Page 51 of Whisper

“Take us to Bagram. To the very front, General.”

Khan piled them into his truck, but he dismissed the fleet of vehicles and the guards who had ridden with them before. “We will be riding through the Shomali. The Taliban attack anything they can down there, and they hold a ridgeline to the south. I won’t give them too many targets.”

Khan’s driver pushed the pedal to the floorboards. The old engine whined, coughed, and spewed dirt as the truck’s wheels spun, sliding on melting snow and mud. Door panels rattled, windows shivered and shook almost hard enough to fracture. They slipped down Khan’s front lines, down the hillside, and dropped into the Shomali.

Desiccated earth, the dust of a ceaseless famine, blustered by the truck. Snow blown down from the mountains mixed with the dust, creating an alien landscape, a desolate expanse of dead land. Crops had long withered, whatever vegetation long shelled by bombs and turned to craters and ash. Broken villages and the remnants of homes littered the windswept land.

“The Taliban punished the Shomali when they first took power. The Plain, it resisted. So the Taliban smashed the farms, destroyed the homes. Burned villages to the ground. They blew up the water pipes and dams and poisoned the wells. Murdered anyone who did not fall into line.” Khan nodded to the devastation.

David was ripcord taut next to him.

“Even Allah has forgotten Afghanistan,” Khan rumbled. “Now there is no water, no food. The people starve and the animals die.” Weariness weighed heavily on the general, etched into the growl of his voice.

An hour later, Khan guided his driver to the northern side of Bagram Airfield. It rose from the Shomali like a concrete ghost town, decrepit bunkers and shattered buildings, twisted rebar and broken glass, an apocalyptic nightmare.

Khan’s driver stopped at a line of low bunkers reinforced with sandbags along the front. He stayed in the bunkers’ shadows.

Kris poked his head around the side of one. A long runway stretched toward the south end of the airfield. More bunkers hovered at the end of the runway, sandbags and a dirt berm beside them.

“That,Gul Bahar, is the Taliban. We are one runway away, here. The front line goes across this airfield.” He pointed to the northern end of the base, where the ravaged pillar of the air traffic control tower still stood, windows long blown out. “But we have the high ground.”

Three cracks sounded, fast snaps that broke the cold air. Whizzes whistled by. Dust sprayed off the bunker wall.

“Careful,Gul Bahar. We trade fire here often.” Khan guided Kris and David into the bunker, a former Soviet military office. The broken windows were blocked with sandbags, only narrow firing slits open at the very tops. Soldiers peered through binoculars at Taliban positions. One soldier passed his binos to Khan.

“They are watching us. Wondering who you are and what you are doing. They will be attacking this afternoon.”

As Khan spoke, the dull thump of a mortar round launching from the Taliban’s line rumbled. It whistled, flying low, and hit the top of their bunker. The walls shook, dust and sand falling from the ceiling. David grabbed Kris with both hands.

“Do not worry. The roof, it is reinforced. We are hit many times. We will patch the damage tonight.”

They slipped out of the bunker and back to the truck. Khan’s driver wound through the remnants of buildings, rotten metal and twisted frames collapsed in on themselves. Destroyed aircraft decayed on the tarmac and in front of hangars, tires long gone flat, frames dented, metal missing, wings torn off. But each wreck was still in a neat line, famous Soviet military discipline still on display, even in an abandoned base at the end of the world.

They idled for a moment at the edge of a long runway, hidden behind a hangar. “You both should duck,” Khan said.

His driver floored it, whipping around the hangar and hauling down the runway. The engine roared, and David pushed Kris down across the back seat, covering him with his body. Kris felt David’s breath against his cheek, felt his fingers dig into Kris’s arms. Bullets pinged off the runway, snapping like firecrackers. One shattered the rear glass.

“The Taliban hold the village in the hills above the base!” Khan shouted. “They can fire on this runway from there. Unfortunately, this is the only way we can drive to the control tower! You will have to take out that village with your lasers!”

Finally, they pulled behind two bunkers, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, and parked in the shadow of the tower. The upper radar dish, the overhang, and the antennae were gone; only the observation deck remained. There was no door on the tower. It had been destroyed long ago. A spiral stairway went up to the observation deck and more bullet holes ringed the inside of the tower. The tower had seen a hell of a fight.

Inside, Shura Nazar forces had telescopes set up for targeting and range finding. Maps covered the floor, marked up with Taliban posts and positions.

Khan introduced Kris and David, and the Shura Nazar fighters eagerly looked at David’s pack once Khan explained what they were there for.

“You can destroy them from here?”

“Between the scope, the coordinates, and the laser, yes. We definitely can.” Kris smiled.

Kris had spoken too soon.

George called on the satellite phone that evening. “Targets on deck for the night are situated around Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e-Sharif. They want to pound al-Qaeda strongholds and loosen up the Taliban around Mazar for Hajimullah’s forces.”

“We’ve got a village infested with Taliban. They’re picking off Khan’s men at the airport. We’ve got the coordinates mapped and a laser on them as we speak.”

“CENTCOM is refusing to release a fighter for your targets unless you can triple guarantee that there are no civilians in the village. We’re not flattening a village of women and children at the start of the war.”

“Khan assures us the Taliban have moved all civilians out. It’s only fighters.”