True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

  The kid laughed again, a musical tinkling noise. “You ain’t gonna shoot me, pig. What, you afraid of a kid?”

  O’Sullivan could feel every breath as it entered his lungs. “No, kid, I don’t want to shoot you,” he said. “But I need you to cooperate. Put your hands above your head. Right now.”

  The kid’s hand shifted to his waistband again. O’Sullivan’s hands began to shake.

  “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood,” the kid repeated.

  O’Sullivan looked around stealthily. Still nobody on the street. Totally empty. The sweat on his forehead felt cold in the night air. In the retraining sessions at the station, they’d told officers to remember the nasty racial legacy of the department, be aware of the community’s justified suspicion of police. Right now, all O’Sullivan was thinking about was getting this kid with the empty eyes to back the fuck off.

  “Go on home,” he said.

  “You go home, white boy,” said the kid. His hand moved lower.

  Suddenly, O’Sullivan’s head filled with a sudden clarity, his brain with a preternatural energy. He recognized the feel of the adrenaline hitting. He wasn’t going to get shot on the corner of Iowa and Van Dyke outside a shitty convenience store in a shitty town by some eight-year-old, bleed out in the gutter of some city the world left behind. He had a life, too.

  The gun felt alive in his hand. The gun was life.

  The muzzle was aimed dead at the kid’s chest. No way to miss, with the kid this close, just ten feet away maybe. Still cloaked in the shadow of the gas station overhang.

  “Kid, I’m not going to ask you again. I need you to put your hands on top of your head and get on your knees.”

  “Fuck you, motherfucker.”

  “I’m serious.”

  The kid’s hand was nearly inside his waistband now.

  “Don’t do that,” O’Sullivan said.

  The kid smiled, almost gently.

  “Don’t.”

  The kid’s smile broadened, the hand moved down into the pants. “Get the fuck out of my hood,” the kid cheerfully repeated. “I’ll cap your ass.”

  “Kid, I’m warning you,” O’Sullivan yelled. “Put your hands above your head! Do it now…”

  The roar shattered the night air, a sonic boom in the blackness. The shot blew the kid off his feet completely, knocked him onto his back.

  O’Sullivan reached for his radio, mechanically reported it: “Shots fired, officer needs help at the gas station on Iowa and Van Dyke.”

  “Ohgodohgodohgodohgod,” O’Sullivan repeated as he moved toward the body, the smoke rising from his Glock. He pointed it down at the kid again, but the boy wasn’t moving. The blood seeped through Homer Simpson’s face, pooled around the kid’s lifeless body. The grin had been replaced with a look of instantaneous shock. His hand had fallen out of his waistband with the force of the shooting.

  In it was a toy gun, the tip orange plastic.

  For a brief moment, O’Sullivan couldn’t breathe. When he looked up, he saw them coming. Dozens of them. The citizens of Detroit, coming out of the darkness, congregating. He could feel their eyes.

  Officer Ricky O’Sullivan sat down on the curb and began to cry.

  El Paso, Texas

  Another dead kid.

  He was the fourth in two days, his body so bloated that he was barely recognizable as a boy. His face was caved in, his nose smashed, his eyes blackened and swollen.

  Another face no one would see. Or remember. Or care about.

  “The coyotes really did a number on him.” Vivian’s voice sounded small behind her. Scared.

  “Yes,” Ellen nodded. She stood up straight, took a picture of the body with her cell phone, and then turned from it. “The governor will want the picture. Let’s get it to him.” Just another day. Just another fact-finding mission along the Rio Grande.

  Just another dead kid.

  Overall, the last year had seen a sudden upsurge in the number of children attempting to cross the border without papers. Not all were children—a surprising number of the unaccompanied minors were of gang age, somewhere between fourteen and seventeen. Some had tattoos. Many were missing fingers, eyes, ears. Law enforcement thought the smugglers had mutilated the kids and sent their body parts back to their parents for ransom.

