Jack thought about the knocking. “Well, fuck me to tears!” he swore as loud as he could, getting out of the truck and slamming the door so hard that the driver’s-side window cracked into a million spiderwebs.
“Beautiful, just fucking beautiful,” Jack grumbled.
“I wish you would not use such vulgarity in my presence,” Giti said, coming to the truck to help Jack check out the problem, as if she had a clue.
“I’m a Marine,” the gunny fired, a head of steam now driving his train. “That’s how Marines talk.”
“Did it blow another tire?” Miriam asked, coming to help check the problem, too.
Jack had the hood up, looking down at the engine. A hole the size of his fist had broken through the side of the block. A piston drooping off a connecting rod lay like a dead man, half-in and half-out of the hole.
“No, Miriam,” the Marine said, slamming down the hood, “we didn’t blow a tire.”
“What then?” Amira asked, trailing him.
“We threw a rod,” Jack said, and looked at Yasir and Sabeen, too far away with the other pickup.
“Threw a rod? I do not understand,” Giti said.
“Blew up the motor,” Jack said. “Unless Yasir carried a spare engine, we’re on foot.”
All three girls turned and ran toward the departing truck. “Stop! Sabeen! Stop! Come back!”
“Ladies, it’s like shouting at an airplane,” Jack said, his hands on his hips.
“They might see us,” Giti said, waving at Sabeen.
“They might,” Jack said. “Probably think you’re just saying more good-byes.”
“Ugh,” Amira let out, hanging her head, the oversized ammo vest making her look even more dejected. “I do not like walking in the desert. I do not want to carry all these heavy guns and bullets.”
Jack let down the tailgate and sat on it. He reached inside the liner of his operator’s vest and pulled out the little intercom radio, its battery he had saved so he could use it to call to his boys when they got close enough to Haditha Dam for his brothers to hear him. The gunny pushed the switch and listened at the headset inside his helmet.
He could hear talking. Familiar voices. Busy jaw jacking, and on the move in their Hummers.
“I ain’t a scared of no ghosts!” Jack Valentine yelled on his radio, a big grin spread across his face.
Cotton Martin came back. “Jack? That you?”
“Cotton! What a treat for my tired ears!” the gunny answered. “Yeah, it’s me!”
“Jack! Where are you?” Elmore Snow broke in. Suddenly, he was drowned out by a dozen other MARSOC Marines talking on the intercom at once.
“Gentlemen, please,” the colonel said.
“Ghost One, what is your location?”
“I’m like those Fuckawi dudes in the joke. They travel at night and when they get up in the morning, they say, where the Fuckawi?” Jack said, happiness overshadowing radio discipline.
“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Cotton laughed.
“We left Omar’s hideout in this broken-down piece-of-shit rust-bucket grocery wagon, heading northeast, and got to this big-ass wadi with cliffs for sides. Blew a tire, and now we blew the engine. Does that help?” Jack answered.
“Not much,” Alvin Barkley said, now with a map unfolded, looking at the red dot that was Omar’s headquarters and running his finger out to the northeast.
“Better question. Where are you guys?” Jack asked.
“Stopped on a hill,” Elmore said, and waited.
“I’m by a wadi, and you’re on a hill, in the Iraqi desert. Go figure! Big middle of fucking nowhere with about a million hills and half a million wadis,” Jack said. “How about a little help!”
“We followed one of Omar’s rat wagons that we let escape from a column that Delta Company, Fifth Marines has trapped, and is currently wiping off the face of Mother Earth,” Elmore said. “We figured he might lead us to Abu Omar’s hideaway, where you might be located. We counted on killing Omar and his minions and rescuing you.”
“Little late for that, boss,” Jack said. “While Omar went north for some kind of meeting with Zarqawi, me and three cute girls stole a truck and escaped. We departed to the northeast. My best-guess heading, based only on my little bubble compass, thanks to Billy-C and his asshole OCD comments, is zero four zero off Omar’s back porch.”
