.45 Caliber Soul
Chapter 11 – "You won't forget me, will you?"The Bohemian cavalry had vanished, leaving their dead behind. The storm front vanished, too, leaving a perfectly lovely day with bright blue skies and a scattering of cloud. You couldn't help the feeling that those events were directly related to the destruction of the glowing-eyeball thing
Unfortunately, victory had its cost. We couldn't dig a proper grave, so we buried Raphael in a cairn made out of loose stone in the middle of the tower's courtyard. Sister Nadeza led us in prayer; I followed with a short eulogy which ended as I came to attention and snapped off a farewell salute. Was his death here really a death, or did he find himself returned to his former place? There was no reason to believe that's what had happened, but you could always hope.
We re-loaded the kids and the baggage on Mister Ed and started down the east side of the pass. After a day's uneventful journey, we came upon an encamped army. We got close enough to make out the banners: some were solid red, with a white Polish eagle; others were in a green and black pattern whichSister Nadeza recognized as belonging to Baron von Labkowitz.
Mission accomplished.
Xianghua handed Mister Ed's reins to Sister Nadeza. "Aren't you coming, too?" asked Citrad.
Mitsurugi answered for us. "Our task is done. We must return to our homes." Another one of those things I knew without knowing how I knew it. I looked at Xianghua; she knew it, too.
After hugs from the kids and tears all around, Sister Nadeza and her charges set off to rejoin their people. We watched them from the edge of a small woods. "We're going home soon, too" Talim said wistfully. Her arm was better, but she'd be sore and stiff and wouldn't have full use of it for quite some time.
"You have the heart of a samurai, young girl," Mitsurugi said. He bowed to her, very deeply. "It has been an honor to fight with you."
I flashed her a smile. "Look me up in a few years, and I can probably get you a job in my outfit." I could imagine her working the fifty-cal on a Humvee; the Taliban wouldn't have a chance.
Xianghua gave her a bow, and then Talim said, "Farewell," and then there was that whatever-it-was-that-I-can't-describe . . . and Talim wasn't there any more.
I started to bow to Mitsurugi, but instead came to attention and saluted him. "A privilege serving with you."
"You are samurai too," he said, meeting my gaze. His eyes shifted to Xianghua. "And you, too, my lady."
Then he was gone.
I looked at Xianghua. She was on the verge of tears. "I can't come with you, can I?"
I knew the answer as well as she did. "Wish you could. Wish I could go with you." I meant it, too. She was exotic and pretty and tough in a fight and she had an attitude and she even liked me. I'd resign my commission and move to Imperial China for that; wouldn't you?
She stepped closer to me. She reached up and removed something from around her neck. It was a necklace of some kind, with an elaborate jade pendant the size of a half-dollar. She pressed it into my hand. "You won't forget me, will you?"
Not a chance!—but before I could tell her that, she gave me a big kiss and—
—I was on my hands and knees between two ammo crates in a spider hole beneath a farmhouse in the Panjashir Valley of Afghanistan. The red glowing thing I'd touched was gone.
"Lieutenant? El-tee?" It was Ruiz. "What you got there, man?"
"Nothing," I said because I couldn't think of anything better to say. "I thought I saw something; . . . must've just been a shadow."
"Oh, okay. Anyway, El-tee, over this way we got a whole crate of them little Russian nine-millimeter pocket pistols, and next to that . . ." Ruiz was rambling on, cataloging the contents of the spider hole, just like I'd never left. I wasn't really listening. It hit me: they were all dead. Not just Raphael, but all of them: Mitsurugi, Talim, Sister Nadeza, Father Jan. The kids, even little baby Zelenka, all dead hundreds of years ago.
". . . a half-dozen Saggers still in the packing crates . . ."
Xianghua. Her, too.
". . . AK-forty-sevens, and—hey, Eltee, there's one of them old bolt-action three-oh-threes, and it looks to be in good shape."
She just kissed me a moment ago, but she's been dead for hundreds of years. The kid that used to wait on me at the Happy Dragon on 21st Street in Terre Haute could be her octuple-great grandson for all I know.
A light shone in my face. "Hey, Eltee," Ruiz said, "you okay, man?"
How do I answer that question? Sorry, Private, I'm a little disoriented; I just got back from time travelling to Renaissance Europe. Or how about: Duuuuude, I just had, like, the coolest hallucination ever! "I'm okay," I sighed.
"You look like you just lost your best friend." Which was true, in a sense. Give the kid credit, he's perceptive.
"I'm just a bit worn out," I said as neutrally as I could. It was truthful, as far as it went, and it wouldn't give anyone grounds to refer me for a psych evaluation.
"It's been a long couple days out here in the boonies, that's for sure," Ruiz said. "'Least we'll be back at the base soon."
"Yeah." I needed to get my mind off Xianghua and Silesia. Doing my job might serve as a distraction. "How much stuff you figure is down here?"
"Man, I don't know." Ruiz thought about it for a second. "'Couple good-size truckloads, anyway."
