ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  “Of course they will!” Wahid shrieked. “Did I not get the weapons and money from them to defeat the Soviets? I know them! They’ll torture you, then kill you!”

  “There’s supposed to be a path across the mountains,” someone called.

  “There’s no passage,” Wahid shouted. “I know – I herded sheep with my father in this valley. If God wanted us to run He would have made one.”

  The next bunker had been imploded and no one answered when they called down into its acrid darkness. A wind had sprung up that cut through his coat into his ribs. He thought of his dreams of jihad and brushed tears from his beard.

  The valley began to fill with light. His ears had cleared and he could hear the steady grumble of trucks. There was no understanding God, he decided as he watched how quickly the trucks came, and behind them hordes of fighters, northerners who had betrayed their Muslim brothers and would burn in Hell forever.

  A huge blast knocked him down spouting a great column of dirt and rocks across the slope below them. His ears screamed with pain. He saw the trucks and running fighters had neared, and terror gripped his heart.

  “Brothers!” he called, “Fear not to die for God!” He waved and the men ran yelling toward the trucks. As Suley ran past Wahid grabbed him. “Don’t go down there!”

  “You just said –” Suley gasped.

  “That’s for the others. Let them taste death. You go with me.”

  “They’ll be at God’s side,” Suley spat. “In Paradise.”

  “The people need you. You shouldn’t be wasted here.” Wahid ducked as another plane passed. “There’s a passage up there, through the cliffs. Come! – God wills it!”

  FROM THE CAB OF THE FIRST TRUCK Jack watched the bombs explode against the mountain. “God is great!” the driver yelled, “See how He kills them!”

  Jack glanced back at Corwin and Walcott gripping the truck’s bed among mujihadeen. Fifty yards back, Ray and Engle followed in a battered Hyundai pickup with a wild-eyed driver.

  They pulled up a quarter mile from the mountain. Taliban were running downhill through smoke and dust, firing wildly. Ray focused the SOFLAM on them as Engle got on the satellite radio and an F-18 dropped another laser-guided 1,000-pound bomb and the hill seemed to implode, whitened, blurred as the whole mountain shook and a spiral of rocks and dirt tore upward and bodies and shredded clothes and splintered rocks tumbled across the hillside. A northern chief named Abdulla radioed Jack. “The ones who are alive ask to negotiate.”

  “How many?”

  “Forty, they say. Plus twenty wounded.”

  “Wahid?”

  “Gone. One of my men says there’s a passage, out the other side.”

  “Gone!” Jack screamed at him.”Goddammit why didn’t you guys cut it off?”

  “These Taliban may not know it. And in any case that’s not how we do it, here.”

  “How do you do it, here?”

  “We leave the enemy some room, if we have beaten him. Then if ever in the future we are beaten, our enemy will perhaps not destroy us either.”

  “That way nobody ever wins,” Ray said. “So they can always keep fighting.”

  The prisoners were a surly bunch, stunned and disoriented. “Where’s Wahid?” Jack yelled at one with a head wound bandaged by a scarf. The man jumped, surprised to hear him speak Pashto. “You want to go home,” Jack said, “or to prison in America?”

  “You’re feeling proud to have won this battle?” the man sneered. “It’s not because you’re a good fighter. Not because you’re brave. Only because you have planes and bombs.”

  “And because God wasn’t on your side –”

  The man’s fist came round and the knife dug a streak of hot pain across Jack’s chest. Afghani soldiers pulled them apart, kicking the man and smashing rifle butts down on him.

  Jack fell holding his chest. Blood spurted but when he breathed in it didn’t bubble and the pain didn’t feel inside his ribs. Idiot!

  “It caught in a rib,” Ray said, cutting away Jack’s shirt. “Hey stop killing that guy!” he yelled at the Afghanis. He probed the wound for bone splinters, applied a pressure bandage and stood wiping his hands on his pants. “Abdulla,” he yelled, “I told you do a full search on these prisoners! Search them again! Jack goddammit translate for me!”

  “These bandages are too tight.” Jack stood carefully. “Have to go up the mountain, cut off Wahid.”

  “Fuck that. We’re gonna chopper you down to Bagram, get you stitched up. There’s three Taliban criticals to go down with you. Corwin’ll be there, help you ask questions.”

