The civilian pilot set it gently down on the field, with a delicate touch. The first person out of the helo was Sergeant First Class Scotty Orr. Last I had seen him, his team had taken serious casualties but managed to evade and escape back through enemy lines. I had left him in DC a week ago, working with Master Sergeant Ball to rebuild the teams. I hadn’t heard from either since then, and to see him walking off the bird was a complete surprise.
The next person to hop off was Ryan Szimanski. He had a bandage around his head, and his scalp had been shaved away; an ugly bruise with surgical sutures showed itself as he turned away from me for a second. His leg seemed OK. I stopped walking. Last I knew, he had been a prisoner with Brit. Had he managed to escape? What the hell was he doing here?
Then two civilian paramedics climbed down and muscled off a stretcher, being careful to carry it away from the rotor wash. Wrapped in a clean blanket, a mass of red hair and a pale face showed on the pillow. I caught my breath and started jogging over to the helo.
Nate passed me at a dead run, screaming “MOM!!!!” at the top of his lungs. Despite the paramedic’s trying to stop her, Brit levered herself off the stretcher, threw off the blanket, and limped over to him, catching him in her arms and hugging him fiercely. I joined them a second later, followed by my daughter Jean and holding her hand as she ran.
I buried Brit in a hug that encompassed all four of us, and held onto her for what seemed like an hour. Eventually the Paramedics gave up on trying to get her back into the stretcher, folded it up, loaded up on the helo, and took off again. I ignored the rotor wash, even as the dust got into the tears on my face.
“Nick,” said Ryan, after a while. He stood there with Scott, the two of them not wanting to break into our family joy.
“I don’t know how you got her out, brother, but I owe you my life,” I said, grabbing his hand and crushing it.
“I didn’t do anything,” answered the tough Master Chief, “It was a prisoner exchange. Scarletti set the whole thing up.”
My heart sank at the idea of us giving up high ranking Mountain Republic prisoners in exchange for Brit, even though I was happy to have her back. I turned to Brit and asked as I helped her walk back to the house. One of her feet was heavily bandaged, and she had a bandage around her whole right hand.
“So who did we give up? Must have been some pretty important Mountain Republic officers in exchange for the famous Scouts!” I was trying to be serious, but I was happy to have her next to me again.
Brit looked at Ryan, who looked at Scott. “We didn’t give up any captured officers, Nick. We gave them one of ours that they wanted for war crimes.”
“You gotta be shitting me!” I said, furious.
“Daddy said a bad word, mom!” said my daughter. Brit shushed her.
“Who did that son of a,” I started then stopped myself, and started again. “Who did Scarletti give up in return for you guys? That’s insane.”
Brit squeezed my arm and said, her voice quiet, “He gave himself up, Nick. Walked straight up to me at the exchange point, told me to tell you that you were the best soldier he ever served with, told me everything he ever did to us was for a higher purpose, asked my forgiveness even though he wasn’t sorry, and then walked right over to the MR people.”
“But … but he had cancer, and he …” I couldn’t say anything more. Too much was happening in too short a time. “We’re going to have to go rescue him!” She shook her head no, but said nothing.
We sat down on the porch, and I noted that the infantry squad hadn’t left yet, even though the Blackhawk was gone. Their squad leader was directing one of his teams to conduct a patrol of the surrounding area. I ignored them, leaving that for later.
“Nate, take your sister and start getting lunch together. NOW,” I said when he ignored me. He disappeared into the kitchen with Jean, I’m sure to listen to our conversation at the door.
“So what happened to your hand and your foot?” I asked Brit.
“They tore the nails off. Four fingers, and one of my toes. It was that traitor, Major Strasser. Actually he told his flunky to get information out of me, Harlan. Nothing personal, he said, and then they waterboarded me.”
I added two men to the list of dead. It was just a matter of time. Brit handed me an envelope with my name hastily scrawled across it. I recognized Scarletti’s handwriting, and tore it open, reading the short note aloud.
