I felt like I was trapped in one of those terrifying nightmares, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can't make your body move fast enough.
My legs seemed to move slower and slower as I fought my way through the callous white space, but the hands on the huge clock ahead of me didn't slow. With relentless, uncaring force, they turned inexorably toward the end–the end of everything.
Arthur turned to me abruptly, slapping my cheek to get my attention.
My eyes flew open, and I was still here, arms cuffed behind the back for the chair.
"Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey. Or, gas and a blow torch." His thumb was flicking the metal switch of the blow torch, an ominous sound in the emptiness.
I closed my eyes so I couldn't see the flame, scrunching them together in terror, clamping my mouth shut so I wouldn't scream.
I could only think of one possibility, locked in horror as I was.
Arthur was going to aim the blow torch at the river of fuel that lead to my chair, and that he had doused over my bloodied, bruised body.
My eyes widened in panic as the torch hit the gasoline, and the blue-orange flames surged toward me in an impossible speed. It quickly enveloped me.
The warmth around my skin got more and more real, warmer and warmer. Hotter. The heat was so real it was hard to believe that I was imagining it.
Hotter.
Uncomfortable now. Too hot.
Much, much too hot.
Like grabbing the wrong end of a curling iron—my automatic response was to break free my arms and douse the flame. But there was something pinning my arms behind me. My arms were dead things lying somewhere at my side. The heat was inside me.
The burning grew—rose and peaked and rose again until it surpassed anything I'd ever felt.
I felt the pulse behind the fire raging now over my body. I wished that I'd embraced the whiteness while I'd still had the chance. I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip my heart from it—anything to get rid of this torture.
Being stabbed with a searing hot knife blade . That was nothing. That was a soft place to rest on a feather bed. I'd take that now, a hundred times. A hundred gun shots. I'd take it and be grateful.
A half second later, I screamed.
It was not just a scream, it was a blood-curdling shriek of agony. The horrifying sound cut off with a gurgle.
The scenery had changed. Hours ago I'd wandered in a wide sea of white. There was nothing else there, and I was lost, wandering aimless and alone, searching for nothing.
I fell to the ground, and sat, wide-eyed and confused. For this time, I wasn't in the chair. Just lost aimlessly.
The whiteness rushed over my eyes more solidly than before. Like a thick blindfold, firm and fast.
Covering not just my eyes but also myself with a crushing weight.
It was exhausting to push against it. I knew it would be so much easier to give in.
To let the white push me down, down to a place where there was no pain and no weariness and no worry and no fear.
If it had only been for myself, I wouldn't have been able to struggle very long. I was only human, with no more than human strength.
But this wasn't just about me.
If I did the easy thing now, let the nothingness erase me, I would hurt them.
Rick. My life and his were twisted into a single strand. Cut one, and you cut both. If he were gone, I would not be able to live through that. If I were gone, he
wouldn't live through it, either. And a world without Alpha Dogs seemed completely pointless.
But it was so lonely here that I couldn't see either of the Alpha Dog's faces as though I had erased them from my memory. Nothing seemed real.
That made it hard not to give up.
I kept pushing against the white, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting.
Not allowing it to crush me completely. I was an Atlas, and the white felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely
obliterated.
It was sort of the pattern to my life—I'd never been strong enough to deal with the things outside my control, to attack the enemies or outrun them. To avoid the pain.
Always human and weak, the only thing I'd ever been able to do was keep going.
Endure. Survive.
It had been enough up to this point. It would have to be enough today. I would endure this until help came.
I held the whiteness of nonexistence at bay by inches.
It wasn't enough, though—that determination. As the time ground on and on and the emptiness gained by tiny eighths and sixteenths of my inches, I needed something more to draw strength from.
I couldn't pull even Flag's face into view.
Nothing. It terrified me, and I wondered if it was too late.
I felt myself slipping—there was nothing to hold on to.
The nothingness cuts off your senses altogether. No pain, but also no sight or sound or smell. Total sensory deprivation. You are utterly alone in the whiteness. You don't even feel it when they burn you.
Even though I was longer burning alive, I was still terrified. But by some small miracle, I spotted a door. Thinking I had finally found a way out, I burst through the door.
It was the Alpha barracks. But I wasn't the only one here. Sam Taylor had one eye shut and the other open. Blood was coming from his mouth and he was making a gurgling sound. He was unconscious. He had lost too much blood. He needed a doctor and a hospital. Even that may not have been enough to save him. He was just barely alive.
Hayes legs were stretched stiff in front of him and were splashed with bright red blood. I was horrified.
My guys!