  “Bring me the guy who knifed me.”

  “So he can try again?”

  They brought the man, beaten and bloody, held up by two mujihadeen, his black eyes blazing at Jack. “I’m sorry they beat you,” Jack said.

  The man did not answer. “It takes courage, what you did,” Jack said. “And it’s true, without the planes and bombs we would not have won.” He turned to the mujihadeen. “Keep this man here. I want to talk to him when I get back.”

  AT BAGRAM THERE WAS NO SPACE so they took the prisoners to Kabul’s Ebnecina Hospital. Walking hunched-over to hold in the wound, Jack limped after Corwin down a corridor.

  Something was hideously familiar. As if he’d died here and now come back to die again. The jaundiced halls, the scarred linoleum, the dirty windows, rusty pipes and peeled walls came back just like it had been before.

  Sophie bent over him talking to herself in French, “He’s not Afghani, this one, despite the beard, God the clavicle’s shattered – how the hell can I splint that?”

  She’d saved him three times, taken him to Ahmad. He’d told her he’d love her forever.

  Sophie please come back. God how I love you. Please let’s start again from here.

  I wish I’d never torn apart your life.

  IN THE CHOPPER back to Jorm he couldn’t sleep, the floor clattering its loose rivets, rotor blades thundering, pain no matter how he lay. For three nights now he hadn’t slept, felt horribly nauseous and dizzy, wanted to die.

  If years ago Sophie hadn’t saved his life in Kabul, she and Leo would be alive now and Sarah never would have existed. How could Sarah, so full of life, have never been?

  If they’d stayed in Paris? If he’d never told her about killing Leo?

  If he hadn’t helped train the people who killed them?

  He tried to stand; the gunner glanced at him. Through the door he saw the coal-black hills, the pilots’ faces underlit by the green instruments, their beetle-helmeted heads. What alien breed was this spreading across the universe, deadly and uncaring?

  Stenciled on the fuselage wall in faded Cyrillic, Load Ammunition This Side, and handwritten in Arabic over it, fading too, from the Twenty-first Sura: How many cities have we overthrown because they were ungodly?

  He saw Wahid coming up from the river in Edeni, beard glistening.

  Nothing’s more dangerous, they said in Sin City, than an enemy who’s insane.

  Slowly the towers fell in their cauldron of smoke.

  He ached with fatigue yet each time he slid toward sleep, Sophie and the kids were running downstairs as the building crushed them, or waiting on the roof for the choppers till the building dropped away beneath them, or falling a hundred stories in an elevator. Or dying slowly, days and nights, beneath the rubble.

  “No one’s alive!” He sat up. Inside the dark chopper he could see Corwin and two other SF guys sleeping, the gunner leaning on his gun. “Bad dream,” Jack said.

  “This is the place for it,” the gunner answered.

  IN THE CP at Jorm a metal Russian ammo box sat beside his cot.

  “Don’t open it,” Corwin said.

  “Fifteen-year-old ammo,” Jack said. “All they have, most of these guys.” He flipped the top open. “Oh Jesus.”

  “What?” Ray said. “What!”

  Matted black hair, a head. Jack kicked the box over, the head rolled out. The man
who had stabbed him, the man he’d saved to start a new Afghanistan.

  Ray took the box and head outside and threw them down the hill. “We ain’t never gonna help these people.” He wiped his hands in the sand.

  SAND HAILED HIS TENT all night as Jack lay there awake. Bandit came and licked his face and nuzzled him. “You’re shivering, Chief,” Ray said as they drank chai, waiting for dawn.

  “Wahid – he’s in a cave.”

  “Relax, Chief.” Ray refilled Jack’s cup. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I just remembered it. The only other person who knew about it was his brother.”

  “So where’s this brother?”

  “Wahid had him stoned to death.”

  Ray sighed. “This fuckin country.”

  “It’s in the hills above Edeni.” Jack stood. “We can be there tonight.”

  “Could we chopper in?”

  “He’d hear us. Better by foot.”

  Ray drained his cup. “You don’t see it as retribution, do you, what happened to your family? For something you’d done?”

  “For something I didn’t do.”

