Assassins by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mike Bond
Published: 2020-08-27T21:56:49+00:00

Windows on the World

“THEY’RE TOO YOUNG!” Galaya screamed. “Please don’t take them!”

“Veil yourself,” yelled the bearded man, “before I kill you.”

“My husband’s out seeking food, he’ll be right back –”

Their flashlights tossing shadows across the huddled children, the Taliban snatched the ones they wanted, skinny boys in flimsy underwear knock-kneed and squinting in the darting light, hands across their groins.

The truck outside gunned its engine. Where, she wondered frantically, do they find fuel? The Taliban were hustling the boys into their clothes, saying, “C’mon, you’re going to be a man” and “You’re old enough now, this is what it’s like,” and she grabbed one kid as they went by the kitchen and shoved him down behind the stove, from where he looked up at her with astonished fearful eyes.

“Keep still!” she hissed. It was Yusef, their kid for years, who last year she’d saved from typhus. A Taliban came through the kitchen curtain and yanked Yusef up by his hair, the boy trooping wordless across the kitchen with this man’s fist in his hair. “I’ll teach you to hide like a woman!”

She sat crying in the middle of the kitchen floor. A little girl tugged the hair back from her face, repeating to her, “It goes away, it stops,” another purposefully jostling twigs into the fire, a third digging cupfuls of rice from a burlap bag into a pot and pouring water over them.

“What happened?” Ahmad whispered when he came in.

“They took all the boys over ten. Madrasah.” She turned away from the pain in his eyes. “If we could find a bus? Drive it across the desert to Peshawar with the rest of the kids?”

“A bus? They’ve all been used for troops.”

“A truck then. Put the kids in back –”

“Even if we did, Pakistan has closed the border.” His body felt powerless, his mind numb. The Taliban would return, maybe in five minutes, a day. He went outside, aching to turn back, grab Galaya’s hand and run, leave the kids –

Oppress not the orphan, the Koran said. But when had he done so?

He walked purposefully through the darkness. At night the Taliban shot at any sound. In these rubbled alleys the mines so hard to see. With a screech something burst underfoot – cat. He caught his breath. Go ahead of me, he begged it. Set off the mines.

A green muzzle flashed and a bullet smacked beside his head spattering brick. He dove among broken walls and squirmed head-down along the shadows, tearing elbows and knees, halted gasping then ran at a crouch along a battered wall past the Haji Yaqub mosque to the old bus depot where the Taliban trucks were parked.

Quieting his breath he waited outside the wall till he heard a guard walking back and forth mumbling a Sura. Then he crawled silently as he could along the wall into the depot.

There was only one way to drive a truck out – through the front entrance where the guard patrolled. The last truck in the first row was a canvas-backed troop transport, far enough away that the guard might not hear him.

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