Terminal Impact Page 19

  “Right,” Jack answered, and looked at his watch.

  “And what about this flat hat you know at one-five, running this sweep? An old friend you say?” Cotton asked.

  “A dear old friend. From my days down in Colombia with Elmore,” Jack said, showing a big smile. “Lieutenant Colonel Edward Bartholomew Black Bart Roberts.”

  “A descendant of Black Bart the pirate, so they say,” Cotton said. “I heard the boys talking about him.”

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “He’s got your old running mate Tim Sutherby with him, too, leading First Battalion, Fifth Marines sniper platoon.”

  “Sutherby? Really?” Cotton smiled. “Thought he was in Afghanistan.”

  “Came over to one-five when I MEF came in country from Pendleton. Found out today when I did some final checking on one-five,” Jack said. “They’d had him busy around Ramadi. Black Bart heard he was down there and snatched him up.”

  “He’s been here all along?” Cotton asked.

  “Apparently so,” Jack said. “I knew they had a new team working Ramadi, but I didn’t know it was Sutherby.”

  “He’s one badass gunslinger,” Cotton said. “Makes me kind of feel sorry for the Hajis.”

  “Only about a second?” Jack smiled.

  “Not even.” Cotton grinned. “Like maybe an interval of Planck time.”

  Jack grinned, remembering their discussion of the first instant of the creation of the universe with Elmore Snow, and Cotton’s explanation of how the physicist Max Planck had divided the first second of creation into intervals based on the time it takes the speed of light to travel one meter.

  “At any rate, I knew one-five had their hands full, so much area to cover,” Jack went on. “So I told Colonel Roberts I’d like to bring out a team or two, from time to time, if he could clear it with the powers that be. Next thing I know, we got this full-blown operation plan. Good opportunity to put some of our guys to meaningful work.”

  “Yeah, but the whole fucking herd?” Cotton said.

  “I’m not leaving any able-bodied operators back there to get saddled with more bullshit escort duty,” Jack said. “We lose another Scout-Sniper, it’s going to be for a better reason than protecting a can of beans.”

  “Black Bart cleared all this with Elmore before he departed for Lejeune?” Cotton asked.

  “Sure. Mostly,” Jack said, not knowing for certain how much Colonel Snow really knew beyond what he had told him. Then he considered. “Well, the colonel may not know about the entire MARSOC detachment coming along. That’s me making a command decision, and not giving Captain Burkehart room to back out. But I’m sure the colonel’s cool with it. Black Bart and Elmore are tight. No way Colonel Snow would ever turn down his asshole buddy from Medellín.”

  “Elmore see your hooch decorations before he left?” Cotton asked.

  Cochise Quinlan looked up. “Gunny kept all that dark shit in the box until the colonel got on the plane.”

  “Going to be a welcome-home surprise.” Jack smiled.

  “What’s Elmore going to say?” Martin asked.

  “He’ll love it!” Jack answered. “Besides. Shit didn’t come in until the day Elmore left, and he saw the boxes. I even gave him his patches. Not like I’m hiding it.”

  “Punisher skulls, snake-eye dice, and Templar cross gunwale to gunwale might look a bit rabid to him,” Cotton offered. “You know, his strong Christian values, and how he never says motherfucker unless he’s really pissed off.”

  Jack grinned. “I got Christian values, too. Only difference, I’m a sinner that don’t care to hide his shit.”

  Cotton Martin rolled his eyes. “One day, lightning will come out of the clear blue and strike you dead.”

  “Colonel Snow’s cool with it. Promise,” Jack assured his staff sergeant.

  Cochise Quinlan and the rest of the team gave Jack a look, not so sure about their gunny’s confidence.

  Captain Margaret Foulks and First Lieutenant Cynthia Snyderman walked toward the helicopter, helmets under their arms and their short-cropped hair fluttering in the hot wind. Both women looked trim, shapely, and fit real well in their flight suits.

  “Dude, check it. They’re hot!” Bronco Starr let slip.

  “Like you had a prayer,” Jaws grumbled.

