The Mullah's Storm (3 page)
Read The Mullah's Storm Online
Authors: Tom Young
He looked around the cockpit for anything else that seemed useful. He noticed Jordan’s pistol still holstered on the copilot’s survival vest. Parson took the handgun. He looked down at Jordan one last time as he shouldered the backpack with his good hand.
In the cargo compartment, he found Gold searching the pockets of the dead civilian. She took some paperwork from the man’s coat, looked into the lifeless face. Then she unshackled the mullah’s feet. Parson had no training on how to handle prisoners, but he knew he and Gold and the mullah had to move. Right now.
“Tell him he’s going for a little hike,” Parson said as he sat beside the mullah.
“I did. He says he’s not going anywhere.”
Parson felt a jolt of anger hit him like voltage. My friends are dead because of you, he thought, and you’re going to give me an attitude? I don’t fucking think so.
He pulled up the left pant cuff of his flight suit. Reached down to his boot knife, unsnapped the leather sheath. He withdrew a four-inch dagger as he grabbed the prisoner’s right thumb.
Using his injured hand, Parson jammed the blade deep under the mullah’s thumbnail. The mullah shrieked, shouted something in Pashto. Parson swore. He felt as though he’d rammed a white-hot nail through his cracked wrist. He twisted the knife and ground his teeth as his own pain tripled.
“Stop it,” Gold said. “Sir.”
The prisoner jerked his hand away and began jabbering and sobbing. Gold tried to examine his bleeding thumb, but he wouldn’t let her.
“He says he’ll go with us,” Gold said, “but it matters little because the flames of hell will consume you.”
Easier than I expected, Parson thought. Everybody understands pain. Bet he’s inflicted his share of it.
Parson could see Gold didn’t like what he’d just done. It probably violated all kinds of laws. And it was the first time he’d ever really hurt someone. But it was hard to care about that with people dying around you. Parson looked back at Fisher. He seemed satisfied enough. Parson nodded at him, turned to Gold: “Time to move.”
Gold took the chain from the prisoner’s legs and locked one end to her wrist. She spoke in Pashto, but the mullah did not respond. She picked up his right arm and fastened the other end of the chain to his wrist. Parson could not see all of the man’s expression because of the black goggles covering his eyes, but he did notice the mullah’s lips curling as if he’d inhaled some foul odor. Guess you don’t like a woman putting you on a leash, Parson thought. Serves you right.
“He’s going to have to see to walk with us,” she said.
Parson removed the goggles from the prisoner’s face. The mullah blinked but did not look around. One eye seemed dull and focused on nothing. It was blue. The other eye, black and alive, glared at Parson with undiluted hatred.
“What’s wrong with his eye?” Parson asked.
“It’s glass,” Gold said. “He lost it fighting the Soviets.”
“Tell him he’ll lose the other one if he doesn’t do exactly what I tell him.”
“Don’t get carried away.”
Who did this sergeant think she was? Parson decided to let it pass. He needed her.
He jumped out the paratroop door at the back of the cargo compartment. The three-foot drop jarred him, sent pain throbbing through his wrist. He reached up with his left hand and helped Gold step down with the prisoner. The move came easily to him since he was so much taller than they were. When the mullah reached the ground, his head came up only to Parson’s chest.
This son of a bitch inspires the people who shot us down, Parson thought, and now I have to look after him. For an instant, Parson wanted to grab him by the hair and slam his face into the side of the airplane.
“Good luck, guys,” Nunez said. “Major, if I’d known you was this hard-core, I’d have been more respectful.”
“You’re all right, Nunez,” Parson said.
Ice pellets made ticking noises as they fell, gathering in the folds of Parson’s coat like spilled salt. He opened his compass and took a bearing, then sighed. The mist of his breath rose in the cold air, only to get torn away by the Afghan wind.
CHAPTER TWO
T
he snow fell in thick flakes. That relieved Parson a little. It would cover their tracks after they holed up for the night.
he snow fell in thick flakes. That relieved Parson a little. It would cover their tracks after they holed up for the night.
