man stood up. “When you are well, I will take you to him. He can be found in a very bad place, a place where criminals meet. I cannot ask such a man into this house. I am poor and worthless, but we live according to the teachings of the Prophet, and we cannot have such a person here.”
“You brought me in here.”
The man finally turned. “You were hurt and God requires mercy of us.”
Finn nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
The man nodded but said nothing.
Finn touched his chest. “Do you know what this is?”
The man looked away.
“Look, I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know how I got this. I was attacked and I’ve been out of my head for days. If you know something, then you have to tell me.”
It took the old man a long time to answer. Finally he said, “There are things in the desert older even than Islam. Older than Christianity. Older than the Jews.” The man made a sign against evil. “There are things older than the world. These things are evil. They are demons who trick and seduce. But . . . no man’s heart is ever corrupted by them if his faith is strong, if his faith is real.” He shook his head. “I will pray for you.”
And that was all he would say.
10
ECHO TEAM
“Jesus H. T. Christ, Esquire,” muttered Top as he rolled Finn onto his back. He pushed two fingers against the side of the man’s throat. “He’s got a pulse. Don’t seem to be hurt. Got a weird burn on his chest, but it’s a coupla days old. Nothing else. Been in the sun too damn long.”
“The fuck did he come from?” asked Bunny, glancing around.
Finn slowly opened his eyes and blinked up at us, and it was clear that he didn’t see us. Or at least didn’t quite understand who—or perhaps what—we were.
“Finn,” I said again, then repeated it more firmly.
He blinked again.
Finn’s eyes locked on mine and I could see them gradually begin to clear. He tried to speak; his lips formed my name, but all that came out was an inarticulate croak. He licked his lips, swallowed, winced at the pain in his dry throat, and tried again, forcing it.
“Joe . . . ?”
I slung my rifle and knelt in front of him.
“Jesus, Finn,” I said, “where are you hurt? How bad is it?”
“Hurt?” he asked as if he didn’t understand the word. I pushed past Top and began checking Finn myself. I saw the burn and pulled Finn’s shirt completely open to look at it. Finn tried to stop me, his fingers quick and nervous.
“Finn,” I said, helping him sit up, “what the hell happened?”
He shook his head and looked past me at the blood. “My men,” he whi
spered. “Bear . . . Cheech Wizard,” he said slowly, his voice barely a whisper, “Jazzman.”
I took him by the shoulders and tried to steady him. Gave him just a little shake, maybe put some of his marbles back into their slots. “Finn, what happened here? Where’s your team? Where are your men?”
I almost said what are your men. My pulse was still hammering.
Finn’s eyes roved around the town square, from one patch of blood to the other.
“Here,” he said hollowly. “Joe . . . they were all just here.”
Top and Bunny glanced at me, but I let nothing show.
“What happened out here?” asked Bunny.
But Finn’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he pitched forward into my arms.
I took his weight and, with Bunny’s help, carried him out of the big pool of blood and onto unmarked ground. We propped him up with his back against a rock wall. Top watched and I could tell from the calculating look in his eyes that he was doing the math on all this and wasn’t happy with the numbers.
Top gave me a small sideways tic of the head, and I rose and walked a dozen yards away with him. We stood there, surveying the carnage. Top took a pack of gum from his shirt and we each had a piece. He saw my hands trembling as I unwrapped mine.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug.”
It took five tries to get a static-filled connection.
“Go for Bug.”
“Give me a rundown on thermal and satellite feeds.”
“Satellites are a negative. They went offline ten minutes ago. NASA’s working on it.”
“Balls. And the thermals? We getting any signal?”
“We got lots of signals, Cowboy. We got four signatures right now—Echo and Finn. All clustered together. That’s cool that you found him. How is he?”
Bug had never been great at the formality of tactical radio chatter.
“Alive, minimal injuries but disoriented. Unable to debrief at this time. What about Rattlesnake?”
“Their signals are weird, Cowboy. One minute they’re here, the next they’re not. Then they’re up in the mountains, then somewhere else. The telemetry is totally fritzed.”
“Okay. We’re returning to the LZ. I need exfil for four now and then air surveillance. Screw the satellites, get me some helos.”
There was a squawk of static and we lost the signal again.
“Shit,” I said, and picked up a rock to throw it as hard as I could. I stopped midthrow, weighed it in my hand, and dropped it.
Then I gave the order to make a stretcher and carry Finn back to the ancient town built into the mountain, back where his team had gone missing. There were enough slats from the unburned stake-bed pickup, and we used the jackets of dead men for a sling. Top and Bunny carried while I walked point.
“Why not wait here?” asked Bunny, and Top nodded.
Fair question.
“Because this shit started back by that small cave,” I said. “I want to figure it out in some kind of order.”
As explanations go, it was lame as hell; but they were sergeants and I was a captain and this wasn’t a democracy. The truth . . . ? This place spooked me more than I could express. Those faces with the burning eyes had been too real, but I didn’t want to talk about it with them. I’ve had some psych issues in the past, and I’m pretty sure my guys know about it. This was not the time to shake their confidence in me.
When we were back at the abandoned town, we placed Finn in the shade of pair of withered trees. He was still unconscious.
“I’m going to walk the scene,” I said to Top.
He glanced around, not liking it. “This is a weird place, Cap’n.”
He left it there in case I wanted to say something. I didn’t.
