Charley Brindley - The Last Mission Of The Seventh Cavalry

They saw more than five hundred mounted soldiers, who were followed by a small band of men on foot, wearing white tunics that looked like togas.

Behind the men in white came another baggage train. The two-wheeled carts were filled with large earthen jars, slabs of raw meat, and two wagonloads of squealing pigs.

A horse and rider came galloping from the front of the column, on the opposite side of the trail from the platoon.

“He’s in a hurry,” Karina said.

“Yeah, and no stirrups,” Lojab said. “How does he stay in the saddle?”

“I don’t know, but that guy must be six-foot-six.”

“Probably. And check out that costume.”

The man wore an engraved bronze breastplate, metal helmet with red animal hair on top, a scarlet cloak, and fancy sandals, with leather laces wrapped around his ankles. And a leopard skin covering his saddle.

A dozen children jogged along the side of the trail, passing the wagon train. They wore short sarongs made of a rough tan fabric extending to their knees. Except for one of them, they were bare above the waist and dark-skinned, but not black. They carried bulging goatskin bags, with straps over their shoulders. Each one held a wooden bowl in his hand. The bowls were attached to their wrists by a length of leather.

One of the boys spotted Alexander’s platoon and came running to them. He stopped in front of Karina and tilted his goatskin to fill his bowl with a clear liquid. With his head bowed low, and using both hands, he held out the bowl to Karina.

“Thank you.” She took the bowl and lifted it toward her lips.

“Hold on,” Alexander said.

“What?” Karina asked.

“You don’t know what that is.”

“It looks like water, Sarge.”

Alexander came over to her, dipped his finger into the bowl, then touched it to his tongue. He smacked his lips. “All right, take a small sip.”

“Not after you stuck your finger in it.” She grinned at him. “Kidding.” She took a sip, then drank half the bowl. “Thank you, very much,” she said, then handed the bowl back to the boy.

He took the bowl but still wouldn’t look at her; instead, he kept his eyes on the ground at her feet.

When the other children saw Karina drink from the bowl, four of them, three boys and the one girl in the group, hurried over to serve water to the rest of the platoon. All of them kept their heads bowed, never looking at the soldiers’ faces.

The girl, who appeared to be about nine years old, held out her bowl of water to Sparks.

“Thank you.” Sparks drank the water and handed the bowl back to her.

She peeked up at him, but when he smiled, she jerked her head back down.

Someone in the line of march shouted, and all the children held out their hands, politely waiting for their bowls to be returned. When each boy got his bowl, he ran to his place in line on the trail.

The girl ran to take her place behind the boy who’d served water to Karina. He glanced back at Karina, and when she waved to him, he lifted his hand but caught himself and turned to trot along the trail.

A large herd of sheep came by, bleating and baaing. Four boys and their dogs kept them on the trail. One of the dogs—a large black animal with one chewed-off ear—stopped to bark at the platoon, but then he lost interest and ran to catch up.

“You know what I think?” Kady asked.

“Nobody cares what you think, Scarface,” Lojab said.

“What, Sharakova?” Alexander glanced from Lojab to Kady.

The one-inch scar running up and over the middle of Kady’s nose darkened with her quickened pulse. But rather than let her disfigurement dampen her spirit, she used it to embolden her attitude. She gave Lojab a look that could wilt crabgrass.

“Blow this, Low Job,” she said, then gave him the finger and spoke to Alexander. “This is a reenactment.”

“Of what?” Alexander ran two fingers across his upper lip, erasing a tiny smile.

“I don’t know, but remember those PBS shows where the men dressed up in Civil War uniforms and lined up to shoot blanks at each other?”

“Yeah.”

“That was a reenactment of a Civil War battle. These people are doing a reenactment.”

“Maybe.”

“They’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get it right,” Karina said.

“Get what right?” Lojab asked. “Some kind of medieval migration?”

“If it’s a reenactment,” Joaquin said, “where’s all the tourists with their cameras? Where’s the TV crews? The politicians taking credit for everything?”

“Yeah,” Alexander said, “where are the cameras? Hey, Sparks,” he said into his communicator, “where’s your whirlysplat?”

“You mean the Dragonfly?” Private Richard ‘Sparks’ McAlister asked.

“Yeah.”

“In her suitcase.”

“How high can she fly?”

“Four or five thousand feet. Why?”

“Send her up to see how far we are from that Registan Desert, “Alexander said. “As much as I’d love to hang around here and watch the show, we still have a mission to accomplish.”

“Okay, Sarge,” Sparks said. “But the suitcase is in our weapons container.”

The soldiers gathered around Alexander as he spread his map out on the ground.

“What’s the cruising speed of the C-130?” he asked Airman Trover, a crewman from the aircraft.

“About three hundred and thirty miles per hour.”

“How long were we in the air?”

“We left Kandahar at four p.m.” Trover checked his watch. “It’s now almost five, so about an hour in the air.”

“Three hundred and thirty miles,” Alexander whispered as he drew a wide circle around Kandahar. “An hour to the east would put us in Pakistan. In that case, that river we saw is the Indus. One hour to the west, and we’d be just inside Iran, but no big rivers there. An hour to the southwest is the Registan Desert, right where we’re supposed to be, but no forest or rivers in that region. An hour to the north, and we’re still in Afghanistan, but that’s arid country.”

Karina looked at her watch. “What time you got, Kawalski?”

“Um, five minutes to five.”

“Yeah, that’s what I have, too.” Karina was quiet for a moment. “Sarge, there’s something haywire here.”

“What is it?” Alexander asked.

“All our watches tell us it’s late afternoon, but look at the sun; it’s almost directly overhead. How can that be?”

Alexander looked up at the sun, then at his watch. “Beats the hell out of me. Where’s Sparks?”

“Right here, Sarge.”

“Check that GPS reading again.”

“It still says we’re on the French Riviera.”

“Trover,” Alexander said, “what’s the range on the C-130?”

“About three thousand miles without refueling.”

Alexander tapped his pencil on the map. “France has to be at least four thousand miles from Kandahar,” he said. “Even if the plane had enough fuel to fly to France–which it didn’t–we would have to be in the air for over twelve hours–which we weren’t. So, let’s cut the crap about the French Riviera.” He looked around at his soldiers. “All right?”

Sparks shook his head.

“What?” Alexander asked.

“See our shadows?” Sparks asked.

Looking at the ground, they saw very little shadowing.

“I think the time is about twelve noon,” Sparks said. “Our watches are wrong.”

“All our watches are wrong?”

“I’m just telling you what I see. If it’s really five in the afternoon, the sun should be there.” Sparks pointed to the sky at about forty-five degrees above the horizon. “And our shadows should be long, but the sun is there.” He pointed straight up. “On the French Riviera, right now, it’s noon.” He looked at Alexander’s scowling face. “France is five hours behind Afghanistan.”