The captain reached into his trouser pocket. “Step aside, Lieutenant,” he sneered, “or you will find yourself also tied to the tree.”
The captain pulled out a small box of matches, then heard a faint cry of despair. Turning, he saw a wide-eyed girl. He smiled at her happily, cocking his head to the side. “Your father?” he mouthed to her.
Azadeh stared wide in fear, then nodded her head.
The captain extracted a match from the box and struck it against the metal sheath strapped to his thigh. The wooden match sizzled to life, and he let it burn a moment, staring at the flame, then looked at the girl and dropped the match at her father’s feet.
The fuel was slow to catch, for it had mixed with the water and soaked into the mud. Several seconds passed with no indication of fire. Then a thin stream of black smoke began to issue from the ground. A yellow flame began to flicker, quickly catching at Rassa’s clothes.
Azadeh screamed, and an old woman cried from the back of the crowd. Rassa took a deep breath and turned his face away from his daughter. The flames caught at his trousers, then the coattails of his shirt. Deep yellow, almost orange, the flames began to lick higher. Every eye, every head, was turned to the fire now. Smoke began to waft through the low trees.
Rassa cried out in anguish, and Azadeh bolted from the crowd, running desperately to her father. A conscript stepped forward, but she pushed through his grasp, tears streaming down her face as she ran to the tree. She tripped on a low stump and fell at her father’s feet. “No, Father! No! You promised you would not leave me,” she sobbed.
The fire grew higher, and she was forced back from the heat. The flames cracked and burned, reaching ten feet into the sky. She reached again for her father, leaning into the heat. “I want to come with you!” she cried. “Don’t leave me, Father. Please, I want to be with you.”
Rassa looked down, then closed his eyes for the last time. The officer watched, a satisfied smirk on his face. The fire reached an apex, burning with a bright yellow flame.
Azadeh rolled onto her back, swallowing the sickness inside. The captain looked down, and their eyes met briefly again. She lay there, unmoving, tears brimming in her eyes, then moaned once in anguish and curled into a tight ball. She pulled at her knees, and her eyes slowly closed. Her breath became heavy, as if she were asleep.
The captain turned to his men. “All right,” he cried. “There is a young boy in this village. Our instructions are clear. Find every boy in the village who is younger than five. Round them up and shoot them, then let’s get out of here.”
* * *
Thirty-nine children were murdered in the village that evening. Those who opposed the soldiers saw their homes and property burned. Those who fought them were murdered along with their sons. Those who sought to hide their children were eventually found. The carnage was sickening even to the most bitter heart, and the smell of death and smoking buildings filled the dim, evening air.
The Iranians were working through the last few blocks of the village when they heard the echo of helicopter blades bouncing off the steep mountain walls. They looked up to see American Blackhawks coming over the hills to the south. The Iranian captain stood unmoving, in pure shock and surprise. He wiped the blood from his hands, then shaded his eyes. Some of his men gathered round him as his mouth grew tight with fear. “American soldiers,” he cried. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
The soldiers didn’t move. Americans? Here? It simply couldn’t be.
The captain screamed again, his voice piercing the air. “Go! They are coming. We’ve got to get out of here!”
The spell broken, the NCOs turned to their soldiers and shouted instructions to them. “Load up. Leave your gear. Evacuate the area. Now!”
The Iranian security forces in their special black uniforms fell into a panic as the American helicopters passed over their heads. Yes! U.S. choppers! It was actually real!
The killers ran to their armored carriers. The engines started, spitting diesel fumes, and the troops ran up the small ramps into the bowels of the machines. The sound of the choppers beat against the canyon walls as they set up to land. The APCs revved their engines and lurched away, moving toward the narrow and broken road that led from the village to the plains in the west.
