“Let’s saddle up,” he said.
Parson tied on his boots and took an experimental step with the snowshoes. They felt clumsy on the bare floor, but the walking seemed natural when he stepped outside in the snow. Fog now obscured the trees across the clearing, mist advancing like smoke from a wildfire. He went to the first two guerrillas he’d shot.
One lay motionless on his stomach. Pink slush spread from under him. The other had fallen onto his back, one knee upbent. The knee moved and Parson drew his pistol.
The man held his hands over wounds to his chest and abdomen. He wore a bandolier across his torso, the pouches filled with magazines and brass cartridges, the odd jewelry of combat. Blood channeled between his fingers, and he looked at Parson longingly.
“Ash-hadu anla ilaha . . .”
breathed the guerrilla.
“Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu.”
It was about all the Arabic that Parson understood. He’d heard it in an intel briefing:
There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.
The Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith. All Muslims usually recited it in Arabic, but this man’s syllables flowed like those of a native speaker.
The guerrilla whispered again. Barely audible, accented English.
“Finish me,” he said. “Finish me, Crusader.”
Parson sighed long and hard. The man would not live without immediate help. Parson could not take him along, and if he did the Arab would die anyway. No morphine in the kit. No options left but degrees of cruelty. Parson shot him in the head.
Gold bolted out with her rifle.
“It’s all right,” Parson said. He paused for a moment. I’ve known ever since 9/11 we’d have to do things we’d rather not do, he thought. Just didn’t think I’d have to do them myself.
Parson picked up the man’s AK. He pulled back the bolt just far enough to check that the chamber contained a round. He ejected the magazine, examined it, found it full. Then he reinserted it and took an extra magazine from the insurgent’s vest. Parson had never held an AK before, but the balance felt right, and it gave him far more firepower than his sidearm.
“We should disable any rifle we don’t take with us,” Gold said.
“Good idea.”
Gold disassembled the first guerrilla’s weapon. She removed the bolt and put it in her pocket. Then she went to the back of the cabin and did the same to the rifle carried by the man with the British jacket.
Parson looked down at the Arab at his feet. Sleet fell from the sky and began collecting in the dead fighter’s beard. White ice pellets mingled with black whiskers and turned the beard gray, as if in death the man aged years by the second. Parson wondered what kind of fervor could have motivated this man to leave Yemen or wherever to die on a mountain where it was nearly a hundred degrees colder than his home.
There came a faint tearing sound, like someone ripping paper at a distance. In the next instant, it seemed an invisible force of biblical power slammed Parson to the ground. The blow to his chest knocked the wind out of him. He fought to breathe. Dazed, for a moment Parson thought lightning had hit him. But when the next bullet kicked up snow beside his head, he realized what was happening.
He crawled toward the cabin door, pain from cracked ribs like stilettos in his lungs. He’d never heard the shots. He also knew his flak jacket was designed to stop shrapnel, not rounds from a high-powered rifle. The only reason the bullet hadn’t gone right through him and out the other side of the vest was that it had come from a great distance.
Parson pulled himself inside as Gold came in the back door.
“What happened?” she asked as she kneeled beside him.
“Sniper,” Parson said. He coughed and winced. “I’m all right; it hit my vest. We gotta move, but don’t go out the front.”
Gold unchained the mullah from the bed frame.
“Just tell him I fainted,” Parson said. “Don’t let him know his buds are still out there.”
Parson struggled to his feet, used the AK for leverage. He shouldered his pack and inhaled deeply, still trying to catch his breath.
“There’s a ravine that slopes away behind the cabin,” he said. “Let’s just get downhill as quick as we can.”
Gold spoke to the mullah, who sat on the floor and did not move. She spoke again, and he shook his head. Parson drew his boot knife, soft clicks as the keepers in the sheath disengaged. He placed the point just under the prisoner’s eye, and he traced a red scratch down toward the beard. The man jerked back his head and rose to his feet.
