Terminal Impact Page 9

  Just then the first semi cranked its engine, boiling black smoke from both stacks. Then, one at a time, the other three started as each operator got his rig ready to roll.

  The lieutenant sized up the truck drivers and guessed where they came from. “Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, my bet. Overweight rednecks with plugged arteries from a life of fatback and taters. Trying to cash in on a rich payday so they can live what they got left of their miserable lives at home, instead of one day keeling over dead at some far-off interstate truck stop.”

  “Since you’re taking bets, I say one’s a ’Bama boy. Maybe a Georgia peckerhead and a Kentucky hillbilly. I’ll throw in one coal knocker from Pennsylvania, too, just to be different,” Billy added. “Poor folks gambling their lives after a poke of fool’s gold, driving trucks over here. Look at ’em, wearing ball caps and T-shirts, like they’s only gonna roll up I-65 to Montgomery or Nashville.”

  “Yup,” the lieutenant said, and spit a brown splat of Skoal on the concrete apron in front of the airport warehouses where big cargo planes from stateside supply centers unload an endless stream of pallets stacked with boxes shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, like those that now filled the trailers pulled by the four big KBR trucks. “I feel for these boys. They’re my people. Trying hard for their families. Let’s try hard for them, too. Keep these fellows from dying today.”

  Billy nodded at the lieutenant, liking him. “Yes, sir.”

  Cotton Martin gave a mount-up nod to his three gunmen, corporals Clyde McIllhenny and Byrd Clingman, and Sergeant Bobby Durant who ran the M2. Martin’s other man, Corporal Hubert Biggs, a muscled hulk just a hand shorter than Cotton, came off a dairy farm near Kerrville, Texas, and went by the nickname, Hub, since childhood, slid onto the driver’s seat as the six-foot-six-inch-framed staff sergeant took his spot at shotgun in the right-front seat, pushed all the way back.

  As the Army infantry officer walked toward the Cougar to mount up his dozen soldiers, Billy Claybaugh called to him, “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Phipps,” he answered, looking over his shoulder. “Jeremy Phipps. Fayetteville, Arkansas.”

  “Go Hogs!” Claybaugh called to him. “Staff Sergeant William C. Claybaugh at your service, sir. Mobile, Alabama.”

  “Roll Tide,” the lieutenant answered, and walked on.

  When the Army Cougar HE packed full of troops rolled out, the convoy fell behind the tan monster with the forty-millimeter grenade-launching main machine gun swinging a full 360 turn in its armored turret, making sure everything still worked. Two of the semis pulled behind the MRAP, and Billy had Rowdy Yates roll behind them. Then two more big trucks fell in, and Cotton Martin and his team of four brought up the rear.

  As the supply convoy left the gated barriers of Baghdad International Airport military compound, which also held Camp Victory and Camp Liberty within its maze of razor wire and high hard walls, Billy-C felt his nerves start to tighten from his belly to his jaws. He and most of the other Marine Scout-Snipers he knew called it the Lump. Nobody ever liked getting the Lump.

  “You boys stay frosty, ya hear me?” Claybaugh told his crew over the MARSOC channel that linked all ten Marines plus Jack Valentine on a squawk box at the operations hooch.

  “Yeah, boss. We cool,” Cotton answered.

  —

  Lance Corporal Rowdy P. Yates’s mother had named her son Rowdy after her favorite Clint Eastwood Western character, from the old black-and-white TV series Rawhide. The P in his middle name stood for Paden, his father’s first-choice character from his all-time top-of-the-ladder Western movie, Silverado. Emmett, Jake, and Mal had plenty of grit going on, but Paden had it all. Quiet, cool, and capable.

  The twenty-year-old lance corporal cut his teeth watching videotape television, if he watched anything on the boob tube at all. Where he lived in the wild wide-open Wyoming wilderness, their best broadcast signal came with snow and jagged lines. They had no cable and couldn’t afford satellite. So Burke and Rhonda Yates had bought VHS movies and TV shows off the clearance racks at the discount store for years. When their boy Rowdy started high school, they bought a DVD player and opened a whole new vista of entertainment.

