by Sean Black
I rushed past Sasha toward him. Anticipating a punch, Masori raised his hands to his face to protect himself. I shifted my weight and threw a big, wide right hook that caught him on the side of the head. His hands fell away from his face.
There was no time to remove the explosives and every chance that Masori would detonate them if I did but I had already devised a far more direct method of ensuring that he stayed alive. I grabbed his right wrist and bent it back until it snapped, then repeated the move with the left.
Two of Masori’s men were getting close to the main chamber. They were both approaching from the passageway to my left. His hands were dangling uselessly at right angles to his forearms so I grabbed the back of his robe and made sure I was between him and the two men as they emerged from the narrow rock passageway.
They skidded to a halt and lowered their weapons. I raised the Makarov and shot them each through the head. My arm wrapped around Masori’s windpipe, I started to drag him backwards.
Masori must have known that if I was there to kill him he’d already be dead. There was a fate worse than death, and it was where I was taking him. He began to fumble for the cord again. I jabbed the butt of the pistol against his broken wrist. He shrieked.
I tightened my grip around his windpipe to starve him of oxygen and he began to weaken. I pulled him back still further. His feet were trying to dig into the floor.
I looked over at the little girl. ‘Follow me.’
She stayed where she was, her eyes wide. She was in a state of shock, near catatonic. I shouted at her again but it did no good: her mind had closed down. An acute stress reaction had kicked in. Usually stress compelled the body into fight-or-flight mode but it could go the other way, overwhelming the nervous system to the point at which the person couldn’t react at all.
I could take Masori. I could take Sasha. But I couldn’t take them both. It should have been easy for me. My mission objective was extracting Masori alive. But now my feet wouldn’t move. I was as frozen as Sasha was.
I could hear more of Masori’s men rushing through the passageways, shouting to each other as they hurtled toward us. They were behind us, closing in from all sides.
I twisted round. It took me a second to grasp that the voices behind me were speaking English — English with American accents. Whoever was set up outside had heard the shooting and made the decision to come in and join the party. I was no longer alone.
My strength, which had barely been enough to hold Masori, kicked back in. There was nothing better in the world than being alone and hearing back-up steaming toward you, and not just any old back-up, US Special Forces, my old comrades, the best in the world.
I adjusted my balance. Masori must have weighed two hundred and twenty pounds but he felt a lot lighter all of a sudden. Perfectly gauging the pressure I needed to use with the choke hold, I hustled Masori forward and used my free hand to grab Sasha’s elbow.
Three of the exfiltration team rushed past us, forming a diamond to cover my retreat with Masori and the child. I saw faces I recognized. The team leader clapped a gloved hand on my shoulder. ‘Good job.’
Masori was prised from me. His broken wrists were pinned behind his back as he was dragged out of the cave system. A couple of rounds pinged off the cave wall, and the three Americans in the diamond returned fire.
I scooped the child into my arms and, for the first time, saw something apart from terror in her eyes, a flicker of recognition. My eyes narrowed to avoid the waves of dust swirling around them from the downdraught of the Sikorsky Little Bird. Somewhere in the dust and wind, time bent and split. Voices, shouts and sudden movements overlaid each other in a rush.
The team leader slashed a hand across his throat and pointed at Sasha. ‘No room for her on the Bird. She stays.’
I started to argue with him. As the words tumbled from my mouth, I felt a warm, sticky spread of liquid across my chest. Sasha’s eyes were open. She stared up at me, her pupils dilating. A red rose blush oozed from the center of her chest. I reached a hand down. It came away slick with blood. The team leader was screaming in my ear but the words were just fragments of sound.
I wasn’t for giving her up. I fell to my knees, Sasha clutched to my chest. My head tilted back. I stared beyond the blades, beyond the mountains, and into the very heavens themselves as I held the dead child in my arms.
