Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  Twenty minutes later, Jack began digging in, building a hide for the day. He checked his range. Eight hundred seventy-two meters. That would work.

  “I’ll keep watch from here,” he told himself. “When the bastards leave to go blow up some shit, I’ll slip in and steal some food and fill my bottles with water. Haditha Dam can’t be far from here if I just keep pressing northeast.”

  —

  All around the outside of the house where Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser made his headquarters, gunmen squatted, eating breakfast and drinking tea. Inside, the girls hurried getting food to all the men who still waited for their morning meals.

  “Why do you just sit here and stuff your faces? We must find this devil before he escapes us!” Abu Omar bellowed, storming through the house and outside in the hard-baked dirt dooryard. Surrounding them, a fleet of rusted and filthy Toyota and Nissan compact pickup trucks waited with pipe racks on the beds, some bristling with machine guns, with belts of ammo draped from them.

  Yasir al-Bayati, Abu Omar’s aide-de-camp and general gofer, hurried behind the Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah chieftain, carrying the old graybeard’s satchel and rifle.

  “They will be finished soon enough, master. Many have not yet eaten,” Yasir reminded him, both men speaking the native Arabic of their Sunni faith. “We will get that dog today, without fail. It is God’s will!”

  The graybeard looked back at his most trusted servant and cracked a hint of a smile. “I know that. But they must fear my impatience or we waste our entire day here. We must scour the land for this filth, Valentine. What a prize he will be! Removing his head while the world watches us will bring our jihad great fame. It will put fear in the hearts of all who oppose us.”

  “Oh yes, master!” Yasir said, bowing and scraping. “God’s will be done! God is great! God is great!”

  Today, Omar wore his Russian Makarov nine-millimeter pistol in a leather shoulder holster, not that he knew how to use the gun much less hit anything with it, unless he put the muzzle against some poor bastard’s head. But he thought he looked powerful wearing it, along with the Moorish-style sword with a ten-inch-long brass-leather-and-ivory-decorated handle, and a gleaming eighteen-inch-long curved chrome blade hanging on his belt. A gift for his birthday two weeks ago, he fancied cutting off Jack Valentine’s head with it.

  “The wadi to the south, I say,” Omar fumed, looking across the broad lands twenty miles west of Haditha, where he had made his headquarters these past weeks. “We keep looking to the north and the west, and this Ash’abah al-Anbar, that the men so fearfully call him, slips ever closer to his rescue. He still waits in the south, I tell you, near where we last saw him and his Marines.”

  “Oh, you’re right, master,” Yasir said, watching the men finish their food. “No one can survive these lands long on their own, not without knowing the ways of them. Surely not some American. He will sit where he is and wait to be found. Just as you say.”

  “That is right, Yasir,” Abu Omar said, and glared at his men. “Someone is helping him, or we would have found him by now. We must go house to house, everywhere he could have gone. As long as we see the Americans still searching, we know he is among us. Somewhere.”

  “We will find him!” Yasir said. “It is God’s will. I know it is God’s will.”

  “Perhaps.” Omar nodded, looking west to the open desert. “Certainly, Allah wants nothing to do with this son of a pig.”

  Suddenly, the old graybeard heard the rushing sounds of screaming jets overhead, and both men ducked for cover inside the doorway. Seconds later, the earth shook with bombs striking targets.

  “As we increase numbers, hiding from the American planes grows most difficult,” Yasir said.

  “Let them bomb!” Omar said, defiance raising his voice. “Our numbers will increase nonetheless, and we will not fail in our jihad! Yasir, that truly is God’s will! Allahu Akbar!”

  “Allahu Akbar!” Yasir echoed.

  —

  Cotton Martin finished his breakfast early and took a seat in the blockhouse atop the hard, high wall that surrounded the camp at Haditha Dam, where Delta Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines held the ground. Craig Ironhead Heyward and Bobby the Snake Durant sat with him.

  Heyward from Dallas and Snake from Lawton, Oklahoma, both men loved the NFL Cowboys. They talked up the greatness of Coach Bill Parcells but missed Jimmy Johnson, and proffered how former New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe was yet another waste of time in a long list of wastes since Troy Aikman left the team, although last season the pokes managed nine wins above seven losses. Both Marines liked the Cowboys’ new acquisition, controversial tight end, Terrell Owens.

