by Don Mann
“This way!” CT shouted in his ear.
Dayna, on her knees praying, waited for the moment the sword met her neck and hoped that the blade was sharp and she wouldn’t feel much pain. Every part of her was shaking, flying apart.
The terror she felt…unimaginable.
What are they waiting for? Please, God…
A moment of silence and her heart skipped a beat, followed by a dull thud and the popping of what sounded like firecrackers.
The men beside her shuffled their feet as though they were dancing. A strange current of fear passed through them and entered her skin.
CT went first, crossing the slick floor and firing, bursting through a door into a back room and peeling right. Crocker bolted in behind him, going to his knees, sliding and taking cover behind a column. It was a banquet-sized room with a high ceiling, filled with rows of desks, laptops, boxes of papers, bicycles, and other miscellaneous junk. A group of armed men fired at them from behind desks at the far end.
“This isn’t it,” Akil said, his eyes blazing with intensity.
“What do you mean?”
Rounds zinged past Crocker’s head, and glanced off the column in front of him.
“She’s not here!”
“Séverine said she’s on the ground floor.”
“This is the ground floor!”
A grenade slid toward them. Crocker pointed right. He, Akil, and CT dove toward a low marble wall and fired. Jumped behind it as the grenade exploded and the whole room shook.
Motherfucker!
As soon as shrapnel stopped falling, they came up together and obliterated the men at the end of the room.
A breathless Mancini joined them as Crocker turned to Akil. “We’re in the Governant Building, right?”
“This is it!”
“Then she’s supposed to be here.”
Dez, at his shoulder, shouted, “Duck!”
Rounds flew at them from a doorway to their right. Crocker slammed a fresh mag into his MP7A1. He and the men responded with suppressed fire of their own.
“Where does that lead?” Crocker asked. Before Akil had a chance to answer, Crocker answered his own question. “Maybe there’s a downstairs. Let’s go!”
Sheikh al-Sufi had experienced profound unease throughout the proceeding. Something didn’t feel right. Were they inviting God’s displeasure by executing an innocent woman?
He wanted to stop the proceeding, but didn’t know how without inviting scorn. When he heard the firing above, he felt relieved of a terrible burden, which seemed wrong, too. The danger didn’t alarm him at first. He stood in his own calm bubble as some men hurried to retrieve their weapons from the table by the door and others took cover.
“Sheikh! Sheikh!”
Someone was holding his arm. Men were shouting back and forth. He stared at the girl kneeling in the center of the room and wondered if he should take her away or signal the man standing by her side to cut off her head.
Crocker pushed through the twin metal doors, and confronted a scene of utter mayhem. Struggled to make sense of it at first. Men in long black robes hurried toward him. Some were armed, some weren’t. Some were running, others hiding behind benches.
He understood enough to go to the ground and open fire. Men fell; ones behind them shifted and turned like a herd of stampeding cattle and ran toward another exit. Breathless, he caught glimpses of what was going on in the rest of the room—photographer’s lights on tripods, a makeshift grandstand along the opposite wall with black-clad men hiding behind it, a man running with a video camera clutched under his arm.
No girl. No Dayna Hood.
Someone screamed. Akil leaned into him and thrust his left arm forward.
“There! She’s there!”
“Where?”
He followed Akil’s finger to the center of the room, as a wild spray of automatic weapon rounds slammed into the wall and doors behind them. Still couldn’t see the girl.
In the split second between picking out targets with his MP7A1, Crocker spotted two militants standing over an orange-clad figure kneeling in the middle of the room. One of them was holding a sword.
In the midst of the chaos, he had no time to calculate the risk of firing and missing. The person in the orange jumpsuit lifted its head. Seeing that it was a woman with a pleading look in her eyes, he unleashed a salvo at the man with the sword. The man’s chest released a spray of blood, and a split second later something huge slammed into the ceiling and exploded.
Fucking hell!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
—John Lennon
Séverine stood in an alley behind the Governant Building when the first Hellfire exploded. She expected to be filled with terror, but felt an almost overwhelming happiness instead.
Something had been accomplished. She turned to thank Mohammad, but the look of terror on his face as he looked up stopped her. She raised her eyes, too, and saw part of the roof falling toward them, and past tiles and chunks of mortar, the pitch-black sky.
Freedom…she said to herself as something hard slammed between her head and shoulder and everything went dark.
Crocker couldn’t remember covering his head, or going to the floor, but did experience the impact of three more rockets hitting the building and exploding. Then something hard hit his back and he passed out.
He dreamt he was swimming underwater. Through very murky water saw the silhouettes of two big sharks emerging from a cave. As they started toward him he heard the muffled sounds of men screaming behind him.
They grew closer.
“Boss? Boss?”
He coughed, spitting out a tooth and pieces of plaster. Tasted blood.
Akil knelt beside him. His head and beard had turned white. Three rivulets of blood ran from a cut above his eyes.
“You’re bleeding,” Crocker said.
“Like I give a fuck,” Akil shouted back. Sporadic gunfire in the background; men crying out in pain.
“You’re shouting, man. Your ears are shot.”
