“Into the trench.”
The boy crawled on all fours out into the open, and quickly fell into the gutter. Rachel followed suit, and jumped in behind him just as a bullet whizzed by!
“They’ve spotted us!” Kimberley said. She let off some rounds as she crashed into the dugout. More bullets flew past. “Keep your heads down and run!” she bellowed, and as the other two sped away, she followed them in a crouching stance, occasionally lifting her arm above the trench to shoot at their aggressors.
A metal door snapped open before Aiden. Rachel almost tumbled into him when he broke his run. A bearded soldier beckoned to him at the door and the girl pushed him forward.
Aiden realized that the man wore Kimberley’s uniform and willingly ran up to this soldier.
“Where’s the sergeant?” the fellow asked.
“Right behind us!” Aiden puffed, going through the door like a bullet.
The new guy revealed an M16 and moved out into the trench. He opened fire on their attackers’ positions as Kimberley appeared in the distance.
“Thanks, Mike!” Kimberley shouted as she quickly sped past the other soldier into the safety zone. How did she know his name?
This marine had drawn enemy fire away from her and now withdrew to slam the armored door behind him. “Whatever happened back there?” he asked the three breathing hard before him.
“You tell me!” Kimberley retorted, hands placed on knees as she tried to catch her breath. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“We’re under attack, Lin,” Mike told her, moving away towards a metal ladder.
“I know but…wait, what did you just call me?” a surprised Kimberley demanded, looking up sharply.
“Lin,” the new man repeated, halting his climb as he spun round to return her stare. “Does this sound like a joke to you?”
No reply, save for the deafening sound of gunfire outside.
“Where are we?” Aiden asked the soldier. The one question on everyone’s mind.
“Whatever happened to you guys back there, Lin?” the man rather demanded in consternation, peering into Kimberley’s face from where he hung. “The sergeant wants to see you ASAP. I hope you have some good news for him.” And he vanished above their heads.
“Good news?” Kimberley scoffed as she reached for the ladder, which was attached to the side of the bunker-like compartment they were presently in. Aiden and Rachel made to follow, but she shook her head. “You two better stay here till I know where we are and what we’re dealing with,” and she disappeared upwards.
She soon came back with a white face.
“We’re in Afghanistan!”
* * *
He started when he realized he was no longer holding a pistol, but an AK-47 semiautomatic, then his gaze rested on his clothes. He wore a grayish-white attire, and…and his feet? A pair of slippers had replaced his shoes!
“What the hell?” he exploded, and looked up when he heard gunshots. “What the hell?” he repeated, snapping around when an open pickup truck rumbled past him.
“Daud, the attack has begun!” a skinny fellow holding up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher behind the vehicle’s driver shouted. “Quick, join the others near the outpost!”
“What the hell?” Carl Bain repeated, still trying to figure out what was actually happening amidst the deafening sound of deadly fire now coming from behind a distant hill. How did he get there from the police station, and which attack had just begun? Where the hell was this place? He trudged up towards the hill, behind which the truck had disappeared. Perhaps a clearer picture would materialize after he got a better view of where he was, he thought.
Perhaps he was dreaming. Who knows? Maybe he was asleep or unconscious. Maybe he’d been knocked out by that female cop and now lay in a cell, out cold. Worse still, maybe he was…dead? Maybe the cop had shot him in the head and he was now dead. Was he in hell? Heaven? He was a bit unsure of this. No, he should be dreaming. What kind of a dream was he dreaming then? What kind of a hellish dream was he dreaming? He realized he was now very close to the little hill’s summit, and as he scaled it, a clearer picture did emerge.
The pickup truck was already approaching the scene before him, but that was not what instantly caught his attention. A US flag fluttered in the wind above a fenced enclave from which he could hear the unmistakable sound of machine gun fire. Men dressed like him lay flat on their stomachs below a slope falling off before this facility. These men were shooting in the outpost’s direction from this position. Suddenly, he saw one of these fellows cry out and throw his hands in the air before collapsing on the dusty ground. Then the guy with the rocket launcher collapsed beside this man as soon as he jumped out of the truck. The launcher was picked up by another fellow who equally collapsed on his dead colleague, and nobody picked the weapon again.