  “The man’s got a mouth,” Ironhead told Bobby the Snake, “but he backs up his trash.”

  “That he does,” Snake agreed.

  They both wondered about the undrafted free-agent backup quarterback, Tony Romo, whom the team picked up three seasons ago from Eastern Illinois University, and all they had done with him so far was sit his young ass on the bench.

  “Six-two and two-thirty, he’s got the body to be a great quarterback,” Bobby Durant said. “I seen him in the preseason last year, and I like how he can scramble. Dude’s got an arm, too.”

  “But where the hell is Eastern Illinois University?” Craig Heyward sang back. “Totally unheard-of nondrafted dude, how did he not get anybody’s attention if he’s any good? I didn’t even know Eastern Illinois University existed, much less had a football team.”

  “Guy’s like Tony Romo come out of nowhere and become great,” Snake said. “Don’t judge him until there’s something to judge.”

  “You got to figure that if Bill Parcells has kept Tony Romo around this season, he sees something worth having,” Cotton Martin broke into the conversation. He, too, liked the Dallas Cowboys, and the Denver Broncos. A two-hat man. His American Football Conference team, the Broncos, and his National Conference team, the Cowboys.

  “Fuckin’ A, dude,” Ironhead said, a total Cowboy hard-core devotee. “Coach Parcells is the best since Tom Landry, and nobody will ever be as great as Tom Landry.”

  All three Marines nodded reverently at the mention of the late Coach Landry’s name. It was like speaking of Jesus.

  “Now, if we could just find a way to fire Jerry Jones.” Cotton laughed. Ironhead and Snake laughed, too, and nodded yes. Nobody liked the Dallas Cowboys owner. The man who had unceremoniously fired Tom Landry.

  “God bless Tom Landry,” Snake said.

  “May he rest in peace,” Ironhead added.

  Then the three Marines got quiet and looked out of the blockhouse atop the high, hard wall, again searching the morning horizons for any sign of Jack Valentine.

  With the gunny missing and the enemy alerted to his status thanks to CNN, Staff Sergeant Martin had moved the entire detachment of MARSOC Marines, including the armorers, to the lake area north of Haditha. Every man mattered now.

  With one-five calling off the sweep operation, more or less falling back to Fort Apache and hunting renegades in the daylight on patrols that took no real-estate ownership but just hunted bad guys, he saw no further advantage in deploying the special operators among the battalion. Colonel Roberts agreed, and even sent two additional rifle platoons to Haditha Dam with Martin and the boys as reinforcements to support Company D overwatching the top end of AO Denver.

  Martin planned to run multiple long-range patrols out to the west day and night, searching for Gunny Valentine. Captain Charlie Crenshaw, Delta Company, Fifth Marines commander, at Alvin Barkley’s behest, assigned the first sergeant and fifty Marines to support the MARSOC detachment’s efforts to find their missing man.

  Speedy Espinoza had at first decided to send Hacksaw, Kermit, and Habu back to Baghdad, since the purpose for their augmenting his CIA staff had all but disappeared in Hit. Because they remained under contract with the
CIA, he thought that Chris Gray might put the oddballs to work at their Camp Liberty complex, where their other assortment of off-center characters stayed away from the stiff collars that worked at the Baghdad embassy offices.

  However, Walter Gillespie had different ideas. He had gone to Black Bart Roberts and given the man a good master-sergeant-to-lieutenant-colonel talking-to. Since his FBI cover was no longer viable with the Malone-Leyva intelligence mission, he had already called Jason Kendrick in DC and gotten his release from undercover duty, except as far as backup for Liberty Cruz and her team was concerned. Kendrick told Hacksaw that simply as Marines, he needed to uphold that side of the deal. No argument from Hacksaw but total agreement.

  So when Hacksaw approached Speedy Espinoza with the idea of going up to Haditha Dam and pitching in on the search for his buddy, Jack Valentine, the CIA agent not only agreed but packed his trash, too. When he called Chris Gray to let him know the plan, Speedy learned that Elmore Snow and Staff Sergeant Billy Claybaugh had already departed for Haditha Dam and would welcome the crew there with open arms.

