Authors: Amber Green
Khyber Run (16 page)
I focused on the glow, on the way his reaming stoked it like bellows stoked the forge fire. Bigger. Hotter. Hotter. He was short-stroking now.
Without warning, the heat blazed through me. I cried out, bucking against the mat.
"Shh."
Took a second to recognize Oscar's hiss. Just then he went rigid, his strong fingers digging into my hips, and hissed again.
I listened to the wind scouring rock with sand and suddenly hoped he was wearing a condom.
He collapsed against me, warm and heavy, a shield against the cold.
My hands weren't caught between my body and his; they were fisted against the mat. I felt the loops, parachute cord all right, cut cleanly between my wrists. I had no idea when he'd cut me free.
One loop shook off. The other fell free when I thumbed the cut knot.
Oscar rolled to the side and made a reassuringly familiar stretched-latex noise. I could all but see him knotting the condom. “Towel, Zu?"
I reached into the pack, fumbling a little, and found the bandannas. Screw Oscar. I needed one to clean myself and the mat and one to keep ready for next time.
Yeah, next time he'd be the one left with a sore ass. Unless one of us got shot before the chance arose.
I pulled on my long johns and pants and wished briefly I still had a clean pair of socks. Or a spare pair. We'd walked the soles out of both my spares. I left my one pair capping my boots. Cold feet tonight would be worth it when I had dry, aired socks for the walk tomorrow.
I spread the sleeping bag. Oscar and I lay atop it, nestled like lovers so that my poncho liner covered us both. And fuck me—why did I feel so good?
We woke in the first shiver of predawn light, his morning wood against my ass, mine under my hand. I pinched mine down, moved away from his. He grunted and left the hollow we'd sheltered in.
I took the time to wash my face and hands in a cupful of the icy water.
I thought I heard a
shpelai
, the bamboo flute shepherd boys played. From far away, the delicate, haunting sighs might have been the sound of moonlight.
My great-grandfather allowed shepherds to play flutes and sing at night, as the sound seemed to calm the sheep. He forbade flutes in the daytime, or close to the hujra where they might lure a man's thoughts outside the track of obedience. The foolish “children's songs” my mother had taught us in Kabul left him sputtering and chewing his beard. Most of all, we boys could not combine singing and instruments.
Even the
naat
, the women's songs of faith, were allowed to be sung, or played, but not both together. And certainly not where a male might be enticed or distracted from his own observances.
In a city minaret, the muezzin would be patiently holding up two threads, ready to sing out the call to prayer as soon as he could tell the black thread from the white.
La ilaha ilallah.
I stretched, ears pricked for raised voices in the cold air. None. Prayers don't need vocalization; only men do. But the coming of this dawn called for unsubdued praise. So I raised my own voice for the first time in months. Maybe a year. Maybe more. “La ilaha ilallah."
The echoes mingled one line with the next. “La ilaha ilallah,” healing over my clumsy enunciation of the classical Arabic. There's something manifestly
right
about liquid chants flowing over stark rock. “La ilaha ilallah."
When I finished, Oscar scuffed a foot, like knocking on a door, and reentered the hollow.
I bristled, waiting for the snide comment any of my shipmates would have offered. But none came. He simply opened a pack and commenced laying out an inventory of what we had to carry.
I crouched and watched him. I already knew what I'd brought and where it was packed. My control-freak tendencies aren't the jealous kind, though; it doesn't bother me to let other people know all the details too.
Besides, the pause gave me a chance to luxuriate in the peace of the morning. Frost shimmered on the rocks about us, where our breath had collected. The moon rested on a smear of cirrus clouds above the western horizon.
One star hung just outside the horns of the moon. Venus or Jupiter.
El Zohra
, I corrected myself.
El Moshtara.
On summer nights in Kabul, when I was very small, we'd sleep on the roof instead of in the brick-oven apartment. My older brother Hamid and I would pillow our heads on our father's arms, and he would tell us about the stars, the planets. Years afterward, I realized my father's eyesight was too poor to see what he described so well. How hard had he studied to be able to teach us?
