Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1) Page 5

  “Does she have a name?”

  Parker exchanged a few words with her, then said, “Nafid.”

  I nodded in greeting as I led the men through the door and into a courtyard. Nafid was short and slender. Over a neat tailored gown she wore an embroidered green vest. A thick scarf wrapped her dark hair, while a large wolf’s tooth dangled against her chest from a leather strap. Her bold gaze lingered on mine before she turned and disappeared into a narrow passageway on the courtyard’s far side.

  We followed her, turning this way and that, until we arrived in another stone courtyard where a group of old men in sandals and traditional robes sat on rugs, smoking pipes and sipping tea. When Nafid hailed them, they grunted and gestured for us to join them.

  “Just Parker and me,” I told the team.

  While Segundo organized the remaining members into a security perimeter, Parker and I crossed the sunny courtyard and sat on a pair of rugs where the old men had made room for us. “These are the tribal leaders,” Parker explained. “What Nafid is calling ‘The Old Ones.’” The men continued to grunt as steaming tea was poured into ceramic cups and passed to us.

  “Begin by asking if the Mujahideen have been in the area.”

  Parker posed the question to the men, but it was Nafid who answered.

  “She says no.”

  “Have they had any trouble from outsiders?”

  “She says no to that as well.”

  “Is there anything we can help them with?” I said. “Building materials, medical supplies, protection?”

  “She insists they’re fine,” Parker said following a short exchange.

  “Explain to them the proposal for the supply route through the Wari Corridor. Tell them it will be temporary and that it is meant to stabilize the area, which will also improve their security.”

  As I waited for Parker to translate, I looked around at the men. They showed no reaction to the message. If anything, they seemed more interested in their tea. I wondered if they even understood what was being said, because once more it was Nafid who answered.

  “She says the village has no problem with the supply route.”

  That was the guarantee CENTCOM was looking for, but something felt off. I’d met with enough tribal leaders to know that the men around us weren’t in charge. Neither was Nafid, who was too young. The real power center lay elsewhere. But why hide it? And if they weren’t having any trouble, what was up with the big guns on the rooftops? They’d been shooting at someone.

  “If it pleases our host, we would like a tour of the compound,” I said.

  The woman’s eyes had already begun to harden before Parker started translating. She waited until he finished before saying something to the old men, who grunted among themselves. Necklaces and bracelets, all featuring wolves’ teeth, rattled softly as they spoke.

  “What are they saying?” I whispered.

  Parker shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s not Wakhi.”

  At last Nafid turned abruptly back to us and spoke.

  “She’s going to show us,” Parker said, then added in a whisper, “but she doesn’t sound happy about it.”

  As Nafid led us from the courtyard, I pulled Segundo to one side so we were out of earshot of Baine and Olaf. “She told us what we wanted to hear,” I said, “and she’s agreed to show us around the compound, but something feels sketchy. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  Segundo nodded as the rest of the team fell in behind me. As we were led deeper into the compound, the Kabadi people began to appear. They watched from doorways with pinched and weathered faces while wide-eyed children peered from behind their legs. The adults were mostly women and the elderly, I noticed. Few men of fighting age were among them.

  Nafid spoke in clipped Wakhi as we walked, which Parker translated.

  “Food storage.” He pointed to a granary off to our right. “Weaving,” he said as we passed an open room where rudimentary looms and large spools stood in rows. I noticed Nafid was avoiding the compound’s central building, where the suspected anti-aircraft guns were positioned. When we passed its main door, I stopped.

  “What’s in here?” I asked.

  “She’s calling it a place for the sick,” Parker said.

  I arched an eyebrow. Given the number of villagers, the tall building with two wings was much too big for an infirmary. Parker shrugged as though to say, We both know she’s lying, but what can we do? Whatever the village was hiding was inside. And if that included Mujahideen fighters, then coalition lives would be in danger when the supply route opened.

  “Tell her we have a medic on our team. We can help.”

  After a short conversation, Parker said, “She insists that no help is needed.”

