Spider and Zorro — the L.A. SWAT kid and the other Ranger — were almost invisible beneath the seething mass of bodies that crouched over them, tearing at clothing with wax-white fingers and at skin with gray teeth.
“Holy mother of God,” whispered Slim.
“God’s not here,” I said as I put the pinpoint of the laser sight on the kneeling zombie. It was a stupid thing to say. Glib and macho. But I think it was also the truth.
The creature bared his teeth and hissed like a jungle cat. Then he lunged, pale fingers reaching for me.
I put the first round in his breastbone and that froze him in place for a fragment of a second, and then put the next round through his forehead. The impact snapped his neck, the round blew out the back of his skull, and the force flung him against the rock wall.
The other walkers surged up with awful cries that I will never forget. Bunny, Slim, and I stood our ground in a shooting line, and we chopped them back and down and dead. Dead for good and all. Painting the walls with the same dripping black. The narrow confines of the pass roared with thunder, the waves of echoes striking us in the chest, the ejected brass tinkling with improbable delicacy.
Then silence.
I looked down at the three men. They’d been part of Echo Team for a day. Less. They’d been briefed on the nature of the enemy. They were highly trained men, the best of the best. But really, what kind of training prepares you for this? The first time the DMS encountered the walkers they’d lost two whole teams. Twenty-four seasoned agents.
Even so, the deaths of these good, brave men was like a spear in my heart. It was hard to take a breath. I forced myself to be in the moment, and I slung my M4 and drew my .22 and shot each of the corpses in the head. To be sure. We carried .22s because the low mass of the bullet will penetrate the skull but lacks the power to exit, so the bullet bounces around inside the skull and tears the brain apart. Assassins use it, and so does anyone who has to deal with things like walkers.
“Bunny, drop a beacon and let’s haul ass.”
Bunny dug a small device from a thigh pocket, thumbed the switch and tucked it under the leg of one of the dead walkers, making sure not to touch blood or exposed skin. The beacon’s signal would be picked up by satellite. Once we were clear of the area, an MQ-Reaper would be guided into the pass to deliver an air-to-surface Hellfire missile. Fuel-air bombs are handy for cleanup jobs like this. When you don’t want a single fucking trace left.
We didn’t take dog tags because the DMS doesn’t wear them. We try to have a “leave no one behind policy,” but that doesn’t always play out.
We moved on.
The night was vast. Knowing that helicopters and armed drones and troops were a phone call away didn’t make the shadows less threatening. It didn’t make the nature of what we were doing easier to accept: hunting monsters in a region of the Afghan mountains dominated by the Taliban. Yeah, find a comfortable space in your head for that thought to curl up in.
This was pretty much the opium highway. The friendlies who lived in the nearby villages were little or no help, because even though they idealistically supported us and hated the Taliban, they also feared the terrorists more than they feared us; and without the trickle-down of drug money, they’d starve to death. It was a devil’s bargain at best, but it was the reason that no one can win this war. The best we could hope for was to slow the opium shipments and keep the Taliban splinter cells underfunded and ill-prepared for a major, coordinated terror offensive of the kind they’ve always promised and we live in fear of.
Something flared ahead and I held up my fist. The others froze.
The pass we were following curled around the mountain like the grooves on a screw, turning and rising toward the peak on the far side. Sixty yards ahead, half-hidden by an outcropping of rock, light spilled from the mouth of a small cave. The overhang would have made the light invisible from aircraft, but not for us on the ground. A shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall and as I watched through narrowed eyes it resolved into the shape of a man. A Marine.
He walked to a spot outside the spill of light, looked up and down the pass, and then retreated into his nook. In the dark, he didn’t see the three big men crouched behind boulders. The sentry went to the mouth of the cave and peered inside. The glow let me see his face. He was grinning.
Then we heard the scream.
A man’s voice, pleading. A string of words in Pashto, ending in a screech of pain that was cut off by the sharp crack of a palm on flesh.
And the sound of a woman laughing.
It was not a pleasant laugh. It held no cheer, no goodwill. No warmth. It was deep and throaty, strangely wet, and it rose into a mocking screech that turned my guts to gutter water.
We did not hail the guard. The situation felt wrong in too many ways. I signaled Bunny to keep his eyes and gun barrel on the sentry as I circled on cat feet behind a tall slab of rock. That put me on the man’s six o’clock, ten feet from his back. Even if this all proved to be a zero-threat situation I was going to fry this guy for his criminal lack of attention to duty. A sentry holds everyone’s life in their hands; this guy was handing me everyone in that cave.
I screwed the .22’s barrel into the soft spot under his left ear, grabbed him by the collar and slow-walked him back. Slim was there and he spun the guard and put him down. I didn’t see the blow, but it sounded like a tree being felled. The guard went out without having said a word. Slim watched our backs as Bunny and I crept to the cave entrance…
…and looked into a scene from Hell.
The cave clearly saw regular use. There were chairs, a card table, ammunition cases, cots, and a stove with sterno burners. A Taliban soldier was tied to folding chairs, ankles and wrists bound with plastic cuffs. His clothes had been slashed and torn away to reveal his pale chest and shoulders. His turban hung askew, one end trailing down behind him where it puddled on the rocky ground between his heels. Several Kalashnikovs stood against the wall, magazines removed.
The other three men of the Marine squad stood in a loose semicircle around the man, laughing as he screamed and begged and prayed. All of them were sweating; a couple had red, puffy knuckles that spoke to the way this session had started. If this was just a group of frustrated Marines knocking the piss out of a Taliban grunt, partly to blow off steam and partly to try to get a handle on something that might result in some real good being done, then I might have just stepped in and calmed it down. Yelled a bit, given them the appropriate ration of shit, but basically dialed it all down with no charges being filed.
But that’s not what we were seeing. These guys had taken it to a different level and in doing so had crossed the line between an attempt to gather useful intelligence and something else. Something darker that was not part of soldiering. Something that wasn’t even part of torturing or “enhanced interrogation.” Something that went beyond Abu Ghraib and into the darkest territory imaginable.
They had Amirah — scientist, designer of the Seif al Din, wife of one of the world’s most hated terrorists. There were two ropes looped around her neck, each end pulled to an opposite side by a Marine so that she could not approach either of them. All she could do was lunge forward toward the prisoner. Her wrists were bound behind her. Her ankles were hobbled by a length of rope. She couldn’t flee, couldn’t run. The men had stripped her to the waist, revealing a body that was beautifully made but which now inspired only revulsion. Her once olive skin had faded to a dusty gray-green and there were four black bullet holes — one in her stomach, three in her back — that were crusted with dried blood and wriggling with maggots.