by Sean McFate
I turned and ran back to the Humvees. The sky was turning dark with sand as I yanked open the bulletproof door and leapt in beside Wildman, who had taken the wheel. We had half a minute, maybe less, before we’d be blind. I radioed the compass reading to the Kurds, and they started up the slope. They weren’t pulling us; Wildman was steering and giving our Humvee gas, but the winch line was short, and it was a lurching ride as the two vehicles fought each other.
“Keep her steady, cowboy,” I said.
The storm hit us ten meters from the top of the ridge, turning the air to sandpaper. We had to make it past the boulders while we could still see where they were. After that, it was open country. As long as we stayed relatively on line, and the sandstorm wasn’t too strong, we’d make it into Sinjar. We pushed forward as the world collapsed. The light was brightest in front of us, but the light was getting smaller as we drove toward it, the sand rising like the mouth of a million-toothed monster closing from all directions, trying to trap us inside.
“Hell yeah!” I yelled as we hit the top of the hill in a brownout, a hundred decibels of abrasion on the vehicle’s skin. If it had been a regular car we would have been airborne, but the Humvee lumbered over the crest like a beast, crushing rocks beneath it, and barreled down into the storm, the sand lashing our windows with a vicious scraping sound.
The Humvee wasn’t airtight. There was flying sand inside, and it hurt. I popped my desert goggles over my eyes, then rewrapped my black turban around the rest of my head. The other Humvee was no more than three meters in front of us, but we couldn’t see it at all. The biggest danger was ramming them from behind, and we almost did that three or four times, but without the tether, there was no way we’d stay together in the storm.
“You’re cut,” Boon yelled into my ear above the screaming wind. “Give me your arm.” He turned on the Humvee’s interior compartment light.
I looked down. I had a slice in my desert camo. Something in the storm, like a sharp rock, must have sliced me as I ran. Boon reached across the Hummer’s cramped interior and tore off the sleeve for access, then slathered a disinfectant inside. I could see the gash now, and I felt the pain.
“It’s going to need suturing,” Boon said.
“Now? You must be joking.”
“Afraid not,” he said, as he reached for his med kit. Boon had been a surgical medic in the Thai Special Forces, and he’d even graduated the U.S. Army Special Forces 18 Delta course at Fort Bragg. They took a few foreign soldiers each year from partner countries.
He placed a gauze pad over my gash. “Hold that,” he shouted as he pulled out a roll of hundred-mile-per-hour tape, known to civilians as duct tape.
“What are you doing?”
“Patching you up,” he said, winding the duct tape around my wound, hands oscillating with every bump we hit.
“Bugger!” Wildman yelled, skidding right as a structure reared up suddenly at our six. I didn’t remember any structures.
“What is going on, driver?”
“I believe we are in Sinjar, sir!” Wildman said in a mock British officer’s accent.
The storm had engulfed us so completely. Our headlights were on, but they weren’t helping. I couldn’t even gauge our speed, except that structures seemed to be rising from the brownout and whipping past us, far too close.
“Bugger,” Wildman yelled again, as he clipped a building and sent the Humvee lurching onto two wheels. He hit the ground with a thud, the winch jerking us forward like a water skier at the end of the line, almost smashing me into the windshield.
The storm was clearing. I could see the rear lights of the Kurd’s Humvee, weaving in front of us at the end of the tether. They were speeding up and starting to whip us from side to side.
“Take it slow,” I yelled into the headset, but they were already rounding a corner too fast, flinging us into a building as Wildman battled for control. We scraped concrete, and the whole vehicle shuddered against the centrifugal force, but Wildman managed to straighten her out.
“Slow down,” I yelled into the headset again.
Two blocks on, blue patches started to emerge in the sky, and the wind began to die. I looked at my taped-together arm in the morning light, gave Boon a thumbs-up, and looked back just in time to see a one-story building with an open rolled metal door looming in front of us. We slammed inside at fifty kilometers an hour, Wildman and the Kurds pounding the brakes and fishtailing to a stop a meter from the back wall. Behind us, the barn doors slammed shut, plunging us into darkness.