  “That’s crap.” Ray put down his cup. “I’ll call up the line, see what they say.”

  “Even without you guys I’m going.”

  THE FORTY MILES TO EDENI took all day, their trucks weaving round carts of refugees, lines of people, burnt-out vehicles and bomb craters. Jack crouched in the cab, trying to protect his aching arm and bandaged chest. This is Hell, and I keep coming back to it.

  No refugees were coming down the Little Kowkcheh trail from Edeni, the snake-head buttress above the canyon as evil and ugly as it was eighteen years before when he’d joined forces with Wahid, and four years before that when he’d come up the canyon the first time.

  The sun had retreated up the east canyon wall and Edeni’s overgrown ruins lay in shadow. He went ahead with Engle through the caved-in houses. No one was there but the rats that rustled ahead as if clearing the way. Engle dropped back to wave the others in.

  Outside the school walls a new yew was growing from the roots of the old. “This’s where I taught,” Jack said.

  “It’s a goatfuck,” Ray said, “this place.”

  “Too narrow,” Engle said. “From above open fields of fire on both sides.”

  Emboldened by the dusk the cliffs seemed buttresses of a cathedral. “Let’s make like we’re setting up here,” Jack said. “Then after dark take the trail to the top and RON up there.”

  Ray glanced up. “How far?”

  “Two-three miles. Three thousand feet.”

  “Fine. I want to stay high.”

  “I don’t trust these Tajiks.”

  “So we leave them here,” Ray said. “Find Wahid on our own.”

  In the dying light Jack climbed to the rubble where once he had lived in the fellowship and warmth of a stone-age village. Then down the path whose cobbles still showed randomly through the dirt and grass grew in scrofulous patches. One of the Tajik scouts was defecating against a wall and it made Jack angry. He tried to find the threshold into the courtyard where Ahmad’s mother had made barley gruel each morning. She’d been Wahid’s mother too.

  He couldn’t find it and turned back toward the school, remembered suddenly a girl saying If I had twenty oranges I would save them all for my family.

  Figure Eight

  THEY CROSSED THE RIVER after dark and ascended the canyon, the steep path slippery with mist. They climbed fast, nobody breathing hard, Jack with just his gun and web gear, the pain of his torn chest taking his mind off the climb.

  Part way up was a ledge where they stood looking down at Edeni. Long ago he had liked this place but now feared falling.

  At the top he led them to a rocky knoll with clear fields of fire, where they could dig in, take turns eating, sleeping, watching. No fires, soft voices only, spread out among the rocks so almost nothing could get them.

  The dark grew colder. Shivering in the rocks, chest throbbing, he waited for dawn.

  Dampness fell on the back of his hand. Against his nose. He looked up. Snow. It sifted down like cinders from a faraway explosion. “This sucks.” Ray pulled his poncho over his shoulders. “We’re going to stand out like a nun’s tit.”

  At first light they moved out, traveling overwatch with a twenty-yard spread, Engle on point with Jack behind him so each time the trail split he could wait and Jack would show him the way.

  They crested ridge above the meadow in front of Wahid’s cave just before dawn. The juniper by the cave was dead, gaunt branches against the rock. “What if no one’s in there?” Corwin said.

  “Can’t you smell the smoke?” Ray said.

  They set up with Corwin and Ray on the angles opposite the cave, an eighty-yard shot, and Engle and Jack to go around the meadow and come up each side. “He’s gotta come out to piss,” Ray said. “Take him then.”

  “Man don’t piss,” Engle said. “Forty years he’s held it all inside.”

  “When the sun comes up,” Ray said, “it’ll be in his eyes.”

  Under the new snow the dead leaves and grass made no sound. Jack slipped through the scrub near the cliff. His breathing was loud and he stopped to calm it. He couldn’t see Corwin across the meadow among the rocks, nor Ray further down, nor Engle coming up this side to meet him.

  A bird twittered. He checked the meadow, the far side, the hill above, could smell the cat-urine odor of the dead juniper ahead. “If they roll out a grenade,” Corwin had said, “it’ll get anyone near the entrance –”

  “Remember,” Ray said, “you can’t kill him.”

  “Question is,” Engle had said, “how many guys in there with him?”

