But he didn’t care. When he was shot dead, he would go to a place where Emma was—of that he was convinced. And for this moment, that’s all he really wanted.
So Y was not truly terrified when the big cell door finally opened and the lone guard walked in.
He was dressed all in black, complete with a hood and cape. The guard didn’t say a word. He just stood Y up and unlocked his manacles.
Y allowed him to do so willingly. Now the pit of his stomach was beginning to throb. He was just minutes away from death. Would it be painful? Would it be quick? Would the bodies of the others be there when he arrived? God, he hoped not!
Worst of all, would anyone he was close to back in America even know he was gone? His family and friends? It was so strange that his life would end here, in a city he knew so well, yet still halfway around the world from where he was born.
The guard finally got his chains unlocked and then blindfolded him. Grabbing him by the left arm, he led Y out of the cell and down a long corridor. They seemed to walk forever, Y’s knees buckling slightly as they gradually turned to jelly.
Finally they stopped, and Y’s blindfold was removed. They were still in a long hallway. A huge door was before them. The guard was holding a flask of some kind. He shoved it into Y’s gut and whispered, “Drink it, it will make it much easier.”
Y was feeling so low and hungover and sick about Emma, he simply drained the flask and handed it back to the guard. It tasted like pineapples.
The guard opened the huge door, and to Y’s astonishment, he could see nothing but clear, blue sky beyond. The sun was shining. And there was a long set of steps that looked like they reached right over to that heavenly horizon.
That’s when the guard took off his hood, and for the first time Y could see his face. It was Hawk Hunter. “Go ahead, Yaz,” he was saying. “You’re free.”
Y woke up a second later, the sound of a key in his cell lock clanging loudly off the dark, dirty walls.
He almost smirked. How cruel was that? Having one last dream about being liberated only to have it dashed by the sound of his executioners coming to collect him?
The cell was dark now, Y had been asleep for several hours. Moonlight was flowing in the small window, the shadows cast by the bars on the wall loomed huge and ominous.
The door swung open and two hooded guards came in. Y felt his body go limp. They unlocked his chains and stood him up. Two more guards came in; they, too, were wearing hoods. One was carrying a black piece of rubber under his arm.
They marched Y out of the cell and into a long hallway. There were many more guards around. These were men in blue uniforms, their faces dirty and shallow, as if they’d been fighting a war nonstop for months—years even.
They scowled at Y as he was led by them, past many more empty jail cells and then down a long set of stone steps.
Y could hear the sound of rushing water and he knew now he was in the bottom of Lords Towers and that the water he heard was the waterfall crashing into the Saint Yabuk.
The guards led him down yet another windowless corridor, which grew darker with every step even as the sound of rushing water became louder.
They finally reached the end of the hallway—two corridors ran off of it. Y looked down the one to his right and saw five poles set up in front of a wall pockmarked with bullet holes. To the left was a small anteroom and beyond that, the waterfall.
Y felt the lump in his throat grow larger. Emma would be there after he died, right? Was he really sure of that? He whispered a silent prayer—his first in years—that this one last wish of his would come true.
But the cosmos had another surprise for him.
The guard with the piece of rubber started unfolding it. Meanwhile, another guard produced what Y believed was an air pump. As he watched in amazement, these two blew up the piece of rubber with the air pump and it soon took the shape of a large rubber inner tube.
When this was done, they put it over Y’s head and pushed him toward the anteroom’s window. It looked out on the waterfall.
“Can you swim?” one guard asked him as they set him up on the windowsill.
Y was totally confused.
“Can I what?” he asked.
“Can you swim?” the guard asked him again with more urgency.
But before Y could answer, the other three guards came up behind him and all four lifted him off his feet and threw him into the rush of the waterfall.
Y was suddenly tumbling head over heels. Water was going in his mouth, up his nose, through his ears.
He hit the bottom of the waterfall and kept going down. The water was black and full of debris—pieces of garbage, burned wood, shell casings, maybe even a body part or two. If it had not been for the inner tube, he surely would have drowned.
But as it was, he soon rocketed back up to the surface, breaking through with a great splash that knocked one of his bottom teeth out.
The current beyond the waterfall was very fast, and Y could not catch his breath. He grabbed onto the side of the inner tube and held on for dear life.
He was soon moving very swiftly down the filthy river, with each second getting farther away from the castle and the place that had been his prison. Why he had been saved, Y had no idea.
He floated downriver for what seemed to be a very long time.
The moonlight was bright, which was good as there was no other illumination in the blacked-out city.
He was totally confused; his thinking processes were not quite right. He’d hit his head several times on the way down the waterfall, and now he was drifting in and out of a hallucinogenic state.
Or at least he thought he was. What was actually going on here? He asked himself that question over and over again, and to no good reply. Even though the guard had asked him if he could swim, he was still convinced the guards were trying to kill him, and the remark about him swimming or not was just a cruel jest. Perhaps, they had run out of bullets and had taken to drowning their prisoners.
Why, then, had they given him the inner tube?