It was suddenly quiet, except for the sawing of the wind outside. Then I heard the scurrying.
“What is this place?” Boon said. I heard a bullet being chambered and knew it was Wildman.
“Stay calm,” I said. I took off my goggles and licked the sand from my teeth. I flexed my arm. The tape was tight, but I could move it in a firefight.
The lights came up. We were in a small warehouse full of bedrolls, water, and other detritus of despair. About thirty people lined the walls, silently staring at us. I counted. Eight of the men were armed.
The older Kurd stepped out of his Humvee. For a moment, everyone waited, and then a man rushed him. They embraced. The old Kurd began to speak rapidly. Finally, he turned to us.
“It wasn’t safe in the Humvees outside,” he explained. “They would have marked us immediately, and it would have given this place away. There are . . . religious police. Spies and thugs. They are checking everywhere. I don’t know how much longer . . .” He stopped, looked at the man beside him, and gave him a hug.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Refugees,” the Kurd replied. “Kurds and Yazidis. They will be killed if ISIS finds them.”
“We have to help them,” Boon said.
My first thought was, No, we don’t. That isn’t our job.
But then I thought of something Boon had said to me, back in the African jungle. I couldn’t remember where or why, but I remembered his words. We’d been talking about Buddhism, I realized, but why?
Monks are judgment without action, Boon had said. Soldiers are action without judgment. A mercenary has the privilege and the burden of both.
As an army officer, I was trained to never question orders, no matter how questionable. A soldier’s ethics were never marked by the wars he fought in, only the way he fought them. But now I could pick and choose my missions. Mercenaries have to own their ethics, unlike soldiers. Many didn’t give a shit, but I did. Or was trying.
“We’ll see what happens,” I said, turning to Boon. “We’ll make this right, if we can. But right now, I have to take a shit, and then we have a job to do.”
It was my old standby. The job. I’m just doing a job. Instead of turning away from it, I turned to the old man. “Please tell me they have plumbing in here,” I said, but I already knew the answer from the way he was shaking his head.
Chapter 17
We followed a Yazidi child through the streets of Sinjar. Our weapons clinked under our Bedouin disguises as we climbed a wall, crawled through a hole, snuck through the ruins of a building, walked a rooftop. It was a child’s route to mischief, in more peaceful times. But these weren’t peaceful times.
ISIS had swept in, killing the men they encountered, without even the pretense of false conversions. Mass graves marked the center of the city. That was two weeks ago. The killings had moved to the smaller Yazidi villages around Mount Sinjar, leaving the city postapocalyptic. Garbage lined the streets and there was no power, since social services were dead. A burned-out car squatted in an alley; an old woman carried a bucket of water to whatever squalid corner she made home. We avoided her. We avoided the orphans huddled in filth, staring at us with a mixture of hope and disease. I’d been here before: Monrovia, Goma, Bangui, Juba, Gao, and a hundred other places whose names I had forgotten.
“You sure about this?” Wildman asked.
No, I wasn’t sure, but what choice did we have?
“The boy knows wher
e to go,” our Kurdish guide said, wheezing as he rolled over a wall.
“Be ready,” I whispered to Wildman, although I knew it wasn’t necessary. In territory like this, we were always ready.
“So, what did you trade for such a little guide?” I asked the Kurd, extending him a hand as we climbed through the remnants of a wrecked market.
He grunted, either from the physical exertion or my question. “I said you will help them escape,” he said.
Is that all? I thought, keeping my eyes on the lookout for the ISIS religious police.
We stopped at an intersection, where a homeless man staggered in an advanced state of disrepair, a target of opportunity for the self-righteous. A block farther, a mother was wrapped around two small children in a doorway, but after that it was eight blocks of shuttered buildings and rutting dogs.
