“What happened to those Afghan nationals?”
“Afghan nationals? Again, Commander, I have no idea what you’re—”
“Listen, motherfucker.” I poke him in the chest. “I’m on to you. This isn’t over. What you did up there—and probably are still doing—it’s illegal, against CENTCOM SOP. There were kids there, asshole. I saw the two cooks in the back. One of the boys pissed his pants when he saw me. The other followed suit a moment later. So, non-combatants and minors, and I know you don’t give a shit, but I do—big time—and I’ll get to the bottom of it. And I haven’t forgotten what your guy said out there when he saw those dead Talis. I’ll find out what he meant by that, just as I will find out what the hell the Agency is doing with Russians in Afghanistan and also what was in those damn crates with biohazard labels. Count on it.”
“Commander,” he says with an easy calm that I find unsettling. I’ve just threatened to go kinetic on the man, and his eerily-serene demeanor for a moment makes me wonder if I should have listened to Granite’s advice and let this one go. “You do what you think you must do. But please, know that when you choose to fuck with a bull…well, you get the horns.” He flashes his creepy grin while making a fist with his free hand before extending the pinky and index fingers toward me.
“Is that a threat?” I ask.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he adds, walking around me to get himself some breakfast.
I stand there a second while seriously considering making true my comment to Colonel Granite by grabbing the bastard by the ponytail.
But before I can make my move, a massive hand clasps my right shoulder from behind, holding me back.
I snap my head around at the intrusion and have to look up. It’s Dix, and he slowly and quietly turns me in the direction of the double doors.
“Time to go, Boss,” he finally says. “Most definitely time to go.”
He steers me outside before finally releasing me.
As I’m about to let him have a piece of my mind, we see the half-dozen ambulances parked in front of the Role 3 across the street from the DFAC. Gurneys pushed by medics stream out of them and toward the ER’s double doors.
And that explains the alert from Kate’s beeper.
It’s carnage of the first degree, and the scene of Marines screaming while being wheeled from those vehicles has a sobering effect in my altered state of mind.
There’s nothing like seeing American kids all mangled up to give you a powerful dose of perspective, quickly pinning any semblance of problems you think you might have to the bottom of the totem pole.
Afghanistan is one sorry place to spend nine months of your life. It’s a sorrier place to die in.
Dix and I do the only thing we can do: stand there in silence as medics push the gurneys from the ambulances toward the ER entrance, where they are met halfway by a mix of nurses and doctors streaming out of the facility.
Kate is among them. She shoots me a look before hurrying to the side of a female marine on a gurney pushed by two Navy corpsmen and starts barking orders while fast-walking alongside them.
But it’s the words she spoke to me a moment ago that resonate in my head as I stare in horror at a body that’s little more than a torso with bloody stumps for limbs plus a head wrapped in bandages. She is writhing in pain and nearly naked as medics had to cut through her uniform to treat the wounds.
I felt very fucking noble amputating kids’ mangled legs and cutting off what was left of their—
“No way, Boss,” Dix says as the commotion ends just as fast as it started. The gurneys vanish inside the Role 3 and ambulances rush off in a cloud of red dust. All that’s left is multiple streaks of blood on the ground, which the sand devours almost immediately—just as this godforsaken land greedily consumes the bodies and souls or our service men and women.
“What?” I say, turning to see my taller companion.
“That’s no way for a brother or sister to live.”
“Dix…what are you—”
“No fucking way you let me go home like that.”
“Dix, I—”
“You’ll take care of it, right Boss? You’ll do the honorable thing?”
I’m speechless. “Where is this coming—”
“Because I’ll do it for you.”
And he just walks off, leaving me wondering, for the second time today, what the hell just happened.
Chapter 4
“We’re way overqualified for this shit, if you ask me,” Murph comments over the squadron frequency while a midday sun bakes us alive.
