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

  “What?” Tompkins demanded. “Did those sons of bitches already—”

  “Agree?” Bibi nodded. “As soon as you leave Kessel.”

  That made Kate frown. How could the villagers know? Only she knew they were packing up tonight. Something had tipped them off, some detail she wasn’t seeing. What?

  “Do you recall the dogs?” Bibi asked. “When we were heading for the village?”

  “Yeah.” Six had alerted to a pack near a ruined compound. The animals had been tearing at something they couldn’t make out. Through her scope, Kate had seen only a flash of dirty white and nothing distinct. “What about them?”

  “We thought it might be a goat, yes? A sick or very young kid cut from the herd?” Bibi shook her head. “It was not. It was a boy.”

  “What?” Kate rocked back as if struck. “What?”

  “Yes.” Bibi’s voice was almost too calm. “The child was a demonstration.”

  “Oh, fuck me.” Tompkins was aghast. “A demonstration of what?”

  “What happens if the villagers don’t agree, go along. The boy was an orphan, plucked from a slum. A child no one would miss. He was a warning. Do this, or else.”

  Tompkins cursed again. Six let out a soft high whine, anxiously shifting his weight from paw to paw, before inching closer and butting Tompkins’s leg with his nose. “They sell their own kids?” Tompkins was so enraged, his mouth quivered. “They can dress them like girls and use them for sex? Heroin’s not enough?”

  “Apparently not. These people are desperately poor.” Bibi held a hand up before Tompkins could protest. “I am not making excuses, simply underscoring the reality here. You are correct, Corporal, in one thing: this drug operation is of long standing. Jawad says it is the demand select boys be offered up for sale that is new.”

  “An escalation,” Kate said.

  “Yes, so you must ask: what else has changed?” Bibi looked from one to the other. “Why now?”

  “Us?” Tompkins said. “It is us coming here?”

  “No, that can’t be it. We’ve been to Cham Bacha lots of times.” Thinking, Kate looked away a moment then snapped a look at Bibi. “Shit. The shura.”

  “So what?” Tompkins said. “They’ve had them before.”

  “But not with the police. That’s what’s changed. It’s the police taking over. Aram didn’t want Bibi to see any of this, remember? Why would he react that way? Why was it okay for us, but not her?” She answered her own questions. “Because of who she is. She’s police.”

  She saw it now. At the briefing back at Kessel, people had talked about corrupt police, police with family ties, police who could be bribed, men who took a cut of the action and looked the other way. A policeman could be like any other tribal warlord, a powerful man in command of a loyal army bound by family and complicated clan allegiances. It was no different than a poor neighborhood in Florida, Chicago, Milwaukee ... pick a city, any city. So long as bellies were full, pockets lined with cash, and opportunities remained limited, a person like that stayed in power. The poor sold children, in one way or another, all the time. One less mouth to feed, a little more money to take care of those who were left.

  “Of course.” Bibi’s dark complexion had paled to a sickly yellow. “It makes sense because why am I here today? Because this is how transitions always go. It is ... how do you say it ... SOP? Standard operating procedure? Soldiers move out, police move in. We take over.”

  “Only, this time, some of the police are in on it, and now they want dancing boys, too.” That tickled something at the back of Kate’s mind. She knew something she wasn’t seeing. What? “Bibi, do the kids know who? Which police? Do they have names?”

  “No, they know only faces, but ...” A pause while Bibi went back and forth with Jawad. “I asked if he knows precisely when. He claims they are not sure, but I do not believe him. Call it ... how do you say it ... a gut feeling.”

  Her own gut iced. “Why don’t you believe him?”

  “Because they cut you out, Kate. They separated you from your herd, you and the corporal and the dog. Think about it. Palwasha insisted you come. Fatimah waited along the path she knew you would have to take in order to return, and she insisted. We have been led farther from the village, not closer, which means it will take more time for us to return.”

  Shit, that was it, what had been poking the back of her brain. A small thing, something Bibi said in passing, before they climbed to meet Fatimah. “It’s time, it’s about the time,” she said, hoarsely. “Tompkins, if the kids are here, it means they knew when to expect us and if they kept us here, if they cut us from the herd, it’s because they know when we’re supposed to leave.”

