Read The Mullah's Storm Online
Authors: Tom Young
The Mullah's Storm (13 page)
“I can’t help you.”
Marwan peered over his glasses at Parson. The look turned Parson’s blood to ice.
“Really?” Marwan said. He closed the notepad. “That is indeed a pity. I did not wish to hear your screams today.”
Marwan kicked his chair, and it clattered against the wall.
“Shaheen!” he called, striding out of the room.
It will be over soon, thought Parson. It will be over soon.
He felt weak and frail. In his career he had seen what metal, either sharp-edged or high-velocity, could do to the human body. During an Iraq deployment he had helped transport the remains of civilians killed by a terrorist raid in Kirkuk. Black, dripping bags in the cargo compartment. All hopes, dreams, intellect, and talent gone, leaving nothing but slack and torn flesh. Decades to build, moments to destroy.
Parson felt sweat roll down his back. His legs began to shake. I’m gone already, he thought. None of this matters, because I’m already dead. I’m not even here.
Strange sounds came from outside the room. A snapping or cracking sound. Someone exhaled hard, with a grunting moan as if punched in the gut. Thuds, like someone falling. Something smacked against a wall, like a rock thrown hard. Another crack. Snap.
“Get on the floor,” Gold said. She jerked to the side and fell over in her chair.
Parson looked at her, puzzled. Had she lost her mind in fear?
“Muhammed?” a voice called.
Whack
. Thud.
. Thud.
“Get down!” Gold shouted.
Parson jerked to his left and fell. His head banged the hard dirt floor. Automatic-weapons fire crackled all around him.
The window burst open. Dust fell from a row of evenly spaced pockmarks that appeared in the wall. Another rip of automatic fire. Screams. Shouts in about three languages, including English.
A metal object sailed through the torn window and bounced across the floor. Parson grimaced, waited for the shrapnel.
The explosion knocked him dizzy. Dust choked him. When he opened his eyes, a trickle of blood dripped from his nose onto the floor. No other injury. But the flash-bang grenade had deafened him. Parson coughed and squinted, tried to make sense of what was happening. Bound to his overturned chair, he could not even roll over.
A guerrilla ran into the room. He grabbed Gold by the back of her chair. She struggled to kick and bite. The ropes kept her from doing any damage. The man dragged her from the room and out a rear door. Parson spun himself around with his legs, tried to keep sight of Gold. She was gone.
Another insurgent stood over Parson, leveled a pistol, shouted silent words.
The guerrilla’s head erupted in a spray of blood and brains. The man fell beside Parson, decapitated except for his lower jaw.
A soldier stood in the doorway, holding a shotgun. In what seemed like slow motion, he pumped the Benelli. A twelve-gauge hull ejected, spun to the floor. The man wore the fatigues of the Afghan National Army, with a snow camo overcoat. He turned to his left, fired again. Recoil jolted the Afghan’s cheek and shoulder. Parson did not see the target. He did not hear the shot, either, only the ringing in his ears from the flash-bang.
The man motioned for Parson to stay down, then disappeared. Parson saw boots and legs run by the doorway. He heard what seemed like far-off drumming of rifle fire.
Another man appeared in the doorway. “Are you hurt, sir?” the man yelled. Parson barely heard him.
Still stunned, Parson looked at the man’s uniform. Subdued U.S. flag patch. ISAF patch on the other arm. Bars of a captain. The officer carried an M-4 rifle painted in three-color desert pattern.
“There’s another American,” Parson yelled. “A woman. They took her out the back.”
The captain turned and ran to the rear door, dropped to one knee, fired two shots on semiauto. Fired once again.
“Clear,” shouted someone outside the room.
“Clear.” Another American.
“Clear!” Afghan accent.
“Clear, bullshit!” Parson shouted. “The woman. Where is she?”
The captain came back into the room. He drew a Yarborough knife and cut the ropes that bound Parson. Two quick strokes. Parson rolled away from the chair, onto his back.
