John is standing inside the hovel again and the girl is cowering between the upended cot and the wall. Peering over her shoulder at him is a toddler of about three and a baby strapped to her chest cranes around to look at him too. All of them are absolutely silent. Three sets of eyes, large and dark, stare at him over a cultural gap so vast he may as well have time traveled here from 2000 years in their future. Between him and her is the only thing they have in common: the Browning L9A1 that she has pointed straight and steady at his face. His own Browning is still in its holster, but he makes up for it by having his 80 assault rifle centered on her narrow chest.
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph on a big fuckin' white donkey," Shea hisses under his breath, standing just behind John. Shea also has the latest in modern combat weaponry pointed at the little trio : on full automatic he could fire his 30-round magazine in less than half a minute – well, maybe half-a-minute given the amount of dust in the air slowing the action just a bit.
Silence drags out forever between them. Outside, further to the north of this building John can hear the clean-up rattle of return fire from his secondary fire team. They've cleared out most of the insurgents here, chased them off or killed them.
Sun glints down through the window between them, dust falling like stars through the light. There are dead bodies strewn through the room. Men, women, other children. John can smell the stink of their deaths: blood, bile, shit. They weren't killed by John's men, nor the ANA unit that got themselves pinned down in the gully just below and called in John's section for help. This happened closer at hand and was far more brutal. It was done with knives and bludgeons and close pistol fire. It was personal.
The girl and John stare at each other. Trying to keep his eyes on John, the baby takes his fist from its mouth and twists uncomfortably in the sling. "Bah…bah. Bahh..Bah. Bah. Bah." He says with finality, then blows a loud, wet raspberry.
"Not sure, but I think he just called you a motherfucker."
"He's not the one I'm worried about."
The baby shoves his fist back into his mouth. No more negotiations.
"Back off, Shea."
"Doc…."
"Slow. Just back off. Do it."
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph."
John watches the girl's eyes shift briefly to Shea as he starts to move. Her eyes widen, flash from Shea to the window in the wall just beside and ahead of John and then back to John's eyes. She stirs slightly and Shea freezes.
"Easy." John says quietly. "Okay. Easy everybody."
"You stop." The girl says, or at least that's what John thinks he hears. Her accent is thick and she's speaking barely above a whisper. He nods and watches as she slowly pulls her finger from the trigger, clicks the safety back on the gun. She does it without looking, keeping her eyes on John's. Carefully balancing the pistol on her thumbs and spread fingers she lowers it to the floor.
John points to it with his chin and then jerks his head sideways. She reaches out with one sandaled foot and kicks the gun away. John uncoils a bit, moves his finger off the trigger of his own gun.
Her eyes shift from John to the window and back again.
She shakes her head minutely, a bare quiver that he would probably dismiss as a breath if every one of his senses wasn't on a hair trigger. She leans back, presses the toddler who has squatted down to hide behind her tighter against the wall, pulls her knees up closer to herself and tucks her chin down over the baby's head, even as she keeps her eyes steady on John's. There might be two thousand years of culture between them, but he knows a crash position when he sees one.
"Shea! Down!" John shouts and drops himself into a ball seconds before the RPG round whooshes through the window, blows into and through the wall opposite and explodes in the next room with a sound oddly distant and hollow.
John jerks awake.
"Doc."
John's gasping in the darkness, trying to orient himself out of the dream. His hand grips the edge of the bunk. There's an echoing boom in the distance, like the one in his dream.
"Doc." It's Bol's voice from the cot below John's. "Sounds like Mala gets the morning call to prayer today." There is a line of British bases running along the Helmand River like knotted pearls set on a string. FOB Mala is the next base north of their post at FOB Agha.
"Yeah," John grunts, rubbing his hands across his eyes.
"Better them than us."
"Yeah." John's quiet for a long minute, trying to get his heart to settle. "Bol."
"Yeah, Doc?"
"Sorry if I woke you."
Another mortar explosion cracks through the purple dawn, resounding again and again as the echo rolls down through the draws in the shallow mountains. Moments later there's the staccato spitting of a 40 mil returning fire.
"When I was a kid in Sudan," Bol says eventually, "and the North bombed us at night my auntie used to tell us to pretend that it was thunder and that we would wake in the morning to fresh rain and green grasses."
"You lived in a desert, Bol."
"Yeah, well, my auntie meant well. She was a nice lady, but not very bright."
John smiles in the dark. He understands that auntie, the desire to give comfort by trying to make the unthinkable something perfectly natural. How else do you live when somebody you don't know is always trying to kill you?
"Shouldn't let that girl get to you, Doc."
"Where did she get that Browning, Bol? How did she know how to use it?"
Bol sighs, he's heard it before. "The things people teach their kids these days."
"Yeah. Bol could only field strip an AK by the time he was eight." Shea gravels. "Had no idea how to aim it."
"Nobody actually aims an AK, Shea." Bol tells him.
"I could field strip Mary Freer with my eyes closed by the time I was twelve." McGraw puts in.
"That's 'cause you didn't want to open your eyes and see her laughing at your wee Scottish haggis."
"Fuck you, you Feinian cocksu—"
Somebody outside kicks the wooden hut door with a resounding smack. "All of you chickens quit your clucking or I'm coming in there and rousting you out 'cause I sure as hell could use some fucking sleep instead of standing out here freezing my balls off."
"Yeah? Forget to put your trousers on again, then, Screamer?" Shea asks.
The door flies open with a blast of cold air and when John blinks at the deep predawn blue he sees white swirling through it. Snow.
Something shoots in through the open doorway and makes a spattering sound close to Shea's bunk.
"Fuckin' hell, Screamer. You're a dead man now aren't you?" And Shea is out of his bunk and out the door wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and the untied boots he dropped into.
"Snowball fight!" McGraw yells and piles out behind Shea.
John and Bol don't move. They listen as the scuffle rolls through the base like an ambush. The whole hut bangs and shudders with the impact of somebody getting thrown into it. There's a howl of laughter outside.
"John?"
"Yeah, Bol?"
"I think you're going to have to explain to me one more time why you whites think blacks are uncivilized."
John smiles up at roof of the hut as it quivers again from another impact. Bol is, without a doubt, the most patently kind, generous and polite person he knows. He is also a fearless and ferocious warrior.
"It's not that little girl that's got you all keyed up anyway, John."
"No?"
"No. It's that other one. The aid worker."
"Oh, you think so?"
Bol laughs low and deep. "I've played poker with you, man, you're hopeless."
John lets his thoughts slide to the aid worker whose name he doesn't even know. He thinks about the scent of her and an ache starts deep in his throat. He tries to swallow it.
"What do you know about goats, Bol?"
"I come from a very long and illustrious line of goat herders."
John smiles to himself, but the smile fades when he realizes it has gone deathly silently outside.
"Bol?"
"Doc?"
"Incoming."
They scramble as the door swings open and a barrage of snowballs blinds them.