IN THE BLACKNESS, Wells heard the Russian’s breath, as close and quiet as a seashell in his ear, no more than ten feet away. Where? Wells couldn’t turn on his flashlight without giving away his own position. The Russian must have the same dilemma. Wells crab-scuttled left, silently, silently, his back to the wall of the cave, holding the Makarov in his right hand.
Step. Step.
Then a burst of AK fire.
But Wells was untouched. The Russian was hitting only the corpse of his partner. Wells threw himself off the cavern wall. The Russian spun toward him, but Wells knocked the barrel of his rifle up and away. With a low arcing kick, he swept the other man’s legs out. The Russian fell back, landing hard. Wells jumped him, and with a knee astride his chest landed a clean left to his chin and another to his nose. The fight went out of the Russian fast. As Wells punched him a third and fourth and fifth time, he hardly resisted. Wells didn’t know if he was disoriented or just resigned to his fate.
Wells flipped the Russian onto his stomach and looped flexcuffs—the temporary plastic handcuffs that police sometimes used in place of regular metal cuffs—tight around the man’s wrists and ankles. Then he snapped open a yellow glowstick.
The cavern was small, no more than eight feet high and twenty-five feet around. On one wall, a guerrilla had spray-painted the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar”—God is great—in black on the grayish-green stone. Small stalactites hung from the ceiling. The walls and floor bulged as if the mountain were laced with tumors.
Three rusty oil drums sat near the far wall, next to a child-sized BMX bicycle. Bizarre. Maybe the guerrillas had been practicing a circus act in their downtime. Aside from those odd relics, the cavern seemed empty. Beside the oil drums two passages led deeper into the mountain. They were just three feet high, narrower than the tunnel that connected the cave with the surface. Wells understood why the Russians had hesitated to take them. If they dead-ended, they’d be little more than traps.
Wells tossed the glowstick aside. “Speak English?” he said to the Russian.
“Sure.”
“Is anyone else here?”
The man spat on the ground. “See anyone?”
“If I do, I’ll kill you first. Understand?”
“I understand. No, we are alone.”
Wells drew his knife. The Russian’s eyes widened. He rolled onto his back and tried to squirm away. “I just want to be sure you’re not hiding anything,” Wells said. He put a knee on the Russian’s chest and slashed at the man’s sweater and T-shirt, pulling them off. Then he hacked away the man’s camouflage pants until the Russian was naked except for ill-fitting cotton briefs. But the guy didn’t seem to have any extra weapons. A surprise. Every decent commando carried an extra knife, just in case.
“Now the boots.” Wells sliced at the man’s boots. The Russian kicked wildly.
“Boots? Nyet. My feet.”
“Nyet?” Wells turned the Russian onto his stomach, grabbed the man’s little fingers, and pulled them sideways until he could feel the tendons about to snap. “Nyet nyet, Vladimir. If I didn’t need you, I’d leave you down here for the spiders. Got it?”
“Okay, okay.”
Wells wondered if he’d meant his threat. He’d killed many men, but never an unarmed prisoner. In New York, he’d spared the life of a Saudi terrorist he’d captured. Treating captives with decency was one way the United States separated itself from its enemies. At least it had been once. Now America seemed to have lost its moorings. Wells wondered if he had too.
Wells flipped the Russian on his back and sliced into the black leather of his boots. He tore them off. The stench of the Russian’s feet filled the cavern. “Time for a bath, Vladimir.”
“I told you leave them on.”
Wells peeled down the man’s socks. As he did, a sharp metal point, warm with body heat, pricked his left palm. A knife was taped to the back of the man’s right leg.
Wells stepped on the Russian’s chest, leaned in with his steel-toed boots until he felt the man’s sternum compress. A slow groan escaped the prisoner’s lips. Wells lifted the Russian’s leg and ripped off the knife. The tape tore, taking a chunk of skin with it. “Now you’re ready for beach season, Vlad.”
“Name is Sergei.”
“Congratulations.” Wells tossed the knife into the darkness. He ran his flashlight over the Russian, looking for other hidden knives or guns, but saw nothing.
“Any other surprises?”
