Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  While the four naked girls celebrated their momentary freedom, Yasir al-Bayati walked heavy-footed to the animal sheds and dropped a dead wild goat he had shot. No white oryx today, but a mostly white buck goat with a brown stripe down his back and a black mask over his face and tail. He had black horns barely a foot long.

  “Wild goat tastes best,” he said, hanging the carcass with bailing wire in the rafters, letting its blood drain in the shade.

  When he first saw the animal, chewing on dry weeds, he thought it was the white oryx. Maybe his mind made it appear much bigger and with the long, curved black horns. So he shot. Then when he got to the dead animal, he cursed the goat’s life as well as his own miserable existence.

  “They will mock me now,” Yasir said as he walked to the water trough and washed his face. Then he heard the girls laughing. He looked toward the back of the house and saw the clotheslines draped with blankets, and smiled.

  Quietly, the old Arab crept to the blankets and pulled a gap between them. All four of the naked girls in open display immediately excited him to rigid hardness.

  He wanted to relieve himself as the girls washed each other, soap on their bodies, water sparkling on their skin. The fat one, Sabeen, caused him the greatest lust.

  Yasir breathed hard and rubbed himself as he looked at the girl, the nest of wet black hair hiding that place of greatest ecstasy for a man. A thing he had not known in more than ten years.

  Suddenly, a flash came over the man, and he stopped masturbating.

  “What filth!” he fumed, disgusted with himself, and rubbed his hand on his shirt.

  The vision that had come into his fantasy-filled mind was not having sex with the fat girl but of the men in their beds at night. Downstairs in the tunnels, hidden from light. They did things with each other that left Yasir filled with self-loathing.

  One night, he had allowed one of the young boys to get in his bed, and he took Yasir in his mouth. It had felt so good, and he ejaculated stronger than ever in his life.

  A few days later, one of the other men cut the young boy’s throat. They tossed his body in the garbage with the dead girl. As a homosexual, doomed to hell, he deserved no respect, not from the self-righteous Muslim men, nor would he receive any mercy from Allah.

  Yasir looked again, and knew he could not end the day without relief, so he threw open the blankets and walked straight at the girls.

  “Whores!” he shouted at them, his member still rigid and showing.

  Four screaming girls suddenly huddled around each other, covering their breasts and crotches with their hands, crying. Giti ran to the wash pot and used the stirring stick to pull out clothes. It didn’t matter whose or what, as long as the soaking-wet garments covered them.

  She threw the steaming-hot white-cotton slips at her three sister slaves, and lastly took something for herself.

  Rather than putting on the items, the terrified girls wrapped themselves with the wet underclothing, the hot water scalding their skin.

  “You! Fat one!” Yasir said to Sabeen. “Come to me.”

  “What will you do with her, Yasir?” Giti pled.

  “That is none of your business,” the Arab goatherd retorted. “Best you and the others get dressed and forget everything about this today.”

  Giti ran to him, took him by the arm. “Please! Yasir. Master. Take me instead. You can kill me and I will be happy. Do not take Sabeen. She is innocent.”

  “She is a whore! All of the men have had her, coming back from Syria. Except me. Now I will have her, too,” Yasir argued. Then he looked at Giti. The white wet cotton slip did not hide her breasts, her dark nipples, or the black hair covering her crotch. It made her nakedness look more lustful to him, hidden but not really hidden.

  Sabeen looked at Giti. “No. Please. I will go with Yasir and give him what he needs. I am hardly innocent. As he said, I am a whore.”

  “Not in God’s eyes!” Giti said, and began to cry. She feared that the Arab would take his pleasure with the girl, then kill her, out of his own fear of what Abu Omar might do to him if he learned of this breach of trust. Sabeen did not yet fully know Jesus, and Giti could not bear the idea of the girl’s dying before she found salvation.

  “Sabeen has no knowledge of lovemaking,” Giti pled, as Yasir pulled the fat girl toward the barns. He snatched a blanket off the lines to use as a bed.

  “I will teach her!” he muttered.

  “You will have to kill all of us then!” Giti exclaimed, and the old Arab stopped.

