The lieutenant answered my first concern by settling in at the far end of the apartment’s living room, about twenty feet away. He wouldn’t be bothering me by breathing over my shoulder. As I arranged furniture so I could take up a good position in the prone looking out the window, I noticed that my body was still jumpy. I was on edge, and focusing on the variables wasn’t helping like normal.
For this mission, I’d brought a Jellico .303, that long-range rifle produced by the reliable manufacturers at Winchester. The lieutenant was on the thermals, and in addition had a Leopold scope that could zoom up to x25 magnification. We kept the target’s rooms under observation from early morning until the sun came up, then waited several hours for the sun to slouch across the sky. Shooting from the West, we needed the sun to line up. At 1400 the light was perfect, so I returned to my scope and waited, scanning the target’s bedroom and living room windows.
It all reminded me of a movie I’d watched once, set in the 1970s. A police officer was tracking some serial killer in San Francisco. I couldn’t remember the details. The serial killer had threatened—a newspaper?—to kill someone—a homosexual?—and had taken up a position on a roof. I think the policeman—also a sniper?—was trying to outmaneuver the serial killer. Everything was in sepia, that washed-out quality you get with older movies. The soundtrack was really arresting, peppy, funky. But I couldn’t remember, in Iraq, watching for Redskins, how it had all turned out.
At 1450 the target appeared briefly by the bedroom window, too quickly for me to acquire a good shot. Redskins had her arms around a young adolescent boy of twelve or thirteen, and kissed him repeatedly on the forehead before shooing him out, closing the door behind him. She placed her hands on her hips, and looked out the window, her face open to the daylight. I had her, and prepared to fire.
The lieutenant whistled, low. “Hey. You seeing this?”
“What?” I looked up.
“Look at this chick. She’s blazing. Packet did not do her justice.”
I brought myself back to the scope, and evaluated. Sure enough, Objective Redskins was a very attractive woman. The photo in the packet had been unexceptional—and while this was the same long, narrow face and nose, the moves were all different, her bearing refined, regal. The human potential of Redskins unnerved me. Our target was an arrogant killer, an evil sadist who unquestionably deserved death. She was also a sexy mother.
“What do you recommend, sir,” I said. “That’s the target, I’m sure. Mission is to take it down.”
Glancing at the target through his spotting scope, the lieutenant abruptly leaned forward and grabbed it with both hands, bringing his eyes up to the near end. “Holy shit, take a look. You’re not going to believe this.”
I already knew what I’d see, and my scalp and forehead started to sweat. Under my crosshairs Objective Redskins was removing articles of her clothing. Below her burka and headscarf lay a shapely body, clad only in lacy red panties and a bra. She was beautiful. In my peripheral vision, I noted that the lieutenant had unbuckled his pants and thrust his right hand into them, all the while observing through the scope that he held with his left. I returned to Redskins, who was practically nude. Of its own volition, my manhood stirred.
“Sir, this isn’t a call we get to make. You saw the photos in the packet—this human has done things, horrible things, and our mission, again, is to take her down.”
The lieutenant wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t shoot without him, I needed his approval to fire, and moreover he was there to help me shoot, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do, take the shot, get it over with. Instead, he was masturbating furiously in the corner while an insurgent commander was defenseless, easy for the taking. I waited while Redskins went to her closet and took out various types of clothing, putting them up against her body in front of a mirror.
After a little while he stopped. “This isn’t doing it for me.” He sat up, his pants still unbuckled. “I’m bored, fuck this shit. You gonna shoot or what?”
I maintained my composure, careful not to roll my eyes or otherwise indicate my disgust for him, for this whole scene, and took aim again. When I returned to the scope, though, Redskins had another surprise.
A beatific smile on her face, she was leaning back on her bed, swaying. She placed her hand down her panties, and began stimulating herself. I shifted uncomfortably as my crotch stiffened, trying to dispel the exquisite, painful urge. My prone position made it impossible to avoid arousing myself with even the slightest gesture. Carefully, I brought the crosshairs to her chest, a few clicks down from her left armpit. My finger drifted to the trigger.
