Joe Ledger: Special Ops

NOTE: This story takes place a few weeks after the events of Patient Zero.

Chap. 1

“I never thought that anyone that beautiful could scare the shit out of me.”

“Tell me about her, Sergeant,” I said.

He looked away so quickly that I knew he’d been waiting for that request. He tried to keep a poker face, but he was a couple of tics off his game. Sleep deprivation, pain, and the certain knowledge that his ass was in a sling can do that. Even to a tough son of a bitch like Sergeant Harper. As he turned I saw the way guilt and shame twisted his mouth, but his eyes had a different expression. One I couldn’t quite nail down.

“Tell you what? That I can’t bear to close my eyes ’cause when I do I see her! That I’ve had the shivering shits ever since we found her out there in the sand! I don’t mind admitting it,” said the sergeant. He started to say more, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

The sergeant’s uninjured hand was freckled with powder burns and skin was missing from two knuckles. He ran his trembling fingers through his sandy hair as he spoke. He did it two or three times each minute. His other hand lay in his lap, cocooned in gauze wrappings.

I waited. I had more time.

After a full minute, though, I said, “Where did she come from?”

Harper sighed. “She was a refugee. We found her staggering in the foothills.”

“A refugee from what?”

“From the big meltdown out in the desert.”

“In the Helmand River Valley?”

“Yes.” He didn’t tack on “sir.” He was fucking with me, and I was okay with that for now. He didn’t know me, didn’t really know how much shit he was in, or how deep a hole he’d dug for himself. All he knew was that his career in the Marines had hit a guard rail at seventy miles an hour, and now he was sitting across a small table from a guy wearing captain’s bars and no other military insignia. No medals or unit patch. No name tag. Harper had to be measuring that against the deferential way the colonel treated me. Like I outranked him, which I don’t. I’m not even in the military anymore. But in this particular matter I was able to throw more weight than the base commander. More weight than anyone else in or out of uniform on the continent. As far as Harper was concerned, when it came to throwing him a lifeline it was me and then God, and God was off the clock.

Harper couldn’t really know any of that, but he was smart enough and sly enough to know that I had some juice. On one hand, he rightly figured that I could drop him into a hole deeper than the one he’d dug for himself. On the other hand, he had information that I wanted, and he was stalling to see how to play his only good card.

“How long are they going to keep me here?”

“To be determined, Sergeant. Do you feel you’re being inconvenienced?”

He didn’t rise to the bait.

“It’s been three days.”

“Not quite. Forty-seven hours and change.”

“Seems longer.” He didn’t even know that we’d already met. Not sure when I was going to spring that on him. It wouldn’t do anything to calm him down.

I opened my briefcase and took out a file folder.

“I’d like you to look at some photos,” I said and took two color eight-by-tens from my briefcase and laid them on the table. If I’d tossed a scorpion on the table he couldn’t have jerked back faster.

“Jesus Christ!”

I nodded at the print. “That’s her?”

“Fuck me,” muttered the sergeant. “Oh fuck me fuck me fuck me.”

Take that as a yes.

I sat back and waited him out. Sweat popped all along his forehead and leaked out from his hairline. He smelled like urine, cigarette smoke, and testosterone; but I could smell fear, too. A whole lot of it. I used to think that was a myth, or something only dogs and horses could smell; but lately I’ve learned different. The kind of shit I deal with I smell it a lot, and on myself, too. Like now, but I wasn’t going to let this asshole know it.

“Could…could you turn the pictures over? I don’t mean to be a pussy, but I don’t want her staring at me the whole time, y’know?”

“Sure,” I said, and did so. But I left them on the table. “Try to relax. Smoke one if you got any.”

He shook his head. “Never took it up. Jesus H. Christ. Wish I had.”

I opened my briefcase and took out two bottles of spring water, unscrewed one, and handed it to him. He drank half of it down. Then I took some airline bottles of Jack Daniels and lined them up in front of him. One, two, three.

“If it helps,” I said.

He snatched one off the edge of the table, twisted off the cap and chugged it, then coughed. More bravado than brains.

“Tell me about the woman,” I said. “And what happened in the cave.”

He gave that some thought, drank half of the second bottle of Jack.