The Russian said nothing.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Wells cut open the flexcuffs binding the Russian’s feet but left his hands tight. “Now. You’re going in there.” Wells pointed to the tunnel that led to the surface. “When you’re in, I’ll cut your hands free so you can drag your ass out of this cave. Understand?”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you. Please be smart. I’m guessing getting shot in the colon is an unpleasant way to die.”
“Colon? I don’t understand.”
Wells grabbed the Russian’s arms and dragged him toward the entrance to the tunnel. Allowing the prisoner to lead was dangerous, Wells knew. If he had to kill the man in the narrowest part of the tunnel, he might end up stuck behind the corpse. But if he led, he risked the Russian’s jumping him from behind. This way he could easily watch the man. Anyway, he didn’t think this guy wanted to die underground.
At the entrance to the passage, Wells flicked on his headlamp and pushed the Russian to the floor of the cavern. “Lift your arms behind your back.” The Russian obeyed.
Wells put a knee on the man’s back. With his left hand, Wells pressed the man’s head down. With his right, he cut the cuffs. This was the moment of maximum danger, the last chance for the prisoner to lock him up in hand-to-hand combat. When the Russian’s hands were free, Wells stepped back.
“Now crawl.”
“Naked?” His accent lengthened the word—naaaked—so it sounded vaguely pornographic.
Wells kicked him in the ribs. “Not my problem. Anyway, you’re not naked. Crawl.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells saw the dim light of the entrance. The Russian hadn’t tried anything. As the tunnel widened out, Wells flexcuffed his hands and legs again and dragged him out.
A flashlight stunned his eyes.
“Halt!” Gaffan yelled.
“It’s Wells. Got a hostile with me.”
“Yessir. Step slowly, now.” Wells stepped forward. “You okay? You’ve got blood all over you.”
Wells had forgotten the cut on his cheek. “Nothing, Sergeant. Looks worse than it is.”
The ground shook with the rumble of a fighter jet. Gaffan quickly filled Wells in. While he was underground, the Special Forces had gotten air support in the form of a pair of F-16s from Bagram. “Those Air Force boys don’t like flying in the mountains at night, but once we told ‘em we could lose two squads if they didn’t get off their asses, they came through all right.”
Because of the tightness of the terrain and the fact that the Special Forces were so close to the Talibs, the jets hadn’t eliminated all the enemy positions. But their presence had given the Americans a chance to regroup. Now the SF had killed at least a dozen Talibs. The rest were trying to escape into the caves or down the mountain. Still, this fight had been anything but a cakewalk. The Special Forces had taken three dead and three more seriously wounded, including Hackett, who probably wouldn’t last the night.
“We shoulda come in with another squad,” Gaffan said. He looked at the prisoner, who sat hog-tied against the side of the mountain. “So who’s he?”
“Good question.” Wells nudged the Russian. “Who are you?” The prisoner strained against the flexcuffs.
“Take these off and I will show you who I am.”
“He went soft in the cave and it looks like he’s not too happy about it,” Wells said. “All I know is his name isn’t Vladimir. It’s Sergei. Who are you, Sergei? Tell us about yourself.”
PART 3
18
THE STEWPOT BUBBLED AND BURPED ABOVE A LOW FIRE, filling the hut with the rich aroma of chicken and carrots and potatoes melting together. Jordan reached for the pot, but his mother swiped his arm away. No, she said. First your father eats. She sat above him on a wooden throne, reaching an impossibly long arm down to stir the pot. Saliva filled Jordan’s mouth and the hole in his stomach swelled to the size of a basketball. He looked around but didn’t see his father.
A scoop, its thin aluminum handle twisted from years of use, lay by the pot. Jordan grabbed it. Wait, his mother said. He’s come back. He’s right behind you. Jordan turned and saw his father, a blush of purple tumors crawling across his face. The old man reached out with a skeletal hand. And though he knew he shouldn‘t, Jordan wanted to keep this wrecked, dying man from dirtying the stew. He blocked his father from the pot and reached in with the scoop. But the pot was empty, aside from a tiny chicken wing. As Jordan watched, the wing fluttered out of the pot, a final insult.