Qassem and his clan felt it was their turn to rule. They had purchased that right with blood, the ancient currency of power.
Thibault was crumpled on the floor in a pool of red. I searched through the other rooms in desperation to find Flag.
A sudden pain twisted in my stomach, almost like the aftershock of catching a punch in the gut.
His torso was a mass of blood and gore. His face looked ghostly white; gone. His skin was grayed and stiff with he residue of death.
My stomach heaved, and I had to swallow back vomit.
But it was worse than that, so much worse. His distorted body, the blood that formed an oily pool that shone dully on the concrete floor of the barracks.
Like some kind of digital virus, my surroundings folded away into the white. The dank, coppery smell of blood as I stood in the centre of the carnage faded away, and I was alone again in the bright emptiness.
My knees gave way and I fell to the ground, sprawling about the space on my hands in knees in total hopelessness.
"No… no!" I stammered. I searched the blankness, but found no traces of anything. No one, nothing.
The eerie silence rang in my ears like static, an uncomfortable pressure building inside my eardrums.
"Let me out!" I shrieked, only to break the silence. "Do you hear me?" My own voice sounded foreign to me, strangled and uncharacteristic. "Can anyone hear me, let me out!" My screams were building into hysteria more and more as I searched the white. Finally, at the top of my lungs, I cried. "Let me out!"
*.*.*.*.
I woke with a start–my eyelids popping open wide–and I gasped. Dull gray light, the familiar
light of an overcast morning, took the place of the blinding white in my dream.
Now that I was really awake, the nothingness and torture of the dream gnawed on my nerves, a dog worrying a bone.
I was in an the giant fuselage of a Locheed Galaxy C-5, DEVGRU's largest military aircraft. The wall beside me was hardened steel; over my head, the glaring lights blinded me. I was propped up on a hard, uneven crate — no doubt filled with tactical equipment.
There was an annoying beeping sound somewhere close by. I hoped that meant I was awake and alive.
I had the sense that I'd been asleep for a very long time–my body was stiff, like I hadn't moved once through all that time, either. My mind was dazed and slow;
strange, colourful nightmares–swirled dizzily around the inside of my head.
They were so vivid. The horrible loneliness and the horror, all mixed together into a bizarre jumble. There was sharp impatience and fear, both part of that frustrating dream where your feet can't move fast enough.
The dream was still strong–I could even remember the smell of diesel. But the strongest, clearest part of the dream was not the horror. It was the white that was most clear.
It was hard to let it go and wake up. This dream did not want to be shoved away into the vault of dreams I refused to revisit. I struggled with it as my mind became more alert, focusing on reality.
This time, I had awoke to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get after you've rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to my nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh.
I reached with my right hand, scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found straps grasping me into the seat.
I lifted my left hand to rip off the belt.
"No, you don't." And cool fingers caught my hand.
If was still dreaming, it felt abnormally real.
But I realized that it felt too real, too real to be a nightmare.
"Logan?" I turned my head slightly, and his face was just inches from mine, his cheek resting on the steel wall. I realized again that I was alive, this time with gratitude and elation. "Oh, where are we?" I couldn't remember clearly, and my mind rebelled against me as I tried to recall, but I knew we were in transit... somewhere.
"Afghanistan." Thibault answered, a palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed his face.
Shock sent shivers through me, I was surprised someone answered me back.
I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands to wipe away the heavy feeling. "Afghanistan?" I held my head gingerly as the groggy feeling slowly eased.
In so many years of slaughter and carnage, I'd lost nearly all of my humanity. I was undeniably a nightmare, a monster of the grisliest kind. Yet each time I
found another victim, I would feel a faint prick of remembrance for that other life. For the first century of my military life, I lived in a world of bloodthirsty vengeance. Hate was my constant companion. It eased some when I met Flag, but I still had to endure the terror of my prey.
It began to be too much. It was hard to believe that, not so long ago, I'd found the Enchantress frightening - lost sleep to nightmares about her, adding the sensory deprivation torture in Iran on top of it.
My eyebrows stayed lodged in a worried line over my anxious brown eyes.
It was just a dream, I reminded myself again. Just a dream… but also my worst nightmare.
"Hey, ere you okay, Trig?" Thibault asked, worry creasing his forehead.
"Yeah, I'm fine," I tried to brush off the stress, forcing a faux grin on my face.
Logan sniffed and looked away, pretending he wasn't interested. For that, I was grateful. "It's not the same, is it?"
"Huh?"
"Spinning up without Kowalski."
Some very unpleasant memories were beginning to come back to me. I shuddered, and then winced. I leaned back on the wall, my head spinning. Something tugged at my memory, elusive, on the edges.
