by Scott McEwen
“Be right back,” he said to his wife, slipping the phone back into his pocket.
Marie didn’t even look at him. She cut the twine on another bale of hay and broke it apart with her foot.
“It’s probably nothin’, babe.”
She stopped and stared at him. “It’s never nothin’ with the Navy. It’s only been a month, and you’re supposed to get two. You’re telling me their ships won’t float without Gil Shannon aboard?”
He grinned, knowing she knew damn well he was no deckhand. “Well, they float well enough . . . but the crews won’t go out of sight of land unless I’m aboard.”
She shook her head and went back to work, his sarcastic sense of humor no longer holding the appeal for her that it once did.
Gil found the cordless on the kitchen table and took it out onto the back porch. “This is Shannon.”
“Gil, its Hal. Something’s happened, and I thought it important enough to call. Can you call me back on your sat phone?” Master Chief Halligan Steelyard was a fellow member of DEVGRU (United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, aka SEAL Team Six) and one of Gil’s closest friends. He’d been in the Navy since Chester Nimitz was a baby, and he was something of his own institution among the SEALs.
“Give me one minute.” Gil hung up the phone and then went to the bedroom where he kept a secure satellite phone and called Steelyard back. “So what’s up?”
“Sorry to bother you at home with this,” Steelyard said. “Sean Bordeaux and five of his men bought it yesterday in an ambush here in Nangarhar Province, south of Jalalabad.”
Gil had worked with Bordeaux a number of times in the past and considered him a friend, but this loss wasn’t the kind of news that rated a satellite call from a guy like Steelyard from halfway around the world. “What else, Chief?”
“A Night Stalker pilot was taken prisoner in the same ambush,” Steelyard went on. “Taliban caught the bird on the ground during a Ranger training op, shot everybody up, killed the copilot, and stripped the bodies. It’s a problem because the pilot they took is a woman, pretty thing, twenty-nine years old . . . the only Night Stalker female. It’s not going to play well in the media, especially if she shows up bleeding on Al Jazeera. I thought you’d like a heads up because I expect it’s only a matter of time before you get the call from SOG.”
SOG was the CIA’s Special Operations Group, a more evolved version of the once infamous and now extinct MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group) that Gil’s father had once been a part of. Though the CIA still recruited through SOG from all branches of the US military—the same as they had during Vietnam—the modern CIA was no longer permitted its own “in-house” specialists. So operators like Gil Shannon were often pulled from their assigned Special Mission Units (SMUs) for the purpose of carrying out one-man operations that were often so highly classified that no one else in the Special Forces community ever knew a thing about them . . . at least not officially.
Gil’s current, primary unit assignment was to DEVGRU the same as that of Chief Steelyard. Being so highly classified that the US government preferred not to admit its existence, DEVGRU was one of only four SMUs within the United States military. The other three SMUs were: Delta Force of the US Army, the 24th Special Tactics Squadron of the US Air Force, and the Intelligence Support Activity—also under the auspices of the US Army.
Gil patted his jacket pocket for his tobacco. “Are we talking about Warrant Officer Sandra Brux, Chief?”
“Yeah. Know her?”
“She’s flown top-cover for us a couple of times,” Gil said. “They’re gonna tear her up, Chief. How’d this happen?”
“It’s a CID investigation right now,” Steelyard said. CID was the Army Criminal Investigation Command—originally known as the Criminal Investigations Division first established under General Pershing during the First World War. For the purposes of continuity, the agency was still referred to as the CID. “But I had a talk with our guy in NCIS who’s connected.” NCIS was the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “He says CID just took some Pakistani intel guy into custody who’s been selling information to the other side. I’m thinking he may have tipped off the enemy about the Army’s plan to snatch an Al Qaeda cleric who’s been making them nervous. Listen, I’ll get back to you in a few days. Sound good?”
“Sounds good, Chief, yeah. Thanks for the heads up.”
“You bet.”
Gil went back downstairs to find his mother-in-law in the kitchen making sandwiches. “Thanks for calling me in, Mom.”
His mother-in-law smiled. “Are you leaving us again?” Her name was Janet, and she was sixty-five years old, short with long gray hair she wore in the braid of a horsewoman, like her daughter.
“No,” he said. “That was just an update to keep me in the loop.”
“Think Marie will buy that?” Janet asked.
He laughed. “There’s not much space between you two, is there?”
She shook her head, offering him a plated roast beef sandwich with potato chips. “Like a beer with that?”
“Yes, I would,” he said, wishing in earnest that he did not personally know Sandra Brux. The two of them had shared some laughs one night half a year earlier, swapping stories about the challenges of holding a marriage together.
LATER THAT NIGHT, after his mother-in-law had washed the dinner dishes and gone to bed, Gil sat alone in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace rolling a cigarette.
Marie came to sit on the hearth in front of him, a glass of white wine in her hand. “I’ve seen you like this before,” she said quietly. “You lost a friend today, didn’t you?”
He looked up from the cigarette. “It’s worse, actually.”
“How so?”