The three walked for about half an hour along the valley floor. Mountains loomed on either side, and Parson knew the old man couldn’t make any time uphill even if he wanted to. The mullah looked well over seventy, with white eyebrows and a face as lined as a terrain map of his homeland. Right now Parson just wanted distance from the airplane.
“What do you give our chances?” Gold asked.
“Wouldn’t bet money I couldn’t lose.”
Gold nodded and tugged gently at the chain that attached her to the prisoner.
The light began to dim, but with the snow and heavy cloud cover, evening brought no sunset, just a slow fade to gray. Parson heard two shots register in the distance. He stopped to listen. Then an eruption of automatic-weapons fire. A mile away. Sounded like popcorn cooking off.
“It’s happening,” Parson said. “That’s at the airplane.” He wished he knew who was winning. Then he realized he did know. Too late to think about it now. Just follow Fisher’s order.
“You did well to get going so quickly,” Gold said.
“We better keep going. In a minute or two, they’ll realize their mullah’s not there.”
A forest of Afghan pines covered the ridges to the north. Their boughs drooped with snow, and Parson thought the scene might look pretty if he weren’t running for his life with the devil in tow.
“Let’s get into those trees and find some cover,” Parson said.
He led the way through snow now ankle deep, and just as he pulled a branch aside for Gold, the prisoner shouted,
“Mrastah wukray!”
“Mrastah wukray!”
Parson clapped a hand over the old man’s mouth and pushed him to the ground. Gold pointed her rifle at the mullah and scanned the mountains.
“There,” she whispered. “Five or six men coming down the ridge. He just yelled for help.”
Parson saw them a couple thousand yards off. He dug a handkerchief from his pocket, unfolded it, and twisted it into a gag.
“Tell him to open his mouth,” Parson said.
Gold said something in Pashto, but the prisoner gritted his teeth. Parson pulled his boot knife.
“Tell him to open his mouth or I’ll gut him like a deer.”
Gold said what sounded like two or three words.
The old man obeyed, and Parson tied the handkerchief as tightly as he could. The man’s face jerked as Parson closed the knot down hard. The prisoner grunted in protest.
“Damn it, I should have thought of this before now,” Parson hissed. “Let’s move.” He yanked the prisoner off the ground and pulled him uphill at a trot, with Gold pushing from behind. Matted snow slid off the mullah’s back and shoulders. The three stumbled through the trees until they reached the crest of the rise. The mullah wheezed with each breath. Saliva soaked the gag and oozed down his chin. Parson looked downhill.
“God, I hope there’s a stream down there,” he said. “Do you see them behind us?”
“Yeah.”
Parson grabbed the mullah’s coat and pulled him down the back side of the ridge. The man fell to his knees, and Parson dragged him up again. Parson knew they were leaving a path through the snow like a herd of buffalo. They slid down to a creek bank, the mud frozen to iron. Panes of white ice covered pools in the stream, but the water ran fast and clear over rocks in the middle.
“Get in the water and try not to break any ice,” Parson whispered. He thought if they walked in the stream, they could make some distance without leaving tracks in the snow. He just hoped the creek was as shallow as it looked.
It was getting dark quickly now, and in the creek bed he could barely tell the moving water from the frozen. He felt stones rolling under his boots as he splashed through the riffles—then he stepped into a deeper section and nearly lost his balance. Parson felt the water soak him to his hips. He gasped as the cold closed on him like a vise.
He slogged through the deep pool, shivering. He stepped up onto a gravel bar where the water ran shallow again. As he waited for Gold and the old man to catch up, Parson reached into his pack for a set of night-vision goggles. He flipped the little silver switch and looked through the NVGs. Evening became full daylight, as if viewed through dark green sunglasses.
