Authors: Amber Green
Khyber Run
Loose Id, LLC
www.loose-id.com
Copyright ©2011
First published in 2011
Loose Id Titles by Amber Green
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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I woke muddled, thinking the ship's engines sounded wrong. Red light glared on my eyelids. Breathing meant gagging on the seagull-shit taste of a hangover. And that sound was not my ship's engines. More like a sardine can's engines or...a plane?
Opening my eyes took effort. A plane. From the rear of the fuselage, I faced up an aisle between rows of knees hugging sea bags. Not sea bags: MOLLE-packs. Red lights in strips overhead barely illuminated a couple hundred hunched forms in desert camo, a row of males in body armor along each bulkhead, facing inward, and two rows of females jammed into back-to-back seats in the center. Male or female, each of them clutched one of those carbines the sponges called an assault rifle.
What am I doing in a plane packed with camo-assed bullet-sponges?
The plane's deck angled down sharply. Screams rang in my ears, going dull. My ears cleared, painfully, and the shrieks sharpened.
Crashing. That's what we're doing.
The deck roller-coastered up, then yawed faster than physics should allow.
Whiplash
. I saw stars. The stench of vomit wrung my empty guts.
A dive and another yaw brought more screams ringing off the bulkhead, prayer in Spanish close by, retching farther away.
How did I stay in my seat, with gravity halving and doubling and snatching me starboard to port? When the plane steadied long enough to let me look down, I saw bands of dull silver duct tape strapping my thighs to my seat, and another red-streaked silver band over my belt.
Something hung on my lower face. I had some kind of mask. No. Somebody had duct-taped a puke bag to my face. It sagged obscenely against my chin, like a giant used condom.
Pulling it off hurt. The stench blasted from it.
Where do I put this
? I looked around, blinking, trying to make sense. The screamers in the middle seats were mostly army. The hundred or so men squatting in the seats lining the bulkhead were marines. Some laughed at the women. Others hunkered down, as if waiting for shrapnel to find them. A few threw curious glances at me, the only squid in sight.
A cluster of pops rapped at the bulkhead, like popcorn in my mother's big pot. One of the sponges grinned at me. “Small arms fire. Welcome to Bagram."
Bagram? A map of the giant air base flashed in my eyes, then a dim memory of riding my father's shoulder, hiding my face in his turban while a trio of
Shuravi
—Soviets—stomped an ominously silent laborer. Couldn't be...
"He means hold on,” added another sponge.
I dropped the puke bag to grab my seat. The plane tilted, again nose-diving but this time braking hard. Instead of falling to the deck, the bag shot forward, splatting against a female's ear.
"I'm
hit! Aaah
!"
"God! Brains! Oh,
God
!"
"
Aaaaaaaaaaaah
!"
The plane swerved and jinked, each jerk redoubling the shrieks. The smell of fear, sharp and sour, fought with the smell of vomit.
One of the marines chuckled, despite the sweat beading on his face, and pitched his voice low enough to hear under the shrieks. “You know you're going to have to police that up, Squidward."
"No-go, sir. The doc's our volunteer."
Volunteer? WTF
? I twisted to see who'd called me a volunteer, but his rifle caught my attention first. A bolt-action rifle. A sniper's weapon.
Behind the rifle, teeth flashed in a grin. He didn't seem to exist, except as a rifle, a hint of helmet, and a grin. Then the grin vanished.
The deck flipped overhead. The unsecured marines bounced, sending bellows among the screams. I hung from my seat, still taped in place.
The deck flipped again, then slammed up at us. A marine fell across my lap. I caught his weapon before it could bean him. The cool metal slapped into my hand, rousing memories like an old lover's name.
I looked at the sniper, still crouched behind his rifle, immobile and near-invisible.
Who the fuck are you?
During a lull in the gunfire, a tall woman in a camo uniform conspicuously bare of insignia trotted the lot of us into a heavily sandbagged bunker, also red lit to preserve our night vision. Inside, a young army lieutenant and a marine corporal sorted us out and lined us up to check our orders.
I still seemed to be the only sailor. As the marines’ formation took shape, I automatically went to stand next to the rifleman at the end of the first row. Not part of it, but not conspicuously alone either.
The doc's our volunteer.
The USMC doesn't have its own medical specialists, so one of us has to accompany any team heading into the field, especially for missions outside the immediate reach of an evacuation helicopter. I had, once upon a time, signed up to be a corpsman for combat missions. The closest I'd gotten to action, though, was wading into a Bangkok riot to drag out a series of stoned swabbies and one little kid who had no business being in the street at night when the bricks were glossy black with blood.
Had I been fool enough, drunk enough, to volunteer again? That might be a good way to get killed, if nothing else. Not that I considered myself suicidal.
It might also be a good way to get past the peer review, finally make chief before my time ran out. Not that I considered myself ambitious.
Some days I just didn't know what I was.