SIXTEEN
The chopper flew low over the wire and landed in a wash of dust. Ground crew and medical staff emerged from the shadows, sprinting toward it, their heads low. I clambered out, my head smothered in bandages, Sasha cradled in my arms, my shirt soaked with her blood.
The six-man special-forces exfiltration team followed, faces set like granite. I reached down and brushed a strand of stray hair from Sasha’s face. The others clambered past me, avoiding eye contact.
It was warmer here than up in the mountains. The sky was dark, the stars obliterated by the haze of camp lights.
Sasha’s face was lily white. I laid her on the bare ground and closed her eyelids with a sweep of my hand. My fingertips left blood and dust on her face. Two army doctors and a trauma medic studied me from a distance. Even though I could feel fresh blood still leaking through the dressing covering my head wound, they didn’t try to stop me.
The graveyard was quiet as I set her down. My walk had taken me through the middle of the camp. Eyes studied me all the way. The worst were those in uniform, the wire-huggers, as I thought of them; the guys who planned and replanned and visited this mess after it had all gone down, and marched around the rest of the time with their fruit-salad medals pinned to their puffed-out chests.
I was thankful that, as the country had slid further into the mire, there had been fewer and fewer of them. What the hell did they have to take credit for? The Taliban were still here. The West had never decided what the hell it wanted to be: avenger or liberator. It had proved to be both, and in being both had become neither. Finally, the IEDs, rogue Afghans and the indifference of a war-sickened people had driven the military to a strategy of drones and men like me. The bitter bounty of our righteous war? Dead little girls and two-day heroes with blackened minds and stumps for limbs that the politicians could jerk off about for as long as the homecoming parade lasted. Wrap yourself in a flag that meant jack shit, drop some dollars into a bucket, close your door, and thank the Lord it wasn’t your son or daughter. That was the truth, as I saw it now. Just don’t say it out loud: if there was one thing the people back home hated more than terrorists, it was some asshole holding up a mirror to them.
I kept walking, past the grunts, who had seen crazier shit than this and knew not to look at me, and the fruit-salad guys, the occasional mute local and a gaggle of NGO workers, trailing silence in my wake. Once I had set her down, I found a clear area, and set to work with an entrenching tool I had purloined from the cabin of the Little Bird.
The earth was brittle. There was no topsoil to speak of. When this smaller base had been built, the ground had been packed hard to prevent any breaching of the perimeter to plant an IED. To conserve energy, I used the blade to mark out the grave. I set to work in the center of the rectangle, digging straight down and scooping out from that hole. The field work back in the village had left me in good shape for such a task. The only time I stopped was to clear the sweat from my eyes. Progress was steady, slowed only by the care with which I piled the dug-out soil I would need to fill in the grave.
With the first foot of ground cleared, the work got a little easier. I heard footsteps close by, scuffed and deliberate, the movements of someone who knew well enough to announce their presence. I was standing in the grave by now, the ground just shy of waist height, which meant I had dug to a depth of three or so feet.
The footsteps belonged to a civilian with long hair tied back in a ponytail and a bushy salt-and-pepper beard. He looked to be in his late forties. He was dressed in boots, camo pants, and bundled up in a thick down North Face jacket.
‘What was her name?
’ he asked, his eyes on the little girl. ‘It is a girl, right? Only with all that blood …’
‘Sasha,’ I said. ‘Her name was Sasha.’
I had seen the guy around. He wasn’t special forces, but he moved in those circles, although ‘flitted’ was perhaps a better word. He didn’t seem to talk much from what I’d seen. He was something to do with psy-ops, the guys of the future, if you listened to the brass.
‘You want I can leave you alone?’ he said.
I shrugged and went back to digging. He must have taken the shrug as a no because he stayed where he was. Minutes passed. The hole in the ground deepened. The ground was at shoulder level now. I glanced across. I could see the guy’s ankles and the tops of his boots. There were more footsteps, in lockstep this time. I put my palms on the edge of the grave. Two grunts were carrying a child’s coffin. They laid it at the feet of the guy from psy-ops, about-turned and left.
