The Utopia Experiment

9

Randi put the helicopter into a steep climb, feeling a jolt of adrenaline when she spotted the shape of a goatherd moving against the dead Afghan landscape. It wasn’t the fear of death that caused it, though. It was the fear that something might happen to the chopper.

There were only three in existence and the CIA tended not to hand them out to self-confessed mediocre pilots. The change of heart could only be the result of the quiet involvement of Fred Klein, but still it had been made clear that there would be hell to pay if she brought it back with so much as a scratch.

Neither the animals nor the goatherd so much as glanced at the sky as she passed overhead, reminding her why she’d fallen in love the moment she’d laid eyes on the aircraft. Its blades had a bizarre bat-wing shape that cut rotor slap by more than half; what noise was left was deadened by a web of speakers using the same technology as over-the-counter noise-canceling headphones. The skids and bottom were painted the hazy blue of the Afghan sky and the top the monotonous tan of the Afghan ground, completing the incredibly effective stealth package.

Of course there were drawbacks. The range was crap and it was a single-seater with a 250-pound capacity. So instead of carrying Deuce to watch her back, she was crammed into the cockpit with a bunch of jerry cans full of fuel. At least they’d make a really big fire if she crashed. Burning alive would be preferable to having to go back to Klein and tell him that she’d left the CIA’s multimillion-dollar toy sticking out of a sand dune.

Randi followed an obvious ridgeline, navigating by memory toward the Taliban village of Kot’eh. She was fairly certain they were responsible for the attack on Sarabat and while it didn’t seem to bother anyone else, she couldn’t shake the image of those headless bodies. She wanted to know what the hell had happened there and, while his motivations were murkier, so did Fred Klein.

It wasn’t until she came around the edge of a broad plateau that the smoke became visible — multiple narrow columns rising dead straight for a hundred meters before being ripped apart by the crosswinds she’d been fighting since leaving base.

“Damn,” she said, her voice just audible over the hum of the engine and hiss of the state-of-the-art rotors. A tug on the collective took her to maximum altitude — a pathetic two hundred meters off the deck.

In the end, neither the mundane performance specs, the fancy paint job, nor the silence mattered at all. A few passes made it clear that there was nothing left alive in Kot’eh to care about her presence. And while she couldn’t say she hadn’t considered the possibility that this was what she’d find, the knot in her stomach tightened perceptibly.

She made another arcing pass around the north edge of the village, speaking aloud to herself again. “So what’s the brilliant plan now, Randi?”

She answered the question by dipping the chopper’s nose toward the rooftops. Just a quick peek. What could possibly go wrong?

It was strange to hear only the sound of the sand battering the glass as she touched down. There was no visible movement outside. She jumped out, leaning over her assault rifle as she ran through the dissipating cloud of dust.

When she made it to clear air, she stood upright and scanned the scene through her scope. To the untrained eye, it would be déjà vu all over again. Just another burning Afghan village strewn with bodies — no different than Sarabat, except that the men were still wearing their heads.

Her eye was far from untrained, though, and it immediately identified stark contrasts. The weapons used against Kot’eh had been far more powerful and destructive than the ubiquitous AK-47. There were gaping wounds in a number of the bodies that were undoubtedly caused by fifty-caliber sniper rounds, buildings displaying RPG damage, and three craters large and well placed enough that they suggested sophisticated light artillery.

The footprints of the offensive force ran the gamut from American and European military-issue boots to sole patterns she didn’t recognize — probably commercially available models favored by mercenaries. Even more interesting was that, if followed backward, most just suddenly appeared with two extraordinarily deep impressions. They’d been dropped, almost certainly at night, and then fanned out in an intricate pattern that suggested serious operators.

Again in contrast with Sarabat, the men in this village had fought. There was no question of that, just as there was no question that their efforts had been completely futile. She counted only three places where bloodstains didn’t have a corresponding corpse — attackers that had been wounded and evacuated.

The sun dipped onto the western plateau as she continued her search, finally finding what she was looking for near a charred fence: the body of Farhad Wahidi. They’d had a very tentative relationship, created over a number of years during occasional moments when the interests of the Taliban and CIA converged. She couldn’t say that she was sorry to see the fundamentalist son of a bitch dead, but it did make a productive conversation unlikely.

She pushed her sunglasses onto her headscarf and continued to search, staring at the ground as she traced ever-larger concentric circles through the scattered buildings. Occasionally, she’d stumble upon the long-strided tracks of a running Afghan headed toward the edge of the village, and she followed each one to an end that quickly began to feel inevitable: a body with a single, nicely centered round between the shoulder blades.

The light continued to flatten and obscure details that the wind would probably make permanent work of overnight. She was about to give up when she found one last set of footprints coming out of a corral full of blackened livestock. They were awkward at first, suggesting that their author had run crouched, using the panicked animals as cover. After about fifty meters, the stride lengthened and turned east toward boulder-strewn mountains glowing red in the distance.

Three pursuing tracks soon converged, but their configuration was calculated and their pace unhurried. This wasn’t a chase initiated in the heat of battle. No, they’d found the track just as she had and were now hunting the escapee like an animal.

Randi looked back at the rising moon. She knew from experience that it would provide plenty of light to track the men and that, in all likelihood, the one person who had the answers she was looking for wouldn’t live to see morning. If he wasn’t dead already.

Of course, setting out on a nighttime chase meant leaving the chopper. The very thought conjured another surge of adrenaline and the mental image of returning to find it stripped and up on blocks.

“Bad idea,” she said, pulling out her sat phone and dialing a number from memory.

A powerful encryption routine delayed the connection for a moment but then Fred Klein’s familiar voice came on.

“Did you find anything?”

“Your suspicious mercenary activity. Everyone here is dead.”

“So those villagers wipe out Sarabat under suspicious circumstances and then they themselves are wiped out by an unknown mercenary group.”

“Seems to me that someone helped them take out Sarabat and now they’re covering their tracks. The question is why? Who would care this much about a couple of little villages in the middle of nowhere?”