“Do you know my outfit? Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. We were part of Operation Khanjar, working that corner of Helmand Province, doing some recon stuff up in the hills,” he began. “Counterinsurgency work, and some fox hunts to flush the Taliban teams running opium through the area. That whole part of the province is nothing but dead rock riddled with a million caves. You could hide a hundred thousand people in there, camels and all, and it would take us fifty years to find half of them. That’s why this war was fucked from the snap. The Russians couldn’t do it twenty years ago, and we can’t do it now. Besides, nine out of ten people you meet are friendlies who look and dress just like the hostiles, so how you going to know?”

“Skip the politics, Sergeant. Talk about the woman.”

He shrugged. “It was weird out there because last week the whole place was lit up by some kind of underground explosion. We got word that some Taliban lab blew up, but the blast wasn’t nuclear. Something to do with geo-thermal chambers or shifting plates or some bullshit like that. A whole section of desert just fell into itself, and there was this spike of fire that shot a couple hundred feet in the air.”

“No radiation?”

“No. Most of us still had TLD badges and the badges stayed neutral. The area was hot, though…not with radiation, but actually hot. Like a furnace. When we reached the outer perimeter of the event zone we could see a weird shimmer, and I realized that big sections of the desert had been melted to glass. It looked like a lava flow, rippled and dark.”

“And is that where you found the woman?”

He drank the rest of the second bottle of Jack Daniels and chased it with a long pull on the water bottle. He was pale, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips dry. He looked like shit and probably felt worse. Just mentioning the “woman” made his eyes jump.

“Yeah,” he said. “Locals started calling in sightings of burned people, and then word came down to scramble a couple of recon teams. We went in…and after that everything went to shit.” He turned away to hide wet eyes.

Chap. 2

I was on the mats with Echo Team’s newest members — replacements for the guys we lost in Philadelphia. There were four of them, two Rangers, a jarhead, and a former SWAT guy from L.A. For the last couple of hours Bunny and I had taken turns beating on them, chasing them with paintball guns, trying to carve our initials in them with live blades, swinging at them with baseball bats. Everything we could think of. Actually, let me rephrase that. There were ten of them this morning. The four who were left were the ones who hadn’t been taken to the infirmary or told to go the fuck back to where they came from.

We were just about to enter a practical discussion on pain tolerance when my boss, Mr. Church, came into the gym at a fast walk. He only ever hurries when the real shit is coming down the pike. I crossed to meet him.

“Good evening, Captain Ledger,” said Church. He nodded toward the recruits. “Are these four men in or out?”

“Is something up?”

“Yes, and it’s on a high boil.”

“They’re in.”

Church turned to Bunny. “Sergeant Rabbit, get these men kitted out. Afghanistan. No ID, no patches. You’re wheels up in fifteen.”

Bunny flicked a glance at me, but he didn’t question the order. Instead he turned and hustled them all toward the locker room. Bunny was a nice kid most of the time, but he was still a sergeant. And we’d been through some shit together, so he knew my views on hesitation. Don’t.

“What’s the op?”

Church handed me the file. “This came in as an email attachment. Two photos, two separate sources.”

I flipped open the folder and looked at two photos of an incredibly beautiful woman. Iraqi, probably. Black hair, full lips, and the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen. Eyes so powerful that despite the low res of the photos and graininess of the printout, they radiated heat. Her face was streaked with dirt and there was some blood crusted around her nose and the corner of her mouth.

I looked at him.

“These were relayed to us by the people we have seeded into a Swiss seismology team studying an underground explosion in the Helmand River Valley. We ran facial recognition on them and MindReader kicked out a ninety-seven percent confidence that this is Amirah.”

My mouth went dry as dust.

Holy shit.

When I was brought into the DMS a month ago my first gig was to stop a team of terrorists who had a bioweapon that still gives me nightmares. I’m not kidding. Couple times a week I wake up with the shivers, cold sweat running down my skin, and clenched teeth that are the only things between a silent room and a gut-buster of a scream.

There were three people behind that scheme. A British pharmaceutical mogul named Gault, a religious fanatic from Yemen called El Mujahid, and his wife, Amirah. She was the molecular biologist who conceived and created the Seif al Din pathogen. The Sword of the Faithful. They test-drove the pathogen with limited release in remote Afghani villages, trying out different strains until they had one that couldn’t be stopped. Seif al Din. An actual doomsday plague. El Mujahid brought it here, and Echo Team stopped him. But only just. If you factor in the dead Afghani villagers and the people killed here, the body count was north of twelve hundred. Even so, Mr. Church and his science geeks figured we caught a break. It could have been more. Could have been millions, even billions. It came down to that kind of a photo finish.

