Khyber Run (2 page)

He stepped out into the eerie starless night, lit here and there by a dim red light or by a brown smear of fire wrapped in dust. “You're Zulu. I'm Oscar. Need a hot shower? Last chance for a while."

Last chance
? “Let me guess: we're heading out before I can work all the booze out of my system?"

I'd taken to drink when I realized how American I'd become. Now here I was half-drunk while surrounded by dead-sober Americans in the land of my fathers. If my tribesmen could smell me, they'd spit in disgust.

"Roger that."

Meaning we were leaving Bagram very soon. Maybe before dawn. The official line was that nothing but time removes alcohol breakdown products from the body. But I'd found that a very long, very hot shower, plus plenty of fluids, would help. “A shower sounds great, unless it would take up time better spent acquiring equipment."

"Plenty lined up."

Meaning I would take what I got and like it. “Are vegetarian rations available?"

He peeked around a corner and grinned back at me, a flash of teeth and eyes. “We don't eat the First Strike sandwiches either. Makes your shit smell NATO. We ask for the humanitarian ration packs—supposed to be halal."

Meaning I'd take what I got with the food too. And that they were interested in accommodating me to the extent it was convenient to do so. Interesting.

Still, why was I here? The navy had cured me of volunteering a while back, and I never drink when I could possibly be called to duty.

We circled behind a line of muttering, heavily packed soldiers loading into a convoy. I had no idea where they were heading, where this week's hot spot was. But unless they planned to make those poor shits sleep in the vehicles...were they heading out of Bagram in the dark?

Which brought another point to the front of my aching and overloaded brain. “Oscar, how far are we going?”
How far and in what direction and why, but let's start with how far.

"All the way.” He didn't say “of course,” or “stupid question, stupid answer,” but the words hung unspoken in the air.

And I could not make sense of what he did say. “All the way
where
? Did you happen to give me some crucial information when I was too stupid-drunk to retain it?"

He laughed shortly. “We'll talk later, out of this place."

"I will go nowhere until I lay hands on some ID. And a set of orders.” This guy might be someone with the pull to drag me all the way here, or he might be an opportunist. If someone else had ordered me here, and Oscar just picked me up... Well, switching dates at the prom wouldn't really further my career goals. What I had left of career goals.

"Mike has your orders."

Okay, there was already a Mike on the team, which explained my Zulu designation. But I was getting tired of Oscar's high-handed tactics, not to mention the huge quantities of information he was not giving me. “You'd have had to show something to pick me up."

"You want to ruin your night vision reading that crap? Or wait just a few minutes and hear the real deal?"

When you put it that way
? For right now, I followed him away from the bunker. He flowed over the ground, turning left and left again, silent as any other predator.

I couldn't match his stealth, but I set my feet lightly and breathed shallowly. And promised myself I'd do a respectable job of it tomorrow.

The plywood American construction ended abruptly; we entered a sector that felt Russian—all poured cement, heroic proportions, right angles, and echoing whispers. My ears pricked to echoes of Dari voices, Pashto voices, voices I couldn't place. None clearly Pakhtun.

I'm told my accent is Nangrahari, a mystery I'd never been able to resolve. The few Nangrahari voices I'd found on YouTube didn't sound like home to me.

I stopped, straining to hear something almost familiar enough to name. The sound strengthened, became an ululating lullaby in Turkic, and faded. When it was gone, I looked for Oscar.

He wasn't there.

Not far away, a goat bleated plaintively and a sleepy-sounding child wheedled it to be still. Farther away, a dog barked, then other dogs bounced the sound back and forth.

The wind shifted, chilled the sweat prickling on my face and neck. Had Oscar shed me on purpose, expecting me to call out like some little lost child?

I flattened against the closest wall, cold cement with deep gouges at hip height, and waited for him to circle back. My black uniform wouldn't blend with the cement wall, but denying movement to a searcher's eye was the next best thing to camouflage.

Among the shadows moved a denser shadow. My right hand curled at my belt, where the knife should have been, while I waited to identify the movement.

