Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  “I’m not looking for vindication. I’m here to find one soldier.”

  “That soldier is long gone. Granny would say you’re talking to a voice that’s only in your head.”

  “Granny only listens to one voice. That got him into a North Korean prison camp. And he’s not here. You are.”

  Vallance looked down at his own chronometer. “Ninety seconds.”

  He released the door. Wind howled through it.

  “Go easy, McCall. Nothing out there but night.”

  Vallance held up his hand in the cockpit. McCall looked down at the rocky terrain below. He caught sight of railway tracks in the distance. The moon came out of the clouds again, bathing the scene in a malevolent pale glow.

  Vallance counted down, “Four, three, two, one, zero.”

  McCall parachuted from the VistaJet and realized they were being fired on.

  CHAPTER 21

  Vallance took evasive action. He threw the VistaJet down into a screaming spiral and then righted it again. McCall plummeted into the opaque sky and spotted the ZU-23-2 Soviet Union antiaircraft autocannon pounding shells up into the clouds. Above him the streamlined jet was climbing higher. McCall couldn’t see from his position, but he was sure Vallance had closed the steps into the aircraft. A few seconds later it was swallowed up into the cloud cover. But that didn’t stop the Jihadist fighters from firing on it from their position along Highway 6, somewhere north of Ar Raqqah and west of Aleppo. McCall thought it was unusual for insurgent activities to be mounted at night, but he knew that Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party had targeted Islamic State positions near the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani.

  McCall drifted from his position amid the high clouds until he saw a BTR-50 armored personnel carrier below on the highway. A DShK 1938 12.7×108mm heavy machine gun was firing up at the VistaJet, but the barrage had been hastily mounted. Another of the vehicles, a Ural-4320 off-road, had been stripped of everything. Two of the Jihadists were in the blackened shell, one of them holding a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher—man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADs, as McCall knew them—manufactured in Bulgaria. They were also firing up at the Global VistaJet but Vallance had maintained his maneuvers until the jet was a speck in the dark canopy before it disappeared altogether.

  McCall had seventeen seconds to reach the ground before the Insurgents turned their firepower on him. He pulled the drogue out of its pouch at the bottom of the BOC and let it go. It pulled out the seven-to-ten-foot nylon bridle. McCall released the pin to the D-bag, and the tension that pulled out the main chute stretched. The wind inflated the cells of the canopy. It was as black as night. McCall looked at the small drogue chute, judging how it was unfolding. He knew he could go from 120 mph to 10 mph if it was opened instantaneously. But Vallance had packed the chute expertly, using the slider to hold the lines together. McCall caught hold of the two toggles and started steering the main parachute to the landing site.

  The machine gun stopped its barrage into the night sky.

  McCall caught a break.

  The moon slid back beneath its cloud cover, and instantly the terrain was shadowed in violet. McCall worked the chute to compensate for where he was heading. He’d had to change his game plan. He was too close to Highway 6 now. He needed to get into the rocky scrub hugging this part of the terrain. He wasn’t worried about the Insurgents spotting him. He was descending rapidly and all their eyes were skyward. McCall heard the two military vehicles start up again. He knew they were already radioing to find the jet’s position. It was not a military aircraft, but it had clearly strayed from its flight path. Vallance would be heading back to Aleppo’s airport. The Insurgents would not be looking for a clandestine drop this far south.

  If the cloud cover held.

  He was coming in too fast.

  It only needed one of the Insurgent patrols to see the barest movement in the billowing canvas in their peripheral vision for them to call a halt on the highway. McCall judged the terrain that rushed up at him. He tried to maneuver to a ravine that cut diagonally near the highway. He hit the uneven ground and badly twisted his left ankle as he skidded over the bracken, but managed to stay upright. He came to a lurching halt. He gathered the black chute around him and limped down into a gully that would hide it from the highway. He packed the chute into the crevices in the ravine and listened.

  He was waiting for the vehicles on Highway 6 to turn around and come back.