The boy stopped and pointed to a local business; it had no sign out front, but the light blue ceramic tile around the door was unmistakable in a town of earth tones. This was the meeting spot given to us by the man in Mosul. A Saudi. An ISIS informant. The Yazidi boy was a safe bet, by comparison.
“Wildman, stay out of sight and guard our six. Keep an eye on the kid. Boon and the old man, with me,” I said.
“Foocking ’ell, babysitting?” Wildman groaned. Children were like Wildman repellent, but I needed someone watching our backs, and Boon had a good instinct for people. Also, I’d learned the hard way never to trust children in war zones, because they are creatures of supreme survival. I knew Wildman would never be taken in by this boy’s charm.
“Flex-cuff the kid if you have to,” I semi-joked, and Wildman’s expression perked up. Boon shook his head.
“Ready?”
The old man nodded. We slipped around the corner, opened the door, and entered.
The business was a room, lit only by the sunlight through the door. There was a broken cooler for drinks on one wall, and an empty bin for bread. Four men sat on chairs to the right. I suspected they were armed, but no guns were visible. On the left was a counter and a display of cigarettes, also empty. Cigarettes were illegal in the Caliphate.
“Abu Nadel?” the old Kurd asked the man behind the counter, who looked up in shock. He had been talking rapidly on a mobile phone, but stopped when we entered. Now he looked us over, his eyes stopping at the rifle barrels peeking out from beneath our Bedouin robes. He said a few more words before hanging up.
“Abu Nadel?” I asked this time. It was clearly a code name. The man behind the counter clearly knew the code.
“You are from Mosul?” he asked in English.
“That’s me.”
His mouth dropped open. “How?”
He obviously knew we were coming—the ISIS informant, no doubt—but hadn’t expected us to get here so quickly, or maybe not at all. Good. I wanted him to understand the kind of men he was dealing with.
“You have an answer?” I said. If he’d talked with the man in Mosul, I had to assume he knew what I wanted.
Someone shifted behind me. Abu Nadel—or whatever his name was—glanced over my shoulder at his friends.
“Not yet,” he said. “Come back in an hour.”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
Instead of answering, I opened my black robe and put my hands on my hips, a few inches from the handles of my Berettas. If the men resisted, a two-hand draw with pistols would be faster in close quarters than swinging an assault rifle. Not that I wanted it that way. I didn’t come here to kill anyone. Did I?
Boon followed my lead, as the old man stepped back, out of the direct line of fire.
Abu Nadel didn’t flinch, but he didn’t bother to stare me down, either. He wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an address. “Two o’clock. Lunch. It’s the best I can do.”
It was. I was sure of it.
“Now you must go,” he urged, coming around the counter. “It isn’t safe with you here. Naboo,” he said (I might have missed the name), “take him to . . . wherever he needs to go.”
The old man looked at me, and I nodded. I’d gotten as much as I could expect. I let “Naboo” escort us a few blocks, knowing he was there to make sure we didn’t double back and scout the joint. Fine. That was Wildman’s job.
Five minutes later, the Welsh merc showed up at the appointed rendezvous without the kid. “Did you track them?” I asked.
Wildman shook his head. “Four men came out as soon as you left. They scattered like cockroaches. I picked the wrong one to follow.”
Damn. They were smart. They had to be, I suppose, to have survived this long.
“The kid?”
Wildman shrugged. “He was slowing me down.”
“No worries,” I said, feeling worried. “We have an address.”
Wildman spit into the dust. “Sounds like a stakeout.”
It was 0900, and already scalding. Iraq in August was an oven. “Let’s head back to the hideout and get some rack,” I said. “It’s five hours until our meet at 1400.”
A lot could happen in five hours. A lot could happen in a lot less time than that.
Chapter 18
Jase Campbell leaned back on the hood of his Viper and drank water from his canteen. Murphy, his second, was dipping Copenhagen and spitting over the side, looking for a varmint to hit. Campbell had been straight-edge since the age of seventeen. He didn’t drink alcohol or smoke, avoided over-the-counter drugs, and didn’t touch coffee. If he needed a quick pick-me-up, he chugged a Red Bull or a Rip It energy drink. But he preferred action to sugar, caffeine, and artificial color.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“I agree,” Murphy replied.
