by Leila Haven
Kincaid was waiting for me alone by the time I was ready to go. She wore a look of thunder on her gorgeous face. “You ready?”
She hitched her gun over her shoulder. “I was born ready, just waiting for you to catch up.”
“Let’s get going then, private.”
We headed out in an easterly direction. We’d been having a lot of trouble with this city as we tried to wrestle it from the grip of the Taliban. The civilians were generally good to us but they always feared the Taliban would use them for retaliation.
The streets wore the marks of previous fights, pocketed with potholes and missing pieces of asphalt. A child’s teddy bear was lying in the dust on the edge of the road, quickly abandoned when the owner had to make a run for it. It was dirty now, and as deflated as most of the Afghan people.
It was like a ghost town. If there were people around before our truck pulled up, they’d quickly decided to return indoors. It was a good thing, but it still made me feel like I was somewhere I had no right to be. This was their city, they didn’t deserve the war coming to their front doors.
“Is it always this quiet?” Kincaid asked. We were walking side by side, our guns bobbing to the same rhythm as our feet. Her face was almost hidden under her helmet, her eyes barely visible.
“Only until the bastards start to shoot at us,” I replied. That shut her up. Maybe that was what she needed, some cold reality that would let her know how out of her depths she was.
I would be a little sad to see her running home, I would miss her. But it was for her own good, she shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
We walked in silence again, my eyes continually scanning for threats. The fuckers were everywhere, hiding in the shadows instead of coming out to fight us in person. They let their guns talk for them, there was no honor in that. They were cowards. Fucking cowards, the lot of them.
As if on cue, a gun blasted and kicked up the dirt just in front of us. Kincaid and I instantly reacted by crouching down and hiding behind the nearest brick wall.
The gun shots continued, all aimed in our direction. The fence we were using as a shield belonged to a small house. Washing was hanging on a line beside it, telling us it was inhabited.
I used my hand to signal to Kincaid an order and she nodded in response. I counted down until I reached one before we popped up over the fence and started sending bullets back their way.
The sparks of a gun firing betrayed their position, they were on the second floor of a building diagonally left. There were at least two of them, continually firing on us until they saw blood.
That wasn’t going to happen today either.
Kincaid got off a series of rounds before she ducked back down again. “I see three targets,” she said, breathless from the adrenalin surging through her veins.
“There’s only two.”
“No, I saw three.”
We popped up again and fired our guns in the direction of the window, hoping to be the first to draw blood. A small group like this should be easy to dispense. It was the enclaves that held dozens of members of the Taliban that were the real challenge.
We ducked down again. “There’s only two,” I insisted.
She shook her head. “Only two have guns but there is a third in the window. He’s not firing but he’s still there.”
I counted down and we fired again. This time I searched in the few seconds I had for the third man in the window. Sure enough, he was there.
I wasn’t going to admit that. “We need to keep moving. They’re only delaying our real mission. On three, we run to the end of the street. I spotted a small café there, we go inside. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was time to see how well Kincaid handled herself in the field. I just hoped she didn’t get herself killed on the first day.
We took off, running with all our gear strapped to us, as fast as we could. Kincaid kept up with me, dodging the bullets kicking up the dirt as we went. My ears were ringing by the time we reached the end of the street.
The café still operated even as the war was waged around it. The Afghan people were strong and resilient but it could only last for so long. They must be almost at their breaking point by now.
Local faces glared as we made our way through the café. Most blamed us for causing their country to be war torn, some realized we were only trying to help them make their country safe again. There was no telling which side these particular locals were on.
We didn’t stick around to find out. I led Kincaid to the back of the café where we slipped out the back exit, receiving sharp words from the owner as we did. He had every right to be angry.
“There’s an alley just down this way,” I started to explain. “We can use it to travel down to the district we need. Stay close and keep your eyes peeled.”
“Yes, sir.”
Our training had taught us to move silently under ideal conditions. These conditions were far from ideal. We walked through buildings reduced down to nothing but rubble, gardens that had long succumbed to the drought, and streets where no car could traverse with all the debris covering it.
I slowly relaxed my protective stance next to Kincaid. She had performed well with her first test back there. Many other people would have been terrified to be rained on by bullets, but Kincaid had kept her head in the situation. I hated to admit it, but maybe I needed to give her some credit for the soldier she was, I just wouldn’t tell her that.
We finally reached our target for the mission, a school that had been closed and was now being used as a Taliban base camp. It was only small, a handful of buildings at most. A pile of rocks that would once have been a small building was our hiding place.
Our station was the east side of the property. The other teams should have been in position now on the other sides. “Teams report,” I said into my radio.
It instantly crackled to life. “Group A in place. Ready to go.”
“Group B. We’re good to move too.”
“Let’s do this then. On my count.” When I looked at Kincaid, she nodded back that she was ready. Her face betrayed nothing of what she really felt. “Three. Two. Go teams now.”
