A heavy blanket kept out not only light, but any semblance of fresh air. The sour stench of yak dung and wet wool cloyed at her throat. Sickened again, she suddenly realized her gaping mouth was pressed directly against the matted hair of the animal.
By slow degree, voices wormed their way in through the rancid blackness. She could make out the thick, phlegmatic tones of men speaking Tajik. Closely related to Persian, it was the common language of the high mountains of Central Asia. Hunt was fluent in Farsi and Pashto. Tajik was close enough she got the gist of what was going on.
Her captors were jubilant men, gloating as they recounted their recent bravery at attacking Outpost Bullwhip. It didn’t seem to bother them that a handful of ragtag Americans had killed over eighty of them. They praised fallen brothers who had died as martyrs in the holy fight, and cursed the dead Americans to roast in eternal fire.
Memories of the battle and of Lt. Nelson suddenly rushed back into Hunt’s fevered mind. She shivered when she recalled the strange little boy who loved chocolate and smiled ever so sweetly as he spoke of cutting off her head.
The yak stopped abruptly, its bony spine heaving with exaggerated breaths. Hunt tried to use the time to readjust but was strapped down too tightly. She was baggage and nothing else. Her hands and the backs of her calves, which must have extended beyond the coverage of the blanket, were numb with cold and lack of circulation. Karen found that if she strained her neck and pressed her cheek against the side of the beast, she could see a stone-covered path and a splatter of green manure beside a cloven black hoof.
Maybe she was dead and being carted off to hell by the devil himself. It would stand to reason… if the devil spoke Tajik.
“Cut deep, my brother,” a voice said somewhere to her right. “We reach Big Headache pass by nightfall…”
A donkey suddenly filled the air with sorrowful braying. Years before, when Karen had first visited the mountains of the Hindu Kush, she’d seen a string of forlorn pack animals with their nostrils slit up each side in a cruel gash. Her father had explained the men who traveled with their pack trains in the highest passes often cut their animals like this. They believed it would help the beasts draw more air in this place they called the Roof of the World.
Karen groaned when the yak lurched forward again, stumbling into a bone-jarring gait. The air grew colder as they climbed and she found herself grateful for the musky layer of warm air that surrounded the animal under the coarse blanket.
When the trail became particularly steep and the yak slowed to catch its breath or pick sure footing, the man walking behind let fly a stream of oaths and curses. His heavy stick struck Karen in the spine as often as it did the yak.
Unfazed, the weary animal continued on, plodding forward at exactly the same gate as before. It had been beaten many times before. She knew her beatings were just beginning.
An eternity later, the yak stopped again, this time on command. Karen strained her ears as shuffling footsteps approached. She heard the thump and scratch of fingers manipulating the cords on the packsaddle.
A sudden blast of light and cold washed over her as the covering was jerked away.
Rough hands tore at the ropes across her back and thighs. At first she thought they’d stopped to give her a break, but one look at these men told her they were not the sort to waste time giving her a pit stop. They’d only paused along the scant excuse for a mountain trial to readjust the saddles before starting a major uphill push.
Towering walls of craggy stone rose into the gray sky. The thin ribbon of trail ahead, wet with heavy fog, wound its way upward disappearing into the same clouds.
Gray sky, gray rock, gray void.
Hunt squinted at the silhouette in a black turban towering over her. The smell of the yak was suddenly a bittersweet memory compared to the foul stench of the man. Only hours before, in the relative safety of Camp Bullwhip, she had joked about the “sweaty-outhouse” smell of insurgents. Now, it made her want to vomit.
As her eyes slowly became accustomed to the light, she could make out the raw, peeling face of her yak driver. He’d been badly burned and wore a rancid bandage that looped over his head and under his chin. The sickening smell came from some form of infection as much as his lack of hygiene. Karen guessed him to be in his late twenties, but he was already missing most of his top teeth.
“ Tik-brik!” he commanded again in what she realized was English. He wanted her to take a break.
He raised a robed arm and pointed at an outcropping of rocks behind them, along the narrow excuse for a trail. To their right, gray stone rose up for thousands of feet. To their left, the thin band of rubble that passed for a path fell away into a gray nothingness filled with fog and the crash of a river far below.
“You go!” the man ordered again. He carried a roll of pink toilet paper on a leather cord draped over his shoulder. It was a sort of status symbol in a land where many still used a handful of stones to cleanse themselves.
He pointed with his Kalashnikov and tapped the toilet paper with the other hand to get his point across.
The yak heaved a shuddering sigh, relieved to be rid of its load. Hunt began to shiver uncontrollably, blinking to keep her balance on the narrow bit of rock and loose debris. They’d trained her for so many different scenarios back at Camp Perry-but being strapped to a packsaddle wasn’t one of them.
She pointed at the toilet paper with a trembling finger. The man shook his head emphatically and shoved her, pointing his rifle at a pile of rocks that was presumably supposed to serve as her outhouse.
There were other men up ahead along the trail with a dozen other yaks and donkeys. Some of the pack animals bristled with guns; others had tarped loads she couldn’t identify. The fog and the way the trail curved made it impossible to see more than twenty meters in either direction. She assumed there were even more men around the corner. The ones she could see were similarly dressed to her toilet-paper-wearing tormentor and, she had no doubt, smelled just as disgusting. They ignored her as if she wasn’t there, tending to their animals or weapons.
“You make fast!” the blistered insurgent barked as Karen picked her way around the head-high rock pile fifteen feet away. She expected him to follow her, but was relieved when he stayed at his yak.
She had no idea when they’d give her another chance so Karen took the opportunity to try and relieve herself. Her time at Camp Perry-and other, less well-known sites-had trained most of the shyness out of her. More times than she cared to remember, she and the other students had been made to squat on a raised platform with a simple hole cut in the center to “do their business.” Such acts had the effect of either stripping away hang-ups about privacy or pressing them so far back into the psyche that they were bound to cause some sort of mental illness in the future. No matter how many times a moderately well-adjusted woman pooped on a tower in front of fifteen classmates, such a delicate act would always be difficult with hateful men standing a few meters away.
Instead of resorting to stones, she ripped off the hip pocket of her BDU pants to clean herself. It was then she realized her captors hadn’t done a very good job of searching her.
Folded in her back pocket, sealed in a clear plastic pouch, was a rayon scarf with an American flag printed on the back. On the other side were printed instructions in six of the local languages-Pashto, Arabic, Farsi, Tajik, and Dari-advising the bearer of the scarf that they were entitled to a handsome reward if they assisted the American who owned it. It was her blood chit, a token to the local populace that she was worth more alive than dead.
Karen searched the other pockets in her baggy BDU pants until she found the stub of an eyebrow pencil. Praising herself for a shred of female vanity, she scratched out a hastily planned message.