The Way Home

Chapter 9

Afghanistan, August

TORTURED MOANS WOKE RABIA, JERKING her straight up in bed. She should be prepared for them by now, yet she never was.

Heart pounding, she rushed out of the small room that was her sleeping place and into the room that by day was a gathering area and by night was a sleeping space for her father and now this American soldier. As she had done many nights since she’d brought him down from the cave, she knelt beside the pallet on the floor, where he thrashed in his sleep. She dipped a cloth in a bowl of water she’d left nearby, quickly wrung it out, then placed it over his forehead. The coolness sometimes soothed and settled him.

But nothing stopped the nightmares. They grew stronger and more frequent. They also held the answers, she suspected, to the past he could not remember.

She glanced over her shoulder to where her father still slept soundly. His old ears no longer heard as sharply. Tonight that was a good thing. Relieved that he had not awakened, she sat quietly, alone with her thoughts, waiting for the worst to pass, conflicted over the unexpected things she felt for the man she had found by the side of the road more than a month ago.

In the beginning, she had been determined to be unaffected by his suffering. He represented a liability and an obligation, no more. She had resented having to care for him. Determination, however, was no match for human suffering. Time had passed, and she had weakened… and eventually grown to pity him.

Even more, she found herself wondering about him, as she wondered while she sat with him tonight. Where had he come from? What horrors had he endured? His body told part of the story. His flesh was colored and marred by old scars and new. His mind had also been abused. And he had been nearly starved to death when she found him.

She gently held the cloth to his forehead. Extremists would condemn her for the reluctant compassion she now showed this American soldier. This infidel who stood for things the Taliban warlords proclaimed Islam did not tolerate. This man and men like him who professed to be saviors yet dropped bombs on her country.

Weary, she leaned back against the wall. She was a Muslim, and the Koran was the primary source of her faith. The Koran dealt with the subjects that concerned all human beings: wisdom, beliefs, worship, and law. It focused on the relationship between Allah and his creatures, provided guidelines for a just society, for proper human relationships and equal divisions of power.

The Taliban preached the Koran and twisted the intent for its own purpose. Under Taliban rule, women were powerless. Under the Taliban, there was only pain. Since its fall from power almost a decade ago, women now held seats in parliament. Girls went to school in many provinces without fear of having acid thrown in their faces, or worse, of death. Women had rights. Women had jobs.

All, in part, because of the Americans. And yet the Americans had brought more war to a country that had seen too much destruction and dying.

She rewet the cloth and applied it again to his brow, reminding herself of a truth she had taken a long time to see. This was but one man, not an army of men. This was a lost man. Lost and in pain. Physical, emotional, spiritual.

“Perhaps you should pray to your God,” she had suggested one day when she had found him in the cave huddled and weeping and beyond his endurance.

“My God?” Wild, angry eyes had met hers. “There is no God.”

She had been so shocked her breath had caught. “You must not say that.”

“For fear of bringing down his wrath? What else could he do to me? Strike me dead? Bring it. I’m past ready. It would solve both of our problems.”

“Your injuries have darkened your spirit.”

Bitter laughter degraded to tears. “My spirit left with my memory. I am not a man. I don’t exist. Why can’t you let me die?”

She thought of the despair on his face and in his voice that day as she watched him now. Thought of how the next time she had come to him, he had found the inner strength to pull himself together. To endure. As he endured these nightmares. How could she not admire him for that?

She had learned not to wake him. Once she had tried and ended up ducking his wild, swinging fists and covering her ears against his animal-like screams. Those screams could awaken the village. Or, worse, attract a Taliban patrol and create a bigger nightmare for all of them.

Always, she lived with the fear of Taliban discovery.

So she waited in the dark with him, hoping to keep him quiet, and wrestled with both compassion and resentment for the danger he had placed her and her father in.

His eyes moved rapidly behind his lids, his legs jerking restlessly. Yet the weight of his despair held him to the bed. He might not have believed it, but he was a creation of God. They all were. The Koran said so. It also encouraged kindness to others… while the Taliban killed and tortured in the name of Islam. Stoned women for showing their faces to the sun, beheaded them for seeking an education, tortured them on a mere suspicion that they did not obey sharia law.

She bathed his forehead and temples, wondering how her faith could be so divergent in interpretation. These were the things she struggled with every day. But in one thing, she was certain: it was right to honor her father’s wishes. And her father’s wishes had been to honor this man’s request for Pashtunwali.

“He asked for refuge, daughter. Pashtun law demands that if a person asks for asylum, it must be given.”

If she had picked any other day to come home from Kabul, she would not be in this position. She would not have found him by the side of the road. Bleeding, dazed, clearly sentenced to death if he were found by whoever hunted him.

Dressed as he had been—in tattered clothes traditional of her tribe, his long hair and beard matted with blood and grime, his skin darkened by the sun—she had not immediately recognized him for what he was. She saw only a man in distress. A man who had whispered, “Pashtunwali,” and begged her in Pashto to help him. To hide him.

For all she’d known at the time, he was Taliban. But Pashtunwali demanded that she give him aid regardless of whether he was friend or enemy.

