Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“That’d be me, sir,” Billy said, and put out his hand for the lieutenant, who shook it.

“You’ve got our channel on your comm link?” the lieutenant asked, pulling a notebook out of his pocket.

“Roger that, sir,” Billy answered. “Staff Sergeant Martin and I both will have you up on command channel. Just talk, and we hear you. Each member of our team’s on intercom as well, also linked to our operations office. You can patch in, if you like. You want a radio check?”

The lieutenant shook his head no as he scribbled in his notebook, then said, “We’ll run one when we pull out. I want to make sure the truck drivers have us on comm, too.”

Just then the first semi cranked its engine, boiling black smoke from both stacks. Then, one at a time, the other three started as each operator got his rig ready to roll.

The lieutenant sized up the truck drivers and guessed where they came from. “Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, my bet. Overweight rednecks with plugged arteries from a life of fatback and taters. Trying to cash in on a rich payday so they can live what they got left of their miserable lives at home, instead of one day keeling over dead at some far-off interstate truck stop.”

“Since you’re taking bets, I say one’s a ’Bama boy. Maybe a Georgia peckerhead and a Kentucky hillbilly. I’ll throw in one coal knocker from Pennsylvania, too, just to be different,” Billy added. “Poor folks gambling their lives after a poke of fool’s gold, driving trucks over here. Look at ’em, wearing ball caps and T-shirts, like they’s only gonna roll up I-65 to Montgomery or Nashville.”

“Yup,” the lieutenant said, and spit a brown splat of Skoal on the concrete apron in front of the airport warehouses where big cargo planes from stateside supply centers unload an endless stream of pallets stacked with boxes shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, like those that now filled the trailers pulled by the four big KBR trucks. “I feel for these boys. They’re my people. Trying hard for their families. Let’s try hard for them, too. Keep these fellows from dying today.”

Billy nodded at the lieutenant, liking him. “Yes, sir.”

Cotton Martin gave a mount-up nod to his three gunmen, corporals Clyde McIllhenny and Byrd Clingman, and Sergeant Bobby Durant who ran the M2. Martin’s other man, Corporal Hubert Biggs, a muscled hulk just a hand shorter than Cotton, came off a dairy farm near Kerrville, Texas, and went by the nickname, Hub, since childhood, slid onto the driver’s seat as the six-foot-six-inch-framed staff sergeant took his spot at shotgun in the right-front seat, pushed all the way back.

As the Army infantry officer walked toward the Cougar to mount up his dozen soldiers, Billy Claybaugh called to him, “What’s your name, sir?”

“Phipps,” he answered, looking over his shoulder. “Jeremy Phipps. Fayetteville, Arkansas.”

“Go Hogs!” Claybaugh called to him. “Staff Sergeant William C. Claybaugh at your service, sir. Mobile, Alabama.”

“Roll Tide,” the lieutenant answered, and walked on.

When the Army Cougar HE packed full of troops rolled out, the convoy fell behind the tan monster with the forty-millimeter grenade-launching main machine gun swinging a full 360 turn in its armored turret, making sure everything still worked. Two of the semis pulled behind the MRAP, and Billy had Rowdy Yates roll behind them. Then two more big trucks fell in, and Cotton Martin and his team of four brought up the rear.

As the supply convoy left the gated barriers of Baghdad International Airport military compound, which also held Camp Victory and Camp Liberty within its maze of razor wire and high hard walls, Billy-C felt his nerves start to tighten from his belly to his jaws. He and most of the other Marine Scout-Snipers he knew called it the Lump. Nobody ever liked getting the Lump.

“You boys stay frosty, ya hear me?” Claybaugh told his crew over the MARSOC channel that linked all ten Marines plus Jack Valentine on a squawk box at the operations hooch.

“Yeah, boss. We cool,” Cotton answered.

Lance Corporal Rowdy P. Yates’s mother had named her son Rowdy after her favorite Clint Eastwood Western character, from the old black-and-white TV series Rawhide . The P in his middle name stood for Paden, his father’s first-choice character from his all-time top-of-the-ladder Western movie, Silverado . Emmett, Jake, and Mal had plenty of grit going on, but Paden had it all. Quiet, cool, and capable.

The twenty-year-old lance corporal cut his teeth watching videotape television, if he watched anything on the boob tube at all. Where he lived in the wild wide-open Wyoming wilderness, their best broadcast signal came with snow and jagged lines. They had no cable and couldn’t afford satellite. So Burke and Rhonda Yates had bought VHS movies and TV shows off the clearance racks at the discount store for years. When their boy Rowdy started high school, they bought a DVD player and opened a whole new vista of entertainment.

While Burke regarded Silverado and True Grit hands down the best Westerns ever made, and Rhonda enjoyed her TV series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza , and Rawhide , and they all loved Jackie Gleason and Lucy, their boy Rowdy thought Monty Walsh and Quigley Down Under beat out all others. The idea of Matthew Quigley nailing all those long shots with his 1874-model Sharps buffalo rifle with a thirty-four-inch barrel, shooting the .45-110 caliber metallic cartridge with a 540-grain paper-patched bullet made Rowdy dream big.

He even went to wearing his Wranglers tucked inside his tall-topped, high-riding heeled Olathe buckaroo cowboy boots, and on his topknot rode an extrawide-brimmed heavyweight beaver Stetson with a Gus crease on the crown and the fore and aft of the brim dipped low over the young cowboy’s eyes and neck with a soft roll at the sides. Just like Quigley or Monty would wear it. Always pearl snaps for shirt buttons, too.

Rowdy’s moustache, however, did not want to grow quite right. It sprouted thin and had gaps. So the only girlfriend Rowdy ever had, Brenda Kay Nevers, eventually talked him into giving up the project, until he grew thicker stalk, and he shaved it off.

“Ain’t no bushiness to it, son,” she’d say. “Makes your mouth look dirty. Like you been suckin’ hind teat on dad’s old sow.”

His senior year at Campbell County High School, where he played football for the Camels and tie-down calf roped on the rodeo team, Rowdy bought a Quigley replica 1874 Sharps long-range rifle, complete with double-set triggers and long-range flip-up sights on the small of the stock, in addition to the buck-horns on the barrel, along with all the brass trim, identical to the one Matthew Quigley used. Rowdy had saved money from two summers’ work to afford the expensive and fully functional work of art made by the Shiloh Rifle Company of Big Timber, Montana. The same folks that made the very gun that Tom Selleck used in the movie.

“Over three grand for a smoke wagon,” his dad marveled.

As Burke Yates had taught his son, never buy something you don’t use, and if you buy it, use it well, Rowdy Yates mastered his Quigley Sharps long rifle. He practiced vaporizing prairie dogs and splattering running jackrabbits at five hundred yards, open sights, on the fly. Fall hunting season after he graduated high school, the boy, still seventeen, killed a seven-by-seven-point trophy bull elk with the rifle. Put the animal down with one shot at 1,206 paces.

Burke had told the young man in the big hat not to risk such a long shot, just too far off. But Rowdy dropped the hammer anyway. He fired the shot and waited. When the heavy bullet went thump, the big elk raised his head and craned his neck back, then collapsed. Burke Yates let out a hoot.