Free Gravedigger by Mark Terry Page A

the so-called Promised Land, Moses sent twelve spies, one from each tribe, into the city to find out what was there. Ten came back and said that giants lived there and would crush their army. Joshua and Caleb came back and told Moses what he wanted to hear, that God would help them out and Canaan would be theirs.
    Moses, with apparent lack of faith in the two spies who claimed to know what God wanted, chose to listen to the ten skeptics. So God, pissed off that Moses and company ignored his advice, had them wander around in the desert for forty years.
    Derek thought about God for a few minutes and the fact that the three of them seemed to be wandering around without actually knowing where they were going. He thought about spies who told tall tales and spies who told the truth and were ignored. Then he drifted off. He had the third watch, Noa the first, Johnston the second.
    Several hours later Noa shook him awake. “Already?” he said, feeling exhausted.
    She put a hand over his mouth and whispered, “We’ve got company.”

12
    There wasn’t really any place to hide. They each grabbed an AK47. Johnston threw a couple pieces of wood in the fire. Derek looked at him for a moment, then grabbed a cooking kettle and shook it. “We got extra water?”
    “What’re you doing?” Noa asked in an urgent whisper.
    Johnston pointed. Derek topped off the kettle from a canteen and hung it over the fire. “I’m making tea,” he said.
    She stared at him. Her eyebrows raised as she got it.
    In a minute a voice shouted out of the darkness. Noa said, “They’re basically saying hello.” She shouted back.
    A moment later three men in traditional Afghan dress appeared. Two them were bearded. One was younger, maybe fifteen, and didn’t look like he shaved at all. They each led a horse on a rope. Each carried an AK47.
    Noa and one of the men spoke for a while. She turned to Derek. “They accept our invitation of tea.”
    Johnston indicated he’d help them tie up their horses. Derek prepared the tea and when they returned, he offered it to them. The six of them sat around the fire sipping the tea. The men were very wet and appreciated both the tea and the fire. Derek held up some dried meat and offered it to them, indicating Noa should tell them they didn’t have much food, but they were willing to share it.
    The group accepted the food, but also offered their own. Soon they were all drinking tea and eating dried fruit, nuts, and naan , or flatbread topped with poppy seeds. They also had dates and olives.
    Noa spoke with them. They were friendly. The youngest was the oldest one’s son and he seemed to be the least comfortable around Noa. She explained to Derek and Johnston that they were from Zin and were more or less a scouting party. The head of their tribe, as she put it, was indeed Mohammad Anwari.
    It turned out that Mohammad Anwari’s group had been involved in an ongoing series of skirmishes with another local warlord, Abdul Karim Azimi. In his head, Derek dubbed this new player AKA. At least part of the battle involved who controlled the valley they had recently cut through, because it was good grazing land, which was hard to come by in Afghanistan. Mohammad Anwari’s group’s village, Zin, was just on the other side of the mountain. AKA’s group was just over another mountain pass on the far side of the valley. These three were scouting the pass, making sure that none of AKA’s people were planning on coming over the mountain in the middle of the night and attacking Zin.
    Derek sat and listened carefully. What they were describing wasn’t exactly a civil war, but the kind of clusterfuck he’d spent time advising on for Special Forces prior to Operation Desert Storm. He’d hit all the garden spots of the world – Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Zaire, just to name a few.
    The thing he had learned during these advising jobs for the U.S. government and military was that alliances were unstable and you had to