I’m lying next to Dix keeping overwatch on a rifle platoon of U.S. Marines approaching a mountainside village along a rocky goat trail around a hundred and fifty klicks west of KAF, so well inside our standard operating theater. Murph and Chappy are hidden just a few hundred feet north of us, along the path the Marines are planning to take as they make their slow approach from the south. Cope is farther north, behind a clump of boulders on a ridge overlooking the village getting eyes on the target.
“That’s the thing, Murph,” Chappy replies. “No one’s asking.”
“Plus,” Murph adds, “no one told me we would be doing this shit in the middle of the goddamned day.”
“What are you talking about, man?” Chappy replies. “It’s a glorious day. Nothing but blue skies and aerial assets above, mixed caliber weapons in our hands, and a bunch Talis out there in need of meeting their virgins.”
“And I wasn’t talking to you, demo boy,” Murph replies.
“Alright, kill the chatter,” I say.
“You know, guys,” Murph continues, apparently unfazed by my order, “I shouldn’t have to remind any of you that operating during the day presents a number of problems, and at the very top of the list is that we’re operating during the fucking day.”
“Yes, we all get it, Murph,” I say. “Now, zip it.”
“Roger that.”
“Don’t mind him, Murph,” Dix decides to chime in. “The boss’s grumpy because he got dumped yesterday.”
I look over at the oversized Jersey boy, mute my mic, and say, “What the hell, man? So, you can talk about that but not about the ponytailed asshole?”
He grins and pulls out a granola bar from a side pocket, removes the wrapper, and takes a bite, chewing it slowly while looking down at the bottom of the rocky ravine with the scope of his MP7SD.
“Really?” Chappy says.
“The little doctor with the awesome lips?” asks Murph.
“That’s the one,” Dix replies still chewing.
I give him the bird but he’s still looking down at the incoming Marines, like we’re actually supposed to be doing.
“Kandi, right?” asks Murph.
“Kate,” Dix replies, shooting eye still on the scope. “Kandi was that belly dancer in Norfolk that also had the hots for our Latino lover.”
“Oh, yeah,” Murph says. “Forgot about her.”
“Saw it happen at breakfast yesterday,” Dix decides to elaborate. “Not a pretty sight.”
“Dix!” I finally hiss.
Chappy starts laughing.
“What are you laughing at, Bro?” Murph asks. “At least our boy didn’t get dumped on Facebook, like you.”
“Snapchat, Man,” Chappy corrects. “But that bitch wasn’t in the same league. The little Doc’s one helluva babe.”
It’s no use with these incorrigible characters. I just shake my head and exhale. There’s laughter from everyone on the line except for Cope.
“Guess we can’t all be as lucky as Dix,” Murph says.
After Chappy getting dumped, and now me, Dix is the last team member standing. Now, anyone next to Dix looks miniscule, but this bartender named Franky Mitchell we met at the Star Bar, a popular club in Norfolk, nine months ago, and whom he married this past Apri
l, just a few weeks before our deployment, gives a whole new meaning to the word petite. And even the name is fitting. She’s a gorgeous little thing. I actually was the first to spot her at the bar on my way back from the men’s room after drinking three beers. The Star Bar was tended by a dozen girls impersonating famous actresses, and Franky looked like the blue-eyed version of actress Emilia Clarke. Yeah, like Kate, I’m a sucker for petite women with beautiful lips.
I was instantly impressed with their juggling bartending skills, tossing bottles in the air to the applause and whistles of the dozens of guys sitting along the long counter. It reminded me of that Coyote Ugly movie from some years back. And so, like every male spectator pretty much hypnotized by their abilities and star looks, I was also hooked. But my eyes gravitated to the little brunette with the intense blue eyes and smooth light-honey skin working my side of the long bar.
And then she shocked me.
“So, what does it take for a soldier to buy a girl a drink?” she asked me while giving me a slow feminine wink, to the amazed stare of every guy around me. And mind you, most of them were also in uniform.
I was stunned, certain that she—like every other star-impersonating beauty behind that bar—was getting propositioned a hundred times each night. Yet, she focused on me.