  The flood wasn’t completely unexpected—after President Prescott’s announcement of no deportation for young, unaccompanied minors, parents all across Central and South America began shipping their kids up to the border. Some of the children rode the so-called “Train of Death” from the southern border of Mexico, then waited for American Border Patrol agents to pick them up in the desert. Others paid coyotes to ship their children through Mexico. Many parents never heard from their children again.

  But those who did make it swamped the available federal resources. Border Patrol spent their days trying to help doctors screen for disease, trying to dig up enough formula for babies, trying to patch up wounds and find blankets and keep the incipient gang members from knifing each other. That meant that the border had even less personnel.

  Every day, Ellen heard complaints from ranchers along the border. They’d been finding bodies on their land. Or ripped panties from rape victims. Or drugs. Or live cartel members acting as lookouts for the coyotes. Some refused to ranch their own land, fearful of stumbling on something that would land them in the soup with the cartels: the murder rate by the cartels along the border scared nearly all of them.

  Governor Bubba Davis had asked Prescott for help. Prescott wouldn’t even take his call. He did, however, tell CNN that those who wished to deport these children were obviously driven by xenophobia. That bullshit didn’t surprise Ellen one bit. She knew what Prescott would do to push forward his agenda. Her husband was stuck in Afghanistan and her marriage was a public joke. That was proof positive of that little proposition.

  The governor tried using state resources to shore up the border. The legislature passed a law, at his recommendation, enforcing federal immigration law. Noncitizens of the United States found entering the country illegally, the law stated, would be detained by Texas state law enforcement, then handed over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for deportation. The governor announced that if the federal government wouldn’t enforce federal law, the state of Texas sure would. After all, the state of Texas was absorbing the cost of the feds’ inaction.

  So Prescott’s attorney general, Jim Ballabon, sued Texas. And won. If the federal government didn’t want to enforce the law, the Supreme Court found, it didn’t have to do so. And if the state of Texas attempted to enforce that law, the court continued, it would be usurping federal authority. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” the governor had muttered angrily to Ellen.

  Ellen looked once more at the body of the dead child, then turned and walked away. It wasn’t until she reached the black Ford F-150 that Ellen bent over and threw up. Then she primly took out a handkerchief and wiped away the vomit from her mouth.

  “You ready to go, Viv?” she said.

  Ellen first noticed the helicopter following her truck a few minutes after leaving the Rio Grande. It wasn’t a news helicopter, Ellen knew—it was too decrepit for that, obviously a 1980s model. Cheap. Black. She could see it through her rearview mirror in the distance. And it was gaining.

  “Any idea what that helicopter is?” she said. Vivian shook her head, her straight black hair rippling.

  Ellen shrugged. Probably a military assignment, or some old kook out for a joyride.

  Then she saw the second helicopter.

  It was in the middle of the road, spanning the yellow line. She slammed on the brakes, screeching the F-150 to a halt, leaving a rubber streak in the road behind.

  “What the hell?” Vivian whispered.

  Two men stood in front of the helicopter.

  They both wore
cowboy hats and boots. They also wore carbines, slung casually over their shoulders. One unslung his gun, pointed it at the vehicle, and gestured for them to get out.

  “Don’t get out of the car,” Vivian said, her voice rising in panic.

  “Do we have a choice?” Ellen answered.

  Ellen pushed open her door, stood up, felt the waves of heat rise from the road. The sweat trickled down her lower back and into her underwear. She had time to think this wasn’t very feminine.

  One of the men shouted something in Spanish at Ellen. She held up her hands. “Just look nonthreatening,” she told himself. “It’ll be over soon.” She reminded herself that this wasn’t the first time she’d been held at gunpoint. It probably wouldn’t be the last, either. A brief thought of Brett flashed through her head.

  “Fuera, perra!” the same man shouted. Ellen turned back to look at the car. Vivian was still inside, tears rolling down her cheeks, shaking her head.

