by Sean Parnell
Demo’s gravestone was simple, like most of them here. The engraving said: robert d. cortez, sgm, us army, 1960–2018, gwot, silver star, purple heart, “send me.”
It might have seemed somewhat curt and cryptic, except to someone like Steele, who’d known Demo so well. His real middle name had been Emmanuel, which he hated, but he couldn’t have his Program handle carved on a gravestone, so D was what he’d ordered in his Last Will and Testament. It was the same for his rank and branch of service—just a simple sergeant major in the army—and his dates of birth and death; the actual months and days would have given away too much to the foreign spooks who sometimes cruised Arlington looking to connect intelligence dots. Steele thought the mention of only the Global War on Terror was smirk-worthy, since Demo had fought in multiple theaters, from Panama to Syria, but there wasn’t enough room for ten wars, both authorized and covert, so he’d chosen his last big game. He’d selected the two decorations that meant the most to him, and the quote from the Old Testament that was his essence.
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”
Steele stood there, looking down at the top of the gravestone, a smooth curving slab of granite. Visitors left all kinds of things on the stones at Arlington and Demo’s was no different. There was a can of Bandits chewing tobacco, probably from one of Demo’s old Ranger buddies, one empty 5.56 mm brass shell casing, a sapphire stone, maybe from Demo’s aging mom, a worn Special Forces tab, from another battle buddy, Steele guessed, and a challenge coin from someone in the 3rd Special Forces Group. He found a small spot between the Bandits and the bullet and laid the soggy Casa Blanca down. Then he stepped back, came to attention, and offered Demo a long slow salute. Right after that, in his head, he heard Demo’s rasp saying, Have a seat, mano, so he did, right there in the wet grass facing the stone.
“I got lots of crap on my mind, brother,” Steele whispered. He didn’t bother to look around to make sure no one was watching and might think he was nuts. Everyone at Arlington talked to themselves, or to someone who wasn’t there anymore.
Spill it, and don’t leave anything out.
“Well, we lost Six, which you probably already know about. Then, they moved Main over to some prissy office complex up by Dupont. After that, I pulled off a job somewhere I can’t say out loud, and the former Soviets sent some goon to remove my skull. And now, I’ve got more than a nagging suspicion that we’ve got at least a leaker, if not a full-blown traitor inside.”
I knew the friggin’ place would go to shit without me.
“And, you stuck me with this turd slice, Dalton Goodhill. I mean WTF? Really?”
Sorry about that. . . .
“But I’ve been thinking maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve been hitting it too hard for too long. Maybe I’m finally losing my mind.”
Well, you didn’t have much of a mind when we met. You were pretty much just cold steel, which is why I recruited you.
“Is that some sort of a pun?”
The dead don’t pun, mano.
Steele thought that was funny, and could actually imagine Demo quipping something just like that. Or had Demo actually just said it? Somehow, from somewhere? He looked up at the heavens and the crystal-blue summer sky, and then he heard the all-too-familiar sound of helo rotors in the near distance, beating the humid air as they often did around Washington. And they took him back to that other time and place. . . .
Forward Operating Base “Turnbolt” was about to be overrun, and there wasn’t a damn thing the men of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 627 could do about it, except fight to the death. The alternative was to be captured, humiliated, tortured, and beheaded while some Haji asshole made a vid of it with his Samsung and posted it on the net for all their families back home to watch. Their A-team commander, Captain Brian Smith, had already made the decision to fight it out and had relayed that over comms, which was a good thing, because he couldn’t talk anymore. He’d taken an AK-47 round through the right side of his plate carrier and had a sucking chest wound.
Some fucking moron, maybe in the Army Corps of Engineers back at Bagram, had decided that building an FOB in the ass crack of an Afghan valley only three klicks from the Durand Line and Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Arandu was a good idea. It wasn’t really a full-blown FOB with hardened structures, T-walls, guard towers, and a decent DFAC where you could at least enjoy a hearty last meal. It was pretty much a pissant Fire Base, with plywood hooches, a mortar pit, an ammo dump, and a perimeter of slit trenches surrounded by piles of sandbags and HESCOE barriers, which were nothing more than huge squares of heavy chicken wire filled to the brim with loose rocks and dirt. The heaviest armored protection was the team’s own gun trucks, and their only secret weapon was a satcom so they could call in something with real firepower, like an AC-130 Spectre gunship or a pair of A-10 Warthogs.