“You paying attention? Do it! Take the goddamned shot!”
Taking the shot now, as much as I wanted to, was clearly not what was called for. “Sir, you’re going to want to take a look at this,” I said.
“This better be good,” he said, then, “Jackpot, total game changer!” His face back on the scope and hand back in his pants, he rendered his decision: “Hold fire.”
I gritted my teeth, rocking back and forth, like an animal, powerless to prevent myself from rubbing myself with my legs. Redskins’ knees were delicately circling as her feet and heels hung in the air, bouncing lightly, and I’d unconsciously synchronized my movements with her own. Then it happened—I finished, at almost the same time as the lieutenant. A great calm washed over me, calm like I hadn’t felt since before Chuck’s death. My facial tic vanished, and my arms stopped shaking. My legs stopped their macabre rattle.
After a long minute, still looking through his scope, the lieutenant spoke. “You ever listen to Rachmaninov? Second Piano Concerto?”
I had not (though I have since) and said so.
“Ayn Rand said it’s the only piece of music a man needs to know,” he said. “You have a girl back home?”
I did, but I was thinking about Angela. “No, sir,” I said, then, “Yes, actually. I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”
“Asian girl, right?”
“Roger, sir,” I said.
He nodded sagely, then left the scope, lay back against the wall, and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Seems like your type, the quiet ones always get yellow fever. Want one?”
I declined his offer, and he lit up, wiping his wrist on the concrete floor. “Man that’s messy as fuck,” he said to himself, then launched into a story about how he’d gone hunting for elk in Wyoming on vacation once, with his dad and grandfather. Naturally, the lieutenant was the protagonist, and naturally, they’d bagged a massive beast, a record-setter. It sounded like bullshit to me, but sometimes that’s how people talk in war. I kept checking the room, and spoke up when he finished the story.
“Sir, should I shoot? She’s still at it.”
The lieutenant dragged on his cigarette, pretentious in profile. “Sure, knock her down. I mean might want to let her finish first.”
He was right. The mission wasn’t personal. I just wanted to wrap it up and return to base. I returned to my rifle with a clear head, and open eyes.
One of the things they teach you to do in sniper training, which is reinforced through patrolling, is always to maintain situational awareness. The lieutenant was facing the door, rifle by his side, and I wasn’t worried about us being discovered. My process for acquiring Redskins was to confirm that she was still in the bedroom, in her bed (she was), then to quickly scan the area for anything that might have changed during our little chat. I was about to take and make a relatively simple four-hundred meter shot, and didn’t want anything to intrude on our escape, especially given what had happened to Chuck. I scanned the roof of her building, the surrounding area, and the window of her living room.
I hadn’t gone home for Chuck’s funeral yet. I hadn’t met his parents, watched them weep loudly by his grave. I hadn’t seen my father’s dull grey pupils dilate when I brought home his first television—sunken-cheeked, weakened by old age and feeble with the first signs of dementia, he wasn’t hunting anymore, though the weapons still hu
ng carefully in his garage. I hadn’t finished helping the cable people set things up for the television and the internet, hadn’t stood in the backyard looking at the Ruhrs’ porch, then gone into the kitchen to grip the sink and squeeze my face shut. I was just a sniper, with a target who was going to die better than most people—painless, after a moment of physical ecstasy.
That’s when I saw the son, face plastered against the wall, hand in his boyish pants, staring through what must have been a peephole. Watching his mother. My face filled with blood. Shuddering with surprise and rage, I brought the sights up to him, then, swiftly, over to her. As she built to her climax, I pressed my cheek hard against the rifle’s buttstock, and calculated the space between us. What effect the wind would have, the angle of deflection. How her window would change the bullet’s direction. The area’s architecture—quarters built for workers, single-file hallways, wide boulevards, simple egress. I breathed in, and focused on the shot’s mathematics, and squeezed my index finger oh, so gently, feeling the narrow metal against my finger, knowing that at some point, the rifle would jerk in my hand. I began my slow exhale.
