Shadows of War

deeper than a few inches. Beds of silt were covered with green weeds.

They walked up one of the irrigation ditches toward the field closest to the houses, then crossed into a grove of small orange trees.

Except for a headache, Mara had recovered from the blast. She tried not to think about Jimmy Choi and his people, whom she’d last seen firing at the Chinese from across the road. There was nothing she could do for them now.

The house near the orange grove was small, with a very high-pitched roof. Mara stopped twenty yards away. “Give me your rifle,” she told Josh.

“Why?”

“I want to check out the house.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You’re a scientist. Give me the gun.”

“I can handle a gun.”

“Stop being so damn defensive,” she told him. “Crap, you’d think I was castrating you.”

Josh scowled, then held the rifle out. There were five bullets in the magazine.

“You have an extra mag?” she asked.

He shook his head. His lips were pursed — he was mad, but she didn’t have time to play psychologist.

Mara made sure the weapon was selected for single fire, then slipped through the trees and trotted to the back of the house. There was a curtain at the window: she couldn’t see inside.

She smashed the window with the rifle butt, ducking down quickly in case someone was hiding inside and fired at her. When nothing happened, she cleared the glass, then cautiously poked the rifle barrel past the curtain and peeked in.

The room was empty. Mara hoisted herself inside, gingerly avoiding the shards of glass still in the window.

The house had been abandoned sometime during the night, quickly, but not in a panic. The beds were undone, but otherwise the place was neat. Its owners had taken many of their possessions with them, but there was some rice in a storage closet in the kitchen. There was no running water in the hut; the only jugs were empty, but Josh found a pump near the orange grove and filled it up.

“I say we boil this if possible,” suggested Josh. “The septics smell.”

The oven was an old gas stove, modified to use bottled gas. The fire flared when Mara lit the stove. M? leapt from the floor and ran out of the hut screaming.

Mara tried adjusting the fire while Josh went after the girl. The knob on the stove was broken; the flame had to be adjusted by the handle on the tank, which itself was very loose and slipped after a few seconds if it wasn’t held.

Mara managed to get the water and rice simmering without burning down the house. Josh came back, carrying M? in his arms.

“She ran all the way back to the ditch. I wasn’t sure I was going to find her,” he said, setting her down. “I’m going to go check the other huts. I’ll be back.”

“Good idea.”

He reached over to take the rifle. Mara grabbed it.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Leave me the gun.”

“Why? You afraid?”

“No,” she said, but she didn’t let go.

Fear wasn’t the reason she wanted the gun. She was the professional, the one trained to use it.

But maybe there was some fear there as well.

He looked like he was going to say something, but didn’t, turning to leave instead.

“Thank you for saving me,” she told him.

“Yeah. We’re even.”

Not quite, thought Mara, though the ledger wasn’t nearly as unbalanced as before.

* * *

A tirade poured through Josh’s head as he stalked to the nearest hut. He hadn’t expected the CIA officer who’d come for him to be a nice guy, exactly, but neither had he thought he’d be a complete jerkoff.

Guy.

Maybe that was part of the problem. Mara had a chip on her shoulder because she was a woman.

And she was a spook. What kind of person became a CIA agent? Doing renditions and all that crap? Water torture. She probably pulled that shit herself.

Maybe rescuing him was her punishment.

The way he saw it, she had screwed up. The rescue had been botched big-time.

That wasn’t exactly fair; the Chinese had been closing in, and really, it was her people who’d taken the brunt of it. They were probably dead. If not for them, Josh would probably by lying in the back of one of the Chinese trucks right now, zipped up in a body bag.

He stopped at the threshold of the hut, reminding himself that he wasn’t on a scientific expedition. People with guns, and a lot of them, were looking for him. He couldn’t afford to act like a prima donna; the world really didn’t care if a woman got his nose all bent out of joint because she was a jerk. The world cared about what he had seen, and the evidence of it on his little camera.

That was like science, wasn’t it? Science was the pursuit of truth, and truth didn’t care whether you had a cold or whether you were hunting a grant or hoping for some killing when your patent got approved. Truth was the bottom line, and if you let your ego get in the way, then it was lost.

Damn, he was hungry. That was what was in his way now.

The door had no lock. What kind of place was this where you didn’t need a lock?

A poor place.

Josh slipped inside quietly, as if he was afraid of waking someone in the front room. It was empty. Just like the other house, the people who had been here appeared to have taken most of what they had before going; certainly anything that was valuable was gone.

So was the food, if there had been any. There was no rice, and not even a dried leaf in the bins near the basin in what he guessed was the kitchen. The stove was even more primitive than the one in the other house, just a metal box attached to a stovepipe.

The barns would be where the food was.

And maybe a farm truck?

He trotted up the road, convinced that he was going to find something. But the barns had no trucks, and no food. One was used as a furniture workshop; several small chairs and bookcases were in various stages of production. Two of the other buildings were used to store wood. The last had probably held vehicles, but they were gone; the bins for food or maybe seeds were empty. There was a chicken coop at the back, with nothing but feathers and one long-broken egg in the nests. The villagers must have taken the birds with them when they’d fled.

Josh eyed the eggshell hungrily before moving on.

A power line ran from the road up to a shed between the barns; lines went from there to the barns, but not the houses. There was also a power generator in the shed, a backup that stank of kerosene. There was an oil lamp next to it, probably meant as an emergency light for someone troubleshooting in the dark. Josh took the lamp with him and went to the north side of the hamlet, where there were three more huts, along with a good-sized toolshed.

He went to the shed first. Besides the plows and a mower, there were a few rusted hand tools. Josh found a machete with a nicked but sharp blade. He took it, then went to see if there was anything of value in the houses. But all three were like the others, stripped of just about anything useful.

He sat down on a bench in the last house, trying to think of where else he might look. It made sense that they would take the vehicles, but all the food, too?