The Mullah's Storm (22 page)

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Authors: Tom Young

BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
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Parson stared at the numbers on his hand, black marks on shivering flesh. He unfolded his map and traced a grid line with his thumbnail. Then he placed the map on a flat spot in the snow. Opened his compass and placed its edge along the grid line. Oriented the map to north, took a bearing. For a moment, the calculations settled his mind. Navigation came down to mathematical sureties: radials and vectors, the angle of wind drift, the declination of Polaris. Numbers worked the same everywhere, a mental lodestar for him.
He found a ham slice in the MRE he’d opened for Gold. Slung the pack over his shoulder. Ate the ham in four bites and wiped his hands on his parka.
“Heading one-five-zero,” he said. “Just over five miles.”
Parson rolled up his sleeping bag and tied it to the pack. Then he lifted his rifle. At first he led the way down a narrow vale, but he knew the easy walking wouldn’t last. Through the snowfall and mist, the next ridge loomed ahead like a wall. He wondered what kind of endurance Gold would have. She seemed willing to keep going, but only so fast.
They stumbled down the escarpment, sliding rather than walking. Their progress through the deep snow left what looked more like a trench than a line of tracks. Parson knew pursuers would have no problem trailing them now, but the bad guys would have to cross the mountains under these same arctic conditions.
At the bottom of the ravine, the snow came up to Parson’s thighs. Gold forged on, staying within a few paces of him. Parson opened the last of the water bottles he’d saved and handed it to her. She drank part of it and handed it back. He finished it, filled it with snow, capped it, returned it to his pocket.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“We still have a chance,” he said. Didn’t know if he should have said anything.
Parson took out his binoculars and surveyed the peaks. No evidence of any other human life. The ridges loomed like cathedral spires. Juniper branches drooped with their burden of snow, some near to breaking. The air smelled like the purest water Parson had ever tasted. He heard no sound but his heartbeat thumping fast from exertion. Who would have thought hell could be so beautiful? He adjusted his pack straps. Put one foot before the other. Felt himself sweating underneath his flight suit, though his hands stayed numb with cold.
The ascent up the opposite slope came hard. In all the equipment from the airdrop, he’d not asked for climbing gear. He hadn’t planned on summiting mountains, so he lacked ropes and tackle. He and Gold could only climb slowly, feeling for footholds. Parson used a low branch to pull himself and got showered with crystals for his effort. Snow grains in his eyes. When Gold became stuck where she found no leverage or handhold, Parson unhooked his rifle sling, dangled it to her, hauled her up. He used both hands, and it made his right wrist burn again.
A sound like a pistol shot cracked somewhere to the left. Parson whirled with his rifle to see a tree limb tumble to the ground in a shower of white. The broken end jutted from the snow like a compound fracture. Parson slung his weapon across his shoulder and moved on.
It took more than three hours to reach the crest. The land dropped away beyond it, but not with the same punishing grade. That side of the mountain sloped more gently, and Parson saw it had once held terraced fields. The land did not look to have been tended in at least a couple of seasons. No dried stalks of crops, just dead weeds sticking up through the snow. Whatever had grown in these fields, war had put an end to it.
Parson glassed the disused farmland with his binoculars. He found this side of the mountain as unpopulated as the other. Small, barren trees stood along one side of the field, a dead orchard. He rolled a focus knob and brought the trees into sharp view, each twig overlaid with flakes delicate as crushed feathers. From his briefings about food sources, he guessed these were walnut and maybe pistachio trees, unable to do him any good now. Gold stooped with her hands on her thighs, catching her breath.
As they paused, snow swept across the mountainside in swaths. A column of white bore down on them and cut visibility to yards. When it passed, Parson watched it recede across the landscape, hanging from gray clouds like tattered strips of muslin.
They slogged downhill into the first field. As they labored across it, they came to four small hillocks in the snow. The rises stood out in an expanse of white that otherwise stretched over the field as if smoothed by a trowel. Parson placed his foot near the end of one of them. The snow crunched and crackled, and he felt loose rocks turn under his boot. He kicked away the layers of powder to reveal a stone barrow about five feet long.
“Graves,” Gold said. Her voice almost startled Parson. She picked up a stone, a tile of shale, crumbling and stratified. She pulled off her glove and held the rock in her cupped hand, kept her white fingertips off it.
“What do you think happened to them?” Parson asked.
She shook her head. Tossed the shale. It disappeared into the snow, leaving only a narrow shaft to mark its passage.
Most of a family dead of something, Parson guessed. Disease if not violence. And now gone. Gone forever, like his crew. Concentrating on Gold’s rescue had taken his mind off his crewmates for a time. But the graves made him think of them. They were not on another mission. They would not land soon back at base. They were not waiting for him at the club. They were dead. They would soon rest in their own graves, and they would be there for a long, long time.
The thought of his crew reminded him of how his father had lived and how he had died. His dad had been a selectee for full bird colonel in the Air National Guard when Desert Storm kicked off. On one of the first nights of the war, he was flying the back seat of an F-4G Wild Weasel. Parson had seen news video from that night that showed triple-A filling the sky over Baghdad like a swarm of exploding fireflies. His father and the front-seater had flown right through it to put a HARM missile into an air defense radar site.
Coming off the target, a burst of shrapnel peppered the canopy and wounded the pilot, so his dad took control of the jet. He could have ejected, but that would have put the incapacitated pilot on the ground in enemy territory, in the dark, without medical help. So his dad flew the damaged aircraft back to Prince Sultan Air Base. The gear collapsed on landing, and the jet veered off the runway in a shower of sparks. When it hit that soft, powdery sand, it cartwheeled and blew up.
