hovering high above a rocky creek carving through the valley. Pedro 1 surged forward.
LB secured his gear and med ruck, his M4 carbine. He unplugged his helmet from the HH-60’s intercom and jacked into the team’s radio comm on his Rhodesian vest.
He pointed at Wally. “Juggler, radio check.”
Wally responded. “Lima Charley. How me?”
“Loud and clear.”
One at a time, LB made contact with the others until all had transmitted and received. Each team member checked his own radio the same way.
Pedro 1 slowed, hovering several hundred meters shy of the LZ. Out of the copter’s rear, a liquid gush blew from the tank release valve as the pilots dumped two hundred pounds of weight to accommodate the passengers they’d come to retrieve. At eleven thousand feet, every extra pound had to be accounted for and balanced so the chopper, after setting down, could fight its way back into the air.
LB rose to his kneepads. The others did the same in a circle. The chopper descended quickly, squeezing another pinched look from Jamie. Out the window, a stream coursed, swollen with winter runoff from snowy peaks on all sides. The HH-60 zoomed in low over the creek, then halted in midair while the pilots final-checked the landing. With an ease missing from the rest of the flight, the chopper touched wheels down.
The PJs unclipped their cow’s tails from the floor, and Quincy slid back the door. The back-end gunner swept the barrel of his .50 cal across the waiting village elders. Wally hit the cold ground first. LB and the rest formed up behind him, crouching beneath the spinning blades. Dust and small stones whipped at their boots. The elders’ dark chapan coats and beards wavered on the rotor wash.
LB lengthened his strides to pass the much taller Wally, raising a hand to the locals. A younger one, in a blue pakul hat to match his long frock, stepped forward. This one’s beard was the shortest, the hand he extended the least thick. Wally and Doc arrived beside LB. Jamie and Quincy spread out, attention on the first huts of the village a hundred yards off, the steep terrain rising behind it, and the sere shrubs along the stream.
“Welcome to Rubati Yar,” the young man shouted in English. “I am teacher.”
LB pulled off his glove to clasp the offered hand. Wally did not remove his sunglasses.
LB asked, “Where’s the boy?”
“Come.”
Wally nodded, stepping back. He rested a hand on the M4 carbine slung at his chest, near the trigger. LB motioned Doc to follow.
The teacher led them away from the stream, up a pebbled trail into the village. Rubati Yar was made up of a few dozen stacked-stone shacks, corrugated tin roofs, stave sheds, and goat pens clinging to a flat patch on the side of a mountain. One cinder trail ran beside the water ten kilometers downhill, leading west to the poppy fields of the Khumbi Khulkhan highlands. Twenty miles east sprawled Pakistan, twenty to the north lay Tajikistan.
In this sparse, far corner of Afghanistan, a boy had stepped on a land mine.
Yesterday a marine LRP team, walking this high-altitude stream, had been flagged down by the villagers of Rubati Yar. They showed the marine captain a boy in rough shape. Half his foot was blown off; black flesh framed the wound. The marines put in a call to Bagram Air Base for an air evac. The PJs spun up at first light.
LB labored for breath climbing the hundred-yard path into the village. Behind him, the river valley thrummed with the beating rotors of Pedro 2 hovering a mile off, the slowing blades of Pedro 1 near the stream, and high above, the circling HC-130 that would refuel both copters on the return to Bagram. Pausing to catch his wind, LB gazed south, where the squall crawled after them over white and russet peaks.
Doc passed him on the path. Four years younger than LB at thirty-six, Doc was the second-oldest PJ in the unit. Doc smacked him in the back on a Kevlar plate. Both men hauled almost a hundred pounds of medical supplies, weapons, communications, and armament up into the village. A breath at this height was a lot less nourishing than one at sea level.
“S’matter, old man?”
Doc ran marathons. LB lifted weights.
The Afghan teacher held out an arm, signaling that the walk was almost over. The boy’s hut lay just ahead.
Chickens scattered from their pecking at the corners of the village. A black-clad woman faded into the darkness of her