Most of the victims turned into mindless killers whose metabolism had been so drastically altered by the plague that they could not think, had no personalities, didn’t react to pain, and were hard as balls to kill. The pathogen reduced most organ functions to such a minimal level that they appeared to be dead. Or…maybe they were dead. The scientists are still sorting it out. We called them “walkers.” A bad pun, short for “dead men walking.” The DMS science chief is a pop-culture geek. My guys in Echo Team called the infected by another name. Yeah. The “Z” word.

And you wonder why I get night terrors. Six weeks ago I was a Baltimore cop doing scut work for Homeland. Sitting wiretaps, that sort of thing. Now I was top dog for a crew of first-team shooters. Do not ask me how one thing led to another, but here I am.

I looked at the photos.

Amirah.

“The rumors of her demise have been greatly exaggerated,” I said.

Church managed not to smile.

“If you’re sending us then she hasn’t been apprehended.”

“No,” he said. “Spotted only. I arranged for two Marine Recon squads to locate and detain.”

“What if Amirah’s infected?”

“I shared a limited amount of information with the appropriate officers in the chain of command, Captain. If anyone reports certain kinds of activity — from Amirah or anyone — then the whole area gets lit up.”

“Lit up as in—”

“A nuclear option falls within the parameters of ‘acceptable losses.’”

“Can you at least wait until me and my guys reach minimum safe distance?”

He didn’t smile. Neither did I.

“You’ll be operating with an Executive Order, so you’ll have complete freedom of movement.”

“You got the President to sign an order that fast?”

He just looked at me.

“What are my orders?”

“Our primary concern is to determine if anyone infected with the Seif al Din pathogen is loose in Afghanistan.”

“Yeah, that’ll be about as easy to establish as Bin Laden’s zip code.”

“Do your best. We’ll be monitoring all news coming out of the area, military, civilian, and other. If there is even a peep, that intel will be routed to you and the clock will start.”

“If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”

“Noted.”

“What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”

“Amirah would be a prize catch, Captain. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The Vice President thinks she would be a great asset to our own bioweapons programs.”

“And is that what you want?”

He told me what he wanted.

Chap. 3

We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT — Small Kill Team — operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.

Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed.

“Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pickup point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”

He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.

The six of us went into the desert, split into two teams and heading into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.

Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool. This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind — sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.

“Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”

Bob Faraday — a big moose of a guy whose call sign was Slim — ran point. It was getting dark fast, and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt from under rocks and rise from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread to join the ocean of shadows that was night.

Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.

As we ran up behind him, I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.

I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.

The dark objects were people.

Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race and even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.

“There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab?” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”

“Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.

Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”

“Even so,” said Bunny.

We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.

The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”

“Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.

There was a long pause.

And it got longer.

I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”

Two long damn seconds.

“Cowboy to Jukebox, do you copy?”

That’s when we heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire. And the screams.

We ran.

“Night vision!” I snapped, and we flipped the units into place as the black landscape suddenly transformed into a thousand shades of luminescent green. We were all carrying ALICE packs with about fifty pounds of gear — most of it stuff that’ll blow up, M4 combat rifles, AMT .22 caliber auto mags on our hips, and combat S.I. assault boots. It’s all heavy and it can slow you down…except when your own brothers-in-arms are under fire. Then it feels like wings that carry you over the ground at the speed of a racing tiger. That’s the illusion, and that’s how it felt as we tore up the slopes toward the path Second Squad had taken.

The gunfire was continuous.

As we hit the ridge, I signaled the others to get low and slow. Bunny came up beside me. “Those are M5s, Boss.”

He was right. Our guns have their own distinctive sound, and it doesn’t sound much like the Kalashnikovs the Taliban favored.

The gunfire stopped abruptly.

We froze, letting the night tell us its story.

The last of the gunfire echoes bounced back to us from the distant peaks. I could hear loose rocks clattering down the slope, probably debris knocked loose by stray bullets. In the distance the wind was beginning to howl through some of the mountain passes.

I keyed the radio.

“Cowboy to Jukebox. Respond.”

Nothing.

We moved forward, moving as silently as trained men can when any misstep could draw fire. The tone of the wind changed as we edged toward the rock wall that would spill us into the pass where Second Squad had gone. A heavier breeze, perhaps. Moving through one of the deeper canyons?

A month ago I’d have believed that. Too much has happened since.

