It was solid gold.
The fucking thing had to weigh four pounds.
I whistled, long and loud.
I have some stocks and I have some commodities. I keep a lazy eye on the price of gold because I have some that my grandfather left me. Some coins and stuff. Last time I checked the price per ounce, it was hovering around seventeen hundred bucks.
Times four pounds?
I was holding about a hundred grand in my hand.
Not to mention the value of the statue. That was probably ancient.
The other objects? If they were all as old, then maybe they were equally valuable in their own way.
So . . . why did someone leave all this shit behind? What was so valuable in that other parcel? Was that the container of pathogen that Rattlesnake Team had been sent here to intercept?
My instincts were telling me no. I thought it was another one of these statues.
But why take that one in particular and not the rest?
What was it about that one?
Then I heard a sound behind me.
Soft. A scuff of pebbles sliding down an incline.
I immediately whirled and brought my rifle up as I threw myself to one side. My finger slipped inside the trigger guard and I almost fired.
Almost.
The barrel pointed straight and steady and my finger was curled around the trigger.
A boy stood there.
He was dressed in the robes of an Afghani villager. He had an oversize kaffiyeh on his head with the scarf pulled around to hide everything but his eyes. The kid must have come down the same slope used by the caravan.
His clothes were dusty and there was a bloodstain on his chest that I thought at first was a bullet hole. It was right over his heart.
He took a step toward me, hands out in a pleading gesture, and in good English said, “Please . . .”
As much as I hated to do it, I pointed my gun at him. “Hold it right there, kid.”
The boy stopped and stood his ground. His eyes were big and dark and they darted nervously from my face to my gun and back again.
“No one’s going to hurt you if you just stay right there,” I told him.
He nodded.
I tapped my earbud. “Bug . . . ?”
I got static for a moment, then I heard his voice.
“—ug to Cow . . . you copy . . . ?”
“Bug, you’re breaking up. If you can hear me, we have a civilian boy who may be a witness. I need evac right now.”
There was no answer.
I tapped my earbud again.
Listened.
Heard static.
I switched to the team channel. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”
A burst of static was the only answer.
“Cowboy to Green—”
A sudden scream of unbearable intensity ripped through the earbud and into my head. It hit me like a punch, as if it were coming from an inch behind me. The shriek was male but piercingly, insanely loud. The shock knocked me forward onto my knees and I clawed at the bud, tearing it out of my ear.
All the while the boy stared at me, his face twisted into a grimace that almost looked like a smile.
The scream instantly stopped.
Just like that.
But it seemed to echo faintly inside my head. My eyes teared up and my nose was running. I pawed at my face and the back of my hand came away slick and wet. And red.
I gagged and coughed dark blood onto the sand.
The boy was still standing where I’d told him to, but he touched his face beneath the rippling scarf. There was a weird look in his eyes. Like he was smiling. Or crying. I couldn’t tell.
Behind me, off somewhere at an incalculable distance, I heard other voices. Men’s voices. Not screaming. Yelling.
Calling my name.
I swung my rifle around on its sling and brought it up as blood continued to pour from my nose.
“Cowboy!” called a voice that was muffled and distorted. “Cowboy, on your nine. Friendlies. Lower your weapon.”
I turned to my left to see Top and Bunny coming toward me. Both of them had their weapons in their hands. Top’s was pointed up to the sky and he held out his other hand in a calming no-problem gesture. Bunny’s barrel and eyes were both pointed at the small boy.
“Freeze!” he yelled, and through the pain and disorientation in my head I thought that was strange. The boy hadn’t made a move, though now there was no expression except fear in his eyes.
Top pushed my rifle barrel aside as he knelt in front of me.
“Where are you hurt?” he said, asking me the same question I’d asked Finn.
I touched my nose. The bleeding had stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” I snapped, “what the fuck was that scream? Was that Finn?”
Top blinked. “Scream?” he asked.
