Khyber Run (13 page)

We were well into the mountains now. The air lacked the muggy heat of Jalalabad, and it smelled of broken stone. Legend says my ancestors once lured an entire army of Ghengis Khan's up into these mountains, then ambushed and slaughtered them. Of all the peoples the Mongols met, we alone weren't crushed. And these clean, hard rocks made up the spine of my history. Despite my burning muscles, my soul sang with the wind.

Heading north and east and north and east again like this must put us right on the Pakistani border. “I hope someone knows where we're going."

"Actually,” Mike admitted. “We don't."

My mare stopped dead. I pressed in my heels to urge her on. She didn't move. I loosened the reins, chiding myself to pay attention, and she caught up. “Say again?"

"Our target—call him Tango—went cross-country and probably across the border with our lieutenant. Westerners without Pakistani troop escorts get killed on sight in Khyber province. But these two made it there—wherever
there
was—and most of the way back before Tango disappeared. We suspect Tango went back across the border with the idea he could ask for political asylum and become a
real big man
."

He'd have a real big surprise, especially in the rural areas where Pakhtunwali still dominated the culture. Loyalty was as fundamental to the Pakhtun as it was to the Corps. “So he'd have headed for Islamabad, probably via Pekhawar?"

"Not initially. If they made contacts over there, he'd want to hook up with them to start with, get sanctuary—
nanawatai
—with them. Then go to a big city—Peshawar, probably—only after he has a local family's support and protection."

Go? That's not how nanawatai works
. “Pakhtun sanctuary doesn't move around except as the family migrates from its summer lands to its winter lands. If a guest leaves the family's land, the family has no obligation to go with him to protect him."

Especially if they knew he was a traitor to his
qawm
, his chosen companions.

Then again, there was the concept of
bedraga
, escort. Whatever the rules for bedraga were, though, they were not as fundamental as nanawatai.

"Yeah, well. That's one point where we hope your inside knowledge beats his by a wide enough margin to give us a tactical advantage."

Maybe. When I was a teenager trying to remember any of the finer points of Pakhtunwali, I couldn't find much reliable-sounding information. With this war going on and on, there's probably a lot more info getting posted now. But I had given up my research at the same time I'd taken up drinking.

I'd had my last drink. Maybe it was time to take up the research again. “What do you know of his back-up plans?"

"Not much. We had no time to get a subpoena, and the time we might have spent getting a hacker seemed better spent getting you. He'd deleted his Facebook page, but Echo dug up the archives and it had crazy shit. Stop here."

Echo and I stopped. Mike dismounted, climbed some rocks to the right of the road, and scrabbled up to check what was over the coming ridge. In less than a minute, he was remounting. He showed me his phone. “This is him."

I caught only a glimpse of a face, bug-eyed and pointy chinned like a human Chihuahua, before Mike moved ahead on the trail.

"Unless he lied on Facebook, Tango maxed his credit cards and cashed out a trust fund to amass over ten grand. The lieutenant took two grand of his own for emergencies during the trip. If Tango has hired the right bodyguards and hasn't been robbed, he could live well for a long time on the cash. Or he could set up a lucrative business. He supposedly had civilian paramedic training, so he acted as our doc, and twice we caught him telling civilians he was a famous US surgeon doing volunteer work with the military. I could see him teaming up with a translator, setting up a quack medical clinic, and robbing the people blind."

I took a sip of water. This nameless lieutenant had to be one of the boys the major didn't want blamed for Tango's actions. Was he in some brig, incommunicado? Maybe he was being held for ransom? The ransom scenario would explain my presence, but they would have simply explained that to me without all the mystery.

Unless he'd done something nobody should know about, or gone somewhere no NATO was allowed to go. “I take it we're backtracking the two of them?"

"Yes. When we stopped for lunch, that rise Oscar climbed was probably the site of the lieutenant's last call-in."

I hadn't noticed Oscar climbing any rise. Too busy dealing with Echo. “Where does the known part of the trail disappear?"

"It disappeared back there. We circled away from their last camp site, since the area is under surveillance, but from that point we're working on guesses."

I didn't believe him. We'd been cantering every time the ground smoothed out enough to allow it. That was too fast to be going in a wild guess of a direction. “Map?"