‘Thought you might be able to use this,’ he said.
‘Appreciate it.’
‘My name’s Muir,’ said the psy-ops guy. ‘You dig any deeper, and you’ll be staying down there.’
I didn’t reply. If the guy hadn’t been standing there, part of me felt like I could have stayed where I was, dragged the child in and pulled the earth over both of us. Muir reached out a hand and helped me up.
Between us we lifted the body into the small coffin. I wished there was something I could put in with her — a teddy bear, some jewelry, a letter. In the end, I took off my jacket, balled it up and placed it carefully under her head. I used my Gerber to ratchet the screws that secured the coffin lid. With Muir I lowered the small coffin into the grave. Muir stood, head bowed, hands clasped in front of him as I shoveled the soil on top. Then we tramped it down.
Finished, I stood back and stared at the patch of differently shaded earth. Now I was done, I felt unsure of what to do next. Part of me had hoped that, after burying the child, I would have made peace with what had happened, but I felt nothing other than I had before – grief, sorrow and anger at one more senseless act in a world full of them.
‘You have kids, Sergeant?’ Muir asked.
‘No one calls me “Sergeant”. They haven’t in years.’ I shook my head. ‘No kids. Maybe one day. You?’
‘Nope, married to my work …’ Muir trailed off as he nodded toward the grave. ‘You ever wonder how much of this is down to sheer bad luck?’ he said.
I didn’t mind listening but I didn’t feel much like talking. I looked at him. ‘What do you want?’
‘This,’ he said. ‘This isn’t normal. Dragging some dead kid onto the heli when it’s already at full load. That’s not like you. Anyone else would be shit canned.’
At last I had something to grab onto, something that made sense. The guy wasn’t here to lend a sympathetic ear: he was here to tell me I’d screwed up, gotten too involved. For the first time since the Taliban kidnap party had shown up, the world seemed to have settled back on its axis. They didn’t give a fuck about me. They gave a fuck that I could do the job without embarrassing them or displaying emotion. Git ’er done, son, and shut the fuck up about it once you’re finished. Fine. That I could relate to.
‘What you gonna do?’ I said. ‘Bench me? Be my guest. I’m done.’
‘This isn’t what you think, Byron. I’m not here to chew your ass. We value your work. We truly do.’ He looked me in the eyes. ‘You don’t have to be done, Byron. You can do what you do best, sleep well and have a good life. We can help you. We want to help you. The only question is, will you let us?’
‘What do you mean “help”?’ I asked him.
I tried to step outside myself for a moment. A guy taking a dead kid on a chopper so that she could receive a proper burial: was it crazy or honorable? Okay, it was outside the usual parameters of behaviour, especially given my job, but it wasn’t without some measure of humanity. What was the alternative? Leave her to the animals? At least this way she had a final resting place.
‘You know what combat fatigue is?’ Muir asked me.
I nodded. Half of the guys I worked with showed signs of it. Most often it crept up on you when you were back home, alone in the silence and stillness of civilian life, surrounded by regular people whose exposure to all this shit was a news item or the occasional piece on 60 Minutes. The rotations had been so heavy in recent years that as soon as you got home, and started readjusting, it was time to head back into the mire. Rinse and repeat. Repeat it often enough, and it messed you up.
‘Combat fatigue. PTSD. Call it what you like. It’s the number-one problem for us now,’ Muir said. ‘We spend all this money training someone like you. It’s like buying a Ferrari and never changing the oil. Sooner or later it’s going to break down.’
I followed his gaze to the freshly dug grave. ‘You want me to see a shrink?’
‘There might be that component to it but we’ve developed something far more powerful.’
‘If it’s pills …’ I said. There was no way I was going to start taking drugs.
I had seen how that went. Get on them, and you might never get off. I had grown up around people who stuffed themselves full of all kinds of things. It never ended well.
