Weapons of Mass Destruction (25 page)

Wolf purposely paired them up, hoping they’d feed off each other’s fervor or whatever the hell it was. He could see it in their eyes. Logan in particular looked like an angel of death, a latter-day Abraham sacrificing Isaac on the altar of righteousness. Sinclair’s expression was more ecstatic than religious. Killing was primitive and ritualistic, an exalted form of hunting. Truth be told, his stories about bathing faces in the blood of slaughtered animals creeped out Wolf. But every soldier had his way of getting into the zone. As long as Allah wasn’t involved, Wolf suspended judgment. The important thing was to get there.

Rifle fire rang out. An enemy gunner had been biding his time in one of the rooms at the end of the hallway, yet another ambush. Logan ducked into an open door on the left and started returning fire. His automatic overpowered the rifle, giving Sinclair the momentary cover he needed to smash through the first door on the right. He whirled in a circle, shooting from the hip to defend against anyone standing or crouching or hiding in what looked like a master bedroom. He didn’t hear the shot over the racket of his own gun, but he felt a tremendous blow against his chest. It must have been a pistol. A bigger weapon in such close proximity would have penetrated his body armor. Either he was lucky or the enemy was ill-equipped. It was too soon to tell.

He kept spinning and firing, realizing too late that his automatic was too unwieldy for such intimate combat. Somebody tackled him from behind. He shoved his gun backward against the ribs of his assailant. Almost simultaneously, he felt the butt of the pistol smash his skull. Sinclair reeled but managed to take advantage of the blow. For that split second, he knew just where to find the pistol. He grabbed the man’s wrist and slammed it against the wall, sending the pistol skittering across the floor. The man pulled a knife and lunged at Sinclair, who had already unsheathed his. It was just the two of them, unencumbered by firearms.

The knife was a gift from Pete’s dad, Eugene. Everyone else back home had given him a hard time about enlisting in the Marine Corps. Eugene gave him a going-away present, complete with a tutorial on how to use it. Sinclair knew exactly what Pete would have said, had he still been alive. Nothing like being taught how to knife fight by a drunken Indian, yet another example of his father’s embarrassingly stereotypical behavior. Sinclair begged to differ. Pete’s dad was the only one brave enough to let bygones be bygones, acting more like a father than his own goddamned father. Eugene’s gift had saved his life more than once in Iraq.

Eugene taught him everything he needed to know one August afternoon. Sinclair was due at boot camp in a week, and time was short. His instruction was completely unorthodox. Everybody else in the world thought the trick was to keep your opponent off balance. Eugene said everybody else in the world was wrong. Knife fights weren’t like fencing where you got points for looking pretty. All you had to do was stick the guy and stick him good. You could be falling over backward and still slice and dice the best of them. They’d be all smug, balanced on the balls of their feet, with their guts hanging out. Touché.

They fought for hours on end, secluded in an abandoned barn. Beds of hay cushioned their falls. Sinclair had carried a knife since he was old enough to clean fish. Now the blade needed to become part of his body, a new and more deadly appendage to fend off Eugene. At first, too much was happening too quickly. Eugene’s limbs seemed to fly in every direction at once in random patterns. His blade glinted with the predictable unpredictability of a firefly. The minute you saw it in one place, it was in another, untraceable.

“Ignore everything but the knife. Keep it simple.”

The less Sinclair tried to follow Eugene’s every move, the more he was able to anticipate the next thrust of his knife. Everything started slowing down. He managed to insert himself into the action, finding fleeting slivers of unguarded air. Once he mastered a few offensive moves, they started working on psychological defense. Knives were more temperamental than firearms. Whether an Iraqi or an American fired a gun, the bullet maintained a strictly mechanical trajectory. Knives had personalities, nationalities, even socioeconomic backgrounds. Eugene started roleplaying, fighting like lumberjacks and punks, soldiers and terrorists.

“How do you know how terrorists fight?”

“My ancestors were terrorists, remember?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Your ancestors were Americans.”

“Tell that to General Custer.”

“He fought the Cheyenne. Not the Sioux.”

“They all looked the same to him.”

