by Clay Martin
“And?” Mike gently prodded.
Letting out a long breath, Moore decided to give him this one. “Two more bodies, underneath the garden shed. Female, probably been there 10 years.”
Mike’s eyes blazed fire. “Well let’s have a little hypothetical then, just between us. You’re not my priest, so I’m not confessing anything. I hope you find your guy. And when you do, you give him a pat on the back, a medal, and some extra bullets. We need law and order in this country, which is your job. It keeps everyone honest, and playing by the rules. But once in a while, something truly evil rears its head. And the only thing you can do with pure evil is shoot it in the fucking head. No negotiation, no reforming, no debt to society to pay. No technicality to get off on, no million dollar legal team. Kill that motherfucker graveyard dead. As they say back in Texas, kill him and tell God he died. It’s the only course of action.”
Mike stared at him as he let that sink in.
“Now Agent Moore, you can charge me, or its time for me to go. I have places to be.”
Begrudgingly, the agents put Mike’s truck back together, and turned him loose.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Driving across the badlands of South Dakota, windows rolled down, Mike thought of how much things had changed. He had been adrift, a ship without sails, a man with no purpose. And now he had found redemption. He knew why he was still walking the Earth, why he had survived when so many of his teammates and friends hadn’t. Because he still had work to do. He had a seat in Valhalla, but they would hold it for him.
A phone rang from the glove box, which was weird since Mike’s was on the dash. And there had been no service for over an hour. Realization dawning on him, he popped the latch and pulled it out. It would be asking too much to think it belonged to the former owner.
A single text message, from a number he didn’t know. Virginia area code. Very subtle guys, very subtle. It read “Abandoned gas station in three miles, pull over.” Not the kind of message it pays to ignore. Mike saw the exit coming, and eased the truck down the ramp. Pulling up to the long defunct pumps, he stepped out into the sunny afternoon. A few minutes later, a black Volvo station wagon pulled up on the other side. A tall, light skinned black man stepped out of the driver’s side, dark ray bans masking his eyes.
“How have you been Mike?” He asked, pulling up his shirt and turning in a circle.
“I was actually having a wonderful day up until about five minutes ago. You’ll forgive me if I don’t do the same. I’m carrying, and it seems pointless to put it away. If you wanted to kill me, I suspect we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“Curiosity gets the best of me. How would you do that in our shoes Mike?”
Mike looked around casually, taking in his surroundings. “Long gun, right over there on the high spot in the rocks.” He was greeted with sunlight glinting off glass, an obvious tell. And a gift. Any sniper on this payroll would have a shade over the scope. “Or I’d just run me off the bridge over the next gorge, probably with a semi to make sure it worked.”
Ten seconds later, an unmarked big rig flew down the interstate, well above the speed limit. Now they were just showing off.
“Very fucking funny Colonel Nuvy. Or are you Mr. Smith today?”
The black man smiled. “Mr. Nuvy actually, thought it would be rude to play otherwise.”
“Well, you came a long way to see me. What is this about?”
“Like you don’t know. Be serious Mike. The FBI can’t access Canadian traffic cameras, but we can. Now I want you to know we aren’t upset about the cousin fuckers. They had that coming. But the Sheriff, really? You couldn’t be a little more discreet? Like maybe a shotgun at close range? That would have done the job too you know. How the fuck am I supposed to blame a 700 yard shot on pissed off white supremacists?”
Mike hadn’t really thought that part through actually. When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. It had been childish, but he really wanted to use that gun. “Yeah, I guess you have a point there. So am I in trouble?”
Nuvy looked at him like a disappointed father. No, you can’t use the car tonight. “We are willing to let one go. But just one. We don’t really care what happens out here, not our business. But we do care if it looks like one of Uncle Sugar’s killing machines is about to go totally off the reservation. We can’t have that. Makes the rest of us look bad, and people start asking questions. So try to keep it a little more refined. Next time, it won’t be me you see.”
