“I chose the path of jihad, and I met him upon the road. He was a beggar, his body broken from his wounds, and his heart broken from the loss of his family at the hands of the Christian crusaders and their bombs. I took him as a companion upon the path.”
“God loves the merciful.” The giant nodded sagely. “However Saboor tells me he is touched by God?”
“The crusaders took much from him. He cannot speak, and barely can he hear, and yet. God in his mercy preserved his eyes and bent them to his purpose.”
The giant met Bolan’s burning cobalt gaze. “And what purpose is this?”
“To gaze upon the infidel invaders through the sights of a rifle.”
“He is a marksman?”
“I have never seen him miss, either in battle or in practice,” Ous replied.
The giant stared at Bolan with renewed interest. “Truly?”
“I swear by God that this be true.”
The giant leaned in slightly and spoke loudly and slowly. “Peace be upon you.”
Bolan raised his right hand and touched his forehead in reply. The giant touched his own forehead back. The little man spoke. “I would like a demonstration.”
Both Ous and the giant frowned at this rather drastic breach of hospitality protocol. The giant spread his hands. “Let them take refreshment first.”
The little man nodded and turned away. The giant gestured toward the carpet. “Will you wait a little while here?”
“Of course.” Ous patted Bolan on the shoulder and they both sat again. Bolan watched the giant walk back to the tent. “What do you make of him?”
“I think he is very dangerous, and he speaks Dari with an accent I do not recognize.”
“And the little guy?”
“He is Hazara.” Ous grunted and shook his head. “And perhaps more dangerous still.”
The Hazara people were the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and generally believed to be descended from Genghis Khan and the Mongol horde he had left behind garrisoning Afghanistan. Many had Asiatic features, and they were mostly Shia rather than Sunni Muslims. The combination made the Hazara people the number-one minority target in Afghanistan for ruthless discrimination. When Kabul fell to the Taliban in the midnineties, the Hazara had thrown in with the Northern Alliance, but they were too far away from their new allies. The central highlands of Hazarajat had fallen to the Taliban and the Hazara people had been brutally suppressed in a widespread series of massacres. The Taliban had gone so far as to declare the Hazara non-Muslim. Only the intervention of Coalition forces had prevented the full-scale ethnic cleansing of the Hazara people from Afghanistan. Bolan’s frown matched Ous’s.
It was very odd to find a Hazara in a terrorist camp.
Bolan gave his earpiece the tap that told his translators he was speaking directly to them. “Any of you speak Hazara?”
The translator nearly went into a panic. “Hazaragi? Oh my God, I mean, it is a dialect of the Persian language, but with a ton of Turkic and Mongolian loan words and idioms. To find a fluent speaker in the D.C. area would be—”
“Find one.”
“Right, on it.”
A young man approached and set down a battered tray. He uncovered a pot containing roasted rice with several fried eggs on top and a pile of small, round flat breads to serve as the eating utensils. He nodded respectfully at Ous and poured the tea. He looked at Bolan in a wide-eyed mixture of awe and fear and backed away.
Word of Bolan’s mojo was spreading.
Bolan and Ous shoveled down eggs and rice. The eggs had been sprinkled with powdered sumac, and the balance of salty and tart was delightfully subtle. Ous leaned back and patted his stomach contentedly. Bolan refilled their teacups. Ous spoke low as he relit his pipe. “I fear your time of trial approaches.”
The giant, the little man and Saboor emerged from the tent once more. Ous cleaned his pipe with a penknife unconcernedly. A small mob began to gather.
The giant approached. “You are refreshed?”
“The Pashtun reputation for hospitality is most generously deserved, my friend, and I thank you.”
This was met with pleased nods and murmurs of agreement from the assembled tribesmen. The giant got down to it.
“Syed has asked for a demonstration of your friend’s skill, and I must admit that I myself, and our brother mujahideen gathered here are eager to see, as well.”
This was met with more murmurs of assent. Ous turned to Bolan and pantomimed aiming a rifle. The soldier nodded once.
“Let it be done,” Ous said to the giant.