The corporal stopped in front of me, his face lit by the netbook he carried like I would a clipboard. “Hospital Corpsman First Class Momand? I just got an update on you, but all it says is TAD. What kind of temporary additional duty did you volunteer for, Doc?"
The slight sneer in his voice brought up the other meaning of TAD: Traveling Around Drunk. It stung. More so because of its obvious accuracy. “If you needed to know, corporal, the United States Marine Corps would have told you."
Rude
! I could hear my grandfather's theatrical gasp. As he would have suggested, I bit down on my tongue in self-rebuke.
When I first shipped out, the week I turned eighteen, I'd gone out of my way to be polite to the bullet-sponges. They were young warriors, deserving of respect as they groped through their cultural chaos in search of something like the Pakhtun Way. But after the first six months of having to order the
kafirs
out of every fucking space I needed to work in and every fucking space I needed to pass through, I'd adopted the navy attitude. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.
No, I hadn't really. It was just the hangover.
My head pounded. Worse, I could smell myself, and my stomach was full of angry snakes. And now my tongue hurt.
The corporal, who probably shaved twice a week whether he needed to or not, frowned. “Momand is one of the tribal names. So you are from around here?"
Not any more, kid
. After my father was killed, then the Shuravi got my older brother and almost got me, Mom had taken the rest of us home to her family in Pensacola. I'd come back once, as a runaway teenager, only to find everyone I knew dead or missing, every place I knew changed, the language awkward on my tongue, the smells and the feel of the clothes and the very color of the sky alien.
Something showed in my face or on the screen, because the kid went on alert. “Never mind."
I didn't hear a word
. That would be the polite thing to say. Instead I changed the subject. “How long has the assault been going on?"
"Thirty-eight minutes. Unless the pattern has changed, it should be over. Of course, the fact we've established a pattern means it's time for a change.” He scanned his netbook, looking bored. Except his left eyelid, which twitched. “If you need to know more, I'm sure someone will be assigned to brief you."
He started to move on, but I raised my hand. “I'll need to draw equipment. Where is my gear list?"
He didn't quite sneer. “Take it up with your COC, sailor.” Twitch. “Doc."
If I hadn't opened my mouth, would he have smelled the booze on me? Fine. The guy with the rifle probably had my orders. Certainly, nobody would have bothered handing them to me anytime since... My mind worked painfully and ground out a memory of being called away from a training session by Chaps, the chaplain's assistant. My face stiffened. I remembered following him out to the fantail where the wind blew hard, remembered waiting silently for him to say which of my brothers I'd lost.
Ben. The youngest. The one who hadn't grown up dreaming of gunshots and terrifying shouts in the night. Though, like the others, he had stupidly listened to my stories of
Pakhtunwali
, the Pakhtun Way, and gone off to be a scout/sniper.
Ben. The one I couldn't quite picture without a skateboard in his rucksack.
Now here I was, thirteen hundred miles, two thousand klicks, twenty degrees of longitude from where I'd stood teaching my class. Possibly AWOL. Maybe on orders. But my pockets were flat under my hands, empty.
Handing me anything—including information—since Chaps handed me Ben's name would have been as useful as flushing it down the head.
Information. I needed that first. Probably only the sponge with the bolt-action M40 rifle was capable of giving me enough. “Enough” being a graduated amount, of course. Right now my pounding head was too thick to take in much.
Gear. A knife. That went without saying. I'd sent each of my brothers a Khyber knife—handmade in Alabama—upon his graduation from high school, but I'd always used a bowie taken from my first commanding officer. Camo. In daylight, my black uniform would stand out among all these shades of dust and dusty green. From what I heard, only the paramilitary and the docs—in other words the prime targets—wear solid black. Body armor. Boots designed for rough ground instead of a flat deck. And the biggest medical pack I could lay hands on. What's a doc without his ouchie kit?
Rations. Getting halal rations shouldn't be a problem. Plenty of Bagram's civilian food vendors should be set up to take American Express. But where was my wallet?
ID. I'd need picture ID to prove my US citizenship. If I ended up captured, I needed something to persuade my captors to consider me a valuable prisoner, not a traitor to be dissected and left draped like a sacrifice over some wind-scoured rock.
And again, information. Facts.
Volunteer, my ass
. Especially for a mission here. Especially as doc for someone toting a bolt-action sniper's rifle. But I'd seen how it works; whining gets you out of nothing. All I could do was cooperate enough to maximize my chances of getting the job done and getting out of here in one piece.
The women, with their disproportionately large packs, were filing out the two end doors. The marines were standing down, unrolling sleeping mats.
"C'mon, Doc."
Being called Doc made me a target. So did the name Zarak Momand. Especially my tribal name. Nor could I ever again expect to hear my cousins’ laughing salutes,
Wezgorrey! The Kid climbed it
! Onboard ship I was simply called HM1. Impersonal, the way I liked it. But the marines used a combination of rank and alpha codes on missions, so I'd be E6 Mike, right? I focused on the marine. “Don't call me that. It puts a target on my forehead."
