The First Casualty

4

Charlie Sherman had been with the mujahideen too long. He was beginning to hallucinate. Maybe it was the food. Qabili palau, a sort of rice pilaf with caramelized vegetables, at every meal was enough to get to men far saner than Charlie. It had been so long since he had tasted meat, he had begun to fantasize about the scrawny goats that bleated in every village. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe he had been insane to begin with, volunteering to liaison between the CIA and the natives resisting Russian invasion.

Whatever. He knew the facts: A month ago, a Russian force had been defeated trying to open up the road winding through the valley below. There were still a number of what he guessed were Russian bodies. Natural decomposition despite the near frigid weather made it hard to tell. Decomposition, plus the quaint local custom of stripping the dead of anything useful, including uniforms.

But that wasn’t what had Charlie questioning his own sanity.

Charlie’s Afghan guide and translator, Aarif, whose name meant “understanding,” wasn’t understandable at all. He had kept pointing to the rusting hulk of a T-72. Like most Russian tanks he saw these days, it had a couple of large holes in it, the result of multiple RPG hits. This one, though, didn’t mount the usual turret gun. Instead, it had a blunt-nozzle sort of apparatus. Charlie had heard the Ruskies were experimenting with various gases, but there wasn’t enough left of the seared interior to tell what sort of weapons it had carried.

Strange but not weird.

Then Aarif had led him into a cave cut into the rock of the hillside. The walls were easily one or two meters thick, far too thick to be penetrated by the 85-millimeter shells fired by Russian tanks. Charlie switched on his flashlight. The cave was full of dead people, mujahideen fighters. Not only did they look as though they had simply gone to sleep — no decomposition, no stench of rotting flesh — the bodies were barely over a meter in length. Unless the Afghans had enlisted a brigade of midgets, there was something really strange there.

Aarif’s English left a lot to be desired, but if Charlie had understood him correctly, he said the tank had fired something that had come through the walls of the cave. But there was no damage Charlie could see.

“Gas,” he said, “the tank fired gas into the entrance?”

The Afghan shook his head adamantly, no. “Came through!”

Weapons that break through solid rock leaving no hole, fighters the size of small children that don’t deteriorate…

Yep, Charlie had been in Afghanistan too long. On the upside, once he reported all this, he wouldn’t be there much longer.