“I—I’m a marine… not a soldier,” was my very lame response, hating myself for saying it the moment it came out.
But mercifully—and ironically—this woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds soaking wet rescued the bumbling Navy SEAL. “I’m getting off my shift now. So, how about it, Marine?”
And just like that, we were doing shots from a bottle of Cava de Oro Tequila Reposado and chasing them with cold Budweisers. The place had one of those old-fashioned jukeboxes and someone decided to play a very old tune from Karen Carpenter, Close to You, which Franky happened to love. So, she dragged me to the dance floor for our very first dance. And then something completely unexpected happened when I held her: Suddenly, with Franky in my arms, all felt right with the world. It was truly as if lightning had struck.
But my mistake—one I still kick myself for—was bringing her over to meet the guys afterwards at their table across the bar instead of just taking her home with me. Franky saw the tall, dark, handsome, and very charming Jersey Boy, and as my bad luck would have it, she was not only from New Jersey, but from the same damn township of Pemberton. I mean, what the fuck, right? What are the odds of that? So, as you would have expected, Dix and Franky hit it off immediately, and by the end of the night I had fallen to second place. A few months later I stood as the best man at their wedding, and the rest of these characters were groomsmen opposite a line of beautiful bartenders. I have to admit that I was jealous at the ceremony, but I nearly lost it at the reception that followed, where they danced to fucking Close to You. Maybe that’s why I messed around with exotic dancers in the weeks that followed, including the beautiful Kandi over in Norfolk, and then latched on to Kate so quickly. I was in a bit of a rebound mode, trying to find that all-is-right-with-the-world feeling again. And if I were to be completely honest with myself, I never got that feeling with Kate. There was no lightning strike during our first slow dance in Qatar—or even during the very wild sex that followed by the beach. So, maybe it was a good thing that she broke it off.
“I’m amazed Dix hasn’t broken her yet,” Murph comments.
“Pole dancers are flexible, man. Don’t break so easily,” Chappy says.
“Fuck you, man,” Dix counters. “Franky ain’t no pole dancer. She’s a licensed bartender working to pay for her IT degree from—”
“But she’s riding the big Dixie pole now,” Murph says.
“Yeah. All three inches,” Chappy adds. “Maybe that’s why she’s still in one piece. Hard to break anything with a Tootsie Roll.”
Dix just shakes his head, and it’s my turn to grin and give him a you-started-this-shit look. And if I were to continue being honest with myself, I would admit that their crude remarks about Franky also bother me.
“Had enough, kids?” Cope finally decides to chime in. “If so,” he adds before anyone can reply, “why don’t you let me buy y’all a cup of shut the hell up?”
I nod at the silence that follows and focus back on the op, which isn’t really an op worthy of a SEAL squad, but beats the hell out of just sitting at KAF feeling sorry for myself while probably getting ribbed by these characters.
Aerial assets confirmed that the village is harboring six men that arrived the day before on motorcycles hauling a mix of RPGs and Anza MK-II rockets. The rule is that if a UAV spots an Afghan national with a rifle, that isn’t enough to be considered a combatant since pretty much everyone in this country owns one. But a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and even worse, a shoulder-launched missile like the Anza, is a different story. The latter is made in Pakistan and supposedly not exported except to the Malaysian Army, but anything goes in Pakistan. And the sighting of just one of the very accurate SAMs is definitely enough reason to check it out. But the Talis know we’re always watching them and tend to let us see them with weapons like RPGs in the open as a way to draw us into a trap. Which is precisely what happened yesterday to the platoon of Marines which was ambushed.
So, the job that Colonel Granite mentioned yesterday at breakfast was simply to accompany this platoon and keep an eye out for his boys.
Basically, a babysitting op, which explains why the team is so damn relaxed busting each other’s balls, but it also brings me back to Murph’s original comment.