  “Shit,” Gillespie crowed. “Old Hammer will feel plumb left out of such a grand reunion of great Marines. Why, with our talent manning the ramparts, we’ll have young Master Valentine home in no time.”

  “We may have to sleep in the ditch,” Speedy said. “I talked to Captain Crenshaw, said we were coming, and he told me we’d better bring cots. He’s fresh out, as well as a place to park them.”

  “Me, Kermit Alexander, and Cory Webster slept most of our Marine Corps careers down some hole filled with shit anyway,” Hacksaw said, smiling with his impressive gold grill at the former Marine major and Prowler pilot turned CIA spook.

  “Just saying, accommodations might be sparse.” Espinoza shrugged. It didn’t bother him much, either. He’d endured much worse, too. But it didn’t make him like it any better.

  “I don’t plan on laying boots up in the barracks no ways,” Gillespie said. “We’re up there huntin’ our boy Jack Valentine. Number one priority, Bubba. Get him out alive.”

  —

  Morning sun and gentle breezes lifted Giti Sadiq’s spirits as she finished hanging blankets on the clotheslines that stood between the back of the house on the Anbar desert where Abu Omar made his headquarters and the adjacent barns where they kept an ample supply of chickens and goats for milk, eggs, and meat. Today, all the men had gone hunting this Ghost of Anbar right after breakfast, led by the old graybeard himself. Now she sang freedom songs from her heart, loud and happy.

  A few steps away, Miriam and Amira had already shucked off their clothes and thrown them in the wash pot filled with soapy water that heated over a hot hardwood fire they had built in the backyard right after breakfast. They chased each other in the sunshine and open world, naked, laughing like children at play. Washday baths. No men. A blessing from God.

  Sabeen, the Shia girl from Syria, wrapped her shawl around herself as she took off her clothes and put them in the great black boiling cauldron. Chubby all of her life, ashamed of her fat, she hid her nakedness. The rolls on her belly, her large breasts, the fat around her buttocks, thighs, and ankles made her feel ugly, undesirable. Outcast.

  The last blanket draped over the rope line carried out a twofold purpose: airing out the bedding of the al-Sunnah gunmen who lived at the ancient desert water stop with their general, and giving the girls a sense of privacy, should their watchdog, Yasir al-Bayati, return unannounced from his so-called hunting.

  He had claimed to see a fabled white oryx, a rare and endangered animal, legendary in folklore, that once thrived across the Arabian deserts and Persia, and at one point not long ago had been declared extinct by world wildlife conservationists. No one had yet sighted the Arabian oryx in Iraq since their return from extinction to the endangered list, but some people now said that they had seen them in Jordan.

  “Boosolah do not know borders. So why can’t they be here in Iraq, too?” Yasir had argued with the other men who teased him and said they had seen unicorns grazing in the desert, too. They scoffed at his tale of seeing the big buck with a harem of three doe. Yet the old goatherd stubbornly insisted that the animal had magnificent ebony horns that curved over his shoulders like great black scimitars, a full meter long.

  “You’re a fool,” the men had cackled at him. “Go back to the lovely goats that you use like a man does a wife.”

  The old Arab from Baiji, who had also known Giti’s father and never liked the man because he had wealth, and Yasir had nothing, left the men, disgusted. He would hunt the mystical great white oryx. He would kill it and bring it back to the house, where he would butcher it for them and feed it to these fools. Then they would surely respect him.

  Yasir had lived his entire life herding goats with his brothers on the open lands along the Tigris valley before the war. He joined Abu Omar’s Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah more out of emotion than common sense. His talents lay more with goats than fighting Americans.

  In Baiji, he had witnessed Omar beheading Giti’s father and brothers, and him shooting the mother and her baby girl in their heads. He was glad that the old graybeard had spared the pretty young girl, Giti, even as a slave. He felt bad for the Sadiq family, but they got what they deserved.

  Rather than respected as a warrior, Yasir found himself relegated to last car. A personal servant. When anything needed doing, Omar took the men and left Yasir to mind the girls and the herd of goats and the chickens.