It reminded Steele of Vietnam’s Khe Sanh, and everyone knew how that one had turned out.
None of them had ever experienced this kind of incoming before. The Hajis were dropping 60 mm mortar rounds all over the place, which were inaccurate but scary as hell because you can’t hear mortar rounds until they hit. RPGs were punching into the hooches from 360 degrees, and all the canvas sunshades were on fire. A Russian DShK “Dashka” 12.7 x 108 mm heavy machine gun was raking the FB and kicking up twisters of dust as the rounds pinged off rocks and the tracers went ricocheting around like burning pinballs, and the torrent of AK-47 fire from all the hills was like something from Al Pacino’s last stand in Scarface. Everyone who wasn’t dead already was deaf.
There were only twelve men on the team, plus the captain, his warrant officer shadow, some poor kid E-4 specialist from the veterinary clinic at Bragg who’d been dropped in to help treat goats and mules in the nearby villages, and one air force joint tactical air controller to call in air support. That man, Technical Sergeant Jason Flatley, had done everything he could before having his skull cracked open by a Haji sniper with a 7.62 mm Dragunov. But it didn’t matter much now. A pair of valiant A-10 Warthog pilots had beaten back the Hajis with their 30 mm cannons until they were “winchestered” and had no choice but to fly back to Bagram for reloads. Flatley had then called in a 9-line for an AC-130, but the Spectre gunship had been called off because FOB Turnbolt was surrounded by Pashtun villages, and that’s exactly where the Hajis had set themselves up.
The Taliban were nobody’s fools; they knew the American Rules of Engagement by heart, and that lawyers were running this war from the Pentagon.
Master Sergeant Eric Steele was beginning to think he was the only one left on his feet. An AK round had bitten his right thigh pretty hard, but it hadn’t cracked bone and he hadn’t even bothered to bandage it. Another one had split his MICH helmet, but his MBITR radio still seemed to be working, except nobody was answering his calls. One of their SAW gunners, Tommy Spellman, was dead, so Steele had taken Tommy’s M249 and all his drums and was hammering back at the Hajis over the sandbag walls as he sprinted from position to position, and the news just got worse and worse, corpse after corpse. His adrenaline level was red lining, but the good news was that he knew he was going to die, so at least he wouldn’t have to console any of their families. Someone else was going to have to do that for his mom, but it wouldn’t be anyone here.
Every time he found a frag on the ground, he pulled the pin and hurled it. Every time he found a LAW, he popped the tube open, squinted through his dripping sweat, and nailed some of the fuckers with a rocket. At one point a turbaned maniac popped up on top of a HESCOE, and Steele dropped the M249, reached up, gripped the bastard by his salwar kameez, yanked him to the ground while he whipped his Gerber StrongArm blade from his Load-Bearing Vest, and drove it so hard into the man’s throat that he pinned him to the ground like a butterfly.
At that point he was covered with blood—his own, and theirs—and he passed into the realm of combat madness. The air
stank of scorched cordite, dust, sweat, explosive smoke, fire, and piss from the corpses. Steele knew there were probably more than a hundred of them out there and no way to fight them all off, and nobody was coming, or if they were, they’d never get there fast enough.
He ran back to the mortar pit, where Captain Smith was lying on his back in the dust, and Sergeant Major Henry Hide was sitting next to him. Hide had pulled off Smith’s plate carrier and was applying an Asherman dressing to his right lung lobe where he’d cut open his uniform top with a knife. Steele skidded to a stop and stared down at Hide, who he thought was doing an impressive job under the hail of gunfire, especially since Hide’s right foot was completely gone. He’d applied his own tourniquet, and he was sucking on a fentanyl painkilling lollipop.
“So how’s this Hearts and Minds thing going for ya, Eric?” Hide shouted up at Steele as he aligned the Asherman’s “chimney” vent with Captain Smith’s frothy pink chest wound. Smith was as pale as vanilla ice cream and his fists were clenched to bone white, but he was holding his own.
