Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (51 page)

“OK, boss, but you realize if we jump in the Humvee and go tooling off across the grass, we’re going to give whoever is waiting in the village an awfully long time to know we’re coming. If they haven’t seen us already—and they might have, it’s amazing how good these natives’ night vision can be—they’ll hear us at least five or seven minutes out. That’s an awful long time to announce we’re coming if there are hostiles hiding there. Lots of time to hide or plan an ambush. Lots of time to lock us in their sights.”

“Yeah,” Bono muttered. “And you know what really ticks me off? There’s no one hiding in the village. I’m sure there’s nothing there. I mean, look at it. If you were an Iraqi soldier and wanted to pop off a couple missiles at passing U.S. aircraft, can you think of a
worse
place to do it? No cover. No escape routes. No place to hide. You telling me those starving fishermen are going to offer you any help? What have they got to offer? A couple dry fish? I don’t know what our Apache driver saw, but if it was a missile it
didn’t
come from this place.”

Sam nodded. He agreed. “But you know what will happen if we don’t check it out,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ve been around long enough that I figure I do. If we don’t check out the village, if we don’t turn over every stone and look behind every door, those aviation grunts will never relax. Every time they fly over this area, they’ll be on edge. They’ll zoom down and fly low, harassing these poor guys every chance that they get. One of their flyboys
saw
a missile and it
was
launched from here, so the first time they see smoke from the village fire or a flash of reflected light in the sun, bang! They’ll come in, their guns blazing to take care of this place.”

Sam nodded sadly. It was true. As a grunt he had learned the value of a pause, the value of evaluating a situation completely before he popped off his gun. But the aviation guys weren’t so careful. Their information wasn’t as good. They flew high and too fast. And because of that, they were much more likely to pull their triggers on their missiles and guns. More, they were so much more vulnerable, sitting like metal ducks in the air. And they never saw the results of their bullets. Sam suspected it was impossible to fully appreciate the ugliness of death when one imposed it from the air.

Sam stared at the village in the distance as he thought. “What do you propose?” he finally asked.

Bono started unstrapping his web belt. He laid it on the bumper of the Humvee, then stripped down to his fatigue pants and boots. “I’m going to float down the river,” he explained as he walked to the rear of the Humvee where the tool kit was stowed. Pulling out a black garbage sack, he wrapped his M4A1 assault rifle, and then secured it with tape. “If I can get into the current, it will carry me across the channel and down to the village.”

“Unless you miss it, and then some oil tanker will find you somewhere off the coast of Kuwait,” Sam replied. He knew the river was fast and deep in the middle.

“Yeah. Unless that happens.” Bono surveyed the gear in the back of the combat vehicle. “I want a blowout kit,” he said as he motioned with his hand. Sam tossed him one of the two medical pouches and watched as Bono strapped it to his belt. “But assuming I don’t drift down to the Persian Gulf, this is my plan. Give me ten minutes in the water, then fire up Bertha and head out across the road. Make lots of noise; gun the engine, whatever it takes to let them know you’re here. I’ll set myself up on the northwest shore, opposite of your approach. I don’t know for certain what kind of cover I’ll have, but I’m assuming there will be marsh and weeds, about like what we have here. I’ll keep in the cover, but get as close to the village as I can. You guys come screaming in. If any bad guys are there, I can cover you from their rear. If they try to retreat, we’ll have them surrounded.”

“Surrounded? With four men? And from only two positions?”

“Whatever.”

Sam looked at Bono, his dark face camouflaged to match the night. “You should take someone with you,” he said.

“No. I won’t need it. I’m only acting as a safety value, you know, just in case it turns out I’m wrong. But I’m sure there are no hostiles in this village. This will be nothing but a cakewalk, a chance for a nice moonlight swim.”

Sam nodded slowly. “You know, Bono, treading water for fifteen minutes in a snake-infested lake while holding a rifle and radio above the waterline to keep them from getting wet is hardly my idea of a good time. But hey, that’s just me. If this is the way you want to do it, then I’m with you, man.”

Bono was slipping toward the water. “It’s cold,” he said.

“Do you want me to—?” Sam started to question, but it was already too late. The captain had already slipped through the marshes and disappeared.

