Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Margaret Vandenburg

  “How do you know how terrorists fight?”

  “My ancestors were terrorists, remember?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your ancestors were Americans.”

  “Tell that to General Custer.”

  “He fought the Cheyenne. Not the Sioux.”

  “They all looked the same to him.”

  Sinclair’s clothes were slashed to pieces. He suffered a number of superficial cuts, friendly reminders of what not to do in knife fights. They kept sparring until he drew blood. His accuracy still left something to be desired. The wound he inflicted was a bit too friendly, more a gash than a knick. Blood soaked through Eugene’s shirt. He shrugged it off.

  “I’ve seen worse in the barber’s chair. Next time follow through.”

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Nothing a little medicine won’t cure. Let’s go get doctored up.”

  They got liquored up instead. Eugene usually drank at home in his trailer. That night they splurged at the local bar. Eugene kept toasting Sinclair’s illustrious future as an oil tycoon. That was the point of the Iraq War, wasn’t it? To build a pipeline straight from Baghdad to your Chevy? He was mostly kidding. He’d have enlisted himself if he weren’t such an old fart. Too bad his son hadn’t lived long enough to fight the good fight, by which he meant any fight at all.

  Sinclair took offense, of course. He insisted America was fighting for freedom, not just free enterprise. They kept circling back to this distinction as Sinclair got drunker and Eugene got more philosophical. Night fell in the bar. The regulars had long since taken the edge off and were pacing themselves. Johnny Cash dominated the jukebox, serenading their otherwise quiet kinship of beer and an occasional shot. Eugene and Sinclair were still drinking full throttle, trying to outpace their demons.

  “I’m not fighting just for the sake of fighting, you know.”

  “God is on your side?”

  “You’re damn right he is.”

  “Lucky you. I wish Pete had your luck.”

  “He wouldn’t have fought anyway.”

  “He’d have fought.”

  “Pete hated the military.”

  “He hated the government. Who doesn’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Doesn’t matter one way or the other. Pete couldn’t pass up a good fight any better than you can.”

  “Last I heard, he trashed the army every chance he got.”

  “He was just trying to impress that girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “Your sister. Who else, dick-brain?”

  Eugene’s hostility toward Candace caught Sinclair off guard. They were in dangerous territory, armed with nothing but tequila, equal parts truth serum and amnesic. Sinclair could count on one hand the times they’d seen each other since Pete’s suicide. The gift of the knife came out of nowhere. It seemed conciliatory, even though he had no idea what, if anything, had estranged them. For the first time, he realized Eugene might be privy to things even he didn’t know about Pete.

  “I’ve asked myself a million times why he did it.”

  “You should have asked me.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “He was dishonored.”

  “By my sister?”

  “By your father. Your sister just went along for the ride.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like you don’t know. Your father told Pete to keep his stinking Indian hands off his daughter. Candace didn’t say a word in his defense. Not a goddamn word.”

  “You’re making shit up.”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Who ever heard of killing yourself for that?”

  “It’s a Sioux thing.”

  “For disgrace in battle. Not love.”

  “Honorable suicide, Billy. Something you palefaces wouldn’t understand.”

  “Since when was Pete such a devout Indian?”

  “Since they rubbed his nose in it. It was all he had left.”

  Either the tequila or the truth caught up with Sinclair. He was too sick to go home, so they both slept it off in Eugene’s trailer. They each remembered about half of what was said that night. There were no hard feelings. Everybody had been blaming everybody else for Pete’s suicide since Grandpa found him dead in the aspen grove. Surely they were the least responsible, they who had loved him most. They said good-bye abruptly that morning, trying to cover the intensity of what they were feeling. Eugene told Sinclair to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t taught him how to fight just so he could get himself killed in Iraq. Sinclair said he’d do his best not to. It was his only real send-off. His own father didn’t even drive him to the airport.