“The Taliban captured one of our helicopter pilots yesterday.” He licked the edge of the cigarette paper and smoothed it into place to make it look almost store-bought. “A Night Stalker. For the enemy that’s a hell of a trophy. Almost as good as capturing a SEAL or a Green Beret would be.”
“And you know him, I assume?”
“It’s a her,” he said quietly, poking the smoke between his lips and lighting it with a match. “She’s twenty-nine. Pretty. It’s gonna play like hell once the media gets hold of it.”
Marie nodded, taking a sip of wine. “Another Jessie Lynch,” she said sadly. “So when are you leaving?”
“They didn’t call me for that.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” she said.
He sat holding his temples with the same hand the cigarette was in. “They don’t even know where she is yet, baby.”
Marie set the wineglass aside with a sigh and rubbed her knees. “Gil, I’m sorry, but I don’t have the patience for these little go-rounds no more. Are ya leavin’ or not?”
He looked at her, his voice not much more than a whisper. “It’s what I do, baby. I can’t explain it, but I feel like the only other thing I was ever meant to do was love you. And how’s a man’s supposed to make peace with that?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she wiped them away. “What about my peace?”
He looked down, unable to meet her gaze. She was the only person he had ever feared intellectually. “That’s a fair question,” he said. “If you ask me to wait for the call, I will. It might easily be another month . . . probably will be.”
“Look at me,” she said. “You’re at the top of your game, aren’t you?”
He considered that for a moment. “Yes, ma’am. I believe I am.”
She lifted the glass, finished the wine, then reached for his cigarette, drawing deeply from it and giving it back. She exhaled and turned to stare into the flames of the fire. “That girl put herself on the line for this country, and now she’s living a nightmare. I reckon she deserves the best this country’s got in return.” She turned to look at him. “But this time you will make me that promise. This time you will promise to come home alive. Otherwise, you do not have
my blessing.”
He puckered his lips to suppress his smile, knowing that she had him over the barrel. “I promise.”
“You promise what?” she said, arching her brow.
“I promise to come home alive.”
“And you will keep that promise,” she said, pointing her finger. “Otherwise, when I eventually arrive in heaven, I will not speak to you. I will not speak to you for at least a thousand years, Gil Shannon. Do you understand me?”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “That long?”
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do . . . and I believe you mean it.”
She stood up from the hearth, straightening the tails of her denim shirt. “You’d better. Now, I am going upstairs to have my bath. Will you still be awake when I’m finished?”
He looked up at her and smiled. “That depends. Do I get a kiss before you go up? A little something to prime the pump?”
She leaned over to kiss him affectionately on the mouth, then turned and left the room.
4
AFGHANISTAN,
Nuristan Province, Waigal Village
Sandra awoke the next morning to the sound of a very heated argument between two men in the next room. She couldn’t understand a word of what was being said, but she knew that it must have something to do with her. She was no longer tied to the bed, but that hardly mattered. Given the inflamed condition of her leg, she was in no shape for escape or evasion, and she didn’t even have socks to wear, much less a pair of shoes. The food she’d been given was coarse and unknown to her, but she suspected that it was a goat meat stew. What worried her was that the water tasted bad. She knew she wouldn’t last long if she caught a gastrointestinal infection, but there was no other way for her to survive in the short term but to stay hydrated.
She wondered if her husband, John, had been told yet of her disappearance. She doubted it. John was her only family, stationed in the Philippines where he flew cargo planes for the Air Force, and Sandra knew that informing him of her abduction was less of an immediate priority than if he were a civilian. In other words, they’d tell him when they got around to it. Sandra was no fool. She knew she was photogenic, and she knew the State Department would already be scrambling in their attempts to get out in front of the story, possibly even scrambling to keep it under wraps. She was now a pawn in the big chess game, and she didn’t give herself much of a chance, particularly since she had no extended family to apply pressure on her behalf. She also knew quite well that in the Hindu Kush even a Muslim woman was worth less than a good packhorse. And Sandra was a Catholic, quite possibly the next worst thing to being a Jew.
In her heart, she believed that her best chance of being brought out alive would lie with the men she flew for, men within the special forces community itself, men who would not easily stand for one of their own being left to languish for an indefinite period without a concerted effort to locate and bring her out before it was too late.
The door was suddenly kicked off its hinges and fell to the floor. In stalked a bearded man she had never seen before wearing a pakol, the ethnic headgear of the Afghan people. The man seemed violently angry as he stalked over to the bed and reached for the hem of her gown. She didn’t resist him at first, believing that he only wanted to check the gunshot wound to her thigh, but he jerked the garment clear up past her waist, and another man came from behind him, pinning her shoulders to the bed.
She screamed and kicked, clawing for the bearded man’s eyes, managing to gouge her thumb deep into the socket before the second man chopped her in the throat, temporarily collapsing her esophagus. The bearded man grabbed his eye, reeling away from the bed as more men came into the room shouting. They sat on her and tied her down. Then they ripped away her gown and left her naked, still gasping for air.
The men laughed while poking and prodding her. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to scream, knowing that would only excite them more.
