A Hard and Heavy Thing (17 page)

Levi ran toward the hut.

After Levi kicked the door in and stepped into the dusty room with his gun up, he saw Gassner standing over the two Iraqis. Both of them lay prone on the dirt floor with sandbags over their heads. Their hands were flex-cuffed behind their backs. Privates Weber and Ott, eyes wide and brows raised, trained their M4 rifles on the two helpless prisoners.

Nick was already in there, yelling at Gassner to stop.

Gassner reared back and kicked one of the faceless prisoners in the ribs.

“Gassner,” Nick yelled. “Stop right now.”

Gassner looked up briefly and kicked again.

“Corporal Gassner, you gotta stop it,” Nick pleaded.

Levi took several steps into the room and grabbed Gassner's shoulder. “Knock it off,” Levi said.

“These are the Ali Babas,” said an out-of-breath Gassner, shrugging him off and balling his fists, “who tried to kill us, Levi.”

“Sergeant Hartwig.”

“What?” said Gassner.

“You address me as Sergeant Hartwig,” he said, his voice obdurate and commanding. “Now remove those sandbags.”

Gassner didn't move.

“Now,” Levi said. “Do not make this worse for yourself.”

“Roger that.” Gassner squared up and stood nose-to-nose with Levi. “Sergeant Hartwig.” He stood there for a moment, and Levi balled his own fists, ready for a fight if it came to that, but Gassner relented and turned around. He grabbed each man in turn by the collar and pulled their necks up enough to remove the sandbags before dropping them back into the dirt.

When he had finished, he turned back to Levi. “Happy now?”

“I am the furthest thing from happy, Corporal Gassner.” He took time to make eye contact with each man in the room. “Take your accomplices here and go outside. Hold a cordon and secure the EOD team.”

Gassner bumped Nick in the shoulder as he walked past him, but Nick took a deep breath, told himself to turn the other cheek, and let it go. The room cleared except for Levi, Nick, and the two prisoners on the floor. Now that the sandbags were gone and his eyes had adjusted to the exiguous light, Nick could tell that these prisoners weren't men at all; they were teenagers. Practically children.

The kid on his left was scrawny, just into his teenage years with wispy hairs above his lip that couldn't properly be called a mustache. Red pimples with heads ripe for popping pocked his dark caramel skin. The other was even younger, but he shared the same unibrow and narrow chin. Probably a brother or half-brother. Back home, this kid wouldn't even have his own locker at school. He would still be playing Little League.

Even more striking than their youth was the damage done to their faces. Their split lips were swollen and bleeding, damaged too badly to blame it on the desert sun. There were other indicators that Gassner and his posse had administered more vigilante justice than the kicking he had witnessed. The nose of the older boy was cocked to the side, obviously broken. It bled into his thin mustache, down onto and even past his cracked lips. Dirt and bits of gravel stuck to the blood on his chin, which quivered in a combination of fear, anger, and indignation. The left cheek of the other boy's face was scraped raw. His eye socket and cheekbone were smashed, and his brow and forehead were deeply bruised. The dark purples and reds drew a sharp contrast to his sickly pallor, and the way he held his right eye wide open in shock drew attention to his inability to open his swollen left.

Nick approached the two detainees from the rear. He looked down at their grubby hands, disgusted. Blood oozed out of the torn skin around the white plastic flex cuffs before mixing with the henna that stained their hands.

Letting his M4 hang, he pulled his own set of zip ties from a pouch on his flack vest. He first knelt over the prone detainee on the left, one of his knees between the boy's spread legs.

“How old are you?” Nick whispered, mostly to himself. “You're just a kid.”

With one hand, Nick firmly grabbed his wrists and the boy tensed, but didn't pull away. “Ssssh,” Nick said. “Relax. Chill.” He put his own zip ties on the kid's wrists, above the other set, just tight enough that he couldn't slip out, but not so tight as to cut off circulation or lacerate his skin. He shuffled over and did the same for the next kid.

“You guys plant that bomb?” Levi asked from over by the door. “Boom boom?”

The boys on the ground didn't look up. Levi leaned his back against the wall. He rested his forearms on his slung rifle.

