“We’ll wait for you, Mad Dog,” Lt. Kirkland replied back.
“Roger that,” Maddix said as he gently dragged a hand along a metallic projection poking out from the dirt. A warning to be careful rippled up from his subconscious. In a booby-trapped nation of a million landmines, he couldn’t be too cautious.
But this object didn’t look like any landmine he’d ever seen. Most anti-personnel mines are cylindrical. This metallic object had a ninety degree angle to it.
Maddix pulled a trenching tool from his pack and began to shovel dirt away from the buried object. In less than a minute he uncovered a lid belonging to a weapons crate. Judging by the crate’s size, he guessed that RPGs or rifles rested inside. Maddix lifted the lid, pushing it to the side. He peered inside the crate. A couple dozen or so AK-47s met his gaze. His pulse rate accelerated.
“Each of you blockheads needs an eye exam. I just found a crate of Kalashnikovs sitting out in plain sight,” he said into his helmet mike.
“Grab one for me, Mad Dog. I’ll add it to my collection of enemy artifacts,” Petty Officer Coleton Webb replied back.
“Sure thing, C-Dub,” Maddix said. He perused the old rifles left over from the failed Soviet campaign, looking for the one with the least scratches. He lifted a likely candidate out and leaned it against the cave wall. He then slid the lid back onto the crate. Later, they would wire up the crate with explosives and detonate it on their way out of the cave.
Maddix slung the AK over his left shoulder and took a step away from the half-buried crate, unaware it would be his last step on two legs.
His right foot contacted the pressure plate of an M-14 anti-personnel mine, causing the firing pin to push down onto the detonator, igniting the Tetryl explosive. The superheated fireball overwhelmed the darkness. And for a brief moment the cave became hotter than the sun. Like a scene from an action movie, Maddix felt himself catapulted into the air. He flew through an acrid cloud of dirt and smoke, landing hard on his back about five yards from the flashpoint.
The jarring thud siphoned the air from his lungs. He tried to sit up, but could only lift his head a few inches. His face burned, and his lips felt like they were melting. He wanted to look at his right leg in the worst way. Something about it didn’t jive. He couldn’t feel his foot.
As he gathered his strength for another attempt at sitting up, he heard Lt. Kirkland’s authoritative voice crackle in his helmet. “We’re coming, Mad Dog! Hang tight!”
Maddix suddenly felt weak. His eyes glazed over even as glacial coldness crept up his torso, pushing away his body heat.
Using the last of his strength, he lifted his head high enough to see his right leg resembled a bloody stump. The explosion had sheared off his lower leg at the knee and scattered it somewhere in the cave.
The rest of the SEAL team arrived at his side seconds later. Just before he blacked out he looked into their eyes. Their worried looks told him all he needed to know.
****
Petty Officer Daniel Pettis hurriedly opened his medical kit and pulled out a C-A-T tourniquet. “Webb, I need you to apply pressure to his femoral artery while I put the tourniquet on.”
“Gotcha,” Coleton Webb said, applying his knee to Maddix’s upper thigh region.
“How are his vital signs?” Pettis asked Lieutenant Kirkland, who had a pressure cuff wrapped around Maddix’s right arm.
Kirkland shook his head. “Not good. His pulse rate is only 38. I counted a respiration rate somewhere around nine breaths per minute, and I’m getting a blood pressure reading of 76 over 53. I haven’t taken his temp yet, but he feels cold already.”
Pettis nodded. “We need to get a medevac to Bagram immediately or he’s not going to make it,” he warned as he routed the tourniquet band around Maddix’s leg, passing the red tip of the band through the slit on the buckle, pulling it tight.
Lieutenant Kirkland pulled out his radio. “I’m on it.”
“Come on, Mad Dog. Don’t check out on us. You’re the toughest SEAL in the Navy,” Webb pleaded to his closest friend.
Pettis twisted the tourniquet rod tighter and tighter but couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. The field medic shook his head. “I still feel a distal pulse. I’m going to have to put a second tourniquet on him.”
“Yeah, he’s leaking like a sieve,” Webb said as he watched a crimson spray gush from his buddy’s leg. Webb applied even more pressure to Maddix’s femoral artery. Nearly all his weight rested atop the crudely amputated leg.
“Wolf-Pack to Base, we have a man down with severe blood trauma. We need a medevac ASAP, over,” Lt. Kirkland said into his field radio. He shook his head. “I’m going to have to go outside. I can’t get a signal in this giant hidey-hole.”
“Hey! He’s trying to sit up!” Webb exclaimed. “Be still, Mad Dog. Don’t try to get up.”
Like Lazarus rising from the dead, Maddix bolted up to a sitting position. His eyelids jerked open. Fear swirled in his bulging eyes. His gaping mouth contorted like a woman giving birth. “Demons!” he screeched. “I can see them! They’re everywhere! I see demons!”
Chapter 1
Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Army Major John Triplett shuffled his notes until he found a group of highlighted questions. They were the same queries he asked his patient in previous sessions, just worded a little differently. Triplett liked to call them his “nut cracking” questions, no disrespect to his patient.
He designed the questions to pinpoint the events and the timeline of their occurrence just before Petty Officer Andrew Maddix encountered his NDE—near death experience.
“Tell me again, Andrew, exactly where do you think the angel took your spirit?” In all his years counseling military personnel, Triplett had never crossed paths with a patient as puzzling as Maddix. The Navy SEAL swore he saw demons during his near-death experience in a cave in Afghanistan’s Khost province.
Maddix sighed and closed his eyes. “It definitely wasn’t heaven. The angel led me through a passageway and into a cavernous room. We stood on the precipice of a high bluff and looked down into a fiery abyss. The abyss stretched for as far as I could see and contained a body of flames as vast as an ocean. And the flames gave off a repulsive odor.”
“Can you describe the smell?”
Maddix nodded. “It smelled like sulfur.”
Triplett wrote down “brimstone” in the margin of his notes. “Do you think the cave you just mentioned was the same one you and your SEAL team were in when you stepped on the land mine?”
“I’m not sure. I just know I didn’t see any of the other guys.”
Triplett removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his thin nose. “But you said in one of our other sessions that when your spirit first lifted from your body that you looked down and saw your team medic tying a tourniquet around your leg.”
“Yeah, I did. But then the angel came and took me away and we were alone.”
“Did the cave you and the angel were in look natural or manmade? And was it composed of granite or sandstone?”
“It looked natural. And the walls were reddish. I guess it was sandstone.”
Triplett chewed on one stem of his reading glasses. “Is there anything else about the geography of the cave that you find memorable?”
Maddix nodded. “There wasn’t a ceiling to it. I could see sky above me.”