  I gave Segundo the sign that we were dividing into split teams. Then, pretending not to have understood the translation, I smiled and pulled the door open. Nafid said something and tried to cut ahead of me, but Parker stepped up beside me, effectively blocking her. While Segundo’s team remained on security, my team filed through the doorway.

  “Stop!” Nafid called.

  7

  I hesitated at her surprising use of English, but the Kabadi woman’s next burst of words was in Wakhi. Inside, a staircase illuminated by smoke-blackened lamps rose steeply. With my M4 trained ahead, I began to climb. A layer of soot clung to the walls, but halfway up the soot broke apart into primitive drawings of wolfish shapes, the flickering lights bringing them to life. Parker was right: isolation had made these people strange.

  “Where are the sick?” I asked.

  Parker posed the question to Nafid as she caught up to us. She shouted something up the staircase—a warning?—before answering Parker.

  “She says they’re ahead on the left, but that we shouldn’t disturb them.”

  There was something she didn’t want us to see, which likely meant the village was harboring fighters. I’d been down this road before. Whether the village was doing so voluntarily or under threat didn’t matter. Coalition lives were in danger, and it was my duty to neutralize that danger.

  The staircase arrived at a T-intersection with a door straight ahead. Nafid gestured left. After another ten yards, the corridor turned sharply to the right. Sweat dripped off my nose, and for the first time I realized how humid it had become compared to the bone-dry atmosphere outside. It was starting to smell too, like crowded bodies—or penned animals.

  Up ahead, a woman with a white headdress peered from a doorway. I aimed my M4 but saw she was unarmed. Nafid spoke to Parker, then rushed ahead, calling after the woman, who ducked away.

  “She’ll let us in,” Parker said, “but she’s asking us to wait outside for a minute.”

  I turned to my split team. Baine had ended up among them somehow, but there was too much going on to deal with him right now. “We’re either walking into an ambush,” I whispered, “or an attempt to hide enemy fighters. I’ll take point. I want the rest of you to cover the room in interlocking sectors. You see someone with a weapon, you take them out. Dan, you stay outside with Baine to guard our rear.”

  Nafid reappeared and motioned for us to enter.

  I approached the doorway and took a quick look inside. Half expecting to be met by combatants and gunfire, I was surprised to find rows of what looked like sleeping pallets. Bundled bodies lay on top of them while a half dozen women in white headscarves stood among them.

  I checked the room’s blind corners, then stepped through the doorway. The smell I’d picked up in the corridor grew stronger. My men followed, carbines covering every angle of the open room. The women watched us nervously, not moving.

  I stepped forward, my gaze ranging over the fifty or so pallets. Their occupants were wrapped in blankets, scarves covering their faces. I searched for the black turbans of the Mujahideen, but saw none.

  “Are they all men?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Parker confirmed from Nafid.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  After speaking with Naf
id again, Parker said, “They’re sick.”

  “That’s a lie,” a voice whispered at my shoulder. “Those are enemy fighters.”

  I looked over to find that Baine had entered the room despite my order. “Get your ass back in the corridor,” I said. He glared up at me, his lips a tense line, but he retreated from the room.

  “What’s their illness?” I pressed.

  “She claims they’re recovering, they just need their rest,” Parker said.

  She’s not answering the question. “Mauli, can you check out that one there?” I nodded at the closest pallet.

  As our medic stepped forward, one of the women moved in front of him, but Nafid said something to her, and she backed away. Arriving at the pallet, Mauli set his M4 down and took out his medical bag. “Explain that I’m going to check his vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, temperature.”

  When Parker translated, Nafid didn’t respond. Her attention, along with the other women, was on the bundled man. Mauli removed a blood-pressure cuff, stethoscope, and thermometer from his bag, then began to unwrap the long scarf that hid the man’s face. He stopped suddenly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Come take a look,” he said.