“Sergeant Major Agostine, I only have a minute. By the time you get this, well, you know. I’m hoping this makes up for the losses you’ve suffered because of what we have both had to do to ensure this country survives. I always turned to you because you, and your teams, are the best, and I know that I could always manipulate you with your love of the idea of America. I make no apologies for that, and I got to my death glad that there are men like you still alive in the world. You know what to do.”
S.
P.S. Your rank of Colonel is now permanent. Welcome to my world.
Well, shit. “How the hell are we going to get him out of that prison?” I asked the guys.
Brit started weeping, silently. The rest of my friends looked away, at the sky, at the ground. I turned to her and asked what was wrong.
“They hung him, Nick. As soon as we flew away. Hung him from a telephone pole with a sign around his neck that said WAR CRIMINAL. I saw it as we lifted off.”
She handed me another note, addressed directly to me. I opened it and read the computer printed sheet out loud to her.
Colonel Agostine;
If you read this, you will have gotten back your wife. I apologize for the torture, but sometimes in war we must shed our civilized veneer and act like a bit of a barbarian to accomplish what we want. Hopefully she recovers quickly and has no permanent damage.
As soldiers and warriors, I feel we are both brothers who are serving our respective countries. If we meet on the battlefield again, I shall accord you all the respect and honor a competent enemy deserves.
Sincerely,
Major John Strasser
2nd SF BN
Armed Forces of The Mountain Republic
“If you see him on the battlefield, Nick, you put a bullet through his head, whatever the circumstances. Respect my ass.”
“Oh, I will,” I answered, looking at her mangled hand. “I will.”
Chapter 246
Sometimes, war is about waiting. Actually, most of the time. Waiting for transport, waiting on guard duty for something to happen, waiting for an enemy to make a mistake you could exploit, waiting for something to happen to relieve the excruciating boredom.
We waited. For weeks. The fighting in Washington had ground down to trench warfare in the ruins, with the MR holding a big chunk of the city, and our forces not having the armored strength, or troop strength, to drive them out. MOUT, or Military Operations in Urban Terrain, uses up a LOT of troops. Stalingrad, a city smaller than DC, had eaten close to a quarter million men alive. It was no place for scouts like us to be, and besides, Brit needed to heal. We worked the trading post and I tried again to get some corn growing.
While we waited, I got in touch with what remained of Army Human Resources Command, now housed at West Point. I knew a sergeant who worked there, and I needed to rebuild my team. Sure as shit, we were going out again. Either now, or later. I was going to kill Strasser, and I wanted good people around me to do it.
“Hey Sergeant MacDuff, it’s Nick Agostine.” The woman on the other end of the line let out a high pitched squeal, and I braced myself.
“YOU NO GOOD SON OF A BITCH. WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
I held the phone a few inches from my ear to protect what was left of my hearing. “I see you’re still mad at me, Molly, I said, when she paused to catch her breath.
“I said, what do you want?” Not good, she WAS still mad at me.
“Come on, Molly, it’s been almost fifteen years, two wars, and two apocalypses. Can’t you cut me a little slack?”
“Nick, you asshole
, you DUMPED me.” Nope, she hadn’t forgotten.
“We were never really dating, it was just a Battalion Dining In. I got staff duty, couldn’t go.”
“Like I don’t know that you set that up with your buddy so HE could take me. I can forgive you backing out on me, but swapping duty to give THAT dipshit a crack at me? Hmphhh.”
Inside I was gleefully celebrating the skin of my teeth escape. Molly was … unstoppable. She looked great, but once she got her hooks in you, she swallowed you like the Death Star swallowing the Millennium Falcon. Thereafter, you surrendered your free will. My buddy had been turned into her first husband and ground down into a shadow of himself.
“Hey, I thought you two would make a great couple. What happened to Alvin, anyway? Is he doing OK?”
“Zombie ate him on the retreat to the Pacific Northwest. Probably tasted like shit,” she laughed. “Now, cut the crap, what do you want?”