"Sorry," he said, whispering. "That was out of line."
"It's okay." I muttered. "I miss him too. He would be having the time of his life, right now."
What was I doing? I should be running from this memory as fast as I could, blocking the image of Kowalski from my mind, protecting myself with the numbness I couldn't live without.
That particular part of that particular time was just a blur. My body remembered it better than my mind did; the tension in my legs as I tried to decide whether to stand up or to stay in my seat, the dryness in my throat as I struggled to keep my voice steady, the tight stretch of skin across my knuckles as I clenched my hands into fists,
the chill on the back of my neck when red light came on above us.
Thibault frowned at me in the shadows.
"ETA 20 minutes!" Flag shouted from somewhere near the cabin.
"Trig?" Thibault urged.
I ignored him, walking slowly forward without ever making the conscious decision to move
my feet. I didn't understand why, but the nebulous threat a fight presented drew me toward the armoured boxes.. It was a senseless impulse, but I hadn't felt any kind of impulse in so long… I followed it.
Something unfamiliar beat through my veins. Adrenaline, I realized, long absent from my system, drumming my pulse faster and fighting against the lack of sensation.
It was strange–why the adrenaline when there was no fear? It was almost as if it were an echo of the last time I'd stood like this, ready to descend from a plane with Kowalski as my second in command.
I saw no reason for fear. I couldn't imagine anything in the world that there was left to be afraid of, not physically at least. One of the few advantages of losing everything.
.*.*.*.*
AFGHANISTAN
"These guys look harmless," Dalton mused, watching as the Afghan soldiers loaded several captured Taliban fighters off their gun truck.
"Yeah." McGuire agreed.
"Can you imagine checking in to this place? Definitely no mints on the pillows." Amir winked at Hayes.
I scoffed, surprised at the dismal banter. "Definitely no pillows." I looked over at Flag, who was watching each prisoner as they were pushed off the truck with heated force. His arms were crossed and his face was stoic, focussed. My eyes followed his gaze, to a Taliban with extensive facial scars; it looked like half of his face had melted and stayed that way.
"Oof. Looks like that guy tried to make out with an IED." Taylor was watching the man, too.
Flag sighed and turned to an Afghan soldier, who was also watching the prisoners. "Well, after the questioning is complete, we'll take custody, we'll move the prisoner to an American base."
"He's already been placed in interrogation," The bald-headed soldier replied, looking at one particular prisoner, who didn't look like a Taliban at all. Sure, his hair was curly like the others, but he was blonde- not a typical Middle-Eastern resident.
"How gently?" Flag ebbed.
"If you can get him to talk, he's still capable of it." The soldier answered indifferently.
"You guys got nothing?"
"I just hope your interrogator is a better man than ours." The soldier replied sarcastically.
"She is." Flag was dead serious. He extended his hand to the man and grinned as the soldier looked dubious. "See you in there."
The man obliged, and shook Flag's hand.
Flag then wandered toward us, one hand on his rifle. This was usually an instinct or habit of ours, always ready.
"So, you get the house rules, yeah?" McGuire asked as Flag stood in front of us, squinting in the sun.
"So you have to keep your hands outside the cage at all times." He pointed at Amir, Hayes a Dalton and I. "I want four of you on the outside. McGuire, you're gonna be with us. We're gonna go side arms only. Taylor, stay at the Humvee for exfil."
McGuire nodded. "You want me to take my shoes off too?"
"That might be more lethal" I disagreed.
Amir and Taylor laughed.
"Ha. Ha." McGuire retorted sarcastically, placing his rifle inside the Humvee tail gate as I was perched on it. "What have they got? 50 guards in there? For like, two thousand Taliban prisoners?"
"They seem to be doing alright," Hayes defended.
"Is this the deputy director's idea of a vacation?" I added cynically.
Taylor cocked one eyebrow. "Sun, sand…"
"And Taliban." Hayes finished.
"Oooh," I whispered.
Taylor smirked. "Reminds me of that Somali pirate situation."
My eyes darted to Flag, knowing this was the op he mentioned that caused the deep scar on his chest.
Flag grinned. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said, almost excited. "We caught this dirt bag who had a freighter captain stashed away, nobody knew where. Several interrogators took a really hard run at the guy. They got nothing. Ellis shows up. She ends up locking herself in a closet in the hold of the ship alone with the guy with nothing but a chest full of ice cubes."
Taylor smiled. "She walks out three days later, right? She's got the guys location."
"Why ice?" Amir asked.