  The women murmured as I approached the pallet. When I arrived, Mauli pulled the scarf the rest of the way from the man’s face. I stared for a moment, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The blue hair was consistent with what Parker had told us about the men staining their beards. But the thick growth covered the man’s entire face, including his forehead. And was his jaw protruding? The man blinked up at us with jaundiced yellow eyes before squinting away from the light.

  “The hell?” I muttered.

  “Hypertrichosis,” Mauli said, slipping his thermometer between the man’s dark lips. I caught a flash of canine before his lips closed back over the metal end. “It’s a rare genetic condition where hair grows over the entire face. Harmless, but probably embarrassing for them.”

  “Are all the men here like this?” I asked Nafid.

  “Yes,” Parker said after carrying out the translation.

  I pointed to two of my team members. “Pick one apiece and check them out.”

  The women whispered nervously as my men approached two different pallets and began unwrapping the men’s faces. “We’ve got another Harry,” one of them called uncomfortably. The other reported the same. Meaning we had likely gotten to the bottom of the secrecy.

  “All right,” I said, waving the men back.

  Mauli tore the blood-pressure cuff from his man’s arm. “His temperature and heart rate are high; otherwise, he sounds healthy. I can leave some aspirin and recommend more hydration.”

  I shook my head. “No, let’s leave them alone.”

  The women fixed the displaced scarves over the men’s faces as we retreated from the room. Nafid joined us in the corridor. I would apologize for our intrusion outside. Right now I just wanted to get out of the building.

  At the top of the staircase, a storm of barking echoed from the corridor ahead. The savage clamoring was accompanied by what sounded like claws scratching over metal. I craned my neck. Was there a kennel in here?

  I jerked as Nafid dug her fingers into my arm and unleashed an explosion of Wakhi.

  “She’s demanding we leave now,” Parker said nervously. “And I’m thinking that’s a really good idea.”

  I was turning to do just that when a cry sounded from behind the closed door opposite the stairs. With my men providing cover, I forced the door open. Nafid hung on my arm, trying to restrain me. I dragged her with me into a room dimmed by smoke. Ahead, fires burned from a pair of pyres. Between the pyres a hooded woman knelt in front of a shrine crowded with urns and strange stick configurations. She was wailing up at something on the wall. Only when I’d progressed far enough inside could I make out what it was: a rotting wolf’s head.

  “What in God’s name?” Parker muttered behind me.

  Nafid was yanking my arm now, but the old woman sounded as though she were in mortal pain. The thought that she was being kept here as some sort of sacrifice roiled my stomach.

  The floor became uneven underfoot. Looking down, I saw I was stepping on bones. Human, animal, I couldn’t tell, but they had been arranged into designs and symbols that covered much of the floor. In the thick, smoky atmosphere my heart began to beat harder and I was having trouble breathing. I turned to Parker.

  “Ask the woman if she’s okay,” I said.

  Parker coughed into his shoulder, then shouted the question in Wakhi.

  The woman stopped wailing and whipped her head around. She tilted her head back as though sniffing the air, then drew her hood away. Wispy white hair framed an ancient face that had purpled and wrinkled like a fig. She had no eyes. In their place were sunken pockets of pink flesh. They puckered wetly as though trying to fix on us. I flicked my gaze to the mounted wolf’s head. A swollen tongue lolled over the huge teeth of its sagging lower jaw.

  When I dropped my gaze back to the old woman, tendrils of light, like those I’d imagined around Nafid earlier, seemed to twist around her like smoke from a cauldron. Fitting, given that the woman looked like a witch from a fairy tale. A very disturbing fairy tale. And eyeless or not, she seemed to be staring straight into me, as though weighing my soul.

  Something told me she was the village’s power center.

  Sweeping her hands toward us, she spoke in a shrill tongue.

  “It’s that dialect I can’t understand,” Parker said. “But I think the message is clear enough. She wants us gone.”

  As Nafid ran up to calm the woman, I saw she was fine. We’d apparently interrupted a spiritual ceremony that involved crying in pain. I signaled to my men that we were leaving.

