Heroes of Afghanistan: Vengeance by Eric Meyer

Author:Eric Meyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Action & Adventure, Thriller & Suspense, War & Military, Men's Adventure, Genre Fiction, War, Thriller, Literature & Fiction
Publisher: Swordworks
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The house was nothing more than ruins, a heap of burning rubble. Smoke rose in the air, mingled with flames from the antique wooden furniture that still burned with a fierce intensity.

Anyone caught inside the house is dead. Burned to a crisp.

He thought of Lena’s sweet loveliness, her feisty intelligence, and cursed his inability to help her escape the conflagration.

Unless she was inside that aircraft, and there’s no way of knowing.

“There’s no sign of Bob and his boys,” Greg said. They’d stopped the Hilux behind a tumbledown cottage a short distance away and watched from behind a hedge. Armed men still ringed the house, and from time to time they fired volleys of shots either into the air or directly at the house. A violent and bloody celebration of the work they’d done this night. Of their magnificent achievement, destroying a woman’s home, probably killing her and her companions at the same time. Condemning local people to a future of poverty, misery, and disease. And war, of course.

“I wish we knew if they were in the aircraft that got away,” he replied, “If they weren’t, and it was one of her pilots making a fast exit, well, we need to…”

“Need to what?”

He didn’t answer at first. Every path was blocked until they knew, one way or the other. Knew if Lena and the men with her survived the onslaught.

“We need to know if they survived.”

Or we need to locate the bodies and give them a decent burial.

They waited and watched the victorious Afghans dance around the flames of the destruction they’d caused. After an hour, the shots petered out as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The fighters milled around the outside of the house, waiting. As the flames began to die, they started to loot anything they could find undamaged. The day grew warmer, and the Islamists tired of their sport. Two men appeared to argue, one of them in the robes of an Imam. The other, without doubt the leader of the warband shouted orders. The Imam stepped into a shiny SUV, and the fighters piled into a decrepit bus. Many of them carried looted furniture. One man even struggled with a white toilet pan and cistern he’d ripped out of the bathroom. The diesel engine fired up in a cloud of dense smoke, and the old vehicle followed the SUV in the direction of Panjab.

They gave it another fifteen minutes, just in case, but the enemy had gone. Both men walked down to the ruins of what just the day before had been a magnificent house. One of the few survivors of the unending conflict that devastated Afghanistan after the Soviets arrived. Now it was like most of the others, a pile of rubble and a building site, awaiting the construction teams to build a new dwelling; or for foliage, weeds, and grass to grow in the ruins until the rubble disappeared forever.

They searched long and hard. Each time they turned over a large chunk of masonry or flattened door, their stomachs churned at what they may find beneath.

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