The Lightning Stones

12

The man who met Mercer at the Kabul International Airport just north of downtown looked like an ordinary Afghani, with three notable differences. He was almost a full head taller than the other drivers clustered outside the terminal building clamoring for fares. He wore Western-style combat boots with high ankle support and steel toes. And his skin was about two shades darker than any other man within many miles. This dark countenance split into a broad grin when he saw Mercer cut through the multitudes that congregated around airports in every Third World city he’d ever visited.

They embraced when they met, and the black man shook the single rucksack slung over Mercer’s shoulder. “I see you still pack like a teenage girl heading to summer camp.”

“Half of what’s in here is for you, Book. A fifth of Maker’s Mark because you and Harry just have to drink different whiskeys, and a carton of duty-free Marlboros because they’re as good as dollars when it comes to baksheesh.”

“Ever since the Fed started quantitative easing, the locals want to be bribed in euros.” Booker Sykes placed two fingertips to his lips and gave such a piercing whistle that everything around them seemed to pause for a beat. A four-door Toyota pickup detached itself from a line of similarly dusty vehicles and approached them. Armed soldiers stationed outside the terminal watched warily, always on the alert for a suicide bomber striking at so many soft-target foreigners.

Sykes had spent a lifetime honing his body into a force of lethality; when he moved, he did so with the grace and reserve of an apex predator. He swung open the truck’s passenger door but paused there until Mercer had settled into the backseat before easing his bulk into the truck. His eyes never stopped scanning the crowd.

“Welcome to Kabul,” he said over his shoulder, his basso voice easily outclassing the Toyota’s rusted-out exhaust. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”

“Neither can I,” Mercer agreed.

He thought of the world map behind the bar back home, with pins stuck in over seventy countries documenting his work as a consulting geologist in some of the remotest locales on Earth. Mercer was familiar with how much of the population lived in grinding poverty among the ruins of failed states. Ten minutes into his first visit here and he could tell Afghanistan, and in particular Kabul, was no exception. What struck him most on flying into the country and again now out on the streets was the near-monochromatic scenery. The roads, the mountains, the buildings, the camels — everything was hued in a muted brown palette.

The exceptions were the yellow-painted taxis that made up the majority of the cars on the streets, and the bright blue of the women’s burkas. The Afghan women moved like wraiths, consciously unseen by the men jostling along the sidewalks. It made no sense to Mercer that the vividness of their costumes should make them stand out against the dull background, when the sack-like burkas were meant to hide them entirely. It was like going into combat wearing safety orange rather than camouflage.

Mercer laughed. “I guess it’s better than if the sample had been found in North Korea.”

The traffic was insane. The roads might have had lines painted on them at some point in the distant past, but the brutal summer heat and biting winter winds had scoured them away. Drivers maneuvered any way they chose. The only thing they all did consistently was try to drive around the worst of the potholes, some of which were deep and broad enough to hide an Abrams tank. Young men on motorcycles and bicycles wove in and out between the stalled cars, often using a fender or tire to rest a leg if things slowed to a stop. Carts led by horses and donkeys, many full of manure, were as common as the gaily painted trucks with Pakistani license plates bringing in goods from over the Khyber Pass.

“I chuckle,” Booker said, “when I hear people bitching about traffic on the D.C. Beltway. It ain’t shit compared to this furball.”

“How much longer are you here?” Mercer asked.

“Two more weeks, then I am stateside. They want me to come back, obviously, but I’m not so sure. Stacy would prefer I take an office job, and I’m starting to think I can compromise and become an instructor someplace.”

This was the first Mercer had heard about this. “So she has her hooks that deep into you?”

“She sure as hell beats coming home to Harry White and that stinky old dog of his.”

That was an unarguable point.

Booker Sykes was once among the elite soldiers in the world. From Rangers to Special Forces and on to the indefatigable Delta, his exact number of deployments remained a national secret even after his retirement from the army, but he had seen as much combat as anyone alive — and in places the American public had no idea their nation had a military interest. He had just last year retired after putting in his twenty, to take a much more lucrative job with a private security contractor with the intentionally innocuous name of Gen-D Systems. He was essentially being paid ten times as much for one-tenth the danger of what he’d been doing with the army. What he hadn’t expected was to fall hard for one of the company’s in-house lawyers. Sykes had one failed marriage already, a casualty of his constant deployments, but he wasn’t the same stupid twenty-seven-year-old he’d been then, and he recognized that he wasn’t going to do any better than Stacy Grantham — and that maybe it would be best if his war fighting days were behind him.

“Just tell me where you two are registered and I’ll get you something nice.”

