Gravedigger (9 page)

Derek gestured toward the barrels. “If your men shoot me, it’s almost guaranteed that a bullet will hit one of these barrels. If that happens, they, you, and everybody else in this whole village will die almost instantly. I suggest you have them put their guns away.”

The Arab scowled at him, then said something sharply in what Derek thought was either Farsi or Pashto. He was fairly certain it wasn’t Arabic. The men all lowered their rifles.

“Do you know what this is?” Derek demanded. “Because it sure isn’t pesticide or fertilizer.”

The Arab’s eyes glittered darkly. “Who are you, Derek Stillwater, that you know so much about this?”

“I’m a professor of biochemistry and I know the chemical formula for VX gas. And you’ve got enough VX gas in these barrels to more than wipe out London, Paris, New York, and Washington DC, or even Riyadh. I also know that if you screw up with it you’ll get a lot of your own people killed.”

“Khan, take him back to his cell.”

Derek leaned against one of the barrels. He pointed the handgun he’s stolen from Khan at it. “No.”

The Arab said, “I believe you’re bluffing.”

Derek waved at Khan and the three
muj
with the rifles and said, “Tell them what happens if I shoot a hole in this barrel.”

“What are you talking about?” Khan demanded.

“These barrels contain VX nerve gas. It’s in a liquid form. A single drop on your skin will kill you in seconds. If you breathe it, it will kill just as fast. You’ll start to sweat. You’ll start to twitch. Your nose will run. Then you won’t be able to breathe and all the muscles in your body will contract so hard you might even break your back. And then you’ll die.”

Khan’s eyes went wide. He looked at the Arab and said something to him. The Arab said something back. The Arab looked annoyed. Khan looked pissed. Derek suspected that the Arab knew all about VX gas and that Khan didn’t.

And then something exploded on the other side of the village. Blinking, Derek realized that the building where he had been kept hostage was in flames. Villagers started running toward the fire and the explosion.

The Arab spun on his heels, then sprinted toward the house where bin Laden and Omar were. The three extra
muj
seemed confused, but that didn’t last long. Another small explosion occurred a hundred yards or so from the first. Gunfire chattered.

They ran toward the gunfire.

Khan said, “I’m not done with you, infidel!”

Raising the handgun, Derek shot him in the face. “Yeah,” he said. “But I’m done with you.”

Derek could do the smart
thing – get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Or he could do the right thing – destroy the VX gas without killing everybody in the village.

He didn’t have much time. He didn’t know what was going on, but the attack on the village wasn’t going away. There were a couple smaller explosions – Derek thought they sounded like grenades or RPGs – and gunfire.

A pry bar was lying alongside one of the crates. He tore the crate open to find a stash of RPGs. He took as many of the rockets as he could handle and began laying them around the barrels of VX gas. A part of his mind paid attention to the wind. A light breeze was blowing down the mountains, over the village. If the VX went off and wasn’t incinerated, the wind would blow the deadly gas through part of the village.

He didn’t have a satisfactory solution. But Noa and Jim had told him that Osama bin Laden was arming his little band of mercenaries in the Sudan. Putting two and two together, he thought OBL was looking for something nasty like VX gas to use … for what?

Whatever it was, he didn’t want this guy and his buddy, Mullah Omar, to have something as ugly as VX gas.

It was a questionable moral distinction, killing someone with bombs and bullets versus killing them with poison gas or biological agents. The biggest concern Derek had about biological warfare was it couldn’t be controlled.

His biggest worry about something like VX gas was you stuck it in a thermos and walked into a subway or a hotel or an office building and you could kill hundreds and thousands of people. It was the devil in a jar, Pandora’s box, a whole lot of death in a very small package.

Derek had stacked dozens of grenades and rockets around the barrels of VX. He really wished he had some C4.

Now what?

Grabbing an RPG launcher and extra rockets, he studied the village behind him. All of the men had run to the far side of the village. The women, as far as he could tell, were hiding in their houses.

Except bin Laden, the Arab, and Mullah Omar. They stood at the front of their house, AK47s in their hands, looking around.

Then bin Laden noticed him standing there. He raised his rifle toward Derek.

Instantly, Derek spun, aimed the RPG and fired.

