All sorts of chaos was going down on the ground floor to Turnbull’s left – dudes running around, shouting, kicking over tables, kicking up piles of powder into toxic clouds. He didn’t see any of them with a weapon in hand yet, so they were the police commandos’ problem. Turnbull’s job was to clear the upstairs, and he bounded over the fallen door and onto the steps, taking two at a time upwards into the dank second floor, slipping two replacement shells into the Remington’s feed along the way.
The stairway rose up to the end of a long hallway going left; a couple of dirty, bare 60 watt incandescent bulbs hanging from cords dropping out of the ceiling threw off the only light. Not very climate change conscious, he noted.
Turnbull hit the landing and pivoted, 12 gauge up and ready. Just as he expected, there were two doorways leading into rooms off of the hall to the left, and then another room straight down at the far end.
Movement left – a big guy popped out of the first door, his face registering utter, fatal confusion.
The terrorist had a battered AK in one paw, but it was pointed down at the grimy carpet. Amateur, Turnbull assessed. Turnbull was already charging down the hall so he could not have stopped even if he had wanted to, and he didn’t want to. The terrorist froze seeing the American coming at him, shotgun barrel pointed directly at his face. Turnbull went straight on and speared him with it – the barrel caught one of his cheek bones and ripped through the skin with Turnbull’s 200 solid pounds behind it. The terrorist staggered back, a bloody flap under his left eye where the barrel had hit him.
Given a couple more seconds, the terrorist might have remembered that he was carrying an assault rifle, but he didn’t live that long. Turnbull half-stepped back, then shot him in the face. The buckshot went in through where his nose had been and out the back, painting the grimy walls with a sheet of crimson terrorist brains. He dropped to the floor like a sack of wet shit.
The American racked another shell into the chamber and scanned for targets. None, no movement. Ignoring the yelling from downstairs, he peeked around the doorframe into the first room. It seemed empty and he didn’t bother clearing it properly. No time. If some other shithead came out behind him, he’d deal with him. Right now, Kelly Turnbull had bigger fish to fry.
A few more steps and he was looking into the second room, his 870 searching for targets. None.
Instead, a girl, probably late teens, was tied down and bent forward over a wooden table. She was naked, of course, and bloody. She tilted her head around and back toward the American, eyes blackened and swollen, lips puffed up and red between her teeth. She looked right into his eyes, with no emotion or anger. She didn’t seem to want from Turnbull any outrage or concern. She saw in his eyes what Turnbull was going to do to her tormenter and that was enough.
Turnbull left the girl tied there and threw himself against the door of the last room at the end of the hall.
The flimsy door almost broke apart, but it held together enough to swing open and out of Turnbull’s way. It was the bedroom of Khalid al-Afridi.
Until Turnbull had wandered into his life, he had been happily handling millions of dollars for the rebel groups and, of course, kidnapping and sodomizing the occasional girl or boy who caught his eye.
The Accountant had been educated in Los Angeles before 2001; his dad was a secular government bigwig. After the liberation, the whole family had gone into the Sunni jihadist business. Sycophants of a secular dictator to enablers of fundamentalist savages – the al-Afridi family was nothing if not adaptable.
Now, the Accountant himself was standing there utterly naked, hands up, shaking. The girl’s blood was smeared across his stomach through his pubic hair and across the front of his thighs. There was a Makarov pistol about two meters away on the bedside table. There was no way he could reach it, no way he could effectively resist.
“Stop! Put down the gun!” Turnbull shouted perfunctorily, loud enough for the commandos to hear downstairs.
“Wait, I’m…” he stuttered, just as Turnbull fired a swarm of buckshot into his groin, making sure to obliterate his bladder and as much of the pelvis itself, and the nerves running through it, as possible. Khalid collapsed onto the floor at a terrible angle, bending at a place people just aren’t supposed to bend. Stunned, the Accountant, simply moaned. Blood was pouring out of him and onto the floor.