Chapter Thirty-One
Army Special Forces Sergeant Samuel Porter Brighton moved slowly through the village dressed for battle: black fatigues, tan leather boots, leather gloves, full flak gear, strands of ammunition, a first-aid kit, grenades, radios, GPS receivers, emergency rations, binoculars. He wore a Velcro name tag, but no other insignia identified him as being from the United States. The sun had set, and the light was dim, and he looked slowly around him, feeling the contents of his stomach rise to his throat. He had seen combat and death; he had seen destruction and loss; he had seen blood and horror in close-up and gory detail; he had seen men that he loved slip away into death—but he had never in his life seen anything equal to this. He had never imagined a scene straight from hell—the burning buildings, the smoke, the smell of spent rifles and blood. And the carnage concentrated on children! His mind tumbled and reeled.
He held a gloved hand to his nostrils and prayed he would one day forget. He counted the bodies, most of them young boys. Young boys and their mothers. It was a gut-wrenching sight. His heart ached like a muscle that had been twisted in two as he stopped and looked down, hearing a muffled cry at his feet. A young mother, her face covered with a thin veil, her long, black burka covering her body from her neck to her feet, tightly held a child who had been shot in the chest. The boy was no more than three, with tangled hair and fat cheeks. He appeared to be sleeping, but Samuel knew he was dead. His mother rocked back and forth in the grass that lined the road and sang to him softly between her deep sobs. Samuel didn’t speak Farsi, though he understood a bit, and the song was familiar, for he had heard it before. She sang slow and in rhythm, so he picked up most of the words.
“I have loved you so deeply,
I have held you so tight,
Go to sleep, little baby,
Rest in God,
Close your eyes.”
Sam turned away, gripping the handle of his rifle, the barrel pointed upward, his thumb on the safety. He wanted to help her, to comfort her if he could, but what does one say to someone holding a dead child in her arms? How does one explain something so evil, so utterly useless, so utterly cruel?
All the dead children . . . How could he ever explain?
But he wanted to listen; he wanted to hear her soft cry. He wanted to remember the pain she suffered this night. He wanted to share it and keep it, like a hot flame in his chest.
One day he would find them. He swore that he would. He didn’t know when or how, but he would find them one day. Then he would remember this mother and the song she sang.
A soldier didn’t fight battles for personal reasons or revenge; it was a job, a duty. Defending freedom was a call. But this scene of carnage, it drove him somehow. And he was going to remember. He was a different man now.
So he listened, his back to her, to the young mother’s crying and the gentle swish of her burka against the tall grass. He listened to her sobbing as she held her son tight.
Then he turned and walked toward his commander, who was making his way from a small field on the south side of the village where the choppers had set down. The U.S. captain stopped before him, and the two men stared grimly, measuring the displeasure in each other’s eyes. “Report?” the captain asked, his voice businesslike.
Sam shifted his feet. “Nothing more, Captain. Nothing you haven’t seen. A bunch of dead babies.” He gritted his teeth.
The captain nodded to his right, toward a low hill on the western side of the village. “It started up there,” he said. “The locals said there were soldiers . . .”
“I told you,” Sam shot back, his voice seething with rage. “I told you I saw old Russian APCs. We could have gone after the soldiers and taken them down in thei
r tracks. But no! That’s not our mission, you said. We are here for the child. Well, what is our mission now, Captain? You want us to bury these children? Is that why we’re here? We could have taken the soldiers, but what can we do now?”
“Sam,” the captain answered calmly. “I’m not the enemy here.”
Sam took a step back and sucked in a deep breath. He pressed his lips and looked around, then slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I was way out of line. I was venting on you, sir, and there is no excuse for that.”
The young officer watched him closely. “Apology accepted,” he said, but his voice was still firm, a warning to Sam. “And I made the right decision,” he continued. “We did the right thing. This isn’t an op. It’s a rescue mission only. We could have gone after the APCs, but they were already pulling away. What were we going to do, chase them all the way to Tehran? And we did do some good here; we interrupted their work. More important, we followed orders. Now, come on, get a grip; we don’t have much time. Let’s do what we can, then get out of Dodge. We’re still in enemy country, let’s not forget that.”