  “That’s crazy,” Tompkins said. “First off, no one will leave without us. Second, the kids can’t know. No one knows but us.”

  “And me.” Bibi’s voice was colorless. “I told Kate on the trail.”

  “And I wondered how you knew we were set to leave two hours before Maghrib,” Kate said. “It bothered me then, but I was too stupid to see the only way you could know is if someone in your group knew. But the police aren’t told either, ever.”

  She saw the moment Tompkins got it. “Shit,” he whispered. “An ambush?”

  “Yes, Corporal. Either as your people leave the village or once they are on the road. It would make sense, too, if there is ... erhm ... a new sheriff in town?” Bibi grunted a mirthless laugh. “You’ve heard of Pashtunwali, our code of life? It is famous because of an American SEAL who was rescued by the Sabray tribe and sheltered from the Taliban many years ago. Unfortunately, our code is not all about Nanawatai, asylum and forgiveness. We have our blood oaths, too, and the spilling of an enemy’s blood is how such deals and alliances are sealed because blood is binding, Corporal.” Bibi’s eyes were black stones. “Blood is forever.”

  “But ... but,” Tompkins sputtered, “they ... whoever they are ... they can’t be sure there won’t be survivors. They can’t be certain they’ll win.”

  “Oh, yes, they can,” Kate said, “if our people trust the wrong ones.”

  PART SEVEN:

  ONE DISASTER AT A TIME

  THE BLACK WOLF, 2017

  1

  Things started to go to shit around two. The sun disappeared behind dark clots of heavy-bellied clouds crowding in from the north. A half hour later, icy pellets rained down, bouncing off dried leaves and rock with a gritty susurration of rice on tin. Within another hour, the snow changed, growing wetter and heavier, falling in thick sheets, deadening all sound.

  If he wasn’t such a mess—half his face reduced to purple-blue hemorrhage, scabs, and half-healed burns courtesy of a bullet ricocheting off his skull—Gabriel might have enjoyed himself. His mom said snow was God’s way of telling people to slow down and take a break. As a kid, he often suited up to prowl his neighborhood after dark and listen to the soft pluhpluhpluh of snow falling on snow. So quiet. He would stay out until, numb with cold, he went home to a bright kitchen with good smells and the murmur of a radio tuned to old-time big band.

  Instead, he now lay prone behind deadfall atop a high ridge, his still-decent left eye to Mac’s spotting scope.

  Dead Man reared in the distance, intermittently visible through gauzy white curtains of snow. The mountain was a ruin: slumped, barren, nothing but bedrock and bare bones glazed with new ice and fresh pack. The morning the mountain let go, there was no warning, not even a tremble. In fact, Dead Man had been silent a good six months. Where before the mountain grumbled and shook hard enough large boulders bounced downslope and windows buzzed in their frames, there was nothing. Save for the Kootenai and Salish, who never camped in the narrow box valley in the mountain’s shadow, the whites were too busy making money from Dead Man’s thick seams of rich coal. These were good times, nearly a century before anyone understood stress and fault lines, and no news was good news.

  From books, Gabriel knew the slide happened around ten on the last Sunday in December. With few exceptio
ns, most townspeople were in church, and if the service followed its traditional program, the congregation was just beginning “How Great Thou Art,” perhaps even singing I hear the rolling thunder, when the true thunder—that first monstrous bellow—shattered the morning and cracked the day wide open as a river of snow and rock plunged down the slopes. The massive slide pummeled everything in its path in its remorseless sweep to the town nestled in the creases along the mountain’s flanks and the valley floor. Houses disappeared in a tidal wave of stone. People and their animals were crushed and swallowed up.

