Read The Mullah's Storm Online
Authors: Tom Young
The Mullah's Storm (6 page)
Through the grass stalks, Parson saw a patch of dun-colored fur. It’s over, he thought. Can’t run from insurgents on horseback. I’ll shoot the prisoner like I should have done yesterday, and then I’ll take as many of them with me as I can.
Then a strange animal stepped into the clearing, alone and riderless. Parson stopped his thoughts of killing and dying, and he tried to think of the word for that thing. Yeah, ibex. Asian mountain goat. Curved horns curled back over the creature’s shoulders, and its black nose emitted twin plumes of mist when it exhaled.
Good left shoulder shot from here, thought Parson. Could take him down like a mule deer or a Dall sheep. Nah. I wouldn’t hurt that ibex. Besides, the shot would draw attention.
The animal sniffed the air, then lowered its head and pulled a mouthful of brown grass. Parson regarded it through binoculars. Thicker fur at the base of its neck, a point of ice at the end of each hair. It stared in Parson’s direction and munched as if in deep thought, ears twitching. Then it looked away and resumed feeding. The ibex grazed across the clearing and nothing startled it, so Parson felt safe enough to move.
He unlocked the chain attaching him to the prisoner and handed the cuff to Gold. Then he pulled the radio from his survival vest and gave that to her as well. She frowned like she didn’t understand.
“We don’t need this radio getting blown up,” Parson whispered. “Stay behind me and try to walk where I walk. If I find a mine, just backtrack and get out of here.”
Gold shook her head.
“Yes,” Parson said. He raised his eyebrows: This is not a suggestion, Sergeant.
Bent at the waist, he crept through the junipers and pines at the clearing’s edge, taking an arcing path toward the shack. The evergreen smell made him think of childhood Christmases. If it’s the last thing I smell, maybe except explosives, that’s all right, he thought. A small mercy.
Parson stepped around a tangle of razor wire, a tuft of snow gracing each blade. He nicked his thigh in the man-made thicket of thorns, and a spot of blood appeared around the rip in his flight suit. That figured. A little gift from the Russians. Why the fuck did they want this place to start with?
He glanced behind him and saw Gold and the mullah keeping their distance, well clear of the kill radius of any mine he might detonate. The tree line took him within fifty feet of the shack, and Parson let out a long breath. Made it, he realized. They’d have put mines farther out than this. Nothing left to do now but take a look.
He pulled his Beretta and cocked it, and he tromped to the door, snow crunching as he made deep bootprints. Parson entered the cabin gun first, sweeping the barrel across the room as he watched for movement. He saw little in the dark shack until his eyes adjusted, and he figured he might as well have kept his pistol holstered. Anybody in here, he thought, would have drilled you before you got two steps inside.
A cast-iron stove sat in the center of the room, its pipe extending to the ceiling. Steel bunk frames along the walls, sleeping places for eight troops. Only two contained mattresses, and they smelled of mold. Wooden ammunition boxes with Cyrillic lettering lay scattered across the concrete floor. A metal cook pot rested upside down on a table. Another door at the back of the cabin, fully closed. Two steel chairs between the bunks. Everything gone to rust and rot.
He leaned outside and gestured to Gold with a thumbs-up. When she led the prisoner inside several minutes later, she said, “Looks like a bunch of men have been living here.” She unlocked her end of the chain, closed the cuff around the steel crossbar of the bunk nearest the stove, locking the prisoner to the bed frame. She put down the pack and leaned her rifle against the table. The mullah kneeled on the floor and began to pray, the gag muffling his words.
Parson wondered about the soldiers who had lived here. If they really were Spetsnaz, they’d have been bright, thoroughly trained, and politically reliable. How had they suffered? Did they make it home? They’d served a misguided government that had done some awful things, but he found it hard to despise them. Yeah, some committed atrocities, but most were like me, he thought, professionals trying to complete a mission.
