Khyber Run Read online

  I followed, knowing he might be guide or kidnapper, soldier or vigilante or brigand. I'd rejected my heritage, effectively disowned my family, and was only occasionally going through the motions with my faith. Lately, I didn't give a shit about my career either. When a leaf lets go of the tree, any wind can catch it.

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  Chapter Two

  I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. Menthol. I gagged. Which brought up my own scent, so I had to fight down the dry heaves.

  The shadow I followed spoke, so quietly I strained to hear. “Oscar plus one. Do not answer. Oscar plus one."

  Ah. We were under observation. Probably from the smoker. Either they didn't know I was Zulu, or not even the code name Zulu needed to be said out loud here.

  What a time to be half shit-faced.

  We went in one heavy, splintery door. Oscar spent no time lingering in the doorway. I closed the door behind me without asking, leaving us in a totally dark and chill room, small enough I felt cold stone all round. But only for a second.

  A keypad abruptly lit up on the opposite wall. Oscar tapped a quick sequence on it. The inner door opened to a dimly lit room with a stone and hammered-iron fire ring in the center, a young blond dropping something into the teakettle over the fire, and a flat smell of lanolin and cooking oil. My stomach clenched.

  Oscar stepped in. “Why is your back to the door, Echo?"

  The blond grinned over his shoulder. He was very young, with brilliant blue eyes like my brother Mohammed's. “Nice to see you too, Oscar. To answer the question I'm sure you meant to ask, there's no more fried pumpkin. There is some leftover lamb, meaning the greasy, stringy carcass of the toughest old ram for miles around, and there's onions. And naan, not too stale. And green tea, which doesn't pretend to have either flavor or caffeine. No coffee, of course, but we did pick up some more caffeine pills. Where is he?"

  Oscar looked back at me. “Please come in. The door needs shutting."

  I eased in, locating the room's other two doorways—both dark—before I shut the airlock door. The lock clicked a quick syncopation behind me. Sounded like two dead bolts snicking home. I put a section of wall to my back.

  The darkness in the far doorway moved, revealing a man's outline. “Sorry to hear about your brother, Zulu."

  Ben. The grief I'd fought off with Jim Beam hit me. I flipped it to anger. “Who are you to speak of my brother?"

  Ah, that was so very rude. My ears burned. And my tongue throbbed, reminding me how recently I'd bitten it.

  The blond moved the teakettle, allowing more light from the fire ring. The man in the doorway, now visible, cocked his head like he was studying me. “We're the people who requisitioned you to arrive hours ago. Your skipper said you'd tied one on, and took the trouble to explain the situation. That's why Oscar went to get you, instead of leaving you to find your way here alone—and run the risk you wouldn't."

  Oscar opened a chest, took out a pair of chunky white ceramic mugs, and crouched by the fire. “Give him a little space. He ain't all here yet."

  Echo poured the white mugs full. Oscar sipped one. The other he lifted in my general direction before he set it by the fire. Invitation? Or command?

  I'm here enough to want answers. “What risk? When have I ever disobeyed a direct order?"

  Oscar looked at the man in the inner doorway, who kept watching me. Okay, so that guy was the boss.

  So what was his reason... Wait. “Zulu” meant they'd prepared to call me something other than Doc, even before I'd said anything. Nobody was assuming I'd be called Doc here. But there wasn't any other excuse for a bunch of bullet-sponges to drag me off my ship.

  The world swung around, reoriented. Yes, there was.

  What did ninety of every hundred feranghi need, more than they needed bullets or dollars? Translators.

  Someone had outed me as a native speaker.

  Or I'd pissed off someone who had in turn arranged to get me dumped in a war zone among people who'd been told I had a skill they needed—hoping I indeed didn't have it and that everyone would assume I was holding out on them.

  The doorway shadows let pass a man with a weathered face, dark hair, and faded denim eyes. He was at least my age. “Call me Mike."

  I really need to be sober for this. “Forgive my manners, but I heard mention of a shower? Please tell me he didn't mean a six-liter tease."

