The Dealer of Hope_Adrian's March_Part 1

by Chris Philbrook

  “Okay so fuck fire,” Glen said, slinging the AK.

  “Yeah fire; bad.”

  “Let’s go check on Rasa. Get moving if she’s doing good.”

  “Alright. I’ve had more than enough of this place anyway,” Thomas said.

  “Me too.”

  The men never found any food or additional ammo in the village.

  Thomas smiled when he saw Rasa half awake when they returned to the school building a few minutes later. She was distressed, but she returned his smile weakly with some relief on her face as he walked up to where she lay. Thomas sat down cross legged on the floor a foot from her and produced his small notebook. He wrote in Pashto for her.

  Are you okay? How is your pain?

  He handed the girl the little notebook and his pen. She took them in shaky small fingers and took a long time to write out a simple reply.

  I am in pain.

  Thomas took the book back and thought carefully. He wanted to ask her only questions she could nod or shake her head to. Watching how much work and pain it caused her to write made him feel terrible about how they communicated.

  Do you need medicine for the pain?

  She shook her head, indicating she did not want anything for the pain. Thomas was surprised at the little girl’s strength.

  You were shot in the hip. You’ve lost a lot of blood, but we saved you. We need to move you to the soldier base we talked about last night.

  Thomas pointed at his hip, then at her hip in case she wasn’t aware of where her body had been damaged. She shook her head and motioned for the notebook. Thomas reluctantly handed it to her, and she painstakingly wrote out a message.

  We need to search for my family. They are not safe here.

  Thomas’ facial expression betrayed his thoughts. She saw what he thought about her suggestion, and her little hands slumped in defeat. Her bright eyes fought hard and welled with meager tears. She shook her head slowly, emotion taking over. Thomas stretched out next to her on the floor and comforted her with a hand on her arm. She reached over and took his hand, squeezing it in a strong grasp. After several minutes of clutching his hand, the grip waned, and she settled. Her strength was amazing.

  Thomas got his notebook from the floor where she dropped it and started writing again. This time he wrote off multiple messages, telling her how it was going to be. He paused between large sentences to allow for her slower reading.

  We will be carrying you to the military base in a few minutes. The trip will take several hours. We have to carry you on a thing like a bed. It will likely hurt some, but there is little we can do for that unless you want pain medicine.

  We are only a few miles away, but it will take time to walk there, especially if we are attacked like we were when you were hurt.

  When we get to the base there should be more soldiers there, and they should be able to help us. There will be medicine for your injury, as well as food and water for us. This trip will hurt, but we must do this if we are to survive. Only then can we look for your family.

  You must be stronger than ever, Rasa.

  Rasa nodded firmly, unafraid, and Thomas left to go help Glen finish building the stretcher she would travel on.

  Carrying a person is exhausting, even if they are a small child that hasn’t eaten nearly enough. Both men hadn’t slept in longer than they could remember, and their mental exhaustion coupled with their physical exhaustion took its toll. It certainly didn’t help that they were trekking over high elevation land that was more slope than anything. The terrain taxed the arms, legs, ankles, and lungs even for two men in peak physical condition. Goats were made for this land, not men.

  Glen walked at the front of the hastily built stretcher with his back to Rasa. Thomas walked at the rear, keeping an eye on the child. Rasa writhed in pain as the stretcher bounced and rocked. The two men couldn’t walk safely on the rough Afghan terrain and keep her stable at the same time, and she paid the price in agony. Thomas watched as she welded her eyelids shut against the fire in her side. The concern he had now revolved more for the mental scars she might obtain from the journey than anything physical.

  The men had been on foot for almost thirty minutes in the fading evening light through the scrubby woodlands heading up and over the mountain to the FOB before Glen saw the two figures following them. They were clearly alive, moving from cover to cover, attempting to use stealth. Through his M4A1’s optics Thomas could see they wore traditional Afghan clothing, and carried weapons. The two SEALs put Rasa down in an earthen recess behind a large stone pressing up from the ground like a knuckle. Without exchanging a word the two men dropped to the ground, and Thomas readied their long rifle.

  Down the length of the barrel through the scope Thomas watched as the two men continued up the hill in a draw, attempting to scurry ten or fifteen feet at a time from rock to tree, from tree to rock. They both were armed with the insurgent weapon of choice, with its trademark banana shaped magazine. Glen looked through a spotting tool mounted on a small tripod at the unfolding scene behind them. The high powered optics was as good as the weapon’s scope if not better, and he watched as Thomas dialed the first shot in. Other than the difficulty posed by the encroaching darkness, this was an easy shot, perhaps three hundred yards, downhill, with a calm wind.

  Glen and Thomas whispered a few bits of information back and forth, double checking ranges, windage, rotation of the earth and more. There was little to confirm and both men had the dope for the shot dialed in automatically. Thomas heard Glen give him the faint clear to fire, and in between heartbeats and the intake of breath, he gently operated the trigger and sent a lethal round downrange. Thomas timed the round’s impact for when the first man just ended his sprint to a tree. The round hit dead in the center of the pursuer’s chest, and the two SEALs watched as a huge portion of his back sprayed out in a bloody, chunk-filled mist.