"Okay, let's go back topside."
I met Sergeant Wheeler and Rawlins at the top of the ladder. "Nice sized cache down there," I said. "The Afghans"—I was referring to the friendlies, the army of the Karzai government and its allied tribes—"could use some of it, but it'd take us all night to hump it out."
"Blow it in place?" Wheeler asked. We didn't want to leave it for the bad guys, of course.
"Yeah, but first we'll copy down serial numbers and shipping labels off the crates; maybe Intel can figure out where this stuff comes from."
Wheeler looked at Rawlins. "Get a couple other guys, go down there and help Ruiz."
"Hey, Eltee," Ruiz called from down in the hole. "You ain't gonna leave this down here, are you?" He was holding up that old British .303 Lee-Enfield he'd found.
There's a very strict rule against taking war souvenirs. Nobody really enforces it. I sure wasn't in the mood to. "Dispose of it as you see fit, Private."
I went off in a corner of the room and sat. I didn't really need to do much beyond looking important; my guys know their stuff, and they don't need a whole lot of adult supervision.
It wasn't helping my mood any. I just kept seeing them all in my head, over and over again: the kids, Talim, Mitsurugi, Nadeza, Raphael, Xianghua.
Raphael had a daughter, or so he'd said; what happens to a kid stuck in the middle of the French Revolution when she loses her parents? Did they send kids that young to the gilloutine?
They didn't have antibiotics where Talim was going; did her wound get infected? Did she lose the use of her arm? Die from gangrene?
Citrad, Rickena, Bedrich, Georg, Dusana, and Zelenka —what was the childhood mortality rate in seventeenth-century Silesia? How many times in their lives would they be refugees again?
Was Mitsurugi destined to be one of the Martyrs of Nagasaki?
What happened to Xianghua?
By the time they had the charges all wired in, I was actually most of the way back to normal. We made our way to a flat spot a hundred yards upwind of the farmhouse. Sergeant Wheeler had the wires clipped to the detonator and the system armed and ready. The platoon was arranged in a tight perimeter around the LZ; the CIA guys and the prisoners had already flown out in a big old MH-47. Our ride home, a flight of four Blackhawks, was orbiting a couple of miles off. They'd come in and get us after the fireworks.
"Everybody take cover," Wheeler said. "There may be a lot of secondaries."
I had a sudden compulsion to run back to the farmhouse. That red thing had to still be down in the spider hole. Find it, touch it, I could go back. Xianghua would be there and . . .
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
Wheeler hit the detonator. The farmhouse disappeared in a volcano of flame. Nothing flew our way, but you could hear ammo cooking off in the bonfire for a good four or five minutes.
The choppers came and picked us up soon enough. Once we were up above small-arms range, you could feel the tension drop away. The guys started joking around, playfully bantering over the noise of the turbines and rotors. "Man, I can't wait to get back to base. A hot shower, a cold brew, and some Garth Brooks on the boom box."
"No way we listenin' to that cracker music!"
"What you wanna listen to?"
"Ja-Rule, 50 Cent, Jay-Z—"
"Oh, man, not that junk!"
"Hey, don't you go dissin' my music. Garth Brooks—dude, you ain't cool enough to dis me!"
"That's enough!" I said in my best exasperated-parent voice. "You two keep it up and the only music you'll get to listen to is Barney's Sleepytime Songs." We actually had a copy on the base; the Intel guys liked to play it for the Taliban between interrogations to soften them up.
"O-kay El-tee, we'll be good. We promise"
"Hey, Johnson, how can you say I'm not cool?"
"You're from West Virginia."
"C'mon, man, West Virginia practically invented cool . . ."
I looked out the side door. The eastern horizon was turning red; God had His hand on the dimmer switch, and He was getting ready to dial up sunrise. It looked like it was going to be a nice day. By that time, I wasn't really thinking about anything in particular; I guess I'd convinced myself that it all must have been an hallucination, or a vivid daydream. Probably from stress. We were due to rotate out at the end of the month; the R&R would do me good.
Ruiz was sitting on the bench next to me. The .303 Enfield was on the deck below his feet, wrapped in a blanket. He also had a Russian Makarov pistol stuffed into a pocket on his BDU; another souvenir for the collection. "'Scuse me, El-tee," he said. "You got any chewing gum?"
"Yeah, I think so." I reached into my pocket, pulled out the contents, found a fresh pack of gum and started unwrapping it.
"Jeeze Louise!" Ruiz all but shouted. "Where'd you get that?"
He was pointing to the intricate jade pendant in my hand. The one Xianghua had given me.
One of the other guys leaned over. "Man, that's a nice one!"
"Uh," I said, fumbling for something to say, "I got it from this girl I used to know."
"You got a girlfriend, El-tee?" Ruiz asked. I guess I nodded. "Maaaaaan, she must really like you."
"She did," I said absentmindedly. I put it back in my pocket. In that moment, I knew I'd see Xianghua again. Don't ask me how, I just knew it.
The End