THE WILD HUNT
by Brian Castner
Mickey never saw the one that got him.
He was on point, and when the shooting started it came from all sides. He was strung out, separated, pinched off, his squad somewhere below and behind him on the path, and the Taliban were close, so close he could smell them, a funky mix of sweat and shit even stronger than the powder tang off his rifle. He shot at them through the trees and they shot back and somehow he never got hit until the moment the whole mountainside erupted under his feet.
Mickey was on his back. He looked down at his legs and saw two red smears in their place. The arms and scalps and organs of things that had been Taliban only a second before lay all about him. A pink mist hung in the air. Rock and timber fell amongst and through it but the haze remained. It was a mist of blood, a mist of him and them. It took shape and he looked it in the eye. The wails of the dying echoed across the valley. Mickey felt frozen in panic and when he finally took a breath he inhaled the pink mist and it coated the back of his throat. He coughed and spit red phlegm, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and saw that he was drenched in the stuff. The pink mist loomed, and when he took another breath, Mickey sucked it all the way into his lungs.
Then pain and adrenaline suddenly flooded his body and he felt like he was going to jizz his pants.
“Sergeant Gabe, I’m hit!” he screamed into the mic on his left shoulder.
Silence from the radio and shouts and shots only feet away.
He tried to move backward using his arms and the remains of his legs. He ground the shards of his exposed shin bones into the earth and pushed, but the stilts provided no leverage or balance and he only managed an inch. He tried to twist himself around but he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t make his body work. Why? He put his hands to his stomach and found his bowels. A massive piece of frag had sliced open his belly, right below his vest. Mickey started pushing the blue and white tubes back into his gut with his snot dirt pink mist hands. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he couldn’t help it. It was instinct.
He rolled over and began to crawl. He didn’t feel his intestines scrape along the gravel. Further down the path he saw his squad mates firing back, up the cliff face, into the valley. They were so far away. Chip was on the ground, lying on his side. Another soldier was working a jam on his machine gun. Sergeant Gabe was missing somehow, nowhere to be seen.
A rough hand rolled him over. Mickey lay on his back and stared up. Two Taliban, eyes rimmed with kohl, their AKs on his chest. Mickey reached for the rifle still slung against him but they pinned it with a foot. He struggled and called for Chip and Sergeant Gabe but he could barely hear his own voice above the gunfire.
Another man approached with a rough hemp rope. They slipped the noose over his head. The rope caught. They stretched his neck. He saw the machete.
A blink.
A break.
A fade.
The Taliban’s head explodes. Another reaches for his rifle and takes two in the chest. The third runs. Refreshed pink mist in his eyes and ears. Mickey rolls on his side and sees a dozen men with baseball caps and beards and wraparound sunglasses, running up the path, firing from cover up the hill. Now Mickey can hear the helicopter flap behind him and he tries to turn around and look but the sun overwhelms him and he can’t see the bird or the lines the men had used to fast-rope down.
Gusts of light-headed euphoria, and Mickey tries to prop himself up. One of the operators runs up to Mickey, squats in the gore, places his body between Mickey and the incoming Taliban fire, lighting up the ridgeline with his grenade launcher. Another comes on Mickey’s left, starts ratcheting tourniquets on his legs. The pink mist dissolves like fog at first light. Mickey’s pumping heart floods the path, pools and ponds and a stream over the lip of the cliff face.
“He’s going to bleed out,” the medic says.
“No, he’s not,” says a third operator just arriving. He checks the blood type stitched on Mickey’s vest, compares it to his own, written in black marker across the top of his boot. “Hook me up.”
The medic pulls out two catheters, two tubes, one bag, ties one man to the other. Buddy transfusion. The man takes a breath and balls his fist and flexes and Mickey’s brain glows from the hot transfer.