Sinclair’s clothes were slashed to pieces. He suffered a number of superficial cuts, friendly reminders of what not to do in knife fights. They kept sparring until he drew blood. His accuracy still left something to be desired. The wound he inflicted was a bit too friendly, more a gash than a knick. Blood soaked through Eugene’s shirt. He shrugged it off.

“I’ve seen worse in the barber’s chair. Next time follow through.”

“Sure you’re okay?”

“Nothing a little medicine won’t cure. Let’s go get doctored up.”

They got liquored up instead. Eugene usually drank at home in his trailer. That night they splurged at the local bar. Eugene kept toasting Sinclair’s illustrious future as an oil tycoon. That was the point of the Iraq War, wasn’t it? To build a pipeline straight from Baghdad to your Chevy? He was mostly kidding. He’d have enlisted himself if he weren’t such an old fart. Too bad his son hadn’t lived long enough to fight the good fight, by which he meant any fight at all.

Sinclair took offense, of course. He insisted America was fighting for freedom, not just free enterprise. They kept circling back to this distinction as Sinclair got drunker and Eugene got more philosophical. Night fell in the bar. The regulars had long since taken the edge off and were pacing themselves. Johnny Cash dominated the jukebox, serenading their otherwise quiet kinship of beer and an occasional shot. Eugene and Sinclair were still drinking full throttle, trying to outpace their demons.

“I’m not fighting just for the sake of fighting, you know.”

“God is on your side?”

“You’re damn right he is.”

“Lucky you. I wish Pete had your luck.”

“He wouldn’t have fought anyway.”

“He’d have fought.”

“Pete hated the military.”

“He hated the government. Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t.”

“Doesn’t matter one way or the other. Pete couldn’t pass up a good fight any better than you can.”

“Last I heard, he trashed the army every chance he got.”

“He was just trying to impress that girl.”

“What girl?”

“Your sister. Who else, dick-brain?”

Eugene’s hostility toward Candace caught Sinclair off guard. They were in dangerous territory, armed with nothing but tequila, equal parts truth serum and amnesic. Sinclair could count on one hand the times they’d seen each other since Pete’s suicide. The gift of the knife came out of nowhere. It seemed conciliatory, even though he had no idea what, if anything, had estranged them. For the first time, he realized Eugene might be privy to things even he didn’t know about Pete.

“I’ve asked myself a million times why he did it.”

“You should have asked me.”

“I’m asking.”

“He was dishonored.”

“By my sister?”

“By your father. Your sister just went along for the ride.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like you don’t know. Your father told Pete to keep his stinking Indian hands off his daughter. Candace didn’t say a word in his defense. Not a goddamn word.”

“You’re making shit up.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Who ever heard of killing yourself for that?”

“It’s a Sioux thing.”

“For disgrace in battle. Not love.”

“Honorable suicide, Billy. Something you palefaces wouldn’t understand.”

“Since when was Pete such a devout Indian?”

“Since they rubbed his nose in it. It was all he had left.”

Either the tequila or the truth caught up with Sinclair. He was too sick to go home, so they both slept it off in Eugene’s trailer. They each remembered about half of what was said that night. There were no hard feelings. Everybody had been blaming everybody else for Pete’s suicide since Grandpa found him dead in the aspen grove. Surely they were the least responsible, they who had loved him most. They said good-bye abruptly that morning, trying to cover the intensity of what they were feeling. Eugene told Sinclair to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t taught him how to fight just so he could get himself killed in Iraq. Sinclair said he’d do his best not to. It was his only real send-off. His own father didn’t even drive him to the airport.

He kept practicing his moves at boot camp. Sergeant Troy was initially skeptical of his technique. Sinclair looked out of control, off balance. But nobody could get anywhere near him with a knife. Master of the long shot, he seldom got the chance to fight the way Eugene had taught him to fight, mano a mano. He had used his Ka-Bar to finish off a few dudes in Baghdad and Ramadi. But he definitely never met his match until Fallujah, the only town down and dirty enough to serve up a knife fight worthy of his training. The insurgent in the master bedroom probably thought he was leveling the playing field, stripping an infidel of his superior firepower. He was actually handing Sinclair his weapon of choice.