“I need to know the status of a Captain Lowenstein. Last assigned to 1st ID down in Washington, got wounded about a month ago. I want her for my team.” I had been very impressed by Lowenstein’s actions during the short fight in DC, and she might want to do something less nerve racking than straight up fighting. If you can call being in the Scouts ‘less nerve racking’.
“Won’t your little redheaded fireball get pissed off? I just talked to her last week.”
AHAH! I had busted one of Brit’s sources. “Well, I’ve learned the lesson about strong willed women. You just have to give in to them, sometimes.”
She barked a laugh and told me the orders would be cut, and to expect her up at the farm sometime next week. Then she hung up on me without saying goodbye.
Lowenstein did, indeed show up a week later, on one of the river boats transiting the canal. She threw her duffle onto the dock and followed it with a jump from the boat. I had made it my custom to meet the boats as they transited, see what they had to trade and catch the news, so I was the first person to greet her.
Her purple hair had grown out a bit, and she was still missing patches of hair. A scar covered her cheek, long and jagged, with stiches still in it, and there was a skin graft over a burn on her jaw. Over that she had tattooed a fierce looking dragon that covered her wounded cheek and wound its way down under her collar. She looked, well, rough and fierce, and as she saluted me, she stood ramrod straight at attention. “Captain Shona Lowenstein, reporting as ordered for assignment to Irregular Scout Team One. Here are seven copies of my orders, Colonel!”
Returning her salute, I told her to relax. “Shona, we’re kind of informal on the teams. Rank doesn’t exactly mean much. I appreciate your coming; you could have turned it down, you know.”
“Colonel, I owe you my life. In the camps, you learned that a life debt can’t be repaid.” She still stood at attention, holding a sheaf of papers in her hand. Kept her gun hand free, though.4
“Noted. You fought well in DC, and I thought you might like a change of pace.”
“Sir, are you saying that I couldn’t handle it?” She relaxed enough to glare at me.
“No, Captain. What I meant was that everyone gets tired of combat after a while, and something different can be a life saver. I’ve seen way too many people burn out.” I held up my hand as she started to speak. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not doing you any favors. We have over one hundred percent casualties on the teams. We run six to eight people on each team, and I’ve buried more than that. I wouldn’t ask you if you weren’t good.”
I waited for her to relax, but she still looked troubled. “Look”, I said, “I need good people, for something that I expect to come up soon. What we do is just as important as slugging it out on the front lines. How do you feel about the undead?”
“I fucking hate them,” was her blunt answer. Typical attitude of refugee camp kids.
“Well, you’re going to have to get past that. They just do what they do; it’s nothing personal. The Mountain Republic people, them you can hate. Come on, come up to the house and meet everyone.”
I turned and crutched away, but not before noticing her look at my missing leg. “Gotta give it a rest every now and then, or the stump can get raw.” She looked a bit dubious, but shouldered her duffle and followed me up to the house.
“Nate!” I yelled. “Open the gate!” It took a minute, but the ten foot high steel doors swung open, counter balanced so even my six year old son could operate them. They were affixed to a ten foot high wall that ran around the entire compound. Spoiled the view from the kitchen, but kept the riffraff out.
Next came the moment I had dreaded. Even with her scar and patchy hair, Captain Lowenstein was a looker, as my dad used to say. Without the dirt and grime of combat, she had olive skin and dark hair, high cheekbones and bright green eyes. Really NOT someone a guy should bring home to his red headed soul snatching wife.
“Wow, Dad, she’s hot!” said Nate, and Brit smacked him in the back of the head. Then Lowenstein did something which I was entirely grateful and won her over to Brit before my wife had a chance to form any judgements.
Lowenstein knelt down and said to Nate, “Kid, if you judge a woman by her looks and not by her strength and how she fights, you’re going to have a very sorry and lonely life.”
Brit smiled and said, “I like her, Nick. Can we keep her?”
Visions of threesomes on long winter nights danced in my head, and I quickly shoved them far down in the back of my brain. I AM a man, after all.
Chapter 247
Team building takes a lot of work, and you can’t just throw together a bunch of individuals and expect them to function smoothly. I knew we were going out again, just not where or when, so I started back to basics training, and grabbed a few more people to go with us.
