“Christ!” I whimpered. “What are you?”
“The bargain needs to be completed,” she said insistently.
I hit her as hard as I could, hooking a left over the top of the arm that held me and catching her on the temple. Her head snapped around just like it should have, but then it whipped back to center. Just like it shouldn’t have.
I hit her again, and again.
Kicked her, too. Real goddamn hard. In the stomach, the thigh, the chest.
I might as well have been dipping my toes in a cool pond. She took it all and I could see her body sway slightly from the impact of foot-pounds. Those kicks would have put Bunny down. Bones should have splintered, the jagged edges tearing through muscle and veins and organs. These were of lethal intent, delivered with steel-tip shoes by someone who knows what the hell he’s doing. I’ve killed people with such kicks before.
She ignored them.
No, that’s not quite right.
They really pissed her off.
A snarl of irritation rumbled from her chest, and she shook me violently. It was then that I realized that she was holding me completely off the ground. I’m a big man. Two twenty, six two, all muscle. Maybe—maybe—someone like Shaq or Hulk Hogan in his prime might have been able to do something like this, but I didn’t think so. But she stood there, so small and sickly, one hand wrapped around me, her arm raised straight above her so that I hung there by my goddamned head, toes inches off the ground. It was impossible. Even if everything else that was happening was some kind of trick or illusion, this was actually impossible.
And it hurt like a motherfucker.
She shook me again, and I could feel something slip in my back.
Then, without warning, she dropped me to the ground so that my feet hit hard, my knees buckling.
“The bargain needs to be completed. He is holding on to you and to false hopes,” whispered the woman’s harsh voice, “but he has already made his promise.”
“Wh-what . . . ?” It was all I could manage. Pain was exploding up and down my spine, and my head felt like it was half pulled off.
Burned and mangled lips leaned close to my ear. As she spoke, those lips brushed my ear in a way that was the most appalling parody of sensuality I could imagine.
When I said nothing, she grabbed me again and added, “You can have them back. All three. You can have their flesh and bone and breath.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I growled as I fought to break free.
“He asked to come back and confess his failure. He wanted you to know that it was his mistake that led to his men being taken. I do not care, but it was part of the bargain. Confessions belong to the infant son of a false god.”
I kept struggling.
“But it is time for the deal to be closed. If you stand in the way, you will be consumed. The only grace you have is what your friend bought for you. Break his deal, and you are mine.”
She growled that last word, loading it with a pernicious delight more avaricious than anything I have ever heard. Her grip was so strong that it was getting hard to breathe. I fumbled at my pocket for the rapid-release folding knife that was clipped there. It sprang into my hand, and with a flick of my wrist, the three-and-a-half-inch blade snapped into place.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, and rammed the knife into the fire of her eye.
And the red world turned black.
As I plunged down into the pit, I wanted to hear her screams. I wanted to hear a howl of agony.
All I heard was the mad laughter of an old woman.
And something else.
The screams of men in terrible, unbearable, unending pain.
16
ECHO TEAM
It was Top who found me.
He later said that I was standing alone in the center of the ancient town square. Just standing there.
He tried calling my name. Tried shaking me.
In the end, he had to slap me. That apparently had pulled me back from the edge of wherever I was. But only halfway, so he belted me again.
I came all the way back and very nearly kicked the shit out of him, purely by reflex. Top knows me, though, and as soon as I began to react, he danced out of the way, hands up in a no-problems gesture, staying well out of range of my hands and feet.
“Cap’n . . . Cap!” he yelled.
That part I heard.
My eyes then cleared, and I saw that it was just the two of us there in the town square. It was dark, but Top’s flashlight was propped on a stack of old building blocks. Above us was a field of stars so saturated with white lights that it looked fake.
“What . . . ?” I asked, my voice thick, my head numb and stupid.
“You hurt?” asked Top. “You okay?”
“I . . . don’t know,” I said, answering both questions at once. “Where am . . . I mean, what the fuck happened?”
Top stepped forward, and there was a strange look in his eyes. He was also bleeding from one nostril. One eye was puffed nearly shut.
I didn’t ask what happened to him. He didn’t ask what happened to me. We looked into each other’s eyes and knew. It had been the same for both of us.
He helped me to my feet and we leaned on each other and half-ran, half-staggered back to where we’d left Finn and Bunny.
Bunny was there.
Bruised and bleeding, sitting on the ground, weeping like a child and holding his face in his hands.
Finn, though, was gone.
There was a burned spot on the ground where he’d been sitting, and that was it.
But I don’t think that’s why Bunny was crying.
On the ground, laid out in a row, were three men. They were dressed in the same uniforms as us.
Cheech Wizard.
Jazzman.
Bear.
All dead.
Their bodies were as fresh as if they had expired a moment ago.
But their eyes.
God almighty.
God save us all.
Their eyes.
Smoke curled upward from the blackened pits where their eyes should have been. We scrambled over and poured water on them and smothered the fire with sand and our hands, but it was far, far too late.