While Elmore Snow and the Marines had stopped on the blind side of the hill, Mob Squad dismounted and crawled to the crest for a look-see at what lay on the other side. The colonel didn’t want to run into a hasty ambush outside Abu Omar’s headquarters, or close to it, if they came bounding down the hill, hey-diddle-diddle.
Sergeant Savoca called on the intercom, “Down a half mile we got a house, goat barns, a grove of palm trees. That sound familiar?”
“That’s Omar’s desert getaway,” Jack said. “Those guys you chased, they still there?”
“Not a sign of life anywhere,” Iceman answered. “No vehicles anyway. At least not running. I see part of a pickup in the barn and what looks like a big old Russian stake-bed three-ton truck with no wheels.”
“Look to the northeast from the house, you see anything?” Jack asked.
“Way out there,” Savoca said. “I see plumes of dust. Three of them. One after the other.”
“They’re following my tracks,” Jack said. “You guys need to catch them. I’ll take up a defensive posture here; do what I can to hold them off. But it’s just me here, with three little girls and a few rifles.”
“You can explain the girls later, but hold tight, Jack!” Elmore Snow said. “We didn’t come this far to have these wastes of skin kill you in a shoot-out.”
“Fuckin’ A, right!” Cochise Quinlan chimed in. “Give ’em hell, Gunny V. We a comin’ ’round the mountain. Guns ablaze!”
—
“Do you see them?” Abu Omar shouted from behind his machine gun, standing in the back of his pickup, the black flag snapping in the wind off the corner by the tailgate.
“Something way ahead, I think by the wadi,” the al-Sunnah soldier on the other machine gun said, and pointed.
“Yes!” Omar said, and slammed his hand on the roof of the pickup. “That is Yasir’s truck!”
The driver hit the gas and honked his horn for the others behind him to pick up the pace.
Omar looked over his shoulder, his white keffiyeh fluttering like the flag, and waved his arm forward, like Peter O’Toole did as Lawrence, leading the Arabian charge.
—
Jack took all his ammunition from the pockets on his backpack, stacked the boxes and magazines next to his rifles, below the rim of the rift, where the two girls had stood when Yasir came up.
“Bring those guns and your ammo down here,” he ordered the girls, and lined them spaced about thirty feet apart. “These are evil men. You got that?”
All three girls nodded. They knew what to do.
“We should pray,” Giti suggested.
“God’s already up on the situation, Giti,” Jack said.
Giti nodded. “We will trust Him to deliver us from the evil that comes.”
“Yup,” Jack said, loading his guns and making sure that the three girls had their AK rifles ready to rock and roll. “Trust Jesus and those automatic rifles.”
He gave the three girls’ ammo vests a quick look. “Pull out magazines and stack them so you can load fast.”
Amira and Giti stacked their magazines handy, but Miriam had a problem.
“What shall I do with these?” she called to Jack, holding two fat, green fragmentation grenades.
“Holy shit!” the gunny said, a big grin on his face. “Where did you find those?”
“In the pocket, on the side,” Miriam said. “What are these things? Bombs?”
“Bombs? Be careful,”
Giti yelled, and hurried to her.
“Grenades,” Jack said, going to the girl holding a frag in each hand. “They’re just fine as long as you’ve got the spoons pinned down.”
Jack took the two bombs from her. “I’ve got an idea.”
He could see Abu Omar’s trucks clearly now, closing fast on them, so he had to hurry.
The gunny crawled in the pickup from the passenger side, set his backpack vertical in the driver’s seat, and snugged down his helmet on top. Then he took a grenade and stuffed it in the space between the seat and the driver’s-side door. He used a bag of MREs, ironically containing a package of Smoky Franks, the Five Fingers of Death, that he had taken from the bombed house when he was captured, and used it to make sure the grenade’s spoon held tight when he eased out the pin.
With the first grenade set to blow, the pin on his finger, he backed out of the truck and closed the passenger door. Jack did the same booby-trap job on that side, this time stuffing a douche-bag delight of a poultry meal his Marines nicknamed Wild Turkey Surprise down the space to hold the other grenade’s spoon in place. As he eased out the pin, he had to roll for the wadi.
