Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

No one was standing guard outside. Earlier in the day someone had been there. Now, nobody. I didn’t like that.

Our four-man stack quietly moved in closer. A team sniper/ observer found a position from which he could see the back of the house. Ready to shoot any squirter, which is what we called someone who sneaks out the back door or window, running away from the attack.

The front door wasn’t terribly substantial, so we rammed it in instead of breaching it with an explosive charge. As we four entered the house, we tossed flash-bangs. There was dust everywhere, the smell of gunpowder.

And through our NODs we could see that the house was swarming with enemy soldiers. Were they expecting us? Had we just stepped into the middle of an ambush? Maybe we’d been betrayed by one of the Afghan soldiers we’d been training. Maybe one of them had placed a call on their mobile phone.

Or maybe it was something much simpler. Maybe they had simply heard the sound of the choppers and grabbed their weapons.

The air exploded with gunfire. Everyone, it seemed, was firing at us at once.

As the first one in, I was the first one shot. A couple of times. It felt like my left leg had been pierced by a flaming arrow. An explosion of pain. I crumpled to the floor. Later, I learned that the first round had broken my femur. The second one had pierced my femoral artery. It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the pain, but it took over my body, disoriented me. I saw blood spewing from my leg. I thought about the very real possibility that I might die in a matter of minutes. I struggled to get up but suddenly didn’t have the strength. This, I thought, was my time. It had finally come.

Suddenly I was being dragged across the room and out of the house. Sean, who was the fourth guy in the stack, had run into the house, exposing himself to the enemy, in order to grab me by a shoulder strap of my body armor. He pulled me across the floor, out the door, and then outside along the ground until he got me safely behind a high stone wall.

I managed to croak out, “Thank you.”

“Not done yet,” I heard Sean say as if from a distance.

Meanwhile, George Devlin, our communications sergeant, was on the radio, calling in a 9 line for a medevac helicopter. Sean got a tourniquet off my kit and applied it to my leg to stop the bleeding. He also put gauze and a bandage on the wounds.

Blood was everywhere. I was in shock, so my memory of everything afterward is hazy. I heard Sean muttering, and I asked him to repeat it.

“You know, there’s an ancient Chinese proverb,” he said. “If you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for it.”

My brain was operating just barely enough to allow me to rasp, “Having second thoughts?”

A Black Hawk medevac bird arrived moments later, and I was lifted into it on a stretcher. A medic on the chopper checked my airway, assessed me for shock, took my blood pressure, looked worried, and gave me a fentanyl lollipop. I licked it a few times. I don’t remember much beyond that until I woke up hours later in a surgical tent in Jalalabad.

I muttered, “How’s Khalid?”

Silence around me. A little louder, I said, “The hostage? How is he?”

“The hostage didn’t make it,” someone said.

Khalid had been executed minutes before we got there.

We never figured out whether we were betrayed by one of the kandak or if they were just alerted by the chopper sound.

Sometimes you just don’t know. Combat is iffy. Sometimes it just goes bad.

A round nine I found myself awake and a little annoyed that Maggie was taking so long photographing the “destroy upon my death” files. Why hadn’t she come by yet?

I took a shower, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and went in search of Sukie’s room. I knocked, but there was no answer. She was probably already downstairs.

By the time I got to the staircase I could hear voices and laughter coming from below. Maybe Maggie was down there and had some reason why she hadn’t been able to return the files yet. Hildy, I reminded myself. I descended the stairs, and as I drew closer the voices became more distinct.

I passed through the entry foyer to the swinging door that led to the kitchen. But instead of entering, I stood outside and listened for a moment. There are all sorts of devices you can use to amplify distant conversations, including “bionic ears” and such, which let you hear a whisper from three hundred feet away. But I didn’t have any with me, and I wouldn’t have used them if I did. Too unsubtle. I didn’t want to be caught with any incriminating equipment.

I stood there against the wall, smelling coffee and bacon frying.

A male voice was saying, “...but once she gets keys to the car, she’ll drive it off a bridge and screw us out of everything.”

“Dad wouldn’t make that mistake,” a woman said.

“He’s changed. We can’t be sure of anything. And she’s got a leash on Cameron like he’s her puppy.”

“The kind that’s never quite house-trained.”

A few laughs. Who was the “she” they were talking about — Natalya, the Russian fiancée? One of the sisters? Obviously Cameron wasn’t in the kitchen. They were talking about him. Probably Maggie wasn’t either. So the male voice had to be Paul, the older brother.

Paul’s voice from inside the kitchen said, “...see what she was wearing?”

A mumble.

A woman: “Surgically augmented figure.” Who was speaking? Sukie? Hayden? Megan was gone, and there were two women in the room, who had to be Sukie and Hayden.

A second woman, maybe Sukie: “She was a flight attendant, I swear.”

“Definitely mail order,” Paul said. “Or whatever the internet equivalent of mail order is.”

The first woman again, maybe Hayden, said, “Why don’t you just ask him?”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“I did ask him, ‘What do you like about her?’ and he said, ‘I enjoy having a conversation with an intellectual equal,’” Sukie, I was now sure it was Sukie, said.

The three roared with laughter.

The longer I waited outside the kitchen, the greater the chance someone would walk by, or come out the swinging doors, and discover me. So I stood there poised to move at any moment.

Maybe Hayden was saying, “...changed his will a thousand times.” But the next few lines were obscured by a clatter of pots or pans.

Then a man said, “He’s gonna screw over Barb and your mom too for this bimbo, and I’m not going to put up with it.”

A murmur and then a female voice: “...controls him now. He does whatever Natalya wants.”

I decided then it was risky to stay out here any longer, eavesdropping, so I pushed open the kitchen door and entered.

Three of the adult Kimball kids were sitting around a long metal-topped worktable on stools, mugs of coffee in their hands. No Maggie.

“You remember her at all?” Paul was saying. “She was the nightmare nanny.”

“The Irish one?” said Sukie.

“Maureen, the bad-tempered one from Dublin,” said Paul. “I eventually got her fired. I was quite proud of that. Well, hello there. I forgot your name.” He looked uncomfortable, like he was wondering how much I’d heard.

“Nick. Good morning.” I leaned over and gave Sukie a kiss on the lips. Somewhere a dishwasher was going. The air was warm and humid.

“Morning,” she said. She was in gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Coffee?” She waved at a glass carafe of coffee in the middle of the dented metal tabletop.

“Sure. Black, thanks.”

She retrieved a big white mug from the counter behind her. Pouring a full mug of coffee from the glass carafe, she handed it to me, and as she did, she looked me straight in the eye. Arched her brow. As if asking, Well? How’d it go?