Sam moved his automatic rifle to his other hand. “Roger, sir,” he answered. And though his eyes still burned with rage, it was directed at the carnage around him, not at his boss. He slipped his hand down the butt of his rifle, bringing the short-barreled machine gun to his chest. “And the boy we are looking for? What do we do there?”
The captain worked a wad of gum in his mouth, a stony look on his face. “Any suggestions?” he wondered.
Sam hunched his shoulders. “It’s possible he might still be alive.”
“Yeah. Possible. Not likely, from the looks of it, but possible perhaps. But who is he, where is he? . . . I doubt we’ll ever find out. We don’t have the men or the time to sort this thing out.”
Sam snorted in disgust. “Freakin’ mess,” he said.
The captain nodded gloomily, then cocked his head to the hill. “Your squad is almost finished sweeping up there. The interpreters have been talking to the people. Go find out what they’ve learned. I’ve got Alpha squad working the other homes near the square. Let’s get an estimate on the damage, then get out of here. I’ll give you five minutes, then I want your squad in the choppers so we can get in the air.”
Sam clenched his jaw, then saluted. “Aye, aye, boss,” he said.
“Five minutes,” the captain warned him as he walked away. “Not one second more. I want your squad ready when the chopper blades roll.”
* * *
Sam jogged to the burned-out homes on the hill. The smoke hung low in the trees, heavy and still, like a deep gray-and-black blanket that had nowhere to go. The air was deadly still, and the thick smoke burned his dry eyes.
His squad had done everything they could to clean up the mess. The medics had treated a few of the wounded, but the Iranian attackers had been thorough. They were efficient with their weapons, and almost all of their targets had been killed instantly. The children proved an easy target, for their bodies were fragile and they didn’t fight back.
Sam jogged to his waiting squad, who stood grim-faced and angry, their eyes dull, their pale faces stretched thin. The shock was universal. None of them was prepared to see such a thing.
“Okay,” Sam said, turning to his Farsi interpreter. “Anything to report?”
The sergeant tucked an unlit cigarette between his lips. “The stories are pretty consistent,” he said. “Four APCs moved into the village sometime late this afternoon, probably not more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, before we got here. They asked for Rassa Pahlavi . . . that’s his house over there.” The interpreter nodded to a small cinder block and mud house to his right. “The Iranians were looking for someone, a young woman and a child, and though Pahlavi was a widower, the soldiers seemed to expect they would find them there. Apparently they weren’t there, or they might have escaped. When Pahlavi didn’t help them, the soldiers freaked out. This is where it ended, with what you see here.”
Sam wet his lips, then turned and looked around. All the villagers had retreated into what remained of their homes, as terrified of the U.S. soldiers as they had been of the Iranians before. “Did you notice?” he asked the sergeant, while motioning to the remains of the village below.
The interpreter hesitated. “Yeah,” he replied.
“All of their targets were children. All of them boys.”
The other soldier was silent. It was painfully obvious.
“Which meant,” Sam continued, “that they didn’t find who they were after.”
The interpreter swallowed. “So they made a sweeping generalization. All the male children must die.”
Sam shook his head in disgust. “A rather harsh method to accomplish their mission.”
“But effective,” the sergeant muttered in a cynical voice. “You’ve got to give them that. When it comes to the mission, these guys are a dedicated bunch.”
Sam wiped his face in frustration, then turned back to his men. “This Pahlavi,” he asked. “Any information on him?”
The interpreter nodded toward a smoldering tree. “That’s him over there,” he answered. “They burned him alive.”
Sam took a step to the right to see past his men, his shoulders slumping as he looked at the smoking tree. The lower branches had been scorched, and all the leaves burned to ash. The corpse lay in a heap at the base of the tree. “Anything else?” he demanded as he looked away.
“No, Sam, that’s all.”