Parson looked at his knife, a smear of red on the point. Not a government-issue weapon but a gift from his father, the handmade tool belonged in a display case on a mantelpiece. Grip made of whitetail antler. Blade of old-fashioned Damascus steel, layer upon layer of alloy pattern-welded and hammered to form textured lines on top of each other. A double edge sharp as truth. Parson saw his own reflection distorted in the whorls of the shimmering metal.
Gold pulled the prisoner out the back door. The mullah looked down at the dead insurgent in the British coat and paused over the body. Parson pushed him forward, then slid down the embankment. Parson carried the AK slung across his back, and the rifle bounced against his neck. The mist closed in so thick he could see only a few yards in front and behind, as though time had swallowed both his past and his future. He felt grateful for it, though. If not for the fog, he supposed, another shot from that damned Dragunov would likely take off his head.
The wooded slope stopped abruptly at a small rill narrow enough to step over. Beyond the stream, Parson tromped into snow up to his knees. He found the walking difficult even with his snowshoes; without them only a few hundred yards would have exhausted him. Now he saw nothing but white, the snow and the fog intermingling so completely that his only sensory references were gravity and pain. He could not tell whether he trudged over road, open field, or frozen lake.
Parson continued ahead, each step a mission in itself.
CHAPTER FIVE
P
arson led Gold and the prisoner across a surface that became mercifully flat. Big snowflakes like soap shavings descended silently through the fog. No terrain in the Hindu Kush should offer walking this easy, Parson figured, and out of curiosity he scraped through the snow with his snowshoe. The effort revealed black ice, the surface of a mountain lake. That concerned him a little, though he had not heard any creaking to suggest the ice giving way.
He drew his boot knife and chopped and probed the ice. He could not chip down to the water, and Parson remembered an old rhyme about the safety of frozen lakes: “Inches two, it’ll hold you. Inches three, you and me. Inches four, put up a store.” At least one break, then, in a place not known for kindness either to foreigners or natives. Even the name, “Hindu Kush,” threatened. An intel officer once told him it meant “Slaughter of Hindus,” in reference to some horror of antiquity.
Every breath seemed to pierce his chest. Pain from the cracked ribs made Parson think of the spikes of an iron maiden as it closed on a victim. Inhaling deeply brought a rattling sound.
“You going to make it, sir?” Gold asked.
“Yeah. We’ll stop if we find a good place.” Parson realized he had no idea what or where a good place might be.
He felt a sharp pain at one spot on his upper chest, bad enough that he kneeled in the middle of the lake to examine it. Parson took off his survival vest, unzipped his coat, fumbled with numb fingers on the buckles of his flak vest.
“What’s wrong?” Gold asked.
“That slug might have gone farther than I thought.”
Gold helped him pull away the front of the flak jacket, revealing a spot of blood reddening his butternut flight suit just above the Velcro patch for his name tag. Parson unzipped the suit enough to see that a bullet fragment had made it through the vest’s Kevlar fibers and lodged under his skin. Wincing, he picked at the fragment with his knife and extracted it. He rolled the jagged shard of lead between his fingers, then dropped it into the snow.
The mullah watched with what seemed like professional interest. No smirk or taunt, only apparent curiosity, as if trying to learn what he could about American field medicine.
Parson found a Betadine pad in his first-aid kit. He had to remove his gloves to get enough grip to pull open the package. The gauze dripped with antiseptic the color of brandy, and it stained his fingers as he placed it over the wound. He taped the pad into place, then zipped, snapped, and buckled himself back together and started walking.
When he felt stones grinding under his snowshoes, he knew they’d come to the shore. What appeared as odd lumps in the snow turned out to be scrubby bushes drifted over. Not much other vegetation nearby. Parson knew they couldn’t count on woods for cover all the time; he’d flown over enough of Afghanistan to see it had been largely deforested.