  “Just one, the prisoners said. A younger guy.”

  “Unless there was already more.”

  Ten feet from the cave Jack stopped again to scan the meadow, listening for sounds. Another bird called, echoing off the cliff, Mars setting like a tiny ingot.

  He tried to remember inside the cave. A tunnel you squirmed through for thirty yards into an anteroom where you couldn’t stand and then a larger inverted bowl of a chamber with a fire pit at the far wall.

  Engle came up to ten feet on the other side. Hear anything? he hand-signaled.

  Jack shook his head. Engle scanned the meadow, the far side, the hill above. I’ll listen here, he motioned. You move back to cover.

  Jack took off his web gear, boots, and helmet, racked the Makarov and crept to the cave. What are you doing, Engle mouthed, waving him back.

  Jack slipped into the cave and waited for his eyes to adjust. Every hiss of cloth echoed. He slid forward one elbow, the other, holding the Makarov before him. His breath thundered off the rock. Anything fired in here will hit you.

  At the last bend in the tunnel the wood smoke smell grew stronger. He waited for a long time but heard nothing. He inched forward and looked into the chamber.

  Red coals in the fire pit, fresh-cut wood beside it, a blackened pot, blankets.

  Nobody.

  “HE’LL COME OUT SOON,” Suley said. “Then shoot him.”

  “I’m tasting this,” Wahid whispered. “For years I’ve wanted it, and now...”

  “See – he’s coming out! Fire!”

  Wahid peered through the brush between two rocks. Down in the meadow one American crouched beside the cave as another slid from it. Jyek’s dark hair, lithe ruggedness. Wahid nestled the front bead on Jack’s chest and touched the trigger. “Fire!” Suley hissed.

  “Quiet! Be ready for the two we can’t see under the hill here, when I shoot.”

  “You’re afraid!”

  Wahid raised his finger from the trigger. “The two below us are a danger. We should let all four pass by in front, as they leave. It will be easy to hit them then.”

  “I remember when he was my teacher.”

  “His dwelling shall be Hell, and an unhappy journey shall it be thither.”

  THEY CROSSED THE MEADOW in fire team file, twent
y-yard spread, Corwin on point, Jack second.

  If Wahid wasn’t here he could be anywhere. Kabul, Paktia with Pashtùns, across the border in Pakistan, Kashmir. In Saudi where no one could touch him. That evil and horrible place where women are completely enslaved, can’t go out without a male family member, have to keep covered from head to toe lest a man see their flesh and be tempted into evil. Where for a woman to uncover her face could get her quickly decapitated by the mutaween, the religious police.

  Suddenly he felt Leo’s little hand in his, like one day years ago walking up Fifth Avenue to F.A.O Schwarz. “Papa,” Leo said, “remember in Sin City?”

  “Hey,” Jack looked down at him, “I never told you about that.”

  “Colonel Ackerman, he always said...”

  “I never told you about him –”

  “When making a withdrawal, sometimes to do the Figure Eight?”

  “True, even when not expecting contact. Because you’re never safe as you think. But how . .?”

  “The Figure Eight?” Leo tugged his hand. “Show me!”

  His hand was empty. The cliffs above cast down a frigid light. “Corwin!” he yelled, “Figure Eight!”

  Any man could call it, in the line or whatever. If he saw something. Felt something. Silly here but what the Hell. Jack followed Corbin east then north again, then east, then south.

  There, on the snow. The imprint of a sandaled foot.

  He waved the others down. A goatherd maybe. But why no goat tracks? Snow freshly compressed, angled. Someone just ahead.

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE SHOT HIM!” Suley hissed. Now we’ve lost them!”

  “Don’t speak like that!” Wahid felt the urge to smash Suley’s face. “Little sparrow,” he said. “Imagine, that’s what I used to call you.”

  “I never was your sparrow.”

  “Leave now. I’ll stay to cover you. We can meet tomorrow in Edeni.”

  “You’d stay here? For me?”

  “Of course. I’ll get away too. Don’t worry.”

  “You must!” Suley held him. “I’m sorry, what I just said.”

  Wahid smoothed the hairs on Suley’s wrist. “We’ll always be together.”