She stabbed a narrow hole in the ground with the blade, shoved one of the plastic packages in it, squeezed the edges together. Looked around, ten feet off and slightly up the slope and to one side of their track, second hole, second package. She waved him to take the pack and head on around the marsh, bent over each surprise left for any followers, then joined him and led on.
That little bit gave his shoulder blades another reason to itch.
He
didn’t keep explosives in
his
emergency bag. Just exactly how sensitive was that stuff? Well, it hadn’t blown up
yet.
The pack felt about two pounds lighter. Dense, compared to the size, probably included a fair amount of metal.
She led him around to a fair-sized stream that fed out of the marsh over an old rotting beaver dam, then moved upslope again. And stopped. She waved
Pack
under his nose again. He obliged. She pulled a pair of compact binoculars out this time and focused back across the open water. Steadied herself against a tree. Then settled into a squat, as if her knees gave out under her. Good idea. He settled his back against another tree and concentrated on knitting his raveled body back together. Even gods have limits.
The ground bumped under him, he looked up, and a puff of black smoke billowed up from the far side of the marsh. More black smoke, shot with orange flame, and another dull bump followed. He didn’t hear anything. She focused binoculars on the scene and started cursing. At least, her body-language and jerking head said cursing. He couldn’t see her lips to read a guess at what language.
She handed him the binoculars and then headed off into the woods, expecting him to stow the gear, grab the pack, sling it over his shoulders, and follow at a slow trot. Which he could muster, after that brief rest. Various parts of his body complained about the jolting, but none of them threatened to go on outright strike.
Yet.
She kept glancing around, not just looking for threats but judging terrain. At least, that’s the only way he could explain the things she slowed for and studied. Then she nodded her head to herself, stopped, and waved
Pack
again.
Another package from the depths, a second, smaller one, and she took her police radio from his belt. Her belt. Whatever. This gear-swapping got confusing, with his head still addled from the blasts. Maybe “traumatic brain injury” applied. How many brain cells had he lost, was he losing, with blood oozing into the spaces twixt damaged synapses and axons . . .
He shook his head to snap out of it, not a good idea, as the instant stabbing headache told him.
She’d planted the third bomb by then, at the base of a rock shrouded in tree roots, gnarled roots of a gnarled father pine rising into the canopy. Attached the second package to it. Covered it all with leaves laid with precision, blending into the winter’s leftover cloak. She waved him on and followed, scuffing her feet as if to make their trail even more obvious than before. No sense.
One hundred yards, two hundred yards through the forest and then she swung off to the right and curled back the same distance and he understood. He settled behind a tree trunk in a hollow where she pointed him, then watched her jog to another spot with a crossing field of fire over the boulder and tree and surprise hidden there. He couldn’t see the booby-trap beyond its backing rock. He hoped
it
couldn’t see
him.
That the rock wouldn’t spray as much shrapnel as the bomb.
She vanished. He waited.
This was the part of her he’d guessed at before, the cold dispassionate killer like her mountain winds. Double-back ambush. He waited some more, contemplating another set of military terms that he remembered but couldn’t remember remembering.
He couldn’t hear them coming. Something moved on their back-trail. It resolved into a man in green camouflage fatigues, green military helmet and face shield, advancing step by step behind a dog. The dog, brown and black and heavy and low, nose to the ground, wanted to go faster than the man, tugged at the leash. Tracking was
fun.
Man was having none of it. He looked over every step before he took it. A survivor.
Then, maybe fifteen-twenty yards back, where one grenade or mortar round would
not
get all of them, two more men scuttled in a darting crouch, eyes over weapons searching front and to each side and a fourth, still a bit further back, searching behind. They all looked scared.
Albert expected that she’d wait to get the second group and maybe the trailing man with her spiffy little command-detonated mine. They could then pick off the point man themselves. He sweated a little more, wondering if she had another receiver/detonator tucked away in her backpack, maybe switched on by a random jolt in the rough life it had been living . . .