Parson was surprised by the touch of Gold’s hand on his arm. He looked up to see her beside him, a blurred vision through his brimming eyes.
I’m supposed to be taking care of you now, thought Parson. Not the other way around. Do your damned job, he told himself.
Gold said nothing. She just seemed to want to remind him she was there. Parson appreciated the gesture. And the silence. She watched him in a way that made him wonder what she was thinking. Whatever it was, she didn’t seem to be judging him.
Then she appeared to look into the distance. With what she’s been through, Parson thought, she doesn’t need me losing it. But now her eyes appeared focused. She wasn’t staring; she was scanning. At something in particular.
“May I borrow the binoculars, sir?” she asked.
Parson handed her the Zeiss. She looked through it and turned an adjustment ring.
“See anything?” he whispered.
“An animal,” she said. “Maybe a dog.”
“You’re sure it’s not a person?”
Gold nodded and gave the binoculars back to Parson. She paused, brushed her hair back with her hands, and tied it in a tight knot.
Beyond the second field, the land flattened into a valley divided by a narrow creek. The stream was visible as a dark gully only in short stretches where the water ran fast. In most places snow overlaid ice that had formed across the surface. Parson chided himself for not noticing the creek earlier. The last thing he and Gold needed was to break through and fill their boots with ice water. Near the creek there were depressions in the snow, straight lines at right angles to the stream. Old irrigation canals, he supposed.
Where the stream narrowed, a jumble of boulders and tree trunks lay across it in what passed for a bridge. A few branches remained attached to the logs, and they stuck up to about waist height. Parson guessed someone had left the branches there for handholds. Afghans were poor but not stupid.
He placed his boot onto the first log and pushed down to test it. The tree trunk held firm, so he stepped onto it cautiously. When he took hold of a branch, it broke off in his hand and left him with a flight glove full of snow, ice, and rotten wood.
Parson kept his balance only by stumbling down onto a rock. He knew if he fell into the water now and couldn’t find anything dry enough to burn, he might as well put the Colt to his temple and pull the trigger. He remounted the logs. He felt the whole mass shift under his weight, and water purled around the soles of his boots. Parson stepped onto a boulder, then another log, then finally to the opposite bank.
Gold removed the magazine from her rifle. What the heck is she doing? thought Parson. She pulled back the bolt, ejected a cartridge from the chamber, placed the magazine and bullet in her pocket.
“Catch,” Gold called. She tossed her rifle across the stream. Parson caught it by the barrel with his left hand. Now Gold could cross the bridge unencumbered. Why didn’t I think of that? wondered Parson. Gold picked her way over without slipping. She took the weapon, reloaded it, and let the bolt slam shut.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
P
arson and Gold moved away from the old farm and orchard, and the pines thinned out, leaving nothing but knee-high thornbush crackling with ice and snow. There was no place to hide. Just a white plateau rimmed with ridges, as if the Hindu Kush went on forever.
Gold had the binoculars again. Now and then she stopped to survey. Parson took that as a good sign. She was back in the game. He watched her drink the last of a water bottle and then pack it with snow. She seemed careful about her fingers, but she didn’t ask for help. Gold pocketed the bottle and kept hiking. No sounds but their breathing and the crunch of their footsteps, and the whisper of steady flakes.
After another hour of walking, Gold said, “I wonder if they’ve engaged yet.”
“What?”
“If they’ve moved on that cave.”
“We can find out,” Parson said.
He had been conserving his batteries, so the radio was off. He dropped his pack, pulled out the 112, and turned it on. Inserted the earpiece.
“Razor One-Six,” he called, “Flash Two-Four Charlie.”
No answer. Parson repeated his transmission. Still nothing.
Something broke the squelch, the radio’s hiss interrupted like someone on the other end had pressed a transmit button. Then more static.
“Razor One-Six, Flash Two-Four Charlie.”
Electronic buzz. Then another squelch break, with sounds in the background. A finger on a talk switch again. The rattle of gear. Two shots:
pa-pop
. One more.
Static again. Then a finger on the button once more. A voice in the background: “Covering fire!”
Then Cantrell, voice steady: “Flash Two-Four Charlie, Razor’s in contact. Call you back.”
Parson looked at the radio, wanted to ask more. Knew he shouldn’t, so he removed the earpiece.
“What did they say?” Gold asked.
“Not much. They’re in a firefight.”
Gold did not answer. She just looked out ahead. Across the snowfield, Parson saw the light wind twisting whorls of fine granules across the surface. It made the ground appear to move, and the visual illusion dizzied him a little. Black dot in the distance. Parson raised his rifle, adjusted the scope, looked through it.
A wolf stood in snow up to its shoulders, several hundred yards away. Hard to see him through the snowfall, even with magnification. The creature looked toward Parson and Gold. Stared as if frozen. Then loped along like a dog jumping through high weeds. Vanished into the terrain.
“See that?” Parson asked.
“I believe I saw him a while ago.”
Parson didn’t think much about it. Wildlife was the least of his problems. Getting spotted by the enemy was his greatest. Not seeing bad guys didn’t mean they weren’t seeing you. And out in the open like this, we wouldn’t be hard to find, Parson thought. Especially with Gold in ACU gear and not winter camo.
White-coated evergreens stood in the distance, beyond where the wolf disappeared. Short ones that offered little concealment, but better than nothing. Parson checked his compass and saw that they lined up with the course he was tracking, so he used them as a marker and headed straight for them.
It took longer than Parson expected. He and Gold forded the deep snow step by step. The two of them eventually came to the wolf’s tracks, holes left by his paws as he’d leaped along, and feathery marks where his tail had dragged. And three other sets of wolf tracks. Parson guessed he and Gold had seen the wolf pack’s straggler.
They hiked on toward the trees. A little closer now. Pines seemingly wrapped in white felt. Parson shivered, and his toes had no feeling.

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