“Mmmm.” Looking back the way they’d come, Bibi regarded the mountains before sweeping a gaze downslope to the valley floor and then back the way they’d come. “I have a feeling I will become well-acquainted with Cham Bacha. Major Gholam was quite . . . erhm . . . anxious? No, eager for this posting. We were originally assigned to Lashkar Gar.”
“And he gave up a cushy job at checkpoints for this armpit?” Tompkins shook his head. “That’s dumb. Why?”
“Who can know? Perhaps he has fam—” Bibi suddenly stopped talking and stared at a spot above Tompkins’s head. An odd expression spread over her face, and her right hand, which had never strayed from her rifle’s grip, tensed. “Kate,” she said, quietly, and nodded at a point uphill. “Is that one of your girls?”
“What?” Instantly alert, Kate straightened from her slouch and followed Bibi’s gaze. For a moment, she saw only rock and more rock, and then a splash of color as a light breeze whipped and tugged at young girl in a purple dress and light head scarf. When she saw Kate looking, the girl made a frantic gesture that was also quite clear: Come here, come here!
“Hey.” Tompkins had shaded his eyes. “Isn’t that Fatimah?”
“Uh-huh.” Thinking, No, come on, not another Palwasha. Fatimah was seventeen, old enough to marry, though she hadn’t been the last time Kate visited. Whatever could be the matter? Her eyes shifted from Fatimah to the west and that rocky lip from which Palwasha had watched them descend. Palwasha was gone.
Weird. She was just there. Was it her imagination, or was that prominence roughly level with where Fatimah waited? Like there’s a path between the two?
“Bibi, tell Fatimah to come down.” Something wasn’t jiving here. As Bibi and Fatimah went back and forth, she thought, Palwasha insists she and the baby can’t come down. The girl knew Kate would eat up time going and coming. So she and Fatimah could coordinate? No, that was nuts. Palwasha had been scared, that was all. She wouldn’t play Russian roulette with her own child. But she’s not stupid. Palwasha has to know the baby is going to die. If that was true—if Palwasha knew there was no hope—then why coax Kate up here in the first place?
“What?” She saw Bibi had turned back, an expression of both annoyance and confusion on her face. “What’s wrong?”
“She will not say.” Bibi sounded a little exasperated. “She is being quite the child, too, because she will also not come down. She wants us to come to her.”
“Where have I heard this song before?” Tompkins said.
“I know, Corporal. I am afraid she is rather insistent, Kate.”
“Naw, naw, this is too weird. One kid, I buy, but two?” Tompkins was shaking his head. “She ever done anything like this, Kate?”
“Never.” Although something else occurred to her. “Tompkins, she must’ve followed us. Think about it. She didn’t show up for clinic, but Palwasha was watching and waiting. So, why not Fatimah, too? I didn’t tell anyone where we were going. She had to have been on the lookout and seen us leave.” What would Fatimah have done if Pederson were still with them, or Palwasha and her baby?
“Why would she do that?”
“Perhaps, like Palwasha, it is safer for Fatimah to follow than be seen with us.” Bibi eyed Kate. “But I do not understand something, Kate. You went back alone for your unpleasant doctor, yes?”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to tire out Six, and Pederson speaks English. So?”
“So why did Fatimah not approach you then? If she followed from the start, that is.”
“Well,” she began then stopped. A good question. “Because her English is as good as my Pashto.”
“Her Pashto sucks.” At Kate’s look, Tompkins said, “Well, it does.”
“Somehow it sounds better if I say it.” Kate turned to Bibi. “But he’s right. She would need a translator.”
“Meaning me. Which would suggest she has been waiting a long time, Kate. Whatever this is, it must be important. If you want to go”—Bibi squared her shoulders—“I will follow.”
“You guys totally forget you’re military?” Tompkins said.
“I am Afghani police, Corporal. Not quite the same.”
“Get real. You understand chain of command.” Unhooking his radio, Tompkins extended the antenna then stood with his thumb poised over the transmit button. “If we’re going to detour, we need to call it in.”
