by R. K. Syrus
• • •
As he hunkered down by the main gates, Bryan’s legs and poncho were covered with muck. Mud jumped the six feet up to his cheeks and chin. He tasted the grit of the land, and was convinced it wanted to kill them all. Kill them and digest them, just like it had done with the Royal Horse guy.
The sandbag-and-wire-mesh wall of 90 Charlie disappeared into the halogen-pink static-screen night. Their squared-up sand fort looked shabby backed up against the jagged ruins of a much older garrison. More than two thousand years older.
Those ruins, just out of normal vision but clear to him, were the indirect cause of them being there. Some archaeologists had been studying Alexander the Great and got themselves kidnapped. A US senator’s niece was among them.
The hostage crisis was resolved, but not because of the show of force. The senator’s niece and the others were left handcuffed in a small fishing boat in the port of Doha. Rumor was a sheik with US ties had paid a ransom.
Perhaps the long-gone soldiers who followed the Great Alexander, the ones who built the ancient fort centuries ago, also had words for the weight in the pit of his stomach and the dryness in his mouth despite the deluge of water from a dark, unflinching sky. The watching, the rain, the mud, the waiting, the terror, it must have been the same.
Sounds ran together, then separated. Engines rumbled diesel drumbeats from the motor hut. Automated searchlights on towers added a high-voltage treble.
Then Bryan heard a noise that did not belong.
Slap.
5
Corporal Bryan scanned left and right, trying to tell where the sound had come from and what made it. A foot hitting a puddle?
Searchlights didn’t help. Criss-crossing barrel-shaped beams reflected off staggered sheets of streaming rain. Rain was everywhere. His helmet channelled it into his blinking eyes. He couldn’t see crap.
He pulled it off and threw it. Like half of a big eggshell, it landed in the stream that formed a jagged meaningless moat in front of the forward bunker.
Dumb, Bryan, dumb.
His brain bucket was the most important piece of gear the government had loaned him. He thought about scooping it up and emptying the muddy water from it. Out at the edge of the halogen haze around the base he tried to make out…
Nothing.
Just the sheets of rain all around, beyond which even his eyes could not penetrate.
Seconds squeezed by. He started to doubt he’d heard anything. He cupped his hands over his brow. Maybe it was a branch falling, or a tarp giving way under too much water.
Why did I ditch my helmet?
He didn’t move. With mud covering his face and poncho, hunkered down among the maze of smaller barricades, Bryan was nearly invisible. He would watch and see.
Coulda not been a branch. What then?
An animal that got loose? If he shot it, high-velocity rounds would go right through, maybe hit a herdsman trying to collect the stray. Then again, donkeys had been outfitted with explosive packs and turned into four-legged suicide bombers. No one likes to shoot a helpless animal.
Slap, slap.
Closer. Bryan flicked his weapon’s safety off. He double checked the select-fire tab. Single fire. Burst sucked without a muzzle compensator, which would have made his rifle too long for sentry duty. No biggie. He could pull the trigger like a jackhammer and stay on a target when he had to.
He checked behind. The distance to the main gate seemed to elongate, like the finish line of the 100-meter when the hush settled over the starting line. Twelve steps and a touchdown dive. That’s how long it would take him to duck back through the dragon’s teeth tank traps and put a few tons of sand between him and whatever was coming.
Maybe nothing was. Might be the wind playing with a wet plastic bag. If he ran now he’d look like a wuss. Of course, none of the others would be able to tell he was afraid by the paleness of his face. One of the few benefits of being an albino. He tried not to blink.
SLAP.
Something was definitely there. Someone?
Spill from the perimeter light outlined a shape. It was on four legs. Closer. They wore ragged clothes. Not very big. They didn’t have to be to be dangerous, though. Could be a sapper trying to take advantage of the weather to place a breaching charge under the wall. It might.
Bryan quickly discounted that idea. The main gate was the most buttressed part of the whole perimeter. There were many weaker places more vulnerable to a two-stage assault. And whatever it was, it was coming toward their spotlights.