  Mike's smile crinkled his eyes, made them look kind. “Not by a long shot. The major did us right. We can use that much in the steam room alone."

  I'd been in a steam room once. Gave me a crushing headache. Didn't need to magnify the crusher I already had. “I'll settle for the shower, if it's all the same to you. You can use the time to get my paperwork laid out."

  The kindness left his eyes. “There are orders cut, if you agree to them, but the paperwork stays in the major's hands. You get to talk to him, hear him out, then tell him your decision."

  My nerves wound tight enough to stiffen my face. I gave him a smile I was careful to keep out of my eyes. “Shower?"

  He regarded me a moment, then waved me through the doorway.

  The shower had ten heads, but the two nearest the entrance had ball joints so I could aim them both at me. I stood under the hard rain a long time, letting the stinging drops beat on me, before I reached for the soap. The soap smelled strongly of evergreen and very faintly of peanut butter. Cashew butter, perhaps. It stirred memories of staring into the fire in the hujra, huddled under a blanket with my older brother, hand-clapping a rhythm while my uncles danced in the long winter evenings.

  My older brother Hamid was long gone. Now, Ben—

  The grief hit again, a knee-bending wave of it. I locked my knees and folded my arms over my chest and let it come. Like surf, drowning me. Scouring me with sand and burning salt.

  Ben was not yet born the night my father got shot. Everyone blamed the invading Shuravi, but it could have been a jealous kinsman. Myself against my brother. My brother and myself against my cousin. My brother, my cousin, and myself against all others.

  I was seven that night, old enough to join the men and sleep in the hujra instead of indoors with the women and the babies. But my mother, an American who'd taught at a Kabul girls’ college until the Shuravi emptied it, had insisted that I would not be circumcised as my brother Hamid had been, in the courtyard where the men gathered.

  My father had said that if he allowed her to take me to the hospital in Jalalabad for such a thing, my masculinity would be forever suspect. They'd fought bitterly, while I hid and hoped none of the cousins overheard.

  The last time I saw my father alive, he was driving the goats into the mountains. Shepherding was not his job—he was an educated man who paid one of my cousins to tend our animals—but I understood his need to go. The arguing at home made us all sick and miserable.

  So he'd left. So he died.

  We were still swimming in grief a week after the New Year when my favorite uncle called me to leave my mother's side and help tend the livestock. Mom, exhausted with the new baby, wrapped an old shemagh tightly about my neck and ears and told me to stay out of trouble.

  My uncle grinned roguishly, took me to the men's place, and made the cut while my grandfather and great-grandfather shot the family's most celebrated rifles over my head.

  Now I was again in the land of my fathers. Perhaps this time I would find my family, would learn what had become of them. Or perhaps I would find peace without knowing.

  A glimpse of movement made me fold my grief inward, leaving the plain skin envelope for anyone to see. That was the American way, wasn't it?

  Oscar stepped behind me to the showerhead farthest away. He was built lean, like a Pakhtun, his glossy black hair somewhat longer than most marines kept it. His voice said Texas, or somewhere west of there. Deep wrinkles radiated from eyes that had seen plenty of sun.

  My first impression made him a cowboy. A certain wolfishness in his manner, in his soundless stride,
raised the next assessment: gunslinger.

  I always wanted to try on a gunslinger for size. I blinked in the water and washed any trace of the thought off my face. He'd walked past my naked ass far too casually to have any interest in men.

  His ass wasn't white. His hands were darker than his legs, but not by all that much. And I suspect I would have noticed if nude sunbathing had become the fashion.

  "What tribe are you, Oscar?"

  He looked over one shoulder, and I wondered if tribe had become a non-PC term. He answered anyway. “The Desert People. Tohono O'odham."

  I'd never heard of them. “Like Navaho?"

  "Neighbors. Here I pass for Tajik or Hazara, until I open my mouth."

  I scrubbed my tongue and teeth with a clean corner of the washcloth. Ugh. At least I could de-crud my mouth. I couldn't scrub my brain, which was what needed it.

