City of Screams (2 page)

“If this valley is indeed cursed,” Atherton continued, “there's the source. The Muslims named this set of ruins Mao Balegh, which means Cursed City.”

Curiosity piqued in Jordan at his words, along with a trickle of dread. Something about the place unnerved him—and few things made him uneasy.

“What happened to it?” He kept filming. He might as well get more background information from the professor while he was at it.

“Betrayal and massacre. But, like many such stories, it started with a tragic pair of young lovers.” The professor paused, as if waiting for a response from Jordan.

Jordan didn't have time to humor him. He tried to move a little faster. The valley was losing light fast, and by tomorrow the snow would have covered everything. He hated the thought of having to finish their investigation in the dark, where they might miss something key.

“This city was once one of the richest in all of Afghanistan.” The professor gestured toward the ruins with his casted arm. “It served not only as a monastic center but also as a major trading post for caravans traveling along the Silk Road from Central Asia to India. To protect that wealth, a Shansabani king named Jalaludin built this citadel. For a full century, it was considered impregnable, growing to house over a hundred thousand people. Stories say it was riddled with secret passageways to help defenders attack their enemies. It even had its own underground spring to make it easier to withstand prolonged sieges.”

“So how did it end up like this?” The ruins had clearly fallen a long way since their glory days. Jordan zoomed in on a blood splash, trying to get a clean shot in the bad light.

“Genghis Khan. A Mongol by descent, he wanted to control this valley. So he sent his favorite grandson to negotiate a peaceful takeover, but the young man was killed instead. Then Khan moved his forces into the valley, swearing to slay every living thing in retribution. But once here, even his vast forces couldn't find a way to breach the citadel.”

Still filming, Jordan took another careful step forward. “He must have found a way. You mentioned something about a betrayal . . .”

The inflectionless voice continued. “And a love story. The king's only daughter had fallen in love during the months prior to the siege. But her father had refused her desired suitor, decapitating him when they tried to elope. Heartbroken and angry, she left the citadel and went to Genghis Khan under the cloak of darkness. To avenge her love, she showed the Mongols the secret passages, told Genghis Khan where the king's forces were hiding at the underground spring.”

Jordan listened to the story with half an ear, concentrating on his work, finishing one side. His efforts weren't as careful as he would have liked, but conditions were worsening. He crossed to the other side of the street, wiped a melted snowflake off the lens, and filmed his way along.

Atherton stood silent for a breath, then suddenly spoke again, as if he had never stopped. “And once Genghis Khan breached those walls, he did as he had promised. He killed everyone in the city, over a hundred thousand people. But he didn't stop there. It is said he slaughtered every beast of the field, too. It was those dark acts that earned the city the name it bears today.” The professor shuddered. “Shahr-e-Gholghola. The City of Screams.”

“And what happened to the daughter?” Jordan could tell that the professor was a nervous talker. He needed an ancient story to distract him from the reality of what had happened to his colleagues.

“Genghis put her to the sword, for betraying her father. It is said that her bones, along with the bones of the other dead, both man and beast, are still buried within that hill. To this day, they've never been found.” Atherton glanced up the bloody trail to a cleft in the mountain a few hundred yards away, and his eye twitched. His voice dropped to an imploring whisper. “But we were close. We had to get as much work done before this winter as we could. We had to. We had to get any historical artifacts unearthed and secured before they risked succumbing to the same fate as the Buddha statues. We had to work fast to get artifacts out. To save them.”

“Could the team have been attacked because of what they found over the last couple of days while you were gone? Maybe some sort of treasure?”

“Impossible,” the professor said. “If the stories are true about this place, Genghis Khan cleared out anything of value before destroying this city. We've never found anything valuable enough to kill for. But superstitious tribesmen did not want us to disturb this mountain-size tomb of their ancestors. Stories abound around here of ghosts, djinns, and curses, and they were afraid that we would awaken something evil. Perhaps we did.”

Jordan let out a soft snort. “I'm less worried about dead enemies than I am about live ones.”

He was glad to have the Rangers at their backs. He didn't trust the professor or the locals here, not even the Afghani trainees under his care. Out here, loyalties shifted in less than a second. Hell, that Shansabani king had lost his kingdom because he couldn't even trust his own daughter.

He turned from the ruins and stared at a pair of CH–47 Chinook helicopters that sat a kilometer away, snow collecting on their blades, positioned at the edge of the neighboring town of Bamiyan. They had a team of investigators questioning the townspeople. They were all fighting the night.

He turned off the camera. He'd study the video later, but for now he wanted to think, to feel the scene.

What could he tell by the setting? Someone had attacked the archaeologists with a brutality he'd rarely seen. Blood was everywhere. It looked like a knife fight, not a gunfight, blood arcing out in thin spatters from a flurry of cuts, not single blotches as from a bullet wound. But the sheer amount of blood made it hard to be sure.

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.

After Cooper passed on his location, Jordan led the others to the far side of the village. He found Cooper crouched with Farshad by a jumble of boulders at the edge of the village. The ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola rose behind their position. Jordan felt uneasy turning his back on that mountainous graveyard to face the village.

“Over there,” Cooper said, and pointed his rifle at a small mud-brick house with a snow-dusted thatched roof. The door was closed, but a window faced them. “Someone's in there.”

“Or maybe you're jumping at shadows,” McKay said. “The Rangers cleared every building. They found nothing.”

“Doesn't mean someone didn't sneak back here when we weren't looking.” Cooper turned to Jordan. “I swear I saw a flash of something pale pass by that window. It wasn't a gust of snow or a trail of mist. Something solid.”

McKay showed Cooper the pictures of the giant paw prints.

Cooper crouched lower and swore. “I didn't sign up to be a big game hunter. If that's some big lion in there—”

“Leopard,” McKay corrected.

“I don't give a flying fart what it is. If it's got teeth and likes to eat people, I'll let McKay's big ass take point.”

“Fine by me,” McKay said. “Especially since we know there are at least
two
of them and the professor here thinks they're holed up in that craggy hill behind you.”

Cooper glanced over his shoulder and swore again.

Jordan settled the matter. “Cooper and Farshad, stay here with the professor. I'll take McKay and Azar and check out that house.”