“I got no shoe to drop, Cap’n. I’m standing here in my socks ankle-deep in some weird shit.”
We looked up at the mountains.
“Bug said NASA thought it’s something in the rocks,” I said. “Some metal or ore that’s creating a field of interference.”
When I looked at Top, I could see how much of that he believed. “You really trying to sell that?” he asked.
I didn’t bother to answer.
When Bunny returned, we three hunkered down around Finn. I said, “I’m tired of watching Finn get his beauty rest. Let’s see if we can get some straight goddamn answers.”
Top produced a syrette filled with a stimulant and cocked an eyebrow at me. I nodded and he jabbed.
Finn twitched and groaned, and in a few seconds his eyes fluttered open. He blinked his vision clear and looked at the three faces ringed around him. He wasn’t seeing any smiles. Then the pain from his face registered and he winced.
“What . . . happened?” he asked thickly.
I told him.
He winced at that, too. Then his eyes popped wide and started darting around, looking past us as his whole body went rigid with tension.
“Is she here? Did you get her?”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said soothingly. “Who are you talking about?”
“Her, goddamn it. Did I get her?”
“Finn—you grabbed my piece and started taking potshots at some local boy. A kid, for chrissakes.”
He shook his head. “That was no boy, Joe. It only looks like one.”
We stared at him.
“We searched him,” Bunny finally said. “Definitely a boy.”
Finn kept shaking his head. “No, you’re wrong . . .”
I snapped my fingers in front of his face. He blinked and stopped shaking his head. His eyes were bloodshot and there were dark smudges under them.
“Hey—listen to me, Finn,” I said, pitching my voice low and calm, “you’re in shock and you’re not making a lot of sense. You’ve got to calm down and—”
“No, I—”
“Shhh,” I said. “It’s cool. We’re clear and we’re safe. We searched the area. It’s just the four of us, and help is on the way.”
He gradually calmed, but only halfway. “What’s . . . what’s our status? Why is there all this blood on my clothes?”
“We’re piecing that together. We found the spot where Rattlesnake Team ambushed the opium convoy. All of the Taliban are dead, the opium’s there, but there’s no sign of your guys.”
Finn gave me a sharp look, penetrating and unblinking. “You’re sure about that, Joe? You haven’t seen them?”
Before I could respond, Bunny said, “Nah, we ain’t seen hide nor hair. But we think they ambushed another convoy a couple hours ago.”
Finn stared at him. “You’re sure it was them?”
“Not sure of anything today,” said Top. “But whoever did it used M14s. Classic SpecOps ambush scenario, too. How many teams of gunslingers you think are out here? There’s us and there’s your boys.”
Finn’s eyes shifted away. He looked toward the town and then he looked down between his knees at the dirt.
“My team is gone,” he said softly.
“Gone . . . ?” prompted Bunny. “You mean they been capped?”
Finn shrugged.
“Where are the bodies?” asked Top.
Another shrug.
“Excuse me,” said Top, “you may be top-kick of that team, Finn, but I’m still a first sergeant and you’re a master sergeant and I asked you a question. Where are the bodies of your team?”
Finn closed his eyes. “Gone,” he said again, but then he added, “They’ve been taken.”
“Taken by who?” demanded Bunny.
“I—don’t know,” said Finn. I had the weird impression that he was hiding something but not actually lying to us. When I made eye contact with Top, I could see that he was in the same place as me.
I placed my hand on Finn’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “Listen, brother, you’ve been out here for ten days and it’s pretty clear you’ve been through some shit.”
“I’ve been through hell,” he said without looking at me.
“If we’re going to help you, then we need to know everything that happened.”
Finn shook his head. “It’s too late for that, Joe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Telling you won’t make it better. My guys are lost.”
“Maybe not,” I said, putting some edge into it.
He gave me a pitying look like I was a naïve idiot who didn’t have a clue about how the world worked.
“I . . . ,” he began, then stopped and swallowed. He brushed a tear from his eye. “Joe, I don’t know why I’m even here. I should be dead, not them. I thought that was how it was supposed to work. Me, not them. It wasn’t their fault.”
“What wasn’t their fault?” I asked gently.
“That they . . . that they were lost.”
I noticed that he kept avoiding the word “died” or “killed.” He called it “lost.” He said they were gone.
It troubled me in ways I couldn’t quite explain.
“Look, Finn, just start from the beginning. There was a firefight here, and there’s a hell of a lot of blood, but there are no American bodies. The only other person we found is a kid, maybe ten years old. And it was definitely a boy, that’s not even a discussion.”
“Hooah,” said Bunny.
I continued. “So, I need you to take a breath, get your shit wired tight, and tell me what happened. And I mean everything.”
I can’t know what Finn was thinking, but I watched his eyes and I could see the process of the frightened and disoriented man yielding all control to the trained soldier—the top-of-the-line SpecOps gunslinger. Top handed him a canteen and Finn took a sip, swallowed, took some breaths through his nose, took a longer sip, and nodded thanks to Top. Finn blew out his cheeks and nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
He told us everything.
As he spoke, I tried to get inside his head and see it all the way he saw it.
