Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  McCall buttoned Josh’s Army tunic and eased Josh back to the ground, propped up by the tires. McCall fished out an oatmeal-raisin PowerBar from his backpack and tore off the wrapper. Josh took a couple of bites.

  “Does your radio work?” McCall asked.

  “It was smashed in the firefight.”

  “But you’re wearing a chronometer on your wrist.”

  “Gunner gave each of his team one when we landed in Syria. It was fractured when I got hit, but after I’d crawled in here, I managed to send out the coordinates of my position to my mother at the UN. Then the chronometer stopped working.”

  “Why didn’t you send the coordinates to your commanding officer in the field?”

  Josh was bleary. The morphine had kicked in, and the Army captain was fighting it. “I had no idea if the coordinates were accurate, or if Helen would get them. I didn’t know if she would even know what they were.”

  “But your commanding officer knew what they were. He would have had a field map out at your HQ in Ar Raqqah, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to triangulate the coordinates. But he didn’t do that. Or he would have led another rescue attempt right here.”

  “Too risky,” Josh said, his manner suddenly evasive. “They believed I was KIA. The intel had been sent to the Pentagon. They couldn’t have been sure where I had strayed off the road. There have been sandstorms wiping out the tracks down through the gullies. Even Highway Six has been almost impassable. If you were looking for this goatherder’s station, you would miss it.”

  McCall knew Josh was lying to him. Josh had carefully laid out the coordinates to his mother, of all people, a high-ranking UN executive, in a Hail Mary pass before his chronometer had stopped. No one had come to rescue him. No one had prepped him to be ready to reach an evacuation point. His own CO had not given up on him, but the news was bleak. They’d left one of their own behind, and he was expected to die in this godforsaken place.

  McCall wasn’t buying it.

  But this wasn’t the time to press Josh to tell him the truth.

  “Wait here.”

  McCall got to his feet. Not until the howl of the wind registered and he ran outside did he realize the severity of the sandstorm whipping around the dilapidated hut and carport. The sand sheeted across the road leading back to Highway 6.

  McCall staggered through the blinding maelstrom up to the animal trough and filled his canteen and Josh’s. He moved back inside the goatherd’s hut and helped Josh to his feet.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I can walk. What if the Insurgents come back?”

  “They’ve been looking for you, moving down Highway Six, but they won’t find you in this sandstorm. When I saw them, they were heading away from the highway out onto one of the side roads, probably Highway Seven, to Ak Kut and Shakrak. They won’t come back to this location now, and if they do, we’ll be gone. Have you got an extraction point?”

  “I had the coordinates, but the rendezvous point was changed at the last minute because of the stepped-up Insurgent patrols in the area.”

  “I’m getting you to a new extraction point. We can make it to the railway tracks on the other side of Highway Six. We can make the night train if we can move out of the sandstorm. I’ve got these night goggles for you.” McCall pulled a second pair of night-vision goggles out of his backpack and handed them to Josh, who put them around his eyes. “Ready to move out?”

  Josh looked at McCall, focusing through the pain, and nodded. “I’m good.”

  “Let’s go.”

  McCall and Josh moved out of the goatherder’s hut and into the sandstorm.

  CHAPTER 23

  McCall supported Josh as the biting wind whipped into their faces. They walked from the hut and the vacant carport and almost tripped right over the goats, who were bleating in the elements. They struck out in a northwesterly direction, which McCall reckoned would take them away from Highway 6. McCall needed to find them more shelter. One of the Insurgent patrols might come back for water, search the goatherder’s hut, and find Josh’s blood on the floor. They would set out to find him again, paralleling Highway 6. Josh was limping on his right leg where the bullet had grazed him. McCall’s own twisted ankle was throbbing badly. He would need to rebind it if he was going to travel any distance in this terrain.

  The first of the buildings appeared out of the murk like a trick of the light.

  McCall brought them both to a halt. The moon was capriciously going into and out of the cloud cover. The buildings looked like an eerie mirage glowing in the desert. McCall took the Makarov pistol out of his jacket and held it in his right hand. The gusting sand uncovered another building, then another, then submerged them in shadow again. McCall strained for a sound, but there was nothing but wailing of the wind.

