Western Xinjiang, China
POWDERY snow lay inches deep on the slopes, not yet evaporated in the thin, arid atmosphere. The wind fluttered gauzy veils from gravelly ridges. Oberg toted the binoculars now that the Major had gone nearly blind.
Just now he was grateful for the gusts, cold as they were.
He’d spotted the sheep several kilometers off. Not the beasts themselves, but their curving paths in the snow, where they’d nosed through to the scanty grass beneath. The three escaped POWs had squatted in a sheltered spot, plotting strategy as carefully as Montgomery or Eisenhower ever had. Testing the wind. Reading the terrain. Then split up and began the encirclement.
Teddy, as the qualified sniper, got the AK.
Now, as he lay in a shallow depression in the snow, wrapped in his cocoon of fraying rags, hunger weighted his gut like a stone. Black and heavy, like basalt. A dense cube, rounded at the corners. Sunlight glistened off the snow. Far overhead, a hawk circled.
Teddy’s prey moved slowly, conserving what little energy they could glean in this cold, high, vacant world. Ambling a few paces, then punching their way through the crust with sharp-looking hooves to the brown grass beneath. The sheep were bigger than he’d expected, the size of mule deer. Their light-colored flanks shaded to reddish-brown backs. Their faces and necks were cream-colored. They looked more alert than he liked. Fitter, too. Actually, more like some kind of goat than sheep, and he hadn’t seen any shepherds. So … wild goats?
Who cared what they were. They were made out of meat. He worked the handle to eject the round Fierros had carried ready in the chamber. For all he knew, the same one the girl guard had loaded it with before he’d plunged the screwdriver into her heart. But the action didn’t open.
He hammered at the operating handle with a fist, concealing the motion under his blanket, and finally got the cartridge ejected into the snow. Chinese steel-cased ammo. Bent, corroded, rusted. Great. He thumbed the other cartridges out of the magazine. Rusty too, but at least not bent. He polished one on the webbing of the sling and set it aside on a rock. He repeated this with the others, then worked the action and pulled the trigger several times. A creepy, gritty, nine- or ten-pound pull that didn’t break the same way twice. SEALs trained on Kalashes, of course, but they were mass-fire, hurrah-charge weapons. Shit ammo, shit barrels, and shit maintenance meant he’d have to get close enough to practically club the fucking sheep to death.
But if he didn’t, they were all going to die out here. Sooner rather than later. He counted the cartridges again. Ten good ones. Two bursts. He snapped them into the magazine, loading the best-looking ones on top, to feed first. Kalashes climbed fast in full auto. He’d have to hold tight, aim low, and let it climb.
A click of rock, far off. Trinh, moving into position. A millimeter at a time, Obie raised his head. It was covered with a scrap of blanket with snow rubbed into it. The wind was steady on his cheeks. And he was still downwind of their prey.
Any idiot could shoot accurately, given a well-made rifle. The battle for a sniper was getting close without being seen. And with this piece of pus, he was going to have to get real close.
Gradually, over the next hour, he low-crawled in, staying in the torn-up tracks where the goats had already grazed. The cold penetrated his bones. Froze the stone cube in his gut. Stiffened his fingers, until he hoped he could still bend them to shoot. These animals seemed abnormally alert. The largest kept eyeing him from atop a mound. But the ram also kept looking off to the right. Dividing his attention.
Teddy noted that another hawk had joined the first. No, not a hawk. A vulture, the same carrion birds he’d seen in the Parachinars when they were hunting bin Laden. One mountain chain, after all. Thousands of miles long, from western China all the way to Anatolia. The scavengers made wide sweeps in the blue, but stayed centered on this hilltop. Maybe a good sign. A vote of confidence from the experts. He worked his hand surreptitiously, trying to fight off the stiffening, but shuddering so hard he couldn’t stop it anymore.
A deep, hoarse shout broke the mountain silence. The ram jerked his head around. His horns were amazing, twisted like a corkscrew, swept back like a jet’s wings, and as long as Teddy’s arms. The rack, the nobly lifted head, the broad shoulders … Christ, the thing was as big as a horse.… Teddy admired him, but wished the bastard wasn’t so fucking suspicious. On the other hand, with wolves roaming out here, he couldn’t blame him. A lot of the females, ewes, had the swinging bellies that probably meant little lambs getting ready to pop out pretty soon.
The ram was getting hinky. With a toss of the head, he gave a high, snuffling bleat. The ewes looked to him. Shaking with cold, Teddy held his breath. “Come this way,” he whispered. “This way, you big old son of a bitch.”
Fierros burst over the crest, yipping madly and waving a strip of blanket. The goats flinched, as if all shocked simultaneously from the same high-tension source, and broke into a gallop away from the airman. From the third side of the hill, Trinh erupted from beneath the snow like a geyser. He shrieked and screamed, pointing his stick like a rifle. The ram, in the lead, tilted like a broken-field runner and changed direction. Toward Teddy. The herd thundered around to follow, flinging up divots of grass and snow and frozen earth that the wind caught and blew over their swaying backs.