‘Something far more radical. A neural implant that wouldn’t just make you better able to cope, it would make you feel and function at levels previously unheard off. Obviously it’s classified so we couldn’t discuss the precise nature of the technology now, and certainly not here,’ he said, with a wave of his arms to take in the camp.
I had to stop myself laughing in the guy’s face. This wasn’t the first time I had heard about that kind of stuff. There had been some talk in special-ops circles about a chip or some kind of gizmo that they were putting in people’s heads. It was out there, all right, but not by that much. Sitting in an airport in Frankfurt, I’d read an interview with some guy who said that, in the near future, he wanted people to plug straight into their search engine via an implant. All you’d have to do would be to think about LOL cats or some other bullshit and it popped up in your head. I knew that DARPA was working on some of this stuff, too, just like they had experimented with acid, electro-shock therapy and a bunch of other crazy shit over the years. Having the conversation was different, though. A discussion like this didn’t come out of the blue.
‘Think I’ll pass,’ I said.
Muir shrugged, took off his glasses and polished them with the bottom of his shirt. It seemed rehearsed, much like the rest of what he’d said.
‘Think about it,’ he said finally. He began to walk away.
‘Hey,’ I called after him, ‘this new program have a name?’
Muir turned. He looked from me to the grave and back. ‘Right now we’re calling it TGFS.’
I knew how much the military loved their acronyms. ‘What’s it stand for?’ I asked.
‘The guilt-free soldier.’
SEVENTEEN
I spent the next two days in classified debriefing sessions, going over every detail of the operation. We covered the events leading up to my abduction in good time and the field officer seemed satisfied with my version of events. The last few hours of the mission were a different story. I relayed what had happened with Masori as best I could. It wasn’t enough. I was asked to go over it again and again until both men grew frustrated. At the end of the first afternoon session, Muir was waiting for me.
‘How you doing, Byron?’
‘I’m fine,’ I told him.
‘Everyone treating you okay?’
I shrugged. I wanted to head back to my quarters, grab a shower, get some chow and go visit the grave. Sasha still pulled at the corners of my mind. Her death was one part of the mission that I had no problem recalling. The memory was vivid to the point of being physically painful.
‘Anything you need?’ Muir prompted.
There was something. I had already made the request and been refused. ‘I’d like to call home.’
‘Soon as you’re no longer in country, I
can fix that for you.’
That was the answer I had already been given. I hadn’t much liked it the first time either. I was sure it was connected to the debriefing, and that I was being punished in some way for the mission having gone so horribly wrong.
‘I’m sorry, Sergeant. I know it’s tough.’
It was something, I guessed. I gave Muir a curt nod of thanks.
‘All talked out, huh?’ Muir said, with a smile.
But I wasn’t a man of few words. I was happy to talk about most subjects. That was part of what made me as effective in the field as I was. I liked people. They fascinated me — even the bad ones, sometimes especially the bad ones. It was something that few people outside special-forces operations understood. When civilians or the media, or even many people in the military, thought of special forces they connected them with direct-action operations, like those conducted by the SEALS. Leave base, kill or capture some asshole or assholes, and come home.
But Army Special Forces, where I had originally trained before taking on a special liaison role with the Agency, had been characterized by a different approach. Those men could fight, and teach others to do the same, but their skills lay in gathering intelligence in the field and forging alliances with friendly forces. Often there was no base to return to. Once you were outside the wire that was it. You lived, slept and ate with the locals. It was a different approach that required not only a different skill set but a different mentality. At the center of it lay communication, which was how you built trust. The problem now was that, since I had got back inside the wire, I wasn’t sure anymore who could be trusted.
‘Sergeant Tibor,’ Muir said. ‘We’re worried about you. That was a pretty nasty head injury you took back there.’
‘No shit,’ I said. They had patched me up as best they could on the ground but I had already been told I was looking at one more surgical procedure at least, and I was still getting headaches that made me want to scoop out my brains.
