Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part Three (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read online

  “It’s very strange.” Bibi listened as several other teens argued with Aram, whose face was set in a stubborn mask. “They say I am not the police about whom they are concerned.”

  “Why would they be worried about the police at all?”

  “I do not know. Here is what is even more curious. The others say I am the right one.”

  “The right police?”

  “So, it would appear. But if that is true, Kate,” Bibi said, “who is the wrong?”

  2

  “Oh, come on,” Kate said, although the evidence was laid out, plain as day, and the cavern was well-lit by hissing gas lanterns dangling from iron hooks. “You are shitting me.”

  “Jesus, how hard did they hit them?” Tompkins asked.

  “Hard enough to render them unconscious and truss them up like goats, Corporal.” Bibi turned from the four men crumpled on the cavern floor and looked back down a stone tunnel leading from the cave complex’s main entrance to this rough-hewn chamber. “That is quite some distance to drag dead weight, too.”

  I’ll say. Kate recognized faces, though she couldn’t dredge up names. Three of the villagers were bad off but not terrible, and she counted their being awake—albeit bloodied up, gagged, zip-tied at the hands and ankles, and probably nursing the worst headaches of their lives—a plus. Still the news wasn’t all bad. Barring an intracranial bleed or subdural or bone splinters driven into their brains, three would live. They just might not enjoy it much for the next day or so.

  The fourth guy, the one just kind of sprawled in a slick of semi-coagulated blood like a discarded sack of laundry ... well, he was a completely different story.

  “Is he dead?” Tompkins asked as she clicked on her headlamp. “Could be why the kids are so spooked and won’t come down.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s feeling all that well.” Peeling back the unconscious man’s left eyelid, Kate flashed a penlight and watched how the pupil constricted. “Knocking out your neighbors would spook me, too.” After checking out the guy’s right pupil—hmmm, a little sluggish—she slotted her penlight into a pocket and shoved a sleeve from her left wrist.

  “What are you doing?” Bibi crouched opposite. Keeping their distance, the kids huddled in a knot. Aram and a few of his buddies stared daggers at Bibi’s back. “Can I help?”

  Three. Pause, pause. Four. Kate shook her head. “Not yet.” Five. “I’m watching him breathe.”

  “Oh. What will that tell you?”

  “How fast we have to move here.” Six. “A normal person at rest takes anywhere from twelve to twenty breaths a minute.” Eight. “Less is bad. So is more.”

  “Jesus,” Tompkins said again. At his tone, Six, who’d sprawled onto the much-cooler stone floor, clambered to his feet and nudged Tompkins’s hand. One of the kids had brought bottled water for the shepherd, which Six practically inhaled. While still panting, the dog looked more comfortable. “It’s okay, boy.” Tompkins stroked the dog’s head as the shepherd sagged into his handler’s left thigh. “Kate, this guy on his way out?”

  “I certainly hope not.” And ... eleven. A touch on the slow side, but not irregular or the long, sucking grunts of Cheyne-Stokes that always reminded her of a suffocating salmon. Someone who did that was on his way out. “I don’t like that he’s still unconscious. He might have a subdural ... a bleed from torn vessels over his brain. Or just a really bad concussion.” She walked careful gloved fingers through the guard’s matted, bloodied hair and found a wide tear in the scalp behind his left ear. She probed, cautiously. Even if there were no cracks or breaks, the guy could still have bled into his head ... She groaned. Oh shit.

  “What?” Bibi threw a sharp look. “Did you find something?”

  “’Fraid so. Guys, aim your headlamps here, would you?” Parting the man’s mucky hair, she exposed a ragged, starburst-shaped laceration. “There.” She pointed to a depression the size of a quarter. “Caved in the bone. I’d be surprised if he isn’t bleeding into his brain or the space around it. That may explain why he hasn’t regained consciousness.” And that sluggish pupil. “Ask Jawad how long it’s been since this guy got whacked.”

  “He says several hours.” Bibi nibbled her lower lip. “I am no medic, but even I know this is bad. What do you want to do, Kate?”