“We’re not really detouring,” Kate protested, although if they went up to Fatimah, they would be going in the opposite direction and away from Cham Bacha. “We’re just—”
“Detouring.” Tompkins gave her a look. “Come on, Kate. You know the rules.”
“Fine, then call it. Am I stopping you? The only one who outranks you here is Six.”
Bibi’s eyebrows rose. “The dog has a rank?”
“Sergeant. It’s a long story.” To Kate, Tompkins said, “What do you got against reporting in?”
“That this will take about two seconds, and there’s nothing to report yet? What are you going to tell Sergeant Stone? Why don’t we see what Fatimah wants and then call? Better yet, you take Six back. Bibi and I will check this out, and then I’ll call.”
“No, not happening.”
She threw up her hands. “Five seconds ago, you were worried about the dog melting.”
“I’m still worried, but if we make this quick, he should be fine. Actually, he went a little bat-shit when you went off on your own, so it’d be easier for us all to stick together.” Hooking his radio back onto his vest, Tompkins shook his head. “His orders and mine are to watch your ass. So, we’re watching.” Then, seeming to really hear what he’d just said, Tompkins shot a glance at Bibi, who only regarded him with an expression of cool amusement. “Don’t say it.”
“Never.” Bibi was bland. “When I am in uniform, there is not much ass to see.”
Kate did her own eye-roll. She’d heard of meet-cutes . . . did they do meet-cutes in Afghanistan? . . . but this was ridiculous. “If you two are done, can we go, please? We could be halfway up to Fatimah by now. Promise, a half hour, tops. Anything more, we call it in, okay?”
“Hooah.” Signaling for Six, already off-leash, to heel, Tompkins said, “Six and I take point. Bibi, you have our six.”
“How fortunate,” Bibi said. “I will have a splendid view of Six’s ass.”
“I am so not touching that,” Kate said.
“Yeah, now that you mention it, he does have a nice tail, doesn’t he?” Grinning, Tompkins turned away from Cham Bacha, scanned the mountain, then pointed. “Goat path. We can take a shortcut here, be up to Fatimah quicker.” He began to monkey up the mountain as Six loped alongside. “So, let’s get this show on the road.”
“Yeah, yeah, just watch where you’re going.” Planting a boot, Kate heaved herself onto the rocks. “The last thing I need is for you to fall off the mountain.”
“I’m not going to fall,” Tompkins tossed back.
“Perhaps not this time, Corporal,” Bibi said. “But, eventually, everybody does.”
PART FOUR:
EVERYBODY FALLS
THE BLACK WOLF WILDERNESS, 2017
1
“Nuhhh!” Kate jolted up with a cry, heart scrambling into her throat, the taste of chalk and desert air and gunpowder and hot brass and fresh blood . . . Jack Jack Jack Jack! . . . still on her tongue. Her pulse thundered though it couldn’t cover the distant pops and then the first snap of that first bullet drilling past faster than the speed of sound—so that it was there and gone before she even suspected—and then there was a shout, a scream, Six’s shriek . . .
Gasping, she flailed, thrashing against something that snatched at her arms and grabbed her hips. They were tying her up, they were going to kill them, kill them all! Rifle—the thought was a panic-rat racing around her mind, digging in with sharp claws and wicked teeth—rifle. Where’s my weapon? She had to fight fight fight!
“Easy, Kate.” Jack’s breath feathered her left ear, and his arms tightened around her bell
y. “Ease down. I’m here, I’m right here and—”
“No!” Shuddering in a sudden spasm equal parts terror and grief, she broke free. Reality snapped into place, and she understood she was still cocooned in her sleeping bag and in her tent. Icy snow scurried over tough Kevlar with a sound like sand shushing over a frosted window pane. Clawing her way out of her bag, she rolled, felt chilled fabric and hard earth beneath her knees. Other than a thin silk undershirt, she was buck naked. Catching herself, she braced herself on both hands and pivoted, swinging her hips and body around in a fast, fluid motion.
