Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  “To the Fewer, the Prouder, the Braver,” Chase toasted. He slugged down the drink in a manner he had picked up since his dildo coronation. He turned to Buckley. “Want some, Buck?”

  “I’m good.”

  Buck turned away from the glare of the Wolf Head without looking up. Fishbait tossed down his drink and returned to tormenting Osama bin Laden. Chase pulled himself up on the stool next to Buck and peeped over his friend’s shoulder to see why he was so engrossed.

  The iPad screen played a grainy video of an empty bedroom. A young brunette wearing red bikini panties and no bra entered the scene. Chase chuckled.

  “Go jerk off in your own cage, dude—”

  He started in on further wisecracks about horny sailors and porn before he recognized the woman. He caught himself. Tammi! Buck’s wife?

  In the clip, Tammi crossed the room to the bed. She was a gorgeous woman with a definite hitch in her go-along and a bounce in her bumpers. Intrigued, Chase couldn’t wrench his eyes off her as she selected a red bra off the nightstand to match her panties and seductively massaged her pert little nipples into the cups.

  Satisfied, she stood before a full-length mirror to admire herself, whirling on tiptoes to catch herself from all angles while a naughty smile played on her lips. She applied lipstick, also red, and smiled secretly at her reflection. She seemed to be completely unaware that she was being videoed.

  “I think Baby Doll’s cheating on me,” Buck said, sounding lower than a rock at the bottom of the Atlantic. “Hope not,” he added.

  “Your wife? Are you kidding me?”

  The screen went blank. Buck sighed with a deep sadness and tried to pass it off as nothing. “At the very least I’ll get some hot selfie porn.”

  “You’re spying on your own wife, Buck? Ever thought of couples therapy?”

  Buckley grunted and scrubbed his face wearily with both hands, as though trying to erase the video from his mind. He obviously didn’t want to discuss it further. Chase got past the awkwardness by fixing his eyes on an 8x10 framed photo on the wall behind the bar. It showed Rip Taggart, Bear Graves, and Alex Caulder during better times. On the beach wearing scuba gear, they had their arms thrown around each other and were mugging the camera like a trio of high school boys.

  “What really happened to Senior Chief Taggart?” Chase asked.

  Buck refused to discuss that either. “Above my paygrade, bro.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  A kerosene lantern hanging on a nail by the door inside the holding cell hut fought back the encroachment of night shadows. It was quiet in the cells, like Death lurked in a dim corner, waiting. McAlwain was likely dying from shock, despair, and his untreated amputation. Nick hadn’t spoken in hours, had barely moved. The schoolgirls slept all in a little pile like frightened puppies. Na’omi lay on the dirt floor, eyes open, watching Taggart tied to his stake. She ignored Chido when he entered bearing a bowl of what appeared to be mushy vegetables immersed in coagulated fat.

  “Askr duro biri ye,” he barked at Na’omi. “Feed the SEAL. And I told you to cover yourself, Christian whore.”

  “What about the girls?” Na’omi shot back in the same language.

  “They’re not worth ten million dollars.”

  Chido stooped and shoved the bowl through the bars at Na’omi. He rose and glowered at Taggart, a look Sugar Ray Robinson never wore even when he fought.

  “Eat, SEAL,” he commanded, pointing at the bowl. He locked the door behind him when he left.

  Silence again settled over the cells. Outside, BH fighters had a bonfire going in the village square. Firelight filtered through the barred window, along with sounds of rough laughter and arguments. The combined glimmer of the outside fire and the lantern inside brought a sad, hauntingly beautiful glow to Na’omi’s somber face as she lay on her side looking back at Taggart, unblinking. She made no effort to get up to obey Chido’s orders to feed him. Clearly, she wanted nothing to do with him. He was not to be trusted after the peril he almost placed Esther in.

  Rip ducked his head toward the bowl of food. “Keep it,” he offered. “For the girls.”

  That produced a little line of puzzlement between her dark eyes. Unlike his fellow foreigners, Mr. McAlwain and Nick, he seemed willing to forego his own well-being for the sake of her and the girls. The man was proving more complex to Na’omi than her first assessment of him at the schoolhouse when he smelled like the local corn and mango brew and his eyes were red from hangover.

  The silence between them grew. Exhausted from hanging tied to his post for so many hours—he had lost track of time—he felt isolated with McAlwain and Nick also ignoring him. He experienced the sudden need to make contact with another human being who did not want to necessarily kill him.

  “Tell me about your family,” he requested of Na’omi at last, to break the uncomfortable stillness that settled between them like an unwanted barrier.

  He thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she did. She sounded reluctant, but at the same time she seemed almost grateful for the chance to escape captivity by interacting with someone other than her frightened students, if only for a short time.

  “My mother was a teacher,” she said, not looking directly at him, but instead into a more pleasant past. “In Lagos. For the Lycee. My father worked for the Foreign Office. They sent me to London for my schooling. They wanted me to stay there. But I wanted to help my people.”

  After that brief exchange, she lapsed into another painful silence. She lowered her head. Taggart barely made out her words. “They will say I brought shame to my family. Just like the girls.”