The American racked another shell into the chamber and quickly assured himself there was no one else in the room. Then he took the Makarov off the nightstand, walked over to the wounded man, and squatted. Turnbull could hear the ruckus downstairs dying down, so he needed to work fast. He bathed the Makarov in the blood spurting out of the Accountant’s ruined gut.
“You have a ledger, right? Look at me, pal.” Turnbull grabbed his chin because his eyes were starting to roll back. “Point to where they are for me and I’ll get you patched up and you’ll be out paymastering and fucking teenagers again before you know it. You hear me?”
Hope is a powerful ally. Khalid pointed to under a dresser. Turnbull got up, scanned it for wires, and then reached underneath into the hiding place. Bingo, the ledger.
Satisfied, Turnbull turned back to the Accountant.
“Drop it!” he shouted, again loud enough for his team to hear it downstairs.
The Accountant seemed surprised. He started shaking his head “No,” then began sobbing.
Turnbull nodded.
“Yeah, I totally lied to you,” Turnbull whispered, and shot him in the sternum. Then he tossed the Makarov to the dead man’s side. It came to rest in an expanding pool of red.
The lieutenant and another police commando were racing up the hall to rescue him when he stepped out of the Accountant’s room. One of them split off to take care of the girl; from the fury in his eyes, it was pretty clear the lieutenant had seen her.
“Sorry. He pulled a weapon. I had to defend myself,” Turnbull said, shrugging.
They could hear the freed girl’s sobbing now.
“Good,” said the Iraqi lieutenant.
The heart of the U.S. military’s police commando advisory presence in Iraq was at a non-descript compound of buildings at an old Iraqi-turned-American-turned-Iraqi-turned American again army base on the outskirts of Baghdad. It held the hundred or so Green Berets and their support personnel, none of whom were supposed to be there. To the north, on another base, was the official U.S. presence, dedicated to America’s half-hearted efforts against the reconstituting Islamic State, which had been largely annihilated in Iraq under President Trump’s administration.
Turnbull preferred to stay with the police commandos he was working within their quarters – rough conditions didn’t bother him. The benefits of good food and many big screen televisions at the US compound were outweighed by the costs – too many people trying to talk to him and interfere in what he was doing. Plus, the only way to really develop local forces was to embed with them – you had to be there, right beside them, eating with them, fighting with them, even dying with them.
But occasionally he had to come in and, not surprisingly, the colonel wanted to see him. Turnbull walked through the compound toward the command building, listening to the gunfire in the distance. There were a lot of bad guys out there; Baghdad was slowly going to hell again, the bloody gains of the last few years squandered by the feckless hacks in the Clinton White House. He could stay busy here for a while.
Turnbull sighed. It was a pain being at the task force HQ. On earlier deployments, when he was leading a Special Forces “A” team instead of working alone with the indigenous forces, his unit operated almost completely on its own, tens or even hundreds of miles from its higher headquarters. On one Afghanistan rotation, his unit had helicoptered in on October 16th, and Turnbull didn’t see his commander again until December 23rd. Both of them were pleased with that arrangement. But now, there were always plenty of the battalion’s staff weenies and civilian “advisors” around to watch and “help,” and to narc the teams out. If the commander
wasn’t so squared away, it would be unbearable.
Things were tightening up on the teams. Less freelancing than before – much less. Instead of running a specified area, cultivating their own contacts, the teams were acting largely on intel other folks gathered. Usually, it was bad. That’s why Turnbull tried to work his own sources, though it was not always possible. Sometimes he had no choice but to take tips from people he’d otherwise be inclined to shoot. The Shia militia, backed and run by the Iranians, had terrific sources. But, of course, they also had their own agenda.
If he was forced to rely on someone else’s source, he always insisted on having a personal chat with the source before going on a mission. What a military intelligence guy or some Iranian spook thinks is important is often a lot different than what the guy kicking in the door thinks is important. And a source provided by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer might send you into a trap that ends with your head getting sawed off on YouTube.
