by Roland Smith
“You know I don’t have a plan,” I said. “I mean, other than to catch up with them.”
Ethan grinned. “You mean we’re not going to bust in on them like a couple of action heroes, take the dirtbags out, and free the hostages?”
I laughed. “Nah. What’s probably going to happen is that we’re going to become hostages ourselves.”
“We’ll see.” Ethan stood up and stretched. “Remind me to tell you what I did for a living before I became an adrenaline-addicted climbing junkie.”
“Why don’t you tell me now?”
“Because we have to top this mountain and find water before we die.”
WE TOPPED THE HILL, which did feel like a mountain, a little before midnight. After a brief discussion about staying where we were until morning, we started down the other side, which in a way was worse than going up because we had to spend most of it sliding on our butts. Midway down, Ethan found a crumpled cigarette package. Gauloises.
“French brand,” Ethan said, reading the package.
“I don’t think Alessia smokes.”
“Yeah, but it’s interesting that someone smokes French cigarettes. I’m not sure how easy French cigarettes are to get in Afghanistan.”
“Rafe said they were Afghans.”
“You look like an Afghan with that keffiyeh.”
I’d forgotten that I was wearing it. “Are you saying they’re French?”
“Nope. I’m saying we have no idea who these guys are, or what they want, and we need to keep our minds open.”
“So, what did you do before you were an adrenaline-addicted climbing junkie?”
“I was an MP.”
“Member of Parliament?”
Ethan laughed. “Just as unlikely. Military policeman. Marine Corps.”
“No way!”
“Six years.” He saluted. “Got into a little jam when I was seventeen. It was either serve time in the military or serve time in jail. I chose to join the marines.”
I had gotten into a little jam myself earlier in the year. It was either leave the country for a while or be locked in juvenile detention until I was eighteen.
“Your nickname,” I said.
Ethan nodded. “Yep, I was a sergeant.”
“Were you in Afghanistan?”
Ethan shook his head. “I was in Iraq a couple of times, but only briefly. I worked mostly stateside.”
“Doing what?”
“Busting military criminals and killers trained by the U.S. government. It was interesting work.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I wasn’t exactly a model soldier. I was terrible at following orders and keeping my mouth shut when something needed to be said. Despite this, they would have kept me on because I was a pretty effective cop, but I opted out. There were mountains to climb. To make money, I work for a buddy of mine from the corps who hires me as a security consultant.”
“What’s that?”
“Basically a highly paid bodyguard for government dignitaries and rich people. The money’s good, but I don’t like the work. That’s why I hooked up with JR’s crew as a climbing consultant. They’re only paying expenses, but I figured that I could learn the documentary business from them. I’m tired of others making money off my exploits. I’d like to do my own documentaries.”
“So you know what to do about the kidnappers?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he answered. “But I do have some experience in handling smart killers. What I don’t have are weapons, and of course the Marine Corps backing me up. We’re at a distinct disadvantage, but it’s not totally hopeless.”
“Unless we don’t find water at the bottom of this hill.”
“Right. If we don’t find water . . .”
He didn’t have to finish the question. We continued our downhill slide.
THEY SAY WATER IS ODORLESS, but I’m not sure this is true. I swear I could smell it from fifty yards away. Ethan could too by the way he half walked, half stumbled toward the source at the bottom of the hill.
We were going to live a while longer. There was a good-size stream, ten feet across, with a good flow. It was the sweetest and coldest water I had ever tasted.
“Take it slow,” Ethan warned, but neither of us did.
I must have scooped half a gallon of water into my mouth without ill effect. When I paused to look over at Ethan, he was still scooping water into his mouth as fast as he could.
“We should eat something,” I said.
Ethan looked at me through dull, tired eyes. “Yeah, I guess we should.”
But we didn’t. Somewhere between unzipping my pack and pulling out my camp stove, I fell asleep, passed out, keeled over, or a combination of all three.
The Ghost Cat
I open my eyes. I can hear the stream bubbling past a few feet away. It’s still dark. The full moon shines through the tree branches above me, casting the forest in pale blue light. There’s a fine mist in the air. I’m cold, but unable to do anything about it. With great effort, I twist my head toward the stream with a vague feeling that something, or someone, is watching me. I see Ethan lying on his back, his arms spread out above his head, his legs splayed as if he’s dead. But he isn’t. I can hear him gently snoring. He must have fallen straight back from where he’d been kneeling next to the stream. I catch a flicker of movement just beyond him on the other side of the stream. I squint my eyes, trying to focus in the dark. The movement comes again—a thick, smoke-colored tail. The shen is crouched down, staring at me. I want to tell Ethan, but my throat doesn’t seem to work. The only thing that comes out of my mouth is my breath on the cold air. The tail flicks twice more, then the cat reels around and disappears into the forest without a sound, like a ghost . . .
I BLINKED AWAKE. The sun was high above the trees. I sat up in a panic and looked at my watch, then looked at it again in disbelief. It was five minutes past noon. I had slept the morning away.
“Afternoon,” Ethan said.
He was sitting next to the stream with his feet in the water. Sitting next to him on a flat rock was a camp stove with something steaming inside a pot.
