Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  McCall and Josh ran out onto the railway bridge above the dizzying gorge.

  The train emerged from the billowing red and orange smoke, a gray metallic color with a red stripe running down the railway cars. The smoke was dissipating slowly. The brake was still being applied hydraulically as the locomotive engineer put pressure against the reservoir at each train car. McCall figured that they had maybe twenty seconds until the train came to a full stop.

  But the train wasn’t coming to a full stop.

  It was picking up speed again.

  McCall and Josh ran along the edge of the bridge span as the train reached them.

  McCall lifted Josh up at the second carriage and he fell onto the moving platform. McCall joined him and opened the door to the train car.

  They moved inside.

  CHAPTER 24

  The railway car had two blue cloth seats on either side of the aisle with white cloths draped at their tops. It was not as packed as McCall had feared. There was a cross section of Syrian civilians, mainly older people, the women wearing various scarves and head coverings, the men dressed casually in jackets, some children wearing jeans and T-shirts and hoodies. People looked at them warily, avoiding their eyes, looking out the windows at the glinting steel bridge span. McCall recognized their uneasiness. He and Josh were white foreigners who had boarded the train while it had come almost to a stop. They shouldn’t be here. Their very presence brought a sense of foreboding to a populace sick of war.

  McCall found them two seats almost at the back of the railway car. He dropped his backpack onto the floor and stuffed Josh’s backpack behind the rear seat. Josh collapsed into the window seat. His breathing was shallow. He nodded in answer to McCall’s unspoken question, but McCall felt like he was losing him. He leaned close to Josh, speaking softly as the train accelerated across the bridge.

  “If there’s a ticket collector, I’ll take care of him. Don’t talk to anyone. I’m going to check out the rest of the train cars. That last shot of morphine should buy you another hour or more. You okay?”

  Josh nodded again and closed his eyes. McCall left him there and made his way to the connecting door and out onto the short platform to the next car. This one was crowded. McCall moved down the car, not making eye contact. The passengers would have reacted to the shudder of the train as it had decelerated. Some of them on the right-hand-side windows would have seen the smoke billowing its tendrils of orange and red streamers.

  McCall walked through the connecting door to the next carriage. Same curious stares. He reached the last train carriage. A door at the end of it led to an enclosed baggage compartment. If there were Insurgents in it, McCall would have to take them out. He couldn’t have anyone radioing ahead, even though he knew there would be limited communications this far out.

  Nothing was in the enclosed baggage compartment except piles of luggage.

  McCall moved back through the other railway cars, rocking with the sway of the train as it thundered toward Aleppo. The train would stop there and people would get off.

  First point of vulnerability.

  When McCall entered the second-to-last train car, he saw a young woman seated beside Josh. She was in her midtwenties, black hair caught up in a red scarf. As McCall got closer he saw bright green eyes, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones. She was very attractive. A child was asleep at the window seat opposite, dressed in jeans, a black Syrian-flag T-shirt, and a blue jacket.

  The young woman looked up at McCall without the requisite suspicion in her eyes and said, “Masaa el kheer.” Good evening.

  McCall addressed her in Arabic. “Hal beemkani mos’adatt.” Can I help you?

  “Ana bekhair, shukran.” I’m fine, thanks!

  McCall noted a strong French accent coming through the Arabic. “Tu parle français?” You speak French?

  Now she lapsed into rapid-fire French.

  McCall nodded. “You speak it well,” he said, also in French.

  She told him she had attended the Lycée Franҫais Charles de Gaulle in London, but she had returned to Syria and her French was a little rusty. “Je suis un peu rouillé.”

  McCall told her her French was fine and knelt down beside her. She told him she and her daughter, Aleena, lived in Aleppo. Her name was Brielle. Both her Syrian parents were working in the city and were living in fear. She was a student and wanted to return to the United Kingdom, but now she had a two-year-old daughter to look after. She kept up her guileless appraisal of McCall’s face. She told him he had a kind face. He assured her that it wasn’t, but she insisted he had seen much tragedy. He didn’t argue.

