Sunrise: Wrath & Righteousness: Episode Ten (7 page)

Turning toward Bono, he felt a sudden sense of heavy sadness sweep across him. It hit him like a black and heavy blanket, covering his entire soul.

For no reason he could explain, he felt like weeping.

For no reason he could explain, he felt like walking toward Bono and holding him in his arms.

The village was too small to even have a name. It sat along a swiftly flowing river, dark, muddy and frothing now from the three days of severe rains. A collection of rock huts and wooden shanties had been built around a crumbling central market, the walls of which were covered arches, the blue and green paint faded now, the white script almost entirely unreadable. The entire wall was pockmarked with bullet holes, some from the brutal Russian military, some from the Taliban militia, some from U.S. soldiers, some from the local warlord’s henchmen, some from celebratory shots fired after a wedding party. Behind the village, the land sloped gently upward for three or four kilometers before jutting suddenly toward the blue sky at nearly impossible angles. The valley floor was too rocky to be farmed, three hundred thousand years of retreating and advancing glaciers having deposited a couple million boulders and man-sized rocks across the gravely ground. Because the valley floor could not be farmed, the foothills had been heavily terraced, every inch put to use. The lifeblood of the village, the terraces were richly earthed but dry, the villagers having no practical way of pumping the water out of the gushing river up to the higher ground. Electricity hadn’t made it to the village yet. Neither had running water nor doctors or medical services. There were a few automobiles, certainly nothing made in the present century, and donkeys outnumbered trucks or cars by at least twenty-five to one. In most respects, the village hadn’t changed much over the past thousand years. Battles had been fought here. Battles were fought here now. People had lived and died here. People lived and died here now.

So much the same.

It was remarkable.

For more than 2000 years, the Pashtun village had lived through a series of horrors known as invasions from the Aryan tribes, then the Persians, then the Mauryas, Kushans, Greeks, Arabs, and Turks. Partly because of this, but mostly because they lived in a land the modern world had forgotten and didn’t care about, the Pashtuns were the largest segmentary people on the earth, segmentary in that they stood as tribes, with no other form of government to bind them. The best description of their hierarchy was found in the old saying, “brother against brother, brothers against cousins, brothers and cousins against the world.”

Conservative in their lifestyle and devout in their beliefs, the Pashtuns made fearsome friends and terrifying enemies.

As Omar stood beside the village leader he wondered, was the village leader a friend or foe?

*******

The village leader’s hut sat in the corner of the lowest terrace, the only structure allowed to take up such a precious piece of farming ground, perhaps the greatest tribute to his status among the village he could ever hope to achieve. It was very early now, not quite morning light, but not quite dark, the gray light having washed out the stars. The prince hung close to Omar’s side and Omar looked down at him. The boy was larger now, stronger and more confident.

“Who is he?” the village leader demanded.

“He is a child.”

“
Who is he?
”

“He needs your help.”

“Who seeks him? Are you his father?”

“Many forces seek him, and no, I am not his father.”

The leader studied Omar. “I will not let you bring evil into my village.”

“I bring no evil. I bring a child.”

“Evil comes in many faces.”

“Look at him, Aashir.”

The leader of the local tribe was young. Life was too hard to leave many old men on the mountain and all village leaders had to be young enough to fight. He was called
abbu Rehnuma
, or father leader, and that’s exactly what he was; father of his people, leader of their tribe. He studied the boy while pulling on his long beard. He hadn’t shaved in his life; his face never touched a blade. He thought a long moment, then turned around. “Take him away,” he commanded. “He’s not my charge.”

“Aashir, please, in the name of all that is sure and holy—”

“He is not my charge!” The young man looked suddenly nervous. “I hear much now, God willing, and I listen. There are foreign forces all around us, and not the devil Americans. No, not from what I hear. These are far more evil, far more dangerous.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “These are the forces of a foreign king; keeper of the Holy Stone, protector of the Shrine.”

