Logan stared at him. Lancaster waited, hoping that, by some miracle, Logan would get beyond his ambition, and filter this through something other than his own innate distrust. And, much to his credit, he did. But much to his discredit, he replaced it with hurt pride.
“Oookay, Chuck,” Logan finally said, already turning away. “Message received. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a terrorist mess to clean up, which I will attempt to do without tripping over my own feet or ignoring the USMC rules and regulations that have served us well for the past two hundred and forty years!”
Lancaster watched him go double time to his Osprey tiltrotor command center with a certain resignation. Well, he thought, I tried.
When he turned back to his own jet, he found Logan’s new aide standing beside him, in a full pencil skirt, black heels, tailored shirt uniform, clutching a clipboard to her majestic chest. He hoped, for her sake, she wasn’t as buttoned-up as she looked.
“You going?” Lancaster asked. She shook her head, gratefully. He put out his hand. “General Charles Lancaster, retired.”
She shook his hand in her strong, but not too strong, elegant, one. “First Lieutenant Rita Jayson,” she said in a firm voice—one, like Lancaster, she didn’t have to strain to use on the noisy runway. She looked up at him with striking violet eyes. “He’ll be using wavelength zero niner two, by the way.” Then she turned and headed back to the control tower.
As Lancaster went in the opposite direction, he murmured, “Got that, Speedy?”
“Roger, sir,” Gonzales answered from Cerberus Versailles, then looked at Safar playing his keyboards like Elton John. “Hacking invisibly into their feeds now.”
They all watched and listened—Lancaster on his jet’s screen, and the Cerberus team in the Hispanic Mechanic’s Workshop—as the Logan-led Assault Team Zebra sped toward the Urgon hill range. As the unit neared, Lancaster was willing to consider that maybe both he and Logan had made the right call. From the copters’ vantage point, the area looked every inch like a devastated mining town. What was obviously a chain of caves had been torn open from the inside.
“Wow,” said Daniels.
“My sentiments precisely,” Safar breathed.
They all fell silent as the attack force descended ever closer. The advanced video lenses zoomed in to show the details of the devastation. Each witness picked out body parts, but only body parts. And even those body parts were torn, snapped, flayed, and burnt almost beyond recognition.
“They must have been using Octabane too,” Nichols guessed.
“Makes sense,” Lancaster said approvingly. “Another link in the chain of evidence that our mission is related to theirs.”
To Lancaster’s satisfaction, Logan made two observational passes over the devastated area, the second being even more detailed than the first.
“No one could have survived the intensity of this blast,” Rahal mused. That garnered a look from Key, but only for a moment. Then his gaze returned to the screens as the choppers started their final descents.
“How many helmet cams can you tap into?” he asked Safar.
The tech was about to answer, but snapped his mouth shut as he studied his monitor arrays. “I was about to answer ‘how many do you want,’ but that would result in all the screens being taken up by postage stamp-size squares,” he explained. “Let me break it up into forty-eight quarter-screen images from the soldiers in front, in the middle, and bringing up the rear. Okay?’
“Works for me,” Daniels piped up. “Joe, you want to watch the front? Ter, willing to take the middle?”
“And you?” Nichols asked.
“I, of course, will watch the rear.”
“To each their own,” Nichols chirped.
Key remained silent but realized that even his team was treating the exercise like a done deal. But that only made his attention all the sharper.
Logan’s unit hit the ground. Logan himself, of course, was nowhere to be seen. He “had” to remain in his command center chopper, which, according to its video feed, was still hovering above the location. Both Lancaster and Key knew it would only land once they got the word that the site was secured and the “coast was clear.”
That was not long in coming. The head team of the unit made a circuit through the open-top tunnels the explosion had made the caves into—first all the way forward, then all the way back. The center units broke off as needed to check that every tributary off the center paths was well and truly sealed, while the rear teams scoured the area for any other openings or escape routes.