"Because it was hot," Hayes replied as though it was the most obvious answer. The story seemed to be finished, but I was curious to know more. Purely because I wanted to know how Flag got in and out of the tangle with the Somali fighter.
But Nicole Ellis came strutting in, wearing a pressed suit and dress pants. Her sunglasses were pushed all the way up to the bridge of her nose. "Hello, everyone," she said, taking her place beside Flag confidently. "Nice to see all of you. Sorry, we don't have times for pleasantries." She looked up at Flag, eager. "Colonel,"
The two strolled off toward the large brick structure, seemingly camouflaged in the desert sand. Large stone walls guarded the prison, but only three men guarded the outside gate.
"Was going to ask you how your trip was, but I guess it wasn't what you had hoped for." Flag started.
"This is the Helmand Province. I'll settle for an opium cocktail and a bit of goat." Ellis laughed. "What are we walking into?"
"They worked him over pretty good." Flag replied, serious.
Ellis looked around her carefully, satisfied that Alpha Team were her only audience. "I told them not to touch him."
"Well, that order has a tendency to get lost in translation out here."
Nicole Ellis hummed in an unsure agreement. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. DC clearly only sends you out on priority Alpha cases, so you want to let me know what's so special about this guy?"
"An attack on a US base that's imminent. A bombing, big, and central. We think this guy knows where."
Flag and Ellis lowered their voices as one of the guards passed by.
"Intelligence say when?"
"As of this morning, it was hours, not days. Any of this going to be a problem?" Ellis asked, casually.
"No. Uh-uh. Not unless you suddenly hit a batting slump."
"You wish."
"So who'd you leave them at the helm of the uh… Enterprise?" Flag asked as they headed back towards us.
"You're about to hear his voice." Ellis sighed.
Flag sniffed and turned on his earpiece. "Command, radio check. We're outside the gates of the lovely Four Seasons Helmand."
"Affirmative." A nervous sounding man replied through our comms.
"Whatever tactic I use, however I come at this guy, whatever he throws back, you two are stone, you understand?" Ellis commanded Flag and McGuire through my earpiece.
"You got it," Flag sounded resigned as they entered the prison, giving Alpha Team a last glance over his shoulder as they entered deeper into the Helmand Prison.
I lifted my sniper rifle carefully over my shoulder as the gates jarred to a close behind them.
Amir let out a long whoosh of air. "Here we go."
"You glad to be back in Trashcanistan, Chapman?" Taylor asked, turning his cap backwards, grinning.
My head bobbed. "Sure am. There's only so much paperwork and rest one can put up with."
"Hooah," Dalton chirped with a sly grin. "Pity Flag put you on the back bench though,"
"Over-watch ain't the back bench, Trig." Amir reassured. "You're a sniper, and I respect that."
"Taylor's going to win the bet," Dalton said smugly.
Taylor's laughter stopped at once, and he studied me with appraising eyes.
"What bet?" I demanded, pausing.
"It's nothing," Amir urged. He was staring at Taylor. His head shook infinitesimally.
"What bet?" I insisted as I turned on him.
"Thanks, Dalton," he muttered as he tightened his belt around his waist.
"Amir . . . ," I grumbled.
"It's infantile," he shrugged. "Taylor and McG like to gamble."
"Hayes will tell me." I tried to turn, but his arm was like iron around me.
He sighed. "They're betting on how many times you . . . slip up after Iran."
"Oh." I grimaced, trying to hide my sudden horror as I realized what he meant. "They have a
bet about how many people I'll kill?"
"Yes," he admitted unwillingly. "Dalton thinks your temper will turn the odds in Taylor's favour."
I felt a little extraordinary. "He's betting high."
"It will make him feel better if you have a hard time adjusting. He's tired of being the weakest link."
"Sure. Of course it will. I guess I could throw in a few extra homicides, if it makes him happy. Why not?" I was babbling, my voice a blank monotone.
In my head, I was seeing newspaper headlines, lists of names. . . all the while, my fingers caressed the barrel on my sniper rifle.
Amir looked at me nervously. "You don't need to worry about it now. In fact, you don't have to worry about it ever, if you don't want to."
"Oh, I'm sure I could swing something,"
He worried aloud a few times that I was wasn't ready to get back to work, but I assured him that that wasn't it. Ukraine went without incident.
As if I needed - or even had room for - one more thing to worry about.
All of Hayes's stories about soldiers with PTSD had been percolating in my head since he'd explained his shaky past.
Now those stories jumped into sharp focus with the news of his and Taylor's wager. I wondered randomly what they were betting.
What was a motivating prize when you were a soldier?