  “That’s your trouble, Alex,” Cortez came back. “No optimism.”

  —

  “Suck on it,” the blindfolded girl heard the stinking man say, inhaling his foul breath in her face as he grunted out the Arabic words in a thick Palestinian accent. Then she felt the muzzle of his Makarov PMM nine-millimeter pistol press against her lips.

  Terrified, she obediently opened her mouth, and he shoved his gun inside it, the oily steel cutting her tongue and lips against her teeth. Simultaneously, he pressed his stiff cock inside her vagina, carelessly tearing her hymen, and immediately began fucking her rough, fast, and hard.

  Helpless, the young virgin, more child than woman, lay tied naked, spread-eagle on a filthy cotton ticking mattress atop rusty wire springs on a wrought-iron bed in a house in the far countryside west of Haditha. The gun pushed to the back of her throat gagged her, muffling her cries. She prayed as tears flooded from her eyes, soaking the blindfold, asking God to please take her life without delay.

  On the other side of a blanket nailed over the otherwise-open doorway to the room where the man raped the girl, Giti Sadiq and her two fellow Christian slaves taken from Al-Shirqat huddled on the floor, against the wall. Holding tight to each other, they shut their eyes and prayed for God’s mercy, hearing the grunting of the man and the whimpers of his victim as the metal bed banged and squeaked.

  Giti and her captive sisters had met the child only briefly in the kitchen an hour earlier, a thirteen-year-old Greek Orthodox girl kidnapped in the Syrian city of Deir az-Zur and spirited to Iraq with one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda Iraq recruiting teams. Her captors had taken this girl, who had introduced herself to Giti as Lina, along with five others. The terrorist soldiers had raped and killed four of them during their journey to Haditha but had saved the barely teen virgin, Lina, as a gift for their leader.

  The sixth Syrian girl, a heavyset sixteen-year-old Alawi Shia called Sabeen, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Deir az-Zur, had somehow survived repeated raping and now worked as a kitchen maid between rounds of abuse. She prayed with Giti and the other two Christian slaves, and asked Jesus to save her, too, even if she was a Muslim.

  “That is Zarqawi in there raping Lina,” the sister called Amira whispered to Giti. “I saw him. It is Zarqawi.”

  Giti put her hands over Amira’s mouth. “Do not say this. Not to anyone. Never again. They will kill you. We cannot know such things, or we, too, will surely die.”

  Then came the gunshot. A single pop.

  All three girls flinched at the bang. Giti blinked at Amira, and their third sister, Miriam. At the same time, dishes crashed in the kitchen, followed by Sabeen’s shrieks, then unrelenting sobbing for her young friend Lina.

  Giti and her slave sisters huddled together, holding each other tight, crying and praying, terrified. “Perhaps Jesus has blessed poor Lina,” Giti thought, “taking her from this evil place. Perhaps that is how He will take me, too.”

  “Get in here! Clean this mess!” the old graybeard Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser bellowed from the doorway at the three frightened girls. Men quickly hustled out the body of little Lina and left the mess of brains and blood for the maids.

  “You!” Abu Omar said, pointing at Giti. “Get in the kitchen and help that mindless fat fool clean up the broken plates she dropped. We have important guests dining with us tonight, so you make sure this meal is fit for them.”

  Giti bowed low and gladly hurried from the murder room and its bloody mess, which Amira and Miriam had to clean up.

  —r />
  Cesare Alosi had waited late for his executive assistant, Irene, to leave for the day before he took the stolen First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment operation plan from its hiding place, between the pages of the New York Times newspaper that he had carried in the office that morning and laid on the bookshelf behind his desk. He ate his lunch in the office, just to make sure that Irene did not snoop through his stuff, as he suspected that she often did when he was out.

  Irene acted suspicious when she left because Cesare never stayed late. She always locked up. Reluctantly, she finally left, irritatingly curious, asking all sorts of questions but trying to sound casual asking them.

  Tempted to rush Irene out the door, Cesare bided his time and painfully let the clock tick. He sat at his desk, feet up, sipping a Coke, thumbing through a Sergeant Grit catalog, his nerves gnawing through every second.

