“Jesus H. T. Christ, Esquire,” muttered Top as he rolled Finn onto his back. He pushed two fingers against the side of the man’s throat. “He’s got a pulse. Don’t seem to be hurt. Got a weird burn on his chest, but it’s a coupla days old. Nothing else. Been in the sun too damn long.”
“The fuck did he come from?” asked Bunny, glancing around.
Finn slowly opened his eyes and blinked up at us, and it was clear that he didn’t see us. Or at least didn’t quite understand who—or perhaps what—we were.
“Finn,” I said again, then repeated it more firmly.
He blinked again.
Finn’s eyes locked on mine and I could see them gradually begin to clear. He tried to speak; his lips formed my name, but all that came out was an inarticulate croak. He licked his lips, swallowed, winced at the pain in his dry throat, and tried again, forcing it.
“Joe . . . ?”
I slung my rifle and knelt in front of him.
“Jesus, Finn,” I said, “where are you hurt? How bad is it?”
“Hurt?” he asked as if he didn’t understand the word. I pushed past Top and began checking Finn myself. I saw the burn and pulled Finn’s shirt completely open to look at it. Finn tried to stop me, his fingers quick and nervous.
“Finn,” I said, helping him sit up, “what the hell happened?”
He shook his head and looked past me at the blood. “My men,” he whispered. “Bear . . . Cheech Wizard,” he said slowly, his voice barely a whisper, “Jazzman.”
I took him by the shoulders and tried to steady him. Gave him just a little shake, maybe put some of his marbles back into their slots. “Finn, what happened here? Where’s your team? Where are your men?”
I almost said what are your men. My pulse was still hammering.
Finn’s eyes roved around the town square, from one patch of blood to the other.
“Here,” he said hollowly. “Joe . . . they were all just here.”
Top and Bunny glanced at me, but I let nothing show.
“What happened out here?” asked Bunny.
But Finn’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he pitched forward into my arms.
I took his weight and, with Bunny’s help, carried him out of the big pool of blood and onto unmarked ground. We propped him up with his back against a rock wall. Top watched and I could tell from the calculating look in his eyes that he was doing the math on all this and wasn’t happy with the numbers.
Top gave me a small sideways tic of the head, and I rose and walked a dozen yards away with him. We stood there, surveying the carnage. Top took a pack of gum from his shirt and we each had a piece. He saw my hands trembling as I unwrapped mine.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug.”
It took five tries to get a static-filled connection.
“Give me a rundown on thermal and satellite feeds.”
“Satellites are a negative. They went offline ten minutes ago. NASA’s working on it.”
“Balls. And the thermals? We getting any signal?”
“We got lots of signals, Cowboy. We got four signatures right now—Echo and Finn. All clustered together. That’s cool that you found him. How is he?”
Bug had never been great at the formality of tactical radio chatter.
“Alive, minimal injuries but disoriented. Unable to debrief at this time. What about Rattlesnake?”
“Their signals are weird, Cowboy. One minute they’re here, the next they’re not. Then they’re up in the mountains, then somewhere else. The telemetry is totally fritzed.”
“Okay. We’re returning to the LZ. I need exfil for four now and then air surveillance. Screw the satellites, get me some helos.”
There was a squawk of static and we lost the signal again.
“Shit,” I said, and picked up a rock to throw it as hard as I could. I stopped midthrow, weighed it in my hand, and dropped it.
Then I gave the order to make a stretcher and carry Finn back to the ancient town built into the mountain, back where his team had gone missing. There were enough slats from the unburned stake-bed pickup, and we used the jackets of dead men for a sling. Top and Bunny carried while I walked point.
“Why not wait here?” asked Bunny, and Top nodded.
Fair question.
“Because this shit started back by that small cave,” I said. “I want to figure it out in some kind of order.”
As explanations go, it was lame as hell; but they were sergeants and I was a captain and this wasn’t a democracy. The truth . . . ? This place spooked me more than I could express. Those faces with the burning eyes had been too real, but I didn’t want to talk about it with them. I’ve had some psych issues in the past, and I’m pretty sure my guys know about it. This was not the time to shake their confidence in me.
When we were back at the abandoned town, we placed Finn in the shade of pair of withered trees. He was still unconscious.