Mike shuddered. He doubted it would be anyone he saw. Probably a pressure plate at the end of his driveway, or some poison soup. He wondered if they had traded the Russians for any Polonium 210 recently.
“Fair enough. Things got a little sporty for a while back there. My bad.”
Nuvy shook his head. Some things never change. “Alright then. Make sure you keep it off the radar if it happens again. Looks like you are headed out West. You’ll want to take this.” He said, handing Mike a Post-it note.” A member of the Association, personal friend, he can help you start over. He knows the ground out there. Best of luck.”
Mike took the Post-it. Nuvy turned and walked back to his car, driving away without another word.
Notes about the Characters
This is a work of fiction. But like all stories, the characters are based on real people. The main character Mike Bryant is based on two good friends of mine, and I hope this page will cause you to take a minute and remember the real heroes in the world. And all the ones from the GWOT that never got to come home.
CW2 Mike Duskin was a giant of a man, standing six foot, eight inches and weighing in a 280 pounds of twisted steel. His hobbies included shooting three guns with his son, and “picking heavy things up and moving them over there.” Despite his intimidating size, Mike was a fantastic mentor and teacher, and he always left his ego at the door. I lost the fast rope gloves he loaned me at SFAURTEC when I was a student and he was an instructor, and he gave me zero new guy shit about it. Later we became fast friends. My favorite story about Mike involved him beating one crackhead with another crackhead in the foyer of a Fayetteville Waffle House when they started some shit. If I had made him the actual central character of this novel, it would have ended many chapters earlier. On realizing he was captured, Mike would have busted the handcuffs and beat everyone to death on principle. It was a terrible blow to the Regiment the day we lost Mike Duskin, and you are missed. Killed in Action, 23 October 2012, Wardak Province, Afghanistan.
Sergeant First Class William Brian Woods Jr., was a very good friend I met during the Special Forces Qualification Course. Like myself, Brian was a former USMC Scout Sniper, having done his hitch with 7th Marine Regiment. Brian was the best Weapons Sergeant in Special Forces, which is pretty incredible since his actual MOS was Medical Sergeant. Brian became Bryant in the novel, because Woods would be a strange last name in a book set in the forest. Brian taught us more during the Q about weapons than I knew was possible, his hobby while cramming four years of medical school into a year of hell known as the 18 Delta course. Brian always had a hold out piece, which would also have ended the novel much sooner. Even if it was a keister stash. You are missed old friend.
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CHAPTER ONE
Preface
I remember where I was when the War started. Not the little brushfire war we had with Iraq and Afghanistan, though I remember where I was when that one started too. No, I mean the big one. What some people would e
ventually call World War III, though it made the previous two looks like a dust up in the school yard. The one that took us to the brink of extinction. How we got there didn’t seem to matter at the time, it never does in a crisis. All that mattered back then was staying alive. Age and what I hope is wisdom has changed my perspective a bit, but it is tempered with a healthy dose of cynicism. I’ve always had that, and what I saw over the years didn’t do much to dissuade it. I don’t think even foreknowledge of what would happen really would have changed anything. All the warning signs were there, but the population chose to ignore them, a recurring theme in history. People were busy going to the mall and watching reality TV, nothing bad could ever happen to them. The political class was busy getting rich off the backs of everyone else, maintaining the status quo, business as usual. Much too busy to think there could actually be a crisis big enough to upset the trough of easy money. The cable news liked to talk about dirty bombs and EMP attacks once in a while to boost ratings, but none of the so called experts saw what was really coming. All the conventional wisdom of the day liked to tell us that terrorist were outliers, Islam was actually a religion of peace, the mad mullah’s were just barking. We rattled sabers and talked a good game about keeping Iran and North Korea from acquiring nukes, but that was mostly just to keep them away from the big boy table. Pakistan acquired its doomsday weapons well before that, and was subsequently invited to be taken seriously. Nukes had so many safeguards in place, red phones and direct lines and serious looking diplomats, that they had basically become status symbols for statesmen. If you had the goods, you could run with the grown-ups. If you didn’t, you could expect to have your nose rubbed in the dirt at will. No more no less. No one really expected the missiles to fly, not when there were so many luxuries for leaders of nuclear nations to indulge in. They might occasionally puff up at the ancient enemies, but that was theater for the peasants. The elite class was never going to end life as we know it, not with so many pleasures to keep them entertained.
