Read The Mullah's Storm Online
Authors: Tom Young
The Mullah's Storm (10 page)
He placed the GPS on the stones beside him and opened another vest pocket to get to his radio. He put the PRC-90 on his lap, pulled off his gloves. Parson rolled the rotary switch on the radio. A click, but no static. He pressed the TRANSMIT button. Nothing.
He drew his knees to his chest, folded his arms, and put his head down. What else could go wrong? He looked up again and exhaled hard, once, twice, three times.
“Radio dead?” Gold asked.
“Leave me alone.”
Parson tugged off his gloves, dropped them beside him. He patted his vest pockets until he found his spare battery. He unscrewed the radio’s battery compartment, removed the dead battery, and threw it as hard as he could. The metal cylinder flipped end over end as it sailed over the courtyard and dropped into the snow with a
whump
. Parson slid the fresh battery into the radio and screwed the cap back into place. He rolled the switch again and the radio hummed to life.
whump
. Parson slid the fresh battery into the radio and screwed the cap back into place. He rolled the switch again and the radio hummed to life.
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Charlie,” he called.
“Flash Two-Four Charlie, Bookshelf. Good to hear from you, buddy. You doing all right down there?”
“Negative. Stand by to copy some information.”
The radio hissed for a moment. “Flash Two-Four Charlie, go ahead.”
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Echo is dead. I found him in an old ruin. They cut off his head. The location of the body is as follows.”
Parson transmitted the coordinates, offset by a classified reference point.
Before the acknowledgment could come, a loud squeal blasted over the radio, the sound of one transmitter blocking another. Then foreign chatter. A taunting tone. Parson made out the word “Amrikan,” but nothing else except the sneer in the voice.
“I bet that’s Nunez’s radio,” Parson said to Gold. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It’s not Pashto. It’s Arabic.”
Then not Taliban, but al Qaeda, thought Parson. “Do you think they understood what I just told AWACS?”
“Maybe. They do have English speakers.”
“We better move,” Parson said. “Now.” He cursed himself for blabbering so much information in the clear. The coordinates were coded, but if the bastards on the radio were the same ones who slaughtered Nunez, they knew exactly where he was talking about. It seemed to Parson things kept happening faster than his chilled and pain-racked brain could process.
“Do you think they’re close?” Gold asked.
“These radios are line of sight.”
He wondered if it was any use to run. If the enemy had horses, they could follow tracks in the snow and chase him down quickly. When the blizzard first started, he’d counted on falling snow to cover his tracks, but now the snow was too deep for that. He thought about the problem for a minute, looked down at his feet.
“Let’s backtrack over our own trail coming in,” Parson said. “With these half-ass snowshoes, they can’t see which way the tracks go. We’ll veer off when I find a good place.”
Parson led the way out of the caravansary. The snow squeaked under his boots, and the makeshift snowshoes left wafflelike imprints. The tracks going in looked just like the tracks going out.
The sky hung low, gray as steel. In the quiet, with the enemy nearby, every sound seemed too loud—the crunch of snow, the clink of buckles and zippers, the rub of rifle slings. Parson listened closely for hoofbeats; he expected horsemen to thunder out of the fog at any moment and strike him down. He carried the AK at port arms. The faster I can get this rifle to my shoulder, he thought, the more of them I can take with me. What kind of war is this that I’m on the ground worried about the raghead cavalry?
Flakes fell large and thick, spiraled down like dying mayflies. The mullah’s breath came in labored wheezing, and the pack grew heavy across Parson’s shoulders. Parson glanced at Gold, who wore an aggrieved expression. She had more than enough reason to look frightened or worried, but this was something else. More like deep sorrow or profound disappointment.
Well, I gave her reason to be disappointed in me, Parson thought. She kept looking back at the mullah. Was she disappointed in him, too? What the hell did she expect?