Sykes casually gave Mercer the finger over his broad shoulder, his attention never far from their immediate surroundings. In the bustle of the city anything and everything could be rigged to explode, from the broken-down truck on the side of the road with one of its tires off as though it was being replaced, to the twelve-year-old boy standing at a crosswalk with his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

Mercer would have never considered this trip if it weren’t for his friendship with Book Sykes. The two had met when Sykes was still with Delta and on a training rotation at the air force’s notorious Area 51. Mercer had been there leading a group of miners who were tunneling underground as part of a top-secret physics experiment. He had used Sykes and his team’s unique abilities once or twice since then under the auspices of his role as special science adviser to the president, but since Mercer had lost that job the two met only as friends. Sykes still lived outside of Fort Bragg, Delta’s HQ in North Carolina, and near Gen-D’s offices as well, but he managed to get to Washington whenever he was back in the States.

A day earlier, as soon as he’d gotten off the phone with the Hoover Library, Mercer had called Book’s satellite phone here in Kabul. Sykes then cleared it with his bosses to take Mercer on as a short-term client, but could do nothing about getting him a “friends and relatives” discount. To hire Sykes and three of his men, plus transportation for just a couple of days, ate up the better part of fifty grand. This was a heavy price, but Mercer had been well paid over the years — and to get a crack at Abe’s killers he was willing to pay far more.

It was only after arrangements had been made with Sykes that Mercer reached out to Nate Lowell. As Mercer knew would happen, the FBI agent listened with the studied disinterest of a tollbooth attendant on retirement day, promised to include Mercer’s information from the Hoover Library in his report, and hung up before Mercer could ask about Kelly Hepburn. As Agent Hepburn had said, hers wasn’t the main thrust of the investigation, so to expect anything out of Lowell was a waste of time.

Mercer had then told Harry and Jordan exactly where the next leg of the investigation would take him. Harry was unmoved. He’d been around to see Mercer jet off halfway around the planet too many times to care. On the other hand, Jordan was stunned. It appeared in just the few days they had been together she’d come to rely on his steady presence. He had assured her that the gunmen couldn’t possibly know their identities, so they were perfectly safe — but that wasn’t it. It seemed as though she liked knowing he was nearby, that she could call his name and he’d be there.

Mercer had given Jordan an indulgent smile. There was something about her that excited him — her youthful beauty, her intelligence, her vulnerability…perhaps all three. “Twenty hours flying there, forty on the ground, tops, and twenty back. Let’s call it four days just to be sure. Then I’ll be back — and hopefully with the answers that will end this nightmare.”

“Maybe…” Jordan had said. “But it’s not safe, Mercer, and you know it.” He nodded understandingly, and told her a couple of stories about Booker T. Sykes and his exploits, knowing it would make her feel better to know he had someone like Sykes watching over him.

Upstairs on his closet floor, Mercer kept a packed go bag. The only items he dumped from it, since he was flying commercial, were the folding knife and the Beretta 92 pistol. He trusted Booker could get him replacements in country. Less than sixty minutes after learning where Sample 681 had been unearthed, he was ready to go. He would fly first to London, then New Delhi, and on to Kabul, where Book would meet him and escort him the last couple hundred miles. He didn’t bother shaking Harry’s hand. They were long past that. The old bastard didn’t even get off the bar stool. He just tossed a casual wave over his shoulder without a second glance. Drag greeted Mercer’s departure with even more sangfroid, and snored on while Mercer left the rec room.

Only Jordan had walked him down to the front door, her arm still held against her chest by the sling. Mercer stooped to kiss her on the forehead, but she recoiled from him, a strange look on her face.

“Just how old do you think I am?”

The question shook him and he sputtered a bit before she rescued him by saying, “I know I look really young, Mercer…it’s been a drag most of my life, but I figure when I’m forty it’s going to be awesome. I’m twenty-eight, not eighteen, so if you want to kiss me properly I won’t think you’re a perv or anything.”

He ran the numbers in his head and found her math to be impeccable. He was gentle with her arm, but firm as he pressed her hard body against his and his mouth to hers. With her sling between them it was awkward, but nonetheless rewarding. He had one hand at the base of her neck, tilting her head, the other at her waist and nearly encircling half her body. Her knee pressed gently between his legs, nuzzling, teasing.

He broke the kiss before he no longer had the will to do so and stepped back, panting, sheepish, and more than a little awestruck.

“Wow,” Jordan said, slow to open her eyes.

“Yeah, wow,” he replied, smiling. “I guess I’ll see you in a few days.”

“And we will definitely pick up where we left off.”

He gave her one more short fierce kiss, and then he was out the door, hooking it with an ankle in a practiced maneuver that gave it just enough momentum to close with a solid clunk.

