our youth.”

“It seems like centuries since we crossed the border into this godforsaken country,” Turabi said.

Zarazi looked at Turabi with a serious expression. Turabi thought he was going to get chewed out again for using God’s name disrespectfully — but instead Zarazi said, “I know what you mean, Jalaluddin.”

Well, this was certainly a change in attitude, Turabi thought. “It’s a shitty business, Wakil. We’re far from home, far from our wives and children.”

“I feel my life is changing here, Jalaluddin,” Zarazi said. “I… I don’t know what it means. I have felt the hand of God on my shoulder before — but I don’t feel it now. I don’t think He has abandoned me, but… but I don’t hear His voice right now. We stand here, on the threshold of the enemy, and I can’t hear Him. I don’t know if this is a test of my faith or if He thinks we can do this task using our own poor mortal brains.”

“It’s called precombat jitters, Wakil,” Turabi said. This was amazing, a relief, wonderful—for the first time in many days, Zarazi wasn’t talking like some kind of religious zealot. He sounded like a regular guy, like any other military commander ready to step onto the field of battle and face the enemy. It was a welcome and heartening change. “We’ve done everything we need to do. We’ve deployed our scouts, deployed troops to our rear to guard against flanking maneuvers and protect our best escape route, and set up reserve forces. We’ve got pretty decent intelligence, and we’re still getting good recruits coming forward to join our army, even though we’re closing in on Mary. We’ve done everything we need to do.”

“Will it be enough?”

“That’s something I can’t answer, Wakil,” Turabi said. He paused for a moment, then said, “Wakil… my friend… listen to me. Why don’t we pull back to Charjew? If you feel there’s something we missed in our planning, let’s fall back, regroup, get some fresh intelligence reports, build our forces a bit more, and plan it again.”

“You mean… you mean retreat?

“Wakil, running away in a disorganized fashion is a retreat. Pulling back in an orderly fashion with three full companies as our rear guard is not,” Turabi said. “Charjew is ours, Wakil — that’s undisputed. We have our hands on the taps of fifty thousand barrels of oil and five million cubic meters of natural gas per day there. We have the twelfth-largest company in America paying us thousands of dollars a day to ‘guard’ their pipelines. We’re in control in Charjew, Wakil. Out here we’re not in control of anything, not even what’s sticking to our tank treads. The apprehension you feel is a soldier’s sixth sense. It tells you when danger is nearby. Listen to it.”

Wakil looked at Turabi — then, to Turabi’s joy, looked behind him, back to the northeast, toward Charjew. It was such a slight movement, such a casual thing, but to Turabi it spoke volumes.

They had marched almost two hundred kilometers from Charjew in less than a week across the barren, burning Kara Kum Desert to get here, fighting off attacks to their flanks by Turkmen guerrillas, chasing away scouts, burying their dead, taking captives and executing spies, and planning their final assault — and not once in all those days had Wakil Mohammad Zarazi ever looked backward. He hadn’t looked backward once since getting jumped by American bombers in northern Afghanistan, since he’d first heard the word of God and set out on this quest.

“We can set up the rear guard in Ravnina. We found good water supplies there, the terrain is a bit higher, and we’re far enough away from the canal so we don’t have to set up security posts there,” Turabi said quickly, excitedly. He had been working out the details in his head for days — but for an escape, not for a withdrawal. This was better than he could ever have hoped. “We leave Second Battalion and Second Air Mobile there, and we pull back — a little at a time, so the Turkmen don’t realize what’s happening. The two units deploy along the Halach oil fields east and west — we know we can hide a battalion-size force among all those wells. In three days we can be back in Charjew, and we fortify the ten-kilometer perimeter I set up after leaving Chauder. As we pull back, we pull the rear guards in. They’ll pull back to a safe, secure perimeter and be relieved. Once they’re rested and rearmed, we push the perimeter out to twenty kilometers. Now we control everything east of the sixty-third meridian. Solid as a rock.”