“Call me when Finn’s awake.”
I stepped back from them, moving to the edge of the town square so I could see the whole thing. I used to be a pretty good homicide cop back in West Baltimore. A lot of what I know about working a crime scene comes from three reliable sources. The first was my dad, who was a cop before me, and he’d worked his way up from the street to a gold shield to commissioner before finally jumping ship to run for mayor. None of his promotions were purely political. He’d been a cop’s cop—he’d done his time and closed a big share of his cases. He taught me a lot.
The second source was my own time on the job. Baltimore has a lot of crime and never enough cops, so the guys on the job have to do the job.
My third source was a cop from DCPD named Jerry Spencer. He was a grumpy son of a bitch, but he could work a crime scene like Sherlock Holmes. He didn’t just see, he observed. And he kept his opinions in neutral until he had enough facts to build a reasonable supposition. Even then, he was never sold on a theory as long as there was a potential for a decent competing theory.
So I stood there and I let the scene speak to me.
Here were the things I could tell for sure.
Rattlesnake Team had come into this valley from the west. As I walked around a clearing that must once have been the town center, I found the trail of their footprints at a few hundred yards, and then the faint brush marks from where Finn and his boys erased the signs of their presence as they prepared to lay a trap. The four of them separated. Finn went through a short tunnel that curled and rose to a flat rock on the far side of the town, almost certainly to set up a good elevated shooting position. Personally, I thought it was a questionable choice. A good shooting position should be in can’t-miss range, but even for a sniper as good as Finn that spot was at the outer edge of safe range. Its only virtue was an element of absolute surprise, but there were better choices he could have made. Maybe that was part of whatever went wrong here. One bad choice can shove everything else downhill in an avalanche of consequences.
The other three guys from Rattlesnake skirted the edge of the town square and found concealed spots to set up an ambush. There were the distinctive marks in the sand of men sitting, lying prone, and kneeling. That spot was thick with their shell casings.
I went upslope and that’s when I found the caravan. Or what was left of it. From ground level, it looked like an empty trail because of a raised lip of ragged stone. But as I drew near, I heard blowflies and smelled the stink of rotted meat. A dozen of the corpses were adult men, and one was a boy of about ten. My heart twisted for the kid. It’s insane how many cultures drag their children into the middle of a war, often literally putting guns in their hands and metaphorically painting bull’s-eyes over their hearts. Bastards.
There were also three dead horses, their bellies swollen from internal gases and crawling with flies and maggots.
The ground all around them was littered with shell casings. The men had made a fight of it, but they all went down.
There was a sudden rasp of static in my ear. “Bug to Cowboy.”
“Go for Cowboy. Good to hear you, kid.”
“Hey,” he said, “we might only have this connection for a few seconds. NASA’s now saying that there might be some combination of minerals in the mountains where you are that’s screwing up the signal. Nothing else seems to make sense.”
“You have any useful intel?”
“We got a couple of good thermals and some clean satellite images and your whole area is clean. Just the same four signals—Echo and Finn.”
“No one else?”
“No.”
“Bug, see if you can take another look at the area we just left. The convoy ambush. I thought I spotted the rest of Rattlesnake Team there, but I lost them.”
“We’ve scanned it. No life signs, no thermals, no visuals, and no telemetry from the RFID chips. There’s nothing out there but dead Taliban guys and lizards.”
“Look again.”
“Okay.”
“And get me some frigging choppers. I want to get the hell out of here.”
But he was gone. The timing was really pissing me off. And . . . scaring me, too.
A lot.
I sucked it up, though,
and went back to studying the dead caravan, and that’s when the scene got suddenly very weird.
On and around the three horses were heavy cotton sacks. Most were still tied shut, but all had been pierced by rounds so that white opium powder spilled out onto the rock. Hundreds of pounds of it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth.
It was still there. No one had touched it.
One bag, however, had been cut open with something sharp and a parcel had been removed. The wrappings of the parcel—green silk—lay discarded on the ground. Whatever had been wrapped in the silk was gone.
From my perspective, it appeared that Rattlesnake Team had ambushed and killed the Taliban caravan, then someone—either a member of Rattlesnake or someone else—targeted one bag, cut it open, and removed something that had been hidden among the drugs. That item, and now three members of Rattlesnake Team were missing, and there were no footprints in the spilled blood of the Taliban to indicate how anyone had approached the bag without leaving a mark.
Curious, I drew my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket, snapped the blade into place, and systematically cut open the other bags. I made sure to keep a cloth pressed to my nose and mouth. Getting stoned was not part of the agenda.
There was a green silk parcel in each bag. They were heavy, too.
None of them felt like the kind of vacuum-packed metal cylinders that would be used to transport a pathogen. They felt like rocks, maybe carvings.
I collected them and retreated down the slope, but I noticed that as careful as I had been, I left a trail of bloody footprints. How had someone looted that first bag without doing the same?
At the bottom of the slope, I found a table-sized rock and placed the parcels there, then unwrapped each one. The first one was a small statue of a snooty-looking little man with an enormous dick. Fertility symbol from some culture. The second was a broken statue of one of the Egyptian gods. The one with the cat face, can’t remember the name offhand. The others were similar. Small idols of gods from several different cultures, including one that was of a very nice carving of a bull. That one really caught my eye and I spit on it and rubbed the dirt away. What I at first thought was brass was something else entirely.
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 27