Joe Ledger Read online

  “Do your best. We’ll be monitoring all news coming out of the area, military, civilian, and other. If there is even a peep, that intel will be routed to you and the clock will start.”

  “If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”

  “Noted.”

  “What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”

  “Amirah would be a prize catch, Captain. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The Vice President thinks she would be a great asset to our own bioweapons programs.”

  “And is that what you want?”

  He told me what he wanted.

  Chap. 3

  The Helmand River Valley

  Sixty-one Hours Ago

  We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT—Small Kill Team—operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.

  Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed.

  “Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pickup point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”

  He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.

  The six of us went into the desert, split into two teams and heading into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.

  Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool. This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind—sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”

  Bob Faraday—a big moose of a guy whose call sign was Slim—ran point. It was getting dark fast, and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt from under rocks and rise from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread to join the ocean of shadows that was night.

  Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.

  As we ran up behind him, I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.

  I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.

  The dark objects were people.

  Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race and even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.

  “There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab?” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”

  “Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.

  Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”

  “Even so,” said Bunny.

  We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.

  The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”

  “Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  And it got longer.

  I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”

  Two long damn seconds.

  “Cowboy to Jukebox, do you copy?”

  That’s when we heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire. And the screams.

  We ran.

  “Night vision!” I snapped, and we flipped the units into place as the black landscape suddenly transformed into a thousand shades of luminescent green. We were all carrying ALICE packs with about fifty pounds of gear—most of it stuff that’ll blow up, M4 combat rifles, AMT .22 caliber auto mags on our hips, and combat S.I. assault boots. It’s all heavy and it can slow you down…except when your own brothers-in-arms are under fire. Then it feels like wings that carry you over the ground at the speed of a racing tiger. That’s the illusion, and that’s how it felt as we tore up the slopes toward the path Second Squad had taken.

  The gunfire was continuous.

  As we hit the ridge, I signaled the others to get low and slow. Bunny came up beside me. “Those are M5s, Boss.”

  He was right. Our guns have their own distinctive sound, and it doesn’t sound much like the Kalashnikovs the Taliban favored.

  The gunfire stopped abruptly.

  We froze, letting the night tell us its story.

  The last of the gunfire echoes bounced back to us from the distant peaks. I could hear loose rocks clattering down the slope, probably debris knocked loose by stray bullets. In the distance the wind was beginning to howl through some of the mountain passes.

  I keyed the radio.

  “Cowboy to Jukebox. Respond.”

  Nothing.

  We moved forward, moving as silently as trained men can when any misstep could draw fire. The tone of the wind changed as we edged toward the rock wall that would spill us into the pass where Second Squad had gone. A heavier breeze, perhaps. Moving through one of the deeper canyons?

  A month ago I’d have believed that. Too much has happened since.

  I tapped Bunny and then used the hand signal to listen.

  He heard the sound, then, and I could feel him stiffen beside me. He pulled Slim close and used two fingers to mime walking.

  Slim had been fully briefed on the trip. He understood. The low sigh wasn’t the wind. It was the unendingly hungry moan of a walker.

  I finger-counted down from three, and we rounded the bend.

  Jukebox had said that they’d found five bodies. Second Squad made eight.

  As we rounded the wall we saw that the count was wrong. There weren’t eight people in the pass. There were fifteen. All of them were dead. Most of them moving.

  Second Squad lay sprawled in the dust. The night vision made it look like they were covered in black oil. Jukebox still held his M4, finger curled through the trigger guard, barrel smoking. A man dressed in a white lab coat knelt over him, head bowed as if weeping for the fallen soldier, but as we stepped into the pass the kneeling man raised his head and turned toward us. His mouth and cheeks glistened with black wetness and his eyes were lightless windows that looked into a world in which there was no thought, no emotion, no anything except hunger.

  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 lin
e, 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.

  Amirah lunged forward to bite the man, but the Marines jerked on the ropes and stopped her when her gray teeth were an inch from the Afghani’s face. Amirah snarled and then laughed. It was impossible to say whether she was enjoying this game or if she was completely mad.

  As the men struggled to keep her in check they danced and shifted around, and I could see that there were two other Afghanis in the room. They lay sprawled like broken dolls. It looked like their faces had been eaten, and their throats were tangles of red junk.

  “It’s getting tough to hold this bitch,” growled one of the men, though he was smiling when he said it.

  “Please, in the name of God keep her away!” begged the bound man. He was already bleeding from half a dozen bites. Thin lines of dark red spider-webbed from each bite. The infection was slow for some, faster for others. Snot and spit ran from his nose and mouth as he pleaded in three different languages.

  A big man with sergeant’s stripes—the only one not holding a leash—bent behind the man and spoke with sharp impatience. “We’ll fucking stop when you fucking tell us what we want to know.”

  “But I don’t…. I don’t….” He was filled with too much panic to complete a sentence.

  The sergeant straightened and nodded, and the men slackened their holds on the rope leashes. Ami
rah instantly lunged forward and sank her teeth into the flesh of the man’s shoulder. Blood spurted hot and red beside her cheeks, and even from where I crouched I could see her eyes roll high and white with an erotic pleasure. The man’s piercing shrieks filled the whole cave.

  “Okay, pull the bitch off him,” snapped the sergeant, and she fought them, her teeth sunk deep into muscle. It took all three men to haul her back, two pulling and the sergeant pushing. He punched Amirah in the face and that finally broke the contact, but as they dragged her away a piece of sinew was clamped between her jaws and it snapped with a wet pop.

  She licked her lips. “Delicious…,” she said in English, drawing the word out, tasting the soft wetness of it, savoring the way the syllables rolled between teeth and tongue and lips.

  Bunny made a soft gagging sound beside me.

  This was what I was afraid of. What Church had been afraid of. During that fight against El Mujahid, we’d encountered several generations of the Seif al Din pathogen. Most of the early generations transformed the infected into mindless eating machines. The walkers. But at the end, when I’d squared off against El Mujahid himself, he’d been among the dead but he still retained his intelligence. It was the result of Generation 12 of the disease. He bragged about how his princess had saved him, had elevated him to immortality. The name Amirah meant “princess.”

  That had to be what we were seeing here. Amirah had become one of her own monsters. Was it an accident or part of some twisted plan? From the way El Mujahid bragged about it—right before I gave him a ticket to paradise—I had to believe that Amirah had chosen this path.

  Chosen. God almighty.

  “Fuck this,” I murmured and stepped into the cave. Bunny was right beside me. I held my .22 in a two-hand shooters grip; he had his M4. Our night vision was off, but we wore black balaclavas that showed only our eyes.

  “United States Army,” I bellowed. “Stand down, stand down!”

  The sergeant whirled toward me, his right hand going for his sidearm. I put the laser sight on him.

  “Stand down or I will kill you!”