Stephen Coonts - Combat

The mourners rose following the benediction and slowly filed out. The ATA contingent stood by while Maria Vasquez accepted greetings and condolences from friends and relatives.

“By the way,” Peters said, “Tim Ottmann is recommending Ozzie for a special orders Medal of Honor. With the political horse trading, he figures it’s a cinch for a Navy Cross.”

“Oz already had a Navy Cross,” Delight replied without irony. “Besides, you know how he felt about this country for the past several years.”

Peters chose to ignore the sentiment. “Additionally, everybody else on the mission probably will get a Silver Star.”

“I’ve got a Silver Star,” Delight replied — with irony.

Carol Delight leaned over the pew. “I don’t understand something. Everybody involved was civilian. How can military medals be awarded?”

“Actually there’s precedent — industry tech reps, even war correspondents have received combat decorations. Besides, Tim said something about a videotape of a former secretary of the Navy with a sheep.” Delight shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe Skip was exaggerating — I couldn’t say.”

Maria Vasquez turned from the front row, her obsidian eyes searching the pews. “Mrs. Peters,” she whispered. “I don’t see Elizabeth. I can’t believe she would miss this.”

Jane patted the young woman’s hand. “Don’t worry, dear. She’ll be here — I promise.” She nodded to her husband, who strode up the aisle in that long, ground-eating gait.

“But the service is over.”

“Not exactly, Maria.” Jane took her arm. “Let’s step outside, shall we?” On their way to the exit, Maria glimpsed Terry Peters speaking into a handheld radio.

Thirty seconds later the screech of low-level jets echoed off the surrounding buildings. “There!” somebody shouted, pointing to the south. Other witnesses followed the gesture and clapped or cheered — or merely shielded their eyes against the glare.

With the effortless grace of jet-propelled flight, the finger-four Skyhawk formation glided eight hundred feet overhead. In unison, they dropped their tailhooks in salute.

“It’s illegal as hell,” exclaimed Carol Delight. “How’d you swing that?”

Zack whispered in her ear. “Don’t ask, don’t tell!”

Maria leaned against Jane Peters, one hand to her lips and the other dabbing at her eyes. Jane hugged her close. “That’s Liz, Maria. With Eric and Rob and Tim.”

From eight hundred feet over downtown Mesa, Arizona, Scooter Vespa added power and abruptly pulled up from the number one position while the others continued straight ahead. The vacant space — the missing man — was obvious to everyone on the ground.

As she laid the stick to starboard, inducing a series of vertical aileron rolls into a cloudless blue sky, Liz Vespa made the call to Hook Peters.

“Wizard Flight, off and out.” She paused. “Break-break. Scooter Flight, returning to base.”

BARRETT TILLMAN is the author of four novels, including Hellcats, which was nominated for the Military Novel of the Year in 1996, twenty nonfiction historical and biographical books, and more than four hundred military and aviation articles in American, European, and Pacific Rim publications. He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1971, and spent the next decade writing freelance articles. He later worked with the Champlin Museum Press and as the managing editor of The Hook magazine. In 1989 he returned to freelance writing, and has been at it ever since. His military nonfiction has been critically lauded, and garnered him several awards, including the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Foundation Award, the Nautical & Oceanographic Society’s Outstanding Biography Award, and the Arthur Radford Award for Naval History and Literature. He is also an honorary member of the Navy fighter squadrons VF-111 and VA-35. He lives and works in Mesa, Arizona.

A workman tossed him a skull.

Green had played football at West Point and should have made an easy catch. But the gesture was unexpected. He got a couple of fingers on the dirty bone, not enough to grip. The skull dropped on a flat rock and rolled into the dirt. Undamaged. Skulls are hard.

The excavating crew laughed and bantered in their own language. Green was supposed to understand, but the dialect was too thick. He smiled, unsure.

“Assholes,” Sergeant Crawley said. He canted his head toward the valley. “More company coming, sir.”

Green looked down through the trees. Autumn had chewed off most of the leaves on the mountainside, but he still heard the vehicle before he saw it. The putter and choke was a leftover sound of Socialism, from the days when nothing quite worked. Now freedom had come, and some things did not work at all.

A small, light-blue truck with a flat bed bounced up the track that led toward the mass grave. It would have to stop down below, where Green and his NCO had left the embassy’s armored Jeep Cherokee. Then the visitors would need five minutes to climb to the massacre site. Unless they were drunk. It was afternoon, and the drinking started early, and the men who drank carried guns. If the visitors were drunk, their climb would take longer.

Green picked up the skull and looked at it. He felt things he could not put into words. Except for the anger and disgust. He could express that. “Fuckers,” he said to himself. Then he climbed down into the ravine where the victims had been shot and lightly buried.

His orders were to observe, not to interfere. The embassy had gotten the report the day before. Yet another massacre site, this time in the mountains down south, outside the village of Melnica. The defense attaché, a small, brave man who did not look like a soldier and therefore had not been selected for promotion, had told Green:

“Take Crawley down there for a couple of days and have a look. Get plenty of Kodak moments and GPS the site. Joe Friday them when they give you the song and dance about NATO intervention and American neglect.”

Lieutenant Colonel Andretti had been passed over for promotion and was slated to retire, but the Army had asked him to extend his tour as attaché because the system that was forcing him out could find no replacement with his skills. Balkan expertise had long been a careerkiller, and now the military was scrambling. Andretti did what was asked of him, with his daughters in high school back in Springfield and their mother remarried. The dark circles under Andretti’s eyes reached halfway to his knees. He had been in-country for five years, and none of those years had been good ones.

“And Jeff,” the attaché had said as Green was leaving the office, “the cease-fire’s holding in that sector. There’s no war in Melnica at the moment. Don’t you and your cowboy sidekick go starting one, all right?” But Andretti was smiling, kidding. “Take care of yourself.”

Green slipped on a clot of leaves, almost dropping the skull again. He resurrected himself and spanked the dirt from his jeans with his free hand. Avoiding the exposed rib cages and hip bones, the femurs and decayed rags of clothing that had emerged from the pit, he made his way toward the foreman of the dig.

The foreman was the only man in uniform, if you called a mismatched collection of military scraps a uniform. He wore an unzipped camouflage-pattern jacket and a gray cap that reminded Green of the German mountain troops he had gotten to know back in his Garmisch days. But the resemblance stopped there. This man was unshaven, despite his captain’s insignia, and he carried two automatic pistols on a web belt cinched into his big belly. The calluses on his hands would have stopped a knife. Even his eyes seemed shabby.