SEAL Team Bravo: Black Ops IV (18 page)

“Zeke, make sure they’re dead, then come after us. We’re not too far away now.”

“Copy that.”

They reached a narrow alleyway. Nolan heard Vince’s voice over the commo.

“Take it easy, Bravo Two. You’re almost there. Go through the alleyway and look to your left. You’ll be right behind them. They’ll be about ten meters away.”

“Copy that. Keep on them, Vince.”

“No worries, buddy.”

They reached the end of the alley, and Nolan peered around, snapping his head back as a hail of gunfire whistled past, but he only heard the muted sound of suppressed firing from Boswell’s group.

“Bravo One, this is Two. Cease fire, I say again, cease fire. We’re behind the hostiles. We can take them from here.”

There was a slight pause, and then the shooting stopped. Boswell’s voice sounded in his earpiece, “Copy that, Bravo Two. We’ll go to ground, so you’ll have a clear field of fire.”

“Understood.”

It meant they could angle their fire slightly upward and know they wouldn’t accidentally target their own men. He explained to the three Seals what was required.

“We go around the corner and open fire immediately. Brad, when you open up with the Minimi, all hell’s going to break loose. So wait until we’ve knocked down the flankers. Then you can hit them before they get a chance to run.”

“Copy that.”

“Okay, lock and load, let’s go, and remember, angle the shots upward. The other guys are out there somewhere.”

They went around the corner in a rush and flung themselves flat on the ground. Within two seconds, Nolan was singling out targets and had already knocked down two of the enemy. They were bunched together behind a low stonewall about a meter high in front of a house. He counted ten men in all. They’d started to pour fire in the direction of the new threat, Boswell’s squad, who had almost reached the two beleaguered Seals. Bryce and Whitman were returning fire from where they were trapped inside some kind of a grain store, and he could see the muzzle flashes as they shot at the hostiles. But the stonewall was effective, and they’d not taken any casualties, until now. Dan and Zeke opened up with their HKs, and the Afghans began to bunch into the center as the withering gunfire blew away the fighters at either end of their firing line. Brad then opened up with the M249; a long burst that cut through more of the hostiles and blew them to hell, or to Paradise if that’s what they believed, in little more than a few seconds. The four Seals stopped firing. It had taken ten seconds in all, and the insurgents were dead or dying several meters in front of them. Nolan called Boswell.

“This is Bravo Two, hostiles are all down. Area is clear.”

“Copy that. Will, are you okay?”

Bryce’s voice came over the commo. “Yeah, good one, guys. We had a nasty surprise back there.”

He stepped out of a nearby doorway, his men right behind him, and joined Nolan’s squad. It was time to go.

“Vince, how do things look from up there?”

There was no reply.

“Vince, do you copy?”

Nothing. Almost certainly his radio was u/s.
 

“Jack, I want you to go to Vince’s location. He’s on the roof of the mosque. We’ll be pulling out soon, so find out what happened to his radio, and call us when you’re with him.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

He ran off, and Nolan called Boswell again. The radio was silent.

“Bravo Two to One, I repeat, come in.”

There was no reply, just the muted sound of the carrier wave.

“We’ll go over and join him. Will, I was just talking to you, try to reach me on the commo.”

Bryce nodded and spoke into his mic. He came through loud and clear.

“It looks like the net’s gone down. We’ve only got local communications. Let’s join the Lieutenant and see if we can find the problem. And watch out for blue on blue. We can’t alert them that we’re on the way in.”

They walked carefully to the end of the street and rounded a corner. Boswell’s squad was still deployed in a defensive position, lying on the ground, their assault rifles pointing forward. But the NVG gear allowed them to identify his men, and they got up warily.

“I tried to reach you,” Nolan explained. “The commo has gone dead, and we only have short range from headset to headset.”

“I noticed,” he replied. “What the hell happened? This gear is incredibly reliable. I’ve never known it go on the fritz.”

“Me neither, but it’s happened. We have to go past it. The problem is, we can’t call in the helo.”

Boswell nodded. “That’s a bitch. The Chinook is waiting a few klicks away. It’s going to be a hike to get to them, and we’ve no idea what lies between us and them.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to deal with it. I have their position marked on the map, so we can locate them, no problem. I guess we’d better get moving.”

“And what if the helo has had to move position for some reason?” Nolan pointed out. “We’ll be walking out into the Afghan badlands with no place to go.”

He stared at Nolan. Finally, he nodded. “I guess you’re right. We have to make contact somehow or get a message to Bagram. We could…hold it!” he delved into his pack and pulled out a portable phone. His satphone.

“Christ, I’d clean forgotten about this little toy. I only just had it fixed back at Kabul. I’ll lock on the signal and put a call through. Damn, I thought this might come in useful. That was a useful repairman you found, Lucas. Would’ve taken weeks to fix it in the States.”