Was he in Iraq? That was a military outpost those guys were attacking, no mistake about that. But.…But how did he get to Iraq without boarding an airplane and hopping over? “What the hell?” he grumbled for the fourth time, feeling flustered and angry. And why did that dude call him Daud? Was this some kind of joke? How did he become a militant attacking a US outpost all of a sudden? How did they expect him to fight his country in Iraq, whoever ‘they’ were? He was never going to do that – he was a very patriotic US citizen, despite his criminal background, and even if he could kill his fellow citizens owing to the need for cash inside his country, he was never going to do anything to…
Then he saw her.
It was her alright. The female cop back at the police station. She was the US soldier working the machine gun from within the military outpost.
The picture sharpened in his head.
The paper he’d found in that office with a single name on it.
Rachel.
He had tried to straighten the paper with his thumbs, and then…
This.
Carl Bain cocked his Kalashnikov.
Chapter 4: Afghanistan
“WE’RE all gonna die!”
“No, we’re not.”
“We’re all gonna die!”
“No, we’re not!” Kimberley snapped, jerking her head in Aiden’s direction. “Now shut the hell up, will you?” The exchange of gunfire above their heads had dramatically increased in the past few minutes, but she envied Rachel’s calm demeanor. The little girl had an accusing ‘I told you’ look and was hugging her cursed book some feet from the shaking Aiden. “Okay, we’ve gotta hold ourselves together and – and climb up that ladder, you hear me?”
“We’re all gonna die!” Aiden repeated and Kimberley glared at him. Was that pee on his pants?
“We have to leave now,” Rachel said. “The Gray Ones won’t be far behind us – they always take a longer route, so we’ve gotta get going. We have to leave this place and…and time due to the situation here.”
“And what do you mean by that?” Kimberley demanded.
“We have to use the book again.”
“Oh, so you now want to go,” Kimberley realized, arms akimbo. “I thought you were okay with the situation…and who knows where that your bloody book will drop us now, eh? Okay, let me guess…another hell?”
Rachel flinched from the outburst, but remained adamant. “Look, things don’t look good in this place,” she argued. “If you haven’t noticed, they’re fighting a war out there and…and we need a better environment to think. We could end up somewhere more peaceful this time.”
“Or worse.… No. We’re going up that ladder.” The older female was also resolute. “I’d as well face this reality right now than any other fantasy that magical crap of yours will come up with.”
“Suit yourself,” the strange girl said, flipping open the book.
“No, you don’t,” the military police sergeant warned, her right finger on her rifle’s trigger and her left hand outstretched towards the girl. “Just hand it over before I do something we’ll all regret.”
“Can we all please calm down?”
Aiden pleaded with alarm. Rachel handed Kimberley the book and he stared at it. How…when did its pages get sewn back together?
Above them, there seemed to be a lull in the fighting and he thought that could be a good sign, but then the compartment shuddered as an explosion rocked the outpost above their heads and the fighting resumed. He lost his nerves all over again.
Kimberley still pointed her semiautomatic at Rachel. Aiden couldn’t find his voice. The sergeant pushed the book into a large pocket on her left thigh.
“Don’t do this,” Rachel pleaded. “We can still leave now without those above knowing. We could be sent to…to somewhere safer this time.” Fear had started edging back into her voice, but Kimberley’s gun remained pointed at her as the cop soldier turned to the boy.
“Aiden, up the ladder with you two,” she ordered him, and a dejected-looking Rachel walked over to the structure and started climbing its rungs before the boy could obey the command. Kimberley went up after him as the guns outside continued their insistent chatter.