“What?”
“What happened? Where are my NVGs?”
“Forget your NVGs. We gotta get out of here and find the girl.”
“The girl?”
Suddenly, it came back to him, and when he tried to stand up, his left knee protested. So did his forehead and back. Still he managed to get to his feet with Akil’s help, recover his weapon, and brush off the debris, all the time trying to peer through the thick dust.
His field of focus extended barely three feet.
“Where is she? What the fuck happened?”
“Air strikes. We gotta get out of here before they hit this place again.”
“Recover the girl first!”
Dayna experienced the flames, heat, chaos, and shouting and thought for a moment that she had entered purgatory. Someone was pulling her by the arm, and she looked up into the face of the man with the silver-tipped beard.
He wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hands. Looked at her as though he wanted to apologize.
For what? What happened?
Then another big object slammed into the roof and exploded, throwing her off her feet and face forward to the floor.
Crocker and Akil were on their hands and knees, injured men around them groaning, Crocker wondering what had happened to the rest of the guys on their team. Six feet ahead he stumbled into a tangle of bodies under a pile of debris. Some were moving.
As he started to dig, his hearing sharpened and he heard moaning to his left—that sounded like a cat.
He crawled toward it, running into a militant with half a face. Pushed him away, and coughing from an intake of dust, saw a flash of orange.
Heard another low moan. Sounded like a woman. Something like, “No…don’t…”
Sheikh al-Sufi saw a large golden gate ahead through the mist and imagined he was arriving at the garden of paradise. As he
approached, two men in white robes appeared and started to wave him back.
“Go away!” one of them shouted.
“No, you’re making a mistake. My wives and sons are in there…”
He blinked and someone was clearing rubble from the collapsed ceiling off his chest, and helping him up.
“No.…”
His mouth filled with dust, and his nostrils were raw from the foul smell of something burning. He tried to get his bearings as Yasir Selah watched him with a stunned look in his eyes.
“Yasir.…”
Yasir didn’t respond. Chaos and smoke wanted to overwhelm him. The girl in the orange jumpsuit lay to his right with her back toward him. A foreign soldier crouched beside her. Seeing the infidel, he reached under his robe for his knife.
“Dayna?” Crocker whispered. “Dayna, can you hear me?”
He started to lift her up when something cut into his right forearm. The pain was so sudden and so sharp that he let go of the MP7A1, and rolled left.
Next thing he knew, he was grappling with at least two men, using the palm thrusts he had learned in CQD. Left, right, left, right, acutely aware of every movement from the enemy, anticipating the next punch.
As he reached into his vest for his SOG knife, a big man bit into his shoulder.
“You fuck!”
Grabbed the man by the beard, pulled him off, and met the man’s eyes for a moment through the milling smoke. Middle-aged, intense, a silver-tipped beard, a gold star sewn into the black tunic.
“Savage motherfucker!”
Sheikh al-Sufi thought he was staring at Ibah. Her angry eyes burned into his, and the fierceness in them started to overwhelm him. Raising the knife, he shouted, “Ebelizuh!” (“Devil!”). But before he could drive the blade into her, she butted her head into his chin and he saw stars. Next thing he knew she was on top of him and suffocating him with her weight, pulling his soul out of his body. He tried to fight back, but couldn’t find the strength.…
Crocker saw the dread and confusion in the militant’s eyes. Drove the butt of his left hand under the bridge of the nose of the man with the silver-tipped beard. Heard blood gurgle in the bastard’s throat. Grabbed the knife away and finished him off with a slash across the throat.
Took a quick breath, when a younger man wearing a black prayer cap screamed, “Allahu akbar!” and slammed into him, stunning him for a second and causing him to spin face-down to the rubble.
Dirt in his mouth, smoke filling his lungs, all the time the militant kicking and shouting like an injured dog. Words Crocker couldn’t understand, maybe to Allah, maybe to his brothers. Retrieved the SIG Sauer from his combat belt and put three quick rounds in the militant’s head.
On the verge of losing consciousness again, he still couldn’t see for shit.
“Akil?”
Someone nearby whispered, “Help,” or so he thought. Reaching toward the voice, he felt something delicate. An arm. Pulled the woman closer, wiped the grit from his eyes, and saw her face. She was having trouble breathing, so he cleared her mouth and windpipe with his fingers, then slung her over his shoulder, struggled to his feet, and staggered toward the stairway.
“Hold on.”
Dayna imagined she was little and her father was carrying her on his shoulder. When she looked at the back of the man’s head, he wasn’t bald like her dad.
“Who are you?” she whispered, smoke burning her eyes. “Where are you taking me?”
The man moved like an animal, powerful shoulders and back. She heard another man’s voice call in front of them. “This way, boss. This way.…” Then passed out.
One step at a time, around debris, bodies, and twisted metal, somehow they found their way outside. Crocker crouched behind a pile of broken concrete near the side door. Took a deep breath to clear his lungs with Dayna in his lap. Felt for her pulse. Akil beside him slammed another mag into his automatic weapon.
“She okay?” he asked.