Nolan said nothing;
it sure turns a bad situation around. Boswell is one
hell of a surprise.

It took ten minutes of wrangling and namedropping before the Lieutenant finally got patched through to the Chinook. He finished talking to them and ended the call.

“They’re leaving now. They’ll land the helo on the flat piece of ground to the south of the village, and they’ve asked us to get over there and make sure it’s clean. Those guys are jumpy as hell about RPGs.”

Nolan nodded. “Vince still isn’t back yet. Whitman went out to find him. I hope there isn’t a problem.”

“You want to send someone else to take a look?” Boswell asked.

“No, Lt. You take the Platoon and head out to secure the landing ground. That’s the priority. I’ll go take a look, one man is enough.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Yep. They know the score, and they’re probably on their way in. I just need to make sure.”

He left them and hurried toward the mosque. He jogged through the deserted streets, wondering again at the state of the inhabitants; a bunch of poor, terrified folks too frightened to walk out onto their own streets to investigate the sounds of battle. Like the population of some medieval French village in the dark days of the Hundred Years War, they bore the burden of the men with the guns and paid with their blood and their lives. They suffered from lack of food, from no medical care, poor housing, and zero sanitation. Their lot was to live out their lives in terror. Just who would show them any compassion?
 
Not their own people, not the warlords, the Taliban. Or the corrupt officials of the Karzai government, who were too busy lining their own pockets, banking the billions of foreign aid money that came into the country into their offshore accounts. These folks had nothing, only an existence of suffering and fear, and likely a premature death through war, famine, or disease. There would be no comfortable old age, no honorable retirement. Probably the few who made it into their senior years waited only for the blessed release of death.

He heard a sound coming toward him and moved into the shelter of a doorway. Vince Merano came into view, and he stepped out. His fellow sniper instantly raised his weapon when he saw the movement but lowered it.

“Christ, Chief, I nearly shot you.”

Nolan grinned. “Not a chance. You’re too slow by half, Vince. I gather you had radio problems too.”

“Yeah, it’s packed in completely. We pulling out?”

Nolan nodded. “The job’s done, so yeah, we’re rounding everybody up and getting out of Dodge. Where’s Whitman?”

“Whitman? I didn’t see him.”

“Damn. He went to let you know we were leaving, but that was a while ago. Where the hell is he?”

“Beats me. He didn’t come to my stand on the roof of the mosque.”

“He can’t have got lost. This place is not big enough. We’ll head back to Boswell. He’s waiting with the others at the assembly point. Whitman should be back there by now.”

The retraced the route Nolan had taken when he came looking for Vince. They were only partway back before Vince stumbled.

“Shit!”

“What is it?”

“A body, it’s okay, it’s not Whitman. It’s one of theirs.”

“You sure he’s dead?”

Vince bent down to check. “It’s not a he, it’s a she, one of their women. They use a lot of them to carry guns around for the fighters. She could even have been training to be a suicide bomber.”

“Or she could be just an innocent,” Nolan pointed out. “A girl out on some errand in the night. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Vince knelt down at the body. She looked young, not much more than a kid.

“How did she die, a stray bullet, maybe?” Nolan asked him.

“No, that’s really interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“Her throat. It’s been cut.”

Nolan went cold, and a chill sliced through his guts. His throat was dry, and his brain was numb. With an effort, he forced himself to speak normally.

“Did you see any activity around here while you were on that roof?”

Vince considered. “I didn’t see any hostiles. Lucas Grant, he came by. Boswell, too.”

And they could assume that Whitman had been past at some point, when he should have been carrying the recall to Vince. Could it have been one of them who killed her, or someone else entirely? Even one of the locals, the Afghans were no slouches when it came to using the knife.

“Okay, let’s get rejoin the Platoon and hope Whitman got back okay.”

The reached the rendezvous point and found Whitman was already there, waiting for them. They walked out of Bandez just as the Chinook was dropping down for a landing. Two hours later, Nolan was locked up in a cell.

They were like a pair of tenacious bulldogs, Preston and Ashe. Because of the time difference, they’d been able to liaise with the Chief of Police in San Diego, who’d gone to speak to the Governor. Who’d got through to the Department of the Navy, who’d notified the JAG’s department, who’d contacted the Base Commander at Bagram, who’d passed the order to the Commander of the Military Police Unit. The MPs had been waiting for him as he stepped off the helo.

“Chief Petty Officer Kyle Nolan?”

He’d nodded, tired and weary, and knowing in his gut what was coming.

“You’re to come with us. Please remove all your weapons and equipment.”

“What the fuck’s going on here?” Boswell stormed, angry that they were once again trying again to undermine his platoon.