  When she had finally gone, he huddled over the combination color printer, scanner, and copy machine, carefully making both a paper duplicate and digital scan of the operation plan without removing the staples and not creasing any pages. He took the paper copy, fastened the pages together, and put it in his desk’s locking file drawer. He then bumped off the PDF scan to a thumb drive and secured the little USB data-storage device with the paper copy. Last, he wiped all traces of the document from the scanner and computer tied to it.

  He took the original operation plan in its top secret envelope, tucked the package back between the pages of his New York Times, folded so that the crossword puzzle showed on the outside, and drove to Baghdad International Airport. A daily visitor there morning and evening, Cesare slid right past the US and Iraqi security forces’ checkpoints leading into and through Camp Victory with the newspaper lying casually on his Escalade’s front passenger seat.

  Inside the busy compound, he drove to the operations building, where he made his regular morning and evening visits, parked, and walked toward the guarded entrance with the newspaper under his arm. A quartet of US Army sentries at the door watched him as he stopped at a trash barrel, took the Times from under his arm, dropped it in the can, and walked away. A few steps toward the door, he stopped as if he had changed his mind, went back to the trash, and retrieved his newspaper, but slid the top secret operation plan out and buried it under a collection of odd paper, candy wrappers, lunch sacks, soda cups, and drink bottles.

  As he walked through the secure entrance, a familiar face to the men who stood guard, he smiled as he handed the sentry his identification. “You know, I almost tossed out my Times without doing the crossword puzzle. Can you imagine? It’s the best part of the paper!” And showed the soldiers the page with the squares left blank. He laughed. “It’s been one of those days.”

  All four soldiers smiled and nodded politely, as if they gave a rat’s ass, while the sergeant in charge logged Mr. Alosi in the building and sent him on his way.

  Cesare made his evening rounds with his usual joint forces operations, intelligence, and security liaisons, and departed a little more than an hour later. He raised no eyebrows, just another step in his mundane daily routine.

  As he drove out the gate and headed to his apartment, he felt proud of himself. Got rid of the incriminating evidence right under their noses. With them watching!

  At his apartment, he dialed Victor Malone’s private line on his secure company sat-link phone.

  “You took care of it?” Malone said without even saying hello but going straight to the point as he answered the call.

  “Done,” Cesare said.

  “Good work on grabbing that CIA contract,” Malone said. Then asked, “This help us lock down that DOD security deal?”

  “Closed it right after I sent out our CIA contract team,” Alosi said. “Very fortunate timing. Literally doubled our business with two strokes of the pen.”

  “You didn’t do anything bonehead, like make copies, did you?” Malone asked.

  “Of course not.” Cesare laughed.

  —

  When Jack Valentine and his seven Marines dropped on the secluded landing zone in the sprawling desert, several miles east of the Euphrates River and south of Haditha, the sun lay blood orange on the western horizon. By the time they reached their first reporting point, darkness had engulfed the world.

  After checking in by covered net radio with one-five’s operations chief, Jack and his Scout-Snipers gathered in a circle, guns pointed outward, eating their evening meal on a hill of hard earth that hadn’t seen rain in recent memory.

  “Dryer than a popcorn fart,” Sammy LaSage commented while working on a cold Meals Ready to Eat package of Smoky Franks that Marines had nicknamed the Five Fingers of Death.

  “What would make people want to inhabit such a brutal land?” Cotton Martin asked Jack, as they ate their own mystery meals, and looked at the distant twinkling lights of Haditha on the west side of the river and Barwana on the east side, far to the northwest, and Haqlaniyah closer to the northwest, across the river. Somewhere ahead of them, Iraqi Highway 19, known on military maps as Alternate Supply Route Phoenix, running north from Hit, along the east side of the Euphrates, then just south of Haditha, across the river from Haqlaniyah, turning northeast across country to Baiji, on the Tigris River, lay hidden in the darkness.

  Jack thought about it, started to say something cute, but thought some more. “I used to ask the same question about the shit-hole places around El Paso when I was growing up. You know? Fuck if I know . . .”