  McCall took out the Makarov semiautomatic from his backpack and slid one of the mags into it. He took aim on the road he could barely glimpse and waited. But the sounds of the Jihadist engines were dying away. The Insurgents could be heading off Highway 6 to Bab al Salama on the Syrian-Turkish border. They would find refuge there. The intel McCall had gleaned from Vallance had fighters from the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah tightening the noose around the Insurgents fleeing Aleppo.

  But he would wait another twenty minutes.

  The wind was blowing sand across the gully. McCall lowered the Makarov pistol. He limped to the backpack, pain searing now through his left leg. He didn’t have time to find out if the ankle was sprained or only twisted. He didn’t think it was broken. If it was, he was finished. He checked the chronometer on his right wrist. He estimated his position from the coordinates to be two miles along Highway 6 and below it about another three miles. He hadn’t seen any identifying markings or buildings. Nothing was out here but desolation and destruction.

  The signal from the coordinates was strong. But that didn’t mean anyone was sending out those coordinates. Vallance’s words came back to him: He could have moved his location. He may be wounded. The Insurgents have been searching for him.

  But the coordinates glowed on the dial of the chronometer.

  McCall weighted down the black chute with rocks. When he’d finished, you couldn’t have found it in daylight even if you’d been searching the gully. McCall sat down on a rock and painfully took off his left boot and heavy sock. His left ankle was badly swollen, but it had not discolored yet. He put it down as a painful sprain. He put one of the bandages from the med kit around the ankle and wound it tightly. He put back on the woolen sock and manipulated his left ankle down and tied the ankle boot. He hoisted the backpack onto his shoulders. He paused long enough at the mouth of the ravine to listen once more. Just the wind moaning and wailing. There was no longer the sound of the Insurgents’ vehicles.

  McCall climbed out of the ravine and made his way toward where he knew Highway 6 would be. When he came to it, it had taken him the best part of an hour, that’s how far he’d been off course. The highway glowed in the moonlight, pocked with blast debris, reaching in both directions. McCall used his compass, checked the coordinates one more time, then started walking. He kept to Highway 6 as a reference point. Silvery moonlight sporadically brought out light and deep shadows. He was favoring his bandaged ankle, and walking on it was more difficult than he’d anticipated. He could absorb the pain of a flat-out run if necessary, but the terrain gave him little cover.

  Then he heard the sounds of vehicles coming for him.

  McCall ran to the other side of Highway 6 where a small track led off toward the south. He scrambled down the rugged channel and found some shelter amid the jagged boulders. He’d been lucky; there was little jumbled terrain at this point on Highway 6.

  On the sliver of cloudy highway were two Sham I armored pickup trucks used by the Syrian Rebel Army. McCall took the NVG night goggles out of his backpack and put them on. Now he could read the script on the vehicles, assigning them to the Syriac Military Council, which was against the Assad government and the Islamic State of Iraq. The two vehicles turned into a growing sandstorm toward the Turkish border. McCall climbed back onto the glowing strip of Highway 6. The Syrian Rebel Army vehicles had been swallowed whole, as if they’d been devoured by some demon. McCall picked up his pace. He checked the chronometer on his wrist.

  The coordinates were closer.

  T
he wind had kicked up again. Sand was gusting across Highway 6 in undulating waves. McCall trudged against the blasting squall. It brought his vision down to a scant few feet in either direction. Little granules of sand scourged his face. He descended down a road as it fell precipitously away from the highway, skirting a bombed-out wall that had fallen finally to a handful of stones. He climbed down another half mile.

  McCall was out of the sandstorm now and heading out into a wilderness that was a green matte through his night goggles. Nothing moved in it. He looked like an alien being, covered with grime and grit, stumbling down the road under a brilliant cluster of stars. He consulted the GPS tracker and the coordinates on the chronometer.

  McCall stopped in the middle of nowhere.

