Khyber Run Read online

  "And...so? Spit it out, so I don't have to write the long-form report on you."

  Oscar held his gaze.

  I sighed. This was so not the time for a testosterone duel. “I went through the bazaar and then some of these shops looking for seeds for my grandmother's garden. This shop has nothing of the sort, but the proprietor is friendly, and his shopboy speaks enough English to run around finding what I want instead of giving me the inshallah, bukhra brush-off."

  "'Fraid I'll have to look over whatever he brings you, Doc. Best for all of us if I sort of spill out anything that looks like wild mountain herb."

  "Fine with me.” What wasn't fine was that I'd just invited him to sit in another man's home, drinking another man's tea. Which might be more than the shopkeeper could afford. “The dude's got to serve us tea, though, and it doesn't look like he lives too high on the hog. So find something to buy, if you can."

  He glanced around, and his face lit up. “Oh, look! That stuff that isn't thyme! My cook was asking for some of this.” He bought a handful of za'atar, which was carefully wrapped in a newspaper packet, then followed the shopkeeper into the back.

  Sitting around the fire with the tea was going to be awkward. I doubted the MP had much training in small talk, Oscar seemed to have taken lessons in being taciturn, and I wasn't supposed to know any reasonable amount of the lingo. So what's next?

  Oscar held his hands around his teacup and recited softly, in Pashto, a poem about a falcon.

  I looked at the mystified MP, and the dawning delight in the shopkeeper's face, and remembered to look puzzled. I wasn't supposed to have a clue what he was saying. The recitation wasn't all that long, and his enunciation sucked, but it was definitely a poem, probably a famous one.

  My father was a scholar. I should know things like this. I'd heard of the Prophet and his cronies passing time by reciting long poems, so why didn't I know any? My ears burned again. I sipped my tea in silence. When it was over, I congratulated Oscar stiffly, without the open admiration of the MP.

  The MP shuffled through his fanny pack. “I got something y'all might like."

  He hooked a speaker to his belt. A male voice crooned in Pashtun, “Close to heaven, West Virginia. Blue-mist mountains, broad and placid river..."

  The MP sang along with Denver's original English, his tenor well suited to the poignant tune. Oscar joined in with a hard-edged baritone. I sipped the watery tea and worked at hiding my blush. I knew the academic argument, that nothing in the Quran forbade music—much less lifting the human voice in song—but I also knew the arguments against it. Especially for men. And my great-grandfather forbade it, which outweighed any argument.

  The MP elbowed me, and I mumbled along with the English. I didn't actually sing, though. Bad enough to be associated with a stranger who had the gall to play music in a man's home.

  A glance under my eyebrows shocked me. The proprietor was openly weeping, but not from mortification or helpless anger. He simply wept, unashamed of his tears. “Beautiful, beautiful."

  Perhaps he meant the words, apart from the blasphemous melody? As verse only, a poem to recite in the long evenings, I tried to memorize the Pashtun version. “Shadows of the mountains, dark against the sky. I drink the taste of moonlight, and tears fall from my eyes..."

  Long conditioning held my tears inside, but they scalded my eyes. The song suited the Pakhtun mood. And my mood. I should have been home yesterday.

  When it ended, we all sat together quietly in the afterglow.

  In my khel, the women played hand-drums and sang, so long as their voices didn't travel outside where a male might be enticed or distracted. Men couldn't sing, though. Nor could we listen to musical instruments. Such music was not only frivolous, but likely to entrance the unwary—as I was now entranced—and create a vulnerability the deceiver could then exploit.

  Singing while listening to music was doubly haraam, like fornicating under the influence of alcohol, which I'd also done my share of. But the recitation says, “God wishes to lighten your burdens, for man was created weak. Do not destroy yourselves. God is merciful to you...” What could he have been talking about, if not good music and a good fuck? I just had to make sure not to die at some time when I had more dirt than light in my soul.

  The girl lifted the man's cup again, and when he refused it, she pouted just the slightest bit. He winked, and she smiled. In that instant, she was the perfect image of my cousin Nerie.

