Stephen Coonts - Combat

He had never been hit so hard. He slumped over. It felt as though his neck had snapped.

The man kicked the plate with its remnants toward him.

“Pojesti.”

The instant the man turned, Green launched himself. He hit him behind the knees in a perfect beat-Navy tackle and scrambled on top of him as soon as the man’s torso thumped the ground.

Green landed one fist. Then they were all on him. When he woke up, he was tied to the tree again. He had to twist his body as hard as he could not to puke on himself.

His eye was swollen and it left Green with a narrowed view of the world. And his feet itched and burned. It seemed ridiculous to him that, waiting to be executed, he should be so bothered by his feet.

Except for a pair of sentinels, the men drifted into the huts to sleep out the day. Eventually, Green slept, too, head drooped above the lashings that bound him to the tree. He half-woke a few times — once he felt crazed by the unreachable itching and cramping of his feet — but every part of him had worn down and the need to sleep finally slammed him down like a whisky drunk.

He dreamed he was back in Wheeling, buying a new car. Except that the car lot was one he recognized from Copperas Cove, in Texas, and he could not square that because he knew he was in Wheeling. A woman he had dated at Fort Hood appeared, excited him, and vanished. There was a problem with the paperwork at the dealership. He needed to prove something and could not. Buying the car was a major commitment, and he needed to get it done before he thought too much about it. He recognized his weakness, knew he was watching himself in a dream.

He woke to twilight and the smell of grilling meat. The sky was deep and cloudless. The fragrance of mutton, a vivid living smell of death, made his stomach ache.

In the shadow of the trees, the gunmen sat and ate, pulling the meat from the skewers with their fingers and gnawing bread torn ragged from a loaf. They shared an oval brandy bottle. Only five of them left now. The tall, thin boy who had marched him up the mountain was gone, Green could tell that much even though the men still wore their stocking masks.

Three of the remaining men stood up and slung their weapons over their shoulders. Green could not make out what was said, but he sensed it was a parting. And he was right. The brandy went around one more time, then the men marched off in a file. Ten minutes later, Green saw their shrunken figures emerge from the treeline, climbing toward the pass. The man at the rear turned around, as if he sensed that he was being watched. In the dying light, Green saw the white dot of an unmasked face.

The masks had only been for him.

He wondered, for a moment, if he had gotten it all wrong. If these men were not ethnic warriors at all, but only bandits imagining a fat Yankee ransom.

Again, he thought of Crawley’s severed head.

Not ransom.

One of the pair who had stayed behind to mind him stood up and swaggered toward Green. He was stocky, with a submachine gun slung across his back. Not one of Green’s earlier abusers. He untied Green and pointed toward the little grill and his companion, who sat cradling an airborne-variant AK. Watching.

Green stumbled at first, almost fell. His legs were numb. And he still had difficulty with his balance.

The man who had untied him grabbed Green from behind, taking a fistful of his jacket collar. Abruptly, he steered Green toward the huts. A bolt of panic shot through Green’s chest and stomach, piercing right down to his bowels.

Was this it?

No. It couldn’t be. They had killed the girl over by the rocks. That was the killing place.

Something else.

What?

Green felt himself shaking. He hated it, did not want to seem a coward, but could not control his body. He felt supernaturally alert, but not in a way that engaged reality. His dream had been more real than this.

He understood it now. Why the people had walked to the ovens at Auschwitz. Because you did not know what else to do, afraid that any action you took would only make things worse. And because you were drugged on hope, even as you faced the executioner.

The gunman shoved him between the huts, prodding him toward a trough that caught the water from a mountain spring. He told Green to wash his face.

The water was beautiful, and delicious.

Afterward, the gunman herded Green to the little stove then pushed down on his shoulder. Green sat. The second raider fingered his rifle, watching everything through the slits in his mask. The stocky one bent down behind Green. A strong-handed man, he jerked Green’s left ankle back and tied it to his left wrist, hobbling him but leaving his right hand free.

The stocky man lifted a last skewer of mutton from the grill and pushed the meat off with dirty fingers. The chunks fell on the flattened grass in front of Green.

This time Green ate. The men gave him bread, and offered him their plum brandy. He almost accepted it. But finally shook his head. When the last of the meat was gone, Green licked his fingers. Wanting more.

In the gloaming of the little draw, the stocky man reached toward his comrade, straining to grasp the brandy bottle. And Green saw a flash of pale skin below the mask.

A scar traced down the gunman’s neck, from below his ear into his collar.

It was not the smartest thing Green ever did or said. But he was far beyond cool judgment. He spoke to the man on the other side of the stove, the one with the collapsible-stock AK.

“Why’d you kill the girl, Frankie?”

The jerk of the head confirmed it. Even Scarface understood English well enough to understand what had happened.

After a moment, Frankie reached up and peeled off his mask. He ran his hand back over his liberated hair.

“Fucking shit things anyway,” Frankie said.

Scarface spoke rapidly. In a tone of alarm. But Frankie made a dismissive gesture.

He looked at Green. “It doesn’t matter now. We’re going to kill you. You know that.”

But Green refused to think about his own death. He kept his eyes on Frankie. “You sonofabitch. Why kill the girl?”

Scarface pulled off his mask and shook his head hard. But he let Frankie do the talking.

“What the fuck do you care? You have plans to marry her or something?” He laughed and said something in dialect to Scarface. Scarface laughed with the old Ford rumble Green remembered.

“Look,” Frankie said, “this isn’t America. People here have values. You can’t just go slutting around in a village like that. That bitch was damaged goods.”

“You said she was raped.”

Frankie rolled his eyes in the glow of the stove. “And that’s supposed to make it all right?” He breathed out heavily, a killer’s sigh. “You’ll never understand. We have to purify our race. A woman who’s been raped … by those people … she doesn’t belong here anymore. Anyway, Daniela was nothing but a slut.”

“She was one of your people, for God’s sake. She was educated. She could have helped you rebuild …”

Frankie leaned on his gun. “She was a whore, man. Nobody around here’s going to marry a whore. And no whore’s going to teach our kids. Shit, she was even ready to go away with you last night. All you would’ve had to do was ask.” His eyes burned. “Do you know it’s a scientifically proven fact that every man who screws a woman leaves his trace in her, his mark? Then, when she has a baby, the baby’s got traces of all of them, of every one who’s been in her. That’s why those people rape. To infect our genes.”

“That’s nuts.”

“It’s science,” Frankie said. “Sci ence. ”

Green closed his eyes. He wished he had not eaten the mutton. “You’re sick,” he said. “You gang-rape one of your own people … put a bullet in her head … and that’s okay? That’s some kind of good deed? To keep the race pure? What fucking race? You’re all fucking the same, for Christ’s sake.”