Abu Omar opened fire on the truck, peppering it and the dead body on the ground, and strafing the rift in general.
“Surrender, and we will allow you to live,” Omar shouted, as the other trucks took up positions.
Jack and the girls hunkered quiet, waiting to fight, their rifles ready. Locked and cocked.
One of the gun wagons with four men aboard pulled next to Yasir’s pickup. A soldier jumped off the side, and seeing the helmet and backpack through the shattered window, looking like a body, he let go a burst from his AK into the back. The helmet flew off the pack and bounced against the steering wheel.
“Check it out,” the driver in the Haji homemade Hummer yelled at the man. He crept forward to try to see better through the shattered left-side window.
Two al-Sunnah fighters climbed in the back of Yasir’s jalopy while the Haji in the passenger seat of the gun wagon stepped out and began looking over the old rust bucket.
Jack and the girls sat tight. Just like monkeys with a box of nuts, the Marine knew that the insurgents would have to tear it open to learn what made it rattle.
One man lifted the hood and laughed, seeing the blown engine. He was still laughing when the gunman who had driven the truck walked around to the driver’s door and opened it.
Abu Omar stood in his truck, parked back a few feet, and his other gun wagon had pulled across the front of Yasir’s pickup, as if it might drive off.
All of the Hajis, including Abu Omar, had totally focused on the men checking out Yasir’s old wreck when the first grenade exploded, blowing both the man by the door and the man at the hood to pieces. Shrapnel from the grenade killed both gunmen watching from the back of the pickup parked across the rust bucket’s front.
The first explosion blew off the roof and sent the passenger door into the rift. The second grenade blew under the truck, wounding the two guys in the cab of the truck parked across the front, plus sending deadly fragments, glass, and truck hunks flying at Abu Omar and his three remaining al-Sunnah fighters with him in the third truck.
As debris fell from the two explosions, and a fireball erupted from Yasir’s gas tank as it went sky-high, Jack and the girls opened fire.
First shot, Jack killed the driver of Omar’s truck. Second shot, he took down the machine gunner who stood up, wanting to open fire. Next he killed the passenger.
The two men in the cab of the truck in front of Yasir’s pickup, wounded but alive, rolled behind their wagon, opening fire with their Kalashnikovs.
Like a pro, Miriam stood up and began sweeping AK fire under that pickup, going after the Hajis hiding there. Amira joined her, and they managed to kill both men.
Jack worked the bolt on his rifle when Abu Omar stood up and opened fire with his PKMS machine gun.
Amira began congratulating Miriam on their success, and Jack yelled at them to get down. But it was too late.
Both girls caught three rounds from Omar’s Kalashnikov, Amira two in the chest and Miriam one in the heart.
When Giti saw her sisters go down, she crawled out of the ravine, her AK braced against her hip, and began hosing down Abu Omar’s truck. He managed one more shot before Jack put a .338 Lapua Magnum through his neck, which sent his head tumbling past the black flag.
Giti turned and smiled at her hero, then collapsed.
One of the .30 caliber bullets from Omar’s gun had caught her through the left side, and blew a two-inch chunk out her back as it exited. She bled bad and fast.
Jack scrambled out of the ditch and grabbed the girl. He pulled the scarf off her head and stuffed it in the hole in her back. Then he took his scrubs shirt off, ripped it in half, and tied a pressure wrap over entry and exit wounds.
“Where are you, Jesus? She is Your devoted child!” Jack yelled to the sky, his eyes filling with tears.
“He is with us always,” Giti whispered, her eyes fluttering open and her mouth red with blood.
“Help’s coming, baby,” Jack said, gushing tears.
“Don’t worry.” The little girl smiled at him. “We are saved from all evil of this world. Miriam and Amira, they have gone to our Lord. I will, too. Don’t weep for me, Jack Valentine.”
“Stop it!” Jack yelled. “You’re going to make it. I promised you that I would take you to America.”
Giti smiled at Jack. “You killed Abu Omar. Just like you told him in the prison.”