  In spring, we'd walked the fields before the plow, collecting the larger stones that floated up through the earth every winter, carrying them to the wall edging the field. My brother Hamid and our cousin Nerie and I usually worked together. Nerie was a year older than me, my grandfather's youngest brother's youngest child. She took my side when Hamid bullied me. When he missed some foolishness, like when Kam Ali and I threw dirt clods at one another and risked spooking the plow horse, she scolded me in his stead.

  Sometimes she called me her younger brother and finger-combed twigs or bits of dead leaf from my hair. I never corrected her, content in knowing that when she and Hamid married, her words would be true.

  She liked to remind me that since she and Grandmother together would someday choose my wife, I truly must be nice to her. So—to the extent Hamid allowed—she got all the sweets from our communal lunch, and I ate the most burned piece of bread.

  Whatever happened to Nerie?

  I probably didn't want to know. As in really, really didn't.

  The shopkeeper lifted his voice, high-pitched and ululating like a prayer. His song was so Pakhtun in sentiment I needed three lines to realize the lyrics were English. “Fighting soldiers from the sky! Fearless men who jump and die! Men who mean just what they say..."

  Some moments brand themselves on a man's soul. I knew I would always remember this dank, lamplit room and this thin, tepid tea, and an armless mujahid singing the “Ballad of the Green Berets."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter Five

  We met Mike and Echo for lunch and let our noses lead us to a cluster of restaurants.

  The first place we came to smelled really good, but I took a hint from the cowering doorboy and shooed the group on past. In the doorway of the second, our uniforms got too audible a growl from the clientele crouched about the half-dozen tables inside, too bug-eyed a look from the proprietor. Echo growled back at the nearest table, but Mike pulled him out of the doorway before we had to fight.

  The third place had no doorboy. Worse, it didn't smell right. I did an about-face and elbowed past Echo. The others faded out of my way.

  Another truck passed: yet another crew cab Toyota pickup with yet another plywood machine-gun mount behind the cab. If you piled all the Toyota crew cab trucks we'd seen in one field and every other motor vehicle in the next field, the Toyota truck pile would be bigger. In this one, the gun had been dismounted and was cradled in the arms of a beefy man in black with a coyote-and-black shemagh scarf. CIA. Or, as they were called here, OGA. Anyone else would be wearing camo.

  He'd probably paid twenty bucks for a three-dollar shemagh. Unless he'd taken it as a trophy from a corpse.

  Across the street and up one building, a doorboy bowed eagerly, entreating us to come to eat clean, fresh, delicious food. I eyed his neatly ironed clothes and smiled. He opened the door and invited us to smell.

  Mutton, dal, ginger, cardamom, cashews, onions, and pistachios tantalized me...and naan. Fresh naan. My stomach growled, and mine wasn't the only one. Inside, an old man threw up his one arm and called out an enthusiastic greeting.

  Mike sighed happily. “Even I know that pick-hair means we're welcome here."

  Privately, I'd bet he knew a whole lot more than that.

  "Or our money is,” Echo muttered.

  Certainly.

  At the other end of the room, a lithe young man—or man-tall boy—with heavily lined eyes danced for a group of men. They clapped and cheered for him.

  The half-dozen men crouche
d around the largest table drew their chooras—each with a blade half again as long as my knife—and laid them among the dishes and cups on their table. They muttered in Dari. I couldn't quite pick out what they were saying, but it didn't sound friendly, and it didn't sound local.

  The men at the far table kept their weapons on their backs, but their clapping and cheering lost some of its enthusiasm.

  Three Kalashnikovs, an M16, something shotgun-like that I couldn't see well, and a PSL rifle with a beautifully cut-out wooden stock joined the chooras.

  The proprietor pretended to see nothing untoward and waved us to take a nice table in the back. We pretended not to understand him. If we had to fight our way out from that table, it would be ugly. We settled at the smallest table, closest to the door.

  The Dari speakers raised another round of muttering, but the set of their shoulders lost some tension. I knew taking the seat by the door was a sign we considered ourselves lower in status than the other inhabitants of the room, and they knew it. For all I knew, even Echo knew it. But we were here to eat, not to establish our status.