All three of the men launched themselves into the house. The RPG hit the ground a dozen feet in front of the door and exploded, leaving a crater in the ground, but hurting no one.

A woman appeared in a burkha, carrying a rifle. He shouted at her to leave. She kept coming. Derek pointed the RPG at her. She said, “It’s me, Noa.”

He ran to her. “Where’s Jim?”

“He’s bringing the cavalry. Where’s bin Laden?”

Derek pointed at the house. “There. We need to get everybody as far from the village as possible. I’m blowing the VX, but I don’t want to kill everybody.”

“I’ve got to get bin Laden.”

“Did you hear me?” he demanded.

Ignoring him, Noa ran toward the house, a wraith in blue.

Dammit! He sprinted in the opposite direction, toward another house. Bursting in the front door, he found several women and children cowering. “You’ve got to leave! Now! Leave!”

They stared at him, unresponsive. Derek leapt over, grabbed a woman by the arm and dragged her to the door. She fought him, but he pulled her anyway. Once he got her out the door, he pointed toward the highest point, upwind. “Go! Run! Take everyone!”

The others in the house were gathering around him, hitting him with their fists. “
Aor!
” he shouted, the word for fire. “
Aor! Aor! Aor!
”

They stopped hitting him, confused.

He thought of the few other words he knew in Pashto. Then it hit him. “
Dzghélem! Dzghélem!
” Run! Run!

The eyes in the burkhas grew wide. Still uncertain. “
Dzghélem!
”

And one more word. “
Khatarnaak!
” Dangerous!

“
Dzghélem! Khatarnaak!
” Then he fired the AK47 into the air. They ran. As they ran, they shouted. Other women appeared and started running. Good.

He heard the helicopter.

Derek sprinted in the direction he had last seen Noa go. As he approached the building, the Arab came out holding Noa as a shield, a gun to her head. Derek raised his AK47. “Let her go!”

Behind the Arab appeared bin Laden and Omar. The Sheik held a bloody rag to his arm. He said, “So, you are CIA, after all.”

“Let her go or I’ll kill you all.”

The sound of the helicopter grew louder. Derek figured it was the Sheik’s ride out of town. Time was ticking down.

The helicopter roared overhead, spun around, and hovered. With a roar its Yak-B Gatling gun fired, tearing through the village, ripping through the
muj
.

Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar started. Apparently this wasn’t part of their plan.

Noa twisted out of the Arab’s grasp, snapping the gun from his hand. Spinning, she fired it three times into his chest.

Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were slow to react. Noa turned toward them, gun up.

The Sheik fired off rounds that caught Noa and lifted her off her feet.

Derek hit the ground, rolling, bringing his own AK to bear, firing at bin Laden and Mullah Omar, but the two men were sprinting for cover behind the house. Derek ran to Noa, crouched next to her prone body. She was alive. Tearing at the burkha, he saw three gunshot wounds. Two in the abdomen. One in the chest. She moaned. Dark blood soaked the blue burkha. Her hair fell around her face.

“Are they dead?” she whispered.

“No. Shut up. Who’s in the chopper?”

“The general.”

He nodded, dropped the rucksack and pulled out the first aid kit. Not much left in there. Duct tape. Two packs of QuikClot. A few bandages.

He poured the QuikClot into the wounds. Laid the few bandages he had left over them, then sealed them with Duct tape. Crude.

Noa had passed out. Heart racing, he pressed his bloody fingers against her throat, felt her pulse. Good. Still alive.

The helicopter roared overhead, finally landing nearby. Derek crouched over Noa, protecting her from the sand and dust and grit blown up by the rotors.

Johnston jumped from the chopper and raced over to him. “She alive?”

“Yes, for now. Let’s get out of here.”

Together they carried the Israeli to the helicopter. Once inside, Derek dropped into the co-pilot seat next to the pilot, who was a weather-beaten Slavik guy with thinning red hair and skin the texture of rhino hide. A cigarette hung from his thin lips. “You pay, yes?”

Derek donned earphones and a microphone. “Yes. Get us to Kabul or the refugee camp. You got a bomb or missile on this thing?”

The pilot looked at Johnston, who knelt next to Noa. “Answer him,” Johnston shouted.

“Two AT-2 Swatters. Cost you extra.”

“We should only need one. Get us up in the air.”