  While Burke regarded Silverado and True Grit hands down the best Westerns ever made, and Rhonda enjoyed her TV series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Rawhide, and they all loved Jackie Gleason and Lucy, their boy Rowdy thought Monty Walsh and Quigley Down Under beat out all others. The idea of Matthew Quigley nailing all those long shots with his 1874-model Sharps buffalo rifle with a thirty-four-inch barrel, shooting the .45-110 caliber metallic cartridge with a 540-grain paper-patched bullet made Rowdy dream big.

  He even went to wearing his Wranglers tucked inside his tall-topped, high-riding heeled Olathe buckaroo cowboy boots, and on his topknot rode an extrawide-brimmed heavyweight beaver Stetson with a Gus crease on the crown and the fore and aft of the brim dipped low over the young cowboy’s eyes and neck with a soft roll at the sides. Just like Quigley or Monty would wear it. Always pearl snaps for shirt buttons, too.

  Rowdy’s moustache, however, did not want to grow quite right. It sprouted thin and had gaps. So the only girlfriend Rowdy ever had, Brenda Kay Nevers, eventually talked him into giving up the project, until he grew thicker stalk, and he shaved it off.

  “Ain’t no bushiness to it, son,” she’d say. “Makes your mouth look dirty. Like you been suckin’ hind teat on dad’s old sow.”

  His senior year at Campbell County High School, where he played football for the Camels and tie-down calf roped on the rodeo team, Rowdy bought a Quigley replica 1874 Sharps long-range rifle, complete with double-set triggers and long-range flip-up sights on the small of the stock, in addition to the buck-horns on the barrel, along with all the brass trim, identical to the one Matthew Quigley used. Rowdy had saved money from two summers’ work to afford the expensive and fully functional work of art made by the Shiloh Rifle Company of Big Timber, Montana. The same folks that made the very gun that Tom Selleck used in the movie.

  “Over three grand for a smoke wagon,” his dad marveled.

  As Burke Yates had taught his son, never buy something you don’t use, and if you buy it, use it well, Rowdy Yates mastered his Quigley Sharps long rifle. He practiced vaporizing prairie dogs and splattering running jackrabbits at five hundred yards, open sights, on the fly. Fall hunting season after he graduated high school, the boy, still seventeen, killed a seven-by-seven-point trophy bull elk with the rifle. Put the animal down with one shot at 1,206 paces.

  Burke had told the young man in the big hat not to risk such a long shot, just too far off. But Rowdy dropped the hammer anyway. He fired the shot and waited. When the heavy bullet went thump, the big elk raised his head and craned his neck back, then collapsed. Burke Yates let out a hoot.

  “Best shooting I ever saw!” he exclaimed, and the boy didn’t say a word but just grinned under his big hat.

  While the family had hoped their son would have one more Christmas at home, the Marine recruiter surprised Rowdy with an early seat at MCRD San Diego, the day after Thanksgiving. He hung his Quigley Sharps over the fireplace with his hat, in mom and dad’s den, and asked Burke to keep it oiled and clean for him until he got back. The long gun still hung there when Rowdy headed to Iraq. Oiled and clean, under his big hat, ready to shoot, as always.

  Rowdy Yates was the only Marine Elmore Snow had ever known besides himself who ever lived at Crazy Woman Creek, Wyoming, much less got born and raised there.

  Snow Ranch, known around those parts by its brand, the Standing-S, twenty-one sections of land homesteaded by Hector E. Snow, Elmore’s great-great-grandfather and namesake, sat at the bottom of Headgate Draw, just west of where Crazy Woman Creek pours into the Powder River. Yates Ranch, that carried the Sky-Y brand, an arc above the Y, likewise homesteaded generations ago and passed along father to son, lay just south of the Standing-S.

 
; Elmore Snow grew up riding horses and chasing cows on that same wild land where Rowdy Yates had learned ranch work from the boots up. They knew the same hills and hideouts, and best places to take a girl for a kiss. Both of them had endured those long bus rides morning and night to and from school at Gillette, seventy miles by road and thirty-five if a fellow could hitch a ride on a crow’s back and fly direct.

  Thus, Rowdy Yates had a leg up with Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow when it came decision time on composing this MARSOC, Iraq team. Those home ties and the intimate knowledge of what kind of man comes from Crazy Woman Creek, Wyoming, helped trump the stump of his junior rank. Kinship of growing up in the same place on Mother Earth that most people never realized existed convinced Elmore that in this instance a lance corporal could measure up. Rowdy also seemed a lot older than his years, probably because the wellspring of his life and many influences came from a time more like Jack’s and Elmore’s, and they related well to him.