A squadron of cliff swallows darted by, five or six little brown birds crisscrossing each other, their rapid wingbeats taking them away through the storm. Parson wished he could take flight and join their formation. But he could only place one foot in front of the other, in an old track if possible, wandering like a pilgrim on a quest for enlightenment, carrying the burden of all his sins.
CHAPTER SIX
T
hey stood in open country now, the heavy fog their only cover. Parson had hoped for a stream to provide a good place to veer off their old trail, but he’d found nothing. So about two miles back they had started into unbroken snow, hoping to find a village, preferably abandoned. Parson hated the thought of another night in a snow cave.
hey stood in open country now, the heavy fog their only cover. Parson had hoped for a stream to provide a good place to veer off their old trail, but he’d found nothing. So about two miles back they had started into unbroken snow, hoping to find a village, preferably abandoned. Parson hated the thought of another night in a snow cave.
The hands on his watch showed just after five in the afternoon. Not much daylight left. His expensive flier’s chronometer did him little good now, with its stopwatch function and digital window set to Zulu time. Hardly need a watch at all, Parson thought, when you’ve had an airplane blown out from under you.
He froze at the bleat of a goat.
“You hear that?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Gold said.
“What do you think?”
“Maybe I can get a villager to take us in.”
“Should we chance it?” Parson asked.
Gold shrugged. “Pashtunwali,” she said.
“What?”
“Tribal law. In their culture, if they take in travelers they have to protect them.”
“Even us?”
Gold turned her palms upward and raised her eyebrows. Not the answer Parson wanted, but he didn’t have a lot of options.
Parson clicked off his rifle’s safety, placed his finger directly on the trigger. If somebody came to my door looking like us, he thought, I sure as hell wouldn’t take them in, let alone feel any obligation. I do not understand these people.
He crept forward until he came to a stone wall about chest high. Beyond it, two goats fed from a trough, their fur a dirty cream color and matted. Their hooves had churned the ground to a foul slush of mud and manure. The smell reminded Parson of horse stables, but worse.
Beyond the goat paddock were three mud-brick dwellings adjoining each other. Not even a village, Parson guessed, but the compound of a single extended family that had probably scratched a living from this valley for generations. He remembered flying over many such compounds, sending sheep and goats scurrying and the women running inside. Parson always wondered why the women ran. In fear of bombs? To get a rocket launcher? Sometimes shoulder-fired missiles came up from these compounds, setting off the aircraft’s missile warning system and forcing the pilots to bank hard in evasive maneuvers.
“If they let us in,” Gold whispered, “lower your rifle, sir, and enter with your right foot first.”
Parson nodded and let Gold through the compound’s gate ahead of him. When he was sure the mullah wasn’t looking, he took a strobe light from his survival vest. He snapped the infrared lens into place and turned it on. With the naked eye, Parson did not see the IR strobe flashing, but the soft, steady clicks confirmed it was working. He placed the strobe on top of the rock wall, concealed by snow except for the lens. Insurance, Parson thought, or at least a grave marker.
He followed Gold and the prisoner to the door of the first hut, stepped carefully around goat dung. Smoke rose from somewhere in the back of the dwelling, but Parson found no chimney or stovepipe. He unzipped a thigh pocket on his flight suit and pulled out his blood chit. The cloth chit, about the size of a handkerchief, bore a U.S. flag, along with a message in several languages:
I am an American flier. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance. . . .
A serial number adorned each corner of the chit. He handed it to Gold.
I am an American flier. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance. . . .
A serial number adorned each corner of the chit. He handed it to Gold.
“Show them this if you think it will help,” he whispered.
“It might,” she said.
Gold knocked on a decaying, wooden door. A rope held it closed, looped through a hole where the knob might have been. The rope had rubbed smooth the edges of the hole, and lines of grain stood out in the planks, the softer wood between the grains beaten out by years of sleet and rain.
No answer. Gold knocked again. Parson moved back a half step to give himself plenty of room to bring up his weapon.
