We loaded onto two big helicopters under the cover of darkness, geared up and ready for battle. Loki even had on his dog body armor. He didn’t act goofy or roll over for belly rubs or nuzzle my pocket for the toy. It seemed like he knew something important was happening.
Apache gunships armed with hellfire missiles and explosive-tipped bullets buzzed back and forth over our heads, ready to escort us to our landing zone.
Lieutenant Schu had briefed us first thing in the morning.
“Echo Company will be spread along this ridge.” He showed us a big map, drawing a line across the mountains with his fingers. “As Alpha Company flushes the enemy out of the village in the valley, they are going to head for the border behind us. We’re going to stop them from getting across. Dog team!”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“First off, glad to have you guys back. We’ve missed our Loki all week.”
“Glad to be back, Lieutenant,” I said. Loki wagged his tail.
“There’s a compound here.” He jabbed his finger at the map, pointing at a spot near the ridge line. “Intel suggests that a bomb-maker might be operating a safe house out of that place. I’m going to want you and first platoon to clear that compound as soon as we land. If they run — and they will run, they always run — second and third platoon will be here and here” — He showed us on the map — “to mop them up. Then we’ll wait quietly inside to see who comes knocking.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
And just like that, Loki and I had our orders. I wondered if the bomb-maker we were after had planted the IED that killed Chang. Part of me hoped so. I’d love to be the guy that caught him.
On board the helicopter, I leaned my head against the metal frame and closed my eyes, imagining Loki and me standing in the bomb-maker’s compound. It looked like a medieval fortress in my imagination, something from one of my brother’s books. There were orcs and ghouls and trolls swarming around us and Loki and I fought bravely through them, sword and tooth, to the dragon’s lair. Instead of gold, this dragon guarded bombs and it opened its mouth to blow us away. But my sword pierced its throat, and the dragon fell. The orcs and ghouls and trolls stopped fighting and cheered. They had been enslaved to the dragon, and now they were free. Loki and I had saved them.
I snapped my eyes open. It’s crazy where your mind goes when you’re tired. I looked over at Douglass and saw graffiti scrawled along the metal hull just beside him. Never trust an aircraft under thirty, it read. I smiled. This was the same helicopter that had brought me to the outpost on my first night.
I felt us suddenly losing altitude at a sharp angle. My stomach lurched into my throat. It was like the big drop on a roller coaster. Everyone started checking their weapons and securing their rucksacks, getting ready to dismount the second we landed. I scratched Loki behind the ears.
“You ready, pal?” I whispered.
The wheels hit the ground and the doors opened. Marines jumped out and scrambled away from the chopper, kneeling and lying down, their guns pointing out to secure the landing zone. Loki and I leaped down, and I raised my gun up, just like I’d been trained. Loki, still on his leash attached to my belt, stood alert at my side, his ears perked, one front leg lifted slightly off the ground. Hunting position. He was ready. The chopper vanished into the darkness.
My team moved out, over the top of the ridge and down toward the compound. We stayed off the trail, which we were sure would be rigged with hidden explosives, and picked our way slowly along the rocky terrain.
The compound was carved into the mountainside, about three hundred yards below us. A dry riverbed snaked along the valley floor beneath it, and high mountains rose on the other side, dwarfing the compound, which was really just a small cluster of buildings with baked mud walls. It didn’t look anything like a medieval fortress. It was a peasant’s compound with a flimsy wooden gate locked with a rusty padlock, not a dragon’s lair. But in this war, the dragons looked like everyone else.
I took up the point position, with Douglass by my side, guarding. I let Loki off his leash to sniff our way down, in case there were explosives hidden along the approach. He walked about twenty yards ahead and I kept my eyes fixed, watching him for any change of behavior, any clue that we were in trouble. I felt a lump in my throat, worried that his armor wasn’t thick enough, worried that it was too heavy and he’d set off a pressure activated bomb that he could have just walked over fine without the armor on. Every action and its opposite put Loki in danger. I wanted to call him back by my side, to keep him safe.