The mist lifted enough for Parson to realize they were deep in a valley. Walls of mountains rose into low clouds on either side. He saw variations of only two colors: the whites of snow and mist, and the grays of boulders and shale. So when he caught a glimpse of green up ahead, he crouched and rested a gloved finger against the trigger of the AK-47.
He motioned for Gold to stay put, and he advanced a little farther. He expected to find clothes drying on a line, a mud-brick hovel, some kind of habitation.
Parson plowed through dry, powdery snow, watching and listening. Listening to nothing. No village sounds, no bleat of sheep. Just his own ragged breathing.
He saw that the green fabric hung not from a clothesline but a pole. Four of them, in fact: four green flags with gold lettering he could not read, planted atop a mound in the snow. Parson signaled “okay” to Gold, and she and the prisoner joined him. The mullah sank to his knees in prayer.
Parson explored the mound with his foot, kicking away the snow, and he uncovered a pile of stones.
“What do you make of this?” he asked.
“The grave of a martyr,” Gold said.
“Perfect. Friendly territory.”
He looked up at the flags hanging in what he judged was a tribute to murder. “Let’s get the hell out of here before he gets inspired or something,” Parson said.
He led through the valley most of the morning, keeping to the low hills within the pass. That course continued roughly in the direction of Bagram. He had neither the motivation nor the strength to head to either side of him, where the land rose so steeply an altimeter would be of greater use than a compass.
He wondered whether he’d ever flown through this valley on a low-level run to an airdrop. The terrain certainly made good cover for a tactical route. Parson had flown dozens of missions to drop supplies to troops, skimming the ground at nearly three hundred miles per hour, deep below the ridgetops. That’s the way he wanted to cross this valley: chart in hand, stopwatch dangling from his neck, turbulence rocking the plane. The copilot’s finger on a release switch, the whole crew waiting for Parson to call “green light.”
He would have blasted through this valley in seconds, so low and so fast a jihadist could not have seen him in time to punch off a missile. Now they slogged through it for hours, exhausted and hungry like wandering penitents.
Eventually the valley seemed to widen, though the fog made it hard to tell. Parson guessed a stream nearby fed into the frozen lake behind him, but he saw only an expanse of snow. Its surface stretched before him unbroken by any tracks, a monochromatic world of white drifts and gray boulders.
He noticed a few brown twigs sticking up through the snow at regular intervals, the remains of some crop planted in rows. Parson brushed powder away from one of the dead plants, the brittle stems crackling in his fingers.
“Opium poppies,” Gold said.
“I should have figured,” Parson said. He knew most of the world’s opium came from here.
The snowflakes had grown smaller and smaller until now they fell like talcum, so fine they seemed just a slight thickening of the fog. Parson held out his hand and watched them collect on his glove. He wondered whether it was true that each flake had its own unique pattern, a geometry never appearing before and never seen again. Not in all the snow that surrounded him, not in all the snow that had ever fallen. He tromped on, thinking maybe lives weren’t much different. Unique, never repeated quite the same way, one among billions, brief in the fullness of time.
But in the short moment we’re here, he thought, one person can cause so much harm or good. Why would you dedicate your life to destruction and fly a plane into a building or blow yourself up in a crowded market? Parson thought about the jihadists he’d shot back at the shack. None looked more than thirty. Why couldn’t they have been in a university learning something useful? Or raising a young family, or doing anything other than making it necessary for me to drag my ass through this fucking blizzard?
In the translucence of the snow and mist, the mountains that walled the valley hung blue in the distance. Ghosts of mountains. In the poor visibility Parson could not tell for certain, but he thought he saw some kind of large structure along one slope. He’d seen lots of villages from the air, mud-brick dwellings the exact color of the ground from which they’d been scraped, looking almost like a natural geological formation. But not this thing. As Parson drew nearer, he saw it was a single building, or more like a single ruin. Snow coated crumbling stone walls, and along the front wall Parson saw a wide gap, perhaps an opening for a wooden gate long since burned or rotted away. Some sort of fortress, maybe.