Foreign and Domestic

by A. J Tata

  “I spent a little over a week on Roanoke Island and I didn’t pick up on all that sex,” Mahegan quipped.

  “Try being a hot blond chick,” she said.

  Mahegan sat on the opposing bed, still dressed in his towel. He wasn’t quite sure if he should excuse himself, but he did not want to put on the same clothes he had been wearing all day. He was fighting his male instincts. Here she was still in her beachwear, tanned shoulder exposed through the ripped OBX T-shirt, long legs crossed and honed and flexed and smooth.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’ll leave that task up to you.”

  She flipped her green eyes up at him and smiled.

  “I should leave,” she said, but didn’t move.

  “Yes, you should.” Mahegan didn’t move either.

  “Or . . . we could hang out a bit.”

  “I would feel awkward with you not in a towel, though.” Mahegan smiled for the first time since he could remember.

  Locklear lowered her face and apologized, “I’m sorry. You’re half naked and we don’t even know each other.”

  “I’m okay with this, Lindy, but I need to understand something,” Mahegan said, feeling himself stir under the towel.

  “Yes?”

  Mahegan scanned her again with his eyes and said, “You’re gorgeous. Sexy. Smart. Usually women like you are taken twice over.”

  “I have trust issues. Besides, you’re not so bad yourself and you’re alone.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Really? How so?”

  Mahegan thought for a moment. He had no vehicle, no home, minimal possessions, and about $90,000 in combat pay left in the bank. He didn’t consider that he had much that would attract a woman nor was he in pursuit of affection. Besides, his mind was its own torture chamber. One day he would be mentally flogging himself for not saving Colgate and his other men, and the next he would be figuratively waterboarding his brain for killing Hoxha. He had tortured himself enough for not saving his mother, which had given him good practice for the additional guilt he now carried. The doctors had diagnosed him with significant post-traumatic stress when he’d processed out of the Army. Regardless, before he could be good for anyone, more than just sexually anyway, he would need to make himself whole again, at least mostly. Before he could do that, he needed to come to terms with Colgate and Hoxha.

  “Can you trust me?” he asked.

  “Can I?”

  “I’m going to do something and I’m not sure how you’re going to react.”

  “Okay,” she said. He could see she was nervous but excited. Her breasts seemed to harden through the T-shirt and her cheeks got flushed. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  He stood, leaned over, and kissed her on the lips. She responded by reaching up to him and placing her hands on his shoulders. Her tongue darted into his mouth and before he let himself get carried away, he said, “Sorry, can you excuse me for a moment?”

  She tugged on him as he pulled away, clearly not wanting to let him out of her grasp, which seemed almost desperate. Her response made his next step more difficult.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said.

  He stepped into the bathroom, quickly put on the same clothes he had been wearing all day, stepped into his mocs, flushed the toilet, and let himself out of the bathroom.

  Then he darted out of the hotel room. He jogged quickly to the stairwell, jumped in, and circled fourteen flights to the ground floor. He dashed into the lobby, out the front door, and began jogging toward the nearest metro stop. Mahegan saw that it was closed and kept running.

  He jogged beneath I-395, passed the Air Force Memorial that looked like three giant spikes curling into the air and then found an asphalt path. Hooking onto the jogging trail, he ran parallel to Highway 110. To his left were the white headstones, standing erect like soldiers in formation. He was separated from the expansive Arlington cemetery grounds by a small three-foot-high stone wall.

  He moved toward the southeast portion of the cemetery and jumped the wall when he was near Section 60 where the Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans were buried. He was certain that the cemetery was under constant surveillance, but if he moved swiftly, though, he could do what he needed to do. He did the math in his head. Colgate was killed a year ago. Since then there had been about 150 servicemen and women killed in those wars. Mahegan figured about two thirds would be buried in Section 60, which would mean 100, while another third were probably buried near their hometowns. As he studied the rows of headstones, there seemed to be about 100 across, so he went to the second row back from the first incomplete row.

  Seventeen headstones toward the middle he found:

  Wesley K. Colgate

  As he knelt, his mind spun. Kneeling before Colgate’s headstone, the memory came rushing back at him like an arrow shot into his chest.