  He kept practicing his moves at boot camp. Sergeant Troy was initially skeptical of his technique. Sinclair looked out of control, off balance. But nobody could get anywhere near him with a knife. Master of the long shot, he seldom got the chance to fight the way Eugene had taught him to fight, mano a mano. He had used his Ka-Bar to finish off a few dudes in Baghdad and Ramadi. But he definitely never met his match until Fallujah, the only town down and dirty enough to serve up a knife fight worthy of his training. The insurgent in the master bedroom probably thought he was leveling the playing field, stripping an infidel of his superior firepower. He was actually handing Sinclair his weapon of choice.

  Eugene was right about how terrorists fight. The man’s movements were veiled and devious. There was something fluid about him, almost incorporeal. His body seemed to vanish whenever Sinclair’s blade approached. It was like fighting a mirage. The man was much older than Sinclair, much bigger and stronger and more experienced. He had the seasoned confidence of a holy mercenary, a mujahid trained in Pakistan or Afghanistan with nothing to lose and everything to gain in the hereafter. Sinclair could only win the fight if he stayed alive. This man would win either way. The odds were in his favor, yet another suicidal warrior embracing death as the ultimate victory, making it almost impossible to prevail over him.

  The specter of suicide pricked Sinclair’s concentration, opening a slit that widened into a gash as the man knifed his thigh. Resisting the impulse to look at the wound, he assured himself it was just a scratch. He felt a spreading warmth before slamming shut the part of his brain that registered pain. Though too late to deflect the attack, he managed to slash the wrist of the man’s retreating arm. In the inevitable tit for tat of knife fighting, Sinclair had chalked one up. Unless his adversary was ambidextrous, he had lost his advantage.

  This first physical contact changed everything. Neither man was bleeding profusely, but one’s boot was full of blood and the other’s hand was slick with it. The terrorist had known exactly where to find the main artery in Sinclair’s thigh. He must have missed it by a fraction of whatever metric they used to measure fatality in his native country. Casualties in battle often resulted not from initial injuries but from the slow and steady bleeding out of wounds. Both men started fighting more aggressively, racing against a clock with blood dripping from its hands. What had been hidden was unveiled.

  The man attacked with what might have been a dozen knives. Sinclair tried to slow himself down, even as his opponent sped up. One mortal blow was worth multitudinous flesh wounds. The man’s collarbone was like a plate of natural body armor. But there was one sweet spot. Like a surgeon, Sinclair probed with steely precision. His knife slid in all the way to the handle. They both heard, or perhaps felt, the spurting sound, a punctured artery in the neck. What had been dripping began gushing. The man fell forward, shuddering in Sinclair’s arms. He held him tightly to make sure he wasn’t playing possum, gathering strength for one last stab at victory. He wasn’t.

  The sound of battles being waged in other parts of the compound came flooding back into Sinclair’s consciousness. Cross fire still raged downstairs. Logan and the lone rifleman exchanged periodic shots in the hall, ducking in and out of doorways. Sinclair sheathed his knife and wiped the blood off his hands. He picked up his automatic and ti
ptoed across the room in his steel-toed boots, ignoring his thigh wound as assiduously as the spectacle of the dead terrorist sprawled on the floor, eyes wide open. Wolf and the rest of the squad needed reinforcement. Time to wrap up this sideshow and get back to the main attraction.

  Sinclair stood in the doorway where Logan could see him and the rifleman down the hall could not. He held his finger to his lips and Logan winked. A plan was born almost telepathically. Logan kept wrapping himself around the doorjamb, trying to take clean shots without exposing too much of his body. His automatic overpowered the rifle, but the ballistics were all wrong. Shooting from rooms on the same side of the hallway made it next to impossible to score. Sinclair had a much better angle. Once he mastered the logistics of their stalemate, he’d be ready to execute a standard bait and hook.

  Logan was the bait. The strategy worked best when the quarry was either gullible or cocky. The rifleman appeared to be both. Every time Logan stuck so much as a big toe into the hallway, out popped the rifleman. He apparently assumed his pal the professional mujahid was making short work of Sinclair. A novice, no doubt about it. The only safe assumption was that enemies lurked around every corner. Sinclair positioned himself. Logan unloaded a decoy round. The rifleman appeared, right on schedule, and fell forward into the hallway. He died instantaneously, but his body kept jerking as Sinclair continued firing into it, emptying his magazine. It may have been overkill. He needed to reload anyway.