“No,” he said aloud.
Jordan opened his eyes and looked around. The stew—along with his poor dead parents—vanished as he woke. Nothing had changed. On the concrete highway above him, trucks rumbled. The morning air was hot and humid. Song and Yu slept under a thin woolen blanket, Yu clutching an empty bottle of Red Star.
The stew was gone, but Jordan’s hunger stayed with him as he pushed himself to his feet. Nothing metaphorical about this feeling. Jordan didn’t want love or hugs or a pony. He wanted food. All day, every day, his stomach ached.
In the mornings, if he managed to earn a half-loaf of stale bread and a cup of tea sweeping the sidewalk for a friendly storekeeper, his cravings faded to a low growl, background noise. But in the afternoons, the emptiness in his belly overwhelmed him. He drank water then, ate vegetables that were more brown than green, anything to fill his stomach. The cigarettes helped too, though he knew he couldn’t afford them. A pack of cigarettes cost as much as a bag of potatoes.
Worst of all were the hours before bed. Then his belly ached so badly that he wanted to cry, though he never did. To keep him smiling, Song and Yu told tales about girls they’d known, peasant girls who sneaked off in the dark to lie with them.
“Once this missus and I, you know, we were ready to—” Song leered, his mouth opening in a gap-toothed smile. “I pulled up her dress and put her on the ground and she yelped.” Song moaned, a passable imitation of a teenage girl. “Turned out her bum had ended up in a chunk of horse dung. I would have gone ahead straightaway—she was none too clean even before that—but she made me take her home. Silly girl. We could have had a bit of pleasure, and that’s too rare in this world.”
Song and Yu howled with laughter and even Jordan found himself smiling. He didn’t know if the stories were true, and he didn’t care. The words distracted him. Song and Yu gave him food too, when they had any. If not for them he didn’t know what he would have done. Yet he wasn’t even sure why they liked him. Maybe because neither had a son, or even a daughter, and they saw him as a substitute.
Each morning, Jordan fought through his daily routine of a hundred sit-ups and push-ups. Even with his belly empty, he never skipped his workout—and it never failed to amuse Song and Yu. “Arnud Schwarz enga,” they called him. More seriously, they told him to conserve his strength, that the exercises wasted energy he couldn’t spare.
He knew they were right, but he refused to quit. He had once heard his hero Michael Jordan say that he worked out even if he could hardly move. “Every day,” Michael had said, with that famous grin. So Jordan stuck to his exercises. Despite his troubles, he had somehow managed to stay optimistic. He never stopped to think about why. Unlike most sixteen-year-olds in America or Europe, he had seen enough death to know that just being alive was a privilege, one everyone lost eventually. While he had it, he would do his best to honor his father and mother.
“Ninety-nine ... a hundred.” Jordan finished his last push-up and stood.
“Arnud ... Arnud. ...” Song smirked. “One day you have big muscles too, Jiang.” They didn’t call him Jordan. He’d kept that name to himself, for himself.
“Come on, Master Song,” Jordan said. “Let’s go.”
Song dragged himself up and pulled the blanket off Yu. “Up, fatty. No work means no Red Star tonight.”
Yu grumbled and tossed the blanket aside. He was filthy, his sweatshirt stained and his pants frayed. Jordan tried not to imagine what his mother would think of the way he lived. Poor as they’d been, she’d always kept their home clean. She swept every day and made him wash himself every morning, even in the winter when the cold water stung him and made his privates shrivel so he could hardly see them. Jordan brushed the dirt off his clothes as best he could. If he found work today, he would buy soap, even a little bottle of shampoo. He couldn’t believe he wanted anything more than food, but he did. He wanted to be clean.
In the meantime he pulled his lucky Bulls hat over his greasy black hair and away they went. Song had heard of a new job site, an apartment building being demolished downtown, with plenty of work.
THE SUN WAS JUST VISIBLE when they reached the entrance to the Guangzhou subway. With no money for the fare, they skipped over the electronic turnstiles instead of buying a ticket. In theory the cops could arrest them, but in reality they’d just be shoved off the train at the next stop if they were caught; the police didn’t want anything to do with them.