Of course, Jack wasn’t there. Jack was a mirage, her own personal Jiminy Cricket perching on her shoulder. Jack came to her at night. Jack slid up from behind, wrapping her against his warm chest, trapping her in a never-ending embrace, that sensual aroma of musk and a man’s light sweat swirling over them both as he fitted his body to hers and they rode their urgent desire together, gasping, their feverish need spiraling higher, their bodies tangling, moving harder, slamming faster harder harder faster harder. . .
It was a cheat. They were a lie. At times, she might be a can short of a six-pack, but she wasn’t crazy. Jack wasn’t real. Jack was as substantial as a phantom limb. Everything they did and she felt were illusions conjured by the biobots and nanocircuitry of her rewritten brain.
“Kate.” He spoke from his usual haunt at her left shoulder. His voice was weary. “I am here because you made me, but I am also me, not a dream or hallucination.”
“No!” Panting, she crouched, eyes bugging, her mane of lush red hair swirling in a wild cascade as she snapped her head left and then pulled herself around and around and around, trying to catch him out and always failing. A very small, still rational part of her mind knew she must look like a dog chasing its tail. “You’re not. You can’t be! You’re dead, Jack, you’re dead, you died in Afghan—” Her voice hitched as a ball of hysteria crowded into her chest. “I t-tried but I . . . I c-couldn’t, I . . . I couldn’t!”
“Stop this.” A note of steel. “That’s past. I’m gone, and yet I’m here and I exist for a reason, not only to keep you company on cold nights. So, think, Kate. Use your head. How long has it been since you dreamt of that last mission? A day, a week? A month?”
She opened her mouth to reply, closed it, swallowed. She hadn’t revisited that nightmare for the better part of half a year. In fact, she remembered the last time she’d had it: on a training mission, accompanied by a couple of Black Ops guys to watch her back just in case because Vance and the DARPA boys, the geek squad that was Project 7UV9, wanted to see . . .
“Jesus,” she gasped. “Vance wanted to see how I did under live fire.”
“Exactly. Real bullets, the right smells, the correct sounds. Kate, it was the bullets, remember? It was their sound and then—“
And then nothing. She’d gotten through the exercise just fine. She hadn’t freaked out. She’d performed well.
Until that night when she fell asleep and had the dream.
It was as if some hidden circuit was thrown. She’d gone apeshit. Clawed her way out of her tent, literally, and did a fair amount of damage, something with which the Black Ops guy whose right leg, five ribs, and left arm she’d snapped like dry kindling couldn’t argue. Really, he was lucky the tranquilizer dart hit when it had, or she’d have uncorked his head, corkscrewing it from his spine with her bare hands.
After, when the dust settled and she came back to herself, she wondered why Vance hadn’t ordered her put down right then and there the way you would a rabid dog. She imagined it might even have been a close call, the Black Ops team leader arguing to take her out while Vance—who must outrank God—kept shaking his head. (Actually, Vance, who had the most intense gray eyes to go with his silver hair, always raised a professorial finger whenever he wanted to make a point. She could see it: the Black Ops leader, face redder than boiled lobster, and Vance, cool as a sleek fox, with that finger: Well, let’s just think about this.)
Much later, the DARPA boys compared what happened to a fugue state. All the Black Ops guys had helmet and body cams, so there’d been footage, and you really could see the moment Kate went away and something—someone—else snapped into place, plumping her skin and filling out the mask of her face.
For Vance, she became more than a curiosity and simple prototype. Neither he nor the DARPA boys understood or knew just how much she had changed—was still changing, growing, becoming—but, at that moment, Kate had metamorphosed into something apart and exotic, a dangerous creature Vance never wanted truly tamed or destroyed.
Just so long as she didn’t turn, or slip her leash.