  Logan followed suit. They both ducked back into the safety of their rooms and slammed in new rounds. They might not need full magazines to finish clearing the bedrooms. But judging from the continuous fire in the kitchen, they’d need an arsenal to get out of the compound alive. Bring it on. The US Army taught its soldiers never to fear combat. Marines were trained to embrace it. Better yet, crave it. When they weren’t actually fighting, they reminisced about fighting or looked forward to the next fight. Half of Sinclair’s platoon had volunteered for redeployment at the end of their active-duty service commitments. They couldn’t bear the thought of their buddies fighting without them. It wreaked havoc on marriages. It won wars.

  They stormed the hallway, side by side, so massive in full combat gear that domestic spaces could scarcely accommodate the enormity of their attack. Logan straddled the dead insurgent, pivoting to fire into the open room to the left. Sinclair kicked in the door to the right. Multiple rounds harmlessly ripped into the walls and mattress of what looked like a boy’s bedroom. Clothes were strewn on the floor, waiting for his mother to tell him to pick them up. The upstairs fell silent. Logan had already stopped shooting.

  “All clear!” Sinclair hollered.

  Logan didn’t respond. Sinclair squared off, preparing to rush headlong into the next room.

  “Logan?”

  “Clear,” he finally said. He voice sounded huskier than usual.

  “Everything okay?”

  Logan appeared in the doorway, visibly shaken. He caught sight of Sinclair and his face hardened. What looked like a woman’s arm was draped across the floor of the room. Logan stepped into the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  “All clear,” Logan repeated. “Let’s get back downstairs.”

  “What happened in there?”

  “Drop it.”

  “Was that a woman?”

  The minute Sinclair asked the question he regretted it. No matter what happened in that room, it wasn’t worth jeopardizing his bond with Logan. The long mission was taking its toll, and they were making mistakes. Correction. Sinclair had made a mistake. Logan was just doing his duty. If Sergeant Troy had told them once he had told them a million times. Never second-guess the decisions of your platoon. Compartmentalize everything. Shoot first, don’t ask questions later, no matter what.

  “I said drop it, Sinclair.”

  Logan had fully recovered his nerve. He was already halfway down the hall, confident that Sinclair was right behind him. Gunners had a secret compartment, deep in the recesses of their psyches, where they stashed the corpses of all the women and children they killed in the line of duty. For the sake of the mission, if not to avoid going crazy, they learned to ignore that particular aspect of winning the War on Terror. Covering the action from rooftop perches, Sinclair wasn’t privy to what happened behind closed doors. He couldn’t get the image of that draped arm out of his mind. Sniper duty had made him soft.

  Sinclair might have escaped the compound with his honor intact if he hadn’t glanced down at the dead rifleman. No wonder he’d been so gullible. He was a teenager at best, possibly the boy whose clothes were strewn across the floor in the next room. Probably the son of the phantom corpse behind the closed door. Sinclair nudged the door open with his automatic. He would never forgive himself for betraying Logan’s trust. It shouldn’t have mattered whether it was a woman or an insurgent. Judging from the position of her body, it was a mother. Her arms were extended, her limp hand reaching out to the dead rifleman. Was it her son or just some random kid? It may not have mattered, even to her. She had reached out to comfort him, one way or the other.

  Sinclair panicked. A traitor had invaded his mind. The warrior in him looked on, incapacitated with doubt, as the traitor violated everything he believed in. He wondered what would have happened if he had cleared that particular room instead of Logan. For days he had fought, killing untold numbers of insurgents without faltering. He had knifed a man whose very breath he could feel on his face without flinching. But the intrusion of kindness into the field of brutality unmanned him. The anomalous presence of civilians seemed to transform war into terrorism. He told himself he wasn’t thinking these things. He had been trained not to think these things. He had been trained not to think. Training was everything.

