Page 67 of Whisper

Hearing Kris’s voice through the radio was almost as torturous as it was cherished. “How’s it going down there?”

“Well, our secret is out. Base camp is now journalist HQ.”

“Shit.”

“Majid’s men have found a new source of revenue. He’s shuttling journalists out to the Milawa camp for a hundred bucks a drive.”

“Enterprising warlord.” David huffed, and clouds billowed in front of his face.

“Villagers are coming down with bodies, too. They’re trying to sell them to us.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s gotten crowded here. The journalists are camping outside our camp, and they’re now paying Shirzai’s men to keep the entire area secure. Jim and I try to stay out of sight. But it’s safer now. Which is good. How are you?”

“Cold.” There was so much David wanted to say. They were on a secure radio, impenetrable by al-Qaeda or any journalist, but every member of the team had an open earpiece and could listen in to whatever was being said. “We keep moving forward, but we’re only moving inch by inch. Any luck with CENTCOM? We getting Rangers to plug the rear?” What was the point of pushing Bin Laden toward Pakistan if no one was there to stop him?

Kris was quiet. “CENTCOM is refusing to deploy Rangers behind Bin Laden. General Faulkner says the Pakistanis have it covered. Hold on.” The channel clicked, Kris switching to another frequency back at base. Dead air filled David’s ear, static and pops, whines and whistles.

Kris came back. “Be advised, fighters on station in two minutes.”

David relayed the message to his team, holding position with their lasers trained on another cave, another trench. There was always another cave, it seemed. Always another bolt-hole for al-Qaeda fighters to run to.

He wastired. Tired in a way he hadn’t been since he was a child leaving Libya, when he’d been exhausted of life and shattered from the inside out. Somalia and Mogadishu had made him weary, his first return to Africa since he was a boy and he’d been faced with, yet again, all the ways humans could tear into each other, hurt one another until the soul was raw.

The world spun differently once all the horrors men could inflict on other men were revealed. The colors changed, the sounds, the sights.He’dbeen changed, initiated into the world of terror and gut-wrenching truth when he was a boy.

Air tasted different when it was saturated with death.

He still felt the hands of ghosts on his shoulders. Muslim dead. African dead. The sound of his father’s voice, too, along with the hands. He couldn’t make out what his father was saying. It just added to the maddening pressure, like a push. A pull.

He was left to his thoughts in the quiet moments of the battlefield, between the bombs and the bullets, and when he tried to fall asleep. The backs of his eyelids were screens, replaying the days, the weeks, of violence, the onslaught of savagery he was a part of, the circle of life and death. Not just death, but terrible, agonizing death. Suffering.

Al-Qaeda was their enemy. Al-Qaeda fighters zeroed David in on their rifles, on their artillery, fired at him, tried to blow him off the mountain. They wanted him dead, like they wanted every American dead. They tried to kill him.

He, and his team, killed them first.

But who were they?

Men, Muslims, al-Qaeda.

He was two out of the three.

What had created the battlefield, had carved such hate into the faith he remembered his father teaching him in sun-strewn gardens, whose first precept was to submit and to love?

Whoever slays a soul, it is as though he slew all men. His father had taught him that verse from the Quran when he was four.

Every day, David counted new blood splatters in the snow and measured the depth of the craters by how many bodies were stacked within.

Was the world black and white, evil and good, horror and righteousness, or did Majid and his shifting loyalties understand the world better than anyone else?

What about Khan and his quiet pleas for American aid, yet his certainty that he would be betrayed? Every Muslim in Afghanistan had stared at them the same way, from Khan to Majid, from the Taliban David spied through his binoculars to the Kabulis on the streets. That look of uncertainty, of wariness. Of expectant betrayal. Of hesitant, hidden hatred.

Was he too American to be Muslim now? Forever outside the rhythms of his youth, the faith of his father, once passed down to him? Twenty-one years he’d been away from his faith. Yet the whispers of prayers came back to him in dreams, the same dreams he had of Kris, bathed in sunlight and smiling down on him.

Kufir, a dark part of his mind hissed.Takfiri. Unbeliever. Apostate.

He wanted to burrow into Kris’s arms and ask questions David wouldn’t even whisper to himself, ask Kris all the whys and hows and whens. Let Kris explain the world until it made sense again. Listen to Kris’s sharp-edged voice until time ran out, until he found the answers, and found the end.