Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

Pearson, known as the spook behind his back at Da Nang Air Force base, stalked into the darkened room fresh from the helipad, a stack of tan files clutched in his hand. “Has he said anything?” he asked.

Colonel Denning glanced over his shoulder at Pearson and shook his head. “Still not a word.”

“So we still have no real idea what’s happening to him?”

“Nope.”

Pearson stared into the bright interrogation room through the one-way mirror. Sergeant Jake Carter was seated at a nondescript government-issue table facing them, a blank expression pasted on his face. Another soldier was in the room with him, on the other side of the table questioning him — a captain. There seemed to be no response from Carter, no matter what the captain said or asked.

“Has he been like this the whole time? Two months?”

“Yeah, more or less.” Denning waved a hand. The time no longer mattered, as far as he was concerned.

“Why are we here today?”

“Well, today he made a face.”

“A face ? You got me here from Saigon because Carter made a face ?”

“It’s considered quite the event among the medical staff,” the colonel said, frowning. “As if you cared.” Carter was one of his boys. He cared.

Pearson ignored the snideness. “What’s the deal with him again? Remind me.”

The colonel sighed. “The docs say it’s traumatic psychosis — dissociation disorder. He’s semi-catatonic. But there is something going on in there, in his brain. Something continuously traumatic. ”

Pearson looked in at the sergeant, who seemed to be staring at him through the glass. It made the agent uncomfortable, so he stalked to the other side of the room.

“I’ve lost four teams,” Pearson said. “His was the first, he’s the only one who came back, and we don’t know shit about why. Or what they saw up there.”

“With all due respect,” Denning said, displaying very little of it, “ we lost the teams. You have lost control of your fucking mission. Maybe you and your spook buddies should just give up and move on to some other sampan on the river.”

Pearson ignored the tone; he was used to it. “That’s a good reason to send in another team, right? We need to find those missing soldiers and Yards.”

Carter’s stare from the other side of the mirror once again focused on Pearson. The agent nonchalantly moved around the room to avoid the sergeant’s burrowing eyes. They made him unaccountably nervous.

“What exactly are we dealing with, Agent Pearson?” Anger rose in the colonel’s voice. “What the hell have your people been up to, on that mountain? I don’t think you care about the missing teams, not at all.”

Pearson looked away from the colonel and the glass partition, both. “We don’t know what it is, but the natives are scared shitless by it.” He combed his rough hair with a tanned hand. “We don’t need something like that falling into the enemy’s hands.”

“You’re assuming they saw a weapon ?” Denning was incredulous. “That’s it ?”

Pearson ignored him. He’d gotten good at doing the Company’s bidding, wielding rank and power, and ultimately dismissing the Army’s objections to every little thing.

“I’d say that’s quite enough, Colonel. We don’t need any new offensive tools used against us, and Charlie’s using his influence in Laos to aid the enemy. We damned well do assume it’s a weapon. It seems to be working on you.”

The colonel muttered a curse and turned away. He knew who swung the bigger balls, unfortunately. Anywhere else…

Meanwhile Pearson had noticed that in the other room, the sergeant’s eyes seemed to glow, surreal light shining from behind his staring irises. The spook kept pacing, trying to get out from under Carter’s zombie gaze.

He made up his mind. “Just send in another team, Colonel. That’ll come across your desk as an order within the hour.”

“Goddamn you, isn’t it enough…”

The colonel’s voice faded in and out as Pearson was suddenly entranced by Carter’s eyes, which grew brighter and brighter until he had to squint to avoid the painful glow.

Pearson felt a breeze blowing, and when he opened his eyes he was staring at a golden sunset as the wind fluttered the weeds on a flat mountaintop. Behind him there was a light ringing sound, like muffled windchimes clanking in the tree branches and, he would later swear, a child’s mocking laughter.

The staccato throb of the Huey’s rotors was deafening as the helicopter cut its path through the night sky. The insertion point was just ahead, south of Luang Prabang and east of the Mekong in central Laos.

They were going over the fence . Their escort, two gunships loaded for bear, flanked them.

Special Forces Sergeant Jake Carter, One-Zero of Recon Team Python, sat with the hundred round drum magazine of the Russian RPD Light Machine Gun resting on his knee.

He was staring out the Huey’s open door, past the ride-along gunner.

Below them an open field of elephant grass that the boys called the Golf Course stretched in all directions, illuminated by the glow of the nearly full moon.

He sighed and turned away from the door, refocusing his attention on the team. Kane and Mac and others.

In his memory, some windchimes and a child’s laughter seemed to play over and over, like an out of tune recording. It was a tape loop, and it was always out of tune.

A familiar flat mountaintop temple awaited him for the hundredth time, and he tried to remember his team members’ names.

Maybe this time it’ll be different .

He wasn’t sure what the voice in his head intended to say, all he knew was that he hoped so.

“Five minutes to insertion…”

Carter got ready to face it all again.

“All right, Schultz, stop here.”

The Mark III ground to a halt on the hill crest, engine growling in idle. Dust powdered the tank’s steel armor, subduing its dark gray paint and the black-and-white German cross on the side. The turret bore the white number 525. On the front hull was a yellow Y with two ticks — the emblem of the 9 thPanzer Division.

Stretching to the horizon was bleak, empty steppe, tall grass rippling in the moaning breeze like an endless, brown ocean. The relentless afternoon sun blazed orange in a cloudless sky. About three hundred meters away, stark and alone at the bottom of a flat, shallow valley, stood a little church of white stone, its black onion dome topped by the three-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Sergeant Langer, the tank commander, stood in the cupola and pushed up his dirty goggles. He wiped his tanned, sweaty face and scanned the church with binoculars.

“Looks deserted,” he said into the throat microphone of the intercom.

The voice of Private Schultz, the driver, came over his headphones. “So what do we do?”

“Secure the area and wait, those are the orders. A special detachment is supposed to rendezvous with us.”

“I hope so, Herr Sergeant,” said Private Koch, the radioman, who sat below in the front hull next to the driver. “We’re way out of radio range now.”

“They needed someone here in a hurry and we were the only ones available,” said Langer. “Everyone else is pushing to link up with Guderian and cut off Kiev.”

“Lucky us,” said Private Hoppe, the loader, raising his voice so he could be heard above the engine noise. The tank was open for ventilation and he sat halfway out of the left turret hatch. “If Ivan decides to show up we’ll have problems.” Ivan was slang for the Russians.