Private Rogue

Chapter 18

The first thing Floyd registered was the smell. Sweet, ripe and rotten, an almost overpowering stench of manure and livestock. He opened his eyes and saw straw and droppings, and heard the bray of a nearby animal. He raised his head to see a horned goat poking its muzzle through the wooden struts of an interior partition — its lips working the air as it strained to reach the sleeve of his flight suit. Behind the creature were others, gnawing on some kind of meal heaped in a clay trough.

Floyd moved his arm and the goat snorted and joined its fellow inmates. Floyd looked up and saw wooden beams supporting rough boards, a ceiling of sorts, the lines of light that fell between them broken by the movement of people overhead. He could hear their footsteps. Lots of footsteps.

He sat up and looked over his shoulder to see two short stern-faced men in gray shalwar kameez tunics and trousers, standing beyond a wooden gate. Both of them held bolt-action rifles and had pistols holstered in gun belts slung across their chests.

One of them yelled something in Kamviri — the local language, which Floyd was aware of but not enough to understand — and there came an almost immediate reply from someone he couldn’t see.

The more dangerous of the two — Floyd had characterized him so because his face was a criss-cross patchwork of old scars — stepped forward and opened the gate, while his companion kept his rifle aimed at Floyd’s chest. Scarface said something and gestured with his long-barreled gun. Floyd didn’t need a translator. He shuffled toward the two men. He was tempted to disarm Scarface, but there was every chance he’d catch a bullet in the gut for his troubles. And besides, he had no idea what lay outside this building. The people of Nuristan weren’t to be underestimated. They’d been at war with one enemy or another for an almost unbroken period of more than a century. Combat was a way of life, and the CIA briefing on the region had left Floyd with a sense of awe at the ability of these people to structure their lives and society around almost ceaseless war.

When he stepped out of the stall, Floyd saw an exterior door, and another man, about the same height as the first two, but older, with narrow, cruel eyes. He was armed in similar fashion, and when he opened the door, Floyd caught a blast of bitter air. He longed for his flight jacket, but it was nowhere to be seen. Scarface jostled him forward, then directed him through the door leading outside. He was pushed up a flight of stone steps that ran off to the right and was almost blinded by powerful torchlight shone by a figure at the top of the stairs.

The ice-cold air chilled his lungs and his head swam from the exertion of climbing the stairs. Whoever had hit him had cracked his head good. He paused for a moment, but a rifle barrel in the small of his back told him to keep moving. When he got closer to the top of the steps and the torch being shone on him, he saw it was being held by a teenage boy with a scraggly beard. He wasn’t sure, but thought it was probably the kid who’d surprised him when he’d first come to the village. The teenager urged Floyd through a doorway that led into a small antechamber full of shoes and coats. The boy opened an interior door and ushered Floyd into a large, well-lit hall.

There were fifty or sixty people in a space about the size of a tennis court. The floor was bare cedarwood, but the walls were hung with ornate woven rugs and a large fire burned in a central hearth. A brick chimney rose into the steeply angled roof. The people were nearly all men and had clustered before the fire. The only two women Floyd could see in the throng were both in their sixties and were seated in heavy armchairs covered in the chipped remains of old gilding. Next to these women were three older men in similar, once grand chairs. These five seemed to command reverence from the assembled crowd.

“Amrikani,” a gray-haired man in a brown shalwar kameez said, looking at Floyd. He was seated in the armchair at the center of the line of elders.

“You are accused of being a spy and a thief,” the man said in English.

He turned to the crowd and said something in Kamviri.

“I’m neither of those things,” Floyd protested.

The elder continued as though he hadn’t spoken, “The punishment for these crimes is death.”