But he didn't speak, didn't offer so much as a silhouette of his rifle. After a moment, the shadow glided off down the sewer's edge of that too-broad, too-straight Russian road.

I followed, knowing he might be guide or kidnapper, soldier or vigilante or brigand. I'd rejected my heritage, effectively disowned my family, and was only occasionally going through the motions with my faith. Lately, I didn't give a shit about my career either. When a leaf lets go of the tree, any wind can catch it.

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I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. Menthol. I gagged. Which brought up my own scent, so I had to fight down the dry heaves.

The shadow I followed spoke, so quietly I strained to hear. “Oscar plus one. Do not answer. Oscar plus one."

Ah. We were under observation. Probably from the smoker. Either they didn't know I was Zulu, or not even the code name Zulu needed to be said out loud here.

What a time to be half shit-faced.

We went in one heavy, splintery door. Oscar spent no time lingering in the doorway. I closed the door behind me without asking, leaving us in a totally dark and chill room, small enough I felt cold stone all round. But only for a second.

A keypad abruptly lit up on the opposite wall. Oscar tapped a quick sequence on it. The inner door opened to a dimly lit room with a stone and hammered-iron fire ring in the center, a young blond dropping something into the teakettle over the fire, and a flat smell of lanolin and cooking oil. My stomach clenched.

Oscar stepped in. “Why is your back to the door, Echo?"

The blond grinned over his shoulder. He was very young, with brilliant blue eyes like my brother Mohammed's. “Nice to see you too, Oscar. To answer the question I'm sure you meant to ask, there's no more fried pumpkin. There is some leftover lamb, meaning the greasy, stringy carcass of the toughest old ram for miles around, and there's onions. And naan, not too stale. And green tea, which doesn't pretend to have either flavor or caffeine. No coffee, of course, but we did pick up some more caffeine pills. Where is he?"

Oscar looked back at me. “Please come in. The door needs shutting."

I eased in, locating the room's other two doorways—both dark—before I shut the airlock door. The lock clicked a quick syncopation behind me. Sounded like two dead bolts snicking home. I put a section of wall to my back.

The darkness in the far doorway moved, revealing a man's outline. “Sorry to hear about your brother, Zulu."

Ben
. The grief I'd fought off with Jim Beam hit me. I flipped it to anger. “Who are you to speak of my brother?"

Ah, that was so very rude. My ears burned. And my tongue throbbed, reminding me how recently I'd bitten it.

The blond moved the teakettle, allowing more light from the fire ring. The man in the doorway, now visible, cocked his head like he was studying me. “We're the people who requisitioned you to arrive hours ago. Your skipper said you'd tied one on, and took the trouble to explain the situation. That's why Oscar went to get you, instead of leaving you to find your way here alone—and run the risk you wouldn't."

Oscar opened a chest, took out a pair of chunky white ceramic mugs, and crouched by the fire. “Give him a little space. He ain't all here yet."

Echo poured the white mugs full. Oscar sipped one. The other he lifted in my general direction before he set it by the fire. Invitation? Or command?

I'm here enough to want answers
. “What risk? When have I ever disobeyed a direct order?"

Oscar looked at the man in the inner doorway, who kept watching me. Okay, so that guy was the boss.

So what was his reason... Wait. “Zulu” meant they'd prepared to call me something other than Doc, even before I'd said anything. Nobody was assuming I'd be called Doc here. But there wasn't any other excuse for a bunch of bullet-sponges to drag me off my ship.

The world swung around, reoriented. Yes, there was.

What did ninety of every hundred
feranghi
need, more than they needed bullets or dollars? Translators.

Someone had outed me as a native speaker.

Or I'd pissed off someone who had in turn arranged to get me dumped in a war zone among people who'd been told I had a skill they needed—hoping I indeed didn't have it and that everyone would assume I was holding out on them.

The doorway shadows let pass a man with a weathered face, dark hair, and faded denim eyes. He was at least my age. “Call me Mike."

I really need to be sober for this
. “Forgive my manners, but I heard mention of a shower? Please tell me he didn't mean a six-liter tease."

Mike's smile crinkled his eyes, made them look kind. “Not by a long shot. The major did us right. We can use that much in the steam room alone."