I tapped Bunny and then used the hand signal to listen.

He heard the sound, then, and I could feel him stiffen beside me. He pulled Slim close and used two fingers to mime walking.

Slim had been fully briefed on the trip. He understood. The low sigh wasn’t the wind. It was the unendingly hungry moan of a walker.

I finger-counted down from three, and we rounded the bend.

Jukebox had said that they’d found five bodies. Second Squad made eight.

As we rounded the wall we saw that the count was wrong. There weren’t eight people in the pass. There were fifteen. All of them were dead. Most of them moving.

Second Squad lay sprawled in the dust. The night vision made it look like they were covered in black oil. Jukebox still held his M4, finger curled through the trigger guard, barrel smoking. A man dressed in a white lab coat knelt over him, head bowed as if weeping for the fallen soldier, but as we stepped into the pass the kneeling man raised his head and turned toward us. His mouth and cheeks glistened with black wetness and his eyes were lightless windows that looked into a world in which there was no thought, no emotion, no anything except hunger.

Spider and Zorro — the L.A. SWAT kid and the other Ranger — were almost invisible beneath the seething mass of bodies that crouched over them, tearing at clothing with wax-white fingers and at skin with gray teeth.

“Holy mother of God,” whispered Slim.

“God’s not here,” I said as I put the pinpoint of the laser sight on the kneeling zombie. It was a stupid thing to say. Glib and macho. But I think it was also the truth.

The creature bared his teeth and hissed like a jungle cat. Then he lunged, pale fingers reaching for me.

I put the first round in his breastbone and that froze him in place for a fragment of a second, and then put the next round through his forehead. The impact snapped his neck, the round blew out the back of his skull, and the force flung him against the rock wall.

The other walkers surged up with awful cries that I will never forget. Bunny, Slim, and I stood our ground in a shooting line, and we chopped them back and down and dead. Dead for good and all. Painting the walls with the same dripping black. The narrow confines of the pass roared with thunder, the waves of echoes striking us in the chest, the ejected brass tinkling with improbable delicacy.

Then silence.

I looked down at the three men. They’d been part of Echo Team for a day. Less. They’d been briefed on the nature of the enemy. They were highly trained men, the best of the best. But really, what kind of training prepares you for this? The first time the DMS encountered the walkers they’d lost two whole teams. Twenty-four seasoned agents.

Even so, the deaths of these good, brave men was like a spear in my heart. It was hard to take a breath. I forced myself to be in the moment, and I slung my M4 and drew my .22 and shot each of the corpses in the head. To be sure. We carried .22s because the low mass of the bullet will penetrate the skull but lacks the power to exit, so the bullet bounces around inside the skull and tears the brain apart. Assassins use it, and so does anyone who has to deal with things like walkers.

“Bunny, drop a beacon and let’s haul ass.”

Bunny dug a small device from a thigh pocket, thumbed the switch and tucked it under the leg of one of the dead walkers, making sure not to touch blood or exposed skin. The beacon’s signal would be picked up by satellite. Once we were clear of the area, an MQ-Reaper would be guided into the pass to deliver an air-to-surface Hellfire missile. Fuel-air bombs are handy for cleanup jobs like this. When you don’t want a single fucking trace left.

We didn’t take dog tags because the DMS doesn’t wear them. We try to have a “leave no one behind policy,” but that doesn’t always play out.

We moved on.

The night was vast. Knowing that helicopters and armed drones and troops were a phone call away didn’t make the shadows less threatening. It didn’t make the nature of what we were doing easier to accept: hunting monsters in a region of the Afghan mountains dominated by the Taliban. Yeah, find a comfortable space in your head for that thought to curl up in.

This was pretty much the opium highway. The friendlies who lived in the nearby villages were little or no help, because even though they idealistically supported us and hated the Taliban, they also feared the terrorists more than they feared us; and without the trickle-down of drug money, they’d starve to death. It was a devil’s bargain at best, but it was the reason that no one can win this war. The best we could hope for was to slow the opium shipments and keep the Taliban splinter cells underfunded and ill-prepared for a major, coordinated terror offensive of the kind they’ve always promised and we live in fear of.

Something flared ahead and I held up my fist. The others froze.

The pass we were following curled around the mountain like the grooves on a screw, turning and rising toward the peak on the far side. Sixty yards ahead, half-hidden by an outcropping of rock, light spilled from the mouth of a small cave. The overhang would have made the light invisible from aircraft, but not for us on the ground. A shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall and as I watched through narrowed eyes it resolved into the shape of a man. A Marine.