Sam glanced at his watch. Nine minutes fifty seconds to wait. He fingered his radio nervously, and then paced back and forth. He stared at the river, and then watched the village through his night scope. He waited as long as he could stand it, eight minutes, then climbed into the Humvee. “Let’s go,” he said.

“The boss said to give him ten minutes,” the noncommissioned officer answered.

‘Yeah, yeah,” Sam shrugged. He hated his new buddy, a guy he was supposed to be training, being out there alone. He hated waiting. He hated being so far away from the village. He counted to sixty. “Let’s go,” he said.

They fired up the Humvee and headed out across the deeply rutted road. One man rode shotgun, standing at the open hatch at the roof. All of the men were wearing night vision goggles, and they kept their headlights off as they drove. No sense illuminating themselves like a target in case there
were
bad guys in the village. “Ranger One, what you got?” Sam questioned over his radio, but Bono didn’t answer, and Sam’s chest tightened up. It took longer than they had hoped to forge their way across the swampland, pushing dead tree trunks and palm leaves like a bulldozer before them, but they finally pulled into the village, their engines racing like a drag racer.

They found Bono sitting on a log next to the fire. The village leader was next to him, and the two men were talking like they were old friends. Bono motioned to his comrades as they came racing in. He pointed to the fire, where some fishes were frying on sticks that had been laid across the fire.

The other Deltas got out and walked toward him.

“So . . . I’m assuming there aren’t any bad guys?” Sam started to question.

“Not so much as a pea shooter,” Bono answered him. “And
Sayid
ell-Marhsif here has assured me that he loves the Americans and would never aid the terrorists. He had four sons; they are all gone, taken by Saddam’s army. He has nothing but his fishing now. No grandchildren. No wife.”

Sam bowed to the old man, who grinned toothlessly back at him.

“And Ell-Marhsif has been kind enough to offer us dinner,” Bono said.

Sam looked down at the fish. “They look like carp.”

“Yeah, but if you cook them long enough, they taste like chicken,” Bono said.

* * *

Standing in the Operations Center, Sam smiled as he remembered that first night on patrol. Yes, Bono had proven thorough, ingenious, and ready to think outside the box. He would do anything to get the job done. Put him in a firefight and he wouldn’t hesitate. But he cared about the Iraqis almost as much as he cared about his own, and he had the ability to think about the larger picture at hand. If there was one thing Sam had learned, it was to respect and appreciate the opportunity to work with men like that.

Sam took a deep breath, and then walked toward his friend. “What’s up?” he asked as he sat on a metal chair next to him.

The other captain looked up. “Three hundred and eleven down,” he replied.

Sam stared straight ahead. “Fifty-four days to go.”

“Yeah, unless we get extended.”

Sam took out a handful of bubble gum, offered one to the captain, then shoved a couple of pieces in his mouth. Double Bubble
^®
. Delicious. He’d been an avid chewer since his days in Little League. “Not going to happen,” he answered after softening the gum in his mouth. “We’re on our way home, my friend. They’re not extending soldiers any longer. They won’t keep us for more than a year.”

Bono huffed. “Regular army, maybe. Air Force pukes—no offense to your old man, the general—may be true as well. Those guys are filling their deployments then heading back home. But you know how it is for us Deltas. They don’t care if it takes us a month, a year, two years. Deltas don’t rotate home until the job’s done. And this is a freakin’ big job.”

Sam didn’t answer for a moment. Bono was probably right. “Life sucks when you’re a Delta.”

“Which is why we fought so hard to get here. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t love you, baby, you know that,” he reached over and slapped a desert cockroach off his knee, “but dude, unless you’re willing to dye your hair blond and start wearing a dress, I wanna go home.”

Sam chewed, blew a little bubble, and nodded his head.

The two men were quiet a minute, both of them lost in thought. Talk of home had a way of doing that.

“Three hundred and eleven,” the captain repeated after a while.

“Fifty-four and counting,” Sam answered again.

The unit radio crackled with static behind them and Bono looked at it, expecting something, but no voices came through.

“You’ve got tactical operations center duty all day?” Sam asked him.

“Until noon, that’s all.”

Sam motioned toward the nearly empty Operations Center. Two young specialists were working at computers, and there were some voices from behind the commander’s closed door, but other than that, they were the only ones there. “Not a bad day to have desk duty,” he offered. “You’re not missing any action. Nice and quiet. If you’ve got to sit at a desk, you got a pretty good day.”