  Oscar grabbed the seat that put his back to the wall. I put my back to the door simply because that would let me get out of here in exactly three steps. Echo and Mike put their backs to the room.

  Oscar casually unslung his rifle and laid it on the table, not exactly pointing at the Dari table, made two minute adjustments with a small screwdriver, then reslung it and laid a scarred KA-BAR on the table. Considering how he'd sized up the blade market, I'd have expected something put out by Strider or Randall, or a fixed-blade Hissatsu. But maybe the custom rifle and the no-nonsense blade together conveyed a message he found useful.

  Echo to my left had his SAW across his lap; his blade stayed sheathed. Mike's rifle stayed on his back, though he laid a wicked chisel-tipped tanto on the table. I followed Mike's example, though my M4 was a lot handier in close quarters than his sniper rifle, and laid my choora on the table, accessible but discreet.

  Or as discreet as a seven-inch blade can be.

  Oscar produced a small diamond sharpener and made some methodical passes over the edge of his blade. The faint shing! shing! probably scraped my nerves harder than the steel scraped that diamond matrix.

  Tension crackled in the room. The proprietor spoke quietly, pleadingly to the Dari table. They returned to eating, though their weapons remained on the table.

  Oscar offered the sharpener to me. I took it, surprised and pleased to feel a rather coarser grit on the other side, and set to the work of producing a beautiful edge.

  Gunfire rattled in the near distance. My guts clenched, but I forced myself to echo the steady shing! shing! that had so bothered me when Oscar did it. From under my lashes, I saw the Dari table finger their weapons, then return to eating. I didn't hear the Kalashnikov clack, that distinctive sound an AK-47 makes when taken off safety.

  Mike leaned forward. “You know, in most parts of the world, smart people hearing gunfire would be diving for the floor, and everyone else would be rushing the door."

  Echo grinned. “The front wall is more than a foot thick, the sound was from farther away than this street is wide, and if something happened to come down the street at the perfect angle to penetrate the door, Zulu would catch it before I would."

  Shing! Shing! “Any of you good enough to identify that weapon by sound?"

  "Those weapons,” Echo corrected. “Nope."

  The Dari table finished eating and gathered their weapons. I turned slightly, unable to keep my back to the door as it opened, and watched them leave. Outside, two small children had a mangy goat on a leash and were struggling to drag her down the street. A Toyota behind them blasted its horn. The goat jumped and bucked, jerking the kids one way and then the other. A Special Ops guy with a bushy beard yelled at them in Pashto, offering to shoot the goat if they didn't get it out of the way. The door closed.

  Echo shook his head. “Welcome to Afghanistan, where goat-pulling is not a figure of speech."

  Mike took delivery of a bowl of hot, scented water and washed his hands thoroughly. “You know, those of us who were kids in the eighties knew for a fact that we'd grow up to a Mad Max world. My brother and I probably watched The Road Warrior over a hundred times. Wore out two tapes, I know. Back home, that reality faded. The next decade's kids knew for a fact their apocalypse would involve hordes of faceless zombies. Or worse, zombies with known faces."

  He passed the bowl to Echo, then tore open a foil packet and recleaned his hands with an antiseptic wipe. “Here, we who have access to electronics and first-world medical care are like tourists in the eighties-style apocalypse vision. Like gamers in a fully immersive game. Maybe that's why so many of these guys act like children. Picture it. Within a few miles of where we sit, there's probably two thousand soldiers or semisoldiers like the OGA and psyops. Yet probably not two hundred of them could pass uniform inspection. Those Special Ops guys, now. You got to wonder how many times a loyal Talib has been shot because someone thought he was a Bearded American."

  Echo passed the bowl to Oscar, then pulled out his own foil packet and antiseptic wipe. “Or how many of the Special Ops have been shot for Taliban?"

  Oscar passed me the bowl. I washed, then cleaned my hands with a wipe as they had. I'd heard of cooks introducing interesting strains of E. coli to the wash water, low-tech bacteriological warfare, but given the fact we were going to be eating food prepared by the same folks who'd had an opportunity to contaminate this, poisoned wash water didn't seem worth worrying about. On the other hand, I'd seen some of the things these guys had touched in the bazaar, and frankly I didn't want to eat with hands that had washed behind theirs.