Lancaster and Key found themselves leaning ever closer to their screens to try catching glimpses of anything else that was moving, be it birds or burros. Key spotted a Kashmir nuthatch and red-fronted serin—both indigenous to Afghanistan—but nothing else.
The soldiers seemed to think the same. The chatter on their comm-links was all in the affirmative, with a chorus of “all-clears” stretching from Key through Nichols to Daniels. They all watched Logan’s tiltrotor begin to descend via its video feed, as well as from a few witnessing ground troops.
All but Gonzales, who was leaning in to a monitor screen on the far, bottom, right. “Espera un minuto,” he breathed, tapping the upper left corner. “What is that? A carpenter bee? A bush cricket?”
“What?” Key immediately asked, but Gonzales was shifting toward Safar.
“Can you close-up on this?” he asked, pointing at the screen.
“What?” Daniels complained. “He can’t control a soldier’s helmet—! Never mind,” he quickly corrected himself as Safar did just that.
“Can’t control the cam,” Safar explained to Daniels as everyone else, including Lancaster, practically pressed their noses to the glass. “But can control this screen.”
They all watched as a one-inch section of the chalky white dirt of the excavated cave wall began to crumble.
“Shhh—” Lancaster began to hiss, not as a method of quieting anyone, but as a preamble to a short, sharp curse word.
Key’s eyes pin-balled to every vid-feed on every screen, looking for what he had been looking for before. Any non-U.S. military movement. Any at all.
He saw the trunk of a Deodar cedar tree shift.
That was the only way he could describe it. The dark brown bark of the coarse, strong, thick, bone-shaped tree did not chip, fleck, or break. It seemed to waver in his vision, as if he had been crossing his eyes. But he hadn’t been crossing his eyes.
“Shit!” Key snarled. “Can we reach them? Can we tap into their comm lines?”
But then it was too late. As they watched, the inch-sized piece of the crumbling wall turned into a foot-sized patch, then a yard, and then the wall itself collapsed around a surging human figure. A surging human figure thrusting an AK-47 in front of him.
And once that first man appeared, many more appeared, each and every one coming out from the walls surrounding the soldiers as if they were being hatched from eggs.
The chaos that resulted was almost too much for any of them to decipher. The audio-comms were full of Logan’s screechings of escape and retreat, and the images from his tiltrotor vid screen was full of fuzzy, lurching images as his command center all but clawed back into the sky.
For a moment, they all could see what the MV-22 Osprey cam could see: the long open-aired tunnels filled with U.S. Marines being surprised and surrounded by what appeared to be an ant-farm’s worth of insects overwhelming them. But then, even that image began to get fuzzy, as if the lens was being smudged by Satan’s thumb.
“Fuck, a—” Daniels gagged. “How?”
But then Key was at Nichols’s side, his encouraging voice in the ear of the girl with the enhanced reflexes. “What do you see, Terri?” he asked quietly. “Focus, concentrate. Tell me what you see.”
She did as she was told. “Each helmet-cam got fuzzy,” she said. “First
they were clear, picking up the images of the ambushers, then, each began to unfocus, then wink out. One by one, one after another, until—”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. Instead she pointed. Safar immediately fed the single remaining image onto all the screens.
Coming out from the cedar tree, wearing a perfectly Deodar-camouflaged robe, was a man. As he approached the last remaining working helmet cam, he pushed back the hood, revealing his identity.
“Yes,” said Aarif Zaman in perfect English. “Yes, you see your folly now, stupid soldiers? Send as many as you want. I’ll just keep going until you stop me.”
Then that camera too became unfocused, before flashing out.
Chapter 13
“Logan’s getting torn a new one.”
Key wasn’t surprised by Lancaster’s information. As much as Daniels, and even Nichols, would have loved to savor the repercussions of Logan’s thirst for personal glory, the field team had more pressing matters to attend to.
They had quickly discovered that “what he took from my eyes” was, most likely, a lyric from one of the many songs in a 2014 Punjabi movie titled Kashi, which was another historical name for the city of Veranesi which, to no one’s surprise, had been described as “The City of Temples.”