Bolan took up his rifle and rose. He walked out from beneath the netting and looked for a target. He found one in the hills to the east, and pointed at a young man herding goats approximately seven hundred yards away.
“Who is that young man?” Ous asked.
“Yesuh, a boy from the nearest village. He often acts as lookout and servant for the camp,” Saboor answered.
Bolan tapped his hat.
“Tell Yesuh to take off his hat and hold it out.”
The murmurs of interest turned to shocked whispers. A number of men broke out binoculars. The giant took out his cell phone and punched a preset number. “Yesuh, take off your hat and hold it out.”
Up on the hill Yesuh stared for a moment incredulously and took off his hat. Bolan shouldered his rifle. Yesuh suddenly understood what was about to happen. The young man shook like a leaf in Bolan’s scope. The pakol cap presented an approximate head-size target. It wasn’t an ideal shooting situation, but Bolan had surmounted worse.
He had one supreme advantage—the weapon he carried had been hand-tuned by one of the world’s greatest gunsmiths. The rifle appeared to be sporting an antique Soviet era 4x PSO-1 telescopic sight. It was anything but. The sight was really a camouflaged 2x10 with a built-in laser rangefinder.
Bolan’s hand brushed the hidden laser range finding button. The range was 647 meters. There was no wind to speak of as the sun climbed to its zenith.
Yesuh shook like a leaf.
Bolan gave his elevation turret a click. Given the range and the rifle, Bolan put the crosshairs of his scope on Yesuh’s fist and his next lowest stadia squarely in the middle of the cap. The rifleman’s mantra rolled through Bolan’s mind. Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze…
Everyone’s eyes flicked with increasing agitation between Yesuh on the hill and Bolan. The soldier took a breath and let out half of it. His lips moved as he exhaled. Anyone who spoke Arabic would recognize the words he silently mouthed.
Inshallah.
If God wills it.
The crowd murmured the blessing in response.
Bolan slowly took up slack on the trigger.
The trigger broke beneath Bolan’s finger and the gun bucked against his shoulder. The pakol flapped and curled around Yesuh’s hand as the bullet passed through it. To the youth’s credit he held on to the hat.
The assembled tribesmen roared. The cap fell limp once more and Bolan slowly put four more rounds through it. Yesuh went from shaking in fear to trembling with near ecstasy at his role in this amazing event. Bolan lowered his rifle and looked at Ous. He tapped his hat and pantomimed a throwing gesture.
Ous’s eyes narrowed, but a smile crossed his face as he addressed the giant. “Tell young Yesuh to toss his hat into the air as high as he can.”
Yesuh wasn’t the only one going into ecstasy. The muj began chanting and shouting and waving their own caps with excitement. Bolan had a last trick to play. He pushed his rifle’s selector to the full-auto option the Cowboy had added with a “clack!” The dusty firing range suddenly became very quiet.
Yesuh hurled his pakol skyward.
Bolan shouldered his rifle like he was shooting skeet. He kept both eyes open and he mated his optic with his bare eye as the cap reached the top of its flight. He dropped his aim two stadia and squeezed the trigger. The Dragunov rifle went rock ’n’ roll at ten rounds a second. The five rounds left in the magazin
e left the barrel in half that.
The pakol jerked in midair as if snatched at by an invisible hand. The cap went horizontal and lazily spun back to Yesuh. The youth caught his cap and ran in circles waving it like a maniac.
Hats flew skyward behind the firing line and men crowded around to pound Bolan’s shoulders. Ous and the giant seemed well pleased. The little Hazara, Syed, looked upon Bolan with eyes devoid of emotion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The squad was coming together. It was a suicide squad, bent on holy martyrdom, but it was coming together. Ous, in mad mullah mode, had become their patriarch. Bolan was flat-out the squad’s holy sword Excalibur. The scarred stranger couldn’t speak, he could barely hear and he was illiterate, and yet God himself guided the arctic-eyed maniac’s hand when he pulled a trigger. He was the perfect weapon. Bolan was treated with awe, reverence, and by all and sundry as if he suffered from severe mental retardation. The squad spoke openly around him as if he were a potted plant.
All the while Bolan listened, and so did the Pentagon.