“Yeah, that goddamn scream. You telling me you couldn’t fucking hear it?”
Top’s dark gaze roved over my face. “Didn’t hear nothing, Cap’n,” he said. “Just you yelling.”
I turned to Bunny. “What’d it sound like to you?”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, “I heard you scream, boss.”
“No,” I snapped. “Not me. Over the mic.”
Top shook his head. “Radio’s dead.”
We stared at each other and then we turned and looked at the kid. Bunny still had him at gunpoint and the kid looked terrified. Bunny told the kid to open his robes, and when it was clear the kid wasn’t wearing a C4 vest, Bunny stepped cautiously toward the boy and took a long reach to pull the scarf away from his face. The kid’s face was badly burned. Not sunburned, either. Flash-burned. He had some kind of gray clay caked over his nose. Maybe a local pain remedy.
“You okay, kid?” asked Bunny gently.
The boy said nothing.
Bunny patted him down and pushed the kid toward where I knelt. “He’s clean, boss.”
Top helped me to my feet and the whole world did a drunken jig for a moment, but I stood still for a few seconds and it passed. Then I leaned on Top and together we staggered back to where Finn lay in a semiconscious stupor.
He raised his head as we approached. “I thought I heard something,” he said in a muzzy voice. He sounded like someone who’d just woken up after a heavy nap.
Top cut a look at me and I gave him a tiny shake of my head.
“It’s all quiet on the western front,” I told Finn. “But we have a visitor, so maybe we can get some answers to—”
As I spoke, Finn looked past me to where Bunny stood with the boy.
His eyes snapped wide and a look of total horror wrenched its way onto Finn’s face. He threw himself backward, raising an arm to shield himself from the sight of the kid.
“Oh God! That’s her!” he cried.
“That’s who?” asked Bunny.
Finn made a grab for my holstered pistol, and he was so damn fast that he had it in his hand before I could stop him. Made a dive for it, but Finn clubbed me in the face with his free hand.
Bang!
Bunny shoved the kid behind a rock and dove for cover in the opposite direction. The bullet whanged off the rock, missing the boy by an inch. Even in his panic, Finn was a hell of a shot.
Finn managed two more shots before Top kicked the gun out of his hand. Finn was still yelling and he dove for the weapon. I shook off the punch to the head and tackled him. We rolled over in the sand, him bellowing about some woman while trying every dirty trick he ever learned to shake me off. He head-butted me, drove his elbow into my ribs, hoof-kicked me in the nuts, and was about to bang my head against a rock when Top stepped in front of him, grabbed a fistful of Finn’s hair, and hit him with three short punches that were so fast the impact sounded like one.
Finn dropped flat on his face and I rolled off, coughing, wheezing, and feeling like shit. Top caught me under the arm and hauled me up, but I could only manage a hunchbacked bend. My balls felt like they’d been mashed flat and then set on fire.
Finn was one of the toughest guys I’d ever known and I did not appreciate the reminder.
“Get that fucking kid over here!” I snarled. “I want some fucking answers right fucking now!”
Bunny stood by the rock and he had a look of total perplexity on his face.
“What?” I demanded.
I already knew.
The kid was gone.
He couldn’t have been.
But he was.
Fuck.
11
RATTLESNAKE TEAM
Two days ago . . .
Finn O’Leary entered the tiny café and sat down across a table from a wizened little man with a smile like a bamboo viper and eyes the color of cow shit. He was the kind of man you’d distrust on first meeting and probably never feel the need to alter your opinion. The kind of man who knew that this was how people perceived him, and instead of trying to ameliorate that gut reaction, he cultivated certain qualities within him to more strongly engender those feelings. It worked very well for him.
“Sergeant O’Leary.”
“You’re Aziz?”
The reptilian smile widened a fraction.
“People in town . . . they said that I should come talk to you,” said Finn.
“Why?”
“They said you were pretty well connected, that you had resources. And contacts.”