An eye appeared at a crack in the door. A male voice spoke from the inside, and Gold answered in Pashto. Parson listened to the conversation flowing back and forth. The way Gold held her M-4, he figured it wasn’t going well. It couldn’t help that she was a woman. But the rope slackened through the hole in the door, and the door opened a crack. Gold offered the blood chit, dangling it from two fingers. Something snatched it inside as if a rush of air had sucked it in.
A long pause. Then the rope came to life, running through the hole in the door like a cobra until the knotted end smacked against the wood.
The corners of Gold’s lips turned up almost imperceptibly. She shook her head and whispered, “I’ll be darned.” It was the nearest Parson had ever seen her come to smiling, swearing, or looking surprised.
“What?” Parson asked.
“They’re not Pashtuns. They’re Hazaras.”
“Is that good?”
“That’s very good.”
About damn time we had some luck, thought Parson. I don’t understand what’s going on here, but if she likes it, I like it.
The door groaned open, and a weathered, wrinkled man appeared before them. He stood about shoulder high to Parson, and he could have been forty or sixty. In his right hand he held an ancient bolt-action rifle. Parson recognized it as a British .303 Lee-Enfield. The man made a sweeping motion with his other hand, bade them to come in. He glared hard at the mullah and the mullah glared back. Parson didn’t need translation to decipher the hate.
As Parson’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw two other people in the room. A woman, presumably the wife, tended her cooking over a fireplace. The smoke had no vent but a narrow window. The wife wore a multicolored shawl over her head, not like any burka or abaya Parson had ever seen. She made no effort to cover her face.
In one corner, a teenage boy sat with a metal plate in his lap. He was breaking a piece of flat naan bread and feeding the crumbs to a mynah bird perched on the back of his chair.
This is damned weird, thought Parson. Even if they’re friendly, I’m glad I left that strobe outside. Wish Sergeant Gold would tell me what this is all about.
Gold and the man of the house continued talking. Parson didn’t understand it, but he did notice that Gold kept repeating herself and slowing down. So he understands Pashto, thought Parson, but it’s not his first language. No wonder that conversation through the door took so long and almost came to gunfire.
The boy held out his finger and the mynah hopped onto it. The teenager disappeared into an adjoining room. He came back with an armful of embroidered blankets and spread them across plank platforms along the wall. Except for the boards where he’d placed the blankets, the floor was dirt.
The boy gestured toward the blankets. Parson unslung his rifle and sat down near the fire.
“Thank you,” he said.
Gold and the prisoner also sat. Parson looked around for something to chain him to, but he saw nothing big and heavy enough. Guess we’ll have to keep him hitched either to Gold or me, he thought.
“So who are these people?” Parson asked.
“They’re Shia Muslims,” Gold explained. “The Hazaras had it pretty rough under the Taliban, who are Sunni, so there’s an awful lot of bad blood.”
“So these guys must like us.”
“Maybe.”
“Works for me.” If these people think we’re not their worst enemy, thought Parson, that’s all I need to know.
The wife brought Gold and Parson steaming cups of chai. Parson inhaled deeply; he thought he’d never smelled anything finer. When the woman gave him his clay cup, she said something he didn’t understand, but he did get the soothing tone. Unlike every other woman he’d seen in this part of the world, she looked directly into his eyes. Her own eyes were blue-gray, and she had high Mongolian cheekbones and straight hair. Her rounded face seemed friendly even when she wasn’t smiling.
Parson sipped the chai, and as it went down it seemed to warm his very soul.
“They don’t even look Afghan,” he said.
“Some people think they’re descended from Genghis Khan.”
“Wow,” Parson said. “Tell him to bring me the blood chit.”
Gold translated.
“He wants to keep it,” she said.
“I’m going to let him keep the part that might do him some good,” Parson said.
More halting Pashto. The man handed Parson the piece of cloth, and Parson drew his boot knife. He cut off one corner, making sure to sever the entire serial number.
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