by David Poyer
As she trudged up the stairs to the office, her cell went off. She fumbled the phone out of her bag and ducked into the women’s room, hoping it was Albert.
But the voice was that of Hiyat, her friend from the women’s circle. Aisha recalled date pastries, a long, graceful neck under glossy black hair. But the words were nearly unrecognizable. “Aisha, Aisha, he is dead. He is dead!”
“Who? Hiyat, calm down. I can barely understand you. What’s wrong?”
“Husayn, Husayn. He is lying dead in the street. They say you were there. They say—”
Aisha got the story by broken words, sentence fragments. One of the children at the mosque had been her friend’s eldest. Only fifteen. Aisha couldn’t think of anything to say as the woman wept and cursed. Aisha couldn’t think of why she’d called, either. But she said what she could think of to say, and Hiyat at last came to why she’d called. “I know where they are.”
“Where who is? Who are we talking about, Hiyat?”
“The irhabis who killed him. Here, in our neighborhood. Foreigners. They leased four apartments. Paid for the whole year, all at once. They bought cars, and a truck. Not Yemeni, they did not belong here. But no one wanted to speak out, and our husbands don’t … they don’t want to say anything, even now. And so we pay … Husayn!” Hiyat screamed again, the anguish of bereaved mothers for a million years lacing her cracked voice like barbed wire. Aisha closed her eyes and prayed.
“Where are they?” she said. And the woman told her, between curses and prayers. Aisha cradled the phone and tore off a paper towel. On its dry, pebbly surface she scratched notes, directions. “How many? And where are they from? Do you know that?”
“I’ll call you in a day or two,” the distant, fading voice said. “And we, the women, will give you what you seek.”
10
Base “X,” Gulf of Oman
“HOOYAH, hooyah, hooyah, hey! Today’s another easy day!”
Teddy sweated furiously, slogging through the sand. The heat was overwhelming, bad as he’d ever felt it. An abrasive paste of sand and sweat gritted between his thighs. His boots thudded remorselessly into the ground. He had to stay in front.
Now, he was the Chief.
Above his head the cloudless sky blazed beneath an unfeeling sun. In Masirah, nearly directly beneath the equator, it was high summer all year round.
The team had deployed to a place few even among the well-traveled senior petty officers had ever heard of. The island was forty miles long and barren as the backyard of hell. It lay fifteen miles off the coast of Oman, itself only a vague idea in most people’s minds. It had been a British base since before time began, but after Desert Storm the United States had poured money and concrete, and now the airfield’s immense silver-black-streaked runways shimmered in the heated air as if seen through a beaker of boiling water. Four-engined cargo planes thundered in and out, and helicopters clattered in from seaward to load slings of palletized bombs and dangling howitzers and black, droopy bladders of fuel. Diego Garcia lay over the horizon, where the logistics for any major Navy or Marine effort would funnel through. Closer in through the blue haze lay the Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group, shortly to be augmented by Kitty Hawk, en route from Japan.
The base was dedicated to cargo handling, supporting the battle group with the fabled “beans, bullets, and black oil.” Which explained why the SEALs were living in hastily erected tents in a compound a quarter mile inland of the runways instead of in permanent buildings. They were used to tents and razor wire and the distant barking of guard dogs, but the dust, humidity, and heat were remarkable even for the Middle East. Outside the wire dozers had scraped out berms and firing lines. They’d been here a week, acclimating and training. The bombing campaign had begun, but they still had no word as to their destination. Guesses, yes; scuttlebutt aplenty. But nothing concrete.
Teddy’s calves were cramping. He turned and ran backward through the warm, stinging surf, looking back.
He had sixteen men in Echo Platoon, though only three trailed him today along the shining strand. The two officers, Dollhard and Verstegen, were back at the HQ tent. Two men were in sick bay: Foss, with a scorpion-fish spine in his foot from the day they took a Zodiac out to the reef for scallops; Catron, with an eye infection exacerbated by getting elbowed during a spirited game of wadi ball. (On Masirah everything was wadi. Wadi ball, a vicious combination of volleyball and lacrosse that included hand-to-hand combat at the net. Wadi lizards, ugly beasts with huge heads, suspicious eyes, and tongues as fast as an Old West gunfighter’s draw. Wadi foot, wadi ass, wadi eyes, and wadi hair for bed-head. Even wadi water, which meant no water at all.) The others were into their own morning workouts. Lifting or grappling or unarmed combat; some out swimming; others doing a full-up pyramid in a hangar converted to a gym; overhead squats, push-ups, Supermans, working on glutes and hams. They did pull-ups on bars they’d welded up and staked into the sand with the help of the same Seabee construction crew that had helped them refurbish their tents. SEALs weren’t into mass PT.
