“Bruce Lee?” I ask. He hates it when I call him that. “Did you know movie stars are just like us? Who knew, man?”
Jason Lee stops doing sit-ups. He looks up at me where I’m leaning back into the corner of our cell. “Quiet,” he says. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear wha—”
And then a tank round discharges through the wall across the room. A blazing shower of rebar and cement shreds my cell mate into big flabby chunks of flesh wrapped in what’s left of dust-colored army fatigues. Jason was here and now he’s gone. Like a magic trick. I can’t even process this.
I’m huddled in the corner—miraculously uninjured. Through the bars, I see the duty officer is no longer at his desk. There isn’t any desk anymore. Just chunks of rubble. For a split second, I can see through the new hole that’s been blasted in the wall across the room.
There are, as I suspected, tanks on the other side of it.
A cloud of frigid dust rolls into the room, and I start to shiver. Jason Lee was correct: It’s a cold motherfucker out there. It registers that despite the new renovation across the room, the bars of my cell are just as strong and steady as before.
My hearing starts to return. Visibility is nil, but I identify a trickling sound, like a creek or something. It’s what’s left of Jason Lee, bleeding out.
Also, my magazine seems to have disappeared.
Fuck.
I press my face against the mesh-wire-reinforced window of my cell. Outside, the base has gone FUBAR. I’ve got eyes on the alley leading to the main pavilion of the Kabul green zone. A couple of friendly soldiers are out there, crouched against a mud-brick wall. They look young, confused. They’re in full rig: backpacks, body armor, goggles, knee pads—all that crap.
How safe can safety goggles make a war?
The lead soldier peeks his head around the corner. He hops back, excited. He yanks out a Javelin antitank missile launcher and loads it, fast and smooth. Good training. Just then, an American tank cruises past the alleyway and spits a shell without stopping. It lobs over the base and away from us. I feel the building quake as the shell impacts somewhere.
Through the window, I watch the antitank soldier step out of the alley, sit down cross-legged with that log on his shoulder, and get filleted by incoming antipersonnel tank fire. It’s an automated tank protection system that targets certain silhouettes—like “guy holding antitank weapon”—within a certain radius.
Any insurgent would have known better.
I frown, forehead pressed against the thick window. My hands are jammed in my armpits to stay warm. I got no idea why that American tank just erased a friendly soldier, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with SAP One committing suicide.
The remaining soldier in the alley watches his buddy go down in pieces, turns, and runs back toward me. Just then, a billowing black cloth blocks my view. It’s a robe. A bad guy just crossed in front of my window. I hear small arms fire, close.
Bad guys and nutso equipment? Fuck, man. When it rains it pours.
The robe flutters away and the whole alley just disappears, replaced by black smoke. The glass of my window buckles and fractures, slicing my forehead open. I hear the hollow concussion a split second later. I fall back onto my bunk, grab the blanket, and pull it over my shoulders. Check my face. My fingers come away bloody. When I look back out the fractured window, there are only dust-covered lumps in the alley. Bodies of soldiers, locals, and insurgents.
The tanks are killing everybody.
It is becoming very clear to me that I’ve got to find a way out of this cell if I want my future to include breathing.
Outside, something roars by overhead, ripping dark vortices out of the rising smoke. Probably an armed drone. I cower back in my bunk. The dust is starting to clear out now. I spot the keys to my cell across the room. They’re still attached to a broken belt, hanging from a splintered piece of chair. Might as well be on Mars.
No weapons. No armor. No hope.
Then a blood-covered insurgent ducks in through the blasted-out hole in the wall. He catches sight of me, stares wide-eyed. One side of his face is plastered with brown-white alkaline sand and the other side is caked with powdered blood. His nose is broken and his lips are swollen up from the cold. The hair of his black mustache and beard is fine, wiry. He can’t be more than sixteen years old.
“Let me out, please. I can help you,” I say in my finest Dari. I pull the rag off my face so he can see my beard. At least he’ll know I’m not active duty.
The insurgent presses his back against the wall and closes his eyes. It looks like he’s praying. Dirt-caked hands pressed flat against the blasted concrete wall. At least he has an old-fashioned revolver hanging on his hip. He’s scared but operational.
I can’t make out his prayer, but I can tell it isn’t for his own life. He’s praying for the souls of his buddies. Whatever’s happening out there sure ain’t pretty.
Better hit the road.
“The keys are on the floor, friend,” I urge. “Please, I can help you. I can help you stay alive.”
He looks at me, stops praying.
“The avtomata have come for us all,” he says. “We thought the avto were rising up against you. But they are thirsty for all our blood.”
“What’s your name?”
He eyes me suspiciously.
“Jabar,” he says.
“Okay, Jabar. You’re going to survive this. Free me. I’m unarmed. But I know these, uh, avtomata. I know how to kill them.”
Jabar picks up the keys, flinching as something big and black barrels down the street outside. He picks his way over the rubble to my cell.
“You are in prison.”
“Yeah, that’s right. See? We’re on the same side.”
Jabar thinks about it.
“If they have put you in prison, it is my duty to free you,” he says. “But if you attack me, I will kill you.”
“Sounds fair,” I say, never taking my eyes off the key.
The key thunks into the lock, and I yank the door open and dart out. Jabar tackles me to the ground, eyes wide with fear. I think he’s afraid of me, but I’m wrong.
He’s afraid of what’s outside.
“Do not pass before the windows. The avtomata can sense your heat. They will find us.”
“Infrared heat sensing?” I ask. “That’s only on the automated sentry turrets, man. ASTs. They’re at the front gate. Aimed away from the base, toward the desert. C’mon, we need to go out the back.”
Blanket over my shoulders, I step out of the hole in the wall and into the frigid confusion of dust and smoke in the alley outside. Jabar crouches and follows, pistol drawn.
It’s god’s own raging dust storm out here.
I double over and run for the rear of the base. There’s a phalanx of sentry guns covering the front gate. I want to stay clear of them. Slip out the back and get someplace safe. Figure it out from there.
We round a corner and find a black-blasted crater the size of a building, just smoldering. Not even an autotank has the ordnance to do this. It means the drones aren’t just spotting rabbits up there—they’re launching Brimstone missiles.
When I turn to warn Jabar, I see he is already scanning the skies. A fine layer of dust coats his beard. It makes him look like a wise old man in a young man’s body.
Probably not too far from the truth.
I stretch my blanket out over my head to obscure my silhouette and form a confusing target for anything watching from above. I don’t have to tell Jabar to stay under the overhangs, he already does it by habit.