That had been nearly a full day earlier. “Mercer,” Sykes called, startling him back to reality. Sykes pointed to their driver. “I want you to meet Hamid. Hamid, this sad white boy is Philip Mercer, and trust me when I tell you that danger follows this man like the goat stench after a Taliban. Hamid’s brother is our chopper pilot, and Hamid works as a mechanic as well as a driver.”

“What kind of helo?”

“A Mil Mi-2 that’s about ten years older than you or I and goes through as much oil as gas,” Booker said with a sardonic smile. “That is one thing I do miss about being on Uncle Sam’s dime. We had Blackhawks that were maintained by boys who ate and breathed all that techno shit.”

Mercer was familiar with the Mi-2, a Soviet-era workhorse found in many of their former client states but now maintained without the patronage of the Soviet/Russian Mil bureau. He’d flown on some in Africa, where they had used flattened paint cans to patch the bodywork, and duct tape and baling wire to hold other parts in place.

“I never said you weren’t brave,” Mercer said.

Book grinned again and repacked his cheek with chewing tobacco.

Gen-D Systems rented a warehouse not too far from the recently renovated Ghazi Stadium, where the Taliban once held public stonings and beheadings. It was now home to several football clubs.

Hamid sounded the Toyota’s horn midway down the block from their destination, alerting the guards that they were coming. This part of the city was relatively safe, but these men took no chances with security. As they neared the razor-wire-topped gate, an Afghan employee inside drew it back on its rollers to let the truck slip through and then just as quickly rammed it home again so that a steel locking bar fell into place. Hamid needed to slam on the brakes in order to avoid hitting other vehicles parked in Gen-D’s tight lot, or any of the shipping containers that seemed to make up half the structures in the city. Here they were storage. Elsewhere they were homes.

The warehouse was battered by weather, and some bricks looked as crumbly as dust, while there were huge stains on the cracked asphalt lot and several of the cars dotting it had been picked clean for spares. In all it reminded Mercer of an East L.A. chop shop, only when he got out of the truck the music he heard from a boom box atop an oil drum wasn’t Latin pop but some Indian synth music that sounded like cats fighting in a burlap bag.

“Home sweet home,” Sykes said, unfolding his considerable frame from the Toyota.

“Has a nice postapocalyptic vibe,” Mercer said. “I like it.”

“I am not wasting my per diem on a room at the Intercontinental. I’ll show you where you’re crashing, and then we’ll see to that bottle of Maker’s Mark.”

The living quarters, though spartan, were adequate, and they had installed a shower with a high-pressure head and enough hot water to soak out twenty-two hours of stale airline air and cramped muscles. Because of the short notice, there had only been coach seats available on the long leg from London to New Delhi.

Mercer met Sykes and three other Americans in the operations room, which also doubled as their lounge. There were mismatched sofas facing a flat-screen TV hooked to a satellite dish on the roof, and a Sony PS-4 console on the cement floor. The walls were covered with travel posters, mostly bikinied women on sugar sand beaches, but also some maps of the country as well as detailed ones of the city of Kabul and the surrounding suburbs. Light came from yellow construction lamps aimed at the ceiling.

The warehouse had once belonged to a spice merchant, and even years later the air still carried the tinge of Eastern flavors — saffron, cinnamon, and of course the aroma of raw opium, which had been the man’s real business.

The bottle of Maker’s Mark was on a sideboard the men used for their bar, among other bottles of spirits he’d never heard of — but in a country where only foreigners could buy alcohol, Chinese vodka and Japanese gin worked just fine. Mercer squeezed two limes into a glass and poured in the vodka. There was no ice.

“Grab one of those liter bottles of water,” Book ordered and waved his bourbon glass in the direction of the flats of water stacked next to the bar. “We’re at nearly six thousand feet and we’ll be even higher tomorrow. I don’t need you puking from the altitude.”

He was sitting on a recliner covered in colorful dyed cotton tapestries since its original upholstery had long since been worn away. “And, Mercer, I hope you don’t take offense — operational security requires that you not know the other guys’ real names. But these are the men going south with us tomorrow. Do you remember the code name I gave you when we jumped into that monastery in Tibet?”

“Snow White,” Mercer said dejectedly, hating the moniker of a newbie but knowing he’d never earn a real operator’s nickname.

“Snow it is”—Sykes laughed—“and these three are Grump, Sleep, and Sneeze. And of course, I am your host, Doc.”

“You’re also an unimaginative prick,” Mercer said. He shook the men’s hands. They all had the calm eyes and easy demeanor of elite soldiers, men who had been pushed so far beyond the limits of endurance that they no longer needed to show how tough they were. If you didn’t immediately recognize it, you weren’t worth their time. Mercer knew he would never have the time to gain their respect, but Sykes must have told them a little of his and Mercer’s exploits because they looked at Mercer with slightly more regard than they would have offered a regular civilian.