  “Why?” he said. Then he, too, realized that if he raped Sabeen, he would have to kill all the witnesses of his crime against his master.

  “Take me,” Giti said. “Let her go. We promise to say nothing to Abu Omar. You will not be raping me, but enjoying the pleasures that I freely give to you of my own accord.”

  “I can give him the same pleasure,” Sabeen said, not wanting Giti to sacrifice for her.

  “No!” Giti scolded her.

  Then she came close to Sabeen, and whispered, “What if he leaves you with a baby? What will you do? What do you think Abu Omar will do?”

  Sabeen realized that Giti already had a baby in her, and once she showed enough, Abu Omar would throw her to the men, who would rape her and kill her and toss her lifeless body on the other dead, with the garbage in the ditch.

  “Please, Sabeen,” Giti said, and looked at Yasir.

  The old Arab suddenly felt ashamed and let her go.

  He looked at Giti and hated himself.

  “I am sorry,” Yasir said, hanging his head. “I heard your laughter and saw the blankets hanging on the line. I looked behind them and saw you naked. My lust overwhelmed me. I am a despicable wretch. May Allah have mercy on me.”

  “Yasir,” Giti said, and smiled at the shamed man. “I forgive you. God has forgiven you. Poor man, in so many ways you are a slave, too. Just like me, like Sabeen.”

  “I am truly sorry,” the sad man said. “I have never done anything so terrible in my life. I am ashamed.”

  “I will go with you, Yasir. If you need a woman’s attention,” Giti said. “My own choice. You need love, too.”

  “No,” he said. “I must atone. I must wash myself and pray that Allah shows mercy for my weakness. I also have a goat to butcher.”

  “You did not see the white oryx?” Giti asked him.

  “Only a goat,” he answered as he walked away, humbled, dejected.

  “You will find him one day, Yasir,” Giti said.

  “God willing,” the old Arab said.

  “You are a good man, Yasir,” Giti called to him, as he walked to the barn.

  “No,” Yasir said, not turning around. “But thank you for saying so.”

  —

  Jack Valentine had fallen asleep watching the house, waiting for the gunmen in the Toyota pickups to leave. When he awoke, he thought he had dozed off for only a moment. When he looked at the house, the trucks were gone. He checked his watch, after eleven o’clock. Exhaustion, lack of food, dehydration had taken a toll on him.

  The Marine’s tongue felt thick and so dry that he could hardly swallow. Not a drop of saliva in his mouth. Just sticky goo that clogged on his tongue and throat. Jack’s head throbbed from lack of water, his brain literally shrinking like a grape turning into a raisin.

  Lips? Forget about it. They had dried out yesterday, now they cracked yellow and bled.

  Gunny Valentine put his spotting scope up and studied the house for any sign of life. Nothing moved.

  “Oh, I could use a drink of water about now,” Jack said as he watched the place through the scope. He shifted the optics to the outbuildings, then behind them, behind the house, and back on the house. Nothing moved in the windows. Nothing moved around the house. The front door was closed. No vehicles were parked in the dooryard.

  “Wouldn’t i
t be wonderful if those guys have all gone, and nobody is home?” Jack said, and it hurt to smile, but his heart did lift.

  Still, Jack watched. Cautious as a wild animal.

  It took all of his willpower to wait a full hour, but after nothing moved, he began pulling himself with his elbows and toes in a low crawl.

  He had slipped out of his backpack and put it with his bolt-action rifle in a drag bag that he pulled behind himself. Jack had also taken off his helmet and put it in the bag, too, and wore his flop hat, which allowed him more freedom of vision and a lower profile.

  Before he had started, he took out his folding knife and cut a good assortment of camelthorns and weeds, festooning them on his drag bag and himself. His flop hat looked like a big clump of weeds as he pushed himself across the ground toward the house.

  Moving with discipline and precision, Jack used the better part of another hour to cover the half mile from his hide to the off side of the barns, farthest away from the house, and the place anyone would least notice him as he rose from his belly to a crouch.

  Squatting on his feet, Jack gathered his kit with his left arm, slung the Vigilance rifle on his right shoulder, drew his Lippard .45, and ran to the front door.