Almost as soon as they witnessed the last helmet-cam in Paktika winking out, they didn’t have time to mourn. They were on their way to. Veranesi. Meanwhile, things were happening almost as fast in Afghanistan.
“Wonder where the colonel’s tail is right about now,” Daniels drawled. “I figure it was so far up between his legs it would be crowding his tongue, but with his foot so far down his mouth I’m not sure everything would fit.”
He and the others were stretched out in Gonzales’s latest creation—a cargo jet synthesized from parts of an Airbus Beluga, an Aero Spaceline Guppy, and a Boeing Dreamlifter—which the mechanic had dubbed the B. D. G. Lawgiver.
“Well, his mouth is still working, Master Sergeant,” Lancaster assured him from a video-conference link in Cerberus’s Chinese Versailles HQ. “He calls it ‘demanding,’ but I call it begging—begging his superiors to give him a crack at making this clusterfuck right. He even called me for help pleading his case.”
“You going to give him any?” Key inquired.
“Still deciding,” Lancaster replied. “If I did, he promised never to doubt, or cross, me again.”
“You believe that?” Daniels snorted.
“Of course not,” Lancaster retorted, “but he might still be useful in the short run, while it lasts.”
“Sterling praise,” Key muttered drily.
There was an uncharacteristic pause coming from the other end, as if Lancaster was deciding whether to elaborate. Finally, he did. “By the way, Joe, he asked me to pass on a personal message to you.”
“Oh dear,” Daniels interrupted. “This should be a doozy. What do you think, Joe? Go for it or leave well enough alone?”
Key sighed. “Let’s have it, sir.”
Lancaster quoted it verbatim without further preamble. “‘Now I knows how it feels getting your whole unit killed.’ For what it’s worth, Joe, I honestly think that’s his idea of empathy.”
Daniels was, remarkably, at a loss for words. Not Nichols. “Class act,” she said, shaking her head. “Class act all the way.”
When Key remained silent, Gonzales filled the void. “But whatever you, or his superiors, decide,” he called from the cockpit, “they’re going to have to find Zaman first. No doubt he’s gone to ground, either moving to, or creating, a new hideout.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult,” Daniels sniffed, “considering all the crooks and nannies in the shit-hole he slinks around in.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” Key suggested, pleased to get back to business. “I may not be a big fan of Colonel Logan, but I’m less a fan of Aarif Zaman.”
“Good point, Major,” Lancaster acknowledged. “The sooner you can track down and bring in this particular—” the retired general paused, unhappy with all the slightly sick nicknames Daniels had come up with for their quarry. “Monster,” he finally decided, “the better chance we’ll have.”
“Toward that end,” Key said, “any more information from C5?”
He was referring to the fifth child, who they had rescued, and who Dr. Helen had awoken.
“She has remained aware,” Rahal interjected from the Chinese Versailles clinic, “but still requires more recovery time. I can tell you, however, that she does not recognize C1.”
“She visited the quarantine unit?” Nichols asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Rahal reported. “We still can’t get a clear photo of C1, so Dr. Helen thought it was important enough to bring C5 over on a gurney.”
“Can you get a clear picture of C5?” Key immediately wondered.
“As a matter of fact,” Rahal mused, “yes.”
Before anyone could dwell on that interesting tidbit, Key continued as if it had no particular importance. “You got an ID on any of them yet?”
“None,” Safar informed them from the copilot’s seat.
“They’re virtually unrecognizable from what they were,” Rahal explained, “and their fingerprints and dental impressions were compromised by their—” She paused, like Lancaster, looking for an appropriate word.
“How do you describe that anyway?” Daniels wondered. “Shrinkage?”
“No, Master Sergeant,” Lancaster instructed in no uncertain terms. “That is not how we are going to describe it. But I’m sure we’ll come up with an appropriate word, if necessary, prior to your return. In the meantime, I have arranged a contact to meet you at Lal Bahadur Shastri Airport. I’m certain he will be extremely helpful in your hunt.”