“How could you let me sleep? You should have gotten me up.”
“I’ve only been awake fifteen minutes—or resurrected, because what happened last night felt more like death than sleep.”
“We better get packed and moving.” I looked at my pack and realized there was nothing to pack because I hadn’t unpacked anything.
“Not before we eat something.” Ethan tossed me a protein bar. “I’m boiling water for oatmeal and tea. We need to replenish ourselves, or we’re no good to anyone.”
I knew he was right, but I still wanted to get moving. “We can eat on the way.”
“Now’s not the time to get antsy,” Ethan said. “We’ve got to move cautiously. They were here, and not that long ago.”
“How do you know?”
“Footprints all over the place.”
I walked over to the stream. There were a half dozen muddy boot prints heading upstream.
“They could be a hundred yards, or twenty miles, ahead. I know you don’t care if we’re captured, but I’d prefer we not round a corner and blunder into their backs.”
Seeing the footprints reminded me of what I’d seen in the dark, or what I thought I’d seen. I waded across the stream. In the soft mud were four perfectly formed shen paw prints.
“What are you looking for?” Ethan asked from across the stream.
“A ghost,” I answered.
Grave
It doesn’t take us long to eat and start upstream. I’m still tired, but it feels good to move. After a mile, my muscles warm and loosen. Ethan, or Sergeant Todd, the most unlikely marine there ever was, is in the lead, setting an easy but steady pace. It’s humid next to the stream, with the trees, plants, shrubs, and birds, not at all what I picture when I think of Afghanistan, but I pay little attention to the scenery and the sounds. Instead I focus on the boot prints in th
e soft mud. Two of the prints are smaller than the others and leave different patterns. Mom’s and Alessia’s. As long as they are walking, they are okay. It’s been nearly forty-eight hours since they were taken . . .
“WHOA!” ETHAN SAID.
I jogged up to where he had stopped. He was pointing at a tangle of muddy boot prints, and in the center of the smallest boot print was a paw print.
“Snow leopard,” I said.
“How do you know?”
I told him about seeing the snow leopard at the stream and on the cliff.
“So it’s stalking us,” Ethan said.
“I don’t think snow leopards are dangerous. I think it’s just watching us, or maybe watching over us.”
Ethan grinned. “You’re not going all magical thinking on me, are you?”
I returned the grin. “It works for Zopa. And we could use some magic.”
“You got that right. Wish I had a magic wand, or an invisibility cloak. But I do think we’re getting closer.”
“A magical feeling?”
“Nah, the boot prints look fresher, and by the way they lie in the mud, they moved pretty fast through here.”
“They teach you that in the marines?”
Ethan nodded. “I spent a couple years in Force Reconnaissance or Force Recon. They’re the guys that sneak around behind enemy lines and gather intelligence before the main force makes its push. It was a lot of fun until some gung-ho captain walked us into quicksand, which killed two men. He blamed us and became a major. I switched to the MPs and busted him a year and a half later for stealing guns and selling them on the black market. He’s in prison. I’m climbing mountains.”
HALF A MILE UPSTREAM, we came to a place where they had obviously stopped for a while. There were food wrappers lying around a couple of dead campfires.
“Let me check this out before we tromp through,” Ethan said.
I sat down on a log and watched him, happy for the rest. He crept around, sometimes crouching to look at the ground, sometimes standing and doing a slow three-sixty of the area.
“I’d guess they were here for a couple hours. Their first long stop, which means they left the cliffs, topped the hill, and walked all the way here until they bedded down to rest. That tells us that the perps are in better shape than we are.”
“That can’t be good.”
“You got that right. And there’s worse news. Come over here.”
He was standing next to one of the campfires. I joined him.
He pointed at the ground. “See those?”
“Boot prints?” There were a lot of them.
Ethan shook his head. “The three little holes in the mud. Here, here, and here. They were left by a camera tripod. They were filming something. Or mounted the camera to a . . .” Ethan swore.
“What?”
“Maybe you should stay here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mounds,” he said quietly.
There were three of them, made out of rocks, thirty feet away. I ran over to them. The piles were about six feet long and three feet wide.
“Graves,” Ethan said. “Maybe we should just leave them be. There’s nothing we can do to help them now.”
“No,” I said.
I dropped down to my knees and started moving rocks. The first grave was Phillip’s. Like Elham and Ebadullah, his throat had been slit. I didn’t want to uncover the other two, but I had to know. The second was Aki. The third was Choma. I sat back, covered my face, and began sobbing with horror and relief. It could have been Mom or Zopa or Alessia or the film crew. I felt angry, afraid, and guilty. Angry because Phillip, Aki, and Choma didn’t deserve to die. Afraid because there might be other graves ahead. Guilty because I was relieved that there was no one I loved among the dead.
By the time I looked up, Ethan had replaced the rocks, but this did nothing to erase the memory. Like mine, his face was streaked in tears, but there was a hard, determined set to his jaw. I think if the kidnappers had showed up right then, he would have tried to tear them apart with his bare hands.
“This changes everything,” he said. “You need to head back to base camp the way we came, try to catch up with Cindy and Rafe.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“You’re not trained for this.”
