The Ranger Objective

by Jason Kasper

  I pivoted around a corner, both hands maneuvering the .22 pistol that hovered just beneath my field of vision. A crimson light marked the corner of an idling flat screen on the wall, and beneath it the black, gaping maw of a fireplace. Moving past them, I stopped at the corner to see a hallway receding into blackness.

  After releasing one gloved hand from the gun, I made a fist and rapped three times on the wall.

  White light abruptly framed a door at the end of the hall, and the rack of a shotgun slide echoed throughout the house. In an instant, the door swung open and flooded the hallway with glaring light. I stepped back into the shadows as the long barrel of a 12-gauge Mossberg appeared from the door frame.

  As the man holding the shotgun emerged from the room and swung the barrel toward me, I shot him twice in the gut.

  He stumbled backward as the quick barks of my .22 faded, his back striking the far wall as he slumped into a seated position. One hand clutched his stomach while the other maintained a tenuous grip on the shotgun.

  I stepped into the light and said, “Hello, Peter. I’m David Rivers.”

  He squinted up at me, panting in disbelief as a glimmer of recognition crossed his eyes.

  “How’s Laila?” he asked.

  “This is between us now. You started our first conversation, and now I’m starting our last.”

  He swung the shotgun barrel toward my face and pulled the trigger.

  A hollow click sounded.

  “That’s odd,” I said, sliding my pistol into my belt. I walked forward and took the shotgun from his hand, which slid down his lap and fell limply to the floor. Then I reached into my pocket for the shells and began slipping them into the loading port.

  He assumed a fearful, obedient look of submission, his now-empty hand uniting with the other over his stomach as bright red blood streamed through his fingers.

  “Don’t,” he whispered between ragged breaths. “I can pay you… call them… get the ambulance.”

  “The last time we spoke, you lectured me on revenge. Do you want to lecture me now?”

  “I never saw you, man. Just go. Please.”

  I loaded the final shell and shook my head.

  “I told you this would happen, Peter. And I know you’ve probably talked shit without consequence on a thousand other occasions. But you finally did it at the wrong time to the wrong fucking person. And now”—I racked the slide to load a shell into the chamber—“you’re about to get smoked in the face with your own shotgun.”

  Balling his hands into nervous fists against his bleeding gut, he cringed as if expecting me to slap him. “Listen to me for one fucking second. Just hear me out—”

  “I gave you the chance to kill yourself, but you didn’t have the brains or the balls to do the honorable thing. Maybe your dad didn’t teach you right, or maybe you were born a coward and it’s in your blood. Either way, I’m giving you a chance to face the consequences of your actions like you’ve never had to do.”

  “I’ve got close to twenty grand in the bedroom safe; just take it and go. The code is 62-29-99.”

  My face slid into a grin. “Peter, you’re not listening. Accept your fate. You asked for me, and now you’ve got me. And no one’s going to avenge you, because I’m swallowing a gun in a few hours. This is how your life is going to end.”

  “I’m begging you, I shouldn’t have treated Laila like that. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry—”

  “Try and have some dignity at your death. You only get one.”

  “I’ll do anything, just please don’t fucking do this.”

  I angled the shotgun barrel level with his face. “At least you didn’t cry.”

  At this, he began weeping like Laila had on the night he called her.

  “Goodbye, Peter,” I said, firing the Mossberg with a deafening blast.

  His head vanished in an explosion of blood and smoke. As his shoulders slumped to the side, I lowered the barrel and watched the eerie postmortem twitch of his shoulders.

  Then I dropped the shotgun at my feet, turned, and walked out of the house.

  The neon liquor store sign glowed in the darkness, its seedy glare the same in every state I’d ever visited. I accelerated toward it, the tires of my twelve-year-old Explorer rumbling over the uneven surface of the pavement, which was saturated with rain that had only stopped minutes ago. The rest of the storefronts along the empty street were dark, now visible only by the distant radiance of streetlights until my headlights swept over them as I passed.

  I sped up as I neared the liquor store. It was moments away from closing for the night, which I had realized abruptly when I reached my hotel and found that the bottle I’d packed was nearly empty.

  After pulling into the abandoned lot, I found a dark parking spot between streetlights and then killed the engine. Snatching my backpack from the passenger seat, I hastily unzipped the main compartment to reveal my laptop case, which bore the scars of half a decade of travel. I paused for a moment before reaching past the laptop, feeling around in the bag until my fingers touched a cool, textured grip.

  I withdrew the Ruger revolver, a steel bulldog that weighed more than double the pistol I’d just used to wound Peter. Opening the cylinder, I checked that it was fully loaded with six rounds stamped .454 CASULL, each capable of killing any big game on the planet. Satisfied, I snapped the cylinder shut and carefully slid the Ruger into my waistband before pulling my shirttail over it.

  I set the backpack on the passenger seat, then stepped into the warm, humid air and strode toward the entrance.

  An elderly vagrant in a green military jacket limped toward me from the side of the store.

  “Hey, son,” he called, “you got any change? Hey, son!”

  I walked past him and pushed open the door, stepping into the bright lights of the store’s interior.