I suppose no one ever sees a paradigm shift coming. But one was on the wind. And it would answer a question the soldiers from the pointy end of the stick already understood, but that no Washington Beltway or Downing Street desk jockey could fathom. What would happen if one of these savage eyed Bedouin lunatics preaching about a new caliphate ever actually acquired a doomsday weapon? Simple. He would use it.
My name is Derek Martell, and this is my story. The story of how mankind was almost pushed into the abyss. How we fought back, how we bled and died by the thousands to claw our way out from the darkness. The terrible price we paid, and how I survived. At least for now.
CHAPTER TWO
The day the world almost ended, I was manning a mostly irrelevant outpost on the Iranian border. It was a long fall for a man like me, but the pay was decent, and the odds of getting shot were higher in Chicago. So I had that going for me. Officially, the name of the place was Combat Outpost Cramer, named after some poor bastard that bought it back in 05. The plaque near the front gate said he was a paratrooper from the 82nd, so he deserved better than what COP Cramer had become, which was a glorified gas station. We called it 7/11, and unfortunately home. I was not that long retired from 3rd Special Forces Group, a victim of Obama’s purge of the warfighters in the years leading up to the end of his second term. Why was I at a refueling depot in a god-forsaken corner of the sandbox, not running Commando Steve missions of derring-do and glory? Good question. I asked myself that plenty of times, too.
Most of it had to do with the great purge, which had driven down the price of labor across the board for all of us former ninja’s. 2021 was a rough time to only possess the skill set of killing bad guys, with the decline of American power abroad. Our first Orange President had lasted only long enough to wipe ISIS off the map before the opposition party managed to have him and his VP impeached, mostly on some made up charges and some highly sketchy testimonies. The Soy Boy Speaker of the House became President, and picked a recently pardoned Hillary as his second, hoping to appease the populace since she “won the popular vote. A few days later he resigned, and the circle was complete. Wrath of the Clinton beast soon followed. There were some predictable protest, and some III% groups even tried to start an armed rebellion. Kill-ary responded with a jack booted lesson that would have made Janet Reno blush. The deep state, so bent on the destruction of Trump, had closed ranks to protect their Queen. Military men quit in droves, most of them heading out West. The ones that didn’t hang it up in disgust at the banana republic politics left not long after, when the full-fledged tranny circus invaded all the services. The once great US Military, praetorian guard of the world’s only superpower, crumbled from within. Twelve years of combined social experiments and humiliation did what no foreign power ever could. It reduced our forces to ashes. The new military was a giant welfare leach at best, often proving incapable of tying its own proverbial shoes. I guess that is a skill you learn after you decide what genitals you want to wear.
Anyway, the flood of surplus labor wreaked havoc on the contracting market. Even a year before, I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $750 a day plus per diem. And we better have all the new Arc’teryx Gucci kit to boot. Now, when you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting ten pipe hitting Special Operations Tier eleventy bad asses, the game had changed. Contracts that once had prerequisites like “must be breathing, two years military service (waivable), and reasonably capable of hitting the floor with a dropped pistol” now said things like “if we could print the name of your Unit, please do not apply” and filled up overnight. I was caught with my pants down. I had made some bad choices after I got bounced out of the service, spent time like an idiot figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, enjoying nature, exploring the country I had defended but rarely seen all those years. Stupid, but I did it. The few coins I had made from contracts I had mostly blown on fast cars and faster women, which didn’t seem like a mistake at the time, but certainly did when they were over. Not to mention, I felt something like patriotism rising in my throat every time I saw that traitorous bitch on TV. I had a lot of years of experience on a sniper rifle and a bad whiskey habit, I needed to get out of the country for a while. Before I did something me and the Secret Service both regretted in the morning. I just needed a little nest egg to buy some land in Wyoming before the revolution started. You have to have somewhere to make popcorn for the fireworks show. With a national divorce on the horizon, Wyoming’s low population density made it unlikely to be strategic ground for either side. So I took the first job I could land, which took me back to Iraq at half my usual pay. And what a miserable job it was going to be.