17
ECHO TEAM
We stood there for a long time, staring at the three dead men from Rattlesnake Team. We all felt lost, confused. Damaged in ways that resisted identification and definition.
Top told me that after I’d left earlier to walk the scene, he’d checked the perimeter of our camp while Bunny made some food. A figure cut right in front of Top. The little boy, running at full speed. Top immediately gave chase and caught up to the kid three hundred yards down the valley. However, when he grabbed the boy’s shoulder, the robes tore away and a woman was there. For just a moment, Top thought that it was a young woman.
“Really friggin’ beautiful, too,” Top told me. “Dusky skin, and built like Beyoncé. Naked and all shiny like she was covered in oil. Got to admit that it floored me. Absolutely fucking floored me. Then I blinked and she wasn’t like that at all.”
The creature who stood facing Top was the same one—or same kind of thing—that had attacked me. Wrinkled, emaciated, with sagging breasts, jagged teeth, and hands that made Top shiver as he described them.
The thing knocked the rifle out of Top’s hand, slammed him against a wall, and kept saying the same thing.
The bargain needs to be completed.
Top didn’t try to figure out what that meant. All he did was try to fight, but the woman slammed him face-forward into the rock.
When Top woke up, he ran back to the camp. Bunny was on his hands and knees, his face covered in welts, coughing blood from a split lip. His story was the same as Top’s.
The same as mine.
It was an impossible story. Bunny is six foot seven and can bench-press four hundred pounds in sets of twenty. And he’s a top SpecOps shooter trained to kill in every way known. Nobody ever manhandled
him. Not without a lot of help.
Until that day.
He was no more effective against this thing than me or Top.
All three of us had been defeated easily. Mastered, humiliated.
Discarded.
But Sergeant Michael “Finn” O’Leary was gone.
And Rattlesnake Team had been returned.
What was left of them, anyway.
We all wanted to compare our stories, to sit down and work out what it meant. Hallucinogens. Some kind of spore in the air that was screwing with our minds. Maybe an electrical field from some kind of science fiction gadget.
We wanted to make sense of it.
There wasn’t time.
We had to find Finn.
For a moment, though, we stood there, back-to-back in a defensive circle, weapons in hand, looking out at the vast darkness around us.
“Fastest way to cover the area is to separate,” said Top.
Bunny looked at him. “Fuck that.”
After a few seconds, I said it, too: “Fuck that.”
Top just shook his head.
So, we stood our ground.
We are three of the toughest, scariest fighters around. That’s not a joke. The DMS scouts the top players from the SEALs, Delta, and other groups. We are actually the best of the best.
But all we could do at that moment was stand there, huddled together for the warmth and assurance of human contact, holding our guns and praying that the night would end.
We tried very hard not to look at the three dead men who lay nearby.
Thirty-six minutes later, we heard the distant whup-whup-whup of our helicopter returning to find us. We popped flares, but we still stood together while we waited.
When we saw the Black Hawk pop its landing lights, I very nearly broke down and cried.
18
ECHO TEAM
They flew us out. Five hours later, we went back out there, this time with three Black Hawks full of SpecOps guys and CIA shooters. A day later, the rest of Echo Team was in-country and they joined us. We scoured the area, searching every inch. The blood was still there, along with the shell casings and footprints.
We found absolutely nothing else.
Not a goddamn thing.
When Bunny went to dig up the artifacts . . . they were gone as well.
And of course, no Finn O’Leary.
We were out there for two whole days. Finally, the word came down to call it.
Oh, was the debrief a bitch.
My boss, Mr. Church, personally flew over and brought along the DMS’s top shrink—who is also my personal therapist—Dr. Rudy Sanchez. They interviewed us separately and together, multiple times. They took blood and urine samples. They did MRIs and CT scans. Rudy hooked us up to lie detectors and ran through a minefield of questions. In the privacy of my session with him, I told him about seeing Rattlesnake Team at the site of the Taliban convoy ambush. About how they were eating one of the terrorists. How their eyes were on fire. When I was done, except for the faint whir of the machine and Rudy’s shallow breathing, there wasn’t a sound in the room.
A lot of the people involved in running those tests, and all of those who’d been out there scouring the ground where we’d been picked up, began avoiding eye contact with me, Top, and Bunny. They didn’t find the right kind of evidence to support our stories, and we sure as fuck weren’t changing our stories. Not one word.
I cornered Rudy one afternoon after he came out of Mr. Church’s temporary office at the Forward Operating Base Delaram, one of the Marine Corps bases there in Afghanistan.
“Talk to me about those polygraphs, Rude,” I said.
I expected the usual obfuscation he gave when pressed about anything clinical, but he shrugged. “All three of you believe your stories . . .”
He’d pitched it as a straight answer, but I could hear some reserve in his voice and called him on it.
Rudy smiled. “Come on, Cowboy,” he said, giving me his best Gomez Addams smile. “You know how these things work. As I said, the tests verify that you believe your stories, and the lab work is clean. But that’s not the same as saying that the stories are believable as described.”