When Nick had finished securing the boys with his own cuffs, he pulled a black Benchmade from his vest and told them not to move. He eased the knife under the first set of flex cuffs and sliced through the plastic, releasing some pressure from the wrists of the younger boy. When he got to the older boy, the cuffs were too tight to slide the knife underneath so he had to saw from the top, toward the boy. He slipped when he broke through the plastic, and his knife point dug into the heel of the boy's hand. The boy unleashed a choleric torrent of Arabic.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Nick said. He backed up onto his knees, grabbed the boy's shoulder, and pulled him up to a kneeling position. As soon as he let go of him, the boy turned his head, arched his back, and spit in Nick's face.

Nick closed his eyes when the boy spit and they remained closed for only a second, but when he opened them, he could already feel the boy's weight bearing against him. Levi, who had been casually resting against the wall, delivered a combat boot to the kid's sternum. Nick lost his balance and fell back on his elbow when the kid fell into him.

Levi reached down and pulled the kid back up by his shirt. He screamed in his face. “He's trying to help you. Are you too stupid to see that?”

Nick scrambled to his feet and put a hand on Levi's shoulder. “Chill, man,” he said. “Just chill.”

Levi stood fast, bent over, holding onto the kid's shirt. He stared into his face.

“Levi.” Nick pulled on his shoulder. “Back off unless you want to get a face full of spit too, okay?”

Levi let go of the kid, but didn't move. He stood there content to tower over and intimidate the boy with his artificial bulk, weapon, and presence.

“Levi, I said back off. We don't both need to get TB from this kid. Just. Settle. Down. I'm okay. I got this.”

Levi took a few steps back, rested his back against the wall, and slid down into a sitting position, legs spread, knees bent, boots on the floor, rifle at the ready.

Nick wiped his face on his sleeve and joined his friend in the dirt. He patted Levi's forearm. “Breathe, buddy. Just breathe.”

Levi shrugged him off, shook a cigarette out of a soft pack he had wedged in the shoulder of his flak vest, and lit it. “You know what the problem is with these people? These animals never know when someone's trying to help them. Fix a road, they blow it up. Build a school, blow it up. Water plant? Boom.” He took a drag and blew smoke out of his nose while waving his cigarette in the direction of their prisoners. “And these kids? They'll gank our money and our Oakleys and our Benchmades and they'll make a living selling us their stupid bootleg porno DVDs, and then two seconds later they try to blow our asses up.” He took another drag and leaned forward.

“Kids have got balls though, right?” Nick said with a chuckle.

“Lucky those balls didn't get them killed.”

Nick reached over and grabbed Levi's cigarette, took a drag, and gave it back.

Levi flicked it into the dirt near the kids' faces. “Animals,” he said. “You should have just let the guys do what they wanted. I would've.”

“Nah. You don't really believe that.”

“Sure as hell do.”

Nick's voice hardened in an instant. “Listen to me, Sergeant Hartwig. That is not how we operate. It's not why we put on this uniform in the first place. Right and wrong don't change because of circumstance.” Nick stood up and looked down at his friend, his superior. “Furthermore, I expect you to notify Archer One-Six personally, considering you're the big, bad platoon sergeant today.”

Levi looked at him, as if in shock.

“I'm not playing.”

Levi rose, straightened his back, and stood as tall as he could, though he still had to look up at Nick. “Let me tell you something,
Specialist
Anhalt. I had Nick's back because Nick's been my best friend for years. But you better get something straight right now. If it comes down to a choice between helping out these al-Qaeda pricks or getting behind anyone else in the platoon?” He pointed toward the door. “Even someone like Gassner? I'm picking our guys every time, no matter what the circumstances. Do you understand me?”

Without waiting for an answer, Levi turned his back on Nick and walked out of the hut.

Nick stood in silence. Looking at the bruised and bleeding children in front of him, Nick wanted to inflict the same kind of damage on Gassner, Ott, and Weber. At the same time, he couldn't deny that they were fighting a war. Regardless of their ages, regardless of their motives, regardless of their respective faith traditions, and regardless of the politics that led them all to cross paths in the first place, there was no ignoring that each of them was trying to kill the other. The proof was in the plans; these two had been part of an attempt to blow them into a pink mist.

