A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
"Here." Nadim pulled out the tape and gave it to Skyler. "Give it a listen on the flight back. See if you get as frustrated as I am while I'm gone."
"What do you mean 'gone?'"
"Now's my turn. That's why I'm here."
"What are you gonna do?"
"There's a Soviet base down there. I'm gonna go there, pretending I'm a stray Afghan soldier seeking shelter, and give them the photos of you. They'll take me in and ask me what happened. I'll tell them I was part of a reconnaissance patrol that spotted an unknown force which engaged us in combat. I was ordered to take the pictures and run back to the nearest Soviet base and report about it. And that's it. I'll stay with them for a few days until Atticus gets me extracted. I'm the only one who knows Russian, so I'm the best suited for the task."
"You think they'll buy it?"
"They always do. I'm the best with alibis."
"I can vouch for that."
*****
Out of the grotto, less than a mile away on the expanse of ochre lowland below them, was a Soviet 40th Army outpost, using the charred remains of an ancient adobe village as an enclave. It was shaped in an upside-down "U," with both ends pointing at the mountain where the four men were located. The buildings that had survived the mortars had been converted into makeshift quarters, and in other areas, barracks had been installed to house the remaining soldiers. A dungeon and several stores of supplies to the north had been built from scratch, as had an airfield to the east, where a row of tanks was parked in single file. In the inner area, connecting with the southern desert, there was a large courtyard paved with sand swept tiles that once may have been used as a space to hold markets, and where, at that moment, a transport chopper wound slowly down as several soldiers crossed its lowered ramp hauling ammunition boxes. A hundred yards from the base at each cardinal point, there was a checkpoint where a soldier guarded each of two huts holding a safety barrier, each hut joined to the rest by an electric fence of barbed wire.
*****
Seiber crouched and glassed over the steppe. Around sixty soldiers. Two platoons. Maybe a company.
Nadim sat up on the ledge the four were lying on and folded his cloth with surgical precision into his bag, exposing a uniform Skyler assumed was from the Afghan national army.
"Patrol sweeps in five," Seiber said. "Thirty minutes each. About seven-margin for you."
Nadim stood up and walked away down the hill. No words. No looks. Cold professionalism. Military depersonalization. Maybe just a kid going through the motions, trying to not think it over. Maybe just suppressing the panic.
At a point when Skyler could no longer make him out by the back of his neck, Nadim squatted and waited for a distant truck to drive by. After he waited it out, he stood up and trudged his way across the plain, melting slowly in the heat haze as he approached the checkpoint to the south.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