The blast bounced him from the ground, sweeping dog and man with shrapnel and raising a cloud of leaves and dust to match the black smoke. He switched his aim to the second man, aiming low—probably chest armor by this time, he’d gotten lucky back at the bunker. Go for the legs and arteries, neck or face if the helmets gave him a chance. The man dropped before he could fire. Two shots at the rear guard, who tipped sideways and fell sprawling, leg hit. Everyone down by then, but he didn’t know if they’d been hit or not. Assume not.
Answer—leaves and dust flying from a stuttering burst of automatic rifle fire low on the ground, wood-chips spraying from the tree beside him, dirt thrown in his eyes. He burrowed behind the little ridge of his hollow and rolled to his left. Faint blasts thumped over his ridge, he actually
heard
them—not full-auto or even burst mode—one shotgun boom and then another and another, aimed shots. He reached a further tree, poked his head out next to the roots on the far side, ducked back and let the images form.
She was out there. In the middle of them. Shotgun aimed at something on the ground. Another boom and another, heard through thick cotton stuffed in his ears.
She moved fast. Fast as the wind. He kept stumbling over that.
He looked again. She just stood there, shotgun braced on one hip, reloading with red shells pulled from inside her carryall coverall. That told him they were all down, all dead. He stood up and checked the function of all his moving parts. No worse. Not much better, either, but no new holes. He pulled a fresh magazine out of a belt pouch and swapped it for whatever was left in the old one.
Then forward, through the reek of the plastic explosive she had used and the sweeter gunpowder smoke and the earth mould-smell of disturbed leaf litter. The trackers lay dead, both man and dog. Helmet dislodged from the man, and a shotgun blast close-range to the face added to the carnage of the mine’s shrapnel. Overkill. Second man, third man, both extra shots. Fourth man, large pool of blood, Albert
had
hit the femoral, but a close-range shotgun blast had shattered the skull there, too.
Not like her, what he
imagined
of her, to waste ammo. Played hell with that cold dispassionate killer bit. He looked up at her. She pulled out the spiral notebook and scribbled in it. Shoved the page under his nose.
They forced me to kill a dog. Pisses me off.
Another page.
2 hits, 40 yds, in combat with a stranger’s pistol. Decent shooting.
From
her,
“decent shooting” probably rated as an Olympic gold medal.
Then she flipped the page back to
Pack.
He pulled it off and she stirred around inside until she came up with boxes of ammo, shotgun shells for her and 9mm for the pistol he’d used. She stowed fresh shells wherever they lived inside her coveralls while he refilled his magazine. It turned out he’d used eight rounds at one point or another, although he could only answer for six. Ammo boxes back in the pack, pack back on his back. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry now.
He signed that he wanted the pad and pencil.
How many bombs do you have left?
A shrug, followed by a wince. Gestures still hurt. She reached for the paper.
None. But that should be their last tracking team. My winds don’t find any more.
So she could still talk to her spies. Maybe they spoke inside her head, rather than using actual sound.
He gestured at the guns lying on the forest floor, looking like guns should in order to be guns but no precise match to any he knew. Drew a question-mark in the air—should they pick up some free hardware? At least a rifle for long range?
She scribbled away, then shoved the new page at him.
No. Need to move light and fast. We’ve never practiced with them—like, where’s the safety?
Yeah. He could just see fiddling around with a gun that wouldn’t shoot when he wanted it, safety in the wrong place or magazine catch he couldn’t find in a hurry . . .
Like that radio knob that turned in the “wrong” direction. Stick with familiar weapons and stay out of fights. If you don’t get into firefights, you don’t run out of ammunition.
He puzzled a bit over her rage at having to kill a dog. Afghan society, Indian subcontinent society in general, didn’t value dogs that highly. They tended more toward pariahs than pets.
As far as the “last tracking team” went, he had his doubts. He kept trying to catch glimpses of the sky through the forest canopy. Didn’t these people have airplanes?
Then he took a last look at the faces of the men they’d killed. She’d pretty much shattered them with the shotgun. But, brown skin. Black hair. Not European. What was left of the faces said “Indian” to him, Native American, First People, whatever.
