Ben Shapiro: True Allegiance

Brett heard the alarm go off. The compound had been breached.

“Men, gather up!” Brett shouted.

Bullets smashed through the windows and glanced off the cement facing of the building in unpredictable patterns. The courtyard was filling up again, new Taliban fighters taking the places of the old. From below, on the first story, Hawthorne could hear the whining strains of an Arabic melody—one of the Taliban fighters had apparently brought a boom box along. Hawthorne stifled a bitter grin. They’d been so comfortable with their plan that they’d even brought their primitive iPods.

Brett took quick stock of his men.

Thirty left.

Just thirty.

“You,” he said, pointing to a dozen men. “Pin them down at the front of the building. The rest of you, come with me. We will see you all at the airport. Good luck.”

Brett led his group downstairs.

When they hit the stairwell above the bottom floor, he turned to his men. “Okay, boys,” he said, calm. “Here’s the plan. We fight through these bastards. Then we flank them, and hit them from the east side of the courtyard. We’ll catch them in a crossfire from the roof, then make our way to the airport. Got it?”

The men nodded.

“Go,” Hawthorne barked.

One of Hawthorne’s men, Sothers, a twenty-one-year-old private, burst through the door—and immediately took a bullet to the jaw. His helmet popped off like the top of a Pez dispenser, blood and brains pouring out on the floor.

Brett recognized the mistake immediately: the Taliban had cut off all the exits. The embassy was a death trap.

That’s when he saw the smoke.

It poured beneath the door, waves of smoke, with fire licking around the hinges. He could smell the gasoline from the fire, so strong he almost choked on the stench. Brett cursed himself for his carelessness, picked Sothers up, slinging him over his shoulder.

“Back to the roof,” he shouted, panting.

Then he sprinted back up the stairs, his sweat mixing with Sothers’s blood, covering his face in ooze. He heard the sharp whizz of a bullet ping off one of the railings—he heard it sizzle as it approached—and then he heard it sink deep into Sothers’s back with a sickening thunk . He bashed the second-floor door open with his forearm, and he found two of his men lying on the carpet, bleeding profusely.

“Report!” he shouted.

A sergeant yelled to him, “Sir, we’ve lost Martinez and Thomas. We can’t hold them here. They’re breaking down the door, and they’ve got snipers across the way firing at us continuously. We don’t have enough cover.”

“Get your asses to the roof, now!”

The men found the stairwell again and dashed up the metal stairs, their feet clanging.

Brett counted the men as they reached the roof, one by one. Only twenty-four left now.

And no place to go.

Except down.

Hawthorne recognized it right away. The building was surrounded on all sides by open space. It was at least a forty-foot drop to the ground. But that didn’t change the situation.

“Men, listen up,” said Hawthorne. “We’re going over the side of this building. When you hit the ground, don’t try to land on your feet. Let your knees buckle and roll. You’ll be fine. We’re all going to be okay.”

He pointed at a young private, perhaps twenty-three. “You go first,” he said.

The private was shaking. “I have vertigo, sir.”

“Son, you don’t get your ass over the side of that building, they’re going to kill you.”

The private’s eyes were welling up with tears now. “I can’t, sir.”

Hawthorne ran over and grabbed him by the back of the uniform. “Come with me, Marine.”

He stood him at the edge of the roof. Then, before the kid could protest, Hawthorne acted. “Buckle and roll,” he said, then pushed him from the roof.

The kid plummeted faster than Hawthorne could have predicted. But the kid had enough brains to listen. He hit the ground and rolled forward, then stood up, shaken but alive. Hawthorne dropped the kid’s weapon down to him.

The other soldiers formed a line, then rolled off one by one. “Hurry it up,” Hawthorne kept muttering. “Hurry it up.” The gunshots were close now, the smoke thickening around the outside of the building. Brett could hear the approaching whine of the Arabic singer. “Get your asses over the side of that building!”

One of the men landed awkwardly, and he shrieked as his ankle cracked. The other Marines silenced him. Hawthorne glanced down the side of the building, hoping nobody had heard. The area was still empty, and he could see his troops below. “Maybe,” he thought, “just maybe, we have a shot.”

Then, almost in slow motion, Brett heard the door behind him open. The big metal door creaked on its rusted hinges, and the Arabic whine blared through.

Brett moved his bulk quickly—more quickly than he had since high school—and opened fire on the Taliban fighter behind him, blowing him back down the stairs. The thought flashed across his mind that the Pentagon would be beside itself knowing it had a general officer in a close-quarter battle. Then he thought that Prescott probably wouldn’t care, so long as it didn’t make too much news.

Brett didn’t have time to think about what he did next—he just did it. He rolled toward the opposite edge of the roof, away from the enemy soldiers, and fell off the roof forty feet toward the ground.

Time slowed as he fell, the wind brushing his blood-smeared cheeks. He had time to think that he’d fallen in the wrong position, that his arm was awkwardly stretched behind him. Then he hit the earth, and the searing pain in his arm told him that he’d broken it. Worse, the smashing noise from his waist told him his comms were dead. Above, he heard the Taliban men running toward his side of the building.

He struggled to his feet, his nerves shrieking in excruciating agony, and staggered toward a nearby alley. He didn’t even hear the bullet coming—when it hit him in his broken arm, he didn’t even feel it.

It had been three hours. Brett sat in another alley in the slums of the town, separated from his men—if any of them were still alive—listening to the silence of a city at peace. A city in the enemy’s hands.

He gripped the empty pistol tighter.

“WE SIMPLY CAN’T PAY FOR it, sir.”

White House chief of staff Tommy Bradley was standing over the president’s desk in the Oval Office, a sheaf of budget papers in his hand. Crumbled, wrinkled papers covered in red notes. The numbers just didn’t add up.

And President Mark Prescott didn’t care.

“Listen to me, Tommy,” said the president. “My reelection relies on our ability to secure funding for this action. You know that. I know that. The polls show it. We don’t have a choice in the matter.”

Tommy gritted his teeth. He knew Prescott was right. The president had been dropping precipitously in the polls—his critics blamed his policies for widespread inflation and unemployment. Prescott was deathly afraid of becoming Jimmy Carter, and he was right on the precipice of having his worst fears realized.

When Mark Prescott ran for president, he didn’t know what he’d be inheriting. He was no babe in the woods—he was a hardened ideologue, a product of the Chicago machine, the handpicked protégé of the power brokers—but he hadn’t quite contemplated the nature of the country he’d be handed once elected. He campaigned on great blustering clouds of rhetoric, his boyish good looks, and a record obscured by a complacent media. He came out of nowhere, they said, an inspirational figure unlike any candidate since John F. Kennedy. He answered no difficult questions, evaded all the exposés about his early political career, his rocky marriage, his connections to some of the more shady characters in town. He brushed off all the attacks on him as the cynical manipulations of a tired opposition.