  The humiliation and guilt in her voice triggered in Taggart an urge to come to her defense, to take her into his arms and comfort her. “Boko Haram raped you, Na’omi. It’s not your fault.”

  Tied to his post, that was the best he could offer. Na’omi shook her head in resignation. Her life was ruined, even if she survived. The same went for her students.

  “My father will say I should have married. I should have been under a man’s protection. You don’t understand.”

  Na’omi’s conversion to Christianity made life more difficult for her in many ways, especially since her folks were apparently still set in the past. Their beliefs were especially severe on women, who were considered mere chattel and not human beings in their own right. In certain areas of the Middle East and Africa, honor killings were considered acceptable if a woman dishonored her family, for example, by being raped. Women were forbidden to walk the streets unless accompanied by a male relative, denied the opportunity to drive a car or attend school, and were often sold or traded like livestock when they were even younger than Na’omi’s students.

  “You’re right,” Taggart conceded. “I don’t understand. I’ll never understand.”

  She was finding this man equally hard to understand.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Rip. Richard Taggart.”

  “Do you have a wife, Richard Taggart? Children?”

  He hesitated. “I had a wife.”

  “What happened?”

  His features hardened. It was his turn to close himself off.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  War and Home

  The years since the Twin Towers fell to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and President George W. Bush’s proclamation of the War on Terror had been trying ones for the SpecOps troops—SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers. From 9/11 they had endured multiple back-to-back deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Africa, and other far-flung shitholes of the world. Senior Chief Taggart, Bear Graves, and the other SEALs of Six sometimes complained bitterly about the deteriorating state of the military and about rampant political correctness that made the war against terrorists even more formidable. You killed the cockroaches where and when you caught them, but you dared not be heard referring to them as Radical Islamists. The US government had gone so far as to spend
sixty million dollars to study what ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and all the other splinter groups wanted.

  Ask any SEAL what the terrorists wanted, Taggart groused, and he would tell you. And it wouldn’t cost the government sixty million dollars. Ask the victims of terrorist bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and attacks around the world what terrorists wanted. The answer was simple: they wanted to kill or convert everyone on the planet who wasn’t them.

  Over the course of the years, the war in the shadows continued all this had been especially wearing on the personal lives of members of SEAL Six teams. Marriages had broken up, families were destroyed. Rip Taggart tried not to blame his ex-wife, Gloria, for the end of their marriage. The life he chose in the navy was tough on wives and family. Women talked about it among themselves—how their men were constantly coming and going, how they never knew where their men were, what they were doing, or when and if they would return. There was something schizophrenic about a woman’s life with SEALs.

  Taggart’s life with Gloria had been one up-and-down roller coaster of deployments interspersed with short deferments home when there was never enough time to pull things back together before he was gone again. Looking back, which he did only infrequently now, he could have graphed the course of his tumultuous marriage along a continuum of “here today, gone tomorrow.”

  In the beginning, it had been wild and fun between them, a honeymoon each time he returned from a mission. The team was younger then. He was younger. Gloria couldn’t wait to get her hands on him when the big bird went wheels down at Oceana coming back from an op. She was an attractive brunette, trim, tough, and in good shape. Those clear gray eyes of hers pierced his soul. His teammates joked that what Gloria wanted, Gloria got.

  Then, as now, the Gulfstream Diner was part of the team’s decompression ritual as they dipped their toes back into the waters of civilization. Gloria would race up to the diner in their old two-seated Ford pickup and Rip would run out to meet her. Generally they ended up parked on some secluded beach where they made savage love in the backseat, Gloria emotionally starved and attempting to reconnect with him through sex.

  Taggart lived a double existence and strived to keep his two sides separate and isolated one from the other. What happened on deployment he dared not talk about to a woman. The single time he tried, Gloria looked at him like he might be a monster with horns.

  He had been to Afghanistan on an op where he gunned down a mujahideen inside a qalat, a common multi-family housing complex in a village on the outskirts of Kandahar. Helmeted and geared-up, he pumped a 5.56 round in the guy’s head to finish him off. He’d plant no more IEDs to kill and maim Americans.

  He had killed before, but that was the first time he killed when he actually felt nothing, felt empty. Half the guy’s skull was blown off. Blood and brain matter gushed onto the floor of the man’s own home. He was young, Taggart remembered, hardly old enough to support his black beard. He died with his eyes open and blood running into them. Taggart felt neither compassion nor sorrow. No hate or regret. Just … nothing.

  He tried to discuss it with Gloria, but then, the way she looked at him, he couldn’t. He never tried again.

  Each rendezvous with Gloria on the beach became a physical release without intimacy, pounding her with residual violence from his most recent mission.

  It got worse each time.

  Back in Afghanistan again, he shot a Taliban three times with his M4, brought him to the ground hard and riddled with steel. Alex Caulder and he walked up to the downed enemy. The guy was still moving and making gurgling sounds. Rip shot him again—and again, and again, splattering blood and gore, speckling his own face and Caulder’s with it. He pulled the trigger until the man ceased movement and stopped making noises.