"Well, it's nice to do something for a change. You don't know how irritating it is - missing things the way I have been. I feel so useless. So . . . normal." I cringed in horror of the word.
"I can't imagine how awful that must feel. Being normal? Ugh." Amir laughed.
There was a sudden rattle of muffled gunfire and distant shouts from men on the other side of the huge stone walls.
I wasn't surprised at all- having a skeleton staff keeping thousands of Taliban restrained inside a prison in the middle of Afghanistan? They wouldn't be able to hold them off for long before there was a riot.
Confirmation was already coming from our earpieces.
""What's happening? Flag, do you read?" the comms radioed.
"I copy. Bit of a situation here. Saw a guard who was just responding to gunfire, and four armed prisoners out on the first floor landing."
"Sounds like we got a full-blown riot on our hands," Taylor replied.
"I have no idea. But someone definitely just lit a fuse. I'm gonna get us outta here before the bomb goes off." Flag said in a low voice, panting.
"Roger that. We will scramble backup and notify Afghan security forces." The man on the comms reported.
"Alright. They took his keys. We're gonna have to find-" Flag's voice was replaced with static.
"Losing comms!" the radio shouted.
After a tense moment, the radio went silent, then more heavy breathing. "I said, we're gonna have to find an alternate exit."
"We're going to try get our hands on a blueprint," the radio hashed out.
"Okay Jaz," Flag droned quietly. "I need you to find a tower. Set over-watch. Dalton, Amir, the main gates are not keyed. They're operated by a control room." Gunfire rattled off in the background as I snatched my pack from the Humvee tailgate. I swung my gear back over my shoulder and winked as Amir began to load his rifle.
"I'm gonna need that open. But not until I say go."
I headed toward the tower to the east, and decided it was safe enough to climb up and inside without being seen.
"We're on it." Dalton grabbed his weapon and checked for a fresh mag.
As I dashed to the base of the tower outside the walls, I could hear Flag rushing along the echoing halls inside, and something crackled. Men's screaming followed, and faded as if the volume were being turned down.
"Where's McG?" I shouted into the comm.
"He's with the HVTs," Flag's rushed reply had me climbing the ladder to the tower with a new urgency.
I put my fingers gingerly underneath the trap door, and held my handgun up to my cheek as I lifted the lid slowly, checking for any combatants.
There was no one there, so I threw the door open and rushed to get my bag and rifle inside.
The bag flew into the pit, and I placed my rifle carefully on the floor as I climbed in.
"Alright, we gotta move. Now." Flag ordered, slamming a door behind him. "Now, let's go."
"Get up!" McGuire commanded, seemingly at the hostage who was stalling.
"You're gonna move, and you're do it quietly," Ellis was talking to the hostage in a low, shaky voice. "Because if you're the reason we're caught, I'm going to tell everyone you're an asset. And then you'll die a traitor, not a martyr." She paused. "This interrogation isn't over, exfil or not."
I searched through the front pocket of my back, and turned on an infrared motion detector. Making sure it was operational, I hovered my hand over the sensor, hearing the beeps as I did it. I placed it on the ledge beside the trap door.
More gunfire erupted from below as I assembled my rifle on the wall of the look out.
"Hold on-"Flag shouted. "This water's electrified. Get him on the boards. Move."
There was a pause on the radio, only the electrifying sparks hashing in.
"What?" Flag grunted.
"If he was so eager to be a martyr, he would have stepped in the water. He stepped back, I can work with that" Ellis replied.
"Not dead, you can't. Let's go. Dalton, how are those gates looking?"
There was more gunfire and yelling.
"Looks like someone already opened 'em."
"I got a head count on 20 rogue prisoners, armed, in the foyer, on the way to the front door. Two dead guards. Small arms fire." Amir reported, sounding a little spooked.
Flag grunted impatiently.
"Colonel, you said the main gates were operated from a control room?" The man on the comms asked.
"That's correct." Flag replied.
"Rioting prisoners on the inside would have no access to a control room on the outside."
Flag scoffed. "Unless it was orchestrated. Sympathetic guards slips a prisoner a weapon."
"Opens the gates." The man added.
"Exactly."
I aimed my rifle at the front entrance, and tried to anticipate them. The prisoners would appear, and I would squeeze off a well-aimed round, and the men would crumble to the ground. Instant satisfaction, and an easy shot for a sniper. "This isn't a riot, it's a prison break." I said confidently.
"Alright, Dalton, I need you to close those gates." Flag ordered.
Dalton groaned unsurely. "Look, with all due respect, Colonel-. If the gates open, you can get out. If it's not, you won't be able to."