  “I can think of a couple of things right off the bat. Radio this in, get help, maybe even a medevac,” Tompkins said. “Then get our butts out of these mountains and go home.”

  “And bring down the anger of an entire village without understanding the why of all this? I do not think these children ... how do you say it ... whacked these men for nothing, Corporal. These caves do not exist for nothing. You remember the entrance?”

  “Yeah. So?” Tompkins shrugged. “Nothing special.”

  “Precisely. A small cut. As you say, nothing special, nothing to attract attention, but that?” Bibi pointed to a rounded arch at the far end of the chamber. Beyond, a line of lanterns marched away into the distance. “That is manmade. There are tool marks on the stone.”

  “You saying another Tora Bora?” At that, Jawad perked up and rattled something off to Bibi. “What did he say?” Tompkins asked.

  “He recognized the name. Tora Bora? He says this is not that in the sense there are no Taliban here.” Jawad added something, and Bibi amended, “That is, no Taliban now.”

  “Oh, really?” Having unwound a long roll of gauze, Kate secured it with surgical tape around the man’s head. “Have there been? Is this a weapons depot?” She had a sense there was another question she ought to ask but couldn’t quite figure what.

  “I don’t think that’s it, Kate.” Tompkins inclined his head at his dog. “Six would’ve alerted if there were explosives and munitions here.”

  “Yes, and if this was a Taliban command center, I suspect we would ...” Bibi pursed her lips. “How would you say ... erhm ... be dodging bullets? There are also not enough guards.”

  “Right now,” Tompkins added.

  “Good point.” She thought this place housed a lot more people. Stripping her gloves, Kate turned them inside out then stuffed them into a biohazard pouch. “What’s different about today?” And what did the rest of this place look like?

  As if reading her thoughts, Jawad took a lantern from a hook. “Merhabani.” He gestured for them to follow into another tunnel. “Please.”

  Tompkins and Kate tossed a look. “Flip you for it,” Tompkins said.

  “What happened to sticking together? All for one, or no one at all.”

  As Kate and Tompkins snorted laughter, Bibi looked bewildered. “What? Is that not the Musketeers?”

  “It’s perfect.” Kate was going to miss this woman. “And you’re right.”

  “Yeah, hooah,” Tompkins gave a hand signal and Six immediately came to heel. “Kate, you going to radio this in? The deeper we go into the mountain, the dicier the radios get.”

  Another excellent point, but the more information she could gather, the less in the doghouse she’d be when she finally did contact Jack.

  “In a minute,” she said. “Let’s see what we got.”

  3

  They followed Jawad and his lantern down another tunnel. Fatimah and another girl and boy, Sabera and Malik, trailed as Tompkins and Six took their rear.

  “Smells fresh and ... I don’t know.” Tompkins sniffed. “Wet? Is that possible?”

  “Very.” Bibi gestured toward the rock ceiling. “If you listen, you catch the faintest trickle. I suspect there are irrigation canals to bring snowmelt from higher elevations.”

  “Would they drill ventilation holes, too? I don’t know about you guys, but I could swear I feel air on the back of my neck. Almost like this breeze.”

  Kate felt it, too: a light feathery brush. “Could be a combination of natural bore holes and manmade. They drop ventilation shafts into mines all the time, but I think these caves are breathing on their own. Just a feeling.”

  “Breathing?” Bibi said.
<
br />   “Yeah, it’s got to do with changes in atmospheric pressure.” When she was a kid, Kate’s family camped and hiked in the Waucamaw Mountains, which lay in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula off Lake Superior. Rust-belt country, the U.P.’s riddled with defunct iron mines, their ore long since played out. Her family toured a couple of drift mines, went spelunking down shafts in another. Her dad was so taken, he packed them all off the next summer to Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, then a deep mine near Soudan, Minnesota that had been alive with brown bats and the only time she’d seen the animals active during the day. “One year, my folks went to a place called Wind Cave. It’s in South Dakota. Air gushes out one day but might be sucked in the next. It’s all about differences in air pressure relative to the cave’s size.” As they reached the tunnel’s end, she ducked through an opening. “The more space there is, the more air moves—”

  “Kate, you okay? What ...” Tompkins fell silent, too, as he panned his light over the chamber’s contents. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Looks like we found their supply depot.”