  Thomas moved his body a tiny amount and put the crosshairs on the bulge that was the top of the head behind a rock of the other person following them. Before the head could duck down behind the large stone Thomas squeezed the trigger a second time. The round sailed slightly lower than expected, and skipped off the top of the boulder before hitting the crouched threat. They watched in professional appreciation as the top of the man’s forehead was punctured by Ring’s shot. His body almost stood straight up from the impact before falling backwards and tumbling down the rocks on the hill.

  “Nice,” Glen whispered.

  “Thank you,” Thomas replied just as quiet. His eyes remained fixated on the area where the two targets had been alive just moments before. He waited for the inevitable. He didn’t have to wait long. The first man he’d shot had died, but now stood back up. As the zombie pulled his body upright using the tree he’d been running to cover for, Thomas erased his head with a third and final round. This time his body went down for good.

  The two SEALs packed up their sniper equipment, and went back to the suffering Rasa. Their trip was not over just yet.

  Sniper teams like Glen and Thomas specialized not only in dealing death from afar, but in gathering information. The two men had been placed dozens of times on missions where they never intended to take a shot. Sometimes their skill and training as observers and spotters was all that was required. As the two men sat on a ridge two hundred yards from the FOB, they used that very skill set as well as night vision equipment to determine what their course of action would be.

  “I see no movement at all,” Glen said as he peered through his optics at the base. The base sprawled across a flat ledge on the side of the opposing ridge from where the two men and Rasa were. The ledge ran perhaps a hundred yards from side to side running parallel to a road that ran along the Cliffside the base fronted. The ledge’s back ended in a high rock outcropping perhaps twenty yards to the rear. Both men wondered what the back side of the ridge looked like. The rear rock facing the base sat against seemed like a bad strategic weakness.

  The base had walls made of sa
nd-filled Hesco barriers, plywood and logs. The gate to enter the base was made of steel rebar, welded plates of scrap metal and concertina wire. It sat ajar, leaving a two foot wide gap.

  “That open gate is bad juju. I can see one humvee. The three sandbox structures I have no movement, and the two conex containers are wide open at the end I can see. It looks like everyone left in a bit of a hurry,” Thomas said, his intense focus on the base’s layout paying off with clues.

  “Agreed. If there were still living soldiers down there the gate would be closed. You see signs of a firefight? You think they were hit by insurgents or undead?” Glen scanned the facility with his spotter’s optics as well.

  “I can see some RPG impacts as well as pretty typical small arms fire damage. No idea if it’s new or not. I’m sure this place caught hell on the regular before all this zombie shit started going down. No way of telling.”

  Glen agreed, but said nothing.

  “Let’s observe for another hour. That’ll give us what? Three hours of darkness to recon the joint. We leave Rasa in the tree line at the base of the valley down there, and move her up and in once we know it’s safe.”

  Torrance nodded. The plan was as good a plan as any.

  The gate of the base rocked back and forth gently in the cool night air. A slight breeze moved the metal barrier back and forth a few inches, releasing a disturbing, low groan. Thomas stifled a shudder as he approached the ominous shape. Somehow, the varying shades of green in his night vision served not to sterilize the situation, but heighten the uncertainty and anxiety. Without all the colors available to his eyes, Thomas’ imagination filled the darkest areas where his gear failed with images of blood and death.

  The two men infiltrated through the open gate and immediately moved to clear the center building twenty feet inside the gate. The building was made of what was available, just the same as the other two. A few Hesco barriers formed the corner pillars, and a mixture of plywood, logs, and bags of sand the walls. The building looked ugly, but the SEALs knew the structure was far tougher than it looked. The ingenuity brought of desperation was sometimes quite effective.

  The interior of what they discovered to be the main barracks of the base was a single large room filled with cots, trunks, and lockers. In the green glow of their night vision equipment the operators saw multiple weapons very similar to theirs lying about.

  “Who leaves their rifle behind?” Thomas said.

  “Insane soldiers, or dead ones who don’t remember how to operate the bang switch, I reckon,” Glen replied.

  “Which do we run into first?”

  The two men moved at a blistering combat pace, leaving no sound in the air, and no trace of their movements behind. They moved straight to the back of the central building and out the rear exit doors. Because of the terrible location of the base the stone face was right opposite the exit, and they were briefly in a funnel. Both men instinctively felt in additional danger, and hustled out to the building to the south. Other than several large antennas on the roof and a small satellite dish, the building was almost completely identical to the barracks structure–and staying in suit–there was a similar rear exit.

  The exit door was a heavily reinforced sheet of plywood that Glen had to pry open with a small crowbar tool he produced from his ruck. They both carried small titanium pry bars for just this occasion, as rare as the occasion might be. The door popped inward with the sound of the frame’s ripping wood, and was immediately shoved shut by pressure from the inside. Glen backed away as the both men brought their weapons to bear on the door at head height. The sound of scratching and clawing mixed with the low impacts of what sounded like boots inside made the two men angry.