She had quickly taken him to the mountains. To the secret, concealed caves where she had played as a child. There she had hidden him until she could consult her father. It was only after she had removed his bloody garments to treat his wounds that his pale skin had alerted her. He was not Afghan. And it was only after hearing the whispers of fear spread through the local villages that she realized Taliban forces were in search of an escaped American soldier.

Her heart felt heavy as she watched his fingers claw at the bedding. Even at risk to her own life, how could she not care for him through fever and pain and these horrible nightmares and not feel something?

Last week, she had to move him from the mountain cave when the Taliban patrols had increased there. The risk of discovery had become too great. Now the risk, if he was discovered in her father’s home, was even greater for her. And for her father. No matter what he said.

“I am an old man, daughter. I am unwell. I do not fear for myself. Allah will take me home soon. For you, though—I regret you have been placed in this position.”

She watched the soldier’s face contort in agony and regretted it, too. This man was a danger to them. As soon as he was well enough, she had to find a way to get him away from here and to someone who could help get him home. But that time, she feared, was still in the far distance. While there had been some improvement in his overall condition, often all it took was the wrong movement of his head, and the vertigo overtook him and brought him to his knees. The headaches still attacked with piercing pain. The vision in his right eye had faded. And the leg he so heavily favored made mobility difficult.

He flung his arm out wildly, then covered his face. “Fisher! Oh, God… Fisher.”

Fisher. She was not familiar with that word in English. Was it a curse? Was it a prayer? A command? A name? He yelled it often. She had asked him one day what it meant.

He had looked puzzled. “It’s a name… but I don’t know what it means.”

Perhaps she should cut back on the opium. Perhaps the drug triggered the nightmares and had become more detrimental than the pain relief it provided. She feared he was now addicted. If so, that was her doing, because she had been unable to bear watching him suffer.

“What happened to you?” she wondered aloud, as a groan rumbled from deep in his chest and his breathing quickened. The scars on his body told of a long history of torture. The more recent wounds told of his fight to escape. Only a strong man could have survived.

Only a warrior.

Who now depended on her for strength.

HIS GMV—GROUND MOBILITY vehicle, which was basically a souped-up humvee—lined up third in the convoy of four vehicles bouncing slowly down a mountain goat path that the locals called a road. Right. Without rappelling gear, on this ice and snow, even the goats would have to be suicidal to take it.

But here they were. Freezing their asses, their toes, their fingers, and anything else the Afghan winter choose to freeze.

He wiped his gloved hand over his jaw, scratching at the stubble and grime. Bone-tired, his ass sore from the long, rough ride, and his reserves depleted from the grueling op, he was more than ready to get back to the post and relieve his weary feet of the boots he’d been wearing for more than seventy-two hours.

“What time is it, Fisher?” he asked his buddy over the grind and whine of the GMV’s engine as it crab-crawled over another pile of fallen rocks and deep drifts of snow.

“Zero dark thirty, Sarge,” Fisher drawled from behind the wheel.

Pat was the team’s weapons specialist, comedic relief, and for a proud Oklahoman who rarely saw snow, he did a damn fine job plowing through the stuff. He slowed the vehicle to maneuver around yet another cluster of white-covered rocks—no easy task wearing night-vision goggles.

“What day is it, Fisher?” he asked around a yawn, then shook his head to wake himself up.

“It’s either Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Possibly Thursday—that is, if it ain’t Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, Sarge.”

He grunted. “Thanks for pinning that down.”

“Anything to make your life more pleasant.”

They took small pleasures when they could—even tolerated Fisher’s stupid jokes—because patrol in and around the Paktia Province, specifically Chamkani, had pitifully few pleasures. The prospect of returning to the post after a cross-border op into Pakistan—bad U.S. Army, shame, shame—was at the top of the pleasure scale tonight. Thoughts of a hot shower—crude as it may be—outranked even the success of their mission to interdict the Taliban supply lines that, of course, the Pakistanis denied even existed.

And there were no poppy fields in Kandahar.

In the bitter cold, the cloudless night sky was a shower of green dots through the frost-coated windshield and the night-vision goggles that every man in the small convoy wore. As team medic, he was happy as hell not to have had to treat any casualties on this mission. Just because they’d survived the op without so much as a paper cut, however, didn’t mean they could let down now. Like the Travelocity gnome, Mr. Taliban was everywhere. Until they reached the remote old Soviet base serving as their temporary home sweet home, he wasn’t going to breathe easy. None of them would.

Every inch of terrain held potential traps. This road in particular. He didn’t like it. Not one bit. Only one way in, only one way out of their target area. It was a target-rich environment for the Taliban, who loved their IEDs and ambushes. That they were about to cross over from Pakistan into Afghanistan meant diddly-squat. The Taliban knew that Special Forces patrols regularly scooted across the very loosely defined border to hunt.

Beside him, Fisher felt uneasy, too. “Don’t mind tellin’ ya, Sarge, I’ll be happy as a pig in slop when we get off this freakin’ stretch of ro—”

BOOM!

A monster blast shocked the air, sucked the breath from his lungs, and sent the GMV airborne.

