The Towers

by David Poyer

  “Could be a Q behind any one of those rocks,” Dollhard said. “So, it’s daylight. Get used to it, operators. Chief, move ’em out.”

  Teddy got Echo advancing by bounding overwatches up along what looked like goat trails. They ran on either side of an ice-bordered streamlet that splashed perfectly clear over a bed of rounded pebbles glowing ruby and garnet, opal and jade, as if a genie had paved it with jewels. Dry, dead-looking bushes overhung the stream here and there, but aside from that and the few low trees, there was little vegetation. Just bare, striated rocks. The goat-path petered out amid them. He scrambled from one boulder to the next like an ant climbing a pile of number two crush and run, sometimes in shadow, sometimes in sunlight. He wheezed the cold and exceedingly thin air in and out. A sudden bruising fall that knocked the wind out of him taught him the lichen patches were slippery. And, once again, that it was nearly impossible to break a fucking MX-300R.

  From the far side of a low ridge between them and what seemed to be the main action came the thumps of bombs and the distant crackle of small arms. Teddy looked back. He couldn’t see them all at once amid the rocks, but waited till he’d sighted each. Echo One to the left of the gully: the new OIC first, then Tatie Wasiakowski, Oz, Smeg, Bucky, Two Scoops, and Mud Cat. To the right, Echo Two: Teddy and Verstegen leading, then Vaseline, Harley, Moogie, Tore, Dipper—also called Doc, the corpsman—and Knobby Swager.

  Dollhard’s briefing had laid it out. The hard-core ALQ had taken refuge in a thirty-cave system called Tora Bora.” Sixty miles west of the Khyber Pass, it had been a redoubt all through the Soviet War. The Sovs had sent in armored columns, but bogged down and retreated. JSOC South—Cutlass’s boss—had it that not only the core leadership but bin Laden himself was here. Not enough US forces in theater to attack, but someone had to. The weather would only get worse; both air support and aerial recon would degrade fast. The Alliance was pushing down from the north. Three separate militias, each led by a different warlord. Special Forces attachments were coordinating the air strikes that covered the advance. Meanwhile, on the far side, the Pakistani army was sealing the border. “It’s not going to be easy, taking down these caves,” the OIC had warned. “But it’s got to be done. Osama’s in a shoebox; now we stomp on it.”

  Teddy caught himself from falling between two rocks, scrambled across a slanting, slick boulder, and rested against a larger one. The valley was gradually being revealed as they climbed. Far down it rose an immense bare earthen hump; to the right climbed the sheer escarpment of the mountain; far above contrails carved the sky. Smoke plumed, and the air shook. He raised the rifle and through the scope made out tanks atop the bare hill. Small figures advanced like wary fleas, with many stops and side dashes. Too far to tell if they were uniformed, but he didn’t get the impression of regular troops. The complex would be to his right, bored into the mountain. The shock waves of another stick rippled across the valley like a handful of pennies tossed into a pond of dust and smoke.

  “We could get him, huh?” Knobby Swager said, pulling a sleeve across a bright red face. He was wearing loose Levi’s with some kind of padding beneath, maybe long underwear, and a skateboard helmet spray-painted tan and black. “Think they’ll give us the twenty-five mil, we bring his head back on a stick?”

  Teddy looked at him, then back through the scope. If only. Everybody kept saying this wasn’t about one man. It was about networks, funding sources, terror cells. But maybe this could be it. He didn’t give a shit about the reward. Give it to the fucking Afghans. Anyway, how could you win a war on terror? That was like winning a war against war.

  A detonation deeper than any before shook the mountains, booming and reverberating away. Teddy found himself crouching, hands over ears. A mushroom cloud of smoke and fire built from the valley, toppled, and began drifting downwind.

  “Holy fuck, Chief.”

  “Air Force is getting serious.”

  It was about time. For just a second Teddy imagined Echo Platoon leading the bearded madman back, hands zip-tied behind him. The tall, Lincoln-gangly leader with the sad smile and flea-bitten beard.

  He wiped his face, slung his rifle, and reached for another rock. Bring him back, hell. For what? A trial? They should flay him and keep him alive in a saline bath with feeding tubes and a ventilator. We have the technology, he thought. If you really wanted to stop getting 911 calls from all over the world, that was how. Make an example they’d talk about for a thousand years.