  They were jumping with Army Rangers on static lines at 500 feet above the Iranian countryside and he was poised against the inside door of the Talon, the new J-Model plane with four feathered propellers and turbine engines. His stick buddy, the jumper next to him, was Sergeant Colgate standing directly in front of him as they held their yellow static lines above their arms. Mahegan was the primary jumpmaster, so he was looking at Colgate, his best friend, who was the number-one jumper on the left door of the MC-130 Combat Talon. Twenty-nine camouflaged Rangers were standing behind Colgate, also holding their static lines above their left arms.

  Mahegan gave Colgate a half smile as if to say, here we go again, bro, and barked his commands alerting the jumpers to stand up, hook up, check equipment, and sound off for equipment check. He got the, “All okay, jumpmaster!” from Colgate, who pointed at him with an outstretched hand, his smirk showing white teeth offsetting his black face.

  Mahegan looked away from Colgate as the Air Force loadmaster opened the door to the Talon with a loud whooshing sound now that the 140-knot slipstream was rushing into the airplane. Mahegan turned to a Ranger paratrooper who was strapped into a countersunk D-ring on the floor of the aircraft wearing a monkey harness and parachute. He shouted, “Safety! Control my static line!” The safety grabbed the yellow nylon cord running from Mahegan’s parachute to the snap link hooked onto the outboard anchor line cable consisting of one half-inch twisted steel that could hold thirty-two jumpers. Mahegan kicked at the two down-locks that held the jump platform in place. He put a heel on each edge of the outer platform and used his large hands to grip the rails inside the aircraft as he leaned into the 140-knot slipstream that was trying to suck him out of the aircraft. As he held on to the frame of the aircraft, Mahegan was now an inverted cee bowing into the powerful current of air riding along the slick exterior of the aircraft. His face whipped into deformed shapes as the wind pushed against his exposed skin. His rucksack full of ammunition, water, and medical supplies was rigged in front of his legs and was the biggest threat to his stability. Mahegan was powerful and his arms were near hydraulic, locked on to the frame of the aircraft.

  He looked to the rear. The other aircraft was blacked out and there was no moon so he barely saw the silhouette of the second Talon. It was slightly higher than them, which was good. He looked to the front and saw a group of lights about two miles to the aircraft’s ten o’clock, near the Iraq border, Mahegan figured. He calculated that they were on course. They should be. The MC-130 pilots were the best in the business.

  The Delta credo was to blend in with whomever they were fighting. If they were working with a bunch of Afghans, then they wore local garb. If they were working with Rangers, they wore Army combat uniforms and Ranger scrolls on their sleeves, as Mahegan, Colgate, Patch, and the rest of his team were wearing tonight.

  Mahegan pulled himself back into the aircraft and turned to his assistant jumpmaster, a Ranger who gave him a nod, indicating he agreed they were on track. Mahegan tightened his grip again as he leaned back into the night. Looking forward he saw the grouping of lights now off to their nine o’clock, which was the one-minute signal. He p
ulled himself back in and held up his right index finger. He heard the entire airplane of sixty-four Rangers and Delta operators echo, “One minute!”

  He leaned back outside of the aircraft and spied the faint reflection of a mountain lake. The thirty-second mark.

  Pulling back in, he held up his thumb and forefinger, as if to indicate a small amount. Thirty seconds.

  He heard the paratroopers echo, “Thirty seconds!”

  And that’s when it all went to shit.

  Mahegan leaned out for his final door check to make sure the second aircraft was higher than theirs so when the green light came on the Talon wouldn’t chop up their parachutes with those new propellers. As he was about to spin back in and give the thumbs-up to his assistant jumpmaster and say, “Stand by!” he saw a rocket glowing and smoking its way from the ground toward the trail aircraft. They were close to the drop zone, which was a suspected manufacturing site of copper plates, electrical components for bombs, and possibly a nuclear facility as well. Their mission was to jump 130 Rangers and Delta operators onto the facility and go through it with a fine-tooth comb . . . and M240B machine guns.