But that wasn’t his job. I needed to clear my head, stop thinking about secret dragons and hidden dangers, and just let him work. I had to trust my partner.
We reached the compound wall and assembled in front of it. Douglass pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. He muttered a small prayer to himself, then pointed the gun at the lock on the gate. A smirk spread across his face. He looked over at me.
“For Chang,” he said. I nodded, and he pulled the trigger.
The lock on the gate disintegrated with the blast. Douglass kicked the door open, and threw a flashbang, which is a grenade that doesn’t kill anyone, just makes a huge noise and a bright flash of light. It confuses and disorients people. I imagined that waking up to a platoon of marines bursting into your house would already be confusing and disorienting enough, but we didn’t take any chances. The marines streamed inside.
I moved in at the back of the line to start the sweep, but as soon as we’d all crossed into the compound, the shooting erupted. I tackled Loki back out the door again as bullets tore up the mud wall around us.
“Shooter upstairs!” Douglass shouted, and the entire platoon unleashed a hail of bullets into an upper room.
“Contact,” Sergeant Gaffley said into his radio, describing our situation to the lieutenant back on the ridge and to headquarters at Camp Leatherneck. He had to shout over the crack of gunfire. A cloud of smoke and dust swirled around us.
“Hold your fire!” the sergeant yelled. The order echoed down the line as marines passed it along. The compound grew quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a stray dog barked. The air smelled heavy with metal and smoke and left an acid taste on my tongue. I could only imagine how unpleasant it smelled to Loki.
After a moment, through the heavy quiet, we heard a wailing. A woman’s voice, crying out, screaming. Vasquez started up the rickety wooden stairs to check it out, but Sergeant Gaffley stopped him.
“Dempsey!” he called. “You and Loki check that out. Could be a booby trap. Douglass, cover them.”
Douglass snapped back the bolt on his big M240. The sound alone was probably enough to give any bad guys second thoughts about lifting their heads.
I leaned down and pressed my face into the fur between Loki’s ears. “Here we go, pal,” I whispered. “Time to protect our friends.” I ruffled his fur, unclipped his leash, and sent him up the stairs ahead of us. He sniffed around eagerly, scanning for any smells that would mean a reward. He sniffed at every step and every crack in the wall. I held my position, keeping my eyes fixed on his back, terrified that the dark doorway above would light up with gunfire.
He approached the doorway, sniffed around the edge, and then looked back at me, his face a question mark.
Vasquez tensed beside me. “Does that mean he found something?”
“No,” I told him. “He’s just wondering if he can look inside.” I gave Loki the hand signal to go in. He vanished into the doorway, and I held my breath. Seconds later, the woman started screaming again, and Loki was barking.
I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. My foot crashed through a rotten one and I almost fell over the side, but I caught the railing, and I made it to the top. I didn’t hesitate to rush through the doorway. I didn’t even consider that the enemy could be waiting on the other side, ready to shoot the first marine who came through. My partner needed me.
“Loki, heel!” I shouted as I entered the room.
There was no e
nemy fighter, but we weren’t alone in the room.
A woman in a full veil that covered her from head to foot was sitting on the floor, swatting at Loki with a stick to keep him away. He growled and barked at her threats but kept his distance. In her other arm, cradled across her lap, she held the limp body of a girl whose clothes were stained with red. I saw the stains blossoming in front of me. Blood. The woman wailed again, a cry like I’d never heard before.
Vasquez came into the room behind me. The moment he saw the woman and the little girl, he lowered his weapon and rushed to her.
“Let me help you,” he said, his voice as soothing as he could make it.
He knelt down in front of the woman and started checking the girl for signs of life. He looked back at me and shook his head. As he did, I noticed around his knees that there were spent shell casings.
Someone had been firing on us from this room. A room with a child in it.
