With the radio out, there was no way to call in our helo. Protocol allowed for a flyby six hours after we’d rappelled into the LZ, and there were still four hours on that clock.
So we used the time to locate and secure a safe spot to use as a base camp. It was a tunnel near the ambush point. It was shaped like a croissant and ran maybe sixty-five feet from one end to the other. Bunny rigged one end of the tunnel with booby traps. No explosives, just a couple of flash-bangs that he hid so cleverly that a mountain goat wouldn’t see them. Bunny is very good at that sort of thing.
Top used flex-cuffs to bind Finn’s ankles and wrists. Once he was secure, Top used the first-aid kit to fix the damage to the man’s face. The three punches had cracked his nose and bruised the orbit around Finn’s right eye. He’d have a headache for a month. Better than a bullet, though.
For my part, I had aching balls, scattered bruises, and some wounded pride. And I was more confused than I’d ever been in my adult life. I swallowed a couple of painkillers—wishing I could wash them down with Jack Daniel’s—and took up a position at the other cave mouth while Bunny did a quick recon of the area. I motioned for Top to join me out of earshot and told him about the statues, and he brought them back and stood them in a row on the sand. Except for the gold bull. That one he held and stared at with goggle eyes.
“Is this . . . ?” he breathed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Solid?”
“I think so.”
“Holy monkey-fuck! This has to be worth a fortune.”
“Call it a hundred grand, give or take.” And I explained about the fight, the massacre, the opium, and the parcels. They worked it through and came to about the same conclusions I had . . . that it didn’t add up. Not in any way we could see.
At my direction, Bunny buried the statues and marked the spot so we could find them again. None of us wanted to hump all that weight around.
“Even the gold bull?” Bunny asked, reluctance showing on his face.
“All of it.”
When he was done, I asked, “What’s the status on the radio?”
“Still out,” said Top. “This is hinky as shit, Cap’n.”
“I know.” I didn’t mention to them that it seemed to go out every time I tried to arrange for a helicopter evac.
“And here’s something else you ain’t going to like,” he said.
I just looked at him.
Top flipped up his tactical computer. “This is dead, too. Went out the same time as the radio. Ditto for every other gadget we have. Sensors, meters, all of it. Now, I know that sounds like an EMP, but the Taliban don’t have anything that can send out an electromagnetic pulse. Not unless someone dropped a nuke somewhere and we ain’t heard about it.”
“Maybe an e-bomb?” I ventured, but it was a lame suggestion. The Taliban didn’t have hardware like that. And no one in their right mind would have sold it to them. That would have been a ticket to a military escalation that nobody on either side wanted. “Okay, Top, drop the other shoe. What’s the rest of it?”
“I got no shoe to drop, Cap’n. I’m standing here in my socks ankle-deep in some weird shit.”
We looked up at the mountains.
“Bug said NASA thought it’s something in the rocks,” I said. “Some metal or ore that’s creating a field of interference.”
When I looked at Top, I could see how much of that he believed. “You really trying to sell that?” he asked.
I didn’t bother to answer.
When Bunny returned, we three hunkered down around Finn. I said, “I’m tired of watching Finn get his beauty rest. Let’s see if we can get some straight goddamn answers.”
Top produced a syrette filled with a stimulant and cocked an eyebrow at me. I nodded and he jabbed.
Finn twitched and groaned, and in a few seconds his eyes fluttered open. He blinked his vision clear and looked at the three faces ringed around him. He wasn’t seeing any smiles. Then the pain from his face registered and he winced.
“What . . . happened?” he asked thickly.
I told him.
He winced at that, too. Then his eyes popped wide and started darting around, looking past us as his whole body went rigid with tension.
“Is she here? Did you get her?”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said soothingly. “Who are you talking about?”
“Her, goddamn it. Did I get her?”
“Finn—you grabbed my piece and started taking potshots at some local boy. A kid, for chrissakes.”