“So does the Red Cross,” said Aziz. “What of it?”
A greasy waiter came and Finn ordered coffee, wishing he could get something stronger. But booze was hard to come by in Muslim towns. Even in shitholes like this where probably nobody within a day’s ride had been to a mosque in years. Guys like Aziz, who was probably Muslim for convenience’s sake and no other reason.
When the coffee came, Finn sniffed it, winced, drank some, and nearly spat it against the wall. But he forced it down.
“Let’s cut the tap dance,” Finn said. “I’m not in the mood for three hours of cryptic bullshit and I don’t banter. I was told to see you. If that’s the case, then someone told you I was coming here to find you. So, can we get right down to it?”
Aziz’s smile flickered and dimmed by half. “You take the fun out of things,” he said, then waved that away. “Sure. Let us talk plainly.”
“Good. Do you know why I’m here?”
After a long pause, Aziz said, “Yes. Do you?”
“No.”
Aziz folded his hands and waited.
“Why I’m here doesn’t make sense,” Finn said. “But I’m here anyway.”
“Yes.”
“So . . . you tell me. You know what the fuck’s going on, so you tell me. Otherwise I got nowhere to go with this thing.”
Another pause, then Aziz nodded to Finn’s chest. “Open your shirt.”
Now it was Finn’s turn to pause.
“Open it,” said Aziz insistently, “or I walk away.”
Finn sighed, and with trembling fingers, he pulled up the rough cotton shirt to show the hand-shaped burn on his chest.
Aziz sat there with his eyes wide and small fists balled into knuckly knots on the tabletop. Then he rattled off a long prayer in a mix of languages. Like most SpecOps field agents, Finn had a passing familiarity with a number of them—he caught words in Pashto, Arabic, Hebrew, and Egyptian. There were many blessings overlapping one another, most of which Finn couldn’t understand clearly, and a handful of names repeated over and over again.
“Lilitu.”
“Al-bashti.”
“Iblis.”
“Lilith.”
No mention of Muhammad or Allah. No mention of any other god, prophet, or saint. Aziz removed a small stone statue from his pocket. It was an earth-mother statue, one of the fertility idols, with pendulous breasts, an enormous stomach, and tubby legs. It also had a hideous face that was painted red and a wide mouth filled with sharp teeth. The stone looked ancient but in excellent condition. Aziz put it to his mouth and kissed each breast and then the feet. Then he put the idol back into his pocket.
The smile he gave Finn was truly appalling. It was filled with awe and worship, but also with a naked, undisguised sexual lust that made Finn’s stomach churn and his testicles contract into his body.
“You have been touched by her. Touched.”
Finn pulled down the front of his shirt.
“I wish I could kill you so I could carve that from your chest and sew it onto my own skin,” Aziz continued. “You have been touched by her. Flesh to flesh.”
“You’re fucking nuts.”
That changed Aziz’s smile back to something closer to what it had been. Aziz drew a breath and let it out slowly. Finn’s chest shuddered as he did that, as if with the aftershock of a prolonged orgasm. He wanted to vomit.
The wizened little man leaned across the table, head bowed and voice low. “You want something back that’s been taken from you?”
“Yes.”
“But they are already at work,” said Aziz. “They found her idol out there in the desert. They took it from the thieves who desecrated her temple. She has taken them as her own and they are already doing what they must do in her service.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I want them back.”
“You know the price?”
“Listen to me, shitbag, I can make one call and have a platoon of marines in here kicking the ass of you and everyone you’ve ever met. I can firebomb this shithole into the next dimension. I told you already: do not fuck with me.”
Aziz contrived to look hurt. “I am not ‘fucking’ with you, Sergeant Finn. I am required to ask this question, and I am asking it. Do you know the price? Do you understand it? What it means?”
“Yeah, yeah, fuck you, I understand. Now let’s get this done.”