  “FUERA, PERRA!”

  Still she didn’t move.

  Ellen had time for one thought—Oh, shit—before the Mexican pointed the carbine at the truck and fired a burst through the windshield.

  The first bullet missed Vivian, but the second caught her directly in the face. Her head slammed back against the seat rest, the back of her head splattering. One moment, her pretty face was staring directly at Ellen. The next, there was no face, just a mess of tissue and tendon and bone and blood.

  Ellen heard Vivian’s body slump over against the car door.

  Ellen didn’t react. She went numb. This made no sense. Vivian was still alive. The helicopters weren’t here. This was Texas, for God’s sake, not the middle of drug cartel territory.

  Except Vivian was dead. And the helicopter still sat right in the middle of the road. In Texas.

  “Pinche puta,” said the man with the gun. He spat a string of saliva into the dust. Then, to Ellen, in broken English: “Get on knees.”

  Ellen looked around quickly. There was nothing in any direction. Nobody.

  She got on her knees.

  The second man approached Ellen. Unlike his buddy, he wore a bandanna over his face; only his black eyes were visible. Ellen figured that this one made the decisions, the Boss—his buddy was a lackey.

  “She worked for the governor?” the Boss asked. He had no trace of an accent.

  Ellen nodded.

  “You also work for the governor?”

  Again, Ellen nodded. As she did, she felt the barrel of a gun against the back of her head. The shooter stood beside her, his carbine warm to the touch. Ellen closed her eyes, shut them tight.

  “I’m not going to beg you,” she said.

  A pause.

  Then the man in black spoke, slowly. In English. “Shoot her.”

  Ellen didn’t have time to close her eyes before she heard the click of the trigger being pulled—and then the split-second click of the hammer hitting . . . nothing. The gun was unloaded. Ellen opened her eyes.

  The shooter laughed. “Se cagó encima,” he scoffed. Then he spit into the dust again.

  “Get up,” said the Boss. “Get in your car. And tell your boss to get his men the fuck off my border.”

  Ellen couldn’t argue with him. She didn’t have the strength or the presence of mind. She had gone numb; her brain had turned off the emotional spigot. She couldn’t process what she was seeing. She could just get out of there. Now.

  She pulled open the car door, and the iron smell of blood hit her hard. She studiously attempted not to look to the passenger’s seat, where Vivian’s body was already drawing buzzing black flies.

  For a moment she couldn’t move. Then, the icy feeling of anger began to creep up her spine. She slammed the car into gear and hit the gas, peeling off the road at a hard right angle. She gunned the engine, bringing the truck up to fifty mph. Sixty, seventy, eighty. She only knew one thing: she had to get as far away from these animals as she could, as fast as possible.

  A few seconds later, in her rearview mirror, she saw the helicopters disappear into the distance.

  She hit the brakes, skidded to a stop, the dust clouding around the truck, the engine growling. She looked down at her hands; her fingernails had bitten small, bloody half-moons into her palms.

  She looked over at Vivian’s corpse, the bloody mess of her head.

  She closed her eyes.

  Only then did she allow herself to scream.

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  It was shortly after midnight. The muddy puddle at his feet ran red with his blood. All he could think about was Ellen.

  Ellen, living the rest of her life alone. Ellen, put through hell again. Ellen.

  At night in Kabul, temperature dipped to below freezing. The good news was that the cold had helped stop the bleeding. The bad news was that he was in danger of going into hypothermia. He could barely keep himself conscious—he’d only been able to do so thus far by jabbing the butt of the M9 into his wound to feel that sharp pain. Now his arm was numb. If he fell asleep, he’d be a carcass by morning.

  “Get up, pal,” he said to himself, shaking off thoughts of his wife. “Time to go to work.”