Teddy figured what he needed was basic endurance. Combat wasn’t a sumo match; it demanded endurance and core strength, not muscle mass. They claimed whatever bug or worm he’d picked up in Ashaara was cured, but he still didn’t seem to have all his drive back. Right now he was at the end of his rope. Still up front, but a glance back told him the others didn’t look near as stove up as he was feeling. They were fit but not huge, few bulky guys or classically ripped bodybuilder types. He wished he could see Sumo’s silhouette back there. His teammate had towered over everyone else, but always kept up. That was the secret. You can if you think you can. Mind over body. So Teddy was still out front, even if it took five hundred milligrams of Motrin twice a day.
Fortunately, he had a couple tricks up his sleeve. He swerved toward the surf, gentle today, cool-looking but warm as soup, green and white stretching out toward coral reefs tickling the horizon. He jogged out knee-deep, a gentle gradient on this beach, until each step dragged at his legs and salt burned his abraded thighs. Then turned and faced them.
“Buddy on your back,” he yelled, and to grunts and wheezes each grabbed another and swung him to his shoulders. “To that pointy rock,” he yelled, and slapped each burden-bearer on the ass as he staggered past, wet, sandy, dripping, sunburned, with a buddy’s weight sagging across his shoulders. “Speed! Speed! Pick it up, operators! Helo ahead, medevac, your buddy’s bleeding out!” They’d be carrying this and more if they had to pull back under fire, eighty or ninety pounds of gear apiece, a wounded buddy, and gear for two. Only knowing they could do it would get them through.
No enemy trained this hard, or fired a Marine division’s annual ammo allowance every week. These were the fittest, finest fighters on the planet, with only a few other outfits even worthy to be mentioned in the same breath. If you knocked them down, they got back up. Shoot them, and they kept shooting back. This was where he belonged, not talking bogus deals in la-la land.
He ran after them. When the last man buckled and fell full length into the water, Teddy picked up the guy’s buddy and carried him on himself.
* * *
THE whine of turbines not far off, the trundle of huge silver fuselages. Teddy remembered this from years back, from Desert Storm, when he’d been a wet-behind-the-ears sugar cookie fresh out of BUD/S. As the plane taxied in to the apron, maintenance vehicles and pallet handlers rolled to meet it. Men and women in USAF coveralls trotted on interception courses. They converged like ants tackling a big silver grubworm, and the hatch came down and everyone swarmed aboard. A smoky mirage of tea-stained air heated the already sizzling afternoon. The turbines whined down out of supersonic to a basement subsonic that quaked in his gut.
The command tent was clustered with others in the SOF compound, inside a separate ring of wire. One small Korean-made air conditioner was laboring manfully but not making much headway. Its louvers were aimed at the computers, so none of the head shedders could be accused
of bagging it. Though of course they still were. The Echo leader, Lieutenant Dollhard, ran a hand down a scrubby goatee, mesmerized by a screen. “Settling in okay, Chief?” he murmured. “How about Ozzie’s kid?” The four-year-old had swallowed a needle.
“Got that resolved, L-T. Reached back and got it taken care of. Kid’s okay.” Teddy gave Dollhard stats on the sick list, how soon they’d be tits up again. Added that Alonzo was catching up on his pistolcraft, and that the Air Force security detachment had agreed, when asked politely, not to idle their trucks upwind of the SEAL hootches anymore. Dollhard massaged his beard again, still fascinated by the screen. He was a bit older and considerably stockier than the usual SEAL. Teddy didn’t make the mistake of thinking this meant softness. Some of the meanest mothers in the Teams had gathered a slight pudge around the midriff. Both that and the air of absolute calm came with years of hanging it out over the edge. Their OIC, Officer in Charge, was ex-enlisted too, a Team guy from way back.
“Any orders yet, Commander?”
“Yeah. Our downtime’s over.”
“We good to go?”
