Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

“That one,” Jack said, pointing at a small brass key.

  When Giti had the lock opened, Jack removed the chains from his ankles and wrists.

  “What the hell took you?” he asked Giti.

  “I could not think of anything to distract the guards or get Yasir’s keys,” she answered.

  “So you were just going to let me die?” Jack said.

  “Everything seemed so impossible!” Giti cried, and she collapsed, overwhelmed by terror and panic.

  Jack picked her up and gave the girl a strong hug. “Faith makes all things possible. You’re a Christian, right? This is what Christians believe. Right?”

  She nodded, and pointed at Sabeen, who still knelt by Yasir. “Our sister Sabeen came up with the idea, and did everything. I had no clue, except to do as she said.”

  “What was the idea?” Jack asked, now in the hall, getting Yasir’s AK rifle and examining Yasir’s key ring He looked for a set that fit a truck and found them.

  “Eyedrops!” Sabeen said, and laughed.

  “Eyedrops?” Jack responded, bewildered.

  “At school in Damascus,” she said, “a girl told me of putting two drops of Visine in a person’s drink as a joke. It makes them have diarrhea. Uncontrollable diarrhea.”

  “And that works?” Jack said, slipping up the stairs, the rifle loaded and ready for action.

  Giti followed him. “It created the disruption.”

  At the top of the stairs, Jack listened. Men gurgled and moaned and gasped for air.

  Amira and Miriam stepped in front of the doorway, and Jack nearly pulled the trigger.

  “Don’t do that!” he said, and walked into the kitchen where two men lay on the floor, their faces in vomit and their skin ash gray.

  “Did you poison them?” Amira cried.

  “They tried for their weapons but could not stand up,” Miriam said. “We took the guns outside.”

  Jack aimed the AK at one gasping man and shot.

  “Why did you shoot him?” Giti screamed. “He was in pain.”

  “He’d get over it and kill us,” Jack said, giving the other guy a push with his bare foot. “This one’s dead.”

  “Eyedrops did this?” Giti asked, amazed. “Sabeen! It has poisoned these men!”

  Sabeen ran up the stairs and looked.

  Another gunman lay dead in the entrance to the living room. The fourth lay on the floor, snoring and moaning. His body had cooled to a dangerously low temperature, and his blood pressure had fallen so low that he had lost consciousness.

  “The girl at school said two drops in a drink would make a person have diarrhea. That is all!” Sabeen cried. “So I put in the entire bottle. These were five men! I wanted to be sure it gave them the full effect! I am sorry!”

  Sabeen took the empty Visine flask from her apron, threw it at Jack, and he caught it.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Jack said, holding the bottle and reading the label. “Active ingredient, Tetrahydrozoline HCI zero point zero five percent, redness reliever. Inactive ingredients, benzalkonium chloride, boric acid, edetate disodium, purified water, sodium borate, sodium chloride.

  “I recognize boric acid and sodium chloride, but I have no idea what the rest of this shit does. Obviously, it had a serious effect on these poor bastards.”

  Then Jack read the warning. “Keep out of reach of children. Serious injury can occur if swallowed, particularly in children. If swallowed, get medical help or contact a poison control center right away.”

  He looked around at the carnage. “I’ll have to keep this in mind.”

  “What about that poor man in the living room?” Giti said. “What about Yasir downstairs?”

  “You want to stay here and take care of them? Be my guest. I’m leaving,” Jack said, looking around the house. Seeing the door that led to Abu Omar’s private bedroom and office, he headed that way.

  In the corner, Omar had a large mahogany wardrobe closet. When Jack opened the double doors, he laughed.

  “That lying son of a bitch!” Jack yelled, and took hold of his backpack, Advanced Operator vest, still stuffed with full ammo magazines, and helmet. There in the corner leaned both the M40A3 Marine sniper rifle and the EDM-Vigilance semiautomatic.

  He slipped on the AO vest and pulled open the Velcro-closed pockets inside the liner.

  “They didn’t check this very well,” Jack said, fishing out his command radio with the bullet fragment in it. Then he got out his GPS position locator, also ruined with a bullet fragment. Last, he reached deep, and smiled. “Still in here, too.” And he pulled out his intercom radio.