He shook his head. “That was no boy, Joe. It only looks like one.”
We stared at him.
“We searched him,” Bunny finally said. “Definitely a boy.”
Finn kept shaking his head. “No, you’re wrong . . .”
I snapped my fingers in front of his face. He blinked and stopped shaking his head. His eyes were bloodshot and there were dark smudges under them.
“Hey—listen to me, Finn,” I said, pitching my voice low and calm, “you’re in shock and you’re not making a lot of sense. You’ve got to calm down and—”
“No, I—”
“Shhh,” I said. “It’s cool. We’re clear and we’re safe. We searched the area. It’s just the four of us, and help is on the way.”
He gradually calmed, but only halfway. “What’s . . . what’s our status? Why is there all this blood on my clothes?”
“We’re piecing that together. We found the spot where Rattlesnake Team ambushed the opium convoy. All of the Taliban are dead, the opium’s there, but there’s no sign of your guys.”
Finn gave me a sharp look, penetrating and unblinking. “You’re sure about that, Joe? You haven’t seen them?”
Before I could respond, Bunny said, “Nah, we ain’t seen hide nor hair. But we think they ambushed another convoy a couple hours ago.”
Finn stared at him. “You’re sure it was them?”
“Not sure of anything today,” said Top. “But whoever did it used M14s. Classic SpecOps ambush scenario, too. How many teams of gunslingers you think are out here? There’s us and there’s your boys.”
Finn’s eyes shifted away. He looked toward the town and then he looked down between his knees at the dirt.
“My team is gone,” he said softly.
“Gone . . . ?” prompted Bunny. “You mean they been capped?”
Finn shrugged.
“Where are the bodies?” asked Top.
Another shrug.
“Excuse me,” said Top, “you may be top-kick of that team, Finn, but I’m still a first sergeant and you’re a master sergeant and I asked you a question. Where are the bodies of your team?”
Finn closed his eyes. “Gone,” he said again, but then he added, “They’ve been taken.”
“Taken by who?” demanded Bunny.
“I—don’t know,” said Finn. I had the weird impression that he was hiding something but not actually lying to us. When I made eye contact with Top, I could see that he was in the same place as me.
I placed my hand on Finn’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “Listen, brother, you’ve been out here for ten days and it’s pretty clear you’ve been through some shit.”
“I’ve been through hell,” he said without looking at me.
“If we’re going to help you, then we need to know everything that happened.”
Finn shook his head. “It’s too late for that, Joe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Telling you won’t make it better. My guys are lost.”
“Maybe not,” I said, putting some edge into it.
He gave me a pitying look like I was a naïve idiot who didn’t have a clue about how the world worked.
“I . . . ,” he began, then stopped and swallowed. He brushed a tear from his eye. “Joe, I don’t know why I’m even here. I should be dead, not them. I thought that was how it was supposed to work. Me, not them. It wasn’t their fault.”
“What wasn’t their fault?” I asked gently.
“That they . . . that they were lost.”
I noticed that he kept avoiding the word “died” or “killed.” He called it “lost.” He said they were gone.
It troubled me in ways I couldn’t quite explain.
“Look, Finn, just start from the beginning. There was a firefight here, and there’s a hell of a lot of blood, but there are no American bodies. The only other person we found is a kid, maybe ten years old. And it was definitely a boy, that’s not even a discussion.”
“Hooah,” said Bunny.
I continued. “So, I need you to take a breath, get your shit wired tight, and tell me what happened. And I mean everything.”
I can’t know what Finn was thinking, but I watched his eyes and I could see the process of the frightened and disoriented man yielding all control to the trained soldier—the top-of-the-line SpecOps gunslinger. Top handed him a canteen and Finn took a sip, swallowed, took some breaths through his nose, took a longer sip, and nodded thanks to Top. Finn blew out his cheeks and nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
He told us everything.
As he spoke, I tried to get inside his head and see it all the way he saw it.