  But he didn’t see the will for that level of lesson-teaching.

  With a roar that scraped the inside of his eardrums, an Apache hurtled through the pass, canted as if it could only fit through sideways. So low Teddy could see the pilot peering down, and he signaled Scoops, who carried it, to lay out the identification panel. He turned again, sweeping his gaze up and down the rockfall. Pressed his mike for Dollhard. “Echo One, Two. Any word what’s on the other side of this hill?”

  “No real-time eyes, Chief.”

  “We want to go charging over that crest, sir?”

  “Send a man up from each squad to check it out. Keep ’em a hundred yards apart. Everybody else, hold up abreast of that big black mother with the cunt-shaped crease.”

  Teddy clicked off and climbed the last yards to the black rock and got his canteen out. Two swallows. The CamelBak was his reserve. He field-stripped a protein bar and crammed the whole thing into his mouth to leave his hands free and pointed the rifle around the boulder. If somebody was hiding above them, this could be an unhealthy place to park. He looked down again as another B-52 strike rippled across the valley. Bursts of smoke and flame the color of the setting sun filled it with a seething veil opaque as a bowl of milk. Seconds later the rumble came, like a glacier collapsing into the sea. There were supposed to be monkeys, tigers, wild boars, in these mountains. He felt sorry for them.

  “Hey, hey, take that, Osama.”

  “Payback’s a motherfucker.”

  Teddy depressed his send button. “Clear the channel, frogmen. Crawl into those scopes. I want eyes on every place that can hold a shooter.”

  Word came back: The saddle beyond looked clear, though there could be dozens of snipers among the rock tumbles that were if anything even worse than on this side. Dollhard pulled the rest of the platoon to the top, then swung left and pushed out a stop line that peaked below the crest and descended two hundred meters on either side. He told Teddy and Verstegen to hold that line. “I’m going out a little toward the valley for a better look.”

  Teddy said, “Sir, we should be down there on the sharp end, busting the caves. Punching tickets at close range.”

  “Appreciate the input, Chief. But since our orders say to stay where we are, I’m gonna confuse everybody and follow ’em,” Dollhard said.

  “What about those guys down where those tanks are, L-T? Whoever’s down there’s trying a frontal assault on a well-defended position. They’re gonna take major casualties. Even if we just move down and lay some flanking fire, we’ll help them out.”

  The lieutenant scratched his beard, which was getting seriously woolly, but finally shook his head. He said the air would collapse the caves and the Afghans would do the mopping up. He climbed down into the rocks and vanished toward the firing. Teddy perched beside the assistant platoon leader on the black boulder, which was gradually heating in the pale sun.

  They had no warning, none at all. Perhaps afterward he might have connected the high, thin scraping of engines against the sky; a distant glitter. Perhaps. But probably not.

  The bomb went off no more than a hundred yards away. It was at least a thousand-pounder. All he saw was a white flash a hundred feet across, succeeded instantly by a globe of glaring orange fire. The shock wave rocked the ground and jarred his teeth and sucked all the air out of his lungs. His left arm flew out as he went over backward and caught the rock at an awkward angle. Something tore inside his shoulder. The whole valley below vanished in flying rock and dirt. His head rang like Quasimodo
’s bells as he cowered, brain blank. Then, realizing he was still alive, he pushed his head up into the smoke that blew back over them.

  The bomb had hit downslope. Dollhard. “Lieutenant!” he shouted into the murk. No response, though he might not have heard it even if he was there. Teddy’s head keened with sirens like a Friday night in South Central. “Lieutenant!” He keyed the Motorola. No response there either, except cursing and questions from the rest of the team. He transmitted, “Echo Two, Two, all hands, get your panels out and on the ground. Visual ID panels out, clearly visible from the sky. And take cover, in between these rocks.”

  Verstegen, face smeared with dirt and snot, blood dripping from under his bush hat. “Where’s the L-T?”

  “Down there.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Mortar?”