“Yes, I did,” Jack said, and kissed the girl on her forehead. “I promised him I would. I keep my promises. Now, you stay awake.”
—
It took ten more minutes for Elmore Snow and the MARSOC crew to arrive on scene. The colonel called for a medical evacuation helicopter, and Cotton Martin grabbed the medical kit from the Hummer and went to work with Jack getting Giti stabilized.
Rattler trotted around the trucks, inspecting the enemy dead. When he was satisfied he had no work to do, Sergeant Padilla took out the Kong. The dog commenced running and retrieving like a day in the park, doing the one thing that made his life worthwhile. Jorge and a little rubber toy.
Cotton and Jack had Giti’s feet elevated, keeping her blood high in her body, talking to her until the rescue helicopter arrived. She watched Rattler play, and smiled. It kept her mind busy, thinking of living.
Bronco, Jaws, Sage, and Jewfro took care of Miriam and Amira, zipping them in body bags that the first sergeant had packed in the back of his command vehicle. Items they hoped they never had to use, but too often did.
Alvin Barkley walked to the back of Abu Omar’s truck and took off the Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah black battle flag, rolling it around its staff as he walked up to Jack and Cotton, and nodded down at Giti.
“I’ve seen worse, little girl,” the Marine with the big knife hanging down his thigh said. “You’re going to be fine. Those through-and-through gunshots, they bleed a bit, but you’ll live. Got to watch out for infection, though. Docs at Al Asad Air Base medical will get that all cleaned up. Get you fit as a fiddle in no time.”
He looked at the Marines carrying the bodies of Giti’s sisters. “Sure hate to see that happen to those other two children.”
“Miriam and Amira,” Giti said in a weak voice. “My baby, if she is a girl, she will have their names.”
—
Jack rode the medical evac chopper to Al Asad, along with Elmore Snow. The colonel left the MARSOC team with Staff Sergeant Martin and First Sergeant Barkley. It took them the rest of the day to get back to Haditha Dam and catch Osprey flights south to the air base. They would fly to Baghdad with Gunny V and the boss.
When they landed at Al Asad, Jack and Colonel Snow went to the hospital with Giti and did not leave until the doctors had her out of surgery, safe in the recovery mod
ule.
The gunny sat by her bed, holding her hand, waiting for the girl to awaken. Colonel Snow sat with him.
“Does this young woman have any next of kin who need to be called?” the doctor asked, coming into the room.
Jack shook his head no. “All murdered by the Hajis.”
“She lost a lot of blood, but she’s a super trooper. Hung in there,” the doctor said. “Baby looks good, too.”
“It made it?” Jack asked, surprised.
“Yes. We could have terminated the pregnancy during surgery,” the doctor added. “But before we put her under, the little mother told us to save her child at all costs.”
“She’s a Christian,” Jack said. “More faithful than anyone I ever met. Presbyterian from up toward Mosul.”
“These Iraqi Christians tend to be pretty tried-and-true,” the doctor said. Then he added, “Would have been a lot easier for her long-term recovery if she let us take it.”
Jack thought about Yasir and Sabeen, started to say something about how Giti’s faith had made the difference there. About the white oryx and his three doe, too. But he decided to just nod and agree. He didn’t mention Sabeen or Yasir to anyone, thus he couldn’t tell the story of the Arabian oryx. It would remain his and Giti’s tale. Perhaps she would tell her daughter one day about the beautiful animals and the old goatherd and her only surviving sister, Sabeen. He figured that Yasir and Sabeen would have an easier time getting away if no one looked for them.
Then a light came on in Jack’s head.
“How about her clothes?” he asked.
“We bagged them,” the doctor said. “They’re pretty ragged and full of blood. We can toss them out.”
Jack shook his head no. “We need them. And the clothes belonging to the two girls who were killed.”
“You looking for something?” the doctor asked.
“A piece of paper, folded up. A note,” Jack said. “I thought Giti might have it in her pocket, but it could be in Miriam’s or Amira’s. Definitely, one of them had it.”
“Is it important?” the doctor asked.
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