  McCall motioned to Josh, and they staggered to the first village hut. It was nothing more than a packed-earth edifice without a door or windows. Beyond it were other huts, most of them destroyed, pocked with mortar fire.

  “There are other villages like this one, straight down Highway Six, patrolled by the Insurgents.” Josh had to shout as the wind whipped around the white-faced buildings. “Foua and Kfary, adjacent Shiite villages, had been besieged by antigovernment militants for more than a year. The Jihadists blasted them apart.”

  “And the people in the villages?”

  “Massacred. It was too late by the time our US observation unit got here from the neighboring village of Alhora. But we were only observing from the road, and we had to get out of here before the Insurgents came back.”

  Both of them were being assaulted by the blinding storm. McCall signaled to conserve their voices. They made their way to the first village hut. There was a wraparound wooden porch with broken slats. One cane chair with mother-of-pearl inlay was unraveling beside the doorway.

  “Sit here,” McCall said. “Stay off your leg.”

  He helped Josh down into the cane chair, then stepped into the first hut. There was nothing to find; some discarded bags of rice and scattered cooking utensils were on the floor. McCall stepped off the porch, motioned for Josh to stay where he was, and walked through the ghost town. The next building had a sloping roof, blown sand almost halfway to the top. It was deserted. McCall gripped the Makarov pistol tighter and checked four more abandoned huts, all of them reeking of death.

  Josh limped over from the porch of the first building. “There’ll be a massive gravesite near this last hut. Where the bodies would have been tossed into like so much garbage.”

  “We don’t have time to find it.”

  In the sixth hut were more cooking utensils, earthen bowls, signs of a family living there. Josh sat down in a Moroccan chair made of walnut wood and lemon-tree wood. McCall looked around what had been a living room. He saw a small bright figure shaped by the moon before it fled again.

  He knelt and picked it up.

  The Barbie doll had flaxen hair, some of it pulled out by the roots. One of Barbie’s arms was missing. The doll was dressed in a canary-yellow Fashion Pack Firefighting Uniform with black boots and a round pink hat. Some child had hugged that doll and dragged it around the village, and maybe it had been her constant companion until she had been killed. McCall had come here for one American soldier. But the personal tragedies that surrounded him were ghosts he recognized. He wondered bitterly if the Equalizer had any chance of lifting even one human being out of despair.

  But it was all he could cling to in the new life he had chosen.

  He stuffed the Barbie doll into his backpack. Josh got up from the Moroccan chair, hobbled to the doorway, and looked out into the sandstorm.

  “The Insurgents won’t come back to this village unless they’re looking for you,” McCall said. “If they do, then they’re looking for some intel you’ve got. Do you want to tell me what that is?”

  “It’s classified.”

  “Only two of us here, Josh. Maybe I can help.”

  “Through your mercenary contacts? So
you can sell the intel to the highest bidder?” Josh staggered in the doorway.

  McCall steadied him. “I came here to pick you up. That’s still the plan.” McCall looked out onto the wooden porch. “The storm’s abating a little. Let’s go.”

  McCall put his arm around Josh’s shoulders. They moved out of the dwelling with its ghosts wailing for the dead.

  If McCall’s instincts hadn’t immediately kicked in, he would not have seen the apparition coming at him out of the sandstorm. The Insurgent fighter had just stepped onto the crumbling porch. McCall let go of Josh and wrenched a weapon right out of the Jihadist’s hands. He had been carrying a Norinco CQ 5 NATO assault rifle commandeered from the People’s Republic of China. McCall smashed the barrel against the man’s face, bringing him to his knees. The Jihadist reached for the Totarev TT-33 semiautomatic pistol in his holster. McCall kicked it out of his hands and swung the butt of the assault rifle hard across his head, taking off most of the back of it.

  In the swirl of sand McCall saw the second Jihadist fighter swing up his own assault rifle, a Zastava M70 Yugoslavian M43. The slim throwing knife was in McCall’s hand a split second later, embedded in the man’s throat. A third Insurgent was running for the dwelling. Josh had drawn his Colt .45 and fired four rounds. All of them hit the fighter in the chest. He collapsed onto the sand.

