Just shy of the bend, Chace held up. She took two deep breaths, filling herself with as much oxygen as she could, adjusting her grip on the knife. One of the voices sounded close, and she hoped it was very close indeed.
She looked up above her, to where Lankford crouched waiting, watching, and gave him the go signal. He returned it, began moving again, this time much more cautiously. The idea was that he’d take a position around the bend but well above the road, preferably one in strong cover. As soon as he had position, he’d open fire, and Chace would move. She licked dust from her lips, waiting. He didn’t have a lot of bullets. He’d have to make them all count, and she would have to work fast.
Then the Browning spoke, two shots, and someone cried out, and immediately upon that, there was shouting in Uzbek, and a barrage of return fire. Chace shoved off the slope and sprinted, the knife in her right held low and ready.
The lead and follow cars had been the ones to burn, their carcasses still smoldering on the trail as Chace came around the bend. There had been six in the ambush team, but Lankford had dropped one with his opening shots, and the man’s death had achieved the desired result. Along the trail, the remaining five were all facing the mountainside, looking up, three of them with M-16s at their shoulders, laying down a spray that chewed the rocks and earth above. Their clothing was closer to Chace’s and Lankford’s than to what Kostum and the others sported, and it confirmed it for her that these men had come from Tashkent.
The nearest of them was fifteen feet away when she made the turn. He was firing furiously at the mountainside above, and Chace made straight for him. He caught her motion in his peripheral vision at the last second, too late, trying to turn toward her and bring the rifle down at the same time. The result was that he turned into her knife as she drove the blade into him, punching above his stomach, then thrusting up with all her might. His eyes bulged and his arm came down, and Chace yanked both her knife and the M-16 from the man, then dropped her blade, turning the automatic rifle in her hand.
There was a shout from down the road, one of the gunmen spotting her, and the firing stopped abruptly, and in that split second the scene seared itself into her mind. She tasted her sweat and the cordite and the acrid smoke from the two burning vehicles, saw the man she’d stabbed doubled over, facedown. She saw the others, the bodies of Kostum’s men burnt and shredded by the RPGs or the M-16s, and the gunman that Chris had hit, flat on his back, his left leg tucked awkwardly beneath him, his blood sucked up by the thirsty earth. She saw Kostum himself, slumped against the rear wheel of the Jeep, bloodied and beaten, in the shadow of two men, each with pistols in their hands.
Two men she knew in her nightmares, one young and big who had grown erect at the sight of her pain and fear, the other older and shorter and disinterested to the point of inhuman. She saw Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev, and they saw her at the same moment the other gunmen saw her, and perhaps they recognized her then, perhaps they didn’t, but Chace had no doubts, and she understood it all in that fraction of a second; this hadn’t been Sevara’s doing, it had been Zahidov’s, and that explained everything.
Then Lankford sprang up from behind his cover and laid down another three shots from the Browning, and another of the gunmen flailed and fell. Chace ducked low, scurrying behind the wreckage of the last car in the line. She brought the M-16 up, butt into her shoulder, and she fired. Tozim was turning and trying for cover but Andrei wasn’t as fast, and the burst caught both of them, cutting across the big man’s thighs and then tearing into the older man’s belly. Both went down.
Chace advanced around the side of the wreck, M-16 still to her shoulder, and she saw the last gunman crouching in the road, by the Jeep, fumbling to reload his rifle, and she put a burst in his chest. He flopped back, gagging, as the M-16 went dry, and she dropped the rifle as the man fell silent.
The gray-bearded guard lay on his side near her feet, face half-missing from shrapnel, Kalashnikov still in his bloodied hand. She took the AK, began walking through the bodies, checking for life.
“All clear?” Lankford called from above.
“Clear,” Chace shouted back.
She heard him begin to descend toward her, rattling more rocks down the mountainside.
Kostum stared at her from where he was slumped against the wheel, holding his right hand in his left, and she saw that one of them, Tozim or Andrei, had put a bullet through it. As she dropped to her haunches beside him, the General smiled at her weakly, saying something in Pashto through bloodied lips, and she nodded, then looked past him.
Andrei Hamrayev was dead, eyes wide and mouth opened, saliva visible at the corner of his mouth, mixed with his blood. But her eyes were on the bloody smear on the ground, tracking the path of a wounded man as he tried to crawl away.
“I’ll be right back,” she told Kostum softly, then stood, adjusting her grip on the Kalashnikov.
Tozim had made it halfway to the ruins of the lead car, dragging himself along, and from the amount of blood he was losing, Chace figured he didn’t have much time. He was sobbing in pain, trying to keep the noise to himself, and she saw a pistol in his right hand, and she almost laughed. It was a Sarsilmaz, maybe the same one they’d recovered from her over six months earlier.
She watched him crawling, and his progress steadily degraded, less and less ground covered with what seemed greater and greater effort. Finally she set the Kalashnikov silently on the ground at her feet, then moved to him. She kicked him hard in the face with her boot, snapping him onto his side, then brought the same foot down on his gun hand, stomping. Tozim cried out, lost the grip on the gun.
She picked the pistol up, still looking down at him. There were tears of pain in his eyes. There was recognition on his face.
Chace thought of all the things she wanted to say, as she checked the pistol, and she was almost positive it was the same Sarsilmaz, and it was loaded and ready, so she pointed it at his right foot. She decided there were no words to say.
She pulled the trigger.
Tozim screamed.
She pointed it at his left foot and fired again.
He screamed again.
She tucked the pistol into the back of her pants, leaned down, and searched him. She found his wallet, a pack of American cigarettes, and a plastic lighter. She took all of them, shoving them into her coat pockets. Tozim was babbling at her, a torrent of Uzbek, and when she began dragging him, he tried to break her grip with his bloodied hands. There was almost no strength to his efforts, and when he did finally succeed in grabbing Chace’s wrist, she punched him in the face before she resumed pulling him.
“You don’t ever touch me again,” she told him.
She was aware of Lankford watching her, crouched beside Kostum, trying to tend his wounds, as she manhandled Tozim to the side of the trail. The slope was severe here and she looked back down at Tozim Stepanov, and she knew he was begging her not to do it, not because she understood his words, but because she heard the garbled desperation in them.
It was another sound from her nightmares, and she would have relented then, she would have spared him then, if only, in her dreams, it hadn’t been her doing the begging.
“Try to land on your feet,” Chace told him, then pitched him over the edge.
They reached Mazar-i-Sharif seven hours later, and three hours and fifty-four minutes after that, Chace was on a NATO-staffed helicopter bound for Termez.