For a moment Teddy lay astonished, then paralyzed as twenty to thirty tons of muscle and bone on knife-sharp hooves tore down the steep bank toward where he lay. His finger stacked the trigger, the front sight post finding the chest of the lead animal, the ram’s beady eye suddenly locking on him, turning murderous. The belligerent head going down. Those spiky horns, aimed like bayonets—
Teddy started the burst at the hooves and let the recoil walk it up, finishing with the muzzle pointed into the clouds. He pulled the rifle down and rolled into a fat ewe swerving white-eyed away. A perfect broadside shot at no more than ten yards.
As the herd parted around him, thundering past to left and right, he fired single rounds, leading the beasts as they bolted past. Aiming for the center of mass, since he had no idea where his sights were set. Registering only immense quadruped forms losing their rhythm, faltering, crashing to earth.
Then they were past, in a welter of blowing snow and dirt and flying fur. He rolled over, panting, and levered painfully to his feet with the rifle as Trinh and Fierros floundered up through the torn-up, blood- and shit-streaked snow.
Two goats lay struggling and kicking downslope. He blinked. Only two? He should have put bullets into five. And a burst into the ram. But Big Daddy was untouched, unhit, and long gone over the ridgeline, probably in Tajikistan by now.
Shuddering, Teddy limped to where the beasts gave their last, expiring kicks. Gut-shot. None of the ones he’d aimed at. And he’d used every cartridge, knowing this was their last and only chance.
Chance?
What guided bullets, when you had no idea where your sights were set?
The men he’d fought in Afghanistan would have said, Allah.
“Great shooting,” Trinh said reverently. Facing those shining eyes, Teddy didn’t have the heart to enlighten him. Instead he just squatted, took out his chert knife, and began unzipping the sagging belly of the pregnant ewe.
* * *
THAT night, groaning-full around a roaring fire, they lay back watching the sparks swirl to the stars. “Enough meat for days,” Fierros observed. “You done good, Tedster. You really were a SEAL, I guess.”
Obie covered it with a meaty belch. No point telling them he hadn’t hit a thing he’d aimed at. The airman went on, “So now what?”
“Keep heading west,” Teddy said. “That’s the plan, right?”
Fierros mumbled around hands full of a greasy thighbone, “West. Uh-huh. How long?”
“You figured three hundred miles to the border.”
“We never saw a map,” Trinh put in. His beard dripped with juices. “That was only Ragger’s estimate. We never knew where the camp actually was.”
“The only smart thing to do’s to keep going. There aren’t any border posts up here in the mountains. Worst case, we go too far, we end up in…?”
“Iran,” said Fierros.
“Oh. Well, we don’t want that, I guess. But we can push on a while longer, now.” Teddy belched again. “Question is, when we come down, who are we?”
They discussed this around the fire, in the lonely night, and settled on becoming ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan. Their gear, maps, weapons, gone in a rockslide. No matter who was on which side by this point in the war, hunters lost in the mountains should pass for noncombatants. Fortunately, Trinh had studied Russian in school, and spoken it with advisers as a junior officer. Teddy knew enough to ask directions and interrogate prisoners. Fierros could pretend to be shy and keep to monosyllabic grunts.
“Best case, when we come down, the war’s over,” the pilot muttered.
“You just keep thinking that,” Teddy told him. “Me? I’m gonna assume the worst.”
* * *
THE meat sustained their shriveled guts and shrunken appetites for days. They feasted on it roasted, then cut it into strips and fire-dried it. Teddy learned a new appetite for the fatty oozing of liver, and how to crack heavy bones with rocks for salty marrow. The hides, scraped, turned inside out, and lashed with sinew, became mittens, chaps, and hoods against the wind, and overboots against the bite of rocks.
In the end, there wasn’t much left for the vultures.
But after that, they had no hope of bagging anything else. They kept the empty rifle as a deterrent in case they met herdsmen. And went on trudging.
They finished the dried meat, then gnawed the scraps clinging to the hides.
Then endured the torments of starvation all over again, until their heads spun and the world reeled as they scrambled across ridges that towered into the clouds, picking their way across fields of scree balanced so precariously that one misstep would send them all to destruction in thousands of tons of thundering rock.
One fireless night, trying to sleep on a divide so high there were no more of the scraggly dry bushes they rooted up for fuel, Fierros had crawled over. Snuggled close. For warmth, Teddy had sleepily assumed. Then came awake as the airman hissed into his ear, “Got a proposition.”
“What,” he muttered. The asshole was going queer on him now?
“Two can travel faster than three.”