“Did you get her?” he asked. His limbs tingled as the blood returned. Parson turned onto his side, rose up on his knees.
“They put her across a horse,” the captain said. “I think I hit the horse, but it kept going. Couldn’t risk another shot when they got too far away.”
Parson struggled to his feet. Why was this bastard just standing here talking?
“They’ll kill her,” he shouted. Parson felt his chest throbbing, animal panic. “Let’s go now! We have to follow them.”
“We’ll never run down bad guys on horseback, sir,” the captain said. “And they’ll want to keep their hostage alive at least for a while.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Cantrell. Special Forces.”
“Captain Cantrell,” Parson said, “I’m giving you a direct order.”
“Listen to me, sir,” Cantrell said. “We’ll do all we can. They have wounded, and some of their horses are wounded. They won’t go far.”
Parson realized Cantrell was right. All his instincts told him to try to rescue Gold now, but a mad dash might just get her killed. When you wounded a dangerous animal, you didn’t immediately tear into the brush looking for it. You gave it some time for its injuries to bleed and stiffen. Then you went after it.
And sometimes it still got away.
“I can’t lose her, too,” Parson said, palms out to his sides. Sweat began clouding his vision. He stumbled backward against the wall. Could not seem to find his balance. His limbs were numb from the hours he’d spent tied to the chair. He slid back down to a sitting position. He put his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. Rocked as if in a zealot’s prayer. “My crew is all dead,” he said. “Everybody on my plane but her. Her and that raghead.”
“What raghead?” Cantrell asked. “Sir, you’re not making sense.”
Parson stared at the commando. Bearded face, desert camo baseball cap turned backward. A patch of duct tape on Cantrell’s shoulder bore hand lettering in black marker: “O+ POS.” A stranger, Parson thought. Not an enemy, but not a friend. All my friends are gone.
The shotgun-toting Afghan came back into the room. Same guy who’d blown the insurgent’s head off a few minutes ago.
“Just this one?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Cantrell said. “They carried a woman hostage with them. We take any alive?”
“Negative.”
“There was an old man,” Parson said. Function. Try to think. “A high-ranking mullah. We were flying him to Masirah.”
“Gone,” the Afghan said. “I believe he is wounded.”
“One of those knuckleheads was picking up a camcorder when I nailed him,” Cantrell said.
“Where did you come from?” Parson asked.
“We were on patrol, and we’d holed up because of the storm,” Cantrell said. “We got word about you on the satphone. We headed toward your last known position and saw the strobe.”
The only thing I did right, thought Parson. He tried to stand, felt light-headed, lowered himself to one knee. He held his wrist and grimaced. Exhaustion and stress closed over him like waves over a drowning man. Nothing to breathe but guilt and despair. All dead but me, and I have failed. Parson looked at the floor. He could not make his eyes focus. Everything turning dark.
HE WOKE TO FIND his feet up on someone’s pack as if he’d been treated for shock. He looked at his watch, but he had no idea what time it had been when he lost consciousness.
“How long was I out?” Parson asked. He struggled to get up, but he felt currents in his stomach that shouldn’t have been there.
“Just a few minutes, sir,” Cantrell said. The captain lifted Parson’s head and offered him a canteen. Parson took it, hand shaking, sipped. The water tasted like purification tablets.
A Green Beret medic gave him a shot of morphine. It burned a little going in, then spread warmth through his bloodstream like the opium chew from the Hazara woman, only stronger. He felt detached from his pain, as if it belonged to someone else. But the anguish was still all his.
The medic splinted Parson’s wrist, then uncapped another needle.
“Antibiotic,” the medic said.
Parson shrugged. He felt the cold steel, but no sting.
“We have to get Sergeant Gold back one way or another,” he said. “I don’t want to think about what they’ll do to her.”
“We will follow them at the proper time,” the Afghan said.
“That’s Captain Najib,” Cantrell said. “My guys are supporting his unit.”