  “No mortar, sir. That was a bomb. Laser-guided? Maybe even a JDAM.” He looked up at the sky, which suddenly felt dense as depleted uranium. Bright and hard with contrails. Filled with smart bombs that sometimes weren’t so smart. He rubbed his shoulder, then checked his watch, filing facts for the report they’d have to write. He keyed the Motorola. “Ozzie, Ozzie, copy? Get on the air channel—”

  “Already there, Chief—”

  Verstegen had his sleeve. “Should we fall back, Chief? Get off the bull’s-eye?”

  “No, sir. We’re where they want us. But we need to get the word out to Poker. Blue on blue on our position. Get our coordinates to the controllers in the valley. Or we’ll get more heavies called down on us if the bad guys start coming this way.”

  When he felt sure the jaygee and Ozzie had it under control, Teddy checked his rifle, rolled over the edge of the boulder, and started crawling toward where Dollhard had disappeared.

  He found him, eventually. There wasn’t much to bring back; the bomb had blasted huge rocks into fragments, and the lieutenant had been deep within the lethal radius. The remains smoldered at the edge of a still-smoking crater. Teddy gathered what he could and dragged it back and turned it over to the corpsman. Dollhard had used up all his luck surviving Kandahar. Now Teddy would have to nursemaid Verstegen again, and since their set-to during the BMP action, they’d avoided each other. Once the corpsman was busy with the body bag, Teddy reluctantly ape-swung his way up the rockslide to the jaygee.

  A long silence on the tactical circuit. Until maybe half an hour later someone said, “Chief? Lieutenant? Hey, you guys know there’s a village back here?”

  “Harley, that you?”

  “It’s me, Knobby. On the right flank. Anybody there?”

  Teddy waited for Verstegen to answer, but the jaygee just sat looking down into the valley and rubbing his nose. “No shit, a village?” he said back.

  “Well, not really. Just three or four huts. Three hundred meters behind us, up against the cliff.”

  “Not on the map.”

  “Better take a man and check it out,” Verstegen muttered, proving at least he’d been listening.

  Why me? Teddy thought, but nodded and hoisted himself on his rifle. Looked around. High noon. The air was almost warm. The air activity seemed to be slacking off. Tatie ought to be able to handle it. He hesitated a moment more, then started off.

  * * *

  THE village was four huts built cheek to butt cheek beneath an overhanging bluff. A dangerous-as-hell place to locate. The cliff looked as if it could come down any minute, especially considering how the ground was shaking. But maybe this was where the water was; anyway, Allah’s problem, not his. As he and Knobby puffed toward it, hauling themselves over the rocks by handholds, he didn’t see so much as a goat. His shoulder was starting to fucking hurt now. He bolted more Motrin and chased it with CamelBak water. The wind sang in the ravines until you could swear someone was playing a flute. A weird, unearthly melody. From moment to moment you almost heard the music whole; then it faded into the rush of the breeze, the harsh pant of your own breath.

  He rounded the first hut and saw them on the far side, squatting on the bare, cold-rimed earth, watching the battle. Old men, women, kids, in ragged sheepskin and colorful dirty wool coats and the floppy flat hats, huddled in family groups with goats folded on their laps like pets. Oohing and aahing at each explosion as if the circus had come to town. Then an old man saw them and exclaimed. Suddenly thirty pairs of eyes fastened on them. Teddy let his M4 drop on the tac sling. Raised both gloves, wiggling extended fingers. “American,” he told them. “Salaam aleikum.”

  The group stirred. Women reached for their childrens’ hands and with the same motion shrouded their faces. Teddy wondered if he should search the huts. No; if they had hostile intent, they’d be down in the valley fighting. The kids bolted up and ran for them, shouting madly. In a moment they were surrounded, boys and girls leaping and grinning up through missing teeth. Swager accessed some Mentos, but those didn’t go far. Teddy lifted his gloves again; he didn’t have anything for them.

  Someone was tugging at his CamelBak. Teddy turned, keeping his muzzle pointed low.