  He put the helmet on his head, and pushed the on-off switch on the little transceiver. In a second, he heard a faint hum in the helmet’s ear pads.

  “She still works.” He smiled, then turned the little radio off. “Better save the battery until we get close enough to my boys to use it.”

  Then he rummaged through every drawer and box, threw things on the floor, searching. “Ah, here’s my watch,” he said, finding the timepiece, bubble compass still intact, in the bottom of Omar’s dresser.

  When the gunny dumped the last drawer on the floor he sighed, frustrated. “Where’s my Lippard?”

  “What is a Lippard?” Giti asked, standing behind him.

  “My handgun,” Jack said. “A Lippard 1911A2, MARSOC Close Quarters Battle Pistol. A .45 pistol effective out to six hundred yards.”

  “This?” Sabeen said, and reached under her dress and withdrew the camouflage-painted firearm.

  “Yes!” Gunny Valentine laughed.

  “You will want this, too,” Sabeen said, and reached again under her dress and unbuckled Jack’s rigger’s belt and long-drop holster she had strapped to her thigh and waist.

  “What were you planning to do with that?” Jack asked.

  “In case I had to shoot one of them, I could,” Sabeen said, and smiled like a child.

  “You are a gem, Sabeen.” Jack laughed, and Giti hugged the large girl.

  Jack glanced around the room. “I need my boots and some socks.”

  “Over here,” Miriam said, pulling back the door. In the corner behind it stood Jack’s RAT combat boots and his tan-wool socks draped over their tops. “They did not fit Abu Omar. Nor even Yasir. Much too big. Like everything, you Americans have large feet.”

  Jack smiled as he laced them up. “Not everything’s as big as you think, young lady.”

  Miriam blushed and ran out of the room. Giti didn’t have a clue.

  Jack put on his pistol, zipped his AO vest, and secured his helmet, shouldered his pack, slung the A3 sniper gun over the top, and took the Vigilance semiautomatic in hand.

  “You girls grab those guns outside,” he said, heading for the door. “Make sure you take the ammo vests, too. We may need every full magazine they got stuffed in them.”

  Outside, the three small-size girls, none of them a hair over five feet tall, took the rifles in their little hands and put on the man-size Russian ammunition vests surrounded with pouches stuffed with full AK magazines. Jack looked at the trio of smiling sad-sack solja girls, swallowed up by the big gear, and let out a chuckle. “I guess it’s just gonna have to work.”

  He held up the keys for the motley trio to see. “Which truck do these fit?”

  Jack hoped for the blue rig with the PKM mounted on the headache rack. However, Giti pointed to the rusted-out white Nissan hunk of junk with the dented door.

  “That one Yasir uses,” she said, as if either truck was perfectly fine.

  “I hope it runs,” Jack said, going to it. “You don’t think we could find the keys to the other one?”

  “I do not want to look for them,” Giti answered, following Jack, with Miriam and Amira tight with her.

  “It’ll do,” Jack said as he pulled the handle.

  The
door popped loud as he opened it, and the seats had worn through the upholstery into the springs. Dirt covered the floors, and all the rubber was worn off the clutch and brake pedals. Instead of a regular throttle pad, it had a silver bar where one used to go.

  “Oh, this is dandy,” Jack said, his butt falling through the seat. “Jump in, girls, and don’t let a spring stab you in the ass.”

  Amira cuddled next to Jack and smiled up at him, batting her eyes, then came Miriam. Both teenagers so tiny that they still had ample room for Giti. However, large-body Sabeen might be a problem.

  “What about Sabeen?” Giti said, wondering which one of their quartet would ride in the back.

  “Where is she?” Miriam cried out, looking around and not seeing her. “We cannot leave without our sister!”

  “I will get her,” Giti said, and bolted to the house.

  Jack pounded the steering wheel, impatient to get going as he waited. When Giti did not return in a few minutes he ran to the house with his .45 drawn.

  “She will not come!” Giti howled downstairs. “Make her come, Jack. Omar will kill her! He will kill Yasir, too!”

  “Come on, Sabeen,” Jack said, exasperated. “Giti’s right. You stay here, you’ll die. You can’t save ’em all.”