Omar felt a cold chill. “One day of rest is all I’m asking,” he begged. “One day is all I need.”

The leader scoffed. “I doubt that, my friend Omar, I doubt that a great deal. One day of hiding the boy and then what, you disappear back to the mountains from which you came? You head on down the river, boy tucked neatly under your goat-hair coat?” The man gestured adamantly toward the mountains. “If I let you stay one day, you will not leave.”

“No, no, no. One day and we will go.”

His words were met with scoffing. “Few will leave the mountain, not at this time of year.”

The two men fell silent.

“How will you do it?” the young man asked. “If I let you stay, how will you leave me?” He looked down at the child. The boy stood beside Omar’s legs, but he didn’t hide his face. His eyes were dark and penetrating, his shoulders small but square.

Omar remained silent.

The
abbu Rehnuma
watched him, waiting, then raised his hand. “Not my charge. Not my charge. I have to protect my people. Look at me, look at all of us, my brother. How could we possibly protect ourselves? We are nothing. For a thousand years we’ve been nothing. For the next thousand years, Allah willing, we’ll remain nothing. That’s all we want now. Nothingness. Peace. No more foreign soldiers. We want our brothers. Sometimes our cousins. That is all.”

Omar took a desperate step toward him. “This is not some
swara
, Aashir, some woman child I have bought or was given because I was owed. This is—” he caught himself, falling suddenly silent. “This child is something else. Something important.” He was afraid to tell.

Aashir turned to him. “This is who, Omar? Tell me, who is this child?”

Omar cleared his throat. “We seek sanctuary, Aashir.”

The younger man’s eyes went hard. He took a sudden breath and held it as if he’d been punched in the gut. He stood there, his mouth open, his face pulled into a frown.

“A single day, that is all,” Omar told him. “A single day of sanctuary is all we ask, then we’ll be gone.”

“I cannot, I cannot—”

“Sanctuary is one of the tenets of your society, a pillar of your faith. You
can’t
deny us sanctuary. Allah
requires
this of you. If you want Him to protect you, you
have
to pay the price!”

The enormous helicopter made a couple passes, its infrared and low-light sensors searching the ground below. But there was simply nothing there. Every inch of open ground jutted up to meet the rocky cliffs. The ancient pines stretched a hundred and twenty feet into the sky. It only took the helicopter’s pilots several minutes to realize there wasn’t a single patch of level dirt on which they could land.

It was starting to get light now and the helicopter was getting low on fuel. And the longer they hovered around the edge of the small lake, the more likely they were to be found, if they hadn’t been found already. Sophisticated as the combat helicopter was, nothing muted the roar of its engines or whine of its powerful blades, sending an audio signal that could be heard for miles.

“What happened to our landing zone?” Sam demanded into his intercom.

“Not here, man,” the copilot called back from the cockpit. Looking forward, Sam could only see the left side of his body behind the armor plate that was wrapped around his seat. “There’s nowhere to land,” the pilot said.

“What about the recon photographs?”

“You got me, Might be some distortion in the picture. Don’t know. Don’t really care. All I can tell you is that there’s no place to land down there.”

Sam checked the digital image of the satellite photograph once again. That was the problem with this area, so much of the terrain was vertical the photographs were easily distorted, making them impossible to interpret.

“Isn’t there anywhere along the beach?” he demanded of the pilots.

“Nothing boss. You can come up here and check it out yourself. There are no beaches around this lake, not in the traditional sense. The water comes right up to the rocks and trees.”

Sam turned to Bono. “Think we could try to fast rope?”

Bono immediately shook his head. “The trees are way too high. The ropes wouldn’t even touch the ground.”

“We could use the rescue cable to hoist ourselves down.”

“Yeah, if we had an extra hour.”

He turned back to the cockpit. “You following this guys?”

“Rog that, boss. Looks like we’re calling this mission an abort.”