I'd been in a steam room once. Gave me a crushing headache. Didn't need to magnify the crusher I already had. “I'll settle for the shower, if it's all the same to you. You can use the time to get my paperwork laid out."

The kindness left his eyes. “There are orders cut, if you agree to them, but the paperwork stays in the major's hands. You get to talk to him, hear him out, then tell him your decision."

My nerves wound tight enough to stiffen my face. I gave him a smile I was careful to keep out of my eyes. “Shower?"

He regarded me a moment, then waved me through the doorway.

The shower had ten heads, but the two nearest the entrance had ball joints so I could aim them both at me. I stood under the hard rain a long time, letting the stinging drops beat on me, before I reached for the soap. The soap smelled strongly of evergreen and very faintly of peanut butter. Cashew butter, perhaps. It stirred memories of staring into the fire in the
hujra
, huddled under a blanket with my older brother, hand-clapping a rhythm while my uncles danced in the long winter evenings.

My older brother Hamid was long gone. Now, Ben—

The grief hit again, a knee-bending wave of it. I locked my knees and folded my arms over my chest and let it come. Like surf, drowning me. Scouring me with sand and burning salt.

Ben was not yet born the night my father got shot. Everyone blamed the invading Shuravi, but it could have been a jealous kinsman.
Myself against my brother. My brother and myself against my cousin. My brother, my cousin, and myself against all others.

I was seven that night, old enough to join the men and sleep in the hujra instead of indoors with the women and the babies. But my mother, an American who'd taught at a Kabul girls’ college until the Shuravi emptied it, had insisted that I would not be circumcised as my brother Hamid had been, in the courtyard where the men gathered.

My father had said that if he allowed her to take me to the hospital in Jalalabad for such a thing, my masculinity would be forever suspect. They'd fought bitterly, while I hid and hoped none of the cousins overheard.

The last time I saw my father alive, he was driving the goats into the mountains. Shepherding was not his job—he was an educated man who paid one of my cousins to tend our animals—but I understood his need to go. The arguing at home made us all sick and miserable.

So he'd left. So he died.

We were still swimming in grief a week after the New Year when my favorite uncle called me to leave my mother's side and help tend the livestock. Mom, exhausted with the new baby, wrapped an old
shemagh
tightly about my neck and ears and told me to stay out of trouble.

My uncle grinned roguishly, took me to the men's place, and made the cut while my grandfather and great-grandfather shot the family's most celebrated rifles over my head.

Now I was again in the land of my fathers. Perhaps this time I would find my family, would learn what had become of them. Or perhaps I would find peace without knowing.

A glimpse of movement made me fold my grief inward, leaving the plain skin envelope for anyone to see. That was the American way, wasn't it?

Oscar stepped behind me to the showerhead farthest away. He was built lean, like a Pakhtun, his glossy black hair somewhat longer than most marines kept it. His voice said Texas, or somewhere west of there. Deep wrinkles radiated from eyes that had seen plenty of sun.

My first impression made him a cowboy. A certain wolfishness in his manner, in his soundless stride, raised the next assessment: gunslinger.

I always wanted to try on a gunslinger for size
. I blinked in the water and washed any trace of the thought off my face. He'd walked past my naked ass far too casually to have any interest in men.

His ass wasn't white. His hands were darker than his legs, but not by all that much. And I suspect I would have noticed if nude sunbathing had become the fashion.

"What tribe are you, Oscar?"

He looked over one shoulder, and I wondered if
tribe
had become a non-PC term. He answered anyway. “The Desert People. Tohono O'odham."

I'd never heard of them. “Like Navaho?"

"Neighbors. Here I pass for Tajik or Hazara, until I open my mouth."

I scrubbed my tongue and teeth with a clean corner of the washcloth. Ugh. At least I could de-crud my mouth. I couldn't scrub my brain, which was what needed it.

Oscar didn't look Tajik to me. Hazara are supposed to make up a good chunk of the population, but I didn't know any. From now on my guess of who might be Hazara would be based on who looked like Oscar. With his brown muscular ass and powerful thighs.