  At night, the streets emptied completely. Even the Taliban fighters didn’t want to be in the open—they’d be in nearby apartment buildings, no doubt huddled around their primitive fires. Electricity had gone out in the city periodically over the last few weeks, with Taliban fighters bombing electrical substations. Every morning, allied forces were finding more and more freezing bodies in the streets, despite the pitiful hamlets they’d set up for the poor around the city. That was all bad news, but for Brett, it was convenient—there was nobody to spot him hobbling toward the Kabul airport.

  The airport would still be in American hands, Brett knew. It was located just north of the city, about nine miles from the center of Kabul. If there was any place left in Afghanistan that would remain in American hands, that would be it. The American military essentially owned the northern portion of the airport. If he could make it that far.

  Brett struggled to his feet.

  He knew he’d have to stay quiet—with the Taliban presumably running the place, there would be a bounty out for US soldiers—but every time he brushed his shattered arm against a wall, swollen to twice its normal size, he gasped in pain. Then, reluctantly, he took the magazine out of the gun and bit down on it. Hard. Better to crack a few teeth than to be featured on CNN being dragged through the streets. And the empty gun wouldn’t be of any use anyway.

  The airport, he told himself.

  The airport.

  He’d seen the footage of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and he’d always groaned in horror at seeing it—it meant the end of a country. Now all he could think about was how the last soldier in that last helicopter must have felt.

  Relieved.

  By the time Brett spotted the airport, he couldn’t feel his legs. The airfield was exposed, with plains surrounding it on every side to avoid the potential for snipers or antiaircraft attacks on the runways. Thank God, Brett thought, it’s a dark night.

  He stumbled forward toward the gates as he reached the empty field. The gates grew larger with every agonizing step.

  Then, miraculously, the gate was before him. Brett grinned as it materialized in the darkness.

  Except that the gate was open.

  Blown wide open.

  Then he saw it. To the northwest, something was burning. The acrid smoke of burning oil and flesh cut his nostrils. He wiped the sweat off his face and walked toward the helicopter. My God, he thought. There is no last helicopter.

  He knew before he reached the helicopter what had happened. The smoke billowed in great black plumes against the blue-black night sky; the soft, angry flames spurted from the landing gear. The runway was clear except for the helicopter and the dozens of uniformed c
orpses lying nearby. Brett knew some of the corpses—they had been his men at the embassy. Many had been shot at point-blank range in the head.

  Obviously, the Taliban had taken the airport, and they’d been ready and waiting when the ambassador’s chopper arrived. A massive, coordinated assault. The Tet Offensive, except successful in every way.

  The Taliban had waited for the helicopter to land, and then they’d shot it to pieces and executed the survivors.

  “Son of a bitch,” Brett muttered to himself.

  Brett glanced at the horizon. The sun would be up soon, and the uniform would be a target. The field would soon be swarming with Taliban allies. He had to find a place to hole up and think.

  The only place in sight was a nearby hangar, one of the military’s famous steel made-to-order jobs. Brett didn’t know whether it was occupied, but at this point, he didn’t care—he felt a wild anger rising in him. He instinctively gripped his pistol tighter.

  He made for the hangar. Even before he stepped inside, he could smell the death there. The horror when he did enter made him step outside again. The nausea felt hard and cold on his stomach. He shook it off, his head thickening.

  Then he went in.

  Blood covered the floor, the walls. It slicked the floor like oil at a transmission shop. The Taliban had used the hangar as an execution post, and there was a line of bodies lying on the floor, many of them wearing American uniforms. Those bodies had been mutilated obscenely, despicably. Limbs and organs were missing, flesh burned. They’d done it slowly. They’d enjoyed themselves. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

  “Animals,” he said softly. “Fuck these animals.”

  One of the bodies looked familiar—the last body in line. It wore an expensive, carefully tailored suit. The face was unrecognizable. One of the hands was missing. Brett ripped the jacket off the corpse and looked at the inside lining. Embroidered on the inside of the jacket were three letters: B.F.F. Brett knew right away: it was Beauregard Frederick Feldkauf. The ambassador hadn’t made it out after all.