He nodded. Echo handed me a GPS showing a topo map. Oscar nudged up behind my mare and handed me the iPad showing what would be a road map if it had a whole lot more or better data.

I juggled reins and electronics, adjusting scale to compare, but there were too many inconsistencies. At least one map had to be inaccurate, and likely both were.

Mike kept talking. “The larger red marks are four towns that are about a day's travel and are big enough to have a horse market. If we stopped at any of them, we could ask whether the lieutenant's mare has shown up. We have good photos of her. The other red marks are two likely villages on the road to Peshawar. The next level of zoom shows smaller villages and khels."

No time to check them all, of course. No time to check any of them, really. If Tango got to Pekhawar, he'd win. “If you're game to cross the border, why not end-run him? Race to Pekhawar and then sweep back along the road to intercept him? Does he have too much of a head start for that?"

"He shouldn't. Depends on how quickly we can move on the other side of the border. Around the next turn there, we should be able to look down on the highway just south of an intersection. The intersection's where we have to make our decision."

Mike scouted the turn, then motioned us to proceed.

I looked at his tired face and wondered if he was maybe a little old for these missions. “I'll take point."

So far, whoever was point had decided our pace. If we were going to head downhill on a steep grade, I wanted the option of taking the descent by foot, leading the horses.

Echo's mare danced, and his bandaged hand came out of its sling long enough to stroke her neck. “No-go, Doc. I mean Zulu. This is what
we
do. My turn for point."

Mike spoke. “Walk it, Echo."

Echo's mare danced again, plainly signaling his irritation. That shemagh might be the only thing between the blond and a charge of insubordination. But after two seconds of hesitation, he obeyed. He was a marine.

Good thing, too. The road down was a steeper grade than before.

I led my mare, letting her pick her footing without my weight to unbalance her. My legs trembled from strain after this long day.

"Halt!” At Oscar's order, I halted instantly. As did Echo.

Oscar slid feetfirst down the scree-covered slope beside the trail, launching miniature avalanches to scatter past us and rain down the cliff to the road below. He stopped to crouch on an outcropping at my knee level. “Funky pothole, eleven o'clock."

I didn't see which pothole in the road beneath us had caught his attention. There were plenty of them. For about fifty yards, the road went wasp-waisted with washouts to both sides...and there, yes, just in front of the narrow place. A repair, rather than a hole. That pothole should have been too small to justify repair given the larger perils left open.

Oscar unslung his rifle, took aim, and fired.

Boom
! The explosion below peppered me with rock fragments. My mare shied, her reins yanking my arm.

Boom-Boom-Boom! Boom-Boom-Boom
! The explosions shook the ground, stung my skin, stunned my ears. I hit the ground just as the last went off.

A daisy chain. His shot had set off a daisy chain of mines. Probably one designed to have one detonation set off the others. We'd have been hamburger on that road, horse and man together.

Distantly, I heard a yell. A mare bugled.

I turned my head. My mare's hoof came down right in front of my nose, striking a blue-hearted spark against the stone. I squinted to see through the cruelly bright daylight.

Echo was trying, one-handed, to control his panicking mare. She reared, lifting him off his feet.

She came down in slow motion. In slow motion, his boots, his shins, his knees sank below ground level into a cloud bank of rising dust. She'd dropped him off the edge of the cliff. Then she tumbled headfirst after him.

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"Halt! Zulu, halt!"

I stopped, trembling with the need to reach Echo. The blond had fallen at least twenty feet, maybe with half a ton of horse landing on top of him. He wasn't even swearing. I saw nothing below but the clouds of dust.

"If it's an active ambush,” I said levelly, “y'all take care of it. If it was laid and left, I have a patient to see to."

The dust parted enough to show Echo's mare, shaking her dust-colored head and peeling her lips back from her yellow teeth. But she kept her feet still, holding position like a buzkashi stallion over a downed rider.

"Go to him, then."

The dust moved on the wind, giving visibility by the time I reached bottom with my mare in tow. Echo lay like the tan version of a plastic Green Army Man, tipped over on his back in the dusty road. His mare straddled him protectively.

