‘He’s going to love it!’ Stone repeated to himself.
Bravado. Ridiculous bravado. Stone started slipping away into the Death Hole, wondering if Virginia had guessed what was bothering him, or even if she had noticed.
Stone closed his eyes to shut out the blackness, and the rattling of the cage against the tube of hard rock. Ten minutes to the bottom. Maybe fifteen. Up to now, there’d been only one Death Hole in Stone’s life. He would be thinking of it all the way down as he dropped into the hole. He would be thinking of the real Death Hole.
Kalai Kumza, March 2002, Balkh Province, Afghanistan. When the Al-Qaeda Arabs and Chechens were still around in Afghanistan. Before the Americans started bombing in earnest. Before they took control. Four hundred Taliban and Al-Qaeda gave themselves up to the Uzbek forces of General Dostum of the Northern Alliance. Dostum later said it was a trick to capture the fort of Kalai Kumza from the inside. The Taliban prisoners smuggled guns and grenades under their ragged clothes, and once inside the fort, they revolted. Against the two hundred Uzbeks and twelve NATO Special Forces. The Americans wore military fleeces and fatigues — Stone and the others in his squad were in plain clothes. Running shoes and HK machine guns.
The Uzbeks said it was the white faces which did it. It was the Red Cross workers whose insignia and white faces inflamed the Taliban — or so the story went. Not Special Forces, who were looking as rough as the Taliban by now. Stone knew it would have kicked off anyway. Why else smuggle grenades in?
A CIA interrogator was dead already. Twenty Uzbeks dead. Dozens of Taliban and Al-Qaeda were down. It was a suicide job. They knew they were going to die. The Uzbek tanks were waiting outside. The Americans would start with the gunships within minutes. No civilians here to worry about — they were all Taliban and therefore bad guys. Dostum and the Allies would wipe out the lot.
Stone forced the Red Cross guys to climb out over the walls, practically at gunpoint. Twenty metres high, but scalable. Then word came there were US and Brit interrogators stuck in cellars of the fort. Trapped with the bodies of twenty more Uzbeks and Taliban after a grenade blast. Stone and Hooper went down to bring them out. Another stupid thing Hooper had agreed to. That guy needed to choose his friends better. Thirty-four steps below ground.
Stone’s cage rattled downwards. Strangely muffled, like there was no echo at all. Like he was sealed in the middle of the earth, where sound and light don’t exist anymore, where his own existence had become entirely theoretical. Theoretically possible to be in that cage. But a very foolish place to find yourself.
Like the place he’d found himself when Hooper had risked his neck to go with him. Thirty-four steps below Kalai Kumza. Stone killed seven Taliban who’d been occupying steps twenty-nine to thirty-four at the bottom, the last two with face shots as they turned back up the steps. The first took it in the upper lip and the second directly in the right eye. Their heads exploded like coconuts filled with raw meat, all shell and blood and weird white stuff. A CIA guy in the chamber below, an ex-Marine, had been holding them off with an empty pistol. A fine effort. He’d used every round in every weapon he could find. When they got to him, he wanted to run right out up the steps. Stone knew better. The C130’s were already outside, pouring fire from their.50 calibre Gatling guns into the Taliban in the compound. The B52’s would be overhead soon. It would be an extinction-level event if they went up those steps. Thirty-four steps down, below many metres of mud baked two centuries ago. They might have a chance. Just might. But it was a very foolish place to find yourself.
Stone, Hooper and the three Americans were dragged from the wreckage fourteen hours after the B52 strike. Stone had thought he was dead, and had plenty of time to dwell on the fact. Hope, despair, panic, delusion, hallucination. Pain. Pain was the least of it. Pain lasts only so long, and Stone had long ago learnt to deal with pain.
The claustrophobia hadn’t started straightaway for Stone. It had come with the dreams of being stuck under the mud and clay. Dreams, recurring for years, again and again. Dreams can be really bad for you.
Now he was heading down another hole, much deeper this time. In a tin cage he could barely squeeze into. The rattling began to slow. There was a faint glow, a centimetre of light around the edges of the cage. This was it. The cage flopped slowly out from the ceiling of a low tunnel, not quite high enough to stand up in.