  But now Mahegan must act on instinct. He whirled inside the aircraft when he saw the chaff of his plane’s aircraft survivability equipment escaping into the air, smoking hot white flakes of metal corkscrewing behind the aircraft, to trick the missile’s heat-seeking guidance system. They couldn’t jump into that.

  Mahegan grabbed the loadmaster and screamed, “Tell them to turn that shit off! We’re jumping now!” He watched the loadmaster bark into the microphone on his crewman’s helmet and a moment later the chaff stopped.

  Mahegan stepped into the door, turned to his stick of jumpers, and yelled, “Follow me!” He was out of the back end of the MC-130 and bunched into a tight ball holding on to his reserve parachute that was snapped onto his parachute harness across his abdomen, one hand covering the ripcord grip so that it wouldn’t get pulled free by the slipstream. He was buffeted about by the airfoil from the Talon and by the time his parachute fully inflated, he felt like his testicles were cinched up into his throat. Mahegan knew the pilot was going over the 140-knot drop speed to evade the missiles just by the ferocity of his opening shock. He saw good silk above and as he spun, he saw Colgate coming down about fifty meters away. Bullets laced with burning green tracers were whipping through the sky like a fireworks display. Mahegan registered that for every tracer he saw there were four other machine gun rounds. The Talons were still powering through the drop zone at 500 feet above the mountains of northern Iran along the Iraqi border.

  The ground grabbed Mahegan and he rolled, hating the T-10 parachute because it was just a round piece of nylon that he couldn’t steer. On the ground, completing the paratrooper’s first task, to land safely, he pulled his rucksack in, having decided not to lower it, given all of the machine gun fire. More protection. Quickly, his next task was to put his weapon into operation and Mahegan pulled his M-4 from the inside of his parachute harness waistband. He chambered a round, snapped his night-vision goggles on his helmet, and saw a group of enemy coming directly at him. His parachute risers were still attached to the canopy release assemblies. With the wind blowing away from him, he popped both of the release assemblies and his parachute sailed directly toward the shouting men with their AK-47s. He used the obscuration to roll just a few meters to his right. In a prone position, with his rucksack between his legs, he popped the lowering line and used his feet to push it back, all the while putting his infrared-aiming laser beam on the first combatant to emerge from the parachute. He fired five times, hitting every man coming toward him, but then there were more than he could count. They were like apparitions backlit by some kind of light, nothing but shadows coming at him, and he knew he was about to be surrounded. This was the paratrooper’s most vulnerable moment, the first couple of minutes on the ground before he could link up with a single buddy.

  Suddenly, he heard another weapon firing from behind him. “Mahegan, I’m here, man.”

  It was Colgate, who came rushing into the craziness with orange and green tracers whipping around like angry hornets.

  “Thanks, Half-mil,” Mahegan said using the nickname that only Colgate let him say. Colgate landed about five meters from him behind a rock. Their combined firepower bought them a couple of minutes, but Mahegan noticed three men flanking them from Colgate’s direction. Suddenly, they were on Colgate and Mahegan couldn’t get a clean shot. He was up with his knife and his pistol, moving into the fray. He shot one with the pistol and cut another, leaving Colgate with one, whom Colgate handled with a butt-stroke of his M-4. Mahegan put the knife in the man’s throat and they’d bought some more time.

  “Man, don’t ever lose that knife,” Colgate said about the time they noticed more enemy troops gathering on the crest of the ridge. Patch had jumped in with an M240B machine gun and suddenly it was singing as it pumped fifteen rounds every second into the gaggle of Iranians reacting to their vertical envelopment.

  Mahegan and Colgate threw their rucks on their backs and ran toward Patch about seventy-five meters away. Now there were three of them. Soon Pucino and a couple of Rangers linked up by calling out the password, “Buckeyes,” a name picked because the regimental commander was an Ohio State grad.

  Mahegan noticed that they had gathered about fifteen men now, everyone coming toward the safety of Patch’s machine gun.

  Mahegan said, “Okay, men, follow me.”

  Patch stopped shooting to bound forward with them when another machine gun picked up the pace from about a quarter mile away. The plan was coming together. Mahegan took his group up to a fence. They cut the wire, moved into the first building by kicking the door in, shot two armed guards, and checked fire on two scientists wearing white smocks.