  Then, standing to one side of the doorway, he quietly lifted pressure on the latch. It wasn’t locked.

  So, the gunny took a breath, lifted the latch once more, and pushed the door open from the side. Then he peeked around the jamb and saw an array of bedding rolled and stacked against the wall in the front room.

  As he slipped inside, he pushed the door quietly shut behind him, easing the latch closed. While the front room was dark, the next room looked unusually bright. Too bright for sunlight.

  He set down his kit by the door and walked, quiet as a cat, to the next room. Blinds were drawn shut; an electric lamp stood by a small chair and desk where someone had been reading and writing.

  When Jack noticed the nearly empty tea glass and a smoldering cigarette in the ashtray, his hair stood up.

  “Someone’s home,” he said in his mind. “Did he see me?”

  Jack searched every direction and saw nothing moving. No sounds but a distant hum, like a small engine on a welder, or a light plant, but far away or well muffled.

  A third chamber, much larger than even the front room, sat off the opposite side of the house. Quietly, Jack slipped to that doorway and peeked inside. An exceptionally clean room, it had a wood floor, as opposed to the tile-covered concrete elsewhere in the house. The room had nothing in it except several small rugs rolled up.

  “Their little barracks chapel,” he thought. Then he glanced back at the room where the cigarette smoldered with the lamp turned on at the desk. “Where did he go?”

  Jack silently eased his way to the door in the center of the house that led into a kitchen, complete with propane range and an electric microwave and refrigerator. And indoor plumbing.

  He went to the fridge and opened the door. Inside, jars of condiments and bowls of leftover Iraqi food. Even a jug of cold tea.

  Then he looked at the sink and ran his tongue over his cracked, dry lips. Two steps and he hit the faucet handle. Out poured clear, clean, cool water from a deep well. He leaned over and put his mouth on the tap.

  It was heaven! He could feel his parched skin absorbing the moisture. A cup sat on the counter next to the sink, and Jack grabbed it and started gulping down the fresh, cool, wonderful-tasting, life-giving liquid.

  “Oh God, thank you!” he said, finishing his second cup. Then he drank a third and a fourth. He had never known anything so awesome as a simple drink of water until this day.

  He sipped his fifth cup, and looked out the back window as he drank, and noticed the open back door.

  “If he ran away, that’s fine with me,” Jack thought, and felt more relaxed. “Obviously, this guy smoking the cigarette saw me run to the front of the house, and he slipped out the back. Good riddance, I say.”

  Jack went to the living room, brought his gear to the kitchen, and fished out water bottles. When he had them all filled, he began searching the cabinets and cupboards for food. Then he looked again in the yard behind the house and noticed several four-inch-diameter pipes coming up from the ground. Some had tin hats on them, and some were just open stacks. Just like vents coming off the roof of a house.

  Jack looked around the kitchen and saw a side door. He opened it, expecting to see the inside of a broom closet, or hopefully a pantry full of canned goods, but instead he found a stairwell carved deep down into the earth. Each step made of stone, and the walls and ceiling of the passageway that led downward were lined with similar stones, as if in an ancient castle.

  He had heard of the camel stops on the caravan routes, many of them thousands of years old. Their deep springwater sources fed from the snows on the tops of the Taurus Mountains of Turkey, far to the north. The same origins of the great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

  As Jack entered the stairwell, he felt the cool stone walls rubbed smooth by countless hands over the millennia, people feeling their ways down the steps to cool chambers and the hidden wells beneath the house.

  Down at the bottom of the stairs Jack saw more lights shining, and heard the rumble of a light plant engine.

  “That’s where they hide their generator,” Jack said to himself as he slowly and deliberately walked down the passage at the bottom of the stairs, careful to not make a sound. Then he smelled cigarette smoke. “And this is where our mysterious friend is hiding. Or maybe he’s not even aware that I am here. That would be cool.”