Maybe he was dead … and this was Hell, just endlessly floating down a river that was far from the clear blue he recalled from years before.
The banks of the river were certainly hellish. They were jammed with all kinds of broken instruments of war. Tanks, mobile guns, airplanes. Helmets, guns.
Skeletons.
And the closer he got to the bridge, the more intense the amount of wreckage became. The sound of cannon fire began echoing through the air.
Then gunfire. Then the strange whine of the bijets and the mechanical cry of the propeller-driven biplanes. Y lifted his head above the inner tube, just enough to see that the area beyond the bridge was now lit up like it was daytime. Another battle was breaking out.
And he was heading right for it.
There were ten divisions of Red Army soldiers manning the trenchworks just outside Kabul Downs’s city limits.
Many of these 100,000 men had been fighting for more than a year, nonstop, without a break except for a few hours’ sleep, and if they were lucky, some time in a rear-area hospital recovering from wounds. Most were either infantry or artillery, and the constant drumbeat of combat was now so ingrained in their beings, that fighting—and killing and dying—was now somewhat routine for them.
This war had been going on for almost a year now, practically unnoticed by the rest of the world. And to a man, the soldiers of the Red Army were prepared to fight for another year, or five more, or ten. They were willing to take whatever hardship, whatever misery that the war could deliver. This was how strong they felt in their cause. This was how much they despised the hated Blue Army.
There were 150,000 Blues facing them. Though the city was surrounded by the Reds, the Blues had dug their defense in deeply, and with more men and more material, this long standoff had ensued. There were occasional breakthroughs—like the day before, when a large raiding party of Reds was able to puncture a weak point in the Blues’ lines, and
then pour into the city causing havoc and confusion before withdrawing again back to their lines.
These actions, while stinging for the Blues, were like the huge artillery duels both sides engaged in on a daily basis—they were brutal, but hardly crippling. Body counts increased, weaponry was expended, and another little piece of the once beautiful city was destroyed. But this was all routine. At this pace, this war would last for years.
There was once a time when the Reds and Blues were actually the same army. They were the Afghan National Forces (ANF)—also known as the Greens—who protected the city of Kabul Downs and acted as a kind of national police force for the country of Afghanistan.
Based along the lines of the British Royal Army, the ANF had prided itself on its professionalism, its high standards of training, and its code of initiative that had been infused in each member, from the privates to the generals. This training, which had been a tradition for decades, was actually the reason this dirty little war was taking so long to be resolved. Both sides were highly trained, highly motivated, fearless, and determined. They knew no other way to be.
But why were they fighting?
That was the question that would baffle historians in years to come. This war was a civil war, yet it had little to do with politics or internal disagreements.
In fact, this war was being fought over one thing: a woman.
Some said, the most beautiful woman in the world.
She was known by several names. The Reds knew her simply as “The Princess,” and it was considered poor form to call her anything else.
The Blues knew her as Minio-Qued, which in local slang roughly meant “Light of the Morning.”
She was the daughter of the last elected prime minister of Afghanistan. She’d grown up in the public eye, though photos of her were rare, and she’d been seen only by a few citizens before the troubles broke out. In the year of war, she hadn’t been seen at all.
Like the Britain of old, the country was broken up into two factions, the Commoners and the Lords. The Lords believed their candidate should take over after the prime minister died. The Commoners wanted his daughter to rule the country. The Lords took the daughter prisoner to prevent that from happening. She was being held a prisoner somewhere in the Lords Towers, and was faced with possible execution. And therein was the conflict
The “red bloods” against the “blue bloods” in a battle for the princess. In one year, nearly fifty thousand soldiers had died, and a large portion of the once-beautiful, if rugged country had been destroyed. All for one woman.
Of course, Y had no idea about any of this as he floated downriver toward the growing battle.
He was about a half mile from the bridge when he saw soldiers on either bank. This was the Blues’ rear area, and to his good fortune, all of the soldiers were too immersed in what they were doing—loading ammunition and rushing other troops to the front—that they did not see him slipping by in the cold, dark water.
There were explosions going off all over as he drew within one hundred feet of the bridge. Now Y could see troops on either side of the span blasting away at each other with machine guns and mobile cannons. The bridge itself appeared to be constructed of very heavy steel built on four large concrete pilings. Though battered, the span was still standing.
The river water was getting uncomfortably warm now as Y drifted close to the embattled bridge. There really was nothing else he could do but let he current take him right into the midst of the battle. It would be foolish to try to reach shore, and even if he did, he’d be right back in the hands of the Blue troops.
So Y just got down as low as he could, said his second prayer in a decade, and held onto the inner tube.
The noise from the battle was now drowning out all other sound.
The next five minutes were like a scene from Hell.
He drifted beneath the bridge, but the river was nearly clogged with wrecked military equipment, and so his progress was slowed to a watery crawl.
A large transport plane had crashed into the river just beyond the bridge some time ago. Its wing and tail fin were now blocking nearly half of its width. Y found himself bouncing off the wing more than a dozen times, not daring to use his hand to push himself along—all the while, the battle for the bridge raged right above him.