We charged for the building. There had been no time for covert actions. No time for sending in a drone so we had a better idea of what was inside. Our intel said they were holding prisoners inside and we had to get them out immediately. A minute spent in the enemy’s hands was a minute too many.
I threw my shoulder into the first door I came to, crashing in and taking the two men inside by surprise. It was too chaotic to keep track of who was shooting and when. All I could see was my own gun as it fired at the men.
They put up a good fight but we had the element of surprise. Both men went down, leaving a puddle of blood to pool on the floor. I didn’t get any pleasure from taking a life but if it were them or us, I would always choose us.
“There’s four men in the hallway,” Kincaid whispered. Or she could have been yelling, I couldn’t tell – my hearing was dulled by the sharp cracks of gunfire. Her body was pressed up against the wall while she looked through the doorway.
I moved to stand in front of her and saw the men making a beeline for our direction. Guns were cracking in other parts of the building now too.
“We’ll wait for them to come to us,” I said, getting good purchase on the floor and taking a strong stance that would see me through.
Kincaid mirrored me, getting ready for the fight that was about to take place. The men arrived in mere seconds, their confused and angry faces greeting us with the welcome of an iceberg.
They were all unarmed.
I held my gun steady. “On the floor with your hands behind your head! Now! Move!” Four sets of eyes glared at me in the second it took them to rush for us. They didn’t care that we had weapons and they didn’t. They would fight us with their fists if they had to.
Kincaid took the first one out with a bullet to his leg. I followed and took down the next two. T
he last one turned and ran for the safety of his fellow terrorists. He would lose eventually.
The three of them writhed on the floor, clutching their wounds. They weren’t fatal but they wouldn’t be running anywhere in a hurry either. I secured their hands with zip ties before heading down the hallway.
Shouting and bullets littered the air all around me in the building. The haze and smell of gunpowder quickly made getting around more difficult. Kincaid stuck close to my side, shadowing me and acting as a second set of eyes on the lookout for danger.
The next person we encountered was Watson. He didn’t seem as calm and collected as he normally was. “They’ve got the building rigged with booby traps. We need to get out of here before the whole thing blows up,” he said quickly.
“How many have we got?” I asked, trying to count up the odds of us getting out with the bodies of the enemy. It seemed crazy trying to save their lives when they wanted us dead so badly. But we weren’t like them, at least I didn’t want to be. We weren’t cold-hearted killers. They also might offer valuable information that would help us. “Have you seen any hostages?”
He shook his head. “Only terrorists.”
A loud explosion suddenly made walls of the hallway shake and rattle like a dancing skeleton. I pressed the button on my radio. “All teams to evacuate immediately. Get out, now!”
I started running, Watson and Kincaid directly behind me. We passed bodies of the men that had refused to give up until they were dead. Thankfully they weren’t our men, they had died for the wrong cause.
My gun felt too heavy in my hands as we ran for the door. Bursting into the open, I couldn’t see any of my other men out in the field yet. I prayed they were right behind me.
Another explosion rang out, taking most of my hearing with it. We reached the edge of the field and turned around to face the damage. Simon and Tate were heading for us but nobody else.
The entire building collapsed in on itself as more bombs went off inside. What rubble wasn’t pushed outwards by the explosion simply crumbled where it stood. We had been in the building only minutes before.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears while time passed and every second seemed to last an hour. I needed to see the faces of my remaining men. They had to have made it out. If they were still in there they had no chance of surviving that last blast.
“Spread out and search,” I ordered. The men and Kincaid quickly followed and sprinted around the burning rubble of the building. The air was thick with acrid smoke, making my eyes water and my lungs burn. I pushed through it, desperate to see the faces of those that trusted me to lead them.
“Over here!” a male voice called out.
Like lightning, I ran toward them. Simon was pulling a body from the wreckage. Blood covered the camouflage of the man’s uniform. My eyes scanned his entire body before resting on his face.
Ronald.
“He’s alive,” Simon said, crouching down and taking his pulse. There was so much blood but I couldn’t find where it was coming from.
Kincaid crouched down to join us. She tugged at Ronald’s uniform. “I don’t think this blood is his. There’s no wound.”
We turned him over just to be certain. All the blood was on the front of his uniform, there was nothing on his back. “You’re right. He’s probably got a concussion. We need to get him back to the truck. I don’t want to stick around here in the open.”
My men nodded. The rest of my troop joined us. I wasn’t going to admit to them how relieved I was to be able to see all of them and know they were all right. I felt sick with what could have happened to them all.
I organized a team to take Ronald back to the truck and use their discretion with his medical treatment. They had my authority to take him back to base if they felt it was necessary.
Two of the others were left on the school grounds to search for survivors – especially the hostages – before they were to move on.
The rest of the troop were given their new orders to move onto the next target where we’d do it all over again. The next ones would be smaller but just as dangerous. We’d already had one major injury, we couldn’t afford to have another.