Zarazi was silent for a long moment. Turabi looked at Orazov and saw nothing but hatred and loathing in his eyes. Keep quiet, you asshole, Turabi said silently. Keep quiet or I’ll kill you….

“We do not need to pull back, General,” Orazov said. “Mary Airport is less than thirty kilometers right in front of us. We haven’t seen more than a few helicopter probes come our way since we moved into position. We can take Mary, sir, just as easily as we took Charjew.”

We didn’t take Charjew, Orazov—I took it,” Turabi snapped. “And there was nothing easy about it. I lost a lot of good men, one out of every five of my force. But Charjew will be nothing compared to the battle that awaits us in Mary. The Russians will be waiting with their close-air-support fighters and—”

“What fighters? We haven’t seen one fighter since leaving Charjew.”

“They are there, Orazov, we know it.”

“They were there at Charjew, too — many of them. But not one lifted off to oppose us.”

“They were flown into Charjew to scare us away, but the pilots left as soon as they got out of their planes,” Turabi said. “Those planes were worthless anyway — a bunch of old Sukhoi-17 bombers, over thirty years old and not very well maintained. They were never a threat to us.”

“They were a very great threat when we first planned the assault on Charjew.”

“Our intelligence said the Turkmen had asked the Russians to bring up their Sukhoi-24s and MiG-27s— the ones based at Mary,” Turabi argued. “They brought up the relics instead. That means the first-line fighters and bombers are probably still in Mary. And we still don’t know exactly what the Americans are doing in Turkmenistan.”

“Ah, yes, your ghostly Americans,” Orazov said derisively. “You say you saw only two men, but they destroyed two armored vehicles, killed a half dozen men — but did nothing to you but question you.”

“Shut up, damn you,” Turabi snapped. “The Americans were there to retrieve their crashed aircraft or cruise missile or spy plane — whatever it was that got shot down.”

“So you say,” Orazov said dryly. “Or did you really lead your men into a minefield, as the helicopter-patrol officers surmised…?”

“Go to hell, Orazov.”

“In any case we haven’t seen any evidence of American soldiers in Turkmenistan — if they ever existed in the first place,” Orazov said to Zarazi. “They probably came in just to retrieve their cruise missile. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”

Nothing to be concerned about? We are facing five to ten thousand Turkmen and Russian soldiers to the west, and we might have these American supersoldiers to the east — or at the very least over our heads with their spy planes and satellites.” Turabi turned to Zarazi. “I’ll take my scout company into Mary and find out exactly what’s happening, Wakil. But if you are considering a pullback to a more defensible position, sir, I recommend we proceed immediately. We need to shift the vanguard to defensive positions and move the main force forty kilometers north along the highway to get across the Kara Kum Canal. That’s a hard day’s march.”

“What is it with you, Colonel?” Orazov asked. “Why are you so bent on retreating all of a sudden?”

“Because any fool can see we are overextended in this position, with a large entrenched force up ahead of us,” Turabi retorted. “We barely have enough supplies to last us three days while we’re on the march. If we go into battle, we’ll use up all our supplies in less than a day.”

“Are you calling the general a fool, Turabi?”

“I am no expert in maneuver warfare,” Turabi went on, ignoring Orazov’s remark, “but I do know that hundreds of successful campaigns have been lost when an army marches beyond its secure supply lines. We are well beyond that point now, Wakil. It now takes more than a day to bring in enough fuel for our helicopters, armor, and vehicles. One interruption in our supply lines and we’ll have no choice but to retreat — and that’s when the chaos and confusion start.”

For the first time since the battle of Chauder, Zarazi looked confused and… yes, a little frightened. The change was amazing, Turabi thought. He didn’t know for sure, but perhaps this was the beginning of the long march home.

“General, we must attack, and do it now,” Orazov insisted. “Let’s not wait any longer. We should move with all possible speed to within artillery range of Mary Airport and begin the assault.”

“That would be suicide!” Turabi retorted. “Wakil, we have incomplete intelligence, our air defenses are not in place, and, as I’ve told you repeatedly, our supply lines are stretched to the limit—”

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