Eugene was right about how terrorists fight. The man’s movements were veiled and devious. There was something fluid about him, almost incorporeal. His body seemed to vanish whenever Sinclair’s blade approached. It was like fighting a mirage. The man was much older than Sinclair, much bigger and stronger and more experienced. He had the seasoned confidence of a holy mercenary, a mujahid trained in Pakistan or Afghanistan with nothing to lose and everything to gain in the hereafter. Sinclair could only win the fight if he stayed alive. This man would win either way. The odds were in his favor, yet another suicidal warrior embracing death as the ultimate victory, making it almost impossible to prevail over him.

The specter of suicide pricked Sinclair’s concentration, opening a slit that widened into a gash as the man knifed his thigh. Resisting the impulse to look at the wound, he assured himself it was just a scratch. He felt a spreading warmth before slamming shut the part of his brain that registered pain. Though too late to deflect the attack, he managed to slash the wrist of the man’s retreating arm. In the inevitable tit for tat of knife fighting, Sinclair had chalked one up. Unless his adversary was ambidextrous, he had lost his advantage.

This first physical contact changed everything. Neither man was bleeding profusely, but one’s boot was full of blood and the other’s hand was slick with it. The terrorist had known exactly where to find the main artery in Sinclair’s thigh. He must have missed it by a fraction of whatever metric they used to measure fatality in his native country. Casualties in battle often resulted not from initial injuries but from the slow and steady bleeding out of wounds. Both men started fighting more aggressively, racing against a clock with blood dripping from its hands. What had been hidden was unveiled.

The man attacked with what might have been a dozen knives. Sinclair tried to slow himself down, even as his opponent sped up. One mortal blow was worth multitudinous flesh wounds. The man’s collarbone was like a plate of natural body armor. But there was one sweet spot. Like a surgeon, Sinclair probed with steely precision. His knife slid in all the way to the handle. They both heard, or perhaps felt, the spurting sound, a punctured artery in the neck. What had been dripping began gushing. The man fell forward, shuddering in Sinclair’s arms. He held him tightly to make sure he wasn’t playing possum, gathering strength for one last stab at victory. He wasn’t.

The sound of battles being waged in other parts of the compound came flooding back into Sinclair’s consciousness. Cross fire still raged downstairs. Logan and the lone rifleman exchanged periodic shots in the hall, ducking in and out of doorways. Sinclair sheathed his knife and wiped the blood off his hands. He picked up his automatic and tiptoed across the room in his steel-toed boots, ignoring his thigh wound as assiduously as the spectacle of the dead terrorist sprawled on the floor, eyes wide open. Wolf and the rest of the squad needed reinforcement. Time to wrap up this sideshow and get back to the main attraction.

Sinclair stood in the doorway where Logan could see him and the rifleman down the hall could not. He held his finger to his lips and Logan winked. A plan was born almost telepathically. Logan kept wrapping himself around the doorjamb, trying to take clean shots without exposing too much of his body. His automatic overpowered the rifle, but the ballistics were all wrong. Shooting from rooms on the same side of the hallway made it next to impossible to score. Sinclair had a much better angle. Once he mastered the logistics of their stalemate, he’d be ready to execute a standard bait and hook.

Logan was the bait. The strategy worked best when the quarry was either gullible or cocky. The rifleman appeared to be both. Every time Logan stuck so much as a big toe into the hallway, out popped the rifleman. He apparently assumed his pal the professional mujahid was making short work of Sinclair. A novice, no doubt about it. The only safe assumption was that enemies lurked around every corner. Sinclair positioned himself. Logan unloaded a decoy round. The rifleman appeared, right on schedule, and fell forward into the hallway. He died instantaneously, but his body kept jerking as Sinclair continued firing into it, emptying his magazine. It may have been overkill. He needed to reload anyway.

Logan followed suit. They both ducked back into the safety of their rooms and slammed in new rounds. They might not need full magazines to finish clearing the bedrooms. But judging from the continuous fire in the kitchen, they’d need an arsenal to get out of the compound alive. Bring it on. The US Army taught its soldiers never to fear combat. Marines were trained to embrace it. Better yet, crave it. When they weren’t actually fighting, they reminisced about fighting or looked forward to the next fight. Half of Sinclair’s platoon had volunteered for redeployment at the end of their active-duty service commitments. They couldn’t bear the thought of their buddies fighting without them. It wreaked havoc on marriages. It won wars.