Fifteen minutes later they reached their stop. Jordan felt himself sag as he walked up the steps to the street. The world went gray and he stumbled backward. Song wrapped an arm around him and gently set him down.
“Jiang?”
“I just need a cigarette.”
“A roast pig too, by the looks of it,” Yu said. He dug into his pocket for a coin. “Come on, Song, let’s get the boy some bread at least.”
They found a vendor and bought Jordan a small ripe orange. He wanted to force the whole sphere into his mouth at once. Instead he peeled it slowly, offering slices to Song and Yu. Though he knew he ought to share—they’d bought it for him, after all—he felt a pang with each piece he gave up. The vendor watched him eat and when he was finished handed him another orange and a pear too. He waved aside Song’s fumbling effort to pay. Usually Jordan didn’t like taking charity, but today he didn’t mind. The fruit filled his belly and gave him a jolt of energy.
“Feeling better?”
Jordan nodded.
“Now let’s win this job.” They cut through a narrow pedestrian mall hemmed in on both sides by concrete apartment buildings. Some stores were already open. Inside a butcher shop, men in dirty aprons shooed flies away from slabs of meat strung from ceiling hooks. Next door, in a store filled with glass jars that brimmed with crumbly green tea, two old men haggled over a plastic bag of leaves. Farther down, the aroma of honey-filled dumplings wafted from a pastry store. Jordan forced himself to look away from the pastries before he spent the last of his money, the emergency money in his Bulls hat.
Two blocks down, they turned left onto a crowded avenue. Song looked at the signs. “This way,” he said. A dozen or so equally dirty men were walking in the same direction. They made a right, and after a short block, turned onto a street blocked by police sawhorses.
“Dammit,” Song said. Scores of men, a hundred or more in all, milled around. So much for finding easy work.
“You woke me for this?” Yu spat onto the pavement. On their right, the steel skeleton of a half-finished sky-scraper rose, the construction site blocked by barbed wire, its gates locked. The other side of the street held the apartment building slated for demolition. Two giant cranes stood beside it, wrecking balls poised to tuck into the eight-story brick building like hungry men slicing up a steak.
But the building wasn’t empty, Jordan saw. On the fifth floor an old woman leaned out, shouting to the street. “Don’t do the capitalist roader’s work! We poor people must stay together!”
Yu laughed. “Capita
list roader? That old missus probably thinks Mao’s still alive. Didn’t anyone tell her we’re all on our own these days?”
“See, Jiang?” Song asked. “They want us to clean everyone out so the cranes can knock down the building. It’s dirty work, but we’ll eat tonight.”
“Dirty work,” Yu said. “Yes, it is.”
A Mercedes sedan and two police cars rolled past the sawhorses and onto the street, forcing the men to make way. A stocky young man in a black T-shirt and slacks stepped out of the Mercedes and raised a bullhorn.
“Ten yuan”—hardly more than a dollar—“for every man who rids the building of these squatters,” he yelled.
“Ten yuan?” Song said. “He must think we’re desperate.”
“He’s right,” Yu said.
“You snake!” the old woman yelled down. “We’re not squatters. I’ve lived here longer than you’ve been alive.”
“And now it’s time for you to go.”
The woman disappeared. When she came back, she held a metal pot.
“Swine!” she yelled. She lobbed the pot at the Mercedes. The men scattered as the pot shattered the sedan’s windshield.
“Crazy old bitch!” the man yelled. Another pot flew out of the window and smacked the hood of the Mercedes, denting the shiny black metal. Two police officers stepped out of their cars and ran into the building.
A low rumble passed through the crowd. “Dirty work,” a couple of men said. “Dirty work.” More faces appeared in the building’s windows. “You can’t throw us out,” voices shouted. Sirens screeched, at first distantly, but growing louder.
“Twenty yuan!” the man in the black T-shirt yelled. “I’ll pay twenty!”
“It’s blood money,” Song said. Jordan felt light-headed at his words. Blood money. His father had died for blood money. “Don’t be afraid,” his father’s spirit said to him, not in his head but for real on the street. He looked around, but the spirit was gone.
The Ghost War Page 17