Right then, he should have called it in. He did not. The risk of exposing his position was small. The bigger risk were the yahoos on the wall warming up their belt-fed machine guns, firing at anything at moved. Including him. Inside the yellow zone, rules of engagement specified sentries could fire after a verbal challenge.
Bryan did not shoot, did not shout. He watched and waited.
SLAP, SLAP.
He’d waited too long.
The sky flashed in strobes. The world stuttered forward.
Faster than he thought possible, the figure was inside the red zone. Danger close. It could be a mortar-sized suicide device. At this distance, even if the ball bearings and shrapnel missed, the concussion alone could kill him.
Forty meters, then thirty. Deeper inside the kill zone.
He could see a face. Her face.
Most definitely a she. A girl, a local. Maybe in her teens. She was moving so awkwardly, so tortuously. She was holding something, a bulge under her dress.
Over that red line, there was no requirement for a challenge or warning shot. Soldiers had the right, the duty, to defend themselves and their base. Whoever she was, she was now in the weapons-free zone. Bryan raised his rifle and aimed for her head.
Most soldiers would have fired. It was the thing they were trained to do. It was the right thing to do. To protect the post, save lives. Perhaps every other man and woman in 90 Charlie would have taken out the presumed hostile inside the red zone. Just shoot, then call in an APC to sweep up the body and get a commendation. It was the safe thing to do.
Bryan stared. His trigger finger was locked in place, like it was welded to his weapon. Rain dashed on his bare head. He blinked. He did not shoot.
Alone among the hundreds of people at the outpost, he had vision that could discern the girl’s face. Something about her expression, her agonized desperation, stayed his hand. His pale hypersensitive eyes were the only ones that could penetrate the gloom of that darkest of nights and see her.
His weapon lowered. The safety clicked back on. Bad hurt lay in wait for him every which way.
If he went out into the red zone, the fire team behind him might just notice movement. Who were they tonight? Belgians? Argentinians? If they were paying attention, they’d see movement and might machine gun them both.
He looked. The tower guards were caught up in some game of cards or dice. It was now or never.
Bryan breathed out and deliberately gulped a lungful of air, a habit from running a track sprint in high school. The protective sandbags his starting block, he lurched forward. His breath mixed with water spray and fine mud. This was less than one hundred meters.
But
the mud
it sucked
at his boots
each step
his muck-covered stones
suddenly underfoot
like chunks of ice
and the threat of sudden obliteration made up for it all.
During a track sprint he never breathed in, only out. His feet scuffed over the wet hard pack.
Slap, slap, slap, slap.
When he was close to the ragged form, he slung his rifle. It wouldn’t matter now. If she meant to blow a crater in the ground, he would be inside of the mess of mud and body parts. He was only endangering himself. It was worth the risk.
If he didn’t take this chance, he knew those eyes belonging to the girl, the eyes only he could see, would haunt him forever. He
had enough things pursuing him in his dreams and nightmares.
As Bryan came upon her prone crawling form, his first thought was to check her for wires or a webbing belt around her midsection. Maybe the bomb had been shorted out by the wet. He would roll her into a ditch and call for the explosives team.
What he found in the shroud of pink halogen illumination he would never forget. The girl was pregnant and trailing blood in a long red smear behind her. Cuts through her dress revealed horrible trauma. There were at least five jagged holes in the thin cloth covering her belly.
This was no accident. The eight- or nine-months-pregnant girl had been deliberately stabbed. Somehow she’d crawled to this outpost. The rotating floods of 90 Charlie were perhaps the only lights for miles.
Bryan picked up the dying young woman and rushed through the tank traps. Ignoring the shouts of the tower sentries, he made straight for the mobile hospital’s trauma unit. He shouldered aside a corporal with a broken thumb and put her down on a stretcher. He shouted for help.
