by Richard Fox
Glass broke from the windows on the second floor. Ritter looked over and saw M4 muzzles used to clear out the jagged glass still in the frames.
“Good shot! You hit the driver,” Morales said.
“I was aiming for the gunner,” Kilo said as he shrugged his shoulders.
One of the other two trucks slowed down next to one of the wounded insurgents. Black-clad figures jumped out and carried their motionless comrade to their waiting pickup. Machine gun fire from the squad’s SAW broke out from the floor below Ritter’s feet. Red tracer rounds zipped toward the approaching truck but missed. The truck was maybe six hundred yards from their position, a difficult shot with the SAW.
Kilo fired again. Ritter saw the air wake of the bullet as it traveled to the nearest truck. The truck’s front tire burst. The truck trundled off the road and crashed into a shallow ditch. The insurgent in the passenger seat pitched through the front glass and rolled to a stop ten yards from crash.
“Asshole wasn’t wearing his seat belt,” Morales said.
The shooters on the second floor fired sporadically. Ritter was grateful they weren’t wasting ammo by firing at targets they couldn’t hit.
“Kilo, how many rounds do you have left?” Ritter asked.
Kilo rolled onto his side and looked at the ammo rack attached to his armor. “Plenty, sir. I have ten more rounds on me, and Morales has another fifty in his assault pack.”
“Wait. What? Did you put them in the pack? I sure didn’t,” Morales said.
“I told you to do it before we got set for pickup—”
“Kilo!” Ritter yelled.
“Ten rounds, sir.”
“If they advance any farther beyond that truck in the ditch, pop ’em. Otherwise, save your ammo for later,” Ritter said. There was no movement from the truck in the ditch. Two of its passengers were running south. The third pickup retreated as well.
“Sir, medevac and extraction are inbound!” Channing yelled.
“Smoke. Who has the yellow smoke grenade?” Ritter asked. Morales pulled an olive-drab cylinder from his assault pack and handed it to Ritter.
“I bet you got chow in there, don’t you? Plenty of room for pogey bait but not bullets,” Kilo commented.
“Dude, shut up,” Morales replied.
Ritter ran to the north side of the roof and pulled the pin on the grenade. He hurled it as far as he could, hoping the helicopters would set down with the building between them and the hostile encampment to the south. Gray smoke rose from the grenade for a few seconds. Then a yellow-green smoke billowed from the canister. Satisfied, Ritter turned to Channing.
“Where’s Sergeant Young?” he asked.
Channing shook his head. “I can’t get them.”
“Don’t stop trying,” Ritter said.
Nesbitt looked over the room with the corpse one last time. The little house had a million places to hide anything of value, and the company standard was to look anyplace a thumb drive could be hidden. Sergeant Young had him go through with his fresh eyes.
“Nesbitt, I think we’re about to leave,” Thomas said to him from the doorway.
Nesbitt knelt beside the body and lifted it to its side. He figured there wasn’t any chance they’d ever come back here, so why not give hajji a little going-away present. He lowered the body so its weight was against the spoon of one of the grenade fuses, then pulled the pin. The spoon stayed in place. The fuse wouldn’t ignite the suicide belt unless someone flipped the body over. Satisfied with his booby trap, Nesbitt tossed the pin under the bed.
“Nesbitt!” Sergeant Young hollered for him.
Nesbitt left the building and saw a pair of helicopters in the distance.
They moved Shelton out of the building and set his stretcher against the outer wall of the house. Ritter and Porter knelt beside their fallen commander, who hadn’t regained consciousness since the explosion. Kovalenko and the rest of his men were lined up along the wall, waiting for the incoming helicopters. It took minutes to abandon the building—longer than it should have since their Saudi prisoner had decided not to cooperate. He’d struggled like an obstinate cat until two Soldiers carried him out.
The smoke grenade had burned out, but the helicopters were nearly there.
Ritter kept looking at the distant house, waiting for Sergeant Young to emerge. He hoped Young would get the idea that they were leaving as soon as he saw the inbound helicopters. He knew hope wasn’t a method, but he had little else to go on.