“Warning order for embark tomorrow. Don’t leave anything; we won’t be back. Pass that to the shooters.” Dollhard went over the embark schedule and what gear they’d need. Teddy listened hard. If they needed a piece of gear where they were going, and they didn’t have it, it would be more than a ding on his eval. The lieutenant handed him the clipboard and gave him the nod that meant he could go about his business.
* * *
ON the way out, Teddy passed the nod on to Master Chief Stroud, a leathery little asshole who essentially ran the headquarters element. “Hey there, Turd Man,” Stroud said sotto voce, a slow smile stretching his weathered cheeks. Teddy took a grip and just smiled back.
Even now, he only remembered flashes of his chief’s initiation.
They’d held it in the Kill House, probably because it would be easier to clean up. And the House was the most soundproofed, secure area on base. They’d modified an old ghillie suit and painted it shit brown. So that when Teddy had had to go before the High Judge with his green Charge Book to plead his case, the Judge—this same Stroud—just had to ask what he was. And Teddy, the hapless selectee, had had to say, “I’m a piece of shit, Your Honor.”
And Stroud had cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, I guess something always has to slip through the marine strainer.”
It hadn’t gotten any more pleasant, or less insulting, after that. But Easy Day wasn’t just a catch phrase. After Hell Week at BUD/S, every day was an easy day.
Teddy had heard all the stories about initiations, but he’d thought they’d been toned down after Tailhook. If this was toned down, he wondered what they’d been like in the old days. Three strippers from out in town had stood at the door collecting cover charges. For a extra few bucks, a chief could get a finger diddle. Unfortunately, there’d only been two selectees, Teddy and another guy from the tech side who didn’t have his Budweiser but who’d gotten dragged in since they had so few other Slugs. And since everyone was getting ready to deploy, Stroud had said, why not?
Anyway, everyone had arrived already loaded, in some cases so drunk several of the already-frocked chiefs had to be locked in the ammo room to sober up so they could even make it to the swearing-in stage. After a sleepless night in the “coffin” wondering what the horrible smell was, drinking the “Truth Serum,” reciting every response to the numbers he could remember and taking the bombs when he didn’t, and dancing the cancan in the Talent Show, Teddy had barely been able to read the CPO creed. But maybe things had been toned down because there was no stripping down, no lit tampons up the ass, no canoe paddles, duct tape, or dog food, and the strippers had left after taking the entrance fees. (Or maybe just gone elsewhere with some of the older Genuines; Teddy had been otherwise occupied. And in any case, not interested; the strippers had been worn, bloated women, old amigas of the master chief’s, apparently.)
Anyway, “Hey there, Turd Man,” Stroud now said. Wagging a finger.
Teddy just smiled. “Hey, Master Chief.”
“Water and ammo and comms, Chief Oberg. Water and ammo and comms.”
“Right, Master Chief. On it.” Obie held up the load list, but Stroud snatched it out of his hands and started to cross things off, sneering. Teddy wavered—Dollhard had just told him this was final—but didn’t protest. Stroud handed it back with slashes through a third of the items. “Snivel gear. Pogey bait! Tell your LPOs, drop the crap and take more ammo. Never have too much ammo.”
Obie considered this bullshit, like a good deal else of what Stroud said, but didn’t voice the opinion. Stroud was the last guy in the unit to sport the yellow-and-red Vietnam service ribbon. He’d served with names that were legends in the Teams. His sneering pronunciamientos might not be current doctrine, but they were worth considering. In his mind, Teddy restored several of the items the command master chief had deleted, but added four more cases of Mk 262 and 7.62. “Got it, Master Chief.”
“Think this is amusing, Oberg?”
“No, Master Chief.”
“You got the attitude. I’ll give you that. But let me tell you something. A chief don’t need attitude. He needs to manage. You don’t pay attention to your gear, your logistics, and your chow, attitude don’t mean shit. Let the officers display the fucking leadership. You just make goddamned sure everything’s there when your troops need it, and it all works. Be goddamned sure your LPOs take what you need, and only what you need.”
“Okay, Master Chief, and this embark—”
“Oh, yeah. We’re goin’ back to Fleet Navy for this ride. Complete fucking uniforms, got that? They can keep their beards, but no Willie Nelsons. Keep the cameras out of sight, and tell ’em to leave their flippers in their gear boxes. Now get the fuck about your business.”