  Even so, Rowdy P. Yates still had to make the grade as not merely a qualified Marine Scout-Sniper and Force Recon operator, but a superior man with a gun, and have keen senses about all those other things rolled into one body of muscle and bone that makes the MARSOC operator all things capable. No task too difficult or too off-the-wall that he cannot accomplish the mission with what he holds in his kit. Creativity, ingenuity, and enterprise define his nature. He’s at home by himself, confident and fearless. A master of field skills, camouflage, and craft. He will adapt to conditions and overcome all challenges, and he will always accomplish the mission regardless of obstacles. It takes special warriors to fight special warfare, and Rowdy Yates filled that bill.

  Right out of boot camp, Rowdy got married while home on leave. Brenda Kay, his girl from high school, never wanted anyone but Rowdy, and he had never wanted anyone but her. She and her family lived just west of Headgate Draw, off Crazy Woman Creek, on a small ranch with good timber, up high. They had a cozy stone house up there and ran cattle in the meadows that they opened from logging where they could. She and Rowdy had gone to those sweet secret places that Elmore Snow had also shown June, his bride from Gillette.

  Now Brenda Kay Yates sat home at Midway Park enlisted-housing area on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, two thousand miles from Crazy Woman Creek, Wyoming, and her family, eight months pregnant, waiting, worrying, and praying for her man.

  —

  “You sure it’s a girl?” Billy Claybaugh asked Rowdy, joking with him as the lance corporal drove the lead Hummer in the convoy of KBR tractor-trailer trucks heading down Fallujah Road. “Maybe it’s a boy, but he had his leg or his hand in the way. Or his pecker’s so little like his daddy’s that you can’t see it without magnification.”

  Rowdy laughed with the others and took the jab in stride. They were brothers, and that’s what brothers do. Tell a guy he’s got a little pecker.

  Before they had left the MARSOC home base, Rowdy Yates had just gotten pictures of his soon-to-be-born daughter in an email that Brenda Kay had sent him. She had gone to the doctor, and they took ultrasound images of the baby, and announced that they were fairly sure it was a girl. Filled with joy, Rowdy had shown everyone from Captain Burkehart and Gunny Valentine right down the line to Bronco and Jaws.

  “Staff Sergeant Claybaugh,” Rowdy drawled back, “my pecker may be short, but it’s wide and satisfying. I’m proud of every pound of it.”

  Everybody laughed more because they had all seen Rowdy with his pants off. None of them wore underwear. It was a thing that special operators did, avoiding crotch rot. Free-balling commando style. Big watches and no drawers. A long-held tradition among Force Recon Marines and Navy SEALs.

  As a result, living as they did, in close quarters, there were no secrets and no surprise packages.

  Cochise Quinlan manned the .50 caliber machine gun and Petey Preston fed him ammo. Randy Powell rode in the jump seat and would run the M240 Golf machine gun if they needed it. The additional man made life a tight fit in the Hummer with the extra boxes of ammunition that Billy-C had stacked in the back. Just in case. Along with the Barrett .50 caliber Bullpup sniper rifle and two of the Vigilance VR1 semiautomatic .338 Lapua Magnum sniper rifles that Bill Ritchie and his son, Keary, at EDM-Vigilance Arms had built for Jack and his boys.

  “Jammed up and jelly tight,” Billy-C had said when his Marines started complaining. “You’ll thank me later, when we get in the shit.”

  Cotton Martin thought it was overkill but went ahead and loaded his Hummer with the gear and ammo his cohort had prescribed for the mission. No questions asked. Billy was in charge of this detail, and the tall Texas staff sergeant supported his authority. When his crew began to complain about the tight conditions, Cotton backed Billy-C up and said he or Gunny V would have made the same choices.

  As they left the pavement and now rolled on hard-packed clay and crushed rock, the Army Cougar that led the convoy ran fifty yards ahead of the first two KBR transport trucks pulling box trailers filled with food and supplies. Each of them also kept fifty yards’ space between their bumpers. Billy-C chased fifty yards behind them, leading the other trucks, followed by Cotton and his crew. All seemed well.