He looked east toward the trackless desert that stretched to the Red Sea. He squinted at a distant mountain range edging over the horizon.
“Wait a minute.” He stood up and stroked his face, pulling his mouth into an exaggerated frown with his fingers. There were no mountains west of the Euphrates, and mountains don’t move. The “mountains” was an approaching dust storm, a shamaal, a veritable wall of dust that would envelop them all in minutes.
Ritter looked to the sky and saw the approaching helicopters; they would land in the next minute. He looked to Sergeant Young’s position; still no sign of him. Ritter did the mental math for how long it would take Young to reach them, how long it would take for the storm to ground the helicopters. He couldn’t find any way for the plan to work. There was no way he could get everyone out in time.
The helicopter-blown dust drowned out his vision, and the whine of the engine was an impenetrable din. A taste of things to come, Ritter knew. The crew chiefs leaped out of their helicopters and opened their doors with enough speed to put a NASCAR pit crew to shame; the chiefs waved frantically at the waiting Soldiers.
Ritter pulled a three-by-five card from his pocket and wrote two words with a marker.
Sergeant Greely stood up; he was the first man in the line to embark, and the rest of the section would follow him to their helicopter. Ritter slapped a hand to his chest and shook his head. Greely took a half step forward, pushing against Ritter’s palm. Ritter pushed back and shook his head again. He pointed at the Saudi, then at Shelton, and then to the air ambulance, which was marked with a red cross on a white square. Ritter left Greely standing there, his face frozen in disbelief.
Ritter ran to the stretcher and grabbed the handles by Shelton’s head. Porter took the opposite end. Ritter and Porter carried Shelton to the air ambulance and helped slide his stretcher into the helicopter. Porter tried to climb in after Shelton, but Ritter grabbed him by the carry handle on the back of his armor and stymied his ascent. Porter jabbed his hand at Shelton, but Ritter shook his head. He showed the three-by-five card to the crew chief, who gave him a thumbs-up.
Kovalenko and another Soldier manhandled the Saudi onto the helicopter. The crew chief slammed the door shut without any further prompting. Ritter ran a few steps toward the house, raised his hand straight in the air, made a circular motion, then chopped his hand to his waist. The pilots obeyed the hand-and-arm signal for “take off” and took to the air moments later.
Porter found Ritter in the swirl of dust and grabbed his arms. Porter’s shouting was inaudible as he shook Ritter. The intelligence officer held up the card for Porter to read.
We Stay
Young watched the helicopters take off, his stomach sinking to his knees as they banked around and flew overhead. He waved his arms as he desperately tried to stop the only way back to their patrol base. Young, realizing he looked ridiculous in front of his men, let his arms fall to his sides. They’d left their target house a few minutes ago—which had proved to be a few minutes too late.
“Did they leave us out here?” Thomas asked.
“No, I see them at the other building,” Nesbitt said. “What the hell is that?”
Young saw the approaching shamaal, a leviathan heralded by the hiss of blowing sand. Young moved back to the front of his line of Soldiers, the three Iraqis stuck in the middle of the line. The woman wouldn’t let go of her son, and the blind man had to be led by the hand. All three would keep their pace slow.
“Sandstorm. We don�
��t want to be in the open when it hits. Come on. We can make it if we hurry. Follow me,” Young said.
From the rooftop Ritter and Kovalenko watched Young’s painfully slow progress.
“Are they going to make it?” the lieutenant asked.
The dust storm hung in the sky, a sheer cliff of churning brown and tan. Ritter had to crane his neck to see the top; it was that close and that high. A half-mile-high nebula of darkness.
“No, they won’t,” he said.
Young stopped as the dust storm enveloped their destination. Wind howled around them, and sunlight dimmed to almost nothing as the storm came for them. Young turned and put his hands to his mouth as a poor man’s megaphone.