COP Cramer was located North East of Al Kut, which is to say in the middle of nowhere. It existed only as a midway refueling point between Firebase Apache in the North and Firebase Clark in the South, on the rare occasions supplies or troops needed to move between those two points. Most people thought Madam President would appease her base by pulling all the forces out of Iraq, especially since ISIS was gone. She must’ve owned stock in KBR though, there was still a large troop presence conducting train and advise missions. These days that mostly meant salsa night and an excuse to ask for a discount at Home Depot back home for the rest of your life, though there were still some Green Berets and others trying to do the right thing. The tide was against them, but God bless them, they were trying.
The COP was part Old West fort, and part prison. At least it felt like a prison to those of us stuck there for a year. We had an exterior wall of Hesco barriers, 400 meters to a side in a square. The Hesco itself was a wonderful invention, basically a wire mesh basket lined with a thick canvas material. Fill it up with dirt from a back hoe, and you have a six foot by six foot Lego block you can stack and build with. It has a side benefit of being able to stop anything short of a direct hit by an artillery round, and it better be a big artillery round. Inside the walls we had a living quarters, a gym, a 50 meter range
for test firing weapons, a chow hall, and not much else. In the back left corner was the fuel farm, further protected by 20 foot concrete Jersey barriers. The fuel farm was segregated into smaller sections, also with concrete walls, to lower the chances of a direct hit from indirect fire. In theory, the same walls would contain most of the blast if one of the massive fuel blivets did happen to go up. At least that was what we told ourselves.
At least I wasn’t alone, though there were days my guard post felt like a life sentence in solitary. I had a good crew with me, and we were making the best of a bad situation. Scott Dodge was a fellow 3rd Grouper, though our paths hadn’t crossed much before. His left arm was mangled from an RPK round in Afghanistan years before, same night his team earned all the Silver Stars in the inventory. I think they had to melt down J. Edgar Hoovers earring collection to make the last one, but they deserved them. Scott was an 18 Charlie (Special Forces Engineer Sergeant) in his past life, which meant he was good at demo, which was pretty much useless at the moment. Fortunately the other Charlie job is team supply monkey, which was useful. Frank Gold was a former 18 Delta from 10th Group, which means he must’ve been more hard up than I was, or he had some bad black marks on his resume. 18D denotes Special Forces Medic, and they are the best in the world at trauma management. If I was all shot up in the street, I would rather have an 18D working on me than a Vascular Surgeon. A surgeon can fix things a Delta can’t spell, but a Delta cannot be beat at keeping you alive long enough to ride a chopper to the hospital. Those boys are looked at like they are made of gold in a combat zone, and I was very lucky to have one on hand. Even if he was a veritable midget, at five foot six wearing boots. Maybe he liked the not getting shot at much part of our new job. Rounding out my American contingent, Willie Pirelli, an old hand from Force Recon, then MARSOC (Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command), then Force Recon some more. I liked making up new acronyms for his unit when I introduced him to strangers. I really wish the USMC would figure its system out, it gets confusing for us Army types. Willie was from New York, which also gave me reason to abuse him over his accent. Poor bastard. Stuck on a COP as the only Jarhead with three SF guys, and a Yankee to boot.
