easily watch the man. Anyway, he didn’t think this guy wanted to die underground.
At the entrance to the passage, Wells flicked on his headlamp and pushed the Russian to the floor of the cavern. “Lift your arms behind your back.” The Russian obeyed.
Wells put a knee on the man’s back. With his left hand, Wells pressed the man’s head down. With his right, he cut the cuffs. This was the moment of maximum danger, the last chance for the prisoner to lock him up in hand-to-hand combat. When the Russian’s hands were free, Wells stepped back.
“Now crawl.”
“Naked?” His accent lengthened the word—
Wells kicked him in the ribs. “Not my problem. Anyway, you’re not naked. Crawl.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells saw the dim light of the entrance. The Russian hadn’t tried anything. As the tunnel widened out, Wells flexcuffed his hands and legs again and dragged him out.
A flashlight stunned his eyes.
“Halt!” Gaffan yelled.
“It’s Wells. Got a hostile with me.”
“Yessir. Step slowly, now.” Wells stepped forward. “You okay? You’ve got blood all over you.”
Wells had forgotten the cut on his cheek. “Nothing, Sergeant. Looks worse than it is.”
The ground shook with the rumble of a fighter jet. Gaffan quickly filled Wells in. While he was underground, the Special Forces had gotten air support in the form of a pair of F-16s from Bagram. “Those Air Force boys don’t like flying in the mountains at night, but once we told ‘em we could lose two squads if they didn’t get off their asses, they came through all right.”
Because of the tightness of the terrain and the fact that the Special Forces were so close to the Talibs, the jets hadn’t eliminated all the enemy positions. But their presence had given the Americans a chance to regroup. Now the SF had killed at least a dozen Talibs. The rest were trying to escape into the caves or down the mountain. Still, this fight had been anything but a cakewalk. The Special Forces had taken three dead and three more seriously wounded, including Hackett, who probably wouldn’t last the night.
“We shoulda come in with another squad,” Gaffan said. He looked at the prisoner, who sat hog-tied against the side of the mountain. “So who’s he?”
“Good question.” Wells nudged the Russian. “Who are you?” The prisoner strained against the flexcuffs.
“Take these off and I will show you who I am.”
“He went soft in the cave and it looks like he’s not too happy about it,” Wells said. “All I know is his name isn’t Vladimir. It’s Sergei. Who are you, Sergei? Tell us about yourself.”
PART 3
18
THE STEWPOT BUBBLED AND BURPED ABOVE A LOW FIRE, filling the hut with the rich aroma of chicken and carrots and potatoes melting together. Jordan reached for the pot, but his mother swiped his arm away. No, she said. First your father eats. She sat above him on a wooden throne, reaching an impossibly long arm down to stir the pot. Saliva filled Jordan’s mouth and the hole in his stomach swelled to the size of a basketball. He looked around but didn’t see his father.
A scoop, its thin aluminum handle twisted from years of use, lay by the pot. Jordan grabbed it. Wait, his mother said. He’s come back. He’s right behind you. Jordan turned and saw his father, a blush of purple tumors crawling across his face. The old man reached out with a skeletal hand. And though he knew he shouldn‘t, Jordan wanted to keep this wrecked, dying man from dirtying the stew. He blocked his father from the pot and reached in with the scoop. But the pot was empty, aside from a tiny chicken wing. As Jordan watched, the wing fluttered out of the pot, a final insult.
“No,” he said aloud.
Jordan opened his eyes and looked around. The stew — along with his poor dead parents — vanished as he woke. Nothing had changed. On the concrete highway above him, trucks rumbled. The morning air was hot and humid. Song and Yu slept under a thin woolen blanket, Yu clutching an empty bottle of Red Star.
The stew was gone, but Jordan’s hunger stayed with him as he pushed himself to his feet. Nothing metaphorical about this feeling. Jordan didn’t want love or hugs or a pony. He wanted food. All day, every day, his stomach ached.
In the mornings, if he managed to earn a half-loaf of stale bread and a cup of tea sweeping the sidewalk for a friendly storekeeper, his cravings faded to a low growl, background noise. But in the afternoons, the emptiness in his belly overwhelmed him. He drank water then, ate vegetables that were more brown than green, anything to fill his stomach. The cigarettes helped too, though he knew he couldn’t afford them. A pack of cigarettes cost as much as a bag of potatoes.
Worst of all were the hours before bed. Then his belly ached so badly that he wanted to cry, though he never did. To keep him smiling, Song and Yu told tales about girls they’d known, peasant girls who sneaked off in the dark to lie with them.
“Once this missus and I, you know, we were ready to—” Song leered, his mouth opening in a gap-toothed smile. “I pulled up her dress and put her on the ground and she yelped.” Song moaned, a passable imitation of a teenage girl. “Turned out her bum had ended up in a chunk of horse dung. I would have gone ahead straightaway — she was none too clean even before that — but she made me take her home. Silly girl. We could have had a bit of pleasure, and that’s too rare in this world.”
Song and Yu howled with laughter and even Jordan found himself smiling. He didn’t know if the stories were true, and he didn’t care. The words distracted him. Song and Yu gave him food too, when they had any. If not for them he didn’t know what he would have done. Yet he wasn’t even sure why they liked him. Maybe because neither had a son, or even a daughter, and they saw him as a substitute.
Each morning, Jordan fought through his daily routine of a hundred sit-ups and push-ups. Even with his belly empty, he never skipped his workout — and it never failed to amuse Song and Yu. “Arnud Schwarz enga,” they called him. More seriously, they told him to conserve his strength, that the exercises wasted energy he couldn’t spare.
He knew they were right, but he refused to quit. He had once heard his hero Michael Jordan say that he worked out even if he could hardly move. “Every day,” Michael had said, with that famous grin. So Jordan stuck to his exercises. Despite his troubles, he had somehow managed to stay optimistic. He never stopped to think about why. Unlike most sixteen-year-olds in America or Europe, he had seen enough death to know that just being alive was a privilege, one everyone lost eventually. While he had it, he would do his best to honor his father and mother.
“Ninety-nine… a hundred.” Jordan finished his last push-up and stood.
“Arnud… Arnud…” Song smirked. “One day you have big muscles too, Jiang.” They didn’t call him Jordan. He’d kept that name to himself, for himself.
“Come on, Master Song,” Jordan said. “Let’s go.”
Song dragged himself up and pulled the blanket off Yu. “Up, fatty. No work means no Red Star tonight.”
Yu grumbled and tossed the blanket aside. He was filthy, his sweatshirt stained and his pants frayed. Jordan tried not to imagine what his mother would think of the way he lived. Poor as they’d been, she’d always kept their home clean. She swept every day and made him wash himself every morning, even in the winter when the cold water stung him and made his privates shrivel so he could hardly see them. Jordan brushed the dirt off his