  “I must stay with Yasir!” she said. “He is hurt, and I must care for him. I’m the one that hit him!”

  “They will kill you! Yasir will kill you!” Giti said.

  “No. He cares for me,” Sabeen said, cradling Yasir in her lap. He began to moan, and she stroked his face.

  “I will get him awake, and we will find the keys to the other truck and escape,” Sabeen said. “I have family in Jordan. We can leave here, Yasir and me, and go to them.”

  “Why?” Giti pled.

  “He finds me attractive. He loves me.” Sabeen smiled. “No man ever saw me the way Yasir does.”

  “That old man?” Giti said, incredulous.

  “He is not that old. You saw for yourself,” Sabeen retorted. “You said that day that Yasir is a good man.”

  “Yes,” Giti said, and looked at how Sabeen cared for the old goatherd. Maybe it was for the best.

  “We gotta go!” Jack growled, taking Giti by the arm and pulling her up the stairs and through the living room.

  The one live gunman moaned on the floor as they went by him, regaining some level of consciousness. As Jack and Giti stepped outside, the Marine started to go back and shoot the culprit but Giti grabbed Gunny Valentine by the arm.

  “Leave him. Please. We must go,” Giti said.

  He gave a last look at the man on the floor. He wasn’t going anyplace soon. So Jack nodded okay and ran with the little girl in the big ammo vest out to the jalopy, slammed the doors, and hit the ignition.

  As he left, he pulled to the side of the other truck, drew his pistol and put two flat-nose hardballs through the sidewalls of the front and rear tires.

  “That ought to slow them down,” Jack said, taking a reading off the bubble compass on his watchband.

  “But what about Sabeen?” Giti cried, seeing the ruined tires.

  Jack looked at her. “Their changing flats will buy us time, should Yasir and that live one on the floor decide to come after us.”

  Giti looked at the house, biting her lip, worried about Sabeen. She knew Jack was right. They needed as much time to escape as they could buy. Giti painfully realized that the Syrian girl had made her choice for Yasir and would have to live with whatever happened now.

  Engine sputtering out headers with no exhaust pipes, Gunny V pulled Yasir’s old junker in gear and hit the gas. It died.

  “Shit,” Jack said, and gave the engine another crank. It coughed, then caught hold. “I hope this rust bucket can make it.”

  Spinning dirt with its one pulling wheel, the four escapees sputtered off, into the desert, rattling cross-country, due northeast.

  —

  Elmore Snow had waited with Alvin Barkley and his Marines for nearly two hours before the troops finally arrived to take charge of cleaning the arms and munitions from the subterranean jihadi barracks and taking charge of the four Rattler-ravaged bandage-wrapped Hezbollah martyrs.

  A US Army lieutenant showed up with a dozen soldiers under his command and two platoons of Iraqi troops with a captain in charge. Slowly but surely the Iraqis went to work hauling out enemy guns and ammo, stacking them in the backs of the six-by-six trucks they drove. The twelve American grunts took up defensive posts, relieving the Marines of their watch.

  While Colonel Snow and company got ready to roll, First Sergeant Barkley got a call from Captain Crenshaw on the command radio. He had deployed a force to Rawa, per the intel, to intercept Abu Omar Bakr there.

  “We got nothing,” the skipper told Barkley.

  “That’s too bad,” the first sergeant said, and Colonel Snow stepped close to hear. “Any sign they had been there?”

  “Air flew recon but saw no vehicles,” the captain said. “Of course, this close to the river, they can hide a battalion in the salt cedars. We took a run through the village and saw zero. But the one citizen who would talk to us reported seeing several gun trucks come through this morning, rally around, then depart to the south. One fellow wore a fancy uniform, and had a black jihadi flag flapping on his Haji Humvee.”

  “That would be them,” Snow said.

  “Could they have gotten word we were coming?” the captain asked.

  “More likely Zarqawi changed his mind,” Elmore said.

  “Or the whole thing was a ruse from the get-go,” Crenshaw said, and added, “which is a distinct possibility.”

  “Regardless,” Elmore said, “they’ve departed the area, apparently south. My bet, they’re headed to Omar’s headquarters. We believe it’s one of these water stations out in the big middle of nowhere, to the southwest of our location.”