“Alive, but semiconscious. Probably the result of smoke inhalation. Where’s Mancini?”
“I got no comms. Don’t know.”
“Where’re the others?”
“Boss, we gotta get the fuck outta here!”
“Which way?”
“Follow me!”
He summoned all the energy he had left to stay upright and keep moving forward, stumbling, catching himself, only semi-aware of chaos around them—people running and shouting, flames shooting out of windows, bullets ricocheting off the street.
Akil stopped and was arguing with a thin man with a beard.
“Why are you stopping? Who is this guy? What’s going on?”
“Name is Mohammad. Wants us to go back and dig out some woman.”
“No time. We’ve got the woman we came for!”
“He says she’s a Western woman. French.”
Crocker’s blood froze. “Séverine…shit!”
“Who’s that?”
“Wait here. Hold the Hood girl. I’m going back.”
Akil stood in his way holding his hands out to block him. “No, boss. Nix that. We can’t now!”
“Out of my fucking way!” Crocker still held Dayna over his shoulder. He was trying to hand her to Akil and push him out of the way at the same time.
“Sorry, boss. No can do!”
Crocker couldn’t remember what happened next. His next moment of consciousness was when he became aware of hot tears streaming down his cheeks. He was sobbing and walking with a half-conscious Dayna across his shoulder.
Couldn’t figure out why he was so emotional, when he realized and stopped.
“Wait!”
The girl moaned. “Austin…Austin, is that you?”
He saw blood on his left forearm and thought it was hers at first.
“Wait for me, Austin…I’m coming…”
“Boss!” Akil tugged him by the shoulder.
“We forgot someone.” He couldn’t remember who.
Akil said, “Boss, keep moving, fast as you can. You need help?”
He saw the river ahead, and reached down deep through the pain, weakness, and exhaustion. Pushed forward blindly, intermittently aware of hands and voices guiding him.
“Where’re the other men?”
He saw blood dripping from a slash across his forearm to the legs of his pants and stopped. He set Dayna down gently in the grass, and started to reach for his medical kit. Couldn’t find it.
“Boss, what do you need? I’ll take care of that.…”
He looked up at CT, who had a bandage wrapped around his head.
“You get hit?”
“Nicked, man. I’m cool. You?”
“Where the fuck’s everyone?”
He heard a gurgle of water, and realized they were sitting behind high scrubs on the south side of the river, near where they had hidden their bikes.
“Boss—”
Another explosion hit the city and lit up the sky. It was far enough away this time that he didn’t even blink.
Felt a stab of anguish as he remembered Séverine.
It’s a fucking shame…
“Boss, we got Mancini and Dez. Manny’s fucked up. You got a radio that works?”
“Negative.”
“It’s okay.…Dez says he’s got one.”
“What’s wrong with Manny?”
He was trying to think of what he needed to do, who he needed to call, what he needed to say to his men, but his brain wouldn’t work.
CT said, “Boss, Dez’s got water. You need some?”
He nodded. The liquid cleared his mouth and throat, and revived him for a minute. He fed some sips to Dayna. She opened her eyes enough to squint up at him and closed them again.
“Hey, boss. Sorry about your friend,” CT said.
He turned to him, but wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first.
“Yeah?”
“The woman.…The French one.”
Then he remembered, winced hard, and covered his eyes.
The wind dried the tears and turned the dust and wetness into a crust that Crocker now brushed away from his eyes. He sat near the open door of the helicopter, watching moonlight reflect off the river, and turning it into a long silver snake.
Commander Kassim sat beside him talking excitedly into a radio, a silver Rolex on his wrist. All he cared about was that Dayna Hood was alive. Somehow they had managed to rescue her. Somehow.
But the price they had paid was steep. Rollins was dead, his body wrapped in a Kevlar blanket. Doyle was clinging to life after receiving multiple bullet wounds and fractures. And Mancini suffered from a broken clavicle, an AK round to his shoulder, a concussion, and cracked ribs.
He was almost positive they had left Séverine behind in Raqqa, presumably buried under rubble. Sweet, special, wonderful woman. He felt awful about that.
All he wanted now was to go home and rest, see his daughter, and heal his body. After that he’d try to get his head together, weigh the good against the bad, figure out the whys and what-fors, and face whatever disciplinary action HQ wanted to hit him with.
It was too soon to worry about that now. His mind was too clouded with pain and exhaustion.
Crocker had spent three days recuperating at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Ramstein, Germany, from the cut to his forearm, and other assorted injuries and bruises. Yesterday afternoon, he and Akil had bid goodbye to Mancini, who faced another surgery to repair his shoulder, and boarded a military jet back to the U.S. Last night was the first time in a long time Crocker had slept in his own bed, which felt like paradise.
Now he woke to the sounds of birds chirping outside his window and warm, sweet smells from the kitchen. A glass of orange juice waited on the night stand.
They felt like the first moments of a new life, a fresh start. As he sat up, the aches and pains returned and reminded him of the recent past.
He had an urge to free himself from all of it. To escape on his motorcycle and leave his old life and SEAL teams behind.