“Hold on to the man in front of you! Do not let go! If you get separated, stop where you are and wait for the storm to pass! Keep your face covered!” Young pulled his goggles over his eyes and pulled his undershirt over his nose and mouth. He turned around, and the man behind him grabbed his carry handle.
The blanket of sand stretched from one edge of the horizon to the other. As the forward edge passed above them, Young swore he should feel some sort of weight as the sand pressed down upon them. Wind howled past them as sand whipped around him. Seconds later, the sun was nothing more than a memory.
Darkness. He was in an abyss with no frame of reference other than where his feet touched the ground. At least he could feel the earth when he looked down to where a scouring fog of sand obscured his boots. If they tried to move forward, they’d end up going in circles. Moving beyond arm’s distance from the person to his front or rear would isolate him instantly.
If they didn’t move, Young knew, the blowing sand would eat away at their noses and lungs. During his first tour with Shelton and Ritter, a dust storm had hit their base outside Najaf. They didn’t see the sun for three days, and Young and his men didn’t have the water to survive that long in the open.
Young, along with the men and civilians in his charge, were between Scylla and Charybdis.
Despair crept into his heart. For all his training and experience as a noncommissioned officer, he was helpless. He took a step backward and reached for the man behind him. He kept his hand on the man’s shoulder as he turned around. He didn’t know what to say or what to do, but he had to do something.
Young leaned in to speak when the Soldier froze. He pointed behind Young and jumped up and down in place. Young spun around to investigate. What on earth could he see in this soup?
A single light shone in the distance, a beacon of hope and survival. If Young kept his bearings, then that light was right where he’d last seen his fellow Soldiers. The light blinked on and off intermittently. It wasn’t fading in and out from the sand; someone was either blocking the light or turning it on and off. If it was Morse code, then the pulses sent A-G-O-N-D-R-A. That was it: dragon.
Young took a tentative step toward the light, waiting for the tug to travel back to the end of the file. A push from behind told him they were ready to move. He took another step.
Thomas stepped into the farmhouse, the last member of Young’s squad to make it inside. The first person he saw was Captain Ritter. The room was poorly lit by a pair of flashlights. Dust hung heavily in the air as the storm carried more sand down the stairs.
“You’re the last one?” Ritter asked.
“Roger, sir,” he said. Thomas slapped at the dirt and grime caking his uniform.
“Turn off the lights. We don’t want anyone else to follow it here,” Ritter said to Sergeant Greely.
“Sir, how’d you do that? The lighthouse trick?” Thomas asked the captain.
“We grabbed almost every flashlight we had and turned them on. Before we lost sight of you, I had Kovalenko put his weapon on the floor, then point it toward you. That’s how we aimed the light,” Ritter said.
Thomas wanted to compliment the officer’s quick thinking but knew he’d already get accused of ass-kissing. He decided a thank-you would work, but before he could say something, he smelled something terrible.
“Ah Jesus, who is that?” Sergeant Young asked as he waved his hand in front of his face. “Who the hell thinks this is a good time to bust ass like that? I swear to—wait. Nesbitt?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” came a sad-sack response from the darkness.
All of Young’s anger evaporated. “Nesbitt, did you mess yourself again?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Nesbitt said.
“Soldier, I counseled you about this. You are to relieve yourself before every mission. What happened?” Young honed in on the smell and got as close to Nesbitt as he dared.
“I didn’t have time! Captain Shelton said we were leaving in ten minutes, and I barely had enough time to get my shit on. Then we were stuck out in that sandstorm and—”
“Stop. There’s a bathroom over in that corner. Get in there and clean yourself up,” Young said. Nesbitt sobbed quietly. “Nesbitt, I shit my pants the first time I got shot at. It is a perfectly natural reaction to life-and-death situations. Your body takes the energy it uses to hold waste and puts it toward fighting. Nothing to be ashamed of, understand?” Nesbitt’s helmet bobbed in the darkness.
“Go clean yourself up.”