  Barkley added, “Except for the gun wagons with the dozen Hajis they may have headed back here. And however many other trucks split off to go back to their outposts.”

  “Good point, but maybe they haven’t split up yet. Or maybe they’re all going to Omar’s house for a festive beheading and goat roast, now that Zarqawi’s obviously not a factor,” Snow said, and unfolded his tactical map across the hood of the first sergeant’s Humvee.

  After he gave it a good look, he told the captain on the radio, “Skipper, I suggest that you will do well to collect your force and move with all haste to overtake this bunch. If they’re unaware of our presence, which I believe, they will likely move at a leisurely pace.

  “Bear in mind they have a goodly-sized force; therefore, I expect that they’ll travel in wide intervals, scattered in small bunches, but coordinated. Close enough so they can reinforce each other. As such, they’ll be difficult to spot from air assets, and challenging to engage, given the terrain and their tactics. Lots of rat holes and gullies to run through. This is their backyard, not ours.

  “But, I think that if we move our forces on them from two directions, cutting off their head and running up their tails, we’ll have a good shot at killing a bunch of them.

  “We’re going to roll fast, cross-country to the southwest, and press hard to intercept their column before they reach their headquarters. We believe they have Gunny Valentine at that location. Ultimately, all our forces will converge on Omar’s headquarters. Hopefully, we will take out his army while they’re in movement and arrive in time to save my Marine.”

  “Roger that,” the captain said, his voice bouncing with his body as his war wagon ran at high speed, going south, picking up the trail left by the Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah legion of trucks. “We’re on our way.”

  “Outbound, too. Meet you in the middle,” Barkley told the captain, and clicked off the air.

  Then he looked at the American soldiers and ragged crew of Iraqi troops. “Colonel, you think these h
ousekeeping commandos can handle a dozen Qaeda guns running at them in Haji home-built Hummers? If those boys decide to come home?”

  “They’ll have to,” Elmore said. “We’ve got to roll hard to intercept Omar before he gets his force home. They beat us there, they’ll ensconce themselves in their hardened defenses, hold us at bay, and kill Jack.”

  In two minutes, eighteen up-armored Hummers, turrets pointed to battle, fifty-four Marines riding inside, blood in their teeth, put a dust storm in the air. They ran hard and fast, racing cross-country to head off Abu Omar.

  —

  Taking a Lawrence of Arabia dramatic pose behind the driver side of the cab, his white keffiyeh fluttering down his back, gripping his Russian machine gun, tanker goggles covering his eyes, Omar Bakr stood tall and proud in the bed of his truck. His force motored behind his Toyota at a comfortable speed along the base of a ridge, heading south. On the opposite side from him, a trusted captain held the grips of the other Kalashnikov PKMS.

  Abu Omar’s soldiers had taken the black al-Sunnah flag that the legion had unfurled in Rawa, and planted it in the stake hole by the tailgate of Omar’s Toyota. As the banner waved, and a sea of odd-colored gun wagons spread behind him in a series of lines like chevrons on a uniform, Field Marshal Abu Omar Bakr Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti now felt truly royal.

  Zarqawi not showing in Rawa, word coming that he had fallen ill, Omar Bakr scoffed at the excuse as, “A likely story.” He stood on the tailgate of his pickup and gave a great speech to his army, calling them to unite all al-Qaeda Iraq forces under his true Iraqi banner. The cause of Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah represented the true Sunni faithful, not the Jordanian Palestinian expatriate. Omar branded Abu Musab a coward and declared victory. Now the graybeard led a glorious parade home in celebration of the propitious day.

  As such, he had rallied all of his army behind his flag and commanded them to come and celebrate with him, just as Arabian sheiks of old had once done. Thus he stood in the bed of his truck, riding crop held high, pointing forward, grand in his uniform and bright sash, leading the parade like Patton.

  In his self-aggrandizing daydream, Omar envisioned himself sitting on a leopard-skin-and-gold-covered throne beneath his date palms, surrounded by his warrior tribe, goats roasting on skewers over a dozen fires. In the evening, they would triumphantly sharpen their knives and cut off Jack Valentine’s head.