The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  Still, perhaps it was time to look on the bright side. I was alive. Also, I was on a helicopter, which probably meant I was back in friendly hands. Probably. Of course, I was also hog-tied and hooded. This seemed to indicate that my newfound companions suspected that I’d had something to do with the ambush.

  Suddenly, my position didn’t seem all that enviable.

  The American military is the best-disciplined fighting force in the world. Even so, it’s still composed of fallible human beings. I know what it’s like to stare at a captured prisoner while your friend’s corpse is lying on a blood-soaked stretcher inches away. I remember thinking about how his pretty wife’s face was going to crumple when the casualty-notification detail pulled into her driveway.

  And that led to a dark place and even darker thoughts. Thoughts about how good it would feel to hurl the prisoner responsible for my fellow Ranger’s death through the helicopter’s open door. On that day, I’d resisted the urge to trade my soul for petty vengeance. But I’d still given the idea a good deal more thought than I cared to admit.

  I struggled onto my side, intending to address my captors, but a kick to my ribs changed my mind.

  “Stay still, motherfucker.”

  The speaker was shouting over the engines’ roar, but I could still hear the deadly intent in his voice. I stopped moving, waiting for the pain in my ribs to subside. That’s when I realized the constant pressure against my side was gone. The phone the Devil had strapped to my belt had been lost during the gunfight or had been taken from me while I was unconscious. Either way, this presented an opportunity.

  But only if I acted quickly.

  “I’m an American.”

  “I don’t care if you’re Brad Pitt. Move again, and I’ll throw your ass out the door. You feel me?”

  “I feel you, but I’m a DIA operative. I need to talk to the QRF leader. Is that you?”

  I got another kick to the ribs for my trouble. This one was hard enough to roll me to my side.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me. Your job is to lie there. Mine is to not chuck you into thin air. Right now you’re making my job harder. I don’t give a fuck who you are. Until we get back to the FOB, shut the fuck up.”

  That was all well and good, but the Devil had made it clear what would happen to Laila if I ditched the phone. The confusion surrounding the ambush might have bought me some breathing room, but I didn’t know how much.

  Either way, Laila’s life was worth a hell of a lot more than a kick in the ribs.

  I opened my mouth again, but before I could talk, an explosion rocked the helicopter. The floor lurched to the left, then angled sharply downward. The comforting whine of the engines turned to a nails-on-the-chalkboard screeching and then something even more terrifying.

  Silence.

  But silence on a battlefield never lasts long. In the space of a heartbeat or two, the void left by the engines’ silence was filled with something else.

  Screams.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I slid across the helicopter’s metal floor, the exposed rivet heads furrowing gashes into my chest and stomach. Riding in a helicopter without being strapped in can be a bit dicey during combat maneuvering. During a crash sequence, it’s pretty close to a death sentence.

  Something large and metal smashed into my face. My lip ruptured as the blow reverberated along my jaw. The floor shifted to the right, sending me tumbling into something else unyielding. This time, I took the impact on my shoulder. My arm went numb. I tried to curl into the fetal position, but my hog-tied hands and feet had other ideas.

  More screams tore through the cabin, accompanied by the shriek of metal ripping away from metal. Smoke gagged me through the hood as the wet-sounding thuds of bodies pinballing around the helicopter’s cabin filled the air. The sensations were coming too fast to differentiate.

  The floor fell out from beneath me and then punched me in the face.

  And the screams.

  Always the screams.

  Cursing competed with snatches of prayers. Voices rose in a crescendo of terror. More screams. I knew that when death came for me, it probably wouldn’t be pleasant.

  I just didn’t think it would take this long.

  The rotor blades began huffing, clawing for air. Then crumpling metal and breaking glass as the aircraft collided with the earth. I shot into space, and bounced twice against the ground before coming to rest in an awkward sprawl.

  I was on my back, bound legs and hands beneath me. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine what was happening easily enough. Flames reaching from the helicopter, scarlet fingers consuming everything they touched.

  A staccato of pops was followed by a deep whump as the fuel cell detonated.

  I rolled away from the inferno, trying to escape the unbearable heat.

  Modern helicopters are marvels of technology. Redundant electrical systems, fly-by-wire controls, computer-assisted hovering, and the ability to traverse hundreds of miles and still hit a landing zone with a time on target of plus or minus thirty seconds.

  But this technical innovation came at a steep price. The composite materials that made the bird so fuel efficient off-gassed toxins when engulfed by flames, and the transmission’s magnesium components burned at more than four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Helicopters were all well and good when they were knifing through the air where they belonged, but God help you if they caught on fire. I’d once seen a Chinook take an RPG to the fuel tank during an insertion gone bad. After the five minutes I’d needed to reach the crash site, sheets of rolling flames had been the only thing left.

  Another round of staccato pops. This time, the noise seemed familiar, but I couldn’t dedicate the mental energy to understand why. The fire had reached my clothes. I flopped on the ground, trying to smother the flames, as rocks bit into my skin.