“I’m going to walk the scene,” I said to Top.
He glanced around, not liking it. “This is a weird place, Cap’n.”
He left it there in case I wanted to say something. I didn’t.
“Call me when Finn’s awake.”
I stepped back from them, moving to the edge of the town square so I could see the whole thing. I used to be a pretty good homicide cop back in West Baltimore. A lot of what I know about working a crime scene comes from three reliable sources. The first was my dad, who was a cop before me, and he’d worked his way up from the street to a gold shield to commissioner before finally jumping ship to run for mayor. None of his promotions were purely political. He’d been a cop’s cop—he’d done his time and closed a big share of his cases. He taught me a lot.
The second source was my own time on the job. Baltimore has a lot of crime and never enough cops, so the guys on the job have to do the job.
My third source was a cop from DCPD named Jerry Spencer. He was a grumpy son of a bitch, but he could work a crime scene like Sherlock Holmes. He didn’t just see, he observed. And he kept his opinions in neutral until he had enough facts to build a reasonable supposition. Even then, he was never sold on a theory as long as there was a potential for a decent competing theory.
So I stood there and I let the scene speak to me.
Here were the things I could tell for sure.
Rattlesnake Team had come into this valley from the west. As I walked around a clearing that must once have been the town center, I found the trail of their footprints at a few hundred yards, and then the faint brush marks from where Finn and his boys erased the signs of their presence as they prepared to lay a trap. The four of them separated. Finn went through a short tunnel that curled and rose to a flat rock on the far side of the town, almost certainly to set up a good elevated shooting position. Personally, I thought it was a questionable choice. A good shooting position should be in can’t-miss range, but even for a sniper as good as Finn that spot was at the outer edge of safe range. Its only virtue was an element of absolute surprise, but there were better choices he could have made. Maybe that was part of whatever went wrong here. One bad choice can shove everything else downhill in an avalanche of consequences.
The other three guys from Rattlesnake skirted the edge of the town square and found concealed spots to set up an ambush. There were the distinctive marks in the sand of men sitting, lying prone, and kneeling. That spot was thick with their shell casings.
I went upslope and that’s when I found the caravan. Or what was left of it. From ground level, it looked like an empty trail because of a raised lip of ragged stone. But as I drew near, I heard blowflies and smelled the stink of rotted meat. A dozen of the corpses were adult men, and one was a boy of about ten. My heart twisted for the kid. It’s insane how many cultures drag their children into the middle of a war, often literally putting guns in their hands and metaphorically painting bull’s-eyes over their hearts. Bastards.
There were also three dead horses, their bellies swollen from internal gases and crawling with flies and maggots.
The ground all around them was littered with shell casings. The men had made a fight of it, but they all went down.
There was a sudden rasp of static in my ear. “Bug to Cowboy.”
“Go for Cowboy. Good to hear you, kid.”
“Hey,” he said, “we might only have this connection for a few seconds. NASA’s now saying that there might be some combination of minerals in the mountains where you are that’s screwing up the signal. Nothing else seems to make sense.”
“You have any useful intel?”
“We got a couple of good thermals and some clean satellite images and your whole area is clean. Just the same four signals—Echo and Finn.”
“No one else?”
“No.”
“Bug, see if you can take another look at the area we just left. The convoy ambush. I thought I spotted the rest of Rattlesnake Team there, but I lost them.”
“We’ve scanned it. No life signs, no thermals, no visuals, and no telemetry from the RFID chips. There’s nothing out there but dead Taliban guys and lizards.”
“Look again.”
“Okay.”
“And get me some frigging choppers. I want to get the hell out of here.”
But he was gone. The timing was really pissing me off. And . . . scaring me, too.
A lot.
I sucked it up, though, and went back to studying the dead caravan, and that’s when the scene got suddenly very weird.
On and around the three horses were heavy cotton sacks. Most were still tied shut, but all had been pierced by rounds so that white opium powder spilled out onto the rock. Hundreds of pounds of it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth.
It was still there. No one had touched it.
One bag, however, had been cut open with something sharp and a parcel had been removed. The wrappings of the parcel—green silk—lay discarded on the ground. Whatever had been wrapped in the silk was gone.