“First off, I want to say thanks. I know it’s more money in your pockets, but Book said you all volunteered for this mission without really knowing the risks. And neither do I. With any luck it’ll be nothing more than a quiet day in the countryside with us back home in time for supper. On the other hand we could be heading into an area crawling with insurgents or drug smugglers. The satellite pictures I’ve seen only show an area of canyons and valleys that are so steep the bottoms are in shadow for all but an hour a day.” He looked to Sykes. “Have you gotten any intel on the region?”

“We’ve asked around,” Booker replied. “It’s pretty remote even by Afghan standards, but it is close enough to the Pak border that there could be smugglers — and those bastards have a hell of a lot more fight in them than the Taliban because they’re better paid. That said, no one has anything solid going on down there. I even reached out to my contact in the Company. She said everything appears quiet. The Tali’s spring offensive is still a few weeks away, and it’s still a little early to catch them moving supplies into position.”

“So what’s the plan?” Mercer asked.

“Nothing’s changed since yesterday. We’ll chopper in to as close as we can, then hoof it the rest of the way. You do whatever you need to do while we cover your sorry ass, and then it’s hot feet back to the LZ and we bug out. The only pucker factor is Ahmad, that’s our pilot, is going to need to dust off and refuel in Khost, so that leaves us on our own for the better part of three hours.”

“And what about you?” the operator nicknamed Sleep asked Mercer. He was African American like Booker but spoke with a deep southern accent. “What are you doing here exactly? Book says you’re a geologist.”

Mercer nodded. “A few days ago a friend of mine was killed over a mineral sample that was discovered in our target area. I have no idea how long ago or what the sample was. I don’t even know if there’s any left there, so I guess we can consider this a fact-finding mission.”

“If my read of history is right,” Grump said, spitting some tobacco juice into a soda can, “the Vietnam War started with fact-finding missions.”

“Don’t worry,” Book told his men. “To the best of my knowledge Mercer has never actually started a war. Right?”

Before Mercer could reply, the earth jolted under them enough to rattle the bottles on the bar and send peppery dust raining from the building’s exposed rafters. The men looked around and then down at the ground. Concerned but not alarmed.

Mercer finally had to ask, “What was that?”

“IED,” Sneeze told him. He was a slender man with dark hair and a beard who could easily pass as a native. “Sounds about two miles away and fairly large. More likely a truck bomb than a suicide vest.”

Seconds later the sound of sirens penetrated the warehouse’s thick brick walls.

“The Taliban is letting the government know that they’re coming soon,” Sneeze went on. “And once they take over, the opposition will swing into action with the exact same tactics. No one can rule this country, because the lines drawn on their hundred-year-old colonial maps don’t mean squat. The idea that there really is a nation of Afghanistan is as much a myth as saying there are such places as Shangri-la or Atlantis.”

A boy of about twelve dressed in traditional clothes came in from another room. He was pushing a trolley cart that looked like it had been stolen from a hotel. On it were stainless serving dishes, a stack of cheap china plates, and cutlery.

“Ah, good,” Book said. “On that happy note, dinner is served. Mercer, this is Hamid’s son, Farzam. Farzam is our batman when he’s not in school, and his mother is our cook. The best in Kabul, right, Farzam?”

“I am that, Mr. Book,” the boy said in what was obviously a routine they did often.

“I was talking about your momma.”

“Her as well.” The boy grinned and settled the cart next to the bar.

There wasn’t much conversation with the meal. The men lined up cafeteria style, served themselves from the rice and goat bowls, and then sat to shovel food into their mouths the way railroad workers used to feed coal into locomotives. Afterward they drifted to their individual rooms, basically cubicles made of plywood with hinged doors that maintained a level of privacy.

“You good, sleepwise, for tomorrow?” Booker asked Mercer when his men had gone.

“Good enough for the trip there and back, but I pity the poor SOB sitting next to me on my flights the next day — unless he’s deaf or otherwise immune to snoring.”

“Fine. I’ll wake you at zero-five-thirty for breakfast and kit up. We head for the chopper at six and hope to be in the air no later than six thirty.” Booker reached behind his back and removed a sleek black pistol. He popped the magazine from the butt and racked the slide to eject the round already jacked into the chamber. He thumbed the brass shell back into the mag and rammed it into place once again before handing it over to Mercer, grip first and the barrel angled away. “We never let principals carry weapons on protection detail because ten times out of ten they’re civilians here doing charity work or part of some rebuilding effort and don’t know a Beretta from a hole in the ground.” He heaved himself off the couch. “You, on the other hand…Just don’t shoot any of my boys.”