Phoenix Island (27 page)

“Yeah,” Henshaw said, “too bad Killer Carl knocked you the eff out before you could even throw it. Agbeko, did you see Cheng jerking on the ground? I thought she was break-dancing!”

Agbeko laughed but said nothing. No one had complained when Agbeko had taken the seat next to Carl. He was the leader of this Phoenix Force squad, a recruit from somewhere in Africa, Carl thought, by his accent. He was the biggest of the group—nearly Stark’s size—and the best fighter in the bunch. He’d managed to clip Carl a couple of times hard enough that Carl was happy the punches hadn’t been flush. Carl had dropped him twice, but Agbeko wouldn’t stay down. When the round was over, he spat out his mouthpiece and gave Carl a hug, saying, “You are a killer, Carl.”

Henshaw had crowed “Killer Carl!” and it had stuck.

Now Agbeko spoke, and at the sound of his deep voice, the other troopers quieted. “In my country, the generals who make soldiers out of
children, they teach you nothing. Only what to do. They give you a gun; they tell you where to point it, who to shoot. ‘There, shoot him,’ they say. ‘But that is my father,’ you tell them. ‘Then shoot him in the head so he won’t suffer,’ they tell you. So you do. Or they shoot you.” He gestured at the room. “We are all so blessed. The Old Man, this place, they are great blessings. There is a plan, you see?”

Everyone hooah-ed.

And before Carl could really ponder what Agbeko had said, Cheng said, “Here he comes,” the door at the front of the room opened, and Phoenix Force shot to its collective feet.

“Atten-shun!” Agbeko said.

Everyone, Carl included, snapped to attention.

“At ease,” Stark said, and walked to the front of the room. “After-action report on this morning’s sparring session: Carl kicked your butts.” He grinned, and the troopers busted up with laughter. Someone patted Carl’s back again.

Stark went to the computer at the front of the room, and the image of its desktop appeared on the large projection screen covering much of the front wall. “Carl, each week, I deliver the ‘sitrep,’ a situation report outlining Phoenix Force activities around the world. Henshaw, get the lights.”

“Yes, Commander.” A second later, the room went dark.

“Here we go,” Stark said. A map of Russia and a bunch of smaller countries filled the screen. Stark pointed to perhaps the smallest of these, saying, “Zurkistan. Former member of the Soviet Republic. Bordered to the north by Russia, to the west by Georgia—that’s the country, not the state, Henshaw.”

The troopers laughed, none harder than Henshaw.

Stark continued, pointing to various locations on the map as he spoke. “Zurkistan is bordered to the east by the Caspian Sea, and to the south by Azerbaijan. Area: roughly forty thousand square kilometers, most of it mountainous. Population: a little over two million. Per capita income: around two thousand dollars a year. Topography: hills and mountains. Primary assets: mining, agriculture, and wine making. Significant income from taxes on an oil pipeline running through their country
from the Middle East en route to Russia. But that’s not the only pipeline running between these regions.”

He dragged the tip of his pointer along a black line that stretched from the south of Zurkistan up and across the country into Georgia. “This is the Taakvili Trail. Thousands of years old; a former caravan trade route. Now it’s a pipeline for all things terrorist. We’re talking weapons, drugs, money, and the terrorists themselves. Ground zero for any extremist looking to stick it to Russia, from Al Qaeda all the way down to ‘Al Smith’ or any other recent ‘revert’ who wants to join the fight. You read me, troopers?”

“Lima Charlie, Commander!”

“Hooah!” Stark said. “The Zurkistani government hates these terrorists. More than anything else, Zurkistan wants a seat on the UN, but until it can stop the flow of bad guys into neighboring countries, that’s not happening. Speaking of the bad guys, who are we talking about?”

Hands went up all around Carl.

Stark pointed. “Boudazin.”

The pretty girl who had outshot everyone at the range spoke with a French accent, saying, “The Tigers, Commander Stark.”