“This wasn’t in the recruiting brochure,” Steele yelled back. An RPG rocket whooshed over his head and struck a fir tree nearby, but he didn’t even duck.
“Where’s Tommy and BJ?” Hide asked.
“Gone.”
“Like we’re all gonna be in a few,” Hide said, as if he were referring to a picnic where the hamburgers and hot dogs were running low.
“And I can’t raise anybody else on comms,” Steele said.
“I called Alamo back to Jalalabad,” Hide said, meaning that their battalion now knew that they were being overrun.
“What’d they say?”
“Good luck and God bless.” Hide grinned up at Steele and said, “All the gun trucks are fucked. Take Smith and go. Maybe you’ll make it if you run south and don’t stop.”
Steele shook his head like a kid who’d just been told by his pop to go to bed early.
“Come here, Son,” Hide said as he crooked a finger at Steele. The sergeant major was the oldest man in the ODA. Steele took a few steps and bent closer, thinking that Hide might be losing so much blood his voice was failing. But instead, Hide grabbed him by the top of his chest plate and yanked him so close they were nose to nose. “Now you listen to me and you listen good. I’m bleedin’ out, so I wouldn’t even make it to a bird. You go now, and you take this fine young officer here with you, because otherwise every single one of us is going to die and our families will never know what happened to us. I am your enlisted superior and I am giving you a direct order. Are we fucking crystal clear?”
It was a moment before Steele nodded. Hide pushed him away, grinned, and pulled his M9 pistol from his thigh holster.
“Now haul his ass up and get moving, Eric,” he said. “I’m gonna let these fuckers come in, send as many of them to their seventy-two virgins as I can, and save the last bullet for myself.”
They shook hands. Steele could hear the victorious warbles and whoops of the Taliban as they started flooding the trenches at the northern side of the FOB. He dropped the M249, slung his M4 around to the front of his LBV with the strap around his neck so he could shoot one-handed, then bent and hauled Brian Smith up onto his shoulders like a firefighter. Hide tossed him a bottle of water from the ground and Steele jammed it into his side pocket. Smith groaned in his ear, “Put me the fuck down,” but Steele ignored him. Hide gave him a snappy salute, and Steele turned and took off.
Steele never stopped. He killed five of the enemy with off-hand double-taps on his way out of the FOB, and another three in the woods of the southern downslope. A few more chased him for a while, but when he fragged their point man, they decided that the slaughter and ransacking back at the Americans’ Fire Base was more than enough glory for one day.
On that day in Afghanistan, Eric Steele discovered that his body was a machine wholly governed by his mind. He erased the pain and walked, with the full deadweight of his unconscious captain bouncing on his shoulders and crushing his neck and spine, and refused to allow any construct of human biology to hinder his mission in any way. Hide’s words were locked right there like the final credits of a film behind his eyes, and he was going to survive for all of them.
The kilometers clicked away, the water eventually ran dry, and he trudged through the parched wadis and rock-strewn valleys, always heading south, while the hawks and vultures circled in the purpling sky above and hoped for his final stumbles. But there were none of those; just one footfall after another. He never tried to call for help using his MBITR, because he knew the Hajis had interceptors and he wasn’t sure how much fight he had left. He’d just kept on walking, always south, knowing that eventually he’d hit J-Bad.
He’d walked about sixty kilometers, or almost forty miles, and he was standing atop a small rise, getting his breath in the late-evening air, when he heard the helo. One thing he was sure about, the Hajis had no air assets, so the sound of those rotors was music to his gunfire-bruised eardrums. When the MH-60 Night Stalker Blackhawk set down in a roiling cloud of dust a hundred meters away, Steele finally fell to his knees. But he never dropped Brian Smith.
A warrior bristling with weapons jumped from the open cargo door and ran toward him, followed by a pair of medics hauling aid kits and a folding stretcher. They eased Captain Smith off Steele’s shoulders, onto the canvas litter, and sprinted back to the bird. The man who’d led them to Steele knelt in front of Eric and grinned.