“Keep out of it, Lieutenant,” the cop warned. He was a redcap captain, and Boswell would know that a Seal lieutenant couldn’t trump even the lowest enlisted man, when that man carried the authority of the MPs in his pocket. Reluctantly, he stood back.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this, Chief, don’t worry. You’ll be freed in no time.”

“Thanks, Lt.”

The MPs looked bored an uninterested. They’d seen it all too many times before, and they were always innocent. This one was no different, except he was a Seal. That was unusual, but too bad. The guy was under arrest. It didn’t matter if he was the Base Commander himself. Orders were orders. Nolan shucked off his gear and waited for them to take him into detention. The MP Captain started to advise him of his rights.

“Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, you are to be held pending certain inquiries.” He looked closely at Nolan. “You gonna do this the easy way, or the hard way?”

“You can forget the handcuffs, Captain. I know you’ve got your job to do, and I also know that running won’t help my case. Lead the way.”

They’d taken him to the guardroom and locked him in a cell. After a half-hour, the two detectives came to see him. They stayed outside his cell, and Ashe was beaming as he set up a portable recorder and pressed the record button.

“Well, well, the runaway is finally back. You care to give us a statement now, Nolan? You don’t mind me recording this interview?”

He stared at the gloating cop. “It’s Chief Nolan. The only thing I object to is staring at your face, Detective Ashe.”

“Not for much longer, my friend. You’re on a flight back to the States. They’re leaving you in our custody, and when we reach San Diego, you’ll have a heap of questions to answer. It’d go much easier for you if you made a statement now and admitted it, got it all over with. We could even cut a deal with the DA when we get back.”

Nolan nodded. “Sure, I can do that. You ready? Here it is. I didn’t do it. This is a crock of shit, so fuck off, and find out who did do it.”

“You’ll regret that when we get back, Nolan. You’re in no position to make enemies.”

He laughed. “It’s a little late for that, or did you think I counted you as one of my friends?”

The man snorted and stormed away, muttering, “I don’t have to put up with this shit.”

Nolan realized he’d achieve nothing by making enemies and cautioned himself to hold his anger in check. Preston looked in at him through the bars.

“Tell me about your problems, Nolan. You sound as if you’re upset. Why don’t we all settle down and sort this out?”

Nolan almost laughed at the poor pretense at good cop.

“Problems? I don’t have any problems, only you and your partner.”

The cop smiled. “I know it’s not easy, any arrest is a difficult time, especially when you’re in the service. But that’s not what I meant. Your mental problems, what made you do it? You’ve had trouble, haven’t you?”

There it is again. Where are they getting this from?

“I didn’t do it. If you think I did, you’re the one with mental problems.”

“But at least I can remember what I was doing at any particular time, buddy. That’s it, you see. Maybe that’s the real problem, you know? Something’s wrong, maybe a blow to the head you’ve taken in action, and it’s caused you to go off the rails. It could be mitigating circumstances. It could rate a plea of diminished responsibility.”

Nolan shook his head tiredly. “You’re wrong.”

“Am I? Are you telling me you don’t get times when you lose your memory and can’t recall what you were up to at any particular time?”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Preston looked surprised. “You mean how did we know you have problems? Detective Carol Summers, of course. Or did you think because you two were lovers, she’d cover for you for rape and murder? You must be crazy. She told us all about it. That’s why we’re here.”

Something crumbled inside him then.

So it’s Carol who betrayed me. Why? She knows I’m not capable of anything like rape or murder. Where is she coming from, and what have I done to her to deserve such a betrayal?

Preston made one last try. “A statement now will go a long way to easing your sentence, Nolan, and you’ll feel better for clearing it up.”

He knew then he had only one defense. He was like a boat, cast adrift on a stormy sea, and he needed to play for time until he could get his bearings and find the way to shore. He needed help.

“I don’t want to talk to you, Preston. I want a lawyer before I say another word.”

 
Preston nodded. He’d heard it too many times before to let it worry him. “I’ll ask around for someone to talk to you, a legal representative. If you change your mind, and do want to talk, let me know.”

He got up and left without another word. He had the look of a satisfied man who was just tying up the loose ends, prior to moving on to the next case.

Nolan dozed for an hour; trying to push his troubles to the back of his mind and think of better, happier times. It didn’t altogether work. Uppermost in his thoughts was the evidence that was stacked up against him. The rape in San Diego, the murders out here in Afghanistan, and he’d been on the scene when each one was committed. It wasn’t perfect evidence, but the rape victim’s description was definitely a mark on the cop’s scoreboard. He wasn’t finished yet, but he was still on the edge of a precipice. He looked up as a guard appeared in front of the bars.

“Visitor to see you, Nolan.”

He nodded, swung his feet off the bunk and stood up. He was just Nolan now, no Mr., no Chief, just Nolan. Captain Mariko Noguchi came through the door and stood in front of the bars. She gave him a wan smile.

