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Authors: Tom Young

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BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
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“Army talk. CM, for continue mission.”
“You got it,” Parson said, trying to sound better than he felt. He realized this soldier Gold was, professionally, a distant cousin. The Army and the Air Force had different cultures and lingo. However, as a C-130 crewman he’d had more contact with the Army than most blue-suiters. He had air-dropped many loads of paratroopers in exercises, and he admired their warrior spirit. Sometimes on the run-in, doors open, red light standing by for green light, he’d heard them psyching themselves, chanting and growling. Nowadays it wasn’t unusual for a load of about sixty airborne troops to have one or two women. They weren’t infantry; they were admin, medical, or interpreters. But they were all part of the airborne division. And he noticed Gold wore jump wings.
He took his handkerchief from his pocket, still wet with the prisoner’s spit.
“Tell him to open his mouth again,” Parson said.
The mullah obeyed, and Parson tied the gag, this time not so roughly.
“He seems cooperative today,” Gold said.
“Wonder why?”
“Maybe
inshallah.
Whatever happens is the will of God. Or maybe he thinks what we’re trying to do is hopeless.”
Or maybe he’s seen enough of his own captives made to suffer, thought Parson, that he knows he doesn’t want to be on the receiving end.
Parson took a compass bearing, surveyed his surroundings. Tendrils of mist ghosted through the trees, branches laden with snow. He heard nothing but his own breathing and the faint clink of chains as Gold and the prisoner moved. Well, navigator, he said to himself, find your way.
He walked uphill from the stream, hoping to disappear into woods and underbrush. Boulevards of pines provided some cover, but little other vegetation grew in the crumbling shingle rock beneath the snow. When the three had gained some elevation above the creek, Parson looked back on where they had spent the night. He felt relieved to see that the snow cave did not stand out at all, though the tracks leading from it were pretty apparent. But the placement of other tracks across the stream unnerved him. The insurgents he’d seen through his night-vision goggles had come a lot closer than he’d realized.
Inshallah.
The three continued up the rise until it flattened into a narrow plateau. The pines gave way to terraced fields now left to nature, planted in what Parson guessed were apricot or mulberry trees. Survival instructors had briefed him about food sources in country, but most of those sources came in summer. The old fruit trees stood bare like ranks of skeletons, broken branches glazed with ice. Parson could hardly imagine them ever sprouting leaves and bearing fruit. This Afghan winter seemed permanent, designed to extinguish life in all its forms.
The heavier snow he’d seen in the distance advanced across the valley and began showering the orchard. The flakes blurred the vista across the fields, and it seemed to Parson as if he were looking through gauze. He avoided the open mulberry grove and kept to the woods. The pines gave way to junipers at the edge of the field, and the junipers grew in stands closer together and provided better concealment. Parson headed northeast, roughly back toward Bagram. He held little hope of walking that far, but he thought it made sense to go in the direction of a big American base. The nearer they got to it, the more likely they’d run into friendlies.
After a time they stopped to catch their breath and let the mullah rest. It was snowing so hard now that the flakes made a hissing sound as they sheeted against Parson’s coat. He leaned against a poplar and looked through the binoculars. At the edge of visibility through the snow and fog, he saw a large, dark mass, something clearly out of place. He rolled the binoculars’ focus knob with his middle finger, but he still could not identify the thing. He turned to Gold and placed an index finger to his lips, then pointed two fingers to his eyes, then gestured toward the object.
They kneeled in the cover of the evergreens, and Parson watched the black shape from less than a hundred yards away. He worried that it was a Taliban truck or maybe a mobile rocket launcher. Parson passed the binoculars to Gold. She raised them to her eyes for a full minute, then handed them back and shrugged.
Silently, Parson mouthed, “Stay here,” and Gold nodded. He drew his Beretta from his survival vest. His right hand still hurt and the splint felt awkward, so he held his pistol with both hands as he crept forward. The weapon could fire double action, one trigger pull both cocking the hammer and firing at a stroke. Still, Parson clicked back the hammer with his thumb, to fire a tenth of an instant faster.