  Apparently, the inventor of stop, drop, and roll had never been hog-tied.

  Thrashing against the soil, I screamed out my rage and terror. Seconds earlier, I’d been praying to live through the crash sequence. Now I was wishing I could take the prayer back. Maybe that’s what Garth Brooks had meant by thanking God for unanswered prayers.

  I screamed again as my pants ignited, and that was when I heard Arabic voices. It took a moment for my mind to render their words into English, but by then strong hands were beating against my arms and legs, smothering the fire. The relief was immediate. A heartbeat ago, I was on my way to dying a hideous death.

  Now I was safe.

  I sucked in a breath to offer my thanks, but couldn’t get the words past the lump in my chest. The surge of emotion was unexpected. I’d confronted death countless times before and had never choked. What the hell was wrong with me? I needed to get my shit together before my rescuers saw tears running down my face.

  And then someone yanked the mask from my head. The cool air brought fresh tears as I coughed away soot and mucus. Once my vision finally cleared, I realized that old Garth had been right after all.

  My rescuer wasn’t a Special Forces operative or a fellow crash survivor. In fact, he wasn’t American at all. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with a bearded man.

  A bearded man with an empty missile launcher strapped to his back.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Brother—are you okay?”

  The jihadi’s dark eyes darted from my soot-covered face to my bound arms and legs. His features contorted with concern. “Can you speak?”

  I could, but there was no way I could mimic his Iraqi accent. My Arabic was understandable, but I couldn’t pass for a native. Clearing my throat, I spat and shook my head.

  The jihadi let loose a string of curses as he drew a knife from his belt and sawed through my restraints with quick, practiced strokes.

  “Come,” my rescuer said, lifting me to my feet. “We must hurry. Surely Allah must have been smiling on you. Yo
u have quite a story. I know Bijan will want to hear it.”

  I nodded as the jihadi helped me toward an idling technical. He was more right than he knew. I did have quite a story. Now I just needed to invent it.

  * * *

  —

  The next thirty or so minutes passed about as uneventfully as you could expect, riding in the back of a Toyota Hilux with a bunch of wounded jihadis. From what I could gather, the battered and bloodied men strewn across the truck bed were the perpetrators of the convoy ambush. Some of them might even have had me to thank for their wounds, but I decided to keep that little nugget to myself.

  Instead, I’d taken the plastic bottle of water someone had offered, uncapped it, and sloshed some around the inside my mouth. Then I’d spit the red-tinged liquid over the side of the truck. Next, I’d dumped some in my hands and washed the crust of equal parts soot, dust, and blood from my eyes. I’d thought that seeing clearly for the first time since the crash would be comforting.

  I was wrong.

  For most people, being on the receiving end of an A-10 rocket salvo would count as a bad day. Getting a helicopter shot out from under them after surviving an A-10 rocket salvo would be a very bad day. In fact, most people would assume that after enduring those two things back-to-back, they’d be due for a little good luck.

  But they were not me.

  I was in the number two vehicle in a caravan of technicals racing across the desert headed who in the hell knew where. I thought about asking the jihadi next to me, but he was too busy holding in the intestines trying to spill down the front of his pants. The guy next to him was doing the rapid, shallow breathing that usually means one’s time on earth is almost over. The truck’s fourth casualty was covered in shrapnel wounds that had just stopped bleeding.

  In other words, he was already dead.

  Weren’t we the merry crew?

  A large combat knife glittered from the dead jihadi’s belt. I unsheathed the blade and cut away the charred remains of my pant legs. In the first good news of the day, the skin beneath had minimal blistering. First- and second-degree burns hurt like hell, but they aren’t life-threatening or debilitating.

  Score one for the home team.

  With the knife still in my hand, I looked at the jihadi trying to hold his intestines together and considered my options. This dude was a dirtbag, no two ways about it. Between the convoy he and his buddies had ambushed and the helicopter they’d blown from the sky, he was definitely on my shit list. Also, now that I could devote some mental energy to the series of pops I’d heard before the jihadi had rescued me, I understood their significance.

  The fighters had been executing the crash survivors.

  What I really wanted to do was slide the knife up to its hilt in between the jihadi’s second and third ribs and smile as the blade plunged into his heart.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead, I doubled the strips of cloth from my pants on top of each other until I’d constructed a makeshift pressure bandage. Then I slid closer to him.

  “Move your hands,” I said in Arabic before succumbing to a coughing fit that sounded like chunks of rock grinding against one another.

  The jihadi looked at me as if he didn’t understand, but the fear in his eyes said otherwise. He knew he was dying. But he was also scared, terrified really, about what he’d find once he moved his hands away from the gaping hole in his stomach.

  “You must move your hands,” I said again, showing him the bandages. “I can’t stop the bleeding, but inshallah I might be able to slow it down. If not, you will die.”

  The man looked at me for a long moment and then slowly closed his eyes. When he opened them, he nodded.