  No shit. There were pallets stacked with bottled water, food, medical supplies. A discarded wrapper from an energy bar. “Why haul all this way up here?”

  “Because this is where it is needed most? We already know there are guards.” Leaning across the threshold to the next chamber, Bibi gestured for Jawad to lift his lantern. “It stands to reason they need to eat, drink.”

  “All this for four guys?” Kate asked.

  “I think we can safely assume this place was designed with more in mind.” Bibi paused a moment then said, very quietly, “Corporal, why has your dog chosen this moment to sit?”

  What? Jerking her attention away from the supply pallets, Kate saw that Six had stopped at the entrance to another room and now sat perfectly still, his attention riveted on a small mound of rocky debris to the left. If Six were any other dog, you might imagine he was simply waiting for Tompkins to catch up, but only if you didn’t already know how Six alerted his handler to a threat.

  “Oh boy.” Tompkins panned his headlamp over the mound and then pointed at a silver filament snaking through a shallow crevice. The wire was so thin as to be nearly invisible. “Tripwire.” He nodded to a ridge of rock overhead. “You can see where they drilled and then plugged with C-4.”

  “A booby-trap?” Kate said.

  “Be my guess. Blow this, and the ceiling comes down. I also bet there are more deeper in the complex. These guys never lay just one trap.”

  “Are we okay to go on?”

  “Far as I can tell. There’s no trigger plate anywhere, so they must blow this remotely or they could set a . . . yeah, here you go.” Tompkins had carefully sidled to the right and aimed a forefinger. “Cell phone connected to a detonator. All you have to do is set the phone’s alarm to go off at a certain time and the electrical charge does the rest. I could see doing that if whoever’s manning the place gets surprised and then wants to block off anyone coming through the entrance we did.”

  “Which must mean there is an exit further on?” Bibi asked.

  “Kind of sucky plan otherwise.” Pulling a small orange flag from his vest, Tompkins stuck the metal end into dirt to mark the tripwire’s location. “Unless you’re into getting buried alive. The question is why anyone would want to rig a room like this to collapse to begin with. We’re only talking bottled water and food.”

  “Not precisely.” Bibi had slipped past Six to scan the next room. “In fact, I now see why they worry about police.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kate joined Bibi. The interior was packed with stacks of wide, shallow plastic basins, aluminum barrels, bolts of cloth. Liquid-filled gallon jugs perched on metal shelves. Several plastic barrels were arranged on the floor alongside three dollies. Although the barrels’ labels were in Arabic, Kate recognized one chemical formula: CaO.

  Calcium oxide? She pointed. “I don’t get it. Why would they need lime?” Her grandfather grew corn and soybeans and routinely used lime both to decrease soil acidity and add calcium. Her gran sometimes mixed lime with plant food and sprinkled this around her hydrangeas. In summer, the blooms blushed a bright, cheery pink. “We’re not even close to the fields.”

  “True.” Bibi’s mouth had thinned to a crack over her chin. “So, they must bring the crops here.” Turning, she fired off a question to Jawad, who nodded and hooked a finger over a shoulder. “This way.” Bibi’s tone was terse and strained, on the near side of angry. “He says it’s a room off this next corridor.”

  “It?” Kate said after Bibi’s back. “It what?”

  Bibi didn’t turn around. “As they have said, it is a visual.”

  “Why is she so pissed?” Tompkins said.

  “I think we’re about to find out.” There were several rooms off this tunnel, and as they passed, Kate’s nose wrinkled at a new odor. “You smell that?”

  “Yeah, they’ve had fires.” Tompkins made a face. “Something else, too. Kind of smoky-sweet?”

  “Food from a cook fire? But that doesn’t make sense either,” she said, as she stepped through a wide opening into the chamber where Jawad and Bibi waited. “There are MREs in those supplies. They’re got flameless heaters. There’s nothing anyone should need to actually cook ...”

