Page 52 of Whisper

“Not good enough. They need visual confirmation before they’ll approve the mission.”

Kris saw David shake his head. His eyes pinched, concern warring with determination. Sneaking behind enemy lines, infiltrating enemy positions? That was David’s bread and butter. He and his Special Forces team were trained to do just that.

But David was alone, with only Shura Nazar forces to back him up.

Alone, except for Kris.

“We’ll have visual confirmation tonight, George. Tell CENTCOM to have their fighters ready.”

“Are yousure?”

David squatted on a pile of crumbled cinder blocks in front of Kris, holding a compact of camo paint. Half of Kris’s face was darkened, the shading breaking up the lines of his humanity, enough to blend in with the darkness.

“Very sure.”

Sighing, David painted a long streak of black over his nose, across his cheek. He wouldn’t look Kris in the eye. “Kris—”

“Out of everyone, you have never doubted me. Not once. Are you doubting me now?”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

Finally, David looked at him, really looked at him. David had applied his own camo paint first, streaks of brown and black across his face until just his eyes were visible in the dim light of the bunker, in the corner where they had set up their sleeping bags.

The air shivered, hovering around them, weighted with whatever David was about to say next. Expectancy was thick, pressing on Kris.

But David looked away, and in that moment, he closed up, rolling up the expectancy and his hesitation as he cleared his throat. The air in the bunker seemed to suck into David, vanishing with apop. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” David said. He dabbed brown paint on his fingers and reached for Kris’s cheek.

“Neither of us will get hurt. We’re in this together.”

David nodded. Kris watched a barrier go up in his gaze, watched him shift, start piling up block after block within him, barricading the world away. He was going operational, putting himself into the mindset of the mission. Kris could feel him disappearing within, going deep into the center of himself.

Closing his eyes, Kris followed, tipping back and falling into his training. The mission plan, their objective, played over in his mind. Their route, how to get to the village. Time on station, and a rehearsal of their actions, their moves, step-by-step in his mind. His breathing leveled out, going flat, going even.

“Done.”

They waited until the dead of night. Other than a few fires lit by frozen Shura Nazar fighters, well off the front lines or buried in bunkers, there was no light after dark in Afghanistan. Certainly not at Bagram. Only the stars gleamed above, beneath a quarter moon.

Kris crept behind David, stepping exactly into his dusty footprints. They were on a grazing path that goats and horses had used before the fighting. To the left and right of the narrow dirt track, buried mines and unexploded ordnance littered the ground. Spent shell casings and dirty brass covered the dust, reflecting a glinty green in Kris’s NVGs.

Neither the Taliban or the Shura Nazar had night vision capabilities. Both sides were blind after dark. Kris and David were ghosts, slipping unseen into the Taliban’s village.

Fixed gun positions pointed down at the airport, manned by sleeping Taliban soldiers. Heavy machine guns, mortars, and larger artillery pieces were covered in rough camouflage. Broken homes, their mud roofs caved in and walls shattered, blown apart by years of bullets and bombs, squatted behind the guns. Soft Dari wound out of the wreckage, carried on the low light of banked fires.

They slid silently through the village, moving house to house, quiet as smoke. There, a group of soldiers slept. There, guards, huddled around the fire. Beyond, in a house set off the center of the village, what looked like a group of mullahs, the senior leaders of the fighters, sat together around a pile of orange coals. Radio antennae cluttered the roof of their hut, and weapons leaned against the side walls.

A convoy of trucks waited behind the village. Two Russian tanks lingered beyond the gun positions with fresh tracks in the dirt. Soon, they’d be firing on the airport with tank rounds.

No civilians. Not a hint of life, other than the infestation of fighters. Who had lived there before? Where had they been taken when the Taliban moved in?

David shifted, sliding around a mudbrick home, the last in the village. Its roof had caved in more than the others, and its walls had crumbled almost to the ground. Burn marks and soot licked up the sides of what remained. Crouching, David scanned the ground, peered inside. Kris followed, hovering beside him. Something must have caught David’s eye,

He spotted it a moment after David did.

Bones.

Chipped, brittle bones, burned and snapped in half. Small bones, the size of a child’s. The size of a young woman. Kris could pick out femurs and jawbones, ribs and shoulder blades. He tried to count them by twos. At least twelve—no, fourteen, eighteen—