He walked to a spot outside the spill of light, looked up and down the pass, and then retreated into his nook. In the dark, he didn’t see the three big men crouched behind boulders. The sentry went to the mouth of the cave and peered inside. The glow let me see his face. He was grinning.

Then we heard the scream.

A man’s voice, pleading. A string of words in Pashto, ending in a screech of pain that was cut off by the sharp crack of a palm on flesh.

And the sound of a woman laughing.

It was not a pleasant laugh. It held no cheer, no goodwill. No warmth. It was deep and throaty, strangely wet, and it rose into a mocking screech that turned my guts to gutter water.

We did not hail the guard. The situation felt wrong in too many ways. I signaled Bunny to keep his eyes and gun barrel on the sentry as I circled on cat feet behind a tall slab of rock. That put me on the man’s six o’clock, ten feet from his back. Even if this all proved to be a zero-threat situation I was going to fry this guy for his criminal lack of attention to duty. A sentry holds everyone’s life in their hands; this guy was handing me everyone in that cave.

I screwed the .22’s barrel into the soft spot under his left ear, grabbed him by the collar and slow-walked him back. Slim was there and he spun the guard and put him down. I didn’t see the blow, but it sounded like a tree being felled. The guard went out without having said a word. Slim watched our backs as Bunny and I crept to the cave entrance…

…and looked into a scene from Hell.

The cave clearly saw regular use. There were chairs, a card table, ammunition cases, cots, and a stove with sterno burners. A Taliban soldier was tied to folding chairs, ankles and wrists bound with plastic cuffs. His clothes had been slashed and torn away to reveal his pale chest and shoulders. His turban hung askew, one end trailing down behind him where it puddled on the rocky ground between his heels. Several Kalashnikovs stood against the wall, magazines removed.

The other three men of the Marine squad stood in a loose semicircle around the man, laughing as he screamed and begged and prayed. All of them were sweating; a couple had red, puffy knuckles that spoke to the way this session had started. If this was just a group of frustrated Marines knocking the piss out of a Taliban grunt, partly to blow off steam and partly to try to get a handle on something that might result in some real good being done, then I might have just stepped in and calmed it down. Yelled a bit, given them the appropriate ration of shit, but basically dialed it all down with no charges being filed.

But that’s not what we were seeing. These guys had taken it to a different level and in doing so had crossed the line between an attempt to gather useful intelligence and something else. Something darker that was not part of soldiering. Something that wasn’t even part of torturing or “enhanced interrogation.” Something that went beyond Abu Ghraib and into the darkest territory imaginable.

They had Amirah — scientist, designer of the Seif al Din, wife of one of the world’s most hated terrorists. There were two ropes looped around her neck, each end pulled to an opposite side by a Marine so that she could not approach either of them. All she could do was lunge forward toward the prisoner. Her wrists were bound behind her. Her ankles were hobbled by a length of rope. She couldn’t flee, couldn’t run. The men had stripped her to the waist, revealing a body that was beautifully made but which now inspired only revulsion. Her once olive skin had faded to a dusty gray-green and there were four black bullet holes — one in her stomach, three in her back — that were crusted with dried blood and wriggling with maggots.

Amirah lunged forward to bite the man, but the Marines jerked on the ropes and stopped her when her gray teeth were an inch from the Afghani’s face. Amirah snarled and then laughed. It was impossible to say whether she was enjoying this game or if she was completely mad.

As the men struggled to keep her in check they danced and shifted around, and I could see that there were two other Afghanis in the room. They lay sprawled like broken dolls. It looked like their faces had been eaten, and their throats were tangles of red junk.

“It’s getting tough to hold this bitch,” growled one of the men, though he was smiling when he said it.

“Please, in the name of God keep her away!” begged the bound man. He was already bleeding from half a dozen bites. Thin lines of dark red spider-webbed from each bite. The infection was slow for some, faster for others. Snot and spit ran from his nose and mouth as he pleaded in three different languages.

A big man with sergeant’s stripes — the only one not holding a leash — bent behind the man and spoke with sharp impatience. “We’ll fucking stop when you fucking tell us what we want to know.”

“But I don’t…. I don’t….” He was filled with too much panic to complete a sentence.