I unfolded the printout with the photos of the man who had killed my little brother. There was another printout with it. More photos.
Two shots of a magnificent gray mare, a classic Arabian beauty. A pixilated zoom-in of her laughing young rider. A group photo, showing the rider between Tango and Mike, with an arm draped around each of them. Oscar stood to Mike's left, with Mike's arm draped over his shoulder and the rider's hand resting on it, but he remained indefinably separate. The four of them wore T-shirts with sweaty dark patches, and their faces shone with sweat. The rifle barrels rising behind them wore condoms to keep the sand out.
Mike and Oscar and my brother. And the man who'd murdered him.
My brother. Ben. Sorrow. My hands shook. I braced my wrists against a frost-rimed stone, waiting for the sun to come up so I could see his face more clearly.
He'd always loved Arabians, always wanted one. I was glad that dream, at least, had come true.
I remember teaching him to shoot, with an old Winchester. My mother had put a stop to the lessons, but not soon enough.
He was born shortly after my father's death, and to my grandparents’ distress had been named Sorrow. In the US, he became Benoni, then just Ben. He'd been so mischievous, so full of life and fun.
I'd enlisted when he was what, ten? And seen him only once since then. So yes, I'd abandoned him, but if I hadn't enlisted, the four of us would have been split up. Foster homes could sometimes stretch to accommodate up to three siblings together, but I made four. So we would have been split, two to one home and two to another. Which meant that when I aged out of the system, I would leave one brother alone among the infidels. Without me, the three of them had a chance to stay together.
Sunlight spread around me. Ben had grown up well. His eyes were deep, but not hollow. His teeth were straighter than mine or Omar's. If I'd never had my nose broken, I still wouldn't have those even, balanced features. Some Bollywood actor playing me might look like this man.
My brother.
I folded the page, eventually, and managed to make it slide into my map pocket.
Apart from his rifle and knife, Oscar had a wicked-looking machine pistol. I didn't recognize the style and suspected it was unauthorized. Especially since he hadn't shown it before. His three-day assault pack also held some energy bars, meticulously coiled black rappelling line, and a hank of 550 parachute cord. He had one two-liter water pack that was full and one nearly empty, a jar of iodine pills and a cup filter to purify found water, and a solar ground still—a square of plastic and a cup. That would have been useful last night. It might yet turn out to be useful, depending on what water we could find in the course of the day. He had bullets for the rifle, four magazines for the machine pistol, a pocketknife, two pressure bandages and a packet of blood-stop powder, some camo safety pins, a spare shemagh, and the clothes he was wearing. Everything else was lost with his horse.
"You don't carry your phone on you?"
He shook his head.
"GPS was in your saddlebag?"
He nodded, his lips a straight line across his face.
I had the sudden urge to reassure him. “We know where we are, and we know where we're going. Unless we have to detour around another lascar, all we need to do is follow the map."
He looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “Got a map?"
Well no. The maps had been programmed into the iPad and the GPS. Which the mujahidin took. Which brought another problem front and center. “They'll know where we're going."
"No. If they break the encryption without erasing the data, which isn't a given, they'll find villages marked. They won't know why we're interested or which is our goal. Did the ‘din last night say anything to indicate whether they think we're worth ambushing?"
His voice became more animated and less clipped as he spoke. I felt knots in my chest untie in response. “They saw the landing site. The consensus appeared to be that three riders with a spare came by horse, then left by helo, abandoning the horses."
He grunted and measured off a length of the smallest cord. “Pack up. I'll lace the load on you."
In a pig's aye-aye
. I pulled myself together and shook out the reflexive anger. He had the rank and the skills. I'd be his pack ass if it let him do what he was good at, because maximizing his prowess maximized my chance of success. “I'll need a quick-release knot."
He twisted a smile at me. I thought he was telling me that was too obvious to need saying. Then I remembered the knots last night and did some of the breathing exercises I'd learned in anger management.
A hand touched my shoulder. I moved away.
The hand hung in midair, then withdrew. “Zu? You okay?"
