Free Khyber Run by Amber Green

he laid a wicked chisel-tipped tanto on the table. I followed Mike's example, though my M4 was a lot handier in close quarters than his sniper rifle, and laid my choora on the table, accessible but discreet.
    Or as discreet as a seven-inch blade can be.
    Oscar produced a small diamond sharpener and made some methodical passes over the edge of his blade. The faint shing! shing ! probably scraped my nerves harder than the steel scraped that diamond matrix.
    Tension crackled in the room. The proprietor spoke quietly, pleadingly to the Dari table. They returned to eating, though their weapons remained on the table.
    Oscar offered the sharpener to me. I took it, surprised and pleased to feel a rather coarser grit on the other side, and set to the work of producing a beautiful edge.
    Gunfire rattled in the near distance. My guts clenched, but I forced myself to echo the steady shing! shing ! that had so bothered me when Oscar did it. From under my lashes, I saw the Dari table finger their weapons, then return to eating. I didn't hear the Kalashnikov clack , that distinctive sound an AK-47 makes when taken off safety.
    Mike leaned forward. “You know, in most parts of the world, smart people hearing gunfire would be diving for the floor, and everyone else would be rushing the door."
    Echo grinned. “The front wall is more than a foot thick, the sound was from farther away than this street is wide, and if something happened to come down the street at the perfect angle to penetrate the door, Zulu would catch it before I would."
    Shing! Shing ! “Any of you good enough to identify that weapon by sound?"
    "Those weapons,” Echo corrected. “Nope."
    The Dari table finished eating and gathered their weapons. I turned slightly, unable to keep my back to the door as it opened, and watched them leave. Outside, two small children had a mangy goat on a leash and were struggling to drag her down the street. A Toyota behind them blasted its horn. The goat jumped and bucked, jerking the kids one way and then the other. A Special Ops guy with a bushy beard yelled at them in Pashto, offering to shoot the goat if they didn't get it out of the way. The door closed.
    Echo shook his head. “Welcome to Afghanistan, where goat-pulling is not a figure of speech."
    Mike took delivery of a bowl of hot, scented water and washed his hands thoroughly. “You know, those of us who were kids in the eighties knew for a fact that we'd grow up to a Mad Max world. My brother and I probably watched The Road Warrior over a hundred times. Wore out two tapes, I know. Back home, that reality faded. The next decade's kids knew for a fact their apocalypse would involve hordes of faceless zombies. Or worse, zombies with known faces."
    He passed the bowl to Echo, then tore open a foil packet and recleaned his hands with an antiseptic wipe. “Here, we who have access to electronics and first-world medical care are like tourists in the eighties-style apocalypse vision. Like gamers in a fully immersive game. Maybe that's why so many of these guys act like children. Picture it. Within a few miles of where we sit, there's probably two thousand soldiers or semisoldiers like the OGA and psyops. Yet probably not two hundred of them could pass uniform inspection. Those Special Ops guys, now. You got to wonder how many times a loyal Talib has been shot because someone thought he was a Bearded American."
    Echo passed the bowl to Oscar, then pulled out his own foil packet and antiseptic wipe. “Or how many of the Special Ops have been shot for Taliban?"
    Oscar passed me the bowl. I washed, then cleaned my hands with a wipe as they had. I'd heard of cooks introducing interesting strains of E. coli to the wash water, low-tech bacteriological warfare, but given the fact we were going to be eating food prepared by the same folks who'd had an opportunity to contaminate this, poisoned wash water didn't seem worth worrying about. On the other hand, I'd seen some of the things these guys