  Josh steadied himself. McCall ran to where the second Jihadist had fallen. He examined the Zastava M43 in the sand and saw that the weapon had seen better days. He didn’t want it exploding in his hands. He tossed it aside, but did help himself to the Browning semiautomatic pistol in the Insurgent’s holster. Josh was off the porch now, limping toward where the third soldier lay. He was similarly armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and a Makarov PM pistol.

  McCall listened to the mournful whimper of the wind, but didn’t hear any vehicles. This patrol had been on its own, having come back to the abandoned village for some reason. Their vehicle was parked right outside the first village dwelling. The confiscated US Army Humvee M988 two-man cargo 1985 model had been modified, with the back of it ripped out.

  Josh limped up to McCall. He was carrying the Jihadist’s AK-47 with the Makarov pistol.

  “Good shooting,” McCall said. “We’ll keep the Norinco NATO assault rifle and I’ll add the Tokarev TT-33 pistol and the Browning.”

  He put his arm around Josh’s shoulders, but Josh wanted to get to the Humvee on his own. McCall let him. The swirling sand was letting up around them, showing swathes of the terrain and, beyond the ghost village, what looked like Highway 6. McCall slid off his backpack and heaved it up into the back of the Humvee. He helped Josh take off his backpack, threw it into the back, and helped Josh into the right side of the vehicle. McCall covered their gear with an old, oil-spattered tarpaulin. He climbed into the driver’s side of the Humvee and pulled away from the sepulchral village, with its memories of slaughter and grief, and headed out into the abating sandstorm.

  Josh lay back against the right-hand seat, eyes closed. McCall debated giving him another shot of morphine, but decided to get them farther from the abandoned village. He consulted his chronometer, which now gave him his position in feet and inches. They were heading away from Highway 6 toward the northeast. McCall kept a lookout for Jihadist patrols.

  He needed to get to the railway tracks.

  Josh opened his eyes.

  “I can give you another shot of the morphine in twenty minutes,” McCall said. “Right now I need to access the maps in my backpack.”

  Josh grabbed McCall’s backpack and rummaged in it. He brought out a sheaf of maps. He unfolded the one McCall indicated to him, with red-shaded areas that slanted across Syria.

  “Find the railway lines,” McCall said.

  It took all Josh’s concentration to focus on the map. “We’re northwest of them, maybe twenty miles. There’s no train running across this terrain at night. The extraction point was further south, at the Turkish border, at Latakia.”

  “You were given the wrong intel. Latakia is too close to the coast. You’d have crossed at the Akҫakale checkpoint in Turkey and Tel Adyad, in Syria, and that’s a bottleneck. We need to head north to avoid Kahramanmaras and Urfa. We’ll head to Afrin on the Aleppo Road. It’s marked there by the bridge into Aleppo.”

  “I got it. There was one train on the extraction route I was instructed to take.”

  “Same wrong intel. We could get the Ic Anadola Maui Trento Adana, then the Mersin-Haler train from Aleppo and change at Damascus, but that train has been canceled at the Turkish border.”

  “Gunner’s XO, a chief warrant officer, had an alternate route picked out for me.”

  “Probably to pick up the Toros Ekspersi, the Taurus Express, from Istanbul, but that’s a long shot. Might or might not be running. We can take the train from Aleppo that goes via Deir-ez-Zor and Al-Qamishli.”

  Josh sat back. He looked out at the road that twisted and turned back onto itself, flooded with moonlight now. The sandstorm had died considerably with only mild gusting across the lonely terrain.

  “So all of the intel I received on the extraction points has been compromised.”

  “I’d say so,” McCall said.

  “That’s not possible, unless…” The words died in Josh’s throat.

  “Unless the intel you’ve been given has been deliberately false.”

  Josh had no response.

  McCall weighed the realization of the betrayal that was going on inside the young Army captain’s head.

  “Get some rest. We’re eighty kilometers away from Aleppo, where we’ll pick up the train.”

