“Jesus Christ!” Alpha blurted in panic, jumping away and falling backward over a chair. “Holy fuck — she’s a fucking leper!”
Crosswhite whipped around. “Calm the fuck down!”
“We gotta get the fuck outta here!” Alpha kicked the chair and scrambled away on his hands and knees.
“Relax!” Forogh said, holding his own shemagh over his face. “Ninety-five percent of people are naturally immune.”
“The fuck you say!” Alpha leapt to his feet and dashed for the door. He stood just outside the hut looking in. “Shit, we’ve already breathed her fucking air — motherfucker! Look at her fucking face!”
Crosswhite went to the door, hissing under his breath: “You’d better shut the fuck up, boy.”
“She’s a fucking leper, and we breathed her fucking air!”
Trigg grabbed Alpha from behind, clamping him in a rear naked choke, shutting off the blood to his brain and hauling him off around the other side of the hut into the shadow of an overhanging boulder. Alpha blacked out a few seconds later, and Trigg laid him down on the ground, assigning a SEAL named Speed to keep an eye on him.
Back inside the hut, Forogh began to question the blind woman in Pashto, telling her exactly who they were and not to be afraid. The old woman’s responses came in a mixture of Pashto and Kalasha. Her words were slurred and difficult for Forogh to understand.
“I can’t tell exactly what she means,” Forogh finally said to Crosswhite. “Her verb tenses are confusing. She’s either saying the American woman is being held in the hut overlooking the rest of the village or she was being held there.”
“Get her to clarify it,” Crosswhite ordered, still rattled by Alpha’s unexpected loss of cool.
Forogh shook his head in frustration. “I’ve tried to five or six times already. She doesn’t know the correct word in Pashto, so she keeps telling me in Kalasha.”
“Christ Almighty,” Crosswhite said. “Are the languages really that different? Fuck, it all sounds exactly the same to me.”
Forogh shrugged. “We can move on the building overlooking the rest of the village, or we can take over another hut.”
“Shit,” Crosswhite said. “Is she going to cause trouble after we leave?”
“I doubt it,” Forogh said. “She keeps saying how tired she is. I think all she wants to do is go back to sleep. She probably thinks this is a dream.”
Crosswhite looked out the door to see the sky was growing light in the east. The villagers would be waking up soon. “We don’t have time. We’re moving on the hut overlooking the village. You’re sure about that part, right?”
“She seems very clear about what building, yes.”
“I guess that’s something,” Crosswhite said. “Let’s go.”
When they stepped from the hut, Alpha was back on his feet and looking at the ground. He was very obviously agitated and embarrassed over what had taken place. He stood between Trigg and Speed, each of whom had a hand resting on one of his shoulders.
Crosswhite stepped directly into Alpha’s face, their noses almost touching, talking in a low growl. “Do you think you can carry out the rest of this mission, sailor?”
“Aye, sir.”
“You jeopardize these men or this mission again, and I’ll drop you where you stand. Is that understood?”
Alpha met his gaze. “Aye, sir.”
Crosswhite turned to Speed. “This man is your baggage.”
Speed nodded. “He’ll be fine, Captain. I guarantee it.”
“He better be!”
Forogh then briefed them on their objective. The hut overlooking the rest of the village was perched another one hundred fifty yards up the mountain, and they would have to move through the center of the village to reach it, climbing a 9 percent grade and weaving in and out of the conjoined buildings most of the way.
“Forget any flanking maneuvers or splitting up,” Crosswhite said. “We don’t have the time or the necessary intel for that shit. We’re going in strong through the front door, hitting the vault, and fighting our way back out any way we can — just like a fucking bank heist. You see anyone with a weapon, you drop their ass. Now let’s move, people. Sandra’s up there waiting for us.”
They worked their way past the first few huts without seeing anyone, moving upward through a narrow alley toward the second tier of buildings. It was growing light now, and they no longer needed their night vision to see where they were going. A door opened and a man froze in the doorway, eyes wide with fear. Forogh ordered him back inside and the man obeyed without hesitation, gently closing the door and bolting it.
There seemed to be five tiers of huts, more or less, but the mountain’s surface was uneven, so it was difficult to discern exactly where they were within the village. All they could do was keep climbing and shifting course toward the northwest. They mounted the third tier and rounded a corner to see a pair of teenage boys standing outside of a hut with AK-47s over their shoulders. Crosswhite sprayed them with automatic fire from his suppressed M4, and they flew backward off of their feet to land with their heads thudding against the wall of the hut.
The column of ten SEALs shuffled past the bodies with the wounded Fischer covering their ass.
A man opened the door to the hut to see what the commotion was about, and Fischer quickly clouted him over the head with his MK 23, knocking him cold and stepping into the hut to see who else might be inside. A woman stood near a table with two small children clinging to her. She looked as though she was about to scream when Fischer aimed the pistol at her face and held a finger to his lips. When he was sure she wasn’t going to scream, he dragged her husband inside by the arm and hurried back outside to catch up with the column.
When they finally came to a dead end, they grabbed a man stepping out for water, and Forogh told him where they needed him to take them. The man immediately told them that Sandra was already gone, that she had been taken away during the night. This of course did not go over well with Crosswhite, who all but jammed the suppressor of his pistol down the man’s throat, demanding the truth.
The man began to cry, swearing that he was telling the truth.
“Make him take us to the fucking hut!” Crosswhite ordered.
Forogh called the man down, saying, “The Americans need to see for themselves. Take us to the hut so they can do their jobs and leave.”
The man led them through an empty hut and out the back door, which opened onto a kind of terrace. Across the terrace was a lone hut with two sleeping teens sitting on the stoop, their heads tilted back against the door, AK-47s propped between their knees.
“Take ’em out,” Crosswhite said to Alpha, wanting to find out if the SEAL was back in the game.
Alpha stood in the doorway and shouldered his M4, preparing to fire.
The village guide began to protest.
Crosswhite whipped around and coldcocked him. “Fucking liar! Who posts guards on an empty building?”
Alpha fired a round through each of the teen’s foreheads, and they toppled off the stoop with their brains splattered on the door.
The team poured out of the hut and onto the terrace, taking up positions to cover every possible avenue of approach. Crosswhite and Trigg approached the hut and stood listening through the door. The only sound was that of a heavily snoring man. Trigg opened the latch and pushed the door inward, stepping inside with Crosswhite following.
There was a table and chairs in the main room and a curtain that hung down in the doorway to an adjoining room. The SEALs drew their pistols and advanced on the curtain. They pulled it aside and saw a bearded man sleeping in a bed.
Crosswhite was sure he’d seen that room before. He stalked across the room and aimed the suppressor of the MK 23 down into the sleeping man’s face. “Wake up, cocksucker!”