The sergeant straightened and nodded, and the men slackened their holds on the rope leashes. Amirah instantly lunged forward and sank her teeth into the flesh of the man’s shoulder. Blood spurted hot and red beside her cheeks, and even from where I crouched I could see her eyes roll high and white with an erotic pleasure. The man’s piercing shrieks filled the whole cave.

“Okay, pull the bitch off him,” snapped the sergeant, and she fought them, her teeth sunk deep into muscle. It took all three men to haul her back, two pulling and the sergeant pushing. He punched Amirah in the face and that finally broke the contact, but as they dragged her away a piece of sinew was clamped between her jaws and it snapped with a wet pop.

She licked her lips. “Delicious…,” she said in English, drawing the word out, tasting the soft wetness of it, savoring the way the syllables rolled between teeth and tongue and lips.

Bunny made a soft gagging sound beside me.

This was what I was afraid of. What Church had been afraid of. During that fight against El Mujahid, we’d encountered several generations of the Seif al Din pathogen. Most of the early generations transformed the infected into mindless eating machines. The walkers. But at the end, when I’d squared off against El Mujahid himself, he’d been among the dead but he still retained his intelligence. It was the result of Generation 12 of the disease. He bragged about how his princess had saved him, had elevated him to immortality. The name Amirah meant “princess.”

That had to be what we were seeing here. Amirah had become one of her own monsters. Was it an accident or part of some twisted plan? From the way El Mujahid bragged about it — right before I gave him a ticket to paradise — I had to believe that Amirah had chosen this path.

Chosen. God almighty.

“Fuck this,” I murmured and stepped into the cave. Bunny was right beside me. I held my .22 in a two-hand shooters grip; he had his M4. Our night vision was off, but we wore black balaclavas that showed only our eyes.

“United States Army,” I bellowed. “Stand down, stand down!”

The sergeant whirled toward me, his right hand going for his sidearm. I put the laser sight on him.

“Stand down or I will kill you!”

He believed me, and he froze.

The other Marines froze.

The man in the chair froze.

Amirah, however, did not.

With a snarl of hunger, the mad witch twisted so suddenly and violently that she tore the ropes from the hands of the startled Marines. She tore her hands free from the plastic cuffs. She screamed like some desert demon from legend, leapt into the air and slammed into the sergeant, driving him against the torture victim. They crashed to the ground amid shrieks and blood and biting teeth.

The two Marines began to move toward the sergeant, but Bunny shifted to cover them with his M4. That left me.

I stepped in and kicked Amirah in the side of the head. The blow knocked her off of the sergeant, but she had his hand clamped between her jaws. And the bound man was screaming and beating his forehead against the side of the sergeant’s head, mashing his ear.

“Holy shit, Boss — on your six!”

It was Bunny. I pivoted in place in time to catch the rush as something came out of the shadows and tackled me. It was one of the other Afghanis. One of the dead Afghanis.

His teeth were bared and spit flew from cracked lips as he lunged for my throat.

I braced my forearm under his chin as I fell backward and clenched my abs so that my flat back fall turned into a curled back roll. The Afghani went into the tumble with me and instead of him pinning me down we ended the roll with me straddling his chest. I jammed the barrel of the .22 into his left eye socket and fired. The bullet tore all his wiring loose, and he transformed from murderously vicious to sagging dead weight in a microsecond.

There were shouts all around, and I had to shove at the body to get free. As I came up, I saw that the second Afghani had clamped his teeth around the windpipe of one of the Marines. Bunny put six rounds into the Afghani: the first one knocked him loose from his victim, the second punched him in the chest to stall him, and the last four grouped like knuckles in a lead fist to strike him above the eyebrows. The man’s head exploded and his body spun backward in a sloppy pirouette. The Marine dropped to his knees, trying to staunch an arterial spray with fingers that shook with the palsy of sudden understanding. His companion crouched over him, pressing the wound with his hands, but the Marine drowned in his own blood in seconds.

Slim was in the cave mouth, his weapon sweeping quickly back and forth from target to target, not knowing whether to take a shot or not.

I dove at Amirah, who had crawled back atop the sergeant. For his part, the Marine was putting up a good fight, but it was clear that terror of the woman he had been using as a tool of interrogation was off the scale, too much for him to handle. He shot me a single, despairing glance, and I saw the moment when he gave up. It must have been one of those instantaneous moments of clarity that can either save you or kill you. His interrogation had failed. His method of interrogation was indefensible, a fact that would never have mattered if we hadn’t shown up. But we were here, and he was caught. His world had just crashed, and he knew it.