Turnbull could be a little more persuasive than some E4 with 16 weeks of HUMINT training at Fort Huachuca. Those guys would talk to the source, and as they were trained, try to create a rapport based on shared values and cultural cues. In contrast, Turnbull would take his .45, shove it into the subject’s face, and count to three. And if the source didn’t interrupt him with some interesting tidbit before he got there, it would be a short conversation.
This was a startlingly effective technique, but it was just one more source of friction between Turnbull and the REMFs, the rear echelon motherfuckers who seemed to live to ensure victory always remained just out of reach. Turnbull found the staff pukes’ short-sightedness tiresome.
They found Turnbull dangerous.
So now, Turnbull worked alone with the natives – everyone preferred it that way.
Turnbull went into the tactical operation center after flashing his ID to the unsmiling guards. Inside, the staff majors and captains glared at him. His clothes were ratty and his unshaven face made him look less like an Army O3 than a roadie for Motörhead.
Turnbull ignored them and went to the back where Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Deloitte was sitting. Deloitte had a cup of coffee and a bad Army haircut. If he had wanted, his uniform could have been covered with so many scare badges –Special Forces and Ranger tabs, Combat Infantryman Badge, airborne, HALO, SCUBA – that they would have made him look like a walking PX.
But that wasn’t Jeff Deloitte. And that was why if some asswipe had tossed a hand grenade into that tent right then, Kelly Turnbull would have made sure he beat his commander to jump onto it.
“I told you I wanted prisoners, Kelly,” Deloitte began. “I mean, not just flunky prisoners.”
“Just didn’t work out that way,” Turnbull replied, pausing before adding a “Sir.”
“It never seems to work out that way with you,” the colonel replied. “You know Kelly, when a commander – and I’m yours – expresses a wish for something to happen, or not to happen, that’s still an order even if he doesn’t announce ‘This is an order?’ You know how command works, right?”
Turnbull just stood there and shrugged.
Deloitte went on. “The MI guys went over the Accountant’s room. The S2 thinks you just dropped the gun.”
“Well, if he didn’t have one, then maybe I mistook his bloody hard-on from raping that teenage girl for a gun. Or maybe I was worried he’d pull a pistol out of the crack of his ass,” Turnbull suggested helpfully.
“You have a lot of anger, Kelly,” he said.
“I have a lot of police commandos whose families that bastard paid to have butchered. Anyway, the rules of engagement allow me to defend myself – at least, they do for now – and I did. I was in fear of my safety and stuff.” Turnbull suppressed a smile at the thought of being court martialed for blasting the Accountant in the nutsack, with him on the stand explaining to the jury of my fellow officers about how the Accountant had been sodomizing a young lady right before the 12 gauge interrupted his party. They’d probably give him a medal.
“Kelly, you’re great at direct action. Great. Too good, because our real mission isn’t doing the trigger pulling. We’re supposed to be training the locals to do for themselves.”
“I can’t lead from the FOB, sir.”
“You also can’t win their war for them all by yourself.”
Turnbull would have ignored it coming from anyone else. And if he hadn’t known Deloitte so well, he might have mistaken his commander’s reticence for weakness. But Deloitte had walked the walk as far as developing indigenous forces. In fact, after turning a primitive tribe of rural Afghans into a top flight fighting force, he and his team had cleared an entire district of Taliban. Deloitte put down his lessons learned in a field manual, and then he taught them in the Q-course at Ft. Bragg. Among his students: Kelly Turnbull.
“One more thing. You have a meeting at 0900 at the embassy annex,” the colonel said. “Clean up.”
“What’s it about, sir?”
“I’m not quite sure. But you’re supposed to have all your stuff ready to go.”
All of Turnbull’s stuff consisted of his guns, a backpack and a duffel bag with some clothes and a single paperback book – some early Vince Flynn novel he had read on the C-17 coming over. No photos, no diary, no iPad. He piled it all into a Blackhawk that had dropped out of the night sky into the base’s landing zone, obviously summoned long before the encounter with the colonel. Turnbull figured it was a temporary assignment or debriefing or something and expected to be back with his commandos soon.