Whenever he gained ten feet or so, he hid behind trees or drifts and scanned the object and the woods. The shape lay in a clearing that seemed part of a disused road, or more like a goat path. Eventually the object materialized as a T-72, a Soviet tank left rusting for more than two decades. One of its tracks had been blown off, the metal links tangled like some fossilized reptile frozen at the moment of violent death. Parson stood and motioned with his arm. Gold pulled the mullah along, and she held her M-4 pointed up at a ready angle, her index finger inside the trigger guard.
They caught up with Parson, and Gold loosened the prisoner’s gag to give him water. The mullah mumbled something in Pashto.
“He says his people defeated the Russians with American weapons, and now they will defeat Americans with Russian weapons,” Gold said.
“Tell him to go to hell,” Parson said, as he uncocked and holstered his pistol. He imagined what must have happened to the tank and its crew. He had seen an old videotape taken by the mujahideen, the good guys then, as they ambushed a Russian truck on a road like this. Dust flew from under the vehicle as a land mine exploded and the truck jerked to a stop. A voice off-screen, perhaps the cameraman himself, shouted,
“Allah-hu akbar!”
Then the quick thumps of AK-47 fire. The picture shook as the cameraman ran forward. For a moment, a close-up of dirt and rocks became visible, maybe the camera held at the operator’s side. The final image showed a Soviet soldier crawling in a ditch, dirty and stubble-cheeked, eyes wide, one hand raised against the inevitable.
Parson approached the tank cautiously, wondering what to do. It might contain something he could use. It might also be booby-trapped. He saw no footprints in the snow, however, so nobody had gone near it recently. Not necessarily the kind of thing you’d booby-trap, anyway. Screw it, he decided.
He stepped up on the broken track and wiped snow from the lid of a toolbox mounted on the outside of the tank. Beneath the snow, he uncovered a layer of rust that caked on his glove. He raised the lid and found wrenches, a hammer, a screwdriver, nuts, and washers, some of which lay encased in ice at the bottom of the toolbox. He also found a roll of cord, synthetic line much like American 550 parachute cord. Parson put the roll in his coat pocket, hoping the rope wasn’t too rotted.
He crawled atop the tank, peered through an open hatch. He saw a tattered seat cushion and unfamiliar controls, two tillers like antique farm equipment, all dusted with snow. A metal data plate on the panel carried a serial number and some writing in Cyrillic. Parson recognized none of it except CCCP. A rod of some sort rested at an angle against a seat back. On closer inspection, Parson realized that its white color came not just from powdery snow. The thing was a bone, a femur. Parson saw no other remains, and he guessed animals had scattered the rest.
He jumped down from the tank, rubbed his hands together to brush away the rust.
“That was stupid, sir,” Gold said.
“Probably.”
They crossed the path, ducked under juniper boughs as Parson led deeper into the forest. The wall of a steep slope stretched in front of him, but the only way to easier walking led to sparser woods where they might be seen. He kept to the sharp grade, stopping every few yards to let Gold and the prisoner catch up. He wanted badly to take off his flak jacket. The extra weight bore down on him and made him feel claustrophobic. But he’d heard too many stories of flak jackets discarded by people now in wheelchairs.
The snowflakes hardened into sleet, though the overstory of evergreen shielded Parson, Gold, and the mullah from the worst of it. Now that he walked under the trees, only rarely did Parson feel ice stinging his face, but when he did, it burned like birdshot fired from a twelve-gauge. They kneeled under an ancient Himalayan yew, its lowest branches forming a tree well that concealed them entirely. The black trunk glistened, laminated by ice. Gold shivered, and the old man looked at the ground.
“How’s he doing?” Parson asked.
“Better than I thought,” Gold said. “He’s been walking these mountains all his life. But he can’t do it all day.”
“We’ll stop when I find some shelter.”