  A male voice called to me from behind the register, “We close in five minutes.”

  Walking through the aisles, I scanned the shelves until I found the rows of glass bottles with reassuringly familiar labels. I passed the scotches and whiskeys, then came to a halt in front of the house selection of bourbon. My eyes drifted to the top shelf, and I sighed in relief as I stretched out my hand to grasp the neck of a single, large bottle.

  I brought it to chest height and cradled the bottom with my other hand as I appraised the neatly printed letters spelling WOODFORD RESERVE.

  I frowned when I saw that the otherwise flawless bottle was marred with a cheap, lopsided green sticker that said, CLOSING TIME WINE & SPIRITS: $62.99.

  As I approached the register, the college-aged Indian man behind the counter watched me.

  “You look like a man on a mission.”

  I set down the bottle in front of him. “Yeah. Didn’t realize I was running out of bourbon until just now.”

  “Busy night?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You need a mixer?”

  “And consume all those empty calories? I’m trying to live forever.”

  He examined the sticker on the bottle and typed the price into his register. “$68.16,” he said.

  I looked up at the vertical American flag suspended from the ceiling behind him, the drooping ripples in its fabric accumulating wide semicircles of dust.

  “$68.16,” he repeated, sliding the bottle into a brown paper bag and setting it upright on the counter.

  I counted out four bills from my wallet and handed them to him. “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks. Need your receipt?”

  “No.”

  “Have a good one.”

  I compressed the bag around the neck of the bottle and said, “I most certainly will. You do the same.”

  When I stepped outside into the damp night air, a voice beside me yelled, “Hey!”

  The old man who had asked me for change was still standing there, and his weathered, unshaven face fixed on mine even as his shoulders swayed with drunkenness.

  �
�Don’t you ignore me,” he demanded, his eyes welling up with tears. “I’m a veteran, goddammit.”

  I stopped and faced him, glancing down at the faded patches on his jacket. “Where’d you serve at, Staff Sergeant?”

  “I was in Dak To in ’67, fighting for your country. That’s Vietnam, son.”

  I tucked the bottle under one arm and reached for my wallet. I pulled out a stack of bills, folded them in half, and handed them to him.

  “That’s everything I’ve got, Sarge. Treat yourself to the good stuff.”

  Returning to my truck, I settled into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind me. I opened the backpack and was sliding the bottle of bourbon alongside my laptop when I heard the sudden, piercing wail of police sirens.

  I looked out the windshield at the empty parking lot and, beyond it, the orbiting flashes of red and blue lights reflecting off storefronts in the distance. I took a deep breath and released it, then reached under my shirt to pull out the Ruger.

  Rotating the revolver upward between my chest and the steering wheel, I pressed the warm steel ring of the muzzle against the underside of my jaw. My right finger settled on the smooth curve of the trigger, and I whispered to myself:

  “Three.”

  The headlights of the first police car pierced the night, and were followed immediately by a second one.

  “Two.”

  I became lost in the sirens’ howling wails as their volume increased to a roar.

  “One.”

  The glare of the flashing lights grew in intensity, nearly blinding me as I squinted into the flickering red-and-blue nothingness.

  “See ya.”

  My finger tensed on the trigger as the police cars roared past my vehicle, their sirens receding as they sped along the wet street.

  I released what seemed like an endless exhale, then lowered the pistol to my lap and took a few measured breaths. I slipped the Ruger back into my waistband and pulled my shirt over it once more.

  Starting my truck, I turned on the headlights and pulled forward, gliding the car through a long puddle before turning onto the street and driving away from the sound of police sirens that, by then, had faded almost entirely.

  As I walked down the hotel hallway toward my room with the heavy backpack slung over my left shoulder, I felt an overwhelming rush of relief. I would be able to spend my final hours drinking and writing, the last two exquisite pleasures in my life.

  Coming to a stop before room 629, I fished the key card out of my pocket and slid it into the slot above the handle. When the light flashed green, I pushed open the door and stepped inside the modest room.

  As I let the door slam shut behind me, my eyes fell to the corner table backed by a rolling chair. There, I would compose my final passage, my magnum opus. It would crown a thousand fragmented pieces of writing that had accumulated on the laptop like cancer cells over the nights spent sitting alone in the darkness, looking deep inside myself and becoming increasingly sickened by what I found.

  My eyes ticked downward, registering wet footprints on the patterned carpet. In that same instant, I heard a man’s voice coming from my left.

  “Get your hands up, shithead.”

  My stomach dropped.

  I held my hands open at waist level and looked through the bathroom doorway to the end of an automatic pistol emerging from the shadows, its barrel extending into a suppressor that was aimed at my chest.

  A second voice said, “All the way up, David. Do it, or you’re dead.”

  I glanced up to see the end of another handgun suppressor leveled at my face, the man holding it tucked behind the edge of the wall in front of the bed.

  My mind raced in disbelief. I took a final breath, and did the only thing I could.

  Yanking on my shirtfront with one hand, I seized the rubber grips of the Ruger with the other. I’d drawn the pistol in a split second, and was just beginning to rotate the barrel upward when the first man tackled me into the wall with the force of a freight train.