The current finally pushed him off the wing, only to get him tangled up in the twisted, rusting tail fin. This is where the watery trip became ghoulish. Soldiers killed in the fierce battle on the bridge had fallen into the water, and now their bleeding, punctured bodies were getting caught up in the same eddies as Y’s inner tube.
Y found himself grappling with the freshly killed. One man’s face bumped right up against his own. Eyeball to eyeball with the corpse, Y realized the man’s chest had been blown away, and his stomach and internal organs were floating nearby. Y pushed himself away from this nightmarish scene only to find himself caught up in another tangle of bodies—these were wearing blue uniforms. They seemed to have been killed in the same explosion, and their bodies were fused together by the same horrific fire.
He kicked himself away from this horror and drifted past two decapitated bodies, which had been caught up on one especially jagged piece of the rotting tail fin. Then he steered the inner tube around the twisted-up left-side landing gear of the crashed airplane and found himself free again.
The current grew fast, and Y was moving very swiftly down the river. But where was he going exactly? Would he drift like this until he saw no signs of life on either side of the waterway? He didn’t know.
But that question was going to be answered for him soon enough.
He drifted for another few minutes, then turned a bend and came upon a confusing, upsetting scene.
There were dozens of small boats in the water, blocking his way. These boats were crawling with red-uniformed soldiers. They were chaotically unloading large black boxes from these boats, which were obviously serving as barges. Even from his poor vantage point, Y could tell the boxes were carrying ammunition. He could tell just by the way the soldiers were handling them.
It was his bad luck to come around this bend in the river just as the major supply of ammo was being landed for the Red Army troops. There was no way he was going to make his way around this blockade.
Y had just realized this when two soldiers in a just emptied boat spotted him drifting down the river. Y felt his stomach go cold as he saw the soldiers pointing at him and yelling to others on shore.
“Here’s another one!” one soldier cried from the boat.
An officer on the shoreline pulled two men from the ammo-unloading duty and directed them into the water. In thirty seconds they had waded out to Y and began dragging him in. He finally landed on a small beach in a heap.
The officer came and stood over him. He looked more perturbed than anything else.
He bent down on one knee and slapped Y a couple times lightly on the face.
“Where did you come from?” he asked in British-tinged English.
“The United States,” Y replied innocently.
The officer nearly smiled.
“No,” he said. “I mean just now … are you the last of them?”
Y pulled himself up to his knees and tried to get the water out of his ears.
“Last of who?”
The officer just shook his head. Obviously he had bigger and better things to do than deal with the waterlogged ex-prisoner.
He motioned to a pair of his aides to come forward.
“Bring him up to headquarters and put him in with the others,” the officer told the men. “Make sure he gets dry, and get some hot food in him.”
The officer looked down at Y and just shook his head. Y realized he must look somewhat pathetic at the moment.
“And give him a double ration of rum,” the officer added to the two aides. “This bloke looks as if he needs a drink.”
CHAPTER 31
ZOLTAN WAS DREAMING OF finding Aztec gold buried beneath an Inc
a plain when something startled him awake.
He rubbed his eyes and felt his right hand go immediately to his temple. His head was buzzing as if filled with a swarm of bees. He opened his eyes fully, but the glare from a nearby light was too intense. He closed them again, took a deep breath, then opened them again slowly.
“I don’t believe it,” he whispered, sitting halfway up on his bunk.
Crabb was sitting on the bunk next to him, drinking a cup of rum-laced coffee. Brandy, Brandi, Brandee and Brayn-Di at his side.
“Don’t believe what?” he asked the psychic wearily. It had been a long twenty-four hours to say the least.
“I don’t believe he actually made it,” Zoltan breathed.
Two seconds later, Y came through the doors of the tent.
A cheer went up from all those gathered inside. The four girls rushed forward and smothered Y with hugs and passionate kisses—they did not know any other way to kiss. The Jones boys, huddled in the corner talking serious business, even came forward and shook Y’s hand heartily. “We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Seth said to him. “You took so long in getting here.”
Y began climbing into a new set of fatigues the guards had given him. He was glad to bid adieu to his old, wet combat suit.
“But where is here exactly?” he asked.
The Jones boys laughed. “Behind the Red Army lines,” Dave answered. “Or didn’t you notice when you floated in.”
“Oh, I noticed,” Y told them. “But why are we here?”
The Jones boys just shrugged. “The Reds saved us all from being shot,” Seth told him starkly. “When we were being taken out one at a time, that’s exactly where the Blue prison guards thought we were going. But the Reds had infiltrated the prison earlier in the day—lucky for us—in order to get some of their own people out. They freed us along with them.”
Y just stared back at them. Freeing a bunch of prisoners—with inner tubes? Why did that sound so familiar to him?
“As to why they helped us,” Dave Jones said. “Well, that’s a bit more complicated.”
Tomorrow War Page 19