  Jack pressed his back against the stone wall of the passageway at the bottom of the stairs and peeked into the large underground chamber beneath the house. Along the great room’s walls he saw shelves filled with canned food and US military Meals Ready to Eat. More shelves held boxes and boxes of ammunition, and on the floor he saw steel cases filled with rocket-propelled grenades. Next to them sat racks of rifles and some mortar tubes and B-40 RPG launchers.

  Then a door opened at the other end of the cavern, and the loudness of the electric generator filled the room. Out stepped a surprised, middle-aged Iraqi man, wiping his hands on a grease rag.

  The fellow never had a chance to speak. Jack put two quick hardballs from his Lippard .45 square in the suddenly dead man’s chest.

  “Well, sometimes good shit happens,” Jack said as he went to the food shelves and filled his arms and pockets with American-made douche-bag dinners. He knew what he could expect from them. Not worth risking life and bowels on canned local crap, possibly full of bugs and botulism.

  As he was about to leave, his eye caught sight of a box of fragmentation grenades. He smiled, grabbed two, and jogged up the stairs to the kitchen. After tucking his food and water in his backpack, rolling up the drag bag and stuffing it in a side pocket on his pack, slinging his M40A3 sniper rifle on one side, strapping on his backpack, his helmet tied on it, his Vigilance rifle in hand, Gunny Valentine pulled the pins on the grenades, rolled them into the stairwell, and ran like hell out the back door.

  Two muffled booms sent dirt rolling out of the house behind Jack. A second later, a more pronounced explosion, from the munitions in the underground chamber detonating, brought down the house. In seconds, it disappeared inside a boiling brown cloud, the ground collapsing beneath.

  Jack Valentine smiled as if he had accomplished something genuinely great. He said in a loud voice, “What is it that we do? Oh yeah, that’s right. We fuck shit up!”

  The gunny laughed as he took a bearing with his handy compass on the side of his watchband, finding his northeast homebound bearing, and looked on the horizon for a landmark that he could use for steering across the wide, flat desert.

  He squinted his eyes, trying to see a plume of dust, and reached in his operator’s vest for his compact binoculars. As he put them to his eyes and focused, he saw what caused
the spouting dirt. Three trucks loaded with a dozen al-Qaeda gunmen running straight at him.

  “Fuck me to tears!” he said, and ran hard, looking for a place to hide. “I wonder if there was another dude back there? Maybe he had a radio and called for help.”

  Jack Valentine had cleared less than a fifty good steps from the smoking house when he heard coursing sounds above him: the shrill cries of jets diving in attack. Heart pounding, he stopped and looked up, when he heard the screams of two large bombs headed his way.

  Ahead of Jack a shower of rockets took out the three compact pickup trucks. When they blew skyward, Jack dove for the ground.

  Behind the Marine, the whole world exploded.

  Jack never saw or thought anything else after that. Not for a long time.

  —

  Severe, sharp pain like lightning bolts shooting up his spine brought the Marine gunny around to consciousness. His eyes blinked open, and the first thing that struck him was the terrible smell of urine and old shit, like the bottom of a dirty outhouse on a hot day.

  As his senses returned, Jack realized that he lay naked on a dank, stone floor. A man with a gray beard and a black Muslim skullcap sat in a high-backed wooden rocking chair. He held a long, electric cattle prod in his hands and smiled.

  “I told Yasir that a good jolt of juice up your rectum would bring you out of that coma,” Abu Omar told the gunny. “He worried that it might kill you.”

  Omar laughed, showing his nasty brown teeth.

  “No, I told Yasir. The Ghost of Anbar does not die so easily.”

  Jack tried to stand, but the chains wrapped tight around his ankles with his wrists padlocked to them kept him on the nasty floor.

  “Fuck you!” Jack yelled at the old graybeard, and got another dose of the cattle prod on his naked butt for his trouble. The voltage sent the Marine convulsing across the floor, and Abu Omar laughed out loud.

  “Hurts like a motherfucker, doesn’t it!”

  Jack moaned, and shut his eyes while he caught his breath. His worst nightmare had come true.

  “What shall we do with you, Gunnery Sergeant John Arthur Valentine? That is your name,” Omar said. “Of course, we will execute you for the world to see. But before that. What shall we do with you? Do you have a suggestion?”