From my perspective, it appeared that Rattlesnake Team had ambushed and killed the Taliban caravan, then someone—either a member of Rattlesnake or someone else—targeted one bag, cut it open, and removed something that had been hidden among the drugs. That item, and now three members of Rattlesnake Team were missing, and there were no footprints in the spilled blood of the Taliban to indicate how anyone had approached the bag without leaving a mark.
Curious, I drew my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket, snapped the blade into place, and systematically cut open the other bags. I made sure to keep a cloth pressed to my nose and mouth. Getting stoned was not part of the agenda.
There was a green silk parcel in each bag. They were heavy, too.
None of them felt like the kind of vacuum-packed metal cylinders that would be used to transport a pathogen. They felt like rocks, maybe carvings.
I collected them and retreated down the slope, but I noticed that as careful as I had been, I left a trail of bloody footprints. How had someone looted that first bag without doing the same?
At the bottom of the slope, I found a table-sized rock and placed the parcels there, then unwrapped each one. The first one was a small statue of a snooty-looking little man with an enormous dick. Fertility symbol from some culture. The second was a broken statue of one of the Egyptian gods. The one with the cat face, can’t remember the name offhand. The others were similar. Small idols of gods from several different cultures, including one that was of a very nice carving of a bull. That one really caught my eye and I spit on it and rubbed the dirt away. What I at first thought was brass was something else entirely.
It was solid gold.
The fucking thing had to weigh four pounds.
I whistled, long and loud.
I have some stocks and I have some commodities. I keep a lazy eye on the price of gold because I have some that my grandfather left me. Some coins and stuff. Last time I checked the price per ounce, it was hovering around seventeen hundred bucks.
Times four pounds?
I was holding about a hundred grand in my hand.
Not to mention the value of the statue. That was probably ancient.
The other objects? If they were all as old, then maybe they were equally valuable in their own way.
So . . . why did someone leave all this shit behind? What was so valuable in that other parcel? Was that the container of pathogen that Rattlesnake Team had been sent here to intercept?
My instincts were telling me no. I thought it was another one of these statues.
But why take that one in particular and not the rest?
What was it about that one?
Then I heard a sound behind me.
Soft. A scuff of pebbles sliding down an incline.
I immediately whirled and brought my rifle up as I threw myself to one side. My finger slipped inside the trigger guard and I almost fired.
Almost.
The barrel pointed straight and steady and my finger was curled around the trigger.
A boy stood there.
He was dressed in the robes of an Afghani villager. He had an oversize kaffiyeh on his head with the scarf pulled around to hide everything but his eyes. The kid must have come down the same slope used by the caravan.
His clothes were dusty and there was a bloodstain on his chest that I thought at first was a bullet hole. It was right over his heart.
He took a step toward me, hands out in a pleading gesture, and in good English said, “Please . . .”
As much as I hated to do it, I pointed my gun at him. “Hold it right there, kid.”
The boy stopped and stood his ground. His eyes were big and dark and they darted nervously from my face to my gun and back again.
“No one’s going to hurt you if you just stay right there,” I told him.
He nodded.
I tapped my earbud. “Bug . . . ?”
I got static for a moment, then I heard his voice.
“—ug to Cow . . . you copy . . . ?”
“Bug, you’re breaking up. If you can hear me, we have a civilian boy who may be a witness. I need evac right now.”
There was no answer.
I tapped my earbud again.
Listened.
Heard static.
I switched to the team channel. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”
A burst of static was the only answer.
“Cowboy to Green—”
A sudden scream of unbearable intensity ripped through the earbud and into my head. It hit me like a punch, as if it were coming from an inch behind me. The shriek was male but piercingly, insanely loud. The shock knocked me forward onto my knees and I clawed at the bud, tearing it out of my ear.
All the while the boy stared at me, his face twisted into a grimace that almost looked like a smile.
The scream instantly stopped.
Just like that.
But it seemed to echo faintly inside my head. My eyes teared up and my nose was running. I pawed at my face and the back of my hand came away slick and wet. And red.
I gagged and coughed dark blood onto the sand.
The boy was still standing where I’d told him to, but he touched his face beneath the rippling scarf. There was a weird look in his eyes. Like he was smiling. Or crying. I couldn’t tell.