And off they went. Derek pointed to the barrels below. “Hit it with the missile. Think you can do that?”

“Piece cake.” He puffed on his cigarette, a half-inch of ash dangling off the end. “Cost extra.”

“Yeah, I know. Do it. But do it from a distance, because it’s nasty shit and we don’t want to be anywhere near the fallout.”

He saw that most of the village was moving upwind.

He hoped.

The pilot jockeyed the chopper around, aimed, and fired. The missile launched and struck the barrels dead on. A small mushroom cloud erupted.

“Let’s get out of here, Ivan,” he shouted. “WHO refugee camp or Kabul. ASAP.”

“Name is Yuri. Not Ivan. Yuri Popovic. What is Ay-Sap?”

“As soon as possible, Yuri. We’ve got a life to save.”

Yuri maneuvered the stick, brought the attack chopper around, and raced away. To Derek he said, “Big payday. Not going to be able to come back here again. That okay. Not like Omar. He’s going to be country boss someday. I don’t think I will like Afghanistan under Omar. Hey, you think you put in good word for me with CIA?”

Thinking maybe he was done with the CIA, Derek nodded. “Yeah, sure. Be glad to.”

Looking below them, he saw a battered Land Rover racing into the mountains. He wondered if it was Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. For a moment he considered telling Yuri to fire his last missile at the Land Rover. But he didn’t know for certain if that’s who they were and Noa needed medical attention as fast as possible.

Glancing back at Jim Johnston, he shouted, “She going to make it?”

Johnston, looking grim, nodded.

Thinking of Noa’s brother and sister who had died fighting for Israel, he sent up a little prayer that she make it. He didn’t want to be the one to tell her parents that they had given all of their children for their country.

Far off to his right he saw the Land Rover disappear over a ridge of mountains. He wondered if he should have ordered Yuri to take it. His gut told him that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were in that Land Rover, that they were fleeing.

His gut told him that letting them get away was a very bad thing.

He hoped he was wrong.

Kabul, Yuri told them, was
a war zone. “Be lucky to find hospital intact there. Everybody fight. We leave, Mohammad Najibullah fall, everyone want piece of pie. Piece of pie, da? Not piece of cake? Piece of cake mean easy, da?”

Derek nodded. “So go to the WHO refugee camp.”

“You pay?”

Johnston had been listening in. “We pay, but you might have to get us back to Peshawar or even Islamabad.”

“Cost extra. Can do, but cost you extra.”

“It’s where the money is,” Derek said.

“Then that where we fly. First, get woman to doctor.”

Yuri dropped the
chopper down outside the WHO refugee camp, which was disturbingly vast. Derek’s stomach roiled at the sight of literally thousands of makeshift tests and tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands. The tents were blankets and plastic tarps spread over poles or ropes.

When the chopper landed, a couple people walked toward them. Johnston and Derek climbed out. A dark-haired woman spoke in French. Derek could follow along, although he wasn’t fluent in French.

Derek said, “We have a woman, three gunshot wounds. Two in the abdomen, one in the chest. She needs immediate care.”

The woman, who introduced herself as Marie Levec, a WHO doctor, clambered into the chopper to look at Noa. She looked at the duct tape. “Did you do this?”

“And QuikClot. It’s been about an hour.”

The woman nodded. “I’ll get a stretcher.” She jumped down from the chopper and sprinted away. Yuri shut down the rotors and sat in the cockpit, smoking. Johnston leaned over, talking to him. Derek couldn’t hear what he was saying.

A few minutes later Marie Levec appeared with two men and a stretcher. They expertly shifted Noa onto it and carried her away. Marie stayed behind and looked at Derek. “She’s not Afghani or Pakistani. Israeli?”

Derek nodded.

“Do I want to know what this is about?”

“No.”

Johnston clambered down and said, “Do you have a satellite phone or some sort of radio?”

“Are you both Americans?”

Johnston nodded.

“I will take you to our headquarters.” She looked at the helicopter. “This flies around in this area. They call him Mad Max. He’s Russian, though, right? That’s a Russian helicopter.”

“It’s complicated,” Derek said.

“It usually is. Come.” She led them through the camp. Derek, who had grown up around missionary hospitals and visited African refugee camps with his parents as a kid, wasn’t horribly shocked by what he saw, although the size of this camp was far larger than anything he had seen before. The stench of open sewage and thousands of unwashed bodies was overwhelming. As usual, he was sickened by what human beings were capable of doing to each other.