“Not trackin’ you, Rag-man.”
“I’m saying we’re starving. And we still got a long way to go.”
“Okay.”
“We lost Vu.”
“Right.”
“Couldn’t get to his body. But if we could’ve, would you have—?”
“Would I have what, Toby?”
But he knew. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought it himself. Killing the goats had pushed those thoughts away for a while. But now they were back.
“You know what I’m asking.” Reproachful. “He’s fucking blind. He’s gonna go down one of these crevasses sooner or later, like Vu. Come on, Obie. You must have been in situations like this before.”
“Not like this, guy. Not quite.” He’d half rolled to face the shadow in the dark. “But if you’re saying leave Nguyen behind, then, no. We don’t leave anyone behind.”
Fierros was silent for a time. Then he whispered, “I’m not exactly saying that we leave him behind.”
“No. No way. Forget it, Toby.”
They’d regarded each other in the dark. Then Fierros had flipped his hides over them and nestled close, and Teddy had heard only the wind.
* * *
IT took a long time to get back to sleep after that.
Actually, he wasn’t sure he was asleep.
Because lying there, feeling Ragger’s hunger-boner pressed against him, his eyes wide open, Teddy Harlett Oberg started to separate, delaminate, pass out of himself.
Oh, he was still there, on the mountainside. Still shaking with the cold.
He just didn’t seem to be himself.
The mountains glowed with an inner light. They were folded out of rock, like origami. The way the world itself was … folded … out of … light and … time.
He looked down, and saw … himself. A tiny seed of flesh, a dying ember in the dark, nestled beside two other embers. A few sparks of electrical activity still danced in its brain. But that wasn’t him.
And he wasn’t it.
He fell through, to a place colder and harder than the mountains. Where a monstrous evil laughed, and he screamed as he was torn apart. Pain. Incredible pain.
Through endless centuries he suffered.
Then he hovered above the mountains again, bodiless, without thought.
An enormous voice spoke into his mind.
I MADE ALL OF THIS.
I have to be dying, Theodore Oberg thought. This must be what happens at the end.
THERE IS NO END. AND NO BEGINNING.
What are you telling me? he asked, or thought. Is there something you’re telling me? Something you want me to know? To do?
But without speech, without words, whatever spoke made itself understood.
YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE MY WILL.
His entire life unlocked in an instant, and he saw how that single bidding underlay it, more rigid than iron. It was all of a piece. The mountains. The world. Everything that happened, had happened, or ever would. It had all been created, foreordained, before Time itself had existed.
Which meant:
There was no choice.
There was no will, other than Its will.
All was one thought. One act. One creation.
The creation by … whatever was speaking to him.
But now it was leaving him. Lifting, like a slowly rising, incredibly immense saucer departing for a distant star. He reached out, groping, flailing, conscious of a withdrawal like the receding tide. Trying to call it back. To go with it, if he could. Even if that meant leaving himself behind.
But it was not to be. Released, he hurtled down, like a high-altitude, low-opening night jump. Yeah. He’d been here before. But on oxygen, with a heated mask to keep his face from freezing. The black mountains below like open mouths. He cried out. Not wanting to go back into the dying, starving, agonized body. The time-bound, ignorant mind, pinched as in a narrow coffin.
Then he was gasping, convulsing on the icy gravel, and Fierros was kneeling on him, forcing a piece of wood between his teeth. The haft of his walking stick. Trinh leaned in too, looking scared in the starlight. “Get a grip, man,” the flier was muttering. “You were stroking out. Going into a seizure. Jesus! You hear me? Talk, fuckhole. Talk to me.”
But Teddy Oberg could not speak the whole rest of that night, nor for long into the next day. He stared about as they walked, like a man possessed, or a child just born.
* * *
AT last, weakened to shambling corpses, they decided to head south. It was that or die.
The valley wound between rocky outcrops, dotted with patches of pasture. When they heard the distant tinkle of bells, the bark of shepherds’ dogs, they climbed again, up ridges, covering themselves with the hide capes. Once, descending, they stumbled across a cleverly hidden sliver of field, nestled just where the sun could slide in between the peaks. Innocent green plants nodded in raked brown soil. Each spindly stalk was tipped with a tiny ball of bud. Teddy steered them away, though he still felt, in the aftereffects of his dream, that it wasn’t really his own action, but something foreordained. “The winter crop,” he explained laconically when Fierros protested at the detour. “Poppy. Like in Helmand.”
“Which means … the government isn’t in control anymore?”
Obie shrugged. “Or that the army’s concentrating on the war, not interdiction. Whoever’s doing the growing, we don’t want to meet them.”
As they tottered on, he scanned the ridgelines for sentries. Opium cultivation might be a sign they’d left China behind. On the other hand, the airman could be right. It had been that way in Afghanistan.
Poppies grew where government withered.