  Highway 6 was behind him, maybe four miles, but with no identification marks. He might have been a hundred miles from any kind of traffic. In front of him were the silhouettes of a couple of buildings, one a hut, the other an old carport. The hut was barely an opening with a corrugated roof over it. No vehicle was in the carport. McCall moved forward with more purpose now, his ankle bringing a new flare-up of pain. He came to a small well with a pipe two inches in diameter sticking up with a hand pump to draw water to an animal trough. He was certain that Insurgents and the FSA Rebel forces used the well, but not at this time of night. McCall sloshed through a ditch, half full of water, right into a goat herd at the side of the road. They scattered, but formed up again. McCall looked down at the GPS tracker and the coordinates on the dial of the chronometer.

  They were perfectly triangulated.

  McCall noticed something that stopped him. A flare that was part of the silvery landscape. McCall looked closer through the night goggles. On the gray-green scope were what looked like small blotches of color. McCall knelt down when he reached the carport. There was no mistaking it. The blood trail was fresh. McCall straightened. He took out the Makarov pistol and approached the small hut from the carport.

  He stepped inside.

  McCall used the night goggles to get accustomed to the gloom, then took them off. More brilliant moonlight shone through the window at the back wall. Between it and the entrance two-by-fours were piled up, an old bicycle with two wheels missing, some rusting farm implements, piles of goat turds, and more blood.

  McCall saw a shadow move.

  He whirled and trained the Makarov pistol at the rumpled figure that was barely able to stand. He was holding a Colt .45 M1911 handgun pointed directly at McCall.

  In one swift move, McCall took the Colt away from him.

  The figure staggered back and slumped down against the wall. He could only see McCall in the moonlight that flared across his dark figure.

  McCall put away the Makarov pistol.

  “My name is Robert McCall,” he said gently to Captain Josh Coleman. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”

  CHAPTER 22

  McCall took out the med kit from his backpack. He took out his canteen and gave it to Josh. The American Army officer held it in his hands, splashing some of the water as he tried to drink it.

  “Take it easy,” McCall said. “We’ll fill the canteens up from the well when we leave.”

  Josh handed back the canteen. Pain obviously raked his body and his voice was weak. “I’ve been listening to vehicles coming and leaving by the well, snatched conversations, most of it in Arabic, Kurdish, and Azeri. I needed my younger brother to translate them. But the accents are different to the ones used by the Free Syrian Army. You’re not with them?”

  “No.” McCall opened Josh’s multipatterned camouflage uniform, revealing the makeshift bandage he’d stuffed over his shoulder wound.

  “If you were with the Insurgents, I’d be dead now. Or dragged out of here to be paraded around for the cameras before they beheaded me. You’re not Army. Special Forces?”

  “No.”

  “A mercenary.” Josh nodded, as if trying to assimilate the information. “The Lions of Rojava, run by the Kurdish YPG movement, asked for mercenaries on their Facebook page to send the terrorists to hell and save humanity.”

  “Try not to talk.” McCall realized Josh was delirious, wavering into and out of lucidity.

  “You’re a predator. Preying on the weak. You don’t leave a dying animal beside the road if you can put it out of its misery.”

  “Look up the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893 that forbade the US government using Pinkerton Detective Agency employees or similar police companies. I’m not a mercenary. I work alone.”

  “But you came here. You were looking for me.”

  “You radioed these coordinates to your mother, who gave them to me.”

  “Why would she contact you?”

  “I told her I would try to find her son if he was still alive.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Josh started to rise up, but he was seized with a coughing fit and slumped down again.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here. It was a very long shot. Help me with this.”

  Josh got his uniform jacket off with McCall’s help. “But you’re not here alone?”

  “Parachuted in. It’s an unauthorized mission. Let me look at this wound.”

  McCall lifted Josh up, examining his right shoulder. “The bullet went right through. The muscles, ligaments, and cartilages were damaged, but the brachial plexus wasn’t touched. I’m going to clean the wound up and bind it. I’m going to give you a shot of morphine.” McCall set Josh back onto the filthy floor and dragged over a bunch of tires to prop him up. He took out the small morphine bottle. “Do you suffer from asthma?”

  “No.”

  “The bullet didn’t rupture the stomach or the intestines. This will ease the pain and slow your breathing.” McCall readied the syringe. “It’ll take effect in under a minute. It’ll bind the opioid receptors on the surface to the nerve cells and make them sluggish so you won’t fire so many impulses.”