“Heaven help us if it’s the wrong village.”
“I know. What kind of reception do you think we’ll find around here?” Parson asked.
“Tough to say. There are some hard-core Taliban in this province, but maybe they’ve made some enemies. And what makes things even harder to predict is that allegiances tend to go on sale in Afghanistan.”
Parson considered whether he should just build a fire outside. He decided that might not get them dry, and it would attract attention. And when it did, he figured, we’d be right back to the coin toss of local loyalties. He felt relatively safe for the moment, though.
The yew hid them so well that Parson decided to take advantage of it.
“We can rest here,” he said.
Parson glassed the mountainside with his binoculars, but he couldn’t see far and he liked it that way. Good cover for now. No sign of another human being. The mist made it hard to tell, but he thought the rise leveled out just above him. He’d grown up in the Rockies and he believed he had a sense of terrain. He remembered a thousand moments alone on a ridge with a .270 and his spotting scope, the gray rocks under his boots, the cold air in his lungs, and the blue sky clear and pure as eternity.
The contrast with now made him so homesick it moistened his eyes, but the similarities gave him strength. He looked at the mullah. I’m a mountain man, too, hajji. You have no idea who the fuck you’re dealing with.
Parson watched his breath drift through the air like smoke signals as he exhaled rhythmically. He’d hoped the hiding place might trap a little warmth, but he felt no relief from the cold. He pulled off his gloves, examined his hands. The reddened skin stretched tight across the pads of his fingers, which had no feeling at all. No frostbite yet, but he worried about it. He’d heard stories of people pulling off their gloves and leaving their fingertips inside.
He put his hands in his coat, under his armpits. They felt like blocks of ice against his body. Parson looked at his gloves now draped across his knee. He considered cutting off the right glove’s index finger to better feel for his pistol’s trigger. No, he thought. If I do that, I’ll lose that finger. He put his gloves back on and looked at Gold and the mullah.
“You can hitch him to me for a while if you’re tired,” Parson said.
“I’ll take the pack,” Gold said. She unlocked the cuff on her wrist.
They crawled from under the yew boughs, white dusting on their knees and shins. The rise turned nearly to a sheer cliff, but when Parson topped it, he found that his instincts were correct. The land smoothed into a clearing grown over in brown grass about knee high, like the broomsedge back home. The grass stems stuck up through the snow like long whiskers. At the far edge of the clearing, Parson saw a building obviously not put up by tribesmen.
Corrugated metal lined the shack, and its steel door stood open and twisted from the frame, hanging by only the top hinge. A stovepipe rose from the flat roof, edges softened by a coating of snow.
Parson inspected the structure through binoculars. Built by the Russians, he figured. Maybe a Spetsnaz camp at one time. God, I hope that stove works.
He pointed to the shack as Gold joined him.
“Let’s just watch it for a while,” he said.
Gold whispered one word: “Mines.”
Good point, Parson thought. Soviet special forces troops almost certainly would have protected some of the approaches by burying land mines, and they’d never been too particular about removing them. Plenty of Afghan kids with missing feet could tell you that. Still, he tallied the odds a little better than just walking up, with zero intel, to the first village he found.
Parson shivered as he surveyed the old campsite. He pondered whether to use the woodstove if it remained, since the smoke might draw notice. Then he thought, Just use it after dark, dumbass. He figured the cold was affecting his mind if it took him that long to think of the obvious.
He eyed the tree line around the clearing. Fog obscured the tops of the trees, and Parson imagined their trunks rising forever. The wind had calmed now, and it was so quiet he heard the swish of a pine needle cluster as it fell from above him and impaled itself in a drift.
In the corner of his eye he saw movement at the far end of the clearing. A low bough sprang back from something that had moved it, releasing a shower of dry, crystalline snowflakes like pulverized glass. Parson drew his handgun and lowered his head, trying to disappear into the sedge. He pulled the mullah flat to the ground. Gold thumbed the safety on her rifle.
BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
9.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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