Читать книгу The Last Mission Of The Seventh Cavalry - Charley Brindley - Страница 6

“Ninety percent of Indians speak English,” Ledbetter said.

“Hey, Apache,” Joaquin said, “Lead Butt said ‘Indians.’”

“That’s okay; they are Indians,” Eaglemoon said.

“Why not Native Asian Subcontinenters?”

Alexander shook his head. “We’re not in India. It’s probably a circus troupe.”

“Yeah? Well, they must have put on one hell of a show to scare the shit out of all those people.”

“Kawalski,” Alexander said, “are the two women armed?”

“Yeah.”

“With what?”

“Bows and arrows, and…”

Alexander glanced at Joaquin, who raised an eyebrow.

“And what, Kawalski?”

“Good looks. They are two HOT babes.”

“Kawalski thinks anything with breasts is hot,” Kady said on the comm.

“That’s strange, Sharakova; I never thought you were hot.”

“You’ve never seen me in a dress.”

“Thank God for small favors.”

“How far away are they, Kawalski?” Alexander asked.

“Fifty yards.”

“For being elephants, they sure are quiet.”

“Probably walking on tiptoes.”

“Can it!” Alexander said. “Could be a trap. Be ready for anything.”

When the two elephants came abreast of Alexander, he didn’t see any signs of an ambush, and the two women didn’t look threatening. He stepped out from behind the tree and raised his hand in a friendly gesture.

“Hello.”

The woman nearest him uttered an exclamation.

“Maybe these people have never seen army helmets.”

Alexander took off his helmet and brushed a hand over his buzzcut. The two women looked at each other and said something he couldn’t understand.

“Now you’re really scaring them, Sarge,” Kawalski said. “Put it back on.”

“Very funny.”

The women looked down at Alexander but made no attempt to stop their animals. The first elephant was about seven feet tall at the shoulder, and the other three feet taller, with ears the size of the doors on an eighteen-wheeler. His rider was a slim young woman with auburn hair. The woman on the smaller animal was similar, but her hair was blonde. Both had some sort of emblem or mark on their faces.

A few yards ahead, Lojab came out of the brush. He removed his helmet and bowed low, then straightened and smiled at the blonde.

“Hello, madam. I seemed to have misplaced my Porsche. Can you direct me to the nearest McDonald’s?”

She smiled but said nothing. He watched her rock back and forth in an easy, fluid motion, perfectly synchronized with her elephant’s movements, like an erotic dance between woman and beast. Lojab walked along beside the animal but then found he had to jog to keep up.

“Where are you ladies headed? Maybe we could get together tonight for a beer, or two, or five.”

She spoke three or four words, but nothing he could understand. She then turned her attention back to the trail ahead.

“Okay.” He stopped in the middle of the trail and watched her reach to push a tree branch out of the way. “I’ll see you there, at about eight.”

“Lojab.” Karina came up to stand beside him. “You’re pathetic.”

“What do you mean? She said to meet her tonight at Joe’s Bar and Grill.”

“Yeah, right. What city? Kandahar? Karachi? New Delhi?”

“Did you see their tattoos?” Joaquin asked.

“Yeah, on their faces,” Kady said.

Joaquin nodded. “They looked like a devil’s pitchfork with a snake, or something like that.”

“Incoming elephant,” Kawalski said.

“Should we hide, Sarge?”

“Why bother?” Alexander said.

The third elephant was ridden by a young man. His long sandy hair was tied at the back of his neck with a length of leather. He was bare to the waist, his muscles well-toned. He looked at the soldiers, and just like the two women, he had a bow and quiver of arrows on his back.

“I’ll try a little Spanish lingo on him.” Karina removed her helmet. “Cómo se llama?”

The young man ignored her.

“A qué distancia está Kandahar?” She looked at Sergeant Alexander. “I asked him how far to Kandahar.”

The elephant handler spoke a few words, but they seemed to be directed more to his animal than Karina.

“What did he say, Karina?” Lojab asked.

