Part 74 (2/2)

”Okay.”

”And get me some frigging choppers. I want to get the h.e.l.l out of here.”

But he was gone. The timing was really p.i.s.sing me off. And . . . scaring me, too.

A lot.

I sucked it up, though, and went back to studying the dead caravan, and that's when the scene got suddenly very weird.

On and around the three horses were heavy cotton sacks. Most were still tied shut, but all had been pierced by rounds so that white opium powder spilled out onto the rock. Hundreds of pounds of it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth.

It was still there. No one had touched it.

One bag, however, had been cut open with something sharp and a parcel had been removed. The wrappings of the parcel- green silk-lay discarded on the ground. Whatever had been wrapped in the silk was gone.

From my perspective, it appeared that Rattlesnake Team had ambushed and killed the Taliban caravan, then someone-either a member of Rattlesnake or someone else-targeted one bag, cut it open, and removed something that had been hidden among the drugs.That item, and now three members of Rattlesnake Team were missing, and there were no footprints in the spilled blood of the Taliban to indicate how anyone had approached the bag without leaving a mark.

Curious, I drew my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket, snapped the blade into place, and systematically cut open the other bags. I made sure to keep a cloth pressed to my nose and mouth. Getting stoned was not part of the agenda.

There was a green silk parcel in each bag. They were heavy, too.

None of them felt like the kind of vacuum-packed metal cylinders that would be used to transport a pathogen. They felt like rocks, maybe carvings.

I collected them and retreated down the slope, but I noticed that as careful as I had been, I left a trail of b.l.o.o.d.y footprints. How had someone looted that first bag without doing the same?

At the bottom of the slope, I found a table-sized rock and placed the parcels there, then unwrapped each one.The first one was a small statue of a snooty-looking little man with an enormous d.i.c.k. Fertility symbol from some culture.The second was a broken statue of one of the Egyptian G.o.ds. The one with the cat face, can't remember the name offhand. The others were similar. Small idols of G.o.ds from several different cultures, including one that was of a very nice carving of a bull. That one really caught my eye and I spit on it and rubbed the dirt away. What I at first thought was bra.s.s was something else entirely.

It was solid gold.

The f.u.c.king thing had to weigh four pounds.

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