  He moved his trembling hands from the gaping wound, and I pushed his intestines back in as best I could. Next, I layered fabric over the wound, trying to ignore the familiar coppery smell of blood mixed with the fecal scent indicative of a perforated bowel. Coursing blood turned my hands sticky, but I bound the pressure bandage in place, tying it off with a square knot over his stomach.

  Abdominal wounds are always horrible, but I’d never seen one this bad. In fact, he probably would have suffered less if I’d just given in to my earlier urge and slid the knife home. But I wasn’t thinking about his comfort.

  I was thinking about my survival.

  “Will he live?”

  The shouted question came from the Hilux’s cab. The glass separating the cab from the truck bed had long since been removed or shattered. A fierce-looking man with a full beard and shaggy brown hair was yelling from inside.

  I shook my head, holding up bloodstained hands. Hopefully the roar of the wind sweeping across the open truck bed would help to mask my poor Arabic, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Do what you can,” the man said. “We’re almost there.”

  That was an interesting statement. As far as I could tell, we weren’t almost anywhere. We were summiting a small hill, so I couldn’t see what lay ahead of us, but the scenery to the left and right was hardly impressive. Flat, open desert. That was it. I turned back to see if my friend with the perforated bowel was still among the living when the passenger in the truck’s cab pounded on the vehicle’s frame to get my attention.

  “Look,” he said.

  I followed his pointing finger as we crested the hill, and I did a double take. I’d been expecting one of two things: an isolated compound or a series of interconnected houses indicative of a small Iraqi village. Both had advantages and disadvantages. Remote compounds were easily defensible against an attacking ground force, but also extremely vulnerable to a couple of well-placed JDAMs.

  Villages on the other hand were usually safe from air attack since American generals and politicians alike were averse to pictures of dead women and children on the nightly news. But the lumped-together structures made a stealthy approach by ground possible.

  What greeted me on the reverse side of the slope was something else entirely. It was a mini outpost complete with HESCO barriers, guard towers, and controlled entry points. If the flag flying atop the bunker flanking the main gate had been the Stars and Stripes, I would have thought we were about to enter an American-controlled forward operating base, or FOB. But the flag wasn’t red, white, or blue. It was green, white, and red. The colors of the world’s only Shia-inspired theocracy.

  Iran.

  “Keep him alive,” the man shouted, the wind tousling his thick hair. “The doctors inside will save him. You will see.”

  And that was what I was afraid of.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The objective of war is to kill people, plain and simple. The advent of drones and precision weapons has mitigated some of the visceral nature of warfare. People can now sit in climate-controlled bunkers and rain down death without ever getting dirt beneath their fingernails. They don’t have to smell the putrid stench of a gut wound or hear the screams of the dying. In some aspects, war was becoming a rather sanitary endeavor.

  This was not that.

  This was me in the back of a truck full of half-dead terrorists. Terrorists who’d killed my countrymen. Together, we were about to roll into a compound full of Iranian commandos who would love to chat with me while using sharp metal objects as conversation starters. In other words, it was me or them.

  In that equation, me wins every day of the week.

  Bending over my patient, I fussed over his bandages in case the curly-haired guy in the truck was watching. Once I was sure that my back was blocking his view, I thrust the combat knife between the jihadi’s ribs and twisted.

  He shuddered once, gasped, and went still.

  It was a cleaner death than he probably deserved, but I was not the judge or jury. I was simply the executioner. Without medical attention, he would have died in the next fifteen minutes. But if the Iranian surgeons were as shit hot as Curly believed, they might have
been able to save him. Which meant that sooner or later, he’d start answering questions, and those answers would not match mine.

  I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  Cold? Maybe. But life as a terrorist was a full-contact sport.

  After wiping the blade on the dead jihadi’s blood-soaked shirt, I slipped the weapon into my pants. Next I loosened his bandages and let the blood pool down the front of his trousers. Only then did I turn back to Curly.

  “Hurry,” I screamed. “He’s bleeding out.”

  Curly looked at me, and his eyes widened. Then he turned back to the driver. The wind drowned out what he was saying, but it must have been a helluva speech. The truck surged forward, rocking me in the bed as we zoomed toward the compound’s gate.

  The guards manning the crew-served weapons out front moved to intercept us, but Curly beat them to the punch. Opening his door and standing half out of the cab while the truck was still moving, he screamed something in Farsi. Old Curly must have had some pull with the Iranians. The steel barrier cranked upward, and the guards waved us through.

  To his credit, our driver didn’t even slow down. Instead, he poured on the gas, and the truck accelerated through the compound’s entrance, roaring past the guard station in a cloud of grit and engine exhaust. I took the opportunity to check the knife’s positioning in my pants, ensuring it was secure and that the pointy end wasn’t about to stab something important.

  I might have been heading into a compound full of people who wanted to kill me, but that didn’t mean I had to make their job any easier.

  The driver took a quick left followed by a right, laying on his horn. Curly leaned out the window, shouting profanities in both Arabic and Farsi for good measure. I might not have been able to discuss the intricacies of the Shia sect of Islam with an Iranian in his own language, but I could curse with the best of them.