  The traitor tried to take refuge in the fact that he hadn’t shot her. The refuge itself was a betrayal. The entire compound had been declared hostile, and they had orders to shoot everything that moved. There was no place for equivocation in the military. There was right and wrong. Democracy and the Axis of Evil. The traitor tried to convince Sinclair that the woman lying in a pool of her son’s blood defied this moral certitude. Even if following orders was right, she wasn’t necessarily wrong, just in the wrong house in the wrong city in a war gone wrong.

  If only Sinclair were fighting his Grandpa’s war. The enemy had been clearly demarcated. They wore uniforms, for starters. The infantry could readily distinguish between civilians and hostile forces. They measured their honor against the dishonor of Nazis herding families into concentration camps. In Fallujah, women and children refused to be herded out of harm’s way. Why were they still there, blurring ethical boundaries? Terrorists had killed civilians by the thousands on 9/11. Marines were in Iraq to punish that transgression, not replicate it.

  Sinclair smacked his helmet to clear his head. He was going mad. Battle fatigue sometimes affected his performance, but never his judgment. Orders were orders. Civilians had been evacuated. Collateral damage was inevitable. His training kicked in and he raced after Logan, fleeing the specter of the traitor standing over the corpses of a mother and her son. A warrior descended the stairs with Logan, his weapon at the ready. They had cleared the upstairs of hostile forces.

  The living room was still filled with smoke, but they could see well enough to confirm that it remained secured. Logan and Sinclair flanked the kitchen door, trying to assess the action within. They recognized the gunner styles of Wolf, McCarthy, Trapp, and Percy. They were all still alive. An awful lot of firepower was crammed into the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. They were up against four AK-47s, maybe five. The odds were already on their side, given their superior weaponry. But Wolf was playing it safe, biding time until the squad was reunited.

  “Ready to engage,” Logan shouted into his headset.

  “What took you so long?” Wolf said.

  “Rush-hour traffic.”

  “Where’s Sinclair?”

  “Riding shotgun. What are we up against?”

&nb
sp; “Enemy gunners at ten and two o’clock. Two or more in the pantry at four o’clock.”

  “We’re right behind you.”

  They stormed the kitchen, guns blazing. There were five, not four, insurgents. The three crouching behind appliances bore the brunt of the assault. Nothing much left of them, just hamburger meat. The other two were splayed in a utility closet. Mops and brooms and legs and arms. Detergent leaking from punctured containers spattered their blood with antiseptic blues and greens. The squad whooped it up. They couldn’t have executed a better blitz. Just one more compound and they’d be scarfing down MREs with Radetzky’s men. By then maybe this bogus cease-fire would be over and they could really kick ass.

  A screen door at the far end of the kitchen opened onto a back porch. Wolf was already assessing their next target. Stacked in their usual configuration, the squad regained its composure. They sprinted toward the adjacent compound, peppering the windows and balcony while Wolf opened a breach to the entrance. As far as they could tell over the racket of their own automatics, their charge was unchallenged. They reconfigured on either side of the front door, panting with excitement. Taking fire was nerve-racking, but at least you knew what you were up against. Either the compound was empty or they were in for one hell of a surprise party. McCarthy prepared to break down the door. Percy and Logan primed grenades. They popped the cork and the team rushed into the compound. Wolf and McCarthy sprayed the fatal funnel. Sinclair and Logan hit the corners. Percy scanned the room for traps.

  “Clear!”

  “Closed door at one o’clock,” Percy warned.

  “Cover it!” Wolf ordered. “We’ve got the kitchen.”

  The door flew open, as if on cue. Trapp and Sinclair let loose, nailing an insurgent. Another one appeared in the kitchen, drawing fire from Wolf. An instant later, two more descended the staircase. The squad was on the wrong end of a double bait and hook. McCarthy and Logan pivoted, zipping rounds up and down the stairs. The lead insurgent’s body danced a grisly jig, arms flailing from the impact. But not before somebody got a shot off. McCarthy went down.