"Yeah, but not at the expense of a thousand bad dudes squirtin' back into the desert. I don't need that on my conscience right now, thank you."
Dalton paused. "Let me get this clear. You want me to lock you inside a prison riot?"
"Affirmative." Flag said. At the sound of that word all the radio traffic, which was busy, stopped. Long seconds of silence followed. "Get it done Dalton."
I could tell them exactly what the Taliban wanted: death and blood, revenge and more death.
My skin was all hot and prickly. I breathed slowly in and out, focusing on that to calm
myself.
Because—in a tier one's eyes—by being captured, it was a fate that was worse than death, or at least equivalent to it.
Was death the lesser concern? Was it really capture we should fear? After Tehran, I wasn't willing to take that bet.
I heard the explosion of gunfire and the zing and pop of rounds passing close to the comm. Flag sighed. "We're on the move."
I was too aghast to make any noise at all. It was one thing to know that death was
coming with fierce, unstoppable speed; it was another thing to watch it happen.
Though I was desperate to be sure that Rick was safe, I could not afford any lapse in focus now.
My still heart felt like a boulder in my chest—a crushing weight. All my hope faded like fog in the sunshine. My eyes pricked.
Unlike Amir and Dalton, I had been to war before, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I knew soldiers fought better when things were going their way.
Once things turned, it was hard to reassert control.
People panicked.
It was happening to Dalton right now. Panic was a virus in combat, a deadly one.
It also made me wonder if everyone on the team thought I was going to get out of control in desperation.
Even when I met the eyes of Hayes, who stared right back with a speculation that looked like interest, I felt in control. Just the same desperate drive to find a way out of this mess.
Only way home is winning Kowalski's voice echoed in my head.
I believe that, I replied.
So then what do you feel when you shoot a terrorist? Kowalski continued.
Recoil. The sound of our laughter cleared the fog of desperation.
Amir sniffed. "You completed your close quarter combat right?"
"Of course." Dalton responded. "Why?"
"'Cause my instinct's anticipating close-quarter combat. Two rules. Number one. Shoot the bad guys. Number two. Don't shoot me." Amir answered lowly.
I laughed to myself. I didn't have time to ponder Amir's mortality. I was waiting around the corner a block east of the target building, listening to the escalating gunfire and itching to get my big gun into the fight. But I was the last one outside beside Taylor, so I was pulling front security, with my gun facing down the path away from everything. I was mostly worried about missing out on the shooting.
Gunshots methodically shattered the silence through the radio.
"You shot the guard." Amir reported.
"Of course. He was one of the bad guys." Dalton replied.
Amir scoffed. "How do you know that?"
"Well, otherwise they wouldn't have left him alive."
Amir and Dalton chuckled at each other.
"Okay, boss, gates are closing." Silence. "Gates are closed. God speed." Dalton said proudly.
Flag sighed in reaction. "How are those exits looking, Tac?"
"Colonel, the schematic we're working with is pretty rudimentary, we're contacting contractors who may have worked at the prison." He paused. "Scratch that, we got you an exit. Can you give us your location?"
"Uh, yeah. East wing, heading west."
The man breathed into my earpiece. "Flag, we got a reference to a HVAC room with a loading dock that's in the central wing. If they're crashing the front gates, your best shot is crossing the east yard."
"We passed that on the way in." Flag answered. "Jaz? Have you got eyes on that yet?"
"About 100 by 300. East and west doors are clear." I mumbled as my cheek jarred against the rifle. "But I got 12 Taliban prisoners breaking open crates on the far end." I spied the tiny men through the cross hairs, and they were searching through wooden crates as though they were kids at a lucky dip.
"Weapons?"
"Nothing I can see. I'm not sure what's in the crates."
"Let's hope it's deodorant," Hayes mumbled into the radio.
I sighed impatiently, because I wasn't finished. "If you can get here fast enough, their backs are to you. You might be able to creep by unnoticed."
"We good?" I heard Ellis ask in the background.
"That depends," Flag breathed. "What's your 100 yard dash time?"
Ellis laughed humourlessly. "Better when my life depends on it."
The men at the crates were opening bags of food and shoving the contents into their mouths like ravenous dogs.
"Good news." I reported. "Looks like our friends were just hungry."
"Okay, well, keep watching our six."
"So far, so good." I added.
A shrill beeping sounded behind me. Without thinking, I took my handgun and shot it over my shoulder blindly, not looking to see who it was.
Everyone on Alpha Team were either inside, or waiting in the Humvee, and they knew better than to sneak up on a lone sniper, especially if it were me. I mechanically slid my handgun back into its holster and returned to the scene below.