I have to agree with him about doing this in daylight. Although I’ve taken every precaution, including arriving here via a separate helo from the Marines and getting dropped off almost three klicks away, we still did it in daylight. On top of that, we’re all wearing ghillie suits, a type of camouflage clothing covered in loose strips of burlap designed to help us blend with our surroundings. You really can’t spot us when we’re laying still. The downside is that the suits are damn hot, especially with the sun pounding down on us. But I’d take losing a pound of water over a pound of blood any day.
And while I’m damn certain there’s no Tali around us, it’s still too exposed for my taste, and especially for the column of soldiers below. But NATO wants this place checked out before the enemy melts away overnight, as it so often tends to do.
I frown while staring at the column of jarheads—something that’s been bothering me since getting a visual on them.
USMC rifle platoons are made out of three rifle squads, each led by a sergeant. Each squad is composed of three rifle teams, and each rifle team has four marines in it. The latter is the basic Ground Combat Element, or GCE. So, with 12 marines per squad, plus three squad sergeants, it comes up to 39 marines per platoon. Add to that number the platoon leader, in this case First Lieutenant Jay Brooks, a platoon sergeant, two Navy Corpsmen, and a messenger. Plus, in this case also a two-man 81mm mortar forward observer team and three Marines up in front of the group sweeping the path with metal detectors searching for buried IEDs. And that all adds up to 49, a number I crosschecked with Colonel Granite and Lieutenant Brooks during the briefing.
But when I do another visual count, I come up with 51.
I pan the binoculars up and down the column trying to spot the two extra heads, but everyone is geared up and wearing standard-issued helmets and tactical glasses. But two of them, tagging right behind Brooks and his gunnery sergeant, are armed with MP7s, not a standard USMC weapon. And one of them has a TAC-338 sniper rifle strapped across his back.
“Hey, Dix, I think the extra heads down there were part of the tac team escorting your CIA buddy yesterday,” I whisper to him after muting my mic. “What do you think they could be doing down—”
“Movement,” Cope reports from his sniper perch.
I unmute the mic while Dix takes a look with his scope and raises his right eyebrow.
“Four Talis with RPKs on rooftops a half click from the jarheads,” Cope adds. “There’s at least a couple dozen more huddled up on the hills overlooking the trail. But something’s wrong with them. Bastards look very… agitated.” He also provides me with the GPS coordinates of all threats and reports no non-combatants in sight. Though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any inside the structures.
“Copy that,” I reply, making a mental note to corner Brooks after the op and find out what were those two guys doing with his platoon. But for now, I need to get my head in the mission at hand. We’re dealing with Talis armed with RPKs, Russian-made light machine guns. But in my book, there’s nothing light about them aside from the weight. That hardware fires the powerful 7.62x39mm round, capable of tearing into our body armor and taking off a limb. And on top of that, there are at least two dozen more flanking the trail ahead of the jarhead column. I switch frequencies to alert them. “Hotel Niner Seven, Hotel Niner Seven, Alpha Charlie.”
“Alpha Charlie, Hotel Niner Seven. Go ahead,” comes the reply from Brooks. I recognize his voice from this morning’s briefing.
“Hotel Niner Seven, be advised my overwatch asset is reporting PID on four Talis with RPKs on rooftops at your twelve o’clock plus over twenty-four more flanking the trail. Half a klick. They look ready to engage.” PID stands for positive identification. I also relay the coordinates of the threat as well as the three sets of coordinates where my team is currently stationed.
“Copy that,” Brooks replies, reading back all sets of coordinates. Then he says, “Stand by.”
The Marines come to a stop, and I watch the individual rifle squads scrambling to form three DFPs, defensive fighting positions, along both sides of the goat trail.
A moment later, Brooks surprises me.
“Alpha Charlie, Hotel Niner Seven. What’s the CDE?”
The lieutenant is asking me for the collateral damage estimate of the coordinates I’ve provided, meaning he wants to make sure there are no civilians in the vicinity. His question tells me he’s considering calling in an airstrike to blow the Talis off the map before getting his men any closer. The strike would also likely set off any IED in their path.
Highest Law: A Gripping Psychological Thriller Page 5