Aziz stood firm on his point and his lip curled in a sneer. “We are not haggling over a rug, you arrogant asshole. You came to me—me—bearing her mark. Who do you think I am? A cheap gangster? Sure, that’s what everyone sees. But I protect her.”
“She seemed able to handle herself,” Finn said, and he was surprised he could manage that sarcasm.
“You don’t understand. There are proper ways to do these things. Prayers and rituals. Why do you think shrines are so important? They focus, Sergeant. They allow. Without doing everything the right way, the precise way, it all falls apart.”
Finn said nothing.
“Even now, the old bargain—the one she made with your men—is falling apart because things were not done properly. She took them after they were already dead. Their souls are being torn. Worlds are breaking apart.” He shook his head and made to stand up. “Ah, why am I lecturing a fool?”
Finn caught his arm. “No,” he said quickly. “No . . . I’m sorry. Look . . . just tell me what I have to do.”
“Are you sure? Because what we do now is to make the actual substance of the bargain. What you will do, what you will get, how it will all play out.” Aziz leaned forward and his face was alight, intense and vicious. “Are you sure?”
Inside Finn’s chest, his heart was hammering dangerously hard.
“Yes,” he lied.
12
ECHO TEAM
With the radio out, there was no way to call in our helo. Protocol allowed for a flyby six hours after we’d rappelled into the LZ, and there were still four hours on that clock.
So we used the time to locate and secure a safe spot to use as a base camp. It was a tunnel near the ambush point. It was shaped like a croissant and ran maybe sixty-five feet from one end to the other. Bunny rigged one end of the tunnel with booby traps. No explosives, just a couple of flash-bangs that he hid so cleverly that a mountain goat wouldn’t see them. Bunny is very good at that sort of thing.
Top used flex-cuffs to bind Finn’s ankles and wrists. Once he was secure, Top used the first-aid kit to fix the damage to the man’s face. The three punches had cracked his nose and bruised the orbit around Finn’s right eye. He’d have a headache for a month. Better than a bullet, though.
For my pa
rt, I had aching balls, scattered bruises, and some wounded pride. And I was more confused than I’d ever been in my adult life. I swallowed a couple of painkillers—wishing I could wash them down with Jack Daniel’s—and took up a position at the other cave mouth while Bunny did a quick recon of the area. I motioned for Top to join me out of earshot and told him about the statues, and he brought them back and stood them in a row on the sand. Except for the gold bull. That one he held and stared at with goggle eyes.
“Is this . . . ?” he breathed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Solid?”
“I think so.”
“Holy monkey-fuck! This has to be worth a fortune.”
“Call it a hundred grand, give or take.” And I explained about the fight, the massacre, the opium, and the parcels. They worked it through and came to about the same conclusions I had . . . that it didn’t add up. Not in any way we could see.
At my direction, Bunny buried the statues and marked the spot so we could find them again. None of us wanted to hump all that weight around.
“Even the gold bull?” Bunny asked, reluctance showing on his face.
“All of it.”
When he was done, I asked, “What’s the status on the radio?”
“Still out,” said Top. “This is hinky as shit, Cap’n.”
“I know.” I didn’t mention to them that it seemed to go out every time I tried to arrange for a helicopter evac.
“And here’s something else you ain’t going to like,” he said.
I just looked at him.
Top flipped up his tactical computer. “This is dead, too. Went out the same time as the radio. Ditto for every other gadget we have. Sensors, meters, all of it. Now, I know that sounds like an EMP, but the Taliban don’t have anything that can send out an electromagnetic pulse. Not unless someone dropped a nuke somewhere and we ain’t heard about it.”
“Maybe an e-bomb?” I ventured, but it was a lame suggestion. The Taliban didn’t have hardware like that. And no one in their right mind would have sold it to them. That would have been a ticket to a military escalation that nobody on either side wanted. “Okay, Top, drop the other shoe. What’s the rest of it?”
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 28