  A boy, but with lipstick and eye shadow and dark hair to his shoulders. Too young to have a beard. Twelve? Thirteen? He stroked Teddy’s hand, cooing something that sounded like an invitation. “What do you want, dude?” Teddy asked. Then figured it out as the kid tugged him toward one of the huts. Another made-up lad had cornered Swager, who was stammering, going red in the face underneath the dirt and goggles as the boy stroked his cheeks like a Sunset Strip hooker. The kids were shouting laughter, rolling in the dirt and holding their stomachs.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Teddy said, starting to laugh. At himself. Big tough SEALs. Then he remembered Dollhard. Spattered on the rocks by US Air Force high explosive, like what was left after you gutted a deer. The meanest bastards in the valley. The world seemed to split in two, and which was real and which was mad? He gripped his jaw, digging dirty-gloved fingers into his gums to anchor himself in the pain. Then spat in the dirt and patted his assailant’s shoulder instead of driving a fist into it. “You’re gonna have to find another friend, Linda.”

  “Linda,” the guy said, delighted. He pointed to himself. “Pretty?”

  “Yeah, very pretty boy. But you don’t want a bastard like me, I’ll break your heart.… Knobby! Untangle yourself. Let’s get back to business.” He started to shoo the rest of them into their huts, then figured, let ’em watch. They didn’t seem hostile. Just simple mountain people, despite the pimped-out boys. Maybe now these kids would have a chance to go to school. He backed out, keeping the smile going, and waved one last time before he turned away.

  * * *

  MIDAFTERNOON. He was halfway back to the position when the pop of rifles got louder. The tactical channel lit up as Echo started taking fire. “See him, there, the red boulder above Big Goober, dude in the sheepskin.” “Diaperhead, my two o’clock.” “Whack-a-mole, three o’clock high, two hundred meters, commencing fire.” The stutter of full-auto Classic Kalashnikovs was overlaid by the higher-pitched cracks of 5.56 going out single-shot.

  “They’re working around our right flank,” he told Swager’s whitening face, streaked with dust and sweat. And here it came: the combat buzz chilling him down, raising his hackles, the jab in his shoulder every time he lifted his arm gone now. He couldn’t help grinning. “Trying to get out. We’re gonna get above ’em and see they make their appointments with Allah. Hoo-yah?”

  “Yah, Chief.”

  Teddy ditched his pack below a pyramid-shaped rock where he hoped he could find it again. He and Swager leapfrogged as fast as they could directly up the mountain. As they took turns scrambling and covering, the firing grew off to their left, reverberating off a thousand rock facets until it was impossible to tell where any given shot came from. They climbed and climbed and finally he couldn’t anymore, he was done. He spotted an elevated, flattish boulder with another propped against it that ought to give decent cover from prone and put Swager twenty yards farther up the rockslide. He still hadn’t eyeballed enemy, but the fire kept getting louder
. He wedged his pistol into a handy crack, checked that his muzzle was clear, and eased his head up.

  Smoke was boiling up out of the valley and blowing over their position, smelling of explosive and dirt and juniper. Like being underwater in bad viz. He scrutinized a tumble a hundred yards off with his Steiners. Then realized he didn’t need them when a heavy bullet cracked two yards away, peppering his cheek with hot needles of splintered silica. “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

  He spotted the shooter a second later as he sprinted from one rock to the next. Still above him, though he’d climbed his heart out. A dark face, a long sniper-type rifle. Teddy set his sights at the top of the rock, then figured a guy who could shoot that well wouldn’t profile himself. He found a cutout at the side, lined up on that. Eighty yards and uphill, no hold over, point of impact at the crosshairs. The instant he glimpsed cloth he squeezed one off. The M4 bucked into his shoulder and something rolled out from behind the rock. It thrashed, then went still.

  “Want me to spot for you, Chief?”

  “Yeah, do that, Knobby. But if they get closer than fifty yards, help me out, okay?”

  “Roger that, Chief.”

  Teddy caught motion farther back, on the flank. Someone’s camo’d shoulder; must be one of Vaseline’s guys in Echo Two. A pointed barrel, a burst of pale granite-smoke as M4 bullets chewed rock. He had a better angle. And there it was, a head bobbing up as the enemy stuck his AK out and unloaded a burst, then ducked back. Teddy lined up and held two minutes of angle over. He took the pressure out of the first stage and broke it the second the flat wool cap eased up again.

  “Pink mist. Nice shot, Chief!”

  “He was asking for it.”

  “Look to the right. Closer in. Hundred and fifty meters? Moving and shooting.”