In military elf, damage to property and injury to innocent persons in the course of battle is called collateral damage. Every side of a war makes decisions about what kinds of collateral damage they can live with — or what they’re willing to risk in order to win. Whoever had been shooting at us from this room had made a decision with major consequences for this woman and this girl, and we were looking at the results.
Or maybe the woman and child had chosen to be here for the same reasons I had. You stick by the people you love, even when it’s dangerous.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep my focus on the job, and commanded Loki to search, doing my best to ignore the woman’s cries as Vasquez tried to calm her. Marines streamed into the room.
“We’ve got civilian casualties,” the sergeant called into the radio. The woman was yelling now, but the translator was with one of the other platoons. We had no idea what she was saying. I could imagine some things I’d be saying if I were her.
I chased those thoughts from my mind and focused again on Loki. He sniffed at the walls and the bed and the floorboards. He stopped at a rug and sniffed some more. He paced over it. He stopped and sat down.
“We’ve got something!” I yelled. The room tensed. The woman’s head snapped to the side to look right at my dog through her veil, and then she really started yelling. She threw her stick at him, and it hit Loki right in the side. With his armor on, he hardly noticed; he thought she was playing. His tail wagged.
I knew she wasn’t playing, and so did the rest of my platoon.
“Hey!” Vasquez yelled at her and stood, pointing his gun in her face. All his kindness wiped away. “Calm down, now!” he yelled.
“She could have a trigger!” someone else yelled.
Everybody froze. Who knew if she was wearing a bomb under her veil? It wasn’t unheard of for terrorists to strap explosives to women and children, to turn their bodies into weapons. We were up against an enemy that had used a room with a woman and a child in it for cover, knowing we would fire back. Who knew what else they would do? We all waited, holding our breath, our fingers on our triggers.
Zach popped into my head. After all this war, I still hadn’t seen a dragon to fight. Just kitchen timers, exploding mounds of dirt, and frightened, angry people.
“It’s okay,” I told Vasquez. “Loki didn’t smell anything on her. He smelled right here!”
Vasquez lowered his gun. The woman went back to shouting. Douglass came over and together we inspected the carpet for trip wires. Once we saw it was clear, we rolled it back. There was a trapdoor beneath it. I raised my gun into firing position, and Douglass raised his. Sergeant Gaffley lifted the wood up, and we saw a drop-off beneath the floor, with daylight streaming through.
“Must lead outside,” Douglass said.
I was about to say I agreed with him when Loki barked once and bolted past me, diving into the trapdoor and running toward the daylight.
“Loki, come!” I yelled after him, but he ignored me. He’d caught a scent and he was after it. I cursed under my breath at his stubbornness and jumped in after my partner.
“Dempsey!” Sergeant Gaffley shouted. “Get your butt back here!”
But by then, I was already gone.
I squeezed through a narrow hole in the rear wall and popped up outside the compound. Loki was running full speed down the slope of the hill toward the dry riverbed, and I ran after him.
I saw two AK-47s, the terrorists’ favorite machine gun, lying in the dirt. The men who’d fired on us in the compound must have ditched their weapons when they’d fled so that they could try to blend in with the civilian population. If we hadn’t found their trapdoor, they would have come back for their guns after we’d gone.
I noticed a blood trail on the rocks. Loki seemed to be chasing it. He was already a hundred yards ahead of me, moving like lightning even in his heavy body armor. I sprinted to keep up.
I looked past him and saw two figures running ahead. I could tell one was injured, but they were both moving fast up the far slope of the hill toward the caves, where they probably thought they could hide.
Or maybe they had reinforcements waiting. I couldn’t think too hard about it. I ran so fast, so focused on my dog, that I didn’t notice at first that Douglass and Vasquez and the others had stayed behind.
Of course they had. The sun had risen above the mountains, so I was totally visible in the valley. If a team from the compound had followed me, it would be a sure way to reveal our position to the enemy and ruin Operation Hunting Dog before it had even started.