“How’re you feeling?”

He grinned at her. “About as good as you’d expect.”

“That bad, eh?”

“Yep.”

“It’s not looking too good, Kyle. Somehow, you have to clear this up before it gets any worse.”

“I don’t know how I can do that. This girl in San Diego. She gave a description that fits me, although it could also be several other guys in the Seals. They’ve decided I’m the perp, that’s the problem, and they’re not looking anywhere else. These murders in Afghanistan and Pakistan don’t help.”

“What happened in Bandez?”

He gave her a searching gaze. “Bandez, what do you mean? That was a successful operation. We went there, we killed the target, and we came back.”

“There was another victim, not one of the hostiles. During the debriefs, it came out that a girl was killed, and her throat was cut in the same way as the others.”

He recalled the body in the street. “Yeah, we did see a body, me and Vince, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it. It looked like a local hassle.”

“I doubt it was that. Piecing together all of the post-mission reports, it has all the hallmarks of another murder by the same person who did all the others.”

He stared at her with a growing, horrified realization.

"You're not serious? They think it was me who killed her?"

She shook her head. "They haven't come to any conclusions about who killed her, and it's still possible it was a local murder and nothing to do with Bravo Platoon. But it doesn't help you, not at all."

He could see that the growing weight of evidence was becoming stronger almost by the day.

There has to be an answer. I know beyond any doubt I’m innocent of any of the murders committed during Bravo Platoon’s missions. And I’m
ninety-nine per
cent sure that blackouts or no blackouts, I had nothing to do with the crime committed back in San Diego.
He explained it all to Mariko.

"It looks to me as if they've made a decision that I'm the chief suspect, and they're not bothering to look elsewhere. I’m fucked."

"I agree they’ve made up their minds," she replied. "And I have to say they have some circumstantial evidence, but that's all it is. The connection is obviously Bravo Platoon, and yet there are twenty men in Bravo. It could have been any of them. I don't understand why they’re pointing the finger at you."

He explained to her his problems with blackouts, after swearing her to secrecy. The cops may know, or were just guessing, but as far as he was aware, the Navy hadn’t caught on yet.

"It hasn't happened recently, but I had to keep it under wraps before, otherwise they'd have taken me off operations. But when the girl in San Diego was raped, I'd had a blackout that was so severe I went to see my physician in the morning. So you see, I have no real recollection of what I was doing that night, and it’s all on record."

"How the hell could they suspect you'd had the blackout?"

"My partner apparently told them. She's a detective on the San Diego force. I guess you'd say ex-partner, quite obviously we're not an item anymore. But I still can’t believe she would have told them."

He saw Mariko’s eyes look thoughtful. “It is strange that someone who loves you would do that to you.”

Nolan shrugged. “That’s all past tense. She’s a cop before anything else, I guess. But the fact is, she did tell them something, and that made me the number one suspect. I have to accept that and move on from there. The problem now is disproving their suspicions.”

“There’s only one way you can do that, you realize that?”

He did. “Somehow, I have to uncover the killer. It has to be one of the Platoon.”

She nodded. “Yep, it’s the only explanation.”

“I won’t be able to do anything, not from behind bars.”

“No, you won’t. Kyle, I’ll do my best to look into it. You’re not on your own. You have to roll with this. They’ll take you back to San Diego, and almost certainly you’ll be charged. You have to make bail somehow, and try to find out what you can from over there. Between us, I hope we can make some sense of it.”

“Thanks, Mariko. Why are you doing this for me?”

He looked into her black Japanese eyes, and she stared back at him with a warmth that surprised him.

After all, I’m a murder suspect.

“I’m doing it because I don’t like to see an innocent man going down for a crime he didn’t commit. I believe we have a killer on the loose, and incarcerating you won’t stop him killing. And I like you, Kyle Nolan. You’re a good guy, and I hope when this is all over, we’ll be able to meet for a drink and laugh about it. Maybe more than a drink, who knows?”

“Understood. It’s appreciated, Mariko. And by the way, I feel the same way about you.”

“But you have a girl back home, Kyle.”

“Not anymore. There’s a big difference between you and her, Mariko. You believe in me, and she thinks I’m a rapist murderer. That’s a bit of a relationship killer.”

She laughed. “I can’t think of anything worse, that’s true. I have to go now. I’m due back on duty. I’ll try and visit before they fly you back stateside.”

“Do you know when that is?”

“I’m sorry, no. I’ll try and find out.”

She left, and he felt the despair of isolation, trapped in a cell for something he hadn’t done. He waited for two hours, and then the outer door to the cellblock clanged open. Boswell walked in. He gave Nolan a small nod of greeting. An MP followed him in and unlocked the cell. Boswell entered, and the door was relocked. He looked at his Lieutenant.

“What gives, Lt? Why did they let you in here?”