  Brielle looked around the train carriage. Everyone in the passenger car had known tragedy. It was part of their lives now. She told him that she knew his friend was hurt. She could see some bleeding under the overcoat he wore across his shoulders. She could help McCall re-dress his wound, if he wanted her to. No one in the train car would have to know.

  McCall told her to go ahead.

  Brielle helped Josh out of the overcoat and the parka, revealing the US Army uniform beneath. If she was stunned to see it, she did not let on. The girl unbuttoned his Army tunic and took it off. McCall shielded them as he pulled the trauma kit out of his backpack and took out another emergency trauma dressing and a roll of surgical tape. They removed Josh’s bloody bandage. Brielle used hydrogen peroxide to clean the wounds with antiseptic swabs. McCall gave her some QuikClot clotting gauze, which she put across the wound. He found another pouch in the trauma kit with a triangle bandage, which they wrapped around the wound, and bound it tight. It would have to do until McCall could get Josh across the Turkish border. His makeshift nurse watched as McCall fitted the syringe into the small morphine bottle. It would be empty soon. He found a vein and pushed the needle into Josh’s arm. Josh relaxed, but his breathing remained shallow. McCall put the trauma kit back in the backpack while Brielle buttoned Josh’s Army shirt and pulled the parka over his head. She pulled the old overcoat around his shoulders.

  Josh nodded his thanks. His pale face was glistening with perspiration. McCall got up and let Brielle out from the seat. The train was losing speed as it rolled through the streets of Aleppo. People around them were up on their feet, pulling backpacks and small items out of the overhead racks. Brielle sat down across from her daughter and gently awakened her. She was sleepy and didn’t want to move. Brielle told her in Arabic they had to get off the train. Time to go home.

  The train pulled into the station platform opposite a low-hanging veranda and came to a shuddering halt. Their train compartment was parked opposite a station entrance, where a bright window overlooked a squat marble fountain surrounded by polished floors. An ornate sign said THE HALL. Even though it was in the middle of the night, whole families were getting off the train. No passengers were boarding the train. This would be the place where armed Insurgents would attack the train if they’d found their quarry.

  Brielle had fastened her daughter’s jacket around her and put a balaclava on her head, which the child was trying to take off. Brielle moved out of her seat with the child in her arms and looked at McCall and Josh.

  “Bettawfeeq.” Good luck!

  “Shukran jazeelan.” Thank you very much.

  McCall added, in English, “Your name, Brielle, means ‘God is my strength’ in Arabic. It’s a beautiful name. Keep yourself and your daughter safe.”

  None of the Syrians took any notice of the hasty English words. Brielle nodded and looked at McCall and Captain Josh Coleman as if her heart would break for both of them. Then she moved quickly to the train door, where a heavyset railway official helped her and her child onto the platform. The train started up again. McCall watched as Brielle and Aleena walked into the station and were swallowed up in the midst of the other passengers. Aleppo station slipped away as the train picked up speed. They were heading toward Myslimiya–Ar Ra’y–Ҫӧbanbey before crossing the Turkish border to the city of Mersin. In five minutes they would be back into the cou
ntryside.

  “Will Brielle and her daughter make it?” Josh said.

  It was a rhetorical question, but McCall answered it anyway.

  “They’re vulnerable. But these people are resilient. They will resist. They’ll survive.”

  “Maybe I was wrong about the mercenary instincts in you.”

  McCall ignored that. “We’re going to get off the train just before the Turkish border. That last shot of morphine should you get that far.”

  The Army captain looked out the train window.

  McCall waited.

  “There’s a secret list,” Josh said, keeping his voice low.

  McCall noted the passengers who were left in the railway car had moved down some rows to be farther away from them. “What kind of a list?” McCall asked softly.