13
RATTLESNAKE TEAM
This is how his story fit into my head . . .
The heat.
The fucking heat.
The heat was a hammer, a fist.
Finn pinched sweat out of his eyes with thumb and forefinger and saw that his fingers were dry. The desert had leached the moisture out of him.
You’d think the desert would leave enough for tears, he thought as he blinked his eyes back into focus and fitted the monocular back into place. The rubber gasket was hot and soft against his eye socket. The heat made the rubber feel like flesh, like some curled length of worm.
He was stretched out on a flat shelf that was jabbed into a cliff wall too high above the jagged rocks below. He had a camo blanket over him and a smaller one over the barrel of his rifle. The blanket didn’t do a fucking thing to deflect the heat and Finn felt like he was slowly being broiled alive. But it was better than being without cover, because his Irish skin didn’t tan worth shit. He’d gone from freckle-white to skinned-knees red the first day here in Afghanistan. Since then he’d kept out of the sun, but being in shade didn’t seem to offer so much as a splinter of relief. Nothing did. Not unless his team had to follow this mission into the higher mountain passes, and then it went from hellish heat to mind-numbing cold.
You couldn’t win in Afghanistan.
Not with the weather.
Not with the people.
Not with the son-of-a-bitching Taliban.
Finn knew he couldn’t beat any of it, so he did what he always did. He did what everyone else did. He did the only thing he could do.
He ate his pain.
He swallowed it whole, feeling it slide down his gullet like a bundle of barbed wire. That was the only way you got through the day, and the week, and the month, and the whole tour. You ate your pain, knowing that th
e more you consumed, the more poison it would release into your system. After a while, that poison ate away at your nerves, your patience, your tolerance. Sometimes your humanity.
It drove some guys right over the edge. Finn knew—knew for fucking sure—who was collecting fingers from the Afghans. Maybe two-thirds of them were Taliban fingers. The rest? Well, when a guy had that much poison in his system, he sometimes said fuck it and took a trophy wherever he could find it.
A few guys had gone on trial for that.
Most didn’t; most never saw the inside of a military court. No one caught a whiff of the madness cooking inside of them.
Finn hadn’t eaten that much poison yet. But, day by day, he found it harder to hate and revile the guys who went off the reservation. Day by day, that seemed to make more sense.
He ground his teeth and stared through the monocular, feeling the seconds and minutes catch fire around him in the burning afternoon air.
The rocky path below was empty.
All morning it was empty.
Well into the afternoon it was empty.
Not a mule. Not a sheep farmer.
Not a stray dog.
Empty.
Until it wasn’t.
From two hundred yards, the man who stepped out of a shadowy cleft and onto the path looked like a goat farmer. He was dressed in cheap clothes that were visibly patched. He leaned on a crooked stick. His face was elaborately bearded and seamed like lizard skin.
Finn adjusted his focus and studied the man.
A farmer.
Definitely a farmer.
Then the man turned and beckoned behind him.
Ten men came up the slope out of the shadows. Ten men leading six horses.
Each of the animals staggered under the weight of heavy burlap bags hung from leather straps.
The men were all dressed as farmers. One of them was a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten. The oldest of them was probably sixty, sixty-five.
Just a bunch of shit-kicker dust farmers from the middle of no-fucking-where.
Finn followed them with the monocular, watching them, studying them, looking for a tell that would give them away. Sometimes it was American boots. Or Russian boots. New ones, not old discards. Sometimes it was an iPod or iPad. The Taliban loved that high-tech shit. Sometimes it was a top-quality cell phone or a satellite phone.
Not today. There was none of that.
But, Finn asked himself, what’s in those bags?
This was goat and sheep country. Nobody around here raised cotton. There was no real blanket industry in this corner of the region.
So what was in the bags?
The CIA intel expressed a very high confidence that the next few caravans of opium would include sealed biocontainment flasks filled with a virulent pathogen. Rumor control said that it was a new twist on the seif al-din prion-based thing from a few years back. A new generation of the bug that terrorists had tried to release at the Liberty Bell Center on the Fourth of July. That stuff did something to the metabolism and rewired the brain so that the infected went apeshit nuts and started chomping on each other like they were extras in 28 Days Later. Not actual zombies, but the real-world science equivalent.
If it was that, then Finn knew that the caravan couldn’t be allowed out of this valley. Even if it was one of the other pathogens, stuff that wasn’t 100 percent lethal, the Taliban had to be stopped here. If something with any kind of significant communicability was allowed out, thousands could die. Maybe hundreds of thousands. If it got to the States or to Europe, the potential loss of life was unthinkable. Imagine releasing an airborne pathogen in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Or at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Or at a crowded airport like Heathrow.
The orders Rattlesnake Team had been given left no room for error. And it had no provision for mercy.
The caravan moved quickly along the path. In four or five minutes, they’d be out of range of Finn’s rifle. He tapped his mike.
“Cheech Wizard,” murmured Finn, “they’re coming your way.”
“Got ’em,” replied the voice in his ear. Cheech Wizard was the machine gunner of Rattlesnake Team. He was tucked into a nook formed by two slabs of rock that had tumbled down the side of the mountain. A sheer wall at his back and the only exit was covered by the other two members of the team, Jazzman and Bear. They had shadowy niches with good elevation.