“Oh, he couldn’t stop to talk right now. He had a dental appointment or something.”

“Yeah, right.”

“More elephants on the way,” Kawalski said.

“How many?”

“A whole herd. Thirty or more. You might want to get out of the way. They’re spread out.”

“All right,” Alexander said, “everybody get on this side of the trail. Let’s stick together.”

The platoon didn’t bother to hide as they watched the elephants go by. The animals ignored the soldiers as they grabbed tree branches with their trunks and chewed them while walking along. Some of the animals were ridden by mahouts, while others had handlers walking beside them. A few smaller elephants followed the herd, without anyone tending them. All of them stopped occasionally, pulling tufts of grass to eat.

“Hey, Sparks,” Alexander said.

“Yeah, Sarge?”

“Try to raise Kandahar on your radio.”

“I did already,” Sparks said. “I got nothing.”

“Try again.”

“Right.”

“Did you try your GPS T-DARD to see where we are?”

“My T-DARD has gone retard. It thinks we’re on the French Riviera.”

“The Riviera, huh? That would be nice.” Alexander looked around at his soldiers. “I know you people were ordered to leave your cellphones in the barracks, but did anyone happen to accidentally bring one along?”

Everybody pulled out their phones.

“Jesus!” Alexander shook his head.

“And it’s a good thing, too, Sarge.” Karina tilted her helmet up and put the phone to her ear. “With our radio and GPS on the blink, how else could we find out where we are?”

“I got nothing.” Paxton tapped his phone on a tree trunk and tried again.

“Probably should pay your bill.” Karina clicked out a text message with her thumbs.

“Nothing here,” Joaquin said.

“I’m dialing 9-1-1,” Kady said. “They’ll know where we are.”

“You don’t have to call 9-1-1, Sharakova,” Alexander said. “This is not an emergency, yet.”

“We’re too far away from the cell towers,” Kawalski said.

“Well,” Karina said, “that tells us where we’re not.”

Alexander looked at her.

“We can’t be on the Riviera, that’s for sure. There are probably seventy cell towers along that section of the Mediterranean coast.”

“Right,” Joaquin said. “We’re somewhere so remote, there’s no tower within fifty miles.”

“That could be ninety percent of Afghanistan.”

“But that ninety percent of Afghanistan never looked like this,” Sharakova said, waving her hand at the tall pine trees.

Behind the elephants came a baggage train of oxcarts loaded with hay and large earthen jars filled with grain. The hay was stacked high and tied down with grass ropes. Each cart was pulled by a pair of small oxen, barely taller than a Shetland pony. They trotted along at a good pace, driven by men who walked beside them.

It took twenty minutes for the hay carts to roll by. They were followed by two columns of men, all of whom wore short tunics of different colors and styles, with protective skirts of thick leather strips. Most were bare to the waist, and all were muscular and heavily scarred. They carried shields of elephant hide. Their double-edged swords were about two feet in length and slightly curved.

“Tough looking soldiers,” Karina said.

“Yes,” Kady said. “Are those scars for real?”

“Hey, Sarge,” Joaquin said.

“Yeah?”

“Have you noticed none of these people have the slightest fear of our weapons?”

“Yeah,” Alexander said as he watched the men walk by.

The soldiers numbered about two hundred, and they were followed by another company of fighters, but these were on horseback.

“They must be filming a movie somewhere up ahead,” Kady said.

“If they are,” Kawalski said, “they sure got a bunch of ugly actors.”

They saw more than five hundred mounted soldiers, who were followed by a small band of men on foot, wearing white tunics that looked like togas.

Behind the men in white came another baggage train. The two-wheeled carts were filled with large earthen jars, slabs of raw meat, and two wagonloads of squealing pigs.

A horse and rider came galloping from the front of the column, on the opposite side of the trail from the platoon.

“He’s in a hurry,” Karina said.

“Yeah, and no stirrups,” Lojab said. “How does he stay in the saddle?”

“I don’t know, but that guy must be six-foot-six.”