As they walked along, he said, “How do you like working for the World Health Organization?”

Marie Levec, striding along, tucked a lock of dark hair behind an ear. “We try to help. I don’t know if we do. It’s overwhelming. It’s a bandage on a huge wound. But we try.”

On the woman’s right side, Johnston, tight-lipped, looked over at Derek, but said nothing.

Derek said, “I’m a microbiologist. Maybe I could help.”

“An American microbiologist,” she said, “in a Russian attack helicopter with a wounded Israeli woman. I do not know if we would welcome your kind of help, Monsieur—”

“Doctor Derek Stillwater.”

“Dr. Stillwater. Excuse my cynicism, but perhaps you are part of the problem, not the solution. Here we are.”

It was a larger tent. She led Johnston inside. Both of them shot Derek a questioning look. He shook his head. “I’ll stay out here. Where’s Noa? Where’s the surgery?”

Levec pointed to another large khaki tent. Derek nodded and headed in that direction.

For the most part, he was ignored. Children approached him, however; young, often missing fingers, hands, arms, or legs. He thought of the landmines the Russians had left behind. He thought about the war he had left behind in Iraq. Even now, U.N. weapons inspectors were scouring Iraq trying to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

And he thought about barrels of VX gas the Russians had left behind.

He wondered what else they had left behind for people to pick up and use.

Johnston found him wandering around the camp. “You okay?”

“I’m pretty sick of Afghanistan, Jim. You get through to somebody?”

“Yuri’s going to fly us to Islamabad.”

“Does he know that?”

“If he wants to get paid, he’ll fly us to Islamabad.”

“There’s no doubt he wants to get paid.”

They walked over to the surgery tent and inquired about Noa. A frazzled doctor with a South African accent said she was still in surgery. Johnston asked if, after she was out of surgery, if she would be well enough to travel by helicopter. The doctor looked at him as if he were insane. “You mean that Russian gunship?”

“Specifically, yes. But I was thinking in more general terms.”

“Perhaps. We’re not well set up for critical care.”

Derek looked at Johnston. “So we wait.”

“I’ll let Yuri know.”

Derek found a cot in the surgery center and promptly passed out. When he woke up several hours later Noa was out of surgery and recovering. Derek found her surgeon, a petite Japanese woman with the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. “She is sleeping. No, I would not recommend transport yet, although I’m not completely opposed to it. We’re not set up for this kind of care. But she should probably wait overnight.”

Derek went and found Johnston, who was sitting in the shade of the helicopter in a pair of battered director’s chairs. Yuri was smoking a cigarette and drinking from a bottle of vodka. Johnston held a glass of a dark liquid in one hand and balanced a plate of food in his lap. “Hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Yuri’s got a cooler in there with some real food. And scotch or vodka and some cold beers if you want it.”

Eyebrows raised, Derek found the food, which was dark bread, cold sausage, several types of cheeses, and pears. There were two brown bottles of beer with Cyrillic writing on them. He took one and found another folding chair in the chopper. Joining the two men, he said, “How do you get Russian beer here, Yuri?”

“Black market. Can get just about everything. For a while, anyway. We left many things. Bullets and bombs, yes. Beer, not so much. But some.”

Eating the food, he told Johnston what the doctor had told him. “We should wait?”

Johnston nodded. “But something’s on your mind.”

“I want to go back to Shing Dun and see if I killed a bunch of people when we blew up the VX gas.”

The general took a swallow of his scotch. He stared off in the distance. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because you carry a hell of a lot of guilt around with you as it is, Derek. For a soldier. For anyone. Leave it alone. You destroyed the VX gas. It had to be done. I had a little chat about Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar with Frank Cameron. OBL was some kind of hero back in Saudi after he fought the Russians here as a
muj.
He comes from this giant family, has an enormous construction business, has tons of money. But you know what the House of Saud is like. They want everything stable, so they try to appease the religious zealots and everybody else. Except bin Laden was juicing up the zealots and the Saudi government kicked him out. So he went off to Sudan and seems to be organizing some people. And buying up weapons. And you and I both know when you get an angry zealot with access to weapons, eventually he’s going to use them on somebody. He’s bad news. And so is Mullah Omar. You did good keeping the VX out of their hands. Leave it at that.”