  It wasn’t until we were down the stairs and outside, mountain air chilling my sweat-drenched body, that I drew a deep breath. Clean air filled my lungs, pushing out the strong stench of the building.

  “Everything all right?” Segundo asked, looking from me to the rest of my split team.

  “Just a lot of strangeness,” I said. “They’re not harboring fighters. We’ll leave them a sat phone and show them how to use it. They can contact us if the Mujahideen give them trouble.” But I had a gut feeling the Mujahideen wouldn’t give them trouble and that the reason they’d been left alone all these centuries had to do with whatever the hell we’d just seen.

  “We need to take them out,” Baine panted.

  “Why? So you can collect a commission?”

  “You read the intelligence,” he said. “They may be sympathetic to the Mujahideen. And most of the men of fighting age are in that building. They’re not sick, they’re being hidden. Would you rather wait until they’re shooting at us to do something?”

  “And you wonder why we confiscated your ammo,” Segundo muttered.

  Baine scowled and said something to Olaf, who grunted noncommittally. When Nafid emerged from the building, I turned to Parker.

  “Tell her we’re sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude. We were just concerned for the safety of our fellow soldiers. Thank her and the village for allowing the passage of supplies through the Wari corridor.” As Parker translated, I unshouldered my pack and removed the satellite phone and some battery packs. “Can you go over these with her? Explain that they can use the phone to contact us?”

  Speaking Wakhi, Parker showed Nafid the phone. She looked over it suspiciously, but now that we were out of the building, the tension across her face appeared to be releasing.

  I checked our surroundings, then walked over to Hotwire. “How’s it looking from the skies?”

  “All clear, according to the drone operators.”

  “Good. Radio a situation report to CENTCOM that the Kabadi intend to cooperate and that there are no apparent threats from their quarters. Then arrange for our transport out of here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Parker finished explaining the phone to Nafid, I signaled to Team 5 tha
t it was time to move out. Nafid escorted us back to the compound’s main gate, remaining by the door as we filed out. When I turned, her intense green eyes fixed on mine. “Thank you,” she said in heavily accented English.

  I nodded back, then turned to Parker. “Something you taught her?”

  Before he could answer, Olaf pushed past Nafid and trotted to catch up to us.

  Suspicion prickled through me. “Where did you go?”

  “Bathroom,” he replied.

  “In a toilet, I hope,” Segundo said.

  I considered berating Olaf for wandering off without telling me or Segundo, but what was the point? Our association was about to end. He paired up with Baine as we cut through the village and entered the pasture.

  At the top of the collapse that separated the lush valley from the dry river bed ahead, I took a final look back. One of the strangest missions I’d ever led, but one without casualties, if I didn’t count Olaf. And he appeared to have recovered fully from his injuries.

  Like I said, strange.

  As we descended the collapse, gravel and grit replacing the dark soil beneath our boots, I heard Baine key his radio.

  “The target’s marked,” he said in a low voice. “You’re cleared hot.”

  Cleared hot? I wheeled around. Did he just order a bomb drop?

  When our eyes met, Baine smiled. I strode toward him. “What in the hell did you just do?”

  “Your job,” he said defiantly.

  I looked at Olaf. The infrared sticks that had been jutting from his pocket that morning were gone. I remembered how Baine had muttered something to Olaf after I’d denied his appeal to take out the hospital. Bathroom, my ass, I thought. He had Olaf climb onto the roof and mark the wing.

  “Hotwire,” I said, “call off the strike.”

  He nodded and spoke quickly into his radio, then frowned. “I’m being blocked. They can’t hear me.”

  “Call off the strike,” I said to Baine.

  “Too late, Captain.” He smirked. “Bombs away.”

  I scrambled to the top of the collapse, arriving at the same moment the laser-guided bomb consumed a section of the compound in a booming plume of smoke. As the rest of the team hit the ground, I remained standing. The young men on the pallets, the women tending to them. Gone. The ground shuddered, and a wave of heat and pressure hit my face. Secondary explosions began to pop off.