Ben looked down the rope through his NVGs to make sure he didn’t come too close to Reed and seeing he had plenty of room, relaxed his grip a little to increase the speed of his slide. Reed landed just before him and moved quickly to the left, then dropped down on his belly. Ben hit a second later and moved right, took a few paces and dropped onto his own belly on the soft jungle floor and began to scan his side of the perimeter over the sight of his rifle. He felt rather than saw the other three SEALs spread out behind him before the crash of the rope as it was cut away from the helicopter. Seconds later the beat of the rotors faded away, and the silence engulfed them. It was strange after the hour of turbine whine and spinning blades from their ride in. Ben continued his slow scan of his section of the jungle around them and saw nothing.
The heart of the evil is here, Ben. Stop them here, and help us be reborn.
Ben shook his head, and the old man’s voice faded away. He squeezed his eyes tightly and then scanned his sector carefully. The three minutes passed like ten.
“Viper lead – clear.” Chris’s voice seemed a loud interruption in his right ear.
“Two,” Lash followed.
“Three, clear,” Ben said.
“Four.”
“Five.”
There was another pause, and Ben knew that Chris checked in with the other two team leaders. Ben continued his scan through his NVGs. A soft sound, barely more than a breeze in leaves came to him. Not a breeze, though, he felt sure. It sounded almost sing-song, and he strained to hear it better. He closed his eyes, thinking he would give his mind only the sound to think on for a moment. It seemed for the world like a whisper – or more like lots of whispers. They were high-pitched, like children whispering in the dark.
–watching–
That word seemed so clear.
“Ghost and Mustang are clear.” Chris’s voice startled him back, and he nervously and quickly scanned his sector again.
Goddammit, keep your head in the game. Focus on the job before you get the whole team killed.
“Up on me. I have point. Two-by-two,” Chris’s magnified whisper commanded. Ben rose to his feet and spread out from Reed and followed their leader through the jungle towards the target. Twelve minutes and they would be in position.
Ben used every bit of mental energy he possessed to stay on his job. At times, he had to force away the childlike whispers that seemed now to come from all around him. After a few moments no more thoughts or images sneaked into his mind. He scanned his sector of the jungle as they moved silently and swiftly to the edge of the village. His mind finally wrapped completely around the task at hand, and in what felt like moments, he took a knee a few yards right of Reed and peered at the three small buildings set off from the rest of the village. The grey image in his NVGs looked blurred by the white light that seeped out from beneath the doorways and through the windows.
Shitty light discipline. They have no idea the hell that is about to rain down on them.
He could hear far away muffled conversation and laughter. The building closest to them was their target, and he re-ran the breach plan in his head as they waited for the other two teams to swing around into their positions and check in. Then, they would confirm that the Rangers had the village, and they would go.
He tightened his hold, not in fear but excitement, on the pistol grip of his rifle. He and Reed would come in from the back while Chris and Auger came in the front. Lash would enter from the rooftop doorway that all these little houses seemed to have (and satellite imagery had confirmed would be on this house) after clearing the roof. In Iraq that had always been a two-man job as there seemed always to be fighters asleep on the roof. Here that seemed uncommon, and a predator fly-over only a short time ago confirmed no thermal images on the roof.
“Mustang and Ghost are ready,” Chris’s voice whispered loud in his right ear. “Positions.”
Ben and Reed moved quickly but silently towards the back of the house, rifles up and ready, and eyes scanning around through NVGs. To his right, he saw Lash move to the wall without any windows and take a knee to assemble the long, telescoping pole with large nubs on the sides that would serve as his ladder. Seconds later he disappeared over the ledge of the roof.
Ben and Reed knelt on either side of the back door, and Ben watched as Reed quickly placed a small, shaped charge of explosives over the door knob. Aware that his pulse pounded in his ears a little, Ben took a couple of long, slow, deep breaths to a four count – tactical breathing just like the Navy had taught him. By the time Reed nodded at him the pounding had disappeared and the hint of tunnel vision had dissipated, as well.