  Josh closed his eyes. The pain was starting to overtake him. McCall kept to the twisting road for another twenty miles, then pulled over at the side of the highway. He took out the med kit, loaded up the syringe, and gave Josh another shot of morphine.

  He had a new concern.

  The gas gauge on the Humvee had read just above half when he’d driven away from the Syrian village. Now it had dropped below a quarter of a tank. McCall crawled under the vehicle and inspected the tank. It had been punctured on one side, a small hole, but enough to do damage. He rooted in the back of the Humvee, found a switchblade, and cut a piece of the seat canvas. He stuffed it into the bullet hole to slow the flow of the gas leak. He climbed back into the Humvee and pulled off the road, heading through the desert toward the small town of Afrin. He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist.

  They would be cutting it very fine.

  McCall followed the map as a guide, using the GPS to transverse their most direct route. The sandstorm had fully abated. Stars gleamed in the desert sky so close McCall felt he could reach out for them. Josh had slipped back into unconsciousness. McCall knew he had to get the Army captain to an ER facility across the Turkish border, maybe in Suruç, but that had been heavily bombed and might even have been evacuated by now. There was a hospital in the Kurdish area southeast of Diyarbakir that McCall knew was run by the Joint Commission International, but that was 190 kilometers away from the border with Syria.

  McCall drove for over an hour while the mountains rose up around him. In the distance he caught a glimpse of the Haradara steel-truss railway bridge that spanned the valley. Moonlight cradled it as it gleamed like a frozen jewel outlining the two steel supports that descended into the river gorge below. McCall had noted the small bridge on the Aleppo road they’d passed ten minutes ago. He looked at the Humvee’s fuel gauge. It quivered at empty. McCall roused Josh and pointed to the Haradara Bridge, spanning the gorge.

  “The CFS trains running on the Damascus al-Hizjaz Railway are all diesel-electric traction, but none of them can go higher than fifty kilometers an hour. The bridges of the Kurd-Dagh are seriously in need of repair, and the locomotive engineers slow down across some of them. This is the longest one. I’m going to try to delay them even more.”

  Josh looked over at the fuel gauge. “You know we’re out of gas?”

  “The Insurgents had their t
ank ruptured and didn’t bother to repair it. We just need to squeeze a few more miles out this vehicle before the bridge.”

  McCall drove fast from the old Aleppo road, turning around a hairpin bend. The engine was catching now, sputtering badly. McCall coasted down the rest of the way to where the Haradara Bridge spanned the gorge and pulled over to the edge just as the Humvee died.

  The train whistle blasted six chimes through the night. McCall noted a white building on the edge of the bridge, but it looked like it had been looted and abandoned some time ago. He strapped on his backpack and helped Josh get out the other side. McCall hopped into the back of the Humvee to do an asset inventory. He threw some old tarpaulins to one side and dug out some black parkas buried in the debris. One of them would fit Josh. He also found an old overcoat. McCall jumped back down and handed the parka and overcoat to Josh.

  “I don’t want anyone on that train recognizing you as an US Army officer.”

  Josh pulled the parka over his head. McCall wrapped the old overcoat around Josh’s shoulders.

  “What about the assault rifles?” Josh asked.

  “We’re not going to shoot up the train. Put your Colt .45 into your backpack. Also the Makarov pistol.”

  McCall had already put the Totarev TT-33 and the Browning semi pistol confiscated from the Insurgents in his backpack. If they searched him, McCall would take them out, firing. He still had his own Makarov pistol in the pocket of his coat.

  One more blast of the six chimes and the train was traveling to the bridge span.

  McCall and Josh slid down the steep slope to the bridge. The train started over the bridge. Its speed was much slower, but even so, it was already at the first steel span. McCall took out one of the packs of four signal flares from his backpack. He hit the first one on the ground to strike the explosive percussion cap, emitting orange smoke. McCall threw the flare as far as he could. It landed on the rails, sending plumes of smoke drifting across it. If the locomotive engineer knew his track geometry, he’d have already applied the brakes. McCall threw the rest of the flares across the tracks, all of them exploding with orange and red smoke.