  She lost the rest of that then as the words unraveled in her mouth.

  Tompkins broke the silence first. “The fuck?”

  4

  This room was larger, easily big enough for a dozen men and its contents besides. As before, there were shelves and pallets but instead of jugs and barrels, these held stacks of clear plastic bags. They reminded Kate of the ten-gallon bags of seed her dad bought for their chickens.

  These sacks were about the same size. Except they weren’t filled with seed or grain.

  In a movie, a detective might use a knife, cut open a bag, maybe dip a finger in and taste the contents. That wouldn’t work here, though.

  Because heroin doesn’t taste like anything.

  It doesn’t have a scent, either. Maybe the bad stuff did, but Kate was willing to bet this was grade-A pure, the real deal. Six might suss out the drug, but only if he was cross-trained. She gave the animal a sidelong glance. Heeling to Tompkins’s left, the shepherd was perfectly relaxed. As the dog would be. There were no explosives here, no munitions. Why stress?

  Now she understood what that odd smoky perfume mostly likely was, too: opium being cooked. She thought back to the barrels of lime, the jugs of chemicals. They probably used the cheesecloth to strain slurries. She had not the faintest idea what chemicals were added when or in what order. The fine art of heroin manufacture wasn’t in her job description.

  She didn’t know why she was surprised either, or even angry that Cham Bacha had a drug factory. Hadn’t Tompkins complained about their inability to stop farmers from growing poppies only the day before? God, was it really just yesterday? She felt as if a year had passed.

  Bibi broke the silence. “What is wrong with this picture?”

  “Other than I’m looking at several hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money?” Kate asked. And the proof that Tompkins is right? This entire deployment’s a joke?

  “Revise upwards to a half million in U.S. dollars, and you would be much closer. Jawad says there are two more rooms exactly like this, and this was a bad year. But, yes, beyond all that. Do you not see it?”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “Wait,” Tompkins interrupted. His tone held a new, brittle edge. “I get it. Goddamn it, goddamn it.” He locked eyes with Bibi. “Why now? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  “Yes, why now? Today?” Bibi echoed. “A good question, isn’t it?”

  “I’m so glad you two have this terrific mutual understanding,” Kate snapped, “but I don’t get it. Care to share?”

  “Look at it, Kate.” Tompkins made an all-encompassing gesture. “I’m talking the whole thing, okay? This isn’t some overnight operation. This didn’t just start. You got supplies
up here that probably date back to the unit before us and the unit before them. Hell, for all we know, we comb through this stuff, we find crap the Russians left. The point is this has been going on for a long time before we got here, and for sure it’ll continue when we leave. What Bibi’s asking is why are the kids showing us this at all? What made them take out the guards and then make sure we saw this? This isn’t new news, get it? Which means you have to ask yourself why the kids took such a huge risk now?”

  “He’s right,” Bibi put in. “Something has changed to force these children to act, and now before it is too late. A shrewd move, when you think about it. They know you are the right person to approach. You will not walk away from this. You will call this in, Kate.”

  Of course, she would, but she saw it, now, what they were saying. Jack would make his report, and a massive presence would move in. All this would be seized. The Afghan police would clamp down on the village. It suddenly occurred to her whatever these kids wanted to keep from happening might have anyway if Jack hadn’t decided to make Cham Bacha their last mission. Today was a fluke, a lucky accident.

  “But that still doesn’t answer why now? It can’t be the heroin.” She waited as Bibi and Jawad went back and forth, and then Bibi’s expression hardened. “Bibi? Why tell me now?”

  “Because,” Bibi said, “their parents intend to sell them.”

  5

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tompkins said. “Dancing boys? That’s what this is about? Bacha bazi?”

  At the mention, Jawad nodded and said something else to Bibi. The boy’s voice was taut, and his eyes were suddenly much too bright.

  Oh, brother. Kate watched a tear spill onto the boy’s cheek. She was starting to get a really bad feeling about this. She thought of the other boys, how angry they were, which she now understood as a veneer covering a much deeper, more visceral emotion: fear. Terror.