Bolan took the squad’s weapons and cleaned, oiled and tuned them like an idiot savant gunsmith. Ous led the squad in prayer with the power of a born leader of men and the knowledge of one who had memorized the Holy Koran.
The giant had disappeared, leaving Saboor in charge. Saboor was necessarily vague about the exact nature of the mission. Syed was the team’s taskmaster, and he scared everybody. This day he was lecturing on satchel charges, and doing so with a riding crop in his hand. The younger of the two brothers, Sohail, already had a red welt across his cheek. His crime had been speaking without being spoken to during the lecture, but Bolan was fairly certain it had much more to do with Sohail and his brother Shahid’s evident hero worship of Bolan and Ous. After the beating, a thermos of tea was passed around and the tent walls pulled down to darken the interior. Syed put on a crudely filmed VHS tape about the joys of Russian Federation PVV-5A Plastic Explosive and how to make IEDs from the unexploded Russian ordnance littering Afghanistan. It was a subject Bolan was all too familiar with, so he sat like a stone Buddha staring at nothing in particular and listening to the whispers around the darkened tent.
Syed wasn’t popular.
The men were muttering. Sohail clutched his livid cheek, while Shahid patted him on the shoulder and assured him the little Hazara dog turd’s death was assured. The instructional tape ended. The lights came up and the squad shuffled out, heading toward the cook tent for the late-afternoon meal that served as supper. The camp was cold and lightless after dark.
Shahid tumbled to the dust as Syed tripped him as he came out of the tent.
“You liken me to dog turd?”
The little Hazara’s riding crop fell across the young man’s neck and shoulders like rain. “My death is assured?” Shahid screamed and thrashed as the whip was applied with a trained torturer’s precision.
“Let me explain something to you. It is you and your brother who are dogs, pariah animals, eaters of shit, unclean in the eyes of God and his Prophet.” Wherever Shahid tried to cover up, the crop lashed into what was newly exposed. Shahid writhed in the dust.
A dozen heavily armed men watched and did nothing. It was a tribute to the terror in which the Hazara was held. “You are a dog and I am your master,” Syed continued. “But you are correct in one thing, and that is my death is assured, and I shall die as a holy martyr. The manner in which you will die has yet to be determined, and that determination will be mine.”
Syed went to work with the whip in earnest.
Ous looked at Bolan, who thought the beating was going on a little too long. It was time to up the ante a little.
Bolan silently stepped forward and caught Syed’s wrist. It felt like the neck of a bowling pin. His hand vised down implacably and stopped Syed’s stroke. Despite being right-handed, Syed’s Khyber knife flashed from its sheath in less than a heartbeat and drove for Bolan’s belly. The soldier’s blade was already in his right hand and the blades sparked and grated against each other. Bolan was surprised to feel Syed’s wrist relax in his hand and even though the Executioner was giving Syed the bone-crusher, the little man didn’t drop his lash. For a nanosecond part of Bolan vainly wished he had led with his machine pistol instead.
They were in a Federally Administered Tribal Area standoff.
It was Syed’s eyes that surprised Bolan most. They had flared in surprise. Not so much in surprise that Bolan had dared to interfere with the beating, but the Executioner’s read on the man told him Syed was shocked that Bolan had been able to walk up to him and grab his wrist undetected, and remain so in a non-disemboweled state.
Syed turned a very cool look on Ous. “Tell your disciple to let go of my wrist or I will cut off his hands and feet.”
Ous looked at Bolan and made a show of opening his right hand. Bolan released Syed’s wrist. At the same time he gambled and sheathed his blade without being told. Syed sheathed his own and stalked away.
Saboor shook his head unhappily and muttered to Ous, “You should make your disciple understand that he has made a deadly enemy.”
Bolan watched the Hazara go back in the command tent.
Syed had been his deadly enemy the second Bolan had stepped down out of the truck.