Derek looked at Yuri. “Fly me back to Shing Dun?”

“When?”

“Now.”

“I’m a little drunk. You pay?”

“Put it on my tab.”

“Sure. You coming, Jim?”

With a sigh, Johnston got to his feet. “It’s a bad idea, Derek.”

In minutes they had lifted off.

The village was
deathly quiet. Derek walked through the muddy streets, looking for people. He found bodies. Counting, he identified ten that had died from gunfire, presumably victims of Noa and Jim’s diversion.

Inside five houses he found the ones killed by VX gas. Twelve women. Six children. Three elderly men.

Twenty-one people. The military or the CIA might call them collateral damage.

Derek felt sick to his stomach.

Rubbing his face with his hands, he walked out of the last house and considered what to do. Start digging a mass grave, all on his own?

Yuri had stayed with the helicopter. After the first two houses, Johnston had stayed outside.

Derek stared at the mountains, wondering how many had made it upwind. If they planned to come back. If they came back, found the dead and decided to leave. That this village, their lives, were cursed.

Blinking, Derek took in a deep breath. Johnston stood a dozen feet away, watching him. Derek turned, met his gaze. “Let’s go.”

Johnston merely nodded and accompanied him back to the helicopter.

Epilogue

Richard McGee was thin and blond and had pale blue watery eyes. He was Derek’s boss at the CIA and he sat across from him in a Langley conference room. He wore a navy blue three-piece suit with a faint chalk pinstripe, a white cotton shirt and a muted red tie with a pattern of seashells on it. Derek often wondered what it would be like to grab up McGee by the ankle and smash him against a wall.

“You did good work in Afghanistan, Derek.”

Cocking his head at him, Derek said, “Sure.”

“I think ‘thank you’ is generally the appropriate response to a legitimate compliment.”

“Thank you,” he said.

McGee studied the paperwork in front of him. “Shing Dun was quite the success. Kept a dozen barrels of VX gas out of the hands of a potential terrorist.”

Derek remained silent.

McGree looked up at him. “Yes?”

“Every cloud has a silver lining, Rick?”

“Your job was to visit twenty-five sites in Afghanistan and see if there were any WMD laying around. I give you great credit after Shing Dun and the Israeli getting shot that you returned to Afghanistan. Although I’m not entirely sure about this bill you sent us.”

“The fastest way for me to finish was to hire Yuri and his helicopter. I finished the job in two weeks. And the country’s deteriorating so fast I’m not sure there was any other way of doing it.”

“And you identified use of sarin gas and VX in three other villages and destroyed stores of sarin in a fourth.”

Derek nodded.

McGee leaned forward. “The recording doesn’t record a nod, Derek.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

The CIA man flipped a page. “Let’s talk about this man, Osama bin Laden.”

“I wrote a complete report.”

“You did. We know a little bit about this guy, and the Israelis seem to know a lot more, but I’d like to know your impressions of him.”

“He’s the kind of guy who will stick a blade between your ribs while smiling into your eyes.”

“He’s got a lot of money and seems to have a following.”

“That doesn’t sound good to me. Particularly if he’s pals with Mullah Omar.”

“We’ll get to the Mullah in a moment. You had a chance to kill both of them. You didn’t take it.”

“I didn’t know if the two of them were in that truck. It could have been villagers trying to do what I told them to do – get out.”

“We’re reasonably certain now it was bin Laden and Omar.”

“Easy to second guess. If I’d known for certain I would have happily had Yuri fire his last missile up their tailpipe.”

“Osama bin Laden worked with the mujahideen during the Russian invasion. We supported them. We were, in essence, allies. Do you think we could be allies with him? With his prominence in Saudi and Sudan, with his—”

“No.”

McGee looked up at him. “You don’t think so?”

“No, and I said so in my report. What do you guys think this guy wanted to do with a dozen barrels of VX gas?”

McGee said, “’You guys’, Derek? Aren’t you one of us?”

Derek didn’t respond. He continued to stare into McGee’s pale blue eyes. Finally McGee said, “Mullah Omar.”

“He’s a lunatic. If Osama bin Laden is a poisonous snake, Omar is a rabid dog.”