Nick thought of the first time his own vehicle had been struck by an IED. The front end of the Humvee flew so high he thought they were flipping over backward. The cab filled with smoke so fast he thought he had gone blind. He still didn't think he could hear right. The same rage and lust for revenge that seemed to have gripped Gassner had filled him that day as soon as he got out of the disabled truck and set foot on the ground. The difference was that when Nick got hit that first time, he felt bullets flying past his head. He fired back at the masked and faceless enemy trying to kill him. He was blessed with the opportunity to unleash the primal fighting instinct known only by those whose lives are on the line. Today Weber, Gassner, and even Nick had been hit without notice by a couple cowards, and yet, they enjoyed no such relief. In their battle, instead of stepping out to engage in a fight to the death with their enemies, they stepped onto the supply route after getting smoked by a point-blank blast of high explosives and shrapnel—concussed and confused and angry as they were—only to be told by the brass up at battalion that now their mission was to stand there in the heat for three hours to guard a hole in the road. The army had bred certain deadly instincts within them, and when the situation arose to waken those violent and reactionary forces, the army asked them to take a knee, hydrate, and wait for further direction.

Levi stormed out of the hut as Lieutenant Michaels and the members of first squad pulled up to the far side of the second squad victors. Gassner stood next to his Humvee whispering to Ott. The sight of them conspiring like that made Levi feel some of Nick's disgust. Levi could have given the benefit of the doubt to Private Weber, about whom he knew nothing except that he was new to the unit and greener than snot from a sinus infection. Maybe Weber didn't know any better. He could give Ott no such benefit. The kid looked like a weasel, and his favorite hobby was spreading gossip and discontent behind the backs of anyone in a position of authority while cozying up to anyone who might listen. He had already been busted in rank twice and wouldn't be in the army at all if they didn't have to cut through so much red tape to get rid of someone. And Gassner? It was a no brainer that Gassner knew better. The whole reason he had been named a corporal was because of his letter-of-the-law priggishness.

Levi unclipped his helmet to let his face breathe. He wiped the sweat pooling on his upper lip as he began the walk down the road to meet the LT.

Ott stepped in front of him. He tried to mask his body language to portray a challenge, but his voice betrayed his anxiety. “What exactly are you gonna say?”

Levi glanced up at an oblivious Hooper in the turret.

Gassner pulled Ott's arm to get him out of the way. “Leave it alone, Private. He ain't gonna say nothing. After all, he and his buddy, Annie, were in there alone. All by their lonesome for quite some time. Anything he said would be our word against theirs. Besides, who's the LT gonna listen to? The new hotshot or the old crew who've been in his outfit since he graduated from ROTC?”

Levi didn't break stride.

“You aren't gonna say a thing, are ya Levi?” called Gassner.

That was one option: saying nothing. He certainly wasn't afraid of Gassner's weak threat, but good NCOs covered for their guys. They took the fall and kept their mouths shut to cover for the failures of their men. That's what responsibility was all about: keeping your mouth shut when the other guys blew it. Not to mention, that kind of leadership instilled loyalty, and loyalty was priceless. Levi took off his glasses and used a corner of the moist shemagh wrapped around his neck to wipe them. In a way, he was grateful it had taken first squad so long to link up with them because if the lieutenant had been the one to catch the guys giving a bona fide beat down to their detainees, he would have held Levi responsible for not keeping his squad under control. You can delegate tasks; you cannot delegate responsibility. It's a tenet of leadership that colonels and generals have long since forgotten, but it's a truth that noncommissioned officers carry with them every day. At the same time, Levi did catch them, and he did put a stop to it. He still wasn't sure that was enough.

He grew lightheaded as he walked down the gravel road.

He passed the EOD truck, where the bomb techs were reconstituting their explosive charges. Levi stopped, trying to decide whether or not to bring them into it. The extent of their interaction with the EOD team had come entirely outside the wire during QRF missions to IED problems, which happened nearly every day, but still; he knew the bomb techs, not the men. A glance back at Gassner and Ott whispering together made up his mind for him. “Sergeant Cazalet,” he said. “Do me a favor?”