A Soldier's Pledge Read online

  They gazed at each other across the small cook fire, which was already settling into a nice bed of coals. She took a small sip of wine, wondering what she should say. His pant legs were soaked from walking through the wet brush, and she wondered if he had a dry pair in his pack. She wondered if she should suggest that he change into dry clothing because the evening was shaping up to be a chilly one.

  She pondered why she was wondering if she should say these things when normally she would just say them. She’d never been bashful when it came to speaking her mind, and Walt had told her more than once that she was downright bossy, yet all she could do was sit with her wineglass clasped in both hands and watch him and wonder what to say.

  “I have a plan,” she blurted out, startling herself because she hadn’t thought to speak aloud, not while he was looking at her that way. He raised his wineglass and took a taste, still watching her over the small campfire.

  “You give me the clothes you’re wearing,” Cameron continued, “I put them in my laundry sack, and tomorrow morning first thing I take them down to the trapper’s cabin. I’ll leave them there, hanging all around the outside of the cabin. Then I come back up here, pick you up and we leapfrog our way back to the cabin. You can walk a bit, or I can drag something of yours and do all the walking while you take the canoe. We’ll cover a lot more ground and lay a good scent trail that way. If your dog survived that run-in with the bear, chances are she stayed in the area. That cabin is the only human structure along this whole river. She’ll pick up your scent and home in on it.”

  He took another swallow of wine. His eyes never left her face.

  “My daddy had a couple hunting dogs when I was little,” she said. “Bang and Vixen. Every once in a while they’d run off on a hot trail, and when they hadn’t come back by dark he’d leave his wool jacket there on the ground. Sure enough when he went back the next day those beagles were right there by his jacket, waiting for him.”

  She set her wineglass on a flat stone, put another chunk of driftwood on the fire, raked out a bed of coals, nestled the potatoes on it and covered them with more coals. “I hope you like steak and potatoes,” she said. “That’s tonight’s special.” She used a piece of driftwood to nudge the live fire to one side of the fire ring, then laid the grill over the narrower end and the exposed bed of coals. “I won’t do a dirty steak, don’t like the grit. I prefer throwing steaks on a hot grill.” She rose to her feet, fetched the bottle of wine and topped off his glass. “There’s an old saying, ‘Wine gives strength to weary men,’” she said. “Sometimes when I’m really tired, the only thing that gives me the strength to cook and eat my evening meal is sipping a glass of wine first. That’s good wine, isn’t it?”

  She sat back down in her chair, cradling her own glass. “Bet I could catch us a char for breakfast right off this point when the sun sets.” She gazed out at the river. “See that riffle halfway across? Right below it. Bet there’s a beauty or two just laying there in that back eddy. Do you like trout? Rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon fat, it’s the best breakfast ever.” She took a taste of the wine and congratulated herself for choosing so well.

  “Roy didn’t like fish,” she continued. “He liked to catch them, but he wouldn’t eat them. How can anyone trust a man who won’t eat a wild caught trout?” She stretched her legs toward the fire, flexed her ankles and admired her L.L.Bean hunting boots. “These Bean boots are good boots for this kind of travel,” she said. “They sure are good for tramping in the woods and canoeing. If I’m lucky, I can get four months out of a pair.”

  She cast a covert glance from beneath her eyelashes. Was he falling asleep on her? She pushed out of her chair, retrieved the steaks from the cooler and laid them on the hot grill. The steaks hissed. Fragrant smoke curled up from the bed of coals. “Maybe you could tell me a little something about your dog,” she said. “Like how you found her in Afghanistan.”

  He shifted in his chair, pulled off his hat and laid it on his knee. “I didn’t find her,” he said. “She found me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE FOUND HIM in the Hindu Kush, in the rugged mountains along the Pakistan border. He was on advance patrol, the only American in the group of four. They were scouting for a possible Taliban training camp in some of the roughest, wildest mountains they’d been in north of Hatchet. For over a week they’d had little contact with the outposts to the south, and they’d been unable to find the rumored camp. He kept to himself when they bivouacked that night, preferring to keep his own company. Ever since the outpost attack at Bari Alai, he hadn’t really trusted Afghan soldiers.