“It was the bullets,” she said now, and shivered as her tent shook under a fist of wind. Glancing up into the welter of shadows gathered overhead, her eyes sharpened on a muted gleam near the peak. Aluminum—the thought was almost lazy, a sidebar—one of the spigots at the end of a fiberglass pole. She should check that come morning. “It was the sound of weapons fire.”
“Exactly, Kate. So, if that’s true—”
“I heard something in my sleep.”
“Yes.” A beat slipped past. “Or I did.”
Could that be? Something had nipped hard enough at the margins of her consciousness to provoke the dream and alert Jack at the same time? A fresh blast of wind buffered her tent. Snow scurried over Kevlar—and then she remembered.
“Gabriel,” she said. “Oh crap.”
“I was wondering when you were going to remember our boy.” Jack’s voice was almost laconic. “He’s still out there, Kate.
“Well then, he’s an idiot.” Probably a snow cone by now, too. She’d told him to duck into the tent if he got too cold or the snow started up. She could picture him, stubbornly huddled in his army poncho and too-thin camo sleeping bag, poking at a fire that wouldn’t give off a lot of warmth, even with the reflector wall of stone and aluminum foil they’d rigged. Hell, in this wind, the fire might even be out. So why hadn’t he asked to come in?
“Don’t be stupid, Kate. He’s a soldier. He’s also AWOL. You think admitting that didn’t cost him?”
“I know that.” She was nettled but mostly at herself. She should’ve insisted.
“If you’d stop making this about you for two seconds, Kate, you might also remember that something woke you up. Something triggered the dream.”
Oh shit. “You don’t think . . .” Did Gabriel have a gun? Had she smelled one? Scuttling over icy Kevlar, she pulled herself on hands and knees to her tent’s front flaps. No, she’d been focused on him, his scent, that black fug of his rage and despair.
“Kate, you might want to put on some clothes.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” It simply wasn’t worth the time and hassle to wriggle her way back into her silk shorties if, by some miracle, Gabriel was fast asleep and doing just fine. In the back of her mind, she also doubted that he was.
“Which begs the question, doesn’t it?”
“What, that I want him to see my ass or catch me out?” Rattled despite herself, she fumbled the zip of the tent’s inner flap and felt the metal teeth stutter then snarl. Damn it.
“Maybe both. Maybe you’re as tired of hiding what you are as he is.”
She snorted. “In your dreams.”
“Really.” Not a question. “Then why are you talking to me out loud?”
“What?” She stopped fussing with the zipper. Her head snapped up and around, but as usual Jack was only a quicksilver flicker at the tail of her left eye, the kind of flash you might see before a really bad headache. “We’re alone, Jack, and believe it or not, sometimes it’s kind of nice to actually talk to instead of think at you and . . . Jesus, why are we even discussing this?”
She went back to work on the zipper. Maybe she should get her headlamp so she could see where the teeth had gummed up, but she was flustered now and impatient and . . . wait a second . . . her eyes zeroed in on a faint gray blush that, after another instant, resolved into a tiny wad of balled-fabri
c about the size of half a pea. Gotcha. Picking the snarl free with her fingers, she said, “I have zero intention of inviting Gabriel in here to play grab-ass, all right?” She gave the zipper a ferocious yank, heard something that sounded like her mom ripping up her dad’s old cotton underwear for rags, and thought, Crap.
Now, with the interior insulating flap gone, cold palmed her face and chest. Balanced on the balls of her knees, something easier to say than do, she reached for the outer flap’s zipper, pulled it, then thrust her face through the gap in the exterior flap. Snow pecked her cheeks, and she averted her face a moment, blinking against a fresh spatter of icy flakes. It was very dark, which was what you’d expect from a sky choked with heavy clouds. She snapped a look to the left. The fire was down to a feeble orange ember. The reflector wall was still intact, but the lean-to had been dismantled, and Gabriel’s gear was gone. He left. Why had he done that? Incredulous, she rocked back on her knees, dropped her eyes to the area immediately beyond her tent’s threshold, and then she frowned.
Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part 2 (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 3