  Set on a small rise to the east, the church was completely buried, the tiny steeple snapping like the mast of a schooner caught in a deadly squall. Because it was Sunday, only a skeleton crew manned the mine and its various operations—the headframe, the coal breaker, the tipple, the rail cars. All those structures were washed away. The escape shafts collapsed, but the mine’s drift did not. This should’ve been good news. With the primary adit still passable, people might have made their way out. This was, however, the era of hand-loading, which meant played-out areas of the mountain were so much Swiss cheese: huge cavities supported only by spindly pillars. At some point in the future, these pillars would be pulled and after the resulting collapse, miners sent to swarm the debris for any remaining coal. Too bad for the miners, no one had gotten around to collapsing many rooms. Trapped underground, the skeleton crew became just that: a heap of bones.

  Gabriel could relate.

  He was a derelict, a husk gutted by war and failure. A ruin. Just like Dead Man.

  Out of one ear, he caught the soft shush of nylon and the muted clatter of gear being shuttled back and forth as Mac repacked and divided up supplies. Still seriously creeped out by what she’d told and shown him, he didn’t stick around. He didn’t trust that not to show in his face. God, the moment her skin—if you could call that stuff skin—split as if unzipped and then how she’d taken off her legs still gave him chills. He’d seen titanium bolts before. A few vets had them inserted into their remaining bone, but theirs were also surrounded by a pucker of healed skin.

  Not Mac’s. There’s been the bolt, a mix of titanium and gold, but there was no true skin surrounding this. Instead, there was a sea of circuitry and even a few tiny firefly flickers of light as her biosynthetics relayed signals to and from those nanobots in her skull, and Jesus—a spider of revulsion climbed the ladder of his spine—it was one thing to have machines attached to you or even implants, but machines crawling around your brain? Your brain? Seriously?

  His mind kept looping back to earlier in the day when he’d spied and seen her tear a tree apart with her bare hands. How she’d suddenly stopped, straightened, looked right at the spot where he’d hidden—and called him by name: Gabriel, I know you’re there.

  Shit. How had she done that? Fucking ESP? It was like that moment on the rocks days ago when something shoved him to consciousness and a voice, a man’s voice, barked orders for Gabriel to save Mac from the rocks. The voice even told him where to find the rope to do it.

  Only how? What had that been?

  Who else was living in her head?

  “Anything?” Her voice floated up from somewhere behind him. “Are they on the move, yet?”

  That jolted him back to the here and now. “Hang on.” Dropping his head to peer through Mac’s spotting scope, Gabriel fiddled with the focus. Still a good four miles and change away, the group they were keeping tabs on was making a beeline for Dead Man. They were also at the limits of what most normal people might comfortably make out through the scope, and he’d had to resort to his left eye, which wasn’t as sharp as his right in the best of times. Unfortunately, his right was still pretty FUBAR on account of him not only failing miserably at life but completely and thoroughly sucking at killing himself. Feathering the scope’s zoom, he waited for the image to gel, took a peek. Uh-oh.

  “What is it?” Mac asked.

  How did she do that? Maybe she could smell him or something. “It’s sort of a visual.”

  “In my experience, whenever someone says that, things are about to go to hell in a handbasket in a major way.”

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “Terrific.” There was the thin sizzle of a zipper being pulled. “What do you got?”

  “Take a look.” As she approached, he heard a softer scuffling to his right. An instant later, a wild, feral musk bloomed in his nose. Follows her like a goddamned dog. The primitive lizard portion of his mind suggested now might be the time to make tracks. Better yet, find a weapon and shoot the thing if it came after him.

  Instead, he slipped to one side and freed up the scope, though he averted his gaze. He hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to look at her full on just yet. He knew why. He was afraid he’d gawk the way a little boy does at a blind person with a cane. Instead, he bounced quick looks out of the tail of his right eye, catching snatches. Her willowy figure, wide shoulders, sleek profile. The set of her jaw. A stray lock of lush red hair loosed from her watch cap fluttered against her left cheek.

  And beyond, not twenty feet from her side, that enormous gray wolf.