  Oscar didn't look Tajik to me. Hazara are supposed to make up a good chunk of the population, but I didn't know any. From now on my guess of who might be Hazara would be based on who looked like Oscar. With his brown muscular ass and powerful thighs.

  I reached down casually and gave my scrotum enough of a pinch to drop the dick.

  Oscar completed his shower in the time I took to rinse off. Neither of us shaved. No razors had been laid out. I had heavy five-o'clock shadow. He had none.

  When I came out to the dressing room, towel draped about my hips, Oscar followed. No modesty there—he carried the towel in one hand. He went past me, straight to a bin of clothes, hung his towel on a hook, and commenced dressing.

  I turned away. Drooling over the man-candy wasn't going to get me anywhere I wanted to go.

  The other bench was set like a shop's table with an array of camo in tidy stacks, all the pieces comfortably worn, each neatly labeled with a size tag. A line of new boots had been laid out on the floor before the bench. Small wads of dark cloth lay between each stack.

  I picked up one of the wads. A...jockstrap? I checked two more. Jockstraps. What the fuck?

  "Pick a tight one,” Oscar advised.

  My face heated. “I do not wear such things."

  I dreamed of them. Has more exciting underwear ever been devised? But I didn't wear them.

  The blond stuck his head in. “Major's here. Hurry it up."

  I threw a jock at him. “I won't wear this!"

  He grinned, snagging it out of the air and tossing it back. “Then you better find some other way to keep your balls from slapping the saddle with every stride, or by sunset you'll be waddling in circles, going meep...meep. Won't he, Oscar?"

  "Shut up, Echo."

  Echo blinked at that quiet order, and yes—that was an order. Oscar had rank as well as years on this boy Echo.

  I eyed the jocks. For hard riding, my father had used a long strip of cloth, wrapped to hold his scrotum high and forward. In the US, I'd worn very tight jeans for support. Now...it wasn't a salacious garment. It was a very practical garment.

  I hesitantly stepped into the nearest jock. It felt okay, I guess, like it wasn't there. When I bounced on my toes, though, my balls bounced more than the rest of me. No-go. This was supposed to be for support.

  The next stack of jocks felt like silk, which is unworthy of an honest man. The fourth had more give than the first. The last looked like it had been worn before, but it was certainly clean. And it fit right, cupping my balls like a hand.

  "Have a spare.” Oscar offered me another, black and clean but used. “Same style."

  I realized the two of them were his and pocketed the spare he offered. We dressed in silence, my mind lumbering like a tired bear from the amazing fact I'd been kidnapped to the question of why I'd been kidnapped to that fine brown ass of Oscar's. And his underwear, cupping my balls like a hand.

  The painful place was sealed away. Mourning my brother was something I'd have to do in my own way, in my own time.

  The major, a big man in a uniform completely sanitized of rank insignia, but with a pistol at his belt, ate heartily. Mike and Oscar ate with their rifles slung at their backs, no small trick for men sitting on the floor. Echo wore a shorter, blockier SAW, the squad automatic weapon. I felt distinctly unarmed among them.

  Echo and the major sat on their left hands. After a look around, Echo rearranged his feet to hide his soles. He was trying to get the basics of courtesy, then. Mike and Oscar ate with just their right hands, their soles comfortably tucked out of sight. They'd been here a while.

  The major took a gulp of tea. “Your records say you don't speak Pashto, Farsi, or Arabic. Why did you lie?"

  Such a blunt insult had to be deliberate. So I banked the coals of anger before answering. “I was asked once if I spoke Pashto. I'd never heard it called that before, and I wasn't really sure, sir, what it was. Nobody asked if I spoke Pakhto or Pukhtu. After that, they asked if I spoke any Towel-head; I don't believe I am required to answer that. I do speak a little Dari, but that isn't Farsi any more than Italian is Spanish. And I only know the Arabic we use to pray."

  Mike poured the major another cupful of green tea. Mike's fingertips were square, very tidy.

  The major's fingertips were spatulate, like Oscar's, but much paler and with long nails. “Do you know how much extra pay you've missed out on?"