"Jaz, East door." Flag shouted.
My entire body shifted with the rifle, aiming at the wooden East door, where a white-robed man had emerged, dashing toward the yard.
Taking aim with the weapon's crosshairs, I guessed he was two hundred meters away. The rifle launched with a punch of a back blast, and I watched it zoom straight in on my target. The gun in his hand went flipping up in the air as he fell.
"Follow's down." I informed.
Flag let out a deep breath. "Alright, we're clear. Command, which way are we headed?"
"You're almost there. Head straight down the hallway. Take the last left. The door on the last left is the HVAC room."
McGuire broke the silence on the other end of the comms. "That's a solid door, Colonel. We're gonna need explosives."
There was a loud crashing noise and a distant bang behind them.
"Or that. We could Colonel Flag it instead."
"Okay, Tac, if there was a loading dock here at one time. It ain't here now. We have no exit. Do you copy?" Flag demanded. Impatient. Whiney.
"Flag, we have got no reference for another exit. No reason to trust it if we did. Your best move might be to reinforce that door and hunker down."
"No Bueno out that way, Tac." McGuire mumbled.
I watched the East door as three men ushered a guard roughly outside.
"Negative. Not much for hunkering right now. Amir, I need you to find me a guard who's still breathing, someone who knows this place."
"Rick, I think I got one. I'll send him to you." I mumbled listlessly.
The men threw the guard to the ground and removed his cap, one pulling his head up by his hair. The man grabbing him had a machete in his hand, and he was yelling something at him.
The guard screamed out, and the other man released him angrily.
One of the other men watched, as another held the guard in place on the ground.
The one with the machete bend over, holding the guard's hair again, holding the blade against his neck as though he were going to cut the head off.
I pulled the trigger just as he raised the blade, and his body went limp, falling beside the guard.
I shot the other man, and he too, fell to the ground. The spectator was frantically searching for the source of the bullets, but he collapsed as my finger lifted off the trigger.
The guard looked around for a short moment, then scrambled to his feet and bolted for the front gate.
I followed him in my sight, trying to make him turn around by shooting just ahead of him.
But he kept running.
"Wrong way, buddy." I mumbled, more to myself than to the guard, pumping the trigger faster, and aiming closer to the guard's feet.
He finally ducked, and turned back around.
"Say hi to my friends," I added, watching as he entered the building. "Rick, you got one guard coming to you."
"Flag, we've got a pretty serious Calvary headed your way." Command added.
The Colonel sighed. "Yeah? It's about time."
"It's not our cavalry. They took out your exfil convoy."
I grunted angrily. "How far out are they?"
"Twenty minutes. Black Hawks should be on target in forty. Afghan forces are at least an hour."
A sharp jolt of unease pierced my stomach as I realized how short the time really was.
I had to remind myself that this wasn't a movie, and the realization filled me initially with a dark adolescent glee. Everything was going to hell-very quickly.
The idea of being in danger from even the most deadly of humans while Flag was with Alpha Team or the DEVGRU's most deadly sniper outside was downright hilarious.
"Perfect." McGuire added sarcastically. "Just in time to retrieve our bodies."
"I need a way out of this place." Flag said, ignoring McGuire.
"All the other doors are closed." The guard argued.
Flag's voice had only confirmed what I'd already known. No reason for fresh panic.
In theory. Not panicking was easier said than done.
Another threat was only moments away, but I wondered if it wasn't a little foolish to sit around, isolated and alone, waiting for the next disaster.
"What about the exterior walls? This all poured concrete?" Flag asked.
"Not the west wing. The new construction." The guard replied.
"Amir, Dalton, I need you to get to the west-most building. Okay? I need you to make us a door. "
Amir breathed. "You just get to where you're going, boss, we'll be there."
Dalton and Amir appeared outside the east wing, and scrambled across the yard to the Humvee, all the while glancing over their shoulders.
"Hey!" Flag's voice shouted in my ear as I watched for movement below. "This is what I do. And I'm gonna get you out of here, okay?"
There was an uneasy laugh from Ellis. "Oh, that's a relief. I was on the verge of convincing Blackburn to promote McGuire."
"That's a mistake," Flag scoffed.
"Too little field experience?" Ellis asked coyly.
Flag grunted. "He's not pretty enough. You ready?"
I slung my rifle and back over my shoulder after throwing the motion sensor in my pocket and headed down the ladder to join Taylor and the others.
Now wasn't the time for anyone to doubt Flag's decision to close the gates. He had been living by the sword now for about two decades. He was one of the least known important army officers in America. He had run covert operations all over the world - Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean. One thing all these missions had in common was they required cooperation from the locals.
