A Soldier's Pledge. Nadia Nichols

Danforth for help with the haying this summer,” he wrote. “Offer him half the crop if he’ll cut it all and put your half in the barn for you. That should be enough for you to winter what’s left of the cattle and horses. Use the money I sent you to cover the missing mortgage payments. I’ll send more next month. The bank shouldn’t be hounding you like that. Clive should keep that from happening. Never mind what Otis Small tells you about anything. Otis likes to stir up trouble. Keep counsel with Kootch. He’ll steer you straight every time.”

      A high yelp of pain jerked his head up. All three Afghan soldiers were picking up stones and flinging them down the slope at a running animal. There was another yelp as another stone struck home and tumbled a leggy dark-colored creature head over heels. It ran off and vanished. It looked like a dog.

      “Knock it off,” he commanded just loud enough for them to hear.

      The Afghan soldiers laughed, but the stones fell from their fingers and the fleeing animal escaped. Dogs weren’t treated as pets in this country, and they weren’t treated kindly. Sometimes they were used for target practice. In Kabul, herding dogs were used for dog fighting, their tails and ears cut off at a young age. They ran in packs, usually, and struggled for survival.

      Jack returned to his letter home, and with what little remained of the daylight, finished it. He was folding it to slip back into his pocket when he noticed movement to his right. His eyes focused on a pair of canid eyes watching him from a clump of brush in the mountainside, perhaps twenty feet distant. The eyes were dark and wary. The animal’s coloring, thick fur, pointed muzzle and upright ears gave it the appearance of a western coyote or brush wolf. He thought it might be the same animal the Afghan soldiers had been stoning, and his hunch was proved correct when the animal moved a few steps and he saw that it was limping.

      It was just a pup, maybe four months old, with that big-pawed, leggy clumsiness that had made it such an easy mark for the stone-throwing Afghans. Hip bones and ribs jutted through thick fur. It was starving. Jack reached inside his jacket and pulled out a strip of jerky. He tossed it toward the pup, who vanished the moment he raised his arm but reappeared moments later to snatch up the piece of beef. It disappeared again temporarily, then peeked warily from cover. He tossed a second strip of jerky.

      There was only one reason he could think of that a stray pup would be on this mountainside. The Taliban and insurgents often used packs of dogs in their camps as an early-warning system. It was highly probable they were near an enemy training camp. In fact, one might be just over the next ridge, and this half-wild pup may have strayed from there. He glanced to where the Afghan soldiers lounged with their pipes, and a few moments later, moving in a crouch and carrying his weapon, he joined them and shared his observations with Maruf.

      “Could be,” the senior platoon leader agreed, nodding. “Tomorrow we will find out.”

      “I’m going up the ridge now, under cover of dark,” Jack told them. “You stay put. Post a guard. I’ll have a look into the next valley.”

      He left the radio with them, a decision he was later to regret, then stashed his pack carefully beneath a clump of mountain brush. With the last of the fading light, he picked an almost vertical path up the mountainside, moving from cover to cover. At one point, the slope became so steep he was crawling upward on his hands and knees. By the time he’d ascended to the top of the ridge line, a good half mile above where he left the Afghan soldiers, he was sweating profusely and struggling to catch his breath in the thin air.

      He moved cautiously forward in the gloaming, keenly attuned to any sounds or movements that would have hinted at the enemy’s presence, but there was just the cooling sweep of wind from the glaciated mountains to the east. The wind was not in his favor, but it shifted as darkness thickened. He flattened himself on the rough, stony ground and looked through his night scope into the deep valley below him.

      A jolt of adrenaline quickened his pulse when he spotted several small mud-walled houses at least one mile distant. Tents flanked both sides of a small river that divided the narrow valley. There were twelve tents in all, and three buildings. Unbelievable that way out here in this impossible terrain he’d find a Taliban training camp. The rumors had been true.

      Excitement coursed through him. It was too dark to return to his men, so he crawled back down as far as he dared in near darkness, then spent an uncomfortable night beneath the sheltering foliage of a big clump of vegetation, dozing off and on, uneasy with the noises that seemed to originate from every direction. The loose rattle of a stone, the sudden tug of wind hissing through brush, the faint murmuring from the distant river. Every small noise brought him from the edge of sleep to a state of instant adrenaline-fueled alertness, but there was no attack. No swarm of insurgents creeping stealthily over the ridge line to knife or shoot him in his sleep.

      As soon as there was enough light to move, he returned to his former position. His pack was where he’d stashed it. The three Afghan soldiers were sleeping in a row where he’d left them sitting the night before. No guard posted. That sort of careless behavior could get them all killed, and he felt a surge of anger at their flouting of his orders. He checked the coordinates of his position in the GPS unit inside his pack. All he had to do now was rouse the Afghan soldiers and radio those coordinates to his commanding officer. The scouting mission would be a success, and the Taliban encampment would be eliminated within hours.

      Jack shrugged into his pack and descended toward the sleeping Afghan soldiers. His furtive approach went completely undetected. As he drew near, he paused uneasily, focused hard and realized with a jolt of shock that they weren’t sleeping. They were dead. Their throats had been cut and their weapons, packs and his radio had been taken. He scouted carefully before moving closer, and for a few moments he crouched beside them, assessing how much time had passed since they’d been killed. Several hours at least, long enough for them to stiffen. Those noises he’d heard last night had not been his imagination. He was a dead man, too, if they caught him out in the open like this after sunup.

      Crouching low and hugging the cover of brush, he raced the sunrise and angled down the steep slope toward the river valley far below, where he would find better cover. He moved slow enough to keep rocks from tumbling noisily down the slope, fast enough to make his thigh muscles cramp and burn. At every moment he expected a bullet to slam into him and push him into the abyss.

      He was well over thirty miles north of a friendly outpost, and that mileage was measured in straight line distance. He knew from experience how hard mountain miles could be. The valleys were easier to travel but more dangerous in terms of potentially hostile encounters, and hostiles were all around him. Still, there were brown trout in that river, and timbered forests and drinking water, all powerful incentives for taking the risk. He had no other options, really.

      In two hours of furtive travel, he’d gained the cover of the timber, and another hour later the river. There had been no sign of the enemy, no hint that his presence had been detected. Perhaps they thought the scouting patrol had consisted of only the three Afghan soldiers. He’d cut no fresh human sign, not even down near the river. When it became too dark to travel farther, he found a place to hole up, away from the river, tucked back into the slope in a shallow cave created when a big pine toppled toward the water. The massive tree truck gave him good cover in front. Nobody could sneak up on him from behind and cut his throat.

      He shrugged out of his pack, took a long drink of water from his bottle and pulled out an MRE. He was halfway through eating it when he lifted his gaze and realized, after a few beats, that he was gazing straight into the eyes of that same stray pup he’d encountered the evening before. The pup was flattened beneath the brush to the right of the tree trunk, blending nearly perfectly with its surroundings. Its ears were erect, muzzle pointing toward him, eyes bright and wary. He took a scoop of food onto his fork and flipped it toward the pup, who waited several long moments before darting out, snatching the mouthful of food and retreating.

      Jack was uneasy knowing that the pup had followed him all day and he hadn’t spotted it. The sky above him had been active with large birds, but he’d seen nothing on the ground, and he’d been checking his back trail continuously. Had he missed the enemy, too? He finished the MRE, sharing every other mouthful with the pup, who darted