I locked my arm around Amirah’s throat and squeezed, bulging my bicep on one side to cut off her left carotid and my forearm to cut off her right. In jujutsu that puts someone out.

It didn’t do a fucking thing to her.

She bucked and writhed with more force than I would have thought possible for a woman of her size, alive or dead.

I shoved the hot barrel of the .22 against the back of her head, bent close, and whispered in her ear, speaking in Farsi.

“There is no shame to die in the service of Allah.”

Her muscles locked into sudden rigidity. The cave was instantly still. Even the Afghani and the sergeant had stopped screaming. I held her tight against my chest, and my back was to the cold stone wall. She smelled of rotting meat and death, but in her dark hair there was the faintest scent of perfume. Jasmine.

“Amirah,” I said. “Listen to me.”

I whispered six more words.

“Your choice, Princess,” I said. “This…or paradise?”

I leaned on the word this. From the absolute stillness, I knew that she understood what I meant. The cave, these men, all this destruction. She knew. And even though she had meant to sweep the world with her pathogen, the end goal — the transformation via Generation 12 of a select portion of Islam and the total annihilation of the enemies of her people — that was impossible. All that was left to her now was to be a monster. Alone and reviled.

The moment stretched. No one moved. Then Amirah leaned her head toward me. An oddly intimate movement.

She said, “Not…this.”

I whispered, “Yarhamukallâh.”

May God have mercy on you.

And pulled the trigger.

Chap. 4

I sat back and studied Harper for a long time.

He said, “What? You going to sit there and tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

I said nothing.

“Look,” he said, “I know that was you in the cave. What are you? Delta? SEALs?”

I said nothing.

“You know what we’re up against out there. They want us to stop the Taliban, stop the flow of opium, but our own government supports the brother of the Afghan president, and he runs half the opium in the frigging country! How the hell are we supposed to win that kind of war? This is Vietnam all over again. We’re losing a war we shouldn’t be fighting.”

I said nothing.

Harper leaned forward, anger darkening his face. He pointed at me with the index finger of his uninjured hand. “You think Abu Ghraib’s the only place where we had to do whatever it took to get some answers? It goes on all over, and it’s always gone on.”

“And look where it’s gotten us,” I said.

“Fuck you and fuck that zero tolerance bullshit. We were trying to save lives. We would have gotten something out of that man.”

“You didn’t get shit from the first two.”

Now it was his turn to say nothing. After a minute he narrowed his eyes. “When you spoke to that…that…thing. That woman. At the end, you gave her a blessing. You a Muslim?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Honestly, Sergeant, I don’t think I could explain it to you. I mean…I could explain it, but I don’t think you’d understand.”

“You think I’m a monster, don’t you?”

“Are you?”

“No, man,” he said. “I’m just trying to….” And his voice broke. At first it was just a hitch, but when he tried to catch it and hide it, his resolve broke and he put his face in his unbandaged hand and sobbed. I sat back in my chair and watched.

I looked at him. The bandages on his other hand were stained with blood that was almost black. Red lines ran in a crooked tracery from beneath the bandage and up his arms. I could see the same dark lines beginning to creep up from his collar. It was forty-eight hours since he’d been brought to the aide station. Fifty-nine since Amirah had bitten him. Strong son of a bitch. Most people would have turned by now.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked, raising a tear-streaked face.

“Nothing. It’s already happened.”

He licked his dry lips. “We…we didn’t know.”

“Yes you did. Your squad was briefed. Maybe it was all a little unreal to you, Sergeant. Horror movie stuff. But you knew. Just as you know how this ends.”

I stood and drew my sidearm and racked the slide. The sound was enormous in that little room.

“They’re going to want to study you,” I said. “They can do that with you on a slab, or in a cage.”

“They can’t!” he said, anger flaring inside his pain. “I’m an American god damn it!”

“No,” I said. “Sergeant Andy Harper died while on a mission in Afghanistan. The report will reflect that he died while serving his country and maintaining the best traditions of the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Harper looked at me, the truth registering in his eyes.

“So I ask you,” I said, raising the pistol. “This…or paradise?”

“I…I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe at that moment he really was. Deathbed epiphanies aren’t worth the breath that carries them. Not to me. Not anymore.

“I know,” I lied.

“I did it for us, man. I did it to help!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

And raised the gun