Parson didn’t know what to make of that. The Muslim was in charge? Najib nodded to Parson. The man looked a lot like Marwan, only younger. His black beard was trimmed closely. Najib’s English was as good as Marwan’s, but he spoke it with his own native accent. His choice of weapon, that inexpensive Italian shotgun loaded with buckshot, suggested to Parson a soldier who wanted to get close to the enemy and do a lot of harm. Had to give him credit for guts, at least.
Parson rose to his feet, steadying himself against the wall with his good hand. His vision turned gray, as if he were hypoxic. He remembered the feeling from altitude chamber training, colors fading with lack of oxygen. But the hues came back as his circulation returned. Not that there was much color to see. Splatter of blood on the floor and wall. Brass ammunition.
As he limped into the main room, he found the rest of the Afghan-American team searching the clothing of the dead insurgents. One U.S. soldier carried a scoped rifle tipped with a noise suppressor. Parson did not see Marwan among the bodies.
He looked about for his gear and found only part of it. His survival vest hung from the back of a broken chair, its pistol holster empty, radio gone. He discovered his pack, robbed of the first-aid kits, night-vision goggles, and extra handgun, and his flak vest had disappeared entirely. Parson hunted through the pack and felt the GPS receiver in a side pocket. At least they hadn’t taken that. And they had never found his boot knife. They hadn’t seen it under the zippered leg cuff of his flight suit. So he still had what his father had given him, and he still had the means to navigate. Signals from the stars and a sharp piece of steel.
He found his parka and put it on. He felt cold and clammy; sweat had soaked most of his flight suit. It seemed every moment brought another kind of discomfort. But he breathed more steadily now. I have to find a way to handle this, he told himself. Got to function. What happens to me does not matter. Not likely I’ll live through this, anyway. What matters is Gold. What does she need from me? What would she have me do? She’d probably tell me to focus. If you must have anger, control it and use it. Don’t let it control you. All right, Sergeant, I’ll try.
Cantrell examined one of the insurgents’ bodies. The guerrilla sat slumped against the wall, eyes open, shot through the head. One lifeless hand remained on his video camera as if he’d carefully placed it on the floor. Cantrell found two memory cards in the dead man’s cargo pockets. He took the cards and put the camcorder in his pack.
“Boys, let’s police up anything of intel value,” he said. “Time to move.”
Najib gave an order in Pashto, and his own men checked their weapons and inserted fresh magazines. Parson followed them outside. Some wore white anoraks dappled with brown and black, causing the troops nearly to disappear into the wintry landscape. Others wore American-issue N-3B parkas, hoods lined with fur. The snowshoes Parson had crafted had gotten lost. As soon as he stepped into the drifts he knew the hiking would come hard.
The bodies of the Hazara family lay sprawled in the snow behind their homestead. Light flakes floated like thistledown, obscuring the frozen faces in a translucent shroud. The boy’s mynah bird hopped and pecked in the snow, left delicate prints.
The guilt hit Parson almost physically, a cold fist crushing his heart. If he’d taken a different path, they’d still be alive. He supposed these Hazaras had been the nearest thing to a happy family one could find in Afghanistan. When he’d entered their home, he’d opened their door to a war not of their making, and it had rushed in like poisoned air filling a vacuum. He remembered when he’d sliced off a corner of his blood chit and handed it to the husband. The serial number on that scrap of cloth was supposed to bring reward, perhaps even asylum. Instead it became a bad draw in some lethal lottery. Parson felt as if he’d killed them himself.
Najib kneeled by the bodies and said something so low that Parson could not hear. A prayer, he guessed. Parson wondered if he should do the same thing, and if he should have done that for Nunez. But he could think of no words. Nothing spoken in any language would bring them back. Can’t change it now, he thought. Concentrate on what you
can
change.
can
change.
Najib’s sergeant major walked point, guiding the team of two dozen men away from the compound. Close behind, Najib gave hand signals to his men, nodded at one of them.
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