Who had done this . . . and why?
Had the Taliban taken some religious affront to the work here? Or maybe opportunists in town grabbed the researchers as a part of a ransom scheme that got out of hand? Or maybe the professor was correct—superstitious tribesmen had killed them because they feared what the researchers might disturb here. He hoped the Rangers were having more success than his team, because he didn’t like any of these answers.
By now, the ice mist had grown thicker, the snowfall heavier, slowly erasing the world around them. Jordan lost sight of the choppers, of the distant town of Bamiyan. Even the neighboring ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola had almost vanished, offering mere peaks of rubble and ruin.
It was as if the world had shrunk to this small village.
And its bloody secrets.
The professor took off his glove and bent to pick something up.
“Stop!” Jordan called. “This is still a crime scene.”
The professor pointed to a scrap of sea-green fabric frozen in a pool of blood. His voice shook. “That’s Charlotte’s. From her jacket.”
Jordan winced. There were so many senseless, savage ways to die. “I’m sorry, Professor Atherton.”
Jordan looked from the professor’s anguished face down at his own hands. His right hand was twisting his gold wedding band around and around on his ring finger. A nervous habit. He let the ring go.
Heavy footfalls, rushed and determined, sounded from his left. He swung around, freeing his weapon—a compact Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol.
The shadowy form of McKay appeared out of the mists, trailed by Azar, his Afghan trainee.
“Sarge, look at this.”
Jordan shouldered his weapon and waved McKay forward.
The corporal closed in and used the bulk of his body to shield his Nikon camera from the blowing snow. “I took pictures of some tracks I found.”
“Footprints?”
“No. Look.”
Jordan stared down at the tiny digital screen. It showed a trail of bloody tracks across a snow-crusted stretch of rock. “Are those paw prints?”
McKay scrolled through a few more shots, showing a close-up of one of the prints. “Definitely an animal of some sort. Maybe a wolf?”
“Not wolf,” Azar interjected in stilted English. “Leopard.”
“Leopard?” McKay asked.
Azar huddled next to them and nodded. “Snow leopards have lived here for thousands of years. Long time ago they were a royal symbol for this place. But now, not so many are left. Maybe a few hundred. They attack farmers’ sheep and goats. Not people.” He scratched his beard. “Not enough rain this year and early winter. Maybe they came down here to look for food.”
That wasn’t even a threat Jordan had considered before now. He felt better thinking that animals had attacked the archaeologists. Animals could be dealt with. Leopards didn’t have weapons, and they weren’t likely to be sheltered by the locals. It also explained the ferocity of the attack, the firefight, and the blood. But could it be that easy?
Jordan straightened with a shake of his head. “We don’t know that the cats killed them. They might have come to scavenge afterward. Maybe that’s why we didn’t find any bodies. They were dragged to wherever this pride of leopards—”
“Leap of leopards,” McKay corrected, ever the stickler for details. “Lions come in prides.”
Atherton hunched in on himself. “If the cats have taken the bodies, they are close.” He pointed his cast toward the ruins. “This place is riddled with hiding places. And also land mines from the many decades of war up here. You have to be careful where you step among those ruins.”
“Great,” McKay grumbled, “like we don’t have enough problems with man-eating leopards. We get land mines, too.”
Jordan had maps of the area with the land mines marked on them, but he didn’t look forward to hunting through that maze to recover the bodies—especially in the dark—but he knew that might become necessary. Any clues to who killed the archaeologists might still lie with those mauled corpses. It couldn’t have been leopards, he realized. Leopards didn’t whisper in ancient languages. So the words must have come either from a survivor or a murderer. They had to go now. The longer they waited, the less likely the survivor would still be alive, or the murderer would be brought to justice.
“How big are these cats?” Jordan asked.
Azar shrugged. “Big. I’ve heard of males as big as eighty kilos.”
Jordan did the math. “That’s about a hundred seventy-five pounds.”
Scary, but not too bad.
McKay chuffed his disagreement. “Then you’d better look at this.”
He flicked to another picture and showed a paw print with a shiny quarter next to it, using the coin to reveal the perspective of its size.
Jordan felt a deep-seated cold fear, a primal reaction to when his ancestors huddled in caves against what hunted the night. The paw print looked to be eight inches wide, the size of a small dinner plate.
“I found another line of tracks, too.” McKay showed them on his camera.
He ended on another paw print, again photographed with a quarter, only this one was smaller—not by much, but clearly different.
“So there are at least two cats hunting here,” Jordan said.
“And both a lot larger than a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” McKay added. “I’d estimate twice that, maybe more. The size of African lions.”
Jordan stared over at the misty ruins, remembering the tale of two African lions, nicknamed The Ghost and The Darkness, who terrorized Kenya for almost a year during the turn of the century. The two lions were said to have killed over a hundred people, often pulling them out of their tents in the middle of the night.
“We’re going to need more firepower,” McKay said, as if reading Jordan’s mind.
Unfortunately, his team had traveled here light, one weapon each. They had expected to come and go before dark. Plus, with the Ranger unit standing nearby, it had seemed like plenty of protection.
That is, until now.
A crackle from the radio caused both Jordan and McKay to wince and grab for their earpieces. It was Cooper.
“I’ve got movement over here,” Cooper radioed in. “Inside the village. Spotted a flicker through one of the windows.”
“Stay put,” Jordan ordered. “We’ll join you. And be on the lookout for leopards. We may not be alone out here.”
“Got it.” Cooper’s voice sounded more annoyed than frightened. But he hadn’t seen the tracks.