Sam snorted. He knew the pilot was only kidding. Although they didn’t know any of the details about the mission, the pilots clearly understood this was the highest priority mission they had ever flown.

There was an awkward silence for a moment.

“Looks like we’re going to get wet,” Bono said.

*******

Two minutes later, the enormous helicopter thundered toward the northernmost edge of the lake, then started to slow. Fifty feet above the water, the nose pulled suddenly into an aggressive flare, the rotors spinning up as the pilot took pitch out of the blades. The helicopter settled quickly toward the water. Ten feet above the lake, with both side doors open, the helicopter came to a momentary hover, then descended into the water, kicking up three-foot waves. Aft, a wall of water moved across the metal floor. The pilot kept the helicopter light, keeping power in the blades, never allowing the full weight of the helicopter to settle onto the lake though it would have floated even if he had.

With the doors open, the six-man team evacuated the helicopter within seconds. The water was deep and cold. Bitter cold. With their packs and equipment weighing them down, they knew they only had a few seconds to get out of the water before cramps and hypothermia set in. The Cherokees started swimming, packs on their backs, ammo and weapons around their waist, rifles over their heads. Bono and Sam kept hold of Azadeh, pulling her along.

A couple of the soldiers disappeared below the water. The pilots watched, both of them subconsciously holding their breaths. The two men suddenly reappeared, this time much closer to the water’s edge. Approaching the shoreline, none of them were able to walk. The water was too deep. The pilots watched the soldiers struggle to pull themselves atop the rocky walls that descended into the water for hundreds of feet below.

Counting off, the pilot waited until the team was safe, then, getting a thumbs-up from Sam, the pilot pulled up on the collective in his left hand, applying greater pitch to the main rotor blades. Taking deeper slices of air with each rotation, the rotors drooped as the heavy helicopter lifted, gallons of clear water rushing out of both side doors.

Sam watched the helicopter lift, turn its tail to the right then climb higher, its dark image disappearing in the dim light.

 Turning toward the rocks around him, Sam started climbing. He was shivering already, his body keeping in what little heat it could. But he didn’t even think about it. In a few minutes he would be sweating. It would be hours before they stopped to rest.

The last thing he had to worry about was being cold.

The Saudi soldier was dressed in combat gear, his face hidden among the low brush one third of a kilometer above the village. He kept his eyes on the two men and young boy who were talking below him. He hardly moved as he watched them, not wanting to give any indication of his position but the truth was even if he’d been lying beside the targets he’d have been impossible to see. Everything about him was camouflaged; his face, eyelids, teeth, clothes, hands, even the boots on his feet. Still, he hardly moved, lying prone across the wet ground, his shoulders and torso stuffed underneath a gnarled quince shrub, its low branches meeting the wiregrass that clung to the side of the hill, the only thing that kept the topsoil from washing away with every storm. It was barely light, but it was light enough for him to see and he watched the men through a long-range lens, the magnification bringing them close enough that he could have read their lips if he spoke the language they were communicating in right now.

But he didn’t. He was a foreigner in this land.

A foreigner and a killer.

The sniper rifle was heavy in his hand. It too was carefully camouflaged, tattered pieces of colored burlap wrapped around the stock and twenty-four-inch barrel. Above his fingers, the bolt was seated in the chamber. He was ready to fire.

He held the rifle close to his chest, wanting to keep it warm. It was suspicious, and kind of crazy, but legend had that it was bad fortune to kill a man with a cold rifle and he didn’t want to tempt the shooting gods.

The U.S. Marine Corps M40A3 long-range rifle was an outstanding weapon, one of the world’s best. When coupled with the M118LR ammo, the sniper rifle was capable of extreme accuracy out to one thousand feet, about the distance he was sitting at right now. He sniffed. No wind. The air was clean and cool and, up here in these mountains, very thin. At this range, give him three seconds and he could put a group of five bullets within a two-inch circle. Give him a couple seconds longer, and he’d group the same shells within three-quarters of an inch.