  He ate a cold MRE, drank from his water bottle, eased the small of his back against the side of the mountain. The sunset illuminated a jagged wall of snow-covered peaks to the west. If he hadn’t been living so long in this place of war, he would have thought this country was beautiful, but it was hard to admire the mountains when each and every day was a struggle of straight up or straight down, carrying gear that weighed close to seventy-five pounds, and wondering when and from where the next attack might come, and if he would survive it.

  There was enough light remaining to work on a letter to his mother he’d been writing for the past week. He pulled it out of his pocket along with the pen, used his thigh as a paper rest and added a few sentences. “These mountains at sunset remind me of home. If this war ever ends, I could be looking right at the future ski and snowboard capital of Pakistan. Hindu Kush could become a popular tourist trap. This mountain range is part of the Himalayas, and the mountains are rugged and wild. Hard traveling. We camp when we can go no farther.”

  He could hear the three Afghan soldiers talking and laughing quietly, and he could smell pot on the faint updraft. They smoked it every night in spite of rules and regulations.

  “Ask Danforth for help with the haying this summer,” he wrote. “Offer him half the crop if he’ll cut it all and put your half in the barn for you. That should be enough for you to winter what’s left of the cattle and horses. Use the money I sent you to cover the missing mortgage payments. I’ll send more next month. The bank shouldn’t be hounding you like that. Clive should keep that from happening. Never mind what Otis Small tells you about anything. Otis likes to stir up trouble. Keep counsel with Kootch. He’ll steer you straight every time.”

  A high yelp of pain jerked his head up. All three Afghan soldiers were picking up stones and flinging them down the slope at a running animal. There was another yelp as another stone struck home and tumbled a leggy dark-colored creature head over heels. It ran off and vanished. It looked like a dog.

  “Knock it off,” he commanded just loud enough for them to hear.

  The Afghan soldiers laughed, but the stones fell from their fingers and the fleeing animal escaped. Dogs weren’t treated as pets in this country, and they weren’t treated kindly. Sometimes they were used for target practice. In Kabul, herding dogs were used for dog fighting, their tails and ears cut off at a young age. They ran in packs, usually, and struggled for survival.

  Jack returned to his letter home, and with what little remained of the daylight, finished it. He was folding it to slip back into his pocket when he noticed movement to his right. His eyes focused on a pair of canid eyes watching him from a clump of brush in the mountainside, perhaps twenty feet distant. The eyes were dark and wary. The animal’s coloring, thick fur, pointed muzzle and upright ears gave it the appearance of a western coyote or brush wolf. He thought it might be the same animal the Afghan soldiers had been stoning, and his hunch was proved correct when the animal moved a few steps and he saw that it was limping.

  It was just a pup, maybe four months old, with that big-pawed, leggy clumsiness that had made it such an easy mark for the stone-throwing Afghans. Hip bones and ribs jutted through thick fur. It was starving. Jack reached inside his jacket and pulled out a strip of jerky. He tossed it toward the pup, who vanished th
e moment he raised his arm but reappeared moments later to snatch up the piece of beef. It disappeared again temporarily, then peeked warily from cover. He tossed a second strip of jerky.

  There was only one reason he could think of that a stray pup would be on this mountainside. The Taliban and insurgents often used packs of dogs in their camps as an early-warning system. It was highly probable they were near an enemy training camp. In fact, one might be just over the next ridge, and this half-wild pup may have strayed from there. He glanced to where the Afghan soldiers lounged with their pipes, and a few moments later, moving in a crouch and carrying his weapon, he joined them and shared his observations with Maruf.

  “Could be,” the senior platoon leader agreed, nodding. “Tomorrow we will find out.”