“And you are?”
“Not exactly,” Ethan admitted. “But the corps did teach me a few things.”
“I’m going with you,” I said. “Or I’m going on my own. I didn’t ask you to come with me.”
“I don’t think you understand how serious this is.”
“I understood how serious it was when I found Elham and Ebadullah murdered during their evening prayer.”
Ethan glared. I glared back. Ethan looked away. I’d won. If you call probably getting killed somewhere upstream a victory. I had gone after the other climbers with the assumption that the kidnappers wouldn’t harm me because they hadn’t hurt the others and had let Rafe go. I was clearly wrong about that, but it didn’t change anything. After seeing the bodies, I was even more determined to get to Mom regardless of the consequences. Apparently, Ethan was thinking along the same lines.
He said, “Okay, then, we’re both dead.”
“Not necessarily.”
“No, absolutely,” he insisted. “We are dead men. We died right here. We have no weapons, there are only two of us, and we have no idea what lies ahead or even how many bad guys we’re up against. The only way to play this is to get it into your mind right now that you died. That’s not to say we’re going to play this stupid like a couple of mindless zombies, but the only way to win this, the only chance we have, is to wrap your mind around the fact that you have already died, and you can’t die again, because you are already dead. Can you do this?”
Ethan grinned, but it wasn’t his normal charming isn’t-life-amusing grin. It was kind of a scary I-have-lost-my-mind grin. He pointed down at the foot of the three graves. “It’s get-real-brutally-honest time. What do you see?”
I saw three round holes in the shape of a pyramid. “Tripod,” I said.
Ethan nodded. “These dirtbags made the video crew film our friends’ execution. They’re going to use the tape to get money.” He pointed at the graves. “These three were expendable, but it could have just as easily been your mom, Zopa, or the film crew. I think everyone is expendable, except for maybe Alessia.”
“Why Alessia?”
“Because the U.S. has a long history of not negotiating with terrorists or hostage takers. Not so the French. Over the years, they’ve paid out millions of euros in ransom money. My guess is that some of these guys are French, ex-military, and they’ve probably been targeting Alessia for months.”
“How do you know they’re French?”
“Gauloises. The only people I have ever seen smoke those nasty things are the French. When I was in Iraq, we broke up a tobacco-smuggling operation. Some of our guys were involved in it. Learned more than I ever wanted to know about tobacco. There are a lot of counterfeit cigarette operations. The Taliban actually make money here running cigarettes when they aren’t smuggling dope. Anything for a buck. Some of the Taliban cigarette exports made it over to Iraq. Counterfeit Turkish brands, American brands, Pakistani brands, no French brands. I’m not saying for certain the perps are French, but I’m leaning that way. And as far as them being military or ex-military, I’m judging that by their physical condition. They got a lot farther than we did before they stopped here, and they were herding a large group of hostages. They’re probably ex-commandos.”
It finally dawned on me what he was getting at. “But we’re not afraid of them,” I said. “Because the worst they can do is kill us, and we’re already dead.”
“Now you’re talking.” Ethan’s skeletal grin broadened. He had dropped at least ten pounds since I had met him in New York. I supposed I had lost some weight too.
“Let’s get back to the tripod and what happened here,” Ethan said.
“Somehow these guys got wind of Alessia going on this climb. The corridor is the perfect place to set up the grab. It’s no man’s land. The reason you got left behind is that they didn’t have any idea how many climbers there were. They probably didn’t know that Cindy and I were at base camp either. They left Rafe behind because they already had too many people and hoped he would die from his injuries. Lucky for him, because he would have been lying right next to these guys if he hadn’t been injured. I think they executed the weak links.”
“Aki and Choma were pretty strong,” I said. “As strong as the film crew, anyway.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t know how to use the camera and sound equipment. I suspect Phillip was mouth breathing by the time he got here. And probably mouthing off too. Bottom line, they culled their hostages like they were cattle. I bet they made them dig the shallow graves themselves and had the survivors cover the dead with rocks.”
“Why bury them at all?” I asked. “They didn’t bury Elham and Ebadullah.”
“They were in a hurry when they left the cliff. Totally exposed on the scree until they got to the hill and down into the valley. The reason they buried these guys is because of vultures.”
“What?”
“Soaring vultures are a dead giveaway. No pun intended. Which probably means their hideout is somewhere up this valley.”
“How did they know where we were going to be?”
“I have no idea. People inside the French embassy had to know where Alessia was going ahead of time. She’s the ambassador’s kid. Plank had to jump through some bureaucratic hoops to get permission for her to go, which means these guys probably know that the richest man in the world is behind the climb. Two pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Plank’s and the French government’s. I think they’ll try to dip into both of them. The vid they shot here is their terrible calling card.”
The Walking Dead
It’s a little hard to wrap my mind around being dead with my legs aching and a heavy pack on my back, but I’m getting there with each step I take upstream. I’m not sure I buy Ethan’s theory as to who the perps are, but it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is finding them. Ethan is in the lead, moving cautiously. We tightened down the gear on our packs to silence the rattle. We haven’t spoken since we left the graves . . .