I was on my own. But I wasn’t completely alone.
A pack of three stray dogs had picked up our scent and were approaching from the side of the dry riverbed, their eyes fixed on Loki. He noticed them too and stopped running to turn in their direction, the hair on his back rising. The enemy fighters moved farther up the opposite slope.
The stray dogs kept coming toward Loki. I needed to get to him first. I kicked at the dirt and skittered down the hill. I bolted across the dry riverbed, leaping over rocks and piles of garbage, tangled plastic bags, and mounds of dirt.
Loki was in trouble. The three mangy dogs, wiry and scarred, tried to flank him, their hackles up, their heads lowered. I knew the behavior from hours spent hunting with Baxter and TJ back at home. They were about to pounce. Loki mirrored them. He was a marine — he was not about to back down.
I was sure that Loki could handle himself in a dogfight, but he was outnumbered and these dogs might carry all kinds of diseases. At the same time, the bad guys were getting away. I had to intervene. When I reached Loki, I charged in front of him, putting my body between him and the strays, and I leveled my rifle at them.
“Back off,” I commanded, hoping that the tone of my voice would scare them into submission.
It didn’t.
They kept pacing before us. I kept my gun at the ready.
As much as I hated the idea of killing dogs, if they attacked, I would shoot them. I had no choice. My finger rested on the trigger and I started backing away, urging Loki to back up behind me.
The first dog barked. I glanced up the hill toward the guys running away. One of them looked back at me. I was glad they’d dropped their rifles because right now they had a clear shot at me and at Loki, both. And we were totally distracted. If there were any other guys in the hills who hadn’t dropped their weapons, we’d be easy targets.
“We can’t stay here, Loki,” I whispered to him. “I’m sorry.”
It seemed unfair, what I was about to do, and I really wished Loki didn’t have to see it. I took aim at the first dog, hoping I got a clean shot, hoping he wouldn’t suffer. I wondered if the first shot would scare off the other two or if I would have to put them all down. Thoughts of Baxter and TJ at home ran through my head. I took another step back. Loki barked. The three strays barked back, and just then, a loud explosion jolted us all.
My head snapped in the direction of the explosion, up on the hills. I saw one of the bad guys scrambling away from a cloud of smoke and dust. The oth
er one lay a few feet below him, totally still. They had stepped on one of their own bombs, I figured. The strays ran off, back in the direction they’d come, frightened by the blast. I kept my gun pointed their way as they ran, in case they got the idea to turn back. Relief trickled down my back like a hot shower. I hadn’t come here to hurt dogs. I’d gotten very lucky.
I turned to Loki and glanced back across the valley to the compound we’d raided. I looked in the other direction toward the hill where the terrorist was fleeing. If I turned back with Loki now, we’d be safer, but the terrorist would get away and he’d keep trying to kill us. If I caught him, he could help us find where he’d hidden explosives. He could help us learn how he got his supplies. He could lead us to other terrorists. If I caught him, I could find out if he’d planted the bomb that killed Chang.
Loki looked up at me, his big brown eyes wide, his face eager for instruction. He would follow me anywhere. The choice was mine.
I tapped my pocket where his toy was tucked. His tail wagged. I pointed up toward the hill, toward the man running from us. “Get him, go!” I commanded, and Loki was off like a bullet.
I ran after him, holding my gun at the ready.
At the top of a ridge, Loki paced back and forth, sniffing around the mouth of a small cavern. I came up to him, panting, winded from my run up the hill. When he saw me, he stood perfectly still, his nose pointed at the dark hole in the rocks.
“Good boy,” I whispered, crouching beside the opening to the cave. I really didn’t want to go charging into the dark. I pulled Loki beside me and I called down into the gaping black maw of the rock, my M16 raised into firing position just in case.
“Come out!” I ordered. “Come out with your hands above your head!”
No response came. I didn’t really think it would. The man inside probably didn’t even understand me. I looked down at Loki and held my finger in front of his face.
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