Still, it wasn’t like the old days when there were helicopters all over the place. Someone with some heat had dialed up this ride. Since no one was trying to put handcuffs on him – a contingency he was mentally prepared to respond to with massive violence – Turnbull figured he’d wait and see how this all played out.
The flight was uneventful and short. Looking out, Turnbull could imagine the Saigon 1975 scene that would ensue there if (when) the Islamic State got its wish and took Baghdad. The few special ops guys were certainly helpful, but that wouldn’t be enough to keep the animals at bay forever. Then he thought about how he was going to get himself out into the field again. After all, there were a lot of jihadis out there, and he meant to kill every one of them that crossed his path.
In Afghanistan, during his second tour, Turnbull stopped counting after he shot his thirty-fifth al-Qaeda guy. Of course, his definition of an “al-Qaeda guy” was never that strict – he was perfectly happy to do any kind of terrorist, or terrorist-enablers, or even terrorist friends and well-wishers, but the real points came from a genuine al-Qaeda guy. Still, Taliban, Islamic State, Baathist, Wahhabi nutjob, generic jihadi enabler, random child-abusing pervert; it was all good. Turnbull shot them all equally.
The Blackhawk landed inside another compound while it was still dark. There was a pair of big, beefy guys with large weapons and civilian clothes waiting. Turnbull was ushered into a dimly lit building inside its own ring of concertina wire. Spook Central.
Turnbull hated spooks.
The guards didn’t come inside the building. Instead, they shut the door behind him, leaving Turnbull alone with an obviously American guy in his mid-forties dressed in casual slacks and a collared shirt – no tie, since it was still 80 even though the sun was just coming up. His hair was grey and styled like a Roman senator’s, almost like a bowl. And there was a second man, in civilian clothes and Middle Eastern, who Turnbull recognized.
“What’s he doing here in a secure area?” Turnbull asked, pointing at the Persian.
The American gestured for Turnbull to sit, and his eyes followed the captain to the sofa running along the far side of the room. It looked like it folded out into a bed. Turnbull adjusted the holster on his thigh so he could sit comfortably, and left his M4 leaning against the wall.
The man had a manila file sitting beside him under a water bottle. That would be Turnbull’s file, of course.
“You can call me Clay,” he said. “Clay D
eeds.”
“Is that your real name?” Turnbull asked.
“No,” he said. It was a stupid question.
“Who do you work for?”
“Think OGA,” Clay replied evenly. “Other Government Agency” – that could be CIA, or something else Turnbull had never heard of.
Turnbull had worked with these kinds of guys before. They always had their own agenda, but theirs and his had never been mutually exclusive, so it worked. Still, this guy was clearly not a field guy anymore, not like the rough ex-special ops contractors they’d dumped into Afghanistan. He was a suit, or at least now he was a suit. Turnbull couldn’t get a feel for what he had been before that. No bulge, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a gun somewhere within reach. Of course, with those two slabs of beef outside, he didn’t need his own piece.
“What is an Iranian Revolutionary Guard field grade doing in a secure American compound, Clay?”
The Iranian smiled. So did Clay.
“You’ve already met Colonel Javadi. I take it you’ve worked together.”
“Yeah, enemy of my enemy and all that shit.”
“Hello, Captain Turnbull,” Javadi said.
“Fuck you,” Turnbull replied. Javadi grinned.
“Kelly H. Turnbull, born Los Angeles, California….”
“I know my bio …”
“What does the ‘H’ stand for?”
“Hugs.”
“Basic training, OCS, Infantry branch, Airborne, Ranger school. Brought into SF on the accelerated SF expansion program as a new first lieutenant.”
“Is there a point incoming? I’m getting super bored.”
Clay looked up, considered Turnbull’s expression, and lowered the file.
“Do you want to shoot me for asking you questions?” he inquired.
“Well,” Turnbull replied evenly, “I do want to shoot someone, but I’d prefer to go with Javadi here, you know, given the choice.”
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