by DW Ulsterman
MAC WALKER’S REGRET
A Short Story
By D.W. Ulsterman
2013
Here is the MAC WALKER series in chronological order:
Available now at Amazon.com!
-MAC WALKER’S BULLET
(Short Story)
-MAC WALKER’S GUNFIGHT
(Short Story)
-MAC WALKER’S BENGHAZI
Books 1-3
-MAC WALKER’S BETRAYAL
Books 1-3
-DOMINATUS
-TUMULTUS
All titles available as an e-book or in paperback!
“Laws are silent in times of war.”
-Cicero
June, 2007
Killing another human being isn’t so hard. It’s the forgetting. After a while, the faces of those you’ve killed tend to sneak up on you. Sometimes it’s in a dream. Other times you might be sitting in a crowded coffee shop and have a nagging sense of familiarity from the person taking your order. Each death is another haunting, another memory, another bit of subconscious weight added to one’s being.
For Mac Walker, that weight was never so great as when he killed that child.
For most people, the reports of the killings in Sudan were just that - reports. Words from a newspaper, or magazine, or read by some mindless, droning, cable news personality.
The Sudanese conflict received some measure of coverage in the international media, but little in the way of actual resolution measures. It was a country devoid of significant financial and/or geopolitical influence, and as such, its ongoing and increasingly brutal conflict was not a priority for other, more powerful nations.
That changed though, when a United States senator demanded something be done. That same senator initiated direct lines of communication to high ranking officials within the Catholic Church, and over the course of months, eventually received agreement from the Vatican for third party funding for an unofficial military training and protection program to benefit the Sudanese people. Mac Walker and his men were to spend six weeks in Sudan helping to train rebel forces against the anti-Christian Muslims forces who were engaged in years of atrocities involving widespread rape, murder and mayhem that left entire villages burnt out holes, devoid of any recognizable semblance of humanity.
It was within one of those villages Mac Walker found himself hunkered down in for the last four days. With nearly seven hundred residents, Tuket existed some forty miles east of Nyala in the southwestern portion of the war-torn African nation. Nyala was, and remains, a particularly violent place, a breeding ground for atrocities and bloodletting. It is a city of over a half million inhabitants, many living in fear of the ongoing campaign of fear and intimidation being waged by various Muslim warlords and pro-government militia against any and all who declared themselves non-Muslim.
That is not to say there were no acts of terrible violence perpetrated against Sudanese Muslims – there most certainly were. The fact was though, that the Muslims were the dominant population of that region, controlled much of its government resources, including the military, and had repeatedly proven themselves more than willing to silence opposition - by any means necessary.
Mac had grown to both hate and love the country of Sudan. Its people, the ones not engaged in ongoing killings, were amazingly resilient, even positive in the face of so much chaos, pain and loss. In the village of Tuket, Mac watched with growing admiration as he saw mothers and fathers attempting to raise children under the always present threat of violence with a determined purpose to make life for those children as enjoyable and supportive as possible. The former Navy SEAL could not help but wonder how much better his own country, the United States, would be if more parents there followed the example of these Sudanese families.
One boy in particular had befriended the glowering, always prepared for the worse, Mac Walker. His name was Musa and he was just a few weeks shy of his tenth birthday. His mother was raising him and Musa’s two sisters by herself after her husband had been killed by a roving pack of Muslim militants almost two years earlier.
Musa’s clear, white eyes looked at Mac with a mixture of wonderment and admiration. For the Sudanese child, an American was a fascinating thing of unbelievable hope and power - a thing of legend. It took two days before the boy gathered the courage to walk up to Mac and smile at him, his seemingly too large for his body head nodding up and down enthusiastically. The boy spoke halting English, taught to him by his father, who, years ago, had taken English classes while a student attending a Catholic sponsored private school in the neighboring city of El Fashner.
“You America?”
Musa repeated the question to Mac several times, his voice growing in confidence, and more determined to be given an answer.
“You America?”
Mac Walker looked down at the dark skinned child and gave an almost-smile, his eyes searching the landscape outside the village for any sign of trouble.
‘Yeah, I’m American.”
Musa’s eyes grew even wider, as did his smile while he whispered the word with a reverence Mac had not heard for a very long time by any who actually had the honor of calling the United States their home.
“America. You America.”
Having confirmed his belief in Mac’s origins, Musa ran off to his home, which was no more than a shack built of old relics of wood and stone, and mud. It had but one room, which Musa and his sisters and mother all shared. They had no electricity or running water. It was as if time, and progress, had stopped for them over a hundred years ago.
Three hours later, Musa returned to where Mac Walker was standing near the military grade jeep he had been using since arriving in the Sudan. The back of the jeep housed a small, mounted PKM machine gun. The lightweight PKM had long been a favorite of the Sudanese government forces, acquired cheaply via Russian based arms dealers. In a small warehouse in central Nyala, the other three members of Mac’s team, Jack Thompson, Jay Minnick, and Benny Williams, were all protecting a stash of over four hundred of these same guns that Mac and his team intended to disseminate, per their assignment instructions, throughout the outlying villages of Nyala in the hopes the people of those villages would have at least some chance of defending themselves.
A week ago, Jay Minnick had informed Mac of Intel hinting at an upcoming attack against the small village of Tuket. So, Mac left the warehouse in Nyala and journeyed there, intent on protecting the village while the remaining members of his team made certain the store of PKM machine guns were kept safe until they could be successfully given over to trusted rebel forces. The exchange was scheduled for tomorrow.
For nearly four days Mac Walker watched and waited for an attack against the people of Tuket. No such attempted attack had yet come.
That changed in the late afternoon of that fourth day, as the temperatures approached triple digits, Mac saw a dust cloud forming some two miles west of Tuket.
He let out a loud, prolonged whistle to make certain the villagers knew danger was likely on its way. Mac then shouted at Musa to tell his mother and everyone else in the village to hide and stay inside. The boy ran off without question, his small feet moving so fast they created their own little dust clouds that followed his hasty departure.
Mac jumped into the driver’s seat of the military jeep and started it up, slamming down upon the accelerator with his foot and moving the vehicle several hundred yards outside the village. It left Mac in the open, but he hoped it would also keep the impending gunfire away from the innocent residents of Tuket.
Within a few minutes, the former Navy SEAL saw the unmistakable metallic flash of approaching vehicles. There were at least two military grade jeeps, similar to his. Putting a pair of St
einer binoculars to his eyes, Mac was able to confirm just two vehicles were making their way toward the village. Each had at least four men inside, wearing an assortment of simple t-shirts.
Mac moved quickly to the back cargo area of the jeep and positioned himself behind the PKM machine gun, waiting for the approaching jeeps to come into range. They were three hundred yards away and closing fast. Walker squinted as he noted all of the jeep passengers appeared to be armed with basic AK-47 assault rifles. The combination of AK-47’s and the casual clothing indicated the men were likely members of the Janjaweed, a rag-tag collection of roving Sudanese Muslims noted for their all too willing acts of repeated violence against others. They were likely armed and funded by the Sudanese government itself, and where they appeared throughout the rural areas of the Darfur region of Sudan, death almost always followed.
Well not today. Today they get a taste of their own medicine.
Mac gave himself a silent countdown as he calculated the approaching jeeps’ rate of speed and the distance between himself and the Janjaweed. The PKM had an