Behind me, off somewhere at an incalculable distance, I heard other voices. Men’s voices. Not screaming. Yelling.
Calling my name.
I swung my rifle around on its sling and brought it up as blood continued to pour from my nose.
“Cowboy!” called a voice that was muffled and distorted. “Cowboy, on your nine. Friendlies. Lower your weapon.”
I turned to my left to see Top and Bunny coming toward me. Both of them had their weapons in their hands. Top’s was pointed up to the sky and he held out his other hand in a calming no-problem gesture. Bunny’s barrel and eyes were both pointed at the small boy.
“Freeze!” he yelled, and through the pain and disorientation in my head I thought that was strange. The boy hadn’t made a move, though now there was no expression except fear in his eyes.
Top pushed my rifle barrel aside as he knelt in front of me.
“Where are you hurt?” he said, asking me the same question I’d asked Finn.
I touched my nose. The bleeding had stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” I snapped, “what the fuck was that scream? Was that Finn?”
Top blinked. “Scream?” he asked.
“Yeah, that goddamn scream. You telling me you couldn’t fucking hear it?”
Top’s dark gaze roved over my face. “Didn’t hear nothing, Cap’n,” he said. “Just you yelling.”
I turned to Bunny. “What’d it sound like to you?”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, “I heard you scream, boss.”
“No,” I snapped. “Not me. Over the mic.”
Top shook his head. “Radio’s dead.”
We stared at each other and then we turned and looked at the kid. Bunny still had him at gunpoint and the kid looked terrified. Bunny told the kid to open his robes, and when it was clear the kid wasn’t wearing a C4 vest, Bunny stepped cautiously toward the boy and took a long reach to pull the scarf away from his face. The kid’s face was badly burned. Not sunburned, either. Flash-burned. He had some kind of gray clay caked over his nose. Maybe a local pain remedy.
“You okay, kid?” asked Bunny gently.
The boy said nothing.
Bunny patted him down and pushed the kid toward where I knelt. “He’s clean, boss.”
Top helped me to my feet and the whole world did a drunken jig for a moment, but I stood still for a few seconds and it passed. Then I leaned on Top and together we staggered back to where Finn lay in a semiconscious stupor.
He raised his head as we approached. “I thought I heard something,” he said in a muzzy voice. He sounded like someone who’d just woken up after a heavy nap.
Top cut a look at me and I gave him a tiny shake of my head.
“It’s all quiet on the western front,” I told Finn. “But we have a visitor, so maybe we can get some answers to—”
As I spoke, Finn looked past me to where Bunny stood with the boy.
His eyes snapped wide and a look of total horror wrenched its way onto Finn’s face. He threw himself backward, raising an arm to shield himself from the sight of the kid.
“Oh God! That’s her!” he cried.
“That’s who?” asked Bunny.
Finn made a grab for my holstered pistol, and he was so damn fast that he had it in his hand before I could stop him. Made a dive for it, but Finn clubbed me in the face with his free hand.
Bang!
Bunny shoved the kid behind a rock and dove for cover in the opposite direction. The bullet whanged off the rock, missing the boy by an inch. Even in his panic, Finn was a hell of a shot.
Finn managed two more shots before Top kicked the gun out of his hand. Finn was still yelling and he dove for the weapon. I shook off the punch to the head and tackled him. We rolled over in the sand, him bellowing about some woman while trying every dirty trick he ever learned to shake me off. He head-butted me, drove his elbow into my ribs, hoof-kicked me in the nuts, and was about to bang my head against a rock when Top stepped in front of him, grabbed a fistful of Finn’s hair, and hit him with three short punches that were so fast the impact sounded like one.
Finn dropped flat on his face and I rolled off, coughing, wheezing, and feeling like shit. Top caught me under the arm and hauled me up, but I could only manage a hunchbacked bend. My balls felt like they’d been mashed flat and then set on fire. Finn was one of the toughest guys I’d ever known and I did not appreciate the reminder.
“Get that fucking kid over here!” I snarled. “I want some fucking answers right fucking now!”
Bunny stood by the rock and he had a look of total perplexity on his face.
“What?” I demanded.
I already knew.
The kid was gone.
He couldn’t have been.
Fuck.