They also demanded a low threshold for bullshit.
The Colonel was a bemused cynic. He had seen just about everything, and didn't expect much - except from his men. His gruff informality suited an officer who had begun his career not as a military academy graduate.
He was a blunt realist who avoided the pomp and pretence of upper echelon military life. Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could - and sometimes did - kill you.
It was ugly work.
Which is not to say that certain men didn't enjoy it, didn't live for it.
Flag was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say, this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die. It was how the real world worked. Nothing pleased Flag more than a well-executed hit, and if things went to hell and he had to slug it out, then it was time to summon a dark relish for mayhem. Why be a soldier if you couldn't exult in a heart-pounding, balls-out gunfight? Which is what made him so good.
A sudden volley of gunfire rang through my earpiece.
"Go! Exit on me-Jaz, get to the Humvee!"
"I'm already on my way." I replied calmly.
"Go across," The Afghan guard instructed in the radio. "Go down, first floor. Laundry room. Good place for a door."
There was silence, followed by the clicking of fresh mags reloading.
"Alright, we're not gonna have Jaz this time. So we gotta do this fast."
McGuire sighed. "Yeah, Jacob Marley here will make that a little difficult."
"Do you have your keys?" Flag whispered. "Take those off. Ready?"
I heard occasional snapping sounds in the air around their location and assumed it was the sound of gunfire that also sounded through the radio, even though the noise was close Maybe the air was playing tricks on me.
"Ah!" An unfamiliar voice yelled out on the radio.
"He's hit!" McGuire shouted.
Flag breathed into the comm. "How bad is it?"
The man screamed again, and his screams turned to moans.
"Sounds bad?" McGuire replied, unsure.
I leaped off the ladder, skipping the last three rungs, and stepped over the body of the man who tried to take me out in the tower. I bolted for the Humvee.
Taylor had already met me halfway, Hayes swung the door wide open so Amir could grab my rifle, and Hayes helped me scramble inside. Dalton waited in the back.
"Leave it. Dalton, we're in cell block three. Prisoner's been hit. Where are we at, Taylor?" Flag asked gruffly.
"Just picked up Trig, and on our way."
"Okay, I'll flag the target."
I hashed in. "Command, how are we looking on those friendlies?"
"Black Hawks are on target in 30. We have authorisation to reroute an armed drone."
"Alright, how long?"
"20 minutes." The man replied. "Taliban reinforcements land in 10."
I rolled my eyes. "Great." Time was of short supply, and our team were still inside.
I tried to understand the spiraling voices through the comms, tried to follow the curling pathway the words made to see where they were leading, but it wasn't making sense. The meaning in the center of their tone were my pictures—the very worst of them. The prisoners seeking out the Americans. Rick's face as he tried frantically to get the team out...
They fear it, too.
But they won't do anything about it.
Protect the HVT
We can't let that influence us.
The safety of our team, of everyone there, is more important than one Taliban.
If they can't make it out, we have to bomb it.
The convoy were intervened… they're all dead. Alpha Team are on their own.
"Hey, Noah, next time you're in charge, you owe me some good news." Flag shouted over the banging of guns.
"Roger that." The man said on the comms. "I'm gonna make sure you're around to hear it."
"Stay here, I'm going to paint a target. I'll be right back." Flag ordered.
There was a low groaning in the background.
"How bad is it?" Nicole Ellis asked, sounding panicked
"It's pretty bad. I think he got shot in the artery." McGuire replied grimly.
"Fix it." Ellis commanded.
More popping of guns screeched in the radios, followed by low growling grunts, and sudden, eerie silence.
"Flag, do you read? Flag? Flag do you copy?" McGuire shouted, breathing heavily as though he were running.
The lack of response made me hold my breath as I refocused, fearing the worst.
It was quiet for a long moment, just heart thudding audibly against my ribs, and my breath seemed to get stuck in my throat. I felt Hayes's eyes on my face, but I refused to meet his gaze. Instead, I stared straight ahead, seeing nothing.
He didn't ask what I was thinking, which was out of character for him. I guessed that meant that he was just as worried as I suddenly was.
At any moment, would I snap? Turn into an angry, hate-fueled soldier?
I couldn't feel it coming on.… Maybe there was no way to anticipate such a thing.
"Boss, do you copy?" There was an urgency in the voice that wasn't far off panic. Very dangerous.
At the sound of that word all the radio traffic, which was busy, stopped. Long seconds of silence followed.
I looked to Taylor anxiously, my wide eyes pleading for an answer.