Bullet tracers light the sky and fast-movers thunder over the valley. Mickey’s anus lets go. The medic leans over, holds him close, grabs Mickey’s hand, looks him right in the eye.
“You’re going home,” he says.
Mickey’s first sight at the hospital is Chip and Sergeant Gabe. They are standing at the end of his bed, in uniform, Chip grinning. Mickey tries to reach for them but can’t seem to figure out how. His torso is buried under wraps and blankets, his leg stubs are mummies stuck in shrink-wrap plastic bags.
“Sergeant Gabe,” Mickey manages to say. “Where did you go?”
“I was right there, don’t worry,” Sergeant Gabe says.
“Chip, I thought you got killed.”
“No, I’m all right,” Chip says. “We had to be here to welcome you home. No way we would miss it.”
Mickey feels relief but anxiety starts to creep in.
“But what now?” Mickey asks. He doesn’t need to point below his waist to explain what he means.
“Now you get into rehab,” Sergeant Gabe says. “You have work to do.”
Every day at the gym, Mickey works his stumps, lifting and kicking and straining. He does leg raises with weights hanging from his femurs, crunches and twists that pull the stitches in his abdomen wall taut as guitar strings. As soon as he receives his metal legs, he starts running every day, first one mile, then two, then more, many more. When his stumps are too sore, he bikes. When his belly is too sore, he works chest and arms and gets big, bigger than he’s ever been. When he takes off his shirt you can see that the scar stretches completely across his belly, turns up at the ends like a smiley face, his nipples as eyes. Mickey works until his legs look like the tips of two muscled torpedoes jutting from his hips.
Mickey is in the weight room, crushing his bench, kicking his stumps, when the telegram arrives. The telegram says: “We need you back.” His eyes fill. Mickey turns to his wife.
“I’m so happy for you, Mickey,” she says. “You’ve worked so hard. You need to go. I’ll be here waiting for you.”
Mickey arrives at the mustering station walking on his new steel pins. Chip is there, and Sergeant Gabe, and the whole squad.
“Syria,” Sergeant Gabe says. “They’re sending us all back over.”
“But how? It’s been so long since I got hurt, you guys should have been reassigned by now,” Mickey asks.
“There’s a new policy,” Sergeant Gabe says. “No more moves. They’re keeping the units together. They’re never going to break up our squad ever again.”
They land at Tartus. The front door of
the landing craft drops and Mickey and his squad mates hit the beach. Mortars fall in sheets and enemy strongpoints lay down overlapping machine gun fire but Mickey and Chip and Sergeant Gabe press up the sandy slope and take cover behind a concrete wall. The enemy soldiers are all dressed in uniforms, black man-jams that silhouette sharply against the grey and dusty homes. Mickey and Chip find their marks, move their squad in one block, then two, into the center of the city. The black uniformed men fall in piles and fill the gutters with blood. Children appear in doorways and immediately run to the Americans, take cover behind them, safely out of the way. One boy grabs onto Mickey’s leg in fear, but Mickey musses his hair and the boy smiles with his wide dark eyes.
House to house they move and the Syrian Army liquefies before them. A rout becomes a slaughter becomes an extermination. Mickey and Chip reach the center of town to see enemy tanks fleeing. Tartus is free. A woman in a headscarf walks up to Mickey and touches his cheek and puts a flower behind his ear and says thank you. The boy smiles. Their commander, Captain Wodinski, drives up in his Humvee, steps from the armored truck, and addresses his men.
“Keg’s on me when we take Damascus! Two kegs for Babylon!”
Chip and Mickey are resting in the shade of the palm trees as Sergeant Gabe walks among the squad and tosses out field rations.
“Chip, what’d you get?” Mickey asks.
“Beef stew and a can of Cope. How about you?”
“Chili Mac and Lucky Strikes.”
“Nice.”
The vacuum-packed meal pouches are already warm in the desert heat, and Mickey and Chip and the squad dig in. Chip puts in his dip and Mickey smokes and they talk of all the girls they left behind and the enemy that lay before them.
The Road Ahead Page 28