Walking through the streets felt surreal after the attack on the school. I tried not to think of the innocent hostages that probably died with the enemy. Just more bodies to add to the death count.
“Are all missions like that?” Kincaid asked quietly, like she might have been scared of the answer.
“Not all, but most. We are constantly faced with situations we can’t predict. Mistakes cost lives, both ours and theirs. Death doesn’t discriminate.”
She nodded somberly but didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe now she would realize that she didn’t belong there. She could be as fit and prepared as the next soldier, but war was a place for men. No woman should have to deal with the carnage we inflicted upon one another.
A part of me wished she didn’t have to see what we just saw. Events like that changed lives, they could never be unseen. It was enough for the hardest of soldiers to deal with, let alone a young woman barely out of the training facility.
“We’re only just beginning our deployment,” I said. “It’s only going to get worse. You should prepare yourself. If you can’t take it, you need to tell me now.”
“I can take it,” she replied quickly, steeling herself into a rigid pose. She wouldn’t tell me even if she did feel like running back home. It was a secret we all kept while on deployment.
My cell phone suddenly vibrated in my pocket. It was a call from base. “Rafter, get your ass over to the bank building downtown. Call in as many of your group as you can. The bastards are holding up inside, approach with caution.”
“Yes, sir, received,” I said before slipping the phone back into my pocket. Kincaid was on tenterhooks, waiting for the next command. “We need to move.”
I filled her in on the small amount of information I had before we took off. While we moved I called the rest of my troop, giving them new directions to get to the bank. We jogged through the streets, the heavy gear in my pockets jumping up and down with my strides.
It took ten long minutes for us to reach the bank building. The area was normally bustling with locals as they went about their normal lives. Today it was deserted with only a few of our comrades crouched behind whatever they could use as shields.
“What’s the status?” I asked Corporal Spencer as we slid in beside him. He was taking refuge behind a building across the street from the target.
“Five members of the Taliban inside. They have eight local hostages and are refusing to let them go,” he said, with a wrinkle creasing his brow.
“What are their demands?”
Spencer gave a sardonic smile as he answered. “They want us to leave Afghanistan. You’d think these guys would get the hint sooner or later, huh? It’s always the same thing.”
“Doesn’t help when they only have half a brain,” I said.
“That’s being generous.”
There was always time to have a sense of humor while on deployment. Once you lost that then you may as well turn in your gun and leave. Otherwise there was no real way to deal with the things we saw and did.
Gun shots rang out through the empty streets, they sounded like they were coming from inside the bank. It was largely a non-descript building, not advertising anything in its windows like most banks did back home. Why it was a target for the Taliban was above my pay grade.
“We need to move in,” Spencer said. I couldn’t disagree with him. There were innocent hostages inside with those lunatics and they had no qualms about shooting anyone they wanted to.
“On three,” I replied. He signaled the other men that had assembled, including those from my troop. They nodded their understanding and I counted down with my fingers in the air.
On three, we moved.
Chapter 6
Sasha
҉ ҉ ҉ ҉ ҉ ҉
There was no time to think, only time to a
ct. We rushed at the building on Rafter’s count, hoping to get the upper hand by surprising the terrorists inside.
I was running on pure adrenalin and instincts as I followed my superior inside. He was fearless as he charged, not worrying about anything except saving the innocent people.
It was that kind of courage that I admired in him. He seemed to be in his element out there in the middle of all that chaos. Private Simon told me Rafter’s promotion was only recent but he acted like he had always been the leader. He’d taken to his new position like a duck to water.
The moment we crossed the threshold and entered the building, all hell broke loose. One of our soldiers had thrown a smoke grenade on the floor, hoping to confuse the enemy and earn a few precious moments that we could use to our advantage.
My goggles prevented any smoke from getting into my eyes so I could still keep them open, but there wasn’t much to see through the dense fog. I could see muzzles flashing through the haze in front of me, but they definitely weren’t those of my allies.
As I got into position I could make out the screaming hostages running in all directions, taking advantage of the chaos. One went down only a few feet in front of me, his face covered in a moment of panic as he fell. He wouldn’t be getting up again, not with a three-inch hole in his chest and his blood pooling on the floor.
One of the Taliban went down and then another. We were winning but there were more casualties than I was comfortable with.
The last standing enemy made a run for it inside, slipping through a door and disappearing. Rafter motioned for me to follow him as he pursued the man through the building. Somebody had to be accountable for the bodies lying on the floor and he was all we had left – the last standing survivor.
We were breaking protocol by leaving the hostages before securing them, but I couldn’t just let Rafter go alone. Rafter had field experience already and I wasn’t going to question him on my first day in the field.
The corridor was dark as we stalked through it. The cool steel of my gun was only mildly reassuring in my clenched hands, holding it tighter than I should have. It was my lifeline there, maybe the only thing that would stand between me and death.
