It had been back when Yuli was working private in western Afghanistan, his fifteen years for Mother Russia behind him. Mercenary work suited him, and the pay was good. He’d had more hair back then. And cheekbones. The contract had been all about suppressing the poppy trade. Opium, heroin. Burning out the farms, breaking the trucks, disrupting the flow of drugs and money whatever way they could. Probably the client had been a rival producer. That was fine. Yuli didn’t judge. One rule was very clear. The operation stopped at the border. They weren’t to cross over into Iran.
They had crossed over into Iran.
There were four of them. Yuli, Wrona, another Pole called Nowak, and man of no particular nation who everyone called Pintador though it wasn’t his name. Yuli was driving. It was a Humvee with customized light armor. He liked it. It felt strong. It was dark, and he had night-vision goggles on that made the hills green and black. The target was a little compound in Sistan and Baluchestan Province that an upcoming warlord named Hakim Ali was using as a base. The target was soft, because the enemy knew that Yuli wasn’t permitted to cross the border. Being in Iran kept it safe.
Yuli parked just before the top of a rise, and they all got out, moving quickly and quietly. Pintador whistled under his breath as he took position with a sniper rifle. Yuli surveyed the site through binoculars. Everything matched the briefing except that there was an extra car. A black sedan. Someone had chosen the wrong night to visit.
They moved forward carefully, Yuli and Wrona and Nowak. They each carried a 9A-91 assault rifle with a suppressor. Pintador’s soft whistling in his earpiece meant the sniper hadn’t seen anything to raise an alarm. The compound was two small houses and a shed, chain-link fence. An American pickup truck that had been white once, an ancient Jeep with a Barrett 82A1 mounted on its frame, and now the sedan. Yuli didn’t see a guard, but two dogs were sleeping beside the shed. Yuli shot them first, then Nowak cut the chain on the fence, and they were in.
Three men were eating dinner, served by a woman in a burqa. One of the men wore a Western-style business suit, but except for that, they could have been brothers. Yuli didn’t know what alerted them. Maybe they’d made a sound. Maybe the light from their window had reflected off some piece of equipment. Whatever it was, the enemy caught sight of them as they were crossing the yard, and before they could find cover, the enemy was firing at them. Nowak died, but Yuli and Wrona made it to the side of the shed where the dogs lay motionless.
“This is not good,” Wrona had said as bullets cracked past them, but Yuli took the barrage of fire as a good sign. The enemy was undisciplined, and the undisciplined were weak. Even now, he can remember the calm of those moments. The focus that left no room for fear. They stayed low and held their fire as he murmured orders to Pintador. Yuli’s patience had always been a weapon.
The first came out, circling around to flank them. The urge to shoot back as soon as there was opportunity was hard to resist, but Yuli signaled Wrona to wait. The little pop of the sniper rifle was unmistakable. The woman screamed, and Yuli and Wrona both opened up on the flanking enemy who had been briefly surprised to realize how far out of safety he had drifted. Just like that, two of the men were dead. Killing the last one and the woman took longer.
Afterward, Pintador brought down the Humvee while Yuli and Wrona went through the houses, the shed, the truck, and the cars. The heroin was in the shed, where Yuli had expected it to be. Fifteen bricks wrapped first in plastic and then cloth. It was what they expected to find. The binders in the sedan were a surprise.
Yuri still remembers seeing them: five three-ring binders with blue plastic covers and spines as wide as his hand. They had reminded him of medical records. When he picked one up, it felt too heavy. He remembers his first thought: the paper had gotten waterlogged. When he opened it, each page was a cardboard backing with a grid of clear plastic pockets four across and four high. A gold coin rested in each pocket; some were krugerrands, some American gold eagles. Each was an ounce of gold. Each sheet, a pound. Each binder, between fifteen and twenty pages deep. At the time, it was a little more than half a million dollars. Gold has gone up since then. Now the coins are worth nearer two million.
Yuli had never heard of the target trading in coins. Everything was supposed to be American dollars, if it was anything. This was something new. Yuli had wondered who the man in the suit was and who he had worked for, but there was no identification in his pockets or in his car.
Pintador had loaded Nowak into the Humvee, wrapped in plastic film they’d brought for the purpose. No evidence left behind was the rule, and a dead mercenary was evidence. Wrona went back to the shed and returned with three bricks of heroin. He had tossed one to Yuli.
“Spoils of war,” Wrona said.
Yuli tossed it back. “You take it. I’m keeping these.”
“You sure?” Wrona said. “The shit will vanish. Show up with those, someone will notice.”
Yuli had taken one of the coins out, enjoying its luster in the faint light of the coming dawn. The weight of it on his fingertips. Some part of him had known even then that he wouldn’t sell them.
“I’m keeping these,” he’d said again, and Wrona had shrugged. Then it had been time to finish up.
Wrona and Pintador took cans of gasoline from the Humvee and soaked the compound. Yuli got the flamethrower and, standing outside the fence line, he turned it on everything. The dead men, the woman, houses, truck, Jeep, sedan. The dogs. The earth.
The flames roared, and he had roared back until his breath and the fire were one thing.
The tunnel narrows down. The roots and soil you were going through at the mouth are thinning out, and you can see the carved stone. This is a worked passage. Not just something natural.
Goblin warren. I’m telling you this is a goblin warren. This is bad.
Better than going in the front door.
The tunnel turns to the right. About twenty feet farther down, you can see an opening. Like it comes to a bigger chamber and ends there. No door, it just opens out. There’s light.
Okay, I’m dousing the torch.
Don’t kill the fucking torch! We need to see!
We don’t need to announce ourselves. Anyway, I’m carrying it, so I douse it.
It gets dark.
We wait until our eyes adjust.
Everyone roll perception, and let me know if you miss.
Ah. I’m down by one.
Anyone else miss? No? Okay, you were looking at the torch before it went out, and so you’re taking longer to get your dark vision. Everyone else, you see that the light at the end of the passage is reddish and flickering. Like there’s a fire nearby. And because of the way the light hits the stone, you can catch the shadows where something’s carved into the walls.
Like runes? Something’s written there?
More like there were places for something to be set into the rock. Braces maybe. But they’re gone now.
I use my amulet for detect magic.
You don’t find anything particular to the marks.
I don’t like that. I roll for traps, and . . . make it by two.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing you’d see if someone had put in a winch or something. If you had to bet, you’d say one of those stones is a pressure plate, but you can’t tell what the mechanism is that it triggers.
Well, folks, you don’t make something like that unless you’ve got something worth guarding. I’d have to say we’re getting close.