  “I’m going up the ridge now, under cover of dark,” Jack told them. “You stay put. Post a guard. I’ll have a look into the next valley.”

  He left the radio with them, a decision he was later to regret, then stashed his pack carefully beneath a clump of mountain brush. With the last of the fading light, he picked an almost vertical path up the mountainside, moving from cover to cover. At one point, the slope became so steep he was crawling upward on his hands and knees. By the time he’d ascended to the top of the ridge line, a good half mile above where he left the Afghan soldiers, he was sweating profusely and struggling to catch his breath in the thin air.

  He moved cautiously forward in the gloaming, keenly attuned to any sounds or movements that would have hinted at the enemy’s presence, but there was just the cooling sweep of wind from the glaciated mountains to the east. The wind was not in his favor, but it shifted as darkness thickened. He flattened himself on the rough, stony ground and looked through his night scope into the deep valley below him.

  A jolt of adrenaline quickened his pulse when he spotted several small mud-walled houses at least one mile distant. Tents flanked both sides of a small river that divided the narrow valley. There were twelve tents in all, and three buildings. Unbelievable that way out here in this impossible terrain he’d find a Taliban training camp. The rumors had been true.

  Excitement coursed through him. It was too dark to return to his men, so he crawled back down as far as he dared in near darkness, then spent an uncomfortable night beneath the sheltering foliage of a big clump of vegetation, dozing off and on, uneasy with the noises that seemed to originate from every direction. The loose rattle of a stone, the sudden tug of wind hissing through brush, the faint murmuring from the distant river. Every small noise brought him from the edge of sleep to a state of instant adrenaline-fueled alertness, but there was no attack. No swarm of insurgents creeping stealthily over the ridge line to knife or shoot him in his sleep.

  As soon as there was enough light to move, he returned to his former position. His pack was where he’d stashed it. The three Afghan soldiers were sleeping in a row where he’d left them sitting the night before. No guard posted. That sort of careless behavior could get them all killed, and he felt a surge of anger at their flouting of his orders. He checked the coordinates of his position in the GPS unit inside his pack. All he had to do now was rouse the Afghan soldiers and radio those coordinates to his commanding officer. The scouting mission would be a success, and the Taliban encampment would be eliminated within hours.

  Jack shrugged into his pack and descended toward the sleeping Afghan soldiers. His furtive approach went completely undetected. As he drew near, he paused uneasily, focused hard and realized with a jolt of shock that they weren’t sleeping. They were dead. Their throats had been cut and their weapons, packs and his radio had been taken. He scouted carefully before moving closer, and for a few moments he crouched beside them, assessing how much time had passed since they’d been killed. Several hours at least, long enough for them to stiffen. Those noises he’d heard last night had not been his imagination. He was a dead man, too, if they caught him out in the open like this after sunup.

  Crouching low and hugging the cover of brush, he raced the sunrise and angled down the steep slope toward the river valley far below, where he would find better cover. He moved slow enough to keep rocks from tumbling noisily down the slope, fast enough to make his thigh muscles cramp and burn. At every moment he expected a bullet to slam into him and push him into the abyss.

  He was well over thirty miles north of a friendly outpost, and that mileage was measured in straight line distance. He knew from experience how hard mountain miles could be. The valleys were easier to travel but more dangerous in terms of potentially hostile encounters, and hostiles were all around him. Still, there were brown trout in that river, and timbered forests and drinking water, all powerful incentives for taking the risk. He had no other options, really.

  In two hours of furtive travel, he’d gained the cover of the timber, and another hour later the river. There had been no sign of the enemy, no hint that his presence had been detected. Perhaps they thought the scouting patrol had consisted of only the three Afghan soldiers. He’d cut no fresh human sign, not even down near the river. When it became too dark to travel farther, he found a place to hole up, away from the river, tucked back into the slope in a shallow cave created when a big pine toppled toward the water. The massive tree truck gave him good cover in front. Nobody could sneak up on him from behind and cut his throat.