“Correct,” Stark said, and pointed to a mountainous region in the southwestern corner of Zurkistan. “There are two main ethnic groups in Zurkistan. You have your indigenous farmer types—poor as dirt and dumb as turnips—and a hodgepodge of Muslims to the south. Lots of ethnic Chechens and a bunch of mujahedeen who relocated after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Against all odds, they actually seem to get along with each other most of the time, at least well enough that the terrorists among them have formed an organization called the Taakvili Tigers.

“Meanwhile, back in the capital,” Stark said, tapping a star on the other side of the country, “what’s the Zurkistani government to do? The Tigers don’t live in barracks; they mix with the locals, so the Zurkistani government can’t root them out without killing thousands of noncombatants. The international community would cry genocide. Why not ask Russia for help?”

Hands shot up. It was twisted, seeing these hardened troopers, most of them older than Carl, act like anxious schoolkids.

“Nachef?”

“The locals remember life under the Soviets,” Nachef said, “and fear Russian occupation.”

“Great explanation,” Stark said.

“Nerd!” Henshaw squawked, and everybody busted up.

“All right, all right,” Stark said. “So they can’t handle the Tigers themselves, and they won’t ask Russia for help, but they want that UN seat. So whom do they call? Phillips?”

“The United States.”

“Bingo,” Stark said. “Truthfully, the US would love to wipe out the Tigers and all the anti-American terrorists they’re training and harboring, but no can do. Why? Cheng?”

“Multiple reasons, Commander,” Cheng said. “Russia wouldn’t like it, for starters, and even if that weren’t the case, American troops would face the same problem as Zurkistani troops. The Tigers are hidden in the mountains, spread out among noncombatants.”

“Excellent.” Stark smiled. “You get an extra belt of ammo next time we’re on the range.”

Someone fake-coughed, “Brownnoser!” and that got everyone laughing again.

Stark waved them into silence and said, “Killing noncombatants remains a big no-no, despite the fact that the women and children in question are terrorists and future terrorists, too. So once again, the greatest army on earth, who could flatten this entire region with a tactical nuke, bows to the all-holy rules of engagement and does nothing.” He smiled. “Well, at least
officially
they do nothing. Unofficially, a few of the more forward-thinking individuals in certain government agencies quietly call us and make arrangements. Because Phoenix Force has only one rule of engagement. Carl, do you know what our one rule of engagement is?”

Carl shook his head. The pleasant post-sparring buzz was gone now, and the weird unreality of the people he was around—people who spoke in these military terms that were sort of plain but still sort of unsettling—was
rapidly darkening into dread. “I don’t know what you mean by
rule of engagement
.”

Some of the troopers laughed.

“That’s all right, son,” Stark said. “And you jokers out there, pipe down. Carl just got here. That might be tough for some of you to remember, considering the way he kicked your butts sparring today, but he’s new.”

Someone hooah-ed and a hand patted Carl on the back.

“The rules of engagement,” Stark said, “are rules of warfare. Vote-grubbing politicians use them to please foreigners and bleeding-heart liberals who know nothing about combat. So they tell the army, ‘Play nice, tie one hand behind your back, don’t fire until fired upon,’ that sort of thing. Luckily for the world, however, Phoenix Force has only one rule of engagement, which brings me back to my original question. Troopers, what is our one . . . rule . . . of . . . engagement?” He drew it out, like a teacher prompting a conditioned response.

“Win!”

Stark leaned toward them, cupping a hand to his ear dramatically. “What? I can’t hear you.”

“Win!” they roared.

Stark looked very pleased. “Hooah!”

“Hooah!”

“Outstanding,” Stark said. “And as your reward, here is fresh footage from Zurkistan, taken about two hours ago, just after midnight, local time.” He tapped some keys, and the map disappeared, replaced by nighttime video: the outskirts of a mountain village, everything otherworldly in that weird, green night-vision glow.

The Phoenix Forcers leaned forward. Carl stayed still; he didn’t like the eager look on everyone’s faces.