  “I will show all of them, even Abu Omar,” Yasir said to himself that morning. He struck out to hunt the white oryx buck that he called Boosolah, just after the men had departed. Yasir told the girls not to tell anyone. Why should they? If they did, Abu Omar would punish them as well as Yasir. So the old Arab trusted them.

  He didn’t worry about leaving them alone here, either. Where could they go? If they tried to escape, they would surely die in the desert. And they knew that quite well. The remote headquarters on the Iraqi desert needed no walls to keep the girls from running away.

  The man, now late in his forties and never married, treated the girls well. He had no meanness in him, but he did like watching the pretty females. He felt strange comfort hearing Giti sing her songs of Jesus. Abu Omar ordered him to punish any of the girls if they ever mentioned their Savior, Jesus Christ. But he didn’t do it.

  Yasir never said anything. He let their Christian faith remain their business. As long as they kept up Muslim appearances, wearing their hijabs and shawls, covering their heads and necks in the presence of the men, all was well.

  “If we just lived and let live, we would have no war,” Yasir had thought. “What does it hurt to sing a song? It is only a song.”

  Giti stripped bare and threw her clothes in the steaming cauldron full of soapy water. Then she jumped in the giant galvanized tub, near the wash pot, that they had filled with hot water for their baths. Miriam and Amira still played chase, not caring that Giti got in the tub first, and Sabeen stood clutching her shawl, legs pressed tight together, shivering.

  “Too bad!” Giti sang out, giggling. “I get the clean water today.”

  Here in this bitter land, bathing was a luxury for the girls, rare and splendid in their lives of slavery. It refreshed their spirits as well as their bodies.

  Miriam and Amira grabbed small pots and began dipping water, pouring it over Giti’s naked body as she stood in the galvanized steel receptacle that would double to rinse the clothes after all four girls had bathed.

  “Is that a baby bump?” Amira asked, surprised, pointing at Giti’s growing belly.

  Giti looked back at her, and the fear on her face said enough to Amira to let it drop. Miriam had already known, and she dreaded the day that Abu Omar discovered that his sex toy carried his child. It was a death sentence.

  Doing her best not to think of her growing baby, trusting God to carry out His will, Giti smiled at Sabeen. The shy Syria
n girl stood shivering nearby, wrapped tight, watching the girls and dreading her turn to stand openly naked while the others poured water over her.

  “Come, get in with me!” Giti called to Sabeen, and extended her hand.

  “I am modest,” the Syrian girl replied, ready to cry.

  “You are our sister, Sabeen,” Giti told her. “We are the same. You just have more beauty than I do. Please, come. Get in the water, and we will wash away all your heartaches.”

  Miriam ran to the plump girl and gave her a hug. “Jesus loves you, Sabeen. Don’t you know? We love you, too!”

  “Jesus cannot love me, I am Muslim,” Sabeen said.

  “You are wrong,” Giti said. “Let Jesus fill your heart! All your sadness will fly away. Here, we will pray for you.”

  Giti, Miriam, and Amira joined hands around Sabeen, closing her in a circle, and began to pray:

  “Oh Father in Heaven, You are the great, loving God of all creation,” Giti said, and Sabeen lowered her head, too.

  “Lord Jesus, take the heart of Sabeen who does not yet know You but wants Your love,” Miriam added.

  Amira closed their prayers, “Take Sabeen into Your eternal embrace, Lord Jesus. Let her know that You are her Savior, too.”

  Then all three said, “In the Name of Christ Jesus our Lord, our Savior, and Your only begotten Son we pray to You, oh Father in Heaven, amen.”

  “My Savior, too?” Sabeen asked. “What must I do for Jesus to save me?”

  “Believe!” Giti laughed and embraced her.

  All four girls hugged, and Sabeen dropped her shawl, and stepped into the washtub, her chubbiness exposed to the world. Giti stood in the water with her.

  “God made you this way, just as He made us,” Giti said, taking a bowl and pouring water over Sabeen’s head, then over her own.

  Amira took the soap and a cloth and began washing the Syrian girl’s back, while Miriam washed Giti’s.