The bearded man was not laughing. He shoved the others out of the way and stood over her glowering, his right eyeball bloody. He shouted into the other room, and a man with a video camera came in, ordering the others out. Then the bearded man dropped his trousers and climbed onto the bed with her, cursing her in a language she did not understand, and that’s when she began to scream.
TEN MINUTES LATER, the man with the beard, whose name was Naeem, sat on a table in the next room trying to keep his head still as a young woman missing most of her nose examined his eye.
“You are lucky,” she said quietly. “Any closer to the retina, and she might have blinded you.”
Naeem pushed her away. “Don’t tell me I’m lucky, Badira. Tell me what needs to be done for it.”
“There are medicines to put in the eye,” she explained, “but none that we have here. All you can do is wear a bandage over it while it heals.”
“Fine. Cover your face,” he ordered in disgust and got up from the table.
Badira backed away, obediently lifting the bottom of her hijab up over her mutilated nose so that only her eyes were showing. She was not forced to wear a chadri or a burqa around the village because she was a nurse and her husband was dead. Her husband was the one who had cut off her nose shortly after their marriage for refusing to wear a burqa. Mercifully, he had been killed by an airstrike near the Pakistani border a few years later. Their marriage had been an arranged affair, as were 75 percent of all Afghan marriages.
An older man stepped into the room from outside, and the other Taliban men began to bristle, but Naeem settled them. “Never mind, old man. It’s done.”
The old man’s name was Sabil Nuristani, and he was the titular head of the village. “Now you must take her far away from here.” he insisted. “Otherwise, they will send men here to kill us all.”
“No!” Naeem snapped. “We will show them the video, and then they will pay to get her back. They have paid before.”
“You had better use your head,” Sabil cautioned, stepping deeper into the room. “Kohistani hasn’t given his approval for a ransom demand. He only said we were to—”
“Aasif Kohistani does not command here!” Naeem shouted. “Hezb-e Islami does not command here! I command here! We Taliban command! We captured the woman, so we will do with her as we please.”
“You are a fool to risk crossing Kohistani. He is a powerful man.”
Naeem stomped pugnaciously up to the older man. “What does Hezb-e Islami do for this village? Nothing! Kohistani did not even have men enough to send to the ambush. Why do you think he sent us instead of his own people—eh?”
Sabil shook his head in dismay. “So sad. Even now, you’re too stupid to see that you were used. You Taliban mean nothing to the Hezbi.”
“Shut up, old man. Get out!”
Nuristani left, and Naeem slammed the door after him, turning to his men. “He’s lucky I don’t have him beaten. Jafar, you will make five copies of the video. Tomorrow, you will take two of them to our people in Kabul. I will write down the instructions for them to follow. Soon the Americans will pay for the infidel woman, and we will have good things again. We will have medicine and more guns. You will see. Now get to work, all of you.”
The room cleared, leaving Naeem alone with Badira.
“So will she live long enough?” Naeem wanted to know.
Badira shrugged. “Not if the leg becomes infected.”
“Will she live a week?”
“Not if the leg is infected.”
Naeem bridled with impatience. “Is the leg infected or not?”
“It must be,” she said. “She hasn’t been given any antibiotics.”
“Then I will send for some,” he said. “She is your responsibility. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He trudged out of the building, and Badira took her medical bag into the room, where Sandra was still lying tied to the bed, weeping with shame and revulsion.
Sandra had listene
d to all of the shouting, assuming they were fighting over whether or not to kill her. It was not until after she felt Badira sit gently down on the edge of the bed, pouring peroxide over the festering bullet wound, did she dare to open her eyes.
She tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat.
“I’m going to give you something to make you sleep,” Badira said with a slight British accent. “You need your strength. Your leg is infected.”
“Please untie me,” Sandra managed to croak.
Badira shook her head. “I’m not allowed, but don’t worry. You will be asleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep,” Sandra pleaded. “I need to get out of here!”
Badira grew cross with her. “Listen to me. Your government will pay them, and then they will release you. You must be patient.”
Sandra shook her head in desperation. “No, you don’t understand! My government doesn’t pay—especially not for soldiers! They’ll let me die here!”
“We are not going to argue,” Badira said peremptorily. “You are going to take some pills and go to sleep. I will try to keep you asleep as much as possible. He will leave you alone that way. In a week, your people will pay and you will leave.”
Seeing the distinct lack of compassion in Badira’s eyes, Sandra suddenly became angry (which was a much stronger emotion than terror), and she lost her willingness to beg. “What are you going to do about the infection?”
“Naeem has sent for antibiotics.”
Sandra watched her tend to the wound, preparing a new dressing. “Where did you learn to speak English?”
“In Pakistan,” Badira said. “I was enrolled in medical school in Islamabad until the Taliban took over the government here. After that, my father demanded that I return.” What Badira did not go on to share was that she had been called home to marry the son of a man to whom her father owed a financial debt, a local leader who had supported the Taliban’s rise to power. And those who found themselves owing money to Taliban officials were severely mistreated.
“Can I have something else to wear?” Sandra asked.