“Probably. And check out that costume.”

The man wore an engraved bronze breastplate, metal helmet with red animal hair on top, a scarlet cloak, and fancy sandals, with leather laces wrapped around his ankles. And a leopard skin covering his saddle.

A dozen children jogged along the side of the trail, passing the wagon train. They wore short sarongs made of a rough tan fabric extending to their knees. Except for one of them, they were bare above the waist and dark-skinned, but not black. They carried bulging goatskin bags, with straps over their shoulders. Each one held a wooden bowl in his hand. The bowls were attached to their wrists by a length of leather.

One of the boys spotted Alexander’s platoon and came running to them. He stopped in front of Karina and tilted his goatskin to fill his bowl with a clear liquid. With his head bowed low, and using both hands, he held out the bowl to Karina.

“Thank you.” She took the bowl and lifted it toward her lips.

“Hold on,” Alexander said.

“What?” Karina asked.

“You don’t know what that is.”

“It looks like water, Sarge.”

Alexander came over to her, dipped his finger into the bowl, then touched it to his tongue. He smacked his lips. “All right, take a small sip.”

“Not after you stuck your finger in it.” She grinned at him. “Kidding.” She took a sip, then drank half the bowl. “Thank you, very much,” she said, then handed the bowl back to the boy.

He took the bowl but still wouldn’t look at her; instead, he kept his eyes on the ground at her feet.

When the other children saw Karina drink from the bowl, four of them, three boys and the one girl in the group, hurried over to serve water to the rest of the platoon. All of them kept their heads bowed, never looking at the soldiers’ faces.

The girl, who appeared to be about nine years old, held out her bowl of water to Sparks.

“Thank you.” Sparks drank the water and handed the bowl back to her.

She peeked up at him, but when he smiled, she jerked her head back down.

Someone in the line of march shouted, and all the children held out their hands, politely waiting for their bowls to be returned. When each boy got his bowl, he ran to his place in line on the trail.

The girl ran to take her place behind the boy who’d served water to Karina. He glanced back at Karina, and when she waved to him, he lifted his hand but caught himself and turned to trot along the trail.

A large herd of sheep came by, bleating and baaing. Four boys and their dogs kept them on the trail. One of the dogs—a large black animal with one chewed-off ear—stopped to bark at the platoon, but then he lost interest and ran to catch up.

“You know what I think?” Kady asked.

“Nobody cares what you think, Scarface,” Lojab said.

“What, Sharakova?” Alexander glanced from Lojab to Kady.

The one-inch scar running up and over the middle of Kady’s nose darkened with her quickened pulse. But rather than let her disfigurement dampen her spirit, she used it to embolden her attitude. She gave Lojab a look that could wilt crabgrass.

“Blow this, Low Job,” she said, then gave him the finger and spoke to Alexander. “This is a reenactment.”

“Of what?” Alexander ran two fingers across his upper lip, erasing a tiny smile.

“I don’t know, but remember those PBS shows where the men dressed up in Civil War uniforms and lined up to shoot blanks at each other?”

“Yeah.”

“That was a reenactment of a Civil War battle. These people are doing a reenactment.”

“Maybe.”

“They’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get it right,” Karina said.

“Get what right?” Lojab asked. “Some kind of medieval migration?”

“If it’s a reenactment,” Joaquin said, “where’s all the tourists with their cameras? Where’s the TV crews? The politicians taking credit for everything?”

“Yeah,” Alexander said, “where are the cameras? Hey, Sparks,” he said into his communicator, “where’s your whirlysplat?”

“You mean the Dragonfly?” Private Richard ‘Sparks’ McAlister asked.

“Yeah.”

“In her suitcase.”

“How high can she fly?”

“Four or five thousand feet. Why?”

“Send her up to see how far we are from that Registan Desert, “Alexander said. “As much as I’d love to hang around here and watch the show, we still have a mission to accomplish.”

“Okay, Sarge,” Sparks said. “But the suitcase is in our weapons container.”