They waited for what seemed like forever.
“Viper – go, go, go,” Chris’s voice hissed in his headset.
They both turned their heads as Reed pressed a button on the small box in his hand, and the charge exploded with a dull WHUMP! Then they were both on their feet and crashed through the destroyed doorway just as another muffled explosion marked their teammates entry through the front door.
Ben moved left and spun on his left foot to clear the corner behind him without thinking. His mind registered the man seated on the floor, his AK-47 assault rifle in his lap. The face showed total surprise, and the man made no attempt to raise his rifle. Nonetheless, his front quarter still uncleared, Ben squeezed twice on the trigger of his rifle. He then spun forward without waiting to see the results and moved deeper into the room.
Ben shut out the panicked hollering – the words were meaningless to him anyway – and worked his scan around the room. A robed figure with long dark hair sprinted away from him towards the front of the house, and Ben shot him twice in the back. The man dropped to his knees and kneeled there, arms up over his head, and Ben’s mind filled suddenly with the face of Little Jewel. Behind her, he saw clearly the piles of bodies in the smoke-filled village. Ben squeezed the trigger again, and the kneeling man’s head collapsed on one side in a puff of red and white mist. He pitched forward onto what remained of his face.
Desecraters of the Living Jungle.
He stepped over the body and moved forward only vaguely aware of Reed to his right. He knew Reed shouted something at him, but it sounded like anger rather than fear or concern, and he continued to move forward.
“Three – we need prisoners!” the voice sounded harsh, but Ben couldn’t seem to make Chris’s words matter.
“Two’s on the stairs,” Lash’s voice announced in his right ear.
Ben moved farther left, away from the stairs in the center of the room to open up Lash’s field of fire.
Then his head exploded.
At first, he thought he had been hit by enemy fire, but after a second he realized what he felt in his head seemed more like a horrible noise, piercing and painful, and he wondered where it came from. He nearly dropped his weapon to grab his head with both hands. Instead, he dropped to a knee and steadied himself, his weapon somehow still up at his shoulder though he could barely see to fire.
LEFT—HORRIBLE—DIE—SATAN—WHY?—NOW—RUN—OUT—DOWN—HAND—GOD—CLOSE—HEAD—GOD—HEART—FOOT—NOW—NOW—OUT—GOD—GUN—CHEST—STAIRS—GOD—WINDOW—KNEE—RIGHT—DOOR—GRENADE—DOOR—GOD—SATAN—
Grenade?
Ben squeezed his eyes shut which seemed only to make the white light brighter, but made some sense of the one word that seemed to matter, more from the tone of the foreign sounding voice than the word itself.
“Grenade!” he screamed out to his team, and his vision cleared. He scanned madly about the room. He saw his teammates dropping to the deck at his call and then in the far right corner spotted the owner of the word.
The man pulled his arm back, and Ben flipped the selector on his rifle with his right thumb from single-shot to three-shot auto and squeezed. All three rounds found the same target, and the man’s head exploded in a cloud of blood, grey, and bone, and he collapsed down on himself like a pile of laundry. The Grenade bounced once beside him and then exploded, just as B
en dropped face-first to the deck.
The concussion and noise knocked the breath from him, but he stayed oriented enough to hear two more things:
FLOOR–MAN—ALI—DEATH—KILL—GOD—KILL
Which all seemed to come as nearly a single word in a foreign tongue that he could still understand somehow, and:
Behind you, Ben.
From flat on his stomach he could not rise and turn in time, so instead he rolled onto his back and raised his rifle in one motion, just as chucks of concrete exploded where his head had been. He sighted and squeezed just as Auger’s voice came to him.
“Ben, watch out!”
Then, the three rounds hit the bearded man twice in the chest and once in the throat and he pitched over backwards, slammed into the wall behind him, and crumpled dead to the floor.
He heard two more rifle shots, the sound more like nuclear explosions in the small space and then a moment of silence.
“On your face, motherfucker,” came Lash’s voice.