“All right, then, let’s go. There’s nothing more we can do, and the Honcho wants to get out of here. Move to the chopper. Let’s get out of this hell.”
“Roger,” the soldiers muttered. They all wanted to leave. There was too much death, too much darkness, too much destruction and despair. And it seemed to be for nothing. None of it made any sense. His unit gathered their gear and moved down the hill in a run. Sam watched them go, then stood alone on the top of the hill.
A slight wind picked up, blowing up from the valley and lifting the smoke to the tops of the trees, bending it over the branches like the long, misty fingers of an enormous dark hand. Sam turned his face to the breeze, hoping the wind would remove the stain from his memory and the smell of smoke from his clothes. He closed his eyes and listened, feeling the breeze on his face and the weight of his gear pressing against his shoulders and chest. The tiny radio receiver beeped in his ear as the other squads announced they were ready to go, but he pulled out the earpiece and let it hang at his neck. He needed a moment of silence; he needed a moment of prayer.
He bowed his head slowly. “Father,” he began, then paused for a time. He wanted to say something, and he felt that he should, but try as he might, the words didn’t come.
He didn’t feel like praying. He felt like kicking someone in the head.
He paused, then finally mumbled the only prayer he could say. “Please bless them,” he muttered, then lifted his head.
Turning, he started to walk down the muddy road. He had walked only twenty paces when something spoke in his mind. He tried to dismiss it, but the feeling remained. He paused, then looked back at the smoldering tree.
He saw her crawling from the high grass on the other side of the road. She was young, wet, and muddy, with long hair and a tan dress. She moved toward the body at the base of the tree and knelt down beside it, holding her hands over her mouth. He saw her shoulders heaving and heard her muffled cries.
“Go to her,” the voice said. “She is your little sister, and she needs your help.”
Sam stared in frustration. “But what could I do?” he thought desperately to himself.
The voice didn’t answer, and Sam didn’t move. The sound of the chopper blades began to beat behind him as the pilots spun the rotors up to operating speed. He turned to the landing zone to see that his squad had loaded up in the choppers and were ready to go. He heard his name being called through the tiny radio earpiece that hung at his neck. “Sergeant Brighton,” his capta
in called him. “Brighton, let’s go!”
He stared at the choppers, frozen in his tracks, then glanced back at the girl who wept by herself in the mud.
“Go to her,” the voice repeated.
The chopper blades spun, ready to lift in the air. His captain moved to the side of the lead chopper and stared up at him, motioning to his radio. He slipped in the earpiece and heard his captain’s voice. “Sam, come on, man, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Please, Sam,” the voice pled. “I can’t do this alone!”
His captain broadcast again. “Let’s get out of here, Brighton! Come on, soldier, let’s go!”
Sam reached for the transmit button. “Stand by,” he said.
“What are you doing up there, Brighton?”
“Stand by!” Sam replied.
He turned away from the choppers and looked at the girl near the tree. She kept her head bowed and her hands at her mouth. Sam took ten steps toward her, and she finally looked up, her eyes wide with fear. She started to back up, pushing herself through the mud, and Sam lifted his hands, holding them away from his body in a gesture of peace. She cowered, her head low, almost bowing to him.
Sam took another step forward, and she slowly raised her head. She looked at him, and his heart seemed to wrench in his chest. She was so young and so childlike and so beautiful. She was small and as vulnerable as a piece of ash in the wind. Her eyes were brimming with tears, which left a small trail on her cheeks.
Looking at her face, Sam’s heart seemed to leap. The feeling was so strong it was like a kick in the chest. He stared, then stepped back. “I know you,” he said.
She watched him intently, then cocked her head, not understanding his words. Her face softened, and she quickly wiped a rolling tear from her cheek. Samuel saw the pain and desperation, and he felt his heart wrench again. He felt breathless and hollow, his chest growing tight.
He moved to her slowly, and she backed up in the grass. She kept her eyes low, too terrified to look at his face. Sam stopped a few paces from her, then knelt down at her side.
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