Ritter used his green LED light find the bedroom where the civilians were tucked away. He nodded to the guard outside the room, Sergeant Greely, as he slipped past him. The woman and her son were on a mattress on the floor. The boy dug his head into his mother’s chest as Ritter sat down on the other side of the room. The woman took a flashlight from the boy and turned it toward the ceiling, brightening the room ever so slightly.
The old man sat against the wall, his fogged-over eyes indifferent to the darkness.
“I’m sorry if we frightened your son,” Ritter said. He kept his head low, his face lost in shadow.
“He is young. He may forget it all after a few years,” the woman said.
“You don’t sound Iraqi,” Ritter observed.
“Neither do you.”
“My name is Captain John Arbuckle. Who are you?” If this woman had heard his true name before, like the Saudi financier had, he might not get much more out of her. He’d removed the name tape from his armor before he came in, and whatever name he gave her didn’t matter, so long as it wasn’t the truth.
“I’m Fatima. My husband took us from Syria months ago, along with his father.” She tilted her head toward the old man. “He wanted jihad, and my family would have forced me to divorce him if he went through with it. So he sold off everything he could and snuck us all across the border.” She trailed off and squeezed her son closer to her chest. “He was my husband and the father of my son. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t say no.”
“Was?”
She smirked. “You Americans killed him a week after we arrived in this worthless, little village. I should blame Mukhtar for his death. My husband was no fighter. He believed he would have months of training, and it would turn him into your Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, he had an afternoon to learn how to shoot a rifle. Then Mukhtar sent him to fight.”
In the shadows Ritter thought the woman looked like Badia, his first love. Badia, dead at age twenty-one from a drone strike Ritter had set in motion. Both women were victims of their husbands’ ambitions and of the Arab culture that kept women shackled to their husbands. Badia’s death kept him awake too many nights as he struggled with the “ifs” of her life. If he’d proposed sooner…If he’d followed her to Saudi Arabia and stopped the wedding to Mukhtar…If he’d known she was in that car before Shannon blew it to hell…There were so many ways she could have been saved, but not one of them had come true.
“I thought al-Qaeda would send me back to Syria after that, but they kept us here. They said the Koran and the Hadith demand a woman have a husband. So, they decided that all of al-Qaeda would be my husband. I had no money, no way to escape. I was the ‘wife’ for any of Mukhtar’s men who came to the door.” Her flat voice betrayed no emotion as she spoke. Ritter had fought al-Qaeda acr
oss the Middle East and southern Asia, and he thought he’d seen every vile thing the terrorists were capable of. Keeping a war widow as a sex slave was one of the more heinous acts he’d ever faced.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” Ritter said, “but I can help you.”
“Oh, can you?” she said, her voice was without hope or belief.
“I have two options for you. The first: all of you leave with me, and I drop you off at the prison at Baghdad Airport. The American government will take its sweet time draining you of every bit of information from your time with al-Qaeda. I don’t know what will happen to your son or his grandfather, but they might go back to Syria, without you.” Ritter let that sink in as the woman stroked her son’s hair.
“If the army knew about you, that would be the only course of action. Lucky for us, they don’t know about you. So, I have a question for you. Can you drive a car?”
The woman stuttered for a moment. “Can I drive a car? Do you think I’m some spoiled Saudi princess, some sort of cow that can’t leave the house without a male escort? Yes, I can drive a car.”
Ritter grabbed the Saudi’s briefcase from the other side of the door and popped it open. He grabbed something from inside and closed the briefcase. He leaned toward Fatima and held out three things in front of her in one hand: a stack of American dollars, a stack of Iraqi dinar, and a set of car keys jingling from his fingers.
“The other option is that you answer questions to my satisfaction, and I give you all this. When I leave, you take the car in the courtyard and drive back to Syria.” Ritter heard her voice catch. “Do we have a bargain?”
She tapped her breast. “I have all our passports hidden under my clothes. What do you want to know?”
For once in this war, Ritter felt good about what he was doing. “Where are the Soldiers Mukhtar kidnapped? Did anyone ever brag about the attack?”