They came up out of the underground bunker into chaos. Here everyone had a gun and lay behind sandbags, directing fire at the group attacking the camp. These fighting men were frantically calling out to one another and magazines were literally flying about. A grenade successfully thrown into the base had wrecked havoc in the middle of the fenced area. Three bloody bodies lay sprawled at varying angles around this mini ground zero, but someone had dragged a far greater number of the dead into a military truck parked very close to the opposite fence.
Kimberley stared. Someone snatched her gun and crashed behind a sandbag as he opened fire. A fortyish-looking man glared at her from behind his rifle’s butt. “Why you standing there doing nothing, girl?” he exploded. “Grab a gun!”
“Sir, yes sir!” This as she instantly turned to a mounted machine gun all the soldiers had consciously ignored, while Rachel and Aiden dived behind sandbags. The quick response had been involuntary, as if it’d been mechanically bored into her brain many years back. How she skillfully swerved the hot weapon towards the sound of distant shots before opening fire was also beyond her.
She had downed four militants and a skinny fellow jumping down from a pickup truck with what looked like a grenade launcher before realizing that her hands were covered in blood. Not hers. The marine initially manning the weapon she now operated lay dead at her feet.
A bullet wheezed past her.
She just had time to dodge another closer shot before realizing that there were no sandbags protecting the machine gun’s shooter! She was a sitting duck! This was why the men had overlooked the gun despite its deadly force.
Kimberley crouched low and tried to unhinge the weapon from its stand, but it won’t budge. She used a small rock to hit the tripod repeatedly, but it remained staunchly embedded in the metal bars sunk into concrete before her. Who the hell locked down a machine gun in concrete and with no sandbag protection? Who the hell would do such a dumb thing?
“Forget it, Lin!” someone shouted on her left. It was Mike from the bunker and she frowned questioningly, falling flat on the floor. More bullets came her way. “Cassidy does some crazy things around here – I couldn’t remove it, too. Just find cover before you kill yourself.”
“No, there has to be some way,” Kimberley refused.
“We need to go right now before it’s too late,” Rachel shouted behind a sandbag heap from her rear. “I can sense them near!”
“We better listen to her, Kim,” Aiden persuaded in a shaky voice, peeping out from the other side of the sandbags.
The military sergeant ignored him. “What happened to the gunners up at the guard towers?” she asked Mike.
“Grenade attack…those guys didn’t stand a chance. The Taliban got them before we took out their launchers.”
“They still have one left,” Kimberley told herself. “We need the machine gun, Mike.”
“I know, but what can we do with that thing stuck there?” He downed another fellow crawling up to where the rebels had left their rocket-propelled grenade launcher and turned back to her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“If I can just…” She was pushing up Cassidy’s body, intent on using it as a mound of sandbags. It got wedged between the gun and its concrete base. “Fair enough.” Now the bullets weren’t wheezing past her position that much.
Crouching, she engaged the enemy again; riddling the rocket launcher with bullets and watching it explode with satisfaction.
“Sir, message from HQ!”
“And what’re they saying, huh? When’re they sending me my attack copters, huh?”
“They say there’s a slight delay…the choppers will be late…”
“The choppers will be what?”
“The choppers will be…”
“Dammit!” the fortyish-looking commander pumped off more bullets at the insurgents trying to overrun his base. “Dammit! Give ‘em all you’ve got, boys, or it’s toast for all of us!”
The men surrounding him knew without being told. Their automatic rifles chattered continuously, spewing empty shells all over the place. Since both guard towers were presently unoccupied, Kimberley’s machine gun was the only one in operation at the moment.
“Look, Kim, we gotta leave right now!” Aiden cried in the din surrounding them. His voice was almost missing, and he was afraid to show more of his head from behind the heap of sandbags.
“We gotta go before it’s too late, miss!” Rachel assisted from the other end of the heap. “This is not your war! It’s one ahead of your time and you’ll never be in it.”
“Very funny…we’re already in it,” Kimberley countered, directing her fire towards a distant cave some militants were trying to stage a comeback from.
“Hey, Lin…you gotta move those kids back to the bunker…it’s not safe here,” Mike advised.