  Oscar took back his sharpener with a polite nod.

  Echo rearranged his shemagh as a bib. “Reckon the Zombie Hunters in the 122nd know they're geographically in the wrong century's apocalypse? That they bought into the wrong live-action game?"

  Mike snorted. “Have they? Groups that large carry their reality with them. Faceless, implacable hordes of hungry foes who don't stop for hunger or pain or fear? Individuals that get knocked down easily, but then there's two or ten replacements? The nerve-shredding awareness that infected people look perfectly safe until after they've gotten inside your personal defenses and killed you? Does this sound familiar yet?"

  Our dish came, fragrant rice topped with a generous pile of curried mutton.

  A dancer came to our table too. He wasn't as young as the one at the far table, which suited me just fine. Little boys don't do a damned thing for me. This one did.

  His heavily made-up eyes met mine. He smiled in recognition, and he danced for me. I leaned back to ease my hardening cock and to watch his flowing, deliberately seductive movements. He smelled and looked and moved like a healthy man. None of that was any guarantee, of course.

  It's been a long time since I insisted on a guarantee. That's what condoms are for.

  My cock ached for a good, hot ass. There were plenty on shipboard, plenty of them anonymous, even. But I didn't like the idea of one of them following me afterward, learning my name, maybe talking about me. So mostly I'd lain in my rack, hand curled tight around my rod, jerking hard enough my nuts bounced, imagining a warm pair of hairy buns rubbing against me.

  "He probably has six kinds of clap."

  The sneer snapped me awake, tightened the skin on my face.

  Mike rolled naan to make a curry burrito. “Shut up, Echo."

  "Seriously, I bet he does. Four incurable, and two that don't even have names."

  Mike looked through his eyebrows at Echo.

  The blond scowled but subsided.

  I waved the dancer away. He pouted, but went. Probably did have clap, at that. And I didn't have a condom.

  Besides, it was broad daylight. If I was going to lighten my load, I'd rather do it in the dark. Or at least without three marines knowing what I was doing. Probably insisting on watching my back. Laying bets. Making comments, or storing up ideas fo
r comments to make later.

  Four soldiers, US Army, came in, nodded to us, and sat around the larger unoccupied table. Not filling it, just taking it up. The dancer swam to them and took up a new dance, this one less a sensuous delight than an open invitation to carnality.

  One of the army men gulped. And gulped again. He was all but drooling. Now that one would be clean, or as clean as the army could keep him, and he sure looked willing. Better, he'd have his own supply of rubbers.

  No, the idiot was waving money at the dancer. The one-armed man came over to negotiate. Oscar watched them intently. Echo rolled his own curry burrito, his eyes flicking sideways on them. I felt eyes on me, though. Not Mike's. He also pointedly ignored the negotiations behind his left shoulder.

  I focused on another man at the gulper's table. Yeah, he was the one watching me, all right. He was blond, with a thin mustache that was probably a lot more of a pain to keep manicured than it was worth.

  I pushed myself to my feet, my gaze locked on his. “I need to use the head."

  Mike rolled another burrito. “Watch his back, Oscar."

  "No-go. I know where all my own parts are. I've been doing this without supervision for a good while now."

  Mike gave a look I couldn't read, but Oscar sat back down. I looked at Mustache and stepped outside. The cold hit instantly, but didn't do a thing to cool my throbbing dick.

  Mustache came out behind me. Looked like he'd shoved a cucumber under his fly. “Where?"

  I jerked my head at a collapsed building across the street. Earthquake damage, and unless I missed my guess, there'd be a hollow space behind it, the remnants of a room. Unstable as hell, or it would be under repair by now. Then again, I was no longer the kid-goat who felt compelled to climb every building, tree, and pile of rocks in sight. The gaps in the foot-thick walls wouldn't block the wind but should give a couple of minutes of privacy.

  Fuck. A hunched figure crouched there, swathed in a soiled burqa, too wrinkled to show whether it had ever been pleated.

  Mustache threw her a handful of coins. “Scram, Gramma."