  “Names of men fighting with the Insurgents in Syria. They have been radicalized. They have an elitist status and are fully committed to the Insurgent doctrine. Colonel Michael Ralston and I have been compiling the list through intelligence sources while on this UN peacekeeping mission. It’s grown exponentially. A few of them are deserters, Insurgent sympathizers, and mercenaries. But not all of them.”

  Pain racked the Army captain’s body and he sat back, fighting off the wave of nausea. McCall gave him an antinausea shot of Phenergan. He didn’t want him passing out. Josh looked at the Syrian landscape flashing past, bathed in moonlight, high cirrus clouds streaked with blurred edges making a patchwork of sailing ships.

  When he found his voice again it was stronger. “They are all American citizens.”

  McCall looked at him. “They’re Americans?”

  “That’s right. If just one of them made their way out of Syria or Iraq, had his hair cut short, cleaned up, and returned with a valid passport, they’d go right through US Customs, no questions asked. They would be assimilated right back into our society with no one realizing what kind of a threat they posed to our national security. Their crimes are treason against the United States.”

  “Where is that list?”

  “The photographs, barely recognizable as Americans, were up on a bulletin board at the team HQ at Ar Raqqah with as much intel as we’ve been able to compile. I had a duplicate copy of the list. We were going to submit the intel to the Pentagon, but we were still working on the identities of the fighters.”

  “How many American names had you compiled?”

  “Nine.”

  “How many in your UN contingent had access to this list?”

  “Just myself and Colonel Ralston. We were compiling the photographs and sightings, some of them from Kurdish tribal leaders, but we weren’t making any headway with them. There are talks to include Syria in an UN-backed plan that was agreed to by top diplomats in Vienna, of which my mother, Helen, was one of the principal architects, followed by the creation of a transitional government, a new constitution, and elections within eighteen months. But there were no invitations sent to the Democratic Union Party about this first stage of the Syrian talks. According to Gunner, the concern at the Pentagon is the possibility, however temporary, of an accord being reached between Syria’s Arab tribes and militant Salafist groups such as the al-Qaeda–affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, the Victory Front. A tribal sheikh told us that, with no international support, Syrian tribes would do what they had to do to protect their assets, including aligning with military Salafist groups, even Iran, to maintain their autonomy with both the Syrian state and armed opposition. They’re not interested in helping the US Army hunt down traitors to the American way of life, which is viewed as corrupt and against the will of Allah.”

  Josh fought off another bout of pain and let it subside. “There was a contact I was liaising with in Syria who had deserted from the Insurgents. He was hiding out in the village of al-Sukhnah. The villagers took me to meet with him. I briefed Colonel Ralston about it. He was going to arrange to get him airlifted out of Syria. This deserter was going to give us more American names. And there was something else.” McCall waited. “He said there were mercenaries who were protecting these traitors. Hired by our own government.”

  McCall was stunned. “Did he have any proof of that?”

  “He said he’d overheard conversations. Then there was firing in the village. The man bolted and the Insurgents shot him. That was when I got hit in the firefight. I managed to get out of the village before the Insurgents could find me.”

  McCall was looking out the window at the countryside flashing past. Then he looked out the far window, which reflected only darkness.

  “What is it?” Josh asked.

  “We’re slowing down.”

  McCall slid across the aisle to where the two seats had been vacated by Brielle and her daughter and looked out. Ahead he saw an abandoned railway station that looked like some forgotten relic from US pioneer days. The two-story structure had yellow sidings and red roofs, one of which had partially caved in. Next to one of the station entrances was a hole you could have driven a truck through. The annex beside the main station and a water tower beyond it also looked derelict. The station had nothing surrounding it. The train tracks were overgrown with tall weeds that grew eight feet high. The train whistle gave its two-chime warning, the brakes were applied grudgingly, slowing the train further. McCall could see a white sign above a low roof under the main station entrance.

  YOUDEHI.

  There was no movement inside the abandoned station.

  No train has pulled up here for a very long time, McCall thought.

