In the drawn-out aftermath of Zero Hour in Afghanistan, Specialist Paul Blanton not only survived but thrived. As described in the following remembrance, Paul discovered an artifact so profound that it altered the course of the New War—and he did it while on the run for his life in an incredibly hostile environment.
It is hard to determine whether the young soldier was lucky or shrewd, or both. Personally, I believe that anyone who is directly related to Lonnie Wayne Blanton is already halfway to being a hero.
Jabar and I lay flat on a ridge, binoculars out.
It’s about ten in the morning. Dry season in Afghanistan. A half hour ago, we caught a burst of avtomat communication. It was just one airborne flurry of information, probably to a roving eye on the ground. But it could also have been to a full-on tank. Or something even worse. Jabar and I decided to dig in here and wait for the thing to show up, whatever it is.
Yeah, pretty much a suicide mission.
After the shit went down, the natives never trusted me for a second. Jabar and I were forbidden to go near the main encampments. Most of the Afghan civilians fled to these man-made caves in Bamiyan Province. Real ancient shit. Some desperate-ass people carved ’em out of sheer mountain walls, and for about a thousand years they’ve been the go-to spot for every civil war, famine, plague, and invasion.
Technology changes, but people stay the same.
The old crusty guys with Santa Claus beards and eyebrows trying to escape up their foreheads sat around in a circle and sipped tea and yelled at each other. They were wondering why avtomat drones were out here, of all places. To find out, they sent
This place they stuck us, Band-e-Amir—it’s so pretty it hurts your eyes. Sky blue lakes pooled up between stark brown mountains. All of it wrapped in bright red limestone cliffs. We’re so high up and the atmosphere’s so thin that it messes with you. I swear, the light does something funny up here that it doesn’t do other places. The shadows are too crisp. Details are too sharp. Like an alien planet.
Jabar spots it first, nudges me.
A biped avtomat walks a narrow dirt road over a mile away, crossing the scrubland. I can tell that it used to be a SAP. Probably a Hoplite model, judging from the height and the light gait. But there’s no telling. Lately, the machines have been changing. For example, the biped down there isn’t wearing clothes like a SAP would. It’s made of some kind of dirt-colored fibrous material instead. It walks at a steady five miles per hour, shadow stretching out on the dirt behind, as mechanical as a tank rolling across desert sands.
“Is it a soldier?” asks Jabar.
“I don’t know what it is anymore,” I reply.
Jabar and I decide to follow it.
We wait until it’s almost out of range. Even when I was running a SAP crew, we kept a drone eye on the square klick around our unit. I’m glad I know the procedure, so I can stay just out of range. Good thing about avtomata is they don’t take an extra step if they don’t have to. Tend to travel in straight lines or along easy paths. Makes them predictable and easier to track.
Staying up high, we travel along the ridge in the same direction as the avto. Soon, the sun comes out in full force, but our dirty cotton robes wick away the sweat. It’s actually kind of nice to walk with Jabar for a while. A place this big makes you feel small. And it gets lonely out here real quick.
Jabar and I are traveling across the broken landscape with just our backpacks, robes, and these whiplike antennae that are about eight feet long and made of thick black plastic that wobbles with every step we take. They must have been scavenged off some machine or other over the last fifty years of war out here. Using our antennae, we can pick up avtomat radio comms and figure out their directionality. This way, we track avtomat movements and send warnings to our people. Too bad we can’t listen in. But there’s not a chance in hell we could crack the avto encryption scheme. It’s still worth it, though, to have an idea where the bad guys are.
Our robes blend in with the rocks. Still, we usually stay a half mile apart from each other, minimum. Being so far apart helps determine the direction of avtomat radio communications. Plus, if one of us gets hit by a missile, the other can have time to hoof it or hide.
After five or six hours following the biped, we spread out and take a final reading for the day. It’s a slow process. I just sit down in my pile of robes, prop my stick up into the air, and put on my headphones to listen for the crackle of communication. My machine logs the time of arrival automatically. Jabar’s doing the same thing a half mile away. In a little while, we’ll compare numbers to get a loose direction.
Sitting out here in the sun, there’s a lot of time to think about what might have been. I scouted my old base once. Windblown rubble. Rusted hunks of abandoned machinery. There’s nothing to go back to.
After a half hour sitting cross-legged and watching the sun drop over those sparkling mountains, a comm burst hits. My stick blinks—it’s logged. I flash my cracked hand mirror to Jabar and he reciprocates. We start the hike back toward each other.
It looks like the biped avto went just over the next ridge and stopped. They don’t sleep, so who knows what it’s up to over there. It must not have sensed us, because it’s not raining bullets. As it gets dark, the ground radiates all the day’s heat into the sky. The heat is our only camouflage; without it we’ve got no choice but to stay put. We pull out our sleeping bags and bivouac for the night.
Jabar and I lay there, side by side, in the cold dark that’s getting colder. The black sky is opening up overhead and out here, I swear to god, there’s more stars than there is night.
“Paul,” whispers Jabar. “I am worried. This one does not seem like the others.”
“It’s a modified SAP unit. Those were pretty common, before. I worked with lots of them.”
“Yes, I remember. They were the pacifists who grew fangs. But that one was not made of metal. It had no weapons at all.”
“And that worries you? That it was
“It is different. Anything different is bad.”
I stare into the heavens and listen to the wind on the rocks and think of the billions of particles of air colliding against each other above me. So many possibilities. All the horrible potential of the universe.
“The avtomata are changing, Jabar,” I say finally. “If different is bad, buddy, then I think we’re in for a whole lot of bad.”
We had no idea how much things were changing.
Next morning, Jabar and I packed up and crept over the broken rocks to the next ridge. Over it, another eye-searing azure lake lapping a white-stone shore.
Band-e-Amir used to be a national park, you know, but we’re still in Afghanistan. Meaning that a bronze plaque never stopped the locals from fishing here with dynamite. Not the friendliest approach, but I’ve used a trotline or two myself back in Oklahoma. Even with the dynamite and leaky gasoline boats and sewer lines, Band- e-Amir stood the test of time.
It outlasted the locals.
“Avtomat must have come this way,” I say, peering down the rocky slope. The jagged slate boulders vary in size from basketball to dinner table. Some are stable. Most aren’t.
“Can you make it?” I ask Jabar.
He nods and claps one hand against his dusty combat boot. American-issue. Probably looted by his tribe members from my base. So it goes.
“That’s great, Jabar. Where’d you get those?”
The kid just smiles at me, the world’s most haggard teenager.
“All right, let’s go,” I say, cautiously stepping over the lip of the ridge. The boulders are so unsteady and steep that we have to go down facing the slope, pressing our sweaty palms against the rocks and testing each step before we take it.
It’s a damn good thing we