  Caulder looked at Rip for a long moment, not saying anything, but his eyes filled with concern and even horror. Rip’s face was a fierce, blood-splotched mask devoid of human emotion. He glanced up at Caulder, then looked back down at the dead man and shot him again for good measure.

  At the Gulfstream Diner upon their return, Bear Graves and Lena were the last to pull out of the parking lot, leaving Taggart waiting for Gloria to pick him up. She looked harried and withdrawn when she finally showed. What Taggart failed to understand was that what happened to him also happened to her. It rubbed off on her like a contagious disease.

  Out of habit and a sense of duty perhaps, she drove them to their secluded beach. The sun rose slowly out of the Atlantic, painting the beach golden and sparkling off rollers endlessly eating away at the continent. They sat separated on the vehicle seat looking out and saying nothing. She shook her head when he made a move on her, then continued to stare out the windshield at the ocean, her face set.

  Rip produced a flask out of the strained silence. He took a long pull and handed it to her without looking. She took it. They finished off the flask without saying a word to each other, without even looking at each other.

  Those were the early years of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. SEAL teams were in and out of the country on a regular rotating basis. Taggart’s disease of the soul seemed to spread and consume him from the heart outward. Gloria wasn’t the only one who noticed the changes in him.

  On a team op near Kabul, six suspected al-Qaeda members lay sprawled dead in the darkness of an unlighted room. The last one to fall was a woman who suddenly bolted from an upstairs room. Taggart and Graves cut down on her simultaneously.

  Afterward, Taggart stood planted to one side of the carnage while Fishbait photographed the mess for intel purposes. The dead woman wore a black abaya that covered everything except her hands and feet and face. A bulge underneath her clothing indicated the presence of a possible suicide vest. Had she charged out of her room with the notion to trigger it against the American invaders?

  Bear Graves squatted and cautiously ripped the clothing off her body with his combat knife to expose a ratty-looking back brace instead of explosives. The middle-aged woman had had a bad back. Bear continued to stare down at the bloody copse until Rip took his arm and led him away.

  A week later at the Gulfstream Diner, Taggart was again the last man standing as wives arrived to rescue their husbands returned from war. The proprietor had arranged wooden benches and tables outside the café for customers who might feel the urge to dine in the open air or merely to sit and contemplate the ocean’s relentless ebb and flow. Rip Taggart sat bent over at one of the tables with his face in his hands, moving only to lift his head now and again to check the parking lot for Gloria. Diseases of the soul could be as contagious for those who waited as for those who went.

  Rip finally phoned Buddha, who came back and drove him home.

  A few days after this less-than-welcoming homecoming, Rip took over a table outside his cage at Command to spread out his weapons and gear for a thorough cleaning and airing out. Bear Graves came by fresh out of the shower with a towel drawn around his waist.

  “Hey,” he said, and kept walking toward his own cage.

  “Bear,” Rip acknowledged.

  Graves had been unusually quiet and contemplative since the team’s return. He took a few more steps, then halted and turned back to Rip’s table.

  “What’s up?” Rip asked.

  They regarded each other. Bear finally came out with it. “On the last op … that woman …”

  “What about her?”

  “She wasn’t wearing a suicide vest.”

  An edge sharpened Rip’s voice when he replied. “How were we supposed to know that? She ran toward us.”

  He resumed cleaning his gear. His voice lowered, became harder. He seemed to be talking to his weapon as much as to his teammate. Or perhaps he was speaking to himself and the contagion inside.

  “To these people,” he said, “we’re like aliens with four eyes and an exoskeleton. You don’t run like she did toward aliens that drop out of the sky. Okay? Look, someday you’ll have responsibility for your own team. Err on the side of bringin
g them home.”

  He rose from the table and returned to his cage. He paused at the door and turned back. Graves hadn’t moved.

  “Bear? Bear, you just have to … You have to bury it. Bury it all.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  The village lay asleep except for guards, sentries, and night birds chirping at each other in the forest as the hours dragged toward midnight. Unable to sleep in his agonizing position tied to the stake, Rip Taggart hung forward against his tethers, his mind alert even though he foresaw no opportunity for escape. Hope rested in his convincing Na’omi to cooperate with his plan and either untie him herself or permit Esther to do it. So far, he saw no sign of her capitulating. She did not trust him to keep his word and return for them with help, in spite of the fact that in him lay the captives’ only chance.

  He heard McAlwain moaning fitfully in his sleep. He would undoubtedly die within the next day or so unless rescued and treated. The condition of his arm above where his hand had been severed at the wrist appeared to have swollen to twice its normal size, leaving a grotesque and bloated thing, discolored and useless. He cradled it against his chest with his other hand, like holding an infant, while he lapsed in and out of consciousness.

  Rip regarded him and Nick in the light thrown from the ever-present kerosene lantern hung by the front door that allowed guards to check on them periodically. McAlwain no longer had the presence of mind to assist Rip in an escape attempt. As for Nick, Rip had tried several times to get him to come around, but the former PR man refused to listen. Better to take his chances with a ransom eventually being paid than the slimmer chance of trying to break out. Rip thought him a fool and a coward.