They had been watching the road into Mosul since first light, with both their binos and their unarmed spy drone. Campbell thought of the drone along the same lines as energy drinks: nice enhancement, but no substitute for the real thing. Technology would never replace human judgment or instinct.
An hour ago, the traffic was light. Now the road was jammed with cars, and security was heavy. Vehicles were being stopped and searched at a checkpoint. Sizable groups of militants were congregating near a large mosque, where they figured the United States wouldn’t bomb. His instincts said something was happening; ISIS was paying attention. Campbell hadn’t fought ISIS, but he’d fought plenty of other Arab militias. They never paid attention. He’d have to rethink his strategy.
“Something’s coming from the west,” Campbell said. “ISIS is watching. If our boy made it this far, we could be fuzucked.”
“You think he’s the reason for the roundup?”
“Doubt it. I think something’s going on. I think if the SOB is coming this way, it’s because of this shitstorm, not the reason for it.”
“Probably,” Murphy said. Jase Campbell had strong opinions. The kind that gave a man the confidence to lead eleven human beings into the line of fire, or to get a python tattooed around his neck like a tourniquet. But he had good instincts, and he never risked a life unnecessarily. Murphy knew it was best to keep his opinions to himself and trust his leader. Unless it was important.
Campbell was playing with his knife, tossing it in the air and catching it different ways, always a bad sign. The boss didn’t like waiting on intel from the boys back at Apollo HQ in Falls Church, Virginia. Murphy knew exactly what his CO was thinking: We’re the hammer, goddammit, find a nail.
The knife began to pick up velocity, until Campbell caught it with finality. “I say we head down the road, raise some ruckus, see what we can stir up. That way, we’ll meet the SOB on our terms.”
Murphy spat. He figured he knew what was coming.
“I’m done standing around here with our dicks in our hands,” Campbell said. “We’re wasting daylight.”
Murphy spat one more time, then rolled off the Viper to his feet. He knew Jase Campbell. He knew how much the man loved this region. Not like one of the residents, whose families had been here for centuries, but like someone
who had given the best years of his life to this patch of sand, and who died a little inside when he watched it go to shit after he was gone. That was why Jase was here, because Apollo Outcomes was his ticket back to the fight. And he was itching to get wet.
But he was no butter bar hothead. And no fool. Jase Campbell knew what he was doing, and Luke Murphy was going to follow him, no matter how inconvenient the man’s moods, or how unnerving his neck tattoo.
“Mount up,” he yelled to the team. “We’re moving out.”
Chapter 19
“Nothing,” I said, taking the binoculars from my eyes.
We were on the roof of a building down the block from the address Abu Nadel had given me for the lunch meeting. It had only one entrance and one window, covered by a closed wooden shutter. Nobody had gone into or out of the building in the past half hour, and we had only fifteen minutes to go before the meeting.
“Agreed,” Boon said. “It’s quiet.”
“Too quiet?”
He smiled. “That’s what they say in the movies.”
Boon and I had been making small talk since we got on this roof. It wasn’t mission protocol, perhaps, but it distracted us from the baking sun. Like all men in our business, we never talked about combat or childhood or anything personal like that. Those topics were dangerous. We only had two safe topics: the future and the opposite sex. I’d been avoiding the second, but it was eating at me and, eventually, curiosity kills cats.
“So how’d it happen?” I asked, without taking my eyes from the door down the block. He knew what I meant, but I knew he’d make me spell it out. “How did you and Kylah get together?”
Boon took a long time to answer. “Remember that night you passed out at the T-Top?”
Not particularly, but I guess that was the nature of my affliction. I’d been on a steady skid in those early weeks in Erbil, beating myself up over everything I had and hadn’t done. I guess that’s what happens when a man like me stops running and takes the time to think. That night, falling apart like that in public, had snapped me out of my slide.