A cloud of flying snow and rock projectiles enveloped them. The GMV rocketed back to earth, crashed with a bone-jarring thud, rocked and then started to roll. Holding on to anything he could grab, he rode with it, trying to recover his breath from the shock of the explosion. When the rocking stopped, the vehicle had flipped upside down, and so had he. Snow and frigid cold blew in through the broken windshield.

“Fisher!” he yelled, barely hearing his own voice above the ringing in his ears.

The one thing he should have heard above the din he didn’t. The sound of heavy weapons. Which meant no one was able to man them. Which meant they were all in a world of hurt.

“My arm!” Pat roared in pain over the zipping of bullets flying around them. His goggles had been knocked off, but he could see Pat moving around beside him in the dark. He’d clamped his hand over Pat’s upper arm. Blood spurted between his fingers.

More explosions and gunfire echoed around them.

He needed to triage Pat’s arm. He needed to radio for help. The mike dangled over his head. He reached around his rifle sling and grabbed it. “Red Striker Two is hit! Red Striker Two has been IEDed!”

No answer. The radios were probably screwed up in the blast.

Or there was no one left in the convoy to answer.

He craned his neck around to look at the back of the GMV. Simmons and Blanco were crumpled on their heads at odd angles and eerily still. He clawed his way halfway over the seat, tugged his glove off with his teeth, and checked their carotid arteries. Nothing. They were dead.

“Can you move?” he yelled to Fisher.

“Like… Jagger,” Fisher managed, a smart-ass to the end.

He quickly applied a tourniquet to Fisher’s arm.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here!”

Pain screamed through his leg as he dragged himself out of the half-open GMV door into a night lit with tracers, burning vehicles, and thick black smoke. Gunfire echoed around him. Gunfire and the screams of men hurt and dying.

“Go. Go. Go. I’ll cover!”

With his M-4 in hand, he fired from the cover of the vehicle, giving Fisher a chance to run for an outcropping ten yards away. He dropped one AK-wielding thug. Then another. But not before they nailed Fisher.

Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ. Fisher was down. The guys in the back were dead. He swallowed back rage and overwhelming sorrow.

Bullets pounded the snowdrifts around him. Muscle memory, training, and instinct kicked in, and he became what he’d been trained to be. A soldier. A soldier who had been marked.

He had to move. He grabbed the door and hauled himself to his feet. His right leg gave out, and he collapsed in the snow as knife-like pain screamed through his shin.

He swore through a groan when he caught his breath then fought from the ground. He laid down a burst of fire, then started dragging himself toward Fisher, cutting a path in the snow with his body. Then he roared in anger and horror when he realized that half of Fisher’s head was blown off. Red blood stained white snow and bled to black in the dark.

Fighting tears, using his buddy’s body for cover, and running on rage and adrenaline, he fired off several more bursts, then dragged himself to the rock outcropping and hunkered down behind it, nailing another two bad guys on the way.

Winded, reeling with pain, he chanced a peek around the rock and assessed his situation. When he saw what was left of the convoy, he knew he would die here.

All the vehicles but his were burning. One lay on its roof. Two teetered on their sides. Lifeless bodies hung out of doors, lay sprawled on the snow.

A masked figure ran toward him, brandishing an AK-47. “Allahu Akbar!”

More attackers followed with RPGs.

“Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

He dropped them all, then lay back fighting for breath in the brittle air. Finally, something gave him hope. The sporadic sound of M-4s returning fire. Horrah! Some of the guys were still out there; they’d found defensive positions. And they were giving those Tangos what for.

He quickly took stock of his weapons and ammo. He had a handful of frag grenades, his M-4 and a hundred rounds, his Beretta and three full mags, and the knife his brother had given him before his last deployment.

He pulled the pin on a grenade and lobbed it toward the AK fire. When it exploded, he nosed around the rock and nailed two bad guys who had survived the blast. They weren’t going to take him alive.

Another M-4 popped in the distance. “Go get ’em, boys,” he cheered, then double-tapped a charging figure that fell in a crumpled heap.

Winded, hands shaking from adrenaline and cold, he propped himself up against a boulder, then, on a deep breath, peeked around again and started taking out targets with single and double shots to conserve ammo.

Bullets slapped into the rocks around him. He knew he needed to move again. Moving targets were more difficult to shoot. But he had a bad feeling his tibia was broken. Which meant he was stuck until reinforcements arrived. If they arrived. He held out a small hope that someone had reached the post on the radio.

Another group of fighters charged him. Their muzzle flashes almost blinded him as they sprayed his position. He emptied the M-4’s magazine, then pulled his Beretta, killing the last Tango who’d gotten so close he fell at the base of the rock.

He belly-crawled around to the other side of the boulder, reloaded, then returned a new barrage of fire, his shell casings bouncing off the rocks, the hot metal burning his face and neck.

A streak of light registered out of the corner of his eye. He turned in time to see an RPG light up his GMV.

The ground shuddered; the air exploded around him. He covered his head, felt a blast like an inferno, then mind-blowing pain, and lost the fight to blackness…