  Wolves shadowing anyone for a reason other than to make a meal of them was bizarre. This was a whole new level of seriously messed up. When he and Mac changed course for Dead Man, the animals split up, five going one way and the remaining three—the big gray Gabriel assumed was the alpha male and two lieutenants—tailing them. The wolves weren’t bothering to hide anymore, either, but ranged around in plain sight, sticking close to Mac. He didn’t think the wolves’ intense focus was simple curiosity. They sensed her difference. He even imagined they might be trying to decide what she was.

  He could relate to that, too.

  “See it?” He danced his gaze away. “Well, them?”

  Stupid questions. Of course, she did. Woman had eyes a hawk would envy. When they’d initially spotted the girls and these men—they’d been no larger than grains of sand through her scope—she’d nailed their numbers in a nanosecond.

  “I count three more guys with gear and weapons, another three girls,” she said. “That tally?”

  “It’s what I saw. So that’s, what, eight kids now?”

  “Uh-huh. Did you see that one kid, though? The short one?”

  “Yeah, I did. Weird, come to think of it.” He lobbed another glance. She was still prone, eye to the scope. “All those teenagers, and then a little kid?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a kid.” Mac stared, unmoving, for another second. “Gabriel, that’s a woman. She’s just really short.”

  “You’re shitting me. Think she’s one of the girls’ moms?”

  “More like grandmother. She looks to be ... maybe early sixties?”

  How are you seeing that? To his eye, the kid—well, woman’s face was a blur. Next, Mac would say she had dentures and no makeup. “Think she got snatched with the girls?”

  “Possibly.” Taking her eye from the scope, she favored him with a cool, green gaze. “These guys look like they’ve gotten into it. One of the new guys ... big one, no beard ... I think he’s hurt.” She made room for him to look. “Below his right ear. See the bandage?”

  He strained to pull details together. “Yeah.” Barely. A square of white extended below the man’s right ear to disappear beneath his parka. “Shot? Wouldn’t we have heard it?”

  “Depends on where and when, or it could’ve been silenced.”

  “Silencers?” Hunters sometimes used them, a practice he hated. If a hiker can’t hear a weapon, he can’t know where not to go. “Jesus, Mac, you’re talking an ambush? A fight?”

  “Maybe?” She moved a shoulder in a small shrug. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “But why? With whom?” Another thought: “They’ve got these new girls and that lady in tow. You’d think they wouldn’t want to risk the kids getting shot.”

  “Unless the kids and the lady are what the fighting was about.”

  He knew where she was going with th
is. Either the girls carried whatever merchandise these guys were ferrying, or they were the merchandise. Could they be both? And they couldn’t have picked a better way of doing either? Humping around the mountains didn’t seem like the greatest plan. On the other hand, the Canadian border cutting across the Black Wolf was tough to patrol, with no official crossings. When he’d planned out this trip—when he’d allowed himself the fantasy of escaping to Canada instead of a one way to Dead Man—he’d researched this. In the lower elevations, much of the border was merely fenced, easy to scale or cut because most stretches were unmonitored. In the mountainous regions, there were no physical obstacles to wildlife passing back and forth. Drone surveillance was patchy at best. A person’s best chance to cross the border without being detected was to pick a region where detection was tough and apprehension almost impossible—and the Black Wolf fit the bill.

  “I can see them moving kids who wouldn’t be missed,” he said, “or contraband or whatever across the border in a car. It’d be pretty straightforward with a small group.”

  “Maybe they ran into a border patrol who figured out something was off.”

  “Yeah, or a couple of kids might have made a break for it.” Suicidal, in his opinion. Ill-equipped to deal with the mountains, a person could wind up very dead. He was also willing to bet whatever these kids were or carried, those guys would want that back. He had a friend, ex-MP like himself, who worked customs and once described the life of a mule. If a mule shits too soon, they make the guy wash it off and swallow it all over again. That’s how we catch them: you look for people who don’t eat, or got this really, really bad breath. I mean, we’re talking curl-your-toenails halitosis. Suspects got a laxative, a bucket, and a room that could be locked from the outside.

  “Those new girls bother me,” Mac said. “That woman does, too.”

  “Could be a chaperone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Like a teacher, and they got ambushed?” She made a face. “Why not just kill her?”