The Mullah's Storm Read Online Free PDF

to the water.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    P arson hovered in the murky consciousness between sleep and waking, the logical part of him trying to separate nightmare from reality. You will wake from this and go have an omelet, some corner of his mind reasoned. Then he came to full awareness, as if rising from the bottom of a pool. He opened his eyes to the gray light of the snow cave and inhaled air stale with body odor. For a moment he fought panic. You’re an officer of the United States Air Force, he told himself. Deal with it. Deal. He worked the fingers of his right hand, and the cracked wrist still burned.
    The mullah sat cross-legged, chained to Gold. He spooned food from a brown packet marked: BEEF STROGANOFF.
    “Hope you don’t mind me going into your pack,” Gold said. Her voice had a resin in it, either from cold or fatigue, though she sounded better than last night. Parson thought she might have been attractive in more normal circumstances, but even before the crash she’d seemed all mission: shoulder-length hair tied tight, no makeup, no nail polish. No tattoo that Parson could see. Eyes deep gray as a whetstone.
    “Can’t let him starve,” Parson said, “but I’d have given him the pork.”
    He looked outside and saw only a few light flakes falling. But in the distance, veils of snow trailed from looming clouds the color of a deep bruise. He considered whether to move or stay put. Neither held much to recommend it. He knew the insurgents were looking for him in the immediate area. But any movement would leave tracks and make the three of them easier to see.
    The shivering tipped Parson’s mind toward moving. He had no more handwarmers, and his wet clothes still clung to his limbs, sapping away heat. Gold and the mullah could be no better off. Parson decided they had to find better shelter somehow. Probable death by gunshot versus certain death by cold.
    He unfolded a tactical pilotage chart and marked his location by creasing the map with a thumbnail. No dots of towns appeared anywhere nearby—just the curving contour lines of rising terrain, along with the notation “Numerous Scattered Villages.” The map told him little of use. It was meant for fliers moving five or six miles a minute, not foot soldiers slogging through snow.
    Parson wanted to find an abandoned village. He’d seen enough of them from the air, the tic-tac-toe patterns of roofless mud walls where mortars or Katyusha rockets had exploded. The ruins stood as silent, shrapnel-scarred witnesses to hardscrabble lives cut short in places that did not even merit a name on an American map. Parson needed just one roof, or part of a roof still intact, to get out of the weather and wait for the clouds to lift.
    Peering out, Parson watched and listened for any sign of pursuers. He saw no one, so he kicked away the snow from the entrance and crawled outside. He looked around and saw nothing moving but snowflakes, swirling fog, and stream water flowing clear as vodka. By the creek, he found what he needed.
    The limbs of a leafless shrub reached over the water like a claw. Using his left hand, Parson broke away some branches and shook off the snow. Then he sat by the cave entrance, drew his boot knife, and shaved away twigs and bark until he had two smooth sticks as big around as his fingers and about ten inches long. He rummaged through his pack for a first-aid kit, unzipped it, unrolled a bandage. Holding the cloth with his teeth, he cut off a three-foot strip. Parson tried to wrap the sticks over his injured wrist, then realized he didn’t have enough hands.
    “Gold, can you help me?” he asked.
    The sergeant spoke softly in Pashto, and she and the mullah emerged from the snow cave.
    “I need to splint my wrist,” Parson said.
    Gold admired the splint sticks he’d improvised and said, “I’d have done this for you.” She wrapped a layer of bandage over his wrist and forearm, then arranged a stick on top of his arm and a stick underneath,