  “Elmore says it’s the Garden of Eden,” Cotton added.

  “Elmore says a lot of shit like that,” Jack said.

  “Hard to imagine,” Cotton added, gazing into the darkness and at the distant lights. “A good land gone bad.”

  “There’s no good land gone bad, Cotton,” Jack said. “People gone bad. Not the land.”

  Cotton smiled. “Elmore tell you that?”

  “Naw.” Jack grinned. “I’m capable of coming up with a pearl of wisdom on my own, now and then.”

  They finished their food, and Jack gave Martin a nudge.

  “Look here, brother,” he said in a low voice, careful to be sure that only Cotton heard him. “Anything happens to me this trip, or down the road, I want you to step up and take over.”

  “What about Billy?” Cotton asked, taken off guard.

  “Oh, he’s my pard and all, don’t get me wrong,” Jack said. “I trust him with my life. He’s capable. But dude, when it comes to smarts, you run circles around him. Me, too, sometimes, I think. I expect to see you wearing bars on your collars before long. Besides, don’t you hold rank over him?”

  “A month in grade,” Cotton said. “But, Jack, you and Billy got a long history. Fallujah Two, a tour up here a year ago. Billy and Elmore go back, too. Don’t you think Billy would expect to step up? Besides, won’t Elmore pick him anyway?”

  “I already had this talk with the colonel, a while back. He respects my choices. Like Billy or not, it boils down to one thing: You don’t do stupid shit,” Jack said. “Billy does stupid shit. Me, too, for that matter. Something happens to me, you tell Elmore I said you’re my replacement.”

  “Whatever,” Cotton said, and sat quiet for a while, watching the lights and picking up the movement of a truck driving along Highway 19 far to the south. “You see that?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, binoculars up. “Long way off.”

  The headlights stopped and went out.

  “Reckon it’s an IED team?” Cotton said, still looking through his binoculars.

  “Lights on, probably not. Then, you never know,” Jack said. “It keeps working up our way, we might just find out.”

  “What brought up this business of something happening to you, anyway?” Cotton said, again talking low.

  “Those guys at the airport,” Jack said. “That one recognizing me. Called me Ash’abah al-Anbar, the Ghost of Anbar.”

 
“So what?” Cotton shrugged.

  “They know me. Know I’m here. Saw us leave. Zarqawi’s going to make it a point to come after me,” Jack said.

  “And?” Cotton said. “Just makes our hunting him easier.”

  “They might get me,” Jack said. “Catch me unaware.”

  “They might get us all,” Cotton said. “We’re eight Marines sitting by ourselves in their desert. Nobody friendly even remotely close.”

  “But we’re badass dudes with badass guns.” Jack grinned.

  “That’s right, brother,” Cotton said.

  “One thing for certain,” Jack said in a low whisper. “They won’t take me prisoner. Not alive. I’m still breathing, I’m still shooting.”

  “Same here,” Cotton said. “I’m pretty sure that goes for every man in the outfit.”

  “Prisoners get their heads chopped off on YouTube,” Jack said. “Balls, too, most likely.”

  “They chop off my head, I don’t think I’d be worrying too much about my balls.” Cotton laughed.

  “Unless they chop balls first.” Jack grinned.

  “Yeah, that would hurt.” Cotton laughed.

  “Anyway, I’m going down in a fucking blaze of glory, or I won’t go down.” Jack smiled.

  “Brother,” Cotton said, “you’re not going down. None of us are. But we’re going to take down a whole shitload of their sorry Haji asses.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Jack said, and put out his knuckles.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Cotton said, and bumped Jack’s fist.

  —

  Giti Sadiq carefully placed a serving board layered with sliced roast goat in the center of the dining table for the men. Amira followed with a platter of khubz and pita breads in one hand, and in the other she balanced a tray loaded with dishes filled with hummus, tahini, fattoush, and rolled, pickled grape leaves stuffed with cheese.

  Miriam put hot plates of sliced, steamed vegetables on the table after Amira had set down her cargo. Giti returned with two pitchers of cold water with lemon slices floating in them.