The video erupted in gunfire and shouting. Carl saw muzzle flashes, then made out vague shapes firing from behind boulders, parked vehicles, and a stone well casing. Bearded men in robes emerged from houses, shouting and firing rifles, and died quickly. A string of bright green explosions obscured everything, and the houses were gone and the rocky ground itself burned.

“Thermite,” Stark said, and the troopers hooah-ed.

On-screen, some of the soldiers were up and moving, while others remained crouching, laying down cover fire. One of the upright soldiers, a sharp-featured man with a hawklike nose and a goatee, drew near to the camera and barked orders to the other soldiers. Then he glared into the camera with the most intense, predatory eyes Carl had ever seen.

“Baca!” some the troopers shouted, and the room rang with the name and a wave of hooahs.

Then the man with intense eyes—
Baca
, Carl told himself,
a name worth remembering
—ran off at a sprint, firing his weapon.

Stark paused the playback. “Baca is the personification of an optimized OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. Watch him. He’s executes the OODA loop as quickly as any SEAL or Delta commando.”

He restarted playback, and the camera followed the prized soldier, who turned down a side street and sprinted between two rows of buildings, lighting up the night with machine-gun fire with one hand and tossing grenades with the other. Other soldiers followed behind him, working in teams, kicking in doors—and killing anyone in sight.

Carl watched numbly as a woman ran into the street carrying a child, then watched in horror as Baca ended her with bullets and charged on without a thought, as if he she barely registered. The scene became a blur of atrocities. More gunfire and explosions; homes burning; men, women, and children falling dead. An animal—a dog, Carl thought, and truly didn’t want to know—ran, completely engulfed in flames, from one of the homes, to be shot dead by one of the soldiers.

Carl looked away.

Awful sounds filled the room—worst of all the cheering of Phoenix Force.

Five minutes later, an eternity, it was over.

A massacre.

The troopers whooped with appreciation.

Carl felt sick. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen, didn’t want to believe it. . . .

“We’ll break down the after-action report once I’ve had time to review
it, but overall, this was a home run,” Stark said. “Phoenix Force suffered only a single casualty, and she’s in stable condition.”

“Hooah!”

“It gets better,” Stark said. “Bad-guy body count: 184.”

“And one dog!” someone shouted, and the others roared with laughter.

Carl forced himself to join in, hating every second of it. This was madness.

“Best of all,” Stark said, “we positively ID’d the guy we were after. Known terrorist dead, mission accomplished.”

As Phoenix Force hooah-ed, Carl thought,
They massacred an entire village just to kill one man?

Then, turning to him with a glow in his eyes, Stark said, “I’m glad you were able to see this, Carl. I didn’t want you to get the impression you’d joined some cut-rate mercenary force, Merc Depot or something.”

“ ‘For all your mercenary needs,’ ” Henshaw said, and everybody laughed some more.

“Indeed,” Stark said. “But you’ll see for yourself one day, Carl. Once you finish initial training, I’ll drop you into Baca’s team and let you get your feet wet.”

Carl’s dread and revulsion shifted to terror.
Baca’s team? Get my feet wet?

“Helots!” someone yelled.

The others laughed, many of them repeating the strange word.

“An inside joke,” Stark said, “You remember the Spartans and their
agoge
? Helots lived within Sparta but weren’t really citizens. They were dime-a-dozen peasant types, trapped somewhere between serfdom and slavery. But they served a higher purpose, too. In order to graduate from the
agoge
, a young Spartan had to kill a Helot.”

“Zip!” someone shouted.

“Zap!”

“Ka-boom!”

More laughter.

Stark chuckled along, and when the noise died down, he said,
“You’ll love your final exam, Carl.” He grinned, staring at Carl with shining eyes. “It’s way, way better than knocking someone out.”

“Killer Carl!” Henshaw squawked, and the room exploded in hooahs and laughter.

Carl forced one more smile onto his face, but inside he was reeling. Eric’s journal was true—all of it. Parker’s executions, the Old Man, killer kids, everything. Were Ross and Octavia okay?