Four Summoners Tales Part 74

My third source was a cop from DCPD named Jerry Spencer. He was a grumpy son of a b.i.t.c.h, but he could work a crime scene like Sherlock Holmes. He didn't just see, he observed. And he kept his opinions in neutral until he had enough facts to build a reasonable supposition. Even then, he was never sold on a theory as long as there was a potential for a decent competing theory.

So I stood there and I let the scene speak to me.

Here were the things I could tell for sure.

Rattlesnake Team had come into this valley from the west. As I walked around a clearing that must once have been the town center, I found the trail of their footprints at a few hundred yards, and then the faint brush marks from where Finn and his boys erased the signs of their presence as they prepared to lay a trap. The four of them separated. Finn went through a short tunnel that curled and rose to a flat rock on the far side of the town, almost certainly to set up a good elevated shooting position. Personally, I thought it was a questionable choice.A good shooting position should be in can't-miss range, but even for a sniper as good as Finn that spot was at the outer edge of safe range. Its only virtue was an element of absolute surprise, but there were better choices he could have made. Maybe that was part of whatever went wrong here. One bad choice can shove everything else downhill in an avalanche of consequences.

The other three guys from Rattlesnake skirted the edge of the town square and found concealed spots to set up an ambush. There were the distinctive marks in the sand of men sitting, lying p.r.o.ne, and kneeling.That spot was thick with their sh.e.l.l casings.

I went upslope and that's when I found the caravan. Or what was left of it. From ground level, it looked like an empty trail because of a raised lip of ragged stone. But as I drew near, I heard blowflies and smelled the stink of rotted meat. A dozen of the corpses were adult men, and one was a boy of about ten. My heart twisted for the kid. It's insane how many cultures drag their children into the middle of a war, often literally putting guns in their hands and metaphorically painting bull's-eyes over their hearts. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

There were also three dead horses, their bellies swollen from internal gases and crawling with flies and maggots.

The ground all around them was littered with sh.e.l.l casings. The men had made a fight of it, but they all went down.

There was a sudden rasp of static in my ear. "Bug to Cowboy." "Go for Cowboy. Good to hear you, kid."

"Hey," he said, "we might only have this connection for a few seconds. NASA's now saying that there might be some combination of minerals in the mountains where you are that's s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the signal. Nothing else seems to make sense."

"You have any useful intel?"

"We got a couple of good thermals and some clean satellite images and your whole area is clean. Just the same four signals- Echo and Finn."

"No one else?"

"No."

"Bug, see if you can take another look at the area we just left. The convoy ambush. I thought I spotted the rest of Rattlesnake Team there, but I lost them."

"We've scanned it. No life signs, no thermals, no visuals, and no telemetry from the RFID chips.There's nothing out there but dead Taliban guys and lizards."

"Look again."

"Okay."

"And get me some frigging choppers. I want to get the h.e.l.l out of here."

But he was gone. The timing was really p.i.s.sing me off. And . . . scaring me, too.

A lot.

I sucked it up, though, and went back to studying the dead caravan, and that's when the scene got suddenly very weird.

On and around the three horses were heavy cotton sacks. Most were still tied shut, but all had been pierced by rounds so that white opium powder spilled out onto the rock. Hundreds of pounds of it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth.

It was still there. No one had touched it.

One bag, however, had been cut open with something sharp and a parcel had been removed. The wrappings of the parcel- green silk-lay discarded on the ground. Whatever had been wrapped in the silk was gone.

From my perspective, it appeared that Rattlesnake Team had ambushed and killed the Taliban caravan, then someone-either a member of Rattlesnake or someone else-targeted one bag, cut it open, and removed something that had been hidden among the drugs.That item, and now three members of Rattlesnake Team were missing, and there were no footprints in the spilled blood of the Taliban to indicate how anyone had approached the bag without leaving a mark.

Curious, I drew my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket, snapped the blade into place, and systematically cut open the other bags. I made sure to keep a cloth pressed to my nose and mouth. Getting stoned was not part of the agenda.

There was a green silk parcel in each bag. They were heavy, too.

None of them felt like the kind of vacuum-packed metal cylinders that would be used to transport a pathogen. They felt like rocks, maybe carvings.

I collected them and retreated down the slope, but I noticed that as careful as I had been, I left a trail of b.l.o.o.d.y footprints. How had someone looted that first bag without doing the same?

At the bottom of the slope, I found a table-sized rock and placed the parcels there, then unwrapped each one.The first one was a small statue of a snooty-looking little man with an enormous d.i.c.k. Fertility symbol from some culture.The second was a broken statue of one of the Egyptian G.o.ds. The one with the cat face, can't remember the name offhand. The others were similar. Small idols of G.o.ds from several different cultures, including one that was of a very nice carving of a bull. That one really caught my eye and I spit on it and rubbed the dirt away. What I at first thought was bra.s.s was something else entirely.

It was solid gold.

The f.u.c.king thing had to weigh four pounds.