  The passengers in the railway car had their faces pressed to the glass. Whispers of Daesh came back to him.

  “Company,” McCall said.

  He grabbed his backpack and hauled it up on his back. He pulled Josh out of his seat, swinging his backpack up to him. “They’ll search the train. We need to get to the back of the last car.”

  The train came to a shuddering halt outside Youdehi station. McCall could hear faint shouting now. He and Josh moved through the connecting door. Passengers were in the next railway car. Heads turned as McCall supported Josh through it. The train started to sway. It had been boarded. More shouted voices, in Arabic. Questioning, demanding. No shooting yet.

  The last car was filled with passengers. McCall and Josh moved through the enclosed baggage area to the last door and out onto the platform. A blast of night air engulfed them. Now the shouted voices of the Insurgents were loud and strident. McCall looked down the train. Two vehicles had pulled up near the station. One was a UAZ-469 Russian military all-terrain vehicle, filled to capacity. McCall recognized the other vehicle as a US Army light strike vehicle, small and mobile, a version of the desert patrol vehicle that must’ve been stolen by the Jihadists in a raid. It should have carried a two-man contingent, but it was so loaded with manpower it looked as if it might just topple over.

  McCall helped Josh down to the tracks. Both of them were swallowed up in the eight-foot weeds as they ran into the abandoned railway station. The interior was littered with debris, and one of the walls had partially collapsed, spewing bricks across the station floor. A staircase led up to the second floor, but most of the stairs were smashed. McCall and Josh ran to a back entrance—none of the entrances had doors—and McCall pulled up short. He had been expecting to see a wide expanse of scrub terrain ahead of them. Instead, an abandoned train with tank wagons sat rusting on the tracks. McCall scrambled under the first wagon. Josh crawled after him, then both of them were on the other side.

  “The Insurgents will have to search every one of these tank wagons in case you’re hiding in one of them,” McCall said tersely. “They don’t have any idea we were on that train. They would be looking for you to be traveling alone if they had found that goatherder’s hut outside the water trough.”

  More shouting reached them. McCall heard the throaty roar of the light strike vehicle as it raced along the rails outside the abandoned station. He and Josh came to a steep gradient that towered twelve feet. They skidded down the incline, both remaining upri
ght until they reached the lower bank.

  McCall looked up.

  The towering tank wagons blocked out the sky. McCall heard more shouting in Arabic. The Insurgents were searching the abandoned station. He heard the LSV crisscrossing back and forth, between the train and the station.

  They don’t know we’re even here, McCall thought.

  At that moment the moon plunged back under its cloud cover, throwing the indigo-violet terrain into darkness.

  McCall and Josh were swallowed in the shadows.

  They stayed in the cloud cover, for which McCall was grateful. After twenty minutes he called a halt in the fields that crisscrossed the landscape. They could still hear the train idling on the tracks. It hadn’t continued its journey toward the Turkish border. The Insurgents had found nothing on the train or the abandoned station and had starting searching the stationary tank wagons. McCall pulled a bunch of maps out of his backpack and checked their GPS coordinates on the chronometer on his wrist.

  “We can’t reach the Turkish border,” Josh said.

  The wind had come up again and swirled around them, but it brought no sand eddying with it.

  McCall unfolded one of the maps. “We could reach Rmeilan Airfield in Hasakah.”

  “I know it. Colonel Ralston said that Rmeilan has been handed back to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units. But the airfield was also to be given back to the SDF with a deal to provide weapons and US planes.”

  “I don’t know if the Pentagon followed up on that deal,” McCall said, “but I know the US military has been expanding the airfield. It’s too far to reach, but there’s an abandoned Syrian airfield fifteen miles from these coordinates. My pilot said it was being used for MiGs to refuel, but that intel is sketchy. It’s probably got some hangars and an admin building. It may be completely abandoned, but I don’t have a better idea. If there are planes there, I can fly one of them.”