The cold war had come before his time, but he remembered his late father’s stories about flying as a navigator and weapons systems officer in F-4s. The Phantoms screaming off the runway at Eielson, twin spikes of flame from the afterburners. Climbing through the thin air to meet the Bear bomber. Rocking the wings and waving to the tail gunner. Okay, Ivan, you’ve made your point. Now turn that thing around before I send you into the Arctic Ocean in pieces. Let’s not do this again real soon. Fly safe, boys.
His dad once quoted some line from Yeats: “Those that I fight I do not hate.”
Unlike that motherfucker on the floor.
CHAPTER FOUR
P
arson hoped they could stay in the shack until the weather lifted, but he knew they couldn’t count on it. Might as well make the most of it while we can, he thought. He looked around and found a dull ax. Its handle was splintered along the grain, ending in a sharp wooden point like some nasty prehistoric weapon.
arson hoped they could stay in the shack until the weather lifted, but he knew they couldn’t count on it. Might as well make the most of it while we can, he thought. He looked around and found a dull ax. Its handle was splintered along the grain, ending in a sharp wooden point like some nasty prehistoric weapon.
“Keep a lookout, will you?” Parson said. “I’ll make some kindling and then light a fire when it gets dark.” He placed rags over the single, cracked window.
Gold lay prone on the floor in the doorway’s shadow, leaving little visible to the outside but the barrel of her rifle. The tip of the barrel danced as she shivered.
Parson took the ax in his good hand, held it near the head. He swung it into an empty ammunition box, and the slats split with a sharp cracking sound. Thin nails held the slats together, and Parson pulled and twisted the slats apart until the box became a stack of firewood. Any torque on his right wrist produced a stab of pain, so he began holding down the slats with his foot and working them apart with his left hand. He chopped up four other boxes, creating a three-foot pile of kindling. Then he pulled off his gloves and picked at a splinter that had gone through the fabric, deep in the heel of his good hand. Now both hands hurt.
He opened his pack and saw that all the water bottles were empty. That gave him another problem to solve. He emptied his pack and took it to the door.
“All clear?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gold said. “What are you doing?”
“We’re out of water.”
Parson stepped outside, scooped the backpack into a drift, filled the pack with snow. Then he hung it from a bunk frame and placed the old cook pot underneath it. The pot contained some kind of residue, but he had no better container. He searched the pockets of his survival vest until he found a small pillbox. He shook out two water-purification tablets, his red fingers fumbling, numbed by the cold. Dropped the tablets into the pot, faint clinks as they landed. Parson thought about putting some of the snow in his mouth, but he knew that could lower his core temperature.
In another pocket he found waterproof matches, and he wanted very badly to light the stove right now. Wait, he told himself. Don’t get yourself killed with impatience. Think. He could remember nothing, not a fine car, not a beautiful woman, not one thing that had tempted him like those matches and that kindling.
He pulled at the woodstove’s handle, but the grate would not budge. He turned the handle the other way. Still nothing. He picked up the ax and hammered the flat of the blade against the stove handle, and the grate clanged open. The mullah startled at the sound, then resumed looking out the door as if waiting for salvation.
Gray ash spilled from the firebox, powder fine as graphite. Some drifted in the air and put Parson in mind of a genie released from a lamp. He didn’t bother to empty the ash pan, and he placed several sticks of kindling in the stove, stacked them at angles to each other for quicker burning. Took out his matches and stared at them for a moment, then set them by his woodpile. Parson decided another task might keep his mind off the cold, so he turned on his radio.
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Charlie,” he called.
No answer.
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Charlie.”
A British accent answered him: “Flash Two-Four Charlie, Saxon. Go ahead.”
So the Royal Air Force was on station. Probably took off from Kyrgyzstan or as far away as Oman. Parson imagined the Nimrod jet orbiting in the stratosphere above him, the blizzard that trapped him just a cottony undercast to the RAF crew.
“Saxon, Flash Two-Four Charlie. Have you been briefed on my status?”
“Affirmative, mate. Search-and-rescue on alert for you at Bagram and Kandahar. Both aerodromes still fogged in.”