When you build a team, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. The more personnel, the bigger footprint you leave. Thing is, though, you have to have enough persons to adequately distribute gear, cover watches, and most importantly, provide enough firepower to get you out of a jam. Six seemed to be the best number I had worked out over the years, easily splitable into two or three man teams, enough people to be able to carry one or two casualties, but small enough that we could move through any environment.
I sat on the porch and thought about each person we would take. Me, Brit of course. Nothing would stop her from going. Captain Lowenstein, or Shona, as I was trying to think of her. She would make a good all-around fighter, and if necessary, could command the team if something happened to us. Ziv, of course, though I was a bit worried how his attitude towards women would work with Shona. He did respect a woman who could fight, and she was all that. That left two.
Red would go if I asked him, but ever since he had been wounded two years ago, catching shrapnel in his foot, his movement had been a little slower. Post Apocalypse, medical rehab facilities were a bit limited, and he had had a bit of a rough time of it on our short scout last summer. Plus, we needed someone back here to keep an eye on things. I mentally scratched his name off the list, though I would take him if he really wanted to go. Red was a good man in a fight, and after working together for almost seven years, we knew each other’s move without question.
That left two slots open. I could bring Scott Orr as a medic; the former paratrooper had worked well with us, and his team had been hit hard by the ambush in DC. In fact, he was the only one still combat capable, and I knew his guilt was eating him up inside. Either him or Scott Ball, but he was busy rebuilding the teams in Maryland.
That left one, and I knew that had to go to Ryan Szimanski. Ryan was a water rat, a civilian who had been part of the scouts since very soon after I formed them; he and his brother had fought all up and down the eastern seaboard until Will was killed in the Second Plague. Team Five, The Warthogs, had been wiped out assaulting the false President’s compound, and again Ryan had lost his whole team in DC. I really thought hard about it, because I knew that soldiers are superstitious people, and I didn’t want anyone to have a feeli
ng of him being a Jonah, someone who got other skilled and brought bad luck. I didn’t believe it, but morale is a trick thing.
I was lost in my musings when one of the soldiers from the infantry platoon, which was still camped outside the farm, came walking up. He was a medium sized, dark skinned Middle Eastern man, in his mid-twenties, wearing sergeant’s stripes on his body armor. He came up to me, M-14 slung over his back, and saluted. There was something vaguely familiar to him, but I put it off to the soldiers having been outside the farm for a month now. I returned the salute, and he did something curious.
Slinging the rifle around to his front, he squatted down on his legs, a distinctly Afghani custom that I had seen many times, and proceeded to study me for a minute. My feeling of familiarity grew even stronger, and I glanced at his name tape. It said in block letters above his rank, “YASIR”. I read it and was struck dumb.
“I know you,” I said.
“Strange are the ways of Allah, that he should bring me to your doorstep, and my father’s grave, Nicholas Agostine.”
I suddenly felt very naked, him sitting there with his rifle vaguely pointed at me, and my pistol securely holstered. The last time I had seen this man was almost fifteen years ago, on a hillside village high in the Afghan mountains. He had been a boy then, and he had hurled rocks at me as my men had hauled his father, Ahmed Yasir, back to our FOB for interrogation.
Behind me, through the screen door, Brit said, “Your father would have been proud to see the man you have grown into, Elam.”
At that, his eyebrows rose. “You know who I am, Ms. O’Neil?”
She laughed. “Of course I do. Your father spoke of you often, and told me how he wished to return home. Impossible, of course, with things the way they were.”
He bowed his head, and then said, “I came to America with the evacuation flights of the military from Kandahar. I was twenty by then, and fought my way onto the plane, posing as an Afghan Army soldier in a captured uniform. No one questioned me in the madness, and when we landed in Seattle, I volunteered for the American Army. I am a citizen now. As you know, my father never let anyone know about his presence on your team lest he wind up in jail again, so I had no idea he had survived.”
Zombie Killers (Book 7): HEAT Page 5