  He shrugged out of his pack, took a long drink of water from his bottle and pulled out an MRE. He was halfway through eating it when he lifted his gaze and realized, after a few beats, that he was gazing straight into the eyes of that same stray pup he’d encountered the evening before. The pup was flattened beneath the brush to the right of the tree trunk, blending nearly perfectly with its surroundings. Its ears were erect, muzzle pointing toward him, eyes bright and wary. He took a scoop of food onto his fork and flipped it toward the pup, who waited several long moments before darting out, snatching the mouthful of food and retreating.

  Jack was uneasy knowing that the pup had followed him all day and he hadn’t spotted it. The sky above him had been active with large birds, but he’d seen nothing on the ground, and he’d been checking his back trail continuously. Had he missed the enemy, too? He finished the MRE, sharing every other mouthful with the pup, who darted out immediately and snatched it off the ground. He could have eaten another meal, but there was a long journey ahead. He rummaged in the pack for the GPS unit and calculated his position. He was a little over twenty miles from the outpost. He’d only made ten straight line miles since finding his dead soldiers. Twenty more miles didn’t seem that far, but when moving carefully and trying to avoid detection, those miles would be long and slow.

  He slipped the GPS onto his belt next to his water bottle, wanting to keep it near. He was exhausted but unable to relax. He rested sitting up, using his pack for a backrest, draping his sleeping bag over his shoulders like a blanket and cradling his weapon in his lap. He closed his eyes but knew he wouldn’t sleep. He couldn’t get the image of those three dead Afghan soldiers out of his mind.

  A noise roused him in the middle of the starlit night, a low, almost inaudible warning growl coming from the pup. He gathered his legs beneath him and let the sleeping bag slide off his shoulders. He was lifting his weapon and preparing to rise to his feet when the night exploded around him and all hell broke loose. Lightning and thunder, muzzle-flashes and bullets, an ambush on his position and no place to go except straight into it. He dove forward, rolled and came up all in one motion, firing at the nearest spit of flame, then raking the muzzle to the right and triggering another burst. He jumped over a fallen form, crashed through the brush and ran like a jackrabbit, zigzagging and dodging.

  How many were there? Four? Five? He wasn’t going to stick around to find out. Another movement to his right, and he swung his weapon and fired another short burst, kept running. Felt something sting the calf of his leg and pushed on. He’d always been a good runner, and he ran now as he’d never run before.
He could hear shouts coming from behind him, nothing up ahead. He dodged among trees. Slowed down when the canopy closed out the starlight and the darkness became too thick. Sped up when he could see the ground again.

  He ran as if his life depended on it, because it did. He ran until he had to slow down, catch his breath, and even then he kept moving, walking fast, pausing from time to time to listen for sounds of pursuit over the pounding of his heart. He heard nothing but that meant nothing. They could be right on his heels. They were stealth fighters, and they were very good at it.

  For over two hours he pushed hard. He paused only once, to check the burning in his calf. His pant leg was soaked, his boot full of blood. He had no idea how bad the wound was, nor was there time to find out, but he knew the bone wasn’t broken and counted himself lucky. If the bullet had struck bone, they’d have had him, and he’d be dead right now. He tied his bandanna around his calf to try to staunch the bleeding, then angled toward the river, and when he reached it he walked in. The water was frigid. He continued downriver in the shallows along the water’s edge. This wouldn’t slow his pursuers much, but they might think he’d crossed the river. He’d walk like this as long as the night covered his movements.

  Too soon the sky began to brighten, and he lost the cover of darkness. He scouted ahead, searching for places where he could leave the river without leaving tracks. He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around his lower leg when he came to an outcropping, and then climbed onto it. The ledge ran back far enough to get him off the immediate shoreline before ending in a choke of brush. He kept his jacket around his leg while he was on the ledge to prevent a blood trail, and removed it only after he was well into the brush. He moved back into the woods and kept moving, but his head wasn’t as clear as it should have been, and he could feel his strength failing him.