  Mike renewed my cup too. I nodded politely to thank him. “Three hundred to a thousand bucks a month."

  "So you paid that much attention. Yet you didn't think it was your duty to come forward. Do the words critical need mean nothing to you?"

  I hid behind my cup, bitter and grassy tasting as it was. “Critical need for what? You want me to pray with the prisoners, or with some suspects somewhere? I can do that. My accent sucks, though. And I warn you, it's not a Muslim thing to be overcome by the power of the Word and start spouting confessions."

  The major leaned forward, knotting his red-blond eyebrows. “Why, Momand?"

  I studied my cup. Didn't he realize he'd said the answer? “I read the newspaper. I've seen the Abu Ghraib photos. I won't be part of an interrogation. I'd serve time before I'd do that."

  He settled back, carefully tucking his feet to hide the soles of his boots. “Serving time is certainly an option, given the need for accurate translation. But aside from custodial interrogation, where do you stand? Would you agree to translate for soldiers in the field?"

  I sipped slowly. We were getting closer to the point here. Closer to the reason I was sitting on the floor here—possibly AWOL—more than a thousand miles from my ship, wearing some other man's jockstrap under a uniform as sanitized as the major's.

  But one reason might not be all the reasons. An acceptable mission might lead to wholly unacceptable ones. Interrogation, spying. If they thought I would agree to head out undercover, to spy on my own people, they had another think coming.

  My own people. I'd decided more than fifteen years ago what that meant. Why now did the question arise again?

  Because the times had changed, and I had.

  I accepted a third cup resignedly. “If I agree to translate for soldiers in the field, y'all will document that I'm agreeing to translate, right? So then when someone can't crack a prisoner, and they decide to blame the translator and send for another, the other one might be me. So your answer, sir, is no. With all respect, no."

  His pale lashes lowered. “How about for one mission? One crucial mission. You get a letter of commendation out of it. Plus a...less official attaboy."

  He dangled that carrot, let me sniff it and think about it. He was all but promising me a promotion. I'd never heard of a chief petty officer being forced to translate. Of being forced to do anything he didn't want to do. Chiefs are administrators, mostly.

  But I didn't know the legal or the actual limits of what they could be required to do. And the major wasn't willing to put his support in writing. So the bait wasn't worth the risk.

  Before I could say no again, he added, nonchalantly, “And you'll take all that back to your nice, safe ship."

&n
bsp; My face tightened. He thought me a coward. Or did he instead think he could push the Coward button on a Pakhtun to get a predictable response? I took another sip and forced my aching brain to consider the matter. What he thought of my character didn't matter, but what he said could matter. What was the worst possible outcome, aside from being forced to assist the interrogators?

  Being sent to the brig at Miramar for a couple of years would suck. They'd probably take my pension, too.

  He could dump me here, let me try to get back to my ship without assistance, let me deal with the fallout of having left it without orders being cut. That would pretty well gut my career. I'd never see chief, but the pension would be there as backup income while I transitioned to civilian life.

  I looked at Oscar's carefully blank face, then at Mike's blandly courteous one, then at Echo's squinted blue eyes and tilted head. If I'd been looking at Echo when the major dropped that insult into my tea, what would I have seen in that open, boyish face?

  The major looked past me toward Mike, giving me a chance to study his face. A major is high enough in rank to have ordered someone to find a translator for him. This was different. He wanted me for something specific.

  And that, I discovered, intrigued me.

  I took another bitter sip. “Could you list me as medic instead of translator on the reports for that one mission?"

  He relaxed, his whole body shape changing, settling to a rounder form as he shed his tension. “Roger that."

  I finished my tea deliberately. They drank silently with me, as if awaiting my decision. A very Pakhtun courtesy, since we all knew I'd just agreed to join their venture, whatever it was.

  They'd known I would accept it, or I wouldn't be wearing a jockstrap now. “What is the nature of the mission?"

  The major again looked past me. The other men stepped away from the table to the three doorways. Each turned on a boom box. One broadcast the babble of a mess hall. The others blasted a newscast and a sermon—both with voices and accents very like the major's.