“You’re Eric Steele, aren’t ya?”
Steele cocked his half-delirious, weary head, wondering how anyone could possibly know that.
“Sorry about your team, Steele. Let’s go home, such as home is.” The man gripped Steele’s arm, helped him to his feet, and guided him toward the rumbling Blackhawk.
“Who the hell are you?” Steele asked.
“Name’s Bobby Cortez, but you can call me Demo. I’m gonna be your new best friend. . . .”
Steele knuckled a tear from the corner of his right eye and put his Oakley shades back on. He remembered his father’s battle buddy, Bo Nolan, had once told him that “Special Forces soldiers don’t cry,” but he figured that one drop for Demo would be forgiven.
On that very last night in Afghanistan, after the docs at Craig Hospital at Bagram had patched him up, Demo had told him privately that a certain government covert organization had been tracking his army career for years. They’d been waiting to see if he’d accomplish something special while serving in SF, something that would show them he had the right stuff, and it looked like what he’d just done at Turnbolt was it. The last thing on Steele’s mind that night was assessing for an outfit higher up the ladder than 3rd Group, especially with the gunfire still ringing in his ears and the stench of blood in his nostrils, but he’d had his fill of Afghanistan and figured he’d go for it.
It was his first inkling of something called the Program.
He stared at Demo’s gravestone and the small row of memorial trinkets on top. For a moment he thought about taking the cigar away, because the first rain that came might make it stain the pristine granite with tobacco juice. Then he left it alone because he knew that Demo would like that.
“You were something else, brother,” he whispered.
I was indeed, wasn’t I?
Then Steele switched his gaze to the challenge coin. Lots of service members from all the branches carried them around, and the tradition was that if you pulled yours out and dropped it on a bar, and the guy next to you didn’t have his on hand, he’d be the one buying everyone drinks. But a Special Forces coin meant much more than that. It was a touchstone, an amulet, the currency of courage.
He squinted at it and suddenly remembered something that Demo had once said to him while they were deep in the shit in a firefight in Africa and it wasn’t looking good for posterity.
“If I don’t make it out, and you do, mano, I’ll coin you from somewhere.”
At the time, Steele had thought it was nothing but a quip, cool bravado under
fire. But now he got to his feet, picked up the coin, and stared at it. The front had the standard SF emblem of crossed arrows over a commando knife, with the surrounding banner that said de oppresso liber—To Liberate the Oppressed—and an emblazoned numeral 3. He turned it over, where the back had the Group motto, we do bad things to bad people.
But Demo hadn’t served in 3rd Group. He’d started out as a Ranger and had gone straight from there to Delta. So who’d left it there? Did it mean something? Steele examined the worn letters and symbols and numerals, but saw no “after market” message carved anywhere, and certainly no way to open the coin like a watch back. It was solid brass.
But now his heart rate picked up a pace, because he was wholly convinced that the coin was intended for him.
He slipped it into his pocket and headed back into the trees.
Chapter 14
No Acknowledged Location
EYES ONLY
SAP (Alpha FLASH)
From: Alpha Ops Middle East
To: Cutlass Main
Subj: KRYTON NUCLEAR TRIGGERS EN ROUTE CHABAHAR, IRAN
Source: IDF AMAN Mil Intel, Unit 8200
Confidence: High/Confirmed MI6, Venice Station
IMMINENT Iranian IRGC transport of 74 Kryton Nuclear Triggers, type Perkin-Elmer Components Corp., from Trieste, Italy, to Port of Chabahar, Iran, via Suez Canal. Vessel type, cargo; Vessel class, Delvar; Vessel#, 482; Vessel name, Chiroo; displacement, 1,300 tons loaded; dimensions, 63.45 x 11 meters (208 x 36 ft); crew, 20; armament, 1 dual 23 mm AA (camouflaged); flag, Nigeria (false); color scheme, white over red.
Operational window, 13 hours. Alternative options, none, kinetic only.
Alpha response—URGENT.
Chapter 15
Trieste, Italy
Collins Austin left the Greif Maria Theresia hotel precisely at midnight, because she knew the Iranian vessel Chiroo would be leaving the port precisely at two.
