Stephen Coonts - Combat

When he stood back up, Frankie had blood on his face and hands, on his jacket and on the legs of his pants. His face had the blankness of an icon in an old church, with a saint’s huge eyes.

He let go of the cinderblock and glanced at Green.

“Martyr to the cause,” Frankie said.

Green was racing on adrenaline now. It brought his brain back to life. He understood why Frankie had done it. Killed the comrade he could not save and could not leave to be captured. With a shard of cinderblock instead of one clean shot. Because a stray animal can set off a mine, but only human beings fired rifles. At the sound of a shot, the other side would have shaken off their torpor and come at a rush to find out what happened.

Their world had begun to make sense to him. He felt as though he had realized something huge that could not be put into words. Something he needed to tell his own people.

Frankie had gone savage. He beat Green up to his knees with the stump of metal where the rifle’s stock collapsed forward. For a bewildered moment, Green imagined Frankie was going to beat him to death, too. But Frankie only wanted to get going. Before a patrol showed up. He made Green bend forward and touch his forehead to the earth, then he hurriedly tied Green’s hands behind his back again. Green’s wrists were already raw and Frankie pulled the cords so tight it made him wince.

Frankie knew the way now, in the daylight. He steered Green down rows of knee-high stumps that had been orchards and on into the forest. Cursing, yet keeping his voice low. He raged against the Muslims, the “Turks,” until the complaints were almost hypnotic.

“Fucking Turks,” he said, over and over. “Fucking goddamned animals. Fucking Turks.”

Finally, Green said, “How do you know it was the Muslims? How do you know it wasn’t the other side? Or even your own people?”

“You shut the fuck up. Just shut up. Only the Turks set booby traps like that. It’s the way they think. They don’t fight like men. They sneak. Fucking cowards. All they want to do is get Christian women doped up and fuck them. They need to be exterminated. Wiped from the face of the earth. Every one of them.”

Madness, Green thought as he listened. And I was wrong. We were all wrong. It’s not a little madness, not something you can reason away or treat. Not even with airstrikes. It’s a big madness. Devouring. Reason doesn’t exist here. It truly is another world.

“That bitch Daniela,” Frankie said. “Her goddamned father was half Turk. She was born a worthless slut. You see what happens?”

Madness, Green thought. It struck him with the force of revelation. That one word. Madness.

They were crossing a field of stubble when they heard the dogs. Yaps echoing up the valley. They were miles away. But they frightened Frankie.

He still has to get away, Green realized. After he kills me.

“Get going,” Frankie said. “Move it.”

Green watched for a place where he could make his break. Desperate now. With his hands tied behind his back, he could not outrun his captor. And he certainly could not outrun a bullet. He needed a change in the terrain. A bank he could roll down. Or another village. Some way to put some initial distance between them, or obstacles to make it hard to aim.

The land had flattened. In the forests, the trees were well-spaced, with very little underbrush. The fields had been harvested. Green never found his opportunity.

He sensed death coming. Thinking: This is how an animal must feel. He longed to just run. To take his last chance. But he marched along and went where he was told.

He could not tell if the dogs were gaining on them or not. There was so much distance between them. And, if they closed in, Frankie would certainly kill him first. Even if he didn’t, those people would do it and blame it on Frankie.

Green understood them now. He got the logic that was not the logic of his kind. It seemed a terrible waste that the knowledge would die with him. When it could be so useful to those who did not understand. To those who imagined sanity waiting to be awakened like some political Sleeping Beauty.

He did not really believe he would die. Not at every moment. Part of him could not conceive of such a thing. Something would happen. He would be saved. It made no sense for him to die like this.

No, he realized. It made all the sense in the world. In this world.

He heard vehicles. The grunt of military diesels. But these, too, were far away.

Frankie marched him faster.

The late afternoon light glazing the land was as beautiful as anything Green had ever witnessed. Indian summer weather back home. The best time of the year. Football games, in high school then at West Point. The scent and feel of the girls as they tested themselves against life. The safe, privileged world from which he came. Where you caught footballs, not bullets, and danger meant getting caught by your father with beer on your breath, then, later, missing your ride and overstaying your weekend pass. Or just an upperclassman in a bad mood.

He recalled the crisp mornings when the hills smoked above Wheeling, then the brilliant days when the wind swept down the Hudson. Young women who never gave a thought to gang rape in their lives, who had left the village a hundred years behind them. Who would never be killed because their father was half-something. His land of wonder.

Vehicles groaned on the other side of the trees. Maybe a pair of football fields away. Abruptly, the motion sounds stopped and the engines went into idle.

Frankie shoved his gunbarrel into Green’s back and said, “Get down. Flat.”

Green got down. And heard voices. No dogs, except for those in the distance. But voices asked each other questions. He could not make out any words, but the intonation was universal. They were looking for something.

Green wanted to shout. To take his chances with those people. To take any chance left to him at all.

Frankie held the muzzle to his head.

The searchers remounted and drove away. Maybe it had just been a piss stop, after all.

“Get going,” Frankie said. “It isn’t far now.”

They passed through a glade where the earth was suddenly soft underfoot and the colors of summer held out. Dark greens hard as lacquer. And pale woodland ferns.

“Tell me one thing,” Green said.

“Shut up. Move.”

“Why’d you come back? From the States? For this?”

Frankie did not answer immediately. The ground rose slightly and hardened underfoot. The earth sounded cold under their boots again.

The yapping of the dogs had grown fainter, almost inaudible.

As they detoured around a clearing, Frankie answered him:

“Americans got no pride. No dignity. A man isn’t respected.”

“Lost your job? Girlfriend dump you?”

“Fuck you. You don’t know what it’s like. Big-shit officer.” They marched a dozen paces. “Here … things make sense. People respect you. For the right reasons. Not just because you’re some rich Wall Street fuck. Because of your family. Because of who you are. Because of who your old man was.”

From a treeline, Green glimpsed a paved two-lane road half a mile away.

That would be it.

Frankie paused for a moment, judging the landscape, the safest approach. Before he got them moving again, he looked at Green. Measuring him.

“You think I’m some kind of nutcase. Right? You probably got your skull crammed full of that equal opportunity shit. All that equality crap just means niggers get to fuck your women and you can’t say nothing about it.” He pointed to the east with his rifle. “It doesn’t make sense to you that those people nailed my grandfather to a tree and skinned him alive and now I want to take a piece of their skins. Does it?”