After I gave him three or four seconds of a stony face, he sighed.
“Joe, in the absence of physical evidence or some workable theory that would explain the kinds of things you three claim to have seen—”
“ ‘Claim to have seen’?!” I said, jumping on it.
“Yes. Claim. There is nothing I know of that can provide a useful framework for constructing a hypothesis that explains it. A tiny woman beating all three of you up, and apparently doing it all at the same time? A woman who was invulnerable to physical assault by trained special operators, including a knife attack to the face? C’mon, Joe . . . give me a scenario that covers that, and I’ll be glad to put it in my report. Hell, I’ll lead with the theory in my summation.”
He knew, as I knew, that there was no theory that could cover it.
“What about the autopsies on Rattlesnake?”
“They’ve been sealed in freezers and shipped back to the States. Mr. Church wanted the top guy at Mount Sinai to do the post.”
And that’s where we left it.
For the next couple of weeks, I was completely obsessed. I took teams of various sizes out there whenever I could to continue the search, the specter of the pathogen always being the primary excuse. Through our CIA contacts, we put feelers out through the various intelligence and criminal networks that are everywhere in Afghanistan. A lot of black-budget money changed hands. I’d like to think that we kept up this level of intensity because three Americans were dead, one was missing, and something—something—was happening out there on the Big Sand that didn’t make any kind of sense. Top and Bunny always went with me, but they’d now become moody and silent. Off the clock, we were all drinking too much. And Top had been seeing the chaplain a lot.
After three weeks, we packed up our toys and prepared to fly home. The CIA took over to try to discover what Plan B was for the Taliban and their bioweapon.
Which is when my boss called me into his office.
Everything was packed except his laptop, which was open on his borrowed desk, the screen turned away. Mr. Church is a big, blocky man, past sixty but looking a fit and brutal forty. I don’t know his past, but there are a lot of wild tales and even wilder rumors. I wonder how he would have fared in that cave.
“Sit,” he said, and like a good dog, I did. Mr. Church had an open package of Nilla Wafers on his desk. He selected one and nibbled it thoughtfully while he studied me through the nearly opaque lenses of his tinted glasses. “An Israeli intelligence officer working undercover in this region captured a series of photos and video with his phone. They were taken last night around twenty-two thirty. I want you to look at them and give me your opinion.”
He spun his laptop and pressed a key. The screen was dark for two seconds and then a grainy image popped up.
It was clearly recorded at a dark and seedy coffee shop in what had to be a dangerous part of some local town. The people at the table—nearly all men—were extravagantly bearded, grim, wary eyed. They sat in a tight cluster, sipping small cups of black coffee and bending their heads close in order to talk quietly to each other. The place was crowded, and when the image shifted, I estimated forty or more men and a couple of women with chadors.
Church kept tapping the key to go from frame to frame. At first, it was clear that the Israeli agent was using his phone camera to take pictures of as many of the men as possible. A cataloging process that I’ve seen with field agents dozens of times. You do that when you’re trolling for someone who is a genuine person of interest. Then there were fifteen shots of three men at a distant table, their heads bent together in earnest conversation.
“Our contact identifies these men as known Taliban drug traffickers,” said Mr. Church. “But they’re also active in the black market for looted antiquities.”
Then
the camera settled down solidly enough that it was clear the Israeli agent had laid his phone down on his table. The lens was pointed at another table against the far wall. Mr. Church then started the video component. Three men sat there. One was an Afghan villager wearing a kaffiyeh with tribal markings. He sat and listened, clearly not a major player in the conversation. The second man was also an Arab, but I couldn’t tell anything specific about him except that he was old, hawk nosed, and wore a turban that was so thick that the wrappings cast shadows down over his deep-set eyes. This man appeared to be doing all of the talking. Unfortunately there was too much ambient noise to pick out any of the conversation.
However, it was the third man who was the real story here. He was dressed in Afghan clothes, including a kaffiyeh, but he was clearly not an Arab. He wore sunglasses and a faint smile that was very strange—sensuous to the point of being almost overtly sexual. He sat with hands folded on the table as he listened to the older man.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Mr. Church said nothing.
“That’s Finn.”
“Without a doubt. Sergeant Michael O’Leary.”
“Where was this taken?”
“A small town named Tekleh.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Nor had I until today. It’s an unincorporated town ninety-four klicks from here, used mostly by smugglers. A few small buildings outside made to look like a sheep camp, and a few dozen furnished chambers built into a series of caves. The CIA is aware of it, and they’ve been working to get a man inside. The Israelis already have a man there, as do the Russians.”
“Can we pick up the guy Finn was talking to? What’s his name? Aziz? Encourage him to tell us where Finn is?”
Mr. Church tapped the key again, and we were back to still images. The next picture showed the mouth of a small cave. There were equipment boxes around and the kind of gear you expect at archaeological digs. In front of the cave lay six bodies. You could tell they were men and that their clothing was typical of the fighters in the Taliban drug trade. But that was it.
Four Summoner’s Tales Page 31