  McCall pushed the syringe into a muscle in Josh’s shoulder. Josh didn’t react. McCall put the syringe and the bottle back into the med kit.

  “I’ll give you another shot of it in about an hour. Tell me what happened.”

  Josh’s voice had more volume to it, just a little above a fevered whisper. “We were dropping supplies from Doctors Without Borders to al-Sukhnah. It’s been raided by the Insurgents in the past few weeks. The Homs Governorate has been driven out of the town. Only small pockets are still resisting, mainly bedouin tribes. The villages have been shelled relentlessly, but we needed to get medical supplies to the predominately Sunni Muslims there.”

  Josh started coughing again and McCall waited until it passed.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Our convoy was made up of one Humvee jeep and a BTR-152 armored personal carrier as a backup. We had been hit by an Insurgent patrol in Al Tabqah and we fought them off, but they weren’t expecting us to go to al-Sukhnah, which was mostly decimated.”

  Josh winced, clenching his teeth against the pain as McCall put the needle and thread through the edges of his shoulder wound.

  “The morphine will be kicking in about now. Try to relax into it. You got separated in the firefight?”

  “Yeah. I had a meeting in one of the village huts. We’d unloaded the last of the supplies. I came outside and there were bullets flying. I got hit right away. I got a couple more nicks, one in the left arm and one that ripped up my right leg. I couldn’t walk. My commanding officer saw me take fire, but he couldn’t get to me. There were too many Insurgents and the UN peacekeeping force retreated back into their Humvee. The BTR-152 carrier took a direct RPG hit and exploded.”

  “Your mother called your commanding officer by a nickname.”

  “Yeah, Colonel Michael G. Ralston, they call him Gunner. Three NCOs were wounded and the two Doctors Without Borders workers were dead. Gunner saw me on the ground, but I was covered with blood. They would never have got out of there if they hadn’t taken the Humvee.”

  “Leave no one behind.”

  “Gunner c
ame back for me. He took another Humvee with two more officers and came back to al-Sukhnah, but the Insurgents had gone. He looked for my body, but didn’t find it. He talked to the tribal chieftains, but they were evacuating the village and weren’t looking for a fallen American soldier. One of them had a report I had been seen in al-Asharak, to the east, and Gunner drove his Humvee like a madman there, but didn’t find me. He made it back to the team house in Ar Raqqah and had to report me as KIA.”

  McCall had stitched up the shoulder wound now. He pressed an emergency trauma dressing in the front and secured it with surgical tape. He had to be careful as he hoisted Josh up and put the second ETD on his shoulder where the bullet had exited and secured it with surgical tape also.

  “How long have you been at this location?”

  “I wanted to get away from al-Sukhnah, but I lost my way. I was trying to reach Highway Six, but I was looking for Insurgent patrols and couldn’t risk it. I don’t know how long it was until I came upon the goat herd milling around the water trough. I wasn’t sure the little pipe was still operational, never mind the hand pump, but it was, so I filled the trough and took some water. The goat herd was thirsty. There were no herders around. The carport had a 1994 Mazda T3500 in it and I tried to start it, but it wasn’t moving. I fell into the hut. I made a shelter of the tires and the planking in case anyone came inside.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I passed out. When I came to, it was night. I managed to get to the doorway. The Mazda was gone. Someone had returned for it and driven it away. I figured it was the goatherder. If he came into the hut, he didn’t see my hiding place. He got out of here as fast as he could.” Josh shook his head, as if woozy. “But there might never have been a Mazda. My memory of the carport is hazy. I lost track of time. All I could hear were the goats bleating. I went back to the water trough and filled up my canteen and gave the goats water, but I was losing consciousness and I had to get back into the hut before I passed out. At some point I heard activity outside. I don’t know if that was the Insurgents filling their canteens and their vehicles. I heard some movement toward the goatherder’s hut, but it was cut short when they discovered the carport was empty. They climbed into their vehicles and drove away. I lost consciousness. The next sound I heard was you moving up to the hut.”