Theodora McKnight was on graveyard shift. She was the only doctor on base with pediatric surgery know-how. Grim-faced, she took over and wheeled her unconscious patient into the nearest operating enclosure.
Corporal Bryan stood, dripping blood-tinged rainwater on the floor. The girl had pressed something to his chest. He had thought she was trying to cling to him, to help him carry her. That had not been necessary. To him she had been no heavier than an average duffel bag.
Stuck to his body armor, he found a small plasticized folder. A Commonwealth travel document. Her name was Hamida Qazi, and through her unimaginable nightmare of a struggle, she had ensured her daughter would be born.
A girl would live, one Dr. McKnight and her spouse, Annalies, would adopt and name Sienna.
6
YEARS GO BY
Despite having to use sunscreen, summer was always Bryan’s favorite North Carolina season. Near the Post, woods were chock full of freshwater marshlands. Slowly swaying reeds in the low waters and along the shores whispered the tunes of age-old harmonies.
One bright day, years after that night at 90 Charlie, he was on another sentry duty. Guarding a picnic basket. On leave, he had tagged along with the McKnight family on a picnic outing. Everything appeared quiet, except for those who knew where to look. And keep still.
Through curved Oakley lenses, he watched a salamander roll in a pat of mud. He heard the low, soft buzz of mayflies among the reeds, and he prepared to be pounced on. With barely a rustle through the tall grass, a fifty-pound jungle cat leaped from the bushes at her prey.
She landed on Bryan’s back.
He slumped to fragrant grass under a six-year-old Sienna. Her long brown hair was barely collected into two pigtails. After a brief tussle, she laughed victoriously and stared at him with kind intentness. He’d stopped shaving his head for a change, and it had immediately spouted dense cotton-white tufts. Sienna found it fascinating.
“It looks like fluffy clouds, Uncle Bryan,” she said. “How come other people don’t grow it that way?”
He smiled back. “After a spell, they do,” he replied. “But most people have to wait years and years to get a fro like this. Sometimes till they’re all of eighty or ninety years old!”
“You’re lucky, then,” concluded the girl with quick reflexes and observant ways.
“Darn straight I am. Very lucky indeed.”
• • •
Sienna’s road from middle school to commissioned US Army officer was paved with a string of hurts that tore Bryan up. It was so very unfair for her to lose one of her moms to an IED before her eighth birthday. That woman’s skill had saved a child and granted the last wish of a dying teenager. Theodora’s compassion and the love she built with Annalies had given that unwanted orphan a home. A bomb set off under an ambulance thousands of miles away took Dr. McKnight away from that home but not the hearts of those she left behind. The hatred behind the violence could not wrest her spirit from the girl who bore her name.
After, things there were never completely the same. Other truths of Sienna’s past lay lurking. At some point, she learned it was not an accident that had taken the life of her birth mother. One day, a girl learned premeditated evil had marked her from the moment she was born. Bryan wished she could have been spared just a while longer.
Bryan had had his own narrow escape. His brother, Elahaj, had told him all about it.
It was worse for her. He watched a six-month-old crawl in her playpen, how she would sometimes try to avoid using her right shoulder. The deepest of the purple-red gashes were there. It was as though she were adjusting to an invisible weight before she even knew what carrying it meant. As she grew to womanhood, Bryan knew he could never fully understand her burden and her pain, only that he would promise to always be there.
Corporal Bryan’s natural albino eyes saw her take her first steps. Career sergeant Bryan’s hella expensive ocular augments recorded HD 3-D scenes from Sienna’s West Point graduation, sombre hat toss and all. He would never have genetic offspring. The world was too filled with unyielding malice. To him, this hate, almost a stalking beast of a thing, it seemed so big and so strong that fighting it could deafen a soldier’s heart and blind a man’s soul.
By the time discussions about college came around, there was for once very little debate around the dinner table. Theodora’s parents had money. They were also never really partial to their only daughter’s relationship with Annalies. When they adopted Sienna, the in-laws became downright cold. He never met the older McKnight generation. His appearance might have spooked them beyond reckoning.