“Tell me what you’re seeing,” said Finn quietly. He didn’t whisper. The sibilant “ess” sounds traveled more when you whispered; quiet voices faded out into nothing. Besides, their team radios had excellent pickup. That wasn’t SOP. The stuff that was usually issued was often beat-up, the works ruined by heat and sand; but there was a gal in supply that Finn had been banging for a couple of months. It wasn’t love, and they both knew it, but he didn’t give her the clap and didn’t trash-talk about her to the other guys, and she made sure his team had gear that was in good working order. Pretty good swap. Everybody came out on top, nobody got hurt.
Bear had the best vantage point and the best eyes.
“Count ten. Eight adult males, one teenage male, one kid—could be boy or girl,” he reported. “No, correction, not a teenager. Kid’s maybe ten.”
Finn’s lip curled. He hated this part of it, but it was something you couldn’t avoid. The Taliban were heartless fucks, and they knew their enemy. They often brought kids along with them—kids, and sometimes women—knowing that most of the allied forces would hesitate to pull a trigger if there was a chance of capping a youngster. Partly because it was a cultural thing with the allies, and partly because the Taliban used their propaganda machine to fry the Americans in the world press for killing civilian children.
Which was total bullshit.
The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and a lot of these other asshole terrorist organizations put a lot of those civilians in the crosshairs. It was part of their strategy. In the towns, they put their supply depots and main meeting places in schools or in apartment buildings. Then they more or less shook their dicks at the Americans to take the shot, knowing they had to take the fucking shot. More than once they’d even sacrificed one of their own low-level people or slipped some intel through back-alley channels just to guarantee that a strike would be made. Then, before the smoke cleared, they’d trot out the screaming, weeping parents of the dead children. Somehow the Red Cross and the world press were always tipped off first. Or some “neutral” would capture bloody children on their iPhone. It was all theater, and it turned a knife in Finn’s guts.
“What’s your read?” Finn asked.
The others knew what the question meant. It had become a common thing for him to ask.
Were these Taliban drug runners? The presence of guns didn’t prove anything. After the Russians had their asses handed to them a couple of decades ago, there was a lot of stuff lying around. Plenty of AK-47s. A villager could buy an old one for a male goat.
Bear said, “Four of the men have new boots.”
“Confirmed,” said Jazzman, “and I’m seeing some serious hardware. I count six . . . no, seven confirmed AKs. Shit, they’re armed to the teeth. These aren’t villagers. No way.”
“Look at the second horse,” said Cheech Wizard. “Something long and hard strapped onto the side closest to the wall. I think it’s an RPG.”
“Affirmative,” said Bear. “I see it, too. These fuckers came to play.”
“Damn,” breathed Jazzman.
“Okay, they’re bad guys and it sucks to be them,” said Finn. He studied the path the caravan was taking. The trail wound through patches of intense shadows, gray wash, and bright sunlight. The longest sunlit path was forty yards from where they were. It meant that his team would have better angles for a three-point shooting box, but it would put the caravan partly behind an upright stone, effectively hiding half of the targets from Finn’s rifle.
He surveyed the terrain. There was a much better shooting position sixty yards around the rim of the same mountain on which he
lay. But it would mean breaking cover, and the only two paths to get to that spot either made him a bug on the sandy wall of the mountain or required that he go through a short tunnel. The second choice of the tunnel was smarter, but it meant losing sight of the caravan for a few seconds.
“I’ve got no shot.” Finn told his team the situation and explained what he was about to do. “Hold your fire until I’m in position.”
They acknowledged and he wormed his way backward off the ledge, mindful of every sound, every ripple of the sandy-colored camouflage tarp that covered him. He knew the others would keep their eyes on the caravan, watching to see if they reacted to anything.
To Finn, it seemed like it took forever to get to the edge of the shelf. He let gravity pull him over and he dropped down to the path behind the ledge, bending his knees to take the shock, exhaling, hands mindful of his gear.
He froze and listened for the telltale sounds of reaction and response.
Nothing.
He dropped the tarp, turned, and threaded his way quickly through the cracked stone spikes and wormhole tunnels that honeycombed this side of the mountain. Mountains were like echo chambers—every noise seemed amplified, and moving in total silence was maybe possible for ninjas and mimes, but carrying forty pounds of gear made it impossible. They didn’t call it battle rattle for nothing.
The mouth of the curving tunnel was dead ahead and Finn moved toward it with lots of small, even steps—a pace designed to cover ground while preventing the hard jolt of regular footfalls.
The tunnel was only sixty-five feet long and curved. There was one brief section in the middle of the curve where it was pitch-black, but the rest was lit well enough by reflected sunlight. Finn had walked it several times. If he kept to the center of the path, the flat sand would see him through. The obstructions were all near the walls.
He moved into the cave and the shadows closed around him.
Within ten paces, the light faded from a dusty tan to purple-gray, and as he rounded the bend the tunnel plunged into total darkness. It was so much darker than he thought it would be, darker than it should have been, but that didn’t matter. He stuck to the path and ran.
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 29