Jordan kept himself from rolling his eyes. The last thing he needed was for the professor to start spouting nonsense. “What did the girl say happened here?”
“She said the team had a breakthrough yesterday.” He tapped his cast and grimaced. “I missed it. Anyway, the tunnel they had been digging had broken into a cache of bones. Both human and animal. They were to begin removing them in the coming days.”
“And what about last night?” Jordan asked.
“I was just getting to that,” Atherton said with a pique of irritation.
He returned to questioning the girl, but Jordan felt her body stiffen. She shook her head, covered her face, and refused to say more. Her breathing grew more rapid and shallow. The heat of her body now burned through his coat.
“Better leave it for now,” Jordan said, sensing the girl retreating into shock.
Ignoring him, Atherton grasped her arm roughly. Jordan noticed a loop of rope dangling from her slender wrist. Had she been tied to the bed?
Atherton’s words grew harsher, more insistent.
“Professor.” Jordan pulled his hand off her. “She’s a sick and traumatized little girl. Leave her alone.”
McKay drew Atherton away. The professor retreated from the girl until his back was flat against the mud wall and then stared at her as if he, too, were afraid of her. But why? She was just a scared little girl.
The girl glanced up at Jordan, her body burning up in his arms. Even her eyes glowed with that inner fire. She spoke to Jordan, pleadingly, faintly, before slipping away.
How long had it been since she had eaten or drunk anything?
“That’s enough for now,” Jordan said to McKay. “Let’s get her to medical help.”
He took out his water bottle and coaxed her to take a sip.
The girl whispered something so softly that Jordan couldn’t make out the words, if they were words and not just a sigh.
The professor’s face blanched. Atherton glanced to the two Afghanis, as if to verify they had heard her words, too. Azar backed toward the door. Farshad to the bed, stepping within the ring of salt, bending to fix the area where he’d picked up the salt a moment before.
“What?” Jordan asked.
“What the hell’s going on?” McKay echoed.
Atherton spoke. “That last bit the girl just said. It wasn’t Hazara dialect. It was Bactrian. Like from the recording.”
Was it? Jordan wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure she’d said anything and, if she had, that the professor would have been able to hear it. He had listened over and over again to that taped SOS. The words at the end certainly hadn’t sounded like what the girl had just said. He remembered those words, deep, guttural, sounding angry: The girl is ours.
The voice had reeked of possessiveness.
Maybe it was her father . . .
“What did she say just then?” Jordan asked. He felt a rising skepticism toward the professor. How could a ten-year-old girl speak a language that had been dead for hundreds of years?
“She said, Don’t let him take me back.”
From beyond the mud-brick walls of the home, a ululating yowl pierced the mists.
A moment later, it was answered by another.
The leopards.
Jordan glanced toward the window, noting that the sun had set during the last half hour, falling away suddenly as it did in the mountains. And with the sun now down, the leopards had come out again to hunt.
Azar darted for the open door, panicked. Farshad called after him, clearly imploring him to come back, but he was ignored. The man vanished into the snowy darkness. A long stretch of silence followed. Jordan heard only the soft hush of falling snow.
Then, after a minute, gunfire burst out, followed by a piercing scream. The cry sounded both distant and as close as the dark doorway. It rang of blood and pain and raw terror. Then silence again.
“McKay, secure the entrance,” Jordan barked out.
McKay hurried forward and shouldered the wooden door closed again.
“Cooper, try to reach that Ranger battalion parked over at Bamiyan. Tell them we need assistance. Pronto.”
As McKay trained his weapon toward the door, Jordan shifted away from the table, to the floor, drawing the girl with him. She clung to his side, breathing hard. He freed his machine pistol and kept his sights on the window, waiting for the cats to come through.
“What now, Sarge?” McKay asked.
“We wait for the cavalry,” he answered. “It shouldn’t take them too long to get those birds in the air.”
Cooper shook his head and lifted their radio unit in his hand. “I’m getting no pickup. Just dead air. Makes no sense, not even with this storm.”
Atherton looked at the little girl as if she had knocked out their radios. Jordan tightened his grip on her.
“Does anyone hear that?” McKay asked, cocking his head slightly.
Jordan strained, then heard it, too. He waved everyone to stay quiet. Out of the darkness, through the fall of snow, a whispering reached them. Again it sounded both close and distant at the same time. No words could be made out, but it set his teeth on edge, like a poorly tuned radio station. He remembered thinking earlier that nothing surprised him anymore. He’d have to revise that. This whole situation had him surprised right out of his comfort zone.
“I think it’s Bactrian, too,” Atherton said, his voice taking a keening, panicked edge. He crouched like a frightened rabbit near the stone oven. “But I can’t make anything out.”
It didn’t sound like a language at all to Jordan. Maybe the shock of the day had caught up to the professor. Or maybe it wasn’t even Bactrian on the tape.
Farshad crouched beside the salt-ringed bed. He stared daggers at the child, as if she were to blame for all of this.
“Remember what I translated from that desperate radio call?” Atherton’s glassy eyes stared past Jordan’s shoulder at nothing. “Those last words. The girl is ours. They clearly want her.”
The professor pointed a trembling finger at the child.
Whispers out in the night grew louder, taking on a gibbering sound, a chorus of madness just beyond the edge of hearing. It felt as if the words ate through his ears, scratching to get inside his skull. But maybe those were just normal leopard noises. Jordan had no idea what a leopard was supposed to sound like.
Atherton clamped his hands over his ears and crouched lower to the floor.
Farshad barked out words in Pashto, his native language, and raised his rifle at Jordan, at the girl. He motioned toward the door with the tip of his weapon. Between the pantomime and the bit of Pashto that Jordan understood, the message was clear.