Parson fought an urge to fling his radio into the wall. He walked in a circle, cursing, then took a deep breath. “Stand by to copy my position,” he said. Parson turned on his GPS and gave them his new coordinates. Then he asked, “Can you advise on position of friendlies in my vicinity?”
“We can. Stand by for authentication.” Then, after a pause: “Flash Two-Four Charlie, what’s the sum of the first two digits of your authenticator number?”
“Five,” Parson called. Do I sound like a fucking raghead to you, Nigel?
“Copy that. Right, then. You have enemy force movement reported to your west and southwest. There is an ANA unit operating to your east, but they’re not in communication with us.”
Great, thought Parson. This province is filthy with Taliban, which I already knew. And somewhere in Asia there’s the Afghan National Army without a radio.
“Flash Two-Four Charlie copies all,” he said. Parson turned off the set, stuffed it back into his survival vest.
He wondered if he’d ever feel warm and dry again. There was still a little too much daylight for him to start the fire. But once it got dark, even insurgents with night vision would have trouble seeing the smoke, since the goggles would have so little ambient light to amplify. The bad guys could still smell, but he could do nothing about that.
The gray outside deepened, and night began to gather at the bases of the trees. The darkness seemed to creep up from the ground. Parson took from his survival vest some fire starter of his own making: cotton balls soaked in Vaseline. Never expected to use these, he thought as he placed the oily cotton under the kindling.
When blackness at last submerged the highest branches, Parson lit a match. The yellow flame flared out like wings, hissing as it consumed the chemicals at the tip. Parson felt the heat on his face. His cold fingers shook, and the flame jittered like an injured firefly as he tossed the match into the stove. The fire leaped into the cotton and embraced it, white strands going black and curling in the orange glow. Runnels of flame illuminated the lettering on one piece of wood, and Parson saw the numerals “7.62” until the fire obliterated them.
The heat infused Parson’s flesh like a narcotic, and for a moment he thought paradise itself, if there were such a thing, might consist purely of warmth.
The mullah held out his hands toward the stove. Parson watched him. Do you expect seventy-two virgins for all the hurt you’ve caused—in the name of God, no less? Why should this fire comfort you the same as me? Parson wondered. Only because my mission requires me to keep you alive.
He needed Gold alive, too. “Sergeant,” he said, “why don’t you let me take watch for a while? Get dried off over here.”
Gold stood up immediately, walked to the stove, handed Parson her rifle. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply as she removed her soggy gloves and spread her fingers.
Two steps placed Parson back in frigid agony. He weighed whether to stay in the heat, to hell with keeping watch. No, no, no, he said to himself, keep your wits, you idiot. That’s just the cold and exhaustion talking.
He sat on the floor where Gold had lain, and he turned on his night-vision goggles, using the backup battery. Green snowflakes floated into an emerald clearing. Parson heard nothing but the crackle of fire and the shuffle of wood as it burned and shifted. The stovepipe didn’t draw well, and smoke hung in the room and burned Parson’s eyes a bit. He got up and pulled the back door halfway open for ventilation, then resumed his watch at the front.
Gold moved two chairs near the stove. She placed her coat across the back of one of them, and she used it as a screen as she unbuckled her belt and pulled down her trousers. White long johns underneath. The mullah tried to mumble in Pashto through his gag.
“Oh, be quiet,” Gold said. She tied her coat around her waist and placed the wet trousers across the chair to dry.
The snow in the backpack began to melt, and Parson felt a moment of satisfaction when he heard the dripping of his makeshift water generator. Gold opened a meal and placed a food pouch inside its heating packet. When the cook pot had collected a few inches of water, she poured some into the heating packet to activate it. A few minutes later, she handed Parson a pouch of boneless pork ribs so hot it burned his tongue.
He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he took the first bite, and then he could not stop himself from eating despite the burns. He scanned the clearing and forest, licking his fingers. Gold brought him a water bottle dipped from the cook pot, and he took a long drink. The water tasted of metal and medicine. Awful, Parson thought, but at least the tablets will make sure we don’t get giardia or something.
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