“No time for that now, Mike, and I can’t tell them to leave cover. They’re safe where they…damn!” she cried, clutching her left shoulder as she crashed to the floor. “I’m hit!” The panic-stricken kids behind her stared at this drama with visible dread.
“I know.” Mike had dropped his rifle. He quickly took over the machine gun, swinging it towards the shot’s direction. “The guy’s got good aim.”
“Seen him?” Kimberley’s shirt now had a bloodied shoulder and she tried to stop the blood flow with her right hand.
“Yeah,” Mike said, watching with satisfaction as the fellow scampered to safety once bullets from the blazing machine gun started raining down on the rebels down below. “He looks kinda weird for an Arab insurgent, though,” the marine continued. “No beard or moustache?” A bullet swished by his helmet and he withdrew from the furious weapon lest a second one did him in. “Why?”
“Why what?” Kimberley asked.
“The dude down there…he looks like an American to me. He moves like a pro, too. There. Behind the pickup truck?”
“Yeah…seen him.” Kimberley peered again at the man. “Is that…”
“It’s him, Kim,” Aiden shouted from behind her. “How did he find us?”
“I must have dropped the page we used to get here in your office and…and he must have come across this paper!” Rachel shouted from the other end of the sand mound. “He must have figured it all out!”
“Says Miss Careful.” Kimberley was furious. “Thanks!”
“Figured what all out?” Mike wondered aloud, trying to get the elusive fellow returning fire from behind the pickup truck. “What’re you guys on about? Do you know this guy?”
“Yes, he’s an old friend.” Kimberley smiled at her dry humor. The others looked on with concern as she reached into a pocket on her combat pants and surprisingly brought out the parcel their tenacious aggressor was after. “This guy’s not just after cocaine.”
“Okay…when did you meet him? During your mission?” Mike asked her, turning his attention back to the man trying to kill them from across the dry terrain.
“Yes,” A
iden stammered. “He was sent to kill my father.” He realized he had an accent.
“Well…aren’t you bright for your age?” the male marine commended. “I bet your father sent you to a private school there in Kandahar.” He couldn’t help seeing his female superior hold up a strange-looking metallic object covered in a white powder-like substance. “What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” Kimberley said. It was a solid silver-plated cube the size of three matchboxes stacked atop each other, and she’d gotten it out of the package Carl Bain was after. “He wasn’t after the cocaine,” she told herself again.
“Is that what he’s after?” Aiden asked.
“Is that white powder cocaine?” Mike wondered aloud.
“Probably not,” Kimberley lied, studying the object in her hand. “What the hell is this?”
“Maybe a new kind of bomb or something?” the other soldier suggested, letting off some more rounds at the enemy. “Look, you gotta get it back to Intelligence when all this is over.”
“Aim for the gas tank.”
“What?”
“The truck’s gas tank,” Kimberley repeated. “Shoot it. That’ll smoke him out.”
“I’ll miss from this…”
Kimberley grabbed the M16A4 rifle and placed the pickup truck’s tank in her sights. The man down below scrambled to get away before the vehicle exploded, flinging him farther from where he’d been trying to run to. “Bull’s eye!” she snapped and flinched from her shoulder wound.
The explosion had shaken the insurgents and it looked like they were beginning to lose ground. Many had lost their lives and it was pointless to press on.
A loud shout went up from the defenders hunkered down the length of the sandbag mound when a few civilian trucks appeared in the horizon and the fighting rebels started what was obviously a tactical retreat.
“Yeah!” a soldier pumping his fist in the air some distance from Mike shouted. “That’s the way to fight!” His colleagues voiced their agreement in various ways, and then all eyes turned to the female sergeant who’d made the victory possible.
“Lin, you know you’re a hero, right? You got the pickup truck despite your being wounded! That deserves a Purple Heart if you ask me!” Mike smiled as he tore off a part of his shirt and placed it on Kimberley’s wound, although she’d stopped losing blood. “Here, apply pressure on it. Where’s the medic?” The fellow was already coming over with a first aid kit.
The White Book Page 4