A second later came Reed’s voice, the words strained and soft, and Ben thought his own heart would stop at the sound.
“I’m hit, guys. Fuck – I think I’m hit real bad.”
“Doc,” Chris’s voice hollered, and Ben heard a panic he had never heard from the officer since he had met him. “Ben, hurry. It’s Reed – it’s bad.”
Ben forced the cloud out of his mind and moved towards the voice, unsteady at first, but then the strength flowed into his arms and legs. He already pulled the blow out kit from his cargo pocket as he knelt beside his best friend.
“Two – Five – are you clear?”
“Two, clear.”
“Five, clear.”
“One – clear. Three and four are clear.” Chris sounded like their leader again, the quiver in his voice gone, and Ben felt glad. “Two, five, secure the crow, and check the bodies.”
“Roger, that,” he heard Auger say, but he no longer cared what anyone else was doing.
His best friend’s right thigh was pretty shredded and bled onto the floor, the skin hanging in thick strips from the exposed muscle underneath. But, that seemed the least of his problems. Ben could see a growing pool of dark blood forming around Reed’s left hip where it ran like a small stream from under his vest.
“I can’t really get my breath. Oh shit, Ben,” Reed said, his voice a loud, rattling whisper.
“I got ya’, bro,” Ben said and squeezed his buddy’s gloved hand. He hoped his voice carried more confidence than he felt.
Ben pulled out his knife and cut away the straps of Reed’s harness and the shoulder straps holding his armored vest in place. He didn’t see any marks on the vest.
But he did on Reed’s body.
Reed wore no utility shirt, but his brown T-shirt had a dark hole just below his left armpit and the whole left side soaked through with dark blood. Ben tore away the shirt with his hands and stared at the small dark whole in the side of Reed’s chest and felt his own chest tighten.
“Chris,” he called out with a quivering voice. “Help me roll him on his side.”
Chris knelt down beside him and cradled Reed’s head in his lap and grabbed his shoulders.
“Easy does it, bro,” Chris said softly in Reed’s ear. The calm, cool voice made Ben feel braver and more confident.
Until he saw the ragged, baseball sized hole on the right side of Reed’s back, just past his spine.
Oh, God no. Jesus, please. Please, no.
“Is it bad?” Reed’s voice sounded muffled like he spoke through a mouth full of cotton.
Ben shook open a large trauma dressing and packed it partially into the wound and taped it tightly in place. “No biggie, dude,” he lied to his best friend in the whole world. “Easy day. We’ll fix you right up, and you’ll buy the beer in Germany on the way home in a week or two.”
He rolled Reed over onto his back. His friend smiled up at him with thin, bluish lips. His face looked so pale, it seemed nearly grey. Ben had his backpack off and pulled more gear out of it and handed an IV set-up to Chris who assembled the tubing and plunged it into a clear bag of fluid. He heard faintly, like background noise, Lash’s strained voice calling for an emergency MedEvac. Ben plunged a needle into one of the veins in Reed’s forearm and hooked the tubing up to it and quickly taped it in place.
“Squeeze that bag as hard as you can,” he ordered Chris. The officer used both hands and squeezed the bag of fluid to his chest.
Reed’s eyes were closed now, and his breathing seemed terribly shallow.
I need to put in a chest tube. His left lung is probably down. He needs a tube.
He needs a Traiteur.
The voice sounded like Gammy’s, but he knew it was the old man’s. Ben held his breath and looked down at the ring on his right hand. The ring was crimson and seemed to glow and pulsate on his hand.
I can’t. I don’t know how.
Yes, you do, Bennie.
Gammy again, but not really he knew. The old man’s voice came to him as its own.
The power is in you, Ben. Not in the ring. Never in the ring. It is in you.
The tingling in his hand moved up his arm and even his chest seemed to pulsate with an almost buzzing like vibration.