Upshot was, even pooling his and Annalies’s money, there was no way Sienna would get the private education she deserved. West Point and the GI Bill it was. She made it through the tough selection process. Then, even before her first class, her survivor’s luck was tested again. It made Bryan’s heart pound every time he thought about it.
The army academy was, academically, the equal of Harvard, Stanford, or any old Ivy League joint. But it was still a military institution. Those who were accepted received free tuition and board in exchange for a period of service to the country. Graduates headed off not to Wall Street, not to the NFL, but to duty assignments in the Army. They were not put in charge of investment portfolios or scrimmage assignments but the lives of their fellow soldiers. They are not destined to have drinks on board private planes headed for Macau or the Pro Bowl. Graduating second lieutenants boarded Hercules transports headed for places like Djoboro and Khorasan to protect their nation and the innocent.
On the start of Cadet McKnight’s four-year journey, Reception Day, he drove her to New York State and dropped her off at Michie Stadium. The guy on the loudspeaker gave the assembled candidates ninety seconds to say goodbye.
“I just had a thought, Sarge.” Sienna beamed; it seemed the whole stadium was not large enough to contain the excitement bursting inside her. “In ninety seconds, as a West Point cadet, I will legally outrank you in the chain of command. It says so in Army Command Policy AR 600-20.”
“Someone’s been studying up,” Bryan said. “Well, then, Cadet McKnight, ma’am, let me be the first NCO to give you a proper salute.”
Bryan and Sienna exchanged crisp ones. Then it took all of two seconds for them to exchange their patented handshake-hug, and then she was off.
When he looked back, she was helping some kid. A teenage boy had dropped his overstuffed civilian suitcase and spilled a dozen asthma inhalers. If the intentions of some very sick people had worked out, that would have been the last he ever saw of her.
Later, Bryan wished he’d taken her anywhere else but there. Somehow, whatever it was, evil, or like the preacher on the Post called it, “perfidy of the soul,” it had a bead on her and would not let up.
Sienna’s first milestone in her enlistment was basic training. It took place at Camp Buckner, about twelve miles away from West Point’s academic campus. The ordeal was called Beast Barracks
. It lasted for seven weeks.
Afterward, students always marched back to campus through Black Rock Forest. More of a celebratory picnic than an exercise, it was open to families and retired soldiers who wished to support cadets along the route. Beast March was a natural target for an atrocity.
That year, a group of well-organized crazies attacked the students and their families. They struck just outside a golf course, where their victims had to bunch up to go over a mesh-enclosed bridge. They knew their victims would not shoot back.
Cadet trainees carried their rifles but had not one round of ammunition among them. All bullets were safely stored back at Camp Buckner’s training armory. It was strictly against regulations to carry live ordnance on public roads and trails. Everyone obeyed. No one wanted to get expelled. More than that, it was a point of honor for all 1,288 future butterbar platoon leaders not to break rules. They had survived basic training, the hard part of first year was behind them.
Terrorists savagely amended that notion. They shot and bludgeoned and bayoneted cadets, their families, and onlookers. They even executed former alumni, retired veterans in their seventies and eighties who traditionally accompanied the first-year class on the unpaved path back the West Point campus gates. The soil of Black Rock Forest was littered with shell casings and soaked with blood.
When he and Annalies sent Sienna off, she was seventeen. Bryan was confident in her. She’d had a head start on everyone else. She had come into the world on an Army operating table. She’d been raised on the Post. She had been fighting since she was born.
But when the news of the travesty came, Bryan’s heart went cold. She had been through enough! Why couldn’t her years at college be free from hatred and violence? These thoughts rushed through his head as he and Annalies ran to catch an emergency flight, which landed at Steward Airport in New York.
They got updates on the way. Sienna was slightly wounded and out of the fight early. Lucky again. Over the next four years, she formed a lifelong friendship with a fellow survivor whose actions turned him into the hero of that day: Ennis Reidt.