  “Flex-cuff them,” Mahegan said and he was moving to the next building, which was a warehouse where they found thousands of copper discs that had been machine struck and milled by makeshift presses, like a coin press. Their products, though, were six-inch-diameter metal Frisbees that when shot from a PVC pipe turned into a molten fist that cut through tank armor. They’d hit the mother lode. Mahegan thought about all of the men and women who were missing limbs or were dead as a result of these munitions. He felt his emotions begin to gallop away from him like a herd of mustangs, but he kept them in check. He and Colgate moved into another room and, as he scanned with his flashlight secured on the rail of his M4 carbine, he said, “Look at this shit.”

  Colgate looked and they were staring at floor-to-ceiling boxes of MVX-90 multi-wave receiver transmitters made in the USA by MVX Entertainment, Inc. in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina’s Research Triangle. It said so directly on the boxes. Mahegan knew this technology because Delta got them fresh off the assembly line in their beta prototype state for enhanced frequency hopping to avoid enemy communications intercept.

  “Grab one,” Mahegan ordered. Colgate cut open a cardboard box that had a dozen MVX multi-wave receivers in smaller containers about the size of an Amazon book-shipping box.

  “Got it,” Colgate said. “Unbelievable. The acquisition guys told us the only people who had these were those who made them and tested them, and us.”

  “They lied,” Mahegan said. He signaled to Colgate before tossing a thermite grenade in the room, shouting, “Clear!” The explosion rang loudly in the warehouse, echoing throughout the valley.

  It was fifteen minutes before the helicopters would land at the soccer field about a quarter mile away. They had been on the objective an hour and Mahegan decided it was time to leave.

  The Ranger demolitions team rigged the warehouse for destruction, though Mahegan knew that without enough firepower, all the explosion would do was kick out hundreds of those copper plates that could be milled again and later used to hurt more Americans. He grabbed the Air Force tactical controller by the body armor the way a football coach grabbed the quarterback by the face mask and said, “Either get me one of those bigass daisy cutter bo
mbs or a bunch of Tomahawks from the squids. The moment we leave here, I want this place to melt.”

  The controller smiled and said, “How about both, sir?”

  “Whatever, but do it.” Within minutes, he got the thumbs-up from the Rangers that the demo was rigged and he checked one just to be sure. He saw a block of C-4, a well-seated blasting cap, and detonation cord, and nodded.

  He rallied his men and they moved out to the soccer field as the helicopters came blowing in. There was some residual enemy fire, but nothing significant. He called into the regimental commander that he had everyone and everything he was supposed to have and they lifted off, spitting dirt and rocks in all directions heading back toward a secure compound in Iraq, which this time, ironically, meant safety. Sitting on the edge of the Black Hawk helicopter, his legs dangling in the cool night air as the pilots sped toward the nearest US Army base, Mahegan saw the warehouse erupt in a ball of smoke and he felt the shock wave from the explosions. A few seconds later, a daisy cutter bomb, a fuel-air explosive and the closest thing to a nuke without being a nuke, incinerated the place, melting all those copper discs.

  Mahegan had the two scientists on his helicopter and he could see Patch, Pucino, and Colgate. They all locked eyes and he nodded as if to say, “We’ve done good, men.” It was all a soldier ever needed, to know that he’d done his job well.

  Suddenly his body ached with loss and mourning. Classic post-traumatic stress reaction, the doctors had told him. Like a magician’s trick, not there one moment, and then appearing somewhere unexpected the next.

  Together they had destroyed the primary copper disc–manufacturing warehouse of the Shia, who were supplied and funded by the Iranians. After their raid, the lethal, explosively formed penetrator attacks against the Coalition had dropped dramatically, and it was near miraculous that no Americans were killed and only a few wounded. Mahegan was most proud of the copper disc raid in Iran. Remembering the moment he’d been surrounded, Mahegan knew the mission would not have been casualty free and he would not be alive had Colgate not been there. Because an MVX-90 had ultimately led to Colgate’s death, the irony made for a bitter memory.