Ben looked up at Chris, whose eyes were closed and lips moved, apparently in prayer. He turned and saw Lash had opened his lap top and spoke furiously into his radio, though curiously Ben could hear nothing, as if he watched a movie with the sound turned off. Past him, Auger pulled flex cuffs on the prisoner. Ben raised his right hand, but this time it wasn’t the ring that caught his eye.
He watched the golden light that surrounded his hand and his arm to the elbow begin to flicker, like it emanated from a million microscopic fireflies. Ben laid his hand on Reed’s chest and watched for a moment as the gold light spread out across his friend’s chest and became haloed by a faint and pulsating bluish haze. Ben closed his eyes and felt a heat that came from his chest and pulsed down his arm and out his finger tips with a burning-like pain that was not entirely unpleasant. He became aware of a soft chanting sound and realized the sound came from his throat, though the words were foreign and meant nothing to him.
Even through his closed eyes he could see the sudden explosion of light and for a moment he felt a ripping pain through his chest. He felt certain he had been shot, as well. He opened his eyes in time to see a bluish haze fade rapidly away. He realized he couldn’t breathe and heard a bubbling from his own chest. The pain was excruciating and he thought he cried out, certain he would lose consciousness any second. Then another light flashed, and the feeling vanished.
“What the fuck was that? Did you see that light, Ben?”
Ben looked up. Chris still squeezed the IV bag but turned his head left and right.
“Was that lightning?” Lash called out from where he knelt in front of the laptop.
“I didn’t see it,” Ben lied.
“I think it was lightning.”
Reed’s voice.
Ben looked down at Reed who smiled up at him. His face looked pink and healthy, though he grimaced a little. “Did it look like lightning to you? Jesus, my arm is cold.”
“It’s the IV fluid,” Ben said. He felt like he floated in a dream. He had the sense that he spoke lines written for him by someone else, like in a play or something. “You can stop squeezing, boss,” he said to Chris.
Ben placed a dressing quickly over the smooth unbroken skin beneath Reed’s left armpit before Chris could get a look.
“Holy shit, my leg hurts,” Reed said. “Hey, man, is that all my blood?” His voice sounded a little panicked.
“Looks like more than it is,” Ben said and looked at Chris who kind of shook his head and shrugged.
“MedEvac helo in the courtyard in five mikes,” Lash called out, his voice still tight and frightened for his teammate.
Ben stuffed his gear back into his bag and slung it over both shoulders. “Let’s get him out to the courtyard.” He looked
up at Chris. “You want me to go back with him?”
“Maybe,” Chris answered. “Let’s see how secure we are here. The PJ’s can handle him if need be,” he said, referring to the Air Force Special Operations Medics aboard the MedEvac helicopter. “If we can spare you I want you with him, though.”
“’Kay,” Ben said. Across the room, Auger knelt with his knee in the back of the prisoner’s neck and strained to see how Reed looked.
“He looks stable, guys,” Ben called out to the team. “He’s gonna be okay.”
“Jesus, I hope so,” Reed said with a nervous laugh.
Lash snapped together a stretcher beside them, and the three of them loaded Reed onto it while Auger continued to kneel on the prisoner who now began to cry. Ben’s headset clicked with a keyed mike somewhere, and he reached on the front of his vest and turned up the volume. He then clicked the button to allow him to hear the command channel, as well as their team tactical channel.
“Ghost – target secure – four crows.”
“Mustang, secure. Five crows.”
“Viper, secure,” Ben heard Chris’s voice and a split second later heard it again in his headset as it bounced back to him from a communications satellite in space. “One crow.”
“Yeah, thanks to Rambo over there,” Lash chuckled.
Ben looked up at Chris and then shifted uncomfortably under the concerned glare from his boss. He would have some explaining to do later.
But not as much as when he figures out that the lethal holes in Reed’s body have somehow disappeared. How the hell will I explain that?
He looked down at Reed who grimaced up at him and squeezed his hand.
He realized he could care less about either question right now. His best friend was alive, and the men who controlled the slaughter on his people were captured or killed – killed if they had been in his line of sight.
The Traiteur's Ring Page 9