Something about the barrel and flash suppressor of the SAW, poking out from behind his neck, gave me a cold premonition. “Do not turn your head! Don't move at all."

He didn't speak. Or move. He'd had either the wind knocked out of him or a lick of sense knocked into him. Oh, and his mare stood on the layered ends of his shemagh.

I flopped on my belly and looked under his neck. The assault pack had cushioned his back to some extent, but that protection ended at his shoulders. The SAW's barrel dented his neck heavily where the top of C2, his second cervical vertebra, should have been. If the bone had splintered and cut through his spinal cord, he'd never lift a finger again.

If it hadn't cut the cord, he had a chance—inshallah. I shot a glance down his gig line. An instant, complete severance of the spinal cord gives a man a raging hard-on. His crotch lay flat like any stunned man's.

"Don't move anything, Echo.” I spoke to the rising cloud of dust over me and the snipers in it. “Somebody get on the phone and bring in a helo. Tell them to bring a dose of Decadron and a full neck board, backboard. Stat."

I tucked the folds of Echo's shemagh carefully to seal out as much of the cough-inducing dust as possible, then collected the closest dozen fist-sized rocks and snugged them firmly about his neck and shoulders. With that expedient in place, I could improvise more formfitting sandbags to replace the rocks. Had to brace his neck and head for when he inevitably needed to cough or sneeze. A shape approached through the dust. “Bring me socks and an entrenching tool."

"Get on your horse, Zulu.” Mike squatted beside me and handed me my sunglasses. “You too, Oscar. We have a mission."

I didn't look at him. “The kid has to be evacuated ASAP. If I get him braced and some steroids in him, and if they get him into surgery before some stray movement manages to cut the spinal cord, he will walk again. He might heal with nothing but a few scars and a stiff neck."

Echo's chest heaved—a good sign, but not as good as it would be if he could still do it in an hour. Sweat freckled his dusty skin with darker spots. “My neck can't be broken. I can wiggle my fingers. All I need is—"

I jabbed a finger at him. “Shut
up
, Echo! All you need is to hold still!” But he was frightened, and snarling at him was ill-bred of me. I moderated my tone. “Combat breathing, son. In three, hold three, out three. Don't hyperventilate."

His chest jerked obediently. That's one thing about a marine: he can obey orders.

I wasn't a marine. I strode to the mares, ripped the Velcro strapping, and threw open the medical pack. I didn't have Decadron, but I had to have something. I just had to figure out what.

"Zulu."

"Shut up, Mike."

"Zarak."

My hands stopped moving. I looked over the saddle into unshaded pale eyes that held no hint of kindness.

"Our target has taken sanctuary with your qawm, your khel."

"Mine.” I tried to suss out some kind of code in his words. My qawm consisted of the men and women who handled sick call with me a thousand miles away, especially the few of them who liked to use the gym as often as I did. As for my khel, I'd spent more than three months looking for it the first time, and another war had happened since then. They'd moved, and nobody knew where. What was this game?

I gave it up and went back to analyzing the contents of the med kit.

A hand reached over the saddle and grasped my wrist. “Ask me how I know.
Ask
me."

I glared, knowing he would tell me whether I asked or not. Then I knew without asking. “Ben."

Eyes pale as a desert sky blazed at me. “Tango pestered Bravo no end. Why do these Sunni sing, when those prohibit singing? Why this, how come that? ‘I don't know’ was never a good enough answer. Two weeks ago, the two of them went on furlough, saying they had a line on finding Bravo's khel. The day they were due back, I got a voice mail. Bravo said they were thirty klicks north of Jalalabad and finally getting more than one bar. Said to expect them by dark. When he was five hours overdue, we went looking. What the dogs had left was mixed with the rags and fluff from his sleeping bag."

Dogs
. I couldn't breathe. Dogs don't go for a shot man until he's had time to decompose a bit. To draw dogs within hours, a man would have to be hacked open—or blown open—to expose the dog meat inside.

From hiding, I'd watched wild dogs tear into the remains of my uncles, my cousins, my brother Hamid. Only in my dreams had I gone down from the rocks and slaughtered the scavengers. Only in dreams had I found an undamaged weapon and hunted down the murderers.