The tactical radios crackled again as one of the teams called in their position report. Bono keyed the microphone and acknowledged with a sharp “Roger,” then noted the time on his log.

“Who’s out there?” Sam wondered, nodding his head toward the radio.

“That was the Snowmen. They and the Tiger team are on security patrol around Al-Attina and Tirkish. We heard last night that—”

The radio crackled again. “Breadman, Tiger Two,” a soldier cut in.

Bono picked up the small FM microphone and answered, “Go, Tiger.”

“Breadman, we’ve got something here.” There was an unmistakable hesitation in the radio operator’s voice. “We’ve got a small car,” he went on, “license plate reads Juliet, Romeo, niner, niner, four, Romeo. Take a look at it, will you? Something’s not right.”

Bono sat up instantly and motioned to one of the young specialists sitting at the computer four empty seats away. She had already copied the license plate information and was entering the query into the INMEDS computer, the multi-unit, multiservice database of automobiles, names, addresses, phone numbers, locations, aliases, Iraqi driver’s license numbers, anything that could be used to track an individual or group of people in Iraq.

While the specialist tapped at her computer, Bono spoke again into his microphone. “What’s the situation there, Tiger Two?” he asked. “Do you need some support?”

There was a moment of silence until the soldier came back. “Negative, Breadman. It’s probably nothing. We’ve got a small sedan parked in a private driveway on the south end of the block.” While he spoke, Sam reached over and pulled out a large urban map showing the narrow alleys and crooked roads that made up the small town of Al-Attina, an old industrial town seven kilometers south of the international airport. He slid the map across the desk to Bono, who turned it 180 degrees so it faced him, then tapped his pencil on a narrow alley off one of the main thoroughfares.

“Tiger,” he interrupted, “confirm your location is Twenty-one and Lashihhia?”

“Roger,” the soldier came back. “And, like I was saying, we’ve got an abandoned vehicle on the street. It’s got a small child locked inside. Looks like he’s no more than two, maybe two-and-a-half-years old. The windows are rolled up, and he’s dying in there. We’ve tried to open the doors, but they’re locked. I’ve got some of my guys going house to house along the street here, but so far either no one is home or they claim they don’t know who he is.”

Bono straightened up, his face turning tense. He looked at one of the specialists, who shot a quick look back at him. “Anything in the INMEDS?” he demanded.

“Nothing so far, sir. The license plate isn’t in the database. The vehicle, or at least that license plate number, isn’t associated with any terrorists or insurgents that we know.”

“What vehicle is the license plate identified with?”

She ran her finger down the screen. “An ’80 BMW 320i. Red. Sedan.

“You copy that, Tiger?” Bono had been holding down his microphone switch, allowing the radio to transmit the conversation.

“Roger that, boss. Ain’t no Beemer here. We’ve got an old Toyota.”

“Which means the car or the plates are stolen.”

Bono released the transmit button and waited.

“Copy that, sir.” Tiger cautiously replied.

Bono dropped his head as he thought. Sam moved toward him, glancing down at the map.

“Breadman,” the radio crackled again. “Stolen or whatever—and come on, half the vehicles in Baghdad are running on bogus plates—we’ve got to do something. This kid is dying in there. It’s over ninety on the street. It must be more than one twenty inside the vehicle. He’s lethargic and sweating. Now he’s just lying on the seat. He’s flushed and dehydrated. We’ve got to get him out of there.”

Bono didn’t hesitate. “
No!
” he replied. “
Do not touch the child!
This is a family issue. You’ve got to find his parents. They have to be in one of the houses somewhere.”

The soldier hesitated, and then called back again. “Breadman, we’ve been up and down this block twice already. There’s almost no one home, but you know how it is, most of these guys are too scared of us. They won’t answer their doors, and we don’t want to bust them down. And yeah, I know we don’t want to get involved in some lousy child-abuse thing, but I’m telling you, this is a cute little boy and we’ve got to get him out of this car. Sergeant Brunner is standing here beside me. He’s going to bust the front window, and then we’ll unlock the door. We’ll be careful not to hurt him, but we’ve got to get him out of there.”