‘Jesus,’ I groaned, ‘what the fuck do you weigh?’
Meyers was singing a Miller Lite commercial.
‘Gone to his happy place,’ suggested Fallon.
‘Bastard could’a taken us with him,’ I gasped, sucking oxygen and dust.
I staggered forward then centered the weight. Meyers grunted. The dust was settling. We had to get back to the Landcruiser before we were fully exposed to the Taliban’s fire. I managed to get through the rubble and come up behind the vehicle without tripping or breaking an ankle, and without being fired upon. I laid Meyers on the ground beside Stefanovic, who was up on one knee in the firing position. His condition was deteriorating fast as his blood leaked away, the bandage saturated. His eyelids were heavy, every blink a microsleep; he was having trouble keeping his weapon aimed anywhere but at the ground. Enemy fire was coming in hot and heavy. We couldn’t hold our position much longer. One Landcruiser, eight passengers, one of them dead.
‘Give me your smoke,’ I said to Stef, seeing the canisters hanging from his webbing. His wounded arm wouldn’t allow him the movement required to unhitch them. His eyes moved around, unable to focus. An incoming round whined off the road beside my hand, fragments of stone chips ripping through the fabric of the battle uniform around my wrist.
‘You’re a ghost,’ Stefanovic murmured, and he dragged his bloody fingers down my face, across my mouth.
I spat the copper taste of his blood out of my mouth and took his canisters.
‘Smoke,’ I said to Fallon.
He handed his over and I collected more from Detmond and Meyers.
‘Get everyone in the vehicle,’ I yelled.
I popped two canisters and threw them upwind. Ribbons of green and red smoke swirled and drifted down the road toward us. I ran to open the driver’s door of the third Landcruiser and verified that the engine was still running. Then I sprinted around to the back and opened the rear hatch. The enemy figured something was up and concentrated their fire on the upright vehicle, but the smoke was making their aim uncertain. A volley of AK rounds, sounding like a heavy-metal drum solo, punched new holes all over the roof of the Landcruiser shielding us.
I dashed back and hoisted Meyers across my shoulders once more. With Fallon shooting over us, we made it to the open rear hatch. I laid Meyers sideways across the width of the floor and hooked one of his arms around a rear seatbelt anchored to the car’s bodywork above his head. Detmond helped Stefanovic into the back seat; Bellows and Mattock provided covering fire. I ran back to the driver’s door. Fallon had climbed in and was struggling to prop Rogerson against the passenger door. There wasn’t enough room; at least, not for me.
I popped smoke, tossed it, then slammed the doors shut.
‘C’mon, Cooper!’ Fallon shouted. ‘Get in!’
‘Go!’ I said, smacking the roof with the flat of my hand.
The incoming fire was getting more accurate. Holes were gouged in the hood; the windscreen shattered. Fallon was about to argue but changed his mind. He jumped back behind the wheel, jammed it into drive, and stomped on the gas. The Toyota took off, wheels spinning in the packed dirt, the vehicle fishtailing into the smoke, drawing some of the fire and leaving a vortex of red and green swirls in its wake. Within seconds, my unit was out of range and out of danger.
I once more took up a position behind the second Landcruiser, the ground crimson with coagulating blood. I had my M4 and the captured M16s. I put a couple of them on single shot and fired them from the hip at the buildings occupied by the enemy. Changing mags, I did the same again. When those mags were spent, I threw more smoke and emptied another couple of mags, changing to three shot bursts, hoping the opposition might think there was more than one idiot left down here.
I put down the M16 with the others, crawled to the rear bumper, popped two canisters, the last of them, and threw them short. Bright red smoke swirled over my position, but mostly over the wrecked building behind me. A barrage of lead poured in, cutting me off from those M16s. I had to leave them, and crept through the smoke and the rubble of the destroyed building, back to where we’d found Meyers.
Still no sign of those damn Apaches. Time to boogie.
The choking, cloying dust and smoke stung my eyes as I ran crouched over. I came out into the open and movement stopped me. Two kids with AKs were creeping in my direction. I saw them before they saw me. The way they were moving, it was obvious that they were hoping to come up behind my position. I recognized them. They were the boys outside al-Eqbal’s cousin’s place when we rolled up. Maybe they were the ones who blew the whistle on our arrival to the Taliban. One of them looked right at me and his eyes widened. Terror filled his face. He pointed at me and screamed. His buddy did likewise, and they both turned around and ran, which was a relief. Killing kids, even ones that would happily plant me in the ground, was not something I wanted to have to answer to myself for.
I wondered what had spooked them.
With still no sign of the choppers, I followed through with my plan, hopped on the pushbike I had seen beside Meyers and pedaled back to the base.
Photograph
‘We sure as shit don’t need this kind of crap.’ Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mertins tossed a copy of the New York Times on the desk in front of me. ‘You want to explain what got into you here?’
Mertins’s nose was white with anger. It was a big nose and didn’t go with the shape of his long, thin head, or the size of his ears, which reminded me of Dumbo’s. In fact, I wondered if Mertins had been assembled from spare parts. My commander wasn’t my kind of guy, or anyone else’s as far as I knew. A guardsman from Montana, he’d left the OSI in the mid-nineties and joined the Helena PD. He was a detail hound, not very popular, and within a year they’d packed him off to Siberia — running the evidence lockup in the basement of a secondary building at the bottom of a long stairwell. His unit’s call-up to Afghanistan was like giving him parole.
‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ I said.
‘You don’t know? That’s not good enough, Cooper. You usually go out on a mission looking like this?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. The photo was printed in full color beneath the headline ‘Harrowing escape in Afghanistan — Hero up for Air Force Cross’. I was familiar with the picture, of course, as was everyone here at Camp Eggers. Fallon had snapped it with his iPhone when I rode into camp on the pushbike. That it had reached the media was news to me. Even more surprising was this business about the decoration. Aside from the fact that I was being considered for it, the consideration for a thing like that was supposed to be a closely held secret. Someone must have leaked it.
I took another glance at the photo. The powdered masonry dust gave my head the color of bone. The overhead position of the sun caused black shadows to gather in my eye sockets. I looked like a skull, an extra macabre touch being the crimson stripes of Stefanovic’s blood that he’d finger-painted down across my mouth. I recalled the terror on the faces of those Afghan kids when they looked up and got a load of me. Thank God the fight had gone right out of them — I owed Allah one for that.
‘US Forces don’t slip into costume when they’re out on patrol, goddamn it,’ he said.
‘No, sir.’
‘Cooper, shit like this makes us look like cowboys — on top of the fact you lost the principal and Specialist Rogerson. Al-Eqbal might have been a jackass, but he was an elected jackass. Democracy’s fragile here. Losing him to the Taliban chalks up major points on their scoreboard. To the local populace we look weak as camel spit.’