Parson studied the terrain and did not see any pursuers. The stream wandered through a narrow valley, and he feared that if he followed the creek too long he’d come to a village. Hypothermia was setting in, and he tried to force his hand to stop shaking and steady the NVGs. He saw that the center of the stream ran ice-free for a few hundred yards. Above the stream and to the right, drifts enveloped the trunks of trees. In the pixels of the NVGs, snowflakes skittered down like green moths.
“Let’s stay in the river just a little longer,” Parson said. “Then we’ll find a place to stop.” He turned off the goggles and placed them inside his flight suit to keep the batteries warm.
The three staggered downstream in the last natural light, boots crunching over icy mud and creek-bed stones. Parson hoped whatever tracks they left would get washed away or covered by snowflakes he could no longer see falling. He stopped when he could distinguish nothing around him, no shape or form, nothing but the deep black of night in a country without electricity under a sky without moon or stars. He feared the next step might plunge him into an unseen pool deep enough to drown him, so again he looked through the NVGs.
The brook widened a little but still ran shallow. On either side of the water, the ground sloped upward, studded with boulders and pines. The wind had piled drifts against the rocks, and Parson sloshed out of the creek, pulling Gold and the mullah by the length of chain between them. He felt the chain pulsing with rhythmic tugs, and he realized both of them were shivering uncontrollably.
“Just hold him still,” he whispered. “I’ll get us out of the wind.” The cold numbed his face, and he formed each word by force of will.
Parson selected the biggest boulder he could pick out, though in night-vision green he had trouble telling rock from snow. The big stone would form the back wall of the snow cave he wanted to build. He dropped to his knees and dug blindly in the drift that had formed against the boulder. That hurt his right wrist so much that he had to dig with his left hand alone until he finished hollowing out the cave. The effort soaked his cloth gloves, and twice he made fists inside the gloves to keep what little feeling remained in his fingers.
He found the second pair of NVGs in his pack, put them in Gold’s hand, and said, “Look through these. Pull him inside.”
Parson followed them in and sat cross-legged with his back to the entrance. He pulled at his wet gloves, and they peeled off inside out like reptilian skin. Then he felt in a coat pocket for his light.
Covering the lens with his hand, he thumbed on the flashlight. The grooves between his fingers lit up red, and he parted two fingers just enough to let out the narrowest shard of light. He saw Gold’s face, eyes hollow, lips blue.
“If we don’t get warm,” she said, “we won’t live through the night.” Parson detected no panic, just a statement of fact. The mullah stared at the ground. Probably hoping for martyrdom, thought Parson, and he’s not far from it.
Parson opened his pack and buried the flashlight in it. In the glow, he found his wad of handwarmers. He tore the cellophane wrapping from several of them and handed the charcoal packets to Gold.
“Put these under your pants legs and anywhere else your clothes are wet,” he said. “Don’t let them burn you.”
He opened several more and placed them under the mullah’s soaked prison overalls. He put others under the prisoner’s coat. The mullah glared at him silently.
Parson saved the last few for himself. The packets heated with exposure to air, and when they touched his skin, he realized this was a poor solution. The handwarmers might keep his core temperature high enough to stave off death, but they did nothing to dry wet clothes. Just a recalibration of misery, keeping Parson and his charges barely this side of the grave. He clicked off the light and rubbed his legs.
“I never should have left them,” Parson said. “They’re probably dead by now.”
“You had to decide quickly,” Gold said, her voice now disembodied by the blackest darkness Parson had ever seen. Like a conversation with God, if you believed in God and He was a She.
“With all of us shooting, we might have fought them off,” Parson said.
“You can’t second-guess yourself now,” Gold said. She paused a moment. “Civilians pay us to make decisions they can’t handle.”
Civilians pay me to fly, thought Parson. Two hours ago, I was in my world. I should be up there somewhere, warm and sipping coffee at twenty-seven thousand feet. When we got shot down, what if I’d been scanning out a window instead of sitting in my seat? Could I have seen the missile before the sensors picked it up? Could I have called a break in time for Fisher to out-turn that fucking SA-7?
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