Did the army use “Indian scouts” here, like they had in the Old West of Real America? The guards back at the bunker had been brown, too. He hadn’t thought anything of it, too damn busy getting out of there, but two points define a line.
Albert wormed his way low around a rock outcrop at the forest edge, focusing Mel’s binoculars on a cluster of buildings about half a mile away, down in a valley in the middle of a large clearing that looked suspiciously like a field of fire—no brush, no boulders, flat land and mowed hay without hollows and ditches that could hide a man. His first glance had bothered him—bad memories. He needed more detail. That meant a belly-crawl to a clear view.
He’d made sure that the cut-over forest brush behind him didn’t contrast too much with the mud smeared on his face, that any movement wouldn’t stand out against the skyline, that he was in shadow with the sun over his left shoulder so the binocular lenses wouldn’t flash a heliograph to the world. He didn’t swat at the mosquito whining in his ear. Just in case anyone in those guard towers happened to be looking in this precise direction at this precise time. With binoculars as good as these.
Mel lived in a different world, for sure. Her Leica binoculars exuded wealth—solid and balanced in his hands, silky-smooth focus, sharp, bright image. She might live in a monastic walkup three-room apartment in a slum rather like his, but she didn’t have to scrimp pennies when it counted.
Yes, those were guard towers. With some large searchlights mounted on the catwalks outside. Four towers, steel boxes sitting atop open steel frames marking the corners of a square compact camp—two firetrap three-story wooden barracks and a third, standing apart, made of brick. One-story mess hall, judging by the garbage cans and multiple chimneys. Three two-story brick houses. A crooked rusty narrow-gauge railroad spur that ended in the camp, with three log-cars half-loaded and more logs waiting for the jaws of the loader boom. Metal-sided industrial garage with three tall overhead doors, probably for logging equipment.
And two steel passenger railroad cars with small, barred windows. Prison cars. Prison labor camp. Wooden barracks for the convicts, slightly better brick barracks for the guards, houses for the officers.
He focused back on the buildings. No windows on the first floor of any of them. Not even rifle-slits visible at this distance. Otherwise, they looked like frontier forts.
He moved his attention back to the cemetery. The
large
cemetery, lying outside the perimeter of the camp and flanking two sides of it, row upon row of markers. Row upon row of mounded grass-covered graves. Some with dark fresh dirt, not old enough for the grass to sprout.
Too damn many graves.
No wire fence, no wall. Probably no place for the prisoners to run
to,
out in the howling wilderness. If his vagrant and unpleasant memories of Siberia were true, the next humans might be fifty, a hundred miles away, in another prison camp just like this one. Run away and die. Most people preferred to live as a slave than die as a free man, no matter what the brave slogans shouted.
He lowered the binoculars, for a general scan. Movement caught his eye—a guard stepping out on the catwalk of the nearest tower. Albert froze, no motion to catch the
guard’s
attention. Then he brought the binoculars back up, slow, slow, and caught the guard in their focus. He couldn’t see much detail at this distance, even with ten-power lenses. Rifle, with curved magazine sticking out the bottom, looked like the ones the trackers had carried. Cloth cap rather than a helmet. Dark hair, brown skin, no way he could check out the eyes or cheekbones or nose, but the general impression was the same as those trackers. Not dark enough for African, but not European.
Vague memory told him that some of the Eastern Woodlands tribes had been doing a fair imitation of empire when the Europeans landed, back in the so-called Real World. So had the Inca and Aztec, down south. Looked like they’d grown up to true “civilization” in this parallel world.
He inched back into the cover of the rock. They needed to give the camp a wide berth. Even if they
could
talk to the people here, had a mutual language between them, they wouldn’t dare. Didn’t matter whether they met guards or prisoners, all the possible outcomes his brain offered ranged from bad to worse.
This place forced a decision. The Seal called to him now, he could sense its direction. It lay somewhere beyond the camp, in the general line of the railroad. The not-smell smell of sandalwood lay on a different course. Not a
huge
difference, but a bit south. The salamander, the
ghost
of the salamander maybe, didn’t want him following that rail line. Didn’t want him taking a direct route to the Seal.