Walking through the HQ tent, Teddy saw notebooks being unplugged, desks folding up, files going into boxes, comm gear into form-fitted foam cutouts in hard-shell cases, cables being rapidly zip-tied into bundles ready to unroll again in some other makeshift location, some other sand-gritty tent or bunker or commandeered mud-brick madrassa. SEAL teams went intel heavy. The usual sources took too long in a tactical situation, so the Teams brought theirs along. They got chaffed as “intel pukes,” but no smart SEAL looked down on his intel guys.
Outside a Humvee honked, and men shouted in the distance. Teddy staggered as the heat hit him again. Afghanistan couldn’t be any worse. Then he corrected himself. No. It could always get hotter. And it could always get worse.
Or better, the way a SEAL looked at it.
There was much to be done, and Chief Oberg set about it.
* * *
2000 hours in the staging area. The lights burned images bright as day. Across the field leaping figures testified wadi ball did not cease with the going down of the sun. Heavily laden SEALs bent beneath packs, duffels, and weapons cases as they scuffed through the still-roasting air. They wore desert BDUs with unbloused trouser cuffs and floppy bush hats and Oakleys and Camel Baks. They carried Steiner binoculars and LST-5B line-of-sight radios and ruggedized Motorola MX-300R bone phones and ear mikes and UHF/sat comms. And short-barreled special ops modded M4s spray-painted in camo patterns and SIG 226 pistols and M240 light machine guns and AT4 antitank rockets. They clanked and creaked as they trudged past. But hardly anyone spoke.
* * *
2210. with a roar and a tilt backward, the COD—Carrier Onboard Delivery—flight left the runway to climb into hazy darkness. The plane was smaller inside than it looked sitting on the strip. The SEALs rode four abreast, belted into backward-facing seats, gear slung into the webbing above them, under their seats, carried on their laps. There might have been more gear in the plane than air. As it climbed, the temperature dropped. Cold air blasted from overhead, bringing a welcome coolness to heavily burdened men.
They could debark from this aircraft, jog across a flight deck, and load into a helicopter for insertion. Te
ddy, nodding out to the thrum of the propellers, didn’t think that’d happen, but it could. He remembered going out on QRF patrols with Sumo and Bitch Dog and what was his name—Whacker. Two, sometimes three, insertions a day. Too noisy in the stripped-down, metal-walled SH-60 cabins to talk, even to think. Everybody covered in a thick, greasy film of sweat. Pitch-dark aside from an orientation strip down by their boots. So gear heavy, their jaws were all they could move. Teddy could almost taste the pineapple gum Sumo’s mom used to send him from Hawaii.
Don’t think about that. He touched the hilt of his thin-bladed Glock knife. It’d been with him for so many missions it was almost like a good-luck piece, though he didn’t like the idea of good-luck pieces. Solid planning, extra ammo—those were his good luck charms.
The familiar tension of the hours before action. Alone, unspeaking, Teddy thought: This is what I missed, back in LA. This amped-up sense of absolute reality. He searched downturned, inward faces, remembering histories and nicknames. Vaseline. Harley. Steff. Two Scoops. Oz. A story behind each name. Some read. Others slept, heads vibrating to the engine drone. Some just stared into space, maybe rehearsing how to blow a steel door or defuse the antihandling device on the electronic version of the Chinese Model 1989 antipersonnel mine.
But this time there was a difference. He frowned, groping for it.
Before, he had one guy to worry about: himself. No, two: him and Sumo. Now he had thirteen enlisted and two officers to take care of. It was a heavier load than he’d expected.
He smiled sardonically in the roaring dimness, imagining what Master Chief “Poochin’” Stroud would have to say about that.
* * *
0200, aboard USS Kitty Hawk, CV-63. A cavernous, dimly lit compartment deep within the carrier. The deck was scuffed charcoal nonskid with red and white stripes, lights glaring high above, the air hot with paint and lubricant fumes. The whole enormous carrier had been turned into a floating special forces base. With her fighter and attack wings off-loaded, the hangar bay was packed with black-painted insectile forms, antenna-spiked and heavily armed. Teddy recognized Blackhawks, Chinooks, Pave Lows. Clunks and the rattle of chains bled through the overhead. He found it comforting to be wrapped in eighty-six thousand tons of American steel, American fuel, American explosives. And six thousand Americans, at least half of whom had given the heavily burdened SEALs fist-bumps, high fives, and V-for-victories in the passageways on the way down from the flight deck.