Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Works for me.” He smiled. “What about them?”

“Yasir will go to Jordan with me,” Sabeen said. “I have family there. Wealthy people! We will live with them!”

“You and that old goat?” Jack said, pointing his thumb at the humble old Bedouin.

“He is a good man,” Sabeen said, then she turned to him. “Yasir, take Haazim from the truck, my sisters and I will clean the seat. Then we go to my family in Jordan.”

The old man smiled at her and went to the truck, dragged the dead Haji to one side and dropped his body.

The girls piled sand in the seats and scrubbed them out with it. Soon they had the pickup fit to drive.

“I don’t recommend driving that Haji gun wagon to Jordan,” Jack told Sabeen. “Trade it to somebody with a car and get to a city. If your family has money, they’ll get you out of Iraq.”

“I will call my grandfather when we get to Hit,” Sabeen said. “I know they have searched far and wide for me. They will be so pleased to meet Yasir!”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to death, Sabeen,” Jack said, and a big grin spread on his face. He told himself, “Love to be a fly on that wall.”

Yasir got in the driver’s seat and put his finger in the spiderweb of broken windshield surrounding the big bullet hole. He closed one eye and looked through it, and smiled at Jack, saying something in Arabic.

“We love you!” Giti and Amira and Miriam all shouted, waving at their sister as the Bedouin goatherd drove along the rift to the south, where he would pick up a back road that would lead him to Hit.

“Good-bye, Sabeen!” Giti cried, and waved farewell to her sister. Miriam and Amira stood by her, crying and waving, too.

Sabeen put her head out the window and waved back at them. “I love you!”

“We love you, too!” the three girls shouted to her.

“We gotta roll,” Jack said, gathering their gear and returning it to the back of the truck.

He started the engine. It sputtered and began knocking, worse and worse.

“Get in!” he yelled, and rolled up the window to cut off the fumes that came in the truck.

The words had no more than cleared his lips when from the front of the pickup came a loud, “Bang!”

Jack dropped to the seat, ducking for cover, and the girls all hit the deck outside.

“Someone is shooting!” Amira cried.

Gunny V put his head up, and peeked around. All quiet. The engine had died with the bang, and he tried to restart it. Nothing but a groan.

Jack thought about the knocking. “Well, fuck me to tears!” he swore as loud as he could, getting out of the truck and slamming the door so hard that the driver’s-side window cracked into a million spiderwebs.

“Beautiful, just fucking beautiful,” Jack grumbled.

“I wish you would not use such vulgarity in my presence,” Giti said, coming to the truck to help Jack check out the problem, as if she had a clue.

“I’m a Marine,” the gunny fired, a head of steam now driving his train. “That’s how Marines talk.”

“Did it blow another tire?” Miriam asked, coming to help check the problem, too.

Jack had the hood up, looking down at the engine. A hole the size of his fist had broken through the side of the block. A piston drooping off a connecting rod lay like a dead man, half-in and half-out of the hole.

“No, Miriam,” the Marine said, slamming down the hood, “we didn’t blow a tire.”

“What then?” Amira asked, trailing him.

“We threw a rod,” Jack said, and looked at Yasir and Sabeen, too far away with the other pickup.

“Threw a rod? I do not understand,” Giti said.

“Blew up the motor,” Jack said. “Unless Yasir carried a spare engine, we’re on foot.”

All three girls turned and ran toward the departing truck. “Stop! Sabeen! Stop! Come back!”

“Ladies, it’s like shouting at an airplane,” Jack said, his hands on his hips.

“They might see us,” Giti said, waving at Sabeen.

“They might,” Jack said. “Probably think you’re just saying more good-byes.”

“Ugh,” Amira let out, hanging her head, the oversized ammo vest making her look even more dejected. “I do not like walking in the desert. I do not want to carry all these heavy guns and bullets.”

Jack let down the tailgate and sat on it. He reached inside the liner of his operator’s vest and pulled out the little intercom radio, its battery he had saved so he could use it to call to his boys when they got close enough to Haditha Dam for his brothers to hear him. The gunny pushed the switch and listened at the headset inside his helmet.

He could hear talking. Familiar voices. Busy jaw jacking, and on the move in their Hummers.

“I ain’t a scared of no ghosts!” Jack Valentine yelled on his radio, a big grin spread across his face.

Cotton Martin came back. “Jack? That you?”

“Cotton! What a treat for my tired ears!” the gunny answered. “Yeah, it’s me!”

“Jack! Where are you?” Elmore Snow broke in. Suddenly, he was drowned out by a dozen other MARSOC Marines talking on the intercom at once.

“Gentlemen, please,” the colonel said.

“Ghost One, what is your location?”

“I’m like those Fuckawi dudes in the joke. They travel at night and when they get up in the morning, they say, where the Fuckawi?” Jack said, happiness overshadowing radio discipline.

“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Cotton laughed.

“We left Omar’s hideout in this broken-down piece-of-shit rust-bucket grocery wagon, heading northeast, and got to this big-ass wadi with cliffs for sides. Blew a tire, and now we blew the engine. Does that help?” Jack answered.

“Not much,” Alvin Barkley said, now with a map unfolded, looking at the red dot that was Omar’s headquarters and running his finger out to the northeast.

“Better question. Where are you guys?” Jack asked.

“Stopped on a hill,” Elmore said, and waited.

“I’m by a wadi, and you’re on a hill, in the Iraqi desert. Go figure! Big middle of fucking nowhere with about a million hills and half a million wadis,” Jack said. “How about a little help!”

“We followed one of Omar’s rat wagons that we let escape from a column that Delta Company, Fifth Marines has trapped, and is currently wiping off the face of Mother Earth,” Elmore said. “We figured he might lead us to Abu Omar’s hideaway, where you might be located. We counted on killing Omar and his minions and rescuing you.”

“Little late for that, boss,” Jack said. “While Omar went north for some kind of meeting with Zarqawi, me and three cute girls stole a truck and escaped. We departed to the northeast. My best-guess heading, based only on my little bubble compass, thanks to Billy-C and his asshole OCD comments, is zero four zero off Omar’s back porch.”

While Elmore Snow and the Marines had stopped on the blind side of the hill, Mob Squad dismounted and crawled to the crest for a look-see at what lay on the other side. The colonel didn’t want to run into a hasty ambush outside Abu Omar’s headquarters, or close to it, if they came bounding down the hill, hey-diddle-diddle.

Sergeant Savoca called on the intercom, “Down a half mile we got a house, goat barns, a grove of palm trees. That sound familiar?”

“That’s Omar’s desert getaway,” Jack said. “Those guys you chased, they still there?”

“Not a sign of life anywhere,” Iceman answered. “No vehicles anyway. At least not running. I see part of a pickup in the barn and what looks like a big old Russian stake-bed three-ton truck with no wheels.”

“Look to the northeast from the house, you see anything?” Jack asked.

“Way out there,” Savoca said. “I see plumes of dust. Three of them. One after the other.”