  There were dead inside. Glen thumbed his selector to full auto and ripped a stream of suppressed rounds across the door at where he guessed the faces of his fallen comrade would be. Half a magazine later there was the sound of a heavy weight careening off some kind of furniture, and then silence. The wooden door, now bashed loose and barely holding on to the hinges swung inward, revealing an American soldier, clearly dead for some time on the floor, decapitated by Glen’s buzz saw fire. The two men pressed slowly inward, revealing the command room for the abandoned facility.

  Smashed radio gear and laptops still connected by cables that looked like veins and arteries were strewn about, covered in blood and gore, long since crusted over in the high mountain dry air. Multiple dead bodies were scattered around the room, some on the floor, some sitting in chairs holding side arms in loose hands with wounds to their chins, and some ripped apart by what might’ve been wild animals.

  “You think an animal did that?” Glen asked.

  Thomas shook his head, “I think the guy you wasted at the door did that. Jury is out on whether or not you can call them animals though.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tommy this is fucked up. I don’t mind shooting insurgents, and the zombies of Afghans, but I just put an American down man. One of us. I’m gonna lose sleep over this.”

  “No you’re not. You’re going to sleep like a baby. You know why? Because you just put that man, a fellow warrior to rest. You didn’t kill him; you released him from torment and brought him peace. And one way or the other Glen, when anyone dies now, they’re a threat. I’d bet my left nut there are people killing family members left and right all over the world because that’s what needs to be done to survive now.”

  Glen looked back at Thomas and nodded grimly. All Glen could think of was his wife. He wondered if they were together when all this happened, would he have the strength to kill her?

  “Let’s finish clearing this place and get Rasa up here. We’ve only got an hour of darkness left, and I don’t want to overexpose us to anything. Let’s see if anyone else is home.”

  Thomas patted his friend firmly on the back, and they left the ravaged communications room to find what other dangers were left in waiting for them.

  They found two more animated corpses in the latrine stalls on the far side of the facility. It looked to both tired warriors that at some point there was a hasty exodus from the base, and those soldiers leaving the base stored their recently deceased brethren in the bathrooms to stay safe from them. Whoever had put the dead bodies in the port-a-potties twisted the door locks closed and jammed either a stick through the lock to jam it, or tied the doors shut with a length of paracord. Nether Navy man had respect for the idea. The two men heard the doors rattle and nearly break open when they approached, and they dealt with the two dead men by yanking the door open while the other fired upon and killed the confused zombie within. The smell somehow upped the ante from the crawlspace below the house in the Afghan village they just cleaned out.

  In all they counted twenty eight bodies and one humvee. Glen shut and fastened the gate closed with the iron rods and concrete blocks the original inhabitants used. If the gate was hit by a vehicle it’d fold like a house of cards, but it should hold out against a handful of undead and buy them time to handle the problem. Rasa was put in the communications room after the two operators cleaned it out. Any intelligence to be had would likely be there, and it didn’t make sense to split up into different buildings. A moved cot from the barracks became her new home.

  The retreat from FOB Forrestal had to have been one done in incredible haste. Two dozen M4s were left behind as was several thousand rounds of ammunition. Body armor was left on beds and medical supplies were covered in dust on the shelves. In the metal Conex containers they retrieved multiple cases of MREs as well as flats of plastic water bottles. For all intents and purposes the base was a goldmine for the SEALs; everything they needed to survive for some time was here.

  Everything but friendly survivors.

  “There’s a note here. It’s written in someone’s notebook. Dated a few days ago,” Thomas said, sitting in an office chair with his feet up on a folding table. His M4A1 was disassembled in front of him, mid-cleaning. Glen was cleaning his sidearm near Rasa.

  “What does it say?”
Glen asked.

  Thomas cleared his throat and took a sip of water from a plastic bottle, “It says, ‘Kandahar untenable per Colonel Matthews. Kandahar base is secured; single approach from the east is open and held. Leaving at 4am tomorrow to consolidate forces there.’ That’s where it ends. According to the date on it that would’ve been two days ago.”

  “Hm. Strange. What happened to them that they left in such a fucking hurry? Were they hit by the people from the town over the ridge?” Glen asked, replacing the slide on his pistol.

  “Something big must have happened. They clearly left here in a big fucking hurry ahead of schedule.”

  Glen shook his head, “Doesn’t add up man. If they were attacked there would be spent brass everywhere here. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. I think something happened inside the wall. Someone went loony and took the fuck off after acing people. Why else would they stuff bodies in the fucking shitter, man?”

  Thomas looked at Rasa and wondered which people were worse. The folks that had shot her, or the folks that could have perpetrated a massacre like the one that had happened here at Forward Operating Base Forrestal? He knew the people that had shot her were dead, and he hoped the latter were the same.

  “Well, if Kandahar is still secured as of a few days ago, my bet is the place is still secure. Getting through the city might be a bit of a bitch for a whole lot of reasons, but the way I see it, we won’t make it out here for long. Eventually we’ll run out of food, and to be honest, I wanna go home,” Thomas said as he sat up and reassembled his weapon. It took seconds for his experienced and deft fingers.

  “I want to see my wife,” Glen said, looking up at his friend, and brother in arms.