"In what way do you mean
okay
? Am I scared? No. Injured or sick? No. Am I pissed about being treated like a dancing boy? Yes."
He turned to his own pack. After a moment he spoke as if to one of the coils of line. “You said harder."
Not to him. Not that I remembered. And I'd been dead sober.
His voice roughened. “You only take it from officers? Or only from white men?"
It took a moment. Then I remembered the blond in Jalalabad. I laughed. “That guy with the mustache was an officer?
He
said harder."
Capable hands hesitated. Then they stroked the lines, nestling one coil inside the other.
I felt them stroking me, just as capably. I shivered.
"I guess I owe you one, Zu."
I thought of touching his shoulder, but he might move away. As I had. So I put it in words. “I'll take you up on that."
At first, Oscar was difficult to keep up with, but it got easier when I set my own pace, marching under my load, and let him range about checking for oddities or movement to either side, ahead, and sometimes behind. Looking up was strictly his job. I had to stop and cut a thorn tree to make a walking staff.
The road was deeply cratered in several places, and when we moved through a valley where I could see side to side, I saw the fields were deeply cratered too. The number of weeds indicated the ground was fertile but left fallow. The craters were too steep-sided to plow.
How hard would it be to helo in a little earthmover to level out the ground, move the stones aside, make this field fit to plow again? The army had the equipment. They might do it for the good PR. I'd heard the arguments about giving people something to lose.
People with nothing to lose are ripe for any extremist who claims to have answers. People who claw a living out of sand and stone don't readily give it up to go join a jihad, but there has to be an
it
to give up.
Oh, but the hollow-eyed students with their burning souls would notice the feranghi cleaning up one field. They'd bring a lascar through to burn the crops and everything in the houses. The shunnings and beatings would follow, until the farmers gave up and left. Then the nicely leveled field would become the property of the strongest bully in the area.
But what if someone came through along a straight line, like Sherman's line to the sea, only instead of destruction they leveled all the craters and rubble piles that were visible from the sky? Then this would be just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of leveled fields.
Anyone who wanted to do that needed to do it now, before the spring planting.
Close to noon, we reached a village. The women at the well covered their faces, and, after quiet discussion among themselves, moved aside so we could drink. It was a hospitable gesture, but we couldn't very well say thank-you to women we didn't know. Oscar solved the problem by saying “Dera manana” to a snot-nosed toddler clinging to one woman's skirts.
Oscar's filtration cup turned out to work better than I'd expected. I was just as happy to sit on a pile of rubble that had been someone's front wall, resting my shoulders and back, staring at the sky. When I stood and stretched, Oscar gestured me to leave the load where it was. He watched it while I explored this place's miserable excuse for a bazaar.
We'd missed the horse market by several days, naturally. I bought broiled pumpkin kebabs from a pair of boys in colorfully embroidered caps. They looked bored and very happy to strike up a conversation with a traveler.
After paying, I asked if this was where “those buzkashi stallions” had been bred. For a reasonable fee, the boys eagerly described an outlying khel that produced very strong stock—without a doubt the chapandaz-quality stallions we had heard of. For a reasonable fee, they could give us directions. One of their cousins even had a truck that could take us there—for a reasonable fee—to ensure we arrived well rested and without getting lost.
I'd about reached my limit of tolerance for the shakedown. I was about to ask if we'd be charged a reasonable fee for the truck, a separate reasonable fee for the driver, and a third fee for the petrol, but Oscar's chuckle reined me in short.
The horse-breeding khel didn't seem to have electricity, but there had to be a generator or a solar cell in there to power a phone, because they sure knew we were coming. They mobbed the road to greet us and practically dragged us to the corral where three fine colts and one that looked extraordinary danced. They asked only the price of a new car for the best two, which were partially trained.
I admired them while Oscar selected a pair of sturdy fillies, too young to be valuable as breeders and only green broke, but with short, thick-muscled backs and heavy leg bones. They cost a full magazine apiece, along with all of Oscar's rupees and euros. I got the filly that the saddle fit, while Oscar got a worn-out local saddle. Then we headed east again, seeking a pass we could use to get across the border.