“Or, considering the more than twenty thousand temples in town,” Safar called out, “your haj.”
“Twenty thousand?” Daniels repeated. “Don’t you mean two thousand?”
“No, he does not,” Key told his brawny associate. “Get ready for anything.”
Daniels, and the others, did just that in the remaining time of the nearly nine-hundred-mile flight. But once the BDG Lawgiver taxied to a stop in a remote cargo area of the tarmac, the field team trio found a tall, aristocratic man with high cheekbones and ice-blue eyes awaiting them at the bottom of the aircraft’s stairs. He took a moment to admire the somewhat unusual cargo craft, then offered his hand.
“Christopher Peters,” he said with a light accent that combined British and Hindi tones. He wore a dhoti tunic and a dastar pagri turban.
“Gone full native,” Daniels whispered to Key as they approached.
“Ah, good,” Peters commented as he shook hands with each one. “Traveling light, I see. From what Charles told me, I was afraid you’d be fairly bristling with bips and bobs.”
“Uh, no,” Key told him after a momentary pause. They were wearing their most basic Cerberus Cali-brake and Chain-silk uniforms—with only a light, zip-up, collarless jacket. “Thought it best to bring only what was necessary, since time is of the essence. Besides, we didn’t want to attract undue attention.”
“No worries there,” Peters assured him as he led them toward the nearest parking area. “Although you’ve arrived between the Nag Nathaiya and Ganga Mahotsav festivals, our not-so-fair city is never at a lack for rabble—most of whom are either consecrating their dead or seeking gurus.”
The man led them to a vehicle that seemed just odd enough to make Key wonder whether Gonzales had a hand in creating it. It was a small, narrow, four-door, white sedan that looked like a combination of a classic London taxi and a classic Volkswagen Bug.
“That’s why I was admiring your air conveyance,” he said with a proud smile. “It reminded me of my little ‘artful dodger’ here.” He opened the back door for Nichols while motioning Key to the front pass
enger seat. “Designed specifically to go where other cars can’t, or won’t.”
Once they were all in, and Peters started what sounded like a putt-putt combination of a golf-cart and lawn-mower engine, he glanced in the rearview mirror. “It’s fifteen miles to town,” he informed them. “What do you need to know?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing.” Key smiled.
Peters chortled, prompting raised eyebrows from Daniels. He had never heard an authentic Indian-English chortle before. “Yes, your commander is not exactly ‘Jack the lad,’ now is he? Best to hear it from the horse’s mouth at any rate.”
As he pulled the vehicle onto Highway 31, he gave them the lowdown with no shame or disclaimer. He was the great-grandson of Corporal Terence Peters, a soldier involved in the infamous 1857 massacre of innocent Indian bystanders.
“My family has been atoning for it ever since,” he told them, “and I am proud to continue the tradition in this”—he motioned out the front windshield—“city of silk and soon-to-be stiffs.”
Daniels laughed. “I like this guy!”
“I’m honored,” Peters said with a modest smile.
“‘Soon-to-be’?” Nichols echoed. “I thought everybody came to burn their dead on the Ganges River.”
“Good catch,” Peters commended her. “I see why Charles has so much faith in you.” He caught Nichols’s green eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment. “No, my dear. While the daily ritual ablutions along the stone ghats fronting the river, in this most holy of all crossing places, are the most obvious to the eye, the most prominent is what is not seen.” He took a moment to glance at Key. “If you are dead here, you are dead, and no amount of unhygienic river water and funeral pyres will change that. But if you die here, you attain instant moksha.”
Key knew what was coming. In fact, he was already turning his head toward the master sergeant when he said it.
“Milkshake? You get an instant milkshake?”
Peters laughed—whether out of honest appreciation or politeness, none of them were able to decide. “No, you pillock,” he replied with sardonic affection. “Enlightenment. You get instant enlightenment. Something every pilgrim, guru and monk spend their entire life seeking. But all any given banma and banpa have to do is time it right so they die here.”
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