  “Staff Sergeant C,” Cochise chimed down from his perch. “Just the other day, Rowdy, me, and Petey was taking us a piss off the Euphrates bridge. Rowdy started whizzing first and said, boy, it’s sure a long way down to that water. Then Petey lets his monster fall, and says, yes it is, and that water’s cold. Then I unfurled my snake. Pretty quick, I let those boys know, that river’s deep, too!”

  The whole crew laughed again. So Rowdy took up for himself. “You know, I bruised mine up pretty good when it dragged the rocky bottom. Water being so swift and all. Bruised it up something fierce.”

  Everybody moaned.

  Billy-C was glad they could joke. It took the edge off his nerves. Boring. He loved boring. Boring to the point that men start measuring their dicks and telling lies.

  As they had left Baghdad, mostly wide space lay between them and any houses. Not much cover to support an insurgent ambush. However, less than a mile ahead, Staff Sergeant Claybaugh saw the tight spot he had dreaded. Walls, buildings, junk cars. Lots of places to set up an ambush.

  “Heads up and eyes out,” Billy-C reminded his crew.

  —

  Captain Mike Burkehart pecked furiously at his computer, across the office from Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow’s vacant desk. Several wall lockers lined the bulkheads of the small white MARSOC headquarters office. In the rear of the building, the captain and the colonel had set up their living quarters in small, walled-off rooms with a single bathroom and shower serving both officers.

  A knock came at the front door, and Burkehart looked up as the bright outside light came through when it opened. A geared-up combat Marine stepped inside, an M4 carbine rifle slung on his shoulder and mature creases lining his tan face.

  “First Sergeant Alvin Barkley, Charlie Company, One-Five,” the Marine said. “Looking for Lieutenant Colonel Elmore Snow.”

  “You missed him by half a day, First Sergeant,” the skipper said. “I’m Captain Mike Burkehart. Officer in Charge of the MARSOC detachment, and executive officer to Colonel Snow. Can I help you?”

  “I hope so, sir,” Barkley said, and took a brown, nine-inch-by-twelve-inch envelope out of a green map case. “Lieutenant Colonel E. B. Roberts, one-five battalion commander, gave me direct orders to hand carry this operation plan to Colonel Snow. I’ve been busting my hump since daylight to get here from out in the Anbar by Hit. Deeply regret missing Colonel Snow. Will he return soon?”

  “He’s gone stateside for three weeks,” Burkehart said.

  “We’ve got a team of your MARSOC operators tasked to support this operation,” the first sergeant said.

  “Colonel Snow told me about it before he left,” the captain said. “Gunny Valentine briefed me, and he’ll lead the team. You ca
n take that envelope back with you or leave it with me.”

  First Sergeant Barkley thought about it and started to put the envelope back in his map case but stopped.

  “Sir, I just don’t know what to do,” he said. “Colonel Roberts didn’t trust email or the classified guard mail couriers with this, and wanted me to hand carry this hard copy direct. Too many compromises these days. But I hate to go back and tell him I couldn’t deliver the package.”

  Captain Burkehart reached out and took the envelope from the Marine. “Leave it with me. Absolutely safe. I’ve known Black Bart Roberts for years. Tell him you left it with Mike Burkehart, Snow’s X-O, and he’ll be fine with it.”

  “Be sure you lock it up, sir,” the first sergeant reminded the captain, and opened a logbook for Burkehart to sign.

  After endorsing receipt of the plan, Captain Burkehart pointed to the three-drawer classified-documents safe in the corner of the office. “I’ve got some other classified materials that I’m wrapping up. I’ll secure your op plan with them when I’m done.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Barkley said, and shook hands with the captain. “I’ll let the colonel know that all is well on this end, and your team will be joining us.”

  “They launch out of here in a day or two, so the gunny tells me. I’ll read the plan and get myself fully up to snuff. Worry not, Marine,” Burkehart said.

  “Sounds righteous, sir,” Barkley said. “I’ve got my company chopping up by Haditha Dam in the morning, setting up our end. Trying to clear the scum up and down the river.”

  “Good luck with that. Easier said than done,” the captain said, walking the first sergeant back to the door.

  “Don’t I know it, sir,” the first sergeant said, and shook the captain’s hand again.

  “Tell Colonel Roberts that Captain Burkehart sends his regards,” the skipper said.

  When the Marine departed, Captain Burkehart laid the envelope on the colonel’s desk with other papers he planned to lock in the classified safe, once he got his work done.