Stephen Coonts - Combat

Green was not in a talking mood.

Finally, the NCO laid the pistol on the blanket. “Look, boss man. I’ve been around the block. I understand the mope you got on, all right? A good-looking woman all cozy at your table, batting her eyes and getting all soulful with you. Then you find out her life’s gone off the rails. Way off. And now you don’t want to take her home to meet your parents anymore. But you feel bad about feeling that way, ’cause we’re all supposed to be sensitive New-Age guys or something, and, yeah, she got dealt a bad hand.” He slapped his palms down on his knees. “Well, let me tell you something. Life ain’t fair. If it was, you’d feel as sorry for some pot-bellied creepo as you do for the Sweetheart of the Balkans. But you don’t, and I don’t. And nobody else will, either.”

The sergeant clicked his tongue in a parody of shame. “When they packed my ass off to eastern Zaire — that one really got to me. Not for the right reasons, though. Much as I hate to admit it, those people didn’t seem real. Not the way your blondie does. Oh, they smelled real enough. Cholera ain’t no air freshener. But even the little kids. In my brain I knew they were human just like me, but it didn’t move me the way it should have. Not the way American kids would’ve done. And you know what really flipped me out? This black captain honchoing our A-team? He had the same goddamned reaction. Couldn’t relate to people in funny clothes talking mumbo-jumbo and crapping themselves to death. And that’s how we get along. There’s plenty of suffering out there. We could just about start a genocide-of-the-month club. So we’re kind of programmed to pick and choose. And you’ve got to do it that way. Sometimes you just have to turn your back. Because there’s so much suffering it’ll just rip you to shreds if you let it. And if you try to fix everything, you end up fixing nothing. So stay in your lane. And be prepared to keep on marching past other people’s misery.”

Green snapped the clip back into his own pistol. You didn’t make a big thing of it, but you did not go unarmed into Indian country. “Rack time? Listen … Bob … maybe I’m not the right man for this. I mean, that grave today. The little kid who looked like a piece of beef jerky. Then the girl, on top of everything else. My feelings do get in the way. It’s sloppy, I know it. Intellectually, I understand. But I can’t help it, goddamn it. And I’m not sure I want to help it. Maybe I’m not the right guy for this mission.”

“There is no ‘right guy,’” Crawley said. “You’ll get over it. You get calluses where you need them.” He laughed to himself, a rusty-pipes sound. “Want to turn off that light?”

“Door locked?”

“Door’s locked, I’m locked and loaded, and the carburetor’s under the bed. I would’ve taken off the tires, major, sir, but it was raining and I’m delicate.”

“Screw off, Crawley.”

“Sweet dreams, Romeo.”

But Green did not have any dreams at all. He lay awake for a time, thinking unhappily about the woman, then disgusted about the way he found himself thinking of her. He decided that Crawley was probably right, that every emotion was driven by biology. But he could not make himself accept the idea. He recognized that there was something cheap and selfish — too easy — about his sense of sorrow, but he still believed it would be worse to feel nothing at all. And he figured Crawley felt more than he was willing to let on. You couldn’t go through this and feel nothing. Then Green thought of the woman — Daniela — again. He expected bad dreams. But it had been a long day and when he fell asleep there was nothing on his channel.

The first blast shook the walls and woke him. After a stunned instant, he heard Crawley yell, “Get down,” and he rolled off the bed.

He landed on the commo gear and pack frames, all knees and elbows and a thin t-shirt. Then he remembered to reach back under the pillow and grab the pistol. The next explosion hit close, but they got lucky. The concussion shattered the windows without blowing them in, and the blinds channeled the falling glass.

“Fuck me to tears,” Crawley said. “Mortars. Fuck me to tears.”

“You all right?”

The night was black between the flashes.

Green felt the NCO reaching over him and smelled the man’s familiar smell. Then the mattress from his bed fell on him.

Crawley was tucking him in.

“Just stay down,” the sergeant said. “I’ve been through this shit before.”

This time, Green heard the whistling before the impact.

Close

The floor shook and the remaining glass blew out. Stings pierced his socks, down where the mattress did not reach.

“What—”

“They know we’re here,” Crawley whispered. “This ain’t no accidental timing. Let’s hope they’re just saying hello.”

A woman’s voice shrieked in the distance. Instantly, Green thought of Daniela. But he made himself focus on business again. He was shaking. But he was ready to go, to move, to act. He just wasn’t sure what to do.

“Get your gear on, sir,” Crawley told him. “Jeans, boots, jacket. In case we have to run. You hear any more whistling, get back under that mattress.”

Green fumbled in the darkness. He had positioned his jeans at the bottom of the bed so he could find them easily. But pulling off the mattress had made a mess of that plan.

Then they heard the shots.

“Oh, shit,” Crawley said.

The shouting began.

“You think this is about us?” Green rasped. He had his jeans now, feeling for the leg holes.

“I know it’s about us. I just don’t know what they’re out to prove. We need to un-ass this place.”

A smaller explosion sounded nearby. Grenade. Then the automatic weapons fire kicked in again. The screaming resumed, and there were male shouts now. Green yanked on his hiking boots. His fingers were unsteady. But they did as they were told.

“Maybe something about that grave,” Crawley said. “I don’t—”

Something struck the wall inside the room. It was a flat sound, followed by the clang of metal on metal.

“Shit,” Crawley yelled. Then he landed on top of Green, covering the major’s body with his own, barrel chest grinding Green’s head into the floor.

The grenade’s blast lifted the sergeant away and stunned Green. He did not even know if he was wounded. He felt as though he had been thumped on every side of his head at once. There was an avalanche in his ears. His body was numb. Then he tasted salt and wet, and sensed the pulsing from his nose.

He could not move, but did not know what that meant. Time warped and would not go forward.

“Bob?”

The sound of his own voice seemed slow to Green. It lingered in the air, surrounded by a bronze roar. In another world, automatic weapons continued to fire. Rounds struck metal. He imagined he was inside a big metal room. There was laughter.

His head hurt. It was so bad his mouth stayed open in a scream without sound. He imagined his skull shrinking, squeezing his brain.

The door swung open. Green wanted to rise, to defend himself. But his body would not move. He could think again. But none of his parts would go. He wondered if that meant he had been paralyzed. The thought stunned him.

Boots. Rampaging through the room. He only realized his eyes were open when a flashlight found them. His neck muscles recoiled.

“On zhiv.” The voice seemed pleased and angry at the same time. He heard it over the enormous, constant ringing. “On zhiv.”

Zhiv. Alive. That was him. A string of obscenities followed.

Suddenly, his arm moved. Without his command. Or maybe he had intended to move it a long time before. Somebody inside him, a ghost from a previous life, reached for the pistol.