“If I don’t come back, make sure somebody feeds my cat.”

“Noted.”

“What about Amirah? You want her brought back here?”

“Amirah would be a prize catch. There’s a laundry list of people who want her. The vice president thinks she would be a great asset to our own bio-weapons programs.”

“And is that what you want?” I asked, and then he told me.

– 3-

The Helmand River Valley

Sixty-one Hours Ago

We hit the ground running. When Church wants to clear a path, he steamrolls it flat. Our cover was that of a Marine SKT-Small Kill Team-operating on special orders. Need to know. Everybody figured we were probably Delta, and you don’t ask them for papers unless you want to get a ration of shit from everyone higher up the food chain. And when we did have to show papers, we had real ones. As real as the situation required.

Just as the helo was about to set us down near the blast site, Church radioed: “Be advised, I ordered the two Marine squads to pull out of the area. One has confirmed and is heading to a pick-up point now. The other has not responded. Make no assumptions in those hills.”

He signed off without explanation, but I didn’t need any.

The six of us went out into the desert, split into two teams and headed into Indian country. We ran with combat names only. I was Cowboy.

Twilight draped the desert with purple shadows. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains the furnace heat shut off and the wind turned cool. Not pleasantly cool: This breeze was clammy and it smelled wrong. There was a scent on the wind-sweet and sour. An ugly smell that triggered an atavistic repulsion. Bunny sniffed it and turned to me.

“Yeah,” I said, “I smell it, too.”

Bob Faraday-a big moose of a guy whose call-sign was Slim-ran point. It was getting dark fast and the moon wouldn’t be up for nearly an hour. In ten minutes we’d have to switch to night-vision. Slim vanished into the distance. Bunny and I followed behind, slower, watching as darkness seemed to melt out from under rocks and rise up from sand dunes as the sparse islands of daytime shadows spread out to join the ocean of shadows that was night.

Slim broke squelch twice, the signal to close on him quick and quiet.

As we ran up behind him I saw that he’d stopped by a series of gray finger rocks that rose from the troubled sands at the edge of the blast area. But as I drew closer I saw that the rocks weren’t rocks at all.

I followed my gun barrel all the way to Slim’s side.

The dark objects were people.

Eleven of them, sticking out of the sand like statues from some ancient ruins. Dead. Charred beyond recognition. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-degree burns. You couldn’t tell race or even sex with most of them. They were like mummies, and they were still too hot to touch.

“There was supposed to be some kind of underground lab,” murmured Slim. “Looks like the blast charbroiled these poor bastards and the force drove them up through the sand.”

“Hope it was quick,” said Bunny.

Slim glanced at him. “If they were in that lab then they were the bad guys.”

“Even so,” said Bunny.

We went into the foothills, onto some rocks that were cooler than the sands.

The other team called in. The Marine was on point. “Jukebox to Cowboy, be advised we have more bodies up here. Five DOA. Three men and two women. Third-degree burns, cuts and blunt force injuries. Looks like they might have walked out of the hot zone and died up here in the rocks.” He paused. “They’re a mess. Vultures and wild dogs been at them.”

“Verify that what you are seeing are animal bites,” I said.

There was a long pause.

And it got longer.

I keyed the radio. “Cowboy to Jukebox, copy?”

Two long damn seconds.

“Cowboy to Jukebox, do you copy?”

That’s when we heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire. And the screams.

We ran.

“Night-vision!” I snapped, and we flipped the units into place as the black landscape suddenly transformed into a thousand shades of luminescent green. We were all carrying ALICE packs with about fifty pounds of gear-most of it stuff that’ll blow up, M4 combat rifles, AMT.22 caliber auto mags on our hips, and combat S.I. assault boots. It’s all heavy and it can slow you down…except when your own brothers in arms are under fire. Then it feels like wings that carry you over the ground at the speed of a racing tiger. That’s the illusion, and that’s how it felt as we tore up the slopes toward the path Second Squad had taken.

The gunfire was continuous.

As we hit the ridge, I signaled the others to get low and slow. Bunny came up beside me. “Those are M5s, boss.”

He was right. Our guns have their own distinctive sound, and it doesn’t sound much like the Kalashnikovs the Taliban favored.

The gunfire stopped abruptly.

We froze, letting the night tell us its story.

The last of the gunfire echoes bounced back to us from the distant peaks. I could hear loose rocks clattering down the slope, probably debris knocked loose by stray bullets. In the distance the wind was beginning to howl through some of the mountain passes.

I keyed the radio.

“Cowboy to Jukebox. Respond.”

Nothing.

We moved forward, moving as silently as trained men can do when any misstep could draw fire. The tone of the wind changed as we edged toward the rock wall that would spill us into the pass where Second Squad had gone. A heavier breeze, perhaps? Moving through one of the deeper canyons?

A month ago I’d have believed that. Too much has happened since.

I tapped Bunny and then used the hand signal to listen.

He heard the sound, then, and I could feel him stiffen beside me. He pulled Slim close and used two fingers to mime walking.

Slim had been fully briefed on the trip. He understood. The low sigh wasn’t the wind. It was the unendingly hungry moan of a walker.

I finger-counted down from three and we rounded the bend.

Jukebox had said that they’d found five bodies. Second Squad made eight.

As we rounded the wall we saw that the count was wrong. There weren’t eight people in the pass. There were fifteen. All of them were dead. Most of them moving.

Second Squad lay sprawled in the dust. The night-vision made it look like they were covered in black oil. Jukebox still held his M4, finger curled through the trigger guard, barrel smoking. A man dressed in a white lab coat knelt over him, head bowed as if weeping for the fallen soldier, but as we stepped into the pass the kneeling man raised his head and turned toward us. His mouth and cheeks glistened with black wetness and his eyes were lightless windows that looked into a world in which there was no thought, no emotion, no anything except hunger.

Spider and Zorro-the L.A. SWAT kid and the other Ranger-were almost invisible beneath the seething mass of bodies that crouched over them, tearing at clothing with wax-white fingers and at skin with gray teeth.

“Holy Mother of God,” whispered Slim.

“God’s not here,” I said as I put the pinpoint of the laser sight on the kneeling zombie. It was a stupid thing to say. Glib and macho. But I think it was also the truth.

The creature bared its teeth and hissed like a jungle cat. Then he lunged, pale fingers reaching for me.

I put the first round in his breastbone and that froze him in place for a fragment of a second, and then put the next round through his forehead. The impact snapped his neck, the round blew out the back of his skull, and the force flung him against the rock wall.

The other walkers surged up off the ground with awful cries that I will never be able to forget. Bunny, Slim and I stood our ground in a shooting line, and we chopped them back and down and dead. Dead for good and all. Painting the walls with the same dripping black. The narrow confines of the pass roared with thunder, the waves of echoes striking us in the chest, the ejected brass tinkling with improbable delicacy.