  The revolver tumbled from my grasp as his shoulders drove me to the floor. Before I could recover from the initial impact, the second man advanced on me and delivered a crushing overhead blow to the side of my face.

  My vision blurred, my mouth filled with thick blood, and pain exploded in my skull. The first man rolled me onto my back, yanking my upper body off the ground by my collar. In a blindingly fast three-part motion, he bounced my head off the ground, against the wall, and off the ground again.

  I involuntarily coughed up an explosion of blood before he rolled me back onto my stomach. One of the men stripped the backpack from my left arm while the other jerked my hands upward to the small of my back.

  I winced and grunted, “motherfucker,” into the carpet as my wrists were cinched together with a narrow plastic restraint. The man straddling my back roughly frisked me, removing the contents of my pockets. I heard the rustling of paper and sloshing of bourbon as the other man searched my bag.

  With half of my face smashed into the floor and my voice slurred with the blood in my mouth, I said, “You know, for a second there I thought you were the police.”

  The man above me grasped the side of my neck, applying his body weight to pin me down further into the carpet. The boots belonging to the second man stepped in front of my face, and as I tried to roll my eyes upward, the end of a pistol suppressor was pressed against my temple, forcing my head back to the floor.

  One of the men responded with a curt voice spoken between angry breaths.

  “It would be better for you if we were. Trust me on that. And we know you killed Peter McAlister.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because we watched you do it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “We watched you get the spare key from the brick in the front walkway. Then we stood over him at the end of the hallway before his brains had dried on the wall. Is that specific enough for you, David?”

  “We’re getting there.”

  “This is where you tell us who paid you to kill him.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  At this, the hand on the side of my neck rotated around my jugular and squeezed, cutting off my air. The man pulled me up by my throat, lifting my chest off the ground before spinning me sideways. My shoulders slammed against the wall as I came to rest in a slouched sitting position.

  When I opened my mouth to hollowly gasp for air, he slid the pistol suppressor between my teeth, pushing it to the back of my throat before releasing the pressure on my jugular. I snorted desperate breaths through my nostrils as I caught my first full glimpse of my attacker. His chest was as wide as my shoulders, and his dark eyes blazed with fury behind the handgun. I tried to pull my face away from the pistol, but he grabbed the back of my head and forced the suppressor deeper into my mouth.

  “Talk around the gun. Who paid you to kill him?”

  “How am I supposed to spit in your face with a pistol in my mouth?” I mumbled.

  I heard the chirp of a radio, followed by a tinny voice that said, “Black, Red.”

  Somewhere to my right, the second man responded, “Go for Black.”

  “You’re going to love what I found in his truck. This guy is coming with us.”

  My mind raced through the contents of my vehicle, settling on the black ballistic nylon bag hidden under a tarp.

  The man hovering over me leaned in and said, “This isn’t finished,” before pulling the pistol out of my mouth, raising it high to the side, and swinging it back down across my head. I flinched a split second before the metal cracked against my skull.

  Then, my entire world went black.

  GREATEST ENEMY: CHAPTER 2

  Five Years Earlier

  March 23, 2003

  Al-Jawf Air Base, Saudi Arabia

  The raging sun slipped under the horizon, the endless sky blushing to a blazing orange hue in the final minutes before darkness.

  The sight could not have been
more welcomed by the men who watched it.

  From the first moment it became visible until it descended into the other side of the earth, the sun over Saudi Arabia turned the world around us into an oven. Its merciless rays were amplified by the featureless, hard-packed sand that extended flat as a pool table in all directions and out to the horizon.

  By the time nightfall arrived, my company of Army Rangers had already been sitting in rows on the ground beside the dirt airstrip for hours, sweating in desert camouflage chemical suits. Our gas mask carriers were slung between our thighs, and on top of those folded kit bags contained vests loaded with ammunition, grenades, and canteens that were pinned across our waists by harness straps from our static line parachutes. Massive rucksacks were attached to our hips below shoebox-sized reserves, adding an additional hundred-pound anchor to our load.

  The majority of us were nineteen-year-old privates, and our purpose at any given time was dictated by slightly older team and squad leaders. Although we were young, if the government wanted to parachute 154 Americans behind enemy lines to capture an airfield and begin ransacking their way across enemy territory until the commanding general said to stop, then Rangers were the force of choice.

  Until I had proven myself in Afghanistan the previous summer, my daily routine consisted of being punched in the stomach, thrown into wall lockers in the squad area, kicked in the ribs as I did push-ups on command, and conducting the aptly named “electric chair,” which involved squatting against the wall while holding a twenty-pound machine gun tripod with arms extended—within minutes the body began to shake uncontrollably, giving the appearance of being electrocuted.

  That type of personal and professional development was completely independent of structured training that included road marches, shooting, practicing raids, and patrolling through the woods late into the night and oftentimes into the following day.

  The collective result of those efforts culminated in the scene before me: a group of men completely desensitized to violence, charged with testosterone, and bored by weeks of living in tents on the remote Saudi airfield. We had spent the days of March 2003 waiting for the Iraq invasion, and now required only the arrival of our airplanes to enter our second war in as many years.