BEING THE LARGEST and strongest man in camp had its disadvantages. So was being perceived as a low-grade, albeit dangerous, moron. Since he was dumb as a mule, the camp assumed he was equally as strong as one and he had been volunteered into the job of squad heavy-equipment humper. Bolan trudged stoically under the weight of his own equipment as well as a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle and a 4-round pack of practice ammo. The weapon had clearly been acquired by less than noble means from Coalition forces. The squad had left at dawn for a forced march. It was long into the afternoon, and Bolan figured they had done twenty miles. The squad staggered back under the netting and flopped onto any available carpet.
Yesuh had the midday meal going. By the smell emanating from the huge copper stewpot, it was wheat gruel mixed with bits of the previous day’s barbecued goat and raisins. Yesuh was busy with an old-fashioned potato peeler shaving carrot slices across the top. Bolan felt his salivary glands activating. He put his hunger aside and turned his eye on the newcomers.
Two foreign fighters had arrived in camp the day before.
Kashgar was reportedly a Chinese Tajik who hated Westerners only slightly more than he hated the People’s Republic of China. He was even more Asiatic in appearance than Syed, but whereas the Hazara was built like a whippet, Kashgar was nearly Bolan’s height but as lanky as a scarecrow. The other new was a Turkmen named Guwanc who bore a startling resemblance to a young President George Bush.
Both men stank like hired killers rather than jihadist martyrs in the making. They stank like security. They hardly mixed with the men and spent most of their time huddled with Syed. One or both were always near Bolan, who had a bad feeling that someone wanted to cull him from the herd. He shrugged off the launch tube and the pack of projectiles. Ous gasped as he folded himself cross-legged on the carpet. He lit his pipe and began smoking as if it were mother’s milk. The tobacco seemed to steady him.
“I do not like these two new men,” he commented.
Bolan grunted in assent.
“I believe they either intend to kill you so that they can bend me to their will,” Ous expounded, “or, kill me so that they can use and abuse you as al-Qaeda loves to use idiot children in their nefarious schemes.”
It wasn’t a bad assessment.
“Yeah,” Bolan agreed. “Who are you betting on?”
“I am betting on you. I think Syed has no love for you, and the combination of your skill and your handicap makes you a dangerous wild card.”
Ous was full of truisms.
“That’s the way I see it, too.”
“I told you this was a very dangerous plan,” Ous said.
“And yet you volunteered.”
“I volunteered to kill the enemies of my
people approximately twenty-six years ago. I will tell you this is not the most suicidal mission I have volunteered for. However it is close.” Ous took a pull on his pipe and sniffed the smells coming from the cook fire. “And so far the food has been fantastic.”
Ous sat up happily. “Ah!”
Yesuh came over with a large communal bowl of goat and gruel with a small tub of yogurt on the side. He placed it on the carpet, giving Ous a bow of reverence. He touched the cap Bolan had given him and bowed in hero worship.
Bolan kept the frown off his face. It was the kind of behavior that could earn Yesuh a whipping from Syed, and Bolan himself couldn’t predict what would happen if he intervened in a matter of camp discipline a second time. He gave Yesuh the idiot savant nod and began shoveling food into his face.
Bolan sighed as he realized he wasn’t going to get to finish his lunch.
Syed approached and addressed Ous. “Your disciple is the most accurate man in camp.”
Ous nodded over his yogurt bowl. “I believe this to be so.”
“When the time comes, two targets will require destruction with the rocket launcher,” Syed said.
“I have never seen him fire a rocket,” Ous replied honestly.
“God loves him,” Syed countered.
“I believe this to be so, also,” Ous replied with equal honesty.
“There are some rusting Soviet tanks just over the western hills. I wish him to practice. If he can strike them from a respectable range, his place in heaven will be assured.”
Ous spoke to Bolan like an infant and made hand gestures approximating a tank and then pointed at the recoilless weapon and the practice rounds. Bolan took a moment to appear to ponder this and nodded.
Syed nodded in turn. “Tell him to go with Kashgar and Guwanc. Tell him to go now. It is a long walk to the safe place of practice. He need not carry his rifle and pistol.”
Bolan rose